Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Jazz and Lola, Joe’s two daughters with Gaby, were in San José, and spent Joe’s birthday night with him. ‘They came back with him and had gazpacho for breakfast,’ said Marcia Finer. ‘They were saying what a lovely time they’d had with Joe as they hadn’t seen him for a while. Definitely he could handle the kids. He had more of a problem with adults.’

  ‘The following night,’ remembered Richard Dudanski, ‘we agreed to meet up on the beach at midnight, a full moon. We were there until 6 a.m., with bongos and tents. He told me that world music was the direction he was going in. He was talking about taking the sound of the Mescaleros and stripping it away. Tymon’s tunes were a direction he wanted to go in. In the 101’ers’ days we’d try and dig out obscure Cajun music – “Junco Partner” was a good example. When he started in the Clash he was always having a dig at me for being a folkie for doing stuff with Tymon. From what he said now it seemed his Scottish side was bringing this out of him, but you don’t have to go further than Walker to see how rooted that view was. I said, “If you ever end up with just Tymon, there’s a drummer here.” “I really appreciate your support,” he said. He was really buzzing with everything going on. The last time I saw him he was taking out the rubbish from the back of a caff in San José where he knew the people.’

  In September Antony Genn and Damien Hirst went out for a night at the Groucho Club. Unexpectedly Joe also turned up. He walked straight over to Ant. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I thought we were going to do a track together. You called Luce about it. You never called me back.’ Ant, who had called Joe when he was in California, was surprised by Joe’s vehemence.

  ‘Two hours,’ grunted Joe.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Ant.

  ‘I live two hours from you. You call me, day or night, any time, and I’ll be there in two hours. Anything you want me to do.’

  ‘That was Joe’s way of saying, “It’s gone. All the past is over.” We hung out for hours, talked about all sorts of things, hugged and said goodbye, and that was the last time I saw him.’

  At the end of September Joe and the Mescaleros returned to Japan for three dates, a festival, for which they were being paid good money, one in Fukuoka, and a final show in Tokyo at the 1,500-capacity Liquid Room. Before the dates Joe sent an e-mail to Dick Rude at his home in Los Angeles. In itself this was extraordinary, as Joe still had not fully adapted to computer culture, far happier with faxing. The e-mail was an invitation to Dick Rude to go with them to Japan: ‘You’ve gotta come with us. We’re doing a cover of Iggy’s “1969”, you’ve gotta film it!’ In Japan Joe told Dick Rude how disturbed he had been by Martin and Scott’s summer job with Paul Heaton, but he was still up for playing with the group and really making a mark with them. When Dick said that Tymon Dogg and Scott Shields hardly saw eye to eye about anything, Joe had a simple, and very characteristic, solution: ‘Leave them to it. They’ll figure it out between themselves.’

  ‘Joe wanted to test new material like “Get Down Moses”,’ said Dick. ‘They performed like I’d never seen them before. They had really started to take it to a different level. Joe was rolling around on stage, jumping off the amps, or over the drum-kit, or out into the audience. He was everywhere. He was so alive he didn’t know what to do. Like a kid.

  ‘Especially that last night in Tokyo, there were no pretensions about what he was doing whatsoever. He was performing with all his heart, with absolute reckless abandon. There are people that are artists because they have to be. He was so happy, so smiley, so full, so shiny. He really was reaching something there at the very end.’ When fans would ask Joe about Dick Rude’s camera, he had a ready reply: ‘Dick’s making a movie. Don’t tell anyone, nobody’s going to want to watch it!’

  The shows had been set up by Masa, in conjunction with Jason Mayall who ran the London office of Smash. Jason also was in Japan, and after the Tokyo gig was severely reprimanded by Joe. Waiting for the star performer were around 150 Japanese fans. Not only did they all want a personalized autograph – always replete with some Joe artwork – along with signatures on every piece of memorabilia they had brought with him, but they all expected to have their photograph taken with Joe. After Joe had dealt with about a third of these supplicants, Jason had a word in his ear. ‘I think you could slip away now,’ he said.

  Joe rounded on Jason in fury: ‘I’ll stay to the very last person. This is my job. This is what I do!’ Ninety minutes later he finally left the building.

