Mick Jones: Stayin' In Tune - The Unauthorised Biography Read online

  Published by

  Eleusinian Press Ltd

  www.eleusinianpress.co.uk

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by photocopying or any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permissions in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher of the book.

  First Edition published 2015

  © Mick O'Shea

  A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

  ISBN 978-1-909494-13-8

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  Introduction

  My Grandpa Came From Russia…

  Mark Me Absent

  Teenage Delinquent

  What's My Name?

  Clash City Rocker

  Who Needs Remote Control…?

  And I Look To My Left

  Elevator Going Up…

  Don't Touch That Dial

  Another Day Older and Deeper In Debt

  The Rebels Were Dancing On Air

  You Don't Understand My Point Of View

  What Am I Gonna Do Now?

  The Horses Are On The Track

  They Play Knock On Wood

  Switchin' On The Strobe

  Entering A New Ride

  Sound Of The Joe

  A Twist Of Modern

  Great Tomorrows Lie In Wait

  Notes

  Photos

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  It was Confucius who sagaciously observed that the longest journey starts with the first step, and if we borrow from this age-old aphorism to say the weightiest volume begins with the opening phrase, then when penning a biography about one of your foremost musical heroes one must take extra-special care where one treads. True, I'd touched on The Clash's early career in Only Anarchists Are Pretty (Helter Skelter, 2004), and again in more detail in The Anarchy Tour (Omnibus Press, 2012), but as with any iconic group, it's infinitely less daunting writing about the collective sum rather than singling out one of its individual parts.

  Having just turned sixteen I was the archetypal impressionable teenager when The Clash played Blackburn's King George's Hall on the Out On Parole Tour in July 1978. Like countless others I'd had my head turned by the Sex Pistols the previous summer in the wake of the furore surrounding the release of 'God Save The Queen' in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, but I'd yet to embrace punk rock per se. Indeed, I'd gone along to the King George's Hall that balmy Thursday evening naively believing the Pistols would get back together to put The Clash, as well as any other usurpers, in their proper place, but came away again – in spite of Steve Jones joining the group on stage for the encore – with my allegiance forever realigned.

  I saw The Clash on every ensuing tour – including the Out Of Control Tour of February '84 (sorry, Mick) – and while I still believe Joe to be the quintessential frontman, Topper the best drummer of his generation, and regard Paul to be one of the coolest fuckers to walk the earth, my eyes were always invariably focused stage right. In hindsight I like to think it was because we're both Cancerian, or that we unknowingly shared a passion for the film Zulu. But in reality, it's because if there was ever a guy born to play guitar, it was Mick Jones.

  True, Joe, Paul, and especially Topper, each played their part in the Clash breaking free from punk's self-imposed restraints and expanding their repertoire by embracing a multitude of musical genres, be it reggae, rockabilly, jazz, soul, funk, and even gospel, but it was the effortless ease which Mick encapsulated The Clash's essence within a simple yet infectious melody that proved fundamental in their achieving greatness.

  Flaubert warned us against touching our idols, lest the gilt rub off on our hands. Yet whilst this has undoubtedly proved true on occasion, Mick was geniality personified when I inadvertently happened upon him at a Glen Matlock solo show at The Borderline in Soho in August 2000. I was working on Anarchists at the time, and though Mick had the Transvision Vamp-ish Wendy James on his arm at the time, I threw caution to the wind and cheekily asked if I might have five minutes of his time.

  To my astonishment, he abandoned Wendy at the bar and guided me away to a quiet alcove where he not only patiently answered every one of my questions, but threw in a few choice anecdotes of his own.

  Over the years, The Clash's career has been expertly and painstakingly documented by the likes of Kris Needs, Marcus Gray, Pat Gilbert, and their devoted master-at-arms, Johnny Green, while Chris Salewitz penned Joe's posthumous biography, Redemption Song (Harper Collins, 2006). Yet despite his having gone on to achieve notable success with Big Audio Dynamite, as well as enjoying a third bite at the cherry with Carbon/Silicon, it seems no one thought a tome dedicated to Mick's near four decade-long career worthy of inclusion into the Clash literary canon?

  I first began touting the idea for Stayin' In Tune back in February 2011, but despite receiving nods of encouragement from several commissioning editors, it felt as though I was destined to plough a furrow in ever-decreasing circles until Alastair at Eleusinian Press stepped up to the plate.

  Books: Needs, Kris The Clash, Joe Strummer and the Legend of the Clash (Plexus, 2004), Coon, Caroline 1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion Omnibus Press, 1982), Gilbert, Pat Passion Is A Fashion (Aurum, 2004), Gray, Marcus Last Gang In Town (Fourth Estate, 1995), Tobler, John The Clash: A Visual Documentary (Omnibus Press, 1983), Robb, John Punk: An Oral History (Ebury Press, 2006), Broad, John A Riot Of Our Own: Night and Day with The Clash (Orion, 1999), Gray, Marcus Route 19 Revisited (Vintage, 2011), Letts, Don Culture Clash (SAF Publishing, 2001), Doane, Randal Stealing All Transmissions (Custos 2012), Albertine, Viv Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys (Faber and Faber 2014).

  Magazines, Periodicals and TV Documentaries: That Was Then… This Is Now, Westway To The World, Viva Joe, Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Time Out, Blitz magazine, Mojo, ZigZag, The Sun, Record Mirror, Q magazine, LA Times, Trouser Press, The Armagideon Times, Austin Chronicle, Rolling Stone, Creem, Pulse Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Vox magazine, All Music, News Of The World, Guitar World, Pulse magazine, The Guardian, The Independent, Daily Mirror, CNN, The Telegraph, New York Times.

  Websites: www.blackmarketclash.com

  www.clashblog.com

  ultimateguitar.com

  www.gibson.com

  www.sabotagetimes.com

  www.blogs.citypages.com

  www.deangoodman.com

  www.thequietus.com

  www.philly.news.com

  www.carbonsilicon.com

  www.teletext.co.uk

  www.louderthanwar.com

  www2.gibson.com

  www.musicfilmweb.com.

  Professional thanks to Bernard Rhodes, Gary Stonadge, Steve Dior, and Nick Reynolds. Front cover design by Pistol and Rottenpunk Productions (check out their website www.pistolart.com).

  Special thanks to Tasha 'Bush' Cowen and Shannon 'Mini-B' Stanley for keeping the kettle on semi standby, the sweet bowl filled, and for putting up with my moods when things weren't quite going according to script.

  Thanks also to Lisa 'T-Bag' Bird, Paul Young (not the singer), Becky Boo Johnson, Alex 'Chef Boy' Jones, James Willment, Amun James, Zoe Johnson, and Joel & Aggie at The Old House At Dorking.

  Also, a special mention to my mum and dad (Pat and Frank) who suffered through 'That Time!!!' as mum refers to my teenage punk rock phase. Well, mum, considering my first tome was based on the Sex Pistols, and this is my fifteenth book to date, you have to admit 'that time' wasn't without its merits...

  On a more serious note I'd like to
dedicate the book to Graham Jackson who was tragically taken from us way before his time at just 54.

  Rest In Peace, brother

  Mick O'Shea

  Still Living The Dream

  August 2014

  – INTRODUCTION –

  'I came into rehearsal just like any other day and, funnily enough, Topper had turned up to see how we were'

  – Mick Jones

  AS MICK JONES ARRIVED AT Lucky Eight, The Clash's new rehearsal facility – with a state-of-the-art sixteen-track studio, and an upstairs recreation area replete with a fridge stacked with cans of Red Stripe – sometime during the afternoon of Monday 22 August 1983, he might well have been pondering the injustices of the Rolling Stones having just signed to CBS UK for a whopping $28 million while The Clash's own six-years-and-counting £100k contract hung about their collective necks like the proverbial millstone, or perhaps pondering whether the weather might hold out until the coming weekend and the annual Notting Hill Carnival. However, it's far more likely that his mind was focused on the tricky middle eight on a new tune for a song he'd written called 'Trans Cash Free Pay One'*, which was tentatively earmarked for the group's follow-up album to the previous year's million-selling Combat Rock.

