Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Joe rented a second-floor flat at 109 Ladbroke Grove, which he moved into with Gaby – back together again. Mick Jones meanwhile had come up with the deposit to buy a flat in Powis Gardens in Notting Hill. Joe admitted that when he had also tried to purchase a property he had been turned down for a mortgage.

  Much tea was always drunk around the Clash. (UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

  On 13 May the Clash opened the European leg of the 16 Tons tour at the Metropole in Berlin. Joe felt that it was already punk-revival time in Germany. ‘It’s become everything it wasn’t supposed to be,’ he said.

  ‘What we were confronted with was junior punks in their expensive designer uniforms with concrete heads and no ears.’ In a Berlin café Joe found himself in conversation with a sixteen-year-old skinhead: ‘He was saying he was horrified, that he couldn’t stand it, because his grandmother was grooving around to London Calling.’

  By the time they reached Hamburg seven days later the group found themselves confronted by anarcho-punk designer violence. Pennie Smith had been approached by Pete Townshend to put together a book of her Clash photographs for his publishing company. The group said they’d write the captions, so she flew out to meet them. ‘I arrived just as they should have come offstage. Except that this car door flung open in front of me, with somebody yelling, “Stop-stop-stop.” It was Joe, getting the driver to stop. This arm came out, dragged me in the back of the car. “We’re off to Norway.” I said, “But I’ve come to get these captions from you.” So he said, “I just got in some trouble. We’re going over the border tonight.”’

  The tour is getting to Joe. IN THE BACK OF MY MIND … … THE RIVETTS MUST BE LOOSE. (Lucinda Mellor)

  An anarcho-punk element in the Hamburg audience had felt that with London Calling the Clash had succumbed to marketing forces. Incessantly they grabbed at Joe’s microphone to deliver political protests. Pissed off, Joe had stepped out into the audience and clattered the principal offender with his Telecaster, sparking a riot of his own. Joe was arrested and the concert brought to an early conclusion. He was taken to a local police station, where a cop congratulated him. The next edition of the local paper featured a photograph of a bloodstained and bandaged man being carried out of the venue on a stretcher beneath a headline: ‘Last Night the Clash Played!’

  The incident brought about a turn in Joe’s thinking, as he explained to Paul Du Noyer in the NME. ‘In Hamburg these kids attacked us, going, “You’ve sold out, you’ve sold out.” It was like nothing you’ve ever seen. They were all down the front, and if they could grab hold of a microphone lead they’d pull, and it was a tug o’ war. Then it started getting really violent – and that was my fault in a way. How much can a man take, y’know? I was playing and I saw this guy sort of using the guy in front of him as a punch-bag, trying to be all tough. So I rapped him on the head with a Telecaster, I lost my temper. There was blood gushing down in front of his face. It wasn’t much of a cut, but it looked real horror show. The howl out of the audience – you shoulda heard it. From then on it was jump in and punch.

  ‘After I’d been taken down the cop station and charged with assaulting a German citizen by striking him over the head with a guitar, I began to think that I’d overstepped the mark. It was a water-shed – violence had really controlled me for once. Since then I’ve decided the only way you can fight aggro in the audience is to play a really boring song.’

  In Sweden an odd incident took place. When Andrew King entered Joe’s hotel bedroom, who should he have found sitting there but Bernie Rhodes, giving Joe a lecture on Marxism. The Blackhill man could not believe his eyes. In the light of events that were about to unfold, it is not surprising.

  As with the London Calling video, Pennie’s book, The Clash: Before and After, further cemented the visual iconography of how the group was perceived. As a semi-permanent fixture around the group, she had ample opportunity to observe aspects of the Clash customarily cloaked from media eyes.

  ‘Joe always needed a posse around him, he always needed other people to keep him up. Joe was nervous. I used to see Joe gear himself up for fans when they came in the dressing-room. That kicked him into his Joe Strummer personality, which meant he could leave his inhibitions behind.’

  Many people who spent time in close proximity with Joe were able to observe that he was not entirely comfortable with himself – that there was sometimes a tension about him, as though something didn’t quite fit. Yet wasn’t part of his appeal the vulnerability that that sense created, so therefore people were able to identify with it?

