Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  After Joe took his first ecstasy that Glastonbury weekend of 1995, he finally understood the attractions of dance music for Mick Jones. Soon he also returned to that love of other psychedelic drugs that had nurtured him during his squatting days with the 101’ers. Magic mushrooms were high on the menu, but also LSD, and the immensely powerful DMT, in the form of ayahuasca. Influenced by some of his co-conspirators, who were very partial to cocaine, Joe became a more regular consumer of ‘gak’, a street term of which he was fond. But in his drug consumption Joe was really caught up in the bombardment of illicit substances that swept Britain during the nineties. The beginnings of his own upward curve could similarly be seen as a reflection of an increasingly creative national mood: thanks to Britpop, UK music was once again on the upsurge. Oasis, Blur, Elastica and Pulp transformed the charts.

  Playing at Glastonbury in 1995 were both Oasis and Pulp, a particular favourite of Joe’s. ‘Somebody that Joe was very much a champion of, before they were famous, was Jarvis Cocker and Pulp,’ said Marcia Finer. Also on the bill were Elastica. Getting into the Glastonbury spirit was their guitarist, Antony Genn; possibly influenced by the acid he’d ingested, he divested himself of his clothes midway through the set. Joe’s daughter Lola was sitting on his shoulders; Joe leaned up and covered her eyes.

  For Joe Strummer Glastonbury 1995 was an epiphany. ‘They came back from the festival and Joe took me to the pub for a pint,’ said Dave Girvan. ‘He got halfway through his beer and spanked the glass down on the table and said, “We’re going back. I can’t stand these walls.” We went back to the cottage and Joe shouted up the stairs, “We’re going back.” I was amazed Luce did this without question. When we got there they’d already started taking the fences down and we drove into the darkness across the fields. Suddenly we heard a booming sound and found some sound systems and food stalls and fires burning.’

  As rekindled as one of his campfires, Joe then went with his Glastonbury crew to the annual T in the Park festival in Glasgow, and then to the Womad world music event organized every year in Reading by Peter Gabriel. I was not aware that he had gone there. I drove out to Womad on the second day, as the masterful Senegalese musician Baaba Maal was topping the bill that night. That morning I had been about to put on a favourite T-shirt, a rare one that bore the sticker for the Don Drummond single ‘Cool Smoke’ on the Jamaican Treasure Isle label, but had changed my mind. Parking my car at Womad, I stepped out straight into the path of Joe; he was wearing the very same T-shirt. We spent a moment discussing this. When the ticket office couldn’t find the pass supposedly waiting for me, Joe slipped me one of his own, and we were through the gate. He took me over to his campsite, where a log-fire was burning and cumbia was sailing out of a ghetto-blaster. Jason Mayall and Keith Allen were in attendance. Then someone stepped over: ‘Hello, I’m Damien.’ ‘I was introduced to Joe by Keith at Womad,’ said the artist Damien Hirst. ‘At about 4 in the afternoon at Womad I was twatted on all manner of stuff by the campfire and I lay down. Joe put a pillow under my head and a duvet over me. Joe turned into a hero. He was the only one who lived it like he talked it, through and through. My first question to Joe was, “Why aren’t you doing something?” He avoided it.’

  Long after it was due, Joe finally renamed Dave Girvan as ‘Pockets’, which required no explanation. ‘At Womad,’ said Pockets, ‘we met this guy who christened the Joe campfire scene Strummerville. Strummerville never really existed. But this guy got a load of T-shirts done, a black shirt with an orange print and a logo that said: “Strummerville: where the past mixes with the future.”’

  Also at Womad was Glen Colson, Keith Allen’s friend, a resolute non-taker of drugs. This stance earned Glen a scolding from Joe. ‘“There’s something wrong with you if you don’t do drugs, Glen,” Joe said to me. They all began to look like people from a Hunter S Thompson book, melting on psychedelic drugs.’

  ‘Womad was when Joe realised he had started something really,’ said Lucinda. ‘We had this fantastic campfire, with netting and fluorescent lights. We had been invited there by Donovan, who had the Master Musicians of Joujouka over for the festival. The Donovan connection was through his daughter, who was married to Shaun Ryder. We all went and watched everything. Keith Allen arrived with a Hammond organ. First of all we had the campfire with the musicians. At about one or two in the morning, Donovan was sitting around the campfire singing “Mellow Yellow”, when this voice breaks out, “It’s alright for you if you don’t have to work. Some of us have got to get up at eight o’clock in the morning.” Little sweet Donovan sitting there with the Master Musicians – all very gentle. And the following night at five o’clock in the morning Keith dragged the Hammond organ out into the middle of the field and started playing and nobody said a thing.’

