The story of The Clash

Four roads to London

The Clash's frontman was born John Graham Mellor on the twenty first of August 1952, in Ankara, Turkey. His father worked in the British foreign service, and at the age of nine John and his older brother David were sent to boarding school in Surrey while their parents lived abroad. He later said he saw them about once a year. Rock and roll became his escape, from Little Richard to the Beach Boys and the folk singer Woody Guthrie, and for years friends called him Woody. Then came a blow he never forgot. David, who had drifted into the far right National Front and the occult, took his own life in July 1970. His body lay undiscovered for three days, and it fell to his younger brother to identify him.[1] [2]

After school, Woody spent a year at the Central School of Art and Design in London and briefly thought about becoming a cartoonist. He bought a ukulele for one pound ninety nine, and a busking friend taught him Johnny B. Goode on it. That, he said, was how he started. In 1973 he moved to Newport in South Wales, sang with local student bands, and worked as a gravedigger. Back in London in 1974 he formed a pub rock band with his housemates, and they named it the 101ers after their squat at 101 Walterton Road in Maida Vale. In 1975 he renamed himself Joe Strummer, a self mocking nod to his basic rhythm guitar, and insisted his friends use the new name.[1] [2] [3]

Michael Geoffrey Jones was born in Wandsworth, south London, on the twenty sixth of June 1955. His parents split up when he was eight, and he was largely raised by his grandmother Stella, whose Jewish parents had fled the pogroms in Russia. Mick lived for rock and roll. As a teenager he followed Mott the Hoople around Britain, dodging train fares and sleeping on town hall steps. After a glam band called the Delinquents, he formed London SS in 1975 with the bassist Tony James, managed by Bernard Rhodes. They rehearsed for most of a year, never played a gig and recorded a single demo. The name was a careless nod to the Nazi SS, and it would later embarrass Jones, who is Jewish.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul Simonon grew up in Brixton and Ladbroke Grove, close to London's Jamaican communities and their music, and won a scholarship to the Byam Shaw School of Art. He wanted to be a painter, not a musician. He tried out for London SS and was turned down, and so was a young drummer called Terry Chimes. A jazz loving drummer from Dover, Nicky Headon, lasted about a week with them. When London SS fell apart in early 1976, Rhodes stayed on as Jones's manager, and in March he urged Mick to recruit Simonon for his next band, because he liked Paul's look and attitude. Jones tried to teach him guitar, gave up within hours, and handed him a bass instead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Year zero, 1976

In February 1976 Mick Jones saw the Sex Pistols for the first time and felt that everything had changed. Joe Strummer had the same revelation on the third of April, when the unknown Pistols opened for the 101ers at the Nashville Rooms in London. He later said that within seconds of their first song he knew his own band was yesterday's paper. Bernard Rhodes had been watching Strummer, and on the thirtieth of May he and the young guitarist Keith Levene approached him after a 101ers show. At the rehearsal room, Levene played one of Joe's own songs back to him. Rhodes gave him forty eight hours to join a band that would rival the Pistols. Strummer said yes within twenty four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new group rehearsed in a former railway warehouse in Camden Town that Rhodes turned into a base called Rehearsal Rehearsals. Terry Chimes settled in on drums, and Paul Simonon came up with a name after noticing how often the word clash appeared in the newspapers. For a short while they had been the Weak Heartdrops and the Psychotic Negatives. Strummer later described joining as year zero, a time when you had to shed your old friends and your old way of playing. Rhodes pushed them to write about what was affecting them, not about romance. Joe would hand Mick a set of lyrics, and Mick would turn them into a song.[1] [2] [3]

The Clash played their first show on the fourth of July 1976, opening for the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan in Sheffield, after less than a month of rehearsals with Strummer. That same night Levene quietly suggested to the Pistols singer John Lydon, then called Johnny Rotten, that they form a band together if the Pistols ever split. In August the Clash, in paint spattered outfits inspired by Jackson Pollock, played for an invited audience in Camden, and a Sounds critic called them a runaway train. The NME was less kind after a gig at the end of that month, suggesting they be returned to the garage with the motor running. Strummer answered with the song Garageland. In early September Levene was out.[1] [2]

