Passion is a Fashion

The Real Story of the Clash

Pat Gilbert

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781845134822
• eBook ISBN: 9781845138028
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Pat Gilbert’s definitive biography of the Clash – universally acclaimed as a great book – has already sold over 20,000 copies in paperback. Now, for the 30th anniversary of the band’s classic London Calling album, it is reissued with a stunning new cover.

For the book Pat Gilbert – a former Mojo editor with the highest credentials – talked to everyone, in over 70 interviews with the key participants – roadies, producers, friends and fans - and above all the band members themselves, including Joe Strummer before his death, to be able to give the first real insight into what went on behind the scenes during the Clash’s ten-year career.

With the surge in interest generated by the Shea Stadium live CD and the official Clash book, Passion Is A Fashion will attract a new sale as the only truly indispensable Clash book.

1

THE UKULELE MAN

‘First say to yourself

what you would be;

and then do what you have to do.’

Epictetus

‘Woody Guthrie was a ready-made identity

for a young man in search of a strong image.’

ANTHONY SCADUTO, BOB DYLAN

It’s 7 June 2001, general election day in Britain, and all the indicators say Tony Blair’s going to get in again. London is warm and muggy. Joe Strummer is sitting in a private room on the first floor of the Groucho Club on Dean Street. I’m ushered in to meet him: he clasps my hand in both of his and enthuses how it’s good to see a familiar face. The last time we met, or at least the last time we’d had a serious, sit-down conversation, things hadn’t been quite so chummy. A piece I’d written for MOJO magazine had included a quote from The Clash’s former manager, Bernie Rhodes, referring to Joe as ‘a coward’. Naturally, Joe was upset by this; not so much, it seemed, because Rhodes had said it as because the then editor of MOJO had drawn it out as a headline quote. Joe described it as the equivalent of being ‘slagged off by an old girlfriend’ and having her point of view presented as fact in huge 24-point type. Today that episode is apparently forgotten, absorbed no doubt among the million and one other spats and hurrahs that make up the public and private life of Joe Strummer.

Joe re-lights the charred brown stub of his tiny spliff and leads me to the balcony window. He points out a bum sitting outside on the pavement on a pile of newspapers. He tells me how they’ve become best mates over the years. He gurgles a hurgh-hurgh laugh and his brown eyes sparkle through thick cow-lashes.

I spritz Joe – in town to promote the second Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros album, Global A Go-Go – with some deliberately spiky questions. The idea is to rile him up a bit, treat him as a contemporary artist rather than a cherished souvenir of the punk era whose past glories mean he can get away with saying anything. And so it starts:

Why is punk’s cheer-leader sitting in the Groucho Club when there are race riots in the north of England?

He says: ‘Do you think it’s down to one man for ever? Time doesn’t tick by in your world, I’ve taken steps to live in the real world.’

It’s election day in Britain; you obviously haven’t voted, have you?

‘Where I live in Somerset me voting wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.’

Why did you chuck Topper Headon out of The Clash?

‘It never crossed our minds to help him. Stop living in the past!’

We spar like this for a couple of hours. Joe tackles most of the stuff thrown at him head on but, rather frustratingly, even after a few drinks he greases past the thornier questions with the expertise of a seasoned politician. It’s a skill that has been honed over twenty-five years of relentless interrogation; not just by journalists but by autograph hounds, Clash nutters, pub bores, the man in the cornershop who knows him off VH-1.

The question I really want to ask I leave till last. It’s about Joe Strummer and his relation to his alter ego John Mellor, the son of a Foreign Office diplomat, the private-school boarder, the prospective art student whose brother took his own life at nineteen. The two, to officialdom, are but one and the same person, of course. But what of it? Is Joe still in touch with his former self? Has John Mellor been buried beneath so many years of being Joe Strummer that he now no longer exists?

‘I do it because I’m half crazy,’ he butts in, half answering in that slurred, mid-Atlantic grunt of his. He looks out of the window and hurgh-hurghs to himself, then continues: ‘It’ – and this I take to mean ‘being Joe Strummer’ – ‘allows you to do stupid things like write ditties on the back of fag packets. If you were rational it would be a stupid thing to do. But it’s about being irrational. I never stop thinking about life, asking, “Why did I do that?” Kind of blundering through life is my method.’

