Death or glory

Julien Temple remembers the great Joe Strummer, ex–Clash man and campfire lover

Even though Julien Temple’s latest film is a look back at the lead singer of a punk band, don’t call it a rockumentary. “I hate the whole form of the music documentary,” the British director says as he sips a late-morning cappuccino at the Soho Grand. “This isn’t a film about music, or even a musician. It’s about a time, and a man’s life through that time. But there’s no wrinkly old rock star in a bloody armchair whittling on. That’s cinematic death.”

Roaring with as much attitude and swagger as its subject, 'Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten' is a study in contradictions: equal parts piss, vinegar, sentiment and uplift. Born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, in 1952, Strummer was the son of a diplomat and the product of England’s public-school system, but he went on to found the Clash, one of the most influential rock acts of all time. After that group dissolved in 1985, he spent the next 17 years exploring other forms of self-expression, becoming an actor, a member of other bands and even a father before his untimely death from a congenital heart defect, in 2002.

“I certainly wouldn’t have made the film if he were still here,” Temple, who also directed the Sex Pistols doc 'The Filth and the Fury' (2000), says. “And I didn’t think about it until about three years after he had passed away. When he died, everyone who knew him well was quite badly affected by it, especially with Joe, because a lot of people knew each other through him.”

Toward the end of his life, Strummer had started hosting huge campfires, marathon jam and gab sessions at everywhere from the Glastonbury music festival to his home, which attracted scores of strangers, acquaintances and best friends. Temple uses the campfire motif throughout the film for all the on-camera interviews. “The campfire was such a big part of his life in the last few years,” the director, 53, says. “It was a magical thing, and quite epic at times. He liked getting people from different backgrounds together. You are very equal around a fire. You connect to them in an intimate way. That’s why it works in the film. There’s a kind of 'Mad Max' fire as much as a hippie fire.”

The hippie reference is arresting for someone best known as a punk, but Strummer wrote politically charged lyrics and played music flavored by reggae, jazz, rockabilly and soul. “There was a lot of nomad in Joe, in a kind of intellectual sense,” Temple says. “You’ve got to move on, mustn’t be in the past. The punk thing was a necessary corrective at that time. But old punks are just as boring as old hippies.”

Strummer always seemed in motion, for better or for worse. “He could decide to move on and leave everyone behind and slam the door,” the director notes. “And he could be quite ruthless about it at times, as the film shows.”

There are flattering remarks in the documentary from Bono, who rues the fact that the Clash isn’t still around. Former Clash drummer Topper Headon disagrees: “Bono’s a sweet man, but I don’t think he got the point. The fact is, it was a lightning strike: five years of intense music and feeling and aggression. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but every band has a shelf life.”

Headon initially resisted being interviewed for the film, which includes testimonies from subjects as wildly disparate as ex-Clash lead guitarist Mick Jones, Johnny Depp and Martin Scorsese. But once he was told that Temple’s project wasn’t just a Clash rehash but a tribute to Strummer, he relented. “He was a fucking amazing man,” Headon says of his bandmate. “He had an incredible impact on a lot of people’s lives, but he had the most phenomenal impact on mine.”

Temple’s history with Strummer goes back to the early days of the Clash: he even shot their first recording session. That incredible archival material is one of the movie’s highlights, and just part of Temple’s patented stream-of-consciousness collage structure, which meshes new footage, old movie scenes and stock shots to create an indelibly impressionistic nonfiction film.

“I prefer using music as a window to see things through, rather than how did they record that album or why is that song better than this song,” Temple says. “I don’t believe in that. And Joe to me was more important. He was a thinker, an aphorist or cartoonist. He wasn’t a technically great musician. He worked out simple ways of communicating what he felt through music. Which is really what you need to do.”

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