  At Womad (in one of the subsidiary stage tents), Joe caught a set by vocalist Gary Dyson. Joe was taken by his spectacular light show and spent time talking to Gary afterwards; he told Joe that the following week he was heading to Peter Gabriel’s Real World residential studio in Wiltshire for ‘Recording Week’ – an annual event in which musicians from around the planet play together in a spirit of global creativity. Why don’t you come down? Gary suggested to Joe.

  Among the eighty or so musicians in residence to play at Real World Recording Week that year was Van Morrison. Also there was Richard Norris, the computer wizard behind the Grid, which he had formed with Soft Cell’s Dave Ball in 1988, earning success and credibility for their adventurous techno-dance music. At the beginning of the week ‘Norro’, as Joe would rename Richard, was hanging out on the grass outside the Real World main studio when ‘a van-load of reprobates with rather loud voices and loads of flags and instruments turned up. Joe was one of them. Suddenly he demands, “Is there anyone here who can program a drum machine?” I said I could, introduced myself, and started programming rhythms into the drum machine.

  ‘The Real World studio management were fairly vexed by the fact that Joe and a kind of floating posse had turned up. It was like, Here comes the freak show, with tents and flags – you know, usual scenario. But Peter Gabriel came over and appeased the studio manager and really welcomed Joe into the thing.

  ‘I hooked up with Joe and we cobbled together bits of recording, got some eight-track recorder from a studio, nicked some microphones from somewhere else, and then found a little cubby-hole to work in. I’d be playing acid house in one corner, there’d be the bloke from Living Colour on guitar, some Bengalis singing, and Joe with some shaker percussion shouting in the middle. We recorded lots of madness. Nothing came of it. At Recording Week it can get quite loose. We met, mucked about and had a laugh.

  ‘I realized Joe hadn’t really understood techno or dance music, hadn’t got his head round it. But now he was starting to understand it. When he did get it, he really got it, and we wrote a song, “Diggin’ the New”, which is pretty much about that, saying when you get it you don’t forget it. “Diggin’ the New” was about him going to Glastonbury and the various other places he’d been, like Real World.’

  Shortly after Recording Week, the Grid was scheduled to film a video in the hills above the Spanish resort of Malaga. Joe, Luce and Eliza, who had moved on to San José for their summer holiday, came over to join the shoot. ‘Joe and I kicked off straight away, and spent a bit of time together, chatting,’ said Pablo Cook, who played percussion with the Grid. Along for the holiday in San José were Paul and Tricia Simonon and sons, the Govett family, the Finers, and some new additions to the Spanish seaside throng, Don Letts and his partner Audrey de la Peyre and their children Jet and Amber. And, amazingly, Gaby with Jazz and Lola. ‘Only Joe could get away with the new and old there at the same time,’ said Don Letts. ‘What a geezer. In public it seemed remarkably cool. I couldn’t see an ounce of tetchiness from anyone. But then because Joe is there everyone is on best behaviour. But if he had been in that situation, Joe would have been the exact opposite.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Audrey,
‘that Don and I were more worried about how you dealt with this situation with these two women, Gaby and Lucinda, than they seemed to be. They were perfectly fine about it. Gaby was open and friendly. Joe was in superb spirits: he was in love. It was very hot and laid back. Joe seemed incredibly at home. He insisted he take us to high up in the mountains along a precarious coast road to this old hippy colony, where there was a bar. There was guitar-playing and good vibes. Wherever we went Joe always offered everyone a drink, and even called the people from the back of the bar to see what they wanted.’

  ‘Joe’s place was built around a communal swimming-pool, about four hundred yards from the beach,’ Don recalled. ‘Not ostentatious. The only other people around there were Spanish. A reasonable location, with a big Rasta flag flying above it. I couldn’t work out how to get there, because of the winding roads, but you could see the red, gold and green flag in the distance. A two-storey red terracotta house, very unassuming, not pop star business, but normal bloke business.

