Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Filming on Rude Boy was complete. David Mingay went down to Vanilla to remind the group of their promise to write a song for the end-title music. When he arrived in Pimlico, Joe pretended they’d forgotten about it. But they already had the tune, ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’, a song that used the faster reggae rhythm of the late 1960s. It was one of the Clash’s best-ever tunes, a timeless number, written especially to link up with the Rude Boy title. ‘It was written about Ray being a drunken idiot, and Joe particularly put that line in – “drinking brew for breakfast”. Myself and Jack Hazan went there to hear what they were doing. They delivered it on time, efficiently and professionally. They weren’t rebellious in any way where their work was concerned.’

  When the two film-makers visited Vanilla, Joe was working on the vocals of another new song, ‘Death or Glory’. While filming Rude Boy Joe had told David Mingay of his love of Casablanca, the 1942 cinematic masterpiece starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a regular treat on television. ‘Death or Glory’ has intriguing lyrics, cynical, world-weary, perhaps revelatory. Joe makes both a statement of intent and a comment on the reality of that intent. Is Joe considering himself in the marvellous second verse? ‘I believe in this, and it’s been tested by research / That he who fucks nuns will later join the church.’

  The song misquotes Casablanca, a take-off of the film’s famous set-piece song, ‘As Time Goes By’, and its lines ‘It’s just the same old story / A tale of love and glory.’ ‘He admitted to me that he had twisted it around from “As Time Goes By”,’ said David Mingay. ‘I think he was always worried – or at least romantically interested – in the idea that it should all end in an intensity that could cause death, as had happened with Sid Vicious. That for the icon of being a rock star to really work it would have to die, to die young.’

  The line ‘He who fucks nuns will later join the church’ – clearly not taken from the lyrics of ‘As Time Goes By’ – always seemed greatly significant, Joe speaking of his own dilemmas and internal difficulties: the anarchist squatter who in some way regarded himself as a failure or traitor for having broken with his past and joined the Clash – where a different form of conformity was called for. In his battle with himself Joe couldn’t win. Don Letts said, ‘The problem with Joe is that he sees everything in terms of black and white: always one or the other. He doesn’t realize that there are all these shades of grey in the middle. He’s beating himself up over that.’ But most of that was yet to come. It would grow much larger before it was fully visible.

  With his omniscient energy, Joe Strummer is now building his separate place in the iconography of the Clash. You receive a cinematic vision when you think of his quest for a producer for the new songs, Joe trawling through the sweaty, characterless pubs filled with trashed lives spattered about late 1970s’ Oxford Street, a man on a mission, searching for another man with charisma: the legendary Guy Stevens, whom the group felt had been unjustly treated over their Polydor demos. Joe Strummer recalled, ‘I found a row of blokes sitting slumped over the bar staring in their beer. I looked down this row and I spotted him because of his woolly hat.’ Joe recognized that face, like a wounded puppy; he’d been there, knew that Guy was grappling with private turmoils that were never spoken of, life’s ironies, like the way that this infinitely influential record producer had a son who had been born stone deaf. ‘I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, he looked round and it was like son-finding-father in one of those corny films. He looked up at me and said, “Have a drink.”’ Joe gave him his pitch, asked him to produce the new album. ‘I’m just a bloke trying to get it out there,’ he said to Guy. ‘We need you, you need us. Let’s do it.’ ‘OK,’ said Guy, downing his pint. As he had no means of listening to the new tunes, the Clash had to buy him a cassette-recorder. When he’d heard them he went up to Wessex in Islington, where the group were setting up for the sessions. A deal was struck, Mick Jones finagling the producer some percentage points from CBS. Despite considerable opposition from within his own company, Maurice Oberstein had gone along with their suggestion that Guy Stevens produce this new album. It cannot have been easy for the dapper Oberstein to negotiate with the producer. Firstly, there was a very specific physical problem: as though you felt it could be some form of commentary on punk rock itself, Guy would spray you with a constant storm of spittle as he spoke, snowflakes of dandruff sprinkling about him with every movement of his head. ‘They hate his guts!’ said Joe. ‘They said they wouldn’t use him again until he was bankable. It gives me heart when Guy tells us about his business history. At least there’s someone around who’s as bad as us, if not worse. All the dreadful, life-wrecking things that’ve happened to him. People tend to be afraid of him because he’s off the wall, to put it mildly. And they should be.’ Joe Strummer was not without a sense of perspective about an almost wilful eccentricity around Guy Stevens: ‘There’s a little bit of an act in there, but it’s not entirely an act. It puts a lot of people off. They just think, “Christ, get this man home.”’ Mick Jones had his own understanding of why Guy Stevens’s lateral approach to record production worked so well: ‘His presence in a studio definitely makes all the difference. It’s like all the mess goes to him like Dorian Gray’s portrait or whatever. All the messy sound goes and it becomes him, and what’s left on the tape is … clarity.’ Guy Stevens loved working with the group, as he told Charles Shaar Murray after the record had been completed: ‘It’s been tremendously refreshing working with the Clash. They’ve changed a lot since I first knew them in ’76. Joe is great, because he always puts you straight if you’re out of order. The whole thing happened very naturally. It just worked.’

