Chimes talks back

Chimes talks back

While Clash fans all over the world were enjoying the release of super boxset, Sound System last year, the band’s first drummer, Terry Chimes, quietly published his autobiography. In The Strange Case of Dr Terry and Mr Chimes he discusses his passion for medicine and drumming in a frank and straightforward tone. He tells The Clash Blog’s special correspondent, Herpreet Kaur Grewal, the reason why he left The Clash, his days playing with the likes of Black Sabbath and Johnny Thunders, and his spiritual rebirth….

Terry Chimes sometimes gets a bad press. Ever since being billed as “Tory Crimes” on The Clash’s debut for leaving the band, there has been an unspoken encouragement to treat him as the outsider in Clash circles. In some ways, this is understandable, as he did actually leave the band and had a different attitude to the rock ‘n’ roll game than the others in the band even though he seemingly had the “credentials”, growing up in a working-class family in east London. Yet he is a part of The Clash legacy and there is not much point in denying that. He went on to become a successful chiropractor and now drums in a band called The Crunch.

When I met him, in his home in east London, he started talking about how many facets of what occurred during The Clash’s formative years, but also during his time playing with other bands, go untold and how he hoped his book goes partway in giving a fresh perspective.

TC: I’ve got lots of stories in my book, that have never been told, and I do wonder why nobody has told these stories because these things happened. Either they forgot about it or they don’t like the idea of it, I don’t know.

HKG: Do you want to share a story that you remember?

TC: When I was in Black Sabbath, we were booked to play this place in Rome at which the Pope had given some kind of presentation the night before. When we got there, to put our gear in, his was still in there! They were supposed to get it out and they didn’t. When in Rome you can’t say, ‘do you know who we are??’, when the Pope’s been there. So the Italians said: “There is another venue we can switch you to. It won’t be a problem. We can put it on the radio and we will tell everyone it’s only round the corner.” So we played some other theatre, but the problem was there were fewer seats in the other place, than the first one and so the gig was oversold. So on the night people, were turning up and saying, ‘I want to come in’ and they are saying, ‘you can’t, it is full up’. People weren’t happy and there was a riot. People smashed the whole place up – someone even got shot but they didn’t die. We had two generators and one of them got smashed up. So the organisers said to us that we could use the remaining generator for either sound or lights, but not both – and there wasn’t time to get another one. So we decided to have the sound. We had five roadies with a torch, each shining on our faces, so all you could see was our faces and we played the whole show like that. It was so bizarre because normally we had a massive light show with all these effects, but the audience loved it!

HKG: Do you have any Clash stories?

There was the time, when we were on “Saturday Night Live” which was the biggest live TV show in the world – 26 million people watched it apparently. Live television is different, because whatever happens, happens, if you screw up or you do something weird, it goes out, there’s no stopping it. We had discussed earlier in the day that as there are lots of comedy sketches, that during one of these sketches, we would like to have someone walking past with a ghetto blaster playing our ‘Rock the Casbah’, which was our latest single. The producers said: “No, no, no we’ve already written the script, you can’t change it”. So Joe or Bernard came up with an idea. We planned that while we were playing ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, we would stop in the middle and a roadie who was in the audience would throw the ghetto blaster up to Joe, who would unpause it and play, ‘Rock the Casbah’ and we would take a particular bit of that song as our cue, to come back in and finish ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. What could go wrong? We even had a minder up in the control room, so if anyone tried to turn us off, he would stop them. …So we are playing the song with 26 million people watching and we stop. The roadie throws up the ghetto blaster, Joe looked at the audience, and pressed the pause button and nothing happened because it was one of those players where the pause button automatically turns off after a few minutes! We were all sitting there thinking ‘ah we didn’t plan for this!’ So we’ve got 26 million people watching and I’m sitting there doing nothing on the drums and only about 4-5 seconds passed but it seemed like an hour. Then fortunately, I think it was Mick that sang some line of something, probably the next bit of ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’. I went blap! on the drums and smacked back into the next verse and we carried on playing the rest of the song and about 30 seconds in, we are all thinking, ‘oh my god, we nearly screwed it there’, and then we realised what had happened and that we had got away with it, so we all started laughing at each other, because it was slightly ridiculous, you know. After, everyone kept coming up to us, asking: “Why were you laughing? What was the secret message of the ghetto blaster?”

