Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  On 4 April Joe and Pablo Cook appeared at the Royal Festival Hall in London at the ‘Poetry Olympics’, playing an adaptation of ‘London Calling/London’s Burning’ dedicated to the Beat poet Michael Horovitz, Britain’s answer to Allen Ginsberg, for his sixty-fifth birthday. Among others on the bill were the renowned dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Mancunian punk poet John Cooper Clarke.

  In May, beginning in Dublin on the first of the month, Joe and the Mescaleros undertook a short tour, concluding with a Saturday night show at a sold-out Brixton Academy, where Joe had played with both the Clash and the Pogues. Standing a third of the way back from the front of the stage I watched Joe’s show with Mick Jones, noticing how he unselfconsciously mouthed his own backing vocal parts on the Clash songs Joe played. There was something indefinably profound as well as almost achingly humble about Mick’s doing this, just one of the audience, still a pop fan even when it was half his own work. This London show – which had a rapturous reception – also included the only performance by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros of ‘Sandpaper Blues’. Afterwards the dressing-room was packed to the gills. In a corner, tucked away on his own, no one speaking to him, I saw Joe. I hugged him and said I’d just come to pay my respects, but he pulled me to one side: ‘What’s it like in the bar?’ I told him it had cooled out considerably. ‘Good,’ he said. As though he really wanted to get away from the dressing-room madness, he slipped out with me to the bar. We stood crammed up against it and each had a brandy. Then Joe was swamped by people. I made my excuses and left.

  The Monday and Tuesday of the next week were taken up with rehearsals and recording of a slot by Joe and the group for the Later with Jools Holland BBC 2 TV series, produced by Mark Cooper who oversaw the Glastonbury recording at which Joe had attacked the cameraman’s lens. Although Jools accompanied the performances of the inevitable ‘London Calling’ and ‘Yalla Yalla’ with his trademark boogie-woogie piano, Joe immediately went to the mixing booth to request this be removed for the actual broadcast. (This didn’t stop Joe from writing and recording a track with Jools, ‘The Return of the Blues Cowboy’, for his 2001 release, Small World Big Band, a compilation album with assorted luminaries.)

  Martin Slattery announced that he and his girlfriend Kirsty were getting married in their home town of Manchester on 2 June, an opportunity for another Big Day Off. Following the wedding ceremony in Manchester Town Hall, a party was thrown in the building itself, featuring the ‘Manc’ posse. At a nearby Ramada Inn the post-nuptials continued, Joe still buying bottles of champagne for the assembled crew at 10 a.m. the next morning. ‘Someone went down for breakfast at about 11 o’clock and Joe was still at the bar,’ said Martin.

  At the end of the month, on 30 June, the group was booked into an open-air event in Italy, the Jesolo Beach Bum Festival in Venice, with Eels, Gene and Reef. Ant Genn, whose narcotic hobbies had taken precedence, did not turn up. ‘It was bad behaviour to miss the gig,’ he admitted. Conflicted about what to do, Joe was unable to come to a decision. ‘When I spoke to Joe about it,’ said Pablo, ‘Joe said, “Well, we can’t do anything about it, because that’s what happened with Topper, wasn’t it?”’ ‘Ant was my mate,’ said Damien Hirst, ‘but I said to Joe, “Throw him out.”’ Finally Joe did come to a decision about his writing partner; he made a phone call to Antony Genn. ‘He called me up in late July 2000 and said, “It’s time we parted company.” I thought he was saying we should split the band up. I said, “I think you’re right.” I then realized he was saying that he thought I should leave the band. But I did say that before I went I would like to play the two festivals we were booked in for.’

  ‘The Ant sacking,’ said Lucinda, ‘came sort of out of the blue inasmuch as although it was on the cards Joe seemed to put up with him for an awfully long time, when as far as a lot of us were concerned he should have been given the push. Joe certainly said to me that Ant’s addiction was his cross to bear and as long as it didn’t affect his musicianship Joe wasn’t going to sack him. He didn’t really discuss it with me. Just said one night that it had to be done, and he did it. He said on more than one occasion he had always regretted sacking Topper, and I’m sure that played a large part in his thinking.

  ‘Before he was going to sack Ant – which I didn’t realise he was going to do – he just went into a quiet space. He sat up all night, running through all the permutations of the arguments – he could predict what he was going to say, and the counter-arguments that he would come up with. If you had an argument with Joe, he always won: he’d say, “I’m always right – except for when I’m wrong.” But he would think it through, and had an answer for everything without squashing you or belittling you.’