I tell him I want to know more about his … I end up describing it as his ‘inner-core’, the bit that deals with tragedies like his brother’s death, the bit you feel you’re not always getting to in interviews. He pauses. ‘The core is where you write, or do your thing. It’s where artists come from.’ There are a few seconds of silence. He scans his mind, looking for a quick exit. ‘I really think it’s a sin to bore people. I’ll only really share my thoughts once I’ve got them into a coherent bundle. I don’t really like to talk about myself.’

Joe is clearly unhappy discussing who he is or isn’t and why, and I’m not entirely happy asking him about it. Implicit in the questioning is the suggestion, intentional or not, that Joe Strummer isn’t an entirely real person, that the cosmic ball of rock ’n’ roll energy sitting opposite me, with white T-shirt and oily quiff, is a front, armour-plating picked up in his early life that’s been customised and adapted down the years to protect him and to make us feel we’re getting top Joe Strummer value; a convenient deceit for both parties.

But one look at Joe, lost in thought again for a moment, struggling to give you an honest answer, tells you that it’s all a hell of a lot more complicated than that. He takes all this very seriously. The problem is that Joe isn’t any corny show-biz reinvention like Liberace, Gary Glitter or Billy Idol. He’s not even an elaborate tangle of personas like Marc Bolan, or a collection of other people’s experiences like David Bowie. He’s something else that hasn’t yet been seen before or since in rock ’n’ roll.

Later, when the interview is over, we’ll end up in a Soho pub with Joe’s press officer, Tony, and the entire staff of the magazine that sent me on this assignment, throwing back Tequila slammers and pints of lager. Each of us will sidle up to Joe in rotation to hear morsels of wisdom and rollicking stories of ‘the old days’. Little did we know that within eighteen months he would be dead.

The raw material that evolved into Joe Strummer came into the world in Ankara, Turkey on 21 August 1952. His given name was John Graham Mellor. The exotic location of his birth was due to his father Ronald’s occupation as a clerical officer in the Foreign Office. In the punk years, Joe would get endless stick about his father’s job, to the point where he would fib to the music press that Ronald worked for the (rather less glamorous) Public Records Office, where he was indeed based in the mid-’70s. In the 1950s the Foreign Office was, and still is, one of the most elite and snobbish departments of the Civil Service. Its employees are expected to embody the stiffly conservative values of old Empire and their personal conduct is required to be beyond reproach. In The Clash’s story, attitudes towards social class – within the group itself and from those outside observers – were to prove hugely important. Joe’s parents would have been described by most people as middle-class, a detail that would have repercussions for him throughout his life.

Ronald Mellor was neither posh nor a high-flier, and his work as a cipher clerk sending coded messages (the secretive nature of the job may have been one reason Joe was never specific about it in public) meant he was regarded, in Strummer’s words, as a ‘junior bum’. The son of a British-born official on the railways in Lucknow, India, he was raised by relatives after his father died. The effect of his formative years under the Raj was, according to Joe, to make Ronald ‘more English than any Englishman’. He worked hard and won a scholarship to university in the mid-1930s, before serving as a major in an artillery regiment for the duration of the Second World War. While still in India, he met a divorcee nurse called Anne Girvan, originally from the west Highlands in Scotland. They married, and had their first child, David, in March 1951.

Not long after the family had settled in England at 22 Sussex Gardens in Paddington, Ronald – now at the Foreign Office – was posted to Turkey. It was one of a series of assignments that put the Mellors in the frontline of the Cold War. As a child, Joe felt the tremors of dramatic world issues firsthand – a convenient explanation, perhaps, for his fascination with global politics in The Clash. In 1952, Turkey joined NATO, an event many believe prevented an all-out American–Soviet war in the Middle East. Two years later the family was sent to Cairo, Egypt, where Ronald would find himself lunching with the infamous double agent Kim Philby, and stayed until the Suez Crisis, the pivotal post-war conflict that exposed Britain’s diminishing clout as an international power-player. Next, they lived in Mexico City, experiencing the devastating earthquake of 1957, then moved to Bonn in West Germany.

To the young John Mellor, born in the summer of 1952 amid fragrant date trees and political intrigue, his father’s work meant little more than constant upheaval and an ever-shifting backdrop of tastes, smells, languages and climates. It was during these early years that he first began to feel like an outsider, a foreigner everywhere he went, including his father’s adopted home of Britain.