HKG: How come you were not more actively involved in the promotion of Sound System last year? Is that something you chose?

TC: I don’t get involved with any of it [The Clash’s legacy projects], to be honest.

HKG: Why not? You are a part of some of it.

TC: Well, I think at the beginning as I had left, Joe was especially upset about that and he never ever forgave me. I have never known a man, who held a grudge for so long. Years, later, having sold millions, done loads of gigs and I suppose, looking back, it might have appeared to everyone else that it was a very selfish thing to do, walking out. But I didn’t walk out. I did loads of things before leaving. I said I wanted to leave, but that I would carry on doing the gigs. So from my point of view, I thought I was being fair. I didn’t want to ruin everything because if I had walked out it would have damaged the progress at a crucial time. When they finally found Topper – it took a while – I said ‘fine, good luck to you’. So I felt I had been reasonable, but actually when someone leaves a band, it’s like when someone leaves a relationship, it hurts people and the person leaving isn’t as hurt, but the person who is left, is. So perhaps there remained a lingering feeling of…’he’s the one that walked out’.

HKG: So why exactly did you leave?

TC: Well the story of my leaving has never been told. I only really fully realised it as I wrote the book because you have to think about things before writing them down. You look at your whole life and all the things that have happened and you understand yourself, who you are, where you are going and it all makes perfect sense. I never understood at the time, it’s quite funny because when I left, they couldn’t understand why I was leaving when they were just taking off. The attempts they made to persuade me to come back just pushed me away even more. I was the odd one out, we used to argue and it was me, on the one side and everyone else in the band, the crew, the management, on the other side, and that felt a bit weary and exhausting…. No one could understand me. My dad understood me though. When I said, ‘I’m not enjoying this’, he said ‘well stop then’. Bernard actually phoned my dad, which is hysterical to me, the idea of Bernard Rhodes phoning my dad! He said: “Your son is making a big mistake, turning his back on all this money.” My Dad came off the phone and said: “I don’t like him.”

HKG: Why were you the odd one out?

TC: Well, that’s what I didn’t realise at the time. We used to argue about politics a little bit, because I’ve always been fairly right-wing in my politics. I believe in freedom, low taxation and the free market…. We weren’t really arguing politics in the party political sense; no one really cared about that. Bernard has a style, he created a kind of hothouse, where we were all very intensely pushed together and we were kind of brain-washing each other constantly. It was very Stalinist, a very bleak, the-world-is-a-nasty-place-and-you-have-got-to-fight-for-every-single-thing-you-get, kind of vibe. I remember thinking, ‘no it isn’t, the world’s a nice place and it is fun and I love it and enjoy it. I enjoy playing music and when I become successful, I will enjoy doing that as well’. But the others were saying they couldn’t be like pop stars, and felt they had to be fighting all the time and agreed that when we got any money, they were going to give it all away. I would say: ‘Well then, how are you going to eat then?’ And it would be that kind of argument all the time and it wore me out – I felt it just wasn’t me. What I realised – and no one has ever heard this – is that I came from a very close, loving happy family and that is what I was: a happy person. The other band members came from broken or damaged homes and when you are from those kinds of homes and are told that the world is a nasty, horrible place, it’s bleak and you’ve got to fight for everything – you are more likely to say, yes and agree with that. I was completely at odds. Now all these years later, we get on fine. There is no problem, but back then, it was completely like chalk and cheese, oil and water and that is why I had to get out.

One thing Bernie said when I left was that I was a foil. He said when we argue, you always kind of put the other view forward and it gives us a chance to practice our answers before we get to the press or others who are out there. But I said, ‘its not a very fun job for me!’

Perhaps there could have been a way it could have worked. But I am quite stubborn I have to say…and so is everyone else. Everyone had strong characters. When Joe, Paul and Kosmo [Vinyl] started talking about getting rid of Mick, it didn’t make any sense to me at all. But they dug in said, ‘its ok for you, but we’ve had years and years of this issue, no good you coming along and saying everything is fine because it’s not’. You couldn’t really argue with that.

