Chris Salewicz - Redemption Song - The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

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 Simonon gets up to speak. He tells a story about how when the Clash first formed in 1976, he and Joe had been in Portobello Road, discussing the merits of mirror shades, as worn by Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come . If anyone showed you any aggro while you were wearing such a pair, Joe decided, then their anger would be reflected back at them. Immediately he stepped into a store that sold such sunglasses. Paul didn’t follow: he was completely broke, having been chucked off social security benefits; Joe, however, had just cashed that week’s social security cheque. He came out of the store wearing his brand-new mirror shades. Then they set off to bunk the tube fare to Rehearsal Rehearsals in Camden. As they walked towards Ladbroke Grove tube station, Joe dug into his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I bought you a pair too.’ Although Joe was now completely broke and with no money to eat for three days, he’d helped out his mate. This story increases the collective tear in the chapel.

Maeri, a female cousin, gets up to speak. Joe’s mother had been a crofter’s daughter, who became a nurse and met Joe’s father in India during the war. Joe’s dad liked to have a great time: a real rebel himself, it seems, not at all the posh diplomat he has been made out to be, a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. We are told a story about Joe as a ten-year-old at a family gathering: he is told that he can go anywhere but ‘the barn’; immediately he wants to know where ‘the barn’ is. Then another female cousin, Anna, reads a poem, in English, by the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean.

Dick Rude, an old friend of Joe’s from LA who has been making a documentary about the Mescaleros, speaks. Keith Allen reads out the lyrics of a song about Nelson Mandela, part of an AIDS charity project for South Africa organized by Bono of U2, that Joe had just finished writing. A Joe demo-tape, just him and a guitar, a slow blues-like song, is played. And the Mescaleros tune, ‘From Willesden to Cricklewood’. The MC suggests that as we file past the coffin to leave, we say a few words to Joe. ‘Wandering Star’ begins to play. ‘See you later, Joe,’ someone says. Yeah, see you later, Joe.

After the extraordinary tension that has built up to the funeral since Joe’s death eight days ago – my sleep is disturbed and troubled the night before the service – it feels like a release when the service concludes. (I have felt Joe around ever since he passed on: Gaby, his former long-term partner, has felt the same thing, she tells me on the phone the previous Friday, and I tell her that a mystic friend of mine has spoken of Joe ‘ascending’ very clearly – according to Buddhism, there is a period of forty-eight days following a death before the soul returns in another form; Gaby feels the same, saying she feels he is very at peace; job done, on to the next incarnation. Until someone reminds me, I have forgotten that Gaby has had plenty of experience of death, her brother having committed suicide while she was still with Joe – as his brother did.) Somehow I expect almost a party atmosphere outside the chapel, with the sound system maybe blaring out some Studio One. But everyone is wandering around in a daze. The wake is being held at the Paradise bar in nearby Kensal Rise.