Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  As well as the Springsteen dates, there had been another significant show in the London rock’n’roll calendar that November in 1975. On the sixth of the month the Sex Pistols had played their first ever gig at St Martin’s School of Art. Five songs into the set the plug was pulled; among the numbers was a cover of the Small Faces’ ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’ in which the singer Johnny Rotten swapped the word ‘hate’ for ‘love’ in the line ‘I want you to know that I love you’. The next day they played at Joe’s alma mater, Central School of Art and Design in Holborn. They got through a thirty-minute set.

  The vice-social secretary at Central was Sebastian Conran, son of design guru Terence Conran, who had given him the lease of a substantial house in Albany Street, next to Regent’s Park. One of those he rented rooms to was the new girlfriend of Mickey Foote. ‘As Mickey Foote was a friend of Joe’s,’ Sebastian told me, ‘we had the 101’ers come and play at one of our parties. It was good – I was really into the 101’ers. That was when I first met Joe.’ When the 101’ers played a Christmas concert at Central on 17 December, booked by Sebastian Conran in his capacity as Vice-Social Secretary, he also designed a poster for the show.

  Towards the end of 1975, however, Joe Strummer had begun to question the position of Mole within the 101’ers. Dan Kelleher, a guitarist friend of Clive Timperley, had guested with the group since the summer, until on 7 October, when the group played at the Nashville Rooms, he joined the 101’ers as a full member, another guitarist. ‘Once, late at night,’ said Jill Calvert, ‘Joe showed me a drawing he’d done of Mole. Then he said, “I’m gonna sack him.” He was asking, “Is it OK to sack Mole?” I wish I had said, “No, it isn’t. You shouldn’t.” There was a weakness in Joe – and I do regard it as a weakness – that he was pressured by the idea that “Dan can play every Beatles song.” Mole was actually much more musical than Dan, much more inventive: he was totally into reggae. The thing is, he was bald, and he was not pretty. So Joe was saying, “Well, Dan can stand on stage and look like Paul McCartney, and sound like Paul McCartney, and he can hold it all together. Mole stands there and looks odd.” Joe was obviously wanting it to look right onstage. Dan was a friend of Timperley’s and they were sort of “the straights”. But it was Joe and Richard who were really the driving power.’ On 11 January 1976 Mole played his last show with the 101’ers at the Red Cow in Hammersmith. He officially left the group four days later, when Dan Kelleher – renamed ‘Desperate Dan’ – switched from guitar to bass. When I asked Boogie who Joe most related to in the group, he insisted that it was Mole. Such dispensing with people would become a characteristic of the behaviour of Joe Strummer – largely in his career, though also in personal relations. Soon would come the turn of the entire 101’ers to be so especially selected.

  Joe Strummer’s life wasn’t all one relentless slog keeping the 101’ers on course. He stayed in touch with his old close friend Paul Buck. ‘Once we had a wonderful Christmas,’ Paul told me. ‘He came down with Paloma over Christmas 1975. He wrote to me, “I’ve met this wonderful Spanish girl and her mum’s coming over for Christmas. Can you tell me of a decent B&B, somewhere around the farm, and we’ll come down there, because it’s nice countryside, and maybe we can meet up for a beer or something.” I said, “Don’t worry about the B&B: just come and stay here.” He turned up, there was him, Paloma, the drummer Richard Dudanski, his girlfriend Esperanza, their mother and some guy called Julio who didn’t speak any English. The whole bunch took over the house. Paloma and her mum were cooking Christmas dinner in the kitchen. My dad came back from the pub completely bemused. I’d forgotten to mention to him that they were coming.’

  Joe took other holidays with Paul Buck; together they went to the Norfolk Broads for a few days. On another occasion they hitch-hiked down to Bexhill-on-Sea, where, for the purposes of this trip, the young man originally known as John Mellor was again calling himself ‘Rooney’. ‘It was so cold that we lit a fire on the concrete on the seafront. We were nice and warm and then the bloody thing exploded, because the trapped air got so hot that the fire exploded and threw us over a wall.’