I do feel I was at the beginning and the end of The Clash although I wasn’t there for a long time. It’s kind of nice to have done it and there’s a lot of grief and hassle I missed out on! [laughs uproariously] It’s kind of neat to have done the beginning and end.

HKG: What was it like to record the debut album and how long did it take?

TC: We went into the studio, we got a drum sound, we got the sound of guitars, we got the bass sound….Paul wanted this big reggae sound…but Mick said, ‘no, no we have got to have a sound you can actually hear on a transistor radio’. They absolutely locked horns arguing about this wretched sound and I’m sitting there and Joe’s sitting there thinking, ‘oh god how can we get round this’, because the two of them had absolutely dug their heels in and weren’t going to budge. We had lost the will to live, really, because we realised that it was costing, something like maybe £200 an hour, at the time when the average worker, was earning £20 a week and every hour that went by with this stupid argument, without moving, we thought it was just mad and then the engineer, suddenly pops up like the United Nations General Secretary and said he had an idea of recording a really bass-ey sound on this track [in a particular way] saying we could argue about it later. I think Joe and I nearly bumped into each other saying, ‘yes let’s do that!’ Then we did five recordings that day and I thought, thank god. Recording it was like walking into a gig and after maybe two or three takes bang, bang, bang the album was recorded in just minutes.

HKG: Did you have any say in how it was recorded?

TC: I wanted a very live echoey drum sound, which I got, so I was happy with that. I couldn’t bear these awful disco records at the time, where the drums were full of cotton wool and played this really dead, contained sound. So as long as the drums sounded like drums and they went boing! I was happy. No one cared, really to argue with me on that, so it was fine. But it wasn’t like Pink Floyd where you discussed a concept for three days before you played the first note. It was 1,2,3,4 bash!

HKG: Did you hear much from Joe or the others, in the years after The Clash disbanded?

TC: In 1998 or 1999, I was out on a date with this girl and I was dropping her off and we were sitting in the car chatting before she went off. It must have been about 11.30 and my mobile phone went off. A voice said: “Is this Terry Chimes?” I said: “Yeah.” The voice said: “Is this the Terry Chimes who used to play with The Clash?” I said: “Yeah.” Then the voice said: “Well, this is the singer.” I said: “Joe, you’re the only person on this planet who would introduce yourself in that way!” That’s a very Joe thing to do to jump sideways like that. So I would hear from Joe occasionally and hang out with the other boys now and then.

HKG: What use has your experience with other bands been during your career?

TC: I’ve got a monkey-like personality, so I can do lots of different things. Now, I’ve got more than one career and more than one living, so yeah, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with Johnny Thunders – he was probably the most underrated person in the punk movement because he was amazing as a performer, in every way. He just didn’t get what he deserved, but then he was a self-saboteur.

HKG: What do you mean?

TC: If he saw big success coming, he would like start vomiting over the record company and blow the deal and that happened several times, in his life and so, I think looking back now, yeah, he had a deep down psychological fear of success, although maybe no one agrees with that I don’t know but that’s how I saw it.

When I played with Black Sabbath it was the chance to play hard rock. I liked hard rock. I grew up with it even with the punk thing happening. Tony Iommi as a guitar player is monumental. I mean there is no guitar player in rock that has not been influenced consciously or unconsciously by Tony and his riffs. He is the granddad of rock guitar and to play with him, to do that and to play a massive drum kit and major drum solos in front of massive audiences, it was kind of fun.

HKG: When the Clash asked you to come on board again did you just say yes straight away, or did you have to think about it?

TC: I said yes straight away, because Bernard said to me at the time: “You left too early, you want the chance to come back and see what you’re missing?” I thought, ‘yeah you’re probably right, I probably left too early’. I thought it would be fun and it suited me, so I came back.

HKG: Were you ever shocked at the amount of success they had after you first left?

