Mick Jones: Stayin' In Tune - The Unauthorised Biography

by Mick O'Shea

  What is indisputable about Stella's activities during the war years and beyond, however, is that aside from continuing working as a milliner, she, along with the teenage Renee, departed the marital home in Kensington and moved into flat 61 in the newly-built Christchurch House on Christchurch Road in Streatham, south London. And that a week before Christmas in 1952, at Wandsworth Register Office, she got married for a second time, to forty-nineyear-old divorcee Hyman Markis. Like many Jewish émigrés trying to make his way in his adopted home, Hyman, who was employed as a wireless salesman, had thought to alter his name to the more Anglican-sounding 'Harry Marcus'.

  Within a year, Stella found herself back at Wandsworth Registrar Office when Renee tied the nuptial knot with Mick's father, twentythree-year-old Thomas Gilmour Jones.

  Though too young to serve in the armed forces during the war, like every other healthy male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, Thomas, or 'Tommy' as he preferred to be known, had been called up for National Service on his eighteenth birthday. When the National Service Act 1948 first came into effect (1 January 1949), the period of enlistment was eighteen months, but was subsequently extended to two years owing to Britain's involvement in the Korean War.

  Whereas the majority of those press-ganged to serve queen and country either never left England, or were sent to serve in the army of occupation in Germany, Tommy was instead posted to the Middle East, which was in turmoil owing to the United Nations' intention to partition Palestine to create an independent Jewish state.

  Whatever his views on the United Nations' intent on giving the Jews their own homeland prior to his posting, he ultimately returned to London a changed man owing to the horrors he witnessed with his own eyes. Mick has always maintained that it was no coincidence that his father subsequently married a Jewish woman.

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  By the time Mick was born, Tommy and Renee had set up home at 20 Fair Green Court in Mitcham, which, though some of its more snobbish residents would have us believe comes under the Surrey fringe, actually lies within the boundary of the South London borough of Merton. When appearing on BBC2's 1988 retrospective series That Was Then… This Is Now, Mick would say that his first musical memory was of the Life Guards Band marching down Mitcham High Street, but this is obviously nothing more than a drum and pipe dream as Tommy and Renee were already back living with Stella and Harry at 61 Christchurch House by the time of Mick's second birthday.

  It was at Christchurch House; a nondescript late-thirties council tenement that stood like a stark sentinel on the north-west corner of the crossroads where Brixton and Streatham Hills collide, where Mick was to spend the next eight years. He and his parents remained with Stella and Harry for several months before finally getting the keys to their own flat at number 109. However, when Harry suffered a fatal heart attack in May 1961, the ever-conscientious Renee – who by this time was working as a cosmetic jewellery saleswoman – elected to move her family back in with Stella at number 61.

  Having her nearest and dearest living under her roof again might have brought succour to the grieving Stella, but Mick's memories from that period are somewhat less than harmonious. Finding himself under Stella's matriarchal yoke once again certainly didn't sit well with Tommy, and served to put extra strain on an already crumbling marriage. Mick would struggle to get to sleep owing to his parents' near-constant arguing, and the hostilities often became so intense that Stella would take Mick down into the building's disused bomb shelter where she would regale him with fanciful tales about her own upbringing in Whitechapel until the latest flare-up had subsided.

  Sadly, however, with Mick out of hearing Renee and Tommy's arguments merely increased in intensity until their differences became irreconcilable. Tommy promptly moved out, and following a period of estrangement he and Renee were divorced in 1963. 'Because of my parents' separation I was often on my own and I'd do lots of things on my own,' Mick later said. 'I filled my time with doing stuff that interested me, like collecting things and thinking about stuff. I guess I must have inhabited my own world really. It was like; I guess I was trying to fill a gap – though I wasn't aware of it. That's how I ended up like I am, I guess. It was definitely a kind of built-in self-preservation thing that I've got. It's inherent. To survive, I created my own private world.' 1

  Mick's private world would soon be rocked to its core when his mum announced she was moving to America. Having had her head turned by the pelvic-thrusting Elvis Presley, the newly-independent Renee had no desire to waste her life on either Streatham or cosmetic jewellery, and instead set her ambitious sights on making a better life for herself in the home of rock 'n' roll and Coca-Cola. However, while one has to admire her desire to start life anew, it beggars belief that she would do so leaving her only offspring behind. Divorce may have been more commonplace in the early Sixties than when Stella and Morris went their separate ways, but the abandonment of one's children was virtually unheard of.

