A Great Celebration Of Joe Strummer

I was pleased with a lot of bands I saw during Canadian Music Week, including The Lovely Feathers, One Hundred Dollars, SNFU, Blacky Jackett Jr., The Bicycles, Les Handclaps, The Golden Dogs, Hexes & Ohs and Vancougar. You can read reviews of all those acts in our Reviews section.

But none of those shows were as entertaining or as moving as the one that drew a surprisingly hefty crowd to the Horseshoe Tavern on Sunday night.

Things got off to a fun start with The Screwed, a punk cover band whose members have rich pedigrees in the genre: singer Steve Saint (The Sinisters); guitarist Steve Koch (The Demics, Viletones, Screamin' Sam); bassist John Borra (A Neon Rome, Groovy Religion, Change Of Heart, John Borra Band); and drummer Cleave Anderson (Blue Rodeo, The Battered Wives, Screamin' Sam). They took you back 30 years with their renditions of classic punk songs and were a great way to warm up those in attendance for what was to come.

Here's The Screwed's awesome set list:

"New Rose" (The Damned)
"What Do I Get?" (The Buzzcocks)
"Baby Baby" (The Vibrators)
'Pretty Vacant" (The Sex Pistols)
"Another Girl Another Planet" (The Only Ones)
"Teenage Kicks" (The Undertones)
"New York City" (The Demics)
"Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" (The Ramones)
"Your Generation" (Generation X)
"In The City" (The Jam)
"Search And Destroy" (The Stooges)

If you've seen The Clash film Rude Boy, you'll know who Ray Gange is. He played a drunk and drugged-out loser in the film and, along with former Boston Bruins star and noted cocaine addict Derek Sanderson, veered me away from a lifestyle I could have easily fallen into much heavier as a teenager. So while The Clash easily ranks as one of my favourite bands of all time, this relative nobody who no-one heard much from after Rude Boy may have actually had a bigger influence on my life as an anti-role model than The Clash did for much more positive reasons.

Well, Gange is back. He DJed after The Screwed and played some great stuff that made an even better transition to the night's headliners: Los Mondo Bongo.

The name isn't likely to be familiar, but the group members should be: Mike Peters, The Alarm's frontman; Simple Minds bassist Derek Forbes; Gary Numan guitarist Steve Harris; and Joe Strummer's post-Clash bandmates Pablo Cook (percussion) and Smiley Culture (drums) from The Mescaleros. They formed recently to celebrate Strummer's music and they're so tight that you'd swear they've been doing it for years.

I thought of The Alarm as The Clash-Lite after their first couple of records, and Peters has the musical background, voice and inspiration to carry off the lead singer/guitarist role with a reverential ease. Harris played his role well and Culture and Forbes laid down solid grooves in a very rhythmic set, but Cook's percussion took the songs in somewhat unexpected directions and really helped set Los Mondo Bongo apart from being what could be considered a tribute band.

The repertoire covered a good range of The Clash and Mescaleros catalogues, and a cover of Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come" was thrown in for good meaure. Recorded spoken-word excerpts from Strummer began and ended the 90-minute set, and the audience paid their respects while quietly listening to his words of wisdom during these interludes. When the music played, however, the 'Shoe was alive with joyous singing and dancing both on the stage and off.

"Tony Adams" briefly morphed into "Guns Of Brixton," a primarily acoustic version of "Armagideon Time" worked really well, the percussion kicked a semi-acoustic version of "Rock The Casbah" up more than a few notches, "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" was simply brilliant, "Safe European Home" was done better than what I witnessed The Clash do, and things ended with a raucous one-two punch of "I Fought The Law" and "White Riot."

I saw bands for four straight nights during Canadian Music Week, and I'll be seeing a ton more over the next six days and nights of the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. But it will take a lot to impress me as much as these musicians did on Sunday night.

Here's Los Mondo Bongo's set list:

"Techno D-Day"
"London Calling"
"Rudie Can't Fail"
"Tony Adams"
"The Harder They Come"
"Johnny Appleseed"
"Police On My Back"
"Armagideon Time"
"X-Ray Style"
"Mondo Bongo"
"Rock The Casbah"
"White Man In Hammersmith Palais"
"Yalla Yalla"
"Pressure Drop"
"Brand New Cadillac"
"Tommy Gun"
"Safe European Home"
"Bankrobber"
"I Fought The Law"
"White Riot"