Why joe strummer died

Arrow Created with Sketch. Calendar Created with Sketch. Path Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Plus Created with Sketch. It is a fitting tribute for a man famed for his love of a good music festival, and who brought up his daughters immersed in the same world. From the moment they were born, both Jazz and Lola accompanied their father on his annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury.

He loved that whole idea of creating a vibe and an atmosphere. At Glastonbury he would string up his flags, get loads of hay bales, have a big campfire — there'd be hour music and he'd be DJ-ing. We'd all go as a family, and our friends would be there. It just became this hub of fun and people. He named it Strummer- ville and we were left to do exactly what we wanted. Run wild, run amok.

At the time of Joe's death, a few days before Christmas in , Jazz was 18 and Lola Their father collapsed at his home in Somerset after taking his dogs for a walk. I was sort of in distress that day and couldn't figure out why. I got a phone call saying come home. So I got on the tube and I remember sitting there, weighing up the options. I knew it wasn't my mum because I had spoken to her earlier, and so I thought it must be either Jazz or my dad.

By the time I got off the tube I rang home and said, 'Dad's dead isn't he? It wasn't like he'd been ill. The day before, we'd all had such a great day with him. He had been away on tour and we hadn't seen him for a couple of months.

So we all met up — our mum, our grandparents, his second wife Lucinda and her daughter Eliza, and we'd all gone out for a meal and then sat in the Groucho [club] drinking champagne. It was a really, really lovely day. The girls reacted in very different ways to Joe's death. For Jazz, it took a while to sink in properly, and a few years afterwards she experienced panic attacks. Although their chart success in the U. And it would seem about that length of time too.

Unfortunately, just as they were ready to explode, the Clash imploded. Headon was kicked out because of his heroin use in , and the following year Strummer and Simonon kicked Jones out because of creative differences.

Strummer and Simonon then released the final Clash record, the much-maligned, Cut the Crap , in In , Strummer formed Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, a band that would further explore his taste for exotic, international rhythms. He said today: "The Clash was the greatest rock band.

They wrote the rule book for U2. It's such a shock. He had a brief stint as singer with the Pogues in the early Nineties and by the end of the decade had formed a new band, the Mescaleros. He had long resisted lucrative offers to reform the Clash and preferred to develop new music rather than dwell in the past. It long irritated him that the spectre of the band cast its shadow over his solo work.

The band finished a tour just a month ago, during which he performed with Jones for the first time in almost two decades at a firefighters' benefit show in west London.

The Clash had been tipped to finally play together for a one-off performance next year as they were inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in the US. A post-mortem examination is due to take place tomorrow to establish the cause of death, which is not thought to be suspicious.