Often Joe would not arrive at Orinoco until late in the evening; other times he would turn up around lunchtime, bringing Lucinda as well as Jazz, Lola and Eliza to the studio. Revealing their business acumen, the girls spotted a money-making opportunity. There were two studios at Orinoco, a smaller one used by Joe and his crew, and a larger room, in which the Chemical Brothers were ensconced. Accordingly, plenty of people passed through the building. In a vestibule the girls set up a stall, selling sandwiches and cups of tea for 10p each. ‘His kids were great mileage,’ recalled Ian Tregoning. ‘Joe was handling them really well. He was working with a lot of people, but the girls got all the attention they needed, without a drop more.
‘Dave Stewart did a little guitar overdub on the song “Yalla Yalla”. “Yalla Yalla” was a big success. I love those lines: ‘There’s a mirror in your soul / You should turn it to the sky.’ When we’d finished “Yalla Yalla” and were packing up in the studio, Joe kept listening to it over and over again. When it stopped, he’d take it back and listen to it again, for hours. He was in this delirious state, so happy with it. Almost like, “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t come out. I’m happy with it.”’
‘The first thing Joe said to me was, “I want that loud, banging, relentless techno-drumming that is real rock’n’roll,”’ said Richard Norris. ‘So it was easy to build up on that excitement. But when it came to recording vocals it was a lot more difficult. At Orinoco we’d start at 10 in the morning. Joe would arrive at 10 in the evening and listen to what we’d done. He’d get into it, have a drink, and get ready to record about midnight. Then we only had a very finite time between recording a good vocal and the partying starting – he’d arrive with various people. This was a shame because it was difficult for Joe to realize what he wanted. He had a big confidence problem. He was beating himself up about not being as good as he wanted to be. It took a while for him to be full on 100 per cent. He’d be re-recording the vocal, but he’d be hoarse by the end. That he couldn’t really get what he wanted was very problematic.
‘We were each coming from very different disciplines. Computers slow things down. It’s not four blokes in a room; it has a different energy. There’d be me and Ian, the engineer, and a couple of other people, huddled round the computer, but Joe would be playing Telecaster like he was at Shea Stadium. Two cultures colliding, but when it worked it worked.
‘He’s writing lyrics as he goes along, enthusiastic and really up for it, meeting a bunch of new people and seeing there’s another way of doing things. “Yalla Yalla” and “Diggin’ the New” were particularly good examples of what was going on, what we were doing.’
There were moments of such stress during the sessions over his singing that Joe was once seen by Richard Norris to punch Ian Tregoning. ‘It was play-fighting,’ the engineer insisted. ‘I’d work on the vocals with him. I’d kid him, saying we should get a real vocalist. When it was going really well once, he came up and hit me. There was a lot of bashing each other about the chest and shoulders. It wasn’t about being pissed off. If he wanted to do a vocal he would come up and whack me round the shoulder. Richard witnessed it one time: “My God, are you guys not getting on OK?” No, this is us getting on. When we wanted to do “The Road to Rock’n’roll”, one of my favourite sessions, we were punching each other out. Joe was really straightforward to work with: no arsiness, no star stuff whatsoever. Just Joe.
‘I wouldn’t announce I was recording. I’d just set it up, knowing the strength of Joe’s voice from hearing it, and I wouldn’t fine-tune it while I was doing a take. At the end of the track I still didn’t tell him. He’d come into the studio and I’d say, “Listen to this, it’s great.”
‘Joe had painstakingly written lyrics. Some of them were on sandwich packets, although he would always have a notepad. He copied them out for me by hand, because the studio photocopier had broken down. I thought the poetry in his lyrics was stunning. I remember that line in “The Road to Rock’n’roll”: “there’s a lot of wreckage in the ravine” – the way the words just roll along. You’d see this phrase and you’d have a movie there.’
There were discussions over the group’s name. ‘What about “Sausage”? I think that was one of Damien Hirst’s suggestions – either “Middlesex” or “Sausage”. I remember how the name of “Sausage” came up: “Which came first – the chicken or the egg, or the sausage in the middle?”’ Later Joe said that the final name decided on for what he described as his ‘acid punk group’ was Machine, ‘but no one ever heard the name since it crashed before we got anywhere’.