‘I had a life moving around different places,’ he explained. ‘In Mexico, I even went to a Spanish-speaking school for two years. In every situation we were freaks. I’d had an eye and earful of some very strange places. I saw some very weird things as a child.’

John Mellor was eight before he finally came to live in the UK, the country he would galvanise into punk rebellion sixteen years later. As London geared up for a decade that would make it the centre of the Swinging universe, Ronald and his wife bought a small bungalow at 15 Court Farm Road in Warlingham, a small village twenty miles out of central London and a few miles south of Croydon, Surrey. Its modest size reflected the Mellors’ income and peripatetic lifestyle. When his father received another posting – this time to Iran, amid growing fears that the Shah might be deposed by a Communist revolt – John and his elder brother were packed off to a boarding school (fees paid by the Foreign Office) in nearby Ashtead. The City of London Freemen’s School was housed in an elegant Palladian villa set in fifty acres of beautiful parkland. A typical private school, it modelled itself on the public school example, promoting sport, academic excellence, individual achievement and social conformity. There were around a hundred boarders, divided roughly equally between boys and girls.

The boys’ first term at school was the beginning of a nine-year drought in which John and David would see their parents only once or twice a year. Karl Marx’s quip ‘blessed is he that hath no family’ would have amused John. The experience scarred him deeply, and presumably his brother, too. The school’s initiation rite, according to an interview Joe gave to Record Mirror in 1977, involved a choice between being beaten up and lying in a bath of used toilet paper (‘I got beaten up’). Other occasions, such as birthdays, were celebrated in similar style. Joe would later describe how boarding school taught him to be independent; to cope with his deep feelings of abandonment, he ‘had to pretend my parents didn’t exist’. Aged nine, there was an early signal of John’s unhappiness: he tried to run away one lunchtime with an older pupil called Paul Warren.

Simon Cowell (no relation to the Pop Idol judge) knew John during his early years at CLFS. ‘We were goody-goodies then,’ he explains. ‘John was a great artist – he drew cartoons. He was shy and extremely nice, but somehow I felt sorry for him. He was touched with a kind of sadness. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because he was a boarder and his parents weren’t around.’

Gentle and dreamy, John tended to hide his finer feelings behind a brusque, diffident front. Chris Reynolds, another pupil, recalls John as ‘a hard nut, a handful for the teachers’. This is possibly an exaggeration but it’s clear John was no wimp. In the Lord of the Flies environment of the all-male dorm, where bullying was normal, his wit, sarcasm, ability to fight his corner and fondness for practical jokes made him popular. ‘I shared a study room with him,’ recalls Ken Powell, one of John’s closest schoolfriends. ‘He was a good guy to hang out with, very funny and artistic. He wrote poems and made his own Christmas cards. He always came at whatever he did from an original angle.’

Ken Powell’s background parallels John’s: his father was in the diplomatic service and, like Ronald, held a fairly lowly position. He is keen to impress that, in a school where there were children from extremely well-to-do families, he and John were considered to be from relatively humble stock. Powell also described Ronald and Anna, whom he met several times, as ‘reserved’ rather than ‘strict’ and liberal enough to allow parties at their bungalow, where the male and female boarders did what teenage girls and boys do when left alone for the evening. Oddly, considering his job, Ronald had staunchly left-wing views.

It was while he was in his early years at CLFS that Johnny, as he became known, discovered rock music. It appears to have hit him with the force of a meteorite. In 1964, aged eleven, he heard The Rolling Stones’ ‘Not Fade Away’ blasting out of the big valve radio in the school recreation room. ‘I was at a really brutal boarding school where they filled you with crap,’ he told the NME’s Sean O’Hagan in a 1988 Clash retrospective. ‘It sounded like the road to freedom. Live! Enjoy life! Fuck chartered accountancy!’ His interest in school withered; he became one of the school rebels. ‘Music was more important than lessons, it was all we talked about,’ explains Ken Powell. ‘Every new Beatles, Dylan and Stones album was crucial to us. They were the backdrop to our lives. It was a truly golden period to have been brought up in. We were in this strange, privileged bubble, creating our own world with all this great music.’

