Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Wherever he went supplicants would clamour to hear Joe’s ‘message’. But what exactly was it? Joe had a series of instinctive complaints about society – against racism, inequality, oppression, corruption – but there was never anything especially specific in his satirical grumbling, apart from ‘Get on with it!’ The vision of Prophet Joe essentially derived from what was projected onto him by those who came to genuflect before the sound of his hurt vocals. This wise man craved reassurance and validation.

  Death had relentlessly shadowed him throughout the previous decade – first his father, then the suicide of Gaby’s brother Nick, then the lingering end of his mother – and these tragedies were all overhung by a further ending that held an equal significance: the death of the Clash. Joe needed to always surround himself with a posse, but now he pulled the wagons into a circle and barricaded himself against the world. This high plains drifter was floating, not only in his career but also in his personal life. For reasons which seemed to have most to do with his own state of mind his relationship with Gaby left him troubled, which he attempted to overcome by seeking solace in the arms of whoever was available.

  What would happen to him over the next ten years? Things would go wrong, even become worse at first. But they would pick up later. And he would meet a new world.

  ‘I don’t remember him being actually depressed until after Clash Mark II split up,’ said Gaby. ‘I think he was disappointed in himself for believing in Bernie. He spent a lot of time and energy trying to get the Clash back together. That he couldn’t talk Mick into doing it frustrated him incredibly, on top of that feeling of “What the fuck am I doing?” He’d been on a career in a certain direction, and it all falls apart around you.

  ‘When we went to LA, he lightened up, and the times we spent in LA were a lot better. But that was because when he was there he was always working on a project. At Lancaster Road he used to say, “I’m downstairs writing.” After a couple of years I started to think, “Well, he’s down there all the time, but I haven’t heard anything!” But I was just getting on with the kids. I think we were beyond caring what anyone was doing. If he was in his room writing, that was fine. But it did strike me that he stayed there for a very long time and no music came out of it. In retrospect.

  ‘Everything had gone wrong. I think there is depression in his family. Because he never talked about it, it wouldn’t be something that he could go and seek help about. In quite a lot of pictures of him, the girls say, “Oh, it’s Dad’s angry face.” There were these manic, almost demonic faces he would pull that were quite frightening.’

  Later in the decade, when he met and became friends with the artist Damien Hirst, he found someone to whom he was able to unburden himself. ‘He talked about his mum,’ said Damien. ‘About the fact that she was an alcoholic. He talked about sitting on the stairs as a child and hearing her shouting and screaming and said, “I didn’t understand what was going on.”’ (Although others would not agree, Iain Gillies, Joe’s cousin, has an opposite view: ‘Aunt Anna was not an alcoholic. I would stay the night at their house and there was never any sign of hard drinking on her part: I would have spotted it, as my antenna had been up for those kinds of antics for a long time, and if it were true I would have no qualms about confirming it. Joe himself was a Mickey Mouse drinker until he was in the Clash. In the early seventies he was down on drinking: I remember a couple of times being surprised by how little he could drink or even wanted to drink, so he construed his mother’s daily gin as hardened addiction and his extravagant imagination took over and he had to run with his theory all the way up to Damien Hurst.’)

  ‘I tried to talk to him about his brother,’ added Damien, ‘but he didn’t want to go there at all. I bought a book for him: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. But he wasn’t interested in the least. He’d shut a door that couldn’t be opened.’

  As is the manner of these things within families, and despite Iain Gillies’s view, it seems as though the drinking of Joe’s female archetype (as well as that of his father, of course) had been passed down to him. Gaby said to me she had once been told that Joe had for a brief time attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – though he never got round to telling her that himself. This seems to have been not long after the death of his mother, when I remember him telling me that he had stopped drinking.

