Let Fury Have the Hour

"I think the film isn't banging you on the head with politics, but it's a political film and Joe was a political animal, but in a really interesting way. He avoided, for the most part, the obvious hectoring or lecturing tone that the left is often forced to adopt, because it's desperate to try and say what it's got to say, and it doesn't have the luxury of owning the advertising business and the press and the TV networks, which the right-wing establishment does own. Joe was an interesting counter-figure to that, because he got inside the machine and tried to work with elements of style and fashion, all the shit that the machine exists on. He tried to wrest some way of saying things through it. You've got to do that, or you're not going to be heard."

In Salon, Andrew O'Hehir interviews Julian Temple about the director's new documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.