3. The ClashThe Clash
I’ve actually got part of a chapter in my new book about how Joe Strummer started me on this path. That was my escape, because I knew that if he could do that, then so can I. I saw The Clash with Robert Smith at Crawley Leisure Centre, which is a very strange name for the place, and Suicide were opening for them. And The Specials were on the bill. Actually, I’d just missed Budgie slightly because he was playing with The Slits at that time. That was a pivotal moment – I’m in this fairly small, dark hall in the outskirts of London.
Suicide were like, the beginning of it. And then there’s The Specials that took this whole thing that you thought was dead and gone and pulled it back into life. And then there was The Clash, who were the ones that were doing it for the time. And then there was me and Robert, who were just starting. It was definitely the pivotal point where everything started to spin out from there. That’s why I like this album – it means a lot to me.
Joe would always say – and I’m going to paraphrase him here – ‘When you listen to the Jamaican stuff and the Rastafarians, if you can’t understand it, if you don’t know what they’re talking about, you’re not gonna get it anyway. So there’s no point.’ And the same thing with Joe. I mean, you know, a lot of the time it took me six months to figure out what some of the lyrics were, but I understood him straight away. I didn’t need to know the exact words; I knew what he was singing about. I also liked the fact that, after a while, you realize that there’s that push and pull, which you get in a lot of bands, which is what makes it work. Because you’ve got Joe, who was obviously the spokesman for a generation, but you’ve also got Mick Jones who’s has got some seriously good chops hiding under his stuff, and he’s very cool with it. And then, of course, they had Terry Chimes on drums. He was great on that first album, but then you had Topper Headon and he was a great drummer. You know, it’s all about the chemistry; you can’t manufacture that. Once you have that, don’t mess with it.
