Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Chimes went along to Rehearsal Rehearsals: ‘Everything was the same except that Billy Watts had disappeared and they said, “This is Joe.” He was an odd-looking character. I thought, “He doesn’t look like a singer,” and when he sang he didn’t sound like a singer. I got the impression that this guy’s a bit odd, and I couldn’t see him as a singer of a rock’n’roll band. But they said he was good. We had a rehearsal and I came back. It became apparent he had a different kind of charisma. He didn’t look like someone from a big superstar rock band, strutting about the way they do. He didn’t have the clear kind of singing voice that you would expect, didn’t seem like a singer. That was my problem, not his – my preconceptions.

  ‘He seemed almost disinterested. We said hello, and then he carried on looking at the floor. When he was on stage he had more energy and emotion than you could think of but you didn’t see that in conversation with him. He was a Jekyll and Hyde: off stage he was just quiet, but you put him on stage and he’d go berserk. After a couple of rehearsals I could see how it could work.

  ‘Me and him, the drummer and the singer, we had to blast the audience with energy. He converted me to his thinking, which was if you put energy out there, then they’ll feel it.’

  Terry was taken with the attitude of the group members. ‘Underlying everything was an almost obsessive sense of ambition: “We are going to do this and we are going to get there!” They didn’t care that they weren’t very good yet at playing certain instruments. They didn’t care about anything like that. They were going to get there.’

  The five musicians began frantically rehearsing, often seven days a week, from around lunchtime until about 10 at night. ‘Only about a third of that time was rehearsing, in the strictest sense of the word,’ said Terry. ‘The rest was asking about what we should like, what we should say, what we should do, what we should dress like, and all the other things. That stuff went on for hours. There was a funny sense in which we were trying to sharpen each other up, so we’d challenge each other very much. It was quite wearing. It wasn’t like having fun – it was almost a sense that we weren’t there for fun. You had to be sharp, and pushing each other to be better all the time. Bernie was in the background orchestrating that attitude: that we work on everything, the way we looked, what we said, the music, the songs – everything had to be worked on to the maximum so that when we were exposed to the public they were going to go “Wow!” Looking back, I think that really worked, but it was blooming hard.’

  Of the five musicians in this new group, it was Keith Levene, Terry Chimes believed, who was the most idealistically rigorous: ‘He was the most keen on making sure no one got too soft or too weak, the guardian of everyone’s attitude. We would argue about every little detail, because it got the right attitude in the end, but it was tedious at the time.’

  The last member to join this group before Terry Chimes had been Joe Strummer. Where did he stand in this endless ideological struggle? What was the position here of this singer with a group whom Mick Jones certainly had been slightly in awe of? Years later, after the end of the Clash, Mick told the photographer Joe Stevens that Joe Strummer had been ‘like a father figure to him’. An interesting remark, for on one hand Bernie Rhodes was in a similar paternal position. ‘Joe referred to Bernie as the headmaster – that was his humour,’ Terry Chimes remembered. ‘Joe seemed to have a certain respect for Bernie: Joe’s attitude was that our job was to perform the music, and Bernie’s was to do that business stuff we don’t know about.’

  ‘Joe did have politics, more than Mick,’ said Bernie, ‘but it started to pull him apart. Joe was very good raw material: it was clear from the start – just be Bernie.’

  ‘Joe had a very idealistic idea of the band,’ considered Terry Chimes. ‘He wanted to share that with everyone, and genuinely wanted us all to be together. He wouldn’t have had a favourite in the group. He worked with everyone trying to make everything perfect. This idea that we should be as good as we can get, this perfectionism, was rife throughout the whole thing. I found it wearing: I was always the one arguing with everyone else, me versus the rest. I thought being in a band would mean you would drive round in fancy cars, and have lots of girlfriends and lots of fun. They thought this was a shocking attitude.’ He laughed. ‘We’d have arguments, but it would all be theoretical, hypothetical and a bit pointless. It was part of the process of indoctrination we did on each other that we were going to be the greatest band in the world.’ ( To assist them in becoming the ‘greatest band in the world’ Bernie sent Joe for singing lessons to Tona de Brett, a vocal coach who also trained Johnny Rotten, Chrissie Hynde and Billy Idol. ‘I couldn’t do much for that Mr Strummer,’ she said later.)

