The band Joe Strummer left to form The Clash
In May 1974, on an unspecified date, a band formed in London that would become a well-regarded live music act and regular fixture on the city’s pub rock circuit. But just two years later, the rhythm guitarist and lead singer who joined the 101ers as John Graham Mellor would depart — taking with him his Fender Telecaster and new stage name, Joe Strummer — to join what became one of the most important groups in the first wave of British punk. That group was The Clash.
It would be cool to see live footage of Strummer and the 101ers during their short tenure as a working band. Alas, none appears to exist. Though there’s a minute or two of grainy film of the 101ers playing in a club, with sound overdubbed, in Julien Temple’s documentary about Strummer, The Future Is Unwritten. In these clips, Strummer resembles (at least from a distance and under colored stage lights) a mid-’70s Bruce Springsteen or Hamburg-era rocker John Lennon — lean, intense, hungry.
The good news is there are numerous examples on YouTube and Spotify of how the 101ers sounded live. While their music has been described as rockabilly, I’d call them more of a throwback rock ‘n roll band. Scan down the list of songs they did in their stage act — Maybelline, Route 66, Too Much Monkey Business, I Saw Her Standing There — and it reads like a set list The Beatles would have been ripping through at the Cavern in 1962, more than a decade earlier! No wonder Strummer concluded after watching the Sex Pistols open for the 101ers at London’s Nashville Rooms in April 1976 that there was no future in doing Chuck Berry covers. The future was punk.
Check out audio below of Strummer and the 101ers performing one of Berry’s classics from 1956. (Maybe a reader can identify the venue.) This show is from 1975. Less than five years later the guy on the right was writing (along with Clash lead guitarist Mick Jones) songs like London Calling and Clampdown.