Punk’s rebel with a cause dies at 50

Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent Tuesday December 24, 2002 The Guardian

Joe Strummer “Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world And ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl Love ‘n’ hate tattooed across the knuckles of his hands The hands that slap his kids around ’cause they don’t understand How death or glory becomes just another story” – From Death Or Glory by Joe Strummer and The Clash

Joe Strummer, the political conscience of punk, and one half of its greatest songwriting partnership, is no more. He is said to have died peacefully in a chair in his kitchen after suffering what appears to have been heart attack while walking his dogs near his remote farmhouse in Broomfield, Somerset, on Sunday afternoon. His wife Lucinda and stepdaughter Elize were with him.

His passing at the age of 50 leaves Shane MacGowan as the last man standing of the songwriting tyros who turned the music industry upside down in the late 1970s.

Tributes poured in yesterday for the rebel with a cause who wrote such rousing and intelligent songs as Death Or Glory, Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, White Riot and Spanish Bombs. London Calling, The Clash’s third and greatest album, was the US magazine Rolling Stone’s album of the 1980s and was regularly voted one of the best of all time.

But a poor early record deal, and The Clash’s commitment to leftwing causes, meant that neither Strummer nor the rest of the band fully reaped the rewards of their success.

Bono, who was about to work with Strummer on a tribute to Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and who never made a secret of how he modelled his own band on The Clash, said: “It’s such a shock. The Clash was the greatest rock band. They wrote the rule book for U2.”

Unlike the Sex Pistols, with whom they were often compared, Strummer and The Clash were not the result of clever media manipulation but the authentic voice of protest and rebellion. His leftwing credentials, forged in the Elgin Avenue squatters’ occupation in west London in the mid-70s, were heartfelt and real and never left him. The music he created with songwriting partner Mick Jones – the “Sound of the Westway”, as he dubbed it – was equally revolutionary, mixing dub, rockabilly and ska into a multicultural roar of anger against poverty and racial discrimination.

Notting Hill was then the home to ethnic tension, incendiary street-protest politics and reggae legend Bob Marley, a powerful social and political brew from which Strummer and The Clash drank deeply. The Clash followed up London Calling with Sandinista!, which attacked American attempts to undermine the Nicaraguan revolution and berated Mrs Thatcher the year after she walked into Downing Street.

Not that Strummer, born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, the son of a senior diplomat, was your textbook working-class punk hero. While Brixton boy Jones fitted the bill more, Strummer was in many ways an early prototype of a radical Notting Hill trustafarian. He first changed his name to Woody Mellor, in honour of Woody Guthrie, the American folk legend, before evolving into Joe Strummer after forming a pub band called the 101ers – named after their squat at 101 Walterton Road, Maida Vale – who ending up playing support to the Sex Pistols.

Protest singer Billy Bragg said last night that Strummer fired his youthful political imagination after seeing The Clash at the first Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park in London’s East End.

“I have a great admiration for the man. Joe was the political engine of the band, and without Joe there’s no political Clash and without The Clash the whole political edge of punk would have been severely dulled.

“His most recent records are as political and edgy as anything he did with The Clash. His take on multicultural Britain in the 21st century is far ahead of anybody else,” he added.

Unlike the Sex Pistols, The Clash never reformed after splitting up in 1986, three years after the band imploded when Strummer sacked Jones – a decision he later bitterly regretted. Until then they were the Lennon and McCartney of punk, sharing top billing and duties as lead singer. “I stabbed him in the back,” Strummer later admitted.

Bob Geldof, another squatter-turned-rock star, said yesterday that he admired their refusal to sell out. “I know for a fact they were offered huge amounts of money [to reform],” he told the BBC. “They just said ‘No, that isn’t really what we stood for’. That’s truly admirable. They were very important musically but as a person, he was a very nice man.”

Despite Strummer’s resistance to reforming, The Clash were believed to be considering a one-off reunion next year at their induction ceremony into the the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. They will be only the second punk band, after the Ramones, credited with founding the movement in New York, to be honoured there.

Strummer always resisted revisiting past glories and insisted that he would rather get on with his work with his new band The Mescaleros, where he continued to experiment with world music. “I never look back. There’s no point,” he said.

He also carved a colourful niche for himself outside his own bands, fronting The Pogues for a time after MacGowan left, as well as making several memorable acting cameos in Martin Scorsese’s film The King Of Comedy, Alex Cox’s Walker and Straight To Hell, and Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 Mystery Train, where he played an Elvis-quiffed armed robber.

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Black Hawk Down: Shoot first, don’t ask questions afterwards

In October 1993, 18 US soldiers died during a botched mission in Mogadishu. The incident is the subject of a new film, Black Hawk Down. But, asks Alex Cox, why have the deaths of the Somali civilians been forgotten?

12 January 2002

In the 1970s and 1980s, Somalia was ruled by a corrupt president, Mohamed Siad Barre. It was a familiar story ­ an unpopular, despotic nutcase (read, Pinochet in Chile or the Shah in Iran) who suppressed popular dissent and did what the US government, or US-owned multinationals, told him to do.

By his last days in power, Siad Barre had leased nearly two-thirds of Somalia to four huge American oil companies: Conoco, Chevron, Phillips, and Amoco (the story presumably involves British business interests also, since Amoco is now part of BP). The land was believed by geologists to contain substantial quantities of oil and natural gas.

In 1991, unfortunately for the oil giants, Siad Barre was overthrown, and he fled the country. Somalia ­ as a functioning nation state with which they could do business ­ fell apart. The oil giants’ exclusive concessions to explore and drill were worthless in the absence of a viable government to enforce their claims.

