Excerpts of Interview with Paul Simonon

Bassist Magazine

October 1999

by Scott Rowley

Paul Simonon ­ the only member of The Clash who was in the band from the very beginning until the bitter end ­ is sitting in a restaurant in Notting Hill answering questions he’s never been asked before.

Paul Simonon:I’ve got one thing to say about being the bass player, he says, sticking another roll-up in his mouth. I didn’t want the role of being Entwhistle or Bill Wyman, stuck in the background. That’s too depressing and if that was what I’d been offered with The Clash I would’ve turned it down. Maybe that’s the nature of the job, or has been in the past; the bass player as the one that held the fort, so to speak, along with the drummer, letting every body else go lunatic. But, y’know [he blows smoke through that loopy, toothy grin of his] why can’t we all be lunatics?

THE BEGINNING

Bassist Magazine: I read that you were first invited to audition for the London SS as singer.

PS: This guy that I knew was a drummer, and he told me, ‘come to art collage, it’s a dawdle, and you don’t have to do anything really. And he got in, and he was walking through Notting Hill Gatre one day and these two guys stopped him and said, ‘Are you a Drummer?’ He says ‘yeah’ and they says, ‘well come down to this audition’, and I tagged along with him. And when I arrived I was confronted with Mick Jones, Brian James, Tony James and various blokes waiting for their turn to be the drummer. And Mick, or one of them, piped up, ‘Are you a singer?’ I said, ‘no, I’m not’. They said, ‘do you wanna have a go?’ So I had to give it a go, and it was like all these lyrics for some group that I’d never heard of. Something about a young barracuda or something, and then there was this Jonathan Richmond song about the radio...

BM: Roadrunner?

PS: No, it was something like ‘Radio on’.

BM: Yeah, that's Roadrunner: "With the radio on.

PS: That’s it. And I’d never heard that song in my life, so I was just trying to fall in with it but I didn’t stand a chance, ‘cos I didn’t know the song. But what’s really strange is there was a guy in the corner, who was Bernie Rhodes, and my first words to him were, ‘Are you their manager?’ And he was like: ‘Why? what’s it to you?’ So I was like [shrugs] ‘Fair enough’. And then a couple of days later he told Mick to sack his group and get a group together with me.

BM: So he obviously liked your attitude.

PS: Yeah, and Bernie was responsible for getting Rotten into the Pistols. They weren’t too keen on having John in the Pistols ‘cos of the way he was. They had other ideas about the singing… So Bernie was really the one responsible for getting me in the band too.

BM: Were you aware of punk at this point?

PS: well, it hadn’t really started. The Pistols were doing their occasional shows, but punk was something that really came about after the Grundy thing. Then it was called ‘punk’ y’know. So after probably about a year in rehearsals with just me and Mick and whoever we could find really to play the drums, and we had Keith Levene with us, we were just trying to build the group up and the Pistols were just starting to do their shows at that time, and it was only that later when we saw Strummer in the 101’ers that we thought, ‘we’ll nick him for our group’. An we did and that was the start of The Clash, really. Once we had Joe on board it all started to come together."

THE END

PS: We didn’t realise that groups were supposed to go to on holiday and have a break from each other. We just worked non-stop really.
"One time at a rehearsal, Joe got a piece of chalk and drew aline on the floor and said, ‘On this side are the musicians and on this side are the entertainers’. So me and Joe were on one side, and Mick and Topper on the other. Our attitude was, 'OK there’s a few wrong notes, but who cares really?'. We want to see some poeple jumping around a bit, we wanna see some excitement, we wanna be entertained, not us all standing dead still getting it all right. You may as well listen to the record. So when Mick was out, that was a big change, because the musician of the group had left."

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