Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  But that was precisely how the show kicked off on Thursday 27 October when Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros played a secret warm-up gig at the 100 Club in Oxford Street. Initially I was as perplexed as Tymon had predicted the audience would be as he stepped with his fiddle to the front of the stage to lead the set in with ‘Minstrel Boy’, Joe standing to the back of the tiny stage, mouth familiarly lolling open as he chopped out rhythm chords on his trusty Telecaster. The tune stirred you to your bones: like many old folk tunes, it was fabulously rousing. It was followed by a quartet of new numbers: ‘Bhindi Bhagee’, ‘Bummed Out City’, ‘At the Border, Guy’ and ‘Gamma Ray’. As often when an act introduces previously unheard songs, they were initially baffling. But after a few bars their rhythms and beats were moving your body and feet. It felt like there was sunshine everywhere. As well as his version of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘The Harder They Come’ – which Joe had recorded for an American benefit for the West Memphis Three, a trio of teenagers dubiously convicted of a triple homicide – he shifted gear through a clutch of old Clash favourites, including the ‘Folk Riot’ version of ‘White Riot’. As though a chorus to the sweat pouring like a waterfall down Joe’s face, condensation dripped from the ceiling onto the packed crowd. The 100 Club was as hot as if it was August, fans stripping down to their bare chests as Joe pounded out the songs. ‘It was one of the most amazing gigs I’d ever done, standing on people’s heads to play,’ said Martin Slattery. In the dressing-room afterwards, the toll that the heat and lack of oxygen had taken on Joe was manifest: he lay down on the floor for a quarter of an hour to recover his breath. Lucinda looked worried. I was concerned. For the first time it really dawned on me that Joe was not as young as he had once been.

  Not that Joe was as full-on in his drug usage as other members of the group. ‘We’d have to have a week or two off after about every three weeks,’ said Martin. ‘It was too hardcore a lifestyle. But Joe’s smart – he didn’t take coke every time it was offered, hardly at all. Once when we were doing the mixing, Joe had just one line and went absolutely mental. We left him at 5 a.m., and when we got back the next afternoon you couldn’t see the studio for the paper he’d been writing on on the coke. It had a massive effect on him, so he didn’t do that much.’

  Scott Shields was in such bad shape that he was subbed for the Who tour. It began three days after the 100 Club, in Birmingham at the National Exhibition Centre. The next day Joe was back in London, appearing at the Park Lane Hotel in Central London at the annual awards ceremony of Q magazine; he received the ‘Special Inspiration’ award. After Manchester the tour moved to Glasgow, where there was a day off. By now Joe had acquired a driver who, in what seemed as zen as the wooden machete, had only one leg. Joe had an idea. Calling up ‘One-legged Tim’, he asked if he would run him ‘up the road’, the suggestion being that this involved a distance of some ten miles. ‘Just drive,’ said Joe. What Joe actually required was that One-legged Tim would drive Joe’s rented Mercedes the 250 miles north-east to Bonar Bridge. Joe suggested they took the longer scenic route, but as it was pitch black this was pointless. The first anyone in Bonar Bridge heard of his imminent arrival was at around 8 in the evening when Joe briefly called. He phoned again, concerned he would not be welcome as it was so late. On their arrival at the croft of his cousin George he instructed One-legged Tim to remove his prosthetic limb in order to engage sympathy so they might be asked to stay the night. Joe and George then sat up until 5 a.m. drinking bottles of rum Joe had brought with him. George introduced Joe to the music of Alasdair Fraser, considered the finest modern Scottish fiddle player, by repeatedly playing him his CD The Road North. After George had gone to bed, needing to rise in a couple of hours for his farm-work, Joe wrote a note for him on a children’s shoes catalogue: ‘Dear George!!! This Alastair [sic] Fraser CD is unbelievable!! My blank tapes I don’t have with me otherwise I’d muck in with your big system and try to copy. Love Joe!! P.S. Thanks for being such a good sport. Warning, Georgie! Frazer [sic] CD in my machine in kitchen. High nick-a-billity factor.’ (In a drawn heart Joe added two words: ‘The Rebels’.) Before he turned in Joe tended to a domestic task, lopsidedly changing the nappy of George’s baby son Duncan.

