Setlist

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18	Complete Control Tommy Gun Cheapskates Jail Guitar Doors Drug Stabbing Time All the Young Punks White Man In Ham Palais Capital Radio Stay Free Police and Thieves Blitzkrieg Bop English Civil War Safe European Home London's Burning Garageland I'm So Bored With the USA Janie Jones White Riot

Clash on Parole Tour
Supported by The Specials & Suicide

updated Dec 2014 - added ticket
updated Oct 2020 - added photo
updated July 2021 added poster
updated 26 January 2022, added very large flyer front and reverse
Updated September 20222 - new layout, addded new article NY Times
updated Dec 2023 added Hebso magazine review (french)
updated March 2024 added NYT article

Audio

very poor - Sound 1.5 - 61min - copied too often! - 18 tracks

Tommy Gun

Sadly the only recording circulating of this gig is fairly awful

It has very little clarity or range with Joe’s between song comments (and there are many) almost indecipherable. Its not near the master, distant and with all the instrumentation largely lost in a confused muddle of mid range sound. Any upgrades nearer the master very welcome.

History of Aylesbury Friars

See also this history of www.aylesburyfriars.co.uk

and this gig

PDF archive

First night of the Out on Parole Tour

The name of the tour coming not from the pigeon shooting farce which the press assumed and vilified the band for, but from Mott The Hoople’s All The Way From Memphis “you look like a star, but you’re really out on parole “.

Although venues were much the same size and largely standing as the previous Get Out of Control Tour this was to be a more professional tour with a new top grade PA and performances much less manic than before but very powerful nevertheless.

Mick’s guitar playing now has a heavier rock sound, which may have been a result of Sandy Pearlman’s HM influence or the quality of the new PA.

Out on Parole Tour would include most of the Rope songs but would climax with a run through of first album favourites to please their audiences who wouldn’t be able to get familiar with the new material until its eventual release in November.

To fill the album gap Whiteman had been released as a single on the 16th June, (same day as the pigeon shooting Court hearing hence the press piss-taking of the tour title) and Joe introduces it here by announcing its current chart position; No.32.

Pauls tour backdrop

The gig also unveiled the new Tour backdrop designed by Paul a Notting Hill townscape with blow up of a WWII Messer Schmidt.

The Friars Aylesbury was a popular venue with audiences and bands alike until its closure in 1984. The gig was reviewed by Garry Bushell for Sounds, the neo-racist Sun gutter scribe.

Posters, flyers

Link

Telegram informing the Clash where they cannot play

Adverts

Tickets

Rare playing of All the Young Punks

It has a rare playing of All the Young Punks (like the demo version circulating) and provides the live debuts for Safe European Home, Cheapskates, Drug Stabbing Time & Stay Free. It also features the first very brief outing for Blitzkreig Bop segued onto the end of Police and Thieves. There is only one edit a short one during Stay Free.

Friars Aylesbury original set list

Friars Aylesbury | Facebook
and
The Clash Official | Facebook

The Clash at Friars Aylesbury original set list which I rescued from the stage although the memory is now hazy not surprisingly.

Greg Howes

It was a great gig and well done for liberating it.

78 07 19 HEBDO magazine (french)

Pop Music | Clash proves punk still lives

The Morning Call Sun (Aylesbury) - 9 July 1978
John Rockweel - New York Times

Link

Sounds - Clash/The Specials - Aylesbury

8th JULY 1978

Link or Link or text version

The Clash supported by The Specials gig at Aylesbury Friars reviewed by Garry Bushell in Sounds 8th, July 1978.

FOR PEOPLE who like to put things in neat little pecking orders - and because of our conditioning there’s a lot of them - the Clash are the Big Boys now, THE punk establishment.

Well, the Damned have split; the Stranglers aren’t cool, are they?; and with Johnny in cold storage the Ex Pistols are nothing more than Uncle Malcie’s marionettes, mainlining on the puerile publicity of negative outrage Jolly shocking, what?

Original link with comments: The Clash Official | Facebook

The Clash, Aylesbury gig 1978.      

The Clash | Facebook - Alternative PDF

On the Road with the Clash

Traxmarx - includes Ayslebury Gig

Punk bands at Friars

Date / source unknown

Link

New York Times : The Punk Scene May Be Waning, But The Clash Carry On

By John Rockwell
July 9, 1978
NYT, Section D, Page 7,

AYLESBURY, England

The punk obituary notices may have been premature. Ever since Johnny Rotten quit the Sex Pistols at the beginning of the year and reverted to his given name of Lydon, and ever since it became clear that no real punk band was about to make a commercial breakthrough in the United States, commentators have sounded the death knell for the whole movement.

But if you believe punk is passé, you should have been in Aylesbury a few days ‐ago, when the Clash began an English tour. Aylesbury is a moderateSized, semi‐rural, semi‐industrial town some 50 miles northwest of London. The space in which bands play is called Friars and is in a shinymodern civic centre in a room that looks like a cross between a theatre stripped of its orchestra seats and a school gymnasium apart for the fact that most people stood ‘downstairs (there were some seats in the small balcony), the concert didn’t seem like any other, at least at first. The opening act, the Automatics, were attended to with a polite indifference that seems the lot of most opening acts, anywhere.

