June 17, 1978 SOUNDS

`AAAWOOOEEEUUUOOO, PETE . . . `ear you bin to the States . . . how wazzit?”

THE DISEMBODIED VOICE in the recreation room at Island’s Basing Street studio gradually reveals itself as emerging from a skinny and extremely stoned figure wearing a black leather jacket draped in a swirly- patterned, table-cloth sized scarf who’s stretched out of sight across four seats so he can get himself comfortable enough to watch the TV.

It’s Mick Jones’ way of relaxing and preparing himself for another twelve-hour day of laying down the backing tracks for the second Clash album. “Oh, the States was fun. I had a great time there.” “Shit. I’m really jealous.” “Go there for your holidays. You went to Jamaica last year; so you must be able to afford to go to the States this year.” “Nah. When I go to the States for the first time, I want to do it properly - I only want to go as a member of a group. That’s the only way I wanna do it.”

While he might have a very personal conception of how to get himself in the correct frame of mind for recording, Mick is as conscious as anybody of the current trend of opinion about the Clash. The nagging implications that they were `last year’s thing, maaan’ and maybe `they weren’t so hot even then’ and `anyway punk’ S dead and these beat combos are much more fun so lets go and drink lemonade and tap our feet to that groovy new love song’.

THE CLASH were always more some people could take and now, in a changed climate, knives are being sharpened that were kept well hidden while the Clash star was in the constant and meteoric ascendant, Some say the Clash have become - or always were - punk’s answer to the Bay City Rollers. Others have renounced them in favour of Tom Robinson’s more easily digestible agit-prop or the crass and banal `sincereness’ and `street credibility’ of Jimmy Pursey and his British Movement followers.

And the wait for the second Clash album. The wait, my God, the wait. If the Messiah was gonna take this long, it’d halve the attendance at the synagogue overnight Why so long? Reasons, reasons, all of them good ones. But people dont care about reasons; they care about records.

Mick understands that He knows and is unsurprisingly worried about it. In fact, he was apprehensive about my doing this story as I’d already penned two long raves about the Clash - one when I reviewed ~ the album last year, the other in a very long article for Trouser Press and he reckoned that I was about ready to do a hatchet job on them

When I reminded him that I’d already given them a heavy slating for Clash City Rockers’ (wrongly, I now think), he seemed relieved. What I didn’t need to remind him about was that, despite all that sufferation, there’s still hordes of eager fans out there who must be just about at the stage of screaming to hear what the Clash are up to these days.

After all, it’s certainly been a long time since there’s been a more than halfway decent article on them in a music paper. And, more than that, there hasn’t been a serious in-depth interview with any of the band since the very early days. The last one in Sounds was a non-communicative shambles done with Giovanni just before the start of the Complete Control tour.

Arriving at Basing Street studios one hot afternoon, I was expecting to do both the interview and the pix within a matter of a couple of hours.

Postponing the interview because Joe was late and had to get straight into recording, I ended up doing the first interview later that night - or rather the following morning - then going over to Paris with them for a one-off gig and finishing up with another interview again done as the sun was rising. So keeping it all in that order for the sake of simplicity, we begin with . .

THE STUDIO
WALKING DOWN the stairs for a short refreshment break after nine hours in the studio, assistant producer cum overseeing engineer, Corky Stasiak, turns to Sandy Pearlman, BIue Oyster Cult mentor and now Clash producer, and asks: “What did I do to deserve this?” Pearlman has no doubts. You worked with Kiss. Thats what you did to deserve this.” After a while in the studio, I started to feel almost sorry for these two American innocents abroad Both

used to working with the most organised band in the world, they are in a continual state of disbelief when confronted with the most disorganised band in the world. While the Blue Oyster Cult drum roadie phones every day to confirm that everything’s running smoothly and `any minor hitches, it’s a very report good day when Clash the roadies manage to get the band to the studio on time without forgetting to bring the guitars or something. The Clash thremseIves seem to positively thrive on the spontaneity that this chaos enforces. They’ re past masters of the British production technique - “Bash it down and we’ll tart it up a bit later” .