  The Clash had recently returned to the soot-encrusted shadow of Rehearsal Rehearsals, the Camden Lock compound where they'd started their odyssey some seven years earlier, but they were no longer the same 'Garageland' group that had thrown three chords together during the heady summer of 1976; more tellingly, nor were they the same people. Whereas Mick had his eye on the future, and wanted to store away his Gibson Les Paul in favour of a Bond Electraglide, or the 'Dalek's Handbag' as Paul uncharitably referred to the carbon fibre guitar, ever since Bernard Rhodes' reintroduction to the managerial reins Joe and Paul were insisting The Clash return to their punk roots.

  This, of course, was anathema as far as Mick was concerned, because while he'd been happy to copy the Ramones' blitzkrieg-bop backbeat for The Clash's own eponymous debut album, punk was a sepia-toned memory. Indeed, his refusal to play 'White Riot' during the final encore at the Top Rank in Sheffield back in January 1980 during the Sixteen Tons Tour had seen him and Joe come to blows backstage. True, he'd gone back out for the encore, but midway through the song he'd made his position clear by unslinging his guitar and walking off stage, and they didn't play 'White Riot' again until the tour hit London some two weeks later.

  While he still believed The Clash to be a great album, with the possible exception of 'Police And Thieves', which wasn't even theirs anyway, the songs were of their time – both musically and ideologically. And wasn't that the reason they'd dropped '1977' from the set-list as soon as the calendar rendered the song obsolete?

  Combat Rock had given The Clash their first Billboard Top 10 album, so how could Joe and Paul possibly think the way forward was to take a backward step in ploughing punk's clichéd furrow. In doing so they ran the danger of becoming as anachronistic as the binliner and safety-pin.

  Had Mick been of a superstitious nature then his being first to arrive may have seemed a telling portent that something out of the ordinary was in the offing. After all, his tardiness when it came to rehearsals was legendary within The Clash camp, and never before had he been called upon to switch on the lights. Further evidence that the fates were conspiring came with Topper Headon's unexpected arrival. Though Topper had been sacked the previous May owing to his spiralling heroin addiction, he was still on speaking terms with his erstwhile colleagues and finding himself in Camden and with a couple of hours to kill Topper thought he'd drop in for a chat. Finding Mick was the only one there Topper leapt behind the kit and the two were soon jamming away as in days gone by. However, rather than risk embarrassing his replacement, Pete Howard, or even worse, receiving a reprimand from the irascible Bernard, Topper put down his sticks and with a glance at the clock suggested he should perhaps make a move. Mick agreed, remarking that he didn't know what could be keeping the others.

  Once Topper had departed, rather than sit around twiddling his thumbs Mick took a stroll to a nearby bookshop. He returned an hour or so later to find Pete sat behind his kit giving the cymbals a cursory wipe blissfully unaware as to who'd been crashing them but a short while earlier. Mick picked up his guitar, but Joe and Paul, made no move for their own instruments. They hadn't come to rehearse, but rather to inform Mick that he was out of the group.

  At that moment, Mick's new guitar tech, Digby Cleaver, came in carrying a pot of freshly-brewed tea. He'd been in another part of the building so was blithely unaware as to the seismic events unfolding around him, but knew seeing Mick packing up his guitar that something serious was going down. Though relatively new to the role, Digby had quickly come to regard The Clash as Mick's group. Up until the moment of Joe and Paul's pronouncement Mick had thought the same, despite his being outvoted over Bernard's retaking the managerial reins.

