Fifty Minutes Of Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros

Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros came together in the late 90s. Joe started working with Richard Norris and Pablo Cook and the Mescaleros formed around that trio. In his memoir Strange Things Are Happening Richard Norris recounts how Joe and a cavalcade of cars turned up at Real World Studio in Wiltshire. Richard was sitting on a grass bank as the convoy arrived and Joe leapt from a vehicle brandishing a drum machine and shouting, 'does anyone know how to make this thing work?'. Richard raised a hand and said he did. Joe, Richard and Pablo wrote Yalla Yalla, with Anthony Genn coming on board to mix. They went on to write Techno D- Day, Tony Adams and the beautiful From Willesden To Cricklewood. Richard Norris Joe wrote Sandpaper Blues, Diggin' The New and the late career rock/ reggae/ acid house classic Yalla Yalla. All those songs became part of the first Mescaleros album, Rock Art And The X Ray Style.

The Mescaleros grew from there with Scott Shields joining (bass and guitar), Martin Slattery (keys and guitar), Richard Flack (various instruments) and Steve 'Smiley' Bernard (drums). Genn hung around for a while but eventually left. In 1999 Joe and the Mescaleros recorded Rock Art And The X Ray Style having played a load of gigs including Glastonbury (where Joe smashed a BBC camera during the broadcast with a mic stand). In Strange Things Are Happening Richard tells the story of his departure from being Joe's creative partner whilst out in LA- the circles around Joe and the former members of The Clash come across like the worst aspects of Succession, in crowds and out crowds and hangers on all jostling for elbow room and access to the top table. At an audience with event I went to Richard was asked how it ended with Joe and he replied, 'badly'. A rueful silence and some regret. 

In 2000 Joe hooked up again with Tymon Dogg, a former 101er and Clash guest. Tymon joined the Mescaleros for Global A Go- Go and the band toured the UK, US and Europe, playing festivals and small gigs, combining Clash songs and Mescaleros songs in fine style, gigs awash with beer flying, and reggae, rock, dub and global sounds, joyous celebrations of Joe's music and life. I saw them twice at Manchester Academy in the 1999- 2002 period and on another occasion at Nynex Arena where they supported The Who in a largely empty arena. They were superb, a life affirming blast of energy and punk rock righteousness. Joe never gave less than everything, the band gave their all too to match him and there was no reason to think it shouldn't carry on for some time. Joe died suddenly at home on 22nd December 2002. 

There are three Mescaleros albums- 1999's Rock Art And The X Ray Style, 2001's Global A Go- Go and the posthumously completed Streetcore from 2003. Between them they show a reborn and revitalised Joe Strummer, writing and recording and having the time of his life, making music that stands as not just the best of his solo career but alongside his songs in The Clash too. In the last year of Joe's life he'd been writing with Mick Jones again, songs that Mick assumed were for an upcoming Mescaleros album. Joe apparently thought they were for a new Clash album. 

Fifty Minutes Of Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros

• Punk Rock Warlord
• Yalla Yalla (Norro's King Dub)
• Fantastic
• At The Border, Guy
• Burnin' Streets
• X- Ray Style
• Ocean Of Dreams
• Johnny Appleseed
• Sandpaper Blues
• Arms Aloft
• Coma Girl
• Without People You're Nothing

Yalla Yalla was released as a single in 1999 ahead of the Rock Art And The X- Ray Style album, Joe and Richard Norris summoning the spirits and the radio. Joe described the song as 'an ancient British folk song written in the year 1999'. Live at Manchester Academy they segued Yalla Yalla into Bankrobber, Joe disappearing offstage and returning with a child on his shoulders, arms in the air and red lights strafing the stage. Yalla Yalla is total Strummer- world with dubbed out references to Kool Moe Dee, The Treacherous Three,  Brownie McGee, Ladbroke Grove, Ragga FM, Tae Kwon Do and the kebab shop. The Norro King Dub was on the 12", a Richard Norris dub of the original. According to Richard no one had ever called him Norro before and from that point only Joe did. 

