Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  The Clash kicked off their seven nights in Japan on 24 January at Shibuya Kohkaido in Tokyo. Why had the Clash never played Japan before? Because of another Clash edict: they would not play in Japan unless the audience could stand up. Never previously had the Japanese been permitted to stand for any act. Even for the Clash the audience was only allowed to stand in their seats. But this compromise was enough for them to go ahead with the dates. ‘Mr Udo, the promoter, liked us for having stuck out for that,’ remembered Kosmo. ‘“These are men of principle!” We got tons of coverage in the papers for that. Even the television news was there.’

  Taking the bullet-train, the group headed for Osaka, where they played two nights at the Festival Hall. Pictures of Joe and Mick on the train do not indicate men who are reputedly at severe odds with each other: as the train thunders along, snow-capped Mount Fuji in the background, they look extremely happy. ‘There is a certain amount of concern about the new record, but I don’t know if it’s dominating Mick’s or Joe’s thinking,’ recalled Kosmo. ‘There’s time to take a break. We were in a hotel room and Joe and Mick were in some dispute about the new record, but I said, “There’s a whole city out there. We should go and enjoy it.” It was fun, Japan. You’re on at 6.30, 10.00 p.m. and you’re done. You can go out.’ Back in Tokyo, they played four more dates at the Sun Plaza – not a strict adherence to Bernie’s edict of seven nights in a major city, but the closest they could manage.

  Pennie Smith travelled out to Japan to photograph the group. Just before the Clash were supposed to leave Tokyo to fly to New Zealand, Joe called her to his room. She found him surrounded by gifts from fans – dolls, carvings, clothing, even a samurai sword. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said to her. ‘I can’t get them all in my suitcase.’ ‘You’ll have to leave some of them behind,’ was Pennie’s solution. ‘How can I do that?’ said Joe. ‘They’ve got them specially for me.’ The next hour was spent stuffing the mountain of presents into plastic bags, which were assiduously sellotaped up and checked in at the airport, ensuring a hefty excess baggage bill for Joe. Before they left for the airport, Pennie photographed Joe with the samurai sword he had been given. Arriving in Auckland in New Zealand, the Clash were subjected to a four-hour delay at immigration, the consequence of Topper’s recent drug bust in London.

  On 5 February the group played the Logan Campbell Centre in Auckland. They were shocked by the presence of a large contingent of local skinheads, many adorned with Nazi eagle insignia. The next day, a Saturday, Kosmo was out in the town when he bumped into Joe, carrying a ukulele he had brought with him on the tour. ‘I’ve been downtown busking,’ he said. ‘How’d you make out?’ ‘Terrible.’

  After shows in Christchurch and Wellington, the party left New Zealand for Sydney, Australia, and a seven-day stint beginning on 11 February at the Capitol Theatre, an art deco cinema with a tin roof, useful for boosting to a stifling degree the heat of a baking summer. The group was booked into an exclusive hotel in the centre of town. ‘We checked in at the same time as the Kinks, who arrived at the same moment,’ remembered Kosmo. ‘Before they’d finished checking in, we’d been checked out. We were kicked out of the hotel – something to do with girls’ underwear and Charlie Parker played very loud. The cases didn’t even make it to the rooms. We were told we had to leave.’

  A hotel was found in the funkier confines of Sydney’s Kings Cross, a red light district. In Australia Joe continued to not smoke weed. He began to speak of getting himself fit for action, and there was mention in press reports of Joe’s ‘cult of the body’: he’d get up at 6 in the morning and go running, and spend time in his room lifting the TV set up and down as though it was a set of weights. He had a moment of passion with a girl journalist, and would absent himself from interviews to make visits to Sydney’s gorgeous beaches. ‘While Mick was talking to The Australian, Joe would be in the sea,’ said Kosmo. ‘I’d be saying, “He’ll be back in a minute,” thinking I’ve got another journalist coming up in forty-five minutes.’

  Joe loved Australia, with its vast expanse of landscape, sea and blue sky – until the group came up against the downside of ‘God’s Own Country’. One night at the Capitol, Aboriginal Land Rights campaigner Gary Foley came onstage to rap about his cause during a dubbed-up version of ‘Armagideon Time’. Afterwards Joe and Kosmo took Foley back to the hotel for drinks in the bar. Previously the bar staff had been friends with the Clash and their entourage; after this they continued to serve them but stopped engaging in any conversation. A hitherto amicable maintenance man at the Capitol told Kosmo Vinyl that aborigines were ‘like dogs, mate’.

