This is Joe Public speaking

>> Listen up, all you punk rawkahs--Joe Strummer's coming to town

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

What a rip-off!

I ring up former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, fully expecting the surly, snarling punk rock hero I've admired since childhood to chew my snivelling journalist ear off with a barrage of incomprehensible shit-talk (reference, please, the end of "Complete Control"). What I get is a charming, good-natured father of three, clearly happy to be back in the rock 'n' roll game again, albeit by his own rules.

Signed with heavyweight indie label Epitaph, Joe Strummer and his new band the Mescaleros recently released their second album in hardly a year--this after more than a decade of intentional obscurity, broken only by the occasional film role or soundtrack gig. As its title suggests, Global a Go-Go is an energetic patchwork of cultures and eras, often colliding gloriously in the same moment. Clash fans will remark the similarity to that band's adventurous final albums in the fusion of punk, folk, beats, world music, soundtracks and everything else.

Here we are, some 20 years after "the only band that matters" decided that matters were out of hand, and Uncle Joe's got plenty to say about the matters that matter. Please note that this interview was conducted before Sept. 11--for his take on that, buy him a beer after the show this Saturday.



Mirror: First thing is, I'd like to know a bit about your band, the Mescaleros.

Joe Strummer: I took an 11-year layoff, and somewhere about halfway through, I began to get itchy feet. I realized that I needed people to work with, so I went on a hunt. I tried to hook up with people, booking sessions and trying to make tracks--you know, the usual sort of thing. I met Pablo Cook, who's the conga player in the band, and through him, and trying to make tracks--projects that went nowhere, crashed into walls and all this--I began to meet the people who are very important to the project. It took about five years to kick in and make that album we did in '99, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Now that we've managed to kick another one out, I feel that I've got the right players, the right people to work with, which is the most difficult thing. If you get it wrong, there's nothing you can do, you're never gonna make anything good.

M: Well, they hold up their end of the bargain. Are they much younger than you? They seem to be all over the map, age-wise.

JS: Let me ask--(to someone in the room with him) how old do you think Scott and Marty are? Late 20s? I don't know why we're a bit vague on it--he said late 20s, but then he changed it to Scott being in his early 20s. Pablo's slightly older than them, early 30s, but I'm obviously the oldest.

M: Do you like working with the younger guys?

JS: I find it's a great deal of pleasure because, not only are they great players, but they can make funny little wisecracks. That might not sound like much, but out on the road--

M: It helps you keep your sanity.

JS: Absolutely. It's a fantastic ability to have. So I have found it pleasurable, and nobody's been kicked off or burst into tears or anything, either.

M: The chemistry sure paid off on the record.

JS: I think so. We just blundered into this--I don't want to give you any impression at all that I or anyone else knows what we are doing. We just blundered into the whole thing, which is the best way to arrive at a result, really. Swimming backwards--

M: Intuitive, intuitive, intuitive.

JS: Exactly.

The mobs don't march, they run

M: Now, given the very multicultural consciousness of the album, I want to know how you feel about the whole globalization thing that's going on--something I'm very much of two minds about.

JS: Yes, I agree. The trouble is, where are we getting any information from? I'm well aware that, whatever newspaper I read in England, trying to get at the facts--is free trade good or bad?--I can't find a purist source of facts. In this newspaper they're twisting it this way, and in that paper they're twisting it the other way. I'm getting fed up, because you want a pure, mineral water spring of facts, without any spin on them, to be a bit more secure in forming some kind of opinion. I don't want to have any opinions based on faulty facts. But I've decided I'm going be against it (laughs). The trouble is that everyone in the world is feeling a little disenfranchised over this. Although we have our votes in England, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans, really. That's where the anger comes from--we feel that nothing we say or do is going to make any difference.

M: You nailed it. I've been watching the protests drift east, from Seattle to Quebec to Genoa, and I'll say this: the Europeans seem to take the whole thing much more seriously. I felt that the protests over here were too much a carnival of complaints--too many costumes, not enough serious expression. But the underlying thing, to me, is that there's a circumvention of democracy going on. I'm not necessarily against free trade, but I'm not going to trust these people, in government and business, if they're not going to tell us what's going on.

JS: I agree.

