Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Two days later my phone rang in the early evening. ‘All the pussy-men ran to the back of the house, but you stood with me. Thanks,’ breathed a familiar voice. ‘No problem, Joe,’ I said, pointing out that as I was pinned by the front door I didn’t have much choice. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Joe. ‘You stood alone with me.’ Several times over the years, Joe recounted this story to people to whom he was introducing me. On one hand it always slightly embarrassed me; but on the other, I was very touched that he was so touched. I remember when he told the story to my new girlfriend. Then he looked at her tits. ‘Gosh,’ he said, rather spoiling the moment.

  On 27 August at the Olympic Stadium in Athens Joe played another festival date. Before and after the show he argued furiously with Bernie Rhodes. Topping a bill over the Cure, the Style Council, Culture Club (whose white dreadlocked singer Boy George had become a particular bête noire of Joe’s), the ‘dodgy’ Clash – as I heard them referred to – played before 60,000 people; the initial 40,000 tickets sold were bolstered by half that number again when the promoters gave in to radicals’ demands that people be let in for free. It was the kind of gesture Joe might have approved of, for what was destined to be the final show by any form of Clash line-up.

  30 September 1985 saw the release of ‘the last great Clash song’ (Joe’s description), the ‘This is England’ single, an impassioned semi-epic protest song that could have been on Combat Rock if there was a greater fluidity in the music against which the words were set. It made it to number 24 in the charts. Cut the Crap, the title ordained by Bernie Rhodes for the new album, was released just over five weeks later, on 8 November. The fact that Rhodes had not consulted a single member of the last Clash line-up about the title was significant: whatever happened to Fuck Britain!? The significance took a quantum leap when you saw that the songwriting credits of the record were attributed to Strummer–Rhodes. ‘That’s not to say he didn’t write anything,’ said Joe, ‘but I wouldn’t have said it was half-and-half.’

  The production of the opening song, ‘Dictator’ – all cut-up radio broadcast samples and beat-box rhythms, ironically like a pastiche of what BAD turned out to be doing far more effectively – set the tone for Cut the Crap. Although it had a few good moments – ‘This is England’, ‘North and South’ (a tune about the geographical divide in Britain) and the vaguely acceptable football song chant of ‘We are the Clash’ – the sound of the record was jarring and virtually unlistenable. Hard as one might have tried to like it, Cut the Crap was mostly a terrible din, and dreadfully disappointing. It spoke volumes about the contempt felt by Bernie Rhodes for the legacy of the Clash and for the group’s really quite musically sophisticated audience; it also said much about his misguided concept of himself as a musical artist. With one or two exceptions – Sounds gave it a good review – the record received a critical kicking. And rightly so: although it made it to number 16 in the UK charts, Cut the Crap was a disaster.

  What must have been even more dispiriting for Joe was the extremely positive reception accorded the first releases from Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite: there was a trio of classic singles, ‘The Bottom Line’ (‘That tune had lyrics Joe had written when I was still with The Clash,’ said Mick), ‘E=MC2’ and ‘Medicine Show’, the last two British chart hits. The excellent album This is Big Audio Dynamite was released a week after Cut the Crap, largely to critical acclaim, which also was how the group’s first tour was received. When they played their first major London date, at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, there was a full-scale turn-out of the groovers who in the past would have been at a Clash show. Tracy Franks, a long-standing fan of the group, would regularly see Joe around lunchtime as he had his breakfast at Bites café on Westbourne Park Road. Joe’s Bites’ breakfasts enjoyed an unswerving routine: a sardine sandwich and a ‘special’ coffee into which was injected a slug of brandy from a bottle stashed beneath the counter reserved for this one customer. On the day of the Town and Country Club BAD show she noticed that Joe seemed in a particularly low frame of mind: ‘Joe was obviously feeling gutted. He said, “Are you going to go and see Mick play tonight?” I said I’d like to go, but I didn’t have a babysitter. Joe said, “I’ll do it.” I thought, “Oh shit: Joe Strummer? Babysitting for an old fan while I go and see Mick Jones play his first big London gig since the Clash?” I left and went home, thinking, I can’t believe this. But at about 6 o’clock Joe was ringing on my doorbell. “Tracy, I don’t think I can make it. The wife thought it was a bad idea.”’

