Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘Joe was like a divorcee when he arrived in the Clash, and it always seemed that he didn’t really fit in and was like an outsider. He was having an intense but rather embattled relationship with Mick with whom he had teamed up for a very rational, absolutely straightdown-the-line reason. Mick was brilliant at arranging music and understood the form of pop music: he could branch off without betraying the genre that he was working in and be inventive, and seemed to know harmonies naturally. But Joe had no musical ability whatsoever of that kind, and he had this strange Brechtian-style of speaking-singing. A very odd voice.’

  Topper Headon – who had not previously made a record – had readily adapted to the studio. On the first day of recording he had put down most of his drum parts with absolute facility. ‘It was the first time I’d recorded,’ Topper told me. ‘Sandy Pearlman had a bit of a love affair with my drumming. In those days I didn’t make mistakes – believe me, it changed. I was at a peak: I was contributing. If they’d got a drummer who couldn’t play jazz and couldn’t play funk they’d never have got further than that second album.’ Unfortunately, because Topper had filled his role with such expertise, he became bored in the studio; he started looking for diversions. He did have a court case on his mind, however. On 30 March he and Paul, along with Robin ‘Banks’ Crocker, Mick’s school friend, the subject of Stay Free, a new song, and Steve and Pete Barnacle, a pair of Topper’s friends, had been arrested on suspicion of shooting at the trains that ran past Rehearsals. Topper had been trying out an air-rifle of Pete Barnacle’s by shooting at what he thought were ordinary pigeons. They were actually valuable racing pigeons. All five were arrested and spent a night in the cells. With bail set at £1,500 each, they were released, but each defendant had to sign on daily at their local police station. For a group that loved to go on the road, this was a great hassle, preventing them from touring until the case was resolved. Somewhat au fait with court procedures, Caroline Coon, Paul’s girlfriend, took the matter under her wing, walking the defendants through the legal minefield. She secured the legal services of a QC by the name of David Mellor – one can only imagine Joe’s response on hearing this. Under David Mellor the defendants received sentences amounting only to payment of fines and damages. At least the Clash got a song for the new album out of the incident, ‘Guns on the Roof’ – although the background to the number led to the Clash being severely castigated. The pigeon-shooting earned Mick Jones’s strong disapproval.

  Was the worried expression on Joe’s face at the Basing Street studio because he was concerned about the direction in which Sandy Pearlman was taking the second album? Quite possibly. ‘Obviously Pearlman had spoken to CBS and been given the brief to produce a rock LP,’ Joe said to me. ‘He probably kept it in that vein with that advice. It came up mainstream, or rock-ish.’ Years later, the sideways move of Give ’Em Enough Rope made more sense to him: ‘We changed the nature of the music. That’s why we made it big in the world and the Jam and the Buzzcocks never did. Because we were willing … we knew that it was a journey of exploration, it wasn’t toeing the line. And that’s why we lost a lot of our early fans, ’cause the second album, you could almost call it just rock. I admit that we didn’t know what we were doing during the second album, but we certainly weren’t trying to play American. We got accused of playing American radio-friendly rock. And the producer was American. But it was the last thing on our minds. We were just trying to record the songs we had in the bag. But we got a lot of kicking for that.’

  By contrast a self-produced single was released on 16 June: ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’, backed with ‘The Prisoner’, a song about Bernie Rhodes (‘The prisoner lives in Camden Town / Selling revolution’). Although a masterly work, ‘White Man’ got no higher in the charts than the edge of the Top Thirty. With the court cases resolved, a nationwide tour had been set up, The Clash on Parole. A couple of days before it began, at Friars in Aylesbury on 28 June, the Clash played a warm-up show before an invited audience at Manticore, a former cinema at the bottom of North End Road in Fulham, only a few hundred yards from where Joe had recently been confined in hospital. Manticore was owned by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, exactly the sort of Progressive Rock dinosaurs the Clash had set out to topple, an irony commented on from the stage by Joe.

