like Topper said in Don’s documentary, Westway to the World, he thought he’d play with the Clash for a bit and use it as a stepping-stone for the rest of his career. He had a different attitude to it all.
‘But the Clash really was made up of Mick with his rock-star attitudes, Joe with his hippy beliefs, and me. And I was out there on my own: I wasn’t caught up in anything. I didn’t even really have any friends, only Nigel from Whirlwind.
‘I was angry at the time when it all came to a halt. It seemed such a waste. But now I’m glad we stopped at a point when we were about to be mega-huge and enormously rich. I’m glad we never re-formed. We proved we could come through it all. None of us were casualties, even though we came close to it. We came out the other side and survived, and people still love our music. Twelve year olds love the Clash now, so we must have done something right.’
Up on Raasay, Paul and I return to the site of Umachan with a guide, the ranger who looks after Rebel Wood. In fact, we had been right all along about the location of the settlement. The ranger shows us how we should have gone backwards along a trail to go forwards, a lesson in Highland zen. When we finally round a sheer mountain cliff and find Umachan a hundred yards in front of us, a lonely and haunting place, a tiny hamlet of eight homes, we rush through the ferns. On the scurrying high winds a golden eagle sails past us, its wings seeming to wave to us from the solitude in the sky, before it disappears behind a headland.
Among the ruins that have been reduced almost to rubble since the settlement was abandoned during the 1930s, Angus Gillies’s house is still standing, although its heather roof is long gone. A sturdy building, it is clearly the largest of those in the settlement, with an intact chimney gable and upper window. In the fireplace, Paul places a gift to the building, a copy of the Clash On Broadway boxed set, which sits like an icon amidst the rubble. There are two rooms on the ground floor – the smaller second room was used for keeping livestock warm in winter. In the late September sun the building’s pink sandstone is warm, vibrating with pulses of energy. The house is held together with lime mortar – beach sand – which allows moisture to be absorbed. Above it is a small, flat pasture. In front, towards the sea, a hundred yards below, is a walled-off yard, where kale and potatoes were grown to supplement the salt herring that was the staple diet of the islands. Out of the rear wall grows a red-berried rowan tree, which legendarily keeps away such bad spirits as witches. In this house was where Joe’s grandmother Jane lived.
Paul Simonon immediately sets up his easel and starts work, slipping off his jeans jacket and his shoes, which have been giving him blisters. As he stands painting in his white V-neck T-shirt, grey Levi 501s and bare feet Paul seems to be method-painting, swaying and rocking and feeling with the elements. He always paints standing, physically getting into it. ‘I act as a conduit: it’s not really me painting. I just stand there and something goes on, and it ends up on the canvas,’ he says.
In the sunlight the view across the sea of the mainland and the Applecross mountains is awesome. A lone yacht ploughs the water, edging the coastline, bounced back almost vertically by each crashing wave, a warning. Suddenly the weather changes. Thick dark-grey cloud gusts across the mountaintops. The view vanishes as we are engulfed in a haze of instant mist. It starts to piss down: thick, drenching rain direct from a Scottish heritage film. Struggling with the billowing wind, Paul even more assiduously straps his canvas to the easel.
The only spot in the roofless house to give any rain protection is in the shadow of the gable. When his canvas is running with rainwater, Paul brings it down to the house and slips it into the fireplace. Our guide produces a flask of malt whisky, mint tea, chocolate cake; we also consume a Joe Strummer Memorial Spliff. Our conversation veers to the practical: where did Joe’s ancestors keep the house whisky still, common to every Highland croft? Paul reveals that in his mid-teens he and his father had gone on holiday to Skye, hitch-hiking the seven hundred miles from London.
When the downpour eases, Paul picks up his canvas and steps back out again into the blustery fray. But the elements are simply too extreme for any more work. Again, he stashes his canvas in the fireplace, next to the Clash boxed set, turning the painted side away from the wind and rain. On the back, in red paint, he adds a warning note: Back later! Paul!
