Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘I’ve never envied U2. I often thought, “Thank God we didn’t have to do that, that huge circuit,” because I wanted to be a person. Also, I stayed at home when my kids were growing up. I’ve got two children from my first marriage who are fifteen and thirteen now, and I’m glad I can remember ’em when they were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It was the best career move I ever made, not releasing any records, because you’re not letting people down with crap albums. You’re still in with a shout, and that’s why I’m rocking here and having a good time, because I didn’t put a record out. If I had, I think I’d have been rowed out of here already.

  ‘I had a crisis of self-confidence around ’85, when all that went down. But I outlived ’em. It’s like a Vietcong manoeuvre: go out in the bushes and wait it out. Dig a few tunnels.’

  When Charles asked Joe about his new material, his reply was succinct: ‘I only realized what it was about the other night when I typed all the lyrics out for the new record. It came to me that, without getting too pompous, the record’s about freedom – although I never planned it. They’re anti-democratic, those politicians, they want power for as long as they can hold it, and it’s going to take an earthquake to get rid of ’em. And then we got nothing to replace ’em with. We’re fucked. They’ve got us in a real half-nelson.’

  ‘So where would you put yourself politically these days?’ Charles asked him.

  ‘In the DMT universe! I’m in the Psychedelic Home Rangers.’

  Although he probably knew what the answer would be, the needs of journalism required Charles to ask the sucker-punch question: ‘What’s the single worst decision you ever took?’

  ‘Could I have two for the price of one? Firstly, to fire Topper Headon, and secondly, to fire Mick Jones. Topper was a heroin addict, but at the time we didn’t really understand what that was. We could have been more intelligent and gone, “OK, he’s strung out on heroin, but so was Charlie Parker. So was Miles Davis.”’

  The group drove on to Belfast, Joe stashing his weed in the bottom layer of a tin of biscuits as they crossed the border. After two more European dates, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros came off the road for six weeks, until the beginning of their British tour.

  Although the working title of the Clash live album had been On the Road with the Clash, by the time it was released in October 1999 it had been named From Here to Eternity. A fifty-minute cut of Westway to the World, the documentary commissioned by Sony from Don Letts, was aired on BBC 2 the same month. Already the eighty-five-minute feature-length version had been screened at the Notting Hill Coronet, followed by a party at the Cobden Club on Kensal Road in Notting Hill; Joe, Mick, Paul and Topper, who resolutely ignored the musical instruments optimistically set up on the stage, had been swamped by media figures anxious for association with these legends. The film, for which director Don Letts was awarded a Grammy, is a definitive look at the career of the Clash; each of the four members gave Don customarily frank interviews. As so often Joe played both sides of the park, comparing Mick to ‘Elizabeth Taylor on a bad hair day’, but then admitting, ‘Sometimes genius is worth waiting for.’ Mick was remarkably forthright. ‘I didn’t understand about self-control,’ he admitted. In many ways the film was more illuminating than the live record it was intended to promote. Don Letts told me that when putting together the footage Joe was by far the most narcissistically finicky of the group: he wouldn’t let Don include a clip from a TV show – he no longer liked the Davy Crockett hat he was wearing in it.

  Busy with his new record, Joe had given over the project to Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, offering virtually no input. Unexpectedly, From Here to Eternity had something of a museum piece feel. The live album was made up of seventeen songs from nine concerts; the disparity between the different performances meant that the record lacked the fluidity that would have come from a single show. It crept into the UK Top 10, but curiously failed to sell in the United States, previously the biggest market for the Clash.

