“This time I’m sure it’s gonna last”
Joe Strummer 002: the Mescaleros Years
DARK HORSE
LOOKING back 20 years later, it seems clearer now that Joe Strummer’s final three albums were each made under very different circumstances, for very different reasons; listening to them, it seems all the more remarkable how cohesive they sound, all shouting from the same street.
The group Strummer dubbed the Mescaleros began as a band in name only, but then rapidly evolved into the real deal, only to be stopped in their tracks in the worst way, just as things had started to fly. The music they recorded across their 1999–2002 lifetime – the albums , and , which are collected together in this striking new set along with an album’s worth of outtakes, demos and orphaned tracks titled – documents this process. You can hear it especially when you assemble it all back to back like this, as
