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Clash On The Barrelhead | The past is filmed in Julien Temple’s rockumentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten.
Directed by Julien Temple. Apr 11-13, 15-16. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
4 Stars
It’s tough balancing hero worship with a critical cinematic eye.
The subject of director Julien Temple’s documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten still holds considerable sway over my musical taste, some 27 years after I first came across London Calling. And every pronouncement that Joe Strummer ever made, no matter how incoherent or wrongheaded, resonates strongly with me even today.
This, therefore, is not a very balanced review.
The Future Is Unwritten is like candy to Strummer fans: two hours’ worth of previously unseen footage of his childhood and teen years, rawly filmed performances of Strummer’s first band, The 101’ers, interviews with people who knew him by his birth name, John Graham Mellor. There are a few repeated clips, images, and soundbites from earlier punk and Clash films, but not so many as to make the film feel like a retread. Visually it’s as much a collage as Temple films like The Filth and the Fury, with quick snippets of an old version of 1984, the animated Animal Farm, Lindsay Anderson’s If..., all interwoven with conversations filmed around campfires—a favourite Strummer pastime in his after-Clash years, when he posited campfires as a vision of utopia.
The people around those campfires—filmed, as far as I can tell, in New York, London, Glastonbury, and a few other locales—relate the story of Strummer’s life, and how he affected their own lives. His wives and girlfriends speak of him mostly as an enigma, someone whose at times erratic behaviour kept them at a distance (although longtime companion Gaby Salter speaks warmly of his relationship with their two daughters). His childhood friends cast an affectionate light on his early years, as well as speaking to the tragedy of his older brother’s overdose at a young age, but some of the celebrity participants come off as a little ridiculous. They all seem to have a story about how important Strummer was to them—John Cusack, Jim Jarmusch, Bono, Johnny Depp, all measuring words about their sometimes slight connection to him—while Strummer interjects supplemental narration via canny use of audio taken from a BBC radio show he briefly hosted.
That Strummer was a bit of a bandwagon-jumper is obvious: he shucked the pub rock 101’ers after being converted by a single Sex Pistols show in 1976, waking up to a musical mirroring of the revolutionary year of 1968 that he’d been too young to participate in. He cut his hair and dyed what was left over, remorselessly dropping flatmates and friends whom he judged too close to the hippie squat scene that punk rock sought to depose. Temple doesn’t gloss over this rather ruthless change either—he assembles a few matter-of-fact words from these old friends just as a voiceover from Strummer sadly acknowledges how he remained a pariah to them even decades later.
“He was a coward,” says occasional running buddy Don Letts, who filmed Strummer for the Clash’s Westway to the World documentary just a few years before the singer died. Letts’ blunt admission of this fact in no way shakes his admiration for the man, but it needs to be said: it was Strummer who destroyed The Clash, not their meddling manager (Bernie Rhodes), junkie drummer (Topper Headon), or rock star guitarist (Mick Jones). But even Strummer admits this, both in The Future Is Unwritten and Westway to the World—and how many rock stars have had the strength of character to do that?
The latter part of the film salves a bit of the pain Strummer caused by disbanding The Clash, covering his renewed faith in music through dabbling in rave culture, and his eventual re-emergence as leader of The Mescaleros—but it can’t help but be downbeat, ending as it does with Strummer’s sudden death at 52 of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. The film spills it out, warts and all: Strummer was at times a poseur and a heartless ideologue, a bastard, and a terrible friend, but when the chips were down, he appears to have come through.
But perhaps the final word on the matter should be Strummer’s response to Van Halen’s David Lee Roth, who derisively took The Clash to task for being “too serious” at the US Festival. Strummer hectored the same crowd into feeling something, giving something back, because “we’re all alive. At the same time, at once.”
I know which statement makes my heart beat that much faster, even today.
