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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 what we were setting out to do, and Topper came along later, when our attitudes were already set in stone. It’s like Topper said in Don’s documentary, Westway to the World, he thought he’d play with the Clash for a bit and use it as a stepping-stone for the rest of his career. He had a different attitude to it all.

      ‘But the Clash really was made up of Mick with his rock-star attitudes, Joe with his hippy beliefs, and me. And I was out there on my own: I wasn’t caught up in anything. I didn’t even really have any friends, only Nigel from Whirlwind.

      ‘I was angry at the time when it all came to a halt. It seemed such a waste. But now I’m glad we stopped at a point when we were about to be mega-huge and enormously rich. I’m glad we never re-formed. We proved we could come through it all. None of us were casualties, even though we came close to it. We came out the other side and survived, and people still love our music. Twelve year olds love the Clash now, so we must have done something right.’

      Up on Raasay, Paul and I return to the site of Umachan with a guide, the ranger who looks after Rebel Wood. In fact, we had been right all along about the location of the settlement. The ranger shows us how we should have gone backwards along a trail to go forwards, a lesson in Highland zen. When we finally round a sheer mountain cliff and find Umachan a hundred yards in front of us, a lonely and haunting place, a tiny hamlet of eight homes, we rush through the ferns. On the scurrying high winds a golden eagle sails past us, its wings seeming to wave to us from the solitude in the sky, before it disappears behind a headland.

      Among the ruins that have been reduced almost to rubble since the settlement was abandoned during the 1930s, Angus Gillies’s house is still standing, although its heather roof is long gone. A sturdy building, it is clearly the largest of those in the settlement, with an intact chimney gable and upper window. In the fireplace, Paul places a gift to the building, a copy of the Clash On Broadway boxed set, which sits like an icon amidst the rubble. There are two rooms on the ground floor – the smaller second room was used for keeping livestock warm in winter. In the late September sun the building’s pink sandstone is warm, vibrating with pulses of energy. The house is held together with lime mortar – beach sand – which allows moisture to be absorbed. Above it is a small, flat pasture. In front, towards the sea, a hundred yards below, is a walled-off yard, where kale and potatoes were grown to supplement the salt herring that was the staple diet of the islands. Out of the rear wall grows a red-berried rowan tree, which legendarily keeps away such bad spirits as witches. In this house was where Joe’s grandmother Jane lived.

      Paul Simonon immediately sets up his easel and starts work, slipping off his jeans jacket and his shoes, which have been giving him blisters. As he stands painting in his white V-neck T-shirt, grey Levi 501s and bare feet Paul seems to be method-painting, swaying and rocking and feeling with the elements. He always paints standing, physically getting into it. ‘I act as a conduit: it’s not really me painting. I just stand there and something goes on, and it ends up on the canvas,’ he says.

      In the sunlight the view across the sea of the mainland and the Applecross mountains is awesome. A lone yacht ploughs the water, edging the coastline, bounced back almost vertically by each crashing wave, a warning. Suddenly the weather changes. Thick dark-grey cloud gusts across the mountaintops. The view vanishes as we are engulfed in a haze of instant mist. It starts to piss down: thick, drenching rain direct from a Scottish heritage film. Struggling with the billowing wind, Paul even more assiduously straps his canvas to the easel.

      The only spot in the roofless house to give any rain protection is in the shadow of the gable. When his canvas is running with rainwater, Paul brings it down to the house and slips it into the fireplace. Our guide produces a flask of malt whisky, mint tea, chocolate cake; we also consume a Joe Strummer Memorial Spliff. Our conversation veers to the practical: where did Joe’s ancestors keep the house whisky still, common to every Highland croft? Paul reveals that in his mid-teens he and his father had gone on holiday to Skye, hitch-hiking the seven hundred miles from London.

      When the downpour eases, Paul picks up his canvas and steps back out again into the blustery fray. But the elements are simply too extreme for any more work. Again, he stashes his canvas in the fireplace, next to the Clash boxed set, turning the painted side away from the wind and rain. On the back, in red paint, he adds a warning note: Back later! Paul!

      For travellers heading up the east coast of Scotland, Bonar Bridge, birthplace of Joe’s mother Anna Mackenzie, was the crossing-point over the Kyle of Sutherland – looking at the map it is the last significant indentation on the coastline. Nestling on the north bank of the estuary, the east of the area still hosts the ancient woodland planted by James IV to replace the oak forest that had been decimated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the village’s iron foundry. Five miles from Bonar Bridge is Skibo Castle, the scene in 2000 of the wedding of Madonna to Guy Ritchie; at the handyman shop in Bonar Bridge the stepladders were all sold out, having been bought by paparazzi photographers trying to snap pictures over the wall of the castle. At Spinning Dale, on the edge of Bonar Bridge, the actor James Robertson Justice lived overlooking the water; when Joe’s Aunt Jennie worked for him there was a certain amount of local gossip after he was once alleged to have pinched her on the bottom. Nearby is the battlefield at which the Marquis of Montrose was defeated in 1650, forcing the later Charles II of England to accept the Scots’ demands СКАЧАТЬ