Pablo Cook had been touring and playing percussion with Pulp, and through them had met the guitarist and keyboards-player Antony Genn, a former member of the group who recently had been playing with Elastica – it was he who’d run onstage during their Glastonbury set in 1995. ‘Ant’, as he was known, was the archetype of the groovy viber, a particularly rarefied breed of musician, a blend of talent, charisma and energy whose very presence is capable of moving a creative endeavour upwards. A consummate scene-maker since moving to London in 1995, he had become friends with Damien Hirst and Keith Allen, bankrolled by a song he had written on the first Robbie Williams solo album. ‘His enthusiasm and understanding of music is fantastic,’ said Pablo.
Following his naked appearance onstage with Elastica, Ant had briefly met Joe at the Glastonbury campfire in 1995. ‘The next time I met Joe was in the Depot in Camden, with Pablo and Bez. They were working on a tune. The chorus was minor and the verse was major. I said, “You want to try changing that around.” Joe would have been quite in his rights to say, “Who the fuck is that wanker?” But Joe is the kind of guy who doesn’t miss a trick. For some reason he must have thought something of that.’
The next time that Joe and Ant met up was again in a recording studio, the Fortress, off Old Street in east London. It was September 1998. Flushed with the success of ‘Vindaloo’, Keith Allen was now making a Christmas single. ‘Really shit, called “Naughty Christmas”,’ said Ant. ‘Total bollocks. But somehow I got roped in, and so did Joe.’
As a six-year-old Ant Genn had been indoctrinated with the spirit of punk by his thirteen-year-old brother. ‘I stood outside Sheffield Top Rank on the London Calling tour to get the Clash’s autographs. I knew who Joe Strummer was: he’d changed my life. That was what I grew up on. I’m not a fuckin’ Britpop nancy boy, I’m a kid off a council estate whose life was changed by punk at a very early age. By that token I have total irreverence for anyone. So whilst I have respect and love for Joe Strummer, I don’t give a fuck he’s Joe Strummer. Hence I said at this session, “I ain’t being funny, mate, but you should be making your own record.”
‘He said he’d been doing stuff with Pabs. I’d heard some of this. Damien had played me a version of “Diggin’ the New”, off our heads at 8 in the morning. The song had an electronic backbeat and when he came up with the lines ‘You gotta live in this world / Diggin’ the new’ I went, “That’s the chorus there, mate. That’s the fuckin’ money shot. You want to be repeating that.” Which of course I ended up doing when we made the record.’
As a struggling young promoter, Simon Moran had first met Joe Strummer in 1988 at the Rock Against the Rich Electric Ballroom date. Through linking up with Joe then, Simon had put on several Rock Against the Rich shows. Ten years later, by which time he had become a highly successful promoter, Simon was co-owner of the annual two-venue V Festival. Seeking a headline act for V the next summer, in December 1998 he made Joe an offer he thought he would probably refuse: re-form the Clash for the two dates and he would pay them a million dollars. To Simon’s surprise Joe said he would think about it. A few days later Joe called him back, asking him to come down to Somerset in early January 1999. ‘I went to Yalway. We had a nice meal, there were lots of dogs, and it was a lovely place. But then Joe said, “I’ve got you here on false pretences. I don’t want to get the Clash together. But my powder’s dry and I want to get out there and do my own record. I’ve got all these songs ready. I want you to manage me.” I said, “Yeah, great. This is exciting.”’
Joe already had an offer of a record deal from Hellcat, the pet project of Tim Armstrong of Rancid. When Simon Moran spoke to the label, he was impressed. ‘They wanted to do it for the right reasons, and they were offering really great royalties.’ The initial contract was for one album, for $250,000, out of which Joe would have to pay recording costs. Simon excluded Europe from the worldwide contract, striking a deal with Mercury.
But who would Joe be playing with? ‘The next time I see Joe is the important meeting,’ said Antony Genn. ‘It’s in Damien’s restaurant, the Pharmacy in Notting Hill Gate. This is January ’99. We’re with a bunch of people, including Joe. We got talking and talking – about music, about everything. That’s when I said it again, about making his own record. “You’re Joe Strummer, for God’s sake. The world needs you.” To which he said, “OK, man. I’m going to go in the studio with you.” And he knew who I was.’
