‘He said to me, “Come with me and hear this group,”’ said Jill Calvert. ‘He knew it was going to be a pivotal moment because he insisted I dress up. He had slicked-back hair, a leather jacket and was reasonably clean – he had had his trousers tapered by then.’
‘I met Bernie,’ Joe told me, ‘when the Pistols supported the 101’ers at the Nashville Rooms. But then I really met him at the 100 Club regular punk nights when the Pistols played.’
‘Joe made us walk to the 100 Club from Chippenham Road,’ remembered Jill Calvert. ‘It was a long walk, a couple of miles, and a hot night, the beginning of that long hot summer. This was where Bernard floated his interest in Joe. He bought us a drink – Joe only had half a lager – and we sat at the back at a table as he talked to Joe about what he was doing and about forming the Clash: he made a direct approach to him there and then. We were very excited. After he’d had this conversation with Bernie we left quite soon – as though it had been done, and we wouldn’t want to hang around. Joe seemed very enthused.’
To help him make up his mind about whether or not to leave The 101’ers for this new group, Joe consulted his copy of I Ching, the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’. Throwing three coins six times to show him which of the Ching’s 64 hexagrams to consult, the answer he was given was ‘stay with your friends’. ‘He conveniently decided,’ said Paul Buck, ‘that his “friends” were The Clash. But it was an extraordinarily hippy way to decide to join a punk group’.
When Paloma returned to London, her enthusiasm for Joe rekindled, she moved in with him at Foscote Mews for a short while, unaware that he’d decided their relationship had finished. Because of this confusion Joe felt obliged to leave Foscote Mews and he temporarily moved back to Orsett Terrace. ‘We were having problems between us,’ Paloma said, ‘so I went for a couple of months to a farm in Scotland, with Gail Goodall and Mole. We kept in touch on the phone. During that time punk happened. When I came back I’d seen the light and wanted to be with him. But he’d moved out of Orsett Terrace. I took a bus to the ice-cream factory. There I saw a bunch of people looking punkish. Mick Jones was one of them. They said he was in a pub. I ran up to him and put my arms around him. He was very serious and said, “I’m going to be a punk rocker.” But as we talked he changed and we were back together. But it was never the same – I was insecure. He moved back to Orsett Terrace. Then we both went to the ice-cream factory. He said he wanted us to have an “open” relationship.’
Paloma remained there and, as Jill Calvert put it, ‘formed the Slits in a rage. She’d never been into music in that way before. She took up the drums: she thought, If you can do it I can fucking do it. Then some of the Slits moved into Foscote Mews – Ari Up, the singer, and Viv Albertine, the guitarist.’ Paul Simonon – unusually, not Joe – renamed Paloma ‘Palmolive’, the name by which she became known in the Slits. ‘When Joe started coming over to my mum’s place,’ said the then fourteen-year-old Ari Up, ‘he never came with Paloma. When she asked me to form a group I didn’t know he was with her. He taught me guitar. It was hard to learn guitar on Joe’s Telecaster: it was hard to press down. He’d only speak with a joke or two. He was always fingering his guitar. Just chords. He was like a guiding star, but very quiet. He was like a brother to me. He never tried to come on to me.’
Those around Joe at the time feel that his behaviour towards Paloma was part of a Year Zero approach to life, as though in some form of Stalinist revision he was writing out large parts of his past. On 26 May, the day after that meeting with Bernie Rhodes at the 100 Club, Joe had gone to see Clive Timperley at his squat in Cleveland Terrace. ‘Strummer came round to my flat. He said, “I want to do this punk thing and I want you to come with me.” He was talking about it as though it would be within the 101’ers. He spent the whole day with me convincing me of the direction he wanted to go in. “Maximum impact,” he kept saying. He wanted me to make more of an effort as a performer on stage. But that’s not me. So that was the end of it for me. I didn’t feel bad. I realized where Strummer was going. I didn’t realize Bernie had approached him already.’