  Solomon to the fans, Genghis Khan at home, Joe was a suitable candidate for therapy or psychoanalysis. ‘I don’t think he really believed in things like that,’ said Tricia Ronane, reminding us of the eternal Luddite within Joe. ‘Although his staying up all night drinking and talking was his own form of therapy.’ Gaby felt that she also was dealing with the psychological detritus of her own upbringing, something that she thought probably was part of the unconscious bond between herself and Joe. ‘A lot of his behaviour I would not put up with in a relationship today,’ she said. ‘He put me on a pedestal and I didn’t have to partake in the world. I lived in a cocoon. I guess that was the pay-off for the support and security. I didn’t realize that.

  ‘But after losing my brother Nicky my life changed. Joe sometimes would disappear for days and wouldn’t call and I never knew where he was. He’d just go off on benders. That was Joe. The thing that pissed me off about him most was that he would disappear. I didn’t know if he was still alive when he did that.’

  Because he was always so distant, Joe never wholly revealed to Gaby his full frame of mind, including the depression in which he was frequently mired. (‘Joe used to go on about people needing to communicate,’ said Paul. ‘But he was the worst at communicating.’ ‘I really tried to get through to him,’ said Mick, ‘but you’d get to a certain point, and that was it – no further.’) Ironically, Gaby says of Joe’s depression, ‘I read about it in a newspaper, where he was talking about it – I think it was an article by you. It was the Scottish thing: you don’t talk at all about your emotions, or about pain. In Spain once he somehow got a third-degree burn on his hand. Obviously it was very painful. He just said, “I don’t think I’ll come out drinking tonight.” Took a painkiller and lay down. He didn’t make a fuss and didn’t want any fuss from anyone.’ When ill Joe would refuse to submit to his sickness, encouraging his children to do the same. Gaby believed he took a similar approach to his depression, not really admitting it was there.

  There are of course always at least two sides to every story, and Alex Chetwynd, the old family friend of Gaby, had a different point of view: ‘Gaby’s a beautiful person, but she’s never had to work.’ (‘Gaby had never worked because Joe had never wanted her to,’ Tricia Ronane gave a counter-view.) ‘I think there was nothing really wrong in the relationship, except that Joe liked his women,’ continued Alex. ‘He’d always had loads of women, and Gaby says she didn’t know about it. You could tell he was a rascal: he tried it on with every one of my girlfriends. He stuck his tongue down a couple of my girlfriends, and it well pissed me off. But I know Gaby as well as him, if not more. He loved Gaby, and Gaby held the purse strings [from 1988 onwards Gaby had taken over the day-to-day running of Joe’s business affairs, setting up an office at 37 Lancaster Road] and was allowed to do whatever she wanted. She didn’t have a bad life, the kids got everything they wanted, she had the big house, plenty of holidays, and he always had his private time. He was a funny guy. He snuck in and out and threw big parties or whatever and had good things to say. He made you feel like you were boss, and that he was there almost as your servant. Life’s hard, and people like that make it better and easier, and if you can learn a trick of how to do it from someone like Joe, it’s a good thing.’ Perhaps Joe had learnt from his studies of that copy of the I Ching that I had seen on the table at Lancaster Road: is not one of its most memorable edicts that to learn how to rule, you must first learn how to serve? But his dilemma now was: what was he supposed to be serving?

  Pat Rodger, the daughter of a Scottish academic, had first met Joe and the Clash in 1977 while working for an Edinburgh music promoter. Whe
n Pat moved to London, buying a small flat in Notting Hill, she was taken on as nanny for Mick Jones’s baby daughter Lauren. As a rapprochement took place between Mick and Joe, she would sometimes moonlight, taking care of Jazz and Lola for Joe and Gaby.

  In December 1990 Pat returned to London from six months in India to discover that the man she had been seeing before her trip abroad had killed himself. She was so devastated, in such pain, that – as she put it – people would cross the street to avoid her. But early one afternoon in the week that she had come back to Notting Hill she ran into Joe Strummer on Portobello Road. She told him what had happened and he responded in an archetypal Joe way: he took Pat to the Warwick Castle and they spent the afternoon getting drunk, Joe seemingly creating a shield around both of them to ward off his usual drinking cronies. ‘We went to the pub and virtually the first thing he did was to tell me his brother had killed himself – which I didn’t know about. He was the first person who understood what I was going through. Without laying his angst on the table he gave me the lessons. He said his was a different situation, because he hadn’t got on that well with his brother. “But he was my brother, he was my flesh and blood,” he said. “When somebody decides to actively remove themselves from life you feel as though part of you has been taken away.” I felt great guilt: would this guy have done it if I’d been around? So there was a real “Wow!” there with Joe that afternoon. I think anybody who has suicide close to them will be haunted by it. “Use this as an opportunity to empower yourself, to do something you wouldn’t do otherwise,” he recommended. Joe said how alienated people are by suicide. When you share that experience you are drawn together, which must have happened to Joe and Gaby after her brother died.