For travellers heading up the east coast of Scotland, Bonar Bridge, birthplace of Joe’s mother Anna Mackenzie, was the crossing-point over the Kyle of Sutherland – looking at the map it is the last significant indentation on the coastline. Nestling on the north bank of the estuary, the east of the area still hosts the ancient woodland planted by James IV to replace the oak forest that had been decimated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the village’s iron foundry. Five miles from Bonar Bridge is Skibo Castle, the scene in 2000 of the wedding of Madonna to Guy Ritchie; at the handyman shop in Bonar Bridge the stepladders were all sold out, having been bought by paparazzi photographers trying to snap pictures over the wall of the castle. At Spinning Dale, on the edge of Bonar Bridge, the actor James Robertson Justice lived overlooking the water; when Joe’s Aunt Jennie worked for him there was a certain amount of local gossip after he was once alleged to have pinched her on the bottom. Nearby is the battlefield at which the Marquis of Montrose was defeated in 1650, forcing the later Charles II of England to accept the Scots’ demands for Presbyterianism if he was also to be accepted as King of Scotland; the ethos of Presbyterianism runs strongly in Bonar Bridge. A further battle affected Joe’s family history: after Culloden, which marked the defeat of the Jacobite army in 1746, four brothers from the Mackenzie clan hid in this remote corner from the savage reprisals.
When speaking to any of Joe’s Scottish relatives, I sometimes feel I am wandering in a fog of confusion: the same Christian names recur throughout the generations. But to compound my bewilderment the Gillies relatives I met weren’t always related to Joe’s grandmother, Jane Gillies. When Jane moved to Bonar Bridge at the start of the twentieth century, she married David Mackenzie – Jane did not pass on until Joe was fourteen. The Mackenzies form a large extended family. Anna Mackenzie, who was born 13 January 1915 and married Ron Mellor in 1949, was one of nine brothers and sisters. At the wake I spoke to Sheena Yeats, one of Joe’s eighteen cousins: the two women who gave eulogies at the funeral were Maeri, who works for the BBC, and Anna, a teacher, the sister of Iain, Rona and Alasdair Gillies, who were especially close to Joe.
It was amidst the wood-panelled surrounds of Carbisdale Castle that, three weeks before he died, Joe Strummer spent his last night at Bonar Bridge – on 30 November 2002, St Andrew’s Night, at the wedding banquet of cousin George to his partner Fiona. Folded in his pocket Joe had a copy of the family tree that his cousin Anna Gillies had drawn up. From time to time he would put down his ever-present can of cider and pull out the chart as another of his countless relatives hove into view; and he would show his willowy blonde wife Lucinda how this person fitted into his life.
Joe and Lucinda had rented a car at Inverness train station. Disdaining to take the new, faster motorway, he had driven over the highland route of the Struie, which he loved for its wildness and fabulous views of the Dornoch firth, past the inn on the road that is open all night and which serves soup and haggis until seven in the morning. ‘That’s the only way you can come,’ he would say. Arriving in Bonar Bridge that afternoon he and Luce had taken a room at the Dunrobin pub on the high street to rest up: ‘He seemed so healthy, so debonair, relaxed, healthy and fit, and young,’ said Alasdair Gillies, who was five years younger. ‘I remember saying, “You look younger than me.”’ ‘He was in good shape,’ confirmed his aunt Jessie, his mother’s younger sister, and the only surviving female amongst her siblings. Aunt Jenny, who had been married to the late David Mackenzie, one of Joe’s mother’s three younger brothers, thought Joe looked ‘terribly tired’, though she added ‘but they hadn’t eaten and were starving’.
At the wedding party at Carbisdale Castle Joe was fascinated by the traditional Scottish melodies of the Carach Showband, and spent time talking with the piper. At Carbisdale Castle Joe was distressed to find that an LP sleeve of the Bonar Bridge Pipe Band, on which the cover photograph showed the musicians posing outside the castle, contained no record inside it: writing down its details he vowed to trace the LP and get hold of a copy. ‘Unfortunately he didn’t have time,’ said Alasdair.
Fiona, George’s bride,