  Without Joe being aware of it, though, things were moving around him. ‘We used to go and see the 101’ers a lot,’ Mick Jones said. ‘He was out doing it, and we looked up to that. We never thought we could approach him. We’d looked around and we’d seen every band going, because we needed a singer. But there was a guy there who we knew we wanted more than anyone else. Bernie said, “Let’s ask him.” But we didn’t do it yet.’

  While playing at the Elgin in November 1975, the group were approached by Vic Maile, who had produced the first Dr Feelgood album, Down by the Jetty. Maile told the 101’ers he wanted to record them, with an eye to striking a production deal through selling the tapes to a record company. On 28 November the 101’ers drove up with their equipment to Jackson’s Studios in Rickmansworth on the fringe of north London, where Maile – an ex-BBC sound engineer who worked at the studio – recorded six of their songs: ‘Motor Boys Motor’, ‘Silent Telephone’, ‘Letsagetabitarockin’ ’, ‘Hideaway’, ‘Sweety of the St Moritz’ and ‘Steamgauge 99’. The 101’ers claim not to have enjoyed the experience: they didn’t take to Maile’s martinet-like approach to recording. He didn’t get them a deal.

  But others were also interested, among them Ted Carroll, who with his partner Roger Armstrong ran a pair of vintage record stalls called Rock On, one in Soho Market, the other in Golborne Road, at the top of Portobello Road, often frequented by Joe Strummer, as well as Paul Simonon. Carroll had decided to start his own independent record label, Chiswick Records. Joe said: ‘When Ted Carroll came to me after a gig at some university and said, “Hey, do you want to make a record then?” it was so far from my mind that anyone could make records who were in our world that I remember looking at him as though I was observing a lunatic, let out from a loony-bin for a day-out trip. I said, “What?” And he said, “Do you want to make a record?” I just couldn’t believe my ears – it was that far away. You know, we were under the sub-sub-sub-level of the subunderground level. It just baffled my head when he said that. I couldn’t believe it.’

  But Ted Carroll was completely serious. Two weeks later, on 4 March, the 101’ers were at Pathway Studios in Canonbury, with Roger Armstrong producing. They recorded a trio of songs, ‘Surf City’, ‘Sweet Revenge’ and ‘Keys to Your Heart’. Six days later Joe Strummer, ‘Evil C’ Timperley, Desperate Dan Kelleher and Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski returned to Pathway, where they re-recorded ‘Surf City’ and ‘Sweet Revenge’, and added a version of ‘Rabies (From the Dogs of Love)’. Two weeks later, on 24 and 25 March, ‘Keys to Your Heart’ was mixed and completed.

  Under the auspices of Boogie, the 101’ers were in a different studio only three days later, on 28 March. Half a dozen 101’ers’ originals were recorded at the BBC studios in Maida Vale, where live performances were recorded for broadcast. It was not a successful session: ‘Joe didn’t really click with studios at that stage, with the repetitious listening to the stuff that had been recorded, and the laying down of vocals, and the post-production.’ The songs put on tape included another version of ‘Keys to Your Heart’, ‘5 Star Rock and Roll Petrol’ and ‘Surf City’.

  Perhaps Joe found the recording experience difficult because he needed the energy of a live performance to overcome his musical limitations, rather than resorting to drugs as did so many of his contemporaries. He and his cohorts were almost entirely outside the grasp of amphetamine sulphate, then widely used on the rock’n’roll circuit. As Joe Strummer told Paolo Hewitt, it was absurd to claim the 101’ers’ shows were the product of this cheap speed: ‘Used to annoy me. At the Western Counties one night we played this really great set, really firing on all cylinders. Then we went out into the bar to have a drink and this bloke goes nudgingly, “Not bad that.” And he’s winking and nudging me and I was going, “What’s the matter with the geezer?” And he says, “How many lines did you snort before that set t
hen?” And we weren’t into speed. We couldn’t afford speed. We couldn’t afford a drink.’

  Something needed to change. Gigging on the pub circuit was draining, and Joe grew frustrated. ‘It was just a slog,’ said Joe. ‘It seemed after doing eighteen months of that we were just invisible. I started to lose my mind. I would go around the squat saying, “We’re invisible, we should change our name to the Invisibles.” You’d get back to London about 5 a.m., unload the gear, put on a kettle and go, “What the fuck’s that about?” And in the paper it’d be like Queen and all that. We were just shambling from one gig to the next banging our heads against the wall.’

