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“Superman” filmmaker and DC Studios co-chief James Gunn sat down with reporters last week to offer status updates on all things DC alongside his co-chief Peter Safran, and one golden rule emerged: They’re not rushing into anything.

Gunn said he’s bringing key lessons in franchise building from his time at Marvel to DC Studios, with a strong focus on script quality over release dates and building a connected universe that still allows for standalone stories.

Gunn directly referenced his experience making the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise noting how initial skepticism on the first film turned to success: “‘Guardians’ came in. Suddenly, everybody’s like this movie is going to be Marvel’s first bomb. This can’t work, nobody cares. What is a raccoon? How is a raccoon ever going to talk to Thor?” Gunn said.

“And then that went the way it did,” he added, addressing chatter over DC’s revamp.

Released in November 1989, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train is seen as the final installment in the deadpan, hard-luck trilogy he began with 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise and continued with 1986’s Down By Law. It’s a journey Jarmusch started with actor-musician John Lurie, who not only starred in Paradise and Law,...

Some rock albums are legends that top the charts for ages or redefine genres, and some albums peak with the first song and are otherwise forgettable. Sometimes a bad album can completely tank a band's career, like the Clash's final studio album, 1985's Cut the Crap, which failed so badly it led to Joe Strummer dissolving the band.

Then there's that rare bird, the album that's so bad that critics and fans can't stand it, but that a band can somehow recover from. Some of these artists took their failures in stride and made sure to listen to the feedback from their fans, some just took a little time to sweep their mistakes under the rug, and some just continued stumbling on and managed to salvage their careers through sheer dumb luck.

Bob Dylan – Self-Portrait Columbia Records, 1970

For most of the 1960s, it seemed that Bob Dylan could do little wrong musically.

Prince, the Clash, and the Four Seasons’ Frankie Valli are among the artists who will receive lifetime achievement awards at the Grammys’ upcoming Special Merit Awards ceremony, the Recording Academy announced Friday.

Pioneering Juice Crew rapper Roxanne Shante, Maze’s Frankie Beverly, blues great Taj Mahal, and gospel singer Dr. Bobby Jones will also be given lifetime achievement awards at the Feb. 1 event, while jazz legend Erroll Garner, Cuban composer Tania Leon, and producer Glyn Johns will receive the Recording Academy’s trustees award.

“It’s an amazing privilege to...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Anora (Sean Baker)

Sean Baker’s Anora expands his filmmaking vision, pushing the writer-director-editor’s fifth consecutive story on sex workers into a higher plane of awards and commercial success. It’s a romantic comedy, a madcap dash around New York City, a movie ruminating on loss, love, and class disparity. Baker aims to put audiences through a ringer of emotional swings, ending with a desolation that’s been building in the background, easier to spot once the tinsel’s shimmer fades. With a true star-making performance from Mikey Madison and a deep bench of supporting actors, Anora whirls until suddenly it doesn’t, and all that’s left is earned, resonant silence from both its characters and audience. – Michael F.

Where...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols)

Using photographer Danny Lyon’s iconic The Bikeriders’ imagery as a jumping-off point, Jeff Nichols’ latest feature imagines a fictionalized Chicago motorcycle club, the Vandals. Motorcycle club culture might be a distinctly American phenomenon, but Nichols casts two Brits in the lead, with varying returns: Jodie Comer as Kathy narrates the story in a clear Goodfellas conceit, adopting a Midwest accent flashy (and divisive) enough to ensure sustained awards-season chatter; Tom Hardy is Johnny, a truck driver who gets the idea to start a motorcycle club while watching Marlon Brando’s The Wild One. This low-stakes “why not?” starting point for founding the club works early in the film, until, following the Goodfellas trajectory, it all comes crashing down.

MoMA’s Bulle Ogier retrospective was occasion upon occasion for discovery, and even then it was great fortune to encounter Candy Mountain, a 1987 road picture directed by legendary photographer Robert Frank and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer starring Kevin J. O’Connor, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, and Dr. John, with the legendary French actress in a small, pivotal supporting role. Replete with cold, pale colors and a thoroughly comfortable vibe, it’s also, from the 2024’s vantage, more than a little melancholy for introducing sequestered communities that very likely don’t exist today.

