Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Having successfully published A Riot of My Own, his account of his life with the Clash, Johnny Green was looking to write a book about the Tour de France. He hoped he could get Joe involved in the process of getting him a media pass. Johnny gave Joe his rap on the great cycling event: ‘It goes to the people – big pitch, this, to Joe – and not the people to it.’ ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Joe. ‘I’m a bit busy. Talk to me in January.’

  Then there was a show at the Leadmill in Sheffield, before the Bringing it All Back Home tour wound up at Liverpool University, on Friday 22 November 2002.

  Back in Somerset Joe heard devastating news. Damien Hirst, his companion in the excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, had made a life-changing decision – to give them up. ‘I decided it was time to stop. Even Joe would tell people to ignore me because I was getting so out of hand I’d be climbing up the chimney at home and taking Joe up there. I’d have two- or three-day sessions and the house would be wrecked afterwards.

  ‘All that consumption starts having a negative effect. If you’re using it to hide something, don’t do it. I think he should have stopped drinking, sitting up consuming as much as we could. I think Joe was afraid of losing something.’ Joe got Lucinda to make a phone call to Damien. ‘This stopping drinking,’ she had been instructed to ask by the man clearly unable to ask this painful question himself. ‘Is it for good?’ Damien replied in the affirmative.

  The next weekend, 30 November, Joe was in Bonar Bridge for the wedding of his cousin George to Fiona, his long-standing partner. ‘On the 29th we took the sleeper to Inverness and hired a car and drove to Bonar Bridge for a family wedding,’ said Lucinda. ‘Joe loved the wedding and he reeled away all night – last to bed, I think. The following day he had lunch with his Aunt Jessie in her beautiful croft high in the hills and then a dram or two with Uncle John in the farmhouse where his mother was born. Then we drove to the cottage which his cousin Alasdair was renting with his wife Deborah and son Harry. Joe didn’t want to leave and tried to persuade me to change the tickets and fuck the cost. I said it wasn’t about the money but he had to be in the recording studio in Wales as it was all booked. So he very reluctantly left with me to catch the sleeper back to Euston. He absolutely loved being in Scotland with his cousins and family again.’

  Joe was supposed to have arrived by then at Rockfield in South Wales, where the Mescaleros were already ensconced. The group line-up at Rockfield consisted of Martin, Scott, Simon and Luke; Tymon was due for the next sessions, in the New Year. ‘Joe was late getting to Rockfield,’ said Luke Bullen. ‘“Coma Girl” and “Get Down Moses” were the most complete of the songs when we got there. A lot was being pieced together still. By the time we left we had a lot of material, but not always the lyrics.’

  The residential nature of Rockfield inclined Joe to behave as if he was at home, wandering around in his slippers – which in Joe’s case were a pair of native American moccasins. The Acton Town Hall show seemed to have drawn him back to the past. Finally, Martin had learnt that many of the musical aspects Joe brought to the Mescaleros had originally come from the Clash. ‘He was really into backing vocals, for example. He was always getting me and Scott to do backing vocals. One night at Rockfield he was really candid about who did what in the Clash. He was really respectful of Mick, saying, “I was into the songs, but it was Mick that was into the sonic picture. It was Mick’s idea to put the backing vocals on and it was Mick’s idea to overdub some great guitar line there.” Another thing I realized he’d got from the Clash was this thing of just throwing a tune down, not over-rehearsing it, so everyone’s still sharp. It takes you to that place a little bit quicker when you’re not sure what’s going to happen.’

  At the end of the fortnight’s session that had been booked at Rockfield, the group went their separate ways. ‘See you after Christmas,’ Joe bade them farewell, with a hug. A session to finish the album was booked at Rockfield for the New Year.

  Then on 15 December Joe went back to Scotland for a few days with Lucinda’s mother and stepfather at their home in Blairgowrie. Back at Yalway on the evening of Thursday 19 December, Joe drove around Taunton with Pockets, who was leaving the next day for a family Christmas. Joe was searching for a cash machine with money in it. Finally they found one. Joe withdrew £100 and handed it to Pockets, who he knew was broke. ‘I’m worried about you,’ said Joe.

