Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘Any time,’ he noted, ‘there’s any urban disturbances they always occur in the poor areas of town. Why don’t they happen in the rich areas? More things would get smashed up if they did. If it’s in London it’s always in either the East End or in Notting Hill: the other day I was walking along and I saw that all of Tavistock Crescent is gone. And they used to seem to really know how to build houses fit for human beings to live in in those days. I mean, round by Westbourne Park Road these real egg-boxes have suddenly sprung up from behind the corrugated iron. Which is just brutal. I’d like to blow the head off the guy who designed those – or, better still, force him to live in it.’

  We discussed the paradox between his serious intent and the fact that so many Clash listeners seemed to miss out on the humour in their lyrics. I told him that there were certain tracks on the first album that made me burst out laughing every time I heard them.

  ‘Yeah,’ he smiled. ‘I think some of it’s really hysterical stuff. We all used to burst out laughing, too, when we first started playing them.’

  I mentioned that Mick Jones told me that he found it a strain when people tried to look on the group as evangelists: ‘Yeah … that’s a bore. Just a load of old crap. I think you’ve always just got to be grateful for what you’ve achieved and then just try and achieve some more.’

  But why did he think the group had got to the position where people thought the Clash had The Answer? ‘We give ’em good stuff. That’s all. There aren’t that many other groups around doing it.’ He named, among others, Sham 69 and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

  So look, I concluded, it’s two years on from when the group first started. How does it feel now?

  ‘I could’ve told you the answer without hearing the question. We’re a good group. That’s the only answer. And when you’re in a good group you feel good.’

  Causing mayhem throughout the land – there was a notable stage invasion by skinheads when the group played in Crawley in Sussex – the Clash on Parole tour continued until it wound up with four nights at the Music Machine in Camden Town. Joe made an impression on Gaby Salter, the girl he had met at Francesca Thyssen’s Christmas party. Late on a hot July night when the Clash had played one of their Music Machine dates, Alex Chetwynd, a family friend of Gaby’s, came across her at a bus stop in Notting Hill Gate, waiting with a chum for a night bus. ‘We’ve just been to see the Clash. Oh, that Joe Strummer is so gorgeous,’ Gaby sighed to Alex. ‘But his teeth are disgusting,’ commented her pal.

  Mick Jones and Joe Strummer were summoned to San Francisco to continue working on the recorded tunes at the Automatt studio. ‘Sandy Pearlman took us to his favourite studio in San Francisco and we worked there for three weeks, just Joe and me,’ Mick Jones told me. It was the first time either had been to the United States. Later Pearlman suggested that San Francisco was chosen as a location by the record company to keep the pair from the confusing influence of Bernie Rhodes.

  As experienced by many on their first visit to the United States, both Joe and Mick were getting plenty of input, visiting the celebrated City Lights bookstore, for example, and stocking up on texts by the Beat poets. In San Francisco they stayed at the Holiday Inn in Chinatown, where scenes from Dirty Harry had been filmed, something that impressed them. The hotel was opposite the city’s only punk club, The Mubai, where they went every night. Joe and Mick went to see a show by Carlene Carter, the daughter of Johnny Cash. Through Nick Lowe, who was by now going out with her, they got to meet Carlene: Mick knew Nick because he had produced an Elvis Costello track that the Clash guitarist had played on, ‘for which everyone had had a go at me.’ But as a consequence Joe got to meet the daughter of Johnny Cash, one of his musical heroes, and was seriously pleased.

  A musical source of inspiration sat in the studio itself, a tastefully stocked jukebox, including one record that was perfect for the repertoire of the Clash. ‘Mick and Joe came back from working on Give ’Em Enough Rope in San Francisco and at the studio they’d had a fantastic jukebox that included “I Fought the Law” by the Bobby Fuller Four,’ said Paul Simonon. ‘I’d never heard the song before. By the time they came back they knew how the song went, and we just adopted it. In some ways it became a Clash song. People even today think: “Oh, that’s a Strummer and Jones tune.” It’s become more Clash than Bobby Fuller, really.

