British rock music has lost its last true megastar

The one reunion music lovers craved and dreaded will never come to pass. The death at 50 of Joe Strummer, founder and frontman of the Clash, the only one of the original clutch of British punk bands to crack America, means they will never sully their stellar reputation by reconvening, though several times they were offered crazy money to do so.

Only this month, Strummer's long-estranged band-mate Mick Jones joined his underrated Mescaleros for an encore of a couple of old Clash tunes, starting talk of further collaboration.

Such an event could never have recaptured their first astonishing impact, as repeated Sex Pistols reunions have demonstrated. Inspired by the Pistols' destruction of pop's rulebook, the Clash were the conscience of punk, concerned rather than nihilistic, gloriously self-conscious in their military duds yet socially aware and charmingly desperate to carve their own place in rock's myths.

Strummer, who took his stage name as a reference to his crude guitar technique, teamed up with Jones and tyro bassist Paul Simonon in west London in 1976. Within a year the band had signed to CBS for a reported £100,000 and released their self-titled debut, to many the definitive punk album.

No one better captured the tension of the times, with such shoutalong anthems as "London's Burning" ("with boredom now"), "White Riot", inspired by the disturbances at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival and the revolutionary rock-reggae cover of Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves". In November 1978 they released the erratic Give 'Em Enough Rope, an attempt to appeal to the American market.

But it was the great London Calling that sealed their reputation. Voted best record of the Seventies and Eighties (because of different release dates on each side of the pond), this extraordinary double LP threw blues, rockabilly, reggae, ska, rock and soul into a glorious blend. In late 1980, the insanely ambitious triple album Sandinista! saw them dabble in rap long before any other rock outfit, and by 1982's Combat Rock they'd finally taken their place as megastars.

Yet they always did it their way. For all their supposed posturing (they refused to appear on Top Of The Pops in those pre-video times), they virtually gave their music away: London Calling sold for four quid, Sandinista! for a mere six.

They could have been the biggest band in the world, but settled for being the best loved, as their always incendiary and celebratory live shows proved.

After their demise in 1986, Strummer dabbled in acting and joined the Pogues for a while before re-emerging with the acclaimed Mescaleros.

His death is a sad loss, a reminder of the last classic British rock band. Strummer was a true great.