The Clash
[The Guardian, 24 Sept 1999]
The Clash changed my life when I saw them in October 1976. My feelings about them became more complex as they got sucked into the music industry and some of them are discussed here. Their 1976 and 1977 shows were just fantastic, however, and I still love their last single, “This Is England”.
It is November 1977: near the end of that exhausting year. I find myself in the press pit at the Apollo theatre in Manchester – a brief corridor between the raised stage and audience front – with just one other person: NME photographer Kevin Cummins. In front of us are the Clash, thundering like a herd of wounded buffalo; immediately be hind us are scores of adolescents, mainly male, squeezed into the sardine pogo: whole rows jumping up and down in unison, faces contorted, bodies rigid. Sheets of spit pour onto the group, in the then fashionable, gruesome bonding ritual.
Behind them is a second level of malcontents who are busy expressing their inner chaos by deconstructing the old cinema. The seats start arriving in the press pit about halfway through the show: thrown and carried over the heads of the front row. They don’t stop. As the mania builds – expressed by that peculiar sound which I have heard very few times: an audience roar louder than the amplification – I forget about the flying wood and catch a glimpse of guitarist Mick Jones, pumping it out with this awestruck look on his face: ‘What the fuck? What is this madness? Are we responsible?’
After the Sex Pistols reunion tour three years ago, here comes another punk time capsule, as the Clash are historically spring-cleaned with a remastered catalogue, a freshly compiled live album, “From Here To Eternity”, taken from the years 1978-82, and a historical documentary, “From The Westway To The World” – with new interviews and unseen archive – by long-time friend and collaborator Don Letts. It’s hard to know what, if anything, today’s teens will make of this, but for those who participated in those years, this high profile reexami nation opens a Pando ra’s box of emotions.
The first thing that needs to be said is that the Clash’s leg end is deserved. After the middle of 1977, when the Sex Pistols became remote, stalled in outrage, the Clash be came the leading UK punk rock group: it fell to them to articulate, advise (for that was in their nature) and gal vanise the energies of a new and rapidly growing rock community. Like the Sex Pistols, their ambitions went be yond music: they aimed to dramatise a city – London – and a country in crisis. As their name baldly stated, they were programmed for confrontation, contradiction and conflict – and they got all three in spades.
The Clash began in summer 1976 as a classic London mod-stutter group: every song a sped-up acrostic of the Who’s “I Can’t Explain”. By the time their first, definitive album, “The Clash”, was released in April 1977, most of this material had been junked in favour of newer, social is sue songs like “White Riot” – at the suggestion of manager Bernard Rhodes, who could see what his friend and former col league Malcolm McLaren was achieving by mixing pop and politics in the Sex Pistols. Nevertheless, tunes like “Protex Blue” and “Cheat” remain a strong snapshot of early punk London, with the thrashing “What’s My Name” a perfect statement of teen angst: “What the hell is wrong with me? / I’m not who I want to be!’
Unlike the Sex Pistols, who were almost always confrontational and aloof, the Clash presented themselves as open, concerned, close to their fans. Joe Strummer’s rasping voice sang loser lyrics of life at the bottom of society: harassed by the police, buffeted by social disorder and riot, conned, vilified, violent, desperately searching for excitement and that rarest of qualities in 1977, fun. This was a voice that could project complexities of emotion, including pathos and empathy: together with Mick Jones consummate arranging and musical skills and Paul Simonon’s brooding good looks and dive-bombing reggae bass, it meant for a three man front line of great power.
From the end of 1976 until the end of 1977, the Clash played some of the best rock shows I’ve ever seen: manic, white light energy converting into a passionate bond between performer and audience. In the footage shot during this period – particularly the Granada “So It Goes” concert from October 1977 – it’s fascinating to see this in action: the hails of gob covering the group and the cameras; Joe Strummer’s habit of plunging, head first into the front rows, who are mouthing every single word that he sings; his spontaneous rant into camera: ‘Here we are on TV / What does it mean to me?/ What does it mean to you?/ Fuuuuck off!’
Rock groups tend not to do this kind of thing these days. They might annoy someone ‘important’ – like Jo Whiley or something. Nor do they play with anything like the Clash’s white line fever: the energy simply isn’t there. Nor would they accept one single speck of gob (nor should they); but any time that anyone puts down any of the punks, just remember that they trailed up and down the country to be harassed by the police and joe public, only to be covered in spit when they finally got to play. They should all receive a retrospective medal. In spring 1978, Joe Strummer developed hepatitis from a flying green one: what diseases might be passed now ?
This is all so long ago. It’s hard to imagine a similar group today: one that epitomises a unitary youth movement, with all its hopes, fears and aspirations. The Clash won the position partly by default – as noone could have foreseen the national hysteria that would surround and engulf the Sex Pistols – but they rose to the opportunity when it was presented to them with two storming Top 40 singles, “White Riot” and “Complete Control”, and a terrific first album. Their spring 1977 tour was the first major punk package to play the UK: it culminated in a scandalous, triumphant appear ance at Finsbury Park’s Rainbow.