But all’s been preserved in a 2K restoration which Film Movement’s releasing on October 25 in celebration of Frank’s centenary, and we’re pleased to debut the trailer. Here’s the synopsis: “New York City, 1980s. A struggling, deadbeat musician named Julius has fallen on hard times. With no guitar, band or paying gigs, he cooks up a...

Manu Chao first made a splash in the late Nineties with his fantastic debut solo album, Clandestino, the work of a multilingual, post-modern leftist busker whose music seemed to infuse the everything-at-once sonics of Beck’s Odelay with the spirit of Woody Guthrie, Bob Marley, and Joe Strummer. The title appropriated a derogatory term for undocumented immigrants, and Manu Chao (who was born in Paris to Spanish parents and had previously been in the Clash-y French rock band Mano Negra) made the album traveling around the world producing songs on...

100 years ago this fall, Robert Frank was born. The legendary Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker has a number of centenary celebrations, including the first-ever solo exhibition of his work to be presented at the Museum of Modern Art starting in September, and now one of his features has been restored and will receive a theatrical rollout beginning soon after.

Candy Mountain, which Frank co-directed with novelist/screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, follows a struggling musician who sets out to find the legendary guitar maker Elmore Silk, with whom he hopes to strike a deal to make himself rich and famous. Released in 1987, the cult classic features a cast including Kevin J O’Conner and Harris Yulin, as well as the legendary actress Bulle Ogier, and real-life music legends Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Joe Strummer, Dr. John, David Johansen, and Arto Lindsay. Coming from Film Movement, they’ve set an October 25th theatrical release...

Anthology films are features made of separate shorter stories. Unlike narratives that jump back and forth in time, like Memento or Pulp Fiction, the shorts in anthologies are stand-alone movies that only share a theme or location in common. This format often consists of short films directed by different filmmakers, but it's also common for anthology films to be made entirely by one director.

Jim Jarmusch and George A. Romero are two of the filmmakers who are the sole director of a great anthology film. Their respective movies Coffee and Cigarettes and Creepshow are great examples of how different two anthology films can be. And among the greatest collaborations of directors, Twilight Zone: The movie and All The Invisible Children are very contrasting examples as well. From drama to comedy to horror, the best anthology films of all time are timeless and are also some of the best of their genres.

The theme of the 2024 Met Gala was “The Garden of Time” — based on a story by J.G. Ballard – but, really, the theme of all Met Galas always has been: Go big or stay home!

While there have been myriad gorgeous gowns, jewels and natty tuxes over many Met Gala years, what do the most dress-obsessed actually remember? Cher half-naked. Lady Gaga’s change of dress performance art. Billy Porter’s royal entrance in Egyptian armor and entourage. Katy Perry as a chandelier. They all proved: It doesn’t pay to stay staid — even if staid means gorgeous.

So the question comes down to: Does one do good outrageous? Or outrageously bad? Both the bad and the beautiful always get the most ink — sometimes, you can’t tell the difference. With such risky looks, it’s a toss of the coin. If you’re Cher, you can pull off anything. Everyone...

The Clash are the touchstone for a story that stretches back to the 50s, told in interviews with many campaigning rockers

There’s no better time than now for a documentary on popular music’s role in the fight against racism and fascism. And in true punk spirit, this lo-fi indie packs in a lot of history and righteous passion for not much budget – even if, to be brutally honest, its core narrative is a very minor part of that history, centred on a bunch of ageing Clash fans.

The Clash are very much the touchstone here. Motivated by musicians such as Eric Clapton echoing the National Front’s racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, Joe Strummer and co became key players in the Rock Against Racism movement in the late 70s, alongside acts including Steel Pulse, Tom Robinson and Aswad. (The 2020 doc White Riot lays out the story in more detail.

Vampire Weekend have played around with a slightly “punky,” slightly “jammy”side project in their free time, band members Ezra Koenig, Chris Tomson, and Chris Baio told the New York Times.

According to Tomson, the extra-curriculars began as a way to blow off steam during the pandemic. “The world had stopped working and a lot of what we normally do was just not being done,” Tomson recalled. “There was something about just playing with no expectation — to just play with my two very close friends without an agenda.”

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Baio added, “It’s very rare for people in a band of our size to be alone together. No engineer, no tour manager, nothing like that. It felt like being at the outset of the band again. And we did that for three years and change, whenever we were all in town.”

