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JOE STRUMMER
My father was at a very junior level in the Foreign Office and he only became
a British citizen two years before I was born. He had been born in India,
and his father worked on the railways but died when my dad was very young,
so he grew up in orphanages in India. His father (my grandfather) was
English but his mother was Indian; he studied hard at school and won
scholarships and ended up in the Indian Army during the Second World War.
When the war ended he came to London, passed his exams for the Civil
Service, met my mum, joined the Foreign Office and was posted to Ankara -
which is how I came to be born in Turkey.
After Turkey we were posted to Mexico City, then Bonn in what was then West
Germany, before I was sent to boarding school in England.
Boarding school in those days was very militaristic. There were uniforms for
the boys and penalties for not wearing a cap. I ran away when I was 9 with
this other guy and we got about five miles away before a teacher was sent
out, and they found us. I remember being taken back to the school and the
vice-headmaster coming out and shouting at us for not wearing our caps and I
was thinking: “You idiot, do you really think we're going to run away with
our caps on?” I couldn't believe it.
There was a lot of bullying, and I was one of the principal bullies. I wasn't
very pleasant, but it was self-preservation.
Because of my upbringing, I felt that authority was something to be avoided if
possible. If you could get in and attack it and get away without being
burnt, I would say, “Do it”. Questioning authority was high on the list of
my priorities.
My relationship with my father was terrible, because I was a lousy student,
always last in class. I began to dread seeing him because he'd pulled
himself up by the bootstraps of his own intelligence. Can you imagine being
an orphan in India in the 1920s? He pulled himself out of the misery by
studying and getting scholarships to university and so he had a big “study”
ethos.
I often think about my parents. I feel bad now because I was a bad son to them
when they eventually came back to live in England and never went to see them
enough.
My parents weren't musical at all and I think if I have got any musical
tradition it comes from my mother's side. She was born on a farm 50 miles
south of John o' Groats, in a town called Bonar Bridge. I think I must have
inherited some musical feeling through her side of the family, which is very
Highland and wild.
The first record I bought was the Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand, and then
the early Stones singles. I remember when music really hit me though. It was
while I was at boarding school, aged 11. I remember hearing Not Fade Away
blasting out of this huge wooden radio in the day room. It felt like I'd
found a gap in the clouds, a light shining.
In 1968 I took my O levels and the whole world was exploding. There was Paris,
Vietnam, Grosvenor Square, the counter-culture, and it seemed normal because
we thought that 1968 was the norm, and that was the year I came of age. It
was like riding a rocket but I didn't realise how lucky I was until later.
In those days, if you were in the position I was in, there was only one answer
to what you were going to do after school, and that was art school; the last
resort of malingerers, bluffers and people who basically don't want to work.
I applied to the Central School of Art [in London] and was amazed when I got
in. When I turned up I realised that the lecturers had chosen 29 girls and
ten blokes to make up their quota. They had obviously chosen the 29 most
attractive female applicants and then spent the next year hitting on the
girls. And that was art school. I didn't last three months.
After I left I bought a ukulele, because I figured that had to be easier than
a guitar, having only four strings. And that's how I got into playing,
following a musician named Tymon Dogg around the London Underground and
collecting money for him like a Mississippi blues apprentice. We went around
Europe busking, bumming around Belgium and France. But we mainly stayed on
the Underground.
One day I was walking past an Irish pub and saw this trio playing, and I
thought maybe I should try that. It was 1974 and I was living in a squat in
Maida Hill and thought that playing pubs could get me through the summer.
That was the first time I'd thought about putting an electric rock'n'roll
band together.
The first time I heard the word “punk” was in Time Out where they wrote that
Eddie & the Hot Rods were a second-generation punk band and I remember
thinking: “What is this word?” And then the Pistols came through and it was
clear what they meant.
My band, the 101'ers, had been playing for two years or so when the Pistols
burst on to the scene, and when I saw them I realised you couldn't compare
the Pistols to any other group on the island, they were so far ahead. Five
seconds into their first song I knew we were like yesterday's papers, we
were over.
