‘I was madly in love with post-punk’: Jessica Adams recommends London Calling

Inspired by The Clash and her love of the post-punk London music scene, Jessica Adams finally managed to return to the city of her birth when she turned 21, writes Christine Manby

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

Some of us were better prepared for this tumultuous year than others. Australian astrologer Jessica Adams knew quite a while ago that 2020 was going to be interesting, in the Chinese proverb’s sense of the word. Consulting the ephemeris (charts which plot the movements of the planets) late last year, Adams announced that March 2020 would be “Clean Up Time”. She wrote “those nations at the top of the world order, will go through a critical clean-up in March 2020, similar to a detox…” Sound like a lockdown to you? With a “final delivery in November 2020”. Adams continued, “This is obviously the month America goes to the polls and she will be electing a completely different class of politicians, a new system, a new constitution…”

When I talked to Adams on the eve of the American election, she assured me that Biden would carry the day with “good news on Sunday 8”, which equated to Saturday 7 US time, when Biden’s victory was indeed called. However, she also warned that Trump’s attempts to overturn the result would rumble on until at least November 20th. “It’s all about Mercury Retrograde,” said Adams. This year’s US election had the same horoscope as Bush/Gore 2000 and the Truman election of 1948 when Thomas E Dewey was erroneously named president elect by the Chicago Daily Tribune, which went to press just a little too early. Remember Thomas E Dewey? Exactly.

Anyway, thanks to the ephemeris Adams was ready for action when a lockdown was announced in spring 2020, taking just 90 minutes to decide to leave Melbourne and head for Tasmania, where she has been holed up ever since. Talking to panicking friends about the upcoming confinement, she advised several of them to “get a chicken”. Days after arriving in Tasmania, someone threw a huge black hen over Adams’ own fence. Though it’s a “total pain in the arse”, the hen has been Adams’ companion ever since. She predicted a lockdown and manifested an emotional support chicken to go with it. Things like this happen in Jessica Adams’ life.

Adams was aware of her psychic abilities at an early age – she says that her dead cat would follow her home from school – but chose to suppress the messages she was getting from the other side. They were too frightening for a child to contemplate, especially when there were so many things going on for her in the earthly realm. Adams was nine when her family emigrated from Brixton to Australia. She tried to forget about her beloved south London, until Christmas 1979 when, as a fifteen-year-old, she first heard the song that would become her favourite of all time. It was London Calling by The Clash.

“As soon as I heard it, I knew I needed to be in London,” she says. “I was madly in love with post-punk.”

London band The Clash was formed in 1976 when art school drop-outs Paul Simonon and Mick Jones invited singer Joe Strummer to join their band. The band was completed by drummer Nicky “Topper” Headon.  Soon they were at the forefront of English punk and made music industry headlines when they signed with CBS Records for £100k at the beginning of 1977. It was an unthinkably large advance at the time.

In March 1977 the band hit number 34 in the charts with their first single, White Riot.  Their eponymous album made number 12 the same year. But while The Clash were huge in the UK, CBS urged them to “clean up” their sound to make it in the US too. Simonon described the recording of the second album as “just the most boring situation ever.” The band’s struggles with their record label were reflected in the song that would become the title track of their third album, London Calling.

“This is London calling” is the phrase that introduced the BBC World Service’s news reports during the Second World War. Its slightly ominous overtone made it the perfect title for a song written during a new period of international angst, sparked by the meltdown of a power station reactor at Three Mile Island, the “nuclear error” of Joe Strummer’s lyrics. There were worries closer to home too: police brutality and the threat of environmental disaster in the form of a flooding Thames. And the very personal concerns of the band members who were facing money problems.

London Calling was released as a single in December 1979. Joe Strummer made a bet with Annie Nightingale, the Radio One DJ, that if the single reached the UK Top 10, she would buy him a Cadillac. London Calling actually only made it to No 11 but all the same a Radio One listener donated a Cadillac that was auctioned to raise money for Corby, the former steel town devastated by the recession.

And of course, London Calling hit the charts in Australia too, which was where it reached young Jessica Adams. Since then, the song has been heralded as a classic, so popular with Londoners that it’s played at home games by both Arsenal and Fulham football clubs.

Inspired by The Clash and her love of the post-punk London music scene, Adams finally managed to return to the city of her birth when she turned 21. It was 1984. “Thatcher was prime minister. It was all kicking off,” Adams says. She became a music journalist.

Though she never managed to interview a member of The Clash, she recalls a long conversation with Kurt Kobain. “Nirvana had just broken through. We laughed about Spinal Tap and talked for ages about The Clash. Kurt was very inspired by them.”

These days, Adams says she “rations” the number of times a year she listens to her favourite song, not wanting to spoil it for herself. Though the song is now more than 40 years old, in many ways it remains as fresh as ever, as does The Clash’s manifesto, as declared to NME. “We’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist and we’re pro-creative.”

I ask Adams if she sings along, “You can’t sing along to Joe Strummer,” she laughs. “But I always hear the song whenever I’m about to go back to London.”

For now, however, she is staying in Tasmania, which has rid itself of the coronavirus thanks to a stringent lockdown and the closing of borders. “But I miss London desperately.”

Will Adams be able to come back to the UK soon? I ask her what she thinks the future holds for her beloved city. The fade out of London Calling is “S-O-S” in Morse Code, plucked out on the guitar. With Brexit looming, should we be sending out an SOS call?  Perhaps not. Having consulted the United Kingdom’s birth chart, Adams predicts that we’re going to see what she calls a “no deal/new deal” akin to the relationship between the EU and Switzerland.

In the meantime, she assures me that Christmas will come as a “wonderful relief. It will be very Gavin and Stacey. Very healing. And 2021 will be a much better year. We’re post-Donald Trump. It’s far more optimistic and hopeful. The worst is over.”