Fantastic came out in 2022, a posthumous release tied into a box set re- release of the three Mescaleros albums and fourth disc of outtakes and demos. It was recorded at Rockfield in Monmouth in December 2002, the month Joe died. Fantastic is an early version of Ramshackle Day Parade from Streetcore. Streetcore was completed after Joe died by various Mescaleros. Joe's vocals are guide vocals, not finished ones- this alone shows how much Joe put in to recording. The guide vocals for Fantastic, Arms Aloft and Coma Girl (among other Streetcore songs) are more impassioned than many singers manage ever. While we'll never know what Streetcore could have been and what other songs Joe might have written for it, the seven songs that the band finished for the album all stand up next to the rest of the Mescaleros back catalogue. 

There are three other songs on Streetcore- Redemption Song, Silver And Gold and  Long Shadow- that date from different sessions. Redemption Song and Long Shadow were done with Rick Rubin, intended for Johnny Cash to record, and were included on Streetcore at Lucinda's request (Joe's widow). The video for Fantastic is a lovely thing, footage of Joe from The Clash, solo and his family life spliced together.   

At The Border, Guy is from Global A Go- Go, a seven minute freewheeling dub tune with scratchy guitar, organ and Joe singing about town planners, the Dow Jones and Leek town hall. Wonderful stuff, the genre hopping spirit of Sandinista! continuing long into Joe's solo career. 

Burnin' Streets is from Streetcore and has a nice lyrically throwback to 1977 and London's Burning. Arms Aloft is a rocker from the same album. In the song Joe sees his (younger) bandmates on tour complaining about being tired and out of gas partway through a tour. Joe, ever the livewire and motivator, shouts at them, reminding them of their duty to rock 'n' roll, the audience and playing the gig, and how only a few nights before they were 'arms aloft in Aberdeen'. It's one of several songs on Streetcore that have a hint, a foreshadowing, of Joe's mortality. 'They say the stars can't see their rays/ Nor can they count the number of days', he sings near the end. At the start there's some cosmic Joe too with the line, 'Sometimes there's no stars shining/ Scouting the edge of the universe/ Sometimes you can't see a horizon/ Between the ocean and the earth'. 

X Ray Style is a beauty, the title track from 1999's Rock Art And The X Ray Style (the cover was painted by Damian Hirst, a version of Neolithic cave art. Joe spent every summer from the mid 80s onward in Granada, Spain and in the nearby Nerja area there is a cave complex discovered by five school boys in 1959 containing the world's oldest known cave art- maybe this was the inspiraiton for the sleeve). The song X Ray Style is an acoustic guitar tune with a bongo groove, Joe singing about the stars and the hopes of a soul, Be Bop guns, rockabilly trains and how 'there's some people living who ain't got no heart and they never had none'. He finishes with the line, 'I want to live and I want to dance a while'. His voice ever sounded better. 

Ocean Of Dreams came out on the 2022 box set, an unreleased Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros song dating from the Rock Art And the X Ray Style sessions with ex- Ex Pistol Steve Jones on guitar. It's got a lazy, laid back feel, Joe improvising and following his nose. In 1999 Anthony Genn had told him, 'You're Joe Strummer, you should be making an album!'. Other people had told him this at points in the decade between 1989 and 1999 but in 1999 the time was right. 

Johnny Appleseed is the lead song from 2001's Global A Go- Go, a solo peak and a song that demonstrates everything that was great about the man. Acoustic guitars, massed backing vocals, old friend Tymon on violin and Joe singing about Martin Luther King and Buick 49s, and how if you want to get the honey you don't go killing all the bees, a line that could be about the environment or it could be about capitalism. Whenever I need to hear some solo Joe, I often start with Johnny Appleseed. The video is very Joe too, Joe and the Mescaleros wandering the streets of London as the public come and go...

Sandpaper Blues is a Richard Norris co- write. Joe's love of what used to be called World Music is all over the Mescaleros songs. On Sandpaper Blues there's Caribbean vibes married to Country and Western and Mariachi. 

