by Mick O'Shea
Mick and Tony were horrified and pleaded with Bernard to put the Nazi ephemera back in the bag, but Bernard remained undaunted, telling them that if they were determined to call themselves 'London SS' then they were going to have to deal with everything it entailed.
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Upon recognising the contact number listed beside the postage stampsized ad for a WHIZZ KID GUITARIST, no older than 20, and no worse looking than Johnny Thunders, within the classified section of the 27 September issue of Melody Maker, Bernard thought the timing right to introduce Mick and Tony to the Sex Pistols. Accompanying them to the Pistols' Denmark Street hideaway that night were Andrew Matheson, and Casino Steel.
It would prove a revelatory eye-opener for all concerned: Mick and Tony's surprise stemming from their 'competition' having short hair, while having cited Johnny Thunders in their Melody Maker ad, while Glen, Steve and Paul were bemused to find Bernard had got involved with a bunch of throwbacks in platforms and bell-bottoms, with hair down to their arses. Mick may have looked like an extra from Hair, but the three Sex Pistols felt a kindred spirit and invited him to jam with them.
Bernard, of course, had purposely taken them to Denmark Street to show them the error of their hirsute ways, and while Mick would cling on to his bangs and curls and frilly shirts a little while longer, he returned to Warrington Crescent knowing his image was in need of a serious overhaul.
What he didn't know, however, was that Malcolm had been forced to place the 'Whiz Kid Guitarist' ad in the Melody Maker to quell Paul's dissatisfaction at Steve's rudimentary playing, or that Paul and Glen had been sufficiently impressed with his guitar style that Glen and Malcolm would subsequently make an abortive foray to an address on London Street in Paddington (Andrew Matheson and Casino Steel's flat where Mick stayed on occasion) to offer him the gig.
As they were going behind Bernard's back, they'd only had a vague idea where Mick was living, and the opportunity for the future of rock 'n' roll to take a left oblique was lost as a belligerent Casino would only converse with them through the letterbox.
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On discovering that Malcolm had secured the Denmark Street lease for the Sex Pistols with a £1,000 deposit, Mick and Tony, together with the recently returned Brian James, set about badgering Bernard into making a similar gesture by finding them a HQ they might call their own.
Bernard duly obliged by striking a deal with the owner of a greasy spoon café called the Paddington Kitchen on Praed Street opposite the entrance to St. Mary's Hospital. With a weekly stipend covering the cost of the electricity the group used while rehearsing in the cellar, they could also use the café to hold court; an added bonus coming with the owner allowing them to stack the jukebox with their favourite records. '[It's] where we used to meet people and sort of vet them,' Mick subsequently revealed. 'If they passed the vetting process we used to take them round the back to the rehearsal room. We saw all the main players.'2
One of these 'main players' was a Croydon-based drummer called Chris Miller (soon to be rechristened 'Rat Scabies'), who'd been monitoring Mick and Tony's Melody Maker ads for several weeks before finally picking up the phone in early December. A professed liking for the MC5 had proved sufficient to get Chris through the vetting stage, but with their having already auditioned scores of drummers in recent weeks, Mick, Tony, and Brian (and indeed Bernard) appeared more interested in the old war film playing on the battered black and white TV set in the corner.
Rat was understandably irked by their insensitivity, and to draw their attention away from the film he set about pounding the kit with a ferocity that would subsequently become his trademark style with The Damned. Mick and Tony didn't seem all that impressed and kept their gaze on the flickering screen, but Brian latched onto Rat's playing and began soundtracking an aerial dog fight in the film with a screeching guitar solo.
One thing that did grab Bernard's attention, however, was Chris' constant scratching between songs. When he confessed to having contracted the highly-infectious skin disease scabies, Bernard leapt up and hurriedly covered all the chairs with newspaper.
Chris was deemed worthy of a second audition, but whereas Mick and Tony were willing to overlook his skin ailment, they were less happy with his scruffy appearance. Brian, however, had been growing steadily suspicious of Bernard's motives, and this show of snobbery proved the last straw. He didn't give a fuck what the auditionees looked like as long as they could play.
