Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  In York the local BBC radio station interviewed Joe as to the purpose behind the tour. ‘We feel we were becoming involved in “release a record, go on a tour, do this, do that”. Yeah, we began to ask ourselves – What is this all about? You know? And we decided if we can’t get it with three acoustic guitars and a pair of drumsticks, on a walking tour of England, then … We are looking for an answer. We wanna know if rock’n’roll means anything, and this is an attempt to find out if it still does.

  ‘We’re gonna have to have an English revolution in about ten years – I think it’s possible and I would like to be involved. We’re not being really preachy – you know. First I like to rock’n’roll, to hell with the lyrics. But if they come in handy … you know, if they’re topical, if they mean something to real life, then that’s extra.’

  ‘To many people, punk rock is just a noise – guitars and drums and somebody shouting,’ suggested the BBC presenter. ‘So what makes the way the Clash shout so successful?’

  ‘If your song ain’t good then you ain’t gonna triumph,’ answered Joe. ‘It’s not just a load of rubbish run together. We try and think about what we do. We gotta two-layer culture, if you like: on the top level we got the TV, Wham stuff. But underneath, underneath, there’s a lot of people walking about not satisfied by that. We’re trying to plug into that network – why we’re on the walking tour.’

  An audience member expressed the gratitude with which this grassroots endeavour was being received: ‘Today after ten years of success, to come round places like York and Leeds and play gigs that are free really means a lot to us lot, because we’re lads who ain’t got a lot of cash. We’re at college, we’re on our own, and it means a lot to us. And I think bands like that should be Top of the Pops.’

  Although Joe’s interview was only granted for the local BBC station, it was immediately syndicated nationally on Radio One. Now the nation knew what the Clash were up to. Joe was furious. But, according to Paul, there were advantages to this publicity. ‘By the time we got to Glasgow there was probably about 800 people and all we had was acoustic guitars, but if you were at the back there was no way you could hear it.’

  ‘That was fun. That’s what I call fun,’ Joe told me. ‘It just gave an extra dimension to me that I need in the music.’

  By the middle of the third week in May, Joe had lost his voice, and – to the alleged irritation of Bernie Rhodes – the assorted assembly returned to London. It would be the last time any form of the Clash toured. There were sessions in studios in Richmond and Wood Green, where Joe walked out. A few days later there was a group meeting to answer the new members’ queries about the future of the group. ‘Joe turned up, looking like a whipped dog,’ said Vince. ‘He knew it wasn’t working. Bernie said, “These guys here have got a beef. I thought I’d bring you here to sort this out. I understand that they’ve got a complaint, but the fact is, Joe, you are the hero in this group. You are the one who’s sold loads of records and affected people’s lives. You’ve changed the course of events.” From this broken-looking figure, Joe was sitting upright. His ego had been stroked and he was back on top again. It was weird to watch. I started to lose respect for him, because he just started to play this weird character. He seemed to be out of touch with his roots as a person, all over the place. You couldn’t trust anything that he or Bernie said any more.’

  At a rehearsal studio in Finsbury Park, Paul Simonon, Nick Sheppard, Vince White and Pete Howard began rehearsing for a planned world tour. Even though the four imagined he would reappear any moment, Joe never showed. (Joe and Paul had struck a deal with Bernie: a third to each of them. ‘When Joe walked out of the studio,’ said Paul, ‘Bernie said I had to sue him for loss of earnings.’) ‘I started to get a phone-call every morning from Bernie,’ said Nick Sheppard. ‘“Why are you calling me – you never have before?” “Because there’s no-one else.”’

  Early in June 1985 Joe turned up yet again in the Silbar in Granada, ordering a Palido-cola, his favourite local drink, Spanish brown rum and Coke. ‘Tell 091 this,’ he said to Jesus Arias. ‘I want to produce their second LP. My budget is 500,000 pesetas [$2,500 US]. I want to do something really great with them.’ The next day he was gone again.

  Two weeks later Joe reappeared in Granada with Jazz and Gaby, who was pregnant again. They moved into a spacious house outside the city which belonged to the brother of Paloma. Every day of his six-week stay Joe took Spanish lessons from Jesus, making notes in the pocket-book he always carried with him. ‘I tried to teach him how to pronounce the sound “q”, complicated for an English-speaker. “Shit! I can’t do it,” said Joe. “Maybe it’s because of my plastic teeth.”’