  ‘I don’t think he ever could believe he was where he was,’ thought Pennie. ‘Suddenly he was very big … in a small field admittedly – the Clash weren’t the Rolling Stones. Joe still had an element about him of “I don’t really believe I’m in this situation.”

  ‘Particularly with girls he was an emotional bully – strangely, because he’s tender and caring. He had a strange attitude to girls: they were there to be used. He always thought he was the ugly boy in the class, the bloke who couldn’t score with girls. There’s an element of being-in-a-band-will-help-me-score. He said that to me twice. I think he needed to prove he was liked, and therefore women came in useful. Joe would be with somebody else every night. The drinking was part of this. It wouldn’t even necessarily be the best-looking girl in the room. Girls slotted in for perhaps another need of Joe – they allowed him to get out of the group for a minute.’ Others in the group were simply getting out of their heads. ‘Drugs aside,’ said Pennie, ‘Topper was probably the sanest of the lot. He didn’t change as much as everybody else.’

  Those around Topper Headon were concerned about the drummer’s consumption of hard drugs. Pete Jenner had been disturbed by the powders evident in the studio in New York. ‘Another thing that wound me up about Joe was that while they were recording Sandinista! I said to him, “I’m a bit worried about Topper. There’s all these white powders. What’s going on? Shouldn’t we be doing something about this? I’m a bit concerned.” I’d seen him throwing up. I’m a bit naïve: I thought it was probably coke. “Oh, we don’t need any advice from you, old man,” Joe said. I was the old man because I was ten years older, and therefore didn’t understand. Not much later he threw Topper out of the band because of drug use, which I had pointed out we should do something about.’

  Back in Britain the Clash played the remainder of the 16 Tons dates that had been cancelled in February due to Topper Headon’s hand injury. On 16 and 17 June they played for the first time at the venue already commemorated in Joe’s greatest song: Hammersmith Palais. Both Joe and Paul had had their ducktailed quiffs cropped, and their hairstyles were now more Steve McQueen than James Dean.

  As though seeking light relief after the end of the 16 Tons tour, in July Joe was in Pye Studios at London’s Marble Arch, producing a record for a group called the Little Roosters, Small Faces clones managed by Cliff Cooper. Cooper had asked Joe to produce their first album, and come to an unusual financial arrangement: instead of Joe receiving a fee he would have all expenses paid for the extensive dental work he required to rebuild the post-Apocalypse bombsite of his mouth.

  In the 19 July edition of NME, T-zers, the paper’s gossip column, indicated knowledge of Topper’s recreational pastimes was no longer confined to those in the group’s inner circle: ‘Clash minder Kosmo “It’s tough being a stylist” Vinyl challenged T-zers on our item last week about Topper Headon having “bad health” problems. This was apparently news to both Topper and his mum, who rang up concerned after reading T-zers, as is her habit. Topper’s mum will be pleased to hear that CBS, against what were for once their better instincts, have decided to release the “legendary” “Bankrobber” on August 3rd.’

  Why had ‘Obie’ taken such an intransigent stance against the release of the single? ‘Bankrobber’ had, after all, been released in Holland as the B-side of ‘Train in Vain’. The consequence of this controversy had been a breakdown of communication between the labe
l and the Clash. As a result, they had refused to do any further work on the tunes recorded for the next album. Only when Oberstein had changed his position – ‘Bankrobber’ was actually released on 8 August – did the group go into Wessex with Bill Price to mix the tunes. Although ‘Bankrobber’ rose to number 11 in the British charts, the position would have been bettered had it not been for the large quantities of Dutch import records already purchased in Britain. ‘They refused to put it out,’ Joe Strummer told me, ‘so we refused to record anything else. We left it at that for a while. We had a load of rough mixes from stuff in New York, but we held off from finishing them off until they put it out.’

