Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  All the same, it’s good inside Joe’s world. He can put a lot of interesting words together, sometimes pulling them in from the conversational action around him. Joe likes the sound of words, appreciates their texture and tone and nuances; like a modern-day Balzac searching for le mot juste for his tales of street-life, he painstakingly tries to forever feel out the right ones. ‘He was really a writer,’ said Gaby. ‘He used to work at it so hard.’ Let’s not forget the actor within him, the Brando-like delivery of the one-liners dropped into the conversational mix, like surreal bullet shots, with a killer pay-off line. He’s happy at home at World’s End, even though he and Gaby have an occasional propensity to break up. Joe Strummer isn’t one of the easiest people to live with.

  But he wasn’t going back to World’s End after these American shows. Inspired by Mikey Dread’s work with them on ‘Bankrobber’ there was consideration that the next album might be a reggae version-excursion with Mikey at the controls. Straight from the American tour, the group flew to Kingston, Jamaica.

  Checking into the Sheraton Hotel – as featured in ‘Safe European Home’ – in New Kingston, the Clash had been booked by Mikey Dread into Channel One studio. In recent months the new ‘dancehall’ style had evolved out of Channel One, a rough street sound that would carry reggae into a new era. The studio’s environ was not the most salubrious in the Jamaican capital. Directly opposite Channel One was an alley known as Idlers’ Rest. There were plenty of badmen there, armed and dangerous, active participants in the ongoing undeclared Jamaican civil war. Driving to the studio, the group narrowly missed witnessing this for real: ‘A youth of fourteen was shot dead on Hope Road just ten minutes after we’d gone past it,’ said Joe.

  At Channel One the group steamed into their first number, a cover of ‘Junco Partner’, an R’n’B classic originally written and recorded by James Booker, a New Orleans keyboards session-player who had some minor hits in the early 1960s. ‘Junco Partner’ had been a staple of the 101’ers’ live set, and was suggested by Joe for the new album. ‘That came from Joe’s department, because I’d never heard the song in my life,’ said Paul. Playing on the tune with the Clash were the Roots Radics’ horn section: ‘They were the guys that were in the studio as we arrived. There was some old bloke hanging out outside, who had a violin, so we brought him in as well.’

  ‘We recorded “Junco Partner”,’ said Joe, ‘and it sounded great. All the dreads were outside cheering. I was sitting at the piano figuring out the chords for the next song when Mikey tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Quick, we’ve got to go. The drug men are coming to kill everyone!”’ It was customary to spread cash around the local hustlers; the Rolling Stones had done this when they’d worked in the studio on Emotional Rescue. But the Clash had no money; the trip was financed by the American Express card of Paul’s girlfriend Debbie. ‘We had to run for cover,’ remembered Paul. ‘The mood changed as though it had been cut with a knife, and we thought, Get the fuck out – like immediately.’ The group hightailed it back to New Kingston in ‘an old Renault. I don’t know where the Renault had come from,’ said Paul. ‘It weren’t no Harder They Come-style getaway. It was more Jacques Tati,’ said Joe. Stuck in Kingston, Ray Jordan drove Joe and Gaby out to Hellshire Beach, very much off the map for white tourists. Joe scored some weed off one of the dreads habituating the area; but when he rolled up to smoke it he was chased away, necessitating another quick exit.

  The group drove across the island to Negril in a boat-sized Cadillac convertible. In this druggy hippie haven the punk rockers ‘were having a spliff,’ said Mick, when ‘a cop came over to us and said, “You’re busted.” We were thinking, “Oh God. Gun Court.” Our tour manager took him off to one side: “Can we have a talk about this?” “OK. I’ll meet you in this field right outside of town.” So we drove out to this field and parked our car facing the cop’s. He got out and we gave him some money. He seemed most amenable.’ They carried on around the island, visiting Bob Marley’s birthplace of Nine Mile.