  Towards the end of his stay Joe announced he would throw a Saturday night party at the house he was renting. He had decided there would be a twist: at the soirée he would be incognito, playing a waiter. Joe’s scheme worked better than he might have hoped. ‘They’re thinking I’m the fucking barman,’ Joe said at one point, almost dying of laughter. If he didn’t take to someone, he would reject their order, in Spanish: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have it. Ask for it when Joe Strummer comes.’ After a couple of hours he changed out of his waiter role, returning dressed as Joe Strummer. Party-goers were shocked: ‘Isn’t he the guy who was serving the drinks?’

  The guests of honour at the party were 091. That afternoon Joe had checked out the equipment by playing Chuck Berry’s ‘Around and Around’ for over an hour. Contrary to what the guests had hoped, he would not play at his party, tucking himself away in a corner. At one point he advised Jesus Arias that a girl at the event was interested in him. The shy Jesus didn’t believe it. ‘Go up to her, say hello and kiss her. If she slaps your face, I’ll give you 5,000 pesetas tomorrow. If she kisses you back, you buy me a drink,’ Joe told him. After Jesus had had a successful encounter with the girl, he called Joe the next morning. ‘I’m a guy of the world. I know how it works,’ Joe told him.

  ‘Spain was like a tonic after the Clash sessions in Germany,’ said Gaby. ‘He didn’t want to leave.’ Tiring of the ceaseless partying and bar-life in Granada, Gaby persuaded Joe to drive down to the coast. Finally they found a small hamlet called San José, checking into the local hotel. In San José Joe filled the car by mistake with diesel, which he sucked out through a hose. Afterwards they caught a ferry to Ibiza, where Gaby’s mother Frances had a finca. ‘My brother Nick was there,’ said Gaby, ‘and he was very unstable. My mother was really terrified: he was behaving very oddly, threatening to kill her, very typical paranoid schizophrenic stuff. We drove back to London with her. It was good we went there and got everyone home.’

  Meanwhile Joe had something else on his mind. In London, at the 1985 Royal College of Art degree show, where Esperanza, the wife of Richard Dudanski and the sister of Joe’s former girlfriend Paloma – the Granada connection – was exhibiting, Joe talked with his cousin Iain Gillies. ‘What am I going to do with Paul?’ he asked, worried. ‘I’ve been with the Clash for years and it’s all come to nothing.’ ‘Are you serious?’ said Iain. ‘Yeah,’ Joe nodded, resignedly. ‘Look, cousin, Paul’s my brother. What am I going to do?’ ‘He was really concerned,’ remembered Iain. ‘He knew it was over and done with, but Paul didn’t.’

  ‘It was a special relationship that Joe and I had,’ said Paul. ‘We were like brothers, I didn’t have an older brother, and then I did. I could tell how much what happened to his real brother cut right into him. Rather than press him on it, I tried to make it easier for him not to talk about it.’

  Mick Jones had long abandoned any ideas of an alternative Clash, and instead was in the studio with his new group, Big Audio Dynamite (aka BAD), with Don Letts on keyboards, bassist Leo Williams and drummer Greg Roberts. On a hot Wednesday lunchtime early in August I was in Edgware Road, near the tube station, when, like a sudden gust of wind from out of nowhere, a leather-jacketed figure going in the opposite direction walked almost straight into me. It was Joe Strummer. Joe said that he had h
ad a meeting that morning with his accountant and had decided to head home on foot to ‘walk off a hangover’. All the same, he suggested we go to a pub on the opposite corner and he got in a round of beers. We made small talk about what had been going on with the Clash; after half an hour or so Joe said, ‘What are you doing tonight? Meet me at 9 o’clock in 192 on Kensington Park Road.’