Politics arrived at the Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976, when a confrontation between Black youths and the police turned into a riot. Strummer and Simonon were caught up in it, and Strummer wrote White Riot, urging young white people to stand up for themselves the way their Black neighbours had. Some listeners heard a call for a race war, and Strummer angrily insisted the song was not racist at all. Photos of the riot became the band's stage backdrop and the back cover of their first album. In late November Chimes left. With Rob Harper on drums, the Clash joined the Sex Pistols in December on the chaotic Anarchy Tour, where local councils cancelled one show after another.[1] [2] [3]

Signing to CBS and the first album, 1977

On the twenty fifth of January 1977, Rhodes signed the Clash to CBS Records for a hundred thousand pounds. For a band that had played about thirty gigs, it was a huge sum, and some punks cried sell out. Mark Perry of the fanzine Sniffin' Glue wrote that punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS, then took it back as soon as he heard White Riot. The deal was less generous than it looked. The band had to pay for their own tours, recordings and artwork, and people in the business later held it up as the kind of contract no group should ever sign. Strummer said it simply meant that for the first time he could stop worrying about his stomach.[1] [2]

The first album was recorded over three long weekends in February 1977 at CBS Studio 3 in London, produced by the band's live sound man Mickey Foote. It cost about four thousand pounds. Terry Chimes came back to drum, but he had already decided to leave, so he is missing from the cover photo and credited on the sleeve as Tory Crimes. White Riot came out in March, and the album followed on the eighth of April, reaching number twelve in Britain. Its songs raged about dead end jobs, boredom, bosses and the police, and it included a bold cover of the reggae song Police and Thieves. CBS in America thought it too raw to release, so Americans bought it on import instead, in huge numbers.[1] [2]

Now they needed a drummer. Strummer later claimed they tried around two hundred and five. The answer was Nicky Headon, the jazz trained drummer who had passed briefly through London SS. He skipped his first audition, then saw Mick, Joe and Paul on the cover of the NME and changed his mind. He hit so hard at the tryout that his hands were covered in blood blisters, and he got the job at twenty five pounds a week. Simonon nicknamed him Topper, after a cartoon monkey in the Topper comic. Headon admitted later that he planned to stay briefly and move on. Instead Strummer called finding him the breakthrough the band had been waiting for.[1] [2] [3]

In May 1977 the Clash headlined the White Riot Tour, with the Jam, Buzzcocks, the Slits and Subway Sect. At London's Rainbow Theatre on the ninth of May, fans ripped up the seats, and the Sun ran the headline Punk Wreck. Strummer called it the night punk broke. Trouble with the law followed them around. Strummer and Headon were arrested for taking pillowcases from a hotel after a Newcastle show, and in June for spray painting the band's name on a hotel wall. Meanwhile CBS put out Remote Control as a single without asking the band. Their furious reply was Complete Control, produced by the Jamaican legend Lee Scratch Perry. Released in September, it became their first top thirty hit.[1] [2] [3]

Rock Against Racism and the second album, 1978 to 1979

Britain in the late seventies saw a rise in racist attacks and in support for the far right National Front. On the thirtieth of April 1978, after a march across London, the Clash played the Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park in front of up to a hundred thousand people. Strummer wore a T shirt naming two far left armed groups, Italy's Red Brigades and West Germany's Red Army Faction. In June came White Man in Hammersmith Palais. Strummer wrote it after an all night reggae show left him disappointed, then widened it into a reflection on violence, wealth and the rise of the far right. NME readers voted it single of the year, and it was later played at his funeral.[1] [2]

Around the same time, Simonon and Headon were caught shooting racing pigeons with an air gun from the roof of their Camden base. The Metropolitan Police's armed counter terrorist squad raided the building, and the pair were later fined seven hundred and fifty pounds. The episode fed into the song Guns on the Roof. For the second album, CBS wanted a cleaner sound that could crack America, and brought in Sandy Pearlman, the producer of Blue Oyster Cult. Simonon called the sessions the most boring situation ever. Pearlman was no fan of Strummer's voice and mixed the drums louder than the vocals, though he was astonished by Headon and called him the human drum machine. Along the way the band fired Bernard Rhodes and hired the journalist Caroline Coon.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Give 'Em Enough Rope came out on the tenth of November 1978 and reached number two in Britain, the joint highest album placing the band ever had at home. Some critics grumbled that it sounded too polished, but NME readers voted the Clash best group of the year, and Tommy Gun reached number nineteen, their biggest single so far. In February 1979 they made their first proper tour of North America, and later picked heroes like Bo Diddley and Screamin' Jay Hawkins as support acts. In mid 1979 they released The Cost of Living EP, led by a cover of I Fought the Law, a song Strummer and Jones first heard on a jukebox in a San Francisco studio. Soon after, they dismissed Coon.[1] [2] [3] [4]

