Punk was rubbish,” says Julien Temple. “Other than the Pistols and the Clash,
all those other bands were really awful. I couldn’t listen to them. But kids
should know about it, because it was the last time when this country had a
youth culture uprising which said things that needed to be said.”
The erratic directing career of British cinema’s chief punk chronicler has
been shaped by three key passions: pop music, radical politics and rebel
artists. Indeed, all three of these enduring obsessions play leading roles
in the 53-year-old maverick’s latest documentary, The Future is
Unwritten, a bold and absorbing portrait of the late Clash singer Joe
Strummer.
Much as in Temple’s two most recent rock documentaries, The Filth and
the Fury and Glastonbury, smart stylistic flourishes punctuate The
Future is Unwritten. There are flashes of animation, telling clips from
classic films, and even an audio commentary by Strummer himself,
posthumously assembled from dozens of archive interviews.
“There were probably a hundred different sources,” Temple says. “To me a lot
of the most interesting stuff was on all these cassettes from journalist
interviews, in bars in Spain. We had to clean it up, it was so noisy.”
Clearly a labour of love for Temple, who was both a friend and a fan [[ of
Strummer, The Future is Unwrittenis passionate, intelligent,
innovative punk film-making at its best. But it also peels back the late
rocker’s Punk Superman image to discover the complex, conflicted, vulnerable
Clark Kent beneath.
Born John Graham Mellor in 1952, Strummer transformed himself from
boarding-school misfit to rabble-rousing populist when he joined the Clash
in 1976. He was globally revered as a charismatic and explosively exciting
performer, but deep emotional and political contradictions lay behind his
egalitarian everyman image.
“Joe was always on the side of the underdog,” Temple argues, “but he wasn’t a
didactic politician in any sense. Freedom of speech was a big thing for him.
“George Orwell was very much a theme throughout his life, the sense that he
was being controlled, spied on. He hated Tony Blair.”
Strummer and Temple were born three years apart and their biographies share
some striking parallels. Both were raised by left-wing civil servants, and
both also lost siblings at an early age. One of the most moving sections in The
Future is Unwritten deals with the suicide of Strummer’s elder brother
David, a troubled introvert and National Front supporter. David overdosed in
Regent’s Park in 1970, aged just 17. Strummer identified the body.
“I had a brother who died at about the same age,” Temple explains. “It’s
tough, but I didn’t get that deep into it with Joe – he didn’t really like
talking about it. I think he got some kind of energy from that, but I don’t
think it unlocks every secret that Joe holds.”
Both Temple and Strummer were politicised by their parents from an early age.
Landon Temple was an Oxford Communist and Spitfire pilot during the Second
World War. He was court-martialled for desertion after leading a campaign
against dangerous landing conditions.
“He was very radical,” says Temple. “I was born in Guy Burgess’s flat soon
after he left for Moscow. I never got to the bottom of that, actually . . .”
Temple’s father later worked for the Ministry of Education, but was sacked for
his political views by the incoming Heath Government. “Every phone call we
had at home was tapped,” the director recalls. “But I was always very proud
that the Pistols were on the M15 blacklist, and Joe was, too.”
For ideological reasons, Temple’s parents raised him on a North London council
estate. A penniless bohemian with a patrician accent, young Julien was often
beaten up by other children. “We had to live like the workers,” he laughs.
“But it was interesting. Rather than being an opinionated toff, I had that
experience.”
However, idealism has its limits. When Temple Senior suggested his son should
abandon his university ambitions for a job at the Ford car factory in
Dagenham, he chose Cambridge instead. “I rebelled against it and became a
drug-taking hippy,” Temple says.
The director’s early forays into film-making coincided with Strummer’s
apprenticeship as a squat-dwelling pub rocker. This in turn led both into
the musical and political maelstrom of punk in mid1970s London. But after an
initial bonding period, band rivalries began to harden and the director was
forced to choose between the Clash and Sex Pistols camps. “You had to take
sides,” Temple shrugs, “and I went with the Pistols.” The result was the
post-break-up documentary The Great Rock’n’ Roll Swindle.
Strummer dissolved the Clash in the mid1980s, just as Temple was directing his
grand folly Absolute Beginners. Both men subsequently went into an
extended career decline. The rocker dabbled in acting and soundtracks with
limited success. The director fled to Hollywood, where he notched up a
portfolio of indifferent features and glossy rock videos.