Naturally, this sometimes reduces the Americans to a state of utter dismay where all they can do is plead to the great god of the recording studios somewhere up there in the sky above New York’s Record Plant. And yet the Clash’s attitude to working in the studio - once they’re actually in there and playing anyway - is very disciplined, even militaristic.

Strummer calls out “Hey, general” when he wants to speak to Pearlman and “Hey, captain’ ` when he’ s after Stasiak’ s attention. And, when I arrived at the studio, they’d just finished showing some of the batch of war movies they’d got CBS to stump up for . . after a little arm twisting - when CBS A&R chief, Muff Winwood (or Duff Windbag as the Clash call him) had refused to pay for any more films, they phoned up and informed him they knew where his car was parked; the films arrived the next day.

Reinforcing this image of them as an army unit, Strummer was continually goading everyone into action like some kind of musical section leader. (I asked him later about his almost quite dictatorial demeanour in the studio. “We arse around so much, you know what I mean. We relax and laugh and joke and if you don’t get down to it sometime, you’ll never do it.”)

But, while quasi-militaristic it might be, the Clash attitude is not quite the same concept of sta-prest organisation that the Americans are used. In the studio proper, the band grouped around putting down the basic backing track live. Topper Headon behind the screens with only his head showing as he bops up and down with the beat.

Paul Simonon, legs akimbo and bass slung low on his right hip while he punctuates his attack with a few casual spits at the floor. Mick Jones lazes on a chair cuddled up round his Gibson Les Paul Special while Joe stands up, pumping his left leg as always and shouting out the changes to the rest of them. Just like he looks onstage, in fact, apart from one thing - his battered but trusty Telecaster is being mended and he’s using a hired Gibson 345 instead, the big cherry red semi-acoustic that’s best known in the hands of Chuck Berry.

Joe completes the illusion with the occasional playful duck-walk. Meanwhile, up in the control room, unable to see what’ 5 happening in the studio (or be seen), Sandy and Corky mix admirable professionalism with acapella choruses’ of the Olympics’

`Western Movies’, discussions about how great it’d be out on the beach in Long Island in this weather arid, now and then, a deprecating comment about what they’ve let themselves in for or, more often, what a lousy studio it is. Mostly though, the odd moment of depression is tempered by admiration for the spirit of the band. Pearlman refers to Topper in almost awed tones as ` `the rhythm machine. What have we done? A hundred tracks? And he’s only screwed us once.”

And, when they’re not too busy eating one of the several ethnic meals they send out for each night, they clearly respect Joe’s drive and spirited animation, even if they can often hardly make out one word of what he’s singing.

They can also ge very frustrated by the band’s more casual approach to the finer points of recording technology. In a break from blowing bubbles with his gum, Corky noticed a small mistake on Paul’s bass track. Paul couldn’t hear it all. Joe could but still wondered: “Why can’t we leave it as it is?” Pearlman: `Because people will notice.” Joe: “Only ten million Hitlers will notice.” Pearlman halfsmiles, re-adjusts his baseball cap and shrugs resignedly. Joe: “Anyway, you won’t even be able to hear it once I shout over it a bit.” Mick: “And I’ll be twanging over it.” The bass part is redone.

SUCH ARE THE pains of aiming for perfecting and such are the lengths to which the band will go to ensure that this second album encompasses both what they and the record company (i.e. the American album-buying public) want and expect Considering that the first album has now sold somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand copies (and is still selling very strongly for a year old album), this might seem an open and shut case of two much green leading to too much worry. But consider - ignoring the fact that all the band would love to be really famous rock and roll stars - that none of their singles has done as well as might be expected and that they’re all still on a ridiculous twenty-five quid plus rent a week and matters move into a little more accurate perspective. And Joe doesn’t even have any rent to pay.

FIRST INTERVIEW

YOU'RE GONNA write where I live ain’t you? I’ve had enough of this white mansion rubbish.” Joe’s sitting on the other side of table surrounded by various kinds of debris including a half-empty can of paint. Given the time and circumstances, he’s playing the perfect host, making me a cup of tea and finding a tin lid for me to use as an ashtray. But it’s still a long way from any white mansion. A squat shares with Boogie, who used to manage him in the 101 `ers and now works with Malcolm McLaren, it’s about as glamorous as leprosy.

