Joe Strummer died 16 years ago today. The Joe Strummer Foundation has a good memorial piece.

But for me it’s amusing or ironic or something, that it should be today of all days that, out shopping, I see (and buy) this book:

I’ve been waiting for this for around five years. You’ll recall, I don’t doubt for a second, that back in 2013 I posted a link to a Kickstarter that the authors were running to help them fund the writing of the book.

What I don’t seem to have posted about is that a year or so later, in June 2014, one of the authors visited the UK and interviewed me for the book. He didn’t come over just to interview me, I should stress. It was a research trip, and he visited various places and interviewed lots of people, some of my friends included.

We’ve exchanged emails a couple of times since then, when he had followup questions, so I kind of expected to hear when the book came out. Coincidentally I was recently thinking about emailing him, to talk about something on the Joe Strummer 001 collection of obscurities that came out a month or two back. Had I done so, I would of course have said, “So when’s the book coming out?”

But here it is. I am extensively quoted (well, quoted a couple of times) in the section on the busking tour’s visit to Edinburgh, which was mainly what he wanted me to talk about.

Here’s the publisher’s page on it. Here’s its GoodReads page, and its Amazon UK and US links. Probably too late to get it for Christmas. Try a bookshop.

Here’s a page with me: