Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  There was not much time for serious reflection on such matters of the soul. Another punk package tour, with the Clash as bill-toppers, was to be launched on Britain. Topper had had under a month to learn the material before embarking on this typically ambitious venture. The White Riot tour kicked off on 1 May at Guildford. Also on the bill were the Jam; a hot new act from Manchester, the Buzzcocks; the Slits; and Subway Sect, another band managed by Bernie Rhodes.

  Like trousers, like brain … … Joe writes to Anne Day from the White Riot tour. (Anne Day)

  On 3 May the package hit Birmingham’s Barbarella’s. ‘We’d like to do this first song for the thirty people who were here last time,’ Joe introduced the set. The Swindon date, on 4 May, was at the Affair club. When the Clash arrived there they discovered their lighting rig was too big for the venue. There was another hall, across a bridge, through a town square, and past the police station, where it was deemed the Clash could play. When the fans arrived at the second hall it was burning down. The equipment in the basement was rescued by some of the audience, including one Dave Girvan, who helped in carrying it out and back across town to the original club, where the Clash now played an astonishing set, and Joe rewarded everyone who’d helped with a pint of beer.

  The show in London at the Rainbow on 9 May was amazing, an extraordinary sight of massed punk. Bob Marley was backstage, at the group’s invitation. (‘But he never gave us tickets for his show at the Rainbow,’ complained Mick Jones to me). The first thing that amazed you was that they had pulled it off and filled the 3,000 seat venue. ‘That was the night punk really broke. The Rainbow was a big venue. It was kinda “Supergroups go there!”,’ said Joe. ‘The audience came and filled it. Trashed the place as well, but it really felt like – through a combination of luck and effort – we were in the right place doing the right thing at the right time. And that kind of night happens once or twice in a lifetime.’

  Ellie Smith, who handled their PR at CBS, arranged for me to meet the group backstage at St Albans City Hall on 21 May. I spent time talking to Mick Jones, who was extremely personable. From time to time he would expel a thin stream of spittle onto the lino floor. This seemed to be part of the act, as though emulating the cool of street-corner black kids who constantly seemed to suffer from a similar excess of saliva. ‘Gob’ was part of punk: every gig saw a hail of ‘appreciative’ spit, a phenomenon started by the Damned spitting at their audience – who spat back. (Six months later, Joe implored the audience at the Coventry Locarno: ‘Before we play you anything we’d like to ask you one favour. Please don’t spit on us. We’re just trying to do something good up here and it throws us off our stride.’)

  Mick was open, funny, obviously intelligent and well read. In the dressing-room was Paul; he too gobbed on the floor. Joe stepped into the room for a moment: he seemed wound up. He shook my hand briefly, but seemed evidently stressed – he stormed off. Joe did have something on his mind. During recent nights on the tour he had become increasingly brought down by the number of security guards: tonight Joe Strummer insisted that no front-stage security be supplied whatsoever. In mid-set he performed a kamikaze head-first dive into the audience. ‘He proved his point,’ pointed out Mick Jones. ‘They didn’t trample on him and they caught him … Of course, if they hadn’t have caught him he could have broken his neck. Joe has a very forceful way of proving a point.’ Joe’s rage onstage was an expression of the fury and suffocating frustration felt by huge swathes of the community – there was a very real frenzied wrath on the streets of Britain, and Joe Strummer became its personification.

  Later, after a couple of spliffs with Mick Jones and Don Letts, it was time for me to get back to London. On the way out I looked into the next-door dressing-room. Joe was sat immediately opposite me, on a bench along the rear wall, surrounded by fans. I waved goodbye at him. He snarled something at me, and it seemed to me I could pick out the word ‘Goebbels’. I snarled back at him. He raised the fist at me that wasn’t holding a can of Special Brew. I raised one back. Then I turned and left, still in good spirits, despite the oddness of that brief moment. That was my first meeting with Joe. Years later I recounted it to him. He appeared shocked: ‘No, no, I can’t believe that.’ But this, it turned out, was a typical mood in which to find Joe in those times. Later I realized it was like one of those fights you’d almost have with someone at school, and then end up the best of friends.

