Golden Oldies
MY CLASH WITH BORIS
I felt old for the first time the day Joe Strummer died, in 2002.
The Clash were the soundtrack to my youth. London Calling, the seminal 19-track double album – hailed by Rolling Stone and NME as the album of the seventies AND the eighties, now pimped with its own show at the Museum of London – was released in 1979.
The Clash turned me and my siblings into public-school punks.
As I was at day school, I could more easily pose and pogo around the many pubs and dives of Ladbroke Grove – the band members lived around there – with spiky, gelled hair and black nail varnish, whereas my brothers tragically had only Eton High Street.
The Clash was Our Band. In 1985, I was driving through Spain with my brother and we had one cassette (well, three – Sandinista was a triple album) between us.
All our stuff had been nicked in Madrid on our first day, along with our camping stuff and the first-aid kit – everything right down to Boris’s stinking espadrilles).
We started arguing about who the lead singer was: I maintained it was Paul Simonon; he maintained it was Joe Strummer.
My refusal to give in annoyed him so much that he pulled over the yellow Ford Fiesta, on some autovia in Andalucia, and asked me to get out of the car. We stood on the hard shoulder. I wasn’t sure why. Then he thumped me. ‘It’s JOE STRUMMER,’ he hissed, ‘OK?’ I have never held this against him. I said, ‘You can’t be right because you’re not cool – AND I AM!’ So I deserved all I got.
When he was Spectator editor, I was trying to get three infants upstairs to bed and the telephone rang. ‘Joe Strummer wants to say hello,’ Boris said with a note of glee.
I couldn’t breathe. I’d seen him play live only once, at the Brixton Academy in 1984, and by then the Clash were trying to put the fizz back into the bottle. But still. Strummer was our hero!
‘I hear you’re something of a fan,’ an amused voice drawled, to me in Brussels in 1998. And then he died.
The diligent rock critic now has to go to the exhibitions (like the ones on David Bowie and Pink Floyd) as well as concerts. This is the first show I’ve been to that’s devoted solely to one band’s one album.
If you’re into the Clash, and lots of people are, not all of them related to me, it’s vaut le voyage.
There is the very guitar Simonon smashed on stage (that made the cover image of London Calling) and Strummer’s battered white brothel creepers.
All of it made me feel even older – but happy that at least I was young and trying to be cool at the same time as my local heroes of British punk.