  Round at the new house at 53 Oxford Gardens shared by Paul Simonon and his wife Pearl Harbor, Joe was a frequent visitor. ‘For some time Joe had been coming round regularly,’ recalled Pearl. ‘Joe was really confused about it all. He wasn’t convinced things were going well. I think he and Kosmo had had a falling-out.’ Kosmo might have had good reason. At the time of Combat Rock he’d been promised a percentage of the group’s profits; because of the subsequent litigation everyone seemed to have forgotten about this.

  ‘Joe and Paul were together a lot at that time,’ said Pearl. ‘The other guys in the group never came around. But it was Joe who was feeling completely negative about the group, not Paul. Paul always liked Bernie. In fact, Bernie really loved Paul, and always wanted to give him lots of advice. He was probably trying to talk to Joe, but Joe wasn’t buying it.

  ‘No one ever seemed to address the fact that Joe’s father had just died and his mother was dying. I think he was in hell. But I found all those guys so internal about their feelings – they wouldn’t talk about how they felt. Even though Joe was obviously in this state, he wouldn’t come over and say that he felt terrible. Later when I’d moved back to San Francisco and I’d sometimes see him, he didn’t even talk then: the most vulnerable he’d get with me was trying to be sexual. But you have to remember that at that time blokes weren’t supposed to talk about their feelings. It was the current of the time. For Joe to start talking, he’d have to be very low, with drink in him. With all of those guys, my favourite thing was being with them drinking, when they’d be very open.’

  By the time that Cut the Crap came out Joe Strummer was no longer really a member of any form of the Clash. Out of the blue he turned up at Vince’s place in Finsbury Park. ‘He came up and had a cup of tea. It was really weird. What was he doing there? It was the first time in nearly two years that he just turned up. He stayed for about half an hour and then he disappeared again.’

  In the period building up to the release of the record Joe had disappeared to Madrid to produce 091, the group from Granada. But life was not much better in Spain. He had immediately run into the kind of difficulties that had plagued the Clash: the record company worried about his presence, to which Joe only added with his habitual absences from sessions to bars or gigs. The record company wanted a cute pop album; they had no truck with Joe’s fondness for using a distortion pedal on the bass guitar, or recording the slamming of doors. The inexperienced 091 were largely too timid to speak up for Joe.

  Joe’s already precarious spirits were wobbled even more. He was very dispirited. He felt he should be in London with Gaby, by now very pregnant, and he was running out of money. Joe made a phone call to a friend, the singer with Radio Futura, Spain’s top group. Joe asked if he would lend him 150,000 pesetas, around £600. When he came up with the cash, Joe bought what he called his ‘Spanish-American car’, an old silver Dodge Dart with a black roof. Then he headed off to Granada.

  In Granada he met Jesus Arias. ‘Look what I’ve bought,’ said Joe. ‘Ain’t she a beauty? My Spanish-American car. I’ve always wanted to have a car like this.’ ‘At stop lights,’ remembered Jesus, ‘he would address people: “Es mi nuevo coche, amigo. Tu gusta? Coche Espanol-Americano.”’

  Joe announced that he wanted to finally visit the burial site of Federico García Lorca, referenced in the lyrics of ‘Spanish Bombs’. His adoration of Lorca’s work can be explained by a simple line of the great writer: ‘At the heart of all great
art is an essential melancholy.’ ‘They headed to the town of Viznar, nine kilometres from Granada. Driving through the countryside, Joe dropped his guard. He told Jesus of the difficulties he was having in Madrid. ‘I’m not having a good time. I don’t know what to do, because I really love this band. I just want them to put into music the ideas I’m having. Guy Stevens did the same with the Clash, and it worked. The first time we met Guy Stevens we thought he was crazy. Look what happened. I feel like the poor Guy Stevens of 091.’

  The road along which they were driving was that on which Lorca had been taken to his execution. This information shocked Joe. ‘I can’t believe that. This landscape is the last thing his eyes saw.’ Jesus had to dissuade Joe from buying shovels to dig for Lorca’s remains: along with 2,000 other death squad victims, the writer had been dumped into the ground without a commemorative marker. His final burial place was close to a pair of olive trees.