“I had to go, I couldn’t get work here,” Temple shrugs. “They liked Absolute
Beginners in Hollywood. First thing, I got this message from Michael
Jackson that he wanted me to go and see him.
“They had prints of the film in their private screening room, him and Janet. I
had to sit and watch them dance beneath the screen. They knew every move.”
Two decades would pass before Strummer and Temple rekindled their friendship.
By freakish coincidence, in the early 1990s, both settled within a few miles
of each other in rural Somerset. Even more bizarrely, they then discovered
their wives, Lucinda and Amanda, had been best friends since school.
In the decade before Strummer’s untimely death from a congenital heart defect
in 2002, he and Temple became firm friends. Around campfire gatherings at
Glastonbury, they even conceived a crazed scheme to establish their own
independent republic in the West Country.
“We were trying to get a rebel state going, a bit like the Confederacy,”
Temple says. “Joe designed a flag, with a skull and crossbones over the
campfire.”
Having rekindled his youthful passions with rock-docs like The Filth and
the Fury and The Future is Unwritten, Temple’s career is at its
highest point since Absolute Beginners. He has another music film in
the pipe-line, on the Kinks, but he his wary of being typecast as a rock
historian. His next project will be a Sydney-based opera, Eternity Man,
hopefully followed by more dramatic features.
“I am really interested in doing drama, but I want to try and do it in a
different way,” he nods. “More like how I made these documentaries, which
was much more free. The way I’ve worked before, I found it hard being told
what to do by bankers and studios. I can work in that way, but I get very
angry . . .”
Temple pauses to reflect. “It’s a problem with authority,” he smiles. “I guess
I was brought up with that.”
Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is released on May 18
PAT GILBERT REMEMBERS JOE STRUMMER
My abiding memory of Joe Strummer is his coming to a Soho pub to entertain a
dozen or so of my colleagues after I’d interviewed him in June 2001. He held
court, talking to everyone generously about whatever it was they’d steer the
conversation towards – kids, mortgages, politics, work, music. Joe bought
tequila slammers, and some drunken idiot (me) lordly announced that he
looked ridiculous with the bushy beard he wore in the 1987 film Walker.
I sheepishly apologised by e-mail a few days later, to which I got a lovely
reply. As a man rudely honest about his failings, Strummer had a remarkable
capacity to make other people feel better about theirs.
Having attempted it myself, I understand how tricky it is to assemble the
disparate aspects of Joe’s personality – rabble-rouser, depressive, kindly
gent, irresponsible boozer, loving father, incurable romantic – into a
picture that does him any justice as a 3-D human being. But The Future is
Unwritten is the most revelatory and complete portrait we’re ever likely
to get.
Tellingly, Temple doesn’t judge Joe’s reinvention as the slurring new wave
crud who in 1976 dropped all his dearest hippy mates like hot bricks. At a
talk last week at St Martin’s School of Art, the maverick Clash manager
Bernie Rhodes dismissed the film as “boring” and “crap”. It was, he railed,
“a film made by a public schoolboy about another public schoolboy”, which
“turned Joe into a hippy because they want another John Lennon”. But Rhodes
misses a crucial point: it’s actually Temple’s empathy with Joe that lends The
Future Is Unwritten a subtlety and compassion that other texts about Joe
have lacked. In the five years or so before his death, I met Joe a dozen or
more times, mostly with tape recorder or notebook in hand. On one occasion,
Joe drunkenly insisted on giving me a lift home after a gig. I only lived
200 yards from the venue. Another night I was showing the Clash’s manager,
Tricia Ronane, the set-list for one of the first Mescaleros shows. She
looked agape: the group had made a pact that they would never play more than
a couple of Clash tunes in their respective bands; Strummer had played
eight. The phone rang and it was Joe. He wondered what all the fuss was
about. He would do exactly what he wanted.
Though Joe was starting to look puffy and careworn towards the end of his
life, The Future is Unwritten paints his last years as his happiest.
He’d found new purpose with the Mescaleros, was reconnecting with his hippy
side via his Glastonbury campfires and had a music show with the BBC World
Service. Usually films about premature rock deaths – Joe was 50 when he died
in 2002 – are pregnant with a poignant sense of a life unlived. Temple, to
his credit, makes Strummer’s life seem like several lived in succession, and
with maximum intensity. And even if you were with him for just five minutes,
you knew that was the truth.
Pat Gilbert is author of Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash
