Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘He’d wake me up and say, “It’s a sunny day: the kid’s not going to school today.” I’d go downstairs and he’s made a picnic. We used to go the Isle of Purbeck, a ferry-ride from Poole. He’d say, “I had a friend at school here, and I know it well, and it’s great.” Whenever the bluebells were out, we’d go and have a picnic.’

  Realizing that Amanda, her closest friend from childhood, lived nearby, Lucinda got in touch. ‘I called Amanda and said we had found a house which I thought might be near them,’ said Lucinda. In April 1997 Amanda invited Luce and her new husband to stay for a weekend. Amanda lived with her husband and children near Bridgwater in Somerset, a more rascally, anarchic town than Taunton.

  Joe on the rear wall of 15 Court Farm Road, when he made the decision to finally sell the Mellor family home. (Lucinda Mellor)

  What Joe was unaware of as he drove there was that Amanda’s husband was Julien Temple, who as a film student had chronicled the Anarchy tour as well as early Clash rehearsals. Later he had made The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, the fantasy story of the Sex Pistols, and Absolute Beginners, a musical based on Colin MacInnes’s Notting Hill-set novels; Julian had also directed top-end videos for artists like the Rolling Stones and Neil Young. He had been told by Amanda that her friend Lucinda would be bringing her new husband, some sort of musician. ‘They come through the gate and there’s Joe behind her, the last person I thought to see. I’d never thought about him for years, and I’m sure he’d never thought about me. It’s always going to be uncomfortable, meeting someone you haven’t seen for that long, with strange parameters around your mutual experience. But we became good friends after that.’

  On Joe and Lucinda’s second visit to the Temples’ beautiful old country house, the two men bonded over the kind of rudiment of life which had always entranced the musician. When Joe arrived in the evening Julien had been laboriously assembling a hot-air balloon for his son Leo. ‘We got stuck into putting all these strips of paper together. The project had to happen. We had to finish it. We had to get this hot-air balloon up, whatever happened. So into the early hours of the morning we tried to put this thing together. We finally got the hot-air balloon flying, and kept the kids up to watch it. Spending a night doing some mad thing like that kicked us off again together.

  ‘The whole Campfire idea came out of that country thing and going to these very straight country pubs, sitting there having these amazing evenings just talking.’

  Joe, Julien noted, seemed in very good spirits. ‘He didn’t seem down. My daughter Juno was doing a Victorian musical play at school: we used to drive around in an old Landrover, steaming down these country lanes, me and Joe in the back with the kids, singing the songs from the play – “Daisy” and “Burlington Bertie” and “Champagne Charlie”, a great vocal roar of “Champagne Charlie”. We had this great, mad summer of singing these songs. He knew all the words, which surprised me, because I’d only just learnt them.

  ‘I think Lucinda opened up another side of Joe. He loved her deeply. There was a huge liberation in being with her and starting again. Although they did lead different hours: Luce’s life ran on school hours because she’d have to get Eliza up and off in the mornings, about when Joe would be going to bed.’

  The town of Glastonbury is only fifteen miles from Yalway; the music festival takes place at nearby Shepton Mallett. Glastonbury – whose legend includes a visit from Jesus Christ – is said to have been the site of the first Christian church in England, and is claimed to have connections with the court of King Arthur. These rich mythological associations hit a deep nerve with Joe Strummer. ‘He was obsessed with King Arthur, and with the Bronze Age and ancient British culture,’ said Julien. ‘At night he would look up at the stars in the clear sky and speak about how this must have been precisely what people in ancient civilizations had seen. Joe was remarking that the one thing that hasn’t changed since the first people were alive is the stars. I think he was finding and liking the sense of being grounded in himself. He was a very spiritual person, although he wasn’t a religious person.’ As well as these spiritual connections, the region had a radical past. It was the site of the last rebellion in England; in 1685, using Taunton and Bridgwater as a base, the Duke of Monmouth had attempted to usurp King James II; savage reprisals only strengthened the characteristic local mood of rebellion, and a free-thinking point of view persists to this day.

  The area was partial to unexpected rituals. Each year at the beginning of November Bridgwater hosts its own carnival, the oldest in Britain. ‘I took him to Bridgwater to the carnival, which is an extraordinary event in that town,’ said Julien. ‘He was pretty amazed by the number of people watching all these crazy floats. The first thing that came round the corner was a “Rock the Casbah” float. Then there was a “Should I Stay or Should I Go” float. So it was like he’d come to this place to forget, yet they were doing this kind of Aladdin strobe dance to “Rock the Casbah”. After he overcame that shock he got totally into the Black Friday, the mad aftermath of carnival in Bridgwater, where they have to drink in each bar. That is a hard thing to do; he did it very well. He was very good at sips of drinks.’

  Damien Hirst was living not far away, at Coombe Martin in Devon. Accordingly, Joe and the enfant terrible of British art spent much time together. ‘Damien was very important to him,’ said Lucinda. ‘I think he really recognised himself in Damien. He adored him. He loved him and Maia, loved them both. Damien challenged him, he stimulated him. He provoked him, he inspired him. Damien was irreverent and is hugely talented. Joe loved him. He loved being with him and Maia. We had lovely times there in Devon. Endless days on the beach. Lovely lunches and long walks. Interesting people were always there. They’re a good crowd. Joe needed to spend time with peers, not mates. I remember once meeting him from somewhere at Heathrow. We got the train down to Somerset. He had just come off tour, and he said, “Give me the phone.” He hated mobile phones, but he rang Damien and said, “I want to come down.” I said, “No, you’re exhausted.” He said, “No, I’m going down to see him.” Because he was still buzzing and he knew he could decompress with Damien.’

  ‘Damien had a big impact on him,’ thought Julien. ‘There was a real energy that Joe got from Damien that helped him feel he could put all this back together and be a different version of Joe. Joe could be so supportive to people like Damien. Joe would sit there and Damien would get off his head. You know, it’s bullshit when people make the accusation that too many late nights killed Joe, because Joe never got out of it like Keith or Damien or me. He was always in control of the situation.

  ‘He did give me some weird joint one night, when we were on our own, that was laced with PCP or something, and I was projectile vomiting. He did sometimes do a lot of weird strong stuff that you can’t do unless you’ve got five days to recover. But he was the one who was in control of the pacing of things, while other people were losing it. He wouldn’t lose it. Joe was slow-burn in terms of consumption, but he did it all the time. There are few people like that. He did love altered states, but he had it down to a fine art, where he was always slightly altered, but not so much as to be out of step with reality around him. Joe approached drugs as very spiritual things, in the same way that Mexicans or Indians would smoke tobacco, as a spiritual and ritual bonding exercise.’

  A characteristic of Joe’s that impressed Julien was his stripped-down approach to life: ‘Joe needs very little to have a good time. He didn’t need material things or designer drugs: a pint that he didn’t drink was enough, if he was with someone who he’s getting something from. A very simple way of living was enough.’

  Joe had a 1930s book, Campfire Leader, rules on getting a good campfire going, which wood to use, what songs to elevate the spirits. ‘He read it,’ affirmed Julien. ‘He took the Campfire very seriously. It’s a hard place to be. You have to be strong enough to get out of it, and lose your worldly bullshit. An important part of what he saw in the essence of the Campfires is you have
to be able to live with nothing, under the stars, so when the electricity goes off in your house you can deal with that. He was a very wise person.’

  I’ve been to those Campfires. The first thing I noticed was the democracy: everyone is equal in the circle around the flame. In a way, the Campfire symbolized the circular nature of Joe’s life; the student from Central, best friends with the biggest names in contemporary art, has his own shows in the dipping Somerset hills. ‘If you see it in a Damien kind of way, the Campfire was his art statement,’ said Julien. ‘The Campfire was about surviving without all the other shit, preparing you to survive without material goods. All you need is other people, which in the end was Joe’s big thing. You and someone else can do much more than you can on your own. When one gives up, the other doesn’t. It takes place at night in the open, night becomes day, an old thing but Joe was bringing it into a modern context. “Club Dawn,” that’s what he used to say: “You and me and Club Dawn.”’

