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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