Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Chapter Eleven

  Do They Owe Us A Living?

  Crass, Southern, The Anarcho Punk Labels and Punk in the 80s

  One of the most divisive statements made regarding the early days of punk was that the movement died the day the Clash signed to CBS, courtesy of Mark Perry of Sniffin’ Glue. The Sex Pistols had been enticed by EMI four months previously, but it was the polemic of the Clash and their ideological cleavage that turned heads – and inspired misplaced hopes. The Clash camp, via manager Bernie Rhodes, were reluctant to divulge their signing-on fee, but £100,000 was later admitted to. With punk exploding everywhere in the light of the Grundy affair, this had escalated quickly from an initial £25,000 proposed by Chris Parry at Polydor. Despite grabbing the biggest offer on the table, having negotiated the famously parsimonious Maurice Oberstein into a substantial advance, Strummer remained cynical. “I think they see us as a threat to their fantastic rivers of money, you know?” he told John Tobler in a Radio One interview. “They see us as something to block it up, right?” But as Clash biographer Marcus Gray points out, “Maurice Oberstein did not sign the Clash because he saw punk as a threat to CBS and its established artists, but because he saw no difference between the band and any other potential money-making proposition.”

  The Clash were immediately defensive about their decision. In conversation with Kris Needs in March 1977, Mick Jones claimed: “You’ve got to make records. You can do your own label, and not many people will hear it. This way more people will hear our record.” He also claimed that the band had extracted full creative control as part of the deal. That assumption, which was self-evidently not based on a close inspection of the fine print of their contracts, would unravel with unseemly haste.

  That dialogue about signing to a major would haunt The Clash down the years. Speaking to Paul Morley in 1979, Strummer stated that Rhodes and McLaren’s machinations in bringing the Pistols and Clash to majors stopped the punk movement dying on its feet, as its American CBGB’s equivalent had before it. “CBGBs on the Bowery was how it stayed for five years. It never came out of there. Our stuff and the Pistols’ stuff was great. I don’t want to brag, but it didn’t deserve to stay in a hole in Covent Garden [The Roxy] for five years.” It’s a dubious proposition. The early punk movement certainly provided a gateway for dross, but a large number of fine minds and artists would also slip through. And often continued to produce vital music long after The Clash ceased doing so.

  Typically, Rhodes himself would paint the decision as ideological, invoking Marxist terminology. “An independent?” he queried when tackled by Paul Rambali in 1980. “You mean a small business. If you don’t have access to gain the means of production, whatever you do is peripheral.” It’s a typical Rhodes folly. The Clash never had access to the means of production. Neither, it could be argued, did artists who recorded for independents unless they were pure self-starters. If there was justification for The Clash’s decision to sign with CBS, it was on grounds of pragmatism and ambition. In ideological terms, it never did have a leg to stand on.

  In June 1977 Perry had handed over control of Sniffin’ Glue to Danny Baker, whose editorial redressed the previously condemnatory tone. “There’s no point screamin’ to the converted on privately owned/distributed labels that could sell about two hundred, is there? We wanna be heard, fuck being a cult.” Perry, however, wasn’t changing his opinion. As he explained at length to Gray in Last Gang In Town. “I was insisting it was up to bands like The Clash – that were very popular and were courting a lot of record company interest – to say, ‘No! We’re not going to become part of the establishment, we’re gonna do it ourselves.’ I knew it could be done. The Buzzcocks did their first EP themselves. We did the Glue without being part of a big publisher like IPC. I think the last Glue sold about 20,000 copies. Even if we take The Clash’s arguments about wanting a bigger audience, distribution problems, and whatever, it’s still possible. The Pistols had stirred this thing up. They’d made this thing interesting to a big audience, they’d made everyone look at us to see what was going to happen next. There was a massive audience for something you could have done on your own. I mean, UB40 proved that later with their own label. And yet The Clash go and sign to CBS. If you talk about just music, it doesn’t matter – I’ve got loads of CBS albums – but if you talk about what The Clash talked about in their songs, then they completely sold out… CBS were one of the biggest weapons and communications systems manufacturers in the world, this massive conglomerate! Basically, it’s why the world’s dying, because of industries like that. If you look at it in those terms – and I’m no longer that serious that I want to, but if you do follow my argument – they completely sold out.”