And Koenig has even embellished...

Record Store Day has revealed the extensive list of limited edition vinyl, box sets, and other speciality releases that will be available as part of its 2024 edition taking place on Saturday, April 20th, 2024.

This year promises exclusive wax from Talking Heads, David Bowie, At the Drive-In, South Park, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Daft Punk, 100 gecs, Blur, The Replacements, Screaming Trees, Sonic Youth, Gene Clark, Fleet Foxes, and more.

You can find specifics on some of the most notable releases below, and find many more detailed at the Record Store Day website.

A live recording of Talking Heads’ November 1977 performance at Wcoz will be available as a 2xLP collection, featuring seven previously unheard songs from the original two-track tapes.

An early version of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, dubbed Waiting in the Sky (Before The Starman Came To Earth), will be released on vinyl.

Mojo Nixon was absolutely himself right to the end. The cult hero died Feb. 7 on board the Outlaw Country Cruise, where he’d performed and caroused in signature fashion the night before (“passing after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners,” according to a statement from his family).

Less than a year before that, he was in peak form as well, speaking with Rolling Stone about the making of his 2023 documentary, The Mojo Manifesto. It was a wide-ranging, side-splitting conversation, going over the wildest early...

Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves is screening exclusively on Mubi in many countries.Fallen Leaves.There’s a moment early in Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves (2023), that will surely tug at the heartstrings of shy lovers everywhere. A man, Holappa (played by Jussi Vatanen), and a woman, Ansa (Alma Pöysti), sit across from each other in a bar. Between them, his friend tries vainly to flirt with hers, getting nowhere, but Holappa and Ansa themselves do not speak, and instead merely stare meekly into their drinks, the gap of a few meters opening up like a yawning chasm. Then, for just a moment, Holappa looks up from his beer and their eyes meet. And as they do, the first cascading piano chords of Franz Schubert’s “Serenade” are heard and a besuited man takes the karaoke stage to start singing: “Softly my songs plead / through the night for...

Certain songs have become overplayed in movies, causing their original meaning and impact to be lost. Songs like "London Calling" and "All Along The Watchtower" are frequently used to represent specific locations or characters' rebellious spirit. "Hallelujah," "White Rabbit," and "Gimme Shelter" are examples of songs that are often used in emotionally momentous moments, but their ubiquity has diminished their power.

Certain songs capture a moment or mood so perfectly that they can define an era – yet being successful can also cause some overplayed movie songs to lose their power. Throughout cinema history, filmmakers have turned to the same songs over and over again to elicit a specific reaction from the audience. Unfortunately, failing to think outside the box has transformed previously iconic movie moments into parodies of themselves, all thanks to an unimaginative song choice.

The best movie songs can become overplayed for any number of reasons. Sometimes, it...

As my 13-year-old son and I browsed a Buffalo, NY, record shop on a recent Saturday morning, his eyes were drawn to two action figures dangling from the wall. Both were from the popular ReAction toy line, known for its delightfully offbeat takes on pop-culture icons as diverse as Joe Strummer, Megan Rapinoe, Jimi Hendrix, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, and late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. The two figures my son grabbed confounded him even more than the Dee Snider hanging nearby. One of them was an intense, glasses-sporting figure brandishing a whip while wearing a red flower pot on his head. The other clutched a guitar while wearing shades and a yellow jumpsuit. “Devo,” I said happily, while starting to ponder this most unique and easily identifiable group.

What’s with the outfits? How did this band become so iconic? What did they do beyond “Whip It”? These are legitimate questions,...

Jack Hazan and David Mingay's Rude Boy is now showing exclusively on Mubi in most countries—including the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Turkey, and Ireland—in the series Rediscovered.London, 1978: Ray Gange, a purposeless punk, shuffles from the unemployment benefit office to his beer-money job at a porno bookstore, selling dirty magazines to shifty-looking customers. Meanwhile, young fascists storm the streets, hurling abuse and waving banners in their fight against “communism in the classroom” and “race-mix propaganda.” Margaret Thatcher is on the cusp of seizing power and the National Front is at the height of its popularity. Racist graffiti, large-scale unemployment, run-down social housing, and right-wing riots: in five minutes flat, Rude Boy (1980) tells you everything you need to know about Britain at the dark end of the 1970s.As much a gritty social-realist document of a country in transition as a charged concert film of the pioneering punk band the Clash,...