  The happy-go-lucky Tommy had no aspirations to seek greener pastures, however; and was content to continue working as a London cabbie. According to Mick, his father also looked after a South London betting shop, as well as having connections with the local boxing fraternity. Indeed, seeing his father on television loitering in the background of Billy Walker's dressing room on fight night on the telly is one of the outstanding memories from his childhood.

  His father rubbing shoulders with the 'Golden Boy' of British boxing was no doubt thrilling for Mick, but the irregularity of Tommy's working hours meant Mick remained at Christchurch House under his Stella's doting tutelage, which to all intents and purposes saw her step in to become his surrogate mother.

  Mick doesn't seem all that aggrieved at Renee's migration: 'My mother had been a wild person. She fell in love with an American soldier in World War II and he took her on a boat to America with him. She was a stowaway – and she got as far as Texas before the authorities found out and called my grandparents. My grandfather had to go and bring her back.'2

  Once again, however, Mick appears to be romanticising the past somewhat, because while the nineteen-year-old Renee did indeed stowaway on a cargo ship bound for America – only to have her dreams of making a new life in America thwarted by a diligent crew member – it is stretching the bounds of credibility that the GI Joe to which Mick alludes would only book himself passage on the ship and leave his English Rose to fend for herself hiding out in one of the lifeboats.

  If Renee succeeded in stepping off the boat as Mick claims, then surely all that was required for her to be allowed to stay in America was for the guy to marry her – and wasn't that the whole idea of them going to America in the first place?

  Rather than head for the bright lights of Manhattan, or Hollywood and Vine, Renee instead opted for the leafier confines of Armwood, Michigan, where she subsequently married a mining engineer called George Tiitu, and opened a second-hand clothes store.

  Mick may have been deprived of a cosseted nuclear family upbringing, but spending his seminal years living with a lone grandparent didn't prove much of a hindrance, or hardship. Indeed, the bond first forged by his parents' separation grew ever stronger over the years until Stella's death in 1989. Mick would dedicate Big Audio Dynamite's third album Megatop Phoenix to her memory.

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  The withdrawal of food rationing in Britain in July 1954 is generally regarded by historians as bringing closure to the Second World War, but for Londoners, myriad bomb sites peppering the capital still served as stark reminders of those dark days. To Mick, however, the weed-strewn vacant lots could be utilised for football kick-abouts, the staging of mock battles, and erecting bonfires, and in winter, the sloping ground was perfect for sledging.

  Saturday mornings were usually taken up with forays to the local fleapit cinema, and then in the afternoon more often than not Mick would buy himself a 'rover' bus pass and while away the hours observing London landmarks such as Tower Bridge, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Houses of Parliament th
rough the nicotine-stained windows on the upstairs deck. On other occasions he would take to the streets on foot, particularly to Carnaby Street where he and his chums embarked on petty nicking sprees whilst humming along to the music blaring out from the boutiques.

  'It was a pretty exciting time to grow up,' he later recalled. 'There was music everywhere it seemed; coming out of shops, on the radio. It was like we had a soundtrack to our lives.'3

  In September 1966, Mick's personal soundtrack was augmented somewhat with his enrolment at The Strand School in Elm Park Hill, a relatively short walk from his home on nearby Christchurch Road. It's ironic that while Joe would find his credibility threatened over his having attended the City of London Freeman's School (CLFS), Mick escaped a similar pillorying by the punk police. The Strand may not have been a fee-paying establishment like the CLFS, but it was nevertheless a cut above your average secondary modern.

