The next time our paths crossed was five years hence. Somehow I got coerced into checking out a new group who’d literally just come into existence. The venue they’d chosen to showcase their set in was actually a Soho record store that had allowed them to set up and play on its premises one Saturday afternoon in late 1974. Maybe the establishment thought the live entertainment would attract more record sales. If they did they were sorely mistaken. The group were beyond shambolic. A bloke with hippie hair and a grimy Afghan coat noodled away on guitar whilst two extremely suspicious-looking types to his immediate left tried unconvincingly to master the art of becoming an interactive rhythm section. Only the singer stood out. He had the voice of a ruptured seal and a surly ‘Bill Sykes’s dog’ type of persona that seemed to be chained to an invisible chip on his shoulder so monumentally large he could have stepped out of a John Osborne play. Unlike his hippie playmates, he wore his hair relatively short in a badly groomed duck-tail and sported a suit that might have once belonged to a hobo during the Great Depression. I asked Ted Carroll - the rotund, jovial capo of Camden Town’s Rock On record store who was one of the only five people there constituting an audience - what the singer’s name was. Carroll - who had the amusing habit of calling anyone he encountered by their Christian name prefixed by the word ‘rockin” - ‘Hi there, rockin’ Dave’ - ‘What’s new, rockin’ Nick?’ etc. - replied, ‘That there is rockin’ Joe - rockin’ Joe Strummer. He’s got a big future ahead of him.’ ‘Yeah, but not
with that cowboy group he’s fronting,’ I remember countering.
It must have been one of the 101’ers’ first-ever gigs. I saw them playing pubs and support spots several times over the next twelve months and they never really improved. Everyone who saw them was pretty much of the same opinion: the singer was something special but his supporting players were a bunch of deadbeat buskers. I don’t recall ever conversing with him during his years as the king of squat rock but we certainly scowled at each other frequently enough. He lived in a squat on 101 Walterton Road and I often frequented a heroin connection dealing out of the building next door to his at no. 99. He never acted like he was particularly at ease with this state of affairs: oftentimes he’d be outside his building staring coldly at the junkies entering and leaving his neighbourhood. Mind you, he was always on the piss back then so he wasn’t best placed to be voicing any kind of disdain for other substance-abusers. In fact, I never saw the man sober until the end of 1977.
But something evidently changed within Strummer shortly after the release of the Clash’s debut album because he cut down drastically on his booze intake and became noticeably more health-conscious and career-focused. My guess is that he was shaping up to fully embrace his new destiny as the lightning-rod conscience of punk but it was also probably to do with him having spent the end of ’77 bedridden from hepatitis. Whatever the cause, it was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Joe Strummer I found facing me in early ’78 when we were brought together for a special televised debate on the merits and shortcomings of the UK music press that took up one episode of a weekly BBC programme devoted to analysing the media in general called
Don’t Quote Me
.
Nick Logan had been invited to participate on behalf of the
NME
but asked me to go in his place. It was a bold move on his part - sending his paper’s druggiest entity out into TV-land to represent the troops. I made an effort to be as clear-headed as possible but the actual taping occurred early one morning and I’ve never been what you’d call a morning type of person. As a result, I became uncharacteristically subdued as the three musicians booked to speak their minds on the subject of their treatment in the music comics ran down their list of grievances, expecting me to stand up for all their media persecutors. What a thankless task! Rick Wakeman of Yes was one of the three - Roy Harper the other one - and stared at me throughout our exchanges like he was trying to will me into a pillar of salt.
Only Strummer talked any real sense during the half-hour we all bantered back and forth. He paid homage to the power of the press whilst calling to attention its tricky, duplicitous side. He didn’t have an axe to grind or old scores to settle and was smart enough to view the subject under discussion from an informed perspective unclouded by petty grudge-bearing. Witnessing him redeem this otherwise dreary spectacle made me realise once and for all that he was a force to be reckoned with.