  At lunchtime Joe had One-legged Tim drive him the couple of miles to Carnmhor to see Uncle John. ‘He stayed here an hour or two,’ said John. ‘He was still here at 3 o’clock, and said he was supposed to be in Glasgow at 2.30. He was quite happy.’ As Joe set off on the journey south, ‘he was standing up in the Mercedes, his head sticking through the sunroof, like the Pope’. By the skin of his teeth Joe made it back for the Glasgow show that evening. The Who tour concluded with three nights in London, the last show on 16 November. After this date drummer Smiley Bernard left the group.

  Back in London the sessions at Battery continued apace from 20 November until Christmas, Scott Shields returning. A consequence of the Who dates was that Roger Daltrey came to the studio to provide additional vocals on ‘Global a Go-Go’, the tune that became the title track of this second Mescaleros album. ‘Roger began to hang out with us,’ Joe told journalist Fred Mills. ‘He knew we were recording, so one night he said, “Hey, if you want me to come by I’d be more than pleased to do that.” I said, “Sure, come on down, and let’s get out the mikes and sing.”’

  After the Christmas break work resumed on the record all through January 2001, but without Pablo Cook – strapped for cash, he had begun playing percussion with Moby, hoping to juggle that job with his Mescaleros work. One evening an added measure of social realism overhung the sessions. Arriving at the studio, Joe and his driver saw what turned out to be a gangland hit. A shot rang out, and in the far distance they saw a man crumple to the pavement as another figure ran off: a Somalian had been shot in a drugs turf war. In shock Joe entered the studio, wondering whether he should approach the police. ‘Joe came into the studio and was like “Fuckin’ hell. You won’t believe what we’ve just seen,”’ said Martin. ‘He was really torn about what to do.’ Joe decided that as he had not seen the person who fired the gun there was no point in volunteering his services.

  But there was a lighter note to these New Year sessions – literally. So many disposable lighters vanished into the pockets of visitors to the studio that Joe would arrive bearing literally dozens of them, which he would proceed to turn into what he termed ‘unstealable’ lighters, customizing them with stickers and logos, gluing three together, or making them too long to fit into pockets by gaffer-taping them to pen bodies. It was good to have a hobby.

  The studio was a very private male world. ‘There was a no-birds-in-the-studio philosophy,’ said Scott Shields. ‘Every time Luce would come up to the studio Joe would go out with her. She’d never be around as we were recording.’ At the end of the sessions, Joe assembled the assorted wives and girlfriends of the various participants, and apologized for having so disrupted their lives.

  But it wasn’t over. Joe announced he had been asked to write the soundtrack for Gypsy Woman, a comedy directed by Sheree Folkson. The process took a further six weeks; the film went straight to DVD.

  Bob Gruen called me. The photographer was putting together a book using his pictures of the Clash; Joe had suggested I should write the text. On the last Friday of April 2001 Bob, his wife Elizabeth and I took a train down to Taunton. Joe picked us up at the station. He was hobbling around with a walking-stick, his foot in plaster. ‘Joe broke his ankle playing football round about the 26th of March so that was a few months of plaster and crutches,’ said Lucinda. He still managed to drive: had he been taking lessons from One-legged Tim?

  Sitting against the wall at the kitchen table at Yalway, with Luce to his right, reggae playing on a ghetto-blaster, Joe seemed extraordinarily at ease, doodling on a pad of paper. From time to time one of his three dogs would push their way into the room, tails wagging, muddy paws over everyone. Opening a bottle of red wine for Bob, his wife Elizabeth and myself, Joe at first drank tea. During the course of the evening he gav
e me a copy of Straight Life, the harrowing autobiography of Art Pepper, the great jazz alto saxophonist, a book he told me he loved. It was not for at least a couple of hours, as Luce served up supper, that he poured himself a glass of wine. But Joe was pacing himself. Although Luce went to bed not long after midnight, at around 4 in the morning Joe was making toast and honey for us and pouring me a glass of what he was consuming, a shot of brandy in a tumbler filled to the top with water. ‘I recommend it,’ he said. ‘It’ll keep you going.’ In five days’ time it would be May Day. Mass anti-capitalist demonstrations were planned for London. ‘Let’s go up and get stuck in,’ said Joe, his patent naughty-boy grin spreading over his features. It was like a moment from ‘Cool’n’Out’, one of the songs recorded for the new Mescaleros’ CD, which he played us: ‘I especially like the line in that song about putting LSD into the gin supply at the G7 summit,’ he said. I went to bed around 5. Down in the kitchen Joe was still going for another couple of hours.