  Although this affected Joe’s bank account, he personally had bigger fish to fry. Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, as the Mescaleros’ record was titled, was set for release on 2 November 1999. It could not have been a better time. The release of the live album and the presence of Westway to the World, along with a barrage of related publicity and interviews, ensured the profile of the Clash and its individual members was as high as it had been since Combat Rock. The record’s title came from a chapter title in a 1930s’ book Joe had found: ‘X-Ray Style’ was a genre of cave paintings in which animals were painted with the bones of their skeletons showing. Nowhere in the packaging of Rock Art and the X-Ray Style were there any pictures of Joe or of the Mescaleros. The artwork was by Damien Hirst; the front sleeve was in vivid pink, adorned with extremely primal sketches of people and animals which had been photographically lifted from cave paintings. ‘Every figure on the cover was done 60,000 years ago. Every animal and picture is from beyond history,’ said Joe, emphasizing his belief in the timeless continuity of existence, a belief that had been reinforced by lying on his back at Yalway, gazing at the stars with the likes of Dermot (once they had clearly watched a UFO), and the ingestion of all manner of psychedelics.

  Rock Art and the X-Ray Style got great reviews. ‘Triumphant return by former Clash legend … an album brimming with hope and optimism, that looks forward both musically and lyrically … mesmerizing, ’ read some of the review in Uncut. ‘A joy, worth spending both time and money on,’ said Q. ‘He was definitely pleasantly surprised and really happy that people liked the record,’ said Lucinda. ‘He thought he would never be forgiven for breaking up the Clash. It had weighed heavily on him. He’d got over it, but he was aware that was what people were going to think. But he obviously got to a stage where he said, “I don’t care: I’m going to do it. Fuck it: I’ll give it a go.” That’s why he did it.’

  Before the record could hit the shops, Joe and the Mescaleros embarked on a full British tour. Damien took Joe to Harrods to buy a suit for onstage wear – but Joe chose one on sale, ‘a half-price, simple suit’. Nottingham Rock City on 18 October and Leeds Town and Country Club the following night were sell-outs. The London dates followed after a day off: a pair of packed nights on 21 and 22 October at the 2,000 capacity Astoria, a venue by Tottenham Court Road tube station with seriously sticky carpets. For Joe this was the big return, London dates always pulling everyone – family, friends, fellow conspirators, a few unbelievers (mainly in the media) – out of the woodwork. The second night was one of the best concerts I had seen in years. ‘I thought I’d never see another rock’n’roll show like that,’ said Rick Elgood, the producer of Westway to the World. Early in the evening of the first Astoria show Joe had been on the local television news, worryingly seeming a rather puffy-faced talking head. But now in front of the heaving crowd he looked really good, almost glowing as he belted through a set of new material and old Clash hits.

  The Astoria was rammed with men of a certain age in black leather jackets. Even though the show was superb – passionate, profound and intimately personal – there were moments when I thought Joe might physically explode onstage from the ferocity of his performance, sweat pouring in visible rivers down his face, veins bulging out on his forehead and neck until you thought they might pop. Though I loved the evening I thought I detected something forced about the singer’s act, as though he was willing himself on, pushing himself into the part of Joe Strummer the Rabble-Rousing Rocker.

  (My suspicion that Joe was playing a part was correct. Sixteen days later in Las Vegas he told me in his gravelly voice, ‘I’ve only just begun performing in the last two or three days, and really getting to it. I was uptight since 5 June when I started, acting it. But then you realize you’ve got to jump that and get over it. I like to be a performer when I get up there. I’m at machine-pace now.’)

  Joe’s penchant for sprinkling his speech with oddities remained; two-thirds of the way into the set, Joe introduced the next number: ‘H
ere’s a Toots Hibbert song, a long-time favourite with the peeps: it’s called “Pressure Drop”.’ (‘The Peeps – he’d call people the Peeps,’ explained Damien Hirst.)

  ‘This is going out to Paul Simonon and Mick Jones!’ was his introduction to a rapturously received ‘White Man’. Topper naturally received the ‘Rock the Casbah’ moment. The audience did not seem to have any trouble with the new material, which hardly anyone had as yet heard. But I couldn’t identify any of Joe’s onstage musical cohorts; I didn’t remember seeing any of them before. It felt like a party with unfamiliar faces, slightly odd.

  The next day I turned on the local BBC radio station, Joe’s favourite, and a presenter was describing it as one of the shows of the year; the review in the Guardian said something similar.

  But the London dates were not without an ominous rumble within the soul of one of the musicians. ‘We played two nights at the Astoria and it was fantastic,’ said Ant Genn. ‘I think after that was probably when I lost interest.’

