Simonon, From Paint to Punk And Back Again
In some ways, Paul Simonon is coming full circle: He went to the Byam Shaw School of Art to be a painter and left to become a musician. Art school as band breeding ground is hallowed tradition in England, from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd in the '60s to Franz Ferdinand and Keane today. It's at Byam that Simonon met guitarist Mick Jones, later hooking up with an art school dropout, singer Joe Strummer, to form the Clash.
Coincidentally, though the American avant-garde art movement was in vogue at the time, Simonon was more influenced by English painters, from the romantic John Constable to the 20th-century London school, worlds away from the DIY, break-all-the-rules, goodbye-to-yesterday approach of punk.
"There's the contrast," Simonon says from London. "There's a certain amount of tradition in terms of painting that is needed, for me anyway, to understand the structure. Without that, you've got no foundation to work on. With that structure, I can go anywhere; without it, I'm sort of in the dark, really."
When Simonon joined the Clash in 1976, he'd never played a musical instrument, never even been to a live show. Jones tried to teach him guitar, but he found it too difficult and switched to bass, which he'd played for only six months before the first Clash gig. Ironically, Simonon's first notable painting dates to that time: a mammoth oil-on-wood mural in the band's rehearsal space depicting car dumps and tower flats under the Westway. A huge elevated dual roadway opened in 1970 to relieve congestion in West London, Westway is a looming landmark in the Clash's psycho-geographic world, from the "London Calling" album to the 2000 Clash documentary, "Westway to the World."
As the band took off, the Clash's gap-toothed heartthrob put away his brushes, but his art school background served him well as he developed the band's early Jackson Pollock-inspired look and their subsequent pop-art/lettrism and urban-guerrilla fashions. After the Clash broke up in the mid-'80s, Simonon formed Havana 3 A.M., but it disbanded in 1993 after the cancer-related death of lead singer Nigel Dixon, at which point Simonon put away his bass and returned full time to his roots as a visual artist.
"Mentally, I needed to distance myself away from music and go somewhere else for a time," he says. It would be a few years before he began exhibiting his work, but Simonon has become a respected figure in the art world, including being selected for an exhibition devoted to England's top 20 contemporary artists. His work has been shown alongside such punk-influenced, shake-up-the-establishment conceptualists as Damien Hirst, but Simonon's paintings tend more toward traditional landscapes. His most recent show, "From Hammersmith to Greenwich," featured large oil-on-canvas evocations of London and the Thames River. (For a photo gallery, go to http:/
He has spent time in the past few years in Spain, researching the corrida (bullring) for a series of paintings. The earlier landscapes were all painted outdoors; the new work will be done in Simonon's new studio -- under the Westway.
"I know where I'm going with my painting," he says. "I know it's a continual search, and I don't think I'll ever be really happy with it, which is a good thing. If I was happy with everything I've painted, I think I might just give up and do something that's more of a challenge. But it's been an ongoing journey of discovery, really."
Between 1993 and last year, Simonon distanced himself from music to focus on painting, convinced he couldn't do both and be taken seriously. "I played at home but not publicly," he says. "Music was always there but not in a professional way."
But he never closed the door. "You just never know what's around the corner."
It might be Damon calling.
-- Richard Harrington
