In footage of the punk band the Clash as they pile onstage at Rock Against Racism in Victoria Park, east London, in 1978, there’s a glimpse of the road manager Johnny Green and his two young daughters Acorn and Goldy. In his 1997 book A Riot of Our Own: Night and Day With the Clash, John wrote: “I felt quite proud that my kids had come to see Daddy at work. A guy in a silk tour jacket [a roadie from another band] said, ‘Who let these kids up here?’ I said, ‘I did. So what?’”
Three decades on, at the first Latitude festival in 2006, John reacquainted himself with an old compadre from punk days, John Cooper Clarke, and before long had become the poet’s “gentleman travelling companion”. He remained so for 15 years, reprising his Clash role of cutting through the bullshit and ensuring smooth passage to places such as the Baths Hall, Scunthorpe.
But John, who has died aged 75, was not just a road man. As often as not he would be up on stage himself, riffing with Cooper Clarke or reading from A Riot of Our Own (written with Garry Barker), his inside track on days with the Clash.
Born John Broad in Chatham, Kent, to Margery (nee Tall) and Jack Broad, both primary school teachers, John spent his early years on the Twydall estate in Gillingham then went to Gillingham grammar school. On leaving he sold Gandalf’s Garden and International Times in Medway towns, then worked in wholefoods collectives in Yorkshire and Snowdonia with Richenda Watterson, the mother of Acorn and Goldy, whom he had married in 1969.
He graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1977, but, his marriage dissolved, a chance conversation led to him travelling to Belfast to help out with the Clash tour.
He stayed with the band – who supplied the Johnny Green moniker – for two years. He was known for letting waifs and strays into Clash gigs without paying, but on tour in the US in 1980 he felt the pure moment of punk had evaporated, and left.
John moved to Lubbock, Texas, worked with the country musician Joe Ely, and married a designer, Lindy Poltock, with whom he had two sons, Earl and Dirk. Both she and Dirk died of pneumococcal meningitis in 1983.
Rudderless for a while, John ended up back in Kent. At teacher-training college in Canterbury in 1985 he met Janette Border. The pair married and settled in Whitstable in 1991 with Earl; two daughters, Polly and Ruby, followed.
John taught RE in north Kent secondary schools before taking the same gonzo modus operandi employed in Riot to cycling, for Push Yourself Just a Little Bit More (2005), his irreverent backstage account of the Tour de France.
I had the pleasure of editing John’s books. He was a brilliant raconteur: thoughtful, astute and hilarious; everything – from Rimbaud “the original punk”, Eddy Merckx’s perfect hair, the life and times of Gillingham centre-half Barry Ashby, life in Yemen – was processed through the Broad/Green filter, to emerge in needle-sharp prose on the page, the stage or in everyday conversation.
John is survived by Janette, his children, and four grandchildren.
