Long before Joe Strummer became one of the voices of the Clash, he was living in a London squat and playing pubs and clubs with a band named after the address where they lived. Now, that early chapter of the late Strummer’s musical life is getting the archival treatment it deserves.

The George Harrison-founded Dark Horse Records has announced Joe Strummer 003: The 101’ers Years, a definitive collection of studio and live recordings from Strummer’s pre-Clash band, due Nov. 20. The three-CD deluxe edition collects 48 tracks and comes housed in a 48-page hardback book with slipcase, while a two-LP edition will also be available.

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The 101’ers formed in 1974 as a house band among the residents of 101 Walterton Road in Maida Vale, where Strummer and his fellow musicians were squatting. The group became fixtures on London’s burgeoning pub-rock circuit, mixing rock, R&B and rockabilly at pubs, clubs and squat benefits around the city.

“The Labour government introduced the Rent Act in 1965,” Strummer said previously. “Its purpose was to protect tenants in rented accommodation. Unfortunately, it backfired as most laws do — and the result was landlords found a loophole and switched to short lets, which were not covered. There were thousands of empty houses in London and the councils actually employed gangs to come in and smash up these lovely Victorian houses, remove floorboards, rip out wiring [and] destroy the plumbing so squatters couldn’t live in them. Now being homeless, I ran into some old friends who were squatting on West 9. Within about a year I had formed a band in a squat. It was named ‘the 101’ers’ after our address (Walterton Road, Maida Vale). We ran a club every Wednesday in the upstairs room of a pub. Entry fee: 10p.”

The collection captures the band at a particularly fascinating moment in British rock history: the brief period when pub rock was giving way to punk. In April 1976, the 101’ers shared two bills with the Sex Pistols at London’s Nashville Rooms, an encounter that helped push Strummer toward the emerging punk movement. Two months later, on June 5, the 101’ers played their final show, with future Clash members Mick Jones and Paul Simonon in the audience.

The recordings collected here document that transition in real time. Disc one gathers the band’s studio work, including newly mixed material. Disc two digs deeper with basement tapes and demos, including “Full Moon,” an especially intimate recording Strummer made alone at the aforementioned squat. Disc three collects live recordings, among them early performances of “Junco Partner” — a song Strummer would later record with the Clash — and “Jail Guitar Doors,” then known as “Lonely Mother’s Son.”

Revered producer Paul Hicks restored the demos and live recordings from the original cassette tapes and soundboard sources. The deluxe book features a foreword from Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, a history of the 101’ers by band member Richard Nother Dudanski, plus Strummer’s own writings and illustrations.

Strummer died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of 50. In recent years, Dark Horse has dived deep into his archives, releasing a 32-song compilation dubbed Joe Strummer 001 in 2018 and Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years in 2022, which rounded up his three studio albums with that post-Clash band plus a disc of 15 previously unreleased tracks.

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