In terms of Joe’s lyric writing, the strength of the words of the new songs shows he had had this stuff thoroughly stored up in his unconscious, ready to flow. With the tunes added from the Richard Norris sessions, Joe had an impressive body of work set to go. And that is what he did. At last, ten years since the release of Earthquake Weather, Joe Strummer had a solo album waiting in the wings. The days of lack of productivity had silted into weeks and months and then years. And now – what a return, what a handsome pay-off.
As the recording began to wind up, the assorted musicians – Joe, Ant Genn, Martin Slattery, ‘Pabs’ Cook, Scott Shields and Smiley Bernard – started to rehearse an onstage set in Battery’s live recording room. Not too assiduously, however: Joe liked rough edges.
Back home in Somerset Joe’s life continued as before. Damien Hirst was a frequent visitor to Yalway, as was Joe to the artist’s home in Coombe Martin, forty minutes away. In May that year the pair of them got drunk and decided to play a kind of written question-and-answer truth game. Some things Joe said were flippant, some revealing:
dh. what is money?
Joe money buys the radio.
dh. yes but what is money?
J. money = FM network, FM network = dissemination of ideas, dissemination of ideas = art
dh. what is money in one word
J. power
dh. what is power
J. realizing things that you thought should be realized
d. how much do you love luce?
J. more than anyone else
d. is money important to you?
J. yes because we couldn’t pursue good tunes at battery studio without paying
d. what else is there?
J. only social interaction when friends exchange ideas in ideal circumstances and communication on the upper levels is achieved.
d. what do you want? (in one word)
J. to groove.
d. why don’t you ask me what I want?
J. because I know you want to be loved.
d. do you care?
J. yes cos you and I are the prow into an ocean of ideas or even shadows and ghosts of ideas, nevertheless sail we will.
d. in truth who the fuck rattled your cage?
J. my mamma never gave me no nipple
d. what do you hold dear to you?
J. I like feeling good
d. can you sing?
J. no
d. can anyone?
J. technique is not where it’s at
d. I know you’re talented why don’t you?
J. because the oldsters were better! let’s not delude ourselves!!
‘Joe was very excited by the Mescaleros,’ said Lucinda. ‘He had real, proper musicians. I think he quite liked being the elder statesman. I think he felt he had earned that position and he was comfortable with it. He definitely thought about being the elder man. And he worried about having a bit of a belly, and he worried about not being slick onstage any more and being able to do leaps and jumps. But the energy was still the same. Yet he definitely worried about being an old man with a young band. Stupidly. But on the other hand he quite enjoyed it, I think. When they toured, they toured on buses, and they didn’t stay in plush hotels, and they always travelled economy. They would arrive and Joe would have to do press all day. Then they would do gigs. Then it would be up in the morning and on to the next place. The younger band-members could at least have a lie-in, but he would have to do interviews. He never complained once. I remember once in Toronto he did press all day and he did the gig, and I said, “I’m going back to the hotel,” and he said, “I can’t, babe: there’s all these people here.” And he came back at three in the morning: and that was just signing records, and talking to people. And we were up at 6.30 the next morning. But you could never tell Joe not to work so hard. He seemed to thrive on it: I remember saying, “Surely you could delegate?” No: he knew he had to do it all.’
On Saturday 5 June 1999 Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros played their first show, at the Leadmill in Antony Genn’s home town of Sheffield, the same city in which the Clash had played their very first date on 4 July 1976; opening the set with ‘Techno D-Day’, it concluded with the Clash’s ‘Tommy Gun’. Although the show was – hardly unexpectedly – a little scrappy, Joe was heartened: he was touring again, he had his own group, and he had a great record waiting to come out. Then they crossed the Pennines to Liverpool, to perform at the Lomax club the next day; if Joe needed reassurance, the Merseyside show was a critical hit, the Guardian reviewer writing, ‘Strummer has a clutch of new material and a new skin-tight band. He leaves us with a “Tommy Gun” so startling I drop my can of lager and grown men are seen to weep into the streets.’ It was working.
‘He loved it when he got that first great review in the Guardian,’ said Lucinda. ‘He loved all that. He would say, “I’m not reading it, because I’m not going to believe the good and I’m not going to believe the bad.” But if you went up to him with a good review, he’d be, “Go on: show me!” He had prepared himself to be completely and utterly battered. He really wasn’t expecting anything at all.’
