Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  12

  UNDER HEAVY MANNERS

  1976–1977

  For the rest of 1976 there was a flurry of Clash shows, at venues as diverse as Ilford’s Lacy Lady and the Nag’s Head in High Wycombe. During November the Clash had sufficiently impressed Chris Parry, an ambitious young A&R man at Polydor Records, for him to offer to record some demos at the company’s studio in Stratford Place, off Oxford Street. Who would be the producer? Bernie Rhodes had a good idea: Guy Stevens. Stevens had been the DJ at the Scene, a legendary Soho Mod club in Ham Yard, where Bernie had first got to know him. His talents were noticed by Chris Blackwell, whose Island Records put out Jamaican tunes in Britain. Blackwell decided to set up Sue, an Island affiliate, to distribute American R’n’B, and gave it to Stevens to run; he quickly scored a number of hits by artists such as Inez and Charlie Foxx, and Roy C. When Island expanded into the ‘underground’ album market in 1967, Guy Stevens began to produce such of the label’s acts as Free and Mott the Hoople, a particular inspiration for Mick Jones, who met him when Guy came along to check out Little Queenie. But during the first part of the 1970s Guy Stevens became something of a rock’n’roll casualty.

  ‘At this time Guy was drinking a lot,’ said Joe, ‘and we went into a demo studio off Oxford Street in Polydor and cut about six songs. That was the first time we’d recorded, and the results were kind of disappointing. We were quite an energetic unit, and it sounded very flat or very dull. I think Guy wasn’t really up to scratch: anyway, it didn’t go off very good – it was a débâcle.’ The songs recorded by the group were ‘Janie Jones’, ‘London’s Burning’, ‘White Riot’, ‘1977’ and ‘Career Opportunities’. ‘After the session we went up to Guy’s flat,’ said Paul. ‘He was going on about having seen this Led Zeppelin film called The Song Remains the Same. It was driving him crazy – he hated it. He got so mad that he got hold of the record and chucked it up in the air and it hit Joe in the eye and of course he was all apologetic, going, “Oh Joe, I’m so sorry.”’

  ‘Guy Stevens was a legendary producer, but he was boozing at the time,’ remembered Terry Chimes. ‘Yet he seemed the natural producer for us. He had a feel for what we were doing: he understood the energy, he understood us. He’d pat you on the back and say, “That’s good, those drums are great, you’re doing really well.” That’s what you needed a producer to do. When Mick was doing guitar, he’d jump up and down in front of him, saying, “Yeah, give it this!” He understood. Joe liked him. But there was a frostiness between him and the guy paying for the studio. Joe said to me, “I think they’ve got him numbered.” When we were at the mixing stage, according to Mick and Joe, the pressure he was under was too much: he got sloshed and screwed it up. The band were behind him, the other people weren’t, and they got someone else to produce it instead. We should have said, “We believe in you, just sober up and get it together,” but we weren’t used to calling the shots at that time – we were a new band privileged to go into the studio to record demos.’

  This would not be the last time that Guy Stevens would work with the Clash. In less than three years – as part of a seemingly ceaseless interweaving and circularity of relationships that flowed around the Clash and its individual members – he would be brought back into a fold that contained many waifs and strays; at times you felt that the Clash and their entourage was almost like a form of ongoing group (pun intended) therapy in the most select mobile rock’n’roll mental home.

  The disappointing results of the Polydor demos were not the only stumbling block experienced by the group that month. ‘Shortly after that,’ said Joe, ‘Terry Chimes announced he was quitting. So it was a setback on two counts: the tapes didn’t come out good, then the drummer was leaving.’ To the amazement of the rest of the Clash and Bernie Rhodes, Chimes – who was and remains very much his own man – had decided he had had enough of the endless ideological disputes within the group, and announced that he was quitting. He agreed to stick around until they found a replacement. ‘Everyone kept saying that when they got any money they were going to give it away. I thought, “Well, I’m not bloody giving mine away!” We would argue like that all the time, and it wore me out. When I said I wanted to leave, they got angry, and then said, “OK. Will you just do these gigs until we find someone else?” But they auditioned a lot of people and couldn’t find the right guy. So I carried on doing the gigs.’

