An excerpt from an article in
CounterPunch, December 24, 2002
Joe Strummer is Dead;
Long Live the Clash!
by GAVIN MARTIN
Over the course of five albums The Clash rewrote the punk rulebook with a musical game plan that embraced reggae, r&b, funk, folk, calypso, jazz and rap. Classic singles - Complete Control, White Man in the Hammersmith Palais and Bankrobber - were accompanied by albums that showed a hotbed of creativity. London Calling with its Cold War inspired title track was their masterpiece but the ambitious Sandinista, named after the revolutionary Nicaraguan group was their most ambitious and diverse. Joe had found out about the Sandinista rebellion from Moe Armstrong a onetime member of Daddy Longlegs.
"They'd made a big noise when they came to London in 1969 and Moe had become very left wing, he gave us info that was quite hard to find out. A bunch of teenage Marxists oust your favourite dictator? The establishment don't want to know."
