As the number two British punk band, the Clash began as the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols’ Beatles, but good and bad were reversed in punk. As the Beatles, as those who set the terms of the new game, the Sex Pistols demanded everything and damned everything—knowing they would be left with nothing, they played and sang as if they didn’t care. The Clash criticized, always leaving an opening: the Sex Pistols were wreckers, they were partisans. The Sex Pistols were symbolist, with every meaning left open and uncertain, utopia and hell in a single, unstable body; the Clash were rhetorical, voice to flesh. If the Sex Pistols—or anyway Johnny Rotten—truly were committed to the destruction of rock ’n’ roll not only as myth but as fact, the Clash were committed to changing rock ’n’ roll, to taking it over, to becoming the Number One Band in the World (“The Only Band That Matters,” their American label said, after the Sex Pistols disintegrated). The explanations the Sex Pistols offered when interviewers asked them why-are-you-so-angry turned into the Clash’s songs, songs about boredom, autonomy, lust, power; the Clash took the true anarchy and the real nihilism the Sex Pistols offered and rationalized it, made it seem reasonable.
The Clash latched onto received ideas, but they soon made those ideas their own, and were changed by them—or anyway Joe Strummer was. It was never clear if he wanted to be a star or if he wanted everyone to hear him: in the rock tradition Strummer was so tied to, the difference between the one and the other was never clear. With a giant multinational corporation behind them, the Clash toured the U.S.A. (1977: “I’m So Bored with . . . “) again and again.
In 1982 they finally cracked the American Top Ten: made it twice with Combat Rock on the album charts and the indelible “Rock the Casbah” on the singles list. Most assumed that the Clash were working for nothing else, that the heresies of 1976 London punk were merely the old clothes of bad dreams, but the band’s success seemed to shock Strummer. If the Clash had scored their hits, if large numbers of people were finally happy to listen to what the band had to say, Strummer seemed to have decided that that meant the Clash were no longer saying anything. With work on the boards, he disappeared in Paris, then reappeared with his head shaved. Drummer “Topper” Headon quit; the group was unraveling. Strummer called a meeting, got bassist Paul Simonon’s vote, and kicked guitarist Mick Jones out of the band.
Jones had been a founder; he had asked Strummer to join him. As guitarist, singer, and co-writer, many saw him as far more central to the Clash’s success than Strummer, but in a way that was the point. Jones’s noisy love songs (“Train in Vain,” “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”) had been the Clash’s most effective bids for mainstream airplay before “Rock the Casbah” (a sardonic, up-from-the-Muslim-streets reply to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ban on music in Iran, and written by Topper Headon); Jones’s voice lacked Strummer’s rough edges, his promise that any song could go in any direction, anytime. Strummer detected a spiritual flaw behind the style; despite the punk attempt to destroy the star system, Strummer announced, a pop star was all Mick Jones had ever wanted to be. He was a fake, a revisionist; he had to go.
Strummer and Simonon recruited three new members: drummer Pete Howard, rhythm guitarist Vince White, and lead guitarist Nick Sheppard, the latter both twenty-three-year-old “ex-punks” who affirmed they’d grown up on Clash music. As a band (“The Clash”) they played a few shows; hope against hope, their American label even brought them back to the USA.
It was, for a night, a trip worth taking. “This isn’t white reggae,” Strummer shouted, introducing “Police and Thieves.” “This is punk and reggae. There’s a difference. There’s a difference between a rip-off and bringing some of our culture to another culture. You hear that, Sting?”
It was 21 January 1984. It had been eight years since the Clash formed, six years and one week since the Sex Pistols played their last show in San Francisco, and the Clash were back in town not as “The Only Band That Matters” but as the only punk band left. “What we play now is what we can do,” Strummer had said in 1979. “It wouldn’t be fair to do ranting music because we’ve mastered a time change. So there’s just no point.” “We started to think we were musicians,” he told Joel Selvin, a San Francisco critic, before the new Clash show. “When we made the first record we knew we weren’t. It’s a bad think to think; it’s irrelevant, not to the point.”
