Back in 2002, the music world lost one of its most vital names when Joe Strummer passed away at the age of 50. Since his death though, many fans have tried to get their hands on some of the rocker’s rare tracks that he recorded with The Clash, The 101ers, The Latino Rockabilly War, and The Mescaleros.
While we’ve received a few live albums from The Mescaleros, fans got their wish earlier this year when it was announced that a new compilation album, Joe Strummer 001, was to be released in late September.
A press release for the album revealed that, upon his death, it was found that the rocker had “barns full of writings and tapes stored in his back garden”. While his archive now contains over 20,000 items, his widow has now revealed just how close we were to never hearing any of these recordings again.
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Lucinda Tait opened up about her late husband’s proclivity to obsessively hoard every piece of musical history he had been involved with, storing it in barns at the bottom of his garden.
“I knew there was stuff there, but I didn’t really know what it was and I also thought it was just papers and lyrics, not recordings,” Tait explained.
“Joe had moved around a lot during his life and when we moved to Somerset he had these huge moving boxes, the wooden tea chests that would give you splinters and they ended up sitting in a barn with no doors, open to the elements,” she continued.
“He also had lots of stuff in different plastic bags, including lyrics he’d written or typed out, chord changes, notes, setlists, sketches and cartoons.”
“After Joe died Damien Hirst kindly offered to come down and take a look and he said: ‘I’m going to take this stuff and put it in storage’, which he did,” she explained. “Some of it was going mouldy. But it was only when he had to move his own stuff into different storage that someone finally started going through these boxes and we discovered there was music in there, hidden away on cassettes and old reel to reel tapes.”
“When Gordon [McHarg III] started going through the tapes and cassettes and transferring it onto a digital data bank he discovered all these new songs and versions we’d never heard before,” she concluded.
“Altogether it took about five years to clean up the tapes – removing all the hiss and noise to make them audible – for us to complete the process.”
Of course, this is nowhere near the first time that rarities of this nature have been found in such a manner. Back in July, it was revealed that the earliest-known recording of David Bowie was going up for sale – years after being found in a bread basket.
Then, just weeks later, it was stated that a long-lost duet between Mick Jagger and Carly Simon had been rediscovered, 46 years after it was first recorded.
Considering how many lost pieces of musical history are still out there, we can’t help but think we should go and check our back shed and see what goodies we may find.
Joe Strummer’s Joe Strummer 001 is out now.
Check out Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros’ ‘London Is Burning’:
