Clash of culture

The greatest rock’n’roll image of all time is a picture of Paul Simonon, according to a poll earlier this year. The photograph, of Simonon shattering his guitar on the New York Palladium stage in 1979, was taken by Penny Smith, and later became the cover of the Clash’s album from that year, London Calling.

It’s not a bad thing to be remembered for, but Simonon has images of a very different kind on his mind these days. For a decade the punk rock legend has been pursuing a career as a painter, which is just as surprising as the peacefulness of the impressionist cityscapes that make up the collection he’s about to unveil at a new London exhibition, From Hammersmith to Greenwich.

He finds it hard to say why, but he’s drawn time and again to the Thames. His large canvases of an idealised, calm river and its surrounding buildings will fetch up to 15,000 each. Simonon can’t rely on the trickle of Clash royalties, so painting is how he earns his crust. There’s no hint now of his former edgy persona as he sits in his local on the fringes of Notting Hill. The gap between his front teeth is still there, he has rather less sandy hair, a hole is growing in the armpit of his sweater.

"You can’t be angry all the time," he says. "When people are antagonistic towards you, then you react. When we started out as young men with drainpipe trousers, the rest of the world was flared. We were an instant target. You got blokes chucking bottles at our concerts who didn’t want anything to do with the idea of punk." These days his routine is less fraught. He takes his two boys, aged eight and 11, to school, and then sets himself up on site along the Thames to paint.

Simonon was born in London in 1955. His family moved around, though he did most of his growing up in Brixton and Ladbroke Grove. When he was nine his parents separated, and he spent a year in Italy with his mother. "Living in Siena and then Rome I didn’t have to go to school. I pretty much lived the way I lived in Brixton, which was to have the key around your neck and out you go into the street."

As a boy he was exposed to rock steady and ska. By the time he returned from Italy the skinhead movement was starting. He would skip classes and roam the streets with a small collection of friends "getting up to no good". His parents’ jobs ranged from delivering milk to working in factories and libraries. He has always painted, probably following the example of his dad, a driven, self-taught "Sunday painter ... He did Fauvist-like pictures of landscapes, nudes, pots and pans, anything. I used to sleep in his studio. There were pictures he’d nicked out of library books and paintings all over the walls. I remember doing a lot of drawing through the night, and then sleeping on a school desk."

By the time Simonon left home, his father had qualified as a schoolteacher. Simonon won a scholarship to the Byam Shaw School of Art in North London. He spent a year and a half there before dropping out; "I believed in doing life drawing as a beginning and a lot of the people at the college weren’t interested in that, they were influenced by the American Abstract movement. It didn’t suit me."

The Clash was conceived in 1976 after Simonon ran into guitarist Mick Jones at a rehearsal. "There was this bloke sitting in the corner called Bernard Rhodes (already on his road to gaining fame as a rock manager). After the session Bernie said, ‘Mick what you want to do is sack your group and get a group together with that bloke’, which was me. I suppose he thought there was a grittiness about me that might be a good ingredient." There was a hitch - Simonon didn’t know how to play bass guitar. "I did a lot of learning in public. I just pretended I was Pete Townshend and jumped around a lot." He learned by playing along to reggae.

It fell to Simonon to style the band. His background of working down Portobello market as a kid came into play; "We’d get hold of second-hand 1960s suits nobody wanted. You got a short haircut and straight trousers with bit of Jackson Pollock splattered on." If someone told him then what he’d be doing now, he says, he’d have been quite pleased. "I’ve moved on. It’s important to try and keep your dignity." The Clash imploded at the right time, he thinks, creatively if not financially. "We were on the verge of being millionaires."

After the band called it a day in 1985, Simonon went to America with a friend, Nigel Dixon, and put together a band called Havana 3am. When Dixon died of cancer and Simonon’s first son was born a few years later, he made a decision to cut out music and paint. Back in rainy London after Los Angeles, "suddenly the clouds were like poetry. I went straight to the British Museum and started from the ground up. I drew every day." Conceptual art would have been too obvious a path, he says. And besides, painting is a compulsion. He hardly ever touches his guitar now.

Why the Thames? "I’d like to live on the river. I did mention getting a houseboat to my wife. She said ‘well, I hope you’ll be happy on it’," he grins.

This week’s gallery showing, "a celebration of London", is his second in the city. His first was much more low-key - even so, the paintings sold out. He has never exhibited in Scotland, although one of his paintings, a collaboration with Damien Hirst that was done "after a litre bottle of vodka - we decided on an interesting 3-D experiment", is part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s current show, NEW.

His latest show is at the commercial gallery Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, picture dealers by Royal appointment, whose usual commodity is the handling of Old Masters. It’s hard to imagine their immaculate front man, Hugo De Ferranti, pogoing at a Clash gig in his youth. Yet he spotted a Simonon painting at a friend’s house, and had the idea of an exhibition.

For the gallery the collection seems a break with tradition, but at the same time Simonon’s "are traditional London views, very establishment paintings", says De Ferranti. The House of Commons is considering buying one. De Ferranti also tells one of the few nice stories I’ve ever heard about Jeffrey Archer. He’d never heard of Simonon, but let the artist use his riverside pad for three months to paint one of the views on sale at the showing. "Paul is a professional artist," adds De Ferranti. "You walk into a museum with him and he knows everything." Would the gallery be showing Simonon’s work if it wasn’t for his prior fame? "It’s a difficult question."

Art critics are often scathing about rock musicians turning to painting - notably Brian Sewell, who has hit out at "an infuriating tendency among clapped-out old pop stars to become artists … I am sick of it." What is Simonon’s response? "Unfortunately a lot of (the work) is rubbish," he acknowledges. "David Bowie and Paul McCartney’s stuff, for instance." But he doesn’t want to damn everyone. "It’s a hobby for a lot of them. But then, Canaletto was a musician."

"Painting is work. you’ve got to put the time in," he adds. He says it’s still early days for him, and that he’s not worried about whether his paintings cut it in the art world. "I know what I’m doing, and what I need to tackle."

So, how does it feel to be the greatest rock’n’roll image of all time? He remembers the moment. "I was frustrated so I took it out on the guitar. It felt good, like I was holding an axe, chopping up the stage, I felt like Pete Townshend at last." As for the image, well … "It’s yesterday isn’t it?"

He’s proud the band didn’t get back together for the money. "We discussed reforming one time," he says, but the conversation ended in a "mild" disagreement. "I wasn’t particularly interested. It’s ridiculous when you’re told you’re being offered 46 million each. It’s like playing Monopoly, you can’t take it seriously."

Now he wants people to find his paintings uplifting. "Sometimes I see a picture in a gallery and I have to run home and paint, the same way that maybe listening to early reggae made you take a bolder step instead of just shuffling along."

Paul Simonon’s paintings are at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, 38 Bury Street, London, tomorrow until 18 October. Tel: [phone]