In the mid-eighties, The Clash were not going through their best moment. In a startling turn, the leader Joe Strummer (Ankara, Turkey, 1952, died in 2002 at 50 years old) and his controversial manager, Bernard Rhodes, dismissed half the band – guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon – allegedly for professional misconduct. While preparing Cut The Crap (1985), the group’s final album, which would receive their worst reviews, Strummer took refuge in Andalusia to “heal and mend his wounds,” as he told the Diario de Granada in his only interview there. Also to regain that anonymity which, due to the disparate geographical situation, made one of the biggest rock stars on the planet pass as a drunken foreigner in any bar.
This is what happened to the members of 091 one night in 1984 at their favorite spot, the Silbar, when they speculated about the resemblance a heavyset man in a lumberjack shirt, speaking terrible Spanish, bore to one of their idols. “At the end of the night, we pinched ourselves to believe that we were really with the singer of The Clash,” guitarist and composer José Ignacio Lapido (Granada, 63 years old) tells ICON. Currently, 091 is presenting their new album, Espejismo nº 9, for which they have received the recognition that was partly denied to them during their career and are filling venues across the country. Back then, the band was barely established. They had only one full-length work, Cementerio de automóviles (1984), and their disappointing experience with DRO, which they felt did not promote them, led them to buy their freedom to sign with the Zafiro label.
In Strummer they found an unexpected new supporter, who thought 091 sounded like British bands, although his judgment about English things was not reliable. “Since we released the music first, during the period when we had no lyrics we sang in an invented language, phonetically similar to English, saying random words that sounded right to us,” explains Lapido. “In the song En la calle, we sang ‘Cause I’m running’. When Joe heard it, he started to piece together what it was about. He said: ‘He’s running for surviving!’ But it made no damn sense. I thought: ‘Maybe he doesn’t know English.” He kept visiting rehearsals and deepening his friendship, until, to the surprise of the young Granadans, Joe Strummer offered to produce an album for them.
“I think he saw himself reflected in us, in how he was in his beginnings,” thinks singer José Antonio García (Padul, Granada, 64 years old), aka Pitos, for his high-pitched voice register. After joining Zafiro, the Cero, as their audience calls them, were sure they would make a splash when they told the record company that their second album, Más de cien lobos (released in 1986, 40 years ago), would have The Clash leader as producer. “And yes, they freaked out. Because they didn’t know who this guy was,” says García, laughing. Along with Lapido and Pitos, the lineup included Tacho González, who is still 091’s drummer, and Antonio Arias, bassist and later leader of Lagartija Nick.
“The one who was going to take care of us didn’t know much about rock,” observes José Ignacio Lapido. “The first thing he did was call someone from the office to go down to Discoplay and bring something from the band. He brought up London Calling [1979], but what he noticed was that it was released by CBS. So he said: ‘Damn! They must be important.” It would be the first of the cultural clashes between Zafiro and Joe Strummer, within a process that Pitos describes as “tortuous,” due to the war they found themselves immersed in. “Joe was used to recording in a way that wasn’t done in Spain. He was a real producer, trying things out, looking for sounds… Here, you prepared the album and had to record it in the days they gave you.”
Strummer, 091 say, put money out of his own pocket so the record company would give them more time, because there was nervousness at Zafiro. Lapido and García, however, admired the producer’s efficiency, who combined recording with an intense nightlife. “Sometimes I called him in the morning to tell him we had to leave and he was already dressed, but because he hadn’t even taken off his boots,” the guitarist recalls. “He put gel in his hair and off we went. Also, when word got out, journalists and musicians started calling to drop by the studio. That delayed us a bit.”
“The company, instead of taking advantage of it as promotion, didn’t understand anything,” adds José Antonio García. The final blow came when, after finishing the album, Joe Strummer’s mixes were altered without the band’s knowledge. “We thought it was horrible,” laments Lapido. “Not because of the mix itself, but for doing it behind our backs and the producer’s. They didn’t explain anything, whether they thought the vocals were too low or what. As soon as we found out, we called Joe, but he didn’t care. I imagine he had similar things happen to him.”
Despite everything, to this day, their opinion of Más de cien lobos is favorable. “Obviously, we have since done better things, growing as musicians and finding our stylistic path. But there are songs we have been playing for many years and that I think are good, like Escenas de guerra, En la calle or Cuando pierdo el equilibrio,” he opines. “Luz de medianoche seems like a great track to me,” adds Pitos.
On the occasion of 091’s return in 2016, twenty years after their breakup, the companies contacted the musicians to remaster their albums. And they saw an opportunity. “Zafiro disappeared and its catalog ended up at Sony,” summarizes the composer. “I told them the story and asked them to look for Joe’s mixes, but everything was in a warehouse in Germany. Hold on! Well, the Germans, apparently, are very organized and they found them. The mixes on the 2016 reissue are Joe’s. Finally, there was historical repair.” Inevitably, that softened the legend of Strummer’s lost mixes as the Holy Grail of Spanish rock: “Listening to both versions, we realized they weren’t that different.”
