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

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СКАЧАТЬ made us walk to the 100 Club from Chippenham Road,’ remembered Jill Calvert. ‘It was a long walk, a couple of miles, and a hot night, the beginning of that long hot summer. This was where Bernard floated his interest in Joe. He bought us a drink – Joe only had half a lager – and we sat at the back at a table as he talked to Joe about what he was doing and about forming the Clash: he made a direct approach to him there and then. We were very excited. After he’d had this conversation with Bernie we left quite soon – as though it had been done, and we wouldn’t want to hang around. Joe seemed very enthused.’

      To help him make up his mind about whether or not to leave The 101’ers for this new group, Joe consulted his copy of I Ching, the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’. Throwing three coins six times to show him which of the Ching’s 64 hexagrams to consult, the answer he was given was ‘stay with your friends’. ‘He conveniently decided,’ said Paul Buck, ‘that his “friends” were The Clash. But it was an extraordinarily hippy way to decide to join a punk group’.

      When Paloma returned to London, her enthusiasm for Joe rekindled, she moved in with him at Foscote Mews for a short while, unaware that he’d decided their relationship had finished. Because of this confusion Joe felt obliged to leave Foscote Mews and he temporarily moved back to Orsett Terrace. ‘We were having problems between us,’ Paloma said, ‘so I went for a couple of months to a farm in Scotland, with Gail Goodall and Mole. We kept in touch on the phone. During that time punk happened. When I came back I’d seen the light and wanted to be with him. But he’d moved out of Orsett Terrace. I took a bus to the ice-cream factory. There I saw a bunch of people looking punkish. Mick Jones was one of them. They said he was in a pub. I ran up to him and put my arms around him. He was very serious and said, “I’m going to be a punk rocker.” But as we talked he changed and we were back together. But it was never the same – I was insecure. He moved back to Orsett Terrace. Then we both went to the ice-cream factory. He said he wanted us to have an “open” relationship.’

      Paloma remained there and, as Jill Calvert put it, ‘formed the Slits in a rage. She’d never been into music in that way before. She took up the drums: she thought, If you can do it I can fucking do it. Then some of the Slits moved into Foscote Mews – Ari Up, the singer, and Viv Albertine, the guitarist.’ Paul Simonon – unusually, not Joe – renamed Paloma ‘Palmolive’, the name by which she became known in the Slits. ‘When Joe started coming over to my mum’s place,’ said the then fourteen-year-old Ari Up, ‘he never came with Paloma. When she asked me to form a group I didn’t know he was with her. He taught me guitar. It was hard to learn guitar on Joe’s Telecaster: it was hard to press down. He’d only speak with a joke or two. He was always fingering his guitar. Just chords. He was like a guiding star, but very quiet. He was like a brother to me. He never tried to come on to me.’

      Those around Joe at the time feel that his behaviour towards Paloma was part of a Year Zero approach to life, as though in some form of Stalinist revision he was writing out large parts of his past. On 26 May, the day after that meeting with Bernie Rhodes at the 100 Club, Joe had gone to see Clive Timperley at his squat in Cleveland Terrace. ‘Strummer came round to my flat. He said, “I want to do this punk thing and I want you to come with me.” He was talking about it as though it would be within the 101’ers. He spent the whole day with me convincing me of the direction he wanted 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 СКАЧАТЬ