London Calling, 1979

Without Rhodes, the Clash lost their Camden rehearsal room, and in May 1979 they moved into Vanilla Studios, at the back of a garage in Pimlico. They arrived with nothing. Strummer and Jones had not written a new song in over a year. So they played old rock and roll, rockabilly, rhythm and blues and reggae covers, kept hangers on away, and fell into a routine of afternoon rehearsals, a game of football, a trip to the pub, and more rehearsing in the evening. Their confidence came back, helped by a new respect for Headon, who could play almost any style. Demos made on a four track machine, later known as the Vanilla Tapes, held early versions of most of the new album.[1]

In August 1979 they moved into Wessex Studios in north London with a producer CBS did not want. Guy Stevens had given Mott the Hoople and Procol Harum their names and was a legend of the sixties rhythm and blues scene, but he was also struggling with drink and drugs. His methods were wild. He swung a ladder around and upturned chairs to create a rock and roll atmosphere, and once poured a bottle of wine over a piano while Strummer was playing it. The band, and Simonon above all, loved him and credited him with bringing out their best. Working eighteen hour days, they cut many songs in one or two takes, starting with the old Vince Taylor rocker Brand New Cadillac.[1] [2] [3]

The songs looked outward. The title track borrowed the BBC's wartime call sign, this is London calling, and fretted about a nuclear error after the Three Mile Island accident, about floods, police truncheons and unemployment. It fades out with Morse code spelling S O S. Spanish Bombs linked the Spanish Civil War to modern tourist beaches. Simonon wrote and sang his first song, The Guns of Brixton. Jones sang Lost in the Supermarket, which Strummer wrote while imagining Mick's childhood in a basement flat with his mother and grandmother. And at the last minute Jones added Train in Vain, a song meant for an NME giveaway that fell through, so it was left off the printed track list.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

London Calling came out on the fourteenth of December 1979, a double album sold for about the price of a single, and reached number nine in Britain. In America it followed in January, and Train in Vain became their first top forty hit there. The cover shows Paul Simonon smashing his bass on stage at the Palladium in New York on the twentieth of September 1979, furious that bouncers would not let the crowd stand up. Photographer Pennie Smith thought the shot was too blurred to use, but Strummer and the designer Ray Lowry loved it, and Lowry framed it in pink and green lettering borrowed from Elvis Presley's first album. A decade later Rolling Stone named it the best album of the 1980s.[1] [2] [3] [4]

New York, Bankrobber and Sandinista, 1980 to 1981

The Clash planned to put out a new single every month in 1980. CBS said no, and the only one was Bankrobber, a reggae song recorded in Manchester with the Jamaican DJ Mikey Dread. The head of CBS in Britain, Maurice Oberstein, disliked it and held it back until import sales from the Netherlands changed his mind, and it landed just outside the top ten that August. The band toured almost constantly. At a show in Hamburg on the twentieth of May 1980, Strummer hit a violent audience member with his guitar and was arrested. The moment shook him. He called it a watershed, the time violence had really controlled him, and he resolved never again to fight violence with violence.[1] [2] [3]

After a run of about twenty shows in America, they went straight into Electric Lady Studios in New York with nothing written. Strummer remembered three weeks of pure joy, making songs up on the spot and keeping first takes. Mick Jones had found records by the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash in a Brooklyn shop, and took to carrying a boombox everywhere. The result was The Magnificent Seven, an early meeting of British rock and rap, built on a bass line by Norman Watt Roy of Ian Dury's Blockheads, because Simonon was away acting in a film. The New York Black radio station WBLS picked it up, and a dance remix became a club hit.[1] [2] [3]

The sessions spread to London, Manchester and Jamaica. In Kingston, recording at Channel One with Mikey Dread, the band were warned that local heavies expected to be paid, and they fled in a crowded Renault estate car. The finished record was Sandinista, released on the twelfth of December 1980. It was a triple album of thirty six songs, crossing reggae, dub, gospel, calypso, jazz and rap. The title honoured Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels, and the catalogue number was FSLN one. To keep the price down, the band gave up royalties on the first two hundred thousand copies sold in Britain. British critics were mostly baffled, but American critics voted it the best album of 1981.[1] [2] [3]

