Matt Jarrett of Diverse Records pictured with Joe Strummer's first guitar “I think he felt that once he got what he wanted he would go back to London, which is what he did and where he formed (his first London band) the 101ers and then the Clash.”
They weren’t going anywhere really, but it was like an apprenticeship for him.
“He wanted to be a successful musician, that’s what he wanted to do. We talked about films and books and we got on well.”įrame said he could see Strummer’s hunger for success even then. “I remember him as very serious, but we had a lot in common. He was either rehearsing with the Vultures at the union or practising in his room. “We were forever at the students’ union, where there was always a band playing and everything revolved around music. “It was like the Young Ones,” he recalls. Sharing a flat with Strummer for six months in 1974, Frame and the aspiring rock star became great friends. Strummer aka Woody pictured at a house party in Newport (Image: Cathy Cooper) “I’d known Joe previously as I was the social secretary of the student union and I was also in a band at the time, so we hit it off.” He lived with them at 16, Clyffard Crescent for a while and then he moved into the flat where I was living at 12 Pentonville. “He initially moved in with Forbes and a guy called Mick Foote who ended up producing the first Clash album. “He’d come down from the leafy suburbs of the south of England and he suddenly found himself in this industrial south Wales town which was completely alien to anything he’d experienced before, but he loved it. “He thought this was as good a place to stay for a while, so he brought his stuff down from London, which included the guitar which he had bought some months previously from a shop in Charing Cross Road in London.
Liking what he saw, Joe decamped to Newport. “They went up to the Newport College of Art student union and there was a band playing. “He decided to call in to see a student that he had been in college with in London called Forbes,” adds Frame. Planning on hitchiking back to London from Cardiff, his first thumbed lift took him to Newport. Joe Strummer pictured in Newport in the mid-70s (Image: Richard Frame)