‘In the Clash Mick didn’t have any back-up, whereas Joe did from Bernie. Bernie gave that madness some shape and form and made it seem like it was an intellectual decision. Joe was goaded on by Bernie, that’s how I see it. It has to be said, that was one of Joe’s faults – he could be directed by a manager, and also by women sometimes. He’d tell you one thing and then he’d go in the next room and somebody would say something that was the opposite and he’d be there, agreeing with them, and he’d hope that the two of you wouldn’t meet.’
Like Marc Zermati, Don Letts was obliged to personally feel the brunt of the Stalinist revisionism taking place. ‘When Mick got kicked out I was still in America working on Clash on Broadway. I got a phone call from Paul saying, “We’ve had to get rid of Mick. If you are going to stay friends with Mick you can’t really stay friends with us.” I felt really bad for Paul. Paul was obviously made to do this call. I said, “Sorry, Paul, but the very fact you’re saying that is a decision in itself. So if I don’t see you for a while so be it.” We didn’t speak for a while, and I stayed friends with Mick.
‘It seemed like the sort of thing that Joe would always do anyway. Just as success is about to embrace him, he’d make a left turn and destroy it. I don’t know what that was about.’
Five years after Mick Jones had been kicked out of the Clash I sat down with Joe in Notting Hill and he told me what he thought had gone on between himself and Mick. ‘I mean really, he was pushed out by a power struggle. Bernie convinced me and Paul that we should get rid of him. We went along with it. Because even Mick’ll tell you he was being extremely uncooperative and it was no longer a pleasure to see him. It was very difficult to get anything done. So we thought we’d try and carry on without him, which obviously proved to be a mistake.’
Although the triumph of bill-topping at the Us Festival had been the zenith of the group’s success, the shows supporting the Who equally appeared in Joe’s eyes to have led to the disintegration of the Clash. ‘If there is a message in the music, it reaches beyond a kind of accepted gig format. It must somehow connect with the real life that people are leading. Stars do not lead real lives, and that’s why I’m glad we came to a halt and the whole thing fell apart. Because I couldn’t really see any future ahead of us if we were going to become like the Who. I watched very closely at those gigs at Shea Stadium and Oakland Coliseum and those places, because I could see in five or six years that would really be the only place we could expect to be at. That would be the definition of everybody’s success. That’s what you’re doing this for. But I thought, Well, what is that? That’s nowheresville! That isn’t living. Standing there singing the songs while it got bigger and bigger towards the end, for some reason I began to feel worse and worse. It’s to do with what those songs are saying. It was all right when we were part of the audience, part of a movement. Like in the Electric Circus in Manchester, somehow it was real. But once it became thousands of miles removed from that I began to freak out. It had become a parody of itself. Perhaps there’s only a certain amount of times that you can actually play songs before it becomes meaningless. Or kind of ridiculous.’
In 1995 Joe expanded on the firing of Mick Jones in a conversation with his friend, the actor Keith Allen. ‘Do you regret that?’ Keith asked him.
‘Yeah, of course. You see I hadn’t understood what the game was. The game was that Bernie had decided to become an artist. What I didn’t spot that I should’ve spotted was that Malcolm had become an artist, releasing albums, and Bernie decided he wanted some of that. He knew he wasn’t going to get any with Mick Jones in the group, because Mick was the sort of musical director. Bernie stepped in and stupidly I allowed that to happen. Because I hadn’t understood that the manager suddenly wanted to become an artist. I mean, that was the end. It’s my fault about the end, definitely. But then maybe the idea had run its course.’
On 18 November 1983 Gaby Salter gave birth to a daughter, Jazz Domino Holly Mellor. Having played the role of surrogate parent to Gaby’s family, John Graham Mellor was now a father for real. But Joe himself was still being parented by Bernie, who had decreed auditions must be held to replace Mick. From October, weeks were devoted to this; at the auditions, aspiring rock stars played to rough backing tracks, a twelve-bar blues and a hiphop track. Those shortlisted were called to Rehearsals a month later and their skills further tested. Bernie sent Joe for further singing lessons.
