Quote Of The Day By Joe Strummer: 'When You Blame Yourself ...'

Joe Strummer was born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, on August 21, 1952, but raised in England, where he became one of the defining figures of the late 1970s punk scene with his seminal band the Clash. Strummer earned his nickname from the fact he learned guitar right-handed despite being left-handed, which initially limited his playing style to strummed chords. What may have been considered a drawback in other genres of rock music suited the back-to-basics ethos of punk perfectly, while Strummer also distinguished himself as a talented lyricist with a singular ability to distill social and political issues into striking, catchy, and confrontational songs alongside the Clash's melodically talented co-frontman Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and drummer Topper Headon.

The Clash hit their commercial peak in the early 1980s, breaking through internationally with the release of "London Calling" in December 1979. But tensions within the band meant the Clash split permanently in 1986, with Strummer going on to continue recording and touring with his new band, the Mescaleros, until his death in 2002 at the age of 50. Today's Quote of the Day comes from a veteran with experience of the highs and lows of the music industry.

"When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don't learn nothing, cause hey, it's not your fault, it's his fault, over there."

Our Quote of the Day comes from an interview Joe Strummer gave to Punk Magazine's Judy McGuire a few years before his death but only published posthumously. In it, the verbose musician looks back over his career in punk and the financial pitfalls that eventually limited his ability to make music.

As he explains in the interview: "I put out a record in 1989 called 'Earthquake Weather,' which didn't sell any copies at all. So [Strummer's record label] Sony thought, we can't let this bloke make another record because the wording of the contract was that as soon as I started a session, they had to write me an enormous advance check." As such, he was prevented from entering the recording studio for many years, curtailing his output. Our Quote of the Day comes in the context of this story: Strummer may have been tied up in a nefarious contract by his record label, but he was eager to shoulder the blame for the legal mess he found himself in.

The situation Joe Strummer was in after the release of "Earthquake Weather" could have seen him throwing blame at his record label for preventing him from making new music. Indeed, it's not easy to avoid bitterness and resentment when we have been wronged. 

But Strummer showed that despite his firebrand punk persona, he had a great deal of emotional maturity when it came to his attitude toward a setback that few would say was his fault. Commenting on his stance in the same interview, Strummer says: "That's a grown-up. You've gotta grow up in this world."

For Strummer, being a grown-up is about learning from your mistakes, and to do that you must take full ownership of them, even if blaming somebody else might be an easy option. That way, you reflect and gain valuable experience that helps you grow as a person so that you don't find yourself in a similar situation again down the line.

• "Punk rock isn't something you grow out of. Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of that attitude is 'give us some truth.'"
• "I thought I was a crud. Then I saw the Sex Pistols and I became a king and decided to move into the future."
• "All the laws are against you. Whoever's got the money's got the power."
• "The way you get a better world is, you don't put up with substandard anything."
• "I think good manners will come back. In America, kids saw punk rock as a license to be as rude as possible. I didn't like that."
• "I was 23 when we started, and you'd break into a sweat because you were supposed to be 19. I think middle age starts at 68. My motto is, 'What's the hurry?'"