To a happy, not quite sold-out crowd in a dumpy, medium-sized hall, the Clash played ranting music. Keeping Strummer’s promise to Selvin, they “went back to where we went wrong, and then forward again.” Against an industrialist backdrop and eight television sets flashing images of present-day social disaster, Strummer shook, scowled, smiled, and sang as if he and his audience had a life to make within a world they’d already lost.
The band was ragged, Nick Sheppard played too many Mick Jones licks, and such rock-star flimsy as if leaps from the drum riser or floodlights in the crowd’s face was still part of the show. The only identifiable new song was the hopeless, “We Are the Clash,” which only added credence to the old rumor that the favorite song of Bernard Rhodes, the Clash’s original and now returned manager, was “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees.” Still, I’d never seen Strummer more exhilarated, or more convincing. In 1978 in Berkeley, “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” was a gesture of contempt to a bourgeois audience; this night it was offered to the audience as their own, and they took it. Some of our culture to another culture.
Still, almost everyone was sure it was the end of the road. As time passed, Strummer gave increasingly confused interviews about “rebel rock,” changing the world, the special role he had to play in that change, England’s turn to the right under Margaret Thatcher, the collapse of the punk community and the possibility of reinventing it, social injustice, fascism, the end of the world, and when there might be a new Clash album. He wasn’t saying anything terribly different from what he and many more had said in 1976 and 1977—but in London in ’76 and ’77, the old rock ’n’ roll dream of “taking over the world” hadn’t meant topping the world’s charts, it was supposed to mean making the charts irrelevant, and then proving that the charts and graphs and ledgers that governed the structures of everyday life—the hierarchies of education, work, family, bureaucracy, politics—could be made just as irrelevant. Now, though, with Thatcher’s brutal, popular Tory rule, the oppressions punk had fought when it gave birth to itself—the oppressions of false leisure, false work, false entertainment—seemed like the playthings of childhood, and Strummer sounded like a crazy old man.
In May 1985, in the UK, the new Clash, the five of them, showed up in a parking lot outside of a hall where the Alarm, a newly popular group, were playing a sold-out show. Strumming acoustic guitars and tapping drumsticks against each other, they were busking—playing for small change. Before 1976, Strummer had been a subway singer, a thick-fingered guitar banger—that was where he got his name. In interviews in the 1980s, he talked often about “going back to the roots,” but no one could have guessed he’d meant going back so far. It was a bizarre reversal, a testament to how desperate Strummer was to dramatize that punk had meant what it said when it said it would destroy all heroes. On their early tours of the UK, the Clash sometimes brought their fans back to their hotel and let them sleep in their rooms; now, playing the Isley Brothers’ (or the Beatles’) “Twist and Shout,” their own “Garageland” (from the Clash’s first album), or “Stepping Stone” (the Monkees again—the Sex Pistols had tried it, too, once), the Clash asked the curious who gathered to hear them if the fans could, you know, put them up for the night. In this moment you could see Joe Strummer’s whole future: on some dank London corner, the drunken bum calls out to passersby. “Hey, you wanna hear ‘Rock the Casbah’? It was a hit, it was a hit, ah, in . . . ”
As the band chanted in the parking lot, you could see the Clash’s past. On the back sleeve of “White Riot,” the Clash’s first single, there was a rough collage of photos (ugly public housing blocks surrounded by rubble; cops; a band) and words. Along wi
th quotes from the Brighton Beach youth culture riots of the mid-1960s (a Mod: “I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for a long time . . . It was like we were taking over the country”), one could read something more suggestive:
That there is, perhaps, some tension in society, when perhaps overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or barricades to the streets years after the liberals had dismissed the notion as “dated romanticism,” the journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled.
The explanations of out of this blind fragment of a found manifesto, the Clash had made a career. In advance of any sort of pop career, the words took in the inevitable dismissal, or failure, of any attempt to use rock ’n’ roll to dramatize a clash between rulers and ruled: As far as almost everyone was concerned, no band could signify more than a transient clash between generations, a present-day (now long past) version of a sixties beach riot between Mods and Rockers, new fans of the Who, and the Small Faces beaten bloody by fans of Bill Haley and Gene Vincent. Teddy Boys who kept the faith were relics whose whole lives were based on the conviction that they had heard the truth and would kick in the faces of anyone who suggested it might be incomplete.
