Joe Strummer

Aileen Colleran

In 1977, aged 16, I wouldn't have dreamed of joining the Labour Party. Join the Party of government, the Party of ageing councillors that denied bands places to play in Glasgow, the Party that paid more attention to the IMF than the trade unions? If I was 16 today, I'd be equally unlikely to join the Labour Party. If the past is another country, why do I re-read the yellow crumbling pages of the New Musical Express stored in the back of my cupboards and discover the truth of the cliché: the more things change the more they stay the same?

It was Joe Strummer's death that did it of course. Sent me burrowing into personal archives, experiencing my generation's equivalent of hearing about the demise of Elvis or Lennon.

At 16 you're stuck in life's waiting room. Sundays in teenage bedrooms last for centuries and all that kept me going was playing that first Clash album over and over again, whilst scouring the NME for clues, looking for the key, looking for the passport out of suburban boredom. The irony of course was that the hell I was experiencing in the douce estate of Wimpey detached villas with turquoise Ford Cortinas in the garage was a heaven for all aspirational working class parents. In the years to come, this would be the model constituency for New Labour, the electorate they chose to pitch their wares at, the real voters (as opposed to the "undeserving" poor).

One of the most successful triumphs of style over substance in political discourse in recent years is the insistence that "lifestyle" (originally defined by Weber but bastardised by style gurus like Peter York and countless pollsters) is a more powerful touchstone for the people than class and economic power. Class politics were to the forefront in the punk era, and some shaven eyebrows were raised at Joe Strummer's respectable middle class background. He later admitted that he talked up his father's job in the civil service, trying to noise up the "prolier than thou" brigade by calling him a diplomat. So, it all depends if you think where you're from and what your parents did is more important than what you believe. In the immediate aftermath of the news of Joe Strummer's death, one common aspect of all the accounts of how the Clash influenced people of my generation is that it was a glimpse of something other than dumb acceptance of your place in the scheme of things.

What had the greater impact, the music or the politics? Does it matter? For me, the two were indivisible. I've never agreed with the premise of "let's keep politics out of music, sport, art, education." How can you keep ideas out of living, breathing, or being human? Listen to the lyrics of Career Opportunities ("they offered me the office, offered me the shop, they said I'd better take anything they'd got") and marvel that this was written twenty years before job seekers allowance and welfare to work. To think that in 1977 we had still to experience the rigours of monetarism and Thatcher's Britain. And yet, when White Man in Hammersmith Palais came out in 1978, it was as if the Clash knew what was coming around the corner "all over, people changing their votes, along with their overcoats". A shiver went down my spine at the time, but let's not get sentimental for a golden age that never was. Pop shlock dominated the charts, Labour Ministers did deals with capital to stay in power, and fascism was on the march.

Among the fake politics and posturing of many punk bands, an integrity that couldn't be faked resonated about the Clash.

Years later, that still applies. They never played Top of the Pops, they never re-formed for a big bucks reunion tour, and in the month before his death, Joe Strummer played a benefit gig for the firefighters.

The guitar sound of the Clash was unique and incomparable. Not all the sound politics in the world can make a good band if the music sucks. I can't say what my favourite track is, only that it comes from the early years and is either Clash City Rockers, Safe European Home, Garageland or, most appropriately in these times; Tommy Gun. The thwack of the guitar sound bouncing off the walls never fails to inspire, and I'm sorry but after Sandinista, Joe Strummer and the Clash dropped off my musical radar, and I can't write with any musical authority about his later output. However, there was a poignant replay on BBC Choice of his gig at Glastonbury last year, and what struck me was how healthy, how full of life and humanity he seemed, but now he's dead, when some of the dinosaur rockers we raged against are still earning their corporate shareholders dividends.

The first gig I ever went to was at the rancid old Apollo, in July 1978. The Clash were supported by Suicide (a New York electro combo who truly lived up to their name in front of an incomprehending and hostile Glasgow audience), and the embryonic Skids. It was one of the most vivid and exciting gigs I've ever been at, and if half the people I've subsequently met that claimed to be there, truly were, then the Apollo must've accommodated tens of thousands. It had everything, including a full scale seat throwing riot, the band arrested afterwards and for myself - a frantic scramble to get the last late night bus, ears buzzing with feedback and mind reeling with possibilities. The next week I joined the Anti-Nazi League. I wonder how many other people were similarly influenced?

Six days on the road to the promised land by Lester Bangs is a substance abuse fuelled piece of hysteria that I absorbed avidly, an account of the Clash's first major UK tour, that ended with these words; "the politics of rock n roll is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is for the rest of their lives, and either the next day they go back to work or boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums, nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the reviving flames when for only once you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all."

Where I take issue with the late Lester Bangs is that the Clash inspired something more than that. It's impossible to quantify, but many, many people made that shift from thinking to doing, from abstract to reality, from pub talk to activism as a result of listening to Give `em enough rope and London Calling and absorbing the anti-racist message that came out of every interview the Clash ever did.

And I'm not sure that there's much fundamentally different between then and now. If young people don't want to join mainstream political parties, or turn out to vote, don't despair. If they don't surface on the anti-war marches, that's the time to worry. Joe Strummer may be dead but somewhere in a garage or a damp rehearsal room a band is putting together a set that's going to echo the energy and politics of the best band of the 70's and become this year's Levellers or Manic Street Preachers, and I'm more than certain that we're going to see teenage protestors alongside the usual suspects on the marches and rallies in the coming months.