In early 1981 Strummer told the others that Bernard Rhodes had to come back as manager, or he would quit. Rhodes's first big idea was a residency at Bond's International Casino in New York in June 1981, with support acts including Grandmaster Flash, the Sugarhill Gang, the Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains and Lee Perry. Strummer recalled that part of the rock crowd threw bottles at Grandmaster Flash. At the end of August 1981, Guy Stevens was found dead at his home in south east London, from an overdose of the prescription drugs he was taking to fight his alcoholism. The band wrote Midnight to Stevens in his memory. In December, Headon was fined five hundred pounds for heroin possession at Heathrow airport.[1] [2] [3]

Combat Rock and the fracture, 1982 to 1983

Combat Rock was recorded largely at Electric Lady in late 1981, while Strummer, Simonon and Headon stayed at the Iroquois Hotel, where James Dean had once lived. Mick Jones wanted a long, dance heavy double album and made the first mix, under the working title Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg. The others wanted something tighter. Rhodes suggested the producer Glyn Johns, who cut the record from seventy seven minutes to forty six at his garden studio in West Sussex. Meanwhile Headon's heroin and cocaine habit was costing him around a hundred pounds a day. A magistrate had already warned him that without treatment he would be the best drummer in the graveyard.[1] [2] [3]

In April 1982, on the eve of a British tour, the band's management announced that Joe Strummer had disappeared. The truth was tangled. Tickets for the Scottish dates were selling slowly, and Rhodes told him to vanish for a while, with a plan for him to hide with his friend, the Texan singer Joe Ely. Strummer went to France instead and told nobody, so even the management had no idea where he was. During that spell he also ran the London Marathon, joking that his training was ten pints of beer the night before. When he came back, it was Topper Headon who was out. On the tenth of May 1982 he was pushed out over his addiction, and fans were told he was simply exhausted.[1] [2] [3]

Combat Rock came out on the fourteenth of May 1982 and reached number two in Britain and number seven in America, where it went double platinum. Its biggest hit was built by the man who had just been fired. Headon wrote the music for Rock the Casbah alone in the studio, playing drums, piano and bass himself. Strummer threw away Topper's lyrics about missing his girlfriend and wrote new words in the studio toilet, about a king who bans rock music and the pilots who defy him. The single reached number eight in America, and Don Letts's video, shot in Texas, ran constantly on the new MTV. Terry Chimes mimed the drums. Headon said watching it drove him deeper into addiction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Should I Stay or Should I Go, Mick's song with Spanish backing vocals from Strummer and Joe Ely, gave the era its other signature tune. With Chimes back on drums, the Clash opened for the Who on their farewell American stadium tour in late 1982, including two nights at Shea Stadium in New York. Strummer looked out at those huge crowds and felt the band turning into a dinosaur. Inside the group, Jones and Simonon were barely speaking, and Jones often turned up hours late to rehearsals. Chimes left early in 1983 and was replaced by Pete Howard, a twenty three year old drummer from Bath. On the twenty eighth of May 1983 they co headlined the US Festival in California before an enormous crowd.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The second Clash and the end, 1983 to 1986

The US Festival was Mick Jones's last show with the Clash. Members of the band brawled with security staff afterwards, and then everything went quiet for months. In early September 1983 Strummer and Simonon fired him. The press statement said Jones had drifted away from the original idea of the group. Strummer later described him as intolerable to work with, behaving like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood. Jones admitted he got carried away and wished he had shown more control. Pete Howard remembered a furious phone call from Strummer, demanding to know whose side he was on. Jones answered with lawyers, freezing the band's earnings, and boasted of touring with Headon as the real Clash.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Strummer and Simonon rebuilt with two unknown guitarists, Nick Sheppard of the Bristol punk band the Cortinas and Greg White, picked from more than a hundred hopefuls. Simonon said he would rather quit than be in a band with someone called Greg, so Greg became Vince. The new line up, which Strummer called the Clash round two, played its first shows in January 1984 and toured hard, even headlining a benefit for striking miners. Rhodes ran it like a drill sergeant. Then in February 1984, as the band prepared to play in Milan, Strummer learned that his father had died. Later that year his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he stepped away to be with her.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