From hundreds of applicants a new ‘Clash’ was formed. Nick Sheppard, formerly of Bristol punk group the Cortinas, was given the job at the end of October, and immediately found himself in the studio with Joe, Paul and Pete Howard. (Nick had met Joe many times, since they had first run across each other at the Roxy. In mid-August he had been in a pub in Holland Park Avenue when Joe had come in with Bernie and Kosmo. They had chatted. At the bar he clearly heard Kosmo saying, ‘He’s gotta go, he’s gotta go.’ He soon discovered who Kosmo had been talking about.) Nick found camaraderie with Pete Howard: ‘Pete bridged both groups, the voice of experience: “Wait until you meet Bernie.”’ On 10 December this line-up was added to by Vince White, formerly Greg (Bernie insisted on the more ‘rock’n’roll’ name change. ‘You’ve a chance to reinvent yourself as a new man,’ said Joe, ‘like Gene Vincent and Vince Taylor – the bad guys.’), from Southampton, a huge Clash fan, who had studied physics and astronomy at university. Insiders asked the question: Does it take two guitarists to replace Mick Jones? The intention was to take the Clash back to basics, largely performing the group’s early material and new similar three- or four-chord songs. Reggae was banned, said Bernie. At first Nick Sheppard was even delegated to sing ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. Most significantly, Joe would hardly play any guitar, Nick delegated as rhythm player.
‘At first the second Clash was quite refreshing,’ said Paul. ‘Two new blokes. Exciting. New again through other people’s lives.’
‘The early days were brilliant,’ said Vince. ‘We were a band rehearsing as a band, with all five members there. We’d go out drinking afterwards. I went round to Joe’s for Christmas. He was very warm. We got on really well. It was solid up to the point we left to go to America.
‘But Joe did drag me over the café and say that Nick and Pete didn’t want me in the band, and were trying to get me out. I’d just joined and they were already trying to get me out. Joe went, “I’m rooting for you, and so is Bernie.” I imagine my arrival diminished their status in the group. I was a bit disappointed to see another guitarist as well. The relationship never got very warm between us.’ (‘No one had said a thing about another guitarist until Vince arrived,’ said Nick. ‘Initially I didn’t understand it. I found a tape of me, Paul, Joe and Pete on the new songs before Vince, an Afro-Latino song. It sounded very different because Joe was playing guitar: the force and presence that his guitar-playing has, his vigour – his rhythm-playing is fantastic.’)
In the Lock Tavern after rehearsals, Joe justified his drinking: ‘Alcohol is a revolutionary drug: it makes you talk.’ Yet Vince noticed that at the omnipresent group meetings (‘About four a week,’ said Pete) Joe always would defer to Bernie: ‘He was basically the man in charge of everything. Joe would back up Bernie on just about anything. Paul and Bernie seemed to get on really well. But as it went on it was quite difficult for me, personally. Bernie picked on me a lot.’
When Vince had gone round to Joe’s that Christmas, he had been puzzled. ‘There’s a black boy cleaning the floor. The image doesn’t sit right with the socialist rock’n’roll star. It’s like an old colonial’s house. You’d get this food – fried egg and rice, some weird proletariat display. You’d eat it with champagne.’
To confuse matters, Mick Jones teamed up with Topper Headon, announcing that his line-up was the real Clash. At the insistence of Pete Townshend, Topper went into a drug rehabilitation programme, though he quickly relapsed. Mick Jones’s declaration that he was proceeding with his version of the Clash was little more than a tactic of irritation. A
fter tickets had gone on sale for a brief ‘Strummer’ Clash tour of the American West Coast in January 1984, Mick contacted Bill Graham, the promoter, to inform him that soon he would be coming over with Topper as ‘the real Clash’. Mick’s lawyer promptly froze the earnings from Combat Rock and the Us Festival. This prompted Joe to write a song, ‘We are the Clash’.
