Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

Eaten by

101’ers Tymon Dogg

Louis The Jeep (Late Bar Toilets)

Co-starring Clowns Fire-eaters Idiots MC Philipe 4-speed

record-player

Dog-fighters bullitt and trouble

The Dancing Pirana Sisters featuring Pirana Custard and

Romero – solo – Dave The VD

The Beatles. Rob on insults. Bouncers Dylan and Wiggin

Foote and Boogie

+ Largest Flapjack in the World + a Nigel

The Miserable Circus

The poster was designed by Helen Cherry. Joe, she said, was very pleased with it: ‘He really, really liked it and I got a big pat on the back. He said, “Helen, a lot of people came to see it and we made a lot of money because of your poster.”’ In retrospect, the entire concept of the evening seems from a very specific world indeed, like a fantasy of an idealized San Francisco of 1967, certainly an event from another, more innocent time.

Which it was about to be revealed to be.

The next night, 3 April, the 101’ers played what must have seemed merely another date, at the Nashville Rooms, next to the tube station in West Kensington. The support act? The Sex Pistols. Glen Matlock, the bass-player and songwriter, had gone to Acklam Hall. Backstage he found Joe Strummer trying to tune his guitar. ‘Ah, the Sex Pistols,’ he said to Glen. ‘We’ll see how it is tomorrow night.’

Joe did see. And everything changed.

11

I’M GOING TO BE A PUNK ROCKER

1976

For Joe Strummer the show the next day at the Nashville Rooms was an epiphany: ‘As soon as Johnny Rotten hit the stand, right, the writing was on the wall, as far as I was concerned. We’re top of the bill. And we’re sitting in the dressing-room and then they walk through it to get to the stage and they just came through in a big long line. And I saw this geezer in a gold lamé Elvis Presley jacket at the end of the line as they walked through. So I thought, I’m going to see what these guys are like. So I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “That’s a nice jacket you’ve got on there.” And he turned around and it was Sid Vicious. And he went, “Yeah, isn’t it? I’ll tell you where I got it. Do you know that stall up at Camden? Blah blah blah.” And he was like dead friendly, he was such a nice guy. He didn’t have to cop any attitude. And they looked so great that I knew this was something great. So I went out in the audience and sat down.

‘There was perhaps thirty people lying around, you know. And they came out and they just, just cleaned me out. They came out, with like, I don’t fucking care if you like it or not, this is it. If you don’t like it, piss off. It was that difference. They were like a million years ahead. I realized immediately that we were going nowhere, and the rest of my group hated them. They didn’t want to watch it or hear anything about it. So I started sort of going off to the punk festivals and getting into the whole thing. Eventually it tore the whole band apart.’

Woody Mellor as Joe Strummer. Letsgetabitarockin’! (Joe Stevens)

Nearly three weeks later, on 23 April 1976, the Pistols again supported the 101’ers at the Nashville. I was there that night, and saw something different, the controversy meter measuring the Pistols rising several significant degrees. The venue was packed – Mick Jones, Tony James, Dave Vanian, Adam Ant and Vic Godard were all there, plus a few journalists, as well as Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Bernie Rhodes. Always unpredictable live, however, the Pistols did not play a good show. To liven things up, Vivienne Westwood slapped a girl’s face right in front of the small stage. In the resultant uproar, both McLaren and Rotten – who had leapt from the stage into the audience – got into a brawl with the girl’s boyfriend. In fear, the rest of the audience backed off; it was the strangest thing many of them had ever seen at a supposed ‘pop’ show: there was no frame of reference whatsoever into which to fit this incident. From now on, violence would be a constant subtext of punk rock.

The same day as that second Pistols/101’ers’ Nashville gig saw the release of The Ramones, the first album by the group that was creating a mythology for itself in New York as a kind of Lower East Side set of cartoon-like dunderheads. Although it contained fourteen songs, the LP’s total running time was less than twenty-eight minutes. ‘The Ramones were the single most important group that changed punk rock,’ said Tony James. ‘When their album came out, all the English groups tripled speed overnight. Two-minute-long songs, very fast. The Pistols were almost the only group who stuck to the kind of Who speed.’ As the 101’ers were already, by Joe Strummer’s definition, playing ‘rhythm’n’blues at 100 miles per hour’, you might feel he was ideally suited for such a shift. That was the opinion of Bernie Rhodes, who had again studied Joe onstage at both Nashville gigs, and talked to him briefly after each performance – though he wasn’t quite ready to tell him about the plan fermenting inside his ever-active brain.

Joe had not entirely cast aside the chains of establishment rock-’n’roll. From 21 to 26 May the Rolling Stones played at Earl’s Court arena, and Joe took Pete Silverton along with him. ‘He was a sporadically generous human being, but we had the worst seats in the house, absolutely awful. Joe says, “We’re not sitting here.” We get up and we walk down to the front, past all the bouncers, to within ten feet of the stage, and we find some seats. We were ambiguous about the Stones: this is the most fantastic band ever, but we know this is not their greatest period, and we’re sneering a bit because they’re not what we want. This is even before punk and the rhetoric about dinosaur bands.

‘We were in front of Bill Wyman, who is poker-faced as he plays. Joe spent all the time trying to get Bill Wyman’s attention, and he eventually managed. He kept calling out: “Bill! Bill!” He was determined to make Bill smile at him. Which he eventually did.’

Part of an oft-repeated myth of the formation of the Clash is that Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Glen Matlock came up to Joe one Saturday afternoon following the second Nashville show; they were alleged to have said to him, ‘We like you, but we don’t like your group.’ When I once asked Joe if this happened, his reply was immediate: ‘No, not really. I did see them in the Lisson Grove labour exchange, signing on the dole one day. They were staring at me funny, and I thought, I’m in for a ruck. But they were only staring at me ’cause they’d seen the 101’ers playing the week before at Acklam Hall under the Westway. I don’t remember meeting them in Portobello Road.’

Although he hadn’t as yet spoken to him, Joe noticed Mick Jones in the audience at another Sex Pistols’ show that same week as the Rolling Stones’ concerts, on 25 May 1976, the third date by the Pistols in a Tuesday night residency at the 100 Club. At the beginning of May, Mick Jones had started playing with Paul Simonon, Keith Levene, a singer called Billy Watts and, briefly, with Terry Chimes on drums, with whom he had already tried to work the previous autumn. At this time Mick Jones and Paul Simonon were living in a West London squat at 22 Davis Road on the edge of Shepherd’s Bush and Acton.

Now resident in London, Iain Gillies remembered Jill Calvert saying Joe was so into the Pistols she didn’t think the 101’ers would continue. ‘I went to some party in North London at this time with Jill, Mickey Foote, Boogie, Richard Dudanski, Joe and some others. The party was in quite a straight house but Glen Matlock was there with some other Pistols’ hangers-on. There was a very noticeable atmosphere that came off the 101’ers’ and Pistols’ people and it seemed to me there was a new thing about to happen.’

When Joe Strummer went along to that Sex Pistols show on 25 May at the 100 Club, a small basement venue at 100 Oxford Street in London’s West End, he took Jill Calvert with him. Jill had just helped him open another squat, in a former ice-cream factory in Foscote Mews, close to the Harrow Road. Joe’s move to Foscote Mews seemed largely impelled by his decision that his relationship with Paloma was coming to an end, and that therefore he should depart Orsett Terrace. It was not Joe but Paloma that had set this process in motion. She was temporarily in Scotland having had doubts about the viability of their relationship and needing time away.

‘He said to me, “Come with me and hear this group,”’ said Jill Calvert. ‘He knew it was going to be a pivotal moment because he insisted I dress up. He had slicked-back hair, a leather jacket and was reasonably clean – he had had his trousers tapered by then.’

‘I met Bernie,’ Joe told me, ‘when the Pistols supported the 101’ers at the Nashville Rooms. But then I really met him at the 100 Club regular punk nights when the Pistols played.’

‘Joe made us walk to the 100 Club from Chippenham Road,’ remembered Jill Calvert. ‘It was a long walk, a couple of miles, and a hot night, the beginning of that long hot summer. This was where Bernard floated his interest in Joe. He bought us a drink – Joe only had half a lager – and we sat at the back at a table as he talked to Joe about what he was doing and about forming the Clash: he made a direct approach to him there and then. We were very excited. After he’d had this conversation with Bernie we left quite soon – as though it had been done, and we wouldn’t want to hang around. Joe seemed very enthused.’

To help him make up his mind about whether or not to leave The 101’ers for this new group, Joe consulted his copy of I Ching, the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’. Throwing three coins six times to show him which of the Ching’s 64 hexagrams to consult, the answer he was given was ‘stay with your friends’. ‘He conveniently decided,’ said Paul Buck, ‘that his “friends” were The Clash. But it was an extraordinarily hippy way to decide to join a punk group’.

When Paloma returned to London, her enthusiasm for Joe rekindled, she moved in with him at Foscote Mews for a short while, unaware that he’d decided their relationship had finished. Because of this confusion Joe felt obliged to leave Foscote Mews and he temporarily moved back to Orsett Terrace. ‘We were having problems between us,’ Paloma said, ‘so I went for a couple of months to a farm in Scotland, with Gail Goodall and Mole. We kept in touch on the phone. During that time punk happened. When I came back I’d seen the light and wanted to be with him. But he’d moved out of Orsett Terrace. I took a bus to the ice-cream factory. There I saw a bunch of people looking punkish. Mick Jones was one of them. They said he was in a pub. I ran up to him and put my arms around him. He was very serious and said, “I’m going to be a punk rocker.” But as we talked he changed and we were back together. But it was never the same – I was insecure. He moved back to Orsett Terrace. Then we both went to the ice-cream factory. He said he wanted us to have an “open” relationship.’