  At least the 101’ers had spent five days of March in recording studios, and they had a full date-sheet of forthcoming gigs. On Friday 2 April 1976, accompanied by Tymon Dogg, the 101’ers played a ‘Benefit Dance’, at fifty pence a ticket, for That Tea Room at Acklam Hall in Notting Hill, beneath the Westway. The mildly psychedelic poster – all blues, greens, and oranges – sets the tone:

  Starring That Tea Room Food

  Eaten by

  101’ers Tymon Dogg

  Louis The Jeep (Late Bar Toilets)

  Co-starring Clowns Fire-eaters Idiots MC Philipe 4-speed

  record-player

  Dog-fighters bullitt and trouble

  The Dancing Pirana Sisters featuring Pirana Custard and

  Romero – solo – Dave The VD

  The Beatles. Rob on insults. Bouncers Dylan and Wiggin

  Foote and Boogie

  + Largest Flapjack in the World + a Nigel

  The Miserable Circus

  The poster was designed by Helen Cherry. Joe, she said, was very pleased with it: ‘He really, really liked it and I got a big pat on the back. He said, “Helen, a lot of people came to see it and we made a lot of money because of your poster.”’ In retrospect, the entire concept of the evening seems from a very specific world indeed, like a fantasy of an idealized San Francisco of 1967, certainly an event from another, more innocent time.

  Which it was about to be revealed to be.

  The next night, 3 April, the 101’ers played what must have seemed merely another date, at the Nashville Rooms, next to the tube station in West Kensington. The support act? The Sex Pistols. Glen Matlock, the bass-player and songwriter, had gone to Acklam Hall. Backstage he found Joe Strummer trying to tune his guitar. ‘Ah, the Sex Pistols,’ he said to Glen. ‘We’ll see how it is tomorrow night.’

  Joe did see. And everything changed.

  11

  I’M GOING TO BE A PUNK ROCKER

  1976

  For Joe Strummer the show the next day at the Nashville Rooms was an epiphany: ‘As soon as Johnny Rotten hit the stand, right, the writing was on the wall, as far as I was concerned. We’re top of the bill. And we’re sitting in the dressing-room and then they walk through it to get to the stage and they just came through in a big long line. And I saw this geezer in a gold lamé Elvis Presley jacket at the end of the line as they walked through. So I thought, I’m going to see what these guys are like. So I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “That’s a nice jacket you’ve got on there.” And he turned around and it was Sid Vicious. And he went, “Yeah, isn’t it? I’ll tell you where I got it. Do you know that stall up at Camden? Blah blah blah.” And he was like dead friendly, he was such a nice guy. He didn’t have to cop any attitude. And they looked so great that I knew this was something great. So I went out in the audience and sat down.

  ‘There was perhaps thirty people lying around, you know. And they came out and they just, just cleaned me out. They came out, with like, I don’t fucking care if you like it or not, this is it. If you don’t like it, piss off. It was that difference. They were like a million years ahead. I realized immediately that we were going nowhere, and the rest of my group hated them. They didn’t want to watch it or hear anything about it. So I started sort of going off to the punk festivals and getting into the whole thing. Eventually it tore the whole band apart.’

  Woody Mellor as Joe Strummer. Letsgetabitarockin’! (Joe Stevens)

  Nearly three weeks later, on 23 April 1976, the Pistols again supported the 101’ers at the Nashville. I was there that night, and saw something different, the controversy meter measuring the Pistols rising several significant degrees. The venue was packed – Mick Jones, Tony James, Dave Vanian, Adam Ant and Vic Godard were all there, plus a few journalists, as well as Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Bernie Rhodes. Always unpredictable live, however, the Pistols did not play a good show. To liven things up, Vivienne Westwood slapped a girl’s face right in front of the small stage. In the resultant uproar, both McLaren and Rotten – who had leapt from the stage into the audience – got into a brawl with the girl’s boyfriend. In fear, the rest of the audience backed off; it was the strangest thing many of them had ever seen at a supposed ‘pop’ show: there was no frame of reference whatsoever into which to fit this incident. From now on, violence would be a constant subtext of punk rock.