Influenced – unlike the Sex Pistols – by the Ramones’ spring 1976 debut album, the Clash employed almost no pacing during their early shows: they hit the ground run ning and accelerated. Until 1978 – where the “From Here To Eternity” album begins – their live sound was, in strict terms, terrible: accurate playing sacrificed to the intensity of the moment. But when all these events were occurring in the crowd, who cared about note-perfect renditions ? The idea was that punk rock was new, and the Clash’s early sheet metal thunder fed right into the then preferred overload mode which does not translate into a live album acceptable to today’s market: you had to be there to experience distortion as an environment – an aural simulation of chaos where anything could happen.
This couldn’t last, of course. When the Sex Pistols fell apart in San Francisco, the Clash were left as the Punk standard bearers: an impossible position to maintain as Punk itself collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions – to which the Clash could add a few of their own. Here was a rock group, committed to personal and political autonomy, who had signed a tough, if not restrictive, deal with a multinational record company; successful chart artists who refused to appear on “Top of the Pops”; ‘street everykids’ who lived an inner London lifestyle; a hyped and packaged idea which became real culture – a conduit for intense social and personal emotions.
Punk had walked the high wire between aesthetics and politics, in an ambitious polemic which aimed to dissolve the barrier between pop music and everyday life. Why sing about love when there was all this other stuff going on ? However, forces outside the music industry playpen came back to challenge the punks on their own terms: how can you wear a swastika when the UK’s principal fascist party, the National Front, is gaining ground in local councils and on the streets ? You sing about riot: well here are some real riots. When the Clash played the Rock Against Racism rally in Victoria Park, they gave a focus for a significant, and decisive protest, after which the Na tional Front were increasingly marginalised – in youth culture at least.
It also marked the moment when the social realist tendency temporarily took over. The Clash appeared to be the ur-social realists, but they weren’t: just a bunch of misfits and pop obsessives who cared enough to look outside their own immediate concerns but who were also interested in pop success. Well, that is the nature of the game, even for punks – for whom, all too often, success represented failure and failure success. As the Clash toured the UK during 1978 – a period captured by Jack Hazan’s misconceived “Rude Boy” – you can see the strain of all this expectation show: as Strummer barks out to the massed punks in the “What’s My Name” that you can hear on the live album: ‘What the hell is wrong with you? / You’re just doing what you’re supposed to do!’
Early signs of these tensions had appeared in the self-referentiality of “Clash City Rockers”: this self-mythologising tendency flowered on the group’s second album, “Give ‘Em Enough Rope”. Half the record convincingly broadens the group sound, while the other is a maudlin, muddled morass. The Clash had begun writing for their perceived subculture, which is always a bad idea in rock music – see the Stone Roses’ “One Love”. In seeking an exit from the punk cul-de-sac, they attempted a fuller, more American rock sound at the same time as they wrote about their mates, their petty hooligan escapades, their own position in the scheme of things. Tempos were down; timings were up – the brakes had been applied.
Worst of all, the record reflected a growing obsession with militaria and male bonding which just seemed like old information. If punk was new, then one of the ways in which it was new was in its sexuality: a crisis in masculinity classically expressed by strong women and hopeless boys – Siouxsie and the Banshees and Subway Sect, X Ray Spex and the Buzzcocks. Even Johnny Rotten was hardly your standard yob, often projecting a psychotic androgyny. The Sex Pistols socialised, not with a barmy army, but with rebellious, powerful women – like Chrissie Hynde. But watch “Rude Boy” and read road manager Johnny Green’s memoirs and you tap into the ‘Loaded’ perplex: men unable to transcend the inadequate social roles allotted by society and peer pressure and all too often relapsing into unthinking, occasionally misogynistic laddism.
I just thought the Clash looked ludicrous in their uniforms and from thereon in, lost any passion for them. In May 1979, the era of social strife that they symbolised ended with the election of Mrs. Thatcher. The group did the only thing they could: they went to America and both broad ened their outlook and their music. As one of the first to successfully fuse reggae with modern rock – with 1977’s audacious version of Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” – they continued to experiment with other black music: ska, soul, and, by 1982’s “Combat Rock”, the electro emerging out of New York. At the same time, they went back to rockabilly – most notably with their great cover of Vince Taylor’s “Brand New Cadillac”.
The post 1979 history of the Clash is that of a successful, superior rock group. “London Calling” and “Sandanista” are over-long experiments shored up by a string of strong singles: “The Call Up”, “Know Your Rights”, “This Is Radio Clash”. Their last album with Mick Jones, “Combat Rock”, is their most consistent later record, with the great singles, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” and “Rock The Casbah” – the last written by drummer Topper Headon. After Jones left, Strummer and Simonon kept it all going with 1985’s much-maligned “Cut The Crap”, a patchy but prescient fusion of punk with hip hop beats and sound ef fects. It’s the only Clash album I still play for pleasure: a last stab at that wild, chaotic sound with the added bonus of Strummer’s greatest song, “This Is England”.
The Clash once mattered but now they’re digital history. Their reappearance opens old wounds, memories of old conflicts. In my darker moods I can’t help thinking of how any one of those great Pennie Smith pictures could easily feature on the front of “Loaded”: mythic machismo on a par, say, with that infamous ‘Rat Pack’ Las Vegas shot. On the other hand, their passion makes almost every one of today’s rock groups look as lame as they are and, if there is one useful thing to come out of this cross-media extravaganza, it would be to highlight the dearth of white musicians who are prepared to project themselves out into the world, then to write simply and empathetically about what they see and feel. So what’s your problem?