At the age of ten I had never really liked any music of any kind… I simply could not understand it. Everything musical was about love, sunshine, beauty and happiness. My family and I lived in the industrial North of England, the sky was permanently grey, rain fell perpetually and unemployment was at an all-time high. The Conservative government had left most citizens with a feeling of complete hopelessness and, on a personal level, I was lost. Love songs on the radio served to further isolate me and I started to wonder if my parents had adopted me from a distant planet. We moved to Africa and things got worse. It seemed like we had traded the beautiful rain for dust… green grass for thorny, unwelcoming bush. We had moved to a world where the only familiar thing was Coca Cola. The sun shone violently and caused third degree burns and the love songs on the radio grew even more prolific. Then, one night, as I sat forlornly in the corner of my brother’s room feeling desolate and beyond consolation, a song came on the radio that made me leap to my feet and, starting to dance, shout out ‘Who is this? Who is this?’ It was a song called ‘Police and Thieves’ being performed by a band called ‘The Clash’. Suddenly, I realised that there was hope… that there was music for everyone.
Joe Strummer (vocalist of The Clash) became a lifelong hero to me. He was born in Turkey to a Scottish nurse and an English foreign-service diplomat and one of the most important characteristics of his personality, his writing, his lyrics and his music throughout his life was that of diversity, multicultural experience, justice and travel. From the Carnivals of Brazil to the Jazz of America, the drum beats of Africa, the reggae of Jamaica and the Punk rock of England, no musical style was left untouched by Strummer and his legacy lives on over a decade after his death.