With Strummer distracted, Rhodes took control. In early 1985 the band recorded in Munich, and Rhodes, credited as producer under the name Jose Unidos, swapped Pete Howard's drums for a drum machine, piled on synthesisers and samples, and in one session started smashing up the drum kit. Simonon does not play on the finished record. The bass parts went to Norman Watt Roy. In the end Rhodes took the master tapes away and finished the album without Strummer. Joe, fighting his manager and grieving, even went to find Mick Jones in the Bahamas to ask him back. Jones said no. To lift their spirits, the band hitchhiked around northern England in May 1985 on a busking tour.[1] [2] [3]

Cut the Crap came out on the fourth of November 1985. It reached number sixteen in Britain, and the single This Is England made number twenty four. Strummer called it the last great Clash song, and said he wrote it on one string of a ukulele, feeling like a talentless failure. The rest of the album was savaged, and the NME titled its review No Way, Jose. Strummer stayed in Spain and refused to promote it. He called the band together, told them it was over, and gave each member a thousand pounds. Pete Howard told him bitterly that this was where following Bernie had got him, and Strummer agreed. In January 1986 the split was made public.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Separate roads, 1984 to 2002

Mick Jones had already moved on. After a brief spell with General Public, he founded Big Audio Dynamite in 1984 with Don Letts, the DJ and filmmaker who had shot the Clash's videos. Their 1985 debut mixed rock with samples and dance beats, the very sounds that had helped get him fired. In 1986 Strummer and Jones made peace enough to write five songs together for the band's second album, No. 10, Upping St., which Strummer co produced. After the third album in 1988, Jones caught chickenpox and pneumonia and spent months in hospital. A reshaped line up, Big Audio Dynamite Two, then topped the American modern rock chart in 1991 with Rush.[1] [2] [3]

Topper Headon's fall was brutal. After the Clash he briefly joined Jones's first post Clash project, and was quickly fired for his heroin use. When the pair each received around two hundred thousand pounds in Clash royalties, Headon spent his within eighteen months and was declared bankrupt. In 1987 he was jailed for fifteen months for supplying heroin. Later he drove a minicab to pay for his habit and busked with bongos on the London Underground, where passers by would ask if he was Topper Headon from the Clash. He contracted hepatitis C, spent time in a hostel for the homeless near the Westway, and went through rehab thirteen times before it finally worked.[1] [2] [3]

Strummer called the years that followed his wilderness years. He wrote songs for the film Sid and Nancy, acted for the director Alex Cox, and played a drifter in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train. In 1987 he learned the Pogues' guitar parts in a single afternoon to stand in for a sick bandmate on tour, and in 1991 he replaced Shane MacGowan as their singer for a tour. His 1989 album with the Latino Rockabilly War, Earthquake Weather, flopped and cost him his contract with Sony. Paul Simonon formed the band Havana 3am and went back to painting, while Terry Chimes drummed for Black Sabbath and later retrained as a chiropractor.[1] [2] [3]

In 1999 Strummer found his second wind with a new band, the Mescaleros, blending punk with reggae, world music and electronics. He called it his Indian summer. He also hosted a show called London Calling on the BBC World Service. That same year Strummer, Jones and Simonon worked together on the live album From Here to Eternity and on Don Letts's documentary Westway to the World, in which Strummer apologised on camera for firing Jones. On the fifteenth of November 2002, at a benefit for striking firefighters at Acton Town Hall in London, Jones walked on stage and played with Strummer for the first time since 1983. The encore was White Riot and London's Burning.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joe's death and the legacy

Just over a month later, on the twenty second of December 2002, Joe Strummer collapsed at his farmhouse in Broomfield, Somerset, after taking his dogs for a walk. His wife Lucinda found him. He was fifty. A post mortem found that he had died of a heart attack caused by an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. His daughters Jazz and Lola had spent a happy day with him only the day before. Bono said the Clash were the greatest rock band and had written the rule book for U2. The Mescaleros finished his last album, Streetcore, released in 2003. It included Bob Marley's Redemption Song, which Strummer had also recorded as a duet with Johnny Cash.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Before he died, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had announced the Clash's induction. Strummer, Jones and Headon were open to playing, but Simonon refused, feeling a high priced gala was not in the spirit of the band. In March 2003 the Clash were inducted, with Terry Chimes alongside the classic four. Headon did not attend, and Chimes used his speech to praise him. At the Grammys that February, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Dave Grohl and Steven Van Zandt played London Calling in Joe's memory, and Westway to the World later won a Grammy of its own. Years afterwards, Jones said he and Strummer had been writing songs that Joe intended for a new Clash album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The survivors stayed friends. In January 2008 Topper Headon, clean at last, joined Mick Jones's band Carbon Silicon on stage for Train in Vain and Should I Stay or Should I Go, their first time playing together since 1982. In 2010 Jones and Simonon reunited on the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach and toured with the band. In 2011 Simonon spent two weeks in a Greenland jail after joining a Greenpeace protest on an Arctic oil rig, having sailed for weeks disguised as Paul the assistant cook. In 2013 the Sound System box set gathered almost everything the band recorded, and Jones said it was the last Clash release he would work on.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Keith Levene, the founding guitarist who helped bring Strummer in, died of liver cancer at his home in Norfolk on the eleventh of November 2022, aged sixty five. Earlier that year, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the surviving members let the Ukrainian punk band Beton rewrite London Calling as Kyiv Calling to raise money for the country's defence. A fortieth anniversary edition of Combat Rock added unheard recordings, including versions with the late Ranking Roger. As of 2026 the Clash have never reformed. Their songs keep turning up, from Stranger Things to M.I.A.'s Paper Planes, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls them the voice of punk's political conscience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around The Clash

Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. The Clash's songwriting heart. Strummer usually wrote the words and Jones turned them into songs, and they shared the lead vocals. By 1983 they no longer trusted each other, and Strummer fired Jones, then regretted it and apologised on camera in 2000. They wrote together again for Big Audio Dynamite in 1986, and shared a stage at Acton Town Hall weeks before Strummer died. Jones said their friendship mattered more than the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Clash and Bernard Rhodes. Rhodes, a friend and business partner of Malcolm McLaren, brought Jones, Simonon and Strummer together and shaped the band's image and politics. Strummer called him his mentor. The band parted with him in late 1978, then Strummer demanded his return in 1981. In his second spell Rhodes ran the post Jones line up like a drill sergeant and produced Cut the Crap under the name Jose Unidos, a record Strummer came to hate.[1] [2] [3]

Joe Strummer and Topper Headon. Strummer called finding Headon the breakthrough, and was amazed when Topper built Rock the Casbah by himself in about twenty minutes. He also fired him in 1982 over heroin, later saying ignorance ruled the day and that the band never played a good gig afterwards. Years later, sober, Headon said Strummer had no choice and bore him no malice. Strummer dedicated Rock the Casbah to Topper whenever the Mescaleros played it.[1] [2] [3]

Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. Jones recruited Simonon in 1976, gave up teaching him guitar within hours, and switched him to bass, shouting out the right notes on stage while Paul learned. By 1983 the two were not speaking, and Simonon felt the band had to fire Jones or break up. Time healed it. In 2010 they played together on the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach and toured with Gorillaz, their first work together in more than twenty years.[1] [2] [3]

Mick Jones and Viv Albertine. Jones had a volatile relationship with Viv Albertine, guitarist of the Slits, the band who opened for the Clash on the White Riot Tour. They split around the time of the London Calling sessions, and Train in Vain is widely taken to be about her. Albertine says she inspired it. Jones has pushed back on some stories about them, saying he never lived with her in a squat but only visited while still living with his grandmother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mick Jones and Ellen Foley. The American singer Ellen Foley, famous for her part on Meat Loaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light, was Mick Jones's partner in the early eighties. She duetted with him on Hitsville UK, sang backing vocals on Combat Rock, and Jones produced her 1981 album The Spirit of St. Louis, with all four Clash members playing on it. Jones lived with her in New York during the Combat Rock sessions.[1] [2] [3]

The Clash and Guy Stevens. Stevens was a sixties DJ and producer who had named Mott the Hoople, the band Jones followed around Britain as a teenager. He turned up at a Clash demo session in 1976 and was chosen to produce London Calling despite CBS's doubts. His chaos and enthusiasm lifted the band, who always credited him. He died of an overdose in 1981, and they recorded Midnight to Stevens for him.[1] [2] [3]