  The time wasn’t wasted on Joe. ‘Everyone’s always saying there isn’t much good reggae happening any more,’ he told me. ‘But I don’t think that’s true. There’s loads. When I was in Jamaica I heard ten all-time stunning classic records on JBC, on the radio. There was one fantastic one called “Rainy Night in Portland”. But I keep waiting for them to turn up here, and they don’t. I heard some incredible rhythms, too. Stunningly inventive. No white group would ever play the drums like some of the ones I heard being played. Almost shuffling it. Pure invention. I heard numbers that would’ve cleared the floor for days, weeks, months, years. I started a couple of years ago to think that reggae had had it, but I’ve since found I was a bit hasty – that music is growing all the time. I’d like to hear it on the radio all night long, instead of the soothing dribble of the big band sounds.’

  Paul Simonon had signed up to act for six weeks in a film being made in Vancouver, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains; the rest of the group were adamant that the creative roll needed to be maintained, and, accompanied by Mikey Dread, returned to New York. They checked into the Iroquois hotel on 44th Street. At first they worked at the Power Station studio on West 53rd Street, with Mick Jones playing bass. There the focus of the new record shifted, possibly influenced by the Power Station being the creative engine of Chic, who had produced the best dance music of the era; Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, the Chic main men, were in situ, recording Diana Ross’s Diana album. The group recorded ’Police on My Back, a tune written by Eddie Grant for the UK’s multiracial – Equals, as well as the classic ’Louie Louie’ and Prince Buster’s ’Madness’, already revived as part of the Two-Tone ska phenomenon by Madness.

  Clash Hot 100 – Joe’s perception of Electric Lady Studios in the West Village. (Lucinda Mellor)

  There were no new songs written, but Joe and Mick decided they would write them as they recorded, the most expensive way of making a new album unless the songs were pouring out – which, luckily, they were. So they took a cheaper, block booking at Electric Lady Studios – set up by Jimi Hendrix – on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village.

  ‘We were really stoking,’ Joe told Gavin Martin in Uncut magazine in 1999. ‘We hit New York, and we blasted straight into the studio. This is something that I must recommend to other groups. Normally after a tour we used to go home and lie down for a few weeks. But we came off that tour full of go.

  ‘We had nothing written. You don’t write on tour, it takes all your concentration to make the gig – that’s survival technique. Afterwards you run around town to find interesting hipsters and go to all the interesting spots. You get to go to every hot spot until everything has closed down. The adrenalin is furious. You’re wired as hell.

  ‘We didn’t particularly know anywhere in New York, so we went into Electric Lady. Every day we just showed up and wrote phantasmagorical stuff. Everything was done in first takes, and worked out twenty minutes beforehand. What we did was go to the core of what we are about – creating – and we did it on the fly and had three weeks of unadulterated joy. We were in New York and I never went out. But it was the most beautiful time ever, everything on a roll.’ (It is not entirely true that Joe never went out. Victor Bockris, the New York writer, was working on a book that consisted of him taking appropriate subjects to have dinner with William Burroughs at his home at 222 Bowery. As Burroughs was fully aware of the Clash – Bockris had played him their records – it was deemed that Joe would be a dinner guest. The great Bohemian writer had a jaundiced view of rock stars because dealings with them invariably involved tardy time-keeping. On the designated day Victor Bockris decided he should go to the Gramercy Park to escort Joe to the Bowery. There were complications. On his first visit to San Francisco Joe had met a local girl called Damita Richter, who afterwards had moved to New York and became Bockris’s girlfriend. By the evening of the soirée chez Burroughs she had disappeared with Joe Strummer again. When the writer had arrived at the hotel f
or Joe, the Clash were being questioned by police officers over the non-payment of some recording fees, possibly from their work at the Power Station. As though proving Burroughs’s point about the habitual lateness of rock’n’rollers, Joe turned up with Bockris some two hours late. William Burroughs considered Joe had an acceptable excuse for his unpunctuality: he warmed to Joe when he opened his jacket and showed six enormous spliffs protruding from an inner pocket. As tribute these were presented to the great man of letters, along with a bottle of whisky and a six-pack of beer. A great evening was had. The event was so close to the deadline for Bockris’s book that it was never included.)

  In those days America was a very liberal country. Joe loved the way you could climb into a cab and the driver might hand you a joint as he headed towards the studio. ‘Cool as fuck! I was thinking, “This is New York.”’