  On 29 November the Clash stepped down a peg, to support the Sex Pistols at Lanchester Polytechnic at Coventry. After the Clash performed ‘White Riot’, the tune was misinterpreted as racist and the Social Secretary refused to pay the group. They were under the impression this was the last show Terry Chimes would ever play with them.

  Ten days before the Lanchester Polytechnic show the Pistols, who had signed to EMI Records, had released their first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, an instant rock’n’roll classic; it not only captured the intensity and magic of their onstage performances, but actually seemed to improve on it. The record got tremendous reviews. EMI upped the ante in efforts to push the single. On the first day of December 1976 the Clash, the Damned and the Pistols were rehearsing for a nationwide punk package tour at the Roxy in Harlesden, a largely Jamaican venue: they were awaiting the arrival from New York of the package’s final component, the Heartbreakers, which featured guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan from the New York Dolls. The Clash were playing with a new drummer, Rob Harper. In the afternoon the Pistols learnt that EMI had secured them a promotional slot early that evening on an ITV magazine show called Today on which they would be interviewed by Bill Grundy, an experienced television journalist – Queen, another EMI act, had had to pull out of the show.

  The consequences are now infamous. Grundy goaded the group into swearing on TV, which led to a witch-hunt of tabloid headlines for an entire week. The Sex Pistols became national scapegoats, convenient whipping-boys, for a country that had been economically emasculated and was culturally stagnating. The Clash were caught in the slipstream of this brouhaha. As the Sex Pistols’ tour was set to kick off two days after the television ‘incident’, the other acts on the package were tarred with the same brush. The dates had been booked throughout December. When the assorted musicians arrived in their tour bus at the University of East Anglia in Norwich for the first date on 3 December they discovered that the gig had been banned. Furious students had arranged a sit-in to protest the decision. Six other dates were cancelled almost immediately. A curious pastiche of Ken Kesey’s hippie Magic Bus trips was enacted as the groups were driven the length and breadth of England and Wales, looking for gigs that hadn’t been cancelled, staying in expensive hotels, bankrolled by EMI. The Heartbreakers merrily set about persuading whoever would fall for it that doing smack could be really good fun. The Heartbreakers are uniquely credited as the one single force that brought heroin into the British punk scene. ‘Loads of people got into heroin because of Johnny Thunders,’ Paul Simonon said to me. ‘He was the cause of huge damage in punk.’

  As they trundled the length and breadth of the country on the Anarchy tour bus you could almost feel from hundreds of miles away the pall of collective depression hanging over the Sex Pistols. It was as early as this tour that the Clash overtook the Pistols as a live act, when they played the second of two nights at the Electric Circus in Manchester; the first show was on 9 December, the next on the 19th, slotted in to give the tour one more date. For Joe, looking like the Eddie Cochran of punk, this second show was a transforming moment, a steaming, electrifying performance. ‘That was the night that I knew we were really going to do it,’ he said, ‘because we were better than the Pistols. They had a really hard time following us. We blew them off the stage – we beat them at it.’ Psychologically, this was crucial for the Clash, who on the tour had been very much guests at someone else’s party. ‘We still had solidarity, but we felt pretty small just then because the Sex Pistols were front-page news and we were just nothing, we were bottom of the bill,’ Joe told Jon Sava
ge.

  Over the course of the Anarchy dates an important element of what became the philosophy of the Clash was established. ‘Because none of us had ever been on tour before,’ Joe told Mal Peachey, ‘and we were determined not to become like the stadium-type groups that were famous at the time, we didn’t really have that thing where, today, backstage is almost like a monastery, protected by rows of goons, and you have to have twenty laminates to get to find a can of beer. It was much more open season in those days, and so the audience would kind of swarm backstage after the gig, and it was part of the times, part of the ethos of it. Because you could talk to the audience, or they could talk to you, it meant you kept your feet on the ground.’ It could be argued that the Pistols had first established this insistence that they were not elevated above their fans: the Pistols would always wander out into the hall after the show and mingle with whoever wanted to talk to them. But they wouldn’t almost wilfully insist – as would the Clash, frequently enduring arguments with theatre management and even their own security – that whoever wanted should be allowed to come back to their dressing-room. After the Anarchy tour the Clash’s dressing-rooms would swarm with fans, front-man Joe holding forth in passionate discussion on all manner of subjects; and then it would be back to the group’s hotel to expand even further on these matters; like many musicians Joe Strummer would be buzzing for hours on adrenaline following his supercharged performances and would rarely be ready for sleep before 6 in the morning; if there was a girl still awake she might end up sharing his bed with him – but not until the dialectic of the night had been thoroughly dissected.