The Clash and Don Letts. As the DJ at the Roxy club, Letts played dub and reggae to London's first punks, a big influence on the Clash. He appears on the cover of Black Market Clash, directed their videos including London Calling, Rock the Casbah and Should I Stay or Should I Go, and co founded Big Audio Dynamite with Jones. His documentary Westway to the World won a Grammy in 2003.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Clash and Sex Pistols. The Pistols were the spark. Jones saw them in early 1976, and Strummer watched them open for the 101ers that April. Rhodes promised Strummer a band to rival them, and the Clash's first gig was supporting the Pistols in Sheffield, followed by the Anarchy Tour. Keith Levene later formed Public Image Ltd with John Lydon. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame casts the Pistols as punk's nihilists and the Clash as its political conscience.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joe Strummer and Gaby Salter and Lucinda Tait. In 1975 Strummer was paid a hundred and twenty pounds to marry Pamela Moolman so she could stay in Britain. In 1978, aged twenty six, he began a relationship with Gaby Salter shortly after her seventeenth birthday. They had two daughters, Jazz and Lola, and stayed together fourteen years, though he had several affairs. They never married because he could not find Moolman to divorce her. He married Lucinda Tait in 1995.[1] [2]

The Clash and CBS Records. The CBS deal of 1977 gave the band security but brought constant fights. The label released Remote Control without asking, provoking Complete Control. It refused to issue their first album in America, resisted London Calling as a double, and made the band give up royalties to sell Sandinista cheaply. That value for money pricing left the Clash in debt to CBS until around 1982.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rare facts about The Clash

