Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Lying in his hospital bed for three weeks, Joe had time to reflect on his life’s recent course. Since joining the Clash his pace had become increasingly relentless as he had embarked on a giant push upwards. ‘When he was living in a squat he was very broke and not eating much,’ said Kris Needs. ‘Then he was on speed and Special Brew right through that White Riot tour and he wasn’t a nice person on it. He was very gruff and scary. The first time I saw him play live I was scared to talk to him afterwards. How was this ferocious, passionate person going to talk to me? That’s what Joe was like till I got to know him.’

  Joe came out of hospital more focused, more resolute. And sober: alcohol was out for the next six months. As though it was a security blanket, he would always carry with him a bottle of R White’s lemonade. And his hash consumption took an exponential leap. He was also trimmed down now, the early signs of a beer-paunch gone. ‘Here, Joe,’ Paul laughed at him shortly before his hospitalization, ‘I saw you pulling in your stomach when you were trying to chat up that girl.’

  Out of hospital in March Joe was still shaky. But he and the Clash went into Marquee studios in Soho to work on various new songs with Sandy Pearlman. The Clash’s version of Booker T and the MGs’ classic ‘Time Is Tight’ was recorded then, Paul Simonon and Topper’s friend, Gary Barnacle, a session saxophonist, taking the lead in a Mick Jones arrangement that dispensed with the organ solo, the original record’s most defining element. ‘In rehearsals there were times when somebody would play one thing,’ said Paul, ‘and somebody would pick up on that and you’d nip out for a cup of tea, come back and suddenly Mick and Topper are playing it, and you’d just fall into it. That was how we started doing “Time Is Tight”.’ ‘1-2 Crush on You’, the Mick Jones original, was readied for later record release. Another cover, the Clash’s version of ‘Pressure Drop’ by Toots and the Maytals, already a live favourite, was recorded at the same time. ‘It probably just came up in a rehearsal and then evolved into a song in the set – we used to play it as far back as the White Riot tour – into the point of being recorded,’ said Paul. ‘I suppose having “Police and Thieves” on the first album opened the way forward for us. Not to mimic reggae, but to give our own interpretation – the version of “Pressure Drop” that we did has got quite a different approach from the song that was very well known because of being on the soundtrack of the film The Harder They Come. It’s a slightly faster version we did. Along with “White Man” we were fine-tuning our reggae direction.’

  Already waiting in the wings, his last act before he went into hospital, was the single Joe would always regard as his finest song, ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’. As though proving a point to CBS the tune was produced by the group – which essentially meant Mick Jones. On the ‘White Man’ single Joe sounds possessed, buzzing on the antibiotics keeping at bay his ‘glandular fever’. A protest ballad with a reggae beat, and as removed from the expected 120 m.p.h. punk tempo as could be, the song marked an evolutionary leap upwards from the sentiments expressed in ‘White Riot’. Now Joe was insisting that black and white youth must unite against a world in which ‘If Adolf Hitler flew in today / They’d send a limousine anyway.’ As though to assure the Clash’s audience of the milieu in which the song was set, Joe delivered an attack from the heart of the punk conscience on groups like the Jam. (Later he would change his mind, describing Paul Weller as ‘Britain’s number one soul singer’.) The single would not be released for another three months. But with considerable appropriateness it would be performed at the group’s next live show.

  That year all over the country the National Front had been successfully recruiting youthful members. Following the Young National Front rally at Digbeth Hall in Birmingham, at which – much to Joe’s pleasure – black youth had chucked the odd brick or two, there was a response from the other side: a left-wing organization called Rock Against Racism, working in tandem with the equally new Anti-Nazi League, was formed to counter this noxious influence. Given the disastrous effect that membership of the National Front had had on his brother David, Joe had a deep-seated hatred for ‘the Front’. On a page of one of Joe’s ubiquitous notebooks he had drawn a pair of circles; one circle, which he declared to be ‘MINE’, showed his own ethnic origin: half of it is Scottish, while English, German, and Armenian are given a sixth each. The other circle bears the name ‘MICK’S’; here half is English, the rest Welsh, Russian and Irish. Joe comments on the two circles: ‘The National Front are hopelessly fighting one COLD fact – a GENETIC fact ask an expert – there is no such thing as a pure race What about the half Greek fellow or the Scottish Italian are you gonna throw them out too? – where do they draw the line? Only people of a different colour? Why? For JOBS? French Dutch Swedes Germans Spaniards etc all work here. There’s room for everybody.’