But even records had their limits when it came to alleviating the tedium of dormitory life. Holed up in his soulless surroundings, John seized upon any opportunity to kill time. One year, he signed up to perform in The Insect Play, a vision of a bleak, post-industrial society, written by Bohemian playwrights the Capek brothers in 1923. John was cast as Head Ant. The play’s sombre mood was perforated on the opening night when he and the rest of the cast were heckled from the audience by Goon star Harry Secombe and his son, a pupil at CLFS. Such, he learned early on, were the perils of taking the stage.

The local cinema in Epsom provided a better and more regular source of entertainment. Over the years, John queued to see scores of films from Battleship Potemkin to Midnight Cowboy. One movie in particular turned his head dramatically: David Lean’s 1962 screen epic, Lawrence of Arabia. The story of the courageous and deeply principled ex-archaeologist, who helped lead the Arab revolt against the Turks in the First World War, stirred something within him – his own latent heroism? his memories of the desert? – and T.E. Lawrence became a role model. ‘I must have been about thirteen when I first saw the film,’ recalled Joe. ‘It swept up my imagination. I read everything that T.E. Lawrence ever wrote after that.’ This included The Mint, Lawrence’s experience of barrack-room life in the fledgling RAF: a sensitive, poetic soul quietly and meticulously observing the men around him, part of them but apart from them. As with John Lennon, another cinematic inspiration was the 1952 Marlon Brando flick Viva Zapata!, which rekindled faint memories of his time in Mexico and, judging from what came later, fired a romantic passion for bandits, cowboys and revolutionary heroes.

As the 1960s went on, John became a voracious consumer of whatever popular culture he could find at school – comics, pirate radio, TV comedies like Hancock’s Half Hour. But his chief love was music. Every detail of every groove of each new release from Bob Dylan, The Who, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Them, The Stones, and many more besides, was studied and absorbed.

Significantly, his musical taste wasn’t confined to white rock acts – a fact which would have a profound effect on The Clash’s music a decade later. On a visit to Tehran to see his parents in 1965, he had bought ‘The Best of Chuck Berry’ EP on Pye International, which was to remain in his possession for many years to come and assume an almost talismanic status with him. On it was a version of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, a song he knew from the With the Beatles LP. Realising that Chuck’s was the original peeled open a whole new area for him: R&B and blues. Black US music sucked him: when the Blues Boom hit the UK in 1968, he supplemented his diet of Fleetwood Mac and Cream records with compilation albums, often bought mail-order, featuring Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Bukka White, Elmore James, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Robert Johnson.

It’s strange to think of the raw protestations of Mississippi share-croppers and Chicago car workers striking a chord with a middle-class white boarder in Surrey. But John instinctively connected with the music, just as Jagger and Richards and numerous other English musicians had. Steve Winwood, from The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, observes: ‘The blues had an emotion which was so different to anything else; it expressed a type of repression that was prevalent in England in the 1960s, though perhaps it was of a less obvious and more subtle type than the blues itself was about.’ Bored, alone and feeling abandoned, Joe got the blues bad. In the summer of 1968, as he was sitting his O-Levels, another seismic event in the creation of Joe Strummer occurred when counter-culture erupted onto the streets. Across Europe there were riots, demonstrations, sit-ins, student protests. John watched it happen on the dormitory TV.

‘The whole world was exploding!’ he enthused, thirty years later. ‘Paris, Vietnam, Grosvenor Square. We took it all as normal because there was no other frame of referen...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE
• PASSION IS A FASHION
• DEDICATION
• QUOTE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• THE CLASH MAP OF LONDON
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE UKULELE MAN
• 2 A WORKING-CLASS HERO?
• 3 BASS CULTURE
• 4 FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
• 5 THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
• 6 TWO SEVENS CLASH
• 7 THE ENEMY WITHIN
• 8 HOW THE WEST WAS WON
• 9 WORLD SERVICE
• 10 THE LAST OF ENGLAND
• 11 HELL SUCKS
• 12 CLASHDÄMMERUNG
• 13 AFTERMATH
• 14 A FAREWELL TO JOE
• 15 GROOVY TIMES?
• DISCOGRAPHY (COMPILED BY STEVE KIRK)
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• COPYRIGHT