There is a date that does not appear in textbooks, but one that anyone who truly loves music knows by heart: 22 December 2002. On that day Joe Strummer died, and with him a possibility came to an end. Not an era, not a genre, but a moral possibility within popular music. Joe Strummer was, as everyone knows, the singer of The Clash. On that 22 December he was fifty years old, and he died in his sleep of an undiagnosed heart defect. He died without fanfare, without farewell tours, without turning into the caricature of himself that rock has imposed on so many of his peers. He died as he had lived: slightly to one side, never at the centre of the stage. Only then did people realise that The Clash had in fact ceased to exist long before. And that, paradoxically, they had never stopped existing. To tell […]
