Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  The next day, Tuesday 18 May, Joe and Gaby returned to London. Now Mick, Paul and Topper learnt that Joe’s initial disappearance had been a Bernie scam which had landed them in serious financial hot water. They were not pleased: further fuel was added to Mick’s distrust of their manager. They would go ahead, they said, with the Lochem show in two days’ time: their fee was to be $75,000, which was urgently needed to pay the British tour’s cancellation costs.

  Lochem was not the Clash’s finest hour. The publicity surrounding Joe’s disappearance meant that it was by no means sold out, but the group still demanded their $75,000, about which they were immovable. By the time they arrived at the festival site, the promoter could not help but observe that they all seemed off their heads, notably Topper. The liberal drug laws in Amsterdam were attractive to the Clash, who on the way to the festival had already spent an hour or so in the city’s coffee-shops, sampling the finest hash and weed. For Topper they were a disaster; before heading to the festival site he had scored heroin and coke. Prior to the show, as Joe checked out his appearance in the dressing-room mirror, Topper removed it and laid it down flat, dumping a load of cocaine onto it, which he hoovered into his nostrils. Joe was furious.

  Like a Shakespearian portent, when they hit the stage a violent storm blew up. After a few numbers Joe stopped the show, demanding the promoter come onstage. ‘Your security are attacking my fans,’ he berated him. Joe then invited the fans onstage, until the Clash were surrounded by 500 of them. A similar number was also sheltering from the horizontal rain beneath the stage. By the end of the set the stage was sagging dangerously.

  ‘We did the show in Amsterdam,’ said Topper. ‘I didn’t know, but they’d obviously had meetings about the state I was in and said, “We’ll test Topper in Amsterdam.” What a place to test a junkie. So I got stoned there. As far as I was concerned everything was normal. When we came back to London, I said, “Right, catch you guys later, I’m off.” They said, “No, we’re having a meeting.” I said, “All right, tell me what happens in the morning.” But they told me I had to come to it.’

  In Paul’s basement flat at 42B Oxford Gardens the four group members and Bernie Rhodes convened in the front room. As though it was his pattern, Joe Strummer pulled the trigger. ‘You’re sacked,’ he told Topper Headon. ‘Mick was in tears,’ said Topper. ‘I was in tears as well, but Paul was on Joe’s side. The decision had been made and that was it.’ When Topper asked who would replace him on the American tour, they announced they had a replacement waiting in the wings – none other than Terry ‘Tory Crimes’ Chimes, the original Clash drummer. It was beginning to feel like an extraordinary rock’n’roll soap opera. Bernie Rhodes had been invited back, so why couldn’t anyone else be? ‘It was obvious Joe wasn’t just a spokesman,’ said Topper. ‘He was obviously the one that had made up his mind. Which was why later on he said that was the biggest mistake he made.’(‘I wouldn’t have sacked anyone,’ said Mick.)

  Topper tried to throw himself a lifeline. Leaving Paul’s flat he walked round the block, in a daze. Then he had an idea, and went back. ‘Listen. Why don’t I come on the tour? You take Terry Chimes along with us. I won’t go on any pay, and I can drum, and if any of you even suspects that I’m taking drugs you can sack me and send me home.’

  The other group members would not go along with this. They suggested they would not formally announce that Topper Headon had been sacked: an announcement would go out that he was suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’ and that Terry Chimes was deputizing. ‘They said, “We’re not sacking you. If you’ve got your act together when we come back then you’re back in the band.” I went away, and once the Clash went out of my life I realized how important they were to me. So I started to clean up.’

  The next thing Topper knew was that Joe said in an interview the drummer had been sacked from the group because he was a junkie. Reading this was devastating. ‘I read it and I’m in London, and people saw me and thought, “There’s Topper. He’s just been sacked.” Up until that point I’d never injected drugs, but then I thought, “Well, that’s it. I’m out of the group. I’ve got nothing to live for any more. I might as well start injecting.” I went downhill from there. I don’t think Joe could have dealt with it in any really different way. But I don’t hold it against him. I put my hand up to losing the plot, but I think we all did. Everyone was fucked up, whether it was drugs or drink. Joe was singing anti-drugs lyrics and I was nodding out on the drum-kit behind him.’