  When they reached the bald terrain on which Lorca was murdered, Joe immediately felt the intensity of the setting, as well as its characteristic sombre mood. ‘I can hear them,’ Joe suddenly whispered. ‘I can hear the screams of the dead.’

  He stepped over to the olive trees, sat down and remained in silence. ‘When I turned back to Joe,’ said Jesus, ‘he was silently crying, his face full of tears, while he made a joint.’

  ‘I promised myself,’ said Joe, ‘that if some day I visited Lorca’s grave I would smoke a joint in his honour. When I was writing “Spanish Bombs” on a plane, I made that promise. This is for you, Federico,’ he said, lighting the joint and saluting the sky.

  The next morning Joe climbed into his ‘Spanish-American’ car and drove for four hours straight to the studio in Madrid, offering the record company money out of his own pocket for further recording time – which was rejected. As soon as his work was completed he flew back to London. The record company remixed the record, Mas De Cien Lobos (More Than a Hundred Wolves), losing Joe’s effects and idiosyncrasies. Joe was not having a good time in recording studios in 1985.

  Back in London he hung on with the Clash, characteristically equivocal, until the disastrous reviews of Cut the Crap had appeared. Then he wrote a tract denouncing the role of Bernie Rhodes in the record, declaring he would take out full-page advertisements in the music press to broadcast these views. But he never got round to it. Meeting up with Pete Howard, Nick Sheppard and Vince White at Paul’s house, he told them it was over; in a bar in Soho the next day he handed them each an envelope containing £1,000 and told them it was the end. Then he was gone.

  The split was reported in the 23 November issue of the NME in a communiqué credited to Joe Strummer, but actually put out by Bernie Rhodes: Bernie was insisting Joe and Paul would continue as the Clash, citing the imminent release of ‘Shooting Star’, a song Joe had written. In the same way Malcolm McLaren had kept going the brand name of the Sex Pistols after the departure of key man John Lydon, so Bernie Rhodes believed he could keep the Clash name alive. Having had to accept that Joe had departed for good, for a time he pushed the idea of another group called the Clash in which Paul Simonon would be the front-man. Of course, it was not to be. However, it was at the suggestion of Bernie Rhodes that Paul soon moved to the United States, basing himself in El Paso and later Los Angeles. Havana 3 A.M., the group he led at the end of the decade, derived from this move. When Paul bailed out, Bernie even tried to keep the Clash going with Nick Sheppard, Vince White and Pete Howard.

  But what was Joe Strummer to do? In the middle of 1974 he had set off on his journey to becoming a rock’n’roll star, first with the 101’ers and then with the Clash, with whom he unequivocally achieved his goal. Now, eleven years on, he was effectively without a gig.

  20

  MAN OF MYSTERY

  1985–1987

  ‘Those five years, from ’77 to ’82, were very intense. Yak-yak-yak, non-stop yak. I didn’t have any more to say, because we’d done eight slabs of long-playing vinyl inside a five-year period, and that’s a lot of yakking for one man to do in terms of lyric-writing, as opposed to gassing on generally. So I think it was pretty cool of me to shut up for a bit. I think I was exhausted: mentally, physically, every which way, you know?’

  Joe to Charles Shaar Murray, 1999

  With his 1984 film Repo Man, Alex Cox had signalled his intent as a Young Turk of independent cinema. His first feature-length film, Repo Man, a surreal film noir, was a critical and box-office hit. On the strength of that, he had started working on his second feature, Love Kills, produced by Eric Fellner, who until recently had worked mainly on top-end videos. Love Kills was the tragic story of the doomed lovers John ‘Sid’ Ritchie (played by Gary Oldman) and Nancy Spungen (played by Chloe Webb), whom he had allegedly stabbed to death in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Soon the film would be renamed Sid and Nancy.

  The film had already been denounced by much of the punk élite. Why was this man who had never been around the Pistols coming over from LA and making a film about them? But this did not stop Joe Strummer from turning up on a wintry night at the end of 1985 at the ‘wrap’ party for the English section of filming.

