Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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east and west coasts of the isle of Raasay, three miles apart.
Tough, gritty, awkward, dangerous, an astonishing terrain of primal, pure, mysterious beauty … It is little surprise that one of the descendants of Raasay – John Graham Mellor, known to those outside his blood family as Joe Strummer – has many of the same qualities as the island itself. Although he’d marked it in his diary for the summer of 2003, Joe himself never made it to Raasay; in the years immediately preceding he had been making a conscious effort to reacquaint himself with the Scottish roots on his mother’s side, an effort to redeem the previous thirty or so years when he admitted he had neglected this part of his past. ‘I’ve been a terrible Scotsman, but I’m going to be better,’ Joe said to his cousin Alasdair Gillies at the wedding of their cousin George in Bonar Bridge, three weeks before he died.
To the east, across the deepest inshore water in Britain, sits the mainland of Scotland and the mountain peaks of the Applecross peninsula, rising to over 2,000 feet and tipped by streaks of white quartzite. Opposite it, down towards the Raasay shoreline, lies our destination. Paul Simonon and I are here to find the earliest known home of Joe Strummer’s Scottish ancestors: the rocky, heathery, hilly path that at times we have to hang on to with our fingertips that we are following is the same one that Joe’s grandmother, Jane Mackenzie, would have taken to school. Donald Gilliejesus (‘servant of Jesus’), a stone mason, from near Mallaig on the Scottish mainland, arrived to repair Raasay House, destroyed by English Redcoats after ‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie hid on the island in 1746 following the Jacobite Rebellion against the English crown. The house at Umachan was built in the early 1850s after the Gillies fled from the ‘clearances’ – the savage requisitioning of small-holdings by landowners – on the south of Raasay. Built by Angus Gillies, the great-grandson of Donald, it was inherited by his son Alastair Gillies. The second of Alastair’s ten children was Jane, born in 1883; Joe’s grandmother would walk barefoot to school along the same path Paul and I had clung to.
We head sharply down, across a lazy burn, past further cairns of stone. On our right there is what appears to be a natural amphitheatre, and a clearly evident ancient burial mound rising out of the greeny-brown terrain. Finally we are standing amidst waist-high bracken on a precipitous ledge, looking down on where we have been told Umachan should be. Between us we have distributed Paul’s canvases, paints and an easel, which have become a burden: we hide them in some undergrowth. Paul, something of a gourmet, tells me how in London he had popped into Bentley’s Oyster Bar in Swallow Street for a dozen oysters and a bottle of Chablis whilst buying the hiking shoes he’s wearing; it’s a long way from heating up flour-water poster-paste on a saw to eat, as Paul did in the early days of the Clash at Rehearsal Rehearsals. But a nourished belly and well-shod feet can only mark us out as the useless city slickers we are: we can find no trace of the home of Joe Strummer’s ancestor.
At a quarter to one, lunchtime on Friday 12 September 2003, my phone rings. It is Paul Simonon. ‘I think you’d better pack your bag, Chris. On Sunday I’m going up to Raasay off the Isle of Skye to do a painting of the house Joe’s grandmother used to live in. You should come with me.’
The Scottish Herald has commissioned Paul to paint a landscape of Rebel Wood, the forest on the Isle of Skye dedicated to Joe Strummer. Paul Simonon is the only member of the Clash to have carved out a non-musical career; returning to his original love of painting, and utilizing contacts he caught along the way as a member of such a prestigious British group, he has made a name and money as a figurative painter. Paul has agreed to paint the wood, but also will supply what he believes is a better idea: a picture of the ruined house in Umachan on Raasay. Iain Gillies, Joe’s cousin, had told us about these ruins.
As I am to discover, our expedition forms part of an experience that will bring some form of ending to the former Clash bass player for the thoroughly unexpected death of his former lead singer. During our time together, Paul emphasizes on several occasions that Joe was his brother, ‘my older brother’.