  The White Riot tour cost the Clash £28,000, over a quarter of their advance from CBS, to pay for the smashed seats at the Rainbow and the huge assortment of liggers they took along with them on tour. After the St Albans gig the tour bus was raided by police who found stolen pillows and hotel keys; Joe and Topper were charged with theft. But the Clash came back from the White Riot tour as a major English group. There was no doubt that the multi-dimensional Clash were the most exciting new thing in years, with real depth in their work and as human beings: their raison d’être, essentially an attack on the established order, was put over with great intelligence and a high sense of instinctive creativity. Plus, as the assorted arrests and dramas of the White Riot tour ensured, they seemed to have an almost filmic ongoing story. Their collective granite-like persona, undiminished purpose and irreducible stubbornness were delivering their cause to considerable effect. ‘We’re anti-fascist, anti-racist, and pro-creative,’ said Joe, remembering the maxim: All great truths are simple.

  Something else had happened to Woody Mellor in metamorphosing into Joe Strummer, singer with the Clash: he’d gained height. ‘I noticed that after the Rainbow show,’ said Jill Calvert. ‘Becoming successful seemed to put inches on him. He was no longer “Weedy Woody”, as we sometimes used to call him.’ Joe’s height, around five foot eight, seems to have veered greatly, dependent on how he was faring in life. Now he was on top of the world, standing tall as the proud Leo king. Later you came to realize you could gauge Joe’s inner spirits by his height: when low, his neck and spine would be bent forwards, and he would shrink in size.

  On 5 June Joe went with Don Letts and Leo Williams to Hammersmith Palais in west London, to see Dillinger, Leroy Smart and Delroy Wilson, a trio of hot acts direct from Kingston, perform at a typical Jamaican concert, aimed specifically at expatriate islanders. Looking for a rootsical reggae experience, Joe instead watched artists who had honed their stage acts on the Jamaican north coast tourist hotel circuit, and came home disappointed. ‘It was all very Vegas,’ said Joe. ‘The audience were hardcore and I felt that they were looking for something different than a showbiz spectacle.’ When he noticed a group of ‘black sticksmen’ endeavouring to snatch the handbags of some white girls, Joe intervened. He didn’t receive any thanks for his troubles. In his omnipresent notebook Joe wrote up his experiences of the evening in verse form, working up the lyrics of what would become ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’. ‘I remember Joe was a bit disappointed,’ said Don, ‘because he expected a roots scene. I think that show was an eye-opener for him, realizing that all those people were trying to get out of the ghetto roots life.’

  Four days later Joe was arrested by police for spraying the word ‘CLASH’ on the wall next to Dingwalls. Joe had to appear in court on this charge the next day at 4 p.m., where he was fined £5. Because of this he was unable to answer the case against him the same day in Newcastle on charges of stealing from the Holiday Inn for which he and Topper had been charged after the St Albans show. The next morning he and Topper were arrested. ‘We were driven handcuffed together all the way up to Newcastle, and spent the weekend in jail there, before being fined on the Monday morning for stealing bedware and keys.’

  Early in August the Clash went into the studio to record their next single. To the fury of the group, CBS had released a further single from the album, ‘Remote Control’. Responding in an angry burst of energy, Mick Jones wrote both the music and words of a new tune, ‘Complete Control’, referring to the absurd phrase Bernie had used. Mick’s lyrics are an indictment of the way he felt CBS
had betrayed the group with the ‘Remote Control’ release; Joe added one line about an abortive visit by the group to the CBS conference in Amsterdam. ‘Complete Control’ was produced by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Picasso of Jamaican record producers. Joe later joked: ‘We wanted him to do a reggae production of a punk song, but he was trying to learn how to do a punk production.’ But the news they had worked with the legendary Scratch Perry enhanced the credibility of the Clash. According to Mick Jones, Scratch made ‘Complete Control’ sound as though the record had been made ‘underwater’. After he left the studio, the group – notably Mick Jones – went to work on the supposedly finished master.

