Raasay Calling - the search for Joe Strummer's ancestors
30th March 2020
Interview with journalist Damien Love who went across to Raasay with ex-Clash bass player, and now artist, Paul Simonon
Growing up in Skye, the Clash were one of my favourite bands. I had no idea of the Raasay connection, and I always associate them with Hammersmith & the Westway. Did it feel odd trekking up to trace Joe’s origin?
DL: I know what you mean – I guess with The Clash you think of London first, but the international thing comes close behind. Both their music and their outlook developed into something more global pretty quickly as the band went on. And, of course, with Strummer, that citizen of the world thing was there from the very first – he was born in Turkey, after all, and had Armenian and German ancestors on his father’s side. I was aware he had a Scottish side of the family through his mother, but I didn’t really know much about it and, yeah: walking deeper into the more silent, barren stretches of Raasay felt a long, long way removed from any kind of a rock and roll thing. It felt quite removed from everything. But the whole trip took on a stranger and much more personal feel – it was something about Joe Strummer the man rather than “Strummer” the image/ icon, or even the musician, largely because of Paul Simonon, who did really seem to be thinking about Joe a lot during the days of that expedition.
Did you feel that Strummer brought anything of this heritage to his music, or is that too much of a stretch?
DL: Well, Strummer’s stuff increasingly took on the dimensions of what we used to call “world music,” with a really wide range of influences in the stew, from jazz to hip-hop to folk roots to desert music and on and on. He started out under the influence of Woody Guthrie, and later played with The Pogues – so he was undoubtedly aware of folk songbooks and a lot of traditional Scottish and Irish tunes, ballads, etc. He spent some time visiting family in Scotland and Glasgow growing up, and those kinds of get-togethers can sometimes involve a song or two coming out as the night wears on – the kind of campfire mood he always tried to bring to gatherings, from what I’ve heard. His writing makes references to lots of things. ( I always remember him quoting “I belong to Glasgow” in his notes for Pennie Smith’s book of Clash photographs - I think it was in there.) I think that, rather than curating and preserving traditional songs in aspic and protecting them from any outside infection or change (although this is also vital, of course), the truly valuable, and living, “folk tradition” is the mongrel tradition, taking stuff from everywhere and customising pre-existing songs into something else (taking old tunes and putting new words to them, etc, exactly the way jazz, blues and hip-hop have always done) and I think his music has a lot of that spirit in it.
Did you get any sense of the man himself when you were across there?
DL: A bit, I think, but not so much from being there on Raasay specifically, as from listening to Paul talk about him. I was there specifically to ask him about Joe, of course. And he wouldn’t have been there making that trip without Joe. And I guess the particular atmosphere of the place – the silence and space, the feeling of being far away from everything, and the lack of distractions – focussed his thoughts in a different way than if we’d been doing it anywhere else. Paul spoke of Joe very much as an elder brother, someone who had helped teach him ways of thinking and looking and being. When I asked him to sum up Joe, he said “passion really” – meaning passion just for being alive, taking it all in, whatever it was, whether it was sharing a bottle and talking or travelling to play a gig. Simonon summed up the philosophy he’d learned from Strummer to me along the lines of: “Either you're Robin Hood or you’re Stalin, and the choice is really quite clear.”
How did the trip with Simonon come about? Did Jones and Topper not fancy the trek? Did you know Simonon previously?
DL: The trip was originally the notion of a commissioning editor at the Sunday Herald newspaper – but the original idea was a little different. I think they’d heard about the Future Forests/ Rebel’s Wood project on Skye, and then came up with the idea of asking Paul to go there – to Skye - to paint the forest site. You have to remember that Paul had really very much stopped doing music all together at this point (years later, he started playing again as a core member of The Good The Bad And The Queen, and it was brilliant to see him onstage with the bass again). He was concentrating solely on his painting, so this was a great little idea, and all really built around his work as an artist. Ao the idea of contacting Mick or Topper for the trip didn’t come up – it was all about asking Paul to paint Rebel’s Wood. The paper asked me to go along and document the project and do the story because I wrote for them regularly, and because they knew I was a Clash fan. I had never had any contact with Paul before that. But he’s an incredibly friendly guy, I found, and it was very quickly like talking to someone you had known for ages. (I interviewed Mick once, and had tried to get Joe to talk a couple of times during the 1990s - what they call “wilderness years” – when he wasn’t making much new music, but he didn’t want to do an interview at that point.)
