Word: strummers
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...inarticulate outrage for the smooth sounds of cabaret Jazz at the same time that Boy George--the painted mockery of preening masculinity--snared the attention of transatlantic audiences. The dire warnings about the System co-opting integrity bands like the Clash was only rock-press pablum. Even if Joe Strummer had held on to his elitist-bashing ethics in the face of record label take-over attempts of the sort T. Boone Pickens would admire, the great unwashed masses of record buyers would have written out his doom. Fashion sells, quality endures--but a band has to sell to quality...
...Strummer of the Clash recognized a kindred spirit and invited Ely and his band to share billing on a European tour in 1979. The punk audience, Ely remembers, "threw shirts, hot dogs, bottles and panties at us. We threw back a crate of ice, and they loved it." The recorded result of the London leg of this tour, Live Shots, was never released in the U.S., although the album's reckless drive and scalding lyricism could have put a few badly needed cracks into the country Establishment...
...Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon are shown living their day-to-day lives, doing things like standing trial for shooting pet pigeons and discussing the Red Brigade ("It's a pizza parlor, isn't it?"), while their fictitious counterpart, played by Ray Grange, wanders from concert to concert, drinking heavily and prying comment from the band. More than once, it seems that the filmmakers have intruded upon Clash concerts in order to beef up the action in the film, including the taunting of an unruly Rock Against Racism crowd. Late into the rambling film, a racial element...
...longueurs; but its two discs conjure the end of the '70s as unmistakably as Exile did their beginning. The title track does so best. Over the ominous bleating of Mick Jones's slightly off-key guitar and a despondent, resigned chorus that drops off into silence, Joe Strummer launches into a chronicle of the new barbarism...
...Strummer's voice through most of the song sounds like he's coughing up his innards, but towards the end he emits a chill screech that you can just imagine echoing predatorially across a deserted, icy moraine...