I certainly wouldn’t live there, even if it does have the advantage of an all-night cafe round the corner. While we’re settling down and I’m sorting out my tape machine, Joe shows me the Brigade Rosse t-shirt he made for the Anti-Nazi league gig. Clearly proud of it, he was surprised that no-one at the gig even so much as noticed what it had on it He places the blame for that on the English daily papers.

When Moro was shot, it was like them killing Winston Churchill, the Italian equivalent of Winston Churchill or someone like that. The papers don’t exactly give it as much coverage as Joyce McKinney, do they? They just keep out anything that’s a bit dodgy."

Leaving aside the international politics for the moment, I asked about the internal politics of the album. How did they come to be using Pearlman? “Me and Mick met him and we went into the toilet and said “What do you reckon” and we said “Let’s give it a whirl’ ` .

Originally, someone introduced us. I think Bernie (Bernard Rhodes, Clash manager) did. “One day I was in a car and he was playing Blue Oyster Cult and I said `What are you playing this shit for? ` . . . ` cos he’s usually got some doo-wop or some reggae of something and he goes `Oh, it’s well produced’ and I said `So what? It’s a load of shit.’ `But I’m listening to the production’ he said. He was checking it out

Wasn`t using them as much what the record cornpany wanted as what you wanted?

“They definitely thought it was a good idea that we had someone who could produce well “

I’d noticed in the studio that they were re-recording the next single, ` White Man in Hammersmith Palais and wondered if they `d junked the orginal recording.

“No. It was just that Pearlman likes it so much that he begged us for a go on it. We’ve got a lot of stuff that hasn’t come out. ` Pressure Drop’ . We’ve done some Memphis stuff. We done another Clash song that never came out - `Crush On You’. It’s got some sax on it and piano. “

!`i'd heard that they’d dropped `Crush’ because the press hated it.

`Nah, we dropped it `cos there was no room for it. Like we dropped `Shitting At The Party’ and `Flies’ which was about all those flies in the basement of Orsett Terrace (where he lived in the 101 `ers days).

“ I lost all my stuff at the ice-cream factory, just underneath Mick’s tower block where I lived. Some guy went and threw it on the skip. Everything . . . even my suit. . . still in its paper from the dry cleaners. I’ve got nothing left from the 101 `ers, not a tape, a poster, even a photograph. Everyone got something out of that group except me. Snakes got a drum kit. Evil got an SG and Dan got a bass amp. I got nothing.” I’d seen Snakes, the drummer, recently and he’d mentioned that he had some tapes of the 101 `ers and he planned to put them together as a proper album if he could get Joe’s permission.

“He’s a fool. If you do it as a proper album, you don’ t get any money out of it. If you do it as a bootleg, you’re rolling in it. That’s the truth.”

Most band see bootlegs as rip-offs. “I dunno. That `White Riot’ one in Manchester don’ t sound as bad as you could expect. You expect it to sound a lot worse than that . . When Pearlman came to see us, he was appalled, horrified at the equip ment and the result that we achieved.”

OUR CHAT went on for another half hour or so. Unfortunately, the unthinkable happened. My batteries had gone flat and I didn’t notice till the tape machine stopPed running altogether. Joe was pleased to be left alone so he could get some sleep but, as I was walking away, he couldn’t resist leaning out of the window and asking for the name of the Sounds editor. Laughing with embarrassment, I told him. “Right. Tomorrow I’ll phone him up and tell him to sack you.”

PARIS

THE BAND’S decision to play Paris was almost as sudden as mine to go. They’d cancelled out of the gig weeks before but the promoter had gone ahead regardless and spattered the city with posters announcing the appearance of le Clash. The replacement band, Subway Sect, also managed by Bernie Rhodes, understandably fearing a riot, refused to play it when they realised there’d be six thousand odd Parisians expecting the Clash.

So, with only twenty-four hours notice, the Clash organisation was at a higher pitch of streamlined efficiency than ever. When I arrived at the meeting point - somewhat delayed by the roadie being forty-five minutes late and Toper having to buy salt tablets, hair-spray and vitamin pills - Bernie had just done a runner on the band, taking with him not only the car but all their pass- ports. Paul had irked him by painting his naked portrait on a blank white wall and then drenching him with a hose. When he returned he explained he’d only gone to get some petrol anyway. Naturally the journey out to Heathrow in the Clash-mobile was rather tense, enlivened only by Paul’s incessant practical jokes at Bernie’s unwitting expense and Mick pointing out the famed Westway tower-block - ` `That’s where some of our best songs were written’ ` - and the rest of them joining in with gobbledegook choruses of `London’s Burning’.