  The name of their group didn’t necessarily mean the Clash were always in conflict. (Sheila Rock)

  That night the Clash were steaming. I had no doubt that they were the finest rock’n’roll group in the world. The hassles of the previous year – finding the right record producer, the constant frictions between the band and record company and, it appeared increasingly, with their management, plus Joe Strummer’s hepatitis bout and the group’s run-ins with the law – all these troubles appeared to have enriched the Clash with new inner strength and righteous power.

  After the show I had an Indian meal with Paul Simonon and Caroline Coon and went back to her flat in South Kensington. Clearly inspired by the war films brought up to Basing Street by David Mingay, Paul Simonon told me that he had designed a new backdrop for the tour itself, a police charge at the Notting Hill carnival juxtaposed against a Messerschmitt fighter plane.

  I joined the group in Manchester on the ‘On Parole’ tour. In the few days since I’d seen the Clash in Fulham, the change in Joe was marked; he seemed very much at the end of his tether. Driven by Joe’s demonic urgency, the gigs I saw were the best, the warmest, the most involving, the most enjoyable rock’n’roll shows I had ever seen. As the Clash had progressed to playing theatre-sized shows, each with an audience of around 3,000 people, Joe had risen as a performer; these larger stages offered him far more room to move around, as he performed his visionary act. But his role as front-man seemed to be taking an exponential psychological, even psychic, toll on him. The moodiness and edginess I had previously observed had returned; being Joe Strummer, which meant leading the punk masses back to the hotel each night like some anti-Pied Piper, was a twenty-four-hour job: Joe Strummer never closed, and you could see the stress that lurked permanently behind that superficially benign stoned countenance.

  In Manchester, the afternoon after the Apollo show and a few hours before an unscheduled gig at Rafters night club on this ‘day off’, the Clash had gone out to pick up some new music at a local branch of HMV – Mick had bought cassettes of Peter Tosh’s ‘Legalize It’, Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’, Neil Young’s ‘On the Beach’ and Randy Newman’s ‘Little Criminals’, which gave a sense of how broad was his taste and the influences from his end on the group. On the way back to the Piccadilly Hotel we had passed a piece of Manchester United graffiti which, through a further graffiti add-on, had transmuted into ‘MU … NF’. ‘About the best piece of art-work they’ll ever manage,’ Joe had laughed contemptuously.

  Later Mick Jones and I had been sitting up in Joe’s hotel room watching a highly emotive World in Action exposé of the National Front, when a tense Joe Strummer had walked in. For maybe two or three minutes he stood scowling at the programme. ‘Did you talk to Bernie about all these problems with the fan club?’ Mick Jones enquired. In a sudden spasm of rage, Joe took a vicious kick at a metal wastepaper basket which flew up into the air, a broken cassette inside it just missing my head, and the Clash’s front-man stormed out – again, Joe being rather frightening. A concerned Mick Jones followed him out of the room and found that the reason he was so wound up was because he had been told it would be difficult getting kids in to the Rafters gig for nothing.

  Joe’s mood swings could seem almost out of control and utterly unpredictable. In the dressing-room before the Glasgow performance that followed the Manchester dates he came up to me. ‘Sandwich, you’re an intelligent man,’ he said with a benign smile. ‘So could you tape this up for me, please?’ He produced some pieces of cotton that he wrapped around his right wrist and about which I wound gaffer-tape – this was what was became known as ‘the Strummer-guard’, Joe’s own invention to prevent his wrist from being slic
ed apart during his frantic chord-slashing on his Telecaster. But in that same Glasgow Apollo dressing-room after the show he grabbed by the throat a fan who was berating him for not having done more to stop the demented bouncers.

  Glasgow’s Apollo Theatre was notorious on the gig circuit for the excessive violence its psychotic bouncers employed. But the bouncers claimed the audience had terrorized them over the years. ‘Here,’ said one of them, proudly pulling up his vest. ‘This scar’s from the David Bowie show. And this one’s from the Faces. And this’ – he showed a thick welt across his belly – ‘is from the last time the Clash played here.’

