News just in, a plaza in Granada, Spain is to be renamed in honour of the Clash singer / guitarist / poet Joe Strummer. Officials confirmed on Tuesday they had chosen a square to be renamed Plaza Joe Strummer, after receiving a petition to honour the musician, who went there from London in 1984 as the Clash began to disintegrate.
“A square has been identified and now the proposal has to be approved by the committee of honours and distinctions,” said a city hall spokeswoman, María José Anguita. “There was a popular petition for this to happen and the city hall accepted it.”
Strummer, who died in 2002, travelled to Granada, in southern Spain, after he and bandmate Paul Simonon provoked the Clash’s greatest crisis by sacking the guitarist, singer and songwriter Mick Jones in 1983. “He was basically fleeing, running away from the problems he had created in London,” said Nick Hall, a Barcelona-based film-maker who is working on a documentary, I Need a Dodge! Joe Strummer on the Run, that tells the musician’s Spanish story.
Strummer’s connections to Spain went back to pre-Clash days when he shared a London squat with a Spanish girlfriend, Paloma Romero, the future Slits drummer known as Palmolive. The squat was also shared by Romero’s sister Esperanza and Richard Dudanski, drummer in Strummer’s pub rock band the 101ers.
“They would talk a lot about politics, the Franco dictatorship and [the poet and playwright Federico García] Lorca. That is the root of his interest,” Hall said
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