  As part of that spiteful mindset that characterized the thinking of some music journalists, the revered status of the Clash set them up as targets to be shot down. The subject-matter of the ‘Bankrobber’ single was perfect to sneer at. All of Joe’s romantic self-delusions seemed contained within this story of ‘Daddy’: He just loved to live that way / Loved to steal their money. ‘Actually, John Mellor’s daddy was a Second Secretary of Information at the Foreign Office,’ jibed the review in Sounds. But there was a fundamental misunderstanding: Joe was not writing about himself but about a character he knew whose father had been a bankrobber – it was a girl with whom he had been briefly involved. Scorn was heaped upon him. As their career trajectory moved upwards in the United States, the Clash discovered that their British critical honeymoon was nearing an end. But was CBS now against them? Jenner and King had examined the group’s CBS contract even though they themselves still did not have a formal contract with the Clash. They could see the CBS contract did not lock the Clash in as much as the company might have hoped. Rudimentary errors had been made: CBS had not specified, as was customary, that if an album was a two-record set then it must count only as one of the long-players due to the label, so London Calling clearly counted as two albums. ‘The contract was the biggest mess I’ve ever seen,’ said Pete Jenner. ‘It had obviously been cobbled together really quickly, bits of paper stuck everywhere. They’d left out that crucial clause about double-albums. But on the other hand Joe had told me that it was a five-album deal. I thought, “That’s cool: a five-year, five-album deal.” But when you looked deeper you saw that CBS at any time could ask for an additional album in any year. So in fact it’s a ten-album, or ten-year, deal, with another clause that can take it up to thirteen albums. I thought that Bernie was a complete bloody twit to let this through.’ Due to a complex payments clause, all money earned by the Clash from their records was paid by CBS in the UK to the parent company in the USA; in New York the money was sat on for six months before being paid to the group. All the same Jenner felt the clause about the double album was a bargaining lever that could be used against CBS: ‘Give them double albums all the time and you can get out in no time. There was a huge contractual hole which they could have used to start walking out on CBS.’

  At Wessex more tunes were written, including ‘The Equaliser’, ‘Rebel Waltz’ and ‘Something about England’. When they had finished at Wessex in mid-September Mick Jones announced the new album would be a triple-record set, notwithstanding that the group had only five sides of recorded material. Accordingly, in the tradition of the reggae music that so influenced them, assorted dubs were recorded: ‘Junco Partner’, recorded in Jamaica, was complemented by ‘Version Pardner’, ‘If Music Could Talk’ by ‘Shepherds Delight’, and ‘Washington Bullets’ by ‘Silicone on Sapphire’. Jenner and King thought that the group was committing financial suicide. Jenner also thought the six sides contained too much waffle, although ‘it could have been a great double album and a fantastic single album.’ By now Joe firmly shared Mick’s vision. ‘That was us at a very specific time. A blast of energy over six weeks or so. It was a statement of what we were as the Clash.’ Looking back, Mick Jones said, ‘Sandinista! is the big reaching out. I knew we were going to make a different record every time. It had to be different. I liked that with other groups like the Rolling Stones: you knew each record was going to be different. We loved the Ramones, but we didn’t want to be like them, doing the same thing.’

  Immediately the group had completed working on Sandinista!, they set about making an album with Ellen Foley, the American singer who was Mick’s new girlfriend. The record, Spirit of St Louis, contained six new Strummer/Jones songs and three written by Tymon Dogg. Produced by Mick Jones at Wessex, it had the usual suspects working on it. All the Clash, as well as Tymon Dogg and Blockheads’ Micky Gallagher, Norman Watt-Roy and Davey Payne played on Spirit of St Louis, and it was mixed by Bill Price. When released, the record received a critical thumping. The group also then collaborated on an album for Pearl Harbor.

  At one point it had been mooted that the new Clash record might be titled The Bible: among the myriad styles essayed on the record, a great surprise was gospel, on the song ‘The Sound of Sinners’. (Joe smiled when we discussed this later: ‘But I wanted to see words like “drugs” in a gospel song. I like all the imagery in gospel like “Going down to the riverside”, and “hurricanes” and “winds of fury” and all that. In the Bible,’ he added dramatically, ‘they blew the horns and the walls of the city crumbled … well, punk rock was like that.’) Fortunately, the potential hubris of calling it The Bible was evaded through the inclusion of ‘Washington Bullets’, a song aimed not only at the imperialistic follies of the United States but also at the Soviet Union and China. It concluded with a wistful sigh of a chorus line from Mick Jones: ‘Oo-oo-oo-Sandinista’. ‘I was singing this song, “Washington Bullets”,’ said Joe, ‘and I got to a verse about Nicaragua. I just came out with it. I just shouted it out. And when I got out of the vocal booth, Mick said, “That’s the name of the album,” and I started thinking about it.’ (‘A long time after “Washington Bullets” came out,’ said Kosmo Vinyl, ‘I asked Joe if he’d known there was a basketball team called the Washington Bullets, and he said he didn’t, and if he’d known at the time he wrote it he would have given the song a different title.’)