Not long after, Bernie Rhodes took me to Shepherds Bush, to a squat in Davis
Road, where there were these two guys waiting who I'd seen staring at me in
the dole office the week before. I'd thought they wanted a fight. There were
amps in the room and we started to practise. Afterwards Bernie said: “Why
don't you think about joining this band?” I thought about it for about 24
hours and then rang him and said: “OK, I'm in.” It was the look of them more
than anything else.
Part of punk was that you had to shed all of what you knew before. We were
almost Stalinist in the way that we insisted that you had to cast off all
your friends, everything you'd ever known and the way you'd played before in
a frenzied attempt to create something new, which was not easy at any time.
It was very rigorous; we were insane, basically. Completely and utterly
insane.
PAUL SIMONON
Growing up in the slums of Brixton was a fantastic place for a child, it
bristled with energy, and the multicultural mix of people gave it a unique
atmosphere. Bus conductors used to yell out “United Nations” whenever their
bus stopped outside Lambeth Town Hall.
I was a happy kid, until one day my father delivered the devastating news that
he wouldn't be living with us any more. The news completely crushed me.
Within a few days, my new father arrived and over the next few months his
belongings were moved in, among them his piano .
In the autumn of 1965 my brother and I were told that our stepfather had won a
scholarship to study music in Italy, and we were all going to live there for
a year. We accepted the news with excitement; we thought it meant the end of
school for ever.
Siena was a paradise. It was sunny, they had grapes and melons, wine and
spaghetti. We rented a top-floor flat, ate pasta and listened to the drums
of the local contrada parading their area in the build-up to the Palio.
Italian school was discussed and I refused to go because the school uniform
was a big blue smock with a big black bow in the front. Mum taught us
herself in the evenings.
The language was a problem, but not for long. A group of teenage girls adopted
us, eager to improve their English. Because the Beatles were very popular
and my name was Paul, I was treated like a prince.
We came back after five months to live in Herne Hill. The skinhead movement
was just beginning to take shape and was very appealing to budding misfits
like me. A friend told me about the Streatham Locarno that put on Saturday
morning dances. We all dressed up. Flash clothes, Jamaican music, fighting
and football were our obsessions. Girls came later.
As the Sixties were coming to a close I'd become completely out of control. I
hardly attended school and the relationship with my stepfather was on a
knife edge. My mother made a phone call. A day or two later I was asked if I
wanted to live with my father. I agreed immediately.
My father lived just off the Portobello Road. When I arrived we sat down and
went through my belongings. He pulled out all my precious football
programmes, ripped them in half, threw them in the bin and said: “We are not
having any of that rubbish in this house!”
In 1973 I stayed on at my school for a final year, but because they didn't
have enough teachers, the sixth form was in the local Ladbroke Girls School.
The art teacher took a shine to me and encouraged me to apply to the Byam
Shaw School of Art in Notting Hill Gate. I was accepted and managed to
convince the county council that I was worthy of a scholarship.
After a year's foundation course my attention started to wander. A month
before I left, I went with a friend from art college to an audition for a
drummer just to back him up. We got to Praed Street in Paddington and
entered what looked like a dungeon. These three blokes with really long hair
and guitars asked if I was a singer. “No, I'm a painter.” They ignored my
answer, or maybe they couldn't hear cause of the long hair. Anyway, I was
encouraged to have a go at singing songs I'd never heard of. It was a
disaster.
A week or two later I ran into the guitarist from the audition. His name he
told me was Mick Jones, and he was attending Hammersmith School of Art. We
became chatty and met a few times in the local pubs. One night he asked if I
played an instrument. “No, but I'd like to.”
The first time I saw Joe Strummer he was in the 101'ers. They were playing at
this dump which had people running about with their dogs and giant hippies
stomping around. He'd be playing and there was a woman breast-feeding a baby
and dogs running across the stage, but Joe was definitely the guy to watch.