  The wisdom of signing to CBS, ultimately, revealed itself quickly. The headline advance figure was enticing enough. But absolutely everything; equipment, producers, tour support and promotion – would come out of the band’s pocket. For all Rhodes’ rhetoric and sabre-rattling (though he was wise enough to secure himself 20% gross on the deal) he’d signed The Clash to the classic ‘stupid record company contract’. Taking a big advance that would soon be exhausted left them at the whim of their ‘employer’. In later years you didn’t have to tell a wizened Joe Strummer of the impact of their decision. “If it’s Monday, the record company must be pissing on me,” he told Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover. “If it’s Tuesday…” The group’s problems with CBS plagued even their most successful years, and ultimately led to Strummer dropping out of view after the band’s break-up for almost a decade, so frustrated did he become with contracts he had ill-advisedly signed in 1976.

  One celebrated acknowledgement of the band’s undue haste in signing to CBS arrived with ‘Complete Control’ (a retort to CBS’s decision to release ‘Remote Control’ as a single against the band’s wishes), Yet one of the standout songs on their triple-album suite Sandinista! is arguably much more revealing. ‘Hitsville UK’, inspired by a trip to Detroit to see the Motown studios where ‘The Sound Of Young America’ had been hand-crafted, reminded Strummer of those labels back in the UK who had carried the torch for a similar aesthetic. “They say true talent will always emerge in time,” ran the lyric. “When Lightning hits Small Wonder/It’s Fast Rough Factory Trade/No expense accounts or lunch discounts”. The doffing of the cap seemed clear-cut enough – though it’s worth noting all the mentioned labels – with the exception of Lightning, if that citation were indeed intended – were ones who existed after the group had signed on the dotted line with CBS.

  If Strummer was temporarily lost in appreciation for a generation of UK independents, his decision to sign that CBS contract spurred on several of the labels invoked in ‘Hitsville UK’. “We were disappointed when The Clash signed to CBS,” Geoff Travis of Rough Trade notes. “We saw that as a sell out, I guess, but that just renewed our endeavours to do what we did.” Which rather prompts the question, did Travis ever query Mick Jones about the CBS call when they were working together, finally, with The Libertines? “No!” he laughs. “You have to give an old rocker a break!” The great Clash/CBS debate (and it remains, indeed, an almost inexhaustibly fascinating and axiomatic moment) informed some of the independent movement’s key records. ‘Never Been In A Riot’ by The Mekons satirised the group’s clumsiest early statement of intent, ‘White Riot’. More obliquely, Scritti Politti’s ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ attacked the band’s then current ‘Magnificent Seven’ schtick. But it would be the extended family of activists living in a communal house in Essex that took the argument to its logical conclusion. That conclusion being, beyond any shadow of doubt, that you could sell millions of records and truly inform, influence and occasionally inflame a worldwide audience without recourse to traditional record industry mechanics. You simply required the will.

  The thrust of independent music is, at one level, to provide an outlet for artists at the margins of commerce. If we accept that premise, independence stands as a philosophical corrective to the brutal Darwin
ist logic of the mainstream music market, rather than simply an alternative business model (and the frustrations in grasping that are key to the perception of other labels, and individuals, discussed in this book). One of the key influences on that discourse came from the Small Wonder stable directly referenced in ‘Hitsville UK’. Small Wonder’s greatest legacy, however, was serving as midwife to the anarchist punk generation spearheaded by Crass. There were other groups who would explicitly and repeatedly rail against The Clash’s fateful decision to ‘take the money’. Crass, drawing on a far more extensive back-story and knowledge base than others who instinctively felt the ‘betrayal’, started out almost as a crusade. Ultimately, however, that crusade quickly developed into something much less one-dimensional and ultimately transgressive.

  Crass was more than a band; rather, it was a co-operative anarchist commune whose values and philosophies drew on the beatniks, the sixties counter-culture and French literature. They were interested in radical ideas about feminism, pacifism and activism. Those interests predated punk, but they were alive to the possibilities when it took hold. “When, in 1976, punk first spewed itself across the nation’s headlines with the message ‘do it yourself’,” the group would recall in the notes to Best Before, “we, who in various ways and for many years had been doing just that, naively believed that Messrs Rotten, Strummer etc, etc, meant it. At last we weren’t alone.”

