Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  The service begins. I don’t know who the MC is, a man in his late fifties, a vague cross between Gene Hackman and Woody Allen. He’s good, tells us how much love we are all part of, stresses how honoured we are that our lives were so touched by Joe, says that he’s never seen a bigger turn-out for a funeral. (There is a sound system outside, relaying the proceedings to the several hundred people now there.) Then he says we’ll hear the first piece of music, and we should turn our meditations on Joe: it is ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’.

  Paul Simonon gets up to speak. He tells a story about how when the Clash first formed in 1976, he and Joe had been in Portobello Road, discussing the merits of mirror shades, as worn by Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come. If anyone showed you any aggro while you were wearing such a pair, Joe decided, then their anger would be reflected back at them. Immediately he stepped into a store that sold such sunglasses. Paul didn’t follow: he was completely broke, having been chucked off social security benefits; Joe, however, had just cashed that week’s social security cheque. He came out of the store wearing his brand-new mirror shades. Then they set off to bunk the tube fare to Rehearsal Rehearsals in Camden. As they walked towards Ladbroke Grove tube station, Joe dug into his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I bought you a pair too.’ Although Joe was now completely broke and with no money to eat for three days, he’d helped out his mate. This story increases the collective tear in the chapel.

  Maeri, a female cousin, gets up to speak. Joe’s mother had been a crofter’s daughter, who became a nurse and met Joe’s father in India during the war. Joe’s dad liked to have a great time: a real rebel himself, it seems, not at all the posh diplomat he has been made out to be, a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. We are told a story about Joe as a ten-year-old at a family gathering: he is told that he can go anywhere but ‘the barn’; immediately he wants to know where ‘the barn’ is. Then another female cousin, Anna, reads a poem, in English, by the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean.

  Dick Rude, an old friend of Joe’s from LA who has been making a documentary about the Mescaleros, speaks. Keith Allen reads out the lyrics of a song about Nelson Mandela, part of an AIDS charity project for South Africa organized by Bono of U2, that Joe had just finished writing. A Joe demo-tape, just him and a guitar, a slow blues-like song, is played. And the Mescaleros tune, ‘From Willesden to Cricklewood’. The MC suggests that as we file past the coffin to leave, we say a few words to Joe. ‘Wandering Star’ begins to play. ‘See you later, Joe,’ someone says. Yeah, see you later, Joe.

  After the extraordinary tension that has built up to the funeral since Joe’s death eight days ago – my sleep is disturbed and troubled the night before the service – it feels like a release when the service concludes. (I have felt Joe around ever since he passed on: Gaby, his former long-term partner, has felt the same thing, she tells me on the phone the previous Friday, and I tell her that a mystic friend of mine has spoken of Joe ‘ascending’ very clearly – according to Buddhism, there is a period of forty-eight days following a death before the soul returns in another form; Gaby feels the same, saying she feels he is very at peace; job done, on to the next incarnation. Until someone reminds me, I have forgotten that Gaby has had plenty of experience of death, her brother having committed suicide while she was still with Joe – as his brother did.) Somehow I expect almost a party atmosphere outside the chapel, with the sound system maybe blaring out some Studio One. But everyone is wandering around in a daze. The wake is being held at the Paradise bar in nearby Kensal Rise.

  Outside the Paradise a bloke in a suit and black tie asks if I have any change so he can park his car. He looks familiar; it is Terry Chimes, the original Clash drummer, who had resigned from the group after making the first album, leaving the way open for Topper Headon. Terry is now a superstar of chiropractry, giving seminars on the subject.