  ‘I thought it was a great, rousing song. I liked the attitude, and the sentiment, lyric-wise, was so apt in some ways. The Bobby Fuller Four were from El Paso and played Texas rock’n’roll. What amazed us on the original was the guitar-playing, like fingers dancing like a gazelle, so in control but so light, in a Buddy Holly way. It was written by Sonny Curtis, one of the Crickets. You hear a lot of conflicting stories about what happened to Bobby Fuller: all I’m aware of was that he was in a car park and they poured gasoline down his throat and set him alight.’

  Paul yet again had been denied the opportunity of an overseas trip with Joe and Mick. Neither he nor Topper was happy. ‘We were asking if Paul and Topper could come over,’ said Mick Jones, ‘and they’re saying, “Oh, I don’t know.” We had a week off after we’d finished our recording – we were going to mix it at the Record Plant in New York, at 44th and 8th. We insisted, “We’ve got to have the other two over here, they’ve got to come. We’ll meet them in New York.”’

  To get to New York Joe – in a typical journey of (self-)exploration – drove across the United States in a Chevrolet pick-up truck with one Peter Impingo, ‘this friend that he made there who was this very religious guy,’ remembered Mick – who himself went to Los Angeles with Sandy Pearlman and then flew to New York.

  In New York together, the foursome linked up with photographer Bob Gruen. At the Record Plant he took a shot of Joe reclining on a couch, a replica of a picture Gruen had taken of John Lennon in the same position. After a day at the studio Gruen took them on a photo-shoot on the streets of New York: ‘It was real late, a rainy night, and we were driving around looking for steam coming up out of the streets, to get one of those classic Manhattan shots. The thing was, there’s a lot of steam in the winter, but not on a hot September night. We went down to Little Italy to try to get something to eat, but everywhere was closed. So we went to a deli and bought spaghetti and sauce and went back to my apartment and ate it and watched New York Dolls videos I’d made.’

  As soon as the Clash had hit New York Joe had been on the phone to another rock’n’roll photographer, Joe Stevens, who had moved back to his native New York. The photographer introduced the punk rocker to ‘the Candy Store’, a Puerto Rican Lower East Side bodega whose primary function was the vending of $10 bags of marijuana: Joe Strummer thought this was a great institution.

  ‘I’d give Joe the key to my place on the corner of West Houston Street and Thompson and he’d come over and hang out and watch TV and then say, “I’ve got to go and be a recording artist now.” He liked going to bookstores and talking to people in coffee-shops. He’d read the New York Times but he had a lot of half-baked political ideas, and his opinions were quite naïve. He didn’t quite get it, because he was quite young. He wasn’t that sharpish with the chicks. Even though I’d given him the key to my place, it never once happened for him.

  ‘He was very awkward with girls. I’d fix him up with young honeys, but nothing happened. He was shy, not aggressive enough. He was a funny guy. I said to him, “Did you get those teeth from John Rotten?”

  ‘The Clash seemed to have no money, and were dependent on friends. I was buying pizza and beer for them. They were living in the Royalton on 45th Street, and very poor. Not really having a good time, all a bit miserable. Hilly who owned CBGBs gave them an open tab. I especially liked Simonon, because he was funny. And Jonesy was looking great in those days. I’d see Joe and Jonesy sitting around discussing lyrics. They collaborated well. There was no certainly no war going on between them.’

  Joe and Topper, working in the Record Plant in New York City. (Joe Stevens)

  But ther
e was a war in one aspect of their lives. Away from London, Joe and Mick together in San Francisco, and then all four of the group together in New York, had discussed their increasingly fractious relationship with Bernie Rhodes. From 3,000 miles across the Atlantic he tried to put pressure on the group to return to London by booking a date for them at the Harlesden Roxy on 9 September, which would have meant abandoning their work at the Record Plant.

