What could he possibly have been thinking of sending to Pablo?
‘We hitchhiked to Morocco, with Richard and Esperanza, and rented a place. Joe did bring some hash back,’ said Paloma. ‘In Spain, we stayed at my parents’ house in Malaga for two weeks. “Why are you all fighting?” Joe asked, ‘when everyone was giving their typically noisy opinion in conversation. Joe loved Spain: part of our courting was about the Spanish Civil War. The fight for freedom really interested him.’
When Paloma had spent time with Joe’s parents, she understood his puzzlement over the noise in Malaga: ‘It was stiff, and a little tense, very English. His father drank a lot, his mother read a lot. We’d watch endless TV. I’d go crazy, we’d have two separate beds. With his mum Joe’s kind self would come out more. He loved his mum, who was very reserved.’
Back in London it was a return to the gig circuit. The 101’ers were now a serious working band, averaging four gigs a week. ‘We were now making a bit of money,’ said Clive Timperley. ‘We weren’t too badly off. We managed to buy a van to get to gigs, and we were getting more equipment.’
That things were starting to happen for the 101’ers was a buzz for everyone involved: they all felt it. Vindicated about his belief in himself, Joe began to grow in confidence. As he became Joe Strummer he had discovered a persona into which he could inject all his abilities and fantasies of rock’n’roll mythology, exaggerating aspects of himself, pulling other parts back, adding his own secret ingredient – himself, and that frantically pumping left leg, always a sign that things were about to getabitarockin. In January 1975 the 101’ers had had three live dates, all at the Charlie Pigdog Club. During October it was seventeen. Although the last date at the Chippenham had been on 23 April, the Charlie Pigdog shows were compensated for by the weekly gigs at the Elgin. The line-up had stabilized. At the end of March, Alvaro Pena had quit, Dudanski stepping in. Two months later Simon Cassell had also gone. Jules Yewdall had only lasted a handful of dates, leaving the group in April. Now the 101’ers were a four-piece: Joe Strummer on rhythm guitar and vocals, Clive Timperley on lead guitar, Mole on bass and Richard Dudanski on drums. ‘Strummer wanted to get the band down into a useful working unit,’ said Clive Timperley. ‘We used to say we want the Shadows or Beatles line-up. We used to have these councils of war. Jules went to Germany and came back and wasn’t in the band. There was this joke: “Don’t go on holiday!”’ But Jules Yewdall stayed around, taking photographs and trying to get them dates – he was responsible for the four shows at the St Moritz Club in Wardour Street that began on 18 June. Mickey Foote, who engineered the live sound and acted as unofficial road manager, also pulled in live dates for the group. By now there was a regular posse of fans, almost all of whom were reasonably close friends with the singer with the 101’ers. Among them was Helen Cherry: ‘I went to lots of 101’ers’ gigs, probably nearly every single one. Joe was always very intent on getting more gear, getting more amps, trying to get it all together really. He had a great interest in it. But all blokes are like that around performing bands, aren’t they? Just talking endlessly about the gear. He’d talk a lot about the performances afterwards, being pissed off if something wasn’t right or picking over a gig, picking over certain things that he felt hadn’t come off.
‘I used to find it intriguing when he was going on to a stage in front of lots of people and he’d be worrying about blow-drying a certain pair of trousers with a hairdryer, not worrying about the set-list or the guitar strings. He liked details. I think he had this good detail with people, as well, which is why people were drawn to him as a friend – he could make people feel included.’
After talking to the group following one of the Elgin dates a roadie, John ‘Boogie’ Tiberi, had been taken on: ‘I met Joe, and it was a good vibe: I really liked him immediately – Strummer was always quiet and spontaneous – and I was really impressed with the 101’ers. First time I saw them, I went up to him at the bar and said, “I really like your group.” I started working for them with Micky.’
Pete Silverton, who had hung out with Woody Mellor and Paul Buck at the end of the sixties, was trying to make his mark as a music journalist, writing for Trouser Press, an American fanzine. He went to see the 101’ers play, on 4 August 1975, at the Hope and Anchor on Upper Street in Islington.