MICK JONES
I was born in Clapham, at the South London Hospital for Women, and brought up
in Brixton.
My mother had been a wild person. She fell in love with an American soldier in
the Second World War and he took her on a boat to America with him - she was
a stowaway - and she got as far as Texas before the authorities found out
and called my grandparents. My grandfather had to go and bring her back.
But she loved America and married an American serviceman and went to live in
Michigan after she split from my father.
London was a very different place when I was growing up. We used to play on
bomb sites around the corner from where I lived in Brixton. Now it's a
garden square, but back then there was a bomb shelter with a corrugated
metal shutter that had been prised off, so we could get inside. It had this
smell - of the war and of the dark inside it.
It was a pretty exciting time to grow up. There was music everywhere it
seemed, coming out of shops, on the radio, it was as if we had a soundtrack
to our lives.
I wanted to play the guitar because no one was cooler than the guitar player.
Provided you stay in tune you could just cruise. I never had any lessons. I
almost took my first guitar back to the shop because it wasn't in tune. I
thought there was something wrong with it!
My mum used to send me Creem and Rock Scene magazines from America. They had
all this stuff about bands that no one else had heard of. Rock Scene always
had stuff about the New York Dolls in it, for instance. They blew my mind
with the way they looked - their attitude was that they didn't care about
anything. They weren't that great sounding, but that didn't matter.
After leaving school I spent a year doing odd jobs, but decided that I'd go to
art school to meet other musicians and get a grant so I could buy some
equipment.
At Hammersmith Art College I looked like Johnny Thunders. I had really long
hair and tight jeans that had been taken in specially. But it was half an
art college and half a building college, so the guys who came in for
bricklaying had to queue in the canteen alongside us. I got a lot of flak
for the way I looked, because there weren't too many people who were into
the New York Dolls or MC5 at the time.
I met Bernie Rhodes in 1975, in a place in West Kensington called the
Nashville Rooms. He had this cap on and he looked sort of like Gene Vincent,
so I went over to talk to him and said: “Are you a piano player?” And he
said: “No, I'm not, but you're wearing one of my T-shirts.” I was wearing a
T-shirt that said, “You're Gonna Wake Up”, which I'd bought from Let It Rock
on the King's Road, Chelsea .
He was an interesting guy, Bernie. He told me about the Sex Pistols, who were
just forming. I met Chrissie Hynde through Bernie, and for a while we were
going to put a band together. We'd go up to my nan's bedroom and play songs
together as duets. We never got the band together. She did cut my hair,
though.
In the end I formed a band with Tony James. I met Paul when he came along to
one of our auditions. He looked so stunning that we said: “Can you sing?” He
tried it and it didn't work out but he made an impression on me and we
became quite friendly. One day he said: “Let's get a group together.”
We borrowed a bass guitar from Tony [James] and we sat down to try and learn.
He turned out to be a fantastic bass player. He had his own style, plus the
look, and was incredible.
I think it was Bernie who directed our thoughts to Joe. We'd seen him around,
in the dole office and so on, and then we went to see the 101'ers with the
Sex Pistols, which ended up with the Pistols in a fight, and that was the
night we decided that Joe was the best guy out there.
He came to see us in our squat and we were all nervously waiting and then we
went straight into it. We went into the little room where we'd put eggboxes
on the walls to soundproof it and began. He didn't want to do his tunes so
much, but he was into changing, improving our songs. We now had a great
lyric writer and Bernie helping us to realise what we were about and what we
should be writing about.
I don't know if we were aware of punk being an outlet for our anger. There
were a lot of things that needed saying and they hadn't been said in that
way before. We were just picking things out of the paper to write about.
Even the name came out of a newspaper. Paul came up with the name the Clash
because it was in the papers all the time. It was representative of how we
felt and sounded.
