The Clash: Audio Ammunition YouTube documentary includes unseen Joe Strummer interview footage

Google-produced ‘mini-doc’ includes new interviews with surviving band members, and sits alongside cover versions by modern artists

Google is releasing a five-part YouTube documentary about The Clash to promote the digital release of remastered versions of five of their albums on its Google Play store.

The Audio Ammunition documentary lasts just under an hour, and draws on unseen footage of the late Joe Strummer, and new interviews with his surviving bandmates talking about the writing and recording process for the five studio albums.

It’s not the first time Google has released this kind of documentary, or “Mini-doc” as the company describes it. Previous recipients of the treatment include the Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe and Busta Rhymes.

“We try to do at least one of these a quarter, although we don’t always pull out all the stops for a mega production like this,” says Tim Quirk, who as Google’s head of global content programming, oversaw the project, which was a collaboration with the band and label Sony Music.

“We’d been talking to Sony for a long time about what we might do, but the moment a lightbulb went off over my head was when they told me they’d uncovered lots of unseen, unused interview footage with Joe Strummer,” says Quirk.

“I thought ‘oh, 15-20 minutes, that’s fine, I can get 3-4 usable minutes out of that’. But it was hours and hours: more than two dozen DVDs. It was from when they sat down to do [2000 documentary] Westway to the World: Joe in front of a camera being interviewed about the entire arc of the band’s career.”

In the music industry’s crosser moments with Google, the company is often accused of valuing technology over music: algorithms over the creative arts.

Quirk doesn’t fit into that stereotype. Before his current role overseeing music, books, apps and video merchandising within Google, he was VP of programming at subscription music service Rhapsody. Before that, he was a music journalist, and before that he was a frontman himself, for punk-pop band Too Much Joy.

“The Clash literally changed my life, so you can imagine what it was like spending a week watching these DVDs on my bus ride to and from work, taking extensive notes, and then sitting down with Mick and Paul and Topper for the new interviews,” he says.

“London Calling, as far as I’m concerned, is the greatest album in the history of the universe. When we got to that part of the interviews, that was my first question: ‘how does it feel to have written the best album ever?’ It was awkware, it made them uncomfortable, but I had to say it because it’s true!”

Naturally, there’s a commercial motive behind the documentary: to persuade people to buy the remastered albums on Google Play, or listen to them through the Google Play All Access subscription service.

“The way you make a subscription service work is by constantly turning people on to new music, but ‘new’ doesn’t have to mean it was released last week. It just has to be new to that individual customer,” says Quirk.

“I’ve felt for a long time that Joe Strummer should be idolised in a way that he’s not necessarily been. You see Bob Marley and John Lennon on posters and t-shirts all over the place, but I’m not sure why you don’t see the same thing with Joe Strummer. Although you do in my office…”

Quirk sees The Clash as fitting into a narrow line of bands whose impact went far beyond their fanbases to shift the direction of popular (rock) music.

“In the 60s you had the Beatles and the Stones. In the 70s the Sex Pistols and The Clash. In terms of rock music, Nirvana was the next one. That to me is the pantheon,” he says.

“I was 13 or 14 when I first heard The Clash, and they were really important: they instantly made the music I’d been listening to feel like a cartoon.”

The documentary is also aimed at communicating this to younger YouTube and Google Play users, a decent chunk of whom may not even have been born when the band released their fifth album Combat Rock in 1982.

Google commissioned some modern bands to perform Clash songs for the project, with Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, Surfer Blood, Kurt Vile and Slipknot’s Corey Taylor all choosing songs from London Calling to cover the songs in their own styles.

Quirk says it’s the interviews that make Audio Ammunition shine, though, as they did for the previous Rolling Stones and Mötley Crüe mini-docs on YouTube.

“Even when people are a big, jaded rock act, when they start talking about the music, they become the fanboys who started the band in the first place,” he says.

“All the celebrity bullshit goes out the window, and you get a visceral sense of what it was like hanging out in the studio making those songs. It’s very easy for that youthful passion to get beaten out of you in the industry!”

He admits the same thing can happen for journalists and others involved in music curation – a phrase that’s very fashionable in 2013, as streaming music services like Spotify, Deezer and Google’s All Access strive to prove they’re more than just search boxes for catalogues of tunes.

Google may possess the most famous search box of all elsewhere in its business, but Quirk’s team is focusing on editorial recommendations and – as shown by the mini-docs – creating new content around music.

He says his experience at Rhapsody (including its predecessor Listen.com, “the online Mojo, a different thousand-word feature in every genre every week!” he laughs) has taught him the importance of stepping back too.

“The truth is the average customer doesn’t know who the hell you are, and they don’t care. We take great pride in our knowledge and expertise, and we have an evangelical fervour to turn the world onto music, but we’re also very humble,” says Quirk.

“It’s more important to build an infrastructure that enables discovery than it is to stand in front of people and say ‘I am Tim Quirk, here are my recommendations’. They need to feel like they’re choosing their own adventure.”

The importance of human beings: perhaps not something Google’s fiercer critics would expect to hear coming out of the company. But a sign that within its music team, people and algorithms are complementary, not competing.

“It’s not either/or. You need algorithms, and you need human beings training the algorithms. The speech I give all young whipper-snappers joining our team is this: the days of being a gatekeeper and a tastemaker are over. That’s not our job,” says Quirk.

“We are park rangers. There is more music in Google Play than any one person could listen to in a lifetime, and our job is to make that content navigable: we’re bushwhacking trails through the content jungle, if you will.”

Source: The Guardian