  On the final day in Japan a typhoon struck the country. ‘I hope the typhoon sticks around so I can spend another day here,’ Joe said to Dick, who suggested he change his return flight to a later date. But he had noticed that even in front of him, Joe would be on the phone every day to Lucinda, blowing kisses down the line. ‘He said, “I can’t do it. I gotta get back to Luce.” Coming from Joe, that was something else, man.’

  At the end of October Dick Rude received a phone call from Joe. He had a meeting in New York on the afternoon of 4 November, he told him: VH-1, the music cable channel, had offered Joe a show, to be called Joe Strummer’s Global Boom Box, a TV version of the BBC World Service London Calling series. Joe would only do it, he said, if Dick would co-host the show. ‘I was so flattered,’ said Dick. When they went to the meeting, Joe had with him a boom box he had had covered in reflectors, stickers and flashing lights, as well as a torn plastic shopping-bag. He was in great spirits: earlier in the day he had been driving around Manhattan in a convertible Cadillac, scouting out locations for that evening’s fun. ‘Everyone came by to say hi,’ said Dick. ‘The CEO of Viacom came down. Everyone came to shake Joe’s hand. Everyone was thrilled to have him in the building.’ It was agreed the show would be broadcast in the new year.

  A very happy Joe with his wife Lucinda. (Lucinda Mellor)

  For another three days Joe stayed in New York. Unusually he had some time on his hands, a chance to hang out and relax. ‘We were in Starbucks in the Village,’ said Dick, ‘just sitting there looking out of the window, and he turns to me and goes, “This is so great! Just drinking coffee, staring out the window, looking at New York City. It’s so beautiful.”’

  There was a gathering of the usual suspects: Bob Gruen, Josh Cheuse, Jim Jarmusch – when Jim and Sara Driver decided to stay in one night, Joe broke into their apartment in the early hours and dragged them from their beds. On the last night, however, it was the turn of now-teetotal Dick Rude to feel Joe’s wrath. At 5 in the morning Dick omitted to save a drunken companion from falling off a bar on which he was dancing. Joe, himself very drunk, was furious: ‘At Glastonbury we stick together and look after each other. What were you playing at?’

  Something else had occurred that evening, something that had perhaps raised Joe’s level of irascibility, something even more fraught with sub-text than the Bob Gruen Clash photo exhibition had been. Chris La Salle brought the news that the following March the Clash would be inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. If they accepted the award, it was very likely that the group would be expected to perform. ‘We talked about the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame that night,’ said Dick, ‘and even though he knew it was a load of crap, he did recognize that it still meant something. It was his peers who were the people who had voted them in, so it really was an honour, like the Ivor Novello had been – that’s how Joe saw that. The irony was that now his other band was taking off and performing in a way that had never happened before, and he loved it in a way he’d never loved it before, and was really happy to just be the ordinary guy, playing his stuff, without all the bullshit. Joe used to make a joke about musicians being on the level of crossword puzzle writers.

  ‘That night in New York we went back to the hotel as the sun was coming up – we’d got over our differences. Me, him and Chris La-Salle were talking about the awards show. At first he didn’t want to do it. Then he said he’d definitely do it. He was trying to figure out which song to do. Should it be “London’s Burning” or “London’s Calling”? H
e couldn’t figure out if Simmo would do it.’

  ‘Joe was very excited about the Hall of Fame for five minutes. He was in the middle of recording and touring and all that,’ remembered Lucinda. ‘He said the Clash had to play as how awful it would be to have other people playing your songs while you sit and watch. He did also say that he wouldn’t do it if Topper didn’t do it, and he knew that Paul had said a definite no. On the other hand he did also call Mani from the Stone Roses and Primal Scream and ask him if he would join them on bass, and Mani was on stand-by.’

  ‘I thought it would be absolutely wrong to play the Hall of Fame,’ said Paul. ‘I wanted to explain to Joe that the tickets were £1,000. There’d be no ordinary fans there. I was threatened, “We’ll get Mani.” I said, “Go ahead.”’