  A diatribe against the modern world was never far from Joe’s thoughts. ‘We’re forming a new country called Rebel Wessex,’ he told me a couple of years later. ‘We want Cornwall, Devon and Somerset to secede from the union. All we do in Rebel Wessex is drink cider all night and plot revolution. We’re so far into it we’ve opened up a website and designed a flag: red and black with a burning skull and flames of change blowing in the wind. We’re making a virtual country on the internet. We want a place where there are rave parks and where we can decriminalize marijuana for personal use. All we do down there is talk about how crap these giant supermarkets are, spraying pesticide all over the land. It’s like an abattoir out there. There’s no joy when the harvest comes in, it’s just a giant machine with poor animals caught in it, run by the lunatics who’re going to fuck up the gene pool.’

  Before retreating to San Jose in Andalucia for his traditional summer sojourn, Joe went that July of 1997 to Japan to the first Fuji Rock Festival, organized by Masa, who had blessed Joe and Lucinda with Glastonbury tickets as a wedding present. He had booked Joe and Bez to deejay in the dance area on the second night – in Japan Joe Strummer was, and is, considered like a fusion of James Dean, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, and bigger than any of them. Although staged in a perfect setting, a spectacular national park on the side of Mount Fuji, the festival was devastated when struck by a full-force typhoon. As tens of thousands of blankets were airlifted in, the dance area was turned into a hospital, Joe and Bez unable to fulfil their task. Joe was overawed by the power and ferocious energy of the typhoon, entranced by its elemental command of mankind. He vowed to return as a performer.

  But his past was pursuing him. Tricia Ronane had talks with Sony to promote the Clash’s back catalogue. It was agreed that a Clash live album would finally be released, and that Sony would fund a definitive biographical documentary, to be directed by Don Letts. ‘Joe needed money with his house move, and Paul and I had two kids and needed to get in cash,’ said Tricia.

  In April 1997 Joe had appeared on a Jack Kerouac tribute album, Kicks Joy Darkness. He played music, recorded at Ivy Cottage in his makeshift studio, behind a tape of Kerouac giving a live reading of the poem MacDougal Street Blues, Cantos Dos. Joe was no stranger to occasional side projects: in 1995 he’d gone to Brighton to work with the Levellers on a single, ‘Just the One’; he had even, through Danny Saber, worked on a song with Michael Hutchence, who’d clearly forgiven him for his cheeky, but insightful remark back in Memphis.

  1997 ended with another death in the Mellor family, that of David Mackenzie, Anna Mackenzie’s brother and Joe’s uncle, who had been born in 1921. ‘Uncle David was very pally with Johnny. They spent a lot of time together,’ said the sprightly Uncle John, whom Joe had defined as ‘the original punk rocker’. For his own part Uncle David had the kind of credentials that thrilled young Johnny Mellor – a distinguished war record, with one especially harrowing experience: as a member of the RAF’s Coastal Command, scouring the drink for surfaced U-boats, he had been forced to ditch in the rough North Sea, floating for three days in a raft with the only other surviving crew-member before being rescued.

  For his uncle’s funeral that December, in the churchyard next to Bonar Bridge, Joe made the long journey up to the heart of his mother’s family in north-east Scotland, his first visit there for more than thirty years. Pockets went with him on the sleeper from King’s Cross station in London to Inverness, where they completed the last stage by taxi; not that for one moment on the train from London did they lie down in their berths, choosing to pass the entire excursion in the bar. ‘It was very nice of Johnny to do that: a long, long journey,’ thought Uncle John.

  As the bagpipes wailed in the graveyard on the chilly edge of the choppy firth, Joe stood hunched in his black coat. Then he detached himself from the cluster of thirty or so relatives and friends and wandered off, close to the Mackenzie family communal headstone, where he was observed wiping his eyes. ‘The funeral was classic,’ said Pockets. ‘As the coffin was lowered into the ground, with the bagpiper playing, sunlight suddenly blasted through the pine trees, producing these pointy shadows. Perfect. Then we went to various homes of various family members. Neither of us were whisky drinkers, but – realizing it would be rude not to drink it – we were obliged to have a tumbler of whisky everywhere we went.’