Coma Girl is the lead song from Streetcore, rousing Strummer three chord, Clash style, electrifying guitar rock. In the song Joe describes his walk through the outer areas at the Glastonbury festival, wandering round the stages as the rain comes in and the oil drums clang, while singing to his daughter Lola, the coma girl, who didn't want to get out of bed. Coma Girl is as good a final song as Joe could have wished for in many ways, a song that summons the vision of him on stage, his left leg twitching away as he bashed out the chords and sang at the microphone stand. 

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Water.

I ran with Sordid Sound System and Raymond Chandler, Dreems, Kalima, A Certain Ratio, Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith and William Orbit, Beth Orton and Underworld. There was a big response from the Bagging Area community with Sundappledliz going for Alex Kassian and Jessica Lauren, Al G with Juan Wauters, Ernie Goggins and The Incredible String Band, Jake with The Avalanches, Ricky Otter and Richard Norris, Walter and The Woodentops, SRC with Bruce Lee and Underworld and also Fela Kuti, Rol and The Cascades, and Jase who had several suggestions- Ride, Blackwater and Elvis. 

Jase's Ride suggestion was their debut album Nowhere which had that huge wave sweeping across the front cover, a visual representation of the band's shoegaze/ FX pedal wall of sound. The album's title track was missing from the album and eventually turned up on the Fall EP in October 1990.

Nowhere

This week's Oblique Strategy card says this- The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.

Which is oblique indeed. And then some. 

It made me think of memories, memory and the act of remembering. Which is always a deep rabbit hole. Not long after Isaac died in 2021- and by not long I mean weeks- I was in bed doom scrolling and a link to a newspaper article flashed up. The headline (from I think The Guardian) read something like, 'Scientists discover whether our lives really do flash before our eyes before we die'.

I didn't click through. At that point, I couldn't see any way that that article was going to be a comfort or a help. I've never been back and looked for it either although it has crossed my mind more than once since. I can still clearly recall that exact moment, the instant, I saw the headline, read it, thought about it and rejected it. I didn't really want to consider what would have flashed through Isaac's mind in the moments before he died, with the three of us in the hospital room with him. It's a strange memory that has stuck with me ever since, unforgotten. 

Buried Memories

Buried Memories is from Pye Corner Audio's 2019 album Hollow Earth, a radiophonic/ dark synth track that suggests all kinds of things. The Hauntology/ Ghost Box scene and much of Pye Corner Audio's output is partly about memory and the way past haunts the future. Boards Of Canada's albums, this year's Inferno included, deal in this too. One of the tracks on Inferno is this one...

Memory Death

As we get older it seems that more and more that what we are as human beings is a bunch of memories and experiences, encased in our bodies. Memory is a tricky thing. It's unreliable and inevitably one sided. It enables us to learn from the past. Sometimes it makes us cringe- things we said or did that we really wish we hadn't. One of the things about dementia that scares us the most is seeing loved ones lose their memory. What is a person without memories? 

In Blade Runner the new generation of replicants (Nexus 7s) have been given memories. Rachael, played by Sean Young, has been implanted with the memories of Tyrell's niece and as a result she believed she was human. On discovering this, her entire world is turned upside down. Her relationship with the past, her past, is fake, a construct, someone else's past. In the film,this Vangelis song plays as Rachael visits Deckard's apartment for the first time. Tellingly, it finishes with sirens and the whirring and bleeps of a computer programme. 

Memories Of Green

Jan van den Broeke's 2017 album 11000 Dreams is a deep dive into memory, found sounds, ambient and samples. This track is literally memories turned into sound, a woman's voice caught on tape with an ambient backing, '...things that happened years and years ago... incidents... memories...'

June 11 Memories

I don't know what Eno and Schmidt intended the most important thing to be or if they even had an intention. The most important thing for us as people could be many things- to be loved, to be remembered, to be live well without doing harm to others, to stand up for the things you believe in, to contribute to society in some way, to leave the world better than you found it. Big stuff. 