The name was strong, not necessarily a reflection of Joe Strummer’s state of mind. Tricia Ronane recalled Joe coming round one evening with Richard Norris to see her and Paul. ‘He took us out to dinner, and Richard’s attitude seemed to be that he was hip-and-cool because of his work with the Grid and this was a great opportunity for Joe. When Joe asked me what I thought, I said, “Don’t forget who you are. I don’t give a shit if he’s just had a dance hit. You’re Joe Strummer, and don’t forget that. It’s fantastic to do this project, but make sure you are in control and respected. Don’t let that go.”’
On 2 November 1996 Gordon McHarg held the opening of his Sandpaper Blues exhibition at the Turnhall Arts Depot behind King’s Cross station. On sale was the Sandpaper Blues album, which included Joe’s song. The sleeve of the record was made of sandpaper, which tickled Joe. ‘You can put it next to CDs you don’t like,’ he said to Gordon at the opening, ‘knowing it will scratch them and you won’t have to play them again.’
George Best, the footballer, opened the exhibition by signing a football. Behind him was a large Union Jack background, along with a shot of the Wembley crowd scene from 1968 when Best’s team Manchester United won the European Cup. George’s mike kept cutting out and he suddenly declared, ‘Oh fuck it, let’s have a drink.’
Joe introduced Gordon to Damien Hirst. Gordon learnt that Joe was working on a song for a short film that Damien was making. When the movie was shown at a film art exhibition the following year, the song was credited as ‘Another Fine Piece of Madeira’ – it was, of course, ‘Sandpaper Blues’.
Early in 1996 Joe involved Richard Norris in a side project that involved several of his friends and Euro ’96, the soccer championship of the European nations, being held in England that summer. Black Grape, the group formed by former Happy Mondays’ main men Shaun Ryder and Bez, had had a number 1 British album in 1995 with the ironically titled ‘It’s Great When You’re Straight … Yeah’, a melange of funk, house and rave sounds, with a melodic emphasis on heavy reggae bass. They had decided they would record a football anthem for Euro ’96. Shaun Ryder asked Joe to be involved and came over to Norro’s place one evening, when the shape of the song was established. ‘We finally get to play the tune, really loud, and then my neighbour comes down from upstairs, knocking on the door: “It’s 3 a.m. in the morning. What are you doing, playing this so loud?” Joe answered the door with half a bottle of Martell brandy in his hand: “But it’s for England.” “Oh, all right.”’
Time was booked at Real World. Black Grape arrived, along with Joe and his friend Keith Allen. The Black Grape ensemble included Danny Saber, an LA-based guitarist, producer and huge Clash fan. ‘When I met Joe he was nothing like I thought he was going to be. I thought he’d be really angry. One day he took me shopping to record stores. He started talking about dub and reggae: “What do you think about this one?” He gave me a great crash course on Jamaican music and how to appreciate it. There’s a certain type of person – there’s not a lot of them around – where everything they do, whether it’s smoking a cigarette, writing a song, or pouring a drink, it’s just pure. Keith Richards is like that. Joe had that.’
With such a congenitally anarchic crew, the Real World recording of the football single did not flow too smoothly. ‘You know you’re in trouble when Keith Allen is the voice of sanity,’ recalled Danny Saber. ‘I remember going to bed one night, leaving Jo
e and Shaun Ryder,’ said Richard Norris, ‘and getting up in the morning and coming to see Joe, and he was still with Shaun – they’d just sat up all night talking. Joe was suddenly, “Where were you?”’ In the vast studio Joe had not only created his habitual spliff bunker but had set up a tent into which he had moved Lucinda and Eliza. At first Joe did not want to sing on the record – did not want anyone to sing on the record – insisting the tune be an instrumental. ‘Me and Shaun were up in the studio trying to mix this thing,’ said Danny. ‘Joe was driving me fucking mad. He got really weird about the whole thing. He was freaking out about shit that was totally fucking irrelevant. I think he’d lost his confidence. But I think the football song helped him regain it.’