  Just before nine I found myself sitting on one of the bar-stools in 192, nursing a glass of red wine. Everything felt very chromey-shiny and velvety, sitting up there on that stool, like you’re always waiting for something. About ten minutes later I was looking in the other direction when I felt someone slide onto the stool next to me. Joe had on the same clothes – leather jacket, off-white jeans – he had been wearing that afternoon, and he looked in good shape. He ordered a bottle of ‘shampoo’. Yet despite his expensive choice of drink, there seemed that day to be a humility about Joe that had not been present the last few times I had seen him on and off stage. His energy was very easy to be around. He appeared to have become younger; his skin looked healthy, with a light tan, and the tiredness lines had disappeared from his forehead; he seemed tender and very open and rather alone. He was angry about women, distrustful, cynical, felt they’d always let you down, believed they always fucked around, that they behaved exactly as women say men behave. ‘They always do, all of them,’ he said, his voice rising almost into anger, when I said I thought this wasn’t always the case. He seemed a man at a point of change. He told me he was putting his house on the market, suggested that this was Kosmo’s idea; said he was going to buy a flat above the Tesco supermarket on the Portobello Road, by the junction with Westbourne Park Road (and conveniently, no doubt, only about 100 yards from the Warwick). ‘I only bought it because it reminded me of the places I used to squat in,’ he said of his house, an argument that to me did not sound entirely convincing. He was clearly very conflicted about his new wealth. I told him he didn’t need to sell the house; he’d worked hard for it and he had a child now, he needed some space. Joe told me how when a girl from an estate agent came round to measure up the house, he had showed her the features of his bedroom. ‘The estate agents are always out to fuck us. I bet I’m the only person you know who’s fucked the estate agent,’ Joe told me, proud of his act of revolution. Joe’s political act of fucking the estate agent – about which he didn’t exactly keep quiet – earned him considerable kudos as well as much chap-on-chap mirth in the local hostelries: it was generally considered one of the funniest things he had ever done. Whether Gaby would have laughed is another matter. (Eventually he decided not to sell the house. I was glad – I thought the flat-above-Tesco’s idea was bonkers.)

  He talked about the Clash a bit. I told him that I used to think that it must have been very hard being the ever-on-duty public figure of Joe Strummer, always expected by the fans to have a ready sage-piece-of-wisdom. ‘Yes, it was,’ he said simply. ‘Drove me nuts sometimes.’ He said that the Clash had been making a new album, that he hadn’t heard it yet, that they had recorded it in Germany; in those days there were considerable tax advantages for musicians from recording out of Britain, but Joe didn’t seem at all aware of this when I mentioned that this surely was why they had made the record overseas. He had already told me that the new album did not have a title. But now he came up with one. ‘Fuck Britain! That’s what we should call it. Fuck Britain! That would say it all.’ He seemed very pleased with his idea.

  It was some time around a quarter to midnight when Joe ordered a further bottle of ‘shampoo’ – the third or the fourth – and made a surprising declaration: ‘I’ve got a big problem. Hang on, I’ll have a wazz and come back and tell you about it.’ Joe went to the toilet for a minute and returned to his stool. ‘Mick was right about Bernie.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Well, I did think that was always the case,’ I spluttered. Then he told me that Bernie had hijacked the latest album, demanding to write the songs with Joe. He said that he’d walked out on the project earlier in the year and had hardly spoken to Bernie since; he told me he’d only recorded guide vocals for the new record [later I checked with both Pete Howard and Vince White, both of whom knew nothing of this] and those were what Bernie must have used: ‘What do you think I should do?’ He wanted to see Mick Jones and tell him what he had realized. I told him to go and see Mick or at least call him up; I gave him his phone number, which he didn’t seem to have. He didn’t call him, though – I didn’t appreciate that at the time Joe was one of those people who had trouble with the phone and was quite uncomfortable with making calls. Afterwards we went back to 37 Lancaster Road, to drink into the night. On the kitchen table I noticed a well-thumbed copy of the I Ching.

  A couple of nights later I went up to Basing Street studios, where an exhausted-looking Mick Jones, unshaven for over a week, was putting the final touches to the mix of the first Big Audio Dynamite album; I told him about my evening with Joe. He was finalizing the first steps in a new career he had been forced into by Joe having kicked him out of his own group. About BAD there seemed an element of proving a point – as Kosmo Vinyl said, ‘Joe would have to acknowledge that Mick was the only one to have commercial success following the break-up of the Clash.’ Almost immediately afterwards Mick had a holiday planned in the Bahamas with Daisy and his daughter Lauren; with them went Tricia Ronane. As they waited for a cab at Mick’s flat, the doorbell rang. Through the frosted glass could be discerned a man in a trilby hat. ‘I’ve come to offer a spliff of peace,’ said Joe, when it was opened. Mick and Joe went into the kitchen together for five minutes. But then the taxi came to take the holidaymakers to the airport.