• Joe Strummer's first instrument was a ukulele that cost him one pound ninety nine on London's Shaftesbury Avenue. A busking friend taught him Johnny B. Goode on it. His stage surname was a self mocking reference to his basic strumming.[1] [2]
• Before punk, Joe Strummer worked as a gravedigger in a cemetery in Newport, South Wales. He lived in Newport in 1973 and 1974, singing with student bands. In 2005 his widow unveiled a plaque on the house where he had lived.[1]
• Strummer's famous Telecaster was bought with the hundred and twenty pounds he was paid to marry a South African woman. The 1975 marriage let Pamela Moolman stay in Britain. He later could not find her to get a divorce.[1]
• Joe Strummer was naturally left handed but played guitar right handed. His friend Tymon Dogg taught him that way. Strummer felt it held him back, but Mick Jones believed it was part of what made his playing special.[1] [2]
• The longest lasting sticker on Strummer's Telecaster read Ignore Alien Orders. The guitar started out sunburst before being painted grey primer and then black. He played it until he died.[1]
• At fifteen, future Clash guitarist Keith Levene worked as a roadie for the prog rock band Yes. He looked after drummer Alan White's kit. Levene called Yes guitarist Steve Howe the greatest guitarist in the world, a very unpunk opinion.[1] [2]
• Before settling on their name, the Clash briefly called themselves the Weak Heartdrops and the Psychotic Negatives. Paul Simonon suggested the Clash after noticing how often the word appeared in newspapers. The others and Rhodes went for it.[1]
• Terry Chimes is credited on the first Clash album as Tory Crimes. He drummed on the record but had already decided to leave, so he is not on the cover. He later drummed for Black Sabbath and became a chiropractor.[1] [2]
• Topper Headon's nickname came from Mickey the Monkey, a character in the children's comic Topper. Paul Simonon gave him the name. Headon said that in his first week he had to deny he was married, because the band expected total commitment.[1] [2]
• While learning, Paul Simonon painted the notes onto the neck of his bass. Mick Jones would shout the right notes to him during early gigs. Simonon found reggae bass lines easier to learn than rock ones.[1]
• Much of the first Clash album was conceived in Mick Jones's grandmother's flat on the eighteenth floor of a Harrow Road tower block. She often went to watch the band play live in their early days.[1]
• The line about letter bombs in Career Opportunities came from one of Mick Jones's real jobs. He had opened post for a government department, checking it was not rigged with bombs. Simonon named the song.[1]
• The first Clash album cost about four thousand pounds to make. It was recorded and mixed over three Thursday to Sunday sessions in February 1977 and delivered to CBS at the start of March.[1]
• Lee Scratch Perry hung a picture of the Clash in his Black Ark studio, reportedly the only white act given that honour. He was moved by their cover of Police and Thieves, a song he had produced. He went on to produce their single Complete Control.[1]
• Chuck Berry once reviewed Complete Control and asked whether the singer had a sore throat. A St. Louis fanzine asked him to review punk records in 1980. He did concede that the rhythm and chording worked well together.[1]
• Joe Strummer caught hepatitis in 1978 from a fan's spit. Spitting at punk bands was common. In 1984 he angrily confronted a spitter from the stage at the Brixton Academy.[1] [2]
• Armed police raided the Clash's base after Simonon and Headon shot racing pigeons with an air gun. The pair were charged with criminal damage and fined seven hundred and fifty pounds. The episode partly inspired Guns on the Roof.[1]
• Some of the clanging on the Clash's I Fought the Law came from hammering on toilet pipes. Jones said the band banged on urinal pipes to sound like a chain gang. At the very end, he said, you can hear the toilet flush.[1]
• The Guns of Brixton began life as an instrumental demo simply called Paul's Tune. It was the first Simonon song the band recorded for an album, and his first lead vocal. The demo tapes were lost on the Underground and found again in 2004.[1]
• Paul Simonon's smashed bass from the London Calling cover is on display at the Museum of London. He regretted breaking his favourite bass almost immediately. It had the word Pressure written on the body.[1] [2]
• The song London Calling fades out with a Morse code signal spelling S O S. The title borrows the BBC's wartime call sign. The line about London drowning reflected real fears that the Thames could flood the city.[1]
• Train in Vain was a hidden track, identified only by words scratched into the vinyl near the label. It was added too late for the printed sleeve, and it was the only song on the album without lyrics on the insert.[1]
• The Clash appear as extras in Martin Scorsese's film The King of Comedy. Strummer admitted they blew the chance, standing around bumbling instead of stepping into the shot as Robert De Niro walked past.[1]
• Sandinista is the only Clash album on which all four members sing lead. Topper Headon sang Ivan Meets G.I. Joe and Simonon sang The Crooked Beat. Mick Gallagher's young sons also sang a version of Career Opportunities.[1] [2]
• The catalogue numbers of Sandinista and Combat Rock referenced Latin American rebel movements. Sandinista was FSLN one, after Nicaragua's Sandinistas. Combat Rock was FMLN two, after El Salvador's Farabundo Marti front.[1] [2]
• The electronic Dixie melody in Rock the Casbah came from the alarm on Mick Jones's digital wristwatch. Jones added it on purpose. It appears just under two minutes into the album version.[1]
• The Spanish backing vocals on Should I Stay or Should I Go are Ecuadorian Spanish. Tape operator Eddie Garcia phoned his mother in Brooklyn Heights, who translated the lyrics over the phone. Strummer and Joe Ely then sang them.[1]
• On Straight to Hell, Strummer played the bass drum part with a lemonade bottle wrapped in a towel. Headon handed it to him just before the take. Headon said the beat was basically a bossa nova.[1]
• The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg appears on the Combat Rock track Ghetto Defendant. He studied punk before writing his lines, and performed the song on stage with the Clash in New York.[1]
• Strummer ran the 1982 London Marathon, claiming his training was ten pints of beer the night before. It happened during his mysterious disappearance, when even the band's management did not know where he was.[1]
• On a 1982 tour of Japan, Topper Headon was given oxygen on stage and nearly ignited it with a cigarette. A stage hand tackled him off his stool. Headon joked he could have been the first drummer to explode on stage.[1]
• In 1985 the last Clash line up hitchhiked around northern England on a busking tour. At one point they followed the band the Alarm from gig to gig. Simonon admitted it was just to wind them up.[1]
• Rock the Casbah was the first song Armed Forces Radio broadcast to the region during Operation Desert Storm. In 1989 American troops also blasted the Clash's I Fought the Law at Panama's Manuel Noriega to pressure him to surrender.[1] [2]
• Mick Jones's cousin is the former Conservative MP Grant Shapps. Another cousin, Andre Shapps, played keyboards in Mick's band Big Audio in the 1990s.[1] [2]
• Mick Jones went vegetarian in 1976 on Chrissie Hynde's encouragement, and it lasted about thirty years. He also remembered Simonon eating the leftover flour paste the band mixed up for flyposting their gigs.[1]
• Joe Strummer's last performance was at a small club in Bridgwater, Somerset, near his home. It came about two weeks before his death, after the Mescaleros' final regular show in Liverpool on the twenty second of November 2002.[1]
• After his death, Strummer's Somerset barn turned out to hold an archive of about twenty thousand items. Tapes, lyrics and letters from it became the 2018 compilation Joe Strummer 001, curated partly by his widow Lucinda Tait.[1]
• A square in Granada, Spain, was named after Joe Strummer following a Facebook campaign. More than two thousand residents signed the petition. He first visited in the 1970s with Palmolive, and later produced an album for the Granada band 091.[1] [2]
• Kurt Cobain's first taste of punk was a library copy of Sandinista, and he was not impressed. He said that if this was punk rock, he was not sure he liked it. He later called Combat Rock the best Clash album.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.