Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  4

  STEPPING OUT OF BABYLON (ONE MORE TIME)

  2003 (1952–1957)

  Moving at a fast pace, Paul Simonon and I are cutting along a narrow rocky mud path that splits the wet grass on this high stretch of Scottish flatland. In a soaking spray of fine rain we have been climbing for twenty minutes. But the moment that we had stepped onto this level plateau the downpour had stopped: damp odours and mysterious scents are all that saturate us now. In the dagger-cold water of a lochan, we stash two cans of beer for our return journey. On the far bank a frog croaks irregularly.

  Lusher and even more magical than its much larger, bleaker neighbour of Skye, this is the remote Inner Hebrides island of Raasay, up towards the northern tip of its twelve mile length. Thanks to an abiding impression of all-pervading strangeness, however, we feel we could as easily be on the other side of the moon as on the far north-western periphery of Europe. But you can’t avoid that feeling of being out on the edge. For miles around there are no other human beings, only a vast, amorphous silence, the soundtrack to the greyish-blue wild mountain scenery that juts around us; you can almost hear the clouds clashing on the highland rock and rustling on the purple heather.

  As we push on each turn of a corner seems to brings a new microclimate, announced by a gasp of angular wind, like a message from a spirit: now the cloud cover is dashed away and a crisp blue sky sets in relief the Cuillin, Skye’s looming mountain peaks, a few miles across the Sound of Raasay; in this sudden sunlight the sea turns azure, the rough breakers crackling and glistening. After our steep, wet, upward hike, the flat stretch has come as a relief. We don’t know there is a far more arduous climb still to come: finally perched on a rock cairn at the top of that tough ascent, we can see both east and west coasts of the isle of Raasay, three miles apart.

  Tough, gritty, awkward, dangerous, an astonishing terrain of primal, pure, mysterious beauty … It is little surprise that one of the descendants of Raasay – John Graham Mellor, known to those outside his blood family as Joe Strummer – has many of the same qualities as the island itself. Although he’d marked it in his diary for the summer of 2003, Joe himself never made it to Raasay; in the years immediately preceding he had been making a conscious effort to reacquaint himself with the Scottish roots on his mother’s side, an effort to redeem the previous thirty or so years when he admitted he had neglected this part of his past. ‘I’ve been a terrible Scotsman, but I’m going to be better,’ Joe said to his cousin Alasdair Gillies at the wedding of their cousin George in Bonar Bridge, three weeks before he died.

  To the east, across the deepest inshore water in Britain, sits the mainland of Scotland and the mountain peaks of the Applecross peninsula, rising to over 2,000 feet and tipped by streaks of white quartzite. Opposite it, down towards the Raasay shoreline, lies our destination. Paul Simonon and I are here to find the earliest known home of Joe Strummer’s Scottish ancestors: the rocky, heathery, hilly path that at times we have to hang on to with our fingertips that we are following is the same one that Joe’s grandmother, Jane Mackenzie, would have taken to school. Donald Gilliejesus (‘servant of Jesus’), a stone mason, from near Mallaig on the Scottish mainland, arrived to repair Raasay House, destroyed by English Redcoats after ‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie hid on the island in 1746 following the Jacobite Rebellion against the English crown. The house at Umachan was built in the early 1850s after the Gillies fled from the ‘clearances’ – the savage requisitioning of small-holdings by landowners – on the south of Raasay. Built by Angus Gillies, the great-grandson of Donald, it was inherited by his son Alastair Gillies. The second of Alastair’s ten children was Jane, born in 1883; Joe’s grandmother would walk barefoot to school along the same path Paul and I had clung to.

  We head sharply down, across a lazy burn, past further cairns of stone. On our right there is what appears to be a natural amphitheatre, and a clearly evident ancient burial mound rising out of the greeny-brown terrain. Finally we are standing amidst waist-high bracken on a precipitous ledge, looking down on where we have been told Umachan should be. Between us we have distributed Paul’s canvases, paints and an easel, which have become a burden: we hide them in some undergrowth. Paul, something of a gourmet, tells me how in London he had popped into Bentley’s Oyster Bar in Swallow Street for a dozen oysters and a bottle of Chablis whilst buying the hiking shoes he’s wearing; it’s a long way from heating up flour-water poster-paste on a saw to eat, as Paul did in the early days of the Clash at Rehearsal Rehearsals. But a nourished belly and well-shod feet can only mark us out as the useless city slickers we are: we can find no trace of the home of Joe Strummer’s ancestor.