Maybe they just meant the drums. 

Short Forgotten Produk Trk Omc

That's Aphex Twin and an archival track he uploaded onto his User18081971 Soundcloud page back in 2023, that dates from 2006/7. 

Feel free to drop your own responses to The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten in the comment box. 

Placeta Joe Strummer

While we were in Spain two weeks ago we drove to Granada and spent several hours at the Alhambra Palace, the 13th and 14th century fortress and palace that overlooks the city. Towards the late afternoon we sat in the shadow of the palace enjoying a very strong and very good Cafe con leche and I said to Lou, 'Placeta Joe Strummer is just down the hill...'

So we wandered down the hill in the heat and found the triangular piece of public land, bordered by roads on two sides and some steps and a derelict and grafittied building on the other.

Once there was a large painting of Joe but at some point it got painted over. 

Why has Joe Strummer got a public square named after him in Granada you might ask?

In the mid- 80s when The Clash split up Joe beat a retreat to lick his wounds and cry into his beer and he went to Granada. In the early days of The Clash Joe was going out with Slits drummer Palmolive and she and her brother Fernando Romero were from the city. Joe and Romero had previously shared a squat, and used to talk politics, Spain, the civil war and everything else and these struck a deep chord with Joe. With Joe in a mess after the break up of The Clash, Fernando took Joe to Granada. He put roots down in Granada and the villages around it, produced an album by local punk band 091, went searching for the (still un- found) grave of poet Federico Garcia Lorca (murdered by a Francoist death squad in 1936 and buried in a mass grave somewhere in the hills above the city) and drank in local bars. Joe included both Lorca and Granada in the 1979 Clash song Spanish Bombs. 

It became Joe's routine in the 80s and 90s to spend a long summer in Granada and then return to London for the Notting Hill Carnival. Esperanza Romero, sister of Fernando and Paloma, married Richard Dudanski (101ers drummer, one time Clash drummer and drummer for PiL, The Raincoats and Basement 5). They still live in Granada. Joe bought a house in Almeria and also lost a Dodge car somewhere in the city- he parked it in an underground car park but couldn't remember where. There's a film about it. 

After Joe's death Fernando and others petitioned the council to name a square after Joe, who they saw as an adopted son of the city. Dudanski, Joe's friends and the local socialists pestered the council repeatedly and eventually in 2013 Placeta Joe Strummer was named. There was a party to mark it with an open air acoustic gig with members of The Pogues, The 101ers, Mescaleros and 091 all playing and Joe's daughters Jazz and Lola attended. 

It's as good a spot as any for a photo opportunity for any Joe Strummer and Clash fans who happen to be in Granada on their summer holidays.

Today is Joe's birthday. He would have been 74. It's fairly easy to imagine a 74 year old Joe, still making music, still open to the endless possibilities of the world and its cultures, still enthusing about Cuban be- bop, African highlife, reggae and three chord rock 'n' roll, raging against the world's injustices and iniquities.

In 1979 The Clash played at one of the series of Concerts For Kampuchea, four concerts organised by Paul McCartney and, um, Kurt Waldheim*. There had been promises that The Beatles were going to reform for the concert- this obviously did not happen. The four concerts were held in late December '79 and The Clash headlined the second, with Ian Dury and The Blockheads and Matumbi also appearing. This clip of the group playing Armagideon Times is as good a live performance as you're going to see today by anyone, The Clash absolutely at the top of their game and Joe magnetic at the centre of the stage...

Ten years later Joe was solo and in the midst of what some people have called his Wilderness Years. Richard Norris, who worked with Joe in '98/ '99 and co- wrote several Mescaleros songs counters this description of the post- Clash, pre- Mescaleros years, arguing that Joe made a solo album, wrote and recorded a handful of film soundtracks, acted in several films and co- wrote and produced Big Audio Dynamite's second album- not really a wilderness period at all. 

