Our offices used to be in SoHo for 22 years and there's a very big audio store just north of Houston on Broadway.
Two decades later, as a reunited Big Audio Dynamite performed at Roseland on Tuesday night, these early adopters inspired some nostalgia for the days of cassette boomboxes and rare 12-inch vinyl; the stage backdrop was a graffiti-style painting of piles of loudspeakers.
So while Strummer was "fucking off to the mountains of Spain to sit sobbing under a palm tree" Jones was already up and running with a new band, Big Audio Dynamite, fuelled by the type of determination that only comes when there are ex-band members/friends to spite with your own success.
A UK tour supporting Big Audio Dynamite eventually led them to New York, where they hung out up with Boogie Down Productions, a crew who were also pioneering rap riddims.
Big Audio Dynamite wrote a tribute song to Roeg, called "E=MC2", which included lyrical references to Don't Look Now—among Roeg's other films along with clips from it in the video, directed by Luc Roeg, while Sophie Ellis-Bextor performed a "pop synth homage" to Don't Look Now with her song, "Catch You".
But onstage, with the lineup that made its 1980s albums, Big Audio Dynamite was more like a standard rock band.
The movie's bold and funny sexuality, carefully handpicked thrift-store art direction, hip cameos and soundtrack full of cool bands like X and Big Audio Dynamite now seem like a blueprint for the coming auteur-as-curator era of independent film.
The same goes for many rock 'n' rollers, including Jones, despite his post-Clash success leading Big Audio Dynamite, and it's hardly a given that the collaboration could have sustained itself — Strummer tells Salewicz that the turning point for him was a series of 1982 stadium gigs opening for the Who, a band he respected yet feared the Clash might turn into.
On 19 June 1992, during the European indoor leg, U2 played the "Stop Sellafield" concert in Manchester, alongside Kraftwerk, Public Enemy, and Big Audio Dynamite II, to protest the operation of a second nuclear reactor at Sellafield.
