Here's the deal: when the punk wars begin to rage, you want to see some front-line action. But you're oddly middle class and you're way, way too old at 24 years of age to be "down with the kids". You set off for battle anyway, trawl some west London squats looking for comrades-in-arms, throw bricks at policemen at the Notting Hill Carnival, take in your flares, cut your hair, sign a record deal and release an album that makes The Ramones sound like a droney, ambient outfit.
You used to be John Mellor, but now you're Joe Strummer and over the next few years you become the "Elvis Presley of your generation". You sing about class war, racism, urban decay, police brutality and all of that noo wave jazz while simultaneously morphing your sound from three-minute, teeth-rattling anthems into jazz, soul, r 'n' b, hip-hop, techno and industrial strength folk.
And it ends as quickly as it began somewhere in an American enormodome amidst the minders, the cocaine, the ego-tripping and the personal assistants. In an anti-faustian pact, you turn to the camera and say "We've done our job and now we've gone." You spend the next 15 years burying the past and burning all those bridges you once so elegantly trampled over.
"I had my say and it was time for me to shut up for a while," says Joe Strummer now, looking back on his Clash years. "I realised that I could cool it. Many performers don't seem to know that the public get sick of you and they could do with a rest from some of these seriously ambitious people. I got lucky, I was spat out of the back of the music machine - and I fell onto the grass."
The past is a different nation state and there's no fear of Strummer getting extradited back there: "You can't hold on to the past if you want any future. Some people say it would be lovely if you could go back to that, but you don't want to be preserved in aspic, do you? You gotta keep moving."
Since The Clash broke up 15 years ago, he has kept on moving as a solo performer, an actor, a producer, a member of The Pogues, a soundtrack composer and an agitpropper for hire. "As much as I've tried to distance myself from The Clash, and what a great group to be in, I'm like a boxer who just can't quit." Hence Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, hence a bangin' new album, hence the prospect of seeing him on stage again - in his revolutionary chic glad rigs, watching the veins in his forehead pulsate as once more he belts them out from a-high.
"We've just played 57 cities in a row so we're well up for it," says the man for whom 100 per cent is never good enough. "It's so weird seeing the type of audience we get now. From where I stand on the stage, I can usually identify three strands; first, and down at the front, are the moshers, behind them are the city groovers who remember The Clash and behind them, at the back, are people like me - 48-year-old punk rockers." But hey Joe, what if you're really crap and we have to go home and set fire to all our Clash records? "No way, man. I'm carrying a legacy and when you're proud of something that good you just can't let yourself down. There are standards that you must keep, and I keep them."
As with everything he says, he's totally right. But when you first get your grasping hands on a copy of the new solo album, you're just willing it to be brilliant because of all that has gone before. And it is. Shane MacGowan would have been proud to have written the stand-out track, From Willesden to Cricklewood, while a song like Nitcomb wouldn't have been out of place on London Calling.
Speaking of which, he'll be banging out a few tracks from that tectonic masterpiece in Dublin. "Yeh, I do London Calling and White Man In The Hammersmith Palais and about five other Clash songs. Why shouldn't I? I do the ones that represent my body of work, but I wouldn't do Stay Free, which is Mick Jones's or Guns of Brixton which is Paul Simenon's."
When London Calling came out in 1979 it sold only about 100,000 copies, but today's Clash copycat bands can rack up 10 million sales. Do you want to kill them or what? "No, not at all. I'm not going to be a grumpy old git about the new bands. I've heard bands like The Offspring and Green Day, who people say are really influenced by The Clash, but then we were really influenced by The Ramones who, to me, wrote the book on punk rock. It's all three chords, and there are only 12 notes after all. Besides which, I'm eternally grateful to one of the new American punk bands, because it was the guy from the band Rancid, who signed me to his record company when all the major labels weren't interested in my new stuff. Once we started playing the new songs live though, the major labels soon jumped on board."
Are you still on a "revolution rock" jag? "Yeh, there's no sell-out here. I still hold firm to my personal and political beliefs. It's just there's no left wing any more, and don't get me started on Blair. But the British left was always so divided anyway. I remember once being asked to do a benefit gig for "Class War" and when I turned up to do the show, there were all these people picketing outside. They didn't recognise me so I asked them what they were protesting against and they said `we're against Joe Strummer playing this gig and when he arrives in his limo, we're going to tell him that because he has had hit records and signed to a major label record company he shouldn't play the show'. What a shambles." The Pistols have done it, will The Clash ever? "No, there won't be any reunion. I mean, the four of us haven't been in the same room together for 15 years. We did the Westway to the World documentary last year to set out our story because there's so many myths about the band. No, no more Clash, but lots more me."
Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros play The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Monday night