  Gaby will say how adamantly against the consumption of cocaine was Joe. Yet Topper is quite clear that from time to time Joe might snarf up a line or two of the drummer’s coke stash, principally as fuel, to keep himself going. ‘They said it wasn’t OK for me to do heroin and cocaine,’ said Topper, ‘but they were doing cocaine, drinking a lot, smoking a hell of a lot of dope, and so it was a bit of a mixed message. By the nature of the beast heroin makes you isolated, so I never saw that coming. It was madness. We were all knackered from non-stop working. There were so many people around the band using. Joe was anti-drugs, but he did them.’

  Much of the decision to chuck Topper out of the group, thereby breaking up a classic four-way partnership, seemed to come from the man whom Joe had brought back to save the Clash seventeen or so months before. In 1999 Joe told Gavin Martin: ‘Bernie said, “He’s a junkie, he has to go.” Ignorance ruled the day. We knew nothing about heroin.’ In January 1988 in the Los Angeles Times Joe spoke to Richard Cromelin, who asked him if Topper Headon could have continued to function in the group. ‘Yeah, considering what happened straight after that when everybody I bloody knew in London was on smack. I think we could have. But then we were ignorant. It was like hoo hoo hoo, the big heroin, horse. I didn’t know anything about it. It was only after we fired Topper and my friends began to go down like flies. Now most of my friends in London are in Narcotics Anonymous. They can’t even have a glass of wine. Just cigarettes and coffee. It’s forever.

  ‘I never liked heroin,’ he added. ‘I never even took it. I might have smoked it once in Holland. I remember the bloke said, “Zis next joint has the heroin in it.” I took like a show puff, the one where you keep it in your mouth. And that was the only time I ever got really near heroin.’

  Especially in the light of the sacking of Topper Headon, you come to realize that there is something about the Combat Rock sleeve that seemed to reveal a fuller story. On the cover shot, with the group astride that Thai railway track, Joe is to the rear of the other three, with his hand over the right side of his face, squinting at Pennie Smith’s camera lens with his left eye. People looked for all manner of meaning in this, rather like they had at the shot of Paul McCartney wearing no shoes or socks on the Beatles’ Abbey Road cover. Joe told me he was simply trying to focus his short-sighted eyes. But perhaps this image of Joe did have a hidden meaning: could it not simply indicate that Joe Strummer was unable to see things clearly any more?

  18

  ANGER WAS COOLER

  1982–1984

  Topper Headon’s belief that Terry Chimes was already waiting to replace him was not correct. It was not until five days before the US tour was scheduled to start that Terry Chimes received a phone-call from Bernie Rhodes: the manager asked Terry to meet him in Marine Ices, just up the road from the Roundhouse. ‘Being Bernie, he couldn’t say, “Would you like to come and play drums with the Clash?” He said, “How much are you earning? Would you like to earn three times as much?” I thought, This is the man that paid me £100 to make one of the great albums of all time and he’s trying to tempt me with money. “Bernie, tell me what is this about?” He said, “We need you to do a tour with us.” I knew nothing of Topper going. I said, “I’ll let you know. Give me a few hours.” I went home and phoned Mick. Mick said, “Well, we couldn’t have Cosy Powell with us, could we?” I said I felt more like discussing it with the band rather than Bernie. But Mick said, “Oh no. Bernie handles business.” I think he was afraid to discuss it.


  ‘I said I would do it. Mick said, “I bet you haven’t got any of the albums, have you?” Which was quite right. I didn’t know the stuff.’ Some twenty-five songs had to be learnt almost instantly. To complicate matters, Paul had already gone to the United States. ‘So it was me and Joe and Mick rehearsing. Joe played the guitar and Mick played bass. We went through the songs and I learnt them roughly and in the end we got there. It was all right. I wrote it all down, had it in front of me on paper onstage – you know, how many verses each one had. Bernie complained that when I turned the page to see what the next song was, he thought I was reaching for a tomato sandwich. But it was all right. We did it.’