  On 24 May Joe was back at the Park Lane Hotel for the Ivor Novello Awards (selected by the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters), this time with all the Clash – including Topper – who were honoured for their ‘Outstanding Contribution to British Music’. It was the first time all four members had appeared onstage together for nineteen years, to a lesser or greater degree a pivotal moment in the history of the Clash. ‘I know the Ivors is a bit “establishment”,’ Mick Jones told the BBC afterwards, ‘but the reason we came is that it’s a recognition of our craft – and for the laugh!’

  24 May was a busy day for Joe, for it also marked the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Bob Dylan. He had been called to the BBC’s studios in the early morning as a pundit for the Today current affairs programme; remarkably, he was partnered with Stevie Wonder, also in London for the Ivor Novello Awards. Michael Horovitz enthusiastically listened to this Dylan birthday segment. ‘I loved hearing Joe on the Today programme, on which both he in the studio and Stevie Wonder in the radio car enthused about Dylan’s contribution and, told there were only a couple of minutes left to name a song they liked best, Joe instantly started chanting, and urged Stevie to do so too, “Blowing in the Wind”, on which they achieved perfect harmony and euphoria. Immediately after the orgasmic climax, the presenter James Naughtie picked up the cue to state something on the lines of “… and now, for once in a lifetime, from Joe Strummer with Stevie Wonder, to Steve May with the sport.”’

  On 24 July Global a Go-Go was released. ‘This album was inspired by Michael Horovitz and Nina Simone and is dedicated to Joey Ramone,’ read Joe’s final line on the sleeve notes insert. The death from cancer of Joey Ramone – whose group had so enormously influenced the Clash – the previous September had deeply upset him. The album opened with ‘Johnny Appleseed’, originally written in the Earthquake Weather sessions, thirteen years previously. ‘The song is a yell from the heart,’ said Joe, ‘a howl for some kind of truth in our lives.’

  The title tune was directly inspired by Joe’s BBC World Service programme and reflected his belief in a world community free of borders and nationalist prejudices. But it specifically hinges around the liberating force of global radio bringing the planet together: motivated by the same mood that had driven the anti-globalization demonstrations, Global a Go-Go concerns itself with Joe’s anarchic preoccupations and sense of fairness towards those less fortunate. ‘Shaktar Donetsk’ (a Ukrainian football team) is the story of a Macedonian illegal immigrant to Britain. And ‘At the Border, Guy’ is about Mexican migrant workers. But it wasn’t all about suffering; ‘Gamma Ray’ turned this on its head – ‘There’s nothing but bad news in the newspapers to make us live in a constant state of paranoia, which is what they want’ – while both ‘Mondo Bongo’ and ‘Bummed Out City’ were love songs, Joe Strummer style. The final tune on the record is a seventeen-minute version of Tymon Dogg’s crowd-pleaser, ‘Minstrel Boy’.

  At Joe’s instigation he and the Mescaleros had been booked to play a free tour of record stores to promote the album, in both the UK and the USA. The dates began at Virgin in Leeds in Yorkshire on 16 July, with a London show at HMV in Oxford Street the next day. ‘It was Joe’s idea to do that tour,’ said Martin Slattery. ‘It was a good example of his passion for just getting in there.’ The plan was to play a forty-five minute set; afterwards Joe and the group would hang around for as long as necessary, talking to fans and signing autographs. Apart from ‘The Harder They Come’, the set consisted of entirely new material. At the show in Oxford Street, the problems of in-store performances were highlighted – or not, as the case may be, for there was little lighting and amidst the racks of CDs it was hard to see the group, set up at the back of the store. But considering that Global a Go-Go would not be out for another seven days and hardly anyone had heard the material, the show received a rapturous response. The Mescaleros’ line-up now consisted of multi-instrumentalists Martin and Scott, Tymon Dogg on violin, and two new players, bassist Simon Stafford and drummer Luke Bullen. Luke, who had played with a group called Adict, met Joe at rehearsals: ‘I was nervous of meeting him. He was much quieter than I expected. He kept himself in his own world. I couldn’t gauge him really. Quickly I found out if everything was going smoothly, Joe would change it, even the songs themselves – he’d add in another chorus. I think he fed off the energy of the friction. Joe was really like a shepherd. He’d go along with whatever was suggested, and then subtly change it. He went where he was feeling.’

