Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘I’m just about ready, and I’m looking forward to working with Mick again, because we’re going to do it together. It’ll be called Throwdown and it’ll be completely the opposite of everything else that’s being made now: just three instruments and the cheapest studio. Everyone’ll hate it except the hipsters and flipsters. I just promise to make a good record when I can, and not to tour, and not to foist any shit on the public. And never to make another video. It’s the performance and the content that counts.

  ‘It ain’t rock’n’roll any more. It’s just wallpaper. Now is the time when you’ve got to look for things, as it was in the days of beatniks existing in straight society, when the good stuff was hard to find. But was even more valuable when you discovered it.’

  The story of Straight to Hell, which had been written by Alex Cox and Dick Rude very quickly (if not in the claimed three days), was like a Mad magazine parody of a spaghetti movie. Joe Strummer, as a character called Simms, Dick Rude, and Sy Richardson, an LA actor, played a trio of hapless, hopeless ‘deadly killers’ who had pulled a bank heist and were on the run. ‘I’m bad energy, man,’ Joe’s character Simms declared his raison d’être. ‘That’s his own line, his self-knowledge thing,’ considered Alex Cox. The film also featured the Pogues, Elvis Costello, a young newcomer called Courtney Love, and a member of Alex Cox’s informal repertory company, Zander Schloss, who became a firm ally of Joe’s. Alex Cox’s idea was to litter the film with cameo parts: Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, John Cusack and Jim Jarmusch were among a host flown in.

  In Spain Joe was more closed down than I had seen him in London, more I felt from being Joe Strummer on public display than from trying to stay in character. As the male lead, Joe was surrounded by conceptually correct details – an acoustic guitar, a switchblade knife, a pack of mansized Commando cigarettes (‘HM Government warning: cigarettes can seriously fuck with your health!’), a mouldy, pre-packaged pizza. He was wearing a black suit that he had not removed since filming began two weeks previously, after having first dived in the hotel pool wearing it. He spent all day on set in a beatup ’71 Dodge. As he also sported a barely concealed shoulder holster and revolver beneath his dust-ingrained jacket, this caused a measure of consternation amongst the customers in the bars he was prone to visit until 6 in the morning.

  It had got to the point, Joe said, where he was no longer able to discriminate between life on and off set. ‘Acting requires concentration,’ he offered as an explanation as to why he appeared so enclosed, so within himself; and why half the crew suspected him of temporary insanity, particularly over such crucial matters as the necessity of allowing himself to be covered in flies without flinching. ‘This,’ he announced in the Dodge one day, ‘is a film for everybody, a film that people all around the world can understand. A Bolivian tin-miner can take his senorita to see it on a Friday night and know that he’s getting his peso’s worth.’

  Frank Murray was manager of the Pogues. As he was also a walking character actor, almost a stage Irishman, he naturally had a part in Straight to Hell. ‘Joe stayed out in the desert at night a lot,’ Frank remembered. ‘Joe likes bonfires and they had bonfires out there and played guitars. It was a very, very unique and magical experience.’

  Starring in a heist film shot on the sets of the Spaghetti Westerns: what better way to spend the summer for Joe Strummer. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  In a drinking session Joe told Frank what he had decided he should do. No longer was it a blues band he was after – now he wanted to form a semi-acoustic group, like the Pogues. ‘Joe started talking about an acoustic project he wanted to get involved in. In a roundabout way he was asking if he could poach Terry Woods from the Pogues. I did like the idea that Joe wanted to play acoustic music, or semi-acoustic. I thought it was the right road to go down.’ When Zander Schloss suggested he and Joe play together, Joe replied, ‘Zander, I don’t want to play music. I’m an old man, Zander.’ Joe had turned 34 a few days previously.

  Frank Murray walked out of another cantina with Joe. ‘He started looking up in the sky and identifying things like Ursa Major. I thought he was taking the piss. He said, “No, Frank, I can identify them all.” I could understand why he stayed in the desert in Almeria, because you looked at beautiful stars at night. Then when he moved to Somerset: same thing, beautiful skies at night.’

