Joe Strummer served as the lead vocalist and chief songwriter for the Clash, generating some of the most intense and fervent punk rock, along with rock & roll overall. His taste for reggae and foundational rock & roll broadened punk's sonic range, while his unmistakable roar infused political declarations in many standout tracks with raw drive. Once the Clash dissolved in 1986 after Cut the Crap, he took on occasional acting parts, supplied music for Alex Cox films, and issued the solo album Earthquake Weather in 1989. Following an extended break from recording, Strummer reemerged at the close of the 1990s fronting the Mescaleros and delivered three albums that blended rock & roll with assorted world-music textures.
Born John Graham Mellor on August 21, 1952, in Ankara, Turkey, where his father worked as a diplomat, Strummer absorbed rock and reggae during his years at London boarding schools and began performing on the streets under his chosen stage name. He started the pub-rock outfit the 101'ers in 1974; although their hard-driving style appears on the later collection Elgin Avenue Breakdown, nothing prepared him for the visceral impact of seeing Johnny Rotten front the Sex Pistols. He abandoned pub rock to join the rising punk scene and helped launch the Clash in 1976, after which the band's trajectory became legendary. Six studio albums, numerous singles and EPs, and an often exceptional catalog later, the group fractured amid bitter disputes and creative drift, especially once Strummer reshaped the lineup following co-founder Mick Jones's exit in 1983.
Strummer placed two songs on the soundtrack for Alex Cox's 1986 film Sid and Nancy, a chronicle of the Sex Pistols bassist; the collaboration proved so successful that he appeared in Cox's subsequent pictures Walker, which he also scored, and the offbeat Western Straight to Hell. His easy screen presence led to further roles with Robert Frank in 1987's Candy Mountain and Jim Jarmusch in 1989's Mystery Train, while he contributed five tracks to the soundtrack of Permanent Record that same year. Earthquake Weather, his debut solo album, arrived in 1989 and mixed direct rock & roll with world-music accents. After a brief period replacing Shane MacGowan in the Pogues on rhythm guitar and lead vocals during live shows, Strummer remained largely inactive through the early 1990s. His first signal of renewed activity came in 1996 with a guest spot on Black Grape's single "England's Irie." The next year he scored the John Cusack comedy Grosse Pointe Blank, whose soundtrack drew heavily from new wave and the British ska revival.
In 1999 Strummer issued his second solo album, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, backed by the Mescaleros; the project largely set aside conventional rock & roll for rhythmically intricate, world-music-inflected pieces paired with detailed singer-songwriter lyrics. He refined that approach on the follow-up, Global A-Go-Go, released in 2001. While midway through recording a fourth solo album, Strummer suffered a fatal heart attack at his Somerset home in December 2002. The final Mescaleros album, Streetcore, appeared in October 2003. One of his last live performances, a benefit concert featuring former Clash bandmate Mick Jones, received a limited-edition release in 2012 as Live at Acton Town Hall. Joe Strummer 001, a 2018 anthology surveying his work outside the Clash, contained twelve previously unreleased tracks. Assembly, another collection of overlooked and unreleased solo material, followed in March 2021. Serving as a companion to the 2018 set, Joe Strummer 002 arrived in 2022 and examined Strummer's concluding recordings with the Mescaleros, presenting all three Mescaleros albums together with a disc of demos and alternate versions.