  ‘When he wasn’t doing the family thing, down on the beach with the kids, he’d be doing the Joe thing. He’d set up the spliff bunker in the garage, where he had four-track recorders and tape-machines. He got loose in the garage and would come on to the beach, do half an hour of the family thing, then run away. Joe took us to a bullfight: Oh dear!

  ‘The morning we were leaving I got a note through the letter-box from Joe saying it was so hot the tarmac had melted; my plane was cancelled. It wasn’t true. I missed that plane and got a later one. He didn’t realize to spend the money for that extra flight was a major deal.’

  ‘We came home,’ said Lucinda, ‘and the summer of campfires continued. We had met Pablo through Norro, and he started to come down to Hampshire, and the idea of making music started around the campfire.’ The philosophy of Glastonbury had really captured Joe’s soul. In future years at the festival, said Lucinda, ‘we would pitch an extra ten tents, just in case people didn’t have anywhere to stay. We were known for our stock-pile of spare Wellington boots, because Joe liked to be hospitable. “I know what it’s like to turn up cold and hungry,” he’d say. So we had to have plenty of water and booze, and it was always to give away. And Joe used to buy a lot of tickets for the hardcore posse. But he didn’t want them to know he had bought the tickets. He gave the impression he got them for free. Because they all had a thing about bunking in for free on principle. But Joe just said, “We’ve got a job to do here, to set this thing up.” Joe wanted the hardcore posse there, so he used to say we had the tickets for free, which we didn’t. The hardcore posse evolved initially from Bez, when he was in Black Grape. Actually, Kermit was the first one we met. We went to a Black Grape gig in Portsmouth. Kermit became a friend. Then we went to T In The Park and we met Bez. And Bez said to come up and stay and we went up and met Debs, his wife, and his sons, who got on with Eliza. They lived just outside Manchester in the Pennines. So we became family friends, if you like. Then they came to stay for a weekend, and we had a very gentle campfire. I think Norro was there. When we were in Manchester with Bez, we went to the Hacienda, and we got taken to all the Manchester places with the Manchester posse. They understood Joe, and Joe loved them. The Manc posse were very important to Joe. We used to go up there a lot, and they used to come and stay a lot. And again, not all drugs and going out: the kids got on.’

  That autumn Johnny Green, the former Clash tour manager, went to visit Joe in the country at Ivy Cottage. Johnny wanted to see Joe over a book about the Clash he was writing. Joe had called late one Saturday morning. ‘You coming over tonight?’ he demanded, as though this had been planned for weeks. ‘I wasn’t planning on it. But I can,’ replied Johnny, getting into his car and driving to Hampshire.

  ‘I can’t quite figure what is going on. There is this shed, about thirty yards from the little cottage. The door is open and I see a portable typewriter and that black Homburg he used to like to wear, covered in dust and spider-webs. “What good’s that, Joe?” I ask. “You never know,” he mutters. But that is the tip of the iceberg. I take a look in the shed. Everything is there, suitcases and black bags of stuff. I always knew he was a collector, but I didn’t realize he was a hoarder.’

  Joe announced they needed to go on a wood-foraging expedition. He wanted to build a campfire. ‘They’re good, these fires. I’m into them,’ he declared, collecting his axe. Johnny Green noticed something. ‘If Joe’s so into his fires, how come his axe is so crap and blunt?’

  When Johnny Green arrived at the house, Pockets was at the cottage; Joe introduced the two men. The three of them wandered over to Pockets’s pottery kiln, which lay on a slight rise. In view was a wide, tall mansion house. ‘It’s the fuckin’ Guinnesses,’ barked Joe, dismissively, like a bit-player in The Great Gatsby.

  Apart from Joe’s spliff accoutrements, there was no evidence of any greater drug consumption. ‘He doesn’t have any coke,’ said Johnny. ‘Just a load of booze – which I was off by then.’

  Late in 1994 the pop artist Gordon McHarg had decided at the end of the next year he would stage a major exhibition of his work. To complement his pieces he asked musicians he knew to come up with a tune based on the title ‘Sandpaper Blues’. ‘The idea was: “Sandpaper Blues – starts off rough, ends up smooth.” I was trying to move the art and music worlds closer together. By the time of the exhibition a year later I had thirty-six songs, and turned it into a double CD on sale at the exhibition.’ Included on the record were Maria McKee, John Mayall and Wayne Kramer. Joe Strummer was the only musician who used studio recording facilities from the off, writing his song with Richard Norris and Gary Dyson. On Gordon McHarg’s double CD the tune, which had a working title of ‘Another Fine Piece of Madeira’, a line from the song, was credited with the nom de disque of ‘Radar’ (Joe was fearful of the response of Sony, to whom he continued to be contracted). Joe’s ‘Sandpaper Blues’ was a successful melange of African and Latin influences; it contained the line ‘From the Yukon comes a cowboy,’ a reference to the Canadian Gordon McHarg’s stetsoned persona.