  ‘Joe was so easy to talk to that afternoon in the Warwick. He made me see things within this tragedy. “It’s not just about losing somebody, because there’s also always guilt,” he said. “But it tells you you have only one life, and if you’re going to do something with it you should start now. Because you might not be around one day and not leave anything behind you.”’

  Pat took a job at the Globe, a shebeen-like nightclub off Powis Square, near where she lived. ‘Joe knew I would finish at 5 in the morning, and he would come and knock on my window around then and come in for a spliff. We’d talk about a lot of things: how when cultures come together there can be collaboration, conflict or celebration. In that context he talked about bringing punk and reggae together. And also how when we first lived in Notting Hill it was the front line but now it had become gentrified. He hated the way that capitalism had made us consumers. He hated apathy and the way that people demanded to be fed on tap, and how people didn’t have responsibility when they had the power. He had seen how powerful a conglomeration of people could be, but at that time they seemed to be doing nothing. He would get very angst-ridden about Topper’s heroin. But we would also talk about Scotland. He talked about how it was a tie from his heart. I said that my heart was there, in Scotland. He said, “My heart is when I’m onstage.”

  ‘He acknowledged that he’d made bad decisions. He didn’t say he’d lost the plot. But he said that he hadn’t been in a place where he could listen to his own voice. And he’d listened to the wrong people. Bernie had been important in getting Joe to talk about politics. But everybody looked up to Joe and he had no one to look up to. When there were tensions between him and Mick, Joe didn’t have a father figure – maybe that was the role that Bernie took on for him. Because he’d had such a disastrous upbringing there was a real need for structure, and because it was so lacking you hold onto other established things to have your frame of reference.

  ‘I remember us talking about the film Clockwork Orange and its very manipulative use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He said that when he saw it he worried about what people were doing to his own music that he couldn’t control – the enormity of what he was putting out there and how he definitely needed to feel he could control it. His songs are so unequivocal and intense, and onstage with Mick – who was similarly dysfunctional – there was the possibility for either greatness or great conflict. Paul was a traditionalist in his painting style and had found an anchor there, and I think Mick and Joe didn’t have that. Joe was jealous of Mick’s musical abilities. He almost replaced his brother with Mick, that element of sibling rivalry: “How can you do that and I can’t?” But Joe had an ability to relate to people, perhaps more than Mick in those days. Mick used to hide behind his dope-smoking.’

  A few days before Christmas 1990 Joe and Gaby threw a seasonal party at 37 Lancaster Road. A really great night, as usual. Joe touched me deeply by retelling the story of the Carnival home invasion and how I’d stood with him. There was not the slightest hint of domestic discord; you would have thought that these two people were very happy together. This also seemed to be the case four months later when they arrived with the two girls at my house for a party I put on; Joe – who had been battling with booze-related weight fluctuations, his face sometimes seeming puffy from alcohol – was only drinking red wine; he had given up beer, he said, because it put too much of a belly on him. ‘We were both very good at that,’ said Gaby. ‘We’d have a party, or people to stay, and everything would seem very jolly. Then afterwards we’d just return to our separate ways.’ Some might feel that since time immemorial that has been the way of many relationships – it’s why men have a shed, or in Joe’s case a studio, except that in the textbook of love written by Hollywood, to which most recent generations subscribe, that wasn’t what we were told to expect. And Joe is in his own movie, which at this time seems to involve a lot of hitting on other women, almost as reassurance. (It was almost literally ‘hitting’ on them: one of Joe’s favoured pick-up techniques involved a sort of mild shoulder charge into his object of seduction.) But he pissed off people close to him through this behaviour. ‘Look at him. He’s pathetic,’ grunted Raymond Jordan at a party as in a corner Joe mooned like a teenager over a girl. Such secretive, sly behaviour leads to feelings of guilt which burden the mind, the last thing needed by Joe, who already had a brain close to imploding. At the very least, such conduct often leads to a fractious attitude to one’s main partner.

