Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Tall, blonde and beautiful, Gaby Salter adhered authentically to the standards of what would come to be seen as Joe’s female archetype. Her parents Tom and Frances Salter, the very definition of groovy Chelsea hipsters, had three children, Mark, Gabrielle and Nick. They had lived in a well-appointed house off the Fulham Road. In the 1960s Tom Salter had started the Great Gear Trading Company, which sold clothes and tourist bric-à-brac in Carnaby Street and in the King’s Road. ‘Joe used to call me the Twentieth Century Pop Kid,’ Gaby told me. ‘It was the Swinging Sixties: we had that swinging kind of life.’ Her father began to promote rock concerts, including the Grateful Dead at Alexandra Palace in north London in 1975. Debt followed. In 1976 the family moved briefly to the United States, where Tom and Frances split up. By the time Joe started going out with Gaby the sumptuous house had been sold to pay the money Tom owed; and Frances, Gaby and her two brothers were living in a council flat in nearby World’s End. Gaby was at Holland Park Comprehensive, retaking her O-levels.

  Very quickly this seventeen-year-old schoolgirl (‘I suppose the fact that Joe was twenty-six sounds shocking: our kids say he was a child molester – it sounds shocking to them but it didn’t seem it.’) moved in with Joe into his new home, a squat at 34 Daventry Street, round the corner from Steve Jones and Paul Cook in Bell Street. As with girls, as with homes: Joe had reverted to type.

  The squat in Daventry Street, off Edgware Road, had been taken over by Kate Korus, the original guitarist in the Slits who was now busy forming another group, the Modettes. Gaby was asked to audition for them, though nothing came of this. The property, a former shop, was a long-term, established squat, and Gaby found it quite acceptable. ‘I can always adapt. I can live in palaces or squats. Joe did tidy up in my honour. It was quite decent: there was hot running water and electricity.’

  The press launch of Give ’Em Enough Rope that Gaby mentioned was held at lunchtime in the St Moritz night club in Wardour Street – the Clash had convened nearby at CBS to go to it. Joe had immortalized the St Moritz in his 101’ers song ‘Sweety of the St Moritz’. At Joe’s request Julian Yewdall stood outside the venue, taking pictures of everyone leaving: ‘Joe said he wanted to know everyone who’d been to it.’

  Give ’Em Enough Rope was released in Britain on 10 November 1978 and in the United States seven days later. In the UK it had a mixed reception: Sounds gave it a five-star review; but Nick Kent in the NME felt it highlighted both the group’s strengths and its weaknesses; Jon Savage in Melody Maker came to the fairly devastating conclusion: ‘so do they squander their greatness’. But the album leapt into the British charts at number 2, its highest slot. In the United States the record received almost universally ecstatic reviews, Lester Bangs in the Village Voice as passionate as Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, where he wrote: ‘The Clash rain fire and brimstone, with a laugh. Give ’Em Enough Rope is a rocker’s assault on the Real World in the grand tradition of Beggar’s Banquet and Let It Bleed.’

  The Clash would become the biggest-selling import album ever in the United States, with over 100,000 copies sold before an amended release in 1979. But it was the official release of Give ’Em Enough Rope that was the benchmark for an understanding of the group by the broad American public. Among the first things Caroline Coon had set in motion was an American tour; she had managed to wheedle $30,000 of tour support from Epic (a division of CBS to which the Clash were signed in the States) in New York, and dates were booked to begin in early February 1979.

  They played the Harlesden Roxy on 25 and 26 October. The first date was filmed by Don Letts for a video for ‘Tommy Gun’. Joe wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase ‘H-BLOCK’, the internment wing of Long Kesh prison in Belfast.

  As the year neared its end there was a very serious trauma, of the sort that had characterized life for the group in 1978. Henry Bowles lived in the basement of his best friend Sebastian Conran’s house in Albany Street and was a good friend of Joe Strummer. By the second half of 1978, Sebastian Conran was managing Subway Sect for Bernie Rhodes, setting up shows for the group under the banner of Club Left. On 5 November 1978 Subway Sect played a gig in King’s Cross and Sebastian invited Henry Bowles along. As it was Guy Fawkes’ night, some wag decided to set off a banger. ‘Henry, who was a little guy, was laughing at a joke or something when the bouncers came in,’ said Sebastian Conran. ‘Someone said he’d set off the firework. He said, “Don’t be silly.” So they took him and threw him out the door, and he never woke up. Horrendous.’

