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

The party is thinning out a little. It is 11 o’clock. I’ve got a slight headache. I leave and walk down to Ladbroke Grove tube station with Flea, Mick’s guitar roadie, and get home around midnight. I fall asleep on the sofa.

7 November 1999

In a shrine-like case in the seedily glitzy foyer of Las Vegas’s Hard Rock casino stands a guitar once owned by Elvis Presley. ‘What would Elvis think?’ groans Joe Strummer, here to play a show on his first solo tour in ten years. This distress seems a trifle exaggerated, as though Strummer is trying to force himself into the character of a 47-year-old bad boy rocker. ‘This case is only plexiglass: we could smash it open and have the guitar out of there before anyone noticed,’ he continues. Is this a confrontational posture he feels he should adopt in his job of Last Active Punk Star?

The frozen grins on the faces of those around him – his wife, an old friend from San Francisco, myself – suggest this is not what we want to hear: there seems a certain anxiety amongst us that, to prove his point, Strummer might carry out his threat, and that within seconds we will be shot to death by security guards. Thankfully, a fan approaches him for an autograph, the moment passes, and he makes his way backstage for his performance.

As a stage act, the reputation of the Clash was almost unsurpassed. Championed by many as the most exciting performing rock’n’roll group ever, there’s recently been the release of a live record, accompanied by a Don Letts’ documentary, Westway To The World . If ever there was a time to jump-start his solo career, this was it. Strummer seized the moment: he released an excellent album, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style ; and took off on a seemingly endless tour, which is how I come to find him in Las Vegas.

Standing with him at the Hard Rock casino’s central bar at 4 in the morning after many post-show drinks, I tell him I’d had the impression that for years he had been going through an ongoing minor nervous breakdown. He balks at this, but initially will admit to having been locked into a state of long-term depression: ‘When people have nervous breakdowns, they really flip out. We shouldn’t treat them flippantly. It was more like depression, miserable-old-gitness.’

How long were you depressed for?

‘About five minutes. Until I had a spliff.’

A moment later he tries to wriggle out of even this admission: ‘I’m not claiming to have been depressed. All I’ll allow is that I didn’t have any confidence and I thought the whole show was over: you can wear your brain out – like on a knife-sharpening stone, run it until it shatters – and I just wanted to have some of it left.

Assisted by his now four-year-old marriage to Lucinda, his second wife, Strummer seems to have found a relative peace; Lucinda is credited by many around him with pulling him out of his malaise.

Christened John Mellor (‘without an “s” on the end, unfortunately: if there was, I’d have pulled more women,’ referring to the game-keeper’s surname in Lady Chatterley’s Lover ), he was born in Ankara. His background would seem to show why Mick Jones once expressed amazement to me at how hard and tough a worker Strummer could be. For his father’s profession of career diplomat didn’t arise from any position of privilege, quite the opposite. ‘He was a self-made man, and we could never get on,’ says Strummer.

The musician’s grandparents had worked as management on the colonial railway network in India. ‘My father was a smart dude: he won a scholarship to a good school, then won another scholarship to university. When the war broke out, he joined the Indian army. My mother and father met in a casualty ward in India – she was working in the nursing battalion. After the war he joined the Civil Service at a lowly rank.’

Strummer’s earliest memory was of his brother, who was eighteen months older, ‘giving me a digestive biscuit in the pram’. He still is unable to assess what it was that led David to commit suicide. ‘Who knows? You can’t say, can you?’

Clearly this would have seemed a crucial, motivating catalyst in the life of the person who became Joe Strummer. How did it affect him? ‘I don’t know how it affects people. It’s a terrible thing for parents.’ He pauses for a very long time, until it becomes evident that this is all he is prepared to offer.

If it hadn’t been for punk, what on earth would have happened to Joe? He didn’t last too long at art school. After that, the only upward career move he seemed to have made was when he decided to stop being a busker’s money-collector and to become a busker himself – but even that worried him, he tells me, because he thought it might prove too difficult. It was this that led to him playing with The 101’ers, from which he was poached to become the Clash’s singer. ‘There is a part of Joe that is a real loser,’ says Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming , the definitive account of the punk era. ‘That’s what he was in his days as a squatter. And it’s that that comes across in his vocals, which was why people could identify with them so much.’

I tell Joe that Kosmo Vinyl, the unlikely named ‘creative director’ of the Clash, once said to me that if it hadn’t been for punk the singer would have ended up a tramp.

‘Yeah,’ he agrees, without a moment’s thought. ‘When I was a kid I knew that I was never going to make it in the thrusting executive world. I love picking stuff out of skips. A few bum records and I’ll be away with my shopping-trolley.’

I ask Joe Strummer what he learnt from his years in the wilderness. ‘Any pimple-encrusted kid can jump up and become king of the rock’n’roll world,’ he says, voicing something to which he has clearly given much thought. ‘But when you’re a young man like that you really do glow in the light of everyone’s attention. It becomes a sustaining part of your life – which is something that is rotten to the core: you cannot have that as a crutch, because one day you’re going to be over. So obviously I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke.

‘I don’t give a damn any more. I’ve learnt not to take it seriously – that’s what I’ve learnt. And I’ve also learnt that because what you do is sort of interesting, doesn’t mean you’re any better than anyone else: after all, we’re not exactly devising new forms of protein. If they say, “Release this record because otherwise your career is finished,” and I don’t want them to, then I just won’t do it. I’m far more dangerous now, because I don’t care at all.’

Moving at a fast pace, Paul Simonon and I are cutting along a narrow rocky mud path that splits the wet grass on this high stretch of Scottish flatland. In a soaking spray of fine rain we have been climbing for twenty minutes. But the moment that we had stepped onto this level plateau the downpour had stopped: damp odours and mysterious scents are all that saturate us now. In the dagger-cold water of a lochan, we stash two cans of beer for our return journey. On the far bank a frog croaks irregularly.

Lusher and even more magical than its much larger, bleaker neighbour of Skye, this is the remote Inner Hebrides island of Raasay, up towards the northern tip of its twelve mile length. Thanks to an abiding impression of all-pervading strangeness, however, we feel we could as easily be on the other side of the moon as on the far north-western periphery of Europe. But you can’t avoid that feeling of being out on the edge. For miles around there are no other human beings, only a vast, amorphous silence, the soundtrack to the greyish-blue wild mountain scenery that juts around us; you can almost hear the clouds clashing on the highland rock and rustling on the purple heather.