Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  The overwhelming negativity against the record left the group confused. The growing tensions within the group – ‘Mick and I would scream at each other in the studio,’ said Paul – were exacerbated by the negative reception in their own country. When highly complimentary reviews from America began to filter through – a five-star review in Rolling Stone – they mollified what had been said in Britain. Although Sandinista! only made it to number 19 in Britain, compared with that number 2 slot achieved by Give ’Em Enough Rope, it made it to 24 in the USA, three slots higher than London Calling. It was clear where the market was expanding for the Clash. Aware that the group was yet again broke, and that it was Christmas-time, ‘Obie’ sent a gift of £1,000 to each group member. Pete Jenner felt this was a blatant attempt to court them. For him and Andrew King, matters would soon take a dramatic turn.

  1980 ended on a strange note for the Clash. Mick Jones had gone to New York to spend Christmas with Ellen Foley, fuelling rumours of a split. These Chinese whispers were reinforced when Joe spent New Year’s Eve playing at the Tabernacle, a Notting Hill community centre, with Richard Dudanski and Mole of Joe’s former band, the 101’ers, performing in a Booker T and the MGs-like revue, The Soul Vendors. Joe maintained a low-key presence, sticking to rhythm guitar and keeping away from the microphone, often with his back to the audience.

  I bumped into him at the bar, ordering a can of Red Stripe. I told him that the length of time needed to be devoted to Sandinista! had amazed me the first time I’d played the sprawling sound-system-like extravaganza. But I added that when I’d played the album at random, choosing individual songs or sides, the record seemed solidly in the iconoclastic, witty tradition of greatness set by its predecessors.

  ‘It’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?’ chuckled Joe. ‘It’s supposed to last you a year, though. There’s loads of bits and pieces all over it that you can just suddenly come across and get into. Mind you, we got really slated for it in a load of reviews – just for its length alone. But that PIL album, Metal Box [which had recently been released], that was three records and used up just as much vinyl, even if it did play at different speed and cost more. We seem to really get up people’s noses: I think it’s really good. We always bring out some reaction in people.’

  Exactly a week later I went round to his tiny and over-priced Ladbroke Grove flat to solve the mystery of what was happening in the Clash. We began by resuming our conversation about Sandinista!. Staring down on us in the dimly lit room was a giant-sized poster of Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock. Perched underneath it, Joe seemed slighter in stature than usual; his new Hollywood-like teeth, courtesy of the Little Roosters, gleamed at me. Sipping from a glass of beer, playing compulsively with a switch-blade knife that almost belied a true nature that was gentle and unassuming, Joe further considered Sandinista!.

  ‘Some of it is very American-sounding,’ he admitted. ‘But if you go somewhere then obviously it’s going to leave its mark on you – and we did that American tour and stayed there for quite a while. If we went to Spain and spent six months there, we’d be talking pidgin Spanish by the time we came back. Well, I would be, anyway. I tend to absorb more – absorb what’s going on where I am.’

  Although it was known that there had been occasional on-the-road rows between Joe and Mick Jones, he thoroughly dismissed any suggestion the arguments might have had any long-term basis: ‘It’s just that Mick doesn’t like being on the road at all. He really hates it, y’know. He has to get a bit pissed to go onstage. So there was conflict there in that the rest of us still really enjoy touring, and Mick thinks it’s a trial and tribulation. So something or somebody has to suffer. The rest of us just think of it as a good laugh. We’re not rowing at all … we have rows sometimes, but then you have rows with your girlfriend, too. You forget about it the next day – it’s not the end of the world. It’s not one row that causes groups to split up.’

  Joe told me he had been shocked by the changes in Jamaica since he’d last been there. ‘I could really tell the difference. Even the street corner guy selling herb was heavy about it – it wasn’t a question of do you want it or you don’t: you want it! I went into this supermarket – there was nothing in it except for 140 tins of syrup! Rows and rows of empty shelves. A big long supermarket up in New Kingston near where we were staying. Somebody was starving Manley out.’

  I told Joe how the IMF and Wall Street had done a number on the Jamaican economy. ‘Yeah, they’re like the Western gang. They did that because they thought he was a Marxist, although he wasn’t even really that. He was just friends with Cuba, which seems pretty logical if it’s your nearest neighbour and you’re a Third World country too. Not that we didn’t have our own problems in Jamaica.’