  As so often with Joe there was a sub-text over his recording of the song. He was using finances from his friend Masa Toshi Nagase, who played a Japanese rocker in Mystery Train: he had commissioned Joe to record a song for Vending Machine, an album of new material for Japanese release only.

  Booking a twenty-four-hour-a-day lock-out session for several weekends – all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday – at Orinoco studios on the Old Kent Road in South London, Joe decided that he would use Nagase’s money, around £15,000, to make an entire album with Richard Norris. ‘He’s got the money to do this song with Nagase, and he goes into the studio and records “Sandpaper Blues”. There was a giggle over that,’ remembered Gordon, who went to the sessions. ‘“Sandpaper Blues” is an attempt at a cumbia beat,’ said Joe later. ‘It’s way off beat, but it’s another cayenne pepper in the pot.’

  ‘In the studio he had flags and bits of material set up and draped around the recording booth,’ added Gordon. So some sort of spliff bunker was in place, an auspicious sign for Joe’s return to recording. ‘When Joe and his mates arrived at the studio, they turned it into their home,’ said Ian Tregoning, another computer wizard who worked with Richard Norris. ‘The first thing Joe did was get his flags up. He said we should live like bedouins. He thought bedouins were really cool – you make your home wherever you are. So we knocked up this vocal booth with flags on it: a real home-made job, but something that felt like Joe.’

  ‘I was renting a place in Devon at the time and Joe and Luce came to stay,’ said Damien Hirst. ‘After ten nights of conversations with him not saying what he was doing, and me demanding, “Why aren’t you doing something?” he finally pulled out a cassette. He played me four or five tracks – “Diggin’ the New” and “Sandpaper Blues” were among them. We were all on MDMA at the time. He took so long to play me this cassette. Maybe he couldn’t get a word in: I used to talk my arse off on drugs.’

  Between Se
ptember 1995 and March 1996 Joe recorded half a dozen new songs; the weekend sessions at Orinoco produced ‘Sandpaper Blues’, ‘Yalla Yalla’ and the bones of ‘The Road to Rock’n’roll’. ‘Diggin’ the New’, Joe’s celebration of his psychedelic summer, was developed at Sarm East on 12 November; at this same session Joe and his fellow workers devised ‘Boom or Bust’, a nearinstrumental on which Paul Simonon played bass, deemed the correct offering for Nagase’s Vending Machine project. ‘Yalla Yalla’ was worked on again at Berwick Street studios in Soho on 15 December. ‘The Road to Rock’n’roll’ was completed at the same studio early in February 1996. (‘The Road to Rock’n’roll’ had been written when Joe first met Luce. He had heard from Rick Rubin that Johnny Cash was looking for songs to cover for his American Recordings album. But when Rubin later introduced Joe to Johnny Cash in Hollywood, the great American archetype simply remarked, ‘You really confused me with that song, boy.’ Joe said he used it to woo Lucinda; in that context you can see the lyrics of the song as Joe laying out the route of his future from that point. And he’s doing more than that: Joe takes the notion of ‘rock’n’roll’ to a higher place, a journey towards a mythic, but attainable, quest.) Around St Valentine’s Day there was a weekend of recording at Joe’s Hampshire Woodshed, dedicated almost entirely to overdubbing, with the completion of ‘Yalla Yalla’ a priority. Integral to this re-immersion in music for Joe was the manner in which Norro took him out on the techno and dance scenes. ‘He was always very aware, listening to radio and reading the music papers. He had that band mentality of wanting to be involved in stuff. He realised the generation of dance people weren’t anti him at all: they thought he was fantastic. He loved Leftfield, a big fan. I went to a studio off the Harrow Road with Joe: Leftfield were there so we went and had a chat with them and heard some stuff. Joe was, “Play it again.” They were like, “Who’s this bloke making us play and rewind our tunes?” They didn’t realize until we left that he was Joe Strummer.’