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Mark Mccord

Redemption Song:  The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

by Chris Salewicz

HarperCollins, HK$320

It's often said that you should never meet your heroes lest their ordinariness disappoint you. Similar could be said for biographies, which can also prove to be a deflating experience. If the biography is well researched and authoritative, then the let-down is justified, but if the book is poorly done, the fan is left sadly cheated.

Having met  Joe Strummer in person, admiration undiminished, it comes as a huge disappointment to find the man utterly stripped of any heroic qualities in  Chris Salewicz's biography of the late Clash frontman.  The  irony is that  Redemption Song doesn't set out to destroy Strummer's good name. On the contrary, written by a long-time journalist friend,  the book is  a blatant hagiography of the punk leader's life. And it's Salewicz's over-the-top  admiration for Strummer that's the chief problem.

So poorly written, so lazily researched and  so lacking in context is Redemption Song that what sets out to honour Strummer actually does him the disservice of making him appear really rather boring.

Arguably, Strummer was never cut out to  be in punk's vanguard. Despite their obvious chemistry as a band once formed, the Clash were as manufactured as the Monkees, put together by svengali  Bernie Rhodes, who was desperate  to cash in on punk after he'd been ejected from  Malcolm McLaren's Sex Pistols camp.

Strummer's musical tastes were contradictory to punk's ethos: he idolised Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, the bloated core of the very rock establishment the movement sought  to destroy.

As much as anything, it was his on-stage persona, which he'd cultivated during his years as a pub entertainer, that caught Rhodes' eye. Strummer just wanted to be a rock star, and he'd have jumped on whatever bandwagon had come along to achieve his goal.

Nevertheless, he possessed a political and social outlook and a hard-working dignity to make U2's Bono look like a snake oil salesman, and as a result won over a huge audience that still idolises him today, four years  after his sudden death.

Salewicz's biography does illustrate the contradictions of Strummer's public school background and the exalted position he achieved within the punk movement. But it fails to then examine why his figure still looms large over rock's ancestry.

Redemption Song's chief failing is that it makes no effort to identify that spark, that intangible quality, that made Strummer  a hero   to so many. Stylistically, it lacks the authoritative weight of contributions from anyone other than those who were close to Strummer.

While we get lots of soft-focus memories from a range of aunts, uncles and cousins, from band mates  Mick Jones,  Paul Simonon,  Terry Chimes and  Keith Levene - and even screeds from Strummer himself lifted from interviews he gave the author over the years - there's little in the way of the analytical observation from people outside of Strummer's immediate circle necessary to provide objective credibility.

Instead there's lots of matesy bluster, the sort of hollow 'you're so awesome' comments you might find in the letters pages of Smash Hits or some other now-defunct teen pop magazine of the time.

Tellingly, vital landmarks in the development of British punk are overlooked or given so little attention as to relegate them to unimportance.

For instance, the July 1976 debut gig by the Ramones at London's Roundhouse, an event that brought the nascent British punk scenesters together on stage and in the audience for the first time, is covered in one short sentence. The  famous punch-up at an early Sex Pistols gig in London's Nashville Rooms that same year - a  gig during which the Clash played one of their first live shows and that established punk's reputation for violence - becomes a mere aside in Salewicz's hands.

Beside such highly regarded chronicles of the time as  Jon Savage's  England's Dreaming and even  Legs McNeil's formidable oral account  of New York punk  Please Kill Me, Salewicz's attempt at deifying Joe Strummer reads like a Janet and John book.

Strummer, for all his failings, still is a hero to millions. He deserves more.



Redemption Song:  The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer