Mick Jones: Stayin' In Tune - The Unauthorised Biography

by Mick O'Shea

  CBS were naturally keen to start recouping their six-figure outlay, and with Terry Chimes temporarily returned to the fold The Clash shuffled into CBS' compact No. 3 Studio in Whitfield Street (since demolished) on 10 February for the first of three consecutive long weekends, to begin work on their self-titled debut album.

  With this being the same studio where Iggy and the Stooges had recorded Raw Power some three years earlier, Mick was in his element. 'I was born for this [to make music],' he enthused. 'To tell you the truth it was all I ever wanted to do. I remember going to the career's officer when I was a kid leaving school and the career officer said, "what do you want to do?" and I said, "I want to play in a band" and they said, "Well all we can do is civil service or the armed forces, that's all we have. So good luck to you but we can't help you in any way." But I always knew what I wanted to do.'3

  The studio offered a reduced rate at the weekend, but with the recording costs coming out of The Clash's collective pocket, speed was again of the essence. To ensure the needle stayed in the red during the marathon sessions, speed of an altogether different nature was thrown into the mix as Mick later revealed to Caroline Coon: 'Two years ago we did the band's first interview on Janet Street-Porter's London Weekend Programme. And me, being all naïve, I blamed bands taking too many drugs for the great mid-Seventies drought in rock. I recall saying it really well and a year or so later I found myself doing just as many drugs as them! I was so into speed, I mean, I don't even recall making the first album!'4

  The first weekend session was taken up laying down the basic tracks of the thirteen songs slated for the album, but on discovering that the running time was coming in at less than thirty minutes the decision was taken to include their version of Junior Murvin's 'Police & Thieves', which at 6.05 minutes, was three times longer than most of their own compositions. Murvin's lament about gang war and police brutality in his native Kingston – co-written and produced by the legendary Lee 'Scratch' Perry – had proved a hit in Jamaica when it was released the previous year, and The Clash believed its subject matter would strike a similar chord with their audiences.

  According to Mick's recollections, Perry initially struggled to grasp what The Clash were attempting. 'Lee had been telling Bob Marley about it, and he was saying, well, I'm not sure about what these punks are about,' he said in November 2007. 'Marley was one of the guys who said, "No, you should see, it's good." He kind of responded by writing that song "Punky Reggae Party". He was asking questions and finding out if we were rebels, too.'5

  Rather than kid himself that he could emulate Murvin's falsetto range, Joe sang the vocal in his customary gruff style leaving Mick to harmonise the higher notes. And what a perceptive song choice 'Police & Thieves' would prove to be, because the punky/reggae hybrid not only removed any chance of The Clash being cynically regarded as the best album the Ramones never made, but it showed the critics that they were a clear cut above the scene's other one-trick ponies.

  Prior to releasing the album, CBS tested the water by issuing 'White Riot' as The Clash's debut single on 18 March. With its inflammatory title 'White Riot' was never going to feature on the Radio One daytime play-lists, but thanks to the band's burgeoning fan-base the single did at least manage to scrape into the UK Top 40 (peaking at number 38).

  The parent album was released on 8 April; the front cover dominated with a photo of Mick, Joe, and Paul striking a mean and moody pose on the cobbled access ramp of the old Tack Room opposite the entrance to their rehearsal space.

  To the uninitiated, the photo – snapped by New York-based photographer Kate Simon – served as a perfect introductory statement of intent for the album's no-nonsense onslaught. From the staccato drumbeat intro to 'Janie Jones' to the lilting melancholic refrain of 'Garageland', the listener is carried along on a ride of relentless rhythms, accentuated with primitive yet proficient rock 'n' roll rebellion.

  The Clash fared well with the critics, with the NME's resident Clashophile, Tony Parsons – having echoed Paul Morley's proclamation that The Clash were currently the best rock 'n' roll band in London, lavishing further praise in saying they'd 'made an album consisting of some of the most exciting rock 'n' roll in contemporary music'.

  The first 10,000 punters to be swayed into buying the album by Parsons' partisanship could also take advantage of the NME's free Clash EP offer by peeling the red sticker from the album's inner sleeve and sending it in coupled with the special 'A Riot Of Your Own' ad which appeared in the paper's 2 April issue (which also featured The Clash on the front cover).

  Aside from the subterranean Circle Line interview which Parsons conducted with the group, the give-away flexi-disc also contained hitherto unreleased Clash material – a twenty-eight second edit of 'Listen' and 'Capital Radio'.

  Though appreciative of Joe's and Paul's respective worth, the opening paragraph of Parsons' 'Sten Guns In Knightsbridge' interview, which had also appeared in the NME's 2 April issue, reads like an ode to Mick: 'You don't know what total commitment is until you've met Mick Jones of The Clash. He's intense, emotional, manic depressive and plays lead guitar with the kind of suicidal energy that some musicians lose and most musicians never have.'

  Nor could Parsons resist borrowing from Giovanni Dadomo's copybook by making mention of Mick's 'uncanny resemblance to a young Keef Richard', and saying the Clash guitarist was possibly leaning on said similitude as a means of relieving an early identity problem.

  Mick retorted to the Stone-clone jibe by insisting he didn't believe in guitar heroes. 'I got my self-respect in this group. If I walk out to the front of the stage it's because I wanna reach the audience, I want to communicate with them. I don't want them to suck my guitar off.'6

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  Joe would subsequently claim that The Clash auditioned every jobbing drummer in London following Terry Chimes' latest departure before finally striking gold with the happy-go-lucky twenty-one-year-old Nicholas Bowen Headon.

  The soon-to-be-rechristened 'Topper' (on account of his resemblance to 'Mickey the Monkey' from the Topper comic) was already known to Mick from his having auditioned for London SS. Their paths had crossed again at a recent Kinks show at the Rainbow. 'I'd never seen them [The Clash] play, but I was really excited as soon as I did. They are incredible,' he told the Melody Maker during his public unveiling. 'I really wanted to join. They are by far the best band in the country.'

  'We'd come along a bit, Mick jokingly told The Telegraph's Andrew Perry in Sept 2013. 'So when I asked, he was much more like, "Oh right, I might actually join these guys."'

  Born and raised in Kent, Topper had taught himself to play piano before switching to the drums while still at school. His weekends were usually taken up playing with a Dover-based jazz outfit called Force 9, but found he could keep the beat with any form of music.

  Upon leaving school with three O-Levels to his name, he'd secured a position as a shipping clerk at the town's docks – where, coincidentally, his boss was the father-in-law of soon-to-be Clash road manager, Johnny Green. But after twelve months of diligently processing outgoing shipments, Topper's mind was beginning to wander – wander all the way to London.

  The first thing he did upon arrival in the capital was marry his sweetheart Wendy, and with the nuptials taken care of he then began perusing the 'Musicians Wanted' section in the Melody Maker classifieds.

  Bernard would, of course, subsequently dismiss Topper as a 'provincial tosser', but there is no truer adage in rock 'n' roll than that of a group being only as good as its drummer. With Topper taking over the drum stool, The Clash's engine room was stoked to the max. They were now ready to take the Westway sound to every point on the compass.

  On Sunday, 1 May 1977, just six months on from having been bottom of the pile on the Anarchy Tour, The Clash kick-started their own headline punk-package UK tour to promote The Clash at the Guildford Civic Hall. Fellow Anarchy Tour survivors, Buzzcocks, who'd filled in for the expunged Damned for the first of the ill-fated tour's v
isits to Manchester's Electric Circus, were on the bill, along with The Jam Subway Sect, and The Slits*.

