The Clash: Caroline Coon, '1988:
The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion', 1977

WHEN I FIRST interviewed the Clash in their barrack like studio in Chalk Farm, they had yet to sign a record contract, although they were already one of the punk scene's favourite bands.

5th November 1976

Three weeks ago at the I.C.A., Jane and Shane were sprawled at the edge of the stage. Blood covered Shane's face. Jane, very drunk, has kissed, bitten and, with broken glass, cut him in a calm but no less macabre love rite.

The Clash were not pleased. 'All of you who think violence is tough - why don't you go home and collect stamps. That's much tougher,' roared Joe Strummer. Then he slammed into the band's anthem ‘White Riot'.

All the power is in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it,
While we walk the streets
Too chicken to even try it,
And everybody does what they're told to,
And everybody eats supermarket soul-food.
White riot, I wanna riot.
White riot - a riot of my own!

The song, played with the force of an acetylene torch, is as uncompromising as the other numbers in the bands repertoire - numbers like ‘Deny', ‘Protex Blues', ‘Career Opportunities' and ‘1977'. To hammer home their impact, the Clash play with enough committed force to bring down the walls of Babylon, Jerico - Heaven and Hell if necessary. And their audiences go wild.

But far from wanting people to hurt each other, Joe Strummer (vocals, guitar), Mick Jones (guitar), Paul Simonon (bass) and Terry Chimes (drums) insist that their aim is to shake audiences into channeling their frustrations into creative outlets. It's difficult, however, trying to maintain a balance between positive reaction and violence.

How easy it is, though when you examine the Clash's background to explain their emotional intensity.

Aware that, like the rest of the band, he'd rather not talk about his childhood, I asked Joe where he came from.

'The only place I considered home was the boarding school in Yorkshire my parents sent me to. It's easier, isn't it? I mean it gets kids out of the way.' Then he adds defiantly. 'It was great! You have to stand up for yourself. You get beaten up the first day you get there.

'And I'm really glad I went because my Dad's a bastard. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn't gone to boarding school. I only saw him once a year. If I'd seen him all the time I'd probably have murdered him by now. He was very strict.'

While Joe is talking, Paul is sitting next to him pointing and shooting a realistic, replica pistol - bang - at the posters on the walls - bang - at Mick across the room - bang - at Gertie the roadie's dog - bang, bang - anywhere at all.

'I get on alright with my parents,' Paul says. 'But I don't see them very much. They split up when I was eight. I stayed with my mum but I felt it was a bit soft with her. I could do whatever I liked and I wasn't getting nowhere, so I went to stay wit my Dad. It was good training because I had to do all the launderette and that. In a way I worked for him - getting money together and that - working down Portobello market and doing the paper rounds after school. It got me sort of prepared for when things get harder.'

Paul liked school. 'I never learned anything. All you done is played about and pissed on the teachers and that. There were forty-five in our class and we had a Pakistani teacher who didn't even speak English.'

Mick, like Paul, comes from Brixton. His father is a taxi driver and his mother is in America. 'They kind of left home, one at a time. I was much more interested in them than they were in me. They decided I weren't happening, I suppose. I stayed with my gran for a long time. And I read a lot.

'Psychologically it really did me in. I wish I knew then what I know now. Now I know it isn't that big a deal. But then at school I'd sit there with this word "divorce, divorce" in my head all the time. But there was no social stigma attached to it because all the other kids seemed to be going through the same thing. Very few of the kids I knew were living a sheltered family life.'

When he was sixteen, Mick believes, he had two choices - football or rock'n'roll. He choose rock. Why? 'Because he couldn't afford toilet rolls,' quips Joe. Mick explains: 'I thought it was much less limiting. And it was more exciting. I got into music at a very early age. I went to my first rock concert when I was twelve. It was free, in Hyde Park, and Nice, Traffic, Junior's Eyes and the Pretty Things were playing.

'The first guitar I had was a secondhand Hofner. I paid sixteen quid for it and I think I was ripped off. But I tell you something - I sold it for thirty to a Sex Pistol.' Everyone laughs gleefully.

Laughter is a cheap luxury when, like Clash, you never have the money for a square meal and when, like Joe, you live in a squat - or like Paul, you crash in your manager's vast unheated, rehearsal room with no hot water or cooking facilities.

After Paul and Mick left school, they both ended up as casual art students. Mick was already in a group (the London S.S.) when a friend of his dragged Paul down to a rehearsal. 'The first live rock'n'roll I can remember seeing was the Sex Pistols, less than a year ago. All I listened to before then was ska and blue-beat down at the Streatham Locarno.

'But when I went to this rehearsal, as soon as I got there, Mick said; "you can sing, can't you?". And they got me singing. But I couldn't get into it. They were into the New York Dolls and they all had very long hair, so it only lasted a couple of days.'

Ten days later however, Paul had 'acquired' a bass guitar, Mick had cut his hair, and they had formed a group called the Heartdrops (although the Phones, the Mirrors, the Outsiders and the Psychotic Negatives were also names for a day). Then, walking down Golborne Road with Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, they bumped into Joe, who was lead singer of the 101'ers.

The meeting was auspicious. 'I don't like your group,' says Mick. 'But we think you're great.'

'As soon as I saw these guys,' says Joe, 'I knew that was what a group, in my eyes, was supposed to look like. So I didn't really hesitate when they asked me to join.'