On 19 January 1984 the US West Coast tour kicked off at the cosy Arlington Theatre, in Santa Barbara, California, virtually a themepark of middle-class American values – hardly the hotbed of punk revolt and ferment you might have expected for a group allegedly returning to its revolutionary roots. New songs were featured: ‘Three Card Trick’, ‘Sex Mad War’, ‘This is England’ and ‘We are the Clash’. The tour included a sold-out 40,000 crowd in San Francisco on 21 January, a show at Long Beach Arena, and the final date of the tour on 1 February in San Diego at the Fox Theater. Onstage in San Francisco, and in keeping with the revisionism within the Clash, Joe delivered a rant against marijuana – before heading backstage for a fat spliff. In a revolt against the past, Joe – who now affected an orange crop – had opted to concentrate on his singing and performance; only on the first two numbers would he play guitar, leaving the instrument to the two new members. Like an unarmed gunfighter – or ‘like a frog in a microwave’, as he himself described it – he would sporadically scrabble for his battered Telecaster, only to fling it past Vince’s head to a waiting roadie a couple of numbers later (‘Every time he did that, I’d think, That’s going to hit me one day,’ said Vince). The group performed against a background of television monitors displaying video footage of suitably strident subject-matter: scenes of police oppression and war movies were highlights. The shows were reasonably well received. In the San Francisco Examiner Phil Elwood commented: ‘It was a good concert although hardly of the gutsy, bombastic style of old. In his shouted, strident vocals and in his non-stop commentary, Strummer often becomes incoherent.’ ‘America loved it,’ said Nick. ‘We did 40,000 people in San Francisco. It had just come off Combat Rock.’
Joe’s interviews seemed like the rantings of someone who was slightly bonkers. In his ceaseless railings against Mick Jones you began to sense that perhaps he did protest too much. In an article by John Mendelsohn for Record magazine conducted in Santa Barbara, almost half the quotes were from Kosmo, who seemed to have been selected not only to provide moral support but also to give Joe cuelines for his denunciations of the former Clash guitarist:
‘We’d get some dates together for a tour, right?’ asserts Vinyl. ‘We’d talk to Paul and he’d go, “Yeah!” We’d talk to Paul and he’d go, “Yeah!” We’d talk to Mick and he’d just shrug.’
“‘Or,’ snarls Strummer, ‘say he’d have to talk it over with his lawyer … I finally said, “Go and write songs with your lawyer, and piss off!”’
‘I had to beg him to play guitar,’ Joe said in another interview, ‘and he’s supposed to be the Clash guitarist. It was like dragging a dead dog around on a piece of string. Insane!’ Publicly there was an anti-drugs line. ‘I’ve smoked so much pot I’m surprised I haven’t turned into a bush,’ said Joe. Doesn’t this make you feel that Joe’s railing against Mick Jones over his ceaseless spliff consumption was something of a projection? Besides, Joe had simply switched drugs, temporarily abandoning weed and hash (except when he didn’t) in favour of heavy alcohol consumption. Later he confessed that this dictum over spliff consumption had been dictated by the manager: ‘That was Bernie’s new regime. It didn’t last long. After two weeks we were gagging for it.’
‘I went into the situation,’ said Vince, ‘thinking, The Clash is a humanitarian band. They care about people. That’s what Joe was always spouting on about – he’s got this socialist thing going. But the reality is the complete opposite. There was a lot of bullying, and it was run more or less like any kind of corporation, with a very rigid political hierarchy.
‘I don’t think Joe really had a deep belief in himself. He didn’t have that much strength of character. He was an artist, and absolutely brilliant. But he couldn’t take responsibility, and so he passed it over to Bernie, who had complete control. Once Mick had gone, Bernie pretty much played Joe like a puppet. I’m not badmouthing Joe, because I do think he’s a great guy.’
But Bernie claimed to be fully aware of the fragility beneath Joe’s bluster: ‘Joe lacked confidence in himself and I spent days and days trying to build him up. I knew the bit of Joe people loved. He wanted to be me. Later he would blame me, but he didn’t own up to chucking Mick out.’
Nine days after the end of the US tour the Clash began a string of British dates in Glasgow. The fourth show in the tour was at Bristol’s Colston Hall. I drove down with Billy Bragg, the support act; his first album, Spy Versus Spy, and one-man Clash-type show had earned him huge acclaim – in a neat twist, he was managed by Peter Jenner. I had slightly contrived this outing in order to try and see what was going on. Bernie Rhodes had put a press embargo on the tour; when he saw me he made a wry remark about ‘stage-door Johnnies sneaking in’. My first sighting of Joe came after Bragg’s set when – shortly before the new Clash were due to hit the stage – I tried to use the backstage men’s toilet. The door unlocked, Joe was in there, doing breathing exercises that sounded as though he was trying to expel his lungs through his nostrils. He seemed slightly sheepish. But the show was not at all bad, really quite exciting, even if somewhat one-dimensional. But Joe and Paul had spotlights on them, whereas the two new members were only lit from the back, making their ears stick out like Mickey Mouse’s. Billy Bragg danced in the aisles during the performance. ‘You play those songs really loud and you can’t avoid moving and dancing to them,’ he admitted to me. ‘I’d been saying rude things about them at gigs, calling them the Cash. After their show Joe and Paul confronted me and I felt shameful. I apologized. As it was my first encounter with Joe it was very hard to do anything but show my affection and respect. I did tell him that if I didn’t care I wouldn’t have gone on about it.