  Suddenly Joe’s attention was grabbed by a newsflash that appeared on his volumeless TV screen. He jumped up and turned on the sound. At a post office a letter bomb had been found, addressed to the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. As the bulletin ended, Joe turned down the volume again. ‘Letter bomb, eh?’ he smirked in great amusement. ‘That’s a bit amateur, isn’t it? I can’t see that doing the job. We’ve all got to try a bit harder than that.’

  Within days of my being at Joe’s Ladbroke Grove flat the crisis over Sandinista! had come to a head. On the main thoroughfare of Notting Hill Gate he had bumped into Bernie Rhodes outside the Wimpy Bar. They had spoken for a few minutes. Calling up the other group members, Joe threatened to leave unless Bernie was reinstated as manager.

  ‘We were drifting and I saw my chance,’ Joe told Gavin Martin in 1999. ‘We wanted some direction to the thing because Sandinista! had been a sprawling six-sided … masterpiece. You got to get out there and fight like sharks – it’s a piranha pool. And I wanted to reunite the old firm, like in The Wild Bunch. Get the old gang together and ride again. I knew we had something in us.

  ‘We didn’t know anything about anything. We were buffoons in the business world. Even Mick wanted him back, because he’s not stupid and he had to admire Rhodes’s ability to make things happen and, even better, to get things over.’

  For once, Joe put his foot down and held to his position. ‘I could easily have walked out then,’ Mick said. ‘But it’s like a marriage, you cling on hoping it’s going to work out.’

  ‘Mick is very idealistic,’ Joe told me. ‘But I felt we had to deal with the real world. I got worried that Mick would lead us to disaster through his refusal to compromise with the real world. I do think Bernie is a very creative individual.’

  Andrew King and Pete Jenner were shocked, more so when Kosmo Vinyl defected to work with Bernie. For Blackhill the decision was a disaster. Due to the perpetually perilous state of the Clash’s finances, they had never been able to invoice the group for their services. ‘We might have had a thousand pounds here and there, but that was it,’ said Pete Jenner. When Bernie Rhodes took over he indicated no desire to save them from this error. ‘We were just dropped out of the blue. They made no effort to pay us back or make any settlement. I was furious because they were fucking stupid. They’d whinge on about things, but not do anything about it, and they could have done something about that CBS contract.’ In 1982 Blackhill were obliged to declare bankruptcy, breaking up the seventeen-year partnership between two of the most honest, able and creative managers in the music business and causing them both hardship. The bankruptcy was directly attributable to debts they had incurred while managing the Clash.

  Fans of the group who had any knowledge of its inner workings were astounded by this change in managers. It had seemed inconceivable that Bernie Rhodes could ever re-enter the fold. But there it was: he was back. ‘Joe’s problem,’ Bernie told me, ‘was that if they got rid of me, he couldn’t be me. He’d said, “Oh fuck it, I’ll get rid of Bernie.” So he became a pop star and was milking it. But he came to me and told me they were half a million in debt. His batteries had run dry and he needed to be me to re-charge. Everybody loved Joe – I always had a soft spot for him. But Joe didn�
�t like himself – so he came back to me. I made Joe great. I knew how it worked. I thought if Robert Plant is it, I know what can replace it.’

  Bernie’s first edict? ‘No more hats.’ Bernie believed his charges were not seen in their best light in the assorted chapeaux with which they had sometimes adorned themselves for photo-shoots since his departure in autumn 1978. This was the sort of arbitrary judgement – part control-freak, part wilful schoolboy bully, part style visionary – that made those around him scream inside. Joe seemed to love such orders. From now on he and Bernie had a much more hand-in-glove relationship than formerly. Mick Jones began to seem increasingly marginalized in the processes of decision-making.

  Joe and Bernie had something in common. They had both had facial refits of different sorts: whereas Joe now had his sparkling set of Hollywood teeth, Bernie had had his cartoon-curved conk cut down to a new pert, snub nose and he had replaced the thick glass of his spectacles with contact lenses. But what else bound them together? Why was Joe so intent on remaining loyal to Bernie? As Joe’s endless reading of the memoirs of World War II leaders suggested, he loved to see himself as a sort of general. At the same time he suffered huge guilt over this, believing he did not have a true awareness of the kind of heroic underclass existence that he celebrated in song: the truth, he had after all proclaimed, was only known by guttersnipes. Even though the Clash had long outlasted the Sex Pistols, to Joe, John Lydon’s feral upbringing ensured he would always be far more believable. A verbally agile, witty and intelligent hustler like Bernie Rhodes possessed that tang of the street; he was an artist, something to which Joe would certainly genuflect; he was also self-made, which Joe respected, this being precisely how his own father had risen from his orphan origins.

  Anyway, the deed was done: Bernie was back at the helm of the Clash. Other than the ‘hats’ edict, what would be his first move? To cancel a brief UK tour that had been organized under the auspices of Pete Jenner and Andrew King. Before Bernie had been brought back on board Joe went ahead to publicize it with an interview on Wolverhampton’s Beacon Radio. He made it clear why it would have only been a brief sprint around Britain. ‘I’m not going to pretend that we’re doing a big tour,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of things putting us off, like a group tends to believe what it reads in the press as reflecting the true mood of the country. This past year, reading the English press has been pretty depressing for me.’

  In an interview with Paul Rambali in the NME, Joe said: ‘When I read the NME now, this is what I think, and this is really heavy … If they’re teaching the readers to hate us, then I’d like to ask the NMEwho they’re teaching the readers to trust? Which groups? Which ideas? I’m looking hard, and I can’t see anybody.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ responded Rambali. ‘I thought the NME was supposed to dote on the Clash.’

  ‘You must have a fucking long memory. You don’t notice every little pinprick – obviously not. I mean I don’t care – my skin is thick enough by now, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get on stage, I’d be hiding in a cupboard somewhere. And I can deal with hard criticism. It’s something I’d like to deal with, because if I’m no good I wanna know it.’

  Bernie Rhodes’s plan was to let the negative press in Britain evaporate by keeping the group out of the country. They would tour overseas. Before that they returned to Vanilla in Pimlico to come up with more new material and to rehearse their live show. ‘The Clash had to get out of England,’ Bernie said to me, ‘because it was suffocating. England doesn’t respect what it has.’

  Since the Tabernacle New Year’s Eve show with the Soul Vendors, Joe had been working with Richard Dudanski on finally putting out an album of material by the 101’ers. In April 1981 they released Elgin Avenue Breakdown on a label contrived for the purpose, Andalusia, distributed by Virgin. The twelve songs were drawn from four different sources: ‘Letsgetabitarockin’ (which kicked off the record), ‘Silent Telephone’, ‘Motor Boys Motor’ and ‘Sweety of the St Moritz’ – all written by Joe – came from the sessions with Vic Maile; their cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Monkey Business’, Slim Harpo’s ‘Shake Your Hips’, James Booker’s ‘Junco Partner’ (showing the roots of the version recorded on Sandinista!), Bo Diddley’s ‘Don’t Let Go’ and an epic rendition of Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, that particular favourite of Joe, had been recorded live at the Roundhouse on 18 April 1976, right at the end of the group; ‘Sweet Revenge’, another 101’ers’ original, came from the Pathway session; and ‘Surf City’ and ‘Keys to Your Heart’ had been recorded at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios. In contrast to the reviews in Britain of Sandinista!, Elgin Avenue Breakdown was extremely well received. Despite the return of Bernie Rhodes, supposedly a harbinger of solidity, the release of the 101’ers’ record was read as further proof of the continuing rifts within the Clash. Even the Brixton Riots over the 1981 Easter weekend – in which hundreds of black people filled the streets, facing and fighting similar numbers of police – exemplified this rift. While Joe approved heartily, Mick Jones had an opposing point of view: ‘It seems a bit stupid burning down your own neighbourhood,’ he said to me. For the Clash the riots only brought further criticism. Why hadn’t they been manning the barricades? demanded naïve thinkers.

  In mid-April, wearing a ‘Clash Take the Fifth’ T-shirt, Joe Strummer ran the London Marathon, the man who as a boy had been his school’s cross-country running champion. He took Gaby with him – she made it half way before dropping out. ‘He hadn’t trained. He just bought some shorts and said, “Let’s run a marathon.”’ Even in personal relations Joe played his cards close to his chest: he never mentioned to Gaby that he had been the top long-distance runner at his school – it wasn’t until I told her, over twenty years later, that she learnt this. ‘He kept that one quiet.’

  On 27 April the Clash played the first date of a European tour, in Barcelona on the Spanish north-east coast. Here the audience heard the début performance of a song from the latest Vanilla sessions, ‘This is Radio Clash’, a tune that employed a riff from ‘Good Times’ by Chic, such an influence on the beginnings of Sandinista!. The lyrics were like the flip-side of ‘Capital Radio’ – now the group itself personified an idealized radio station. Joe’s words were direct and sparse, but they seemed devoid of the humour and warmth that traditionally characterized his lyrics: they were very much the sloganeering of an advertising man. ‘This is Radio Clash’ always seemed an oddity, a transitional work that was not entirely successful. Yet even a sub-standard Clash song was head and shoulders above most music released that year: synthesizer pop had begun to take over in Britain.

  Working with the Clash on the European tour was Jock Scot, the intelligent and very funny man whom Kosmo had introduced into the group’s camp two years previously. Jock loved to don a kilt and express his love of Scotland in the most heartfelt of ways, but he and Joe rarely discussed their joint Scottish origins. ‘When we got back to the hotel in Barcelona,’ he told me, ‘I sang a song, a Scottish song. Joe started to shed a tear. Then he was crying his eyes out. The Scottish gypsy in him is very strong.’

  In Madrid the next day the Clash played at the ground of the revered Real Madrid football club. In Spanish Joe gave a speech in support of Bobby Sands, a Republican activist in Northern Ireland who was on hunger strike in Long Kesh prison. While on hunger strike he won a by-election as a Member of Parliament after the death of an independent MP who supported the prisoners’ cause. Joe said to Jock Scot: ‘“Get a black armband on. I’ve got to learn this speech in Spanish for Bobby Sands, to say to the audience. Test me on my words.” So he learnt this speech, and said it to all of Madrid, wearing a black armband himself. Told them about Bobby starving himself to death in a prison in Northern Ireland. He didn’t have to do that.

  ‘He did his homework, he read up on it. He felt he had to have an opinion, or you were wasting any education you had ever had. That is what Joe made people aware of. If you were lucky enough to have been at school, and read
a book, fucking use it. It wasn’t preaching, it was mad! It was informed. Don’t be lazy, is what he’s saying. Keep applying what you’ve learnt. At least, think of what you’re doing yourself personally with your life.’ Bobby Sands died a week after Joe’s speech.

  Considering the death threat that had been made against Joe by the Red Hand almost three years previously for voicing lesser sentiments, Joe’s stance here was fearless. You might think that as he was broadcasting these sentiments in another country, in another language, he might have felt the hardline loyalists would not get to hear of it. Yet the Clash were not playing in the UK at that time; if they had, past experience suggests Joe almost certainly would have expressed the same feelings there.

  Kid Creole and the Coconuts were also on the bill. One of the girls in the party fell for Joe’s charm. How could she resist such a sophisticated chat-up line? ‘I’m a man. You’re a woman,’ said Joe. ‘You know what I want.’

  There were more Spanish and Portuguese shows – ‘Lisbon, that white city lying there in the sun as we crawled its alleyways like rats with hangovers,’ remembered Joe – and French dates followed by concerts in Sweden, starting with a show in Gothenburg on 15 May. That year Dotun Adebayo, a Londoner of Nigerian extraction who had been a member of the English National Youth Theatre, was studying Literature at Stockholm University. He was also writing for a Swedish music paper called Schlager. When we met a few years later, I discovered he would translate into Swedish the articles I syndicated to the publication. Raymond Jordan gave a pair of tickets to that night’s show to Dotun, a huge Clash fan, who had seen the group several times. After the show Dotun went backstage where a banquet was laid out. As assorted journalists in the area attempted to dig in to the food and drink, Kosmo Vinyl screamed at them: ‘You fuckin’ greedy journalists. Leave that alone. It’s for the kids, not you lot.’