He already looks like Joe Strummer and talks like Joe Strummer. Now, Glasvegas frontman James Allen is even acting like The Clash legend.
As NME reports, Allen has confirmed he is safe and well in New York after going missing last week and failing to turn up with the rest of his bandmates to last night’s Barclaycard Mercury Prize ceremony.
“James is not missing, he’s in New York,” Dean Cunning, the band’s manager, told The Independent. “He got in touch with me yesterday at about 1:45 pm to tell me he was OK because he knew people were worried, but to be honest I’ve been just as much in the dark about this as anybody — the last time I saw James was at the gig in Cardiff. I don’t even know exactly when he went missing.”
His bandmates, as The Independent goes on to report, told journalists at that he had been missing for five days, because he had a “fever”. The band were due to perform at the Grosvenor Hotel in London, but called off their performance because of Allan’s absence. It is unclear whether he will be joining his bandmates when they arrive in the U.S. today to support Kings of Leon on its upcoming tour.
Of course, if you’re up on your Clash history, you would know that on the eve of the band’s 1983 American tour, Strummer went missing. As the story goes, “the frontman was urged to ‘disappear’ by manager Bernie Rhodes, who believed that the media attention generated by the MIA punk rocker would constitute an ace marketing move. When Strummer asked where he ought to go, Rhodes told him to hoof it off to Austin, Texas, where Strummer’s old pal Joe Ely lived. Strummer: ‘So I took the next train to Paris. I thought it’d be a good joke.’ It still is, and the subterfuge was made even more da-da-Dada by the fact that the wayward rocker ran the Paris Marathon and grew a beard in the interim.”
No word on whether Allen is currently sporting a beard… but we can certainly hope. Either way, who doesn’t like a good conspiracy theory…
