RUDE BOY - THE MOVIE
MARCH 1980 MELODY MAKER

Clash Movie. Rude Boy

`Rude Boy’s the movie featuring the Clash, has been in the works for two years and is now being held up by rows between the film-makers and the band.

MICHAEL WATTS reports.

“Rude Boy” is a dispassionate, sometimes glum, but always immensely truthful account of the punk years, as seen with the perspective of the band which represents punk’s political wing.

It’s been made by director Jack Hazan and his co-writer and editor, David Mingay, the team which in 1974 produced the highly acclaimed semi-docurmentary about David Hockney, “A Bigger Splash”. That film was extraordinary for its style, length, method of filming, and the reactions of its subjects when they eventually were confronted with themselves on screen. “Rude Boy” has followed that pattern, to the point where the Clash and their new managers, Andrew King and Peter Jenner of Blackhill Enterprises and PR Kosmo Vinyl, are considering legal action against it.

Filming began in 1977. Despite their distance from the rock scene, Hazan, who is 40, and Mingay, 33, felt the culture shock that was reverberating from punk.

“What previously had seemed beautiful and correct had changed,” says Mingay. “When the Clash played the Rainbow and the seats were ripped up, it was just after the Irish bombs had gone off in London. There was an atmosphere about the Clash, and what they were doing was a long way from swearing on TV, which apparently launched the Pistols big.” Mingay visited punk clubs and found

in Ray Gange, a kid from Brixton, the films symbolic link with the times. Gange was bored and restless, seeking both excitement and purpose in his life. He was working in a sex bookshop but trying to get a roadie’s job with the Clash.

Hazan and Mingay moved in on gange with their cameras. In “Rude Boy’ they have shown his frustrations in the context of the prevailing political mood and of the Clash’s lifestyle.

Scenes from the odious Derek Day, the National Front’s branch member from Hoxton, ranting out- side a school, are intercut with Jubilee footage and Marches and concerts for Rock Against Racism. Gange is busted and fined on a trumped-up drunk and disorderly charge when provoked by police. He discusses the NF with a skin- head friend in a poolhall plastered with Anti-Nazi posters and the skin erupts with a diatribe against communists, Ray later responding With a venomous criticism of the RAR mentality.

Life for him is mostly joyless (a mood reinforced by Hazan’s photo- graphy, which leaves an impression of darkness and claustrophobia). He’s seen receiving a desultory blow-job in a ladies’ toilet. “Don’t call me love’,” he warns the gum chewing punk, “ `cos I don’t believe in it.” Afterwards, when he returns from cashing social security money, he finds she hasn’t bothered to wait for him. He shrugs. There is no loss because he had nothing in the first place. He’s chiefly sustained by his enthusiasm for the Clash, and especially, it seems, his relationship with Joe Strummer.

Two key scenes involve a conversation between Strummer and Ray. In the first, near the beginning of the film, they argue in a pub about the merits of Left and Right politics. Gange is the working-class kid on the make, wanting the country mansion and the lackeys. Strummer, trying to defend the Clash’s support for RAR, tells him that one day “some guy is gonna come to your country mansion and blow your head off”. The discussion ends, amusingly, in alcoholic befuddlement.

But in the second scene, towards the films end, Ray is more desperate.. He has had the roadie’s job he wanted, but quickly lost it; and he’s acquired a drinking habit. He offers a beer to Strummer who, pounding mercilessly away at a piano, disregards it. “No thanks. Gave it up,” he says tersely. “It was fuckin’ me up.” Then he turns briefly. “What you gonna do with yourself, any- way?” he interrogates. “You re always drunk.”

“You make me feel fuckin’ old,” Ray mumbles in seIf-pity.

“You shouldn’t get involved,” Strummer counsels, and moves back to the keyboard. Ironically, he’s singing “Let The Good Times Roll”.

“Rude Boy” reflects the rootlessness of kids like Ray who turned to punk rather for its value as a sup- port system than for the anarchic comedy proposed by the Pistols; but it also shows the effect of time and success on rock movements, and how ultimately they fail their followers.

Early in the film a Clash gig is disrupted by the fans’ good- humoured invasion of the stage, yet a later tour is notable for its strict organisation. No-one climbs and reaches the band. “The money has tightened up,” tour manager Johnny Green informs a crestfallen Ray, who has appeared at a gig looking for a spare bed and a job.

By the end, the strong, simple statement made by “White Riot”, the song which is at the heart of the film, has been diluted to Mick Jones’s painfully earnest “Stay Free” and the merely playful “I Fought The Law”; by the end a new movement has arrived in mod - “clean and tight-arsed,” as Hazan says. Still Hazan and Mingay say they admire the Clash for having tried to be true to their ideals. “The pressures on them are tremendous,” Mingay confesses. “You are what the music press sets you up as, because your every move is chronicled there, and so the demands from the fans are greater even than those from the business

“There’s also a lot of stealing from other bands if they know that you’re not going to appear on Top Of The Pops, say, which the Clash have never done and which- would’ve broken them as a Top 20 band. I think they’ve plotted the way for a lot of people, and at the same time struggled to develop musically themselves.”