On 30 May the 101’ers played the Golden Lion at Fulham Broadway, with pub-rock favourite Martin Stone deputizing for Clive Timperley – he had also stepped in to help out at a show at Bromley College two days before. ‘Bernie Rhodes turned up at the Golden Lion with Keith Levene and I went outside and stood at the bus stop with them and he sort of said, “What you gonna do?” And I said, “I dunno,” and he said, “Well, come down to this squat in Shepherd’s Bush and meet these guys,” and Keith was nodding, saying, “You’d better.”’ In 1989 Keith Levene claimed to Jane Garcia in the NME that it was he who recognized the full potential of Joe: ‘Joe used to wear zoot suits and just go fucking mad all over the place. He was always so great to watch.’ Joe later declared that initially he had been convinced to leave the 101’ers by meeting Keith: ‘In those days people looked really boring, and Keith looked really different.’ Bernie Rhodes had his own viewpoint: ‘Nobody gave a fuck about Joe Strummer until I got hold of him.’
‘Bernie Rhodes came over to me the next day with Keith and said, “Come with me,”’ Joe told me. ‘Then he drove me down to a squat in Shepherd’s Bush. They were squatting in a place above some old lady’s flat: Mick, Paul and various crazies. He said, “I think you should join this group.” We started to rehearse that afternoon.’
Joe told me that the first song he remembered attempting to play with these new musical allies was ‘One-Two-Crush on You’, a song already written by Mick Jones that featured in early group live sets, released as the B-side of Tommy Gun in 1978. ‘The day Keith Levene brought Joe round to Davis Road, we were all terrified,’ said Mick Jones. ‘He was already Joe Strummer, he was already somebody. We’d seen him do it, what we hadn’t done. It was a big deal getting Joe Strummer. We did seem to just start straight away. We might have had a cup of tea first. It was, “We’ll show you our songs,” and we already knew he had some songs and that was it … The next time he came round he was in the gear and everything, he was already part of it, he was there.’ ‘We was expecting Joe,’ said Paul Simonon. ‘We were sitting in the living room area, me and Mick, then Keith turns up with Joe. So we got into the rehearsal room, which is a box, about five foot by five foot – it was cramped. Mick played a couple of songs and then Joe played one – we alternated back and forth. The fact that he’d turned up, that made a statement: “Well, this is it: we’re going from here onwards together.” That was the first day of the Clash.’ ‘“I’m So Bored with You” was the first song we worked on together,’ said Mick. ‘Definitely. He famously changed it to “Bored with the USA”. Before we did that we played “Protex Blue” to him, about the condom machine in The Windsor Castle, a pub off the Harrow Road. He went, “That’s pretty good. Let’s get to work.” That was the first day.’
Suddenly Joe felt validated. ‘The whole thing was really great from the beginning of 1976 when I met them and we took off, all the way through that. My dreams were like carnivals, my mind would churn over and over in my sleep ’cos of the decisions, throwing in one thing and another. Everything was being tried and experimented, it was just great. It can’t be like that all the time but it’s great when it is.
‘We knew it was going to be good. You know that certainty when you don’t even bother to think? That certainty was with us and I’m glad of it. We knew that this was it. Finally I thought, We’ll show those bastards. They’d been ignoring us, and when we got big reviews it seemed like we deserved it.’
When he learnt that Paul Simonon was essentially a non-musician, and that he learnt the numbers note by note from Mick Jones, Joe did have some initial reservations: ‘He couldn’t play. It phased me a bit at first ’cos I’d been through two years of all of us learning to play [in the 101’ers]. We couldn’t really play either but we could kind of hang our chin together. When I heard that Paul couldn’t play at first, I thought, Well, it slows you up. But then I got on with Paul so wel
l and he just picked it up. In three weeks he could play as much as we needed. Well, he could play as good as me in about three weeks, yeah.’
Paul Simonon brought with him another set of inspirations to the collective. ‘By the end of the 101’ers we were wearing drainpipe trousers,’ Joe told Mal Peachey. ‘And this might not seem significant to many people. But in a world of flares, drainpipe trousers were the equivalent of shaving your head and painting it orange – it really stuck out. If your trousers weren’t flared, then you were into the new age, the new world, and so the 101’ers had a kinda grunge look. I suppose now you could describe it like that, like we were just filthy squatters. But with Paul Simonon and Mick Jones – very, very flashily dressed people – I mean, that’s what took my eye. I think Paul already had his hair dyed blond and spiky tufts. And it was so much more glamorous than the norm.