  At a quarter to one, lunchtime on Friday 12 September 2003, my phone rings. It is Paul Simonon. ‘I think you’d better pack your bag, Chris. On Sunday I’m going up to Raasay off the Isle of Skye to do a painting of the house Joe’s grandmother used to live in. You should come with me.’

  The Scottish Herald has commissioned Paul to paint a landscape of Rebel Wood, the forest on the Isle of Skye dedicated to Joe Strummer. Paul Simonon is the only member of the Clash to have carved out a non-musical career; returning to his original love of painting, and utilizing contacts he caught along the way as a member of such a prestigious British group, he has made a name and money as a figurative painter. Paul has agreed to paint the wood, but also will supply what he believes is a better idea: a picture of the ruined house in Umachan on Raasay. Iain Gillies, Joe’s cousin, had told us about these ruins.

  As I am to discover, our expedition forms part of an experience that will bring some form of ending to the former Clash bass player for the thoroughly unexpected death of his former lead singer. During our time together, Paul emphasizes on several occasions that Joe was his brother, ‘my older brother’.

  Every year film director Don Letts and his wife Grace throw a garden barbecue at their Queen’s Park home on August Bank Holiday Monday – a sort of refuge for the over-forties and under-tens from the Notting Hill carnival taking place a mile or so to the south. At the event in 2003, eighteen days before he made that Friday lunchtime call to me to come up to Scotland, I’d last seen Paul Simonon. The smaller 1976 Notting Hill carnival, when black youths and police had violently clashed beneath the elevated Westway in front of Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, had led to the writing of ‘White Riot’, one of the most contentious songs in the Clash’s canon of work, a tune that at first – before people understood that its lyrics expressed the envy of white outsiders that black kids could so successfully rebel against the forces of law and order – led to suspicions that the group had a fascist political agenda. The 1976 event and the Westway became part of Clash mythology.

  In the early days of the group Paul had always seemed shy. In 2001, however, when I had written the text for a picture-book about the Clash by Bob Gruen, the New York photographer, I had been surprised by a change that had overcome the group’s former bass player; as Bob Gruen and I went through hundreds of photographs with each of the group members, he was by far the most articulate. Mick was as warm as ever, but his comments were more jokey and less specific; and although Joe had insisted to Bob Gruen that I should write the text for his book, he surprised me by being the worst of the three interview subjects. Perhaps the photographs, which encapsulated almost the entire span of the career of the Clash, drew up too many memories; he ended up by saying he would write captions himself – and never did. Global A Go-Go, his second CD with the Mescaleros, was being readied for release and Joe was exhaustively – the only way he knew how to anything – promoting it; I could feel tension from Lucinda, on the couple of occasions when I rang up and spoke to her, trying to press Joe to come up with some text. A couple of months later, in the upstairs office that served as a dressing-room at the HMV Megastore on London’s Oxford Street, where Joe and the Mescaleros had just aired the new Global A Go-Go songs to a housefull crowd, he came up and apologized to me for not having come up with the goods.

  ‘It’s fine,’
I said, telling him I’d used quotes he’d given me over the years. ‘I know you had a lot on your plate, and we came up with something anyway.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t let down your mates,’ he shook his head at himself.

  Anyway, in Don Letts’s back garden it dawned on me that – contrary to everything that you might have expected in 1977 – even before Joe’s passing Paul had become the spokesman and historian of the Clash. At Don’s home that August evening he was especially communicative and open and seemed to feel an urge to talk about the group.

  Paul Gustave Simonon was born on 15 December 1955 to Gustave Antoine Simonon and Elaine Florence Braithwaite. Gustave, who preferred to call himself Anthony, was a 20-year-old soldier who later opened a bookshop; Elaine worked at Brixton Library. As happened to Mick Jones, Paul’s bohemian parents split up when he was eight; he and his brother were taken to Italy when about ten, where they lived for six months in Siena, and six months in Rome. There his mother took him to see all the latest Spaghetti Westerns – not just Sergio Leone, but all the Django films also. In London, Paul moved to live with his father in Notting Hill. His father, once an ardent Roman Catholic churchgoer, joined the Communist Party: ‘Suddenly we’re being told we’re not going to church any more. I’m being sent off to stuff leaflets for the Communist Party through people’s letterboxes in Ladbroke Grove. You can imagine what it was like: all these rough Irish or West Indians, hanging out on the steps, and I’m coming up to their letterboxes: “What’s that you’re putting through there?” “Oh, it’s just something about the Communist Party.” Then I figured out, if my dad was such a passionate Communist, how come he was sitting at home and sending me off to do this?