  There was another drawback. Under pressure from the record company the group agreed to work on the album in Sydney, attempting to mix the tracks at a local studio each night after the shows. But their ears were still ringing from the stage sound of that night’s gig – nothing sounded right. ‘After the show in Sydney we’d go down and mix the album. But, of course, that sucked as well,’ said Joe. After a couple of nights this plan was abandoned. This failure to progress only compounded the mutual tensions over the record. The Clash made a political move, having dinner with Paul Russell, the boss of CBS Australia. It had just been announced that Russell was moving to London to replace the retiring Maurice Oberstein as head of CBS in Britain, and they needed him on board. Despite their rebel posturing, the group was ever capable of being pragmatic.

  In tropical Brisbane, the capital of right-wing Queensland, an aborigine dancer joined the group on stage; then he came back to the hotel for dinner with the Clash, his presence causing a great upset with the staff; while there he received a phone-call that his home had been smashed up during his stage performance. Joe wrote a lyric about it, which was never completed; part of it ran ‘In Queensland state / they eat aborigine steak … ’

  After shows in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth (so hot that Joe collapsed onstage from dehydration), they were on another plane, heading for Hong Kong. Here they were again joined by Pennie Smith. Her task? To shoot the cover for the new album. The idea was to use this futuristic Asian city’s Blade Runner-like locations and neon Chinese calligraphy as a backdrop. The record company had asked her to shoot in colour: they wanted this fifth Clash record to be a commercial album. But the mood at the 28 February show hardly set the tone: mass fighting between Chinese and expatriate English in the audience broke out several times, and Joe had to stop the gig twice: ‘We’ve come all this way to play and all you want to do is fight.’ The Hong Kong date was a downer: let’s move on to the next setting, the final show, in Bangkok in Thailand, and do the record sleeve cover there, was the verdict.

  When the Clash arrived in Bangkok for their 3 March date at Thamasat University, they were amazed that ‘This is Radio Clash’ was the number 1 record in the country. Soon they learnt the chart position was completely bogus, an edict of the promoter.

  The venue at the university was an old cinema, with a substantial audience capacity, a crowd of locals and a few Westerners. All public entertainment in Thailand was obliged to begin with a performance of the national anthem. Accordingly, the Clash would have to dump their Ennio Morricone theme music and stand to attention while this was played. When Kosmo passed on this information, Joe – misunderstanding what he had heard – flew into one of those ‘quick rages’ that those around him had seen so often. ‘How the fuck are we going to learn the Thai national anthem in fifteen minutes?’ he demanded furiously. This final date of the Clash’s Asian tour was a resounding success. By the third number, ‘Safe European Home’, there was a stage invasion. A great night.

  The complexity of Hong Kong fired the poetry and anger inside Joe’s soul. (Lucinda Mellor)

  The group stayed in Thailand for seven days. For once they got to take a holiday. Kosmo Vinyl had secured them a deal in a new hotel development outside the city. This created a problem for Topper Headon: after being clean in Japan, he’d started using heroin again in Australia. Now, stuck in the Thai countryside, wher
e he would imagine he would easily score, he went into withdrawal. All he wanted to do was get back to London so he could connect with some heroin. Although others around the group recall Joe giving him a hard time over this, Topper claimed to have no recollection whatsoever. ‘He probably was, but I was too obsessed with scoring and withdrawing. The humidity was horrendous: withdrawing from heroin, it was like my arms and legs weighed a ton. I knew we were doing the photo-shoot for the album cover but I was ill and I had to get home. Joe probably was giving me a hard time but I was oblivious to it, which probably made his mind up even more. But the Thailand thing was really the first warning I had.’