  Back home Joe had slotted in a short British tour, the Bringing It All Back Home Tour, taking in assorted small towns and unexpected venues. They were the sort of dates the Clash would often play, taking their music to parts of the country that rarely see quality live acts. There were murmurings among the Mescaleros – some felt they should not be playing such deadbeat venues. ‘That was the hardest tour,’ recalled Luke Bullen. ‘Joe thought it was a good idea, but I remember him apologizing to Scott and Martin: “I should never have booked this.”’ At the beginning of December the Mescaleros were scheduled for a two-week stint at Rockfield residential studio in Wales. Did Martin-Scott not appreciate that Joe liked to be at peak match fitness when he went into the studio?

  These shows opened at a decidedly prestigious venue. Through the auspices of Louise Aspinall, an old school-friend of Lucinda, Joe had been added to a bill that included Michael Palin and Bryan Adams for a benefit for Diane Fossey’s Gorillas’ charity at the Royal Opera House on 10 November. Since he had worked at the Coliseum as a cleaner in his early twenties, Joe had hated opera. ‘Joe could carry a chip on his shoulder,’ said Dick Rude, ‘and one of the chips was the fact he had had to clean out the toilets. He told me how he loathed those people because they would piss in the stall and throw their cigar butts down. Joe would have to pick them out.’

  ‘It was a great evening,’ said Lucinda, ‘the first time rock music had ever been played there. They had a great sound-check and then Joe told me in confidence what the real running order was. The last tune was “White Riot”. He thought it would be a fantastic buzz to play that in the Opera House, and it was.’

  The next night Joe and the Mescaleros played the Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Evening News gave the show a review that can only be described as ecstatic. ‘A hero’s welcome awaited Joe Strummer when he took to the stage, the sort of spontaneous uproar that speaks volumes about the respect in which he is held in Edinburgh,’ ran the first line. ‘… Strummer is obviously revelling in one of the most fruitful periods of a remarkable career … The Joe Strummer of late 2002 is every bit as vital, vibrant and unmissable as the man who fronted the Clash in 1977. The crowds will keep coming out for many years to come.’

  Shows followed in Newcastle and Blackpool before a move back to the west of Notting Hill for a gig on Friday 15 November at Acton Town Hall, a benefit for the striking workers of the Fire Brigades Union. While in Japan, Joe had been approached to play the benefit; he immediately agreed.

  But the major significance of this show, what makes it a historic rock’n’roll event, was that it marked the first time that Mick Jones had played onstage with Joe Strummer for nineteen years, since the Us festival outside Los Angeles. As it was, Mick nearly didn’t make it to the show. Someone who’d said he’d go along with him let him down at the last moment, but he caught a cab on his own to Acton Town Hall. ‘I’m glad I did,’ he told me afterwards. He also said he had not meant to necessarily play with the Mescaleros at the FBU benefit. He simply grabbed a guitar at the side of the stage and found himself playing with Joe.

  Joe Strummer’s audience already knew Mick Jones was in the building. ‘Mick Jones is here tonight,’ Joe had declared after ‘Bhindi Bhagee’, the second number. ‘And more than that, Mick Jones and his lady Miranda have had a baby last Sunday morning. And the baby’s called Stella. And this is going out to Stella.’ Joe and the Mescaleros sloped into the reggae beat of ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’.

  It was a set of extraordinary music, a steaming punk rock performance. Just like Joe: to have thought of doing one thing, and then done the complete opposite. As Dick Rude said of the Japanese shows, Joe Strummer on the Bringing It All Back Home tour was performing at a peak of his abilities, his voice honed and sinewy with catarrh, his improvisations from the top of the pile – in the way, for example, that he segued ‘White Man’ into an unexpected verse of ‘Last Train to Skaville’ with such utter aplomb. His ad-libs were as rich as ever. Before ‘Mega-Bottle Ride’ he announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for the next three minutes we are going to try and bring everyone in Acton Town Hall into the fourth dimension. The bar’s still open in the fourth dimension.’

  Before the eighth number Joe requested, ‘If you’ve still got vocal cords, give us some assist on this one, thank you. This one’s going out to those other two cunts in the Clash. That’s affectionate, of course. Namely, Paul Simonon and Nicky “Topper” Headon.’ Into a historic staple of Clash material, their version – with arrangement by Mick Jones – of Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’, the tune that cemented on vinyl the punk–reggae alliance. ‘This one’s entitled “I’ve Been Running, Police on My Back”,’ announced Joe, introducing the Eddie Grant song with the first two lines, a prompt to his memory, as in the Clash. There were the first performances in London of ‘Get Down Moses’ and ‘Coma Girl’, a fantastic version, creatively muscular.

