Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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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