  The English tour carried on to Norwich, Cardiff, Manchester and Glasgow. Scott Shields was happy to be playing in his home town, at Barrowlands. But when Scott woke up in his bunk in the coach as it arrived in Glasgow, he found the driver telling everyone to get off the vehicle and not return, threatening to call the police. ‘One of the Manc posse had been doing heroin at the front of the bus, and there was tinfoil everywhere,’ said Scott. ‘Joe was hanging off the front windscreen wiper of the bus and shouting at the guy as he was driving it off. We checked into a hotel in Glasgow where there was a police convention. We’d commandeered the lobby and Joe was passing round joint after joint, trying to get one up on the police. Joe loved to push it: make sure that he had his last joint at the airport in New York before he was about to leave in the plane, turning up at 4 in the morning smoking weed with music blasting out of his ghetto-blaster. Causing absolute chaos was like a hobby.’

  Three days later Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros were on the West Coast of the United States for a nineteen-date tour of significant venues, beginning at the Seattle Showbox on 1 November. As the tour bus wound its way to the next date in Portland – Joe also played a solo acoustic set at the same city’s Music Millennium record store – he felt a need to drive home some cold realities to the Mescaleros. ‘I’m so glad I’m not you young guys, because you’re going to be disappointed. People in America won’t listen to us. I’m glad I’m not one of the young guys that are really hungry for success and fame because you’re not going to get it.’

  Joe Strummer: never without a pen or a notebook. (Lucinda Mellor)

  ‘He was trying to resign us,’ said Scott, ‘to the fact that we weren’t going to be liked, we weren’t going to be played on the radio. I think he genuinely felt bad for the young guys in the band. But the good thing was that Joe had this whole ethos of why he was doing it: “I have to promote this record, because if we don’t break even on this record we will never get a chance to make another record.”’

  Rock Art and the X-Ray Style not only broke even, but went into profit, selling around 150,000 copies worldwide. Within a couple of years Joe was receiving royalty cheques.

  On the bus it was largely a professional relationship, the group members occupying the lounge at the rear of the vehicle while Joe would hunker down at the front, often with Andy Boo, his guitar tech. As in the days of the Clash, Joe would hardly speak during the daylight hours before a show, sucking lozenges and sipping herbal teas. A bolstering glass of pre-show brandy aside, alcohol hardly touched his lips until after his performance. At sound-check he would leave the group to play on their own, only joining in if there had been a problem he was anxious to rectify. ‘The only time we really spoke was after the show, at night when we were back on the bus,’ said Scott. ‘It was a bizarre relationship really. Sometimes he was like your father, sometimes he was like your devil, sometimes he was somebody that you just couldn’t understand. On stage Joe always let you feel there was an edge, so you didn’t know what was coming next, and you’d be caught off guard. At first I was quite nervous in this band.’ As with the Latino Rockabilly War, Joe – unseen by the audience – conducted the group with hand signals behind his back. If a cue was missed it was not unknown for the offender to find an object whirling his way.

  After playing in Portland’s Roseland Theatre, the group moved on to San Francisco, another sell-out date at the Fillmore on 4 November. Here Joe linked up with Rudy Fernandez, who travelled with him to the next dates, in southern California. On the tour bus, sitting at a table at the front of the bus at 5 in the morning, with everyone else on the bus asleep, Joe put a Dexter Gordon CD on his ghetto-blaster. As the beautiful music sailed out of the speakers, Joe turned to Rudy. ‘This is the good life,’ he said.

  After a 5 November show at the Sun Theater in Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, south of Los Angeles, the tour moved to LA proper. Saturday 6 November saw a date at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard. I had flown out to write an article for the Daily Telegraph’s Saturday magazine. When I turned up around 5 p.m. for the sound-check I found Joe in his dressing-room, engaged in a series of interviews as Lucinda busied herself in a neighbouring room – she had flown out for the show with Damien Hirst and his wife Maia. ‘Grab a beer,’ said Joe. As I waited for him, I talked to a friend of Alex Cox. A DVD of Straight to Hell was scheduled for release and Alex had asked his mate to interview Joe on camera for the DVD extras. I mentioned this to Joe, who immediately postponed everything else he was doing, positioning himself at the rear of the House of Blues to talk about Straight to Hell. As he was supposed to be promoting Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, this caused controversy; an MTV crew had to wait, which kept Joe happy – when he had turned up earlier that year at the offices of MTV in New York, wired for sound with his ghetto-blaster, Joe had been shocked that he had been asked to turn down the volume.

