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“They were a fair audience, and that gave us a lot of heart, because we realised that this was a nationwide thing that was about to explode.”

“One thing that didn’t change from the beginning, right through to the end of the group,” Chimes says, “was that before each show Mick was always nervous, running around, very uncomfortable and really stressed. But Joe was making jokes and seemed very happy. Then we’d come off stage and Mick would be all happy because it was over, and Joe would be sitting with his head in his hands, saying it was the end of the world.”

During the Pistols’ set Strummer and Chimes stood at the side of the stage. “I really rate this lot,” Strummer confided to the drummer.

“They’re not very good, are they?” was John Lydon’s almost predictable assessment of the Clash.

The Sheffield date only intensified the level of ambition within the Clash. On July 7 the Damned supported the Pistols at one of their Tuesday night dates at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, which caused anxiety within the Clash. They should have been playing that gig: might they miss the boat of this new musical mood? By now Jones was staying for much of the time with Stella, his grandmother, on the 18th floor of a tower block, Wilmcote House, on the Harrow Road. Strummer would go over there to work with his songwriting partner. “The lifts never worked in those flats. That’s the worst thing about them,” he once complained to me.

Jones would reciprocate by visiting Strummer’s squat in nearby Orsett Terrace, where by now not only Simonon and occasionally Sid Vicious were living, but also Levene. He and Strummer began to work as a true songwriting partnership, with an established methodology.

“We wrote fast,” Strummer observed. “We would fire off each other. Mick said: ‘I think we should have a song called Career Opportunities.’ So I said: ‘Right. You and Paul go down the Kentucky Fried and get some potato croquettes,’ and I just banged the lyric up while they were out. When they came back, we’d bang it into a tune, or Mick would. He was a good tunesmith.

“Now and again we’d separate: like he’d come up with Janie Jones, or I’d come up with London’s Burning.

“Bernie Rhodes’s input was direction, not content,” Strummer continued, “which can be one and the same thing. He said: ‘Write about what's important.’ He steered us away from lovey-dovey stuff because he realised it was overdone, and he steered us towards writing something that was more real.”

“At our height, around London Calling or a little after,” Jones says, “Joe used to sit with his typewriter, typing it straight out. I’d sit the other side of the table with my guitar. He’d whack it out like a newspaper man, hand it to me. I’d knock the tune out there and then. On the spot. There might have been a little tiny finesse after that, but hardly any.

“It was just a gift. Lyrics tell you what the tune is a lot of the time. It’s the way the words go: if they already have musicality, then it’s a song.”

© Chris Salewicz 2006. Extracted from Redemption Song, to be published by HarperCollins on October 16 (£20). Copies can be ordered for £17.99 with free p&p from The Times BooksFirst on 0870 1608080

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