It was the first time in around five years that Pete Silverton had seen John Mellor, now in his new incarnation of Joe Strummer. Joe greeted him ‘very warmly. I had the impression that he seemed to feel he was a star – or felt the first step of being a star was to act like a star. He wasn’t an arsehole – and I’ve met lots of those who think they are stars. I felt that Joe was patently using the supposed revolutionary message of squatting, which seemed to be essentially that everybody should smoke inordinate amounts of dope and play rock’n’roll. The political philosophy was at about that level of sophistication.’
Some of Joe’s exuberance of spirit was undoubtedly sparked by the presence of his girlfriend, Paloma. Not that you would have realized they were an item, according to Pete Silverton: ‘Paloma – very sweet, very young, but also very independent for a provincial Spanish girl. They seemed ambivalent together: it was partly the fashion of the time to pretend you weren’t with someone – being in a couple was considered a bit parent-like.’ ‘Joe was madly in love with Paloma,’ confirmed Jill Calvert. ‘But Paloma was having a good and a bad time. Because there was a flightiness to Joe: he wasn’t going to be there for more than five minutes, and you knew that. I never would have wanted to put myself in her position.’
‘The 101’ers were playing at the Hope and Anchor,’ continued Pete Silverton. ‘You would have thought from reading the music press that there was this very big vibe, but there was about fifty people and a dog there – literally, a dog. This was the first time I’d seen them and it was a transcendent moment in my life. I was absolutely blown away. By Joe. Not by the band. They were okay, but Joe … he had this suit on, a big off-pink zoot suit. It looked great. The way it moved, it looked like the sails on a galleon.’
Iain Gillies, Joe’s cousin, told me that the suit ‘came from his father, it was an old post-war suit of Ron’s. Ron thought that it was perplexing and funny that Joe wanted to have it and intended to wear it on stage. He said that Joe had many times previously declared that he’d never wear a suit.’
Pete Silverton resumed: ‘Joe was also wearing co-respondent shoes. He had his hair swept back and he’d got sideburns. His hair’s dark, because he’s greased it, I guess: his natural hair colour is dishwater blond, standard English. It’s the only time I’ve walked into somewhere and gone, “This man is a star!” I remember them playing “Gloria”, with him climbing all over the amps. Joe moved with a strange staccato grace on stage. It wasn’t very big, the Hope and Anchor stage, but he was duck-walking across it. In the music he was playing and in his moves on stage he was obviously stealing a great deal from films of 1950s’ performers. My girlfriend at the time thought Joe was really sexy. I never saw him as a ladies’ man at all but he had a sort of sexy appeal.
‘The songs were also fantastic. It’s nearly all original stuff, but derivative. Joe realized that there were a lot of great songs out there – you could just rewrite them and redo them. By now he had started to be caught up in the thrill of what he was doing, but he was faced with the problem that the 101’ers couldn’t really get anywhere, so there were tensions already in the band. The conflicts in the 101’ers were very clear. Joe is not the most musically literate person in the world. But he had a fantastic rhythmic sense, even though he could barely play the guitar. He was very passionate, but he could get very depressed.’
In October 1975 Jules Yewdall and Mickey Foote had ‘opened’ a new squat at 42 Orsett Terrace, a road of tall, well-appointed terraced houses with stone staircases near Royal Oak tube station. In the basement of the property the 101’ers set up a far more professional rehearsal studio than at Walterton Road. But at Orsett Terrace there were worries a
bout burglaries: the next-door house was occupied by a gang of junkies. ‘Joe hated the idea of junkies,’ recalled Jill Calvert. ‘He thought it was a hopeless existence. I see his own depression as slightly complex, because I think some of the time he was acting: he could act the part of his depressed self. He was also able to escape from it. I know people who are depressed and don’t function. So I would call him a functioning depressive.’
At World’s End, the unfashionable end of the King’s Road, there was some cultural movement. Malcolm McLaren and his wife Vivienne Westwood ran Let It Rock, an arcane boutique, much of whose wares were designed to shock or irritate. McLaren had managed the New York Dolls at the tail-end of their careers; while he had been in the USA, Bernard Rhodes, a friend of his and Vivienne’s, had nurtured another scheme: a group that consisted of the shop’s Saturday boy Glen Matlock and a pair of Shepherds Bush musicians, drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones, along with a shortlived character called Wally as vocalist. Since the previous year they had been nagging McLaren for help; all he had provided so far had been a name, the Sex Pistols – after Let It Rock had been renamed Sex.