RUNNING STRICTLY to Clash schedules, they landed in Paris ten minutes before they were supposed to be onstage. Not that they knew that till after they left the stage. The promoter who met them was so out of it that it took him several attempts to find the car he came in. “See, that’s how you’ll end up if you keep on smoking dope’ announced Bernie to no-one in particular. The promoter, his eyes surrounded by heavy layers of silver glitter, grinned wildly and had another go at trying to find his car keys. The gig was the show piece of the last night of a festival celebrating the tenth anniversary of the French uprising in May 1968 . Organised by the largest French Trotskyist organisation, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire, it was held in the Hippodrome which is normally used as a circus. The Subway Sect really needn’t have worried about a riot. They would’ve got it anyway.

Just before the band were about to go on, I wandered out to have a look at the crowd. I only had time to notice that rather a large number of people were wearing crash helmets before a Clash roadie pushed me back to the dressing room with a shout of “Ammonia”.

As far as I can makeout, there’s a French political faction, les Autonomes, who consider all forms of political organisation to be intrinsically bourgeois. So they break up everyone else’s meetings. However, as they were heavily outnumbered, they were soon forced out and the rest of the crowd broke into a couple of verses of the Inter- nationale to clear the air and psyche themselves up for a touch of le vrai punk politique. With the odd bottle still flying at the stage and the sound on stage being about as good as a ten quid tranny’s, the show was the Clash at their most disorganised. The highpoint was Topper and Mick’s duet version of `White Riot’ - Paul had dropped his bass and Joe had knocked over his `mike and thrown down his guitar in disgust.

What they couldn’t understand was why the crowd were threatening another riot if they didn’t do an encore. Almost unable to speak for laughing, they told the promoter: “If you can’t get `em to leave, tell `em we’re coming back again.” Only later did they find out that the sound in the hall itself had been excellent and the French hadn’t totally lost their senses when they demanded more. Still, as one of them said: “The way we played tonight, Don Revie . . . he’d transfer us.”

SECOND INTERVIEW

BACK IN THE studio a week later, they’re at the stage of putting on the vocals, no-one would find the Parisian haphazardness even slightly amusing and Pearlman and Statisiak have got themselves a new name in tribute to their nightly pursuit of new culinary delicacies - the Glutton Twins.

Only Joe was really needed this night but Topper had dropped round sporting a large `I’d rather be playing pool’ badge and Mick hung around watching TV till he decided he might as well go home to bed. But mostly it was Joe stuck up there in the studio by himself, ploughing through endless takes of `The English Civil War’ (`When Johnny Comes Marching Home’). With a clean handkerchief stuck loosely in his breast pocket and his own little bar of honey-sweetened teas set up in front of him on an amp case, he looked a bit like a seedy and tee-total Bryan Ferry When, even with constant soothing with honey his throat could no longer stand the strain, the session was halted and we started the second interview again at his squat just off Marylebourne Road but this time with a brand new set of batteries.

In the studio, I’d heard some mention of finishing the album in the States

“That’s just bollocks, pie in the sky. It’s just that we were gonna go over and do three gigs and we got the cold shoulder. We were told it was a waste of time. We were gonna do the gigs and then mix the album at the place they (the Glutton Twins) know best. I just never even bothered to consider it. I’d like to go over there really strong with a thing like the Anarchy tour - load ofgroups, a whole evening, a whole spectrum of punk rock.”