That Joe did know who Antony Genn was and still made a decision to work with him verges on the extraordinary. For Ant was a full-blown heroin addict of long standing. ‘I was an addict, not a kid off his head. I’m a big geezer from up north: two grams of heroin a day kept me normal, along with the fourteen pints of cider and a gram of coke. That’s what I worked on every day. I didn’t understand that I might be just a greedy fucker who should never take anything.’ In the light of the demise of the Clash following the sacking of smackhead Topper Headon, and the subsequent lengthy self-recriminations over this on the part of Joe, his choice of new co-worker had an almost cosmically bewildering significance. Joe Strummer had knowingly taken on a musical collaborator who was a junkie? Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And you can’t help finding yourself wondering: In the unmistakable paradox of his action was Joe thereby making some sort of unformulated penance to the errant Topper?
‘He’s already seen this movie. He knows how it ends,’ said Ant. ‘But we had a great conversation that night. At the end Joe says, “OK, man. I’ll call you tomorrow and I’m going to fix it so you and me can go in the studio for a few days.” I thought, “Yeah, whatever, mate.” The next day I got a phone call. We booked some time at Battery Studios in Willesden.’
Joe had had a further meeting with Simon Moran. ‘I’ve got this guy who’s a bit of a wild card,’ Joe told his new manager. ‘He’s a drug addict, but I think I can do something with him.’ ‘I’d met Ant and he was dead keen,’ said Simon, ‘and he understood that Joe needed to make a proper rock’n’roll record with a proper group. I didn’t want Joe to go down that route he’d been trying and become a dance group.’
Once Joe and Antony Genn started work at Battery, on St Valentine’s Day 1999, matters moved apace: ‘Two days into starting we’d written this song, “Techno D-Day”, and he said, “Let’s book the studio for three months and make a record.”’
Joe was concerned Ant should never be without his requisite daily survival kit. ‘Joe would always make sure I had money for drugs. “Hey man, you all right there? You need any money for that thing?”’ For his part Ant thought Joe seemed in great shape: ‘Excited. We were in the studio and writing. I just wanted to see Joe back playing.’
The atmosphere at Battery felt like a horse-racing stables, everything about to go off with these pure thoroughbreds. Joe and Ant wrote and recorded four new songs: ‘Techno D-Day’, ‘Willesden to Cricklewood’, ‘Tony Adams’, and ‘Nitcomb’ (who else but Joe Strummer would start an ode to his sweetheart with the unlikely metaphor, ‘Gonna take a nitcomb / To get rid of me’). ‘X-Ray Style’, a new song written almost entirely by Joe, was recorded at Battery. ‘Forbidden City’, written by Joe much earlier in the decade, was re-recorded, as was ‘Diggin’ the New’. ‘The Road to Rock ’n’ Roll’ was reworked. The versions of ‘Yalla Yalla’ and ‘Sandpaper Blues’ produced by Richard Norris were added to the tunes recorded in Willesden.
The song ‘Tony Adams’ was quixotically named after the former England and Arsenal football captain – even though the lyrics only contained a reference to him tucked away in a mixed-down vocal coda – after Joe had read Addicted, Adams’s then newly published autobiography. As much of the book recounts the battle with alcohol of this master of defensive play, it is hard not to sense significance in the story having had such resonance with Joe.
The song presents Joe’s image of a dystopian world, presumably New York: ‘All the neon blew down funky Broadway.’ The opening verse signified that time certainly had not withered Joe’s lyrical abili
ties, as well as displaying a new fondness for the effectiveness of alliteration: ‘Stroboscopic snowflakes fell from the stratosphere’.
Joe’s voice was strong. ‘Joe was not a master of tuning, but that’s not his forte. He’s a singer. He’d choose performance over perfection any day of the week, and I think his vocals sound good on that record. We’d usually do four or five takes. Occasionally he’d drop words in later, but generally that would be it.’