  On 19 and 20 August Joe and the Mescaleros were set to play the two legs of the V Festival, the event for which Simon Moran had originally contacted Joe. There was a warm-up date at a club in Leicester, at which, although Antony Genn had taken steps to control his heroin intake, everything else was on the menu, making evenkeeled Martin Slattery declare Ant ‘an embarrassment’. Ant promised he would not drink more than five pints before he went onstage for the V Festival shows.

  ‘Joe came up to me on the bus,’ said Martin, ‘and said, “I want you and Scottie to produce the next album.” When he said that, Ant was upstairs. I thought, “Hang on, Joe, I’d love to do it, but let’s sort the situation out first.” Joe was a strong man, and a great guy, but not good at tying up loose ends.’

  Yet Joe did not permit Ant’s behaviour to sway him from his habitual course. The second V Festival was in Chelmsford in Essex, twenty miles to the east of London. The previous night the group had checked into a nearby hotel. ‘In the morning,’ said Pablo, ‘I thought, “What’s that smell? I know: it’s wood smoke.” I could see Joe in this tiny bit of woodland in the hotel car park. He’s sitting by a fire and he’s got a bottle of red wine and a spliff on the go. So I went and sat down there. Then Scott and Marty came over, and we were sitting there, pissed before lunchtime. By this time the hotel security has come running out – we’ve got a full-on campfire: “You can’t do this. What are you doing?” Joe went: “I’m Joe Strummer. We’re doing a video.” They said: “Where’s the crew?” “They’re coming later. We’ve got to set it up.” “What video?” Joe goes: “Oh, it’s a cover of a Paul Weller song. It’s called Wild Wild Wood.” “Oh, OK, all right.” Then Joe adds: “They said they were going to send some drinks over for us.” The next thing, the security guys are bringing drinks over.’

  Although Ant had promised he would limit his pre-performance drinking, he said nothing about how much he might consume onstage. During the course of the Mescaleros’ V Festival show in Cheltenham he downed another six pints: ‘That was between numbers in a forty-five minute set, so there was only about a second for each one: straight down the hatch.’

  ‘What happened with Joe and Ant,’ considered Pablo, ‘was a sort of love affair. But within the love affair they got a bit bored with each other’s behaviour.’

  By the time the tour bus trundled back into London, it was 21 August. It was the early hours of the forty-eighth birthday of Joe Strummer. One chapter of his life had ended; another had just begun.

  27

  CAMPFIRE TALES

  2000–2002

  Later on the day of his forty-eighth birthday Joe flew to Spain, to his regular holiday spot of San José. Lucinda was already there, picking him up from the airport. In San José Joe would worry he might run over some of the local children playing in the streets. Accordingly, he drove everywhere extremely slowly, his warning lights permanently flashing. But that year the waggish Damien Hirst decided to play a prank on him. Hiding behind a bush, when Joe approached in the vehicle the artist sprang out and leapt across the bonnet, tumbling over the other side. Until he realized who it was he had ‘knocked down’, Joe was horrified.

  Joe and Lucinda returned to England on 31 August. On 11 September Joe went up to London to record his final series for the BBC World Se
rvice. Ten days later he and Lucinda flew to New York for the first major opening in the US by Damien Hirst. Afterwards Joe, Damien, Keith Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Bob Gruen and many others spent the night busking on makeshift instruments around SoHo’s chic restaurants; in the repertoire was an almost nursery-rhyme version of ‘White Riot’. ‘In 2000 and 2001,’ said Lucinda, ‘there was lots of hanging with Damien and Maia, either at theirs or at Yalway, and the diary dates seem to merge into one continual campfire.’

  ‘I associated Joe with taking loads of drugs, though it was only in the ’90s he’d really been into them,’ said Damien. ‘He loved E. But I’ve given him one and found him palming it and putting it in his pocket, saying he’d keep it for later.’

  Although ‘differences of musical opinion’ is a standard music business euphemism for ‘sacked’, in the case of Joe and Ant there genuinely were creative divergences. Many of these hinged around ‘modern’ notions of recording and stagecraft: Joe was uncomfortable with the onstage tape machine used on ‘Yalla Yalla’, one of the very best Mescaleros’ songs, and with the devices required for ‘Techno D-Day’ and ‘Tony Adams’. ‘Joe wanted it to be much more organic,’ said Martin Slattery, who operated them during live work.

