Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The thinking man’s punk

Mary Wakefield talks to Julien Temple about Joe Strummer and his latest film

Sometimes you absolutely know, beyond the gentlest breath of a doubt, that you’re not going to like a person; something you’ve heard, or read about them, has tipped you over into a flinty conviction that they’re not your type. I took a preconception of this sort with me to meet the cult film-maker Julien Temple. He’ll be arrogant, I thought, full of humourless guff about rock festivals and his days documenting the lives of the Sex Pistols (Sex Pistols Number 1 [1977], The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle [1980] and The Filth and the Fury [2000] — though all three films were good).

I carried my conviction with me along Bethnal Green road to Temple’s recording studio; into the canteen and up to his table, where, as he lifted his head to say hello, it instantly collapsed. My antipathy, it turned out, had just been a front for a fear of punk. And though Temple is unquestionably hip — slim in denim, with gelled and tinted hair; handsome, with just a hint of eye make-up — he’s not the least bit frightening. He blushes as he says hello, and within five minutes we’re talking about toads: ‘They’ve suddenly appeared near our house in Dorset,’ he says. ‘Big fat ones. Lovely. The kids and I spent a whole day carrying them across the road to safety.’

So no need to be scared of Temple, and perhaps not of Joe Strummer either, the late front man of The Clash, and the subject of Temple’s new film, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. There was no one more terrifyingly cool than Strummer in the late 70s — he was the thinking man’s punk, all peroxide and political angst, a cut above the Sex Pistols’ anarchy — but he and Temple had a lot in common.

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