In typical Joe Strummer mode, the entire studio was reinvented as a spliff bunker. Although they would sometimes sleep at Damien Hirst’s houseboat on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, Joe generally rested up in the vocal over-dub studio (‘Hotel Over-dub’, as he named it.) while Ant Genn got his head down in the drum-booth. It was a simple life that the pair lived, aided and abetted by Richard Flack, the in-house engineer. Joe and Ant would crawl blearily out of their pits around 1 in the afternoon, stumbling over to Katie O’Grady’s, a nearby Irish pub. After three or four pints (‘Joe would always have a bit less. Joe was a very steady drinker.’), they would leave at 5 p.m. At the off-licence on the way back to Battery Studios, Joe would buy half a bottle of brandy and several bottles of red wine; Ant would pick up a dozen cans of Strongbow cider, as well as a pack of Stella lager for Richard Flack. Back at the studio Joe and Ant would watch the double episode of The Simpsons that aired every night on Sky at 6 p.m. (‘With The Simpsons you can go back to work with a keen heart,’ said Joe later. ‘I’m kind of Homer, you know.’). ‘By then all the phones had stopped,’ said Ant. ‘Joe didn’t like anyone to contact him. I would very rarely see Joe with a phone to his ear. Then we’d work until we weren’t inspired any longer, which was usually somewhere around 5.30 in the morning. Then we’d sleep in our respective havens.’
One day early in the sessions, as they walked down Willesden High Road, Joe turned to Ant. ‘I’ve decided that this record is by the Mescaleros,’ he ordained, recalling that at Jazz and Lola’s school Christmas carol concert he had declared this would be the name of his next group. ‘He had decided then this was the name of his new group, even though there were only the two of us at that time,’ said Ant. ‘Then he started to get guilty about it, wondering if it was disrespectful to the Mescalero Apaches.’
When Joe arranged for Bill Price, who had worked with the Clash on London Calling and Sandinista!, to come to Battery to mix the record, the sessions didn’t work out. ‘Joe never fucking spoke to Bill. He daren’t call him. He’s a fucking girl. He’s a pussy, really. He used to have this thing going, “We’re men! We’re men! We’ve got to behave like men!” But he didn’t exactly live up to it.’
In the pub, Joe would open up. ‘We got down to honest stuff. He talked about his brother killing himself. He didn’t know why his brother had killed himself. He talked about his mum and his dad. He was a loner, Joe. That’s why he didn’t give much away. I don’t think Joe ever dealt with his brother’s suicide, what it meant to him. It was too painful. It was a massive thing. He didn’t know what it was about. The reason he didn’t know was because that family didn’t talk.’
Tragically, that year Amanda Temple’s brother also committed suicide. ‘She was very close to her brother and it was a horrible thing, his suicide,’ said Julien. ‘Joe was so impassioned towards her about it: “Don’t hold onto the past. Live now. Don’t invest everything in the past. You’ve got to move on.” The way Joe dealt with the death of his own brother is on one level clinical: the situation didn’t exist, and he never talked about him. But on another level it’s probably the best way to deal with it. Joe’s thing was you can’t grieve all your life. You’ve got to deal with the future, and where you are now.’
‘You learn more about Joe Strummer from looking at the things he loved,’ said Ant. ‘The guy loved music. He loved art, he loved excellence, he loved brilliance, he loved a man that could mend a shoe. That was the poetry in Joe for me: the tiny detail. As much as Joe could focus on the big things, his attention was always on many little things.’
More than might ordinarily have been the case, Joe’s mind was wandering over specific aspects of the Clash: Don Letts was making the documentary Sony had commissioned and Joe gave the director a long interview, conducted by Mal Peachy, formulating his thoughts on the group. Could his on-camera metaphorical confession have helped free him from his creative past, allowing him to move forward at last? ‘Joe spoke very highly of Mick, what a great arranger he was,’ emphasized Ant. ‘I think that Joe had probably bullied Mick a bit, reading between the lines from conversations I had with Joe: Joe really looked up to Mick’s ability. I said to Mick, at a Mescaleros’ Brixton Academy gig: “I never realized until I worked with Joe what a genius you are.” Mick looked embarrassed, like I’d insulted Joe.’