  The Anarchy tour bus arrived back in London on 23 December, a chilly, damp night. Joe remembered sloping up Tottenham Court Road, consciously not buttoning up his coat, as though he needed to feel the harsh wind on his body as a reminder of a world removed from a life of hotels and tour-bus travel. Some Christmas: the Clash were completely broke, having earned virtually no money for all their efforts during the year. Although Mick could usually get a hot meal at his grandmother’s, Joe and Paul had been near to starving half the time – after making paste from flour and water to put up posters for the ICA gig, Paul famously had gone back to Rehearsal Rehearsals, heated up the remnants on the blade of a saw and eaten them. ‘After the Anarchy tour returned to London,’ Joe told Mal Peachey, ‘it was pretty sad, because it was freezing and it was like the excitement was over, and we were dumped back on the street. It was all a bit of an anticlimax, though we did have something to look forward to – that we were going to sign a contract and record our songs and get them out.’ When Joe got back to Foscote Mews, his mood dipped even lower. While he had been away his squat had been broken into, and all his possessions had been stolen, including every piece of his memorabilia from the 101’ers. If anything, this only confirmed for him that the only way was forward with his new group – but it was also a major loss for someone who had always been a hoarder of his past, and was already stuffing all manner of matter into used plastic carrier bags, out of which he almost seemed to live. Friends would say that Joe had moved so often as a child that hanging onto all that stuff gave him ‘a sense of permanency’. For a time Joe moved into the upstairs of Rehearsal Rehearsals, sharing the place with Paul.

  The group celebrated New Year’s Day 1977 by playing two sets at a new club, started as a punk forum, the Roxy in Neal Street in Covent Garden, the last date for Rob Harper with the Clash. Joe wore a shirt with ‘1977’ stencilled on it and – his Telecaster in for repair – played a borrowed white semi-acoustic Gretsch guitar. ‘Remote Control’, a new song written over Christmas on which Mick Jones took lead vocals, was performed for the first time. The Roxy, which only lasted for 100 days, briefly became the punk Mecca; it had been started by Andy Czezowski, the manager of Generation X and the accountant for Acme Attractions, the only rival to Sex on the King’s Road. Running the shop for owner John Krivine were petite, pretty Jeannette Lee and her boyfriend Don Letts, a young Rastafarian from Brixton who had been profoundly influenced by Bob Marley.

  When Czezowski opened the Roxy he asked Letts to be the DJ. Letts in turn co-opted his brother Desmond and friend Leo Williams to run the bars; Leo worked the downstairs bar. He and the Letts brothers also sold sno-cone spliffs. The ganja helped establish a cross-cultural mood underpinned by the soundtrack of roots reggae that Don Letts would play in between the amphetamine charge of the punk acts booked for each night. ‘There weren’t enough punk records to play,’ remembered Letts, ‘so I just brought my reggae collection along.’ As a consequence of Letts’s record choices, he helped set in motion the celebrated punk–reggae fusion which would find its most ardent interpretations in the music of the Clash and be celebrated later in 1977 in the Bob Marley song ‘Punky Reggae Party’.

  At the end of 1976 Don Letts, Leo Williams and a friend called JR had rented the top two floors of a house in a salubrious part of Forest Hill in south-east London. After the Roxy would close the élite of the assembled multitude might well find themselves squeezing into Don Letts’s Morris Minor and driving back to the Forest Hill flat, where – smoking spliffs and listening to reggae – they would watch the sun come up. A frequent visitor on such occasions was Joe Strummer; after a time he became an occupant of one of the smallest rooms. Although he was there infrequently, for close to a year he paid his small share of the rent. ‘It was a tiny room, like a closet,’ said Don. ‘But Joe seemed to like small rooms. Everywhere I went, even if Joe was in a big room he’d make it small by making a bunker within it. I didn’t see him that often, he was moving around and going to other places, but I do remember smoking and playing different records with him and that he stole my copy of the Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari triple album. Which I never forgot: Joe, you bastard. Me and my brother Desmond once took him to a black wedding reception, where he was the only white man there. Joe had this way of getting involved and warming to people. He’d engage them in conversation, and in that engagement he’d make that person feel very special, as though they were maybe the only person in the world. All the way through his life he made people feel special, even though they probably weren’t. Joe just seemed to like everybody. He was an equalizer. I dug that about him.’