  In tune with a then new current of thought that celebrated physical fitness, Joe would continue to harp on throughout 1982 about the Year of the Body, when he was at home in London going for runs most mornings along the canal at the top of Ladbroke Grove, up the road from his new rented flat in Portland Road, Holland Park. But at the same time he was once again hammering away at spliffs, as well as spending most evenings down the pub or staying up until dawn in bars when on tour. Aside from a natural inclination towards alcohol-induced altered states, you couldn’t help feeling that this sensitive – though certainly hedonistic – man was attempting to obliterate something deeply discomforting within himself. In the parlance of the early twenty-first century, he was ‘self-medicating’. Had he disliked what his unconscious had shown him when he had stopped smoking weed and hash in and after Japan? A consequence of the consumption of ceaseless joints is that when you sleep you hardly dream at all – your dream-state emerges instead in your stoned waking hours. When you stop smoking, however, your dreams soon return with a sometimes frightening vividness and ferocity. Dreams, of course, are necessary for psychological balance. But, as Joe admitted to Terry Chimes, you might not like what you see in them. ‘He wanted to give up spliffs. He told me that when you give up spliffs you dream a lot, and he hated dreams, so it was hard. He tried not smoking, but then he had a lot of dreams.’

  When the Clash had played at Bond’s, I had observed that the Gramercy Park bedrooms of both Joe and Paul each contained rows of plastic containers of Nature’s Plus brand vitamins, all mega-strength – the yin, presumably, to the yang of the bottles of Rémy Martin brandy that each of them also had on display. By the time Terry Chimes had returned to the group, the quantity of vitamins had only increased. ‘Joe was fit – he needed that for his physical work onstage. But he took a ridiculous number of vitamin pills. I’d say, “What the hell is all that? You can’t need all that.” I would say, “If you’re eating a good diet, why do you need all these vitamins?” He’d say, “Oh, we’re doing extra hard super-work so we need extra help, and these vitamins will do it for us.”’

  As he had with the Rémy Martin, Joe now was balancing out his slow-release mega-vitamins with large amounts of beer. ‘I remember him drinking a lot of beer in ’82,’ said Terry. Although the deep-lying depression that the drummer had observed in Joe in 1976 and 1977 was still apparent, he didn’t feel that it was in any way alcoholrelated. ‘I think that’s just the way he was, with or without alcohol.’

  Still a vegetarian, Joe sometimes seemed to approach his relationship with his fellow occupiers of earth with the passive zeal of a Hindu priest. On one occasion he seemed to be taking his inspiration from the title of that early, unrecorded Clash song, ‘How Can I Understand the Flies?’ ‘I walked into his room,’ said Terry, ‘and he and Gaby were standing there with pillow-cases, trying to get the flies out of the room without killing any of them. The windows were open, but every time they shooed one fly out another two would come in. They’d been doing this for hours. They said, “We don’t want to kill any flies.” They say artists have got no kind of logic.’

  Since the return of Bernie Rhodes something inside Joe, powerful and urgent, had pumped a driven energy back into his previously wavering spirit, and snapped life and leadership back into him. Perhaps it was the recognition of some wonderful truth within himself. Or simply a question of wanting to get the job done. But was he surrounded by the right allies? Perhaps because of the spontaneous and fissiparous warlordism that Joe had injected into his personal relationships within the Clash since seizing control over Combat Rock, he found his own allies – his co-conspirators, more like – within the group’s crew, where he was far less likely to encounter dissent. ‘We used to get on very closely with our road crew that we had a long time, like Baker and Johnny Green and Raymond Jordan our bouncer, and people like that,’ said Joe to me. ‘We didn’t live above them as I’ve seen some groups doing. We were equals. We’d go out to drink together. When we were on tour we’d stay in the same hotel as much as possible. I think that was good because it keeps your feet on the ground. Kosmo became almost the fifth member of the group – in some ways he was its conscience.’