  The picture session took place the morning after the Bangkok show. It had to be quick as Topper was booked on the next plane back to London. What the drummer didn’t realize was that in Thailand Joe was coming to the conclusion that Topper must go. ‘I’ve walked into rooms where the Clash were staying,’ said Pennie Smith, ‘and thought, “This doesn’t feel right,” but I’d never witnessed open hostilities. When I saw it all break down was round the time of the shoot in Thailand. It literally somehow dissolved before my eyes. There was no longer the same clump of people I knew in front of me. It was like doing pics of a new band. I thought, “I’ve got to construct this thing in front of me,” and before I never had. Something had gone wrong. It wasn’t an argument. There were a few snipes at Tops.’ ‘It did start to drag us all down, Topper’s drug thing,’ Paul said to me.

  There were good times in Thailand. A group outing to the bridge over the river Kwai satisfactorily ignited the ensemble’s sense of cinematic romance; there were taikwando boxing sessions; fuelled on the local Tiger beer, Joe and Kosmo danced on a bar with the establishment’s girls. Out with Pearl Harbor in the local streets, Paul bought a snack from a food-cart. The next day he was in hospital in agony, diagnosed as having a twisted colon, an emergency operation mooted as the only solution. (Eventually Paul’s supposed twisted colon was established as having been no more than a severe case of viral food poisoning.) As Mick sat in Paul’s room with him, he was impressed that Joe arrived with a local Buddhist monk, ostensibly to pray for Paul’s well-being. Instead, the monk took off his robes and disappeared into Paul’s en suite shower. Then he left. Under Joe’s guidance, further monks appeared; they also took off their robes, showered, and left. Later the group learnt that becoming a monk was a way of avoiding national service in the army, and the monasteries in which the monks resided were not known for their hygiene facilities. ‘Joe brought all these monks in. He was totally into it,’ remembered Pearl. ‘He was learning. Joe was always learning and exploring. He wasn’t interested in being cool all the time. He was definitely interested in exploring.’

  Back in Britain, after meetings with Muff Winwood, it was decided that Glyn Johns, the stellar producer who had worked with the Beatles, the Who, the Faces and the Rolling Stones, should be asked to remix the record. At the initial meeting with Johns, only Bernie, Kosmo and Joe were there; the sessions would take place at the producer’s own studio in Warnford, West Sussex. Glyn Johns, who neither drank nor took drugs, had no truck with all-night studio sessions: he worked regular daytime hours. Joe was there at the kick-off on the first day, an 11 in the morning start. Mick arrived at 7.30 in the evening and was confronted with myriad changes and deletions of ideas to which he had personal attachments. Glyn Johns had the rejected tapes hanging around his neck like a tie. ‘That’s my work,’ Mick complained.

  Although he disagreed with all the changes, he reluctantly went along with them. The vocals for ‘Know Your Rights’ and ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ were re-recorded. ‘Everything about them clashed,’ remembered Gaby of this time. ‘You’ve got strong personalities who can’t back down. Mick was very fixed. Joe could appear more charming, but he wanted it the way he wanted it. Strong personalities, who lose the same vision, means trouble.’

  In London, the film director Stephen Frears offered Joe a substantial film role as a gunman in his upcoming film The Hit, co-starring John Hirt. Frears said Joe was keen to take the part, but that ‘the others would kill me’. Instead, he suggested an impressive new actor, Tim Roth, whom he had seen on TV.

  On 2 April the news broke that Argentina’s fascist military junta had invaded Britain’s Falkland Islands, a desolate rocky outcrop in the midst of the icy south Atlantic. The response of Margaret Thatcher was to dispatch a ‘task force’ towards the islands. Before what became the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives had been fifteen points behind the Labour Party in the opinion polls; immediately after the British troops returned she won a snap election, setting the political tone in the UK for the rest of the decade. Joe responded to this war by personally changing the title of the new album to Combat Rock. After the British navy had sunk the Belgrano, an Argentinian troop ship stuffed with young recruits, a furious Joe wrote a poem that he called ‘Falkland Rock’.

  EXOCET! EXOCET! TWO ELECTIONS TO WIN! FIRE AN EXOCET!

  HAWKER HARRIER! HAWKER HARRIER! THE POLLS LOOK BAD! SO CALL A HAWKER HARRIER!

  SIDEWINDER! SIDEWINDER! THE VOTERS ARE WATCHING! LOAD A SIDEWINDER!

  A TASK FORCE! A TASK FORCE! GETS THE PEOPLE IN THE STREETS! A FINE TASK FORCE!