I saw a lot of Strummer after that. Throughout 1979 he was living off Edgware Road near the chemist’s I frequented for my daily medication and we’d often bump into each other at a local greasy spoon where we’d pass the midday hours together eating a belated breakfast and discussing the issues of the day. He had a real missionary zeal about him and took his job as punk’s resident Moses very, very seriously indeed. He wanted to get his demographic politically motivated and more in sync with the questing bohemian youth mindset of the fifties and sixties. He
didn’t want what he’d helped instigate to go down in history as some brief fashion-driven season of silliness. He reminded me in many ways of the underground press guys I’d worked and lived alongside back in 1972, with their incessant diatribes against ‘the man’ and their fervent embrace of a multiplicity of fringe causes. But Strummer had far more personal magnetism and restless energy than all the rest of the country’s disaffected post-hippie advocates for social revolution put together and had a far better platform to spread his message with: the Clash.
Much has been written since his untimely death about the fact that Strummer’s upper-middle-class origins were so blatantly at odds with the working-class prole firebrand role he assumed in young adulthood. That may be so but his reinvention was so all-encompassing and his drive to project that reinvented persona out to the world so unrelenting that he literally became what he’d dreamt of becoming since adolescence - Che Guevara with an electric guitar. History may now indicate that he wasn’t a particularly brilliant political theorist or any kind of God-given musical talent but he knew how to blend the two roles into one credible entity. And if rock ’n’ roll immortality was based on physical energy alone, Strummer would be at the very top of the heap. His voice may have been a gnarly abomination, his guitar-playing just a blur of rhythmic chicken-scratching and he wasn’t even particularly good-looking, but no one apart from James Brown and Jackie Wilson ever sweated more on stage in order to incite some form of rapture from their audience.
That was the great thing about the Clash: they knew they weren’t the best but that just made them work harder. I remember seeing them play in some hall in Manchester in the winter of ’78, not long after the release of their second album
Give ’Em
Enough Rope
, and it was like Beatlemania revisited inside the venue - kids screaming and risking personal injury to mount the stage and touch their heroes. Strummer stood aloft before them gleefully stoking the fevered response but also cannily controlling the momentum, never letting the high energy teeter into out-and-out chaos. That was his gift - the capacity to rock the house to the rafters whilst indoctrinating its inhabitants in the same breath with more than just the usual ‘let the good times roll’ platitudes. Thank God he and his band were there to pick up the slack after the Pistols’ premature flame-out. If the Clash hadn’t rolled up their sleeves and committed their efforts to furthering the range and impact of punk rock at the end of the seventies, the form would have fallen under the exclusive control of feckless thug-exhibitionists like Jimmy Pursey and Sham 69.
Pursey was a big noise in 1978 - a big, hectoring, double-ugly noise that drew punk’s dimmest adherents to him like flies to excrement. Sham 69’s audience was a sight to curdle the soul - skinhead behemoths with prison tattoos and someone else’s blood on their Doc Martens - and Pursey had them spellbound like T. S. Eliot’s ape-necked Sweeney reinvented as a punk Mussolini. Throughout ’78 and ’79 he made it his business to invade the
NME
offices on virtually a weekly basis and lecture us all on ‘what the kids are really thinking’. You’d be trying to do your work and this malodorous brute would suddenly materialise out of nowhere and start rabbiting on about his and our responsibilities to ‘the kids’. If there’d been a gun in the place, I’d have gladly shot the man. He represented everything I despised most in the late seventies: rank, vainglorious, talent-free opportunism masquerading as ‘the voice of the oppressed’. Elvis Costello once remarked that the worst aspect of Thatcher’s gruesome regime
was the fact that she ‘let all the dogs out of their cages’, that she in effect empowered the greedy and heartlessly vindictive to run amok over the country’s social policies and cultural landscape; punk’s immediate legacy was much the same, with smarmy brutes like Pursey and his ilk suddenly choking up the spotlight and drowning everyone else out with their barking and braying.