After three days Danny Saber had prevailed upon him sufficiently for Joe to feverishly start writing lyrics, all night, for several nights. ‘He was forty-three years old and he’d discovered ecstasy and was up for several days. He had big pieces of paper all over the floor and was writing endless lyrics. He decided he wanted to use ninety per cent of it. We couldn’t, of course.’ Did Joe have so much material stored up within him from his years of inertia that he was unable to stop writing it down? Or was such overwriting a sign of his uncertainty? Eventually Keith Allen added to the lyrical mix. ‘Keith was the one who pulled the whole thing together because Shaun was off doing his thing. Joe was at a tangent with all his lyrics and stuff. Keith really came up with the bulk of that, the body of it. But the song did all right. It came out really good.’
It was called ‘England’s Irie’, the juxtaposition of the Jamaican term for ‘all right’ with the name of the football team’s country presumably being the point. The lyrics bubbled with double entendre. But also with wit. ‘Flying saucer rock’n’roll,’ Joe, taking happy lead vocals, dropped in at the end of remix three (Suedehead Dub).
‘Joe was a bit of a flirt,’ reported the journalist Jane Cornwell, then working at Real World, indicating that though Joe might have been true to his new wife, his essential demeanour had not shifted. A friend of cousin Gerry, working at the studio, was concerned that Joe was so consistently out of it, and relayed to the family that their relative was not in a good state. There was concern.
On 5 March 1996 Joe and his cohorts came up with another tune, ‘War Cry’, a moody, driving, machine-head instrumental that almost could have been by the Happy Mondays. You could not hear it without conjuring up the image of Joe cutting out the chords onstage, head hanging down, mouth wide open. By now new songs were needed: from Los Angeles Joe’s film-music mentor Kathy Nelson had been in touch, asking him to submit material for Grosse Pointe Blank, a comedy thriller starring John Cusack, who Joe had met when making Straight to Hell. The invitation was from Cusack himself: ‘John Cusack called me and said, “Hey, we’re writing this movie listening to very heavy Clash tracks like ‘Sean Flynn’ and ‘Armagideon Time’. Do you want to write some bits of score?” I basically wormed my way in on that,’ Joe explained his involvement in Grosse Pointe Blank to John McPartlin. ‘Grosse Pointe Blank was very interesting,’ said Lucinda. ‘Kathy Nelson was his great friend. At the time she was head of music at Disney and was doing the music for the film. Several people connected with the production, including John Cusack, were big fans of Joe. Johnny had said to Kathy, “Do you think you could get Joe to do the music?” Kathy said she would try. So they flew us out first-class. Joe always loved LA so it was a very attractive proposition. But after he’d said he was interested, he got complete and utter cold feet about it. He got scared.
‘We were staying with a friend called Hein Hoven who had a recording studio in his house and made commercials. I think Joe suddenly realised what was being asked of him was not to come up with some music like he did for Walker: Hein had a whole picture-to-sound-synch system, and Joe saw him digitally putting in music at certain sequences. So he was looking at Hein’s studio and he’s thinking, “Oh, my God: there is just no way I can deal with this.”
‘So he gets Norro out, to bolster him really. He didn’t understand that they wanted Joe. They didn’t want Richard Norris, or Hein, they wanted Joe. And Joe simply couldn’t handle it. He got Hein to do some stuff and had this meeting and they came to hear Joe’s work, but in fact they got Hein’s. Joe was saying, “Here: there’s your man.” Kathy Nelson politely watched what Hein had done, and then she said, “Joe, you don’t get it, do you? We want you to do it. We want your music and vibe.” I think Joe was terrified. I think he was really scared. It was a different way of working, and he wasn’t really ready for it.
‘But in the end he agreed to it, and Kathy Nelson booked him into Westlake Audio in West Hollywood. He set up the studio with the flags. Joe lived under the piano. The whole place became his home. And Joe’s great friend was the tramp, a hobo, who lived in the alleyway behind Westlake. Joe would feed, clothe, and talk to this hobo all the time. Joe made him a bed in the seating-area in the loading-bay.