Then it was on to a date in Glasgow at King Tut’s where Joe linked up with Alasdair Gillies. ‘I asked them to get in a couple of bottles of malt whisky, because I knew you were coming,’ Joe told his cousin, before making a grand admission: ‘This is only the third show of the tour and I’m already exhausted.’ Stuffing Kit-Kat chocolate bars in his pocket from the backstage catering, Joe was then back on the bus for the all-night ride to London 500 miles south.
Mescaleros’ set-list. (Lucinda Mellor)
The next day was one off for the rest of the group, but Joe and Ant went straight to Battery, stripping down ‘Yalla Yalla’ for release as a single. The following afternoon they drove to Portsmouth to play at the Wedgewood Rooms. What is surprising is the number of Clash songs that Joe had in the set: ‘London Calling’, ‘White Man’, ‘Straight to Hell’, ‘Rock the Casbah’, ‘Bankrobber’ and ‘Tommy Gun’ – soon he added ‘Safe European Home’ and – a perennial crowd pleaser – ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’. But, as on the Latino Rockabilly tours, the Clash tunes were often covers: ‘I Fought the Law’ and ‘Brand New Cadillac’ were the only examples on this first brief tour, but soon ‘Armagideon Time’, ‘Pressure Drop’, ‘Junco Partner’ and ‘Police and Thieves’ were added.
After Portsmouth Joe and the Mescaleros sprinted through European summer festivals and club dates: a Tibetan Freedom Concert in Amsterdam on 13 June, the Elysée-Montmartre in Paris the next day, the Brussels Botanique on 16 June and the Markthalle in Hamburg on 17 June. Joe was ever anxious to cater for Antony Genn’s pastoral interests. ‘“We can get you heroin anywhere, man,” he said to me in Brussels. “That guy in that van – he’s definitely got heroin.” Then I went off on my own to score in Brussels and came back having been sold a bag of mud.’
Two days later they were in Sweden at the Hultsfredfestivalen, before a crowd of 25,000; on 20 June they were in Finland, at the Provinnsirock Festival, in the backwoods of the country. Gavin Martin, a former NME journalist, was there. Joe invited him up to Battery to write an in-depth article for Uncut magazine. ‘I’ve never seen anyone drink as much as Joe,’ Gavin said afterwards.
They were back in England for Saturday 26 June. This marked Joe’s first and only appearance at the event he had transformed into his own spiritual home – the annual Glastonbury Festival, where he had established himself as a kind of king. Unfortunately this performance, on the main Pyramid stage, was not the great triumph for which he had hoped. ‘Until then the dates had been fantastic. The group had been really steaming,’ said his manager Simon Moran. ‘But it all fell apart at Glastonbury, just when Joe didn’t want it to.’
The show was great, really. There was just one problem, which happened at the end. The late afternoon set on this muggy day started off fine, even though Joe griped at having to play before nightfall. Joe was in great voice on the crowd-warming set-opener, ‘
Techno D-Day’, after he declared how he had realized that Tony Blair reminded him of Cliff Richard, and he had concluded, he said, that Britain was being governed by Cliff. (‘There’s a picture of Joe with Mick Jones at Paul’s first gallery opening, just after Tony Blair got in,’ said Lucinda. ‘He’s wearing this white t-shirt that says “TLF – the Tony Liberation Front: We’ve got to get rid of Tony Blair.” He felt totally betrayed by this Labour government. When they got in, he was so ecstatic, and he really felt betrayed.’)
Not wishing to test the patience of the crowd – the material he had written and recorded with the Mescaleros would not be in the shops for another four months – and aware of what they really wanted to hear, Joe played ‘Rock the Casbah’ as the second number, dedicating the song to ‘Mr Topper Headon’, and following it up with ‘Yalla Yalla’, with its heartfelt opening lines: ‘Well so long liberty /Let’s forget you didn’t show.’ After the end of the next song, ‘London Calling’, Joe delivered a rap from the centre of his soul, one that included an explanation of his approach to life in recent years: ‘Going to festivals is one of my favourite things to do. And I’m always thinking, “This is not meaningless!” There’s something about getting together, which we have every right to do, and they’re going to fuck us up on that right. You see this coming and we’re going to be kept away, separated. This is a new song. It’s called “The X-Ray Style”. God help us.’