  Joe’s own assessment of the style of the tunes recorded for Sandinista! by the end of March 1980. What happened to some of these songs? (Lucinda Mellor)

  It was at Electric Lady that for the first time Joe created what became known as the Spliff Bunker. In the corner of the studio he built his equivalent of a wartime pillbox from equipment flight cases. Secreted in the Spliff Bunker, away from the mixing desk control room, Joe was free to work on his words for songs. He would even sleep in it. ‘Me, Topper and Warren “Stoner” Steadman built it out of flight cases,’ said Joe. ‘It was a small scene, the bunker, a place to retreat and consider, for musicians and groovers only. It’s a good system, which I still use today, because it stops everyone hanging out in the control room. The engineer can’t work with all that background babble.’ From now, a Spliff Bunker was a feature of most recording sessions in which Joe was involved.

  Despite the presence of Mikey Dread, the group decided – somewhat to the Jamaican’s chagrin – that they would produce the record themselves; this meant Mick Jones was in the production seat. ‘It was just there: we were just picking it off a tree. Sometimes it’s like that. You just get that perfect moment. Sandinista!: we went free then and it was great. Such a lot of diversity. No rules any more. Because even the one before that wasn’t so free. It was still in the traditional structures.’ Bassist Norman Watt-Roy and Micky Gallagher from Ian Dury’s Blockheads flew out to Manhattan on Easter Monday, 7 April; at Electric Lady they found themselves working on a brand-new tune with a distinctly funky backing track, one that seemed to capture the sounds, sensations, even smells of the city of New York. ‘There was Topper, me, Micky and Mick,’ said Norman Watt-Roy. ‘Joe was in the bunker. Jonesy says, “We need something really funky ’cos Joe says he wants to do a rap.” So we started that riff and looped it and Joe wrote the words there and then. Totally spontaneous, a couple of hours and it was in the can.’ Mick Jones told the new arrivals the title of the song: ‘The Magnificent Seven Rap-O-Clappers’, later abbreviated to ‘The Magnificent Seven’. Joe admitted that the idea for the song came from Mick Jones, his cultural antennae alert as ever. The previous year ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang had been the first hit for this new form – revolutionarily, it was a 15-minute record on a 12-inch disc. Mick had visited all the shops in Brooklyn that sold rap music. ‘Jonesy was always on the button when it came to new things,’ Joe told Gavin Martin. ‘That stuff we made the week after he came back from Brooklyn with those Sugarhill records – it all still rocks.’

  While the Clash were at Electric Lady a transport strike crippled the city. One night, unable to find a taxi, Mick Jones was walking back to the Iroquois when he stepped straight into Tymon Dogg, Joe’s old friend and mentor, in New York for a few weeks, walking back to where he was staying with Helen Cherry. Mick took Tymon to the hotel and an emotional reunion with Joe. At Mick’s suggestion Tymon came to the studio the next day and the group worked on Tymon’s song ‘Lose This Skin’. ‘It wasn’t because I was Joe’s mate,’ said Tymon, ‘because it was Mick who instigated that, not Joe. Joe said one of the reasons I was involved with the Clash was because when Joe left the 101’ers he came round one time to see me when I was playing at Acklam Hall underneath the Westway. He said, “I’ll carry your gear to the gig.” I said, “You must be feeling nostalgic,” and he said, “Well, the lads in the band, we were rehearsing, and they said, ‘Oh, Tymon Dogg’s playing Acklam Hall tonight. Let’s go and see him.’”’

  Often Tymon was accompanied by Helen Cherry. Before this she had not met Mick Jones, and was fascinated by what she saw. ‘I hadn’t realized what Mick was doing in the Clash, and I don’t think a lot of people did. But I was lucky enough to hear them record quite a lot of Sandinista!, and I was amazed to see that Mick was so much of an energy as a writer and an instrument player for The Clash. I thought, “Mick, I can see how much Joe needs you in the Clash.” I think Joe didn’t like him because he had mood swings. Yet because Mick does very quickly show his feelings, you should be grateful because it’s somebody who is straightforward and you know where you are with them. You could see he was definitely an energy Joe needed, but I don’t think Joe could see it. I thought, “Wow, Mick’s really firing away here.” But Joe was too – he wrote an enormous amount of lyrics. They were amazingly prolific and hard-working.’

  ‘Joe was sitting in his hotel room, writing,’ said Tymon. ‘As he said, if it moves, write it down. He was working fast. Mick was putting guitar things and sequences in. Every time I went in there a new song was on the go. The New York sessions had an openness about them, which is how I ended up on the record with my song. It was that open that some totally unknown person is going to come in and play his song.’