In the early 1990s, there were various humanitarian disasters also deserving of urgent intervention. For the United States to spearhead a United Nations mission to Somalia was, from a humanitarian viewpoint, capricious. But, citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, and an urgent need to restore order, President Bush I sent in the Marines.

The United States meant business in Somalia: this was obvious from the location of the American embassy, established a few days before the US marines arrived in Mogadishu, in the Conoco corporate compound. The Los Angeles Times reported that Bush’s special envoy to Somalia had used the Conoco compound as his temporary headquarters.

The marines ­ along with their United Nations “partners” ­ settled down to their tasks of guarding American oil men and disarming the unruly populace. It didn’t go well. On 7 May 1993, the Canadian press reported that elite Airborne Regiment Commandos in Somalia had tortured and murdered a civilian teenager, Shidane Arone. Other reports of murder by Canadian peacekeepers followed.

As for the Americans, having encouraged the ambitions of a Somali general and clan leader, Mohammed Aideed, they decided (shades of Osama Bin Laden!) that Aideed was their enemy. Half-a-dozen “United Nations” missions were dispatched to capture him. All failed.

On 3 October 1993, a team of so-called “elite troops” ­ Delta Force Rangers ­ tried to capture Aideed again, in central Mogadishu. Aideed wasn’t there, but the American troops became confused. Shortly after, they were surrounded by angry crowds. In the massacre that followed, between 500 and 1,000 Somalis, many of them women, children, and old people, were killed. Eighteen Americans also died.

Of course, it is the American deaths, and the TV image of a couple of American bodies being dragged by enraged Somalis, rather than guilt over the massacre of hundreds of Africans, that haunts the popular-American-media mind. There wasn’t a massacre. There was a firefight. Only Americans lost their lives.

In the aftermath of 3 October 1993, various articles appeared about the shootout/massacre, including internet postings by Mark Bowden and pieces in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1999, Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down appeared.

It’s interesting to observe how the story was re-told over that time. An article by the former Independent correspondent Richard Dowden the previous year makes the clear point that US troops killed unarmed men, women and children from the outset of their mission: “In one incident, Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence. The killer is not identified.” Dowden’s original articles contain these horror stories. But his book does not. Instead, Black Hawk Down gives us lashings of extraordinary heroism in the face of blah, blah, blah. Rolf Harris singing “Two Little Boys”. Sanitized and deodorized Death From Above.

The author of Black Hawk Down is aware of the problem with these “elite, superior, special forces”: they are all white. But he doesn’t deal with what that elite whiteness means, or where it leads. The American elite forces couldn’t perform their central role in Somalia ­ to protect the oil business ­ because they were white racists, untrained and unable to relate to a humanitarian mission in Africa, even when corporate money was involved. The House Armed Services Committee laid the problem on the line the following year, 1994, in a comprehensive report on the state of racial affairs within the US military ­ An Assessment of Racial Discrimination in the Military: a Global Perspective, 30 December 1994, US Government Printing Office.

The committee sent investigators to 19 military bases at home and abroad, where they interviewed 2,000 randomly selected GIs. They found that overt racism was “commonplace” at four of the bases, and that inadequate training in racial awareness was a widespread problem.

Another task force, which investigated organised racism in the US Army, said the problem was particularly serious in all-white, so-called “elite” and “Special Operations” units. Such racial separatism could lead to problems, its report warned, because it “foster[s] supremacist attitudes among white combat soldiers”. (The Secretary of the Army’s Task Force Report on Extremist Activities, Defending American Values, 21 March 1996, Washington DC, page 15.)

The Somalia mission ended in disarray. The Americans and the “United Nations” allies left. In the aftermath of the massacre, Canada, Italy and Belgium all held enquiries into the excesses of their troops. Canada put several “elite” white soldiers, who had tortured and killed Somalis, on trial. The US has never held any public investigation or reprimanded any of its commanders or troops for what went on in Somalia.

Now the US prepares for another mission to Mogadishu. It may take the form of bombings, or of a poor Somali academic, harassed by the State Department and CIA into offering himself up as sacrificial prime minister in another doomed governance experiment. It involves a substantial propaganda angle. The oil business is all powerful, and must be obeyed.

Not that I’m suggesting that the forthcoming film of Black Hawk Down, directed by Ridley Scott, is anything so crude as that. I’m sure that it will be even-handed, and depict its protagonists exactly as they were in life, skin pigment and all. And I look forward to the sensitive handling of Ewan McGregor’s character: elite, white GI John “Stebby” Stebbins, renamed as Company Clerk John Grimes in the film, who is now serving a 30-year sentence in Fort Leavenworth military prison for raping a 12-year-old girl. Massacres and rapes are horrible things. No one would stoop to glorify, or justify them, would they?

The current US military doctrine is something called “Full Spectrum Dominance”. It is the brainchild of several other mighty corporations and the Pentagon. Consisting of putting weapons in orbit in outer space, it will mean the US is an even greater, more unstable, military power ­ in heaven as here on earth. It ­ along with anti-ballistic missile systems and the murder of prisoners of war ­ is currently illegal under international law.

If British politicians go along with the next war, on Somalia, or on Iraq; if they loan the country to the US for their Star Wars and Echelon; if noted British film-makers like Ridley and Tony Scott (coming soon! Top Gun reality TV!) do devote themselves to burnishing the image of an elite US military in films like Black Hawk Down, perhaps it’s time for a debate in Britain about what America’s “Full Spectrum Dominance” really means.

Alex Cox has just completed ‘Revengers Tragedy’, a British film, for Bard Entertainments and Exterminating Angel.