In other words, with that old manifesto now playing against the idea that an old band could make itself new, Strummer, well into his thirties as he spoke—as the new Clash made noise for coins, and then made a new record and asked people to buy it—was precisely the old fart punks had dumped when “White Riot” first hit the stores. Cut the Crap, the new Clash album was titled, and the words were thrown back in Strummer’s face. You should talk, said the British reviews. Go away! Who wants to hear what a dead man has to say! Stop reminding us of what you failed to do the first time around!
On the terms punk set for itself, it would change the world or it would be nothing. In a certain sense, Strummer was never a real rock ’n’ roller, because he trusted neither fun nor money; thus the chart success of the Clash had to mean nothing to him. You could draw two different conclusions from the failure of punk to change the world and its sometime success on the charts: you could conclude that the punk critique of everyday oppression and spectacular entertainment was wrong—or you could conclude that it was correct, and the enemy more invisible, than even the most conscious punks had dared to think. Drawing the first conclusion, you would, if you were Strummer, try to find a place in the record business; drawing the second, you would try to find a new way to say the same old things. And of course it is the second path Strummer has chosen.
Cut the Crap seems to be set in a riot—not the idealized “White riot/Wanna riot of my own” of the 1976 Clash, not their “LONDON’S BURNING WITH BOREDOM NOW!” but a far more prosaic affair, tired, too familiar, the everyday bad news of New Britain. A new king of riot: As the strict re-division of British society into a capitalist and serving classes proceeds, it becomes plain that redundancy and civil disorder are not merely costs of this project, but linchpins. Under Thatcher, redundancy is not simply economics: It is social exclusion organized as spectacle. Those who are cut out of organized social life make up a third class, which is used to terrorize those who still retain their places into a thank-god-it’s-them-instead-of-me acquiescence, which is silence, and that silence has no force without some noise in the streets.
This is power as culture: a form of speech that has answered all questions in advance. Behind the Labour government of 1977, which administered What Is as a final social fact, punk could discover a negative: welfare security as spiritual poverty. With Thatcher, who administers What Could Be (you can be anything, she says, which means, you can also lose everything), oppositional culture can only discover an affirmative. It can only agree, and agreement is a further silence. As the redundants riot, the ranter grabs a passing clerk by the collar and tells him the truth: “You could be next!” “Right, mate,” says the clerk. “That’s why I’m keeping my nose clean. Hey aren’t you Joe Strummer?” As public speech, both the riot and the Clash’s new music have been contained before the fact.
Thus Clash’s new riot, too, sounds like a kind of silence: an exhortation in place of drama, inspirational music for “rebel rockers.” “CLASH COMMUNIQUÉ OCTOBER ’85,” it says on the inner sleeve. “Wise MEN and street kids together make a GREAT TEAM . . . but can the old system be BEAT? . . . no . . . not without YOUR participation . . . RADICAL social change begins on the STREET! . . . so if you’re looking for some ACTION . . . CUT THE CRAP and get OUT there.” The new songs, the new music, aren’t much more convincing. A wash of ambient mass media noise, an old-fashioned punk guitar sound communicating not as a revival of a period style but as a new discovery, an occasional rhythmic jump—too soon, it all seems lost in a shoving match between skimpy lyrics and football-match chants of vague slogans. More than anything, Cut the Crap sounds like a transfer from the Clash to Big Country—a band that scored a good, rousing hit with the self-titled “Big Country,” a teary approximation of early Clash—back to the Clash again. Cut the Crap sounds less like failed “rebel rock” than like failed pop music.