M: If I wanted that, I'd move to China.

JS: Exactly, we could live under that in China. We're not supposed to be China (chuckles).

M: What do you make of the anti-globalization protests?

JS: Are you kidding? It's the most interesting thing going on in any sector of public life. At least it's touching off an interesting debate. Obviously, we've got to say, the violence we cannot condone. But we can understand the rage behind it.

M: My heart's with the pacifist protesters--just be there, be dignified, show your face and let them know that you know.

JS: I was thinking about this very thing the other day, thinking about Gandhi and how his message is probably one of the only ones that can work here. Now that they're shooting at people, there has to be more Gandhi-cizing. Just for self-protection.

Daddy was a bank robber

M: Next thing--I'm curious what you make of the Internet. Populist power-tool or corporate control mechanism?

JS: Hopefully the former. I finally got Internetted up, or however you say it, about 18 months ago, although I've been hiding behind my wife, who can run it, send the e-mails and get on the Net. I have to ask her help to get in there. I find it difficult--you know that old saying, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks"?--I find the concept of it difficult to insert in my brain. But I am getting there. Probably, by the time I do get there, it'll be a corporate control tool, but I'm definitely trying to get in there.

M: Taking an angle from that, you have teenage daughters--

JS: Absolutely.

M: So what are they into, culturally, and how do you perceive it?

JS: They're into West Coast punk rock.

M: So they're not the Britney Spears types.

JS: Oh, no, they disdain all that. They're quite a bit older than that--the oldest is 17, another is 15 and my stepdaughter is nine, and even the nine year old is into Dr. Dre. "Can I have the new Snoop Doggy Dogg record?" It puts me in an interesting position, as a parent. But mainly they're pretty hip, I reckon.

M: Do you try to keep a hand in it?

JS: I was taught, the way I was brought up, to always find my own way, so I try to do the same there. Of course, occasionally, if she's listening to some cheesy record, I'll shout, "This is rubbish!" To the nine year old--I wouldn't dare to the others.

M: So no politics, just aesthetics.

JS: Yeah--typical parent stuff.

White man in Hammersmith Palais

M: Taking a tangent from that, now, I want to talk about hip hop. You were there right at the dawn of hip hop in NYC, with the Clash hit "Magnificent Seven." Close to a quarter-century later, hip hop is rapidly becoming the most important music in the world. I'm curious how you see the evolution of hip hop.

JS: I was always aware that hip hop was holy for the black nation. I've followed it through. Luckily, in Britain, we've got a white guy, actually the son of a vicar, and he's our hip hop expert, runs every show. His name's Tim Westwood, and he's been running shows for 15 years. He keeps us in touch, because he's got a two-hour show on national radio every week. That's the window that's allowed me to keep current. It's pretty hard to keep current with hip hop, because it's such a large field. Everyone used to make fun of this bloke, because he talked like a hip-hopper, even though he's British, y'know what I mean? Then somebody shot him the other week, because--get this--he was doing a program, going, "Yo! Less of the violence, guys." Y'know, at the shows, trying to get them to chill. And some yardie shot him. He survived--he was in a car, got shot in the arm or something--and in a perverse way, it's given him his badge of honour. Now he's a hip-hopper, for good and for true (laughs). So that's how we can dig hip hop in Britain, but beyond that, actually, British radio is all pop. There's no way I can get on the radio in Britain.

M: That's funny, because over here, we look to the U.K. and to France Inter and what have you, the European radio, and we're jealous of how much good music we think you get to hear. But maybe that's just mythology on our part.

JS: What happened was, some idiot went in and ruined it all. Some moron went in and said, "Let's just play music for 10 year olds."

M: That goes back to my questions about your daughters. Pre-teen girls are the number-1 marketing niche in the world.

JS: Damn right. They've certainly taken over. In fact, that's why I'm sitting here in Toronto. When I realized that we couldn't get on the radio anywhere, I thought the best thing we could do, to tell our people we've got a record out, is to go play in stores and try to get a word-of-mouth thing going. When you can't get on the radio, you've only really got two avenues. One's playing live and the other is talking to writers like yourself. Beyond those two avenues, you're fucked.

With Chino at the Spectrum on Saturday, Oct. 13, 8pm, $32.50, all ages