Celebrate Joe Strummer's birthday with the streaming of the 2007 documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten on August 21. Enter Screen Rant's giveaway for a chance to win a Joe Strummer Campfire Acoustic guitar inspired by his Glastonbury Festival campfires. Also win a vinyl edition of "Assembly," the remastered collection of Joe Strummer's greatest solo work, featuring live versions of The Clash classics and never-before-heard recordings.

In celebration of Joe Strummer's birthday, Shout! TV will be streaming the 2007 documentary about The Clash's iconic frontman. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten airs on August 21, and there is no better way to bask in the musician's achievements than with a Fender guitar in hand. Screen Rant is teaming up with Shout! TV to give away one Joe Strummer Campfire Acoustic guitar, which is inspired by the Glastonbury Festival campfires that the man himself used to hold. The guitar, along with the...

How a film comes into being can be just as important as what you're watching during the film itself. The terms and conditions art is produced under always heavily influence the end product, and in some cases, can be the key to understanding the work itself. On paper, Straight to Hell already sounds insane from the get-go. Alex Cox directing Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Elvis Costello, the Pogues, and Dennis Hopper in an acid Western featuring hitmen on the run with a pregnant woman versus a band of coffee-addicted hillbilly cowboys is a pretty nuts premise. The film itself feels a bit raw, and a bit unfocused, even by Cox's standards. However, a trip into just how this film was made reveals exactly why that is, and what makes Straight to Hell worth watching today.

At 70, the outsider movie hero is releasing his first album. He muses on music, the demise of film and finding joy in mistakes

There are few film-makers quite as particular about music as Jim Jarmusch. Over the years, he’s enlisted Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA to score his hitman-meets-samurai flick Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, had Tom Waits and Iggy Pop jacked up on caffeine and locking horns in a thick swirl of smoke in 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and got Neil Young to let rip some improvised guitar for the soundtrack to Dead Man. Not to mention that his films feature acting turns by everyone from Joe Strummer to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and he directed a documentary on the Stooges along the way.

“Music’s always been there,” he says, in his unmistakable deep baritone register, speaking from New York. “Since being a teenager, music has been...

Jim Jarmusch said that his upcoming feature will likely go into production this fall — but that it also could have no music.

“The film we’re preparing now for late this year to shoot, probably, I think, may have no music,” Jarmusch said during the 2023 Overlook Film Festival as part of an “Only Lovers Left Alive” anniversary panel (via The Playlist).

Jarmusch continued, “It’s a very subtle film; it’s very quiet. And I think music could move it too much one way — it’s a funny and sad film, right? It sort of has both woven in. I don’t know if I want to have music to add some other thing over it. It doesn’t really want it so far.”

The “Paterson” filmmaker is known for his soundtrack choices, including casting musicians like Tom Waits, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Joe Strummer, Jack White, and RZA. Jarmusch also...

Decades ago, “when the Clash was falling apart” – as the band’s bassist Paul Simonon tells it – Joe Strummer wanted to return to his roots busking in public. So he and the band journeyed to the north of England to play in the streets. “We slept on a lot of people’s sofas, because we left our credit cards and money behind and lived on what we earned in the street,” Simonon remembers on a Zoom from his home in London. “We had enough to get to the next town and something to eat.

Writer-director James Gray re- created elements of his childhood for Focus Features’ Armageddon Time, set in 1980 Queens. Banks Repeta plays Paul Graff, the onscreen avatar for Gray: an aspiring artist whose rambunctious behavior infuriates his parents (played by Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway) but delights his aging grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). The latter supports young Paul in his creative pursuits and, when Paul admits that his classmates use bad words to describe his Black friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb), orders his grandson to “be a mensch” and stick up for those who are not in a position to defend themselves.

Gray naturally turned to his own family history when crafting this personal tale, poring through photo albums that he says offered “a moment frozen in irretrievable time — both sad and beautiful at the same time.” Armageddon Time is imbued with melancholy and nostalgia, with the wide-eyed Paul experiencing firsthand the privilege he...

Innovative guitarist Keith Levene, a cofounder of The Clash and later with Public Image Ltd., died Friday at 65 of liver cancer at his home in Norfolk, UK. Author/writer Adam Hammond confirmed the death.