  The next morning Joe, Lucinda and Eliza travelled up to London, to the annual pantomime treat that Luce’s father organizes for Eliza. ‘This year it was Grease. Poor Joe had seen it before,’ recalled Lucinda. Staying at the Groucho Club, Joe had late-night drinks with Mick and Miranda.

  ‘The last night Joe spent in Groucho, those two together, it was just lovely to see,’ said Lucinda. ‘Really lovely. Mick and Miranda arrived and I said, “Oh Mick, Joe’s here.” And Mick’s whole face lit up. Then they found each other, and it was great. They really loved each other. Joe adored him.’

  The next day, Saturday 21 December, a Christmas lunch had been organized by Joe, with Jazz and Lola, Eliza, Luce, Gaby, Frances, and Tom Salter.

  Gaby had slept strangely the previous night, waking from a troubling dream. Then Lola had told her she had had a premonition that she was going to die that weekend. Gaby put it to the back of her mind, as she buried herself in practical details, booking a table for them at Kettners, an upmarket pizza restaurant in Soho – Joe had forgotten to make arrangements for the meal. ‘There were eight of us there, at a huge table in the middle of the room with a light shining over it. We had a three-hour meal, with the girls telling him what they wanted to do with their lives and Joe really listening. I made a decision to stop the uncomfortableness between us. I thought, Why don’t I try and be more easy with him, and able to communicate. It was so much easier to be with him that day. He had been to Scotland and seen all the family and reconnected with them. Mick had been with him the night before, and later that evening Trish had a phone conversation with him. But Joe and I tidied up everything between us over that lunch. It was as though he knew everything needed to be sorted out.’

  ‘After lunch,’ said Lucinda, ‘Joe, me and the girls walked to Covent Garden where we did some Christmas shopping. Joe was totally exhausted but still on wondrous form. He laughed and joked with Eliza on the train home, chasing her up and down the empty carriage.’

  When Joe, Lucinda and Eliza got back to Yalway, there was a message on the voice-mail, not exactly what he needed that night. Tricia Ronane was pointing out that the deadline was on them for the track-listing for a Clash compilation, The Essential Clash, being rush-released by Sony in time for the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame event in March. Joe called Trish back. He stayed up all night working out his choice of songs for the record.

  Waking early on the afternoon of Sunday 22 December Joe sent a fax to Tricia with the tunes that he suggested. He appended a note to his old friend ‘Simmo’, suggesting he reconsider his refusal to play at the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. ‘Try it. You might like it,’ he suggested. Then Joe went for a walk with his three dogs.

  Back home, at just after 3 in the afternoon, Joe sat down on the living-room sofa to read the Observer.

  29

  CODA (THE WEST)

  2002–2003

  The autopsy revealed that John Graham Mellor had not died, as thought, of a heart attack. Although he had never known this, he had been born with a congenital heart defect: a main artery that should have run around his heart went through it instead. He could have died suddenly at any point during his fifty years.

  ‘I woke Joe up on the morning of the 22nd,’ said Lucinda. ‘The night before he had said he wanted to come with me to do the Christmas food shopping, but he was too tired so I left him in bed. When Eliza and I got back he was still in bed, very sleepy, so I didn’t hassle him. I told him we were going to look at a pony we were going to buy Eliza. We got back at around 4 p.m. and there was no sign of Joe. I could tell he had been up as the dogs had obvious
ly had a good walk and his car was still there. I searched for him, and Eliza and I found him sitting on the sofa, apparently asleep.

  ‘I tried to wake him. Then I realized something awful had happened. His body was already going cold in places. I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and was screaming hysterically. Eliza got the phone and I told her to call the ambulance service, and to go and wait for the ambulance in the road. She didn’t even put her shoes on and rushed outside. She went to our neighbours who were having a drinks party. One of the guests was a nurse. She took over from me in the resuscitation. I could tell that he was gone when I saw the look on her face.’

  Almost immediately, some were apotheosizing him. But those who knew Joe Strummer, that international group of interconnected old souls who had formed his and the Clash’s posse, knew he wasn’t Saint Joe. No, he was much more interesting than that. If you knew him you’d love him. But you’d be mad not to recognize he could be a piece of work.