Paloma remained there and, as Jill Calvert put it, ‘formed the Slits in a rage. She’d never been into music in that way before. She took up the drums: she thought, If you can do it I can fucking do it. Then some of the Slits moved into Foscote Mews – Ari Up, the singer, and Viv Albertine, the guitarist.’ Paul Simonon – unusually, not Joe – renamed Paloma ‘Palmolive’, the name by which she became known in the Slits. ‘When Joe started coming over to my mum’s place,’ said the then fourteen-year-old Ari Up, ‘he never came with Paloma. When she asked me to form a group I didn’t know he was with her. He taught me guitar. It was hard to learn guitar on Joe’s Telecaster: it was hard to press down. He’d only speak with a joke or two. He was always fingering his guitar. Just chords. He was like a guiding star, but very quiet. He was like a brother to me. He never tried to come on to me.’

Those around Joe at the time feel that his behaviour towards Paloma was part of a Year Zero approach to life, as though in some form of Stalinist revision he was writing out large parts of his past. On 26 May, the day after that meeting with Bernie Rhodes at the 100 Club, Joe had gone to see Clive Timperley at his squat in Cleveland Terrace. ‘Strummer came round to my flat. He said, “I want to do this punk thing and I want you to come with me.” He was talking about it as though it would be within the 101’ers. He spent the whole day with me convincing me of the direction he wanted to go in. “Maximum impact,” he kept saying. He wanted me to make more of an effort as a performer on stage. But that’s not me. So that was the end of it for me. I didn’t feel bad. I realized where Strummer was going. I didn’t realize Bernie had approached him already.’

On 30 May the 101’ers played the Golden Lion at Fulham Broadway, with pub-rock favourite Martin Stone deputizing for Clive Timperley – he had also stepped in to help out at a show at Bromley College two days before. ‘Bernie Rhodes turned up at the Golden Lion with Keith Levene and I went outside and stood at the bus stop with them and he sort of said, “What you gonna do?” And I said, “I dunno,” and he said, “Well, come down to this squat in Shepherd’s Bush and meet these guys,” and Keith was nodding, saying, “You’d better.”’ In 1989 Keith Levene claimed to Jane Garcia in the NME that it was he who recognized the full potential of Joe: ‘Joe used to wear zoot suits and just go fucking mad all over the place. He was always so great to watch.’ Joe later declared that initially he had been convinced to leave the 101’ers by meeting Keith: ‘In those days people looked really boring, and Keith looked really different.’ Bernie Rhodes had his own viewpoint: ‘Nobody gave a fuck about Joe Strummer until I got hold of him.’

‘Bernie Rhodes came over to me the next day with Keith and said, “Come with me,”’ Joe told me. ‘Then he drove me down to a squat in Shepherd’s Bush. They were squatting in a place above some old lady’s flat: Mick, Paul and various crazies. He said, “I think you should join this group.” We started to rehearse that afternoon.’

Joe told me that the first song he remembered attempting to play with these new musical allies was ‘One-Two-Crush on You’, a song already written by Mick Jones that featured in early group live sets, released as the B-side of Tommy Gun in 1978. ‘The day Keith Levene brought Joe round to Davis Road, we were all terrified,’ said Mick Jones. ‘He was already Joe Strummer, he was already somebody. We’d seen him do it, what we hadn’t done. It was a big deal getting Joe Strummer. We did seem to just start straight away. We might have had a cup of tea first. It was, “We’ll show you our songs,” and we already knew he had some songs and that was it … The next time he came round he was in the gear and everything, he was already part of it, he was there.’ ‘We was expecting Joe,’ said Paul Simonon. ‘We were sitting in the living room area, me and Mick, then Keith turns up with Joe. So we got into the rehearsal room, which is a box, about five foot by five foot – it was cramped. Mick played a couple of songs and then Joe played one – we alternated back and forth. The fact that he’d turned up, that made a statement: “Well, this is it: we’re going from here onwards together.” That was the first day of the Clash.’ ‘“I’m So Bored with You” was the first song we worked on together,’ said Mick. ‘Definitely. He famously changed it to “Bored with the USA”. Before we did that we played “Protex Blue” to him, about the condom machine in The Windsor Castle, a pub off the Harrow Road. He went, “That’s pretty good. Let’s get to work.” That was the first day.’