  SEVEN HUNDRED DEAD! SEVEN HUNDRED DEAD! WE ESTIMATE PUBLIC TOLERANCE! AT SEVEN HUNDRED DEAD!

  ‘Know Your Rights’, the first single off Combat Rock, backed by ‘First Night Back in London’, was released on 23 April. Three days later the Know Your Rights tour was to open in Aberdeen. But then took place one of the most extraordinary events in the complex history of the Clash: Joe Strummer went missing.

  The idea behind the disappearance had been a set-up, a Bernie Rhodes scam to hype up demand for tickets for the British tour, which was not selling out. Bernie issued a typical press statement: ‘Joe’s personal conflict is: where does the socially concerned rock artist stand in the bubblegum environment of today?’ Joe, said Bernie, had ‘probably gone away for a serious re-think’. What Bernie had suggested was that Joe should disappear to Texas, to stay with Joe Ely; Bernie was adamant that Joe should go on his own, leaving Gaby behind, and call him every day. ‘He couldn’t stand me,’ said Gaby. ‘He was weird with all women. Kosmo didn’t like me either. They all knew I could be passed off on some level as a dumb blonde and I had Joe’s ear – they were nervous around me. Joe always needed a sidekick and it had become Kosmo. Maybe I was in the way.’

  As though he had decided to show he really was his own man and not in thrall to his manager, Joe adopted an alternative strategy. He would vanish of his own accord, not telling Bernie where he was, and he would take Gaby. He really would disappear. He called his mother and told her not to worry about what she would hear about him. Then Joe and Gaby took the boat-train to Paris on Wednesday 21 April.

  Joe and Gaby after running the Paris Marathon – Gaby came last. (Richard Schroeder)

  ‘I had a friend who lived in Paris,’ said Gaby. ‘She had a little flat in Montmartre. As she lived with her boyfriend she gave us her place. On the third day we were at a restaurant and someone was talking to me and Joe gave me a furious look, to stop me talking about why we were there. I was pickpocketed, all our money was stolen and Joe got cross and told me I should go home – I didn’t. I didn’t have a passport or money. I had to go to the British embassy and they gave me travel documents. We just immersed ourselves in being Parisiens for a few weeks. We went on a little tour of Paris. I had a beret and we travelled on the Métro with copies of the newspaper articles about Joe being missing. After a while he grew a beard and had an army jacket, a disguise: the Clash were well known in France, Paris particularly. Joe took me to every museum and all the places every famous writer had ever mentioned. Rimbaud was his real hero. We ran the French marathon. Both of us. I came last in the race. We had a lovely time.’

  It was a classic romantic act. Would a pile of Joe’s clothes be found on a beach somewhere? (There was a brief rumour that his body had been found in the River
Clyde in Scotland.) In the real world, was Joe simply in hiding from all the pressure, worried and angry about Topper and fearful of the reception that Combat Rock would receive? In Britain the last Clash album had been savaged; now, having seized the reins on Combat Rock, the creative judgement of the increasingly mysterious Joe Strummer was about to be held up to public and critical scrutiny.

  On 14 May, while he was still in Paris, Combat Rock hit the shops. To a fantastic reception. It was loved by the music press, especially by the NME, whose earlier love for the group had seemingly turned to hate. Combat Rock raced up the British album charts to number 2. In the United States it was similarly adored.

  A twenty-three-date US tour was planned to start on 29 May at Asbury Park in New Jersey. The consequence of cancelling it, with the financial penalties that would be incurred, would be to plunge the Clash into bankruptcy. Bernie Rhodes’s piece of pop manager Svengali-ism was about to blow up in his face. But the Clash were also scheduled to play a one-off date on 20 May, at the Lochem Festival, outside Amsterdam in Holland. As news of Joe’s disappearance was by now common currency, tickets for the event were not selling well. Through a stroke of serendipity a Dutch journalist mentioned to the Lochem promoter that he had seen Joe Strummer in a bar in Paris. The producer immediately called Kosmo Vinyl, who phoned Gaby’s brother Mark Salter. Mark gave Kosmo the name of Gaby’s girlfriend in Paris, the one who had lent them her flat. Kosmo immediately flew out to Paris. That evening he walked into a bar where Joe stood, drinking. Kosmo looked at Joe, saw his beard. ‘Fidel!’ he laughed. They sat down and discussed the matter in hand.