“It is with great sadness I report that my close friend and legendary Public Image Limited guitarist Keith Levene passed away on Friday 11th November,” Hammond wrote. “There is no doubt that Keith was one of the most innovative, audacious and influential guitarists of all time.”

Hammond added, “Keith sought to create a new paradigm in music and with willing collaborators John Lydon and Jah Wobble succeeded in doing just that. His guitar work over the nine minutes of ‘ Theme’, the first track on the first PiL album, defined what alternative music should be.As well as helping to make PiL the most important band of the age, Keith also founded The Clash with Mick Jones...

A new video for Joe Strummer’s recently released “Fantasy” draws from the former Clash frontman’s vaults to create a revealing, personal portrait of the late artist.

The clip opens with Strummer speaking posthumously from a boombox around New York City: “People are out there doing bad things together; it’s because they’re being dehumanized,” he says. “It’s time to take the humanity back to the center of the ring.” The clip shows snippets of Strummer’s lyrics along with footage of him walking around, tipping saxophonists on beach boardwalks,...

Without Joe Strummer, Eddie Vedder would have never found his way to Jack Irons, and subsequently Pearl Jam. During a show the Clash singer played in November 1989, Vedder ended up becoming Strummer’s right hand man during an unexpected power outage. The fateful case of right place, right time brought him together with Irons, who would later recommend him when Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were looking for a fourth band member to join a band that would be known as Pearl Jam. Ahead of what would have been Strummer’s 70th birthday (Aug.

During the time she was married to Joe Strummer starting in 1995, Lucinda Tait would often hear her late husband at work in the kitchen of their house in Broomfield, in southwest England. “He had a typewriter, an old-fashioned one that would go ‘clack clack,'” Tait recalls. “When I went to sleep at night, I’d be upstairs and hear him tapping away at the kitchen table.”

Strummer’s wildly influential former band, the Clash, were long in the rear-view mirror by then, and Strummer had recently formed his latest combo,...

Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up-close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features drummer Jack Irons.

Whenever the history of the Nineties alt-rock revolution is chronicled, the name Jack Irons comes up quite a bit. Not only...

American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has directed the new music video for Cat Power‘s version of The Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes” (see below) from her new album Covers, which is currently out on Domino Records.

A director widely considered one of the film industry’s most original and unique minds, Jarmusch’s filmography includes acknowledged classics such as “Down By Law,” “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Night On Earth,” and the Forest Whitaker action pic “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” It’s also worth mentioning Jarmusch’s musical reach is similarly pathbreaking, having worked with luminaries Tom Waits, Neil Young, RZA, Gza, Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, and more.

Continue reading Jim Jarmusch Directs Cat Power’s New “A Pair Of Brown Eyes” Music Video at The Playlist.

For a one-hit-wonder, Tommy McLain admits he has few complaints.

Back in 1966, he’d climbed into the top 15 with a swamp-lounge version of Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams,” which showcased the Louisiana native’s tremulous voice. Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe were fans of his work; Joe Strummer cut a cover of “Before I Grow Too Old,” a Fats Domino B-side associated with McLain (Strummer’s version was called “Silver and Gold”). The drugs and alcohol were behind him, and decades later, McLain was gigging regularly in his home state.

Alex Cox attacks the Reagan years with a political tale sung in the key of the Italo Spaghetti Western: expect plenty of slow motion shots of stylish pistolero mercenaries fighting for the historical ‘filibuster’ William Walker. Look him up, he’s the patron saint of every neocon and would-be soldier of fortune. Everybody on this show goes the whole 9 yards in commitment, with Ed Harris in the lead — they filmed in Nicaragua. It may be director Cox’s finest film, packed with vivid images and surreal anachronisms — and a terrific music score by Joe Strummer.

Walker

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 423

1987 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 94 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 12, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: Ed Harris, Richard Masur, Rene Auberjonois, Xander Berkeley, Peter Boyle, Marlee Matlin, Alfonso Arau, Pedro Armendáriz Jr., Gerrit Graham, William O’Leary, Blanca Guerra, Miguel Sandoval.

Cinematography: David Bridges

Production Designer: Bruno Rubeo

Art Directors: Cecilia Montiel, Jorge Sainz

Film Editors: Alex Cox,...

A Ukrainian punk band has rerecorded the Clash’s classic “London Calling” as a protest song and a resistance anthem against the Russian invasion.