Suddenly Joe felt validated. ‘The whole thing was really great from the beginning of 1976 when I met them and we took off, all the way through that. My dreams were like carnivals, my mind would churn over and over in my sleep ’cos of the decisions, throwing in one thing and another. Everything was being tried and experimented, it was just great. It can’t be like that all the time but it’s great when it is.

‘We knew it was going to be good. You know that certainty when you don’t even bother to think? That certainty was with us and I’m glad of it. We knew that this was it. Finally I thought, We’ll show those bastards. They’d been ignoring us, and when we got big reviews it seemed like we deserved it.’

When he learnt that Paul Simonon was essentially a non-musician, and that he learnt the numbers note by note from Mick Jones, Joe did have some initial reservations: ‘He couldn’t play. It phased me a bit at first ’cos I’d been through two years of all of us learning to play [in the 101’ers]. We couldn’t really play either but we could kind of hang our chin together. When I heard that Paul couldn’t play at first, I thought, Well, it slows you up. But then I got on with Paul so well and he just picked it up. In three weeks he could play as much as we needed. Well, he could play as good as me in about three weeks, yeah.’

Paul Simonon brought with him another set of inspirations to the collective. ‘By the end of the 101’ers we were wearing drainpipe trousers,’ Joe told Mal Peachey. ‘And this might not seem significant to many people. But in a world of flares, drainpipe trousers were the equivalent of shaving your head and painting it orange – it really stuck out. If your trousers weren’t flared, then you were into the new age, the new world, and so the 101’ers had a kinda grunge look. I suppose now you could describe it like that, like we were just filthy squatters. But with Paul Simonon and Mick Jones – very, very flashily dressed people – I mean, that’s what took my eye. I think Paul already had his hair dyed blond and spiky tufts. And it was so much more glamorous than the norm.

‘It was Paul Simonon who really gave the look to the Clash, and kind of led us into … Well, we had to make our own clothes – that was one difference I have to say between the Clash and the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols had McLaren’s boutique, and he was able to feed his clothes to the group. But with Bernie in charge of us, who’d split apart from Malcolm, we were in the situation where we had to make our own clothes. Paul Simonon was really instrumental in this, because he was an artist at the time, as he is now. It was Simmo who got into flicking the clothes with paint [inspired by the drip-painting method of the American artist Jackson Pollock], and then we started to paint words on them. I think it was Bernie who suggested putting words [on them], because he was into that situationist theory stuff, and it has to be stressed none of us were intellectuals, or are … But a large part of it for me was the look as well as the sound. A new world was taking over, and I mean we wouldn’t stop. It was a twenty-four-hour experience, day or night, either writing songs, or making clothes, getting into records. It was a full-on thing.’

‘Joe looked funny when we first met him,’ said Mick. ‘He didn’t look quite right. We already looked the part, committed to this new thing. We gave him some trousers and a jacket and did it up a bit for him. He started to look right straight away. He had quite short hair at that time, dyed blond. Standing at the bus stop, opposite Davis Road, I was thinking, He’s starting to look all right. But he had all this stuff that we didn’t have, the stuff that we looked up to – just the fact that he was doing it and making an impression, playing to people in public. All our projects had hardly involved any public excursions. Up to that point.’

For now Bernie Rhodes wanted an assurance that he had made the right decision in selecting this singer for the group. He checked out his choice with Glen Matlock. ‘When he got Joe Strummer into the Clash, he asked me what I thought of him. “He’s all right,” I said, “but he’s a bit old.” “Don’t you worry about that,” said Bernie, “I’ll have ten years off him.” And he did. Next time I saw Joe he looked maybe not ten years younger but certainly a totally different man and ready to rock.’

‘My take on Joe Strummer is this,’ Bernie Rhodes told me. ‘Before we met, Joe and I, he had a dilemma: he was dissatisfied with himself and his life. He took on the role of Woody, but then he met me and I shook his life into the future. Joe didn’t want to be Woody, he wanted to be me. And that’s how he became an international success.’

When Joe Strummer returned home from that first visit to Davis Road, Iain Gillies was waiting for him: ‘He came back in the evening and was in a state of high excitement, running on adrenalin, pacing non-stop around the ground-floor rooms. The others at Orsett Terrace had to follow him from room to room. Joe and the 101’ers were supposed to be having a meeting about the state of the band. But there was no band. It was a fait accompli – Joe was leaving.’

The 101’ers had one last gig to play, a show south of London on 5 June 1976 at the Clare Halls, Haywards Heath in Sussex. Although Martin Stone was again deputizing on guitar, Clive Timperley turned up to add his instrument on this valedictory performance. Then it was all over.