  The shambolic Anarchy Tour had served to keep punk rock in the public eye in the wake of the Sex Pistols' teatime contretemps with Bill Grundy, and while the White Riot Tour – as the massive 25-date tour was called – was further evidence that the latest teenage musical trend wasn't a passing phase. For nine months The Clash had been singing about wanting a riot of their own, and with the punk rock genie now out of its bottle they were about to get their wish…

  The 3000 all-seater Rainbow Theatre on the Seven Sisters Road was by far the biggest venue The Clash had played to date. In its former guise as the Astoria Theatre, the cinema had staged numerous one-off music events during the 1960s – most notably the night Jimi Hendrix first set light to his guitar back in March 1967.

  The Clash didn't set fire to their equipment, but the audience's exuberance resulted in some two hundred stall seats being trashed. The ensuing 'Punk Rock Shock Horror!' headlines the following morning were perhaps to be expected given Fleet Street's propensity for never allowing the truth to get in the way of a good story. In this instance, however; the hyperbole was wholly unwarranted as an agreement had been reached beforehand whereby The Clash would cover the cost of any damages incurred during the performance.

  The White Riot Tour might have been a success in terms of exposing The Clash to the masses, from a financial point it was an unmitigated disaster as the tour ran up loses estimated at £28,000 – more than a quarter of their CBS advance. A sizeable chunk of said losses came from the impromptu Rainbow renovations, but the majority went on subsidising Subway Sect and The Slits who as yet were both still unsigned acts.

  Though initially happy to go along with this show of punk solidarity, it wasn't long before The Jam's management – namely Paul Weller's dad, John – began making grumbling noises about what The Jam were getting in return for the alleged four-figure sum they'd handed over to play the opening ten dates on the tour. As a result, the Woking threepiece, whose debut album In the City was holding its own in the album chart despite the critics' tepid response, left the tour immediately after the Rainbow date.

  It wasn't only rival acts with whom The Clash now found themselves at loggerheads, however, because midway through the tour CBS decided to ride roughshod over the group's supposed 'complete artistic control' by releasing 'Remote Control' b/w 'London's Burning' as the follow-up single.

  Mick had penned 'Remote Control's acerbic lyric about governmental pressure and interference in everyday life shortly after The Clash had returned to London following the ill-fated Anarchy Tour. In light of CBS's high-handed attitude he may well have considered amending a certain line to read: 'they had a meeting in Soho Square' as this was where CBS' London offices were located at the time.

  Of course, the silver lining from the 'Remote Control' debacle was that it incited the group to pen 'Complete Control', which is indisputably one of the best songs within the Clash canon.

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  On 20 October, and less than a fortnight since returning to Britain following a mini-European jaunt, The Clash flew to Belfast to kickstart their twenty-one-date Get Out Of Control Tour – with Richard Hell and the Voidoids in support – at the troubled city's Ulster Hall Polytechnic. Or at least that's what they thought…

  Their attempt to be the first punk/new wave group to play Belfast would ultimately be thwarted by jobsworth insurance brokers who withdrew the Ulster Hall's policy owing to The Clash supposedly having several outstanding insurance claims against them back on the mainland.

  When the spiky-haired, leather-clad throng – which included the then unknown Stiff Little Fingers' frontman Jake Burns – gathering outside the Ulster Hall discovered the show had been cancelled courtesy of periodic announcements on local radio and TV, they marched on the Europa Hotel on Great Victoria Street where The Clash were rumoured to be staying.

  When the group emerged out onto the street to try and placate the crowd, several police cars screamed into view with lights flashing and sirens blaring. While the police maintained a healthy distance as though unsure how to handle a hoard of irked punk rockers, The Clash attempted to assuage the irate fans by announcing plans were ongoing to try and re-stage the show at the nearby Queens University. They'd also offered to underwrite any damages incurred, as they had with the Ulster Hall, but such assurances failed to hold sway with the university's faculty. And when the punks lay down in the road in protest pandemonium ensued.