  On 5 August the Clash played the second annual European Punk Festival at Mont-de-Marsan in France, near the border with Spain; an early version of ‘White Man’ was aired. Ten days later I joined up with the Clash on the ‘punk night’ of the 14th Bilzen festival, near Liège, in Belgium. As was now becoming commonplace, the Clash’s set was no stranger to controversy.

  Playing before 20,000 people, the music was extraordinary, but Joe’s performance was even more breathtaking. He saw that a group of European anarchists was trying to pull down the concrete posts and barbed-wire fence that separated them from the front-of-stage pit. ‘Why is this space here?’ Joe spewed rage into the mike. ‘Venez ici! Venez ici!!!! – et maintenant … “Les Flics et les voleurs”,’ as the Clash-reggae of ‘Police and Thieves’ appeared to be about to cool things out a trifle.

  Joe’s mike-stand slipped into the pit. Then Joe was down in the pit himself, racing for the post that was nearest to coming down, grabbing it, shifting it backwards and forwards, wrestling with it. No one quite saw what happened, but Joe was down on the ground. (‘One of ’em took a swing at me.’). He was dragged back behind a large wire shield; on his feet, surrounded by security heavies, like some very aggro gallant young squire in a medieval battle scene.

  The show continued as Joe was pushed back on stage, playing this time under a hail of cans rather than a stream of gob. Despite the adverse conditions, two new songs, ‘Clash City Rockers’ and ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’, rang out above the clamour.

  Bernie Rhodes went backstage where Mick Jones was puking up. ‘The cymbals were too loud at the back,’ was his only comment. ‘It didn’t seem like a gig. It was more like a war,’ said Paul Simonon, stretching the neck of his conceptually frayed sweater to show where a half-brick had landed on his left shoulder and broken the skin.

  After the gig, Joe showed that, just as on stage, he was not prepared to play the game. This time it was me he had in his sights. ‘All journalists are swine,’ Joe suddenly pronounced, in front of the rest of the group. I was not too wiped out to realize that out of the blue I had been thrown into a legendary Clash debating session, the sort of thing that had made Terry Chimes leave the group. ‘All journalists are complete swine,’ Joe repeated.

  Paul and Mick came to my aid by uttering disturbed noises. Mick declared that the press had helped the Clash a lot in the past. But Joe told Mick he was too gullible – he would never tell the press the things Mick did. Mick, however, riposted that Joe had that attitude because of a conscious need to maintain his mystique. I noticed that suddenly the discussion had struck a level of intensity on a quite personal level – it was like a group (or Clash) therapy session. ‘They’re all swine. Journalists are people who should be kept at arms’ length at all times. This is nothing personal against you, Sandwich,’ Joe snarled sibilantly through the gaps at either side of his upper front teeth. ‘The nature of what you do means you must be kept at bay.’

  (‘Joe Strummer always seems to me to be a rather tense person,’ said Malcolm McLaren to me, around this time.)

  The subject thankfully moved on as we talked about the-Clash-as-political-group. Mick Jones said that he was equally appalled by the mindless bigotry of the right-wing National Front and the leftie International Socialists: ‘The International Socialists are always like sending us telegrams of congratulation. But we’re nothing to do with either of them. We don’t consider any of it a political statement. We just consider it statements of … life through our eyes.’

  ‘It’s a load of bullshit,’ Joe chipped in. ‘We’re just a group. The National Front are against us, though. They know about us. And the police.’

  But what had impelled Joe towards his extraordinary front-of-stage performance? ‘I don’t think about things I do too much. I just do ’em.’

