Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘And,’ he added, with considerable prescience, nine years before the LA riots, ‘these people out in East LA they aren’t going to stay there forever. And if there’s anything going to be in the future, it’s gonna be from all parts of everything – not just one white way down the middle of the road … So if anybody out there ever grows up … For fuck’s sake …’ he snapped, before belting into ‘Rock the Casbah’, their biggest ever hit in the USA. Does this make him a hypocrite? I don’t think so. Joe was the personification of Carl Jung’s view that all great truths must end in paradox – when I once mentioned this to him, he nodded with his customary sage glee, this man who, as Sean Carasov pointed out, was wired up differently to other folk.

  Satire raised its head in his introduction to ‘Armagideon Time’, with its theme of world starvation, as he referred to a faddish diet of the time – ‘The F-Plan Beverly Hills reggae song’. A great performance, sweat running down his face; Pete Howard handled himself commendably on the reggae beat. ‘Lose five hundred pounds. Success guaranteed. Or your money back.’ Then he returned to scolding the Californian audience. ‘Bollocks, bollocks! You don’t have to fake it. You’re paying twenty-five dollars to be out there, so do what you like. Also a lot of you seem to have had speech operations: you can’t talk or shout back. I need some hostility here. You know: AAARGGHHH! I need some feeling of some sort. Some collective, you know, Hey we’re all alive at the same time. As it’s Sunday tomorrow, I hope you’ll join me in this …’ And he ran straight into the Sunday service tones of ‘The Sound of Sinners’, emphasizing the song’s greatest line: ‘The message on the tablets was valium.’

  Then – apart from throwing down the brief conundrum ‘The people on this stage – we’re nowhere. Can you understand that?’ – Joe seemed to decide to rebuke his constituency no longer. The Clash thundered through another seven songs, until they closed the set proper with an extraordinary version of ‘The Magnificent Seven’.

  They came back to play three encores. On the customarily epic ‘Straight to Hell’ Joe seemed off-key, struggling with his breathing, as though his voice wasn’t holding up. But the next song gave him a break, Mick Jones taking the lead on ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’; without trying to force the symbolism, hindsight lends this an enormous resonance. But on the final song at the Us Festival, ‘Clampdown’, with its references to the Harrisburg nuclear disaster, Joe took off again in a stream-of-conscious: ‘Nuclear power stations – don’t kid yourselves – they ain’t got any fuckin’ idea! … A nation of boneheads. Bonehead has come to pass!’ Back into the chorus. And off stage. This was the biggest live audience platform Joe Strummer ever had in his life. Having as so often made it hard for himself in the first place, he ended up using it very well indeed.

  There was a scuffle as the group left the stage, an altercation with the DJ, who had started to play records, preventing the Clash returning for a further encore. Mick Jones and members of the stage crew exchanged punches, Mick giving a good account of himself, according to Kosmo Vinyl. ‘I got in a fight with some people at the end of the Us Festival,’ said Kosmo, ‘and Mick muscled in. He’d go down with you.’ ‘At the Us Festival me and Mick weren’t talking at all,’ said Paul. ‘But I saw a bloke hitting Mick, and took him out. It patched us up for the time being.’

  Chris Chappel, a friend of Mick, was backstage watching the show; Chris was Bruce Springsteen’s tour manager and knew the requisite professional behaviour in such circumstances: he hurried to find Bernie Rhodes to tell him about the incident. As at the Glasgow Apollo in July 1978, when Joe and Paul had been arrested, the manager of the Clash showed no interest. Then Bernie threw another agenda into the mix. ‘Anyway,’ he said, playing a hitherto unknown card, ‘Mick’s not long for this group.’

  At the festival was Sean Carasov, liaison man between the merchandising company and the Clash. He went out into the crowd with Joe, to check on the merchandising stall, Joe suggesting ways to better display the T-shirts. ‘There was a lot of mumbling about Mick, and you could tell that Bernie was lobbying to get Mick kicked out. Joe told me that Bernie was trying to figure out how to get rid of him. Mick was the rock star in the group and loved the festival vibe; the others couldn’t give a shit. You could tell there was something going on – there was a bad vibe. Mick seemed oblivious to it. He was digging the festival thing.

  ‘When they decided to work with Bernie again, I thought it was like that line from The Godfather: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” There was immediate mistrust. I thought it was ridiculous what he was doing. The paranoia and megalomania from him was getting worse.’