  Had Joe and Paul delivered their bombshell during the heat of the moment, then Mick might well have gone away and allowed time for tempers to cool before showing his face at the rehearsal door. But there had been no crossing of swords, or even a heated exchange. This was a coolly calculated coup d'etat, with Bernard waiting in the wings with Mick's severance cheque.

  * * *

  * The song would subsequently be re-titled 'The Bottom Line' and appeared on BAD's 1985 debut album, This Is Big Audio Dynamite. (BACK)

  – CHAPTER ONE –

  MY GRANDPA CAME FROM RUSSIA…

  'We all come from a pretty large extended family of Jewish immigrants that escaped Russia and settled in London at the turn of the century, so there's quite a lot of us.'

  – Mick Jones

  THE SLEEVE FOR THE CLASH'S debut single 'White Riot b/w 1977'* – which was released on March 18 1977, would serve as the group's clarion call to arms for the remainder of their career and beyond. It depicts Mick, Joe, and Paul dressed in their urban battle fatigues, facing a nondescript wall with their hands raised above their heads as though they have just fought a losing battle with the law and are awaiting the consequences of their actions. Joe and Paul, standing on either side of Mick, have the two song titles daubed upon the back of their respective boiler suit, whilst Mick's shirt bears the spraypainted aphorism: 'Sten-guns in Knightsbridge'.

  They'd written the song in response to the violence that had flared up between heavy-handed police and certain sections of London's West Indian community at the Notting Hill Carnival over the previous August Bank Holiday weekend. At the time, The Clash came in for much criticism for their perceived agitprop posturing, for whilst the trendy upmarket central London thoroughfare was once renowned as being the haunt of highwaymen, robbers, and cut throats targeting travellers on the western route out of London, the likelihood of automatic weapons being discharged in anger appeared remote in the extreme.

  However, what had initially appeared an ill-conceived cliché would prove eerily prescient in the coming decade with the SAS storming of the Iranian Embassy, the IRA's car-bomb attack on Harrods, and the £60 million Knightsbridge Security Deposit heist.

  Somewhat appropriately, Sten-guns were fired in anger on the afternoon of Sunday, 26 June 1955 – the day Michael Geoffrey Jones made his inauspicious entry into the world at the South London Hospital for Women in Clapham – when South African police were called in to break up a 3,000-strong protest rally against Johannes Strijdom's National Party's newly-implemented laws on apartheid in a non-white suburb of Johannesburg.

  ♪♪♪

  It is perhaps rather fitting that Mick spent his formative years growing up in the multicultural melting pot that was mid-Fifties Brixton. The south London borough was already home to thousands of dispossessed souls from every corner of war-ravaged Europe when the majority of those now celebrated 492 West Indian émigrés – having been the first to take up the British government's offer to work in England under the newly-ratified British Nationality Act – disembarked from the MV Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks
on 21 June 1948.

  One of those who would have undoubtedly felt empathy with the newly-arrived émigrés was Mick's maternal grandfather Morris Zegansky, who'd fled his native Russia in the wake of the revolution that had brought down the Romanovs to start life anew within the bustling heart of the British Empire.

  Mick would subsequently romanticise his multicultural ancestry in the song 'Beyond The Pale', which appeared on Big Audio Dynamite's second album 10 Upping Street in 1986. In the lyric, Morris, a furrier by trade, had arrived in London after stowing away in some bails, and had taken his Jewish bride-to-be, Esther Stella Class – who at 27, was five years older than himself – dancing down to where the air-raid sirens hailed. Mick is surely stretching poetic license here somewhat, because while Morris and Stella had pledged their love at Holborn Register Office on 30 May 1927, Stella having given birth to Mick's mother, Renee, late the following year, they were no longer speaking to each other – let alone dancing cheek to jowl whilst jitterbugging the night away in defiance of the Doodlebugs – by the time Hitler's tanks rolled into Poland.