Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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that it was perplexing and funny that Joe wanted to have it and intended to wear it on stage. He said that Joe had many times previously declared that he’d never wear a suit.’
Pete Silverton resumed: ‘Joe was also wearing co-respondent shoes. He had his hair swept back and he’d got sideburns. His hair’s dark, because he’s greased it, I guess: his natural hair colour is dishwater blond, standard English. It’s the only time I’ve walked into somewhere and gone, “This man is a star!” I remember them playing “Gloria”, with him climbing all over the amps. Joe moved with a strange staccato grace on stage. It wasn’t very big, the Hope and Anchor stage, but he was duck-walking across it. In the music he was playing and in his moves on stage he was obviously stealing a great deal from films of 1950s’ performers. My girlfriend at the time thought Joe was really sexy. I never saw him as a ladies’ man at all but he had a sort of sexy appeal.
‘The songs were also fantastic. It’s nearly all original stuff, but derivative. Joe realized that there were a lot of great songs out there – you could just rewrite them and redo them. By now he had started to be caught up in the thrill of what he was doing, but he was faced with the problem that the 101’ers couldn’t really get anywhere, so there were tensions already in the band. The conflicts in the 101’ers were very clear. Joe is not the most musically literate person in the world. But he had a fantastic rhythmic sense, even though he could barely play the guitar. He was very passionate, but he could get very depressed.’
In October 1975 Jules Yewdall and Mickey Foote had ‘opened’ a new squat at 42 Orsett Terrace, a road of tall, well-appointed terraced houses with stone staircases near Royal Oak tube station. In the basement of the property the 101’ers set up a far more professional rehearsal studio than at Walterton Road. But at Orsett Terrace there were worries about burglaries: the next-door house was occupied by a gang of junkies. ‘Joe hated the idea of junkies,’ recalled Jill Calvert. ‘He thought it was a hopeless existence. I see his own depression as slightly complex, because I think some of the time he was acting: he could act the part of his depressed self. He was also able to escape from it. I know people who are depressed and don’t function. So I would call him a functioning depressive.’
At World’s End, the unfashionable end of the King’s Road, there was some cultural movement. Malcolm McLaren and his wife Vivienne Westwood ran Let It Rock, an arcane boutique, much of whose wares were designed to shock or irritate. McLaren had managed the New York Dolls at the tail-end of their careers; while he had been in the USA, Bernard Rhodes, a friend of his and Vivienne’s, had nurtured another scheme: a group that consisted of the shop’s Saturday boy Glen Matlock and a pair of Shepherds Bush musicians, drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones, along with a shortlived character called Wally as vocalist. Since the previous year they had been nagging McLaren for help; all he had provided so far had been a name, the Sex Pistols – after Let It Rock had been renamed Sex.
But in August 1975 Bernard found a scrawny youth from Finsbury Park in north London called John Lydon who walked into Sex wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words ‘I hate …’ added above the group’s name. Rhodes invited Lydon to come to the nearby Roebuck pub; he auditioned for the Pistols by miming to the pub’s jukebox. ‘Bernie definitely influenced the start of the Pistols,’ Lydon told me in 1980. ‘He got me in the band.’ Bernard Rhodes was adamant that his name was ‘Bernard’ and not ‘Bernie’ – ‘I’m not a taxi-driver.’ Naturally everyone therefore called him ‘Bernie’.
In October 1975 the 101’ers played five times at a former country and western venue called the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington. In the audience one night was Mick Jones and a friend called Tony James. Jones was a guitar-playing art student who had been born in Brixton; after living with his grandmother in a tower block off the Harrow Road, he had moved in 1975 to a small flat in Highgate – though he would soon move back to the tower block. Soaked in pop culture, Mick Jones had felt that it was his destiny to become a rock-’n’roll musician: ‘I’d known since I was ten that this was what I would do with my life. It wasn’t so much ambition as what I knew I had to do.’ But even though he had devoted most of his time on a degree course at Hammersmith Art College to playing the guitar, the fulfilment of his fate had not at first been easy. He’d been in a group called the Delinquents, followed by one called Little Queenie – though he fell out with them. Through Little Queenie he met Tony James, a bass-playing maths student who had placed an advertisement in Melody Maker to form a group. Now Mick Jones and Tony James were trying to start up a group called London SS, one of the great mythological acts of all time, a legend only enhanced by the fact that they never played a single show.
At that 101’ers gig at the Nashville in October 1975 they found that they hated the group, who seemed to this style-obsessed pair to be an archetypal pub-rock outfit. But they were extremely impressed with the singer. At the gig that evening – on which there was clearly a propitious convergence of energies – they ran into a short, bespectacled man with an extremely protuberant nose. This was Bernard Rhodes.
Mick Jones was wearing a pink T-shirt he had bought from Sex that bore the legend ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on.’ And so was Rhodes. ‘We said, “Go on, stand over there in that T-shirt,”’ remembered James. ‘“Fuck off!” replied Rhodes. “I made it.”’ Impressed, the pair fell into conversation with this gnome-like fellow, who gave them their first information about the Sex Pistols. Mick Jones later said: ‘I thought he looked like a piano player. He seemed like a really bright geezer. We got on like a house on fire.’
For £1,000 Malcolm McLaren had bought a rehearsal studio in Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley. ‘Mick and I went to see Malcolm at the studio,’ said Tony James. ‘The Pistols were there. We both had really long hair.’ McLaren took them for a meal at which they were both extremely taken with his vision. ‘He told us what would happen,’ remembered James. ‘That a group would come along and completely shake up the music business and alter things utterly. And it all came grizzily true.’
McLaren didn’t recognize the potential talents before him. But Bernard Rhodes had set about looking for a group of his own, after McLaren had turned down his request for a half-share in the Pistols. So the pair arranged a more thorough meeting with Bernie Rhodes, telling him of their plans to form a group called London SS. ‘Bernie made us go up to the Bull and Bush pub in Shepherds Bush to meet him, which was unbelievably rough and dangerous,’ remembered James. ‘As soon as he got there he slapped all this Nazi regalia on the table: “If you’re going to call yourself London SS, you’ll have to deal with this.” We hadn’t thought at all about the Nazi implications. It just seemed like a very anarchic, stylish thing to do,’ admitted James.
Following their meeting with Rhodes, Mick Jones and Tony James placed an advertisement in Melody Maker: ‘Decadent 3rd generation rock and roll – image essential. New York Dolls style.’ Jones was still living in Highgate and it was the phone number of this address that was given in the advert. James lived in Twickenham, at the physically most distant end from Highgate of the 27 bus route: every day he would take the two-hour ride to Jones’s home, where they would both sit anxiously by the phone.
Only half a dozen people replied – one was a singer from Manchester called Steven Morrisey, though nothing came of this. Jones and James were extremely taken with the very first response: Brian James, a guitarist with Belgian group Bastard. As the duo deemed necessary, he was stick-insect thin; after meeting the pair, Brian James went back to Brussels to quit his group.
Beneath a café in Praed Street, Paddington, Bernard Rhodes found the London SS a rehearsal room. ‘When we started working with Bernie, he changed our lives,’ said James. ‘Up to then we were the New York Dolls, and had never thought of writing more than “Personality Crisis”. I remember sitting in the café upstairs with Bernie and saying I had an idea for a song about selling rockets in Selfridges. He liked it. But he was thinking of nuclear rockets and I was only thinking of fireworks. He said, “You’re not going to be able to do anything unless you give me a statement of intent.” It was artspeak. He’d give us reading lists: Proust, books on modern art – it was a great education. He also used to pull a sort of class