But in August 1975 Bernard found a scrawny youth from Finsbury Park in north London called John Lydon who walked into Sex wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words ‘I hate …’ added above the group’s name. Rhodes invited Lydon to come to the nearby Roebuck pub; he auditioned for the Pistols by miming to the pub’s jukebox. ‘Bernie definitely influenced the start of the Pistols,’ Lydon told me in 1980. ‘He got me in the band.’ Bernard Rhodes was adamant that his name was ‘Bernard’ and not ‘Bernie’ – ‘I’m not a taxi-driver.’ Naturally everyone therefore called him ‘Bernie’.
In October 1975 the 101’ers played five times at a former country and western venue called the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington. In the audience one night was Mick Jones and a friend called Tony James. Jones was a guitar-playing art student who had been born in Brixton; after living with his grandmother in a tower block off the Harrow Road, he had moved in 1975 to a small flat in Highgate – though he would soon move back to the tower block. Soaked in pop culture, Mick Jones had felt that it was his destiny to become a rock-’n’roll musician: ‘I’d known since I was ten that this was what I would do with my life. It wasn’t so much ambition as what I knew I had to do.’ But even though he had devoted most of his time on a degree course at Hammersmith Art College to playing the guitar, the fulfilment of his fate had not at first been easy. He’d been in a group called the Delinquents, followed by one called Little Queenie – though he fell out with them. Through Little Queenie he met Tony James, a bass-playing maths student who had placed an advertisement in Melody Maker to form a group. Now Mick Jones and Tony James were trying to start up a group called London SS, one of the great mythological acts of all time, a legend only enhanced by the fact that they never played a single show.
At that 101’ers gig at the Nashville in October 1975 they found that they hated the group, who seemed to this style-obsessed pair to be an archetypal pub-rock outfit. But they were extremely impressed with the singer. At the gig that evening – on which there was clearly a propitious convergence of energies – they ran into a short, bespectacled man with an extremely protuberant nose. This was Bernard Rhodes.
Mick Jones was wearing a pink T-shirt he had bought from Sex that bore the legend ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on.’ And so was Rhodes. ‘We said, “Go on, stand over there in that T-shirt,”’ remembered James. ‘“Fuck off!” replied Rhodes. “I made it.”’ Impressed, the pair fell into conversation with this gnome-like fellow, who gave them their first information about the Sex Pistols. Mick Jones later said: ‘I thought he looked like a piano player. He seemed like a really bright geezer. We got on like a house on fire.’
For £1,000 Malcolm McLaren had bought a rehearsal studio in Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley. ‘Mick and I went to see Malcolm at the studio,’ said Tony James. ‘The Pistols were there. We both had really long hair.’ McLaren took them for a meal at which they were both extremely taken with his vision. ‘He told us what would happen,’ remembered James. ‘That a group would come along and completely shake up the music business and alter things utterly. And it all came grizzily true.’
McLaren didn’t recognize the potential talents before him. But Bernard Rhodes had set about looking for a group of his own, after McLaren had turned down his request for a half-share in the Pistols. So the pair arranged a more thorough meeting with Bernie Rhodes, telling him of their plans to form a group called London SS. ‘Bernie made us go up to the Bull and Bush pub in Shepherds Bush to meet him, which was unbelievably rough and dangerous,’ remembered James. ‘As soon as he got there he slapped all this Nazi regalia on the table: “If you’re going to call yourself London SS, you’ll have to deal with this.” We hadn’t thought at all about the Nazi implications. It just seemed like a very anarchic, stylish thing to do,’ admitted James.
Following their meeting with Rhodes, Mick Jones and Tony James placed an advertisement in Melody Maker: ‘Decadent 3rd generation rock and roll – image essential. New York Dolls style.’ Jones was still living in Highgate and it was the phone number of this address that was given in the advert. James lived in Twickenham, at the physically most distant end from Highgate of the 27 bus route: every day he would take the two-hour ride to Jones’s home, where they would both sit anxiously by the phone.
Only half a dozen people replied – one was a singer from Manchester called Steven Morrisey, though nothing came of this. Jones and James were extremely taken with the very first response: Brian James, a guitarist with Belgian group Bastard. As the duo deemed necessary, he was stick-insect thin; after meeting the pair, Brian James went back to Brussels to quit his group.