  That autumn Joe and his group returned to Battery Studios in Willesden to begin recording what would become Global a Go-Go. ‘It must have taken us less than a week to get into starting at 8 in the evening and leaving at 9 the next morning,’ recalled Martin Slattery. ‘I want a gang mentality in the studio,’ Joe ordained. As Joe had suggested, Martin and Scott seized the reins and – with Pablo Cook on percussion and Smiley Bernard on drums – drove the sessions along, aided and abetted by engineer Richard Flack. ‘We’d throw some stuff down,’ said Martin, ‘then each of us would have half an hour or so to see where it would go. That album is an experiment from beginning to end.’

  Attempting to return to his musical roots – those of busking, perhaps – Joe iconoclastically insisted the songs be based around guitars and keyboards rather than the rhythm section. ‘I don’t want any drums. Hit a waste-bin instead,’ Joe demanded. Drumming on the songs was generally added on after the number was near completion. ‘That’s why the tracks go on for so long,’ said Martin. ‘“Shaktar Donetsk” is based around a wacked-out sample that Richard found, which me and Scott jammed to for over thirty minutes. A lot of the playing on the record is a first take.’ Joe frequently left the musicians to their own devices. ‘Joe’s not there a lot of the time,’ remembered Martin. Joe would sequester himself away in his spliff bunker, writing lyrics or meditating on life. Lyrics occasionally came about in an organic way. Walking down Willesden High Street on a break from the studio, Joe was approached by a young New Zealander who had just stepped out of a taxi from Heathrow airport. He inquired of Joe if he knew anywhere where he could buy some ‘mushy peas’, the side dish of mashed processed peas that is a staple of fish and chips. Unfortunately this connoisseur’s favourite is a northern speciality, a rarity in London. This led to ‘Bhindi Bhagee’, a song that was a meditation by Joe on the ethnic mix of the capital as seen through its stomach. When the New Zealander appreciated who he was talking to, he was staggered. Joe, the perpetual gatherer of waifs and strays, took him to the studio, inviting him to return on another day. When he did he was more staggered to find Joe had written a song in which he had become the protagonist.

  Joe would record the musicians’ sessions on his Fisher-Price child’s cassette-recorder before stealing away to write the lyrics. ‘It sounded really chunky and analogue on that machine,’ said Martin. ‘It allowed him to sometimes say, “It sounded much better three hours ago.”’ Every night he would roll in at about 5 a.m. to see how things were going. ‘Almost always he would walk in and stick his thumbs up and be really pleased and very encouraging. “I’m so happy, guys. This is the greatest music I’ve ever made. Do whatever you want and I’ll sing on it.” We were willing to do anything for him.’

  Would they have been so willing if they had known that Joe had an alternative scheme for the new album? He had sent Mick Jones half a dozen sets of lyrics, asking him to turn them into songs. ‘I did it in about a week,’ said Mick. ‘He’d sent me some before and I hadn’t got on with it, and he’d been pissed off. What he wanted to do, he said, was make an alternative album with me. He said he wanted to do it when Martin and Scott had gone home – they mustn’t know about it. I told him he’d better think about the logistics. I sent him the songs – they were really good. Then I didn’t hear any more.’

  On Sunday 8 October Joe enjoyed a diversion from the recording sessions at Battery. Michael Horovitz was promoting a further ‘Poetry Olympics’, at the Astoria. What Joe was not expecting was that as he walked through Soho he would run, as though apparently by chance, into the man who had introduced him to live playing, as a busker – Tymon Dogg.

  After Joe had worked with Tymon Dogg on several of the Sandinista! sessions, he had then gone into the studio with him, financing a Tymon solo album, Hollowed Out, recorded with producer Glyn Johns. Tymon decided not to release the record: ‘I move on.’ The tapes languished on Joe’s landing. The pair did not link up again until 1998, when Joe had gone to a memorial evening at the Acklam Hall for Maurice ‘Mole’ Chesterton, the bass-player with the 101’ers who had died. ‘When I met Joe at Mole’s thing the first thing he said to me was, “Have you heard that album again yet? You might like it.”’