  Joe provides the evidence to denounce the National Front: ‘There’s room for everybody’ (Lucinda Mellor)

  It was no surprise that the Clash had agreed to perform their first show for three months at a Rock Against Racism concert, a huge open-air event held on Sunday 30 April 1978 in Victoria Park in Hackney, East London, a working-class area of considerable ethnic diversity. The concert was the culmination of a three-mile march from Trafalgar Square in central London. By virtue of its raison d’être it was a richly emotional event; the obsessive display in Victoria Park of left-wing banners and flags, billowing under a blustery breeze, seemed like a real transcription of a willed romance. The decision to play the show had been made by the group, against the wishes of Bernie Rhodes. ‘It’s not my idea, this. I didn’t think they should do it. But some members seemed to feel very strongly about it,’ Bernie told me behind the stage. But the opposition of Bernie Rhodes to the group playing the RAR concert was yet another mark of the several beginning to be stacked against him.

  Ideological disputes aside, to recommend that the Clash should not play this show could be seen as bad managerial advice. The 80,000-strong audience was the biggest crowd the group had yet played for. The event was an opportunity to convert Clash virgins to the idea of the group, letting them be seen as a kind of white equivalent of Bob Marley and the Wailers, whom Joe loved, an act that combined an addictive pop sensibility with a larger global message. The Clash’s powerful performance was a triumph. Fortunately this was captured on film; perhaps spurred on by Malcolm McLaren’s efforts to make a film about the Sex Pistols, Bernie Rhodes had enlisted the services of Jack Hazan and David Mingay to make Rude Boy, a feature film about the Clash. The two film-makers had had success two years previously with A Bigger Splash, an art-house study of the painter David Hockney; excited, theatrical impresario Michael White offered funding for their next project. Rude Boy utilizes an actor, Ray Gange, to play one of the group’s roadies, a device to interweave events in the life of the Clash into the film. At one point Gange offers Joe his can of Special Brew. ‘No thanks,’ Joe responds. ‘I gave it up. It was fucking me up.’ The scorn and disgust with which punk rock had been greeted had caused the group to separate from society almost completely, and they became solidified within their own mythology, underpinned by self-referential lyrics, military postures and the sense of a gang living by its own code. Rude Boy would not document that existence, but be part of its myth-making.

  Due to the widely seen footage from Rude Boy, there is an assumption that the Clash topped the bill at Victoria Park. This is not true: among others playing were reggae act Steel Pulse, the Tom Robinson Band, X-Ray Spex and the Boomtown Rats. But although the Clash went onstage at around 5 in the afternoon, they did manage to steal the show. Joe’s sterling performance as front-man at this Rock Against Racism rally marked the moment when his own mythology took off, righteously opposing the National Front – the personification of positive punk.

  But – as so often with Joe Strummer – there was a paradox here. He wore a shirt especially commissioned by him from Alex Michon, a girl who made the group’s clothes, that bore the two words BRIGADE ROSSE, Italian for ‘Red
Brigade’, the Italian left-wing terrorist group. According to David Mingay, this was ‘strongly disapproved of by Mick’; no doubt the guitarist’s disapproval would have been even greater had he known that in ten days time the Brigade Rosse would kidnap and murder Aldo Moro, the former Italian President. Later in the year Joe attempted unsatisfactorily to explain away the shirt to Allan Jones, his old friend from Newport now on Melody Maker: ‘I am ambiguous. ’Cause at once I’m impressed with what they’re doing, and at the same time I’m really frightened by what they’re doing. It’s not an easy subject.’ Is there a clue in a conversation that Joe’s cousin Alasdair Gillies had with Ron Mellor on a visit to the family bungalow in Warlingham later that summer? ‘He was talking about the Red Brigade: “Can you understand what drives these young people to commit murder? Maybe they have a point of view.”’ Had Ron been having discussions with his son? Although extremely proud of Johnny Mellor’s burgeoning success, Ron strove to appear cynically indifferent. ‘The only reason John is a singer,’ he would theatrically grumble, ‘is so that he doesn’t have to get up in the morning.’