  But Joe showed how, if you lock yourself into a great truth, however apparently implausible (that man might be able to live with man, for example, as he articulated in ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’; or that you should get out of bed and motivate yourself), it can resonate around the world with a loving spirit. Despite the endless contradictions that seemed to fuse him together, there was no doubt who he was. ‘I’m a good guy,’ he said to me in Las Vegas. ‘That’s how I see it, somewhere in my mind.’ In his work with the Mescaleros Joe had transcended all those questions in the Wilderness Years about what he was doing, and he had become a genre of his own.

  That genre had a final act needing to be played out. As Joe lay in his open casket in Taunton, Martin Slattery had been struck by how his features resembled nothing less than those of an American Indian chief. From out in the ether this chief led his braves on. Martin and Scott Shields immediately set about finishing the record they had worked on with Joe at Rockfield. At Unit 21 in Hackney they put in another month’s work – often using Joe’s guide vocals – with Cameron Craig, the engineer who had recorded and mixed it. Streetcore, which featured ten songs, was released on 20 October 2003. ‘Coma Girl’, the first single, had come out two weeks before. Martin and Scott, who never quite understood why Joe wanted to play so many Clash songs onstage, did superlative work, turning in a thundering record that was the closest Joe had come to the Clash since the demise of the group. Worldwide it had great reviews. On 15 December ‘Redemption Song’ was put out as the last single from Joe Strummer. The duet of the song that he had recorded with Johnny Cash received a Grammy nomination.

  The ten Streetcore songs included two the group had played on that last British tour – ‘Coma Girl’ and ‘Get Down Moses’. ‘Arms Aloft’ and ‘Ramshackle Day Parade’ had been recorded with them at Rockfield. ‘Long Shadow’ and ‘Redemption Song’ were brought in from the sessions Joe had done in LA in April 2002, as well as ‘All in a Day’. ‘Burnin’ Streets’, to which originally Joe had mischievously given the title ‘London is Burning’, had been worked up for a TV programme about firemen. ‘Midnight Jam’ was cobbled together by Martin and Scott from samples of Joe’s World Service broadcasts. ‘Silver and Gold’ covered and renamed Bobby Charles’s 1952 classic ‘Before I Grow Too Old’. The artwork, which included a picture of his studio at Yalway, had already been decided on by Joe, who left ample notes about it.

  Shot by the pool of the house he was renting in the Hollywood Hills, the image became the cover shot of Earthquake Weather, and was later taken up as the iconic logo of Strummerville. (Josh Cheuse/WFN)

  In the grounds at Yalway, as a tribute to her husband, Lucinda erected a circle of twelve standing stones, installed in a Druid ceremony; she also had planted 1,300 trees in what was named Rebel Wood, overlooking the house. On the isle of Skye, 800 miles north in Scotland, a further wood grew. In May 2003, at the suggestion of Michael Eavis, the organizer of the Glastonbury festival, the same head Druid oversaw the unveiling of a memorial stone to Joe in a far corner of the Glastonbury site. No plaque was put up: people could learn the significance of the stone for themselves. Eavis gave the area immediately in front of the stone, behind the surreal Lost Vagueness area, for use as what became Strummerville, a physical representation of a charity established by Lucinda to assist underprivileged musicians. With a big campfire, surrounded by sofas and chairs, permanently blazing during the days of the Glastonbury festival, an equally hot sound system, and flags and bunting fluttering and billowing, Strummerville has became an established feature of Glastonbury, where those in the know – up to 2,000 people sometimes – congregate for all-night sessions after the rest of the festival has died down. ‘Joe told me he thought his real legacy might not be the Clash, but his campfires,’ said Julien Temple. ‘He thought he’d found a way for people to communicate with each other in a very easy way. The campfire at Fuji was an example of how he wanted it to spread around the world.’

  Globally websites growled with news of local tribute nights to Joe, which time did not appear to diminish. But almost immediately there were larger versions of these. On 24 February 2003, at that year’s Grammy Awards, like the ultimate tribute group, Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band guitarist Little Steven joined Elvis Costello, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal in a rousing rendition of ‘London Calling’. At those Grammies Don Letts earned an award for Westway to the World, belatedly released in the United States. ‘What concerns me,’ he considered, ‘is that Joe is starting to be taken out of the context of the Clash and placed on a pedestal. I don’t think he’d have wanted that.’