'It was a very drifting situation regards [to] who was supposed to be getting the group together,' Mick revealed while subsequently giving his own interpretation about London SS' criteria to journalist John Tobler. 'Sometimes people fitted the bill because they looked right like, and they couldn't play – they couldn't play a note or nothing – they just didn't know nothing about instruments. At one time there was only about two of us who knew how to put a chord together. The rest of them would be just stoned people, just falling all over the drum kit…'3
Bernard's high-handed attitude wasn't solely reserved for potential auditionees as Tony often found himself the target of his ire. One such occasion occurred when Bernard called the bassist at his parents' home in Twickenham and began berating him for not knowing his Sartre. Armed with a list of titles provided by Bernard, Tony dutifully paid a visit to his local library and took out every book he could find on Jean Paul Sartre and Dadaism. In doing so, however, he came to realise that Bernard was simply trying to get him and Mick to look beyond what they were doing and grasp the bigger picture.
Of course, this enlightenment didn't spare Tony from further torment. With Christmas approaching, Bernard called demanding that he forego the turkey and trimmings in favour of spending the day with the hookers operating out of Praed Street. And that if he wasn't willing to do that then he might as well buy a copy of Gay News or Spare Rib from his local newsagent.
'I don't think I was too hard on Tony at all,' Bernard says, shrugging away the memory. 'Just look what he went on to achieve with Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik? And anyway, he was a bit like Glen [Matlock] in forever standing around with an "anxious to please" look on his face like some girl hoping to be fucked.'
Tony chose to ignore Bernard's counsel to forego a family Christmas and engage in some festive fornication. Yet although he was happy to tag along on recces to check out suitable candidates for the group, he was no longer willing to tolerate Bernard's management style and furtively began perusing the 'Musicians Wanted' notices in the Melody Maker.
Shortly into the New Year, a drummer called Roland Hot – having responded to yet another of Mick and Tony's Melody Maker missives – had arrived at the Paddington Kitchen to try out for the vacant drum stool.
Hot's skills ultimately proved to be rather tepid, but he nevertheless stayed around long enough to feature on the only known recording of London SS material in existence – recorded while Tony was still in the line-up. The songs covered were the MC5's 1969 hit 'Ramblin' Rose', Jonathan Richman's recent transatlantic release 'Roadrunner' – which the fledgling Sex Pistols also happened to be covering at the time – and The Strangeloves' 1965 US Top 30 hit 'Night Time'.
The quality of the recording was your typical 'let's-see-what-wesound-like' job, which in all probability would have been long since consigned to the dustbin had it not been for its subsequent significance. Hot's brief tenure with London SS would also prove significant. Owing to his apprehension about making the journey to Praed Street alone for his initial audition he'd cajoled an art college friend into tagging along for moral support. And there was something about the gap-toothed, Rimbaud-esque ruffian that caught Bernard and Mick's eye.
Like Mick, twenty-year-old Paul Simonon came from a broken home; his parents having split up when he was eight. His mum subsequently remarried to a budding composer, and when he won a twelve-month scholarship to study music in Sienna, Tuscany, his new family went with him.
On returning to London, the family set up home in Herne Hill, where Paul rekindle
d his love for reggae and became something of a teenage tearaway. His relationship with his step-father had also deteriorated to the point where it was suggested he might like to live with his dad in Notting Hill.
It was whilst attending the Isaac Newton Boys Secondary School that Paul's talent for art first came to the fore, and thanks to his art teacher's diligence he applied for a scholarship at the prestigious Byam School of Art in Holland Park which accepted pupils on the quality of their portfolio rather than exam results.
Paul appeared to have all the prerequisites for a frontman: tall, lean, blond, and roguishly handsome. He'd only come along in a show of moral support for his mate, but it didn't take much persuasion from Mick to get him to step up to the mic for a run-through of 'Roadrunner', and The Standells' 'Barracuda'. The ever tactful Mick suggested Paul should perhaps stick to painting, but Bernard recognised a similar rough and ready street persona to that of the irascible John Lydon, and filed Paul's name away for possible future use.
