Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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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.
By now Mickey Foote had moved out of Orsett Terrace and was living with his girlfriend in Sebastian