  But Joe had a day job. How was he doing? ‘He would come up with inspired ideas for lines,’ said Alex Cox. ‘When he and Dick Rude are on their deathbeds, Dick is lying there, groaning and moaning that he’s dying, and Joe comes up with: “Still, mustn’t grumble.” – his last words in the film. He improvised them, the words written in the script were probably something like “Adios, hombre.”’

  Down in Almeria Joe also encountered another member of the ensemble: Jem Finer, the banjo-player and engine-room of the Pogues. While the gnarled visage of Shane MacGowan was the public persona of the Pogues, Jem Finer – who wrote much of the material – was the real leader of the group. He had come down to the set with his wife Marcia, and their two daughters, Kitty and Ella, roughly the same ages as Jazz and Lola, there with Gaby; later, Joe’s treat for all four girls would be to make them fish finger sandwiches. Gaby became tight with Marcia Finer, an intelligent, interesting artist. ‘After Spain Gaby and Joe invited us over to Lancaster Road,’ said Jem. ‘I knew him primarily through the family connection. I didn’t know him through music at all. There were a few times when we’d all go and do stuff with the kids and Mick and his daughter Lauren would come along. Joe always seemed a very no bullshit person, good company, good fun, good at setting up things for kids to do, making dens. We’d get pissed and stoned in the evening. I felt there were two people there, John Mellor and Joe Strummer. The person I knew was John Mellor; Joe Strummer was very much a construct.

  ‘The Joe Strummer character would emerge after a period of sustained activity which seemed to involve staying up very, very late, getting more and more obsessed, being destructive, and being a control freak. As time went on when we were working together it took longer and longer until he was Joe Strummer the whole time – which was not always pleasant.

  ‘The singer is the focus of attention. Joe was a front-man in a very different way from Shane, our singer: there’s an element of a showman about Joe. Interlinked with that was his position as Joe Strummer, saving the world, and he’d try and figure out how to do that role. But there were weird contradictions. There was a side to him that was decidedly totalitarian, poised on the precipice between the extreme left and the extreme right. I’m not saying he’s a fascist, but just somebody who has that control tendency. One of the last times I saw him he was talking about General Montgomery. He was saying how brilliantly he’d done.’

  Jem and Gaby, Joe and Marcia: people used to joke that they were like two pairs of brothers and sisters. Not that it always stayed so platonic: ‘There were the odd times,’ said Marcia, ‘he’d come on a bit amorous to me and I’d think, “I don’t believe this for a minute.” Sometimes he’d do that “You understand me” routine and I said, “You say that to all the girls, come on.” There was that thing about the depression, and being in love, or having a fling, was a move away from it. He had that duality. I wasn’t very girly and he wasn’t really totally macho – that construction, that masquerade of a person’s sexual persona and type. He could relate to people who had that duality.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say he seemed depressed,’ Jem added. ‘He seemed very positive, not cheerful – that’s not the right word for Joe. There was a time the Pogues were recording round the corner from his house. I bumped into him and it seemed obvious he wanted to be in a band again, making music again, out in the world rather than his basement. I felt he wasn’t totally happy not being a working rock’n’roller. He definitely wasn’t an uproariously happy person. He was seriously engaged with the world, and the world’s not the nicest place, and any sensible person isn’t going to be uproariously happy.’ (Later Mick Jones echoed Jem’s tho
ughts: ‘Maybe Joe did fall into depressions. Because he was grounded in reality.’)

  The film director Jim Jarmusch, who had met Joe briefly in Cannes, quickly became part of his posse and returned to New York from the Straight to Hell film set via London. ‘I stayed at Joe’s house on the sofa for a few days and often after that. Once Jazzy and Lola came downstairs dressed in feather boas with strange lipstick marks on their faces and started jumping up and down on the furniture. Joe said, “What’s all this then?” They said, “Daddy, we’re playing punk rock olden days.” And the expression on Joe’s face … He sat down in the kitchen and poured himself a brandy and Coke and poured me one. One time we were walking in London and we passed a guy younger than us in a suit and tie, a businessman guy, and he had a Walkman on. Joe said, “He’s probably listening to Sandinista!” That remark, even though it was funny, was probably born out of that depressive side of Joe.’