‘He needed to be reassured, but he wrote the most incredible music. And I think he got disheartened that a lot of the music didn’t make it into the movie. But by the time Joe agreed to do it, they already had a lot of music in place, and they were used to hearing those tracks. So when the Disney producers heard what Joe came up with, they were like, “We kinda like 99 Balloons,” and Joe was, “Urrrhhh …” He got quite down, but Cusack explained to him, “When we write a script, it’s something that we’re immensely proud of, but when we sell it we have to let go of it. We wrote Grosse Pointe Blank, but the finished movie is not the way we wrote it. But we’ve sold it and we have to let go of it. You’ve been employed to score the movie: you provide the music, and whether they use it or not is not your problem. You have to let go of it.” And Joe found that quite hard. There’s a lot of unused very good stuff from those sessions. But I should think it was quite expensive to install Joe in Westlake for three months. We were there a long time. We first went out at the end of March and didn’t come back until September.’
In America there was good will and a good feeling towards Joe. ‘It was always very chaotic, working with Joe,’ said Norro. ‘We wouldn’t ring up people’s management to see if they wanted to work with us, it would be like, “Let’s go and see them at this club, and maybe we’ll talk to them.” It had a strange sort of chaos all of its own, which made it work or made it not work. Joe went to LA to do Grosse Pointe Blank. He was there for a day, and calls, “Norro, it’s brilliant, we are staying at this bloke’s house, get the next plane over. Come on, we can do this. We’ve got a new studio to do something.” So I got the next plane.’
Hein Hoven’s house was on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood hills: as well as being a commercials and video director, Hein had produced the Stray Cats, and was married to Melissa Modette. It was a good-sized house, resplendent with Mexicana. While Joe was there he would take Lucinda and Eliza to the Chateau Marmont for the afternoon, to use the swimming-pool; Gerry Harrington remembered coming across Joe and family there, playing with Courtney Love’s daughter in the water. Some evenings, he and Lucinda would go off to exclusive LA showbiz parties, suitably suited up. Recording at Westlake Audio, off Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, Joe pulled in his punk contemporary, Rat Scabies, formerly of the Damned, visiting LA, to play on drums on the soundtrack. Rat moved into the property on Mulholland. On bass was Seggs, formerly a member of reasonably successful Clash copyists the Ruts. Joe sent a plane ticket to Pockets, who moved into the poolhouse. ‘Joe would work at Westlake during the day, come home for some food, and then shut himself in the garage all night where he’d set up another studio,’ recalled Pockets. When Hein Hoven put the property on the market, Joe, Lucinda and Eliza moved to the Chateau Marmont, ‘which was our favourite place in the world,’ said Lucinda. ‘Then we moved to a house at the top of Mulholland and Laurel Canyon which was rented by a writer friend, Mel Bordeaux, from Rupert Everett. It had views over the Valley and over Hollywood. Really lovely. We were there for about six weeks. He liked to work, Joe
. He liked to be involved in something. I think that’s where all the energy came from when he wasn’t working. If it wasn’t being poured into a studio or something actually taking place now, it still had to come out somewhere. He’d have two days off, and it was like, “Let’s get in the car: you’ve never been up the PCH north. Come on: jump in the car – let’s go. Jump in the car – let’s go to Mexico.” “Joe, we’ve got two days off – let’s relax.” “No, I want to go to Mexico.” He said to me, “All we have is today.” He lived every day.’
They went to see Black Grape play in Tijuana, Joe driving Shaun, Bez and Richard Norris the ninety miles to the Mexican border town in his ’55 Cadillac, which he had taken out of mothballs for his stay in LA. (Richard Norris: ‘Because it was LA people would be driving around in sparkling pristine new things but the drivers would be shouting, “Hey, is that a ’54 or a ’55?”’) On the way back Joe managed to become completely lost, the two-hour drive back to Hollywood turning into six, all to the soundtrack spinning out of a mega-sized ghetto-blaster – perhaps the giant spliffs being consumed for the entire journey on the vast back seat by Shaun Ryder had something to do with Joe’s navigational difficulties. ‘The vibes, man,’ Shaun uttered incessantly as the Caddy wandered its peripatetic course across southern California. That was all he said. In the inappropriate location of Los Angeles, at Westlake Audio, another remix of ‘England’s Irie’ was worked up, very ragamuffin.
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