Every Friday afternoon Joe would walk over to nearby Cricklewood to gather supplies for the end-of-week ‘blow-out’. On Friday 19 March 1999, while Joe was on his peregrinations through the lanes of North-West London, Ant came up with a tune. ‘This was never going to be a Joe Strummer song – it’s a 3/4 waltz with strings and all this gentle stuff. Of course, Joe comes back and goes, “Right, man, right. I like that. Keep going on that.” So we started that song and Joe wrote the lyrics and we mixed it and finished it at half-eight the next morning.’ The lyrics, like a pastoral ode to the joys of the area, were essentially Joe’s musings as he wandered on his mission to score cocaine. ‘I was working with Joe Strummer,’ said Ant. ‘But I think “Willesden to Cricklewood” is very John Mellor: those words in that song: “Thought about my babies almost grown / Thought about going home.”
‘I would love the way he would let you talk and then fly one in. I was talking in the studio with Richard Flack about how we’d like to run the Marathon, how we’d been not bad runners in our day. Joe suddenly goes, “Yeah, I’ve run three Marathons.” What? How long did you train? “I didn’t fuckin’ train. Not once. Just turned up and did it.” That was Strummer, man.
‘Often I think with Joe, I had moments when I knew who he was,’ said Ant. ‘But it was still very fragmented. The reason for that is simple: he was fragmented, as a human being. He was an alcoholic. For many years he drank too much. He shit himself when I got clean and then – worse for him – Damien got clean. Meeting and hanging out with people like Damien who gives as good as he gets and is also the fuckin’ king of his world had been very important for him. Because often Joe liked to have people around him who were lesser beings.
‘When we went into Battery he was lost and I was lost. One thing about Joe in his ruthlessness and diplomacy and wisdom is that he’s got his eyes open, all the time. For what he can get.’ Antony Genn laughed loudly.
After writing the songs, it became the task of producer Antony Genn to assemble a troupe of musicians to formally record the material with Joe. When the Mescaleros were revealed, it was apparent Joe had cherry-picked much of the finest young talent in Britain. Pablo ‘Pabs’ Cook came in immediately on percussion. The next person in was Martin Slattery, the highly adept multi-instrumentalist whom Joe had met when he was in Black Grape, whom Ant described as ‘my favourite musician’. Bass-player Scott Shields was from Glasgow; he and Martin Slattery had already played together in a group. ‘With Joe there was a lot of “Are we men or are we mice?” talk,’ said Martin. ‘Joe was our friend, but it was more a work relationship. I think it would take a very long time to be connected with Joe. He would be guarded with his emotions, and he would only let you in when he truly, truly thought you wouldn’t let him down. Because I’ve seen people let him down, and I’ve seen how he was with them: Chop! No matter how tight you were, once you’d gone, that was it. Quite ruthless.’
Yet, said Martin, it was easy working with Joe at Battery. ‘Joe was really relaxed, and it was good fun. That’s when we started to learn about Joe’s working methods. I’ve been involved in late-night sessions before, but not where your whole life gets turned on its head. Joe was amazing at that alternative existence, just walking through Soho with him, wi
th his blaster playing, sat outside some bar in Frith Street, smoking a joint. He had this invincible feeling that was a big “Fuck you!” to everybody.’
‘We were making the record and we’d be in there for days,’ said Ant. ‘Richard Flack had been going out with this girl for seven years. Working these hours, Richard’s not been seeing much of her. She rings in, he picks up: “Hi, how you doing?” “What do you mean, how am I doing? Haven’t you been home?” “Oh, I stayed in the studio the last couple of nights. Sorry I haven’t been home.” “I haven’t been there. I left you two days ago.” “Oh, right.”
‘He puts the phone down. “She’s left me.” Strummer goes: “It was bound to happen.” Straight off the bat: “It was bound to happen, man. Don’t worry. These things happen in life.”
‘There was this girl Hayley who worked on reception. An Irish Harlesden bird. Joe says: “Don’t worry. You’re going to get together with the Harlesden girl downstairs, and make babies. That’s what you’re going to do.” Richard has just had twins with Hayley, his second and third child with her. The man was a prophet.’
Also brought up to Battery was Ged Lynch, formerly with Black Grape, who played drums on many of the songs. When he quit the embryonic Mescaleros to tour with Marianne Faithfull, he was replaced by Smiley Bernard, who had played with Martin with Robbie Williams. Arriving at Battery for rehearsals, Smiley immediately found himself playing on ‘Forbidden City’, soon recording the song.
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