  Someone who was a true and sincere ally was Sean Carasov, who handled the Clash’s merchandise on tour, an intelligent twenty-two year old whose father had disappeared out of his life twenty years before. ‘Seeing as I didn’t have a dad or brother, Joe was like both to me,’ he told me. ‘I was closer to Joe than to the other two and did a lot of drinking and philosophizing and hanging with him. When I went to America with them on the Combat Rock tour it was almost like he acted as my own personal tour and pop culture guide.’ I felt Sean – eight years younger than Joe Strummer – allowed Joe’s father–brother role in his life to colour his observations with regard to the group. ‘Mick doesn’t have the genius. Joe was a genius. Mick was a very talented musician, and could come up with an amazing song like “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, but he got teased a lot.’

  ‘Joe was taking control at that stage,’ Terry Chimes pointed out. ‘I don’t know why. He’d lay the law down on certain things, and he would be bossing Bernie around, which he wasn’t in the early days.’ Between Mick Jones and Bernie Rhodes he noticed a different energy: ‘There was a bit of tension between the two of them. I just remember Mick getting angry with Bernie now and again.’

  On 29 May the dates to promote Combat Rock – officially known as the Down the Casbah Club tour – opened with two nights at the Convention Hall, Asbury Park, New Jersey. ‘I don’t think we played a good gig after Topper was fired, you know,’ Joe said to me. ‘It’s the whole thing with chemistry – you’ve got four blokes who make a decent racket, so don’t change it. That’s the moral. Don’t tinker with it.’ Then he amended this view, conceding that maybe there had been one good show, at Asbury Park. But he was wrong: the group was steaming.

  For their new Combat Rock world the Clash had adopted a stage look of exaggerated machismo, blurring the lines between Vietnam vet and juvenile delinquent street-gang; some fifteen years before it became fashionable on the high streets, they were wearing militaristic camouflage clothes, the sleeves torn from their jackets and shirts at the shoulders. Prior to the New Jersey shows the new image led to the group being mistaken for British soldiers on their way to the Falklands War. Joe had had his hair shaved off at the back and sides into a semi-Mohican, an adaptation of the cut adopted by the Robert de Niro character Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver . ‘Joe wasn’t interested in looking handsome, he was interested in creating an impact, so it worked for him,’ said Terry Chimes. Joe unsuccessfully tried to persuade the drummer to have the same haircut, citing how aesthetically pleasing it would look onstage, with the drummer seated directly behind the singer.

  The Clash’s preoccupation with visual style earned them criticism from those unconcerned about it. ‘Although he might not have a lot to say,’ Joe said to me, ‘Paul certainly had a lot to do with the image of the group and the stance. He was really the physical embodiment of what the Clash was. It wasn’t me or Mick or Topper, it was Paul. And he became the role model for countless thousands of young men. I think you have to come up with some type of glamour. You are stepping on a stage after all, you are putting on a show. I very much like the feeling of changing out of my street duds and the tra
nsformation from being an ordinary person on the street into a rock’n’roll performer. I think it was really important. I don’t think we’d have got across to as many people if we’d just worn cable-knit jumpers and baggy corduroy librarian trousers. To me it’s all part of the glamour of it.’ It can’t be denied, however, that there was something odd about the latest haircut: whereas Joe had always been the master of the subtle detail, this look was very obvious. Yet if the delicacy had been removed from the latest album, why shouldn’t it also be from Joe’s appearance? For many American fans of the Clash their abiding image of the group resides in Joe’s Combat Rock Mohican look.

  Perhaps inspired by this new militaristic tone, onto the stage at the first show someone threw an M80, a firecracker containing a small amount of dynamite. It blew a chunk of flesh out of Joe’s leg. Onstage on this leg of the tour, Joe presented a cartoon version of himself, ranting to the masses, dismissing established American acts with a sneer – as he did to the crowd at the Convention Hall: ‘How’d ya like the London fog outside? We imported 22,000 tons just for you – we figured we’d show Styx and Foreigner how to do it right.’ In the United States such simplistically expressed viewpoints seemed to work. More than anywhere else, it was in the USA that Joe Strummer really did become synonymous with the Clash, boosted by his position as group singer – ignoring the fact that Mick Jones had sung on the Clash’s first US hit single, ‘Train in Vain’, and was the singer on the song that would be their next hit, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, released in the United States on 10 June. ‘Rock the Casbah’, the single that followed ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, got to number 8.