Smash hit

The group's politically charged fourth album, Sandinista!, appeared in 1980. The first to be produced by the group itself, this sprawling, 36-song triple-album was released at a special budget price, after the group agreed to forego royalties on the first 200,000 copies in return for CBS's co-operation.

In 1982 Strummer mysteriously disappeared for three months, later claiming that he was in Paris where his girlfriend's mother had been in jail. The mystery helped the next album, Combat Rock, to number two in the British charts and gave the group its first American top ten entry.

Strummer still sounded confrontational and the album produced hit singles in Rock the Casbah and Should I Stay or Should I Go? Yet paradoxically, it was the beginning of the end for the group. Headon left, and when the Clash joined The Who on their farewell tour of America in late 1982, many felt that the latterday punk heroes sounded tame in comparison to the 1960s veterans.

The following year Jones was evicted from the group. Strummer and Simonon soldiered on with new recruits Vince White and Nick Sheppard, and played a number of benefit shows for the striking miners. But after the group's final album Cut the Crap was savaged by critics, they called it a day at the end of 1985.

As a rock icon who had achieved everything before he was 30, Strummer appeared unsure what to do next. He played on Bob Dylan's album Down in the Groove, organised a "Rock Against the Rich" tour, played with Latino Rockabilly War and released the 1989 solo album Earthquake Wonder. But that was to be his last album for a decade as he turned to cinema and deployed his chiselled good-looks to effect in such films as Straight to Hell, Sid and Nancy, Mystery Train and Lost in Space. He also worked on several film soundtracks including John Cusak's Gross Point Blank.

After a brief spell deputising for Shane MacGown as lead vocalist with the Pogues, he spent much of the 1990s resisting invitations to reform the Clash as various compilations kept them in the charts and a reissue of Should I Stay or Should I Go? became the Clash's first number one single, following its use in a Levi's jeans commercial. At one point, Strummer reportedly refused an offer of more than £3 million for the group to tour America. "That was never the Clash way of doing things," he later told The Times. "We all agreed it would have been sickening to have been playing that music with the pound signs hanging over us."

It was not until 1999 that he returned fully to the fray with a new band, the Mescaleros, and the album Rock, Art and the X-ray Style. A second Mescaleros' album, Global A Go-Go, followed within 18 months. "It took ten years to recharge my batteries. I felt isolated and wanted to wait until I'd stopped being the singer from a once-famous group and was this guy who needed help," he said.

Although he moved to Somerset to bring up his family, his political fire remained undimmed. "The spirit of rock'n'roll helped to stop the Vietnam War," he told The Times last year. "Perhaps it's a bit crazy for me still to feel like that. But I can't help it. Someone's got to keep the faith."

In March, he was due to have been inducted with the Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when it was anticipated the group's original line-up would perform for the first time since 1983. Fate has decreed that the Clash will now never reunite. He was also working on a track written with Bono and Dave Stewart for Aids Awareness in Africa.

He is survived by his wife and two daughters and a stepdaughter.

Joe Strummer, rock singer and lyricist, was born in Ankara, Turkey, on August 21, 1952. He died of a suspected heart attack at his home in Somerset on December 22, 2002, aged 50.

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