  Crass came into being in North Weald, Essex, at the behest of Penny Rimbaud (Jeremy Ratter) and Steve Ignorant (Steve Williams). Rimbaud first moved into Dial House in 1967, while still working as a part-time teacher, and embarked on establishing an open house community partially inspired by the film The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness. However, the death at what he believed to be the hands of state apparatus of close friend Phil Russell, aka Wally Hope, convinced him that such a passive alternative lifestyle was insufficient. He began to write songs with Ignorant, who had become a regular visitor. Initially, and for some time thereafter, this comprised “just fucking about” more than any serious musical venture.

  As the band grew the line-up remained flexible in terms of both their role and their level of participation, bass player Pete Wright the only ‘musician’ involved at the outset. It depended to a large extent as to who was sharing living space at Dial House, which became the engine room of a whole counter-culture task force. The Pistols and Clash initially inspired the key participants, but they were always at least as interested in talking up literary influences (the beat poets, French existentialists) and folk protest singers from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan. By the summer of 1977 they’d amassed enough equipment to play occasional benefit shows and, famously, got themselves banned from punk’s most famous fleapit. An event they dutifully recounted on ‘Banned From The Roxy’, from their debut release Feeding Of The 5,000, which used the pretext of their expulsion from punk’s most iconic venue to rip into the British government’s arms policy. Another of the lyrics on Feeding, ‘Punk Is Dead’, directly sniped at the Clash’s marriage to a major (“Schoolboy sedition backed by big-time promoters, CBS promote the Clash, But it ain’t for revolution, it’s just for cash”). “Obviously there was a lineage between that group of punk bands,” notes Rimbaud, talking on a bitterly cold morning in Dial House in January 2009, “but they were a clique. In a way they were quite elitist as well, quite chauvinistic. These were the things that became very obvious to us. When Strummer said do it yourself, he didn’t really mean it.”

  “Throughout the long, lonely winter of ‘77/’78,” Crass later stated in their sleevenotes, joint statements being preferred policy, “we played regular gigs at The White Lion, Putney, with the UK Subs. The audience consisted mostly of us, when the Subs played, and the Subs, when we played. Sometimes it was disheartening, but usually it was fun. Charlie Harper’s indefatigable enthusiasm was always an inspiration when times got bleak, his absolute belief in punk as a peoples’ music had more to do with revolution than McLaren and his cronies could ever have dreamt of. Through sheer tenacity we were exposing the punk charlatans for what they really were, a music-biz hype.” Thereafter they realised that their then drunken ramblings needed to be more focused. So they binned the booze, started printing their agenda on pamphlets and published the magazine International Anthem, plotting the course of a non-career which, they decided, would end when the calendar turned round to 1984.

  In the meantime Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69 offered to help them “market the revolution”. They declined. See ‘It’s The Greatest Working Class Rip-Off’ on Christ The Album (1982) for further exposition of the group’s attitude to the class divide and what they saw as the commodification of proletariat rebellion. In figureheads Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant, Crass had a near-perfect antidote to the class apartheid that existed so perniciously then and still dogs commentary on the period. It remains a monstrous fib (and a peculiarly Anglicised one at that) that the punk movement can legitimately be retrospectively colonised by either class faction. The insurmountable truth is that any creative and artistic gains – and achievements of a wholly more pragmatic nature – were fuelled by cross-party initiative and plurality. That Rimbaud and Ignorant’s unification of a punk ideal would be tested by the ‘reunion’ shows of recent vintage, in which trace elements of class ideology re-emerge and separate, does not detract from what was, for the entirety of the period they collaborated, a supremely successful accommodation.