Hardware stores, flamenco singers and Manolo Escobar tapes
Before recording the album, Joe Strummer and 091 prepared a demo where the idiosyncrasy of the punk legend and his friends from Granada merged in a rawer way. The demo was called Grabando en Recogidas with sexy señoritas, after the street where they played, Recogidas. “We did some improvisations a bit jokingly and he wrote lyrics mixing English and Spanish,” describes José Ignacio Lapido. One of the songs gave its name to the documentary about their time in the south of the peninsula, Quiero tener una ferretería en Andalucía (2011), the words he shouted, with a strong English accent, in the chorus. “For some reason, he loved hardware stores,” José Antonio García tries to unravel. “He saw the screws, the field tools, the hanging pans, and he liked it. I don’t know if there weren’t hardware stores like that in London.”
In the film I Need A Dodge! Joe Strummer On The Run (2014), another radical crossing between The Clash leader and deep local flavor was recounted: at Eurosonic, where 091 were recording the album, he lit a cigarette for Isabel Pantoja after exclaiming “Paquirri’s widow!!” (“Paquirri’s widow!”). “It happened that Isabel Pantoja did a recital in a theater that was going to be broadcast by Spanish Television and she went to re-record things,” Lapido recalls. “Joe had no damn idea who she was and we explained that her husband had been a bullfighter, that he had been killed… Of course, in his head it was a crazy Spanish story, so he wallpapered the walls with sheets of ‘Isabel Pantoja Welcome’ and photos he must have cut out from some magazine. He was a very funny guy.”
Strummer, the guitarist says, came to gather a notable collection of Spanish popular music. “On roadside bars, he was fascinated by the covers of tapes on the displays, like Los Chunguitos with their bow ties. He grabbed a bag and bought a ton. He carried one of those big radiocassettes, where people from Harlem listened to hip hop, and played rumba.”
“In the car he had a Manolo Escobar tape and said that when he saw the Civil Guard, he played it because it seemed to calm them down,” says Pitos, who still keeps “very rare” Jamaican reggae tapes he gave him, as well as his handwritten list of possible titles for the album, among which, according to the book 091: Aullidos, corazones y guitarras (Ondas del Espacio, 2016), by Juan Jesús García, were Tortilla internacional or Andalucía 1 – Europa 0. “I don’t remember the tortilla one, but the other wasn’t just 1-0, it was more,” Lapido clarifies.
The musician’s experience in Andalusia was not that of a tourist, nor that of an artist without ideas who settles in a culturally rich place to do extractivism. On the contrary, Joe Strummer got involved in the scene, mingled with its inhabitants, left countless crazy stories to those who knew him, and took an interest in what was nearby: he listened to flamenco in the caves of Sacromonte and even went to Víznar with a shovel, accompanied by his friend Jesús Arias (journalist, leader of TNT and brother of Antonio Arias), to look for Lorca’s remains. To fully blend with the traditions, he starred in his own spaghetti western, the delirious Directos al infierno (1987), in the Almería desert. A square in Granada now bears his name.
The artist’s obsession with Andalusia, in any case, came from before, as his song Spanish Bombs, about the Civil War, from the album London Calling. “Joe learned about Spanish culture from Palmolive, his girlfriend in the seventies, and Paco Ibáñez’s records. Her brothers were big fans,” Richard Dudanski, drummer in one of Strummer’s first bands, The 101ers, tells ICON by video call. Dudanski has lived in Granada since 1988 and is married to Esperanza Romero, Palmolive’s sister, who was a percussionist in The Slits. They met within the London squatter movement, the so-called squatters. Along with Antonio Arias, he currently plays in Tymon Dogg & The Dacoits, whose leader, precisely, taught Joe Strummer to play guitar and also lives in Granada. A whole detachment of old London squatter in the former Nasrid kingdom.
“Now The 101ers are called protopunk, but I had a love-hate relationship with punk,” says Dudanski. “In 1976, I passed through Spain and for me the attitude of many people during the Transition or musicians like Paco Ibañez, who were against the regime, was more punk. That was a real political struggle compared to what was in London, which, for me, was a lot of pose.”
Strummer also produced Tymon Dogg himself and another band Dudanski formed in Andalusia, Por Si Las Moscas. “He was a very generous spirit. He contributed ideas, but was never dominant. And the whole history of Spain, the International Brigades, Lorca, his poetry, interested him a lot. Later he supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. A man of great romanticism!” describes the musician, who shares with his old colleague the passion for pronouncing Spanish words with great sonority. Although, in practice, he sometimes constructed strange phrases, like in the chorus “Spanish bombs, yo te quiero infinito”. “When he sang that, I understood ‘I love you, little gypsy,” remembers 091’s singer. “One day I told him and he answered: ‘Yes, that’s what I wanted to say!”.
