Legend calling

>> Director Julien Temple on the Clash, campfires and his bittersweet, inspirational documentary
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

by MALCOLM FRASER

Joe Strummer was a study in contrasts: a child of privilege turned squatter, a hippie turned punk, and a rock star with a radical conscience. After leading the Clash to previously unknown heights for any punk band, both in mainstream success and musical diversity, he ran the band into the ground and entered a decade-long self-imposed exile from the music business. In the midst of a successful comeback and on the eve of a Clash reunion, he died suddenly from a congenital heart defect. His fascinating story, both inspiring and tragic, is poignantly told in the new documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

Director Julien Temple has himself had quite an interesting career. His first film, in 1980, was The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a bold collage of documentary, animation and staged sequences, as well as a forum for Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren to advance the thesis that he’d masterminded the band as a high-concept publicity stunt. Temple went on to direct dozens of music videos—everything from Whitney Houston and Culture Club to Van Halen’s “Jump” and several Judas Priest classics. He’s also made a handful of features, notably the big-budget musical Absolute Beginners, which was critically savaged as a “feature-length music video” (though in retrospect, for better or worse, Temple may have been ahead of his time in that respect).

In 2000, Temple made The Filth and the Fury, a sort of corrective to Swindle in which the surviving Sex Pistols tell their story from their own point of view. Temple brilliantly captured the excitement of the early English punk movement, as well as how genuinely frightening it was to mainstream culture. But while the Pistols films serve mainly to perpetuate their legend, the Strummer doc is a much more intimate and in-depth portrait, unafraid to question punk orthodoxy or Strummer’s self-mythologizing.

Life-affirming legacy

Reached on the phone in Australia, where he’s in post-production on his latest film, Temple discussed the genesis of Joe Strummer, whose subject he had filmed in the early days of the Clash, lost touch with, then became close to in the last years of his life.

“I wouldn’t have made a film if Joe was still alive,” he says. “It took a couple of years after he died to come up with the idea of doing it. I just thought maybe it would help everybody to create some kind of legacy for him, for people who may not have heard of him. But it took a while to be able to feel good about doing it, actually. I think we were all pretty shaken up when he died, people who knew him well. It was such a great loss of someone who was so life-affirming; it was a difficult one to come to terms with.”

Strummer’s story is largely told by friends from various parts of his life, gathered around a campfire—a setting that had a significant role in Strummer’s later years. “He used to have them regularly towards the end of his life,” says Temple. “He really liked the idea of just getting a bunch of people together around a fire, creating a mood with the right kind of music, the right kind of hospitality. He thought the fire was a great kind of equalizer of people. In the firelight, people are just human beings.”

In this spirit, Temple makes a curious decision not to identify any of the speakers in the film. Some of them are familiar faces from the worlds of music and film (Strummer acted in a few movies in the ’80s, and we’re treated to reminisces from some unexpected sources, Johnny Depp and Matt Dillon among them). With others, their identity and role in Strummer’s life becomes clear over the course of the film, forcing the viewer to pay a little more attention.

“Well, no one wore supermarket checkout identification badges around the campfire, so I thought it would be a bit of an insult to stick them on people,” Temple says facetiously when asked to explain this decision. “I hate standards. Standard isn’t good enough,” he continues with a laugh. “I think the standard documentary treats people like foie gras ducks, you know? It massages information down their throat. For me, cinema should be a two-way thing, that the audience has to have something to think about, not everything tied up in little bundles.”

Hippie turns punk

Woven through the campfire reminiscing, Strummer’s early life is summarized in a fast-paced montage. His father was a diplomat, and he grew up all over the world, absorbing the cultural and musical influences of a range of countries. Back in England as a teenager, he ran away from home and became an itinerant hippie musician. When the punk explosion first hit in the form of the Pistols, he did an abrupt about-face, severing ties with his squatter hippie community to join the nascent Clash under the tutelage of a hard-nosed music manager, Bernie Rhodes.

“Rhodes and Malcolm McLaren were similar in that they took credit for inventing the whole punk thing, and the bands themselves totally refute that,” notes Temple. “The truth is probably somewhere in between.”

Considering the radical politics and ethic of authenticity prized by the punk movement, and Strummer in particular, the film implies that he carried some guilt over these semi-manufactured beginnings. Certainly, some kind of disillusionment kept him estranged from the music world after the rise and fall of the Clash, and he was only able to come back to music by reconciling with his past. “I think at the end of his life, he was able to bring in elements that he kept shut out in the harsh spotlight of the punk moment,” says Temple. “And for me, the campfire kind of represents how he didn’t lose who he was as Joe Strummer.”

Always musically open-minded—the Clash hired Grandmaster Flash as their opening act in the early ’80s, and Strummer berated the punk audience when they predictably booed the hip-hop pioneers—he acquired his campfire habit while investigating the outdoor raves that were sweeping England in the ’90s. As he got involved in playing music again, he also picked up a gig as a radio host on the BBC World Service, where he played a wide variety of music from around the world and spread a humanist message.

Getting a political clue

Since Strummer died just as he was enjoying a renaissance, the film is inevitably bittersweet, but ultimately inspiring. “I found him an incredibly inspirational person just to sit around and converse with, hang out with,” recalls Temple. “And I think underneath Joe, there was a sense that social justice wasn’t just a luxury, it was really important for the survival of everybody on the planet. And I believe that’s true.”

Asked if he thinks that political music has any role to play today, Temple is cautiously optimistic. “You wouldn’t have a President Bush if people had any kind of a political clue about anything, so it can’t get any worse than it has been. But it’s much harder for people who have something to say to find a mass audience, because the information society has broken everyone up into little niche tribes. It’s hard to break out in the way that a band like the Clash managed to do across the culture, and really have a massive impact. To do that, you’ve gotta be so bland that you’re not really a human being anymore. So that must change.

“I think the more people wake up to where we’ve actually got—and what Joe was singing about 30 years ago is actually more important now than it was then—I think there will be voices for those audiences that need to know what’s going on a bit more.”

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
opens at the Cinéma du Parc on Friday, Feb. 22