  No form of the Clash played at their Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame induction two weeks later. But Joe’s death had removed the controversy for Paul, and he went with Terry Chimes and Mick Jones, who said he was accepting the award on behalf of all the garage bands out there that might never have thought a moment like that would be possible. But, to his derision, his mention of Robin ‘Banks’ Crocker having gone to Baghdad as a human shield was edited out of the televised broadcast.

  Sifted from his dusty carrier-bags, Gordon McHarg curated an exhibition of Joe’s work in London and Tokyo. In a sweet ceremony at Bristol train station a railway engine was named after Joe. That night Elvis Costello, at the city’s Colston Hall, played Elvis Presley’s ‘Mystery Train’. ‘That was for Joe Strummer,’ he said. Joe would have loved that, but not as much as when Bob Dylan kicked off his encores with ‘London Calling’ in a season of concerts at London’s Brixton Academy in November 2005.

  ‘Joe always had a twinkle in his eye,’ said Lucinda. ‘He was fun, the Pied Piper of happiness. You knew you were going to have a good time with Joe, and that life was going to be great. He said to me, “I promise you life will never be boring.”

  ‘I’d say he was very happy at the end. But I think he was very, very tired. Very often he only had four or five hours sleep. A punishing and hectic schedule. He was very excited about what was going on down at Rockfield. He had the most incredible time in Scotland. He was really moved by all of that. Those plans to come back were not empty promises made as you leave a party. He was saying, “I’m going to make Jazz and Lola come back at Easter. I’ll drag them up there if I have to.” I loved him. I loved being with him. I loved the life he made. He was alive. So alive and vibrant. Intoxicating and exciting.’

  On 21 August 2003, on what would have been Joe’s fifty-first birthday, there was a celebratory concert in the hills above Granada. Mick Jones, Tymon Dogg, Jem Finer and Richard Dudanski were among those who played into the warm night.

  Afterwards, down in San José, Jazz and Lola took their portion of their father’s ashes along the coast to a cliff of gnarled white rock, a beautiful, perfect spot. Behind it, in the desert, was the bikers’ bar where Joe would enjoy Toxico, the marijuana-infusion tequila drink. As well as his two daughters, there was a small party present, including Jem and Marcia Finer, Lauren Jones and assorted children.

  They were responding to a dream
that Gaby had had. From a pottery urn made by Pockets, Jazz tipped Joe’s ashes over the cliff towards the sea. ‘I’d never seen them before,’ said Jem. ‘I was amazed how fine they were, like particles. It was beautiful to see them drifting out in the breeze, like white, sandy rock. They dispersed towards the sea, the mountains in the background. That’s my last memory of Joe, drifting off across the sea and mountains. Very beautiful.’

  Jazz still clutched the urn. ‘Shall we keep it?’ she asked Lola. As Lola was replying in the affirmative, it flipped out of Jazz’s hands, as though grabbed by a gust of wind, and hovered in the air above the cliff edge before smashing down onto a rock below. The urn’s broken fragments were gathered and thrown out to sea.

  ‘It was very weird,’ said Jem. ‘Mischief from the other side. You don’t stop, Joe, do you?’

  ‘Get on with it!’ Joe would have barked.

  Ahoy, me hearties (Lucinda Mellor)

  EULOGY

  The tragic death of Joe Strummer has magnified his status a thousand-fold. Every year, close to the anniversary of his passing on 22 December 2002, Strummer fans gather around the world to pay tribute to the Clash singer. Similar events take place to celebrate his birthday on 21 August. Joe loved symbolism and, in an appropriately ironic way, the unfortunate end of this most alive of men confirmed him as a durable archetype, albeit a multifaceted one of absolute myriad contradictions – which may well be the entire point. That complexity is a key component of the allure that makes him so fascinating. Part of Joe’s enigmatic magic was that he could be all things to all men; yet simultaneously everyone could feel his pure essence.