  The bar is packed with people and a grey atmosphere of grief. I see Lucinda and hold her for a moment. Simultaneously she feels as frail as a feather and as strong as an oak beam. But she is clearly floating in trauma. I tell her how sorry I am, and as I speak my words feel inadequate and pathetic. From a stage at one end speakers are batting out reggae. The pair of pretty barmaids are struggling with the crush. I am handed a beer, which I down, pushed into a corner. I see a woman with a familiar face: Marcia, the wife of Jem Finer, effectively leader of The Pogues – I used to enjoy spending time with them at evenings and parties at Joe’s house when he still lived in Notting Hill. I am incredibly flattered by what she says to me. She says, ‘Joe always used to say that you were the only journalist he trusted. And he said he loved you as a friend. He really loved you.’ I am unbelievably touched by this. I want to talk to her more, but she is clearly looking for someone. I nearly burst into tears when what she has said fully registers with me. (I’m not unusual in being in such a state: all around me I see men putting their hands to their eyes, sobbing for a few moments.) Later Jem Finer, Marcia with him, deliberately seeks me out and tells me this again, both of them together this time.

  Next to the cloakroom I find a couple more rooms, where food has been laid out. I grab a plate: smoked salmon, feta cheese salad, pasta – good nosh. And sitting down I find a middle-aged woman. The sister of Joe’s mum, and a great person, Sheena Yeats now lives in Leeds, where she teaches at the university. She’s very Scottish, however: ‘Well, this is the best funeral I’ve ever been to,’ she burrs, with a smile. ‘Joe would have really appreciated it.’ She tells me how Joe had been up to Scotland a month ago, to a wedding, and that he had been in touch with everyone in his family recently. She reminds me that Joe’s mum Anna had passed on in January 1987. ‘Although he chose to call himself Joe, because it was such an everyman name, his real name was John, a name with the common touch,’ she explains.

  Bob Gruen tells me how Joe had been in New York a couple of months ago, in some bar, leading the assembled throng in revelry and having a great time. Seated nearby is Gerry Harrington, a Los Angeles agent who had guided Joe’s career when he was working on Walker and Mystery Train and releasing 1989’s Earthquake Weather. Joe had written a song for Johnny Cash last April, at Gerry’s house in LA, entitled ‘Long Shadow’: he plays it for me on an I-Pod, an extraordinary valedictory work that could have been about Joe himself, with lines about crawling up the mountain to the top.

  I talk to Rat Scabies, former drummer with the Damned. He tells me he and Joe had been working together in 1995 on the soundtrack of Grosse Pointe Blank, but that they fell out over that hoary old rock’n’roll chestnut – money. ‘I was stupid,’ he admits. ‘I thought I knew everything from playing with the Damned. But working with Joe was like an entirely new education. He understood how to trust his instincts and go with them every time. I couldn’t believe how fast he worked.’

  I run into Mick Jones. He puts his arms around me and kisses me on the cheek. We hold each other. He tells me how he’d loved the message I’d left on his voice-mail after seeing the JOE STRUMMER R.I.PUNK graffiti on Christmas Day; it had touched Mick as deeply as it touched me. He tells me how great the Fire Brigades Union have been, and that the police have behaved similarly. At the Chapel of Rest where Joe had been laid in Somerset a sound system had blared out 24-7. When the police came round in response to complaints from neighbours, and were told it was Joe who was lying there, instead of telling them they must turn down the music they responded by placing a permanent two-man unit outside the chapel: a Great Briton getting a fitting guard of honour, an irony Joe would have appreciated as his mourning bredren consumed several pounds of herb.

  Pearl Harbour, Paul’s ex-wife, is there, talking to Joe Ely, the Texan rockabilly star who had often played with the Clash. She tells me how this trip has brought closure for her by bringing her back to what, she admits, was the happiest time in her life.

  A moment later Tricia – Mrs Simonon – comes over as Pearl departs and proceeds to tell me how the absent Clash manager Bernie Rhodes had been contacted and invited
to come to the funeral, but after the usual over-lengthy conversation it was impossible to discover what Bernie really felt or thought. ‘It seemed that he was more intent on getting on to the next agenda, which was that he desperately wanted to be invited to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for the Clash next March. What he didn’t realize was that it was already decided that he would be invited.’