  Now Joe asked Tymon, ‘Where are you going? Come with me. Where’s the violin?’ ‘About a mile away in the back of the car,’ said Tymon. ‘Go get it!’ said Joe. As at the Poetry Olympics six months previously, Joe had turned up with Pablo Cook to provide percussion and backing vocals. He immediately enlisted Tymon and his violin into his act. Unexpectedly, after a backstage conversation, the line-up was augmented by another performer on the bill: Martin Carthy, the celebrated British folk guitarist, a friend of Bob Dylan during his British sojourn in 1962.

  ‘That event displayed Joe’s open-hearted stance and brilliant group-feel musicianship,’ said Michael Horovitz, ‘in the way he brought others, notably Martin Carthy, on stage and created a spontaneous jam session, which for my money compared favourably with the one filmed by Scorsese in The Last Waltz. He was always terrific fun to be with. We were soulmates, and fellow cultural revolutionaries from different genre places.’

  Joe performed a short set, only three numbers: ‘Island Hopping’, off Earthquake Weather, ‘Silver and Gold’ and an acoustic version of ‘White Riot’ on which Keith Allen and his daughter Lily joined in. ‘When Joe came offstage at the Astoria,’ Tymon told me, ‘he said he had enjoyed singing that night more than ever before. I said, “Why?” He said, “Because I could hear everything I sang, and I felt like everybody else on stage was listening to me.” He’d always worked in electric rock, so he’d never realized how much he could enjoy the vulnerability of an acoustic performance. Joe had always been a singer-songwriter, like those performers in the early seventies, and I think he was beginning to realize that’s what he was.’

  Following this performance the assembled company then retired to the nearby Colony Room, the tiny upstairs members’ bar in Dean Street that had once been a favourite of the painter Frances Bacon and the poet Dylan Thomas. In the Colony, watched by a packed crowd including Mick Jones, Joe, Pablo and Tymon played for a further forty-five minutes. But this was just the beginning: when Joe returned to Battery the next day, it was with Tymon Dogg, now a member of the Mescaleros.

  The arrival of Tymon significantly shifted the demographic of the group. Whereas previously Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros had signified an-older-bloke-with-a-bunch-of-young-blokes, now Joe had an ally of his own age, someone who literally knew where he was coming from. As though indicating the various archetypal roles on offer, Martin Slattery’s father had once studied in a Catholic seminary with Tymon. Like Martin and Scott Shields, Tymon was a consummate multi-instrumentalist: on what was to become Global a Go-Go he would play vi
olin, electric guitar, Spanish acoustic and mandolin. It seems no coincidence that in its loose and complex sprawl Global a Go-Go is the Joe Strummer solo record that is closest to the feel of the Clash’s Sandinista!, on which Joe also worked with Tymon. Yet – as with Sandinista! – the tone had already been set before his arrival. ‘In its roots of music and variety,’ said Dick Rude, ‘Global a Go-Go was the only other time, after Sandinista!, where Joe spoke of a recording coming from absolute spontaneity.’

  After Tymon had been with Joe in the studio for a week, out of the blue Joe tossed him a request: ‘Can you come on tour with us?’ Like a flashback to the US stadium dates of 1982, the Who were to tour Britain, and the Mescaleros had been booked as support. Almost immediately Joe began to change his mind about playing the shows. ‘We’re writing a song a day, I don’t want to break the spell,’ he said, concerned. Late on a Sunday afternoon, Joe, Pockets and Tymon retired to an Indian restaurant in Willesden High Street. Joe was restless and awkward as he mentally sifted through the reasons for playing the tour; the fact that he was legally contracted was weighing on his mind, but there was also something else: ‘I’ve got to get up and play “London Calling” for the fifty thousandth time when I’m coming up with something really great here in the studio.’

  Tymon had a suggestion. ‘Why don’t you go on the Who tour and use it as a rehearsal space for these new songs?’ After a moment, Joe came to a decision. ‘OK, we’ll do that. But we start the gig with you playing the violin on “Minstrel Boy”.’ That first week at Battery, Joe had got Tymon to join in on violin on this traditional Irish tune, as he had taught a version of it to Martin Slattery, Joe throwing in scat lines. The version they played had been at least twenty minutes long; Tymon had begun to add experimental effects. When Joe suggested the song as a set-opener, Tymon was concerned. ‘I thought, You’re kidding. You want me to play that old tune in front of a load of punks waiting for “White Man”?’