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?'
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...