  Before the Clash headed back to Britain they flew out to Los Angeles to appear on Fridays, a nationally networked comedy television show on which they performed ‘London Calling’, ‘Train in Vain’, ‘The Guns of Brixton’ – Paul was back after filming – and ‘Clampdown’. Seizing the moment, they also played a one-off show on 27 April at the Roxy club on Sunset Strip. The LA Roxy was a long way philosophically from the Covent Garden Roxy, a scene for the city’s cool-and-groovy. But the Clash did play ‘Somebody Got Murdered’, the first of the songs they had recorded for the new album to be given a live outing. Joe had written it after being approached by the American music legend Jack Nitzsche who was providing the soundtrack for the film Cruising, which starred Al Pacino. ‘The car park attendant in the World’s End housing estate, where I was living, was murdered over five pounds,’ said Joe. ‘We got a phone call from Jack Nitzsche and he said, “We need a heavy rock number for this movie with Al Pacino,” so I said, “OK.” I went home and there was this guy in a pool of blood out by the car parking kiosk. That night I wrote the lyric. I gave it to Mick and he wrote the tune. We recorded it and Jack Nitzsche never called back.’ The Clash recorded the song themselves, with Mick Jones employing a complex synthesizer arrangement.

  Back in London, where they continued the sessions at Wessex, Joe and Tymon maintained their renewed relationship. When Joe learnt Tymon had spotted a potential squat in an empty house close to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, he asked if he could come and live there. Some of the perpetual difficulties in Joe’s relationship with Gaby had become more than usually dominant and he had decided to move out of World’s End. The irony was that finally Joe’s bank balance was extremely healthy and he could easily have afforded to rent a flat. Instead he purchased the most expensive pair of bolt-cutters stocked by his local hardware store. ‘But not only did he buy the bolt-cutters, which really impressed me,’ said Tymon, ‘he also said, “Right, let’s buy a can of bolts that we can practise cutting on.”’

  Around midnight they drove up towards Bloomsbury in Tymon Dogg’s three-wheeler Reliant Robin van. At a set of traffic lights a police car pulled parallel with them. The pair of cops peered into the three-wheeler. ‘We’ve got the bolt-cutters in the back,’ said Tymon, ‘and Joe is dressed a bit like a burglar, unshaven, and he’s got a comical bad-guy look on his face. He’s sitting in the van and this cop car pulls up, screwing us, and h
e looked so dodgy.’ Then Joe noticed a small Indian statue on Tymon’s dashboard. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. Tymon replied that it was Ganesha, an Indian God who is the remover of obstacles. As he said this, the lights turned to green and the police car pulled off, leaving them behind. Tymon and Joe arrived at the address, a large Georgian house in Gilbert Place, and easily broke into their new home. Joe took a big room on the first floor. As he plugged in a piece of electrical equipment he noticed a previous occupant had provided the skirting-board with a discreet piece of graffiti, just two words: ‘White Riot’. ‘That was great,’ laughed Helen Cherry. But she was not so impressed with other aspects of Joe’s existence. ‘He’d left Gaby in rather a distressed state – I thought rather meanly. Sometimes I’d see mean sides of him and find it hard to like him. I felt a bit of a strain with him living in Gilbert Place because I did feel Gaby was suffering and that was being ignored.’

  But another figure from Joe’s past appeared at the Gilbert Place squat: Bernie Rhodes, who on one occasion had turned up at the London Calling sessions, and with whom Joe continued to keep in contact. ‘Bernie Rhodes came round,’ said Helen, ‘and was like, “Back to your old ways, Joe, sleeping on the floor again.”’

  But a crisis befell the Gilbert Place collective when Joe was away on tour: bailiffs and police appeared on the doorstep to evict the occupants. Helen Cherry phoned Pete Jenner for help. ‘Peter was great. He came round in a Volvo and took all the gear out and put it in the back of his office in Blackhill – as a favour, and because he was Joe’s manager. He even took the curtains down for me. He got on the phone to me about a week or two later: “Can you come round? There’s Joe’s washing-up to do here.” Even the dirty washing-up had been carried out.’