Clip includes unreleased footage
Dark Horse Records continues its celebration of Joe Strummer with the premiere of the Lance Bangs directed official music video for “Fantastic,” featuring previously unseen footage from the Joe Strummer Archive. The previously unreleased track is among the highlights found on Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years, the first-ever comprehensive collection highlighting Strummer’s work with his post-Clash band, The Mescaleros. The package is available 4 CD and 7 LP box sets.
“Fantastic” marks one of Strummer’s final recordings, with vocals recorded in December 2002 at the famed Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales, mere weeks after Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros played their last ever live show at Liverpool University on November 22, 2002. The track’s emotional companion video, directed by renowned rock ‘n’ roll filmmaker Lance Bangs (Nirvana, Sonic Youth) and featuring archival footage shot by Strumer, Dick Rude, Julien Temple, Don Letts and Josh Cheuse, along with a special cameo by Eddie Vedder and spoken word introduction by Strummer.
Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years includes remastered editions of all three of the band’s studio albums, plus 15 rare and unreleased tracks spanning the first demos Strummer wrote for The Mescaleros though outtakes from their final sessions. Executive produced by Joe’s widow Lucinda Tait and produced by David Zonshine, the richly curated boxset also features exclusive new interviews with Strummer’s friends, collaborators and Mescaleros band mates, plus never-before-seen handwritten notes, lyrics, and drawings by Strummer taken from the Joe Strummer Archive.
While best known as the front man for The Clash, Strummer produced some of the most exciting work of his career with The Mescaleros. Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years highlights this intense period of creativity from 1999-2002, collecting for the first time such extraordinary albums as Rock Art and the X-Ray Style (1999), Global A Go-Go (2001), and the posthumous Streetcore (2003), along with Vibes Compass, a new compilation of 15 B-sides and rarities, spanning early demos of some of the first tracks Strummer wrote for The Mescaleros (such as “The Road To Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “X-Ray Style,” and “Techno D-Day,” as well as the previously unreleased “Secret Agent Man”) to the original recordings from Strummer’s last ever sessions, including outtakes of “Get Down Moses,” “Coma Girl,” and the never-before-heard new song, “Fantastic.” All albums are remastered by 3x GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Paul Hicks (The Beatles, John Lennon, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie) especially for the release and are packaged with extensive new liner notes, unreleased images, and four reproduction lyric sheets and chord charts from the Strummer archive.