  ‘When I really saw what was going on,’ said Ari Up, ‘was when I went to a Clash rehearsal at Rehearsals. They had these sprayed-up clothes – very stylish. Back then the shape of jeans was disgusting: this was very military. It looked brilliant, compared to hippie musicians. In your eyes suddenly: FUCK! When I saw those clothes and I was 14, I flipped.’

  As yet this potential Greatest-Band-in-the-World had no name. Several had been tried out, among them the Mirrors, the Phones and the Outsider (Terry Chimes insists it was ‘Outsider’ in the singular – The Outsider, Colin Wilson’s celebrated 1956 study of disaffection, was prominent on the Bernie Rhodes’ reading list). Two that stuck more readily with the five musicians were the Heartdrops, a reference to a Big Youth song title, ‘Lightning Flash (Weak Heart Drop)’, and the Psychotic Negatives, which seemed in the perverse tradition of Sex shop group names. It was Paul Simonon who noticed how frequently the headlines in the London Evening Standard carried the word ‘clash’; the Clash was the name decided upon. ‘I didn’t just stumble upon it,’ he said. ‘We were so highly attuned to what we needed by then that the word leapt out at me from the pages of the paper.’ Which was just as well, as – after nagging Bernie Rhodes ceaselessly – the group had their first gig booked, as support act to the Sex Pistols, at a pub the 101’ers had played, the Black Swan in Sheffield, 180 miles up the M1, on 4 July 1976.

  ‘It was pretty good,’ Joe told Mal Peachey, ‘because there we were in Sheffield and I think it was on a Sunday afternoon and all these people came out of the woodwork, you know, like punk types: ex-Roxy Music, like leopard-skin period, but searching on for the next thing. Lots of make-up and hair beginning to go berserk. There was a fair audience there, and that gave us a lot of heart. Because we realized that this was a nationwide thing that was just about to explode.’

  ‘One thing that didn’t change from the beginning, right through to the end of the group,’ confided Chimes, ‘was that before each show Mick was always nervous, running around, very uncomfortable and really stressed. But Joe was making jokes and seemed very happy. Then we’d come off stage and Mick would be all happy because it’s over, and Joe would be sitting with his head in his hands, saying it was the end of the world – and that never changed at all.’

  Among the numbers played by the Clash were the 101’ers’ ‘Rabies (From the Dogs of Love)’, Mick Jones’s ‘Ooh, Baby, Ooh (It’s Not Over)’ and ‘Listen’, an instrumental number. Joe’s equipment included a microphone he had stolen from the English National Opera House when he had worked there as a cleaner. During the Pistols’ set Joe Strummer and Terry Chimes stood at the side of the stage. ‘I really rate this lot,’ confided Joe to the drummer. ‘They’re not very good, are they?’ was John Lydon’s almost predictable assessment of the Clash to Glen Matlock.

  The Sheffield date only intensified the level of ambition within the Clash. 5 July saw the Clash at Dingwall’s Dancehall in Camden Town, to see the revered Ramones. The following night, the Damned supported the Pistols at one of their Tuesday night 100 Club dates, which caused anxiety within the Clash. They should have been playing that gig: might they miss the boat of this new musical mood?

  By now Mick Jones – in a relationship with Viv Albertine who continued to live at Davis Road – was staying f
or much of the time with Stella, his grandmother, his ‘Nan’, in the eighteenth-floor tower-block flat in Wilmcote House on the Harrow Road that became part of Clash mythology. (On the Sandinista! album Mick would write a song about his life there. ‘I wrote “Up In Heaven (Not Only Here)” about the swirl of the wind in the rubbish shaft in the tower block: “a giant pipe organ up in the air … when the wind hits this building, this building it tilts” – that’s about Wilmcote House,’ he told me.) Less than ten minutes’ walk from Orsett Terrace – right, left, beneath and along the Westway and right again – Joe would go over there to work with his songwriting partner. ‘The lifts never work in those flats. That’s the worst thing about them,’ he once complained to me. Mick Jones would reciprocate by visiting Orsett Terrace, where by now not only Paul and occasionally Sid Vicious were living, but also Keith Levene. ‘Joe and I had an understanding between ourselves,’ said Paul, ‘that stemmed back from when we were living together at Orsett Terrace and Mick was living with his nan. Living with someone like that, you get to really know and understand each other. So at the bottom line there was a certain separation between me and Joe, and Mick.’