But the film is less a commitment to the Clash, or even to Ray Gange, a character who resents working- class involvement in punk being manipulated by forces like the media than it is a clear eyed observation of two years in their lives Politically everything comes out of the people in the film, says Mingay commenting on his and Hazan’s attitude to the material

The two worked in a highly individual way. Just as in ‘A Bigger Splash”, where over three years the camera intruded at intervals upon Hockney and his friends, Hazan directed his subjects to act out real scenes from their lives which perhaps had happened a few days or only a few hours before. The dialogue was either invented or written up from an actual conversation, much of it by the Clash.

This “existential film-making”, as it’s been called, is exciting because of all the day-to-day uncertainties: the film has no tangible end, and is therefore more “real”, whereas in cinema verite, for example, the action is generally compressed into an allotted filming schedule. Hence the two hours ten minutes length of “Rude Boy”. The result is curiously stylised. A film that naturally takes its tone from its characters and subject matter, not the vision of its director: since the principals are “actors” speaking their own lines, it is neither wholly documentary nor completely fictional.

In “A Bigger Splash” this technique admirably suited Hazan’s portrait of Hockney’s narcissistic world, but the lack of dramatic climaxes makes for odd viewing in a film with a rock background There’s plenty of lively concert footage of the Clash, and there are many moments of gritty humour, often supplied by the band, whose court appearances for various mis-demeanours are the films running joke; the dialogue is acute and authentic, and there are some telling images: the road manager wandering a hotel corridor, dressed only in a blanket. so that Ray can pull off a quick screw in his bed; or the camera surveying Strummer’s bathroom, littered with pill bottles, and fastening upon a flick knife - drugs and violence and rock `n’ roll.

Yet “Rude Boy” is fundamentally concerned with the Clash’s lyrics, as “A Bigger Splash” was about Hockney’s art; it doesn’t set out to expose the Clash, as “Gimme Shelter’ did the Stones or Don’t Look Back” Bob Dylan. It’s a very be familiar rock film, one nearer to neo realism than any other genre.

Hazan and Mingay claim they made a point of assuring the band they would not be depicted as pop stars.

“I told the band there’d be nothing about their sex lives,” says Mingay, “and it because a joke with Joe that we’d never show him in his underpants.”

But equally they intended to retain their independence as film makers: they were not asking for money from the Clash or their record company, CBS (in fact, most of the backing for “Rude Boy” - which has cost at least £500,000, according to Hazan has come from London theatrical impresario Michael White). They did, however, require the Clash’s co-operation, and from the start this was not always readily given. Much of this problem has lain with the band’s changes of management, which has passed from Bernard Rhodes to former rock writer Caroline Coon and now to Blackhill, a company founded by hippies.

Rhodes, who originally approved of the film, says: “It was hard work to get the group interested in the project because they were losing interest in me; it was difficult enough to get them to accept Ray. In the end they were going to get paid a certain amount, but basically it was supposed to be a labour of love.”

The actual filming had its ups and downs. At one point, when the Clash announced they were about to do a TV film, Hazan threatened to throw his footage in the bin; he says, however, that at the last minute Strummer informed him: “Don’t worry, Jack - you don’t have to use the bin.”

Shooting ended in February this year, and in August an unfinished version was shown to the band, Andrew King and Kosmo Vinyl. It was then that difficulties began in earnest for, although Hazan had thought it was generally well received, the next day he got a call from King demanding that the film be cut to’ a 50 minute presentation of the Clash.

“He obviously had his orders from the band,” says Mingay. “He said there were scenes they objected to, that they were not a political band and should not be represented as such. The next minute he was say ing they were off to Cuba and they had to work in the sugar fields for a day to get a licence to play there. That made me laugh, and he knew he’d given himself away.”
BLACKHILL have refused to comment beyond a reticent state ment from the normally ebullient Kosmo Vinyl that their solicitor had told the Clash not to talk to the press, that they might injunct, and that they had asked for another showing of the film which had been turned down. Vinyl let slip, though, that the band had considered the film boring and also that blacks were represented in a racist rnanner

This wouId seem to be a reference to scenes that run parallel to the main narrative, in which a group of blacks is arrested as pickpockets: at the close of “Rude Boy”, one of them is about to be ground beneath the machinery of British justice To this, and possibly other parts of the film, Hazan and Mingay believe Mick Jones is the chief objector. Apparently, leadership of the Clash rotates among its members, and currently Jones is in the chair.

“Joe said there was nothing wrong with the film when be saw it,” Hazan claims. “He didn’t want to suppress it. But Mick said nothing. Now we’ve heard that he thinks that al the white people are presented as fascists and the blacks as criminals.

Consequently, the band are not lending every assistance with the soundtrack and three weeks ago when Mingay went to see them in the studio where they were completing their third album, he says he met he met with threats to cut him; later, at home, he had to take the phone off the hook because of repeated promises of violence. Yet he left the studio with a tape of a new song, “Rudie Can’t Fail”, which the Clash had written about Ray Gange. “They’re testing you the whole time, Mingay explains. It’s ironic that Hockney, too, disliked their previous film as being “boring and long” after its first showing: “Then I thought, the photography was stunning.” His fashion designer friend, Celia Birtwell, also swore she would take out an injunction.

Hazan, who has a temperamental reputation, remains surprisingly cheerful about the chances of `Rude Boy’ coming out in February or March. “There’s always one person who objects,” he says, but you have to take it right to the brink, and then the person backs down. We don’t mind the Clash seeing the film- but they insist on seeing it with their lawyers. I think they’re a bit confused.” The one person not party to the controversy is Ray Gange, who now lives in California. “He could see no future here,” says Mingay. His job? He works on a building site.