Following a joyously received ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’, Joe introduced the next song. ‘Although I’m a Chelsea fan myself, I just felt that Tony Adams had to have a eulogy as great as anything that Keats or Byron wrote,’ he declared with commendable lack of modesty. ‘And I came up with this: it’s called “Tony Adams”.’
Joe and the Mescaleros then flew into ‘Brand New Cadillac’, followed immediately by ‘I Fought the Law’ before returning to new material with ‘Diggin’ the New’. The line ‘I’ve got no time for Luddites, always looking back’ rang out with especial irony from someone who for years had been dictated by his inability to move on and adopt new recording techniques.
But during the middle of ‘Straight To Hell’ there was a sudden eruption onstage: Joe swung his heavy mike-stand at a BBC cameraman as he came too close to him. The cameraman was a man in his fifties, assiduously attempting to do his job and extremely unimpressed by the incident. Luckily Joe missed him, but did catch his extremely expensive camera lens, all of which was shown later in the evening on national television, with remarks from the presenter about how Joe had not been in the Glastonbury spirit. ‘The crowd were screaming, “Go for it! Smash it all!”’ Joe later remembered.
Writing up the set-lists for his group, overseen by a young fan. (Rudy Fernandez)
After introducing the group, with a reference to Antony Genn’s naked appearance at a previous Glastonbury, Joe and his musicians dropped in a thumping ‘Tommy Gun’ before winding up the twelvesong set with another Clash classic: ‘Bankrobber’.
Still, his moment of irascibility had ruined for him what should have been the finest hour so far of his comeback. ‘Because Ant, Martin and I had stayed up until 7 in the morning doing a remix of “Tony Adams”,’ said Scott, ‘Joe was saying, “Don’t worry, man. I’ll carry this, just watch me.” But the cameras were really in his face, and I don’t think he was comfortable enough with the situation for that to be happening. The crowd were great and the reaction was great but it was quite overwhelming for everybody, Joe included.’
After the TV broadcast, the phones of those who knew Joe were red-hot, several people having the opinion this was a classic case of Joe Strummer showmanship, an endeavour to hijack attention to himself. But it was more a consequence of extreme nervousness and anxiety, and indicated Joe was still fully capable of shooting himself in the foot. The first person to whom Joe spoke when he came offstage and dived into his dressing-room was Alan Yentob, an extremely senior figure at BBC Television, someone who could mollify the matter, who told Joe how fantastic he thought that his performance had been. Mark Cooper, who had written about the Clash and interviewed Joe on the Combat Rock tour for Record Mirror, was now in charge of the BBC broadcasts and saw Joe’s performance. ‘That incident on stage was so typically Joe,’ he said. ‘Because you got the two sides of him: the onstage lout who then goes through some apparently magical transformation and writes this extremely humble and very long letter of apology to the cameraman.’
Furious with himself for his lack of control, Joe disappeared off into the vastness of the Glastonbury site, tears slithering down his face, before he threw up violently. He made his way over to the campfire where Amanda Govett and Jem and Marcia Finer were plotted up. With them was a comedian who had been booed offstage. ‘He was quite hurt, being booed off the stage,’ said Marcia. ‘Then Joe comes along. He’s crying. Jem was pouring him drinks and he nestled in Jem’s lap for a while. I said, “Joe, I wouldn’t be too upset. Just a bad day at work. This poor guy’s been booed off stage.” Joe came to life. “Were you, man? Which stage?” I said he was a comedian. Joe said, “How intelligent.” Then he gave a master-class in comedy, ending with that joke about the piece of string that goes into a bar.’ ‘I do think there was suddenly a lot more pressure for him to be Joe Strummer,’ thought Jem Finer.
Following Joe’s controversial performance at Glastonbury – far less a failure for those who watched him than for himself – there was little time for maudlin self-recrimination. Beckoning was the group’s first tour of the United States. Two days after playing at Glastonbury they were flying to Washington, DC, the capital of a country then under the semi-liberal auspices of President Bill Clinton. There was an ominous moment as the group arrived at immigration at Dulles airport. Andy Boo, the guitar tech, was stopped by customs; he was carrying Antony Genn’s guitar-case, inside which – unbeknownst to Andy – were twenty morphine capsules. ‘We’d come from Glastonbury. When I was there I’d put them in the case and forgotten about them,’ admitted Ant. Andy Boo was hauled off for questioning, where it was accepted he had had no knowledge of the drugs. Luckily there was nothing to identify Ant Genn as the owner of the guitar.