  Founded in 1890 as a subsidiary of King's College in the Strand in central London – hence its name – the boys-only grammar had relocated to the Elm Park site in 1910, which at the time was a very upmarket area. 'It was a grammar school, but it was originally the school that everyone who went there used to go straight into the civil service, in like the 1900s. It was really old-fashioned. All the teachers had mortar boards, and they all seemed to have been tortured by the Japs in World War II. They had deep psychological scars which they took out on the pupils!'4

  While the main topic of conversation amongst London's adult population would have been the recent insensible slaying of three plain-clothes police officers in broad daylight in East Acton, in what the tabloid press dubbed the 'Braybrook Street Massacre', Mick, like the vast majority of eleven-year-old kids up and down the country, no doubt arrived for the first day of school with the memory of England's victory over West Germany in the World Cup Final at Wembley several weeks earlier still fresh in his mind.

  He would have also no doubt been hoping his passable footballing skills would catch the eye of the Strand's PE teacher, and put him in contention of a place in the school's football team. Alas for Mick, however; though he could hold his own in the playground kickabouts, he was overlooked when it came to serious competition as his small stature meant he was easy to nudge off the ball.

  Playing football was only one facet of Mick's fascination with the national game, as aside from pledging life-long allegiance to Queen's Park Rangers (who would win the old League Division Three in the 1966/67 season), at weekends he could often be found – a dog-eared copy of the Topical Times Football Book in hand – laying in wait either outside the players' entrance at QPR's Loftus Road, or within the portals of the West End hotels frequented by visiting teams to secure the autographs of the top players of the day.

  During his thirty minutes under the That Was Then… This Is Now spotlight, Mick would readily assert that as far as he'd been concerned there were really only two legitimate means open to those from a working-class background to escape a life of mundane nine-to-five drudgery: achievement in either sport or – since the mid-Fifties, at least – popular music. 'I'll always remember going into the office of the careers advice people at school and saying 'I wanna be in a band', and they said, 'Well, you can't be, if you're too useless you go into the Army or the services. Or there's the Civil Service.' There were no real choices; there wasn't a vegetarian option on the menu.'

  Realising sport would never feature on the menu; Mick hung up his footie boots and began focusing his full attention on rock 'n' roll. Mick appropriated his nan's radiogram so that he could tune in to the pirate radio stations of the day such as Radio London where future Radio One stalwart John Peel would spin the latest hits from the UK, as well as America's West Coast, on his now-legendary late-night show, the Perfumed Garden. In addition he began setting his paper round money aside so that he could start assembling his own record collection.

  His first choice was Disraeli Gears, the second album from the socalled supergroup Cream, and as soon as he'd amassed another 33s 3d in his piggy bank he returned to his local record shop and grabbed a copy of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's singles compilation album, Smash Hits. 'I used to listen to them over and over again – Hendrix especially. I knew from an early age that I wanted to do music.'5

  With music now his sole obsession 'Rock 'n' Roll Mick', as he was soon to be known – both in and out of school – was a walking musical encyclopaedia, and would regularly walk to school with an album clutched tightly under his arm to show which group was currently meriting his allegiance. While his classmates followed the ongoing triangular top-of-the-table battle between Manchester United, Nottingham Forest and Tottenham Hotspur, Mick was more interested in seeing The Beatles and the Rolling Stones battling it out for the top spot on the hit parade. He also devoured the features and articles in Melody Maker and New Musical Express; little knowing that his image would one day adorn the front pages of both magazines.

  Mick's first live music experience came on Saturday, 27 July 1968, when Traffic, the psychedelic rock outfit fronted by the former Spencer Davis Group frontman, Steve Winwood, performed an open-air free concert in Hyde Park. 'They used to put on free gigs in [Hyde] Park back then, not like today where they charge an arm and a leg for any old rubbish. That gig was put on by Blackhill Enterprises who later managed us (The Clash) for a time.'6

  Also on the Hyde Park bill that day were the Pretty Things, whom the British media rather unkindly dubbed 'the uglier cousins of the Rolling Stones'. A little under a year later on 5 July 1969, Mick was in Hyde Park to see their Satanic Majesties release hundreds of white butterflies from the stage as a tribute to the Stones' founding member Brian Jones who'd drowned in the swimming pool at his home Cotchford Farm several days earlier.