  On 11 September 1977 Joe went to see Mick at Wilmcote House. He was broke and hoped Mick would be able to lend him a fiver. Whilst he was there three local Teds turned up and announced that they were going to get them. One of the Clash who lived in Ladbroke Grove, they said, had beaten up a girlfriend of theirs. Mick and Joe protested that none of them lived in the Grove; and, anyway, they wouldn’t do that to a girl. But the Teds announced that they were coming back, with some Angels from a local pub. Then they left.

  Mick and Joe turned off all of the lights and waited for Mick’s Nan to return. Then Mick gave her some money to go to a friend’s to stay the night. Sneaking out of the tower block’s rear exit, they caught a bus over to Wandsworth, to watch High Noon on a friend’s ‘colour telly’ – a detail Joe noted, a sign of the times.

  Beneath Babylon’s shadow, the Clash attempt abortively to play in Belfast. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  Returning to Wilmcote House around 1 a.m., they found the door to Mick’s Nan’s flat scuffed with boot marks. Above the lintel was written ‘PUNK IS SHIT’ and ‘ANGELS ROOL’. Despite the threat, they stayed the night there. But Joe came to a decision: ‘I’ve gotta help Mick get out of there, before they break his arms like matchsticks.’ (Around this time Joe dived into the canal that ran along the Harrow Road to save a drunk who had fallen in. ‘He was always very brave,’ said Mick.)

  ‘Complete Control’ was released on 23 September 1977 to ecstatic praise. The sophistication of the song’s structure and the pointed satire within its lyrics showed how far the group had come since recording The Clash at the beginning of the year. On 20 October they set off on their Out of Control tour. Belfast in Northern Ireland was ravaged by civil war, a part of Britain that no acts came to play: the Clash chose the city’s Ulster Hall for their first date on the tour. The show was banned.

  At the end of the tour Joe moved into Sebastian Conran’s house by Regent’s Park, at 31 Albany Street; the huge property had its main entrance, hardly ever used, directly on the carriageway that ran around the park. Nobody could quite figure out how, but Bernie managed to get a foothold in the building, installing his office. The occupants of this luxury abode, among them Henry Bowles, a friend of Sebastian’s who became close friends with Joe, overcame their ideological conflict by pretending it was a squat – on occasions Joe actually claimed that it was – and treating it with utter disrespect. But this step up in his accommodation also brought Joe closer to his past; directly opposite the front door was the bench on which his brother David had died, still an unmentionable subject for Joe.

  Around this time, on a visit to Warlingham to see his parents, Joe prepared them for the myth-making that was already underway. ‘You’re going to be seeing a lot about me in the papers soon,’ he warned them. ‘Don’t believe what you read.’ By now, Ron Mellor was taking the music papers – NME and Melody Maker – on a weekly basis from his local newsagent.

  Joining the entourage after the Belfast gig was Johnny Green, possibly the only road manager with a degree in Arabic. It wasn’t until they were back in London – and he found himself still working with them – that Johnny began to understand the inner workings of the Clash. ‘Fans always assumed Joe ran the band. That wasn’t my perception. When he roused himself he could be extremely dynamic and forceful, but Mick was always on the case. I’ve always regarded Mick as being precise, whereas Joe was a man who would lift his head up and go, “What?”

  ‘Often it seemed that it was Mick’s group. It wasn’t just that he could employ bully
ing tactics – which he could. He was very forceful and quick to put his point of view in, in a way that Joe wasn’t. Joe was more considered. There was a huge amount of energy coming off Mick. Although he was always the last man to show for a rehearsal, he always did show, and the attitude of the other three went up a gear the moment he walked into the room. Mick’s behaviour was tolerated because he was worth it. He could be a source of amusement: the poodle jokes about his hair, for example. But they were jokes, they weren’t backstabbing. Not at all.

  ‘But don’t misunderstand the amount of energy Paul Simonon put in there. It’s easy to pigeonhole him: charismatic figure, stylish, amusing. But it was energy, boundless energy, too much energy for one man to have about himself, as a matter of fact.’