  I was concerned about Joe, and felt his energy had disappeared from the area. And in Portobello Road I ran into Gaby, who had been in LA with her dad; she was evidently pregnant. She said that Joe had had to go away somewhere.

  Joe in repose at 37 Lancaster Road, taking a respite from the Notting Hill Carnival raging outside. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  Then it was the last weekend in August and Carnival in Notting Hill. On the Sunday, out in the claustrophobic crush of Portobello Road with my three-year-old son Alex, I sought some kind of safety for him by slipping up Lancaster Road. On the pavement outside number 37 was Joe, a bottle of dark rum in his hand. ‘Come in. Go in the kitchen and get yourself a drink.’ There, in the back of the house, he told me where he had been. ‘I went to Nassau, to see Mick. I landed in the early evening. I went straight down to the dodgiest part of town, full of crack-heads, and scored an ounce of weed. The next day I rented a moped and tracked down Mick’s hotel and took it up to him.’ A couple of days later I saw Mick Jones, who told me of his surprise when Joe had knocked on the door of his room in the Bahamas. He told me that he had played Joe the BAD album. Joe had said, ‘It’s no good. You need me.’ ‘Which was hardly the most tactful thing to say in the circumstances,’ laughed Mick, who to his credit had resisted giving interviews railing against Joe and the new Clash: perhaps he remembered the early dictum he had expressed to me about not dismissing other acts in interviews because it drew you closer to them. Anyway, it was great round at Joe’s that Carnival Sunday; there were quite a few other people with kids. Micky Gallagher was there with his family, as well as several others. The children were an important part of the mood: they softened the vibe, one of those things I used to like about the kids and adults hanging out together. I talked to Joe about this. ‘The “adults” stop being so full of shit when the kids are around, they are more like human beings,’ he said. This became an integral feel of the times I would spend at Joe’s.

  I went back to his place with my girlfriend the next day, Bank Holiday Monday, early in the evening, the second and final day of the Notting Hill Carnival. In 1985 there was a 9 o’clock curfew to close it down. A few minutes before that a lot of people were outside the front of the house, moving and swaying on the pavement and the steps to the last tunes being played by Saxon sound system, set up on the corner
of Lancaster Road and All Saints Road, with its shuddering rhythms and especially insightful toaster.

  Suddenly there was a flurry of movement. ‘Get in the house. Now,’ Joe muttered at me, motioning with his eyes to a posse of youth rapidly gathering on the opposite side of the road. ‘I was sitting on the front steps and this hand came and whipped Jazzy off my lap, and it was Joe, also pulling me back,’ remembered Harriet Cochran, a young friend of the family. ‘What’s going on? I’m thinking. And Joe pulled us in the front door.’

  Before the safety of the house could be reached by all of Joe’s crew, their brains befuddled by the day’s consumption, the property was being steamed by five or six youths who slipped up the front steps and through the front door like quicksilver, almost unnoticed they moved so fast. As I slammed the front door shut I saw an empty whisky bottle arcing through the air towards it. It shattered against the wood as the lock slipped shut. But then I was in the dark hallway with my back to the door. Directly in front of me was Joe, punching it out with one of the youths. I stepped past him and grabbed another one of them, trying to pull him towards the door. He landed a fist in my face, knocking my sunglasses onto the ground. Then it was more fists flying all around – everything in slow motion – and Joe opening the front door, and the two of us shoving them out. At the rear of the living-room, menacing all the party-goers, was the last of these home invaders, strutting around. The owner and myself told him to get out. He sulked towards the front door and was gone. I then noticed that in his hand Joe was now brandishing a wooden machete, a weapon whose zen-like qualities are worth considering. ‘I was so frightened. It was really heavy. But I always remember the wooden machete,’ said Harriet. In the great tradition of the last hours of the Notting Hill Carnival the entire area now seemed to be going off. In Westbourne Park Road, parallel to Joe’s road a block south, over 1,000 youths were hurling missiles at around 100 police.