  There are few words more poignant in the English language than ‘longing’, and Joe was endlessly longing for love. Life seemed to work well for him when he was in love: the love affair with Paloma coincided with the 101’ers; Gaby came along just before the beginning of London Calling, a golden phase; the Danielle von Zerneck affair was no bad thing – the Pogues, the Permanent Record soundtrack, Mystery Train (just about …), all came to fruition while he was in love with her. His next relationship would involve a creative rebirth.

  At Easter 1991 Joe, Gaby and the kids, with their friends John and Amanda Govett, went to Andalucia in southern Spain, staying in Mojacar, a base to find somewhere to rent for the summer months in nearby San José. They discovered an apartment in San José at 1 Los Genovese.

  A great time was had in August in San José, to which Joe would now return every year, to the same property, always returning to London in time for the Notting Hill Carnival. When Joe and Gaby returned to England, a momentous decision was taken: although they would keep 37 Lancaster Road, they would move out of Notting Hill and set up home close to Andover in Hampshire, in Bransbury Cottage owned by John and Amanda Govett. Joe always maintained that this was his idea, that Jazzy one day had picked up a used hypodermic syringe in the playground in Powis Square and he realized it was time to make a move. But this short-hand explanation was typical Joe romanticism.

  The reason did involve the children, but was about the education of Jazz and Lola, in a way that Joe could not reveal in interviews. Adamant he would not send his children to private schools – knowing it would be contrary to everything in which he professed to believe – Joe had enrolled Jazz and Lola in Coleville Primary School, the state school closest to Lancaster Road. He and Gaby were disturbed to discover their children weren’t progressing at school. Here a real
moral dilemma opened up, familiar to parents of liberal persuasion.

  ‘I think the move to the country was definitely from Gaby’s end,’ said Tricia Ronane. ‘She wanted to do that. But Joe felt the children’s education in London was not great. With their edicts about “No private education” they made a rod for their own backs. Then they’ve got their own children going to the state primary round the corner and the education isn’t that great. Joe is realizing that and is finding that really hard to cope with. Lots of times I had conversations with Joe where he was battling with that principle and the actual reality of it.’

  Accordingly, in September 1992 the children were placed at Thorngrove, a private day school some twelve miles from Newton Stacey, near the Govetts. As headteacher Connie Broughton recalled, ‘Joe was fantastic, always very helpful and generous. He would take all the children under his arm. He would do recordings of the Christmas carol services – but only on the condition that he was provided with a glass of wine. He was a very kind, likable man, so different from the impression you got from him onstage.’ On one occasion, drinking wine in the kitchen at Thorngrove, Joe made an announcement: he had decided the name of any new group he formed – it would be the Mescaleros. What inspired this? Connie Broughton didn’t know. To the school he donated an electric guitar and amplifier, and he gave a copy of Clash on Broadway, a box set released in the United States in November 1991 and in the UK almost three years later, to the Broughtons’ fourteen-year-old son. Both Jazz and Lola left Thorngrove in July 1997. Jazz went as a boarder to Bedales, a celebrated public school in Hampshire, where Lola joined her.

  ‘Getting his mother to apologize for sending him to boarding school – that was one of our points of difference when he sent his own children to boarding school,’ recalled Marcia Finer. ‘He said he wanted the best for his kids, and I said maybe he should have been a bit more sympathetic towards his mother.’ Marcia was also concerned about what she saw as needless self-inflicted suffering: ‘Come on, maybe it would be nice to have an easy time of it now. You’ve worked hard, actually suffered quite a bit.’