His work inspired devotion around the world – prompting more than one fan to tell him he had changed their lives – but for a long time after his untimely death Lucinda Tait could not bear to hear her husband’s Joe Strummer’s voice. Her grief was simply too raw and his singing only served as a cruel reminder of what she had lost.

“When Joe died I was so immersed in grief and trying to find a way to move on that I couldn’t listen to his voice. It was just too much to hear him”

So it was only in recent years that Tait could bring herself to listen to the previously unreleased recordings by the former lead singer of  The Clash which she had discovered in their Somerset barn, shortly after he died of an undiagnosed heart defect in December 2002, at the age of 50,Now 32 songs from that stash of long lost Strummer tapes have been released as part of a new collection of work by a man who inspired [ . . . ]

Continue at THE TELEGRAPH: Joe Strummer’s widow tells how she found The Clash singer’s lost tapes in their Somerset barn