  Later Joe, Alasdair Gillies and Pockets went to the Caledonian Hotel, next to the bridge, where they drank pints of ‘heavy’; Joe loved the Scottish term ‘heavy’ for what in England is known as ‘bitter’. ‘With us later was another younger cousin,’ said Pockets. ‘He was too young to be a Clash fan, a young ’un with a pronounced London accent. Joe loved that this guy wasn’t into the Clash. He was just into the fact that Joe was another family member. They didn’t know each other, except they were cousins. Joe always liked talking to people who didn’t know anything about the Clash.’ The taxi-driver scheduled to drive them over the Struie to Inverness was worried, he said: the night was getting stormy – they should set off. First Alasdair was instructed to get Joe moving; then it was the turn of Anna Gillies. ‘Just have another drink,’ Joe kept saying. When they eventually got him outside the Caledonian to the car, Joe was asked, ‘Where are you going to sit?’ ‘On the bonnet,’ he grinned beerily. ‘I’ll help you,’ said Aunt Jenny. Joe finally climbed into the car. On the return journey to King’s Cross, he and Pockets again spent the entire trip rammed up against the train’s bar, dining on eggs on toast when they finally reached London; afterwards Pockets projectile-vomited his food across the concourse of King’s Cross station.

  26

  LET’S ROCK AGAIN!

  1998–2000

  ‘Like a modern scientist, the Mescalero knew that there was power in every atom of nature. It could be tapped and channelled, for good or bad. He could tap the power in nature for his own and others’ good if he had the right revelation and could acquire a ceremony from another Indian or from some supernatural power.’

  The Mescalero Apaches, by C.L. Sonnichsen (University of Oklahoma Press)

  Despite his extra-curricular musical activities, it seemed as though Joe Strummer, Bez and Pablo Cook were the nucleus of a group. Further names were discussed: after the Hand of God (‘Joe decided that was too arrogant,’ said Damien Hirst), Longbow was temporarily settled upon. ‘I put some more tunes together,’ said Pablo, using the Depot, a studio in Brewery Road in Camden near where he lived; Joe would come over and stay with him. Bez would also come to the studio.

  Early in 1998 Joe had performed on ‘Vindaloo’, an absurdist song written by Keith Allen as an unofficial anthem for that summer’s Soccer World Cup. Released under the name of Fat Les, ‘Vindaloo’ – a celebration of the British love of curry – reached number 1 in June that year as the World Cup was staged. Joe again appeared on Top of the Pops. Wryly, Pablo Cook gave him a hard time: ‘You’re fucking out of order. How come you’ve gone from being a punk legend to being a fucking comedian, dressing up to do Top of the Pops with Keith Allen? Ne
ver do that again. I’m not in this business with you to write football songs. That’s a bad mistake, a bad move.’ That really got his goat. He said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve done that, fucking comedy music. I’ve never done comedy music.’

  Through a set of associates, a number of meetings with record companies had been set up for Joe, to strike a deal. Unfortunately, these were put in the diary for the week following that year’s Glastonbury festival. ‘This was before I knew that Joe would go off on these five-day parties,’ said Pablo. ‘I go to Glastonbury on the Saturday. We’ve got a meeting the following Thursday, so I keep an eye on Joe. On Monday morning I shoot off to make sure the meetings are in hand. On Tuesday I call up Luce; she hasn’t seen Joe. Jason Mayall says, “Joe said he was going out of the festival to Habitat to buy a couch, to sit beside the campfire.” On the Thursday morning, after the meetings have been cancelled, someone finds him on the far side of the Glastonbury site. He’s sitting on a Habitat couch with these old-school crusties and travellers. He’s been there for four days. Fantastic.’

  Ironically, considering his criticism of Joe, Pablo now found himself working with him on another football song, a tune for Manchester United, the biggest soccer brand-name in the world. There was a comedy element here too, even in the title of the song: ‘Man, Man United’. As all of Joe’s ‘Manc posse’ – as they became known – were United supporters, Bez was involved, as was his close friend Dermot. A weekend was booked at Hook End studio, thirty miles to the west of London. Joe soon was scurrying about the woodland, gathering kindling for a campfire. ‘Sitting at a campfire for forty-eight hours getting hammered – what a brilliant idea,’ mused Pablo. ‘Why do you want to sit in your flat and watch TV when you can sit with your mates and get fucking trolleyed? Some of the fucking things that you saw, when the DMT came into play, arguing about who’s going to have the Superman cup. Joe got out what was supposedly a box of damp fireworks, which he thought he’d use as ballast for the fire. How we didn’t kill ourselves, I don’t know. There’s fireworks flying everywhere.’ The ‘Man, Man United’ song seemed to similarly blow itself up, never to resurface.