In 1989 Joe released Earthquake Weather, a fourteen song album with the musicians who became Joe's Latino Rockabilly War. It's a messy album, probably a handful of songs too long, with muddy production and a confused mix and I often feel guitarist Zander Schloss needed reining in at times. The final song, Sleepwalk, is a beauty though, a great Joe Strummer solo song.  Rueful and ruminative with a Caribbean feel and Joe coming back to the line, 'What good would it be if you could change every heartache that ran through your life and mine?'

Sleepwalk

In 1999 Joe returned with The Mescaleros and made two fine albums- Art Rock And The X- Ray Style and Global A Go- Go- and then a posthumously completed one from 2003, Streetcore. More from these Mescaleros years coming up on Sunday. 

Happy birthday Joe. Feliz cumpleaños. 

* Kurt Waldheim was an Austrian politician who became secretary general of the United Nations between 1972 and 1981. In 1986 it was revealed he had knowledge of Nazi atrocities as a member of the Wehrmacht during World War II, and that this had been covered up. This caused an international controversy but didn't prevent him from becoming president of Austria between 1986 and 1992. During this period he was officially declared persona non grata by the American government (and most western ones) and banned from entering the USA. Today of course, they'd send a limousine anyway...

Touch Me With Your Love

The recent Disco Pogo Tribute To Andrew Weatherall book has a section on many of Andrew's remix and production work, along with interviews with the artists involved from the earliest days (Hallelujah and Loaded) to Andrew's last released remix (GLOK's Cloud Cover). In between, much else is covered including a part on the production and mixing Andrew and Keith Tenniswood did for Beth Orton, that resulted in three songs that came out on Beth's album Trailer Park. Beth talks glowingly of the time spent in the Two Lone Swordsmen studio and the work the three of them created together. Beth had already recorded the basis of the three songs- Galaxy Of Emptiness, Tangent and Touch Me With Your Love- with some top musicians including the wonderful double bass of Red Snapper's Ali Friend. Andrew and Keith took the three songs and set about remixing them in the studio with Beth recording new vocals on the spot. They way Beth describes it, it all sounds very organic and natural, easy and creative. 

My go to from Trailer Park is usually Galaxy Of Emptiness, ten minutes of spaced out, cosmic existential splendour. But I went back to the other two and Touch Me With Your Love particularly sounded superb- it was almost like listening to it anew. 

Touch Me With Your Love

Ali's double bass, woody and vibrating, sits at the centre. Around it Andrew and Keith weave a rich and detailed sonic tapestry, whirrs and clicks, FX, acres of s-p-a-c-e and Beth's distinctive voice, everything sprinkled the Weatherall magic dust. Trailer Park, as much as any other record from 1996, invented folktronica- a clumsy label but a fitting one and one that she seems happy to accept. Beth says that at the time she wished that Andrew and Keith could have done the entire album but it wasn't to be and she's OK with that- those three Weatherall/ Tenniswood produced songs on Trailer Park are more than enough. 

Blue Ba- Ya

Jon Hassell was an American trumpet player and composer who made and contributed to a huge range of twentieth century music, playing with Holger Czukay and Irwin Schmidt, Terry Riley, Talking Heads (on Remain In Light), Brian Eno, Ry Cooder, David Sylvian, Bjork, Juan Atkins and many others. He died in 2021. The Ndeya label has been set up in partnership with Warp Records as a home to Hassell's music and they have released two posthumous albums- Listening To Pictures and Seeing Through Sound- as well as a re- issue of his 1977 debut Vernal Equinox. In October Ndaya are going to release  Music Is Invisible, a live recording from May 2015 when Jon played at St John's church in Hackney as a trio, with Rick Cox and John von Seggern. This excerpt of Blue Ba- Ya came out last week.

Blue Ba- Ya (Excerpt) is a gorgeous way to spend four and a half minutes, at an intersection of jazz, global, ambient and experimental, what Hassell called Fourth World music. There are synths, drones, a two chord piano part and Hassell playing trumpet. Three people on stage, two laptops and various synths, FX devices and a load of cables and wires and a trumpet making such human sounding music. AI could never do this. It doesn't know how. 