  Did there seem an element of Clash-Aid-to-the-Walking-Wounded over the hiring of Guy? As a deterrent to the spittle with which Guy Stevens would spray you as he spoke, Joe invented what he called ‘the splatterboard’, which he insisted Guy hold in front of him as he spoke to them, only his eyes appearing over the top. But he was the inspiration the group had hoped for. Thanks to the DVD release in the 25th Anniversary Edition of London Calling, many of us have seen the footage of Guy in the studio swirling a step-ladder around his head as Mick Jones tries to record a guitar part. (‘Guy’s methods would be considered in modern-day production a little bit out there. But he didn’t actually swing the ladder at me, it was more like he was just swinging the ladder, but I was nimble enough to make space’). And heard the story of him pouring a bottle of red wine into a piano as Joe played it, to improve the sound; or the one about Guy lying in front of Obie’s Rolls Royce until the record company boss admitted how ‘brilliant’ the new record sounded. Or the arrangement that the group had to make so that on the way to every session he could ritualistically stand in the middle of Arsenal football ground as a cab waited for him.

  But Guy Stevens’s production methods did not all hinge around confrontation: in Joe’s personal archive is a copy of a biography of the actor Montgomery Clift written by Patricia Bosworth, given to him by the producer, signed by Guy and dated ‘July 28 1979’. ‘The Right Profile’, a tribute to Clift, was written after that, in the midst of the sessions.

  ‘Brand New Cadillac’, a cover of the classic by Vince Taylor and His Playboys, was the first tune recorded. There was an assumption at the time the album was released that this was a tune recently picked up on by the Clash, part of their new romance with rockabilly. But not according to Paul. Even before Joe met up with them he and Mick had loved the classic English rocker: ‘“Brand New Cadillac” dates back to that period when Mick and me were living in the squat in Davis Road in Shepherd’s Bush. The record was lying around in the house, and when Joe met up with us there we used to play it a lot. We were trying to work out how the song went. Once we’d sussed it, we started playing it a lot more. At first it was only played in a playful way, not as a song to go in the set.’ The version on London Calling, the second song on the nineteen-tune double LP, is a recording of the first time the group had run through ‘Brand New Cadi
llac’ in the studio. ‘It’s a take,’ said Guy Stevens.

  The usual suspects: the Clash at Wessex Studios during the London Calling sessions, (left-to-right, front row) engineer Bill Price, producer Guy Stevens, CBS record company boss Maurice ‘Obie’ Oberstein. (Pennie Smith)

  At Wessex the Clash pounded through extraordinary new material. Key moments were ‘Clampdown’, a decisive and powerfully rocking statement about the never-had-it-so-good materialist thinking Joe saw at the core of the rise in right-wing thinking. Joe’s faint falsetto ‘Who’s barmy now?’ is his throwaway final line, continuing that great tradition. ‘I’m so nervous!’ is Joe’s one-liner in ‘Lovers’ Rock’, the group’s first love song. ‘Lost in the Supermarket’, sung by Mick, was criticized as ‘another typically wimpy Mick Jones song’ by those in the press who sneered at his supposed ‘rock star poseur stance’. But, as Joe told me, he had written the song, realizing it closely reflected what he knew of the guitarist’s earlier life. ‘I thought Joe wrote that for me,’ said Mick. ‘I didn’t have a hedge in the suburbs. But the people who live on the ceiling I knew all about. And the line about long-distance calls making me lonely could be about me and my mum.’ Perhaps the Mick Jones detractors should have listened more closely: when Joe himself sings the penultimate chorus as a counterpoint to Mick – ‘I’m all lost!’ – the song attains a transcendent melancholy beauty.