Bu then - it was Paul himself who came up with the idea of going to Raasay to find the ruins of the cottage, an idea inspired by his meeting with Joe’s cousin, and memories of Joe roughly talking about the Scottish side and wanting to make a trip there. And that idea of Paul’s changed the entire nature of the trip and the project, and made it far more meaningful, I think. He was making the trip “for” Joe, and both his absence and his presence were kind of floating around in the quite places.
I know that Simonon must have been in Inverness when they played the Ice Rink in 1985, and I read from your article that he had been on a camping trip to Skye with his dad before, but do you think that prepared him for the northern wastes of Raasay, or was it a shock to the system?
DL: The rain was pretty crazy at some points, but I don’t think it was anything he wasn’t prepared for. He’d travelled far and wide, and he had spent a lot of his time doing landscape paintings outside in all kinds of places and weathers. I got the impression that he just took it as it came, and acted accordingly.
What else did you chat about whilst braving the weather?
DL: Well…the weather! Aside from talking about the project and him and Joe, just general chit chat – he was asking about Glasgow, because he had memories of it from The Clash days. During the walk out to the cottage, a lot of the talk was about trying to remember where it was. I was asking him about himself a lot for the piece that I was going to write, and he had some pretty funny stories about playing a session with Bob Dylan. But, yeah, off the meter, we were just chatting. I remember he had some good things to say about the food at Raasay House, as well.
Did any of you go back across to Umachan or Raasay after that?
DL: I have never been back on Raasay since, though I would like to go. I don’t know about Mr Simonon.
I really love Simonon’s bass work on Sandinista. Did he mention how much input he had into the writing of these songs?
DL: I really love that album, too, but I don’t recall that we really talked about it during that trip. The Clash had members of The Blockheads working with them on many of those Sandinista sessions, too, so it’s sometimes hard to keep track of who played what on what.
Growing up in Skye, the Clash were one of my favourite bands. I had no idea of the Raasay connection, and I always associate them with Hammersmith & the Westway. Did it feel odd trekking up to trace Joe’s origin?
DL: I know what you mean – I guess with The Clash you think of London first, but the international thing comes close behind. Both their music and their outlook developed into something more global pretty quickly as the band went on. And, of course, with Strummer, that citizen of the world thing was there from the very first – he was born in Turkey, after all, and had Armenian and German ancestors on his father’s side. I was aware he had a Scottish side of the family through his mother, but I didn’t really know much about it and, yeah: walking deeper into the more silent, barren stretches of Raasay felt a long, long way removed from any kind of a rock and roll thing. It felt quite removed from everything. But the whole trip took on a stranger and much more personal feel – it was something about Joe Strummer the man rather than “Strummer” the image/ icon, or even the musician, largely because of Paul Simonon, who did really seem to be thinking about Joe a lot during the days of that expedition.
Did you feel that Strummer brought anything of this heritage to his music, or is that too much of a stretch?
DL: Well, Strummer’s stuff increasingly took on the dimensions of what we used to call “world music,” with a really wide range of influences in the stew, from jazz to hip-hop to folk roots to desert music and on and on. He started out under the influence of Woody Guthrie, and later played with The Pogues – so he was undoubtedly aware of folk songbooks and a lot of traditional Scottish and Irish tunes, ballads, etc. He spent some time visiting family in Scotland and Glasgow growing up, and those kinds of get-togethers can sometimes involve a song or two coming out as the night wears on – the kind of campfire mood he always tried to bring to gatherings, from what I’ve heard. His writing makes references to lots of things. ( I always remember him quoting “I belong to Glasgow” in his notes for Pennie Smith’s book of Clash photographs - I think it was in there.) I think that, rather than curating and preserving traditional songs in aspic and protecting them from any outside infection or change (although this is also vital, of course), the truly valuable, and living, “folk tradition” is the mongrel tradition, taking stuff from everywhere and customising pre-existing songs into something else (taking old tunes and putting new words to them, etc, exactly the way jazz, blues and hip-hop have always done) and I think his music has a lot of that spirit in it.