  'I wormed my way the whole day through the crowd to get to the barrier just before they came on. It was like a great trek or odyssey. I was like "Excuse me, coming through… Oh, sorry…" treading on people all the way through Hyde Park. I wormed my way through and then the Hells Angels came through the crowd on their motorbikes! Everyone was going "Oh my god!" It was a wonderful moment.'7

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  Joe would subsequently opine that 1968 was a 'great year to come of age'. The on-going war in Vietnam was raging out of control and in March a protest against the war staged outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square resulted in ninety-one people being injured, and some two hundred demonstrators being arrested. In May, student protests in Paris almost brought down the French government (future Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren would subsequently falsely claim that he and Bernard Rhodes had been manning the barricades in the French Quarter at the time), and the whole world had been rocked the following month with the assassinations of both Senator Robert Kennedy, and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

  1968 would also bring upheaval for Mick and Stella as they moved from Christchurch House to another council high-rise on the Edgware Road in west London, where Stella's older sister, Cissie, and her sister-in-law, Celia Green, were already living. 'My Nan and I were on the [council] housing list for years and occasionally went to see flats, but it just never seemed to happen. I was living with three old ladies, which was pretty strange. 'They were really Jewish, too. I remember I once got a Snoopy and the Red Baron T-shirt and they freaked because it had an iron cross on it, so they confiscated it.'8

  While the Class sisters objected to unsavoury reminders of Hitler's atrocities, their adherence to their faith wasn't all encompassing, especially seeing as Renee was allowed to marry a non Jew. This in turn, meant little or no pressure was applied towards Mick becoming a Bar Mitzvah when he turned thirteen.

  The Clash, of course, would get plenty of mileage from Mick's tower block teenage existence, but unlike Christchurch House – and the ultra-depressing Wilmcote House where Mick would be living when first putting The Clash together – 90 Park West was a decidedly upmarket nine-storey late-Deco-period private mansion block with porterage, and its own underground car park. It was also rum
oured to have an underground swimming pool.

  The relocation also meant several miles being added to the daily round trip to school, but whereas this would have undoubtedly proved too daunting a prospect for most thirteen-year-olds, Mick elected to remain at the Strand. This, however, would prove something of a double-edged sword, for while remaining at the Strand allowed him to befriend the fourteen-year-old Robin Crocker* – who would go on to become a life-long friend and confidante – their sharing a desk would ultimately see Mick's grades take a dramatic downturn.

  Robin was one of those kids who frustrate teachers, because while being above average intelligence, he found schooling intolerably dull. He would do just about anything to alleviate the boredom, which often resulted in a visit to the headmaster's office for a caning. This became such a regular occurrence that he took to wearing a pair of Lederhosen under his school trousers to absorb the sting, while his total disregard for school discipline was the reason for his being held back a year.

  Rock 'n' roll was as important to Robin as it was to Mick; so much so, that their first interaction came in a stand-up argument over whether Bo Diddley was a better guitarist than Chuck Berry. Robin was for Chuck, who was best known for his 1958 hit 'Johnny B. Goode', whilst Mick championed Berry's Chess Records' label-mate Bo who was hailed as 'The Originator' by his peers owing to his role in the transition of blues to rock 'n' roll. The ensuing roll-about on the classroom floor might not have endeared them to maths teacher, but it served to create a brotherly bond that has lasted to the present day. Having agreed to disagree on Chuck and Bo, Mick and Robin cemented their friendship with a shared passion for the Rolling Stones. Another favourite was the Stones-esque Faces, who at the time were fronted by Rod Stewart, and of course, featured future Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood in the line-up.