  After the Us Festival the Clash went to Las Vegas for a brief break. ‘Bernie gave us a thousand bucks each and twenty-four hours to make our fortunes,’ said Mick. ‘So we all hit Caesar’s Palace. I finally hit lucky on a slot machine in the airport departure lounge: fifty dollars on my way out.’ ‘I found myself walking along the Strip,’ said Joe. ‘It was pretty good. Then I started talking to Vietnam veterans who were drinking bottles out of brown paper bags. So I had an entertaining night.’

  That summer, Ron and Anna Mellor travelled up to Scotland in the WAR camper-van to visit Bonar Bridge, the first time they had been there in twenty years. Harry and Margaret Gillies, the parents of Iain, Anna, Rona and Alasdair, went to stay at 15 Court Farm Road, looking after Lulu, a cat Joe had given his parents. Ron and Anna had a wonderful time, even managing a visit to Raasay. When they stopped at a tiny village called Clashmore near Dornoch, Ron had Anna take a picture of him standing with mischievous pride in front of the village’s boundary sign, his torso deliberately obscuring the second syllable of the place name.

  When Ron and Anna Mellor returned to Upper Warlingham from Bonar Bridge Harry Gillies went to Glasgow, leaving his wife at Court Farm Road; she wanted to spend a few more days with her sister, she said. By now, Anna seemed to Gerry King to have become ‘a quite solitary figure, and very fragile. She wouldn’t cook any more, and they would get pre-made meals.’ Six weeks later, back in Glasgow, Margaret Gillies died suddenly of a heart attack.

  For the second time in two months Ron and Anna made the long journey to Bonar Bridge, for Margaret’s funeral. At the burial another man, fifteen years younger and several inches taller than Ron Mellor, tried to claim Joe’s father’s position on the coffin. Ron elbowed him out of the way and took up his place.

  But Ron Mellor was not well himself. After having worked in London for the Foreign Office, in 1976 he had been ‘put out to pasture’, as he described it, at the Public Records Office in Kew. Each weekday morning he would catch a train up to London Bridge station, where he would take the tube for the journey to Kew in the west of London, a tiring, three-hour round trip every day. The work had its rewards: Ron Mellor was offered grateful dedications in the forewords of a number of books. After the extremely steep climb to Court Farm Road from the station, having poured himself a reviving glass of his favourite Ruddles beer, Ron would sometimes theatrically pat his heart, parodying the effect the upward hike had had on him. Around the turn of the decade he had suffered a heart attack, but soon recovered. There was a history of coronary ailments on both sides of the family.

  The Clash’s inactivity earlier in 1983 had been blamed on an alleged reluctance by Mick Jones to tour. ‘We were just at the point when we had to give it another shove,’ Joe told me later. ‘There sometimes comes a time when you simply have to keep going.’ On the other hand, you might feel that the Clash’s bill-topping appearance at the Us Festival indicated the goal had been achieved, and creativity always benefits from periods of lying fallow. Besides, Mick disputed the argument: ‘One of the things Bernie was saying was that I didn’t want to tour. But that wasn’t true at all. I wanted a different tour, of places we hadn’t been. I thought this was a chance to go to somewhere like South America.’

  In interviews later Joe would rail about how at the end of his relationship with Mick in the Clash they had been posting
songs to each other. But, said Mick, it was Joe who was doing the posting: ‘He’d send me lyrics, and I’d put music to them and then take the tape up to the rehearsal studio. It didn’t seem like it was a big deal.’

  It seems clear it already had been decided that Mick Jones, the founder of the Clash, was to be fired from his group. But it was not Bernie who had come up with this. ‘Joe and I had been discussing it as far back as just after “London Calling”,’ said Paul. ‘I used to have screaming rows with Mick in the studio. It wasn’t Bernie who wanted to do it. It was us. Bernie didn’t even know it was going to happen. We knew we were cutting our arm off, but we felt it had to be better than it was.’