  ‘I’m Not Down’ also tackled depression – Mick shouts the word out in the song – although Mick says that it’s not something he ever brought up with Joe: ‘It was there. There was a point when you got right down to it and you couldn’t quite go past. About his brother, … there was something in there about that. He’d never tell anything about that. Then years later I just casually asked one day “How’s your mum?” We’re in a bog somewhere, having a piss, and he says, “She’s got cancer.” There was stuff like that all inside. Really shocking to even look at.’

  In similar melodic vein is ‘Spanish Bombs’, romantic in both sentiment – notably Joe’s enduring fascination and love for Spain and in particular the poet Federico García Lorca – and the kind of melody Mick Jones was so adept at producing, which opened side two of what would be a double vinyl LP. ‘Jimmy Jazz’, set to a New Orleans jazzy-blues feel, is the story of a Rasta who has killed Jimmy Dread – what was Joe saying about his shifting interests in music? ‘The Guns of Brixton’ had a similar theme, the first-ever Clash number sung by Paul Simonon, unexpectedly creating a different dynamic in the set.

  There was a version of Lloyd Price’s ‘Stagger Lee’ that cut almost immediately into ‘Wrong ’Em Boyo’ by the Rulers. Although this felt a splendid example of Clash art-school intuition, it was a strict replication of how the Rulers had originally recorded it. ‘I don’t know who the Rulers were,’ said Paul. ‘It was a mid-sixties’ record, with a ska element to it, before Jamaican music evolved. The original Lloyd Price song might have come from Bernie. It wasn’t just Bernie Rhodes who put records on the jukebox at Rehearsals. We all did. There were things that belonged to Bernie, some were mine, and some were Mick’s. I don’t think Joe put any on: Joe just had lots of record covers but no records.’

  The album continues to build its widescreen drama with the galloping ‘Four Horsemen’, a call to arms, another conscience-shaker: ‘You’re never gonna ride that lonely mile / And put yourself up on trial.’ It’s a stir to action, and Joe’s scolding is heightened by the heroic romantic feel of the song, reflected in its self-mythologizing melody.

  Tucked away at the end of the album, as you get set to leave it, is the statement of intent of ‘Revolution Rock’, couched in laughs, the best way of getting anything over. It was a cover of a recent reggae record, ‘Revolution Rock’ by Danny Ray, which had a more ‘poppy’ sound than the rougher Clash version. ‘Danny Ray put out his version of “Revolution Rock” just before we were recording London Calling,’ Paul told me. ‘Our version has a whole different attitude, and also you’ve got the element of Joe throwing in different lyrics. The horns section takes it to another point too.’ By the time it appears on London Calling, ‘Revolution Rock’ sounds more Jamaican than the original, Joe a cool-throated badman of the microphone: ‘Oo-la-oo-la-oo-la-oo-la-oo-la,’ he half-doowops, half-chants like a mantra, towards the end. He pushes the lyrics to the max, urging them out, adding, extemporizing at length, inventing whole verses, almost speaking in tongues – and his control, his timing, is awesome, a perfect performance. ‘Everybody smash up your seats and rock to this brand new beat,’ he urges, conspiratorially – on the original Danny Ray sings ‘Everybody get off your seats’.

  ‘Revolution Rock’ is a real statement of intent from Joe and the Clash. He popped in this message of punk-rock self-motivation, Joe, who secretly believed in hard work as much as his father had: ‘young people shoot their days away’. ‘Revolution Rock’ is one of the Clash all-time greats, intended to wind up the album, but for the last-minute addition of ‘Train in Vain’, Mick’s urgent late entrant, at first intended as a free single to give away with the NME – ‘It was too good for that,’ said Mick. ‘Revolution Rock’ was also a stylistic declaration: from now on the Clash entered a phase of dubbed-out, longer stage shows, rockers galore.

