London Calling
The Real London Calling
When I came back from America after 2 years, I returned to nothing. The band was splintered. Jimmy had walked away, Steve’s girlfriend was pregnant, and I was left staring into a void. In America, I’d had a girlfriend,— beautiful, calm, steady. We never fought. She knew how to talk me down, how to defuse me. Coming back to London without that anchor felt like a collapse.
I moved into a flat with old friends from the scene, she was an MTV presenter, lived there with her partner, a filmmaker named called Emma. Another flatmate, was a model. They didn’t have a real room for me — just a space with no door where I rigged up a curtain and threw down a mattress. That was home. A golden retriever named Bob shared my bed, along with a plague of fleas. He was a beautiful dog, but I was basically hosting a flea circus.
It felt like a huge comedown coming from a 5 bedroom house in Hollywood with an outdoor swimming pool which was heated to 30 degrees all year round
The crowd around us blurred the line between music and mayhem. Rebecca and her friends partied hard. Celebrities drifted in. Kate Moss, some guy from Eastenders . This wasn’t Glasgow anymore — it was London at its most volatile and I had fallen into the middle of it.
And then there was Frank. He’d show up with deliveries, often in the company of Liam , who was at the absolute peak of fame in ’98 and ’99. Imagine that: he was standing in your house next to Bobby from the scream or Chris from menswear.
I was headed right down. Spending money I didn’t have, losing grip, disappearing into myself.
And then — another reinvention.
Even in that low, I never stopped chasing music. I was writing constantly, working at Damon Albarn’s studio, flying to the States to collaborate with James Hall. The songs weren’t commercial, but they were good. Still, I wasn’t breaking through.
Then Martin, who’d played keyboards with Bond, got the chance to work with Joe Strummer. Through him I heard Joe needed a bass player. I wasn’t a bassist, not really — drums were my first instrument — but I could pick up whatever was needed if I worked at it.
So I went down to Willesden, where Joe was holed up working on his comeback record, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. The studio was alive with possibility. Joe and I slipped out for a curry around the corner. He wanted to get a measure of me.
Over the table, he asked, “So, do you want to play in the band?”
I laughed in disbelief. “Joe, you haven’t even auditioned me. You don’t know if I can play well enough. This is a leap of faith.”
He waved it off. “Ah, don’t worry. You’ll be fine .”
And that was it. No test. No trial. Just Joe Strummer handing me a lifeline at the exact moment I was disappearing.
We worked in that studio night and day. Ants — yes, Antony Genn from Pulp — was the producer. He pulled Martin in, Martin pulled me in, and the three of us, along with Pablo the percussionist and Smiley on drums, we finished off the record. Rock Art and the X-Ray Style came together from that chaos.