  Joe and his spar Sean Carasov at the bar of 192, the Notting Hill restaurant that became a part of Joe’s scene. (Sean Carasov)

  After Straight to Hell, more film work for Joe came up almost straight away. Through Alex Cox, Joe met Rudy Wurlitzer, who had scripted Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; Joe was a big fan of Bob Dylan’s soundtrack for that film. With Robert Frank, who had made the Rolling Stones’ banned Cocksucker Blues, Wurlitzer was co-directing Candy Mountain, shot in Canada in the autumn of 1986. Wurlitzer offered Joe a small part, as Mario, a security guard. ‘It was frustrating that Joe had only a small part, because he was very exciting – one wanted more of him,’ said Rudy Wurlitzer. ‘He could be a great star, a major leading man.’

  Returning to London, much of Joe’s time was dedicated to his mother. Anna Mellor, whose cancer had reached a terminal stage, was in the last throes of her life at the hospice in Caterham. Paradoxically, said Gaby, this ‘withdrawn’ woman ‘only came alive when Lola was born – the day after Anna’s birthday. She was besotted, the only time I saw her really animated. She had bone cancer. It was painful for her to touch anything – yet she’d let Lola crawl all over her.’ It was at the hospice that Joe continued to quiz, sometimes with considerable hostility, his reluctant, dying mother about why he had been sent away to boarding school. Anna Mellor did not leave this world without a considerable fight; twice she was moved out of her ward at the hospice and taken to a room where she could die on her own; twice she packed her things and moved back into the ward.

  This was the time when on so many occasions I’d walk round a corner in Notting Hill for Joe to walk straight into me, tension sparks almost visibly flying off him, his head bowed, his face drawn. He seemed hardly able to bring himself to speak, not even looking entirely comfortable in his habitual black leather jacket, as though the uniform no longer fitted. After the great success of working on the second BAD record, he now seemed desperately unhappy. On such chance meetings I would want to put my arms around him and tell him it was all right, he was going to be OK. But the defence mechanisms learnt young within John Mellor, and certainly frozen within the complex Joe Strummer, would not permit such thinking from others. You felt his antennae were so alert that he would second-guess your every attempt to console him, and he would traipse off on his way. Later Jim Jarmusch would describe him to me in such moods as ‘Big Chief Thunder Cloud’, an apt description of the dark aura that Joe seemed able to summon up at will to surround him like a shield.

  The final end of Anna Mellor, on 28 December 1986, only led to more introversion. ‘After Ron died,’ said Joe’s cousin Iain Gillies, ‘Anna was dignified and gracious. When she became ill herself she didn’t complain or even want to talk about it. From Ron going until her death in late 1986 I saw her regularly, once a month or so.’ When his mother finally died, Joe stopped going out, stopped drinking, stopped smoking spliffs.

  For Anna’s funeral on 2 January 1987 Joe had arrived wearing a dark brown hand-me-down suit from his father (‘He was proud of his father,’ said Dick Rude), which only accentuated the tramp-like appearance ordained by his new hirsute look. There was criticism of him from neighbours who had endeavoured to alleviate the agony of his mother’s last months. ‘I remember,’ said Gerry King, Joe’s cousin, ‘one neighbour saying that he had been a terrible son, that he hadn’t treated his parents properly. He hardly came to visit. He was very demanding when he did come. For the funeral he arrived late.’

  At 15 Court Farm Road, following the service, Joe took out all the old photos from India that he could find. ‘He said to me,’ said Gerry, ‘that he was trying to find out about his background. When we were looking at the pictures, he would ask if I knew people in them. He wanted to find out more about himself. He seemed impassive, this quite solitary figure.’ Whilst rifling through his parents’ memorabilia, Joe showed his cousin Iain Gillies the suicide note that his brother David had left for his parents.