Beton, a punk-hardcore trio, received permission from the surviving members of the Clash before recording “Kyiv Calling,” which changes the lyrics of the 1979 single as a call-to-action to fellow Ukrainians and the rest of the world. The track was recorded in a studio in Lviv, Ukraine on March 17 and 18, the same day Russians fired missiles at the city that’s become a hub for displaced citizens.

A trove of previously unseen photographs of Joe Strummer will appear in a new book, Joe Strummer: Print the Myth, set to arrive this fall via Rocket 88 Books.

The book was helmed by New York photographer and creative director Josh Cheuse, who grew close with Strummer after cold-calling the Clash at Electric Lady Studios in 1981 and asking if he could shoot the band. Print the Myth captures Cheuse and Strummer’s friendship and working relationship through 20 years of material, from that initial 1981 meetup to Strummer’s final New York gig...

Utama is about the effects of climate change and its particular impact on South America’s indigenous communities, no doubt, but its other urgent subject depicts the challenges of a really ornery grandpa. The grandfatherly traits of having your tea brewed to a certain temperature, the non-negotiability of a spot on a particular armchair, and an absolute insistence on daily routine are all in evidence, and in a film that aims to be a universal story––where its lessons can be applied in any locale––this is still the element that rings truest. It’s quite a shock of recognition, as grandson Clever visits their home, to be branded a “brat” by gramps Virginio (Santos Choque); then he is calmly invited to the table for dinner with a reassuring pat from nana Sisa (Luisa Quispe).

In a Clash track not considered their absolute finest, Joe Strummer wondered “should I stay or should I go.

Blame the pandemic, the dying planet, or our rapid transition into United States: Fury Road, but there’s a lot of soul searching going on these days. Some artists, especially in the Americana genre, are even looking to the heavens. Brent Cobb is releasing a gospel album in January, Hiss Golden Messenger sing hymns religious and secular on a new LP, and Katie Pruitt is dissecting her complicated religious upbringing in the must-listen podcast The Recovering Catholic.

Brian Fallon, meanwhile, is turning to the spirituals he heard in the pews as a kid.

Eddie Vedder reflected on the aftermath of the Roskilde tragedy — where nine people were killed during a crowd surge during Pearl Jam’s June 2000 set at the Danish music festival — in an excerpt from the singer’s recent Audible Original, I Am Mine.

(As Vedder’s contribution to Audible’s Words + Music series was announced in August, his new comments about Roskilde predated the Astroworld tragedy, where at least 10 people were killed and hundreds more injured following a crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Houston festival.)

In the excerpt, via Louder,...

Eddie Vedder reflects on a seminal night in his rock & roll life — when he got the chance to meet the Clash’s Joe Strummer and future Pearl Jam bandmate Jack Irons — in an excerpt from his new Audible Original, I Am Mine, from the platform’s Words + Music series.

The night in question, Vedder recalls, was Nov. 21, 1989. In a year, he’d move to Seattle and begin fronting Pearl Jam, but that fall he was living in San Diego, playing music and working at a venue called the Bacchanal, where Strummer was playing that night.

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in 1977 London when I popped in to visit the already-legendary dub creator Lee “Scratch” Perry to get his reaction to a new version by the Clash of his song about corruption “Police and Thieves.” I was curious – Joe Strummer’s rasp was so different from the angelic falsetto of the original singer, a policeman from Port Antonio named Junior Murvin. How would Scratch react?

I was surprised to find Bob Marley sitting with him; Scratch was staying in an apartment over the studio where Marley,...

Dark Horse Records has released a new compilation of Joe Strummer‘s solo material, titled Assembly. The collection from the late Clash frontman also includes live renditions of the band’s “Rudie Can’t Fail” and “I Fought the Law,” recorded by Strummer and the Mescaleros at London’s Brixton Academy on November 24th, 2001. “I Fought the Law” received its own music video, created by Spencer Ramsey, on Friday.

Three-time Grammy-winning engineer Paul Hicks mixed and mastered the album, which features remastered singles and archival rarities from Strummer’s catalog.

Dark Horse Records has shared a previously unreleased recording of Joe Strummer performing an acoustic version of the James Wayne blues classic, “Junco Partner.” The track will appear on the upcoming Strummer solo collection, Assembly, out March 26th.

