Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros
Album: Global A Go-Go/Streetcore
Label: Hellcat
Tracks: 12/17
Website: http://www.strummerville.com

To mark what would have been Saint Joe's 60th birthday, Hellcat have organised a righteous rave up through the back catalogue.

There's the mighty Hellcat Years digital box set - 60-plus tracks comprising the three studio albums, nine b-sides and compete 16-song live set - but for those of us who prefer something in our hands over bytes and pieces, there are the CD/vinyl expansions of his second and third Mescaleros' albums (the debut, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style only comes in vinyl on a US export for some reason).

Anyway, that's all formats - what of the sounds?

In case you don't already know it, Global A Go-Go is possibly the great lost Strummer album. The international flavours of its predecessor were sharpened, honed and filed into a superbly well-crafted set of classic English folk songs that were/are/will be simultaneously before, of and ahead of their time. Johnny Appleseed deserves to be far better known, while Bhindi Bhagee is a classic World Service-era Joe rap writ large and with a dead cool soundtrack. Bummed Out City shows he could still rock out with the best of them, ditto Gamma Ray, with its killer hook and steam-driven belt drive.

Only disappointment is the extras are limited to a live take on Bhindi Bhagee. Mind you, even that captures the wondrous essence of Joe the Communicator.

No such gripes about the Streetcore set. Released a few months after his death, the actual album was pieced together from tracks and sketches Joe had been working on right up until the end. Still poignant almost a decade later, his lyrics are resolutely forward-looking, the music buzzing with energy and fixing with possibilities.

Opener, Coma Girl, is as youthful as anything he had done for 20 years or so; as is Arms Aloft, a great big rockin' memoir. Although the lone guitar and voice of Redemption Song is weak, Ramshackle Day Parade is a campfire classic and Long Shadow chillingly prophetic, while Get Down Moses could almost be a Sandinista out-take and the closing cover of Bobby Charles' Silver and Gold still brings a lump to the throat.

Thus, the live extras are all the more joyous - covers of Blitzkreig Bop, Junco Partner, Pressure Drop, Rudi, Armagideon Time and The Harder They Come remind us all what a great host Joe was.

Christ, I miss that man.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk