Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  PHOTOGRAPH YOUR EVIL MOMENTS – OR TAKE NO PRISONERS AT ALL!. (Lucinda Mellor)

  Topper, Dotun noted, was sitting in a corner, wearing a half-smile. Mick and Paul were swanning about, talking to the fans who would shortly partake of the feast originally intended for the group. ‘But Joe was just sitting there, observing, a bit like you’d find Bob Marley doing. He had a Swedish girl on his lap, in a skimpy white outfit, showing her white stockings and suspenders. I don’t think she was wearing a skirt – she was the sister of a friend of mine.’

  Dotun had met Joe before, with the Slits, at a squat party in Sutherland Avenue in Maida Vale, so he felt no constraint in going over to speak to him. ‘They hadn’t had a support that night, and I told him it was a shame that they hadn’t had Mikey Dread. He said they were trying to run the tour to a tight budget. I said, “Tomorrow in Stockholm you could have Sweden’s best toaster – I know him.” “If you get him to the gig tomorrow,” said Joe, “he can play.” I said that I’d better be honest with him: the “best toaster” was me. “That’s cool,” said Joe. “Just get there and play.”’

  Dotun took a train to Stockholm. Arriving at the venue, an icehockey stadium, he first had a fight with some out-of-town skinhead punks, then managed to make his way inside with the records he had selected to toast to: ‘About five tunes – a “Satta Masagana” rhythm, an Augustus Pablo dub, Lone Ranger’s “Love Bump” rhythm, and a couple of others.’

  When he hit the stage, to toast entirely in Swedish, friends of his in the front rows were astonished: ‘Hey Dotun, what are you doing there? Come down before you’re kicked off.’

  Joe, who watched from the wings, loved Dotun’s set. ‘Afterwards he said, “That was wicked!” But I didn’t have the bottle to say, “Put me on one of your records then.”’ The next edition of Schlager carried a picture of Sweden’s Best Toaster at the show, with the headline, ‘Schlager’s Dotun Was King for a Day.’

  The Clash went on to Austria on 20 May. ‘The worst city to play? Vienna. It means nothing to me,’ wrote Joe in 1988. A television reporter incurred the Clash front-man’s wrath when he asked why Topper had become ill during the journey. Is this punk posturing? asked the Austrian TV reporter. ‘Do you think this is 1976 and you’re talking to the Sex Pistols?’ snapped a furious Joe. Joe seemed almost incandescent with rage at the questioning, quite the bully almost. You couldn’t help feeling that the hapless TV journalist incurred Joe’s anger because of the question’s sub-text: What really is the source of Topper’s ‘illness’? Which was his growing fondness for heroin. But there was a lighter moment. When Bernie Rhodes came on camera, Joe observed: ‘That’s Bernie Rhodes. He invented punk rock. It was obviously too much for him.’

  The next day they were in Italy, in Milan, and after a concert in Florence on 23 May, their live show honed and taut, they flew straight to New York City.

  17

  THE NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS

  1981–1982

  According to myth, Bernie Rhodes’s first master-stroke on his return to managing the group was to decide they should play residencies in significant cities around the globe, and that their stint at Bond’s International Casino in New York City was the first leg of this strategy. But the story omits the sixty-date tour of the USA Bernie had first wanted the group to play; however, Epic refused to underwrite it, and the New York dates were an alternative strategy.

  This was a clear case of turning adversity to advantage, for the seventeen shows played by the Clash at Bond’s on Broadway and Times Square in May and June 1981 marked a major upward turn. In the States they already had hip group status; the last two albums had made the US Top Thirty and ‘Train in Vain’ had been a hit single. But now large-scale American stardom finally appeared. The career of the Clash was definitively pre- and post-Bond’s: the Top Ten US success of Combat Rock the next year can be traced back to this springboard. And from here to the beginning of the end. When it was taking place, in those late spring months of 1981, it seemed like one of the most perfect times you could possibly experience. The sexy, sultry weather helped: the temperature never dropped below 90 degrees for the entire stretch of what had been planned as eight New York dates.

  After the European tour, the group was back in financial shape. The new deal struck with Rhodes only permitted him a percentage of the group’s net profits, so it was in his interest for them to earn wads of cash. The New York gigs were regarded as the final leg of a tour that had loosened up the Clash after nine months off the road, the longest period without live action in their career. Bond’s had been picked after Rhodes and Vinyl visited New York in the early spring. Choosing the tacky former disco as the venue for an eight-night New York stint was in the tradition of the kind of sleazy venues, redolent with low-life romance, into which Rhodes had booked the Clash early in their career. It is a myth to suggest that it was the Clash that used the venue for the first time: I’d seen Burning Spear perform there in April that year. Plenty of people in New York were confused by the Bond’s dates: Why had the Clash turned down Madison Square Garden, where they could have made far more money for far less effort? Here was an abyss-like cultural, even ethical, gap. In the frequent words of members of the group, they didn’t understand. Making far more money for far less effort was not only not the point, it was more like the anti-point.

  The Clash were staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel, on whose roof Humphrey Bogart had married Lauren Bacall, midway between Times Square and Greenwich Village. Popular with musicians, the Gramercy was also playing host to another group, a fledgling outfit called U2 who had worshipped the Clash. Bono introduced himself to Mick Jones in the elevator one afternoon as I sailed upwards in it with the guitarist.

  This visit to New York was stage-managed with an efficiency whose machine-like momentum was cleverly concealed; the group’s élite status was manipulated for maximum TV and newspaper coverage, in a quantity completely disproportionate to the amount of records the group had so far sold; you’d turn on the TV news and there would be the Clash, paying an official visit to some school in Brooklyn, like alternative statesmen – Kosmo and Susan Blond excelled themselves. Two days after the Clash arrived in New York, on 27 May, a press conference was held at Bond’s, in the club’s foyer. A journalist pointed out that Paul Weller had accused the Clash of selling out. ‘What constitutes a sell-out to the Clash?’ he demanded. Mick Jones took up the gauntlet, to toss it to one side. ‘What happens,’ he said, deadpan, ‘is that all the tickets go on sale for a concert, and all the people who want to go go and buy them. And if as many go and buy them as there are tickets, that constitutes a sell-out.’ The assembled US media thought this was witty.

  Manhattan was a perfect backdrop against which a group of former art students in love with the switchblade ethos of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets could perform. Across the road from Bond’s, on 49th Street and Broadway, was Tin Pan Alley, a bar in which one of the final scenes of the revered director’s Raging Bull had been shot; it became Clash Central for the next three weeks. Soon new additions to the camp appeared: the graffiti artists Futura 2000 and Fab Five Freddy.

  At a party Mick threw for his girlfriend Ellen Foley, I noticed that Mick and Joe seemed inseparable, not a hint of a bad vibe, even though Joe was going through personal problems with Gaby at the time. Later he told me that because of this it had been a very difficult time for him – I didn’t pick up the slightest scent of this, a tribute to a professional who knew the importance of these shows. Don Letts was making a film about the visit to New York, with a working title of Clash on Broadway; after each night’s show he’d be handed a wedge of dollars by Bernie and told to buy more film. (Bernie placed the footage in a lock-up in New York, forgot to pay the bill, and the film stock was thrown away.) This was the heyday of the New York after-hours bar scene: half dead from tiredness or from what you’d ingested, you’d slide into yet another dubious downtown sleaze-hole at 8 in the morning and find Joe Strummer and Kosmo Vinyl there, playing poo
l.

  The temperature had risen yet again, to just over 100 degrees, on the Thursday night of 28 May when the Clash opened at Bond’s. In the street outside black kids from Harlem were break-dancing, a riveting sighting of a then new phenomenon. Inside the packed hall it was another matter. That night’s support act, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, were soundly booed – even pelted with garbage – by this audience of out-of-towners, a logistical whim thrown up by the Ticketron computer ticket sales outlets. (The group seemed amused by the idea of fans travelling to see them, rather than the musicians travelling to the fans. ‘It’s the mountain coming to Mohammed,’ said Joe.)

  That same first-night audience went crazy for the Clash, in a way I’d never seen a more reserved British audience behave, and the group seemed lifted by the applause. The group was a powerhouse, tight, tough and immeasurably confident. To the sound of ‘Sixty Seconds to What’, Ennio Morricone’s theme from Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More, they roared onstage like a thundering storm, straight into a set that lasted two and a half hours or thereabouts.