  Mick Jones and Joe Strummer began to work as a true songwriting partnership, with established methodology. ‘We wrote fast,’ said Joe. ‘We would fire off each other. Mick said, “I think we should have a song called ‘Career Opportunities’.” So I said, “Right. You and Paul go down the Kentucky and get some potato croquettes,” and I just banged the lyric up while they were out. When they came back, we’d bang it into a tune, or Mick would. He was a good tunesmith.’ ‘We did “Career Opportunities”,’ said Mick, ‘when we were sitting in Joe’s squat in the ice-cream factory round the back of Harrow Road. There was the three of us. Paul was looking through the Evening Standard. It had a classified advertisements section: Career Opportunities. He said, “What about ‘Career Opportunities’?”’

  Mick had plenty of ideas for songs left over from his time with his previous groups, and Joe would write lyrics to match the music of these; on other occasions he would write out a set of words on his own to which Mick would then match music; or they would write together at Rehearsal Rehearsals. ‘Bernie’s input was direction, not content,’ said Joe, ‘which can be one and the same thing. He said, “Write about what’s important.” He steered us away from loveydovey stuff like “She’s Sitting at the Party” [a song that Mick Jones already had written], I think because he realized it was overdone, and he steered us towards writing something that was more real. Although now and again we’d separate: like he’d come up with “Janie Jones”, or I’d come up with “London’s Burning”. And we continued to do that throughout our time together. But quite often he’d play me a tune and I’d write a lyric, or give him a lyric and he’d come up with a tune for it. The really great stuff, like “White Man at Hammersmith Palais” [the next year], was done like that.’

  ‘At our height, around “London Calling” or a little after,’ said Mick, ‘Joe used to sit with his typewriter, typing it straight out. I’d sit the other side of the table with my guitar. He’d whack it out like a newspaper man, hand it to me. I’d knock the tune out there and then. On the spot. There might have been a little tiny finesse, just change that, but hardly any. It was just like that, straight. A gift. That was when we were at our height. We used to sit and write together. Lyrics tell you what the tune is a lot of the time. You just read the lyrics and you hear it. It’s the way the words go: if they already have that musicality, then it’s a song.’

  In appreciating the speed with which the pair worked – Joe said that if a song took more than a day it was invariably abandoned – it is worth noting it was just over twelve weeks from the time they started before the Clash were themselves on a Roundhouse bill, supporting Crazy Cavan and His Rhythm Rockers – whom Joe had known in Newport – and the bill-topping Kursaal Flyers, a Southend semi-pub-rock group who had managed to push themselves into the charts.

  ‘Bernie Rhodes is a very creative man,’ Joe told me, after much water – and metaphorical blood – had flowed under the bridge for all members concerned. ‘I remember clearly he gave us direction. At the time there was a lot of discontent, because that was really the first time that a generation had grown up and realized they didn’t really have any future. The sixties were a booming time in England and elsewhere, and it seemed like the future was unlimited, and science hadn’t reached any kind of dead end, and pollution hadn’t become a topic, and the economy was booming. By that time in the seventies the generation had realized that there wasn’t going to be a lot going for it. So we were really articulating what a lot of young people were feeling.’

  ‘We liked Bernie, and he liked us,’ said Mick Jones. To further focus his flock, the manager contacted Joe Stevens, an NME photographer from New York City who had worked on the British underground press in the late 1960s. Stevens was living with another American photographer called Kate Simon in Finborough Road in Fulham, a short distance from Sex, and he had got to know Bernie through Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Joe Stevens had been to see the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Nashville at which they had supported the 101’ers, the show at which the fight had broken out (‘Sid was standing off to one side, not being Vicious at all.’). ‘I took a couple of pictures of Strummer, and he saw me. Afterwards he came over to me at the bar, the first time I met him – it bonded us. Later he introduced me to Simonon, “This is Joe Stevens – he took pictures of me for the NME,” when in fact they’d run one picture, about postage stamp size.’

  Malcolm McLaren had recommended that Bernie Rhodes investigate Joe Stevens’s sizeable collection of underground publications: ‘It wasn’t just English papers like Oz and IT. I used to get pictures in all the American underground papers, like the East Village Other, the LA Free Press, the Boston Phoenix, even Black Panther and lesbian papers. And they used to send them to me. So Malcolm told Bernie that he should get these papers and magazines off me to let his group read them and get some agitprop inspiration for songs. He came round and borrowed them from me. I never got them back. But look what it did for Joe Strummer’s career,’ he joked.