  On an album of magnificent material, the greatest song on London Calling is almost certainly track 1, side 1, the title track. ‘London Calling’, comprised of a simple chord sequence, is an ecology-in-crisis song, long before this began to be realistically feared. There were always those in the know about what was really going on in the world, and Joe was one not afraid to address the issues. In his June 1979 NME interview with Charles Shaar Murray he had declared, ‘There’s 10,000 days of oil left. It’s finite.’ Joe Strummer had been inspired to write the song riding back with Gaby Salter in a taxi from Vanilla to World’s End. As the cab drove along Cheyne Walk, next to the river Thames, they were talking about the state of the world in the light of the nuclear disaster in the USA that March at Three Mile Island – an event that worried people around the world. ‘There was a lot of Cold War nonsense going on,’ Joe said. ‘We already knew London was susceptible to flooding. She told me to write something about that. So I sat in the front room, looking out at Edith Grove. Years later, I found out I was looking right onto the flat where the Stones lived when they started out, which seemed appropriate.’

  Such thinking was in tune with what he was writing in ‘London Calling’. The lyrics for this song didn’t just pour off Joe’s pen, as he would suggest happened with various sets of song words. There are at least half a dozen versions of ‘London Calling’ lyrics, some substantially different from what we hear on the final song. In what seems to be the earliest version, the lyrics of a prototype of ‘Lovers’ Rock’ are intertwined with some of what we know as ‘London Calling’: Joe talks about the need to splash your seed on the wall – which seems to be an anti-contraceptive pill rant.

  At first the song isn’t called ‘London Calling’ but ‘News of Clock Nine’, a reference to the BBC television news in those days broadcast at 9 o’clock each weekday evening: ‘London calling’ was the call-sign for BBC radio broadcasts during World War II. What follows is from what is probably the third draft.

  London Calling News of clock nine

  Birth Control – there’s a plot on it

  London Calling the past is a cult.

  The right kind of parka is proof of the doubt

  London Calling – the fools and the clowns

  You should be more careful – when you jeer your way around

  London Calling – kings of the south

  Hated all over – kings of the mouth

  Permanently anxious to further the progress of the Clash, Mick Jones was concerned for the prospects of the now managerless group. Meeting Peter Jenner again when Mick played on Philip Rambow’s first solo album, they fell into conversation. With his partner Andrew King, Pete Jenner had formed Blackhill, the company that put on the Blind Faith and Rolling Stones free co
ncerts in Hyde Park in 1969; the original managers of Pink Floyd, they had done the same job for Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias, who stayed with Joe in Maida Vale. Now Blackhill looked after Ian Dury and the Blockheads, whose New Boots and Panties was an iconic punk album. Crucially, Pete Jenner and Andrew King had reputations for being scrupulously honest. And there was a bonus: working for Blackhill was Kosmo Vinyl, a sort of conceptual publicist with energy, attention to detail and generosity of spirit.

  It didn’t seem a bad team. Pete Jenner and Andrew King were invited down to Wessex to meet the group. ‘Bernie has completely destroyed us,’ they were told. ‘We have no idea what has happened. We’ve fallen into a black hole.’ Jenner and King were rewarded with a management deal – a gentleman’s agreement, nothing signed. With the package came Raymond Jordan, in charge of security.

  Significantly the choice of Blackhill to manage the Clash was made by Mick Jones; again Joe found himself pushed to the margins over who would care for his career. As he had started the Clash, did Mick consider it to be his group? ‘S’pose. To a degree.’ Eight years later when I had a conversation with Pete Jenner about the Clash, I was surprised by the extent of his vitriol towards the singer. ‘I thought Mick Jones was fine, but Joe was a complete arsehole,’ he said forcefully. What had happened to make him feel like this? Sitting in a restaurant on the Harrow Road, only a couple of hundred yards from Walterton Road, I reminded Pete Jenner of that assessment of Joe. ‘I suppose nowadays I couldn’t really see him as a complete arsehole,’ he admitted, ‘because actually he was really nice and really committed on all the ideas. But he failed to link things together. He wasn’t stupid, but he failed to link A to B to C. There were rational problems that could be dealt with. All of their problems were solvable. But Joe would not let you solve them, and then would blame you when the further problems that you predicted did occur.