TC: No, no, I always knew they would be successful, it was obvious from the beginning. Before I joined The Clash, I auditioned for every band in London and it was bloody soul destroying, because you had to get your drums, carry them downstairs put them in the car and drive to this god-forsaken dump somewhere, then carry the drumkit out of the car, unpack it, set it up, play for half an hour with some guys who were obviously no-hopers and pack it up again, carry it to the car, drive home, go up the stairs to put it all away, every week!

There is something about people, if they are going to be successful or not, it’s something about them, regardless of whether they can play or not. Paul couldn’t really play the bass, when I first met him but I thought, there’s something about him, he’s going to succeed. You just knew. When I met the guys, there was no discussion about whether they were going to make it. They had an attitude that said, ‘we are going to do this and it will work’. I always felt the same way and I thought, ‘thank god, someone that has got some ambition, some confidence, some drive and enthusiasm’. When we spent all those months rehearsing and getting together, it was a bit like whole is greater than the sum of the parts, everyone’s energy coming together. It was a bit like a pressure cooker getting ready to explode and when we got onto the stage and exploded into people, they would go ‘wow’.

HKG: But even though there was that willpower about the band, you feel there was still negativity?

TC: It was driven by anger, bitterness, misery and….I couldn’t relate to any of that. I was always abnormally happy, people used to say to me, ‘what drugs are you on? You never stop smiling, even when you get up in the morning, you’re smiling. What’s going on?’ But I just can’t be around negative people.

HKG: It’s an interesting contradiction within The Clash that they were determined, but then they had all of those negatives, isn’t it?

TC: Yes, and the second time around touring with them, I’d find myself on a beach or somewhere and I’d say something to Joe about the lovely sunset or the gorgeous weather as we’d be having a nice meal sitting there and Joe would be uncomfortable. He would say: “We shouldn’t be doing this.” I would say: “For god’s sake just relax, you have been working all day, for months just have one day off for once!” He’d say, ‘ok’, but ten minutes later he’d be off doing something else. He was not comfortable being comfortable and I felt sorry for him.

HKG: Do you miss him?

TC: I really always thought Joe and I would be sitting here on a bench in our eighties, like the two guys out of the Muppets. He’d be saying, ‘you left the band!’ and I’d be saying, ‘why don’t you get that out of your head and move on!’ I fully expected to have that conversation with him! It’s sad he’s gone. Even though he drove me mad, it was just a part of life to drive him mad and be driven mad by him.

HKG: How do you feel about re-bonding with the band over the last decade or so? Or would you say you’ve always had a bond with them?

TC: We pop in and out of each other’s lives and we have kind of got used to each other. We have matured and gone in different directions. We don’t argue anymore! It has been nice to talk to Mick and Paul about things without any pressure.

HKG: Out of everyone in The Clash, who do you think changed the most over the years?

TC: Mick completely changed his personality. God knows WHAT changed him, I’ve asked him and he just laughs but he’s changed his personality, he’s more mellow now, he was quite sparky before and now he’s mellow, I suppose he’s just mellowed out as he got older. I don’t know but he’s very different.

HKG: In your book you talk about a spiritual experience. Can you tell me more about that?

TC: Spirituality is a big part of the book in terms of its message.

HKG: Can you sum up the message?

TC: In the last chapter – I say thank you for sharing the journey and if there’s one thing I have got to say to the world, it is this, so read this. It is the Thomas Aquinas quote about how, in order to be happy, the common man searches for happiness in created things but they should look for it in divine things. People search for money, power, honour [fame] or pleasure. I’ve had a bit of power, I never want any more. I’ve had way more money and pleasure than I probably deserve and it hasn’t made me happier. And I’ve had fame and I think its absolute nonsense. So, the thing the four have in common is pride, they are all about ‘me me me’. If you search for mercy, kindness, charity and love, it’s all about the other, putting energy into making others happy but then you end up making yourself happy. It took all the things I‘ve done in my life – a quarter of a million [chiropractic] treatments on people and playing in a band to millions of people – to realise this. It’s about doing more of that. To me, that’s the secret of life.

WORDS: Herpreet Kaur Grewal