A wayfrom the record for the moment, you don’t play live very . Often now do you? “No, we don’t really, do we? Of course I was ill. I was only in hospital for a couple of weeks but it took me a Long time to realise what was wrong with me. You don’t think you’ve got hepatitis. You just think you feel ill. “Rocco (who took the photo on the back of the album) said “Ey, my friend, you looks a little yellow’. And he turned round with this floodlight and my eyeballs were bright yellow and my face was all yellow and I took off my shirt and my body was all yellow. “I reckon there’s an epidemic. Princess Margaret. I mean people like that - what have they been up to? “We’ve been doing a gig every couple of weeks lately the Nazi League, Birmingham, Paris. But playing London is a very difficult thing for us. We’re trying to get a London date as hard as we can at the moment. It’s only two weeks to go . . . It’s just all their prejudices against punk rock. “The Rainbow said they were going to use us as a dry run. If those three nights went alright, they were going to take out all the seats in January. They never did. I don’t think they’ve even taken one out.”

As Paris was the first gig I’d ever travelled to with them, I wondered if they were always so disastrously organised.

“We’re always like that. It was so typical, I don’t even notice any more. It starts with Bernie and it,comes down to use. Bernie lives in another universe to most people. But it’s not true we’re gonna get rid of him. It’s just we’re always washing our dirty laundry in public. It’s a natural gift that Mick Jones has got. He prefers to have a good fucking argument with an audience. He likes someone to play to. . . I can dig it.”

How about the view of you as apunk Rollers?



“What? That’s a new one on me . . . It’s like the Lurkers talking about Strummer and those three other posers he hangs around with. The Lurkers just don’t know us at all. But how can they know us? But they certainly have no idea of us if that’s what they think. They think they’re doing something new, grovelling around in sweaty places but I’ve done my share of that and so has everybody. “lf you listen to everybody, you just end up as a fucked up cunt. You’ve gotta do what you think’s right. `Cos no-one’s here when you’re writing a song, there’s no-one to help you”.

Aren’t those jibes because you somehow go beyond being a mere group, and for some people become some kind of moral paragons?

“Don’t ask me mate. I’m in the group . . . Do you mean they think we’re like the Pope?”

Yes.

“What a lousy job”.

How do you feel about being treated as some kind of hero because in the beginning you were saying it was something you wanted to avoid and now you`ve found yourself trapped. “The truth is it’s very hard to believe it’s happened.”

Well, for example Rotten’s freaked by it, locks himself away in a house. “Well, you can’t really compare me and him because he went through the whole heavy thing. Suddenly everybody in the world descended on him. He went through something, a lot more pressure, a million tons more. You can’t compare.”

But do you ever feel that kind of pressure?

“No. I feel pretty good . . . I don’t know anymore. You end up thinking you ain’t got no fans really. You only think you’ve got no fans in between I gigs. I’ve completely forgotten now what it’s like to do a gig and I must have done a million. Then, when you see a good group on tele you can get a bit of a feeling. Like when I see Sham, I get a shot of adrenaline `cos I remember what it’s like to be onstage just by watching them. But I don’t get that off any other group on tele.”

But you’re certainly more relaxed about things these days, like you no longer lie about your age.

“I thought it was important. When you’re about23, I think you feel worse about it. When you’re 25, you don’t care. It’s `cos you’ve gotta say goodbye to being a teenager forever at 22/23. Whereas when you’re twenty one, you can still kid yourself.”

But changing it from 24 to 22 is such , a small difference.

“Do you think I should have taken ten off then I would have been twelve. That’s the silliness of it. When you , he about it, it’s a big difference. It’s like women. They always used to say in the old days that you should never ask a woman her age . . . I had a lot to conquer, y’ know. Like in the old days, this (plays slow riff on guitar) was banned and it was all this (fast riff) and we’ve got a bit of this (back to slow riff) on this record”.

Another way in which you’ve changed is the change in emphasis over politics.

“It was like a defence thing. I’m prepared to talk about it more realistically now, I suppose, about us being a political group. It was like the Damned are a fun group (big smile) and the Clash are a political group (big frown). We certainly have a sense of humour, a really highly developed one, amongst ourselves. A lot of things that made us fall about laughing, people took very seriously. Some of the words on that first album . . . me and Mick laughed till we cried. “I tell you what it was about the politics. We never thought of what we were doing as political. What all those politicians are up to is what we though politics was.