  ‘I always had a soft spot for Joe,’ Bernie later told me. ‘But I couldn’t go to the funeral because I didn’t like the people he was hanging around with.’

  Joe and Mick had both wanted a re-formed Clash to play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. But the one refusenik? Paul Simonon, painter of Notting Hill. Trish admits that the last communication Paul had from Joe was on the morning that he died. Joe sent Paul a fax – he loved faxes, hated e-mails – saying, ‘You should try it – it could be fun.’ Paul, however, was adamant that the group shouldn’t re-form for the show.

  Never too computer-literate, Joe wrote on a typewriter to the end. (Lucinda Mellor)

  Next I find myself in a long conversation with Jim Jarmusch’s partner, Sara Driver, who commissioned Joe to write the music for When Pigs Fly, a film she made in 1993, starring Marianne Faithfull, that suffered only a limited release after business problems, and Bob Gruen’s wife Elizabeth. Jim is sitting next to us, deep in conversation with Cosmic Tim, a mutual friend of Joe and myself, from completely separate angles of entry. I had walked into the main upstairs bar as Cosmic Tim was standing on the stage with a microphone. It was the usual stuff that had gained him his sobriquet, and I groaned inwardly. ‘And this man Baba had been to the mountains of Tibet and lived there for twenty-five years, meditating.’ Other people in the packed crowd were groaning too (‘Get on with it.’). But then Cosmic Tim turned it around: ‘And one day when he returned to London, I was walking down Portobello Road with Baba when I see Joe walking towards us. I cross the road, and Baba and Joe look at each other. Suddenly, Baba calls out, “Woody!” (Joe’s nickname from The 101’ers.) And Joe looks up and shouts, “Baba!”’ According to Tim, Baba and Joe had known each other at art college. At length Sara, Elizabeth and myself discuss the state of depression in which Joe was regularly mired, and that most of the tributes to him that day are utterly omitting. Sara says how Jim used to refer to him as ‘Big Chief Thundercloud’. She also tells me how Joe had an enormous crisis when he was on tour in the States singing with the Pogues: he had fallen deeply in love with a girl and wanted to leave Gaby for her. Although he didn’t, in some ways it was the end of his relationship with the mother of his children. (This was a period when I remember Joe seemed even more in turmoil than usual, an air of great anger about him.)

  The party is thinning out a little. It is 11 o’clock. I’ve got a slight headache. I leave and walk down to Ladbroke Grove tube station with Flea, Mick’s guitar roadie, and get home around midnight. I fall asleep on the sofa.

  3

  INDIAN SUMMER

  1999

  7 November 1999

  In a shrine-like case in the seedily glitzy foyer of Las Vegas’s Hard Rock casino stands a guitar once owned by Elvis Presley. ‘What would Elvis think?’ groans Joe Strummer, here to play a show on his first solo tour in ten years. This distress seems a trifle exaggerated, as though Strummer is trying to force himself into the character of a 47-year-old bad boy rocker. ‘This case is only plexiglass: we could smash it open and have the guitar out of there before anyone noticed,’ he continues. Is this a confrontational posture he feels he should adopt in his job of Last Active Punk Star?

  The frozen grins on the faces of those around him – his wife, an old friend from San Francisco, myself – suggest this is not what we want to hear: there seems a certain anxiety amongst us that, to prove his point, Strummer might carry out his threat, and that within seconds we will be shot to death by security guards. Thankfully, a fan approaches him for an autograph, the moment passes, and he makes his way backstage for his performance.

  As a stage act, the reputation of the Clash was almost unsurpassed. Championed by many as the most exciting performing rock’n’roll group ever, there’s recently been the release of a live record, accompanied by a Don Letts’ documentary, Westway To The World. If ever there was a time to jump-start his solo career, this was it. Strummer seized the moment: he released an excellent album, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style; and took off on a seemingly endless tour, which is how I come to find him in Las Vegas.