It says a lot about the ongoing deterioration of the
NME
that such an obnoxious pest should be not only tolerated in the paper’s office space but actively welcomed into its very midst. It wouldn’t have happened if Nick Logan had still been the editor but in May ’78 he stepped down and left the paper to be guided by other hands. IPC duly interviewed a number of possible successors and picked a candidate they felt worthy to assume the responsibilities. But then, just two weeks before he was due to take control, this ‘candidate’ received a visit from the drug squad, who came armed with a search warrant and uncovered enough cocaine in his home to duly charge him with dealing the drug. This charge also effectively put the kibosh on his chances of becoming
NME
’s next kingpin, which meant that IPC suddenly had to resort to solutions closer to the immediate home front.
With time running out, they had no other option but to offer the post to the fellow who’d been Logan’s assistant editor since the departures of Ian MacDonald and Tony Tyler. This was one Neil Spencer, a former schoolteacher who’d first appeared in the paper in the mid-seventies as a kind of self-appointed reggae specialist. Spencer took his reggae so seriously he felt compelled to talk at all times in a fake Jamaican rude-boy accent even though he was English and whiter than a loaf of Mother’s Pride sliced bread. Somehow he’d managed to get involved in the day-to-day running of the paper - editing copy, taking the train to the
printers each Tuesday morning and overseeing the weekly print run - until he’d become the de facto head man during ’77, when Nick Logan had often been absent.
To his credit, Spencer worked hard to keep the paper afloat in extremely trying and uncertain circumstances, and when he was formally anointed
NME
’s editorial top dog - it was made official in the May 23rd issue - it was generally assumed that he’d at least have the moxie to keep the winning team of writers at the paper’s disposal in gainful employment. This turned out not to be the case, however. Spencer wasted little time in consigning the paper’s more ‘difficult’ elements - i.e. argumentative, independent-minded writers like myself, Lester Bangs and Ian MacDonald, as well as opportunistic fire-starters like Parsons and Burchill - onto the back burner of the paper’s creative oven.
In our place, he brought in a sorry selection of music-industry functionaries and groupies. One was a woman who’d been both Bob Marley’s press officer and a ‘close personal friend’ of John Lydon’s. Another had done time as the press agent for both Jimmy Pursey and Siouxsie Banshee. Joining them in the front lines were the young editor of a Clash fanzine and a bloke who happened to be sharing a flat with the singer from the Gang of Four. With these kind of industry ‘insiders’ on his team, Spencer felt confident he could get the paper closer to the very heartbeat of the end-of-the-seventies pop-culture Zeitgeist. What he achieved instead was to set in motion an ongoing haemorrhaging of the papers weekly sales figures.
The only one of this ‘clued-in new breed’ that I found in any way sympathetic was a gaunt Mancunian lad named Paul Morley who’d been a local ‘stringer’ for the
NME
prior to Spencer’s
coup d’état
and who’d lately been drawn to try his luck as a struggling
young writer in London. He was being groomed to take over the role I’d been sidewinded into assuming back in the early seventies - that of
NME
’s resident word-wielding ‘gunslinger’. Spencer and the other editors were always whispering in his ear trying to mould him into their idea of the new office saviour, but I could tell Morley was growing increasingly ill at ease with their interference.
One time we were alone in the reviews room-a dimly lit space with a desk, hi-fi and a chair that was ideal for drug consumption - and I told him to ignore all the ‘editorial advice’, that the people now running the paper were all talentless jobsworths anyway and that he’d be far better off simply following his own instincts and writing about things that genuinely moved him. From what I’ve seen of his work since, he evidently took those words to heart, though not in a way I could readily relate to. At first I felt slightly protective of the fellow - he always looked like he was in the grip of some secret sorrow and soon started cultivating a scary predilection for pouring hard liquor down his throat as a way to deal with all that deadline stress. But then he decided to reinvent himself as Britain’s most pretentious man-a role he’s apparently proud to sustain to this very day - and I promptly lost all interest in him and his general well-being.
Morley’s media ascension corresponded neatly with the way his old stamping ground Manchester had lately started to become a hotbed of home-grown music-making talent. Back in the sixties, the Northern metropolis had been something of a bad joke amongst the beat-boom cognoscenti. Liverpool had the Beatles, London had the Who and the Stones, Birmingham had the Move and half of Led Zeppelin, and all the Mancs could muster up was a bunch of mickey mousers like Herman’s Hermits.