ABSTRACT
In reinventing himself as this down-to-earth persona, Joe Strummer was opened to charges of fakery. But he was due for that anyway, given the British music press's penchant for tearing down artists who thought they could slough off their accreted histories. For one of the standout songs on the Clash's first album, "White Riot", Strummer writes not as the bomb-throwing anarchist that many punks yearned to be, but rather as a yearn-filled viewer of revolutionary activity. In the summer of 1981, when the Clash came to New York to play their epochal run of 17 shows at Bond's Casino in Time Square, they brought along frequent collaborator Don Letts to film it all. The footage that survives from that shoot has never quite been pulled together into a proper film, though it was repurposed for the "This is Radio Clash" video and serves as the visual spine for Letts' heavily talking-head documentary Westway to the World.