  Joe claimed that no one was aware of the revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua, a small Central American country, bordered to the north by Honduras and to the south by Costa Rica. William Walker, a maverick American adventurer, had seized Nicaragua for Washington in 1855, and the country had remained a tool of the United States; when a revolutionary movement against President Somoza, who seized power in 1937, began in earnest, the rebels became known as Sandinistas. But the struggle against Somoza’s repressive, corrupt regime had been assiduously reported; in 1979 a US television journalist was shot dead on camera there, and the footage was broadcast worldwide. Somoza fled the country later that year. The revolution won, the country became a cause célèbre for radicals.

  But the Sandinistas never made three-album sets. Or had CBS to deal with. The Sandinista! album was an ideal testing-ground for the anomalies in the CBS contract. Maurice Oberstein declared he was not prepared to release it at the price insisted on by the Clash, £5.99 in the UK, unless they signed an amended version of the contract that corrected the glitch CBS inadvertently had allowed to slip in – thereby locking them back in to a ten-year contract. To the consternation of the Blackhill men, Joe especially went along with this. ‘Joe was no businessman,’ Pete Jenner emphasized.

  Joe might have been responding to these words of Jenner’s when he declared to Paul Du Noyer: ‘I believe in socialism because it seems more humanitarian, rather than every man for himself and “I’m alright Jack” and all those arsehole businessmen with all the loot. When I left art school, I took a dive: no future, no skills, nothing. So I just laboured and doled, fucked off around the place. Took a job when I was really skint, if I could get one, got fired every time for late timekeeping.

  ‘I made up my mind from viewing society from that angle. That’s where I’m from and that’s where I’ve made my decisions from. That’s why I believe in socialism. When I was on my uppers, every door was slammed in my face. Once I asked a lady outside a sweet s
hop in Hampshire to buy me a bar of chocolate. I’d been hitching all day and I was really hungry. I just thought I’d turn round and try society on. This lady came along and I said, “Would you give me the rest of the money for this bar of chocolate?” She just said, “No, why should I?” Things like that annoyed me.’

  Impressive though Joe’s political ideals were, they were indubitably a little bit ‘student’: he didn’t seem to appreciate that even the Left required certain practical economic realities to engineer a perfect society. Kosmo Vinyl admitted to me that in Joe’s stance there were contradictions. ‘We’re claiming that we’re broke. But we’ve got quite nice places to live in, we’ve got taxis everywhere, we eat in restaurants three times a day, and we’ve always got a lot of the best drugs going.’

  In late September Joe was stopped and searched in the decidedly insalubrious area of King’s Cross by police officers from the notorious Special Patrol Group. Finding weed in his ubiquitous carrier-bags, they went to his flat, coming up with several ounces of home-grown marijuana. Joe was fined £100, and told that, if busted again, he would receive a custodial sentence.

  On 1 November a playback for Sandinista! was held at Wessex. The record was released on 12 December, and marked a sea-change in the relationship between the Clash and the UK music press. In the 8 December edition of the NME Paul Morley reviewed ‘The Call Up’, the new Clash single, taken from the album, and soundly dismissed both the record and the group as ‘Americanized’, ‘old fashioned’, ‘too wrapped up in those used-up myths’. ‘They care so much, but seem so lost,’ he concluded. The NME review of Sandinista! by Nick Kent, until now a big Clash fan, was the most derogatory that anything by the group had ever received in the paper, ‘ridiculously self-indulgent’ being perhaps the mildest criticism. He tore into Joe’s singing as ‘simply duff’ and hated the lyrics. Patrick Humphries in Melody Maker found Sandinista! ‘a floundering mutant’. But at least Robbi Millar in Sounds gave it a thumbs-up.