  'The most horrible thing was the way the kids were treated – the way they were pushed around,' Mick explained a few days later. 'They didn't have a chance to understand what was happening, so they were disappointed in us. Obviously, it wasn't our fault, but you can't explain that to eight hundred people personally.'7

  Earlier in the day, Mick and Joe had gone along to the local radio station, Downtown Radio, to give an interview, but had no sooner alighted from the car when they were pounced upon by security officers suspecting them – owing to their zip-infested custom-made 'Streetfighter fatigues' courtesy of Alex Michon – of belonging to the loyalist paramilitary organisation, the UDA (Ulster Defence Association).

  This should have been the cue to high-tail it back to the hotel bar until show-time, but someone within The Clash retinue thought it a good idea to take the group on a whirlwind tour of the province's less salubrious sights and have them pose in front of a bomb-damaged pub with its blackened windows boarded up.

  The Clash might look menacing strutting about Camden in their urban guerrilla chic, but doing so on the Bogside where people were being maimed and murdered on a near daily basis was outlandish.

  Even had the Ulster Hall show gone ahead, The Clash would have faced further ridicule as the stage backdrop they played against was a photographic blow-up of a Belfast street scene, replete with armoured cars and cowering civilians. While one could argue that The Clash were simply adding local flavour to the Rocco Macauley shot depicting the first baton charge by police at the Notting Hill Riot that adorns The Clash's rear cover, the people of Belfast lived with the everyday threat of being struck down by a bullet rather than a baton or bottle.

  Mick for one had been harbouring reservations about using the backdrop. 'I didn't think we should put it up here, because they aren't going to particularly want to be reminded of it,' he told Chris Salewitz later in the tour. 'In Bournemouth it's great because everyone is fucking asleep and it's really heavy because everyone is confronted by this stuff. But in Belfast, they don't need to be reminded.'8

  Mick then went on to say how The Clash were sympathetic to what was going on in Belfast, and that they had empathy for the people. Yet again he was leaving the group open to ridicule, because empathy implies understanding and running the gauntlet at the Electric Circus doesn't even begin to compare to venturing out on the Falls Road after dark.

  Aside from being frustrated at the last-ditch cancellation, Mick was disappointed on a personal level. He'd felt the Ulster Hall was going to be a great rock'n'roll show, and that the audience would be one of the best they'd yet played to. 'But of course, the bureaucrats and arseholes put their foot in it,' he lamented. 'But listen, you can be a catholic or a protestant kid, still come along and all be bouncing together. It's a cruel irony, the backdrop being associated with our group, and the authorities stamping on our concert.'9

  To Mick's delight, his childhood literary hero Lester Bangs was chronicling the Get Out Of Control Tour for the NME. Yet while Lester – or 'Mo-lester' as Paul renamed the affable American – would subsequently 'fall in love and see the promised land', Roadent had finally grown weary of Mick's high-handed attitude and duly gave notice.

  'It was in Edinburgh,' Roadent shrugged matter-of-factly, as if remembering a tooth extraction. 'It was obviously my job to see that everyone had what they needed for that night's show – strings, skins, plectrums, and what have you. When I got back at the venue – Clouds, I think – Mick came in being his usual s
elf, and shouted, "Where've you been? Have you got my stuff?" He didn't even give me chance to reply before saying something about how I'd asked Richard Hell's people if they needed anything. That was it for me, and of course, that's when I uttered the immortal line: "Fuck off, Mick; you need a valet not a roadie."

  'I got my train fare back to London off of Bernie, and the next day I went to the King's Road to see Malcolm and got a job with the Pistols.'

  * * *

  * An alternate version of events has Queen pulling out from appearing on Today owing to Freddie Mercury recovering from dental treatment. (BACK)

  * The Birmingham-based Prefects appeared on the billing at several shows. (BACK)

  – CHAPTER SEVEN –

  AND I LOOK TO MY LEFT…

  'I don't know where our sound came from. I think your sound is a reflection of your personality; you'll always sound like you, no matter who you are. When I play you're hearing my whole life.'