  The death of Henry Bowles deeply affected Joe, who became involved in a campaign for regulations over the hiring of doormen at music venues. It marked the final involvement of Sebastian Conran with the music scene: ‘Punk rock ended for me when Henry was killed. After that I got very depressed, packed it all in and got a job.’ Joe ensured that the next album, London Calling, was dedicated to Henry Bowles.

  The British leg of The Clash Sort It Out tour began on 9 November in Bournemouth. By the time of this tour the strongest new song in the set – apart from ‘Safe European Home’ – was one not on the album: ‘I Fought the Law’. When they played Manchester Apollo on 23 November, Nick Kent wrote an article in the NME in which he claimed to detect tension between Joe and Caroline Coon. In Glasgow the group discovered that their two shows at Strathclyde University on 4 and 5 December were alleged to be open only to students. To check this, Joe borrowed a motorcycle helmet: disguised by it, he attempted to buy a ticket – and was refused. ‘I’m in the band,’ he informed the ticket-seller. ‘And we ain’t playing the gig.’

  At the gigs the Clash did play, Joe was always extremely aware of the size of crowd that the group could pull in. ‘If we play in Staffordshire,’ he would say, ‘I know we can get in about 400 people.’ Like a politician estimating whether he can win a seat, Joe knew the size of the Clash’s constituency throughout Britain, and – although he may always have been up for increasing it – he never exaggerated its size. (Joe liked staying in hotels on tour, and was always fond of the Gideon’s Bible found in most rooms: ‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it, that they put a book there for you for free, and what a great book to read.’ Joe’s understanding of the Bible, of course, was approached from the eye-level of Punk-Rastafari, and the admonition of Roots Rastas that the Book must be read at the rate of a chapter a day.)

  When they played the Music Machine in Camden on a snowy night on 19 December, a benefit for the Sid Vicious Defence Fund, Mick Jones and Glen Matlock played with support act Philip Rambow. Notwithstanding the fact that Rambow had first introduced Joe to Gaby Salter, Joe was furious with Mick for this. But Gaby said Joe was otherwise extremely happy with the progress of the Clash. ‘He was really buzzing and very positive. He was happy. It was starting to dawn on him that it was really working. Although he didn’t like the way that Caroline was managing things. He missed and trusted Bernie, the way he operated. I don’t know what had gone down with Bernie. There were so many issues around the Clash I ended up thinking they were aptly named. About now Joe wanted to split the songwriting money four ways and Mick didn’t – Joe later retracted this but then he wanted that. Whenever a decision had to be made one of them was always at odds with another. For a long time it was Joe against Mick – Paul and Joe were pretty much aligned with each other.’

  According to Johnny Green, at this time Joe himself felt quite isolated within the group, especially as the two most musical members, Mick Jones and Topper Headon, automatically gravitated towards each other. Soon Joe had moved with Gaby into her mother’s home at Whistler’s Walk in World’s End. ‘He was always very keen to get back to World’s End in a way he hadn’t with any of his other places,’ said Johnny Green. ‘There was an intensity about this relationship that drew him there, because you would never regard Joe as a dutiful man. I remember the staggering nature of just how besotted he was with Gaby. I was surprised, really. I never saw Paul like that: Paul had his independence always.

  ‘Strummer worked hard to keep a pr
ivate life. Even when I first met him at Albany Street, he created a private space. He’d hang around for beers in the pub, but I’d find out that afterwards he’d gone to Luton to watch Ray Campi and the Rock’n’Roll Rebels. I’d say, “Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have gone.” “Oh, all right.” He didn’t appear to be separate, but in fact he was. It’s the same with him going to World’s End. Different world: BANG! Steps out of the world he’s in.’

  By going to live with Gaby and her mother and two brothers, Joe was accepting and honouring a weighty responsibility, a sign of maturity. ‘Joe,’ said Gaby, ‘became the patriarch of my family. He took on me, my mother, my brothers. We’d lost our home, we’d lost everything and later his home became our family’s home. In some ways we gave him that sense of family. He was very generous and giving in that way.’

  Joe’s generosity meant he was also capable of giving extremely bad advice. ‘There was this time I was down the pub and I’d been with my ex-bird,’ said Johnny Green. ‘I was really proud of her. She’s with some other bloke in her place across the road. Joe goes, “Go and hit him. That’s what you do if you love someone. You fight them.” I went over, smacked the bloke, kicked him in the head. The girl is screaming, and leaves with him. I go back to the pub. Joe says, “How did you get on?” I said, “Don’t ever give me advice again.” He laughed. I was distraught. I’d lost my girl.’