In 2023 a compilation of late 80s recordings was re- released, an album called Psychogeography that originally came out in 1990. This track was the album's opener, a descent into the city with drones, whirrs and found sounds. 

Ariel View

The Big Wheel Keeps On Turning

I go back to work today, two weeks earlier than I've been used to now I'm working in a 6th form college. Returning to work in mid- August feels a bit odd- the rhythm of my year usually sees me return in early September, but change is good, change is what I moved jobs for so I'm just going to have to get used to it. It'll soon be the bank holiday weekend and then September and then the weeks when the leaves start to turn from green to orange, gold, yellow and then brown. It's already darker earlier, noticeably so this week. 

The big wheel keeps on turning.

Hymn Of The Big Wheel

Blue Lines is a fantastic album, one of those which crossed borders, knocked doors down and united different tribes. The flow of the album, from Safe From Harm to Hymn Of The Big Wheel via those chilled rap songs, the glorious majesty of Unfinished Sympathy and lush, organic proto- trip hop is perfect. Every beat, every note, every word, weighed and exactly correct. When side two plays out with Hymn Of The Big Wheel it feels like you've done the full trip, gone all the way round. It creates a stew from Bristol, late 80s/ early 90s club culture, rap and reggae, dub, breakbeats, sampling, graffiti, rare groove, weed, 90 bpm tempos, found sounds, Horace Andy, Nellee Hooper, Neneh Cherry, sound system and DJ culture and American hip hop styles into one hypnotic and seductive package. 

Hymn Of The Big Wheel is a Neneh Cherry co- write and she sings the female harmony (uncredited on the sleeve). Daddy G has said that Neneh gave the members of Massive Attack a kick up the arse and a place to record (her baby's bedroom), booting them out of their natural laziness. Good job she did eh?

Monday's Long Songs

This compilation came out back in May but I missed it and have been catching up recently- Occupied Minds Vol. 1, an eighteen track multi- artist album from Belfast released in solidarity with the people of Palestine and raising funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Many of the artists are new to me and the range of music is huge, from ambient to folk to techno and covering a range of emotional responses. This one, We Are! We Want!, is by The Light Brigade, who you might know as an alias David Holmes uses.

We Are! We Want! rides in subtly but gathers pace with rattling drums and metallic percussion and the wobble of synth bass. There are pauses and stabs of synth, the ever present rumble of the bass and some early 90s tension. 

Over the top of this is the voice of James Baldwin, speaking about humanity and love, about the actions of individuals and what people choose to do and who they choose to be.  

'What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be'

Baldwin was talking about life in the USA in 1970 and the daily racism he and other black Americans faced. He was honest but optimistic- grace and humanity would save the world from despair he believed. 

Occupied Minds is at Bandcamp. 

In some ways We Are! We Want! reminds of some of David's earliest work, tracks like Johnny Favourite and Four Boy One Girl Action and their sole release, the 1993 single The Hawaiian Death Stomp. Eleven minutes of early 90s progressive house/ techno spliced and an equally long, slowed down thumping, stompy dub. Moody, tribal and Sabres- esque.

The Hawaiian Death Stomp

The Hawaiian Death Dub

The four boys were Holmes, Jagz Kooner, Gary Burns and Kris Needs. The girl was Patti Smith, sampled, fucking with the future. 

Also on Occupied Minds is Timmy Stewart, Belfast producer, DJ and promoter who along with Aaron Black records as Black Bones. Timmy's track on Occupied Minds is The Right To Life, a rattly, spacey slice of 2026 dub techno. 

In April Black Bones released a self titled album pulling together tracks they'd released on 7'', 10'' and 12''. It's here and highly recommended. In May they put out an EP/ 12'' single called Black Bones 008, four pieces of dark dance floor Balearica/ electronic edit mayhem that sound great in the mid- August sun. Listen/ buy here.