‘It was Paul Simonon who really gave the look to the Clash, and kind of led us into … Well, we had to make our own clothes – that was one difference I have to say between the Clash and the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols had McLaren’s boutique, and he was able to feed his clothes to the group. But with Bernie in charge of us, who’d split apart from Malcolm, we were in the situation where we had to make our own clothes. Paul Simonon was really instrumental in this, because he was an artist at the time, as he is now. It was Simmo who got into flicking the clothes with paint [inspired by the drip-painting method of the American artist Jackson Pollock], and then we started to paint words on them. I think it was Bernie who suggested putting words [on them], because he was into that situationist theory stuff, and it has to be stressed none of us were intellectuals, or are … But a large part of it for me was the look as well as the sound. A new world was taking over, and I mean we wouldn’t stop. It was a twenty-four-hour experience, day or night, either writing songs, or making clothes, getting into records. It was a full-on thing.’
‘Joe looked funny when we first met him,’ said Mick. ‘He didn’t look quite right. We already looked the part, committed to this new thing. We gave him some trousers and a jacket and did it up a bit for him. He started to look right straight away. He had quite short hair at that time, dyed blond. Standing at the bus stop, opposite Davis Road, I was thinking, He’s starting to look all right. But he had all this stuff that we didn’t have, the stuff that we looked up to – just the fact that he was doing it and making an impression, playing to people in public. All our projects had hardly involved any public excursions. Up to that point.’
For now Bernie Rhodes wanted an assurance that he had made the right decision in selecting this singer for the group. He checked out his choice with Glen Matlock. ‘When he got Joe Strummer into the Clash, he asked me what I thought of him. “He’s all right,” I said, “but he’s a bit old.” “Don’t you worry about that,” said Bernie, “I’ll have ten years off him.” And he did. Next time I saw Joe he looked maybe not ten years younger but certainly a totally different man and ready to rock.’
‘My take on Joe Strummer is this,’ Bernie Rhodes told me. ‘Before we met, Joe and I, he had a dilemma: he was dissatisfied with himself and his life. He took on the role of Woody, but then he met me and I shook his life into the future. Joe didn’t want to be Woody, he wanted to be me. And that’s how he became an international success.’
When Joe Strummer returned home from that first visit to Davis Road, Iain Gillies was waiting for him: ‘He came back in the evening and was in a state of high excitement, running on adrenalin, pacing non-stop around the ground-floor rooms. The others at Orsett Terrace had to follow him from room to room. Joe and the 101’ers were supposed to be having a meeting about the state of the band. But there was no band. It was a fait accompli – Joe was leaving.’
The 101’ers had one last gig to play, a show south of London on 5 June 1976 at the Clare Halls, Haywards Heath in Sussex. Although Martin Stone was again deputizing on guitar, Clive Timperley turned up to add his instrument on this valedictory performance. Then it was all over.
By now Mickey Foote had moved out of Orsett Terrace and was living with his girlfriend in Sebastian Conran’s palatial house by Regent’s Park. Paul Simonon and Sid Vicious replaced him in the Orsett Terrace squat. ‘By then Joe’s new group had obviously formed,’ said Jules Yewdall. ‘The 101’ers were no more and the squat was starting to come to an end as well. Everyone was trying to figure out what they were going to do next. By then Joe had already moved. Everyone was losing touch with each other.’ 42 Orsett Terrace continued as a squat until November 1976, with Joe and Paul spasmodically living there. However, with the end of the 101’ers the spirit of the squat had significantly declined.
Joe’s breaking up the 101’ers caused ructions among his squatter mates. Jill Calvert remembered him being called to ideological order one night by Tymon Dogg and Dave Goodall in the kitchen of 23 Chippenham Road, as rainwater ceaselessly dripped into a plastic bucket from the leaking roof: ‘Tymon and Dave were outraged with him: “You can’t do this. How can you do this?” Joe almost asking permission, “Can I go with a clear conscience?” It was painful. There was something very parental about it.