And out of this comes one true moment, “This Is England.” Released as a single, it had a strange jacket: on the front, a Mohawked punk couple wander through Piccadilly Circus, blank-eyed and scared of the sleaze, country mice finally arriving in the big city to find out what punk is, seven years too late: “24 HOUR ETERNAL SUNSHINE STRIP STRIP STRIP,” “SEX STYLE SUBVERSION,” “DISCUSSION DISCO.” There’s no one else on the street. On the back, there are lots of people on the streets, black-and-white shots of 1950s men and women finally shrugging off the privation of the postwar period and shopping, buying, smiling, “IT’S NEW,” “GET IT,” “LAST FEW DAYS SALE,” and, square in the middle, a collage from old painted postcards, Buckingham Palace, the Queen in her carriage, a hand raised to hide her face.
“Who will buy my potatoes?” asks the voice of a small child; a drum machine kicks in, slowly, firmly; synthesizer chords lift the music, hold it in, refuse to let it move through any melody, to find any rhythm; a punk buzz saw guitar rides down, sounding wonderful, alive, free, then beaten. Strummer begins to sing, to talk, walking through the riot like his own tour guide, nearly mute for all his words. As the riot takes place it’s already over; he is singing the ruins, and the passion in his voice, the despair, the plain desperation to make you understand, is like blood frozen on a corpse. The corpse is the singer: It’s the country. “This is England,” an anonymous male chorus says over and over, and again and again Strummer comes off the chorus to try and tell you what it is: “Land of a thousand stances.” Images of random violence, of official murder, pass by; nothing connects. The singer flees; he’s trapped. An incident comes to life with detail, then vanishes as allegory.
On a catwalk jungle
Somebody grabbed my arm
A voice spoke so cold it matched the
Weapon in her palm
This is England
This knife of Sheffield steel
This is England
This is how we feel
England is a nowhere, but all possibilities of feeling seem present in the way Strummer sings that last line, here in the voice of another, throughout the rest of the song in his own. “THIS IS ENGLAND,” echoes the chorus, and then Strummer is solitary, bearing down on the following words so hard he makes them vibrate, the solitary “we” so painful and strange, pressing with such force that all that’s come before, the Clash’s whole career, all the great songs, your favorite, seems trivialized by this quiet, still negation, the patent, the physical gap in the “This” of “This is how we feel,” a frightened hesitation between the “th” and the “is,” a break in time that carries the full weight of what Strummer is saying: carries it, and suspends it, leaving you hanging, unready for the fact that after a few minutes the record, like other records,
simply fades out.
Postscript: Shortly after the release of Cut the Crap, the three new members quit the band; it never re-formed. Cut the Crap was never released in the United States. “This Is England” has been excluded from all Clash retrospectives, greatest-hits collections, and CD-boxed sets.
_____________________
Originally appeared in the Village Voice, January 31, 1984; Music (Tokyo), January 1986; Artforum, February 1986; revised January 1992.
Act II
FIGHTING THROUGH THE NIGHT
Joe Strummer as Johnny /Elvis in Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 film Mystery Train. (Mystery Train © 1989 Mystery Train, Inc. Photo by Sukita.)
THE REBEL WAY
Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch, and Dick Rude on the Filmwork of Joe Strummer
By Antonino D’Ambrosio
For me the problem with writing a novel is that I would not want to be content to be the author. I would want to be the character.
—ROGÉRIO DUARTE
Oh come on Earl. Give me me gun back. I might have to pawn it to pay my tab.
—JOE STRUMMER AS JOHNNY IN JIM JARMUSCH’S Mystery Train
Strummer: What are you going to do with yourself? Ray Gange: I don’t know.
—FROM THE FILM Rude Boy
Standing on the edge of a diving board, Strummer strikes a defiant rockabilly pose for the cover of his first official solo album, Earthquake Weather.1 The cover foretells the isolation and fall awaiting Strummer after the Clash shut down in 1985. He was venturing out on his own for the first time, an intimidating undertaking for a performer who had always enjoyed the collective comfort of a band. Restless and a bit lost, Strummer carved out a brief, idiosyncratic film career as an actor and a composer, with his most prolific period covering the four years up to 1989. After that point, Strummer entered what Dick Rude—actor, director, and longtime friend—calls his “dark night.”2
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