(Credits: Far Out / John Joe Coffey)
Mon 29 December 2025 20:00, UK
Any rock band would need to be doing a lot more than standard rock and roll to impress Joe Strummer.
The Clash were built on the idea of the music being having the power to move people on a visceral level, and when Strummer first got a guitar in his hands, it felt like a matter of life or death every single time he walked on that stage. But even if everyone has their favourite records, Strummer thought that a few artists were practically unobjectionable in the world of rock and roll.
Then again, Strummer has always been brutally honest about his opinions whenever he had a platform. He wasn’t quite as insufferable as John Lydon could be when he had a camera in his face, but that was only because he wasn’t looking to provoke. He came from the punk tradition, but his definition of punk was about going against the grain and singing about things that had meaning rather than straight hedonism.
His band didn’t get the name ‘The Only Band That Matters’ by accident, and a lot of Strummer’s heroes were the ones that were facing adversity and trying to find ways around it. Punks could come from all walks of life, and whether that was listening to the best reggae bands that he could find or going back to the glory days of rock and roll, Strummer was always interested in championing music that transcended whatever hardships they were facing at the time.
So when a punk came along in a leather jacket and a gruff New Jersey accent, Strummer was all ears. Although Bruce Springsteen was dangerously close to getting overexposed back in the day for being the answer to Bob Dylan, Strummer knew exactly what everyone was talking about. He still held true to the values of rock and roll, but no one spoke about that search for freedom more romantically than ‘The Boss’ did whenever he launched into songs like ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Born to Run’.
He wanted to see whether his guitar could get him out of his nowhere town, and Strummer knew that was something to celebrate, saying, “Bruce is great. If you don’t agree you’re a pretentious martian from Venus. His music is great on a dark, rainy morning in England, just when you need some spirit and some proof that the big wide world exists.” And that big wide world was something that Springsteen was searching for as well.
These two were an ocean away from each other, but whenever they talked about their struggles back home, they practically knew each other’s life story. Strummer may not have seen the New Jersey turnpike, and ‘The Boss’ didn’t need to look at the desolate roads scattered throughout England, but when they sang about their problems, they knew that their message could resonate with any kid that had dreams of playing a guitar to get away from their problems.
That even extends to the Springsteen records that went beyond rock and roll altogether. Nebraska is one of the most abrasive acoustic albums ever written, but even if Strummer was toying with every single genre under the sun at the time with London Calling, Springsteen was peeling back the layers of his sound and writing about the kind of outsiders that people were far too afraid to talk about at the time.
It’s not that hard to draw any connections between The Clash and the E Street Band, but their biggest similarity had almost nothing to do with their music. It was about the fearlessness of trying anything they wanted to, and by making their own masterpieces, both Strummer and Springsteen created music that will continue to live on long after people forget about the fashions of the day.
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