  Late in January 1987 I was walking up Portobello Road in the early evening winter dark to the Gate Cinema, where I was going to see Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law. Suddenly a long-haired, bearded scruff walking in the other direction barged into my shoulder. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ asked a familiar voice. It was Joe. I was amazed. His new look was for his part in Alex Cox’s forthcoming Nicaraguan-set film, Walker. He told me that he had been staying in since his mother had died, but that he was looking forward to going to Nicaragua to make the film the following month. Now he seemed fragile and open again. ‘Down by Law’s good,’ he called out over his shoulder as he set off on his way. ‘I’ve seen it twice.’

  ‘When his mum died,’ said Dick Rude, ‘it was incredibly traumatic for him. He felt a lot of guilt for not having been closer to her, and not having been there when she died. I imagined his mom was the carrier of that depression and he had some rebelliousness towards her because of that. He was the child of an alcoholic. I think at some point after she died he found forgiveness by looking outward, not inward. The way he treated Gaby was the result of his relationship with his mother. I remember him going to the funeral, and he was really at odds with Gaby. He’s sitting there going, “How did I get here?” That was his truly dark night of the soul. It was his period of deepest brooding, and he was very introverted. Your mom dies, you’ve gone from hero to zero, and you’re off acting in little movies around the world.’

  21

  SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE

  1987–1988

  The Walker film set, Granada, Nicaragua, late March 1987

  William Walker, played in Alex Cox’s movie by the excellent Ed Harris, was a figure little known in his home country of the United States. In 1855 he shipped an army to Nicaragua and had himself proclaimed President, though he was overthrown after a year. ‘He’s a complete puzzle,’ said a still bearded, still long-haired Joe Strummer to me when I arrived on the set. Like those humorous roles Shakespeare wrote for the alleged ‘groundlings’, Joe was playing Faucet, a cook in Walker’s army; Dick Rude played his partner-in-cuisine. ‘Even the book he wrote, The War in Nicaragua, he wrote in the third person. He was a megalomaniac, and in the end he went bonkers. He even shot his own brother,’ he concluded, describing what for Joe might have been the very worst of mortal sins. Joe’s face was smeared with mud: ‘Sunblock,’ he announced. ‘That’s all that Walker’s men had to use. So I’m using it too.’

  In a cantina to one side of the set, he was thoughtfully sipping a cerveza. ‘They released Sandinista! here,’ he suddenly announced, slightly oddly. ‘I don’t think it sold any copies, though.’ Contrary to what I had expected, in a land which had a deep resonance for him, Joe did not seem to be exactly having a great time. In the cantina he unexpectedly snapped at me for not knowing that the Spanish for ‘beer’ was ‘cerveza’. As though taking his lead from those family sojourns in far-flung parts of the Empire, and despite his film costume, Joe seemed more like a white-suited Graham Greene characters than a member of The Wild Bunch. (All the same, Joe Strummer was offered Nicaraguan citizenship, but respectfully declined it – he thought
it might prevent his family from being given US visas.)

  Who was that Man of Mystery? Joe Strummer (centre) in character for his part in Walker. (Daniel Lainéé/Corbis)

  Spider Stacey of the Pogues was the only member of the group to have been given a part in the film. This was the first time he had seen Joe Strummer since being on the set of Straight to Hell. ‘He seemed troubled, at least distant. I know he was acting in a film, and his appearance had had to change for it, but it made him look very strange. He didn’t seem the Joe I had met in Spain the previous summer.’

  The spiky aura I had observed around Joe on the streets of Notting Hill had travelled with him on the plane to Nicaragua. He again seemed not in a good state, awkward, visibly uncertain. He was suffering a lot from his mother’s death, yet in that traditionally Highland ‘close’ manner, Joe had omitted to mention this to those involved with Walker. Alex Cox had no idea that he had gone through the experience of losing his mother shortly before leaving for Nicaragua.

  Rather than live in the Managua crew hotel, Joe and Dick Rude moved into a house in Granada, where Dick observed Joe’s angst at first hand. ‘There is no man that was ever better at brooding and isolating than he was. You could be in a bar with him having a laugh and everything is fine, then you turn around and he’s left without saying goodbye. He could isolate better than anyone, he could make you laugh better than anyone, he could be there for you more than anyone. He did it all to his fullest.’