  Don and Leo Williams would drive with Joe to Jamaican reggae clubs like the Bouncing Ball in Peckham or the Four Aces in Dalston, venues with tricky reputations. ‘He’d be the only white man in the Four Aces, and they’d kind of have to get over his look, because to the people there at first it seemed like some kind of right-wing thing. But when he lit up a spliff they realized that he wouldn’t have been in there if he was like that. Once when he came to the Four Aces the guy on the microphone name-checked him while Joe was making a spliff, which seemed to surprise him so much that he somehow blew the weed out of his hand.

  ‘It’s got to be said that people like Joe Strummer and John Lydon – particularly Joe – were like the punk intelligentsia, they were the thinkers. They were the ones that gave it the depth. With Joe there was no mistaking early on that my man was deep. He knew all the cultural and literary references, all the revolutionary references, and he put it all into context: he wasn’t just an angry young man stamping and screaming. As you can see in his lyrics, there’s a lot more ideas in one of Joe’s rhyming couplets than there are in some people’s entire albums. More than anyone he moved the lyrical goalposts of what contemporary music could deal with. There had been protest songs and anti-establishment songs before, but Joe did it in a way that made it sound exciting and not over-earnest. He made it humorous as well. Because it’s about the way you tell ’em: you’ve got to capture people’s imaginations before you give them the serious input, and he had a great understanding of that. I remember when I first saw the Clash I didn’t actually hear what he was saying – well, no one could understand what Joe was saying – but you knew something was going on because the power and energy were so intense. It just made you want to be involved, and made you realize that you could
be part of this too. Joe made me see that you should just get on with it.

  ‘Now that Joe’s dead and gone it’s easy to look at him through rose-tinted glasses,’ added Don, ‘but he definitely had a bastard side to him. When Joe wanted something horrible done, when things happened that he couldn’t deal with, he’d get other people to do it in a really Machiavellian way. He had a cowardly streak about him in this respect. But this is all part of Joe’s humanity, the contradictions. But because he was so extreme it was more noticeable: he’d say one thing and do the opposite, all the time. If ever there was a wrong thing to do you could count on Joe doing it. I almost dug that.

  ‘Joe was a sneaky fuck sometimes. In fact most times. Particularly to women. It must have been harder for Joe because he was supposed to be this right-on guy. But I’ve got to say it makes me love him more.’

  In his uniform of well-worn black leather jacket, circular John Lennon-like metal-framed spectacles, sprayed-on cotton trousers and blue brothel creepers, the diminutive figure of Bernie Rhodes struck an appealing gnomish posture that was at odds with his efforts to appear as an archetypal twentieth-century revolutionary, a Fidel Castro of Camden Town. It was Bernie who came up with the idea of the three or four word tag-lines with which the Clash would stencil their clothing and equipment: lumps of Clash lyrics – STEN GUNS IN KNIGHTSBRIDGE, WHITE RIOT, KNIVES IN W11 – rivalled Jamaican political slogans – UNDER HEAVY MANNERS (the campaign catchphrase of the ruling People’s National Party) – and mottoes from the individual members’ own particular agendas – CREATIVE VIOLENCE was urged by Paul, and Joe came up with CHUCK BERRY IS DEAD, a clear volte-face on his past, and HATE AND WAR, the mirror-image of the hippies’ Peace and Love ethic. Joe, whose sixth-form ambition had been to go into advertising, took to this with gusto: in his lyrics his economy and directness with words always delivered the message – he was almost selling the need for us all to want a White Riot of our own. The elevated, inspired amateurism of the Clash had the benefit of an extreme simplicity of approach and a shocking disregard for the accepted system of strategy and tactics. The Clash were moved, if not sustained, by abstract slogans and symbols. Like contemporary gang leaders, they had to make their authority manifest through bold, unmistakable symbols and dazzling displays of bravura elegance.