  Matters came to a head almost as soon as they returned to London, already exhausted from their time in the various studios – ‘We came out like zombies,’ said Joe. Bernie had rescheduled the Harlesden Roxy date for 25 September, but the show had been oversold – 1,600 tickets for a venue with a 900 capacity. Accordingly, the Clash turned up on that night to explain to the fans why they couldn’t play: they intended to reschedule a pair of shows to accommodate everyone who wanted to get in to see them – they gave out promotional T-shirts for the imminent ‘Tommy Gun’ single. I went to meet the group in Harlesden; I noticed that although there was no sign of Bernie Rhodes, Caroline Coon, Paul’s girlfriend, appeared to be directing operations. Afterwards we drove down to Khan’s, an Indian restaurant on Westbourne Grove. ‘I can’t think of any other group that turns up to a gig, spends a couple of hours talking to the fans in front of a fish and chip shop and then goes home,’ Mick Jones said to me. Weren’t the fans pissed off, I asked? ‘Wouldn’t you be?’ said Joe. ‘There were kids from all over the country: Cardiff, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Glasgow. What am I supposed to say when someone says to me that they’ve spent twenty quid to get to the Roxy and that they’re broke now?’ As we were leaving the restaurant, it was arranged that I should go round to Mick’s flat on Chepstow Place one lunchtime the next week to hear the new album. With all the group, nervously rolling joints, clustered expectantly around me – the very worst way to hear a new record – I sat in an armchair as it was played to me. It sounded very impressive, I told them, but the weight of anticipation around me made it not the most easy of listening experiences. The songs that stuck out for me were ‘Safe European Home’, ‘Stay Free’, ‘Guns on the Roof’ (despite the dubious pigeon-shooting origins of the tune), ‘Julie’s Working for the Drug Squad’ and ‘Tommy Gun’. ‘English Civil War’ seemed a little obvious. But the record was very different from the Clash – broader and brasher in both sound and themes. ‘There are more guitars per square inch on this record than on anything in the history of Western civilization,’ Sandy Pearlman had told the San Francisco-based rock critic Greil Marcus at the Automatt. The Sound of the Westway had become the Sound of the World.

  By now Bernie had booked a full set of dates, the Clash Sort It Out Tour, which kicked off with the group once again in Belfast, on 13 October, the day after news had broken that Sid Vicious had allegedly stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, sending shock waves through the punk world. But the tour then moved on for a quick canter around the European western seaboard, with shows in France, Belgium and Holland.

  Again, as in parts of the ‘On Parole’ tour, they were accompanied by film-makers Jack Hazan and David Mingay. What surprised this duo was that, a typically perverse and confrontational act, Bernie had also given a green light to another pair of film-makers, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, who had a brief from Thames Television to make a documentary about the Clash.

  ‘We went to Paris and had a wonderful time. They were so marvellous on this tour sometimes, and then we got to Belgium and suddenly Joan Churchill and Nick Broomfield were there on the plane,’ said David Mingay.

  In Amsterdam the Clash played at the potheads’ haven, the Paradiso. Perhaps inspired by the available wares, they played a show that Johnny Green regarded as ‘staggering’, the best show by the Clash that he ever saw. ‘We went to some club after the Paradiso,’ said David Mingay. ‘We’re by the bar with Joe, who’s in a nice mood. Jack said, “There can’t be two films about you. I’m going to ring our assistant tomorrow and tell him to put all that we’ve filmed so far in the bin and junk it.” Joe was incredibly drunk, and he said to Jack – because he always had respect for Jack, who wasn’t impressed with rock’n’roll groups and let that be seen – and said, “In the bin. It’s all in the bin.” I admired him for that, he was great. Then the next morning we were in the tour bus: “Hello, Joan, Nick.” The group were all gurgling with laughter in the back seat. Suddenly the bus drew up in a garage and the door was opened and the other two film-makers were told to move out. Then all the group said, “Hooray! Great! Got rid of Bernie! Bernie was trying to make a Communist film about us!”’