  Within two months of going out with Gaby, Joe had taken her to Warlingham to meet his parents: ‘I adored his dad. He was quickwitted, had a wicked sense of humour. His mother was very quiet, very stoic and seemed a bit like she’d been beaten down by life: she’d lost a son, and because she’d travelled a lot she didn’t have a community of her own. She was very loyal to Ron. She seemed quite withdrawn. Anna quite liked a drink and I think a lot of that was the foreign lifestyle. Joe was charming, he was brought up as an embassy child – he knew how to fix you a drink. But he was not all charm: he was a chameleon – he was exactly what you wanted him to be. People think they know Joe but everyone got a different part of him.’

  Gaby – who was a couple of inches taller than Joe – noted that he looked ‘very much like his mother and like his father. He was the same build as his dad, his dad was slightly smaller – Joe was five foot eight. His mum was five two.’ At 15 Court Farm Road the subject of David arose, but was met with almost entirely sealed lips from Ron and Anna Mellor. As to Joe’s thoughts about David, said Gaby, ‘he felt somewhat guilty. He survived at boarding school and his brother didn’t. Joe was still having a go at his mother on her deathbed about boarding school. It did traumatize them. His mother told me – and there is absolutely no reason why his brother was like he was because of this – that when they left Turkey David had lost his nanny, the first person he’d lost. He used to cry for his yayah.

  ‘I’d heard Joe had been bad at school but it was worse than that: he was appalling at school. He was totally self-taught. He had a highly evolved mind and intelligence but when it came to working at school he just wasn’t interested. His father had built his life on guts and determination, and Joe was totally the opposite. It was difficult for Ron as he thought the only way you could better yourself was to be educated. Joe’s marks were horrendous. He wasn’t even trying. But he was really popular in school. His brother was not only not popular, he was a loner. Joe loved that there were girls at school; in some ways he made the best of it.

  ‘David was just very withdrawn. He had a deep depression and sense of paranoia. There was depression in the family. I know Joe suffered from it.’ For her own part, Gaby’s schooling suffered: there was a contradiction between her life with Joe and her return to secondary school at Holland Park Comprehensive: ‘I would get the train on a Friday night to join him on tour, intending to go back to school on Monday morning. But it ended up being more like Thursday afternoon. I ended up mucking up my schooling again.’

  The Clash ushered in 1979 by playing three dates at the Lyceum Ballroom, off the Strand in central London, on 28 and 29 December and 3 January. These were probably their best shows in London to date, and the 3 January concert was filmed for Rude Boy. What these extraordinary Christmas shows did was to cement the reputation of the Clash as the hippest act in town.

  In January they went into Wessex studios in Islington for three days to record ‘I Fought the Law’, which had been received with such acclaim – as the second tune in the twenty-odd song set – on the recent tour. Mick Jones produced the record, and the session was engineered by Bill Price, who had worked with Mott the Hoople and on the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album. At this session the group also recorded ‘Groovy Times’ and ‘Gates of the West’ and remade ‘Capital Radio’ – previously only available on the NME free single.

  14

  RED HAND OF FATE

  1979

  On 30 January 1979 the Clash flew to Vancouver in Canada for a couple of days’ rehearsal, before playing their first date of the ‘Pearl Harbour’ tour – as it was almost inevitably named – in the town. ‘I flew up to Vancouver,’ said Bob Gruen. ‘I remember everyone being really nervous about whether they would be searched at the border. Would the band be harassed? They all psyched up for it.’

  ‘Everyone had emptied their pockets of millions of knives etcetera that they thought were not allowable,’ said Paul Simonon.

  ‘Then no one even looked at them at immigration,’ said the photographer.

  After the tour bus had stopped for the night in Seattle, where Topper Headon paid tribute to Bruce Lee at his graveside, the party woke to the grim news that Sid Vicious had overdosed in New York and died. In a state of some shock they continued down the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco.

  In an inspired move by CBS publicist Ellie Smith, Joe would record the entire trip in diary form for the NME. He definitely now appeared the spokesman – and therefore leader – for the group.