  The same day as that second Pistols/101’ers’ Nashville gig saw the release of The Ramones, the first album by the group that was creating a mythology for itself in New York as a kind of Lower East Side set of cartoon-like dunderheads. Although it contained fourteen songs, the LP’s total running time was less than twenty-eight minutes. ‘The Ramones were the single most important group that changed punk rock,’ said Tony James. ‘When their album came out, all the English groups tripled speed overnight. Two-minute-long songs, very fast. The Pistols were almost the only group who stuck to the kind of Who speed.’ As the 101’ers were already, by Joe Strummer’s definition, playing ‘rhythm’n’blues at 100 miles per hour’, you might feel he was ideally suited for such a shift. That was the opinion of Bernie Rhodes, who had again studied Joe onstage at both Nashville gigs, and talked to him briefly after each performance – though he wasn’t quite ready to tell him about the plan fermenting inside his ever-active brain.

  Joe had not entirely cast aside the chains of establishment rock-’n’roll. From 21 to 26 May the Rolling Stones played at Earl’s Court arena, and Joe took Pete Silverton along with him. ‘He was a sporadically generous human being, but we had the worst seats in the house, absolutely awful. Joe says, “We’re not sitting here.” We get up and we walk down to the front, past all the bouncers, to within ten feet of the stage, and we find some seats. We were ambiguous about the Stones: this is the most fantastic band ever, but we know this is not their greatest period, and we’re sneering a bit because they’re not what we want. This is even before punk and the rhetoric about dinosaur bands.

  ‘We were in front of Bill Wyman, who is poker-faced as he plays. Joe spent all the time trying to get Bill Wyman’s attention, and he eventually managed. He kept calling out: “Bill! Bill!” He was determined to make Bill smile at him. Which he eventually did.’

  Part of an oft-repeated myth of the formation of the Clash is that Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Glen Matlock came up to Joe one Saturday afternoon following the second Nashville show; they were alleged to have said to him, ‘We like you, but we don’t like your group.’ When I once asked Joe if this happened, his reply was immediate: ‘No, not really. I did see them in the Lisson Grove labour exchange, signing on the dole one day. They were staring at me funny, and I thought, I’m in for a ruck. But they were only staring at me ’cause they’d seen the 101’ers playing the week before at Acklam Hall under the Westway. I don’t remember meeting them in Portobello Road.’

  Although he hadn’t as yet spoken to him, Joe noticed Mick Jones in the audience at another Sex Pistols’ show that same week as the Rolling Stones’ concerts, on 25 May 1976, the third date by the Pistols in a Tuesday night residency at the 100 Club. At the beginning of May, Mick Jones had started playing with Paul Simonon, Keith Levene, a singer called Billy Watts and, briefly, with Terry Chimes on drums, with whom he had already tried to work the previous autumn. At this time Mick Jones and Paul Simonon were living in a West London squat at 22 Davis Road on the e
dge of Shepherd’s Bush and Acton.

  Now resident in London, Iain Gillies remembered Jill Calvert saying Joe was so into the Pistols she didn’t think the 101’ers would continue. ‘I went to some party in North London at this time with Jill, Mickey Foote, Boogie, Richard Dudanski, Joe and some others. The party was in quite a straight house but Glen Matlock was there with some other Pistols’ hangers-on. There was a very noticeable atmosphere that came off the 101’ers’ and Pistols’ people and it seemed to me there was a new thing about to happen.’

  When Joe Strummer went along to that Sex Pistols show on 25 May at the 100 Club, a small basement venue at 100 Oxford Street in London’s West End, he took Jill Calvert with him. Jill had just helped him open another squat, in a former ice-cream factory in Foscote Mews, close to the Harrow Road. Joe’s move to Foscote Mews seemed largely impelled by his decision that his relationship with Paloma was coming to an end, and that therefore he should depart Orsett Terrace. It was not Joe but Paloma that had set this process in motion. She was temporarily in Scotland having had doubts about the viability of their relationship and needing time away.