Every year film director Don Letts and his wife Grace throw a garden barbecue at their Queen’s Park home on August Bank Holiday Monday – a sort of refuge for the over-forties and under-tens from the Notting Hill carnival taking place a mile or so to the south. At the event in 2003, eighteen days before he made that Friday lunchtime call to me to come up to Scotland, I’d last seen Paul Simonon. The smaller 1976 Notting Hill carnival, when black youths and police had violently clashed beneath the elevated Westway in front of Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, had led to the writing of ‘White Riot’, one of the most contentious songs in the Clash’s canon of work, a tune that at first – before people understood that its lyrics expressed the envy of white outsiders that black kids could so successfully rebel against the forces of law and order – led to suspicions that the group had a fascist political agenda. The 1976 event and the Westway became part of Clash mythology.
In the early days of the group Paul had always seemed shy. In 2001, however, when I had written the text for a picture-book about the Clash by Bob Gruen, the New York photographer, I had been surprised by a change that had overcome the group’s former bass player; as Bob Gruen and I went through hundreds of photographs with each of the group members, he was by far the most articulate. Mick was as warm as ever, but his comments were more jokey and less specific; and although Joe had insisted to Bob Gruen that I should write the text for his book, he surprised me by being the worst of the three interview subjects. Perhaps the photographs, which encapsulated almost the entire span of the career of the Clash, drew up too many memories; he ended up by saying he would write captions himself – and never did. Global A Go-Go, his second CD with the Mescaleros, was being readied for release and Joe was exhaustively – the only way he knew how to anything – promoting it; I could feel tension from Lucinda, on the couple of occasions when I rang up and spoke to her, trying to press Joe to come up with some text. A couple of months later, in the upstairs office that served as a dressing-room at the HMV Megastore on London’s Oxford Street, where Joe and the Mescaleros had just aired the new Global A Go-Go songs to a housefull crowd, he came up and apologized to me for not having come up with the goods.
‘It’s fine,’ I said, telling him I’d used quotes he’d given me over the years. ‘I know you had a lot on your plate, and we came up with something anyway.’
‘But you shouldn’t let down your mates,’ he shook his head at himself.
Anyway, in Don Letts’s back garden it dawned on me that – contrary to everything that you might have expected in 1977 – even before Joe’s passing Paul had become the spokesman and historian of the Clash. At Don’s home that August evening he was especially communicative and open and seemed to feel an urge to talk about the group.
Paul Gustave Simonon was born on 15 December 1955 to Gustave Antoine Simonon and Elaine Florence Braithwaite. Gustave, who preferred to call himself Anthony, was a 20-year-old soldier who later opened a bookshop; Elaine worked at Brixton Library. As happened to Mick Jones, Paul’s bohemian parents split up when he was eight; he and his brother were taken to Italy when about ten, where they lived for six months in Siena, and six months in Rome. There his mother took him to see all the latest Spaghetti Westerns – not just Sergio Leone, but all the Django films also. In London, Paul moved to live with his father in Notting Hill. His father, once an ardent Roman Catholic churchgoer, joined the Communist Party: ‘Suddenly we’re being told we’re not going to church any more. I’m being sent off to stuff leaflets for the Communist Party through people’s letterboxes in Ladbroke Grove. You can imagine what it was like: all these rough Irish or West Indians, hanging out on the steps, and I’m coming up to their letterboxes: “What’s that you’re putting through there?” “Oh, it’s just something about the Communist Party.” Then I figured out, if my dad was such a passionate Communist, how come he was sitting at home and sending me off to do this?
‘The Clash was a bit like the Communist Party,’ Paul free-associates, drawing up mention of manager Bernie Rhodes, ‘with Bernie as Stalin. We were his playthings. Bernie is a total original, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what he is – he’s absolutely unique.
‘What happened to Topper,’ he brings up the subject of the firing in 1982 of Topper Headon, ‘was that Mick, Joe and myself had an absolute belief in