And when people said we were political, that was what we thought they meant. And we didn’t want anything to do with those bastard boring c**nts. Who wants to be labeled with that lot of lying bastards. That’s what freaked us out. “We just thought politics was like the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. And the people you meet from those organisations - I’m not knocking them, maybe they’re doing good work - are just deadly boring, really just deadly f**king boring. And we didn’t want people to start thinking we were like that. `Cos we thought they were just creeps.”

Some people think Bernie used you as apolitical mouthpiece.

“That reminds me of once when I was talking to Viv of the Slits and it was the time that Malcolm was doing something with them and we were talking about being Malcolm’s puppets. She just said, `At Least it’s better than being Rhodes’ puppets’. “Bernie never told us what to say. He just told us to stop singing songs like `She’s Sitting At The Party’. He said toss that fucking song out of the repertoire, write something else. It was great to meet him. Along comes this guy who says “Think about what you’re doing, have something worth taking out there. Don’t just shamble out there” . And it was great . . . we don’t really have a relationship like that with him anymore . . . still, everything changes.”

But is there still a mutual trading of respect?

“Yeah, on good days. On bad days, there ain’t much of anything.”

How do you feel now about the treatment of you as a working-class hero? Do you think it was a fair representation? “Yeah, I do.”

Well, you certainly don`t come from any poverty-stricken background.

“Yeah, but it’s not where you come from. It’s where you’ve been, what you’ve been through. If you just stood on your own two legs, do it that way, then it don’t matter where you come from `cos you learn all the lessons and you get wise, just `cos you have to, to survive. Songs like `White Riot’ were written walking along the street in my head . . endlessly.”

And what about those photos of you in Belfast, posed like you were local guerrilla fighters?

“It’s funny being in a group. Whenever you go to a city, it’s like in and out. It was like that in Belfast. Straight in, soundcheck, zoom round the streets, few shots. I didn’t want to do it. It was disrespectful to the people who live there. If you wanna know the truth they say to you “Well you won’t get your picture on the front of Melody Maker if you don’t do it. Don’t you want to get ahead? Do you want to be a small group all your life?’ Anybody’d go for that. It’s just that your ego takes over.”

Talking of ego, how about the name Joe Strummer? “I thought it out in the Charlie Pig Dog days. That’s more defensive paranoia. I could only play chords and at the first two gigs I ever did, there were like ten, twenty people in the room who could play better guitar than me. But I was the only one with a guitar. When you can only hold an A chord, you feel . . . I felt very inferior about it . . . playing music . . . I thought it was something difficult. That’s what’s so great about punk rock.

Almost everybody I know knows how to play something now.” At the first encounter you mentioned that you were listening to a lot of country music. That could mean we’ll now have a million country punk bands. “I refuse to accept that. It’s just crazy. I just flit about. I mean I was red hot on canun for like a month and now my cajun discs are all dusty at Micky Foote’s house. And now I just went mad on country music, Joe Ely, people like that. Next week I won’t be playing it. “I only like good music and the country that I listen to is f**king good. And if it’s good it ain’t gonna harm anyone if they listen to it.”

How

“I’m more strong on bluebeat now. There’s a point where it stopped being R&B and suddenly became bluebeat and that’s the fucking stuff I like. I heard some great stuff like Greek reggae . . . really, I’ve got it on tape. I think reggae was in a bit of a rut lately.”

So does that mean the Clash will be doing bluebeat?

` I have written a couple of bluebeat numbers but we haven’t had time to work them up yet. We do a great version of ` Israelites’ . We do a load of covers for fun at sound-checks. We was thinking of making a record like our sort of `Pin-Ups’. “We’ve come up with some great ideas. Like the thought of us doing this or that number is mind boggling We do a stonking version of `Train Kept A Rolling’ , like the Johnny Burnette Trio. We also do a great version of `Your Rockin’ Mamma’ by Carl Mann. I saw him when he came over, really one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. It starts off with a waltz but I’m sure that ain’t right- I only heard him do it onstage.”

AFTER HE’S had a piss out of the window, I said that made it sound like the Clash were a concept. Some people see them as the concept coming first and then everything being fitted into it. “No. First and foremost, it was always a group. Our main concept was that everyone should move. All action, no fucking lazing about. No- one riding on anyone’s back. Everyone working full-tilt. It’s much better to have a group working full-tilt. It’s a real group.”

Like the Clash.

Pete Silverton