  Johnny Green, who was living at Rehearsals, noted that on a number of occasions the phone at the studio would ring late at night, when the group was guaranteed to have left. It would be Anna Mellor, Joe’s mother. ‘Is John there?’ she would ask. But Johnny felt she was calling at a time she knew full well he wouldn’t be there. ‘“Ask him to call, would you, please,” she’d say. I had the sense that she was in her cups, waiting for when she knew he wouldn’t be there, so she wouldn’t have to talk to him. Joe seemed pleased that she called. I don’t know if he called her back.’ Shortly after the Victoria Park concert, Joe surprised Jeannette Lee by asking her if she would go and have lunch with his parents. She was nervous about the formality of such a situation, but Jeannette intuited that Joe wanted her to go with him to Warlingham as a measure of support. ‘In order for him to go he needed someone to take the attention away a bit. I said I would, although I didn’t really want to.’

  The couple took a train down from Victoria station to Croydon, where they caught a bus. ‘Joe kept teasing me that once I saw the size of the house and the swimming-pool I wouldn’t want to know him. He was enjoying the fact I didn’t know what I was going to. Once I saw how wealthy he was, he said, the bubble would burst. Then we got there and it was as ordinary as you like. Nothing special. They lived in a little modest bungalow, really nicely kept. A kind of neat couple.

  ‘His mum was a very sweet, grey-haired Scottish woman. Very pleased to see him. I remember her being not overbearing. She was very warm and friendly, but not too much of a big presence. Dad made cheeky jokes. Joe was certainly visiting out of duty. He felt uncomfortable about it. Yet there was nothing that was awkward at all. His parents were lovely to him, and really complimentary to me. It was formal in the old-fashioned sense. More like “How you doing, old man?” than arms around each other.’

  In the background to this visit were two issues that Joe never discussed with Jeannette; one was his father’s past in India. ‘You’d think that would be something he would be bragging about,’ said Jeannette; more fundamentally, Joe never said a word to her about his brother David. ‘He never, ever talked to me about what happened to his brother. He told me he had a brother, but he never talked to me about the fact that he committed suicide. I knew that, but he obviously didn’t want to talk about it, and he never brought it up. He didn’t want to talk about anything real.’

  Later that afternoon the pair caught the train back to London. ‘That was the last time I saw him as his girlfriend. He took me to see his parents and then after that he never called me again.’ When Jeannette next called round to 31 Albany Street, Joe had moved, leaving no forwarding address. After her time with Joe, Jeannette became a member of John Lydon’s PIL, when she formed a relationship for a time with Keith Levene, whom Joe had summarily dumped as well.

  Joe had also fled Albany Street. Awkward questions had been raised around him as his new status as punk spokesman brought with it unwelcome elements. Specifically, Joe’s address had been under the microscope. In the NME Tony Parsons railed that his choice of abode was tantamount to class betrayal. Punk audiences responded accordingly, and the sneering chant of ‘White Mansion’ became commonplace at Clash shows.

  A serious culture Clash: Joe takes on Rick Wakeman on the BBC ’yoof‘ television programme, Don’t Quote Me (Joe Stevens)

  Joe moved into accommodation in Gloucester Terrace, just to the west of Baker Street. Although only essentially a bedsitter, its exclusive West One address marked it out as expensive. Wary of damaging his credibility, but also perhaps enjoying a measure of solace, Joe refused to tell anyone where he was living. Only Johnny Green knew where it was, because he would drop Joe off there. The place was tiny – a room with two single beds in it, a table and a chair. Joe loved it there, feeling it was where he should be, living off tins of tomato soup he would heat up in the lone saucepan that was provided on the single electric ring. More than one observer suggested Joe liked living in academic and almost monk-like ways, probably a throw-back to boarding school.

  ‘They weren’t cheap, those flats,’ remembered Johnny Green. ‘He said he couldn’t write, because he was too accessible in Albany Street. He wanted time on his own. He needed to be on his own, regularly. Even on tour he always had to have that space. If the space started getting closed down he’d fuck off for a couple of hours. He could play at being the cheapskate, but then he moved into a place like that, because he knew he needed it.’

  In May 1978 Bob Dylan came to London for a series of dates. On the same label as the Clash, he was placed under the care of Ellie Smith, the company’s press officer, who gave him a copy of The Clash. He loved it. At Joe Strummer’s suggestion Ellie took the maestro to the shebeen-like Four Aces reggae club in rough Dalston. He loved it. Ellie Smith was almost fired for this.