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Tony was already tired of Bernard's incessant nit-picking, but after nine frustrating months of trying to get London SS out of the rehearsal room and onto a stage he decided enough was enough and informed Mick that he was going to try his luck with a proto-punk outfit called Chelsea. Mick was naturally gutted at his friend's decision, but for Bernard it was a godsend. He and Malcolm had long envisioned a new scene, and with the Sex Pistols beginning to create a bit of a buzz about town there were suddenly a clutch of kids hanging about desperate to get in on the action. 'Malcolm and Bernie would be planning some group or other and I'd be sent over to some rehearsal,' Mick laughingly told the NME's Chris Salewitz when reflecting on Bernard's pre-Clash musical meddling.
One of Bernard's 'three-chord coalitions' saw Mick jamming with a sassy Ohioan called Chrissie Hynde, who would, of course, go on to achieve mainstream success with The Pretenders. 'I met Chrissie through Bernie and for a while we were going to put a band together,' Mick revealed. 'We'd go up to my nan's bedroom and play songs together as duets. That's where "Every Little Bit Hurts"* came from. We never did get the band together. She did cut my hair, though.'4
In the booklet accompanying the Clash On Broadway box set, Mick admitted to occasionally losing heart after Tony's defection, and that it had been Bernard's foresight that had seen them through. Bernard's steadfast belief that he and Mick were on the right path was to be rewarded when Mick happened upon Paul Simonon on the Portobello Road. On hearing about this fortuitous happenstance, Bernard told Mick to stop moping after Tony and to start a group with Paul.
Paul was surprisingly open to the idea of learning an instrument, and with Mick having accumulated several guitars it made sense to let Paul try his hand with one of these. One get-together, however, was enough for Mick to realise Paul's limitations and so he suggested they borrow a bass from Tony.
Paul wasn't initially thrilled with the idea. 'Mick told me there was an exhibition of paintings at Camberwell Art College by someone called Stuart Sutcliffe who used to be in the Beatles,' he revealed. '[Mick said] how he couldn't play the bass either. So after Mick's history lesson I started to learn.'5
The first step in Paul's musical education came with his learning where to put his fingers on the fretboard, which he inventively accomplished by sticking notes on the relevant frets. He then started playing along to his sizeable reggae collection at home, but as he had to rely on Mick to tune the bass for him it made sense to move into the Davis Road squat in Acton Vale where Mick was now living with Viv Albertine.
Another frequent visitor to the one-bedroom upstairs maisonette was Julian Keith Levene who, like Mick, had taught himself to play guitar. Mick had already encountered Keith, as he preferred to be called, whilst hanging out with the Warrington Crescent crowd, so was familiar with his precocious talent. 'I met Mick and got on really well with him,' says Keith. 'The main thing we had in common was we knew we really wanted to get a group together. That was it.'6
After the disappointment of losing Brian James to Rat Scabies and seeing Tony James lose heart, Mick now had the nucleus of a group to work with. The bonding that all bands need came one Saturday afternoon when he, Paul and Keith each purchased a gaudy ladies car coat from a second-hand stall on the Portobello Road Market.
With Paul coming on in leaps and bounds, the trio began to focus their attentions away from garish garb and onto finding a frontman. As he had with Tony, Mick took Keith and Paul on regular sorties on the pub and club circuit, gradually narrowing down their search until only one candidate remained. 'I saw Joe play with the 101ers many times,' Mick revealed. 'They were nearly at the point of being the best band in London. They were lumped in with the pub rock scene, but they were really a squat band, from the squatting communities. Joe was part of that scene, which was very big in the early Seventies. And we'd seen them many times. We just thought he was the best guy out there. We were looking for a singer and said, "Let's see if we can get Joe."'