‘Joe only drank in those days if it was around: if dope was about he’d have it, if drink was about he’d have it. He was much more of a drinker once he got into the Clash. I think there was a lot of pressure once he was in the Clash. [Mick Jones disagreed: ‘He drank loads. The 101’ers was pub rock, after all.’] I think there was an awful lot of keeping up he had to do, with Mick and Paul, to prove he wasn’t a hippie. So he had to become a bloke. But there was a life-support system that had been taken away from him. When he came to London, Dave and Gail were there and he met Paloma, he was anchored. I think that gave him a sense of family.’
Joe had attempted to bring one member of the 101’ers into his as yet unnamed new group – Richard Dudanski was offered the drum-stool: ‘I was in bed one night, and Joe came up with some of the guys in this new group. I went down to Davis Road, and the first guy I met was Bernie Rhodes. Bernie was not the easiest person. I just didn’t want to work with him. So I said, “We can change the name of the 101’ers, but let’s keep doing what we are basically doing, and we’ll be fine.” But Joe was sold on Bernie’s ideas of management. So I went off to Italy – that was that. Joe had to totally deny the 101’ers and anything to do with them. After about a year I found him sleeping out in the garden one morning, where the rubbish was. He had come down to see us, but, being Joe, didn’t want to wake us up at 2 in the morning. For me the Clash’s political approach was very ironic, because the 101’ers were living political stuff – that was our existence as squatters, literally the politics of the street. We were laughing at society from which we managed to be rather separate, living another way.’
Pat Nother simply said, ‘I don’t understand why my brother didn’t join the bloody Clash.’
Bernie Rhodes had rented premises from British Rail in Camden Town which he named Rehearsal Rehearsals – abbreviated by its users to simply ‘Rehearsals’. ‘Rehearsals’ consisted of one large downstairs room, and two upstairs rooms, one filled with second-hand pinball and fruit machines (a further sideline of Bernie Rhodes, as was selling second-hand Renaults), and another a band office and recreation area, with a jukebox.
This new group may have had space to rehearse but they still didn’t have a drummer. Joe Strummer called up Paul Buck. Paul had seen the 101’ers once, at a show in Hammersmith, but he was unaware that Woody now had another name. ‘I called him “Wood” and he snarled at me: “I’ve changed my name.”’ Although he appears in the earliest photographs of the still unnamed group, Paul lasted for only a couple of rehearsals. ‘The group came down to our farm in a big truck which they’d borrowed,’ Paul told me. ‘ To see them all in the Sussex countryside was very funny. They were all there, including Keith Levene and other hangers-on, and Bernie.
‘Unbeknownst to everybody I recorded the whole afternoon. I had a foot switch I used to flick when I was playing with anot
her guitarist so we could ascertain our progress. I recorded the whole afternoon so I could learn the songs, if it all worked out. Unfortunately Bernie realized I’d made a copy and asked to borrow it. That’s the last I ever saw of it.’
Terry Chimes had been born in 1956 into a musical family in London’s East End, but decided at the early age of four that he would like to become a doctor. But, before he settled down to what he knew would be his ultimate career, he felt he’d like to become a rock star. ‘You think, “Well, it’s got to happen to someone!” When you’re young and stupid, you can get away with thinking like that.’
Fortunately, his ambition coincided with the most radical change popular music had experienced in a decade. ‘I thought that punk was great because we were sweeping away all the old stuff: “We’ve got a better idea than you. We’re having fun and you’re not!” It was a way of changing the rules. You didn’t have to crawl to record companies. People at the gigs were so excited. When you’d read in the media that it was about having safety pins in your nose, I couldn’t believe it – they had it completely wrong.’
Terry Chimes had played with three of the line-ups that Mick Jones had tried to put together, having auditioned in August 1975 for Violent Luck; then for London SS; and also for the version of this new group that had the singer Billy Watts. ‘I had long hair then. They had chopped their hair off and wore drainpipes, and looked pretty odd compared to everyone else in the street. We walked down the road to a caff and it felt like a gang, only I felt that I wasn’t in the gang because I didn’t have the same gear. I suppose it’s some male instinct, but I remember thinking, It’s good for a band to look like a gang.’
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