  As had happened with their championing of punk, the Clash always had telescopic sights pinned on any coming Zeitgeist. Dub reggae, rockabilly and then rap had been absorbed into their catalogue of material: ‘The Magnificent Dance’, a mix of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ by the group under the name Pepe Unidos, was bubbling on black dance stations like WBLS and KISS, the audiences probably unaware that the Clash were a white, pinko, British guitar group.

  After that first night’s set the problems started. Someone had called in the Fire Department and the Manhattan Building Inspector. Bond’s had been dangerously oversold; if there had been a fire no more than 900 of the 3,500 strong audience could have escaped; the shows looked about to be cancelled. The Friday night event went ahead, although only 1,750 ticket-holders were allowed in, but negotiations over the rest of the dates came to a standstill and Saturday night was cancelled.

  A deal was eventually done. The shows could continue if more fire exits were opened up and there was an audience maximum of 1,750. Suddenly the Clash found themselves agreeing to play seventeen dates instead of the eight they’d flown in for. ‘I’m very worried about Joe’s voice. I hope he can hold up,’ pondered a concerned Mick Jones to me. Other members of the group gave perhaps greater cause for concern. Later, Don Letts showed me footage of an interview with Topper for the aborted Clash on Broadway movie. Topper was asked how he felt about having to play a total of seventeen shows. He was unshaven, his voice was slurred, and he was not looking in good shape. It was not a problem, he said, playing all those dates. But his face told a different story; his face never matched what he was saying.

  When the Saturday night show was cancelled, there was a near riot in Times Square by frustrated ticket-holders – and more TV and press coverage. But the time spent in New York established the group in the unconscious of the city’s cultural underground. Lauded by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro, as well as kids from Queens with spray-cans, they became a fixture of the coolest edge of the New York art scene. They very briefly appeared in the acclaimed director’s King of Comedy, supposedly a test-run for their appearances in his mooted next film, Gangs of New York. After the dates finally ended they stayed on in the city, to record ‘This is Radio Clash’.

  On a New York radio station Bernie was interviewed about the Bond’s overcrowding crisis, and he gave a Bernie-type rap: ‘The policy of the Clash has been upheld, which is giving you the news behind the news, put to music. And we think you’re more informed than any other audience there is. So that’s one benefit.’

  Raymond Jordan, the group’s minder, felt that the only person not inspired by the rarefied shenanigans in which the Clash had become embroiled was – perhaps predictably – Bernie Rhodes. It was noted that at the time he was needed, when the shows were in danger of being cancelled altogether, Bernie was nowhere to be found, and no decisions could be finalized. Raymond went to the Gramercy Park and persuaded a chambermaid to let him into Bernie’s room. The TV set was booming out a news story about the Bond’s furore. A prone figure could be made out under the bedclothes. It had the pillows wrapped about its head and ears. ‘What’s going on here?’ demanded Raymond in his characteristic booming tones. Bernie peered out from beneath the pillows: his face was wan and he was blinking even more furiously than ever. ‘I can’t handle it! I can’t handle it! Leave me alone!’ whimpered his shrunken voice. ‘Get up, you bloody fool. Everyone needs you,’ chortled Raymond. And left the room.

  Among the most extraordinary nights of the Bond’s residency was that of 10 June when revered Beat poet Allen Ginsberg came to meet the group in their dressing-room. For Joe and Mick, who on their first visit to San Francisco in 1978 had paid homage to the Beat writers by visiting City Lights bookstore, this had to be a seminal moment. ‘Well, Ginsberg, when are you going to run for President?’ asked Joe immediately.

  The audience at Bond’s, who’d faced an array of seemingly baffling support acts, ranging way beyond Grandmaster Flash to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry to the Fall and a spokesman from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, were now to be treated to the unlikeliest of all: the Clash were to back Allen Ginsberg on ‘Capitol Air’, ‘a poem that has chord changes,’ as Ginsberg described it. Ginsberg himself felt honoured. ‘ I don’t know of any other band that would be willing to go on with a big middle age goose like me who might or might not be able to sing in tune.’

  After the shows ended, the group stayed on in New York, recording ‘This is Radio Clash’, completed at Marcus Music in London. ‘Epic hadn’t understood at all what we were trying to do,’ Bernie told me. ‘They didn’t give a fuck. So I thought, “Let’s deal with the people.” So I booked a series of shows right in the face of CBS. After Bond’s I went in and renegotiated the Clash’s contract. They wrote off the debts, and I made sure we got promotion and that’s why we got big hits.’

  29 August brought the unexpected death of Guy Stevens from an accidental overdose of the antidepressants that had been prescribed to combat his dependency on alcohol. The response of the group was to record the tribute tune ‘Midnight to Stevens’, a sweet elegy that did not appear until the Clash on Broadway box set was released in the United States in 1991. When the new album on which the group was working would finally appear, he would be credited on the sleeve-notes as ‘inspiration’.

  On 24 September the group kicked off the Radio Clash tour by repeating the Bond’s experience with seven nights at the Theatre Mogador in Paris, which had a capacity of 2,000. During this set of dates the group débuted material from their next album, which had the working title of Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg. In April they’d already laid down early versions of three new songs, ‘Car Jamming’, ‘This is Radio Clash’ and ‘Sean Flynn’, at Marcus Music, off Westbourne Grove; in August and September, using the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, the Clash put down four more songs at Notting Hill’s Ear Studios in Freston Road: ‘Know Your Rights’, ‘Inoculated City’, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ and ‘Ghetto Defendant’. On 5 October the tour shifted to Britain, opening in Manchester – the first time the group had played in their home country for fifteen months. By 18 October it was finally time to hit the capital and to visit the Bond’s experience on London: the tour concluded with seven nights at the Lyceum.

  The Lyceum audience received the Bond’s treatment, with a similar structure. The set included a rap from Futura 2000, ‘The Escapades of Futura 2000’. During the course of the two-hour set Futura would spray-paint a graffiti mural backdrop, and then leap down from his step-ladder to deliver his rap. ‘This is Radio Clash’ was finally released as a single the next month. There was a small lunchtime launch party for the record at a screening room in Wardour Street in Soho; there was a showing of Don Letts’s video for the single, effectively a trailer for the Clash on Broadway film he had been editing in Manhattan. ‘The Clash have got to have a big single, and this is not goi
ng to be it,’ Jock Scot muttered to me. He was right – the record hardly dented the Top Fifty. (Kosmo told me later: ‘Me and Bernie so much needed a single after they played Bond’s, and we got “This is Radio Clash”.’) Paul, Topper and then Joe turned up for a couple of drinks before the event wrapped at 3.00 p.m. But there was no sign of Mick Jones. For those of us who knew him, this was hardly a surprise – 2.30 in the afternoon was the time at which Mick generally raised his head from the pillow.

  Mick, however, had declared himself to be the producer of the new record, which he insisted should be completed in New York, at Electric Lady, in the weeks before and after Christmas that year; he wanted to be in the midst of the city’s sounds of urban ghettology, which so inspired him; and he also wanted to be close to his girlfriend Ellen Foley. When queried about this, he responded in the same way that Joe had when the others questioned the wisdom of bringing Bernie Rhodes back as manager – he threatened to leave the group. Obliged to back down, both Joe and Paul were furious: recording in New York would dramatically raise the costs of the album. When later challenged by Joe about this, Mick said that he had only been joking, but three years later his decision still rankled with Paul.

  Whereas Mick Jones had been thoroughly entranced by the rap culture in which he had immersed himself in New York, a consequence of which had been various experimental mixes of ‘This is Radio Clash’, Joe Strummer was veering back towards his love of the roots of contemporary music. ‘I want to do real music, not punk,’ he told Bernie. ‘Know Your Rights’, first recorded at Ear to a semi-rockabilly beat, indicated the growing rift between Mick and Joe: ‘This is a public service announcement … with guitars!’ One attempt at recording ‘Know Your Rights’ was aborted after Mick and Paul argued for two hours over the appropriate bass sound, Paul demanding a heavier reggae feel. Paul has insisted to me that the final feel of the song was entirely wrong. He’s not complaining about his bass parts, but about something else altogether: ‘It was supposed to have been funny, but that didn’t come over at all.’