Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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Название: Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer
Автор: Chris Salewicz
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007369027
isbn:
A familiar figure on the streets and in the bars of Notting Hill, Joe Strummer was mired – as he later admitted to me – in depression. He tried acting, with a passable role in Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell (1987), and a minor part in the same director’s Walker (1987), for which he also wrote the music; he made a much more significant impression in 1989, playing an English Elvis-like rocker in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. That same year he released an impressive solo album, Earthquake Weather, and toured. But apart from briefly filling in as singer with the Pogues, he was hardly heard of again. For a time Tim Clark, who now manages Robbie Williams, attempted to guide his career. ‘He was obviously in bad shape,’ Clark told me. ‘He’d turn up for meetings the worse for wear. You could see he was going through a bad time, but you also felt there was probably no one he could really talk to about it.’
After moving out of Notting Hill to a house in Hampshire – he had become worried about his two daughters, he said, after one of them found a syringe in a west London playground – he subsequently split up with his long-term partner Gaby. Remarrying in 1995, to Lucinda Tait, and moving to Bridgwater in Somerset, Joe seemed to find a relative peace. He formed the Mescaleros and began recording again, releasing two excellent albums, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style (1999) and Global A Go-Go (2001), that title a reflection of his interests in world music, about which he presented a regular show on the BBC’s World Service. Strummer was once again touring, incessantly and on a worldwide basis: he was playing to sold-out audiences, with a set that contained a large amount of Clash material. ‘All that’s happening for me now is just a chancer’s bluff,’ he told me in 1999. ‘This is my Indian summer … I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke. I’m far more dangerous now, because I don’t care at all.’
One of Joe Strummer’s last concerts was at Acton Town Hall last month, a benefit for the Fire Brigades Union. Andy Gilchrist, the leader of the FBU, was apparently politicized after seeing the Clash perform a ‘Rock Against Racism’ concert in Hackney in 1978, and had asked Strummer if he would play the Acton show. That night Mick Jones joined him onstage, the first time they had performed live together since Jones had been so unfairly booted out of the Clash. ‘I nearly didn’t go. I’m glad I did,’ said the guitarist, the poetry of that reunion clear to him.
Bitterly critical that the present Labour government has betrayed many of its former ideals, Joe Strummer was delighted at the show for the firemen; a smile came over his face at the idea that, if only tangentially, his former group was still capable of causing discomfort for those in power. His death, however, comes as a deep shock. After considerable time in the wilderness, Joe Strummer seemed to have reinvented himself as a kind of Johnny Cash-like elder statesman of British rock’n’roll, a much-loved artist and everyman figure. ‘I still thought he’d be doing this in thirty years time,’ said his friend, the film director Don Letts.
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R.I.PUNK
2002
Christmas Day 2002. Driving through south London, I am wondering if Joe Strummer had known how much people loved him. Pulling up at traffic lights, I glance to my left; there, spray-painted across a building in large scarlet letters, seems to be some sort of answer to my meditations: JOE STRUMMER R.I.PUNK. I call Mick Jones and leave a message, telling him what I’d seen. Joe’s funeral, eight days after he died, polarized all my thoughts and feelings. The following day I wrote this:
Monday, 30 December 2002
The sky is a slab of dark, gravestone grey; rain belts down in bucketfuls, leaving enormous pools of water on the roadside: Thomas Hardy funeral weather. Ready for the funeral’s 2.00 p.m. kick-off, I find myself at the entrance to the West London crematorium on Harrow Road. A voice calls to me from one of the parked cars: it is Chrissie Hynde and Jeannette Lee (formerly of PIL, now co-managing director of Rough Trade, a punk era girlfriend of Joe). Chrissie is clearly in a bad state. ‘Not great,’ she answers my question.
On the main driveway I bump straight into the music journalist Charles Shaar Murray and Anna Chen, his girlfriend: he looks fraught. It is pouring with rain. I take a half-spliff out of my jacket pocket and light it, take a few tokes, and hand it to Charlie. Out of the hundreds of hours I had spent with Joe I don’t think I had been with him on a single occasion when marijuana had not been consumed, so it seems appropriate, even important, to get in the right frame of mind to be with him again.
The spliff is still burning when I see massed ranks of uniformed men. Not police, but firemen, two ranks of a dozen, standing to attention in Joe’s honour. With Charlie and Anna, I walk between them. Standing under the shelter of a window arch I see Bob Gruen, the photographer, and walk over to him. We hug. Then Chrissie and Jeannette arrive; Jeannette and I hug. Soon Don Letts also arrives. I roll him a cigarette.
Suddenly it seems time to walk inside the building, into the main vestibule. That’s where everyone has been waiting. I see Jim Jarmusch, who directed Joe in Mystery Train, Clash road manager Johnny Greene, and – next to him – the stick-thin, Stan Laurel-like figure of Topper Headon. We hug; there is a lot of hugging today. Against the wall I see an acoustic guitar, covered in white roses, really beautiful. In its hollowed-out centre is a message: R.I.P. JOE STRUMMER HEAVEN CALLING 1952–2002. A large beatbox, next to it, is similarly covered in white roses. All the seats in the chapel are full. I find a gap against the rear wall. A lot of people are snuffling.
Then the sound of bagpipes sails in through the door, lengthily, growing nearer. (Later I learn that the music is The Mist-covered Mountains of Home, also played at the funeral of President John F Kennedy.) At last Joe’s coffin slowly comes in, held aloft by half a dozen pallbearers. It is placed down at the far end of the chapel. Keith Allen, the actor and comedian, steps forward and positions a cowboy hat on top of it. There’s a big sticker on the nearest end: ‘Question Authority’, it reads, then in smaller letters: ‘Ask Me Anything’. Next to it is a smaller sticker: ‘Vinyl Rules’. On the sides of the coffin are more messages: ‘Get In, Hold On, Sit Down, Shut Up’ and ‘Musicians Can’t Dance’. Around the end wall of the chapel are flags of all nations. More people are ushered in, like the kids Joe would make sure got through the stage-door at Clash gigs, until the place is crammed. In the crush I catch a glimpse of Lucinda, Joe’s beautiful widow: she carries herself with immense dignity but – hardly surprisingly – has an aura of almost indescribable grief, pain and shock. People are standing right up by the coffin. The aisle is packed: suddenly a tall blonde woman, looking half-gorgeous, a Macbeth witch, is pushed through the throng, to kneel on the stone floor at the front of the aisle – it’s not until later on that I realize this is Courtney Love.
The service begins. I don’t know who the MC is, a man in his late fifties, a vague cross between Gene Hackman and Woody Allen. He’s good, tells us how much love we are all part of, stresses how honoured we are that our lives were so touched by Joe, says that he’s never seen a bigger turn-out for a funeral. (There is a sound system outside, relaying the proceedings to the several hundred people now there.) Then he says we’ll hear the first piece of music, and we should turn our meditations on Joe: it is ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’.
Paul СКАЧАТЬ