  ‘The Clash was a bit like the Communist Party,’ Paul free-associates, drawing up mention of manager Bernie Rhodes, ‘with Bernie as Stalin. We were his playthings. Bernie is a total original, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what he is – he’s absolutely unique.

  ‘What happened to Topper,’ he brings up the subject of the firing in 1982 of Topper Headon, ‘was that Mick, Joe and myself had an absolute belief in what we were setting out to do, and Topper came along later, when our attitudes were already set in stone. It’s like Topper said in Don’s documentary, Westway to the World, he thought he’d play with the Clash for a bit and use it as a stepping-stone for the rest of his career. He had a different attitude to it all.

  ‘But the Clash really was made up of Mick with his rock-star attitudes, Joe with his hippy beliefs, and me. And I was out there on my own: I wasn’t caught up in anything. I didn’t even really have any friends, only Nigel from Whirlwind.

  ‘I was angry at the time when it all came to a halt. It seemed such a waste. But now I’m glad we stopped at a point when we were about to be mega-huge and enormously rich. I’m glad we never re-formed. We proved we could come through it all. None of us were casualties, even though we came close to it. We came out the other side and survived, and people still love our music. Twelve year olds love the Clash now, so we must have done something right.’

  Up on Raasay, Paul and I return to the site of Umachan with a guide, the ranger who looks after Rebel Wood. In fact, we had been right all along about the location of the settlement. The ranger shows us how we should have gone backwards along a trail to go forwards, a lesson in Highland zen. When we finally round a sheer mountain cliff and find Umachan a hundred yards in front of us, a lonely and haunting place, a tiny hamlet of eight homes, we rush through the ferns. On the scurrying high winds a golden eagle sails past us, its wings seeming to wave to us from the solitude in the sky, before it disappears behind a headland.

  Among the ruins that have been reduced almost to rubble since the settlement was abandoned during the 1930s, Angus Gillies’s house is still standing, although its heather roof is long gone. A sturdy building, it is clearly the largest of those in the settlement, with an intact chimney gable and upper window. In the fireplace, Paul places a gift to the building, a copy of the Clash On Broadway boxed set, which sits like an icon amidst the rubble. There are two rooms on the ground floor – the smaller second room was used for keeping livestock warm in winter. In the late September sun the building’s pink sandstone is warm, vibrating with pulses of energy. The house is held together with lime mortar – beach sand – which allows moisture to be absorbed. Above it is a small, flat pasture. In front, towards the sea, a hundred yards below, is a walled-off yard, where kale and potatoes were grown to supplement the salt herring that was the staple diet of the islands. Out of the rear wall grows a red-berried rowan tree, which legendarily keeps away such bad spirits as witches. In this house was where Joe’s grandmother Jane lived.

  Paul Simonon immediately sets up his easel and starts work, slipping off his jeans jacket and his shoes, which have been giving him blisters. As he stands painting in his white V-neck T-shirt, grey Levi 501s and bare feet Paul seems to be method-painting, swaying and rocking and feeling with the elements. He always paints standing, physically getting into it. ‘I act as a conduit: it’s not really me painting. I just stand there and something goes on, and it ends up on the canvas,’ he says.

  In the sunlight the view across the sea of the mainland and the Applecross mountains is awesome. A lone yacht ploughs the water, edging the coastline, bounced back almost vertically by each crashing wave, a warning. Suddenly the weather changes. Thick dark-grey cloud gusts across the mountaintops. The view vanishes as we are engulfed in a haze of instant mist. It starts to piss down: thick, drenching rain direct from a Scottish heritage film. Struggling with the billowing wind, Paul even more assiduously straps his canvas to the easel.