‘It’s an unfortunate thing that people don’t realize what his strength was. His politics were formed before punk, when he was a squatter; they came much more from that world of anarchy. He never stepped over that line to mainstream politics. I was dreadfully disappointed that the world was not changed by my buying Clash records.’
The tour then moved into Europe for dates in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, culminating in a show on 1 March in Paris at the Espace Ballard.
The day prior to the concert in the French capital, Joe received terrible news.
Ron and Anna Mellor had spent a wonderful Christmas Day of 1983 at Joe’s new house at 37 Lancaster Road. Anna told her relatives up in Bonar Bridge what a nice time they had had. At the beginning of 1984 Ron Mellor was diagnosed with a gall bladder complication. An exploratory operation was scheduled for 29 February. On the operating table, under anaesthetic, Ron suffered a further coronary, and died; he was sixty-seven years old. ‘He was a really giving man,’ said Gaby. ‘He had stopped going up to Kew by then and they used to send work down to the house. I think he lost the will to live as he needed outside stimulus and wasn’t getting it.’ Ron Mellor’s sudden death was a terrible shock to his wife. ‘She rang me that lunchtime,’ remembered her sister Jessie, ‘and could hardly speak. She was in such shock. It was so unexpected.’
Alasdair, Iain and their uncle David travelled down from Scotland for Ron Mellor’s funeral, losing their way in Upper Warlingham. When they reached the cemetery the service had already started. ‘The old man would have loved that, you coming late,’ said Joe, with sad humour.
At the wake Alasdair and Iain Gillies separately noticed that next to a date on the kitchen wall were written three words that summed up Ron Mellor’s gallows-humour: ‘Heart attack continues.’ ‘You know what families are like,’ said Alasdair. ‘Unless you’re actually in it, you don’t know what’s going on. Maybe Ron and Joe were so similar they were rivals. He wasn’t a ma
rtinet, or Joe a rebel – it was more complex. He would take me on drives. Any “Private Road” sign he saw he’d drive up. “Let’s have a look at this, shall we? I’m going to ignore that sign.” He’d drive in and look at the person’s house. The afternoon of his funeral, in the back garden, Joe said, “I wish I’d given him a chance to talk to me again. I lost my chance.”’
The night of the funeral the Clash were playing in Scotland. Joe left the wake to be driven to the airport, calling his mother later. ‘It was obviously a terrible day for him,’ Alasdair recalled. The grimness of the experience was only amplified by Joe’s feeling that he had completely let his father down by having been away on tour when he had died, something that he expressed to me the next year. ‘I didn’t feel good about it at all,’ he told me.
But why was the Clash show not cancelled? ‘There was no leniency shown to Joe,’ said Nick Sheppard, ‘but he didn’t ask for it.’ Joe had wanted the show to go on, taking his mind off his father’s death. In his ‘close’ way he never mentioned to the new Clash members where he had been. Like David’s death, the subject was unmentionable.
It was not going to get better. Anna, Joe’s mother, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Soon she had her right breast removed, and began radiotherapy at Guildford Hospital. Stricken with grief over Ron’s passing, when she detected the first symptoms she had not acted as rapidly as she should. Although halted at first, the cancer returned to her bones. She was admitted to a Marie Curie hospice, Harestone House, in nearby Caterham. The hospice administrators told Joe his mother would live from two months to two years. Joe regularly visited her. He told me that to achieve parity with Anna’s severely medicated state, allowing himself to communicate with her, he would smoke a powerful spliff as he stepped up the driveway of the hospice. Was he also trying to dull his own pain over her visible suffering? As though trying to return to the happier days of his own time as a small boy, Joe sometimes made an outing of his visits to his mother, returning home alone via the funfair theme park at Chessington, loving its rides. But it was clear to him that shortly both his parents would be gone from his life.
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