  During the Clash’s show the bouncers indiscriminately pummelled, clubbed and kicked the audience, who of course retaliated. Joe – wearing a T-shirt that read ‘GET TAE FUCK’ – backed off from the mike and shook his head to himself after pleading with the bouncers and the kids to stop attempting to dismember each other: ‘Simmer down. Control your temper.’ Which in the heat of the moment few probably recognized as a pair of lines from Bob Marley’s 1964 Jamaican hit. When he finally gave up, leaving the stage in tears, a whisky-fumed bouncer stepped forward. ‘We’re gonna have yeeew,’ he leered at Joe. Rumours quickly swirled that the bouncers were heading for the group’s dressing-room, determined to kick the shit out of them.

  The Clash left the Apollo, me with them, glad to be away from the place. Except that we were met outside by aggrieved fans, complaining that Joe and the others stood by and watched while they were massacred. ‘Ye’re jus’ big-egoed pop stars,’ snarled one. Exasperated, Joe slammed the lemonade bottle he was carrying into the ground. As it shattered, police materialized as if from nowhere, and heavyhandedly grabbed Joe to sweep him into one of their vans. Paul Simonon stepped forward to protest and for his pains was viciously cracked across the skull by a truncheon, before also being thrown into a van.

  Topper, wisely, disappeared. Mick and myself, together with Johnny Green, raced off in the direction of the hotel to hide Joe and Paul’s drugs in case the police searched their rooms. At one point I went in search of Bernie. When I found him he showed no interest whatsoever in half his group being in police cells; later Johnny Green told me that this failure on Bernie’s part was a pivotal moment in his relationship with the four.

  The next day Joe and Paul appeared in court, charged with breach of the peace. Joe later told me that the other punks locked up with them sang ‘The Prisoner’ all night: ‘As we were leaving one of the cops on the door said to the one in charge of us, “How come you didn’t beat them up? Are you reformed or something?”’

  Joe’s brush with the law gave his Brando slouch in the dock real credibility. He was fined £25; Paul, £45. ‘What is the name of your group?’ enquired the magistrate. ‘Vuh Clash,’ mumbled Joe. ‘How appropriate,’ tittered the magistrate.

  In the street outside the court Joe Strummer turned to Paul Simonon and grinned. ‘Maybe it was a mistake calling this “The Clash on Parole” tour.’

  As the Ford Granada purred out of Glasgow with Johnny Green at the wheel, on our way to the next gig in Aberdeen 150 miles to the north-east, relaxing spliffs were produced to take the edge off the general trauma of the previous night. Joe slotted a copy in the vehicle’s cassette player of Trout Mask Replica, the most avant-garde – and ‘difficult’ – work by his beloved Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, hardly the best driving music. ‘Eurghhh! What’s that? It’s horrible! Take it off,’ demanded Paul Simonon.

  The journey through the Scottish Highlands passed without further incident, and after some hours we hit the oil boom-town of Aberdeen. Although it was July, it was freezing cold, a bitter wind billowing off the North Sea; at a roadside stop Mick Jones took out of his suitcase a brown World War II German army leather coat he had bought in Camden Market and put it on: ‘Everyone said I was stupid to bring this but I knew I’d need it.’ With Joe sitting in the front seat, we drove straight to the venue for the sound-check. I was sitting between Mick and Paul in the back seat. Johnny Green pulled up to open the gate in the metal-link fencing that enclosed the rear entrance, leaving the engine running. As he pinned the gate open against the fence, Joe – always up for a prank – leapt into the driver’s seat. Although he couldn’t drive, he knew how an automatic car worked. Slotting the stick into the ‘Drive’ position, he seized the steering-wheel and pressed his foot down on the accelerator, clearly intending to whizz past Johnny by inches, startling him. Except – as I said – Joe couldn’t drive. He misjudged by a few inches, and pinned Johnny Green against the fence, the right edge of the car’s nose lodging in the metal links. Johnny screamed in pain. The full weight of the Ford was against him. Joe was now panicking. He didn’t know what to do. Although he had taken his foot off the accelerator, the automatic was still in gear and was edging slowly forward against the fence, crushing Johnny. ‘I can’t breathe. My ribs are breaking,’ he screamed. Horror descended upon everyone’s face as everything went into slow motion. From where I was I could see that Joe had gone white and tears were forming in his eyes – which Johnny confirmed many years later when we talked about this. Mick acted quickly. In his German army leather coat he jumped out of the car and ran for help. Paul raced to the front of the Granada, hopelessly trying to push it back. I could drive, and realized what needed to be done. ‘Joe, get in the passenger seat,’ I told him. Slipping through the gap between the two front seats, I got behind the wheel. I yanked the wheel to the right and put the gear lever into the ‘R’ position. The car moved backwards and off Johnny, who staggered forward, gulping for air, clutching his ribs. In shock, Joe and I looked at each other. ‘Thanks, Sandwich,’ he said, and looked away, his eyes still rheumy, his skin ashen. Mick Jones arrived with a rescue party, half a dozen thirteen-year-old kids on skateboards. But they were not needed in this story of the rock’n’roll wars. As I said, I had already felt on this tour that Joe Strummer was a man at the end of his tether. I felt unspecifically but deeply worried for him. We never again mentioned the Aberdeen car incident, Joe and I; not that there was anything unmentionable about it, but simply because everything was happening so instantly that it somehow seemed almost quite normal.

  In the Aberdeen hotel after the show, I went up to Joe’s room with him. ‘Waterloo’ by Abba wafted through the window from the hotel’s disco – ‘That’s a good one,’ said Joe. He told me that the occasional losses of control I had witnessed on the road were due to unrelenting pressure. But, as Joe himself admitted, in the past they were down to ‘the demon drink’ – he said this problem was solved when his hepatitis obliged him to lay off booze. ‘It doesn’t half make you lose your friends, though, not going down the pub,’ he laughed. But he also – untruthfully – vigorously denied that the hepatitis was due to any ingestion of stimulating powders. In what I later realized was a somewhat hypocritical jibe at Mick Jones, he declared that cocaine was ‘complete muck’: ‘If you snort coke you’re on your own. You don’t want anybody and you don’t need anybody. Which is a horrible place to be.’

  Joe had a very powerful aura about him. Onstage, he never smiled. This hard-man stage persona, you realize, might well have been an extension of the belligerent Scotsman within him, something I hadn’t known until he revealed it that night. As he leant back against the headboard of his hotel bed, it was apparent what a very sensitive and perceptive bloke he was, though at this time he didn’t strike me as necessarily a near-intellectual in the same way that Jones certainly was. All the time, he told me, underlining something that Mick Jones had said earlier in the day, he kept getting signs – whether in the form of actual emissaries or less tangible incidents – that he and the group were on the right path.

  ‘I go in for that mumbo-jumbo a lot myself,’ he smiled. ‘Like, when me and Mick went to Jamaica I was quite convinced we were going to die. At Heathrow someone dropped this ketchup all over the floor in front of us – and then we get there and we’re driving through Trenchtown and I glance up at this wall and just see this one wor
d “BLOOD”. Mind you, nothing happened at all like that, and when I got back I thought, “What a lot of time I wasted worrying.”’

  We moved on to the contradictions within the Clash: how the warmth and positivism were hemmed in by overtly aggressive imagery – the gun logo, the militaristic stage backdrops, even the new song titles: ‘Tommy Gun’, ‘Guns on the Roof’ … ‘It keeps coming up, doesn’t it?’ Joe nodded. ‘I think it’s just a reflection of what’s out there. I really do think we are a good force, but we’re dealing with the world and those images are just a reflection of what it is.’

  He told me about a new song, ‘The English Civil War’, a reworking of the American folk tune ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, which he first recalled singing as a kid in singing lessons at school. Why was the Clash’s version transported to England? Because, said Joe matter-of-factly, ‘It’s already started. There’s people attacking Bengalis with clubs and firing shotguns in Wolverhampton. What really gets me is it’s so-o-o respectable to be right-wing. All those big geezers in the Monday Club will probably switch over to the Front if they start making any headway. That’s what happened in Germany – they turned round and said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been a Nazi all along, mate.” It’s a pity, when the skins go out on the rampage, that they don’t go down the House of Commons and smash that place up.