  The Clash in their natural habitat, beneath the Westway in 1978. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  By May the Clash were in Island studios in Basing Street in Notting Hill, renowned for the quality of work which emerged from it. The studio had a distinctly Jamaican feel; Bob Marley had used it to record both his Exodus and Kaya albums, as well as ‘Punky Reggae Party’. Beginning on Saturday 20 May, Jack Hazan and David Mingay shot several sessions for Rude Boy. Earlier in the month, on 7 May, they had filmed a show at Barbarella’s in Birmingham, the group’s performance of ‘Police and Thieves’ that night making it to the final cut of the movie. Accompanying them was Ray Gange. ‘Ray was awed by Joe. If Joe would speak to him it was a big deal,’ said David Mingay. Not only was David a witness to the recording of much of the album, but he filmed it and – as you do when making a film – watched the resulting footage many, many times, studying the events and psychology at work.

  Paul had decided he needed to get in the mood for studio-work by watching aerial battles from World War II. A projector was acquired, and David Mingay went to the Imperial War Museum on South Lambeth Road and rented a number of classic war movies, including Battle of Britain and Tora, Tora, Tora. While the various members worked in the studio, Messerschmitts and Spitfires would dive across their bodies as the films were projected onto the studio wall. ‘They’d watch it and then play. It seemed to create the right adrenaline, and Paul would wear this military-like uniform. Joe pretended to go along with it, like a schoolmaster getting enormously excited by the idea of this young fellow, slightly patronizingly – though Paul didn’t notice that. Mick was in favour of it.’ David Mingay noted that Sandy Pearlman and Corky Stasiak, his engineer, seemed like strangers in a strange land. ‘Pearlman couldn’t deny the originality of Paul’s idea, even though it invaded his lovely studio. Pearlman obviously found them difficult. He was really just sitting there as Corky Stasiak did the work, in the manner of engineers. Mick sat up there all the time with the pair of them. It was obvious that he really wanted to produce the record. But CBS wouldn’t let him. There was a huge plan
that CBS were trying to ruthlessly expedite to try and break the group in America. Joe was looking very worried, whispering, taking honey drinks, walking around looking shifty and a bit depressed. Bernie only came down once a week, bringing the wages from Camden. The group were worried whenever Bernie was going to show up in case he didn’t like the new material.’

  ‘A lot of stuff went on behind our back,’ said Joe. ‘When we were recording we thought, “We’re in Island’s Basing Street studios, this is the big realm, let’s rock.” We didn’t realize there was a whole crew of Yanks in the room with Pearlman, everyone putting their oar in.’ You wonder what might have been had Joe managed to pull off his dream of who should produce the Clash’s second album: when they had been living together in Canonbury, shortly after they had released the first album, he and the Clash’s roadie Roadent had fantasized that there was one ideal producer for the follow-up – John Lennon. Of course, this was not to be. But this wish says much about the John Lennon-like persona that Joe bore; and provides an explanation for a remark uttered by him – to roars of appreciation – when the Clash had played at Leeds University the previous autumn: ‘No more Queen Elizabeth. And no more Rolling Stones or Beatles. But John Lennon rules, OK?’ As the photographer Bob Gruen, on that tour with the Clash, remarked: ‘I thought, “How come John manages to escape?”’

  David Mingay noted how Joe Strummer and Mick Jones took differing roles at different times. ‘Joe was culturally quite limited, but also quizzically interested in culture. In the studio he’d have a beer and sit down with a pencil, and sketch out a song. Half the time he’d be an amusing, rational person, a little bit existentialist, a little bit on his own, prepared to give you a short amount of time; then he would veer off and wander into a corner, do something else. Then he would seem slightly a loner: he wouldn’t really talk, and would look rather tragic. But he could be incredibly sensible and understanding of what was going on. Then there’d be these other areas where he would seem just inexplicably thick. Mick, on the other hand, seemed to be the heart of the Clash. There would be great impatience in the group, because one person would learn their parts in five minutes, and another would take like what seemed five months. They realized there are certain rules about being in a group that must be observed, as there are in a marriage. I think they realized to confront problems in a major way – to the extent that they’d have to leave the group – would entail a fundamental alteration in their lifestyle. You had the impression by now they had become a bit tired of their squat existences – they were tired of being uncomfortable.