Beneath a café in Praed Street, Paddington, Bernard Rhodes found the London SS a rehearsal room. ‘When we started working with Bernie, he changed our lives,’ said James. ‘Up to then we were the New York Dolls, and had never thought of writing more than “Personality Crisis”. I remember sitting in the café upstairs with Bernie and saying I had an idea for a song about selling rockets in Selfridges. He liked it. But he was thinking of nuclear rockets and I was only thinking of fireworks. He said, “You’re not going to be able to do anything unless you give me a statement of intent.” It was artspeak. He’d give us reading lists: Proust, books on modern art – it was a great education. He also used to pull a sort of class thing: are you street, or are you middle-class? It didn’t seem very honest, as he was patently obviously middle-class himself.’
Through the door of the rehearsal studio wafted various future members of the cast of punk. One Paul Simonon turned up by accident, and was auditioned for the job of singer: as a perfect David Bowie lookalike he sang Radio One, Radio One, over Jonathan Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’ song, for ten minutes until he was requested to stop. Both Terry Chimes and Nicky ‘Topper’ Headon auditioned as drummers, Headon being offered the job although leaving after a week. ‘I remember the audition was in some tiny little basement studio,’ he told me. ‘I got the gig, but I’d already done an audition for a soul band, and that was fifty quid a week, so I went on the road with them. London SS was very loud rock’n’roll. It was a bad punk group, really. Although the fact that Generation X, the Clash and the Damned came out of it shows there was something there, it wasn’t really very good.’ Having given up the hunt for a singer, London SS started rehearsing with Mick Jones on vocals and a drummer called Roland Hot. Over Christmas of 1975 Brian James left and formed the Damned with other McLaren luminaries Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible, leaving the London SS back at square one for Mick Jones and Tony James – although the Sex Pistols had unsuccessfully attempted to contact Jones to offer him the role of second guitarist.
On 18 November 1975 Joe Strummer saw the first of two London shows at the Hammersmith Odeon by Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen, who had never played in London before, was pro
moting his Born to Run album, his third LP, a landmark record, which saw him touted as ‘the future of rock’n’roll’. ‘When Strummer went to see Springsteen his head was turned,’ said Clive Timperley. ‘The whole idea of Springsteen doing full-on three-hour concerts. Strummer thought, “That’s the way to do it!”’ The fact that Springsteen played a Telecaster was significant for Joe, who saw it as a sign. Joe even bought an excessively long guitar lead, allowing him to wander at will about the stage and even into the audience – just like Springsteen. Clive Timperley recalled that Joe Strummer’s performing histrionics became even more exaggerated; at one gig the guitarist noticed as he launched into a lengthy solo that Joe had disappeared offstage and was lying on an old mattress in the wings; as the moment came for his microphone cue, he sprang up and – as though shot from a cannon – hurtled across the stage, bursting into his vocal lines with perfect split-second timing. Springsteen-like, the 101’ers’ sets got longer: they would often play almost thirty songs, onstage for over ninety minutes, at a time when established high-energy acts like Steve Marriott’s Humble Pie were getting away with thirty-five minutes, including encore.
Joe Strummer’s invigorated stage performance was not all he took from that much-hyped Hammersmith Odeon Springsteen concert. Born to Run, a unique and hugely influential album, was a record that combined an epic rock’n’roll feel with songs that were stories of ‘street life’ in Springsteen’s highly mythologized home town of Asbury Park in New Jersey. The Clash’s similar mythologizing of Notting Hill could be seen as coming partially from here, as well as from the references to Kingston, Jamaica, and specifically Trenchtown, in reggae records, notably those by the newly elected king of the genre, Bob Marley. ‘I was actually turned onto playing reggae by Mole, who was the bass player for the 101’ers, who finally made me really listen to Big Youth and feel it and I sort of saw the light,’ Joe told me. ‘I found it quite hard to step from R’n’B into that deep reggae style. But once it was under your skin it became almost a passion.’ So stirred was Joe by these profound Jamaican rhythms that, on a trip to Warlingham to see his mother and father, he found he couldn’t get the ‘Chh-chh’ sound of the high-hat out of his mind. ‘I went back to London and said, “Give me that record and put it on again.” That’s when we first tried to play reggae, was very early in the 101’ers.’ Although at the Charlie Pigdog Club Mole would occasionally sing a version of ‘Israelites’, the Desmond Dekker classic, Joe recalled the group’s reggae efforts were largely restricted to rehearsals.
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