  But it was the appearance onstage during ‘Bankrobber’, the first encore, of Mick Jones that cemented the place of the evening in the legend and mythology of rock’n’roll. As soon as he heard the opening chords of ‘Bankrobber’, he felt ‘compelled’ to join Joe onstage. Mick seemed joyous up there, dapper in a fitted three-button jacket and white shirt; the chemistry and interaction between him and Joe – as band-leader more consciously in control of the moment – was instant and spontaneous; it was as though no one else was on the stage. ‘All right, baby, play that guitar now – for the baby,’ Joe scatted to Mick during ‘Bankrobber’, a laugh in his voice, as though he was immediately freed up, as though something had fallen away from him. The Spinal Tap-like cliché of this onstage reunion only added to the innocent joy. ‘That was for the Harlesden and Willesden Fire Companies,’ said Mick Jones after ‘Bankrobber’. ‘In the key of A,’ Joe bellowed to his group. ‘Look at him,’ he gestured to Mick. And the group pounded into a stupendous ‘White Riot’.

  ‘Thanks for being a great crowd. Honestly, we’re with you,’ said Joe after the Clash classic. ‘And this is the last tune of the night. Specially requested by Andy. And this is called [pause]: “London’s Burning”.’ What more perfect choice for final number could there be for a benefit for the Fire Brigades Union? What did you think they were going to play? Mick Jones onstage multiplied the inspiration.

  At the end of ‘London’s Burning’, Joe finally introduced the man who had appeared onstage: ‘Mick Jones, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you very much. Good luck with everything, everybody.’

  The poetry of the occasion – not all of which could immediately be recognized – was compounded by the event itself, a non-profit righteous act of defiance, unsullied by ego. That Mick Jones should have gone onstage with Joe at his last London gig before he died is a testament to the magic that overstrode the Clash (and those around it). That always overstrode it.

  ‘When he saw Mick, Joe’s face was like a kid,’ said Luke Bullen. ‘He was genuinely chuffed.’ David Mingay had gone along to the show. After the gig he told Joe how great he thought the Mescaleros’ songs were. ‘He said, doing his Joe Strummer voice, “Can you get any money for movies? This is my e-mail.” My daughter asked Joe what his politics were now. “I’m still a man of the left,” he sai
d. “But I’m not against America. I have a lot of American friends.”’

  In the audience had been Gaby, the mother of Jazz and Lola: ‘I stood at the front of the stage when Joe and Mick were onstage together and it took me back to being a teenager. It was really powerful seeing them there together. A real deep feeling.’

  ‘I asked Joe in the cab leaving the gig how he felt about Mick jumping up on stage like that,’ said Lucinda. ‘He turned round with a big grin on his face and said, “Bloody cheek!” He loved it.’

  There were more shows that weekend, on Saturday at TJs in Joe’s post-art-school stomping-ground of Newport, and another benefit on Sunday night, on home territory, at the Palace in Bridgwater, Somerset, a benefit for the Engine Room, a media centre. ‘Joe’s gig provided the last bit of finance needed to complete the project,’ said Julien Temple, who was involved with The Engine Room.

  After a day off Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros were at the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth. Joe was approached by a fan who showed him his ‘Combat Rock’ tattoo on his arm. ‘Great,’ said Joe, signing his name underneath it. When they made it to Hastings the next day, the fan turned up: he had had Joe’s signature permanently tattooed onto his arm. Johnny Green caught up with Joe there. ‘We walked in the rain up the Esplanade in Hastings. He’s having his stroll before the show, gazing out at the sea, away from the pier. He stopped and put his hand on my arm and said, “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?” I said, “Yeah, course I would.” The truth, he meant, of course.’ During the show Johnny noted the strength of the new songs, ‘Get Down Moses’ and another new number, ‘Dakar Meantime’. ‘Barry Myers, who was working as DJ, said they were changing them every night in the set. These songs really weren’t finished. Barry told me they did them very differently to how they’d been done in Portsmouth.’