Mick Jones It was pretty crazy when we arrived in Japan. I’d flown there from New York, having stopped off in Alaska, and when I got there Paul was wandering around the foyer, Joe was upset and something had gone on with Topper in the elevator. It felt very strange – we were chased around as if we were the Beatles or something, with lots of screaming and people throwing presents to us. It was beautiful.
On our way to New Zealand after Japan we stopped for an afternoon in Australia and were all thrown out of the hotel for playing our music too loud. We’d only stopped off there for a couple of hours, yet we managed to get banned from the best hotel in Sydney.
In Thailand we only did one gig, but ended up staying for two weeks after Paul got ill. It was on the photo shoot for the Combat Rock cover, and Paul jumped in what he thought was a puddle but was actually some kind of black mud with loads of flies in it. He was in an old colonial-style hospital with a tropical disease. Joe and I got friendly with some monks who wore orange robes and we took them to see Paul in hospital, and they were really excited because he had a shower in his hospital room. Then the monks started coming to the hospital to have showers, loads of them queueing up to get in the shower.
more from the Sunday Times here.