October 2000
Joe Strummer: The 100 Club

No vidous verbals or faux fisticuffs here. Instead the cream of the Q A wards nominees
and techno demigods Orbital
went nose to nose with a boisterous but bonhomie-filled rock'n `roll soundclash. It was the pre-awards Q Week and it rocked...

"Pure punk" white man in the 100 Club. Joe Sirummer will see Q now. Alone in the long narrow dressing-room he shuffIes about in some agitation. "I am a man just about to leap off the top of a cliff into a forest of long-bladed knives," he declares. I've got one hour before we're on and my bass player has had a nervous attack, tension, and this guy jimmy's here at two days' notice and we're doing a lot of new numbers... I'd just like to stand here and read the lyrics. I'II talk later."

He turns decisively to a shelf covered with sheets of hand-scrawled verses. This pure punk interview has lasted 93 seconds.

In the sauna that is the 100 Club, the gig unfolds game-of-two-halves fashion. The first five songs are "world premieres" of songs The Mescaleros have recorded through the week. Engaging stuff, they recall Strummer's Pogues connection via the jiggy lilt of fiddler Timon Dogg (who busked with Strummer around Europe in 1971).

But Dogg withdraws when it comes to the rousing run of Clash classics, London Calling, Rock The Casbah, (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, I Fought The Law and more. These lifelike reconstructions have a strange, rather comical effect. Large, balding men at the lip o[ the stage
an original Brigada Rosse T-shirt conspicuous at the front
punch the air. One of them, assisted by a team of helpers, even manages to climb astride a friend's shoulders. But then he topples ominously and soon his corpulent figure is dumped on the stage from where, unblinking, he stares up at his old hero, "I thought he was dead," Strummer chortles later. "Just heat exhaustion, it turned out.

It was a fantastic, fun occasion. Terrific. Straight out of the studio and, 1, 2, 3, go. It's lovely to be a human being again."

Phil Sutcliffe