  Bernie was incensed in the middle of the summer when he presented Joe, Paul and Mick with a management contract to sign, and Mick demanded that his lawyer read it. While this may have seemed like nothing more than sensible behaviour, Bernie wound Joe up, claiming this showed Mick put himself on a pedestal. It might also seem extremely naïve of Joe and Paul that they did not contact a lawyer for professional advice over this legal document – and that they didn’t see Bernie’s remarks were designed to make them feel angry. ‘The others signed it,’ said Mick, ‘so that put big pressure on me. Bernie said, “Why don’t you give your power of attorney to your solicitor. Then I can sort it out with him and you don’t have to worry about it.” I temporarily did that. Then he went to the others and went, “Look, Mick only wants to talk to you through his lawyers.” He got them all worked up. So they all started to get on my case: “If he’s doing that, he must have gone off his head into lawyer-land.”’

  The simple fact is that one day in the last week of August 1983, Mick Jones found that – almost unprecedentedly – he had arrived before the others at Rehearsal Rehearsals, where they were attempting to write new songs. Then something strange happened. An unexpected visitor called by: Topper Headon. ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘I was in Camden Town. I thought, “I’ll go and see the Clash.” I went to Rehearsal Rehearsals, and Mick was there. I saw Pete’s kit, and I had a go, and we were jamming away. Then I said, “I’d better go.” Mick said, “Yeah, I don’t know where the others are. I’m normally last.”’

  Topper left. Mick went up the bookshop. When he returned (‘Late as always,’ Paul said to me, the kind of mix-up that overstands the entire affair.) Joe and Paul had arrived. ‘We want you to leave the group,’ said Joe. ‘What do you think?’ Mick turned to Paul. ‘Yeah,’ said Paul. ‘I want you to go.’ ‘I put my guitar in my case,’ Mick told me, ‘picked it up, and walked out.’ Bernie Rhodes ran after him and pressed a cheque into his hand. ‘Like giving you a gold watch when you retire,’ said Mick.

  ‘So I left,’ said Topper, ‘and after I’d gone the others turned up and sacked him, that same day. And he, like me, had no idea he was going to be sacked, which shows that Joe could be quite devious. I think the rot had set in before I went. They cut me out, but the cancer had spread.’

  ‘At the Hall of Fame,’ said Mick, ‘both Paul and Kosmo told me it wasn’t Bernie who fired me. I was really surprised because I always thought it had been. Maybe it was the same thing as what happened with Keith where there’s a collective thought that everyone picks up on and goes, “Yeah!” And then you’re done,’ he chortled.

  Mick acknowledged that he had not readily accepted the return of Bernie in 1981. ‘Joe delivered an ultimatum to me and the others, who were less resistant, that Bernie had to come back, or he’s off. I was really in Bernie’s face all the time after that. I didn’t deal with it very well. I wish I’d handled it better. I was really not being nice. He was trying, and I was shouting at him. But I was so suspicious. Riddled with it,’ he laughed, ‘by that time.

  ‘But when it happened it was horrible for weeks afterwards. I felt I couldn’t go anywhere. Walking around at the carnival that weekend was horrible, because everybody lived in the same area. Really fucking horrible. I grew a beard. Dyed my hair for a couple of days. I wanted to change my identity. It was traumatic. It took me ages to get over it. It took all of us ages to get over it. The whole thing. Now I look back and think it was all supposed to be. That’s the way it turned out, and the way things are. Not so bad.’

  As the founder of the Clash, Mick acknowledged he had always perceived it as his own group. ‘So it was weird, being kicked out of your own group. Later I realized how pointless was the fuss and the pain that I went through over Combat Rock: no one really remembers now how high the hi-hat was or the cymbals. They only remember that it did really great, and everybody benefited from it. So all that pain was for nothing. The original is very contemporary. But the real record is better, so lasting. It turned out all right for everybody. I shouldn’t have put myself through all that grief.’

  Kosmo Vinyl was in the greasy-spoon café opposite Rehearsal Rehearsals when he saw Mick cross the street from the studio. He entered the café. ‘He said, “They’ve sacked me.” It’s one of those days you play around forever. I was shocked. He wore gloves, Mick, and he had his guitar in a case. He got in a taxi. Did I know they were going to sack him? No. But if Joe was here he’d say he’d been left no other option by me and Bernie. I can honestly say I did not know that Mick was going to get fired, but I would later say to myself, “What did you think was going down?”

  ‘My curse and my blessing is that I can understand both Bernie and Mick,’ Kosmo said to me late one freezing December night in the Dublin Castle on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, where he now lives. Significantly perhaps, he didn’t say ‘Joe and Mick’. ‘I fall on both sides of their civil war. Civil wars have more atrocities and bloodlust than anything.’ As we talked ‘Death or Glory’ came on the jukebox. ‘Speak of the devil and he shall arrive,’ laughed Kosmo, sadness in his eyes.