Extracted from The Clash (Atlantic, £30), to be published on October 6. Buy
the book
© Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Topper Headon
TWELVE TOP CLASH CITY ROCKERS
WHITE RIOT (1977)
The single that started it all is often wrongly taken as a racist call to
arms. In fact, having witnessed the Notting Hill riots of 1976, Joe Strummer
was impressed by the black community’s readiness to challenge authority, but
felt excluded. He wanted “a riot of my own”.
COMPLETE CONTROL (1977)
Having signed to major label CBS, the band began to feel that they were no
longer in control of their own destiny. “They said we’d be artistically
free, if we signed this bit of paper/They meant, ‘let’s make a lot of money,
and worry about it later’” sang Strummer. When CBS delayed the release of
the first Clash album in the United States by two years, many people saw it
as an act of retaliation.
POLICE AND THIEVES (1977)
One of the first signs that there was more to this band than three-chord
riffs, this cover version of the Junior Mervin reggae classic played it
remarkably straight.
STAY FREE
(1978)
From the underrated second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope is a rare foray into
sentiment by Mick Jones and Strummer, a realisation of the life that they
had avoided by being in a band, addressed to a friend recently released from
Brixton prison. The last verse brings a lump to the throat.
WHITE MAN IN
HAMMERSMITH PALAIS(1978)
The single that fused reggae with rock and alienated a million punk rockers
was inspired by Strummer’s disappointment at a reggae gig at the now closed
London venue. His lyrics build from that one night to encompass a wider
disillusionment at the state of Britain.
CLAMPDOWN (1979)
The title track of the double album London Calling, the band’s third album, is
now so commonplace that it can no longer be heard with fresh ears. Not so
this lament for the loss of youthful idealism. Rolling Stone once voted
London Calling the most influential album of the 1980s, even though it was
released in 1979.
TRAIN IN VAIN (1979)
The last track of London Calling was included at such short notice that it was
not listed on the sleeve. Unusually, it’s a love song, and it’s sounds for
all the world like a Motown classic.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN(1980)
A year after releasing a double album, the Clash returned with the triple
album Sandinista, which opens with this wonderfully produced mini-epic.
Black music is once more a big influence, this time the nascent American
hip-hop movement.
THE CALL-UP(1980)
Over its six sides, Sandinista was a ramble, a much of what’s there sounds
rough or improvised. Not so this pointed attack on military conscription
turning young people into killers. “He who may die. Is he who will kill.”
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
(1982)
The Clash’s last great album Combat Rock opens with this Strummer showing that
in the two years they’ve been away they’ve not calmed down a bit. “You have
the right to free speech,” he shouts. “Provided you’re not dumb enough to
actually try it.”
ROCK THE CASBAH (1982)
A rare hit for the band and a staple of late-night TV, this late single deals
with the repression of popular music in the Middle East.
STRAIGHT TO HELL(1982)
A track that uses samples, overdubs and studio techniques that would later
become commonplace, this is a gloomy global survey of misery, oppression
which highlights, among other things, the American treatment of children
fathered by its soldiers in Vietnam.
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
The Clash were just brilliant. Their lyrics, music, arrangements etc. were truly great, but most of all the chemistry between the band members and their indomitable courageous and humanitarian collective spirit. Rest in peace Joe.
Ari, Bris,
The Clash were on of the great english punk/new wave bands that survived the initial rush of the movement and went on to true greatness,we could use them,or a version of them right now.
i wonder what joe,mick,and paul would make of the current political situation in this country?great band.
steve walters, wakefield, england
The first music my ten year old daughter heard was The Clash,she had just been born a day earlier. They influence my life and music every day. One of if not the best bands ever
Branden, modesto ca, u.s.a
Thanks The Clash for inspiring so many bands that i love and also for Train in Vain - love it.
Ralph, Glasgow,
The Clash... it's simple: simply the best rock band ever.
Helder Oliveira, Porto, Portugal
Joe Strummer - RIP
Joe harris, London, UK