  That summer there was a sense of something new in the air, so tangible you could almost touch it, but it was not always positive. When Bob Marley and the Wailers played five nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in June the scale of mugging by black youth was a stark contrast to the evident cultural and moral miscegenation at Marley’s Lyceum shows a year before. This aggression was a mere prelude to what happened a couple of months later: on the last weekend in August, at the annual Notting Hill carnival, black youth clashed violently with the police, with running street battles in Ladbroke Grove, around the area of the Westway. ‘I can honestly remember standing right there,’ Joe said to me, ‘and I swear to you that stuff happened right in front of our eyes, in that small road, just under the Westway.’

  Also at the carnival with Joe, Paul Simonon and Bernie Rhodes was Pat Nother. When the riot kicked off Pat was not colossally impressed with his leather-jacketed companions’ efforts to become street guerrillas. As black youth raged around them, lobbing bricks and bottles at the police and overturning cars, Joe and Paul tried to seize the rebel initiative: ‘They were trying to set a car on fire by holding a cigarette lighter next to the petrol cap. Luckily the lighter kept blowing out in the wind. They were hardly going to rock the Establishment like this.’

  This outbreak of street fighting at the Carnival inspired Joe to write the song ‘White Riot’. At first often misunderstood as a White Power statement, ‘White Riot’ was in fact a plea for white youth to emulate the facility with which their black counterparts confronted the forces of law and order. (Black people gotta lot of problems / But they know how to chuck a brick.) Joe’s lyrics were a masterful expression of the thoughts of the disenfranchised that summer of 1976.

  Pat Nother watched the growing radicalization of Joe Strummer with an amused eye. ‘He chased me down the road because I’d got a copy of
a book on anarchy. “Where’s that bloody book? I need it!” I said, “Joe, behave!” He was frantic to learn what this anarchy stuff was. I do think if it had been Stalinism he’d have signed up to it, and then got shot at the first trials, but he would have signed up. Because he was so into the idea of getting into the Zeitgeist, the moment.

  ‘I wouldn’t say he was psychic about this stuff, but I would say he was intuitive. Because psychic would be a message to his brain. I don’t think he had messages to his brain, I think he had messages to his body – he could intuit things without having to think too much.’

  The story behind ‘White Riot’ quickly became part of the Clash mythology, focusing the minds of their fans on the concept of ‘The Sound of the Westway’, a fundamental separation for Joe from what he had previously been singing about. ‘In the 101’ers,’ he said to me, ‘you’d sing “Route 66” – in pubs people expect that kind of thing. Once we’d decided to leave that behind, we just decided to make our own surroundings the themes. In fact, I don’t know if we even decided that: we just did it, instinctively, making our surroundings happen, giving them a bit of glamour or style.’

  By now the Clash had played two more shows: one on 13 August at Rehearsal Rehearsals, a showcase event to which booking agents and press had been invited – three journalists turned up, two from Sounds, one, Caroline Coon, from Melody Maker; and the night before the Carnival riot, on 29 August, they had played at the Screen on the Green, supporting the Sex Pistols. The Clash’s performance that night was not received at all well by the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray. ‘The Clash are the sort of garage band that should be speedily returned to the garage, preferably with the motor still running,’ he wrote, ‘which would undoubtedly be more of a loss to their friends and families than to rock and roll … their guitarist on the extreme left, allegedly known as Joe Strummer, has good moves but he and the band are a little shaky on ground that involves starting, stopping and changing chords at approximately the same time.’ The Clash responded by immediately writing the song ‘Garageland’. ‘Joe was really excited about this idea of a garage band, that led to the song “Garageland”,’ said Terry Chimes. ‘He really thought, “We belong in a garage.” He’d hit on something like that and get very, very excited and live off that for days. Then he’d be depressed about something else and he’d come in and say, “We’re not really a garage band at all.”’ (‘Joe would go into everything at a million miles an hour and then change his mind,’ said Bernie.) First performed at the Screen on the Green was a new song, ‘London’s Burning’. ‘London’s Burning’ turned an apparent pastiche of the nursery rhyme about the Great Fire of London of 1666 into a definitive expression of punk distaste for contemporary existence: ‘London’s burning with boredom now’, as well as the lines ‘Now I’m in the subway and I’m looking for the flat / This one leads to this block, this one leads to that’. This is the only song by the group that detailed the council estate world that led to the ‘tower-block rock’ reputation that became part of the myth of the Clash. It was a song that Joe had written almost entirely himself, in the same way that Mick Jones had come up with ‘Janie Jones’ while riding the 27 bus over to Rehearsal Rehearsals.