Did you get any sense of the man himself when you were across there?
DL: A bit, I think, but not so much from being there on Raasay specifically, as from listening to Paul talk about him. I was there specifically to ask him about Joe, of course. And he wouldn’t have been there making that trip without Joe. And I guess the particular atmosphere of the place – the silence and space, the feeling of being far away from everything, and the lack of distractions – focussed his thoughts in a different way than if we’d been doing it anywhere else. Paul spoke of Joe very much as an elder brother, someone who had helped teach him ways of thinking and looking and being. When I asked him to sum up Joe, he said “passion really” – meaning passion just for being alive, taking it all in, whatever it was, whether it was sharing a bottle and talking or travelling to play a gig. Simonon summed up the philosophy he’d learned from Strummer to me along the lines of: “Either you're Robin Hood or you’re Stalin, and the choice is really quite clear.”
How did the trip with Simonon come about? Did Jones and Topper not fancy the trek? Did you know Simonon previously?
DL: The trip was originally the notion of a commissioning editor at the Sunday Herald newspaper – but the original idea was a little different. I think they’d heard about the Future Forests/ Rebel’s Wood project on Skye, and then came up with the idea of asking Paul to go there – to Skye - to paint the forest site. You have to remember that Paul had really very much stopped doing music all together at this point (years later, he started playing again as a core member of The Good The Bad And The Queen, and it was brilliant to see him onstage with the bass again). He was concentrating solely on his painting, so this was a great little idea, and all really built around his work as an artist. Ao the idea of contacting Mick or Topper for the trip didn’t come up – it was all about asking Paul to paint Rebel’s Wood. The paper asked me to go along and document the project and do the story because I wrote for them regularly, and because they knew I was a Clash fan. I had never had any contact with Paul before that. But he’s an incredibly friendly guy, I found, and it was very quickly like talking to someone you had known for ages. (I interviewed Mick once, and had tried to get Joe to talk a couple of times during the 1990s - what they call “wilderness years” – when he wasn’t making much new music, but he didn’t want to do an interview at that point.)
Bu then - it was Paul himself who came up with the idea of going to Raasay to find the ruins of the cottage, an idea inspired by his meeting with Joe’s cousin, and memories of Joe roughly talking about the Scottish side and wanting to make a trip there. And that idea of Paul’s changed the entire nature of the trip and the project, and made it far more meaningful, I think. He was making the trip “for” Joe, and both his absence and his presence were kind of floating around in the quite places.
I know that Simonon must have been in Inverness when they played the Ice Rink in 1985, and I read from your article that he had been on a camping trip to Skye with his dad before, but do you think that prepared him for the northern wastes of Raasay, or was it a shock to the system?
DL: The rain was pretty crazy at some points, but I don’t think it was anything he wasn’t prepared for. He’d travelled far and wide, and he had spent a lot of his time doing landscape paintings outside in all kinds of places and weathers. I got the impression that he just took it as it came, and acted accordingly.
What else did you chat about whilst braving the weather?
DL: Well…the weather! Aside from talking about the project and him and Joe, just general chit chat – he was asking about Glasgow, because he had memories of it from The Clash days. During the walk out to the cottage, a lot of the talk was about trying to remember where it was. I was asking him about himself a lot for the piece that I was going to write, and he had some pretty funny stories about playing a session with Bob Dylan. But, yeah, off the meter, we were just chatting. I remember he had some good things to say about the food at Raasay House, as well.
Did any of you go back across to Umachan or Raasay after that?
DL: I have never been back on Raasay since, though I would like to go. I don’t know about Mr Simonon.
I really love Simonon’s bass work on Sandinista. Did he mention how much input he had into the writing of these songs?
DL: I really love that album, too, but I don’t recall that we really talked about it during that trip. The Clash had members of The Blockheads working with them on many of those Sandinista sessions, too, so it’s sometimes hard to keep track of who played what on what.