“Walker has the best soundtrack of any film I’ve done.” “Really his impact was as a composer,” the director says. Cox believes Strummer’s underrated film scores eclipse anything he did on screen.

The next year, Strummer also played a smaller role in Cox’s ambitious, anti-imperialist period piece Walker, but it was with the soundtrack that he struck gold: the lush score for Walker remains the finest of his career. He also struck up a new creative partnership with maverick film-maker Alex Cox, contributing music to his punk biopic Sid And Nancy, and starring alongside The Pogues, Elvis Costello and a young unknown called Courtney Love in Straight To Hell, Cox’s deranged 1987 spaghetti western.

In 1986, Strummer buried the hatchet with Mick Jones, the former soulmate he had acrimoniously sacked from The Clash, co-writing and co-producing the album No.10 Upping Street for Jones’s new band, Big Audio Dynamite. When The Clash imploded following their feeble 1985 swansong album Cut The Crap, the singer seemed poised for multiple careers as an actor, composer and musical journeyman. Like, if you stormed in here and said the new record was rubbish, I would probably quit.”Ī master of reinvention, the artist formerly known as John Graham Mellor spent his pre-punk music career as a neo-beatnik folk rocker. “The ones who give it the mouth and trousers. “Yeah, but those are probably the people who are the most unconfident, really,” Strummer shrugged. It seemed bizarre that such an explosively dynamic, fiercely charismatic performer should have suffered such a prolonged slump.

Clearly energised by music again, Strummer told me he had spent much of the last decade “running into brick walls”.

Age of mythology ost