  Although more hesitant than at the Astoria, the House of Blues show was still a stormer, with a phalanx of celebrities in the audience, including actor Robbie Coltrane, Sex Pistol Steve Jones, even Kiss’s Gene Simmons, who had once soundly denounced punk rock to me. Afterwards there was a party at the Viper Room, so packed that it was claustrophobic. Joe and I were supposedly scheduled to do an interview while he was in LA, but there was no way this was going to happen. The next day I flew to Las Vegas, where he was playing the Joint, inside the Hard Rock Hotel.

  Early that Sunday evening I sat down with Joe and Lucinda at a table in the Vegas branch of Nobu, the chic Japanese restaurant. They seemed very easy together, very comfortable to be with.

  A discussion of the finer points of magic mushrooms led to me asking if Joe’s move to the country was the final proof that punks had always been hippies with short hair. ‘Not really, because I started out a hippie, and I ended up a punk. So I’d say the difference was, hippies were trying to believe in the illusion of an alternative world, and punks knew that to create that alternative world something had to be done.

  ‘I’ve gone through both trips, and my only conclusion is that we were better out on the land. When we were hunter-gatherers we were happier people. You had time to express yourself. That’s when people are happiest, when they are expressing themselves, being in the creative universe. Instead of spending ten hours a day pumping the job. For what? So you can build these malls and buy these shitty goods here? To desecrate the world for this? It ain’t no bargain. The world is going to turn against all this. This world we’re in, especially here right now, is the equivalent of genetically modified tomatoes. The Disney experience and the mall is hollow – it looks good, but there’s nothing there. The hash browns look great but they taste of nothing. From A–Z, it’s a brilliant scam. If you raise your voice you’re going to be fined. If we rolled up some marijuana and smoked it we’d be in jail. But we’re only smoking the herb that grows in the earth. Everybody is out of their fucking minds here anyway.’

  It was this distaste with modern existence, Joe told me as we ate up our exotic
sushi, that had led to his fondness for festival life. ‘The only reason I hang on the festival scene is that I’ve been to a few free ones and they were the ones where you felt, This is getting there, everyone pitching in together. I’d like to get involved with some of the free festival throwdowns and help bring them about.’

  I asked him about his itinerant, tramp-like existence. ‘Me and Bo Diddley are the same: you can’t keep us out of skips. It must be a disease. Have you seen those carrier-bags in my room? Now all I need is a shopping trolley: a few bum records and I’m away with my trolley. It must be a disease, this trolley, shopping-bag-itis. It’s universal, isn’t it? You see cats in Holland, cats in Vegas, women in Helsinki.’

  And here we discussed one of the central elements in the life of Joe Strummer: his fondness for placing things in carrier-bags. ‘Because they hold things and you can put things in them. And come back to them later, sometimes many years later.’

  A full moon had peaked on the night that Joe and The Mescaleros had played in Anaheim. Now, on the wane of the moon, the Sunday evening show was not a sell-out, with only maybe 500 people there out of a 1,500 possible capacity, the energy dipping. (‘Darling, it was a Sunday,’ Lucinda said to me afterwards.) But the smallness of the venue and the crowd gave the evening an intimacy lacking at the House of Blues. ‘A lot of people have come here tonight from LA,’ said Joe. ‘So let’s get on with it.’ Yet, late on, there was an onstage contretemps. Joe chinned ‘a cunt’ who’d jumped on the stage before the last verse of ‘Tommy Gun’, knocking drink into the microphone. ‘Do what you like, but don’t fuck with me here,’ Joe bellowed, almost a statement of his existence.