On Tuesday 29 June the group’s brief, water-testing American dates began at the 9.30 Club on DC’s V Street, to positive local press response. Shows followed at Irving Plaza in New York (where Joe and his group filmed a video for ‘Yalla Yalla’), the Cabaret Metro in Chicago, the Milwaukee Summerfest, the San Francisco Fillmore and the Palace in Los Angeles. Throughout this brief tour the ‘young musicians’ in Joe’s new group were especially commended, while Joe received reverential reviews worthy of his status as a British national treasure. To the group, their singer seemed a strange one. ‘The first American tour we did, I didn’t really know what was going on,’ said Martin Slattery, ‘but Joe was a really angry person. He distanced himself from us, wouldn’t come into the dressing-room. It was hard to know what was going on in his head.’
Arriving back in Britain, they drove straight up to play T in the Park, the annual Glasgow festival, on 8 July, only four weeks since Joe and the Mescaleros had first played in the city. Following this show, and a three-week summer break, they flew to Japan for their slot on 1 August at Fuji Rock. When ZZ Top, who were headlining that day, realized that as the bill was running late they might miss their flight out of Japan, they asked if they could swap slots with the Mescaleros. ‘Fuck off,’ said Joe.
On Friday 13 August the group played in France at the Free Wheels Festival at Clermont-Ferrand. All bar Joe were concerned about how he would respond after a sixteen-hour journey and saw how their performance was being sold at the site: ‘A tribute to the Clash: Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros’. The posters were hurriedly taken down before Joe got to see any of them.
One week later they played before a 20,000-strong audience at the Two Days a Week Festival in Wiesen, Austria, before crossing the border to Germany to play at the Bizarre Festival in Cologne, where the group’s set was shown on television. Much of the audience wa
s there for the American metal bands on the bill; some responded to Joe’s appearance by throwing razor blades. Joe picked out a member of the audience who was wearing a T-shirt celebrating anarchy: ‘Who gave you your Anarchy T-shirt? Was it your fucking mother?’ ‘The guy was giving the finger,’ said Scott Shields. ‘Joe’s like, “Come up here and do that!” He gets him up on the stage, and the guy’s about six foot six. The bouncers are holding the guy back, and Joe’s going: “You fucking pussy!” Then he walks away from it, thank God. There was the potential there for Joe to get crucified. It was really scary. There were a few of those moments.’ Back in his hotel room, Joe watched a documentary about the Beach Boys and burst into tears.
After a date in Portugal, there were shows in Dublin and Belfast. In the group’s history the Dublin show became legendary. ‘The whole place literally wouldn’t leave,’ said Ant Genn. ‘The promoter came into the dressing-room and said, “You’ve got to do another song.” But we’d played every song we knew. So Joe said he’d go and tell them they had to leave. As he left, I said, “Let’s play ‘London Calling’ again.” Just as he got out there the tour manager said to Joe, “Do ‘London Calling’ again. The whole band’s behind you.”’
In Dublin Joe was joined by Charles Shaar Murray, the former NME journalist, writing an article for the Daily Telegraph. Hunkered over the bar of the group’s hotel at 3 in the morning Charles found Joe to be reinvigorated, with the strength to look back on his past with clear eyes.
When Charles discussed the notion of the-Clash-as-political-group, he suggested that Joe had always come more from an anarchist tradition than one of strict socialism. ‘I’m more of a Merry Prankster type of person than a committed anything,’ Joe immediately agreed. ‘I realized that I didn’t know anything about anything. What I’d like to do personally is to start all over again. If I had a red button here and if I pushed it everything in the world would vanish and we’d be nomads walking the grasslands, I’d push it straight away. I wouldn’t even hesitate. Because money runs this nonsense, and they’re gonna feed us gasoline and oil until the world is a dead shell. I’d like to think the Clash were revolutionaries, but we loved a bit of posing as well. “Where’s the hair gel? We can’t start the revolution till someone finds the hair gel!” We were revolutionaries on behalf of punk rock.
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