Strummer performed “Junco Partner” throughout his career, with the Clash notably recording both a reggae version and a dub version for their 1980 album, Sandinista! This new version — which features just Strummer and his acoustic guitar — was found in the late musician’s vault on a hand-labeled cassette tape.

This acoustic version of...

Highlights from the Clash legend Joe Strummer’s solo career will be the focus of a new collection titled Assembly, out March 26th via Dark Horse Records.

The compilation includes singles and fan favorites from Strummer’s solo LPs as well as his work with the Mescaleros, including “Coma Girl,” Johnny Appleseed,” a cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” and “Love Kills” from the Sid and Nancy soundtrack.

The 16-track collection will also feature a trio of unreleased performances: Renditions of the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” and...

Forty years ago this winter, a strange new album arrived in U.S. record stores. It was a triple-vinyl set, by a London band still best known as punk rockers: the Clash’s Sandinista! It was barely a year after their global breakthrough, London Calling, which got them a U.S. Top 40 hit with “Train in Vain (Stand by Me).” Yet it sure didn’t sound like a band trying to ride the momentum of their first hit. Sandinista! was full of dub-reggae goofs and sound effects and proto-rap experiments.

The Black Crowes will mark the 30th anniversary of their 1990 debut album Shake Your Money Maker with a deluxe reissue. Set for a February 26th release, the package arrives in multiple formats, including a “super deluxe” edition with unreleased songs, demos, and a raucous concert recording from the band’s early days that finds singer Chris Robinson breaking up a crowd fight mid-song.

In 2019, Chris and his guitar-playing brother Rich Robinson patched up their own notoriously volatile relationship to reform the Black Crowes with new members for a 2020 summer tour.

As corrosive and unsettling as the images of lawlessness from the U.S. Capitol have been today, there’s a twist of fate at their core so brutally ironic it can make your head spin. When the Maga protesters, turning off their incendiary right-wing TV and Internet channels and getting off their couches, set out for Washington to foment what Joe Strummer 44 years ago called a “white riot,” they probably didn’t expect to be competing with the headline “Democrats Retake the U.S. Senate.” Because, of course, few observers were expecting the game-changing referendum we got from the two Senate races in Georgia.

The grand paradox is that you can link that seismic pair of Democratic wins directly to Donald Trump’s 10 weeks of drum-beating over his increasingly destructive fantasy of election fraud. Why? Because his descent into total demagogic loopiness revealed his nature so starkly it turned voters off?...

Julien Temple had never considered making a documentary about Shane MacGowan, the sensational, shambolic former Pogues frontman, until MacGowan himself asked him to do it. The pair had met in the mid-Seventies when MacGowan was just another punk pogoing at the Sex Pistols’ early shows, and they have remained friendly in the decades since. The director, whose credits include the yin-yang Sex Pistols films The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, as well as pics about the Clash, Keith Richards, and the Kinks’ Davies brothers,...

The Crown, Season Four

As the new season nears, we get deeper glimpses into the new forces entering Queen Elizabeth’s life: Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin). We see Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) give Thatcher a warning as to not make enemies out of “left, right and center.” Thatcher, however, is unbothered: “What if one is comfortable with having enemies?” The spotlight shifts to Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor), who is experiencing more than the average familial pressure to marry – not just to find a wife, a companion,...

The story of the Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, one of rock’s great rabble-rousers, is the focus of the upcoming documentary Crock of Gold. Ahead of the film’s December 4th premiere, Rolling Stone is dropping the trailer for the film about the Irish rocker that the Clash’s Joe Strummer called “one of the finest writers of this century.”

Crock of Gold will be coming to cinemas, digital, and DVD in the U.K. and Ireland in November before its December 4th U.S. drop on cable and streaming.

Between 1984 and 1986, the Pogues released some of their best material: their 1984 debut Red Roses for Me and Rum Sodomy & the Lash, produced by Elvis Costello, which combined punk, traditional Irish music and classic rock.

A new box set, The Pogues: The BBC Sessions 1984 – 1986, collects the extensive live recordings the band made for the BBC during that time (pre-order here).

The set, out released on October 30th, will feature 23 tracks from six separate live sessions, including appearances on shows by John Peel, David “Kid” Jensen, Phil Kennedy and Janice Long. It’s full of classics,...