http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 68485.htmlhttp://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainmen Joe Strummer: The angry young man who grew up
".......................They will all be contributing to Strummer of Love, the festival that Lucinda is planning with Strummerville, the charity set up to keep Joe's spirit alive. It takes place in Somerset's Blackdown Hills, from 17 to 19 August, around the time of his 60th birthday. Lola, now 26, has a similar "magnetism" to her father, according to Lucinda. "She's like a pied piper, a great gatherer of people and wonderfully inspiring." Jazz, 28, embodies Strummer's thoughtful side and his creativity (he was also a talented cartoonist), and will oversee a craft corner at the festival. Eliza, 20, is writing songs and has been singing with the London band Alabama 3 – one of many musical kindred spirits that will be playing at Strummer of Love, along with Billy Bragg, Badly Drawn Boy, KT Tunstall, Basement Jaxx and Emmy the Great.
Another of these kindred spirits, the Pogues – who are headlining the festival – gave Joe the chance to get back on tour in the early 1990s. But it wasn't until 1999 that his career really enjoyed what he called its "Indian Summer", as he returned to much acclaim with a new band, the Mescaleros. Lucinda quickly became a fan and, with Eliza, accompanied Joe on tours to America, Japan and Australia. At the age of seven, Eliza was on a Japanese stage filming her stepfather with a video-camera. "She was on the stage videoing him and I'm at the front-left looking up and seeing her little face as she's realising what she is capturing," her mother recalls.
Lucinda would try to position herself in the throng of the audience, almost as if she was making up for missing the Clash years. "Sometimes I thought I would burst with pride." Then, after the show, she'd encounter those old frustrations about Joe and his late nights as she wanted just to go home with her husband. "It took me a while to understand this was Joe's way of reacting; he couldn't just say: 'Thanks very much, I'm going home now to go to bed.' He needed that downtime and enjoyed having people around."
The couple weren't flush with cash – though they were far from starving – and they had great times on tour. In New York, they might stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel, a Strummer favourite from his Clash days, and in Los Angeles, they lived it up at the famous Chateau Marmont, which he knew from his acting period.
She has finished her tea now, and asks the barman to bring us passion-fruit Martinis – passion is a fashion, as Strummer used to say. Many of Lucinda's closest friends today are people she knew through Joe. She still sees all the other members of the Clash, especially bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon, who has promised to attend the festival, as will the actor Keith Allen. The artist Damien Hirst has taken on the considerable job of curating the archive of Joe Strummer lyrics, drawings, photographs and miscellania gathered from scrapbooks and from the mountains of plastic bags which Joe carried around on tours, before bringing them home to Somerset.
"There were notebooks in the bags where the paper was stuck together with rain and damp," Lucinda explains. "There was endless kitchen roll and matches. Invariably there might have been a tuna sandwich in there as well..." And, as she went through these plastic bags, there was the odd unpleasant discovery for a recently bereaved widow. "I'd sometimes find lyrics, and I'd take things quite personally. There was one song about a row we had ['Bummed Out City', from the Mescaleros' Global a Go-Go album]: 'It was me that fell off the sweetheart highway...' That was it!" Clearly she no longer feels so bad about it.
But Joe was also a romantic. "Every morning I'd come down and there was a little note: 'I love you,' 'Please could you fax this to...' or 'Please wake me at 11 – I have an interview,' but always with a heart and a little drawing." Some of this handwritten material will be incorporated into Strummer School, an exhibition of memorabilia being put together by Joe's artist friend Robert Gordon McHarg, designed to inspire a new generation........."
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