Was he lost in the supermarket?

This is one of the strangest rock music stories I’ve ever read, and I’m kind of perplexed that I haven’t discovered it before. I like the Clash but they’re not a band I actually know many historical details of, so I had no idea that Joe Strummer actually disappeared for a while in 1982.

This was not the only or even the first such musical disappearing act of that year, with Jaz Coleman from Killing Joke having hilariously relocated to Iceland in February either to escape a nuclear apocalypse or else become Iceland’s top hash dealer, depending on which of his stories you believe…

And I wonder if that peculiar incident inspired Strummer’s vanishing. The story goes that Bernie Rhodes, who’d been reinstated as the Clash’s manager, suggested Joe “disappear” for a while cos ticket sales for the upcoming tour were a bit sluggish; Rhodes seemed to think that him going into hiding in the US for a while might work as a publicity stunt. (I don’t know if he did get the idea from Jaz Coleman or not, but the timeline does fit.) Strummer decided to take this idea and carry it out properly… by actually disappearing. Not only did the public not know what had happened to him, neither did the band or Rhodes.

Anyway, he was eventually discovered in Paris after a few weeks and normal business resumed; unfortunately, normal business for the band by this time meant increasing dysfunction and tension, resulting in Topper Headon being ejected from the band owing to his increasing substance abuse a week after Combat Rock came out and the tour finally started… a little rich given the rest of the band’s drug consumption and the fact that Topper had just given them a great big hit in the form of “Rock the Casbah”. The whole story really is quite odd, and Strummer did later regret it; supposedly he wanted Rhodes back as the band’s manager to recapture some of the chaos of their earlier career, and I suppose he got that in this case… it was just that he didn’t realise the one thing the band didn’t need by that time was chaos. Still, at least he learned not to do that again as far as I can tell, unlike Jaz Coleman…