  Their first show was at the Berkeley Community Center on 7 February, an utter triumph – every concert had sold out when the tour was announced. The pre-show introductory music was ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ by local boy Sly Stone. ‘There was no gobbing,’ said Paul. ‘That was a big plus, because clothes tended to last longer. I suppose people were trying to figure out what the whole thing was about from what they’d read in the press about punk groups in London.’ ‘The first show was a blast,’ confirmed Bob Gruen. ‘The place was full of happy, dancing people. The Clash were more than your average good-time band. You not only had a good time but you also thought about issues that bothered people. Things were serious and there was a lot to be angry about, but there was also a lot to have fun about. The force of the music made it sound like a battlefield, a clash. The lights were always flashing, like explosions.’

  The next afternoon the group travelled with the photographer to the Sunday flea-market in nearby Sausalito. ‘I found loads of bits and pieces there,’ said Paul. The group purchased assorted leather jackets and vintage relics of Americana. Afterwards they drove with Gruen to Mount Tamalpais, in Mill Valley. Sitting up on its heights they could see for miles over the Pacific and back inland.

  That night – much to the anger of Bill Graham, promoter of the official Berkeley show – the Clash played another date, a benefit gig for the homeless at the Geary Temple in what had been the old Filmore West, which ironically had been established by Graham at the height of flower-power. The second show the Clash played in the USA was a benefit – right from the start they nailed their colours to the mast. On this, his second visit to San Francisco, Joe met a political radical called Mo Armstrong, formerly a member of Daddy Longlegs, an American group who had moved to England in 1970. ‘He’d become very left-wing,’ said Joe, ‘and he gave us the info, which was quite hard to find, about the Sandinistas. It was the sort of thing they weren’t interested in printing in the Sunday Times. A bunch of Marxist teenage hooded rebels oust one of your favourite dictators? The establishment didn’t want to know about it.’

  At the requ
est of both Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon a support act on the tour was Bo Diddley. ‘I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,’ confessed Joe. Caroline Coon had tracked Bo down in Australia. His fee was more than the Clash would earn on the door – initially he refused to play any of his classic songs because he didn’t own the copyright to those tunes. Paul remembered, ‘Bo Diddley used to sit up all night and put his guitar in the bunk instead. Which was unusual.’ On the video system on the bus, rented from Dolly Parton, there were endless viewings of the first Star Wars movie. When the bus was pulled up by a speed cop, the officer demanded that everyone get down from it. ‘Well, I have to tell you,’ said the man behind the wheel, using his wits, ‘we got Dolly Parton asleep in the back.’ Reverential at the mention of the Queen of Country, the cop rescinded his order and waved the vehicle on.

  In Los Angeles the Clash played at the Santa Monica Civic, just back from the Pacific. Another triumph. Robert Hilburn wrote in the Los Angeles Times that it was ‘one of the most exhilarating rock shows in years’. He spotted – how could he not? – the onstage strength of Joe Strummer: ‘The band’s strongest visual lure on stage spits out the lyrics with such alarming intensity that a life insurance salesman would think twice about writing him a policy.’ The show was most notable for a post-gig incident that has entered Clash legend. Assembled with the local Epic hierarchy for the kind of self-congratulatory photographs beloved of the record industry, the group suddenly cut and ran, walking straight out of the room, to the bafflement and apoplexy of the company employees. Joe explained this act to Billboard, the American music trade publication: ‘If you let them you’ll have no soul left, and if you have no soul you cannot make records. We’d rather make our records, even if they don’t make the Top 100.’ Despite the Clash’s endless railings against CBS in London, the group’s actual relationship with the company was more complex. Almost every time I went into CBS’s headquarters in Soho Square, members of the Clash could be found there, having sociable chats – especially with Ellie Smith, head of publicity. With much of their income frozen by Bernie Rhodes, the record company was keeping the group going – this even extended to the dishing out of large amounts of promotional records, knowing only too well they would be immediately sold at the nearest discount store, bearing out what Muff Winwood said of Maurice Oberstein’s strategy to make it appear as though there was constant conflict between the company and the group. Caroline Coon had an even-handed vision as to the Santa Monica Civic lost photo-opportunity. ‘Part of the punk ethic was to refuse to be in any way gracious to anyone from the record company who came backstage,’ said Caroline. ‘My charm helped a bit, especially when we ran out of money halfway through the tour, and I had to go on my knees to the record company and ask for more cash to finish the tour. But they did it because the Clash were playing fantastic gigs that were absolute sell-outs.’