  The only spot in the roofless house to give any rain protection is in the shadow of the gable. When his canvas is running with rainwater, Paul brings it down to the house and slips it into the fireplace. Our guide produces a flask of malt whisky, mint tea, chocolate cake; we also consume a Joe Strummer Memorial Spliff. Our conversation veers to the practical: where did Joe’s ancestors keep the house whisky still, common to every Highland croft? Paul reveals that in his mid-teens he and his father had gone on holiday to Skye, hitch-hiking the seven hundred miles from London.

  When the downpour eases, Paul picks up his canvas and steps back out again into the blustery fray. But the elements are simply too extreme for any more work. Again, he stashes his canvas in the fireplace, next to the Clash boxed set, turning the painted side away from the wind and rain. On the back, in red paint, he adds a warning note: Back later! Paul!

  For travellers heading up the east coast of Scotland, Bonar Bridge, birthplace of Joe’s mother Anna Mackenzie, was the crossing-point over the Kyle of Sutherland – looking at the map it is the last significant indentation on the coastline. Nestling on the north bank of the estuary, the east of the area still hosts the ancient woodland planted by James IV to replace the oak forest that had been decimated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the village’s iron foundry. Five miles from Bonar Bridge is Skibo Castle, the scene in 2000 of the wedding of Madonna to Guy Ritchie; at the handyman shop in Bonar Bridge the stepladders were all sold out, having been bought by paparazzi photographers trying to snap pictures over the wall of the castle. At Spinning Dale, on the edge of Bonar Bridge, the actor James Robertson Justice lived overlooking the water; when Joe’s Aunt Jennie worked for him there was a certain amount of local gossip after he was once alleged to have pinched her on the bottom. Nearby is the battlefield at which the Marquis of Montrose was defeated in 1650, forcing the later Charles II of England to accept the Scots’ demands for Presbyterianism if he was also to be accepted as King of Scotland; the ethos of Presbyterianism runs strongly in Bonar Bridge. A further battle affected Joe’s family history: after Culloden, which marked the defeat of the Jacobite army in 1746, four brothers from the Mackenzie clan hid in this remote corner from the savage reprisals.

  When speaking to any of Joe’s Scottish relatives, I sometimes feel I am wandering in a fog of confusion: the same Christian names rec
ur throughout the generations. But to compound my bewilderment the Gillies relatives I met weren’t always related to Joe’s grandmother, Jane Gillies. When Jane moved to Bonar Bridge at the start of the twentieth century, she married David Mackenzie – Jane did not pass on until Joe was fourteen. The Mackenzies form a large extended family. Anna Mackenzie, who was born 13 January 1915 and married Ron Mellor in 1949, was one of nine brothers and sisters. At the wake I spoke to Sheena Yeats, one of Joe’s eighteen cousins: the two women who gave eulogies at the funeral were Maeri, who works for the BBC, and Anna, a teacher, the sister of Iain, Rona and Alasdair Gillies, who were especially close to Joe.

  It was amidst the wood-panelled surrounds of Carbisdale Castle that, three weeks before he died, Joe Strummer spent his last night at Bonar Bridge – on 30 November 2002, St Andrew’s Night, at the wedding banquet of cousin George to his partner Fiona. Folded in his pocket Joe had a copy of the family tree that his cousin Anna Gillies had drawn up. From time to time he would put down his ever-present can of cider and pull out the chart as another of his countless relatives hove into view; and he would show his willowy blonde wife Lucinda how this person fitted into his life.

  Joe and Lucinda had rented a car at Inverness train station. Disdaining to take the new, faster motorway, he had driven over the highland route of the Struie, which he loved for its wildness and fabulous views of the Dornoch firth, past the inn on the road that is open all night and which serves soup and haggis until seven in the morning. ‘That’s the only way you can come,’ he would say. Arriving in Bonar Bridge that afternoon he and Luce had taken a room at the Dunrobin pub on the high street to rest up: ‘He seemed so healthy, so debonair, relaxed, healthy and fit, and young,’ said Alasdair Gillies, who was five years younger. ‘I remember saying, “You look younger than me.”’ ‘He was in good shape,’ confirmed his aunt Jessie, his mother’s younger sister, and the only surviving female amongst her siblings. Aunt Jenny, who had been married to the late David Mackenzie, one of Joe’s mother’s three younger brothers, thought Joe looked ‘terribly tired’, though she added ‘but they hadn’t eaten and were starving’.