  The shindig was being thrown at the top end of Ladbroke Grove, at a club on Kensal Road. The venue was therefore comfortably within Joe’s fiefdom as King of Notting Hill; as soon as he heard about it he assumed right of entrance. But he discovered he was expected to pay a tithe to the robber baron who was behind the event. As soon as Alex Cox learnt that Joe Strummer was at the party, he sought him out. ‘I said, “Right, if you’ve come to the party you can write some music for the film.” Joe didn’t want to know at first. He reacted as most people did when they heard about the film. I persuaded him to see a rough cut.’

  That December Joe also went back to Granada. He seemed unconcerned about the 091 record. On 19 December he called Jesus Arias: he wanted to visit Lorca’s birthplace with some friends and refreshments. ‘I’ve got the joints,’ said Joe when he met up with Jesus.

  At Lorca’s birthplace of Fuente Vagueros Joe had photographs taken of himself by the room in which the poet had been born. After visits to several bars, he drove to the killing fields of Viznar. In very good spirits, Joe sang an acapella ‘Spanish Bombs’ for his friends as he sat under the olive trees, firing up yet another joint.

  But what happened to the silver Dodge Dart, his ‘Spanish-American car’? Joe lost it. In Madrid the next month he drunkenly parked the car in a city centre parking lot and forgot where it was. He then spent several days searching every parking facility in the area, to no avail. Joe’s ‘Spanish-American car’ simply vanished from his life. It is possible that here Joe was being offered a lesson about the losses that could come from drunken driving. Evidently he ignored it; soon he would pay a stricter penalty. While he was in Spain, Gaby went into labour. On 14 January 1986 Gaby gave birth to a second daughter, Lola Maybelline Mellor, the girl’s first name was taken from a suggestion the previous spring by José Antonio García, the 091 singer, the second from the celebratory Chuck Berry record of the same name.

  Birth and death are interlinked. As well as the traumas of the Clash break-up, Joe had learnt at the beginning of the year that his mother’s cancer had developed further. But that wasn’t all. ‘I had this foreboding,’ said Gaby. ‘I knew something was going to happen.’ The day before Lola was born, Nicky Salter, Gaby’s brother, had had a ‘section’ order imposed on him under the Mental Health Act: he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. On 24 January 1986 Nicky committed suicide by hara-kiri. ‘It tore the family apart,’ said Gaby. ‘Joe was so supportive because he’d been there with David.’ When I heard the news of Nick’s suicide my immediate, unchivalrous thought was for Joe. How much more mental turmoil, I wondered, must be thrown up for someone who had never really recovered from another family suicide?

  When he was back in London, Joe was shown a rough cut of Alex Cox’s available footage. Possibly because he wasn’t doing much else that month, Joe quickly became, said Alex Cox, ‘very
attached to the Sid and Nancy project. He came and wanted to hate it. But didn’t.’ Cox’s appealing energy and charismatic certainty would have attracted Joe Strummer; at the time, that was something Joe certainly needed.

  Keeping up a public face, Joe agreed to write and perform the title tune for Alex Cox’s movie, a song that had to have the title ‘Love Kills’. ‘He became part of the post-production music department,’ said Alex. For a time Alex and Joe discovered each other to be kindred spirits, the film director’s guerrilla approach corresponding to the musician’s attitude: both believed in the energizing, edifying effects of an artist throwing his entire essence into a project. Also, they both had a fondness for the occasional refreshing drink. Under the terms of his contract with CBS, which would become more niggling and constraining as the years wore on, Joe was only legally permitted to write and perform a pair of songs for the film. Falling back on that old music business stand-by of the nom de disque, he wrote another six. ‘Quite soon after we’d met, he was doing me tapes,’ said Alex Cox. ‘Twenty different tracks that he thought I should listen to – reggae, or other types of music he thought I didn’t know enough about. He’d start out making the tapes at about 6 o’clock in the evening, and the writing would be perfect, very musical-looking handwriting, and it would start to go scribbly about halfway through the bottle of wine, and by the end it was a spider walking all over the tape-box.’