The Time Joe Strummer missed his own tour
We’ve all been there. You stare vacantly at your phone “2am…” you mutter to yourself, with work at nine and already six Bishop fingers deep, the chances of getting employee of the month, let alone actually turning up look slim. Although when it’s a job you do to just afford your diet of deliveroo, with a manager whose life purpose has entwined with company policy, does denying them your scarce time awake and sober really matter? Well it would, if the year was 1982, your manager was Bernie Rhodes and the job was touring the world.
They were considered one of the biggest bands in the world. Following the release of The Clash and London Calling the band The Clash were experiencing an internal clash of ideas and a clash with management. Members of the band Mick Jones and Joe Strummer were butting heads, a rift had been rupturing between the two for years and during the recording of Combat Rock tensions had hit breaking point and the Casbah had truly been rocked. Some would say it was the growing of egos, like Senna vs Prost at McLaren. Others would blame Mick’s callousness and lack of punctuality when it came to the band, later the reasons he would be fired for. To only throw flammable drug flavoured fuel onto the fire, the drummer, Nicky ‘Topper’ Headon (possibly the inspiration for Hot Shots own Topper Harley? We’ll never know) was suffering with a serious and debilitating drug addiction which was weighing heavily on the fab four. All of this created a troubled group, and although most definitely not connected, poor gig ticket sales in Scotland.
Bernie Rhodes was a wise man and savvy manager, and he quickly formulated a plan. The only way to create buzz and increase sales would be to make Joe disappear. The plan was simple, Joe would hideaway in Texas, not be seen for a while and the media would hopefully have a field day. So on April 21st Joe did leave the country, just not by plane, but by ferry and to instead a more romantic, cultured destination...
Paris. The city which gave us the works of Delacroix, was called home by Hemingway, birthed Joan of arc and harbours an underground labyrinth of catacombs built to house the dead. A place where one can stare in awe at the majestic arc de Triomphe… whilst simultaneously navigating nonsensical unmarked roundabouts, only built to help cull off the naïve moped rider. “I thought it would be a good joke if I never phoned Bernie at all,” Strummer reminisced in The Future Is Unwritten. “He was going to be thinking, ‘Oh, where has Joe gone?’… And I ran the Paris Marathon, too.” Joe had decided to flee to Paris with his then girlfriend, Gaby Salter and the pair found solace from band tensions in the calming cafes and warmly lit streets. The trip would be so good, Joe didn’t want to come home, apparently taking refuge in a few old local bars, he grew a rough beard (being later affectionately referred to as ‘Fidel’ by friends who found him) and as alluded to previously, did enter a marathon apparently still drunk from a session the night before.
As time went by, Rhodes and members of the bands team were getting worried. Although the plan had worked initially and had generated a lot of media buzz and helped ticket sales, the stunt had gone on too long and was starting to cause issues. Rumours had now arisen that Joe was holed up in Paris, with newspapers running stories about his disappearance from the band. Ticket sales started to dwindle and shows had to start being pushed back or cancelled, culminating in the entirety of the UK tour being postponed. Combat Rock even had to be released without the accompanying tour.
A close friend, Kosmo Vinyl, was sent with a private detective to retrieve the wayward singer in May 1982, and after some snooping, found the segregated Strummer. After pulling him from his favourite pub, Joe and the Clash did catch up with their own tour in the Netherlands where they played a festival set. Ironically the member to leave the band first after this escapade was Topper Headon, with this being his last set with the band thanks to the recently resurfaced Strummer firing him after playing. Strummer’s unannounced holiday and Headon’s dismissal would signal the beginning of the end for the reckless rambunctious rockers, with Mick Jones also being fired in the same year and eventually Joe calling it a day in 1986.
Upon reflection, Topper and Mick would say the disappearance was the event which ended them, claiming it was an attempt by Strummer to assert himself as the embodiment of the Clash. Joe would talk melancholically about the stunt and the end of the band in 1988 with the LA times, where he’d say "I was trying to prove that I was the Clash and it wasn't Mick (Jones). I learned that that was kind of dumb. I learned that it wasn't anybody, except maybe a great chemistry between us four, and I really learned it was over the day we sacked Topper, and not the day we sacked Mick.”