John Graham Mellor was born in Ankara, Turkey, in August 1952, where his parents – owing to his father Ronald being a clerical officer with British Foreign Office – were living at the time. He'd also lived in Egypt, Mexico, and West Germany before the Mellors were finally able to put down some home-grown roots of sorts by setting up home in Warlingham, Surrey, during the summer of in 1960. However, when Ron Mellor received another posting to Iran shortly thereafter, it was decided that John and his older brother David* would remain behind to concentrate on their education.
Having decided to 'live, enjoy life, [and] fuck chartered accountancy!' after hearing the Rolling Stones' 'Not Fade Away' in February 1964, the rebellious teenager did just enough in the classroom to scrape the three O-Levels necessary to gain a place at art school. He was accepted into the Central School of Art and Design, only to drop out during his foundation year. He then taught himself the rudiments of guitar on a two-quid ukulele, adopted the name 'Woody' in homage of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie, and embarked on a series of Jack Kerouac-esque adventures. He returned to London during the summer of 1974, moving into a spare room at 101 Wallerton Road in Maida Vale where he set about putting a rock 'n' roll group together. He also underwent a second name-change to 'Joe Strummer'
These days the mere mention of Joe Strummer conjures up images of The Clash, but at that time The 101'ers, as the Wallerton Road squat group were known, were just beginning to reap the fruits of their hardearned labour following two years of relentless gigging. They'd also recently released their debut single 'Keys To Your Heart' b/w '5 Star Rock 'N' Roll Petrol' on the independent Chiswick Records in the hope of it helping them to secure a recording deal with a major label.
In Don Letts' Grammy Award-winning 2000 Clash documentary Westway To The World, Joe tells the apocryphal tale of how Mick and Paul had made their clumsy approach offering him the frontman role in their group whilst they'd been waiting in line to sign on at the Lisson Grove Labour Exchange. As he'd no idea as to why they were eye-balling him, he'd naturally assumed the two were plotting to jump him once he got outside and relieve him of his giro.
Causing a ruck was the last thing on Mick and Paul's minds. 'He [Joe] had seen us out a few times, either at his gigs or in the dole queue,' Mick explained. 'We were in the dole queue looking across at him – glaring – and he thought we were gonna start a fight with him. But we were actually looking in awe because we'd seen him play the other night! So we'd seen each other before, but he had obviously noticed us as well.
'We went to see him play with the 101ers, at the Golden Lion in Fulham. Afterwards, Bernard, our manager, went round the back and talked to him and made him the offer.'8
Bernard did indeed give Joe a forty-eight hour ultimatum backstage at the Golden Lion, but the latter was already at a crossroads having undergone a Damascene conversion after seeing the Sex Pistols when they'd supported The 101'ers at the Nashville Rooms in early April 1976. Despite the Melody Maker's dismissal of the Pistols' performance as a 'retarded spect
acle' riddled with tiresome punk clichés – whilst lavishing The 101'ers with praise – his own view was that R&B was 'yesterday's papers'.
'As soon as I saw them [the Sex Pistols], I knew rhythm and blues was dead, that the future was here somehow,' Joe told Caroline Coon in November 1976. 'Every other group was riffing their way through the Black Sabbath catalogue. But hearing the Pistols I knew. I just knew. It was just something you knew without bothering to think about.'
Such was Joe's conviction that he'd glimpsed the future he didn't even hesitate when Bernard called back after just twenty-four hours demanding an answer. 'We were in the squat in Shepherd's Bush, and he (Bernard) brought Joe around a couple days later. 'Joe had already made it in our eyes,' said Mick. 'It took a lot of courage to get him to join our group, since we hadn't done anything. But luckily, Joe had seen the Sex Pistols. [He'd] seen the new thing coming in. He obviously wanted to be a part of it, and that was to our advantage because we were part of that.
'We went into the little room where we'd put egg boxes on the walls to soundproof it and began. He didn't want to do his tunes so much, but he was into changing, improving our songs. So we had a great lyric writer working with us.' 9