  “I never suffered any illusions about the Pistols,” Rimbaud reflects now, “except they were a great band. Undeniably a great band. But I don’t think they ever made any statements that they intended to be anything more than a hedonistic outfit. And they were great at that. Within the tradition of rock ‘n’ roll, they were supreme. My argument has always been that if it hadn’t been for Crass, those early punks would simply now belong within the canon of rock ‘n’ roll, as a natural extension – New York Dolls, Pistols, whatever happened next. It wouldn’t have come out of the framework of what rock ‘n’ roll is perceived as being. But the serious political ambitions we brought into it actually created a movement, which is traceable in all sorts of areas. Initially we didn’t have political ambitions, but we very quickly landed ourselves with them. Initially, Steve and myself were just fucking about, literally. No ambition whatsoever. Certainly no ambition to become a rock ‘n’ roll band, and no interest in becoming a rock ‘n’ roll band. As other people started to take us seriously, so we were forced to take ourselves seriously. But it wasn’t within the framework of rock ‘n’ roll, it was within the framework of what we were saying. Certainly if I talk about my own lyrical content, I was just talking about what I’ve always talked about, which was ideas, which inevitably are political. I remember at one time Strummer saying he intended to set up a radio station – wow, that’s a great idea. But the promises were never fulfilled, although I do think he tried to make up for it in later days.”

  “It’s one of those things where you think you’re in the same game,” he continues, “and I suppose that’s what I did think, initially. I was taken in, if you like. I only saw The Clash once, in Chelmsford, and I really liked them. I liked the style, I liked the attitude. I sort of ‘believed’ it. So it was a huge disappointment. The Clash were shipping themselves off to the US, making an extreme and unacceptable contradiction. So we felt we were on our own, whereas we thought we were part of this game, almost like kids in a playground. We suddenly felt on our own. We’d gone along with some of the conceits of early punk, ‘Anarchy In The UK’, and all that sort of stuff. But with the Sex Pistols, it was an archetypal nihilistic agenda, which fitted very well into the entire rock ‘n’ roll tradition, no different to The Who, and probably as powerful and as good a band as that. The rock ‘n’ roll theatre was just continuing in its own way, And that’s just the rock ‘n’ roll circus. The Pistols belonged firmly within that. I’m not critical of that. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll always has been – schoolboy revolution, a lot of fun, a great Saturday night out – but it’s no more
than that. The Clash had certain political pretensions, but not the age or experience to see them through. Strummer showed later in his life that he had some genuine political ideology, which he tried to practice. Somewhat misguidedly, but then that’s my political view. So they moved slightly to the right or left of the rock ‘n’ roll lineage, and that’s where they collided with us. We took the baton. They fell back very quickly into that lineage, and we were out on our own – and that’s where the punk movement started, in my view, rather than rock ‘n’ roll history, which is where that lot belong, and rightly so, because they were good rock ‘n’ rollers. We weren’t. What we did was far more within the framework of the avant garde than rock ‘n’ roll. We made of rock ‘n’ roll a sort of avant garde art statement, much closer to Dada, if you like, than anything else I can think of, in terms of the breadth of our statement and the diversity of it.”

  Crass were also politicised, to a large extent, by the first of many concerted attempts to co-opt what they were doing. “There was a sense of promise about early punk, and I’d include the American crew in that. We thought we were joining a club, by going out and playing. We used to go and play with the UK Subs at the Red Lion. This is fun, everyone’s getting along. And then Rock Against Racism turned up and said, will you do a benefit for us? The Subs and ourselves did it, with some reggae band. That’s when I thought, something’s happening here.” RAR were, famously, closely linked to hard left politicos like the Socialist Workers Party. “Hard left, and also hard left within the framework of hard white,” thinks Rimbaud. “I thought it was very white, middle class, Trotskyist, university based thinking. I had no time for it. There was capitalist business, and on the other hand leftist politics, and both were keen to buy us out in one form or another. ‘Get us on board’. I had an equal distaste for both. In fact, probably a greater distaste for RAR, who were less honest. We got a lot of stick for that, for our attitude to that. Interestingly, RAR were the first people to offer us money for playing. We did the gig for them. At the end of the gig, some bloke came up with a wad of notes. ‘I thought it was meant to be for a cause?’ Yes, it is. Here’s the money.’ That was the first time we’d ever been paid for a gig. And that was the last gig we ever did for them. We became very critical of them after that. That money should have gone to whatever cause they were doing.”