  What Joan Churchill and Nick Broomfield were unaware of was that they had become caught up in a power-play between the group and Bernie Rhodes. The group had decided that Bernie should no longer be manager of the Clash. The decision had essentially been made by Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, Joe reluctantly going along with it. In archetypal terms, this was a complex situation: Mick and Bernie had essentially founded the group, with – as group managers often are – Bernie as something of a father figure to Mick, and later to both Paul and Joe (‘He is the master and I’m the apprentice,’ said Mick). Now it was as though, in a replica of real life, the father was being turned against. To compound the complexity, Joe was against this change. ‘I was the only one who realized how lucky we were to have Bernie and tried to argue against it,’ he said. ‘I was the only one who’d been struggling around, bashing my head on the wall since ’71. It’s a thankless task trying to keep a group going in those circumstances. So I realized that Bernies didn’t grow on trees. But maybe Mick and Paul thought, “Hey, anyone can do this.”’ (It is worth noting that Bernie Rhodes was even more remote from the group than one might have realized. When Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s film Rude Boy was eventually released, Bernie spoke to David Mingay. ‘Bernie said that when he saw the film he learnt more from it than he’d ever learnt about the group when he was with them: “I’d never seen them before – I never realized what they were all about.” He had never listened to a word they said. That was it. He admitted it. He didn’t understand the dynamics of the group. Mick and Bernie had invented the group. Bernie felt that he had been the person that Joe then became, the leader of the group. He’d been the person who thought he knew what the group should do, the one who had been saying: “Don’t write these love songs, write something else.”’)

  Several candidates were considered for the task of taking over the management of the Clash. They included myself and photographer Pennie Smith: Mick told me that we would have formed ‘the Axis of Journalists’, along with Barry Miles. Miles, who wrote under his surname and had edited IT and worked for Apple Records in the late 1960s, had a meeting with the group, along with Ellie Smith, CBS’s head of publicity. The four Clash members had suggested the pair of them should come on board as a management team, and then all proceeds would be split six ways. But Miles and Ellie backed off from the project, essentially because Miles felt dealing with Joe over business was an uphill struggle. ‘He just didn’t seem to have a clue. He was like the most innocent schoolkid. Hopeless. Ellie and I had a meeting with them at which we went through their financial books – which amounted to about eight pages. Mick was still taking buses everywhere, and Bernie had a personalized number-plate, CLA5H, a bone of contention. But Joe just sat there smoking joints, saying, “Bernie’s OK.”’ After Miles and Ellie Smith had dropped out as potential Bernie replacements, another friend of Miles’s from the late sixties’ London underground era was brought on board – Caroline Coon, Paul’s girlfriend. Joe claimed to have been the one member of the group who did not favour the arrival of Caroline as manager. ‘Caroline’s achievement at [drug-bust charity] Release was phenomenal, really amazing. But I think her ability was more organizational than inspirational or visionary. So it didn’t translate too well into the weird rock world.’

  Besides, there was now another woman in Joe’s life – although as she had just had her seventeenth birthday on 1
2 October 1978, ‘girl’ is how she should properly be defined. While Joe had been in San Francisco, Topper Headon had started to go out with a girl called Dee; Dee was a good friend of Gaby Salter, whom Joe had briefly met at Francesca Thyssen’s Christmas party the previous year; Topper, Dee and Gaby started to hang out. Back in London Joe saw Gaby and checked up with Topper that this was indeed the girl he had met at Francesca’s soirée. ‘I’d bunked off school to go to a press reception for Give ’Em Enough Rope,’ said Gaby. ‘I was at CBS with Johnny Green waiting for Topper and Dee to go to this event, then Joe arrived and he asked me out.’ Gaby had heard a rumour that Joe was seeing a girl called Plaxy, a presence on the Clash scene. Was this true? she asked him. ‘No,’ Joe lied. So Gaby agreed to go on a date with him. ‘He met me at the Roebuck pub at World’s End. But it was a big punk scene and a bit too overwhelming for him, people were all over him, so we ended up with Steve Jones and Paul Cook at their flat in Bell Street.

  ‘I found out later that Dee had ambitions to get together with Joe: Topper was the stepping-stone. She was furious when he asked me out. We fell out – she still ended up sleeping with Joe.’ Not that Joe hadn’t provided Gaby with ample warning of the likelihood of this. ‘I’ve been to bed with over a hundred women,’ he revealed to her. ‘But you’re the one.’ Later, she appreciated she should have heeded the latent threat that lay in his boast. ‘Joe was one of the most unfaithful people I could have possibly met.’ Such conundrums of contemporary behaviour notwithstanding, this was the beginning of a relationship that – despite a nine-year age gap – would last over fourteen years.