  The news pages of the 10 September 1983 edition of the NME carried a press release: ‘Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon have decided that Mick Jones should leave the group. It is felt that Jones had drifted away from the original idea of the Clash. In future, it will allow Joe and Paul to get on with the job the Clash set out to do from the beginning.’ The same edition carried a rebuke from Mick Jones: ‘I would like to state that the official press statement is untrue. I would like to make it clear that there was no discussion with Strummer and Simonon prior to my being sacked. I certainly do not feel that I have drifted apart from the original idea of the Clash, and in future I’ll be carrying on in the same direction as in the beginning.’

  Is it not when Mick Jones leaves the Clash that the legend of the group is truly born? For now their story takes on every dynamic of life: betrayal, arrogance, art. A further problem was removed for Joe: although the egalitarian concept behind the co-songwriting credits of all members on the last two albums had been admirable, Joe had told Kosmo he regretted the Clash co-writing credit, because it diminished his and Mick’s reputations as songwriters. ‘Joe was fiercely proud of his writing,’ said Kosmo.

  The one fundamental flaw in the firing of Mick Jones was something no one seemed to have thought out, an indication of the corrupted thinking that lay behind this entire egregious act: with the exception of Topper’s ‘Rock the Casbah’, it was Mick who wrote almost all the music, so getting rid of him was madness. ‘We didn’t think,’ said Kosmo. ‘“Anyone can write a punk rock song!” That was our mistake.’ By dumping Mick, a problem may have been solved for Joe, as he perceived it, peering out of the narrow chink in his personal doorway that week. But another was about to be introduced. What the surviving members were as yet unaware was that Bernie Rhodes believed he had a solution to this: he would take charge of the music. After all, his former cohort Malcolm McLaren had become a musical artist in his own right with hit singles like ‘Buffalo Gals’ in December 1982 and ‘Double Dutch’ in July 1983, as well as his Duck Rock album the same year.

  Artistic development often comes at the expense of other areas of the personality: the requisite drive can have its roots in deep personal damage, the kind of painful experience that ultimatel
y can deliver the gift of wisdom. As singer with the 101’ers, Joe had come to punk rock from a different direction than almost everyone else in the movement, a slightly older guy than the other players, and perhaps therefore more anxious about the passing of time. In firing Mick Jones, Joe Strummer committed one of those acts of amputation with which he seemed to have become almost comfortable. Mick was a man of the collective and the commune, someone who loved the idea of a community, a great idealist who valued loyalty. Like a lion with his pride (perhaps an apposite word), Joe also liked the idea of a gang – so long as he stood out as king. ‘I remember the day Joe sacked Mick,’ said Pete Howard. ‘I hadn’t heard from them since we got back from America. Joe called me up. He’s almost threatening – “I’ve sacked him. Are you with me?”’

  Across the world people were shocked by the departure of Mick Jones from a group in which they had invested a large part of their lives, and in whose apparently against-the-odds success they had taken much comfort. ‘When it did happen for me,’ said Marc Zermati, remembering when he heard about it, ‘it was the biggest catastrophe in rock’n’roll history. That was the end of it, the end of rock’n’roll. The last big rock’n’roll band is the Clash. After that rock-’n’roll was just counterfeit. I was really fucked up and depressed about it. But then Paul asked me to choose. “You have to choose: it’s us or Mick.” I said, “Sorry, it’s Mick.”

  ‘Suddenly everything falls apart, part of the rock’n’roll story very often. I was expecting them to be more clever, as human beings, because Joe as a human being should have understood. But he wanted to be the leader.’

  When the Clash had played at Bond’s, Don Letts had observed how much the emergent hiphop had influenced the group – though most of all Mick Jones: ‘Joe could make the cultural and social connection, whereas Mick would make the musical connection, almost to the point where it was too much for Paul and Joe. Mick had a great foresight to see where contemporary sounds were going. They say he was driven out of the band for rock-star behaviour, but I maintain that we need a bit of rock-star behaviour. Who else is going to do it? Mick can be a difficult bastard. What did Joe say? “Elizabeth Taylor on a bad hair day.” Though you can’t fault Mick for trying to boldly go where no rock band had gone before. It was great when they did the reggae stuff and the hiphop, and the Latin rhythms coming off the street.