Joe broke up the 101'ers directly as a result of seeing the Sex Pistols. A few months ago he told me, 'Yesterday I thought I was a crud. Then I saw the Sex Pistols and I became a king and decided to move into the future.'

Today he says: 'As soon as I saw them I knew that rhythm and blues was dead, that the future was here somehow. Every other group was riffing their way through the Black Sabbath Catalogue. But hearing the Pistols I knew. I just knew. It was something you just knew without bothering to think about.'

What is it about punk-rock which is so important to Joe? 'It's the music of now. And it's in English. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.'

Continues Mick: 'It's the only music which is about young white kids. Black kids have got it all sewn up. They have their own cultural music, reggae. Basically young white kids are relying on a different time to provide for their kicks.'

But what's so different about youth today, then, I probe. And there's silence. Joe stands up and, relishing the drama he turns to reveal the stark, hand-painted graffiti on the back of his boiler suit: HATE AND WAR glare in red and white across his shoulders. It's the Hippy motto reversed.

'The Hippie Movement was a failure,' is Joe's explanation. 'All the hippies around now just represent complete apathy. There's a million good reasons why the thing failed, O.K. But the only thing we've got to live with is that it failed. At least you tried. But I'm not interested in why it failed. I'll jeer at hippies because that's helpful. They'll realise they're stuck in a rut and maybe they'll get out of it.'

What do they feel about society today? 'It's alienating the individual,' says Mick. 'No one gives a shit about you.'

Says Joe: 'There's nowhere to go. Nothing to do. The radio's for housewives. Nothing caters for us. All the laws are against you. Whoever's got the money's got the power. The Rent Acts are a complete mockery. It's a big joke. I just have to fuck off into the night for somewhere to sleep.'

Adds Paul, with feeling: 'At the moment what the Government should do is put licences on clubs so that kids can have somewhere to go. But they're clamping down on all that. The situation that is beginning to happen now is their fault. If we end up wrecking the place it's the Government's fault. They'll bring back National Service and we'll all be sent down to South Africa or Rhodesia to protect white capital's interests. And then we'll all be slaughtered..."

They may knock society, but they're all living off the dole aren't they? 'Yeah. We get a little freedom from social security. Otherwise I'd have to spend 40 hours a week lifting cardboard boxes or washing dishes or whatever I done in the past. But because we're on the dole - which is £9.70 a week - I can get a rock'n'roll band together.

'If I got up at 4.00am and went to Soho and joined a queue I could get a job as a casual washer-up. That's the other opportunity I've got. Or the opportunity to work in a factory.'

But someone's got to work in a factory? 'Why have they?' demands Mick. 'Don't you think technology is advanced enough to give all those jobs over to a few people and machines? They're just keeping people occupied my making them work.

'There's a social stigma attached to begin unemployed. Like "School Security Scroungers" every day in the Sun. I don't want to hear that. I cheer them. You go up North and the kids are ashamed that they can't get a job!'

Aren't they being rather pious when all they are doing is playing in a rock'n'roll band? 'No,' says Paul. 'It's the most immediate way we can handle it. We can inspire people. There's no one else to inspire you. Rock'n'roll is a really good medium. It has impact, and if we do our job properly then we're making people aware of situation they'd otherwise tend to ignore. We can have a vast effect!'

Oh yeah? Rock stars have usually started out saying they're going to change everything. Joe reacts first. 'But you learn by mistakes. The Rolling Stones made mistakes. But I want to do something useful. I'm not going to spend all my money on drugs. I'm going to start a radio station with my money. I want to be active. I don't want to end up in a villa on the South of France watching colour T.V.'

Do they want money then? 'Yes,' says Paul. 'Money's good because you can do things with it. Bands like the Stones and Led Zeppelin took everything without putting anything back. But we can put money back into the situation we were in before, and get something going for the kids our own age.'

If present performance is anything to go by then we can expect the Clash to put any money they make where their mouths are. Already they are playing nearly as many 'benefits' as they are profit-making gigs. Not that there are any profits at all at the moment. The band is struggling harder than ever before to stay on the road.

'We make a loss at every gig,' says Joe. 'It's the promoters who we want to attack. I bet you can only name one or two who really care about music. I'm amazed there isn't one that really cares about what's happening at the moment. We're really having to get down on our knees and grovel for venues.'

The Clash are more politically motivated than the Damned, perhaps more musically accessible than the Pistols. Their lovingly painted clothes (the same on and off stage, of course) which are acrylic spattered with the ferocity of a Jackson Pollack action painting, have started one of the most creative fashion crazes of the year. And their acute awareness, and ability to articulate the essence of the era which inspires their music, will make their contribution to the history of rock of lasting significance. Happy times are here again...

In December the Clash were one of the bands on the Sex Pistols' 'Anarchy In The U.K' tour. Like everyone else, they came back to London tired, exhausted and stunned at the growing national outcry about the horrors of punk rock which was making it impossible for them to play anything but isolated gigs.

The Clash played the Roxy club on 2nd January 1977, but although the club was still flourishing the atmosphere was beginning to sour. Flights were always part of the scene, and accepted in moderation. The real aggression was reserved for outsiders - the 'boring old farts'. But after Christmas, 1976, there was a significant change in the nature of the aggression. It was as if the bands, especially the Pistols, unable to insult the Establishment without incurring severe retaliation turned in on themselves and their own.

In March the Clash signed to C.B.S. and released their debut single 'White Riot'.

© Caroline Coon, 1977