  Standing with him at the Hard Rock casino’s central bar at 4 in the morning after many post-show drinks, I tell him I’d had the impression that for years he had been going through an ongoing minor nervous breakdown. He balks at this, but initially will admit to having been locked into a state of long-term depression: ‘When people have nervous breakdowns, they really flip out. We shouldn’t treat them flippantly. It was more like depression, miserable-old-gitness.’

  How long were you depressed for?

  ‘About five minutes. Until I had a spliff.’

  A moment later he tries to wriggle out of even this admission: ‘I’m not claiming to have been depressed. All I’ll allow is that I didn’t have any confidence and I thought the whole show was over: you can wear your brain out – like on a knife-sharpening stone, run it until it shatters – and I just wanted to have some of it left.

  Assisted by his now four-year-old marriage to Lucinda, his second wife, Strummer seems to have found a relative peace; Lucinda is credited by many around him with pulling him out of his malaise.

  Christened John Mellor (‘without an “s” on the end, unfortunately: if there was, I’d have pulled more women,’ referring to the game-keeper’s surname in Lady Chatterley’s Lover), he was born in Ankara. His background would seem to show why Mick Jones once expressed amazement to me at how hard and tough a worker Strummer could be. For his father’s profession of career diplomat didn’t arise from any position of privilege, quite the opposite. ‘He was a self-made man, and we could never get on,’ says Strummer.

  The musician’s grandparents had worked as management on the colonial railway network in India. ‘My father was a smart dude: he won a scholarship to a good school, then won another scholarship to university. When the war broke out, he joined the Indian army. My mother and father met in a casualty ward in India – she was working in the nursing battalion. After the war he joined the Civil Service at a lowly rank.’

  Strummer’s earliest memory was of his brother, who was eighteen months older, ‘giving me a digestive biscuit in the pram’. He still is unable to assess what it was that led David to commit suicide. ‘Who knows? You can’t say, can you?’

  Clearly this would have seemed a crucial, motivating catalyst in the life of the person who became Joe Strummer. How did it affect him? ‘I don’t know how it affects people. It’s a terrible thing for parents.’ He pauses for a very long time, until it becomes evident that this is all he is prepared to offer.

  If it hadn’t been for punk, what on earth would have happened to Joe? He didn’t last too long at art school. After that, the only upward career move he seemed to have made was when he decided to stop being a busker’s money-collector and to become a busker himself – but even that worried him, he tells me, because he thought it might prove too difficult. It was this that led to him playing with The 101’ers, from which he was poached to become the Clash’s singer. ‘There is a part of Joe that is a real loser,’ says Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming, the definitive account of the punk era. ‘That’s what he was in his days as a squatter. And it’s that that comes across in his vocals, which was why people could identify with them so much.’

  I tell Joe that Kosmo Vinyl, the unlikely named ‘creative director’ of the Clash, once said to me that if it hadn’t been for punk the singer would have ended up a tramp.

  ‘Yeah,’ he agrees, without a moment’s thought. ‘When I was a kid I knew that I was never going to make it in the thrusting executive world. I love picking stuff out of skips. A few bu
m records and I’ll be away with my shopping-trolley.’

  I ask Joe Strummer what he learnt from his years in the wilderness. ‘Any pimple-encrusted kid can jump up and become king of the rock’n’roll world,’ he says, voicing something to which he has clearly given much thought. ‘But when you’re a young man like that you really do glow in the light of everyone’s attention. It becomes a sustaining part of your life – which is something that is rotten to the core: you cannot have that as a crutch, because one day you’re going to be over. So obviously I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke.

  ‘I don’t give a damn any more. I’ve learnt not to take it seriously – that’s what I’ve learnt. And I’ve also learnt that because what you do is sort of interesting, doesn’t mean you’re any better than anyone else: after all, we’re not exactly devising new forms of protein. If they say, “Release this record because otherwise your career is finished,” and I don’t want them to, then I just won’t do it. I’m far more dangerous now, because I don’t care at all.’