  Tucked away upstairs after the HMV gig in an office that served as a dressing-room, Joe played a couple of classic reggae compilations he had picked up at the date in Leeds. He came over and sought me out, apologizing for not having made a further contribution to Bob Gruen’s book of Clash pictures – although I knew he had been smothered with advance promotion for Global a Go-Go. ‘You shouldn’t let down your mates,’ he said. Afterwards we retired to the Groucho Club in nearby Dean Street in Soho, a members-only media hang-out that seemed a strangely rarefied location in which to find a fellow like Joe. Yet since the middle of the 1990s he might often be seen there, in the company of the likes of Keith Allen or Damien Hirst. ‘There was an upstairs room that was a bit of a Britpop hang-out,’ explained Martin Slattery, ‘where Keith, Damien, Joe and a few others had a little scene. I don’t think it was so much that it was the Groucho, I think it could have been anywhere that was central and private and had a snooker table. They ruled it as kings – Ant Genn was very much involved in that scene. The bar at the Groucho is tab-based, which left Joe with some fuck-off bar bills. “Another round, everybody?” He must have spent some money there. No wonder they put up with their behaviour.’ As an out-of-town member of the Groucho, Joe would receive very generous room rates when he needed somewhere to stay in London. One night a waitress came up to him: ‘I think you know my father.’ It was the daughter of Richard ‘Dick The Shit’ Evans. After not seeing each other for a quarter of a century, their friendship resumed.

  On this visit to the Groucho we hunkered ourselves away in a corner of the downstairs restaurant. Lucinda was there, along with a few other people. A couple of bottles of red wine were ordered. Joe seemed subdued, quiet, doing what he was so fond of, sitting at the edge of the table and watching the conversation unfold in front of him. He was smoking Cutter’s Choice rolling tobacco, which he decreed to be ‘the Courvoisier of rolling tobacco’; we were both on the same tip, smoking roll-ups to make the hassle of rolling a cigarette ensure we smoked less. ‘You’ve got to stick at it,’ insisted the man who’d moaned ‘There’s no smoking anywhere’ on ‘Mega Bottle Ride’, on the new album.

  A few days later Joe and the Mescaleros were on their way to New York City. On 24 July, the day that Global a Go-Go was released, they played at Virgin Megastore in Times Square. Later that evening there was a TV performance on the Conan O’Brien Show, playing ‘Johnny Appleseed’.

  Mescaleros? Punk-rock mate! (John Zimmerman/Proper-Gander)

  Dates followed in Toronto
, Chicago, San Francisco, and Tower Records in Los Angeles, on Sunset Strip. Leaving the bar at the Standard after playing at Tower, Joe encountered a busker he had met the last time he was in LA. Then the street musician had serenaded him – inappropriately, as Joe had pointed out – with a version of ‘Train in Vain’. ‘I hope you know more than “Train in Vain” this time,’ said Joe now. At which point the busker burst into a version of another Clash song – ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. Smiling, Joe pressed a $20 note into his hand. ‘You’re so nice,’ he told Joe. ‘Prince wasn’t that nice.’ But then Prince hadn’t been a busker – as Joe had.

  The next night, 2 August, Joe and the Mescaleros stepped across Sunset from Tower to play a show in the tiny Viper Room. After only having played a few dates with the Mescaleros, Luke Bullen already had detected tensions between Scott Shields and Tymon Dogg. ‘Tymon and Scott would wind each other up: Scott was very progressive and Tymon was completely old school. It made it difficult. Also, Joe didn’t really like to rehearse. We’d say we’d want to start rehearsals at 2 p.m., but Joe would say, “The smart money is on 4 p.m.,” and it would end up being 6.’

  Whenever a hot new group was in LA Gerry Harrington would go to see them. Gerry told Joe he was going to see the Strokes play at the Troubadour the day after the Viper Room date, just over three weeks before the release of this acclaimed new New York act’s first album, Is This It. This time Joe was up for going along with Gerry. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It will be terrible. We’ll just go and drink and tell them they’re no good.’ But Joe loved the group. Standing at the front of the venue up against the stage, he pummelled the air with his fist throughout the Strokes’ set. After, he and Gerry Harrington went upstairs to the dressing-room bar. Julien Casablancas, the singer, could not believe Joe was there. Grabbing and hugging him ecstatically, he demanded, ‘Why did you come to my show? You’re so great, you should just listen to your own music.’ This sort of moment would always perk Joe up.