Closer inspection revealed some anomalies, however, especially in matters- of dress. Safety‐pins driven through the cheeks and earlobes were in blessedly short supply. But the other accoutrements of the punk world were common enough — cropped, spiky, dyed hair, torn clothes, dog collars around the neck and such like. Some of these 'folk were London punk loyalists who had journeyed out to Aylesbury to see their favorite band. But most of then’ were locals, suggesting the spreading of punk throughout the land.

Innocence incarnate, this observer steadied himself in about the fifth row of closely packed bodies, right in front of the center of the stage. The instant theClash began to play, the whole clot of bodies began to pogo as one — a convulsive mass hopping. Since several hundred people can't hop together, however, there was soon a series of violent eddies cutting through the crowd. Whole masses of people would lurch againSt one another; individuals would jump off‐center and crash down half on top of their neighbors; others would fall to the ground and claw their way upright again.

If this sounds dangerous and brutal, it wasn't, really. Even the fights — and there were some — were more friendly rough‐housing than grudge matches, with smiles and laughter abounding. The only really unpleasant aspect was the spitting. Punks crowds have taken as as a matter of ritual to spraying the performers with beer or actually lobbing wads of spit about the hall. Some bands reportedly resent this lot, but although Joe Strummer and the others in the Clash went to the effort of dodging the grossest items hurled their way, they seemed sanguine about accepting sweat and spit as part& the intensely physical relief that a punk concert turns out.

After a bit of being knocked this way and that, this writer decided to extricate himself from the up‐front violence.‘This was easy enough to do, simply by working oneself back to the periphery of the pogoing, where the rest of the’ audience was standing more calmly, listening to the music. It was all rather like going on one of those rides,,at an amusement park in which one drives a rubber‐bumpered electric car,:the express purpose of which is to ram as many other cars as rudely as one The Clash itself is probably the leading punk band in Britain at the moment, although less well known in the United’ States than the Sex Pistols were. Actually, the Clash is known at least by name to readers of the American rock press, since a number of well known writers have proclaimed them about the greatest rock band of the day. But the group's first album, called “The Clash,” is available only as an import on CBS International. Somewhat crudely produced, its release in the United States has long been delayed (although why crude production should be considered inappropriate for a crude band seems paradoxical). Now, there is talk that the first album will be out soon in the United States (on Columbia's Epic label), with a few promotional concert appearances by the band at that time. And the Clash is close to completing its second album, produced with greater finesse by an American producer, Sandy Pearlman, and that should be released in America, as well.

The Clash is interesting on several counts. One is the way in which it testifies to the clubbish nature of British punk. The band is not only friendly with the Pistols and other British punk bands, but has played together informally with them the Pistols’ guitarist, Steve Jones, has reportedly rehearsed recently with the Clash, for instance, and the Clash's original second guitarist — when the group had five members — is now part of Mr. Lydon's new band).

More pointedly still, the Clash's manager, Bernard Rhodes, is a former associate of Malcolm McLaren, who founded the Pistols. Both Mr. McLaren and Mr. Rhodes steered their charges in a strongly political direction. With Mr. McLaren and the Pistols, it was a wild sort of anarchism. Mr. Rhodes and the Clash are slightly more specific in addessing themselves to the frustrations of their peer‐group — workingclass British youth — and slightly more overt about suggesting that a violent, political response is in order.

Actually, what the real nature of the Clash's politics is remains slightly mysterious. Mr. Rhodes can spin a fluent if somewhat disjointed rap about the band as a sort of Hegelian‐Marxian agent of the class energies of its audience, and about how the band can “focalize” those energies in its songs. But the band itself, only half‐joking, calls Mr. Rhodes “our enemy in the worst sense. Earlier on, he helped us as lot,” admitted Mr. Strummer, who is rhythm guitarist (always feverishly double‐time in his right‐hand strumming, hence the name), lead singer and co‐songwriter, along with Mick Jones, the lead guitarist and other lead singer. “But now I wouldn't say there is any connection at all.” Which is clearly exaggerated, since Mr. Rhodes was still very much in evidence arranging the concert at Aylesbury and at a dress rehearsal /punk party in London the night before. But it points up the inherent instability of all these genuinely punk bands.

Mr. Strummer disclaims any specific political intention. “We just wrote our kind of songs,” he says. “People heard ‘em and said, ‘You're a political group.’ I can remember the first time I heard that, I was genuinely surprised.”

Unfortunately, the two sets this writer heard — at the party the night before the tour began and at the actual first concert in Aylesbury — were not overwhelming. Interesting, even exciting at the actual tour concert, but not “the greatest.” The band's songs combine the raw energy of punk with a certain cleverness of arrangement and execution; Mr. Jones is a first‐rate guitarist, and the feverish strumming of Mr. Strummer heats things up considerably. But nobody seems the compelling onstage personality that Mr. Rotten/ Lydon was/is, and certainly neither Mr. Strummer nor Mr. Jones is a formidable lead singer. One could see how the band might be able to muster a white‐heat intensity, but that intensity was only intermittent at these shows.

One might be tempted to accept Mr. Strummer's curiously contradictory self‐analysis — “We're not a big deal ; we're just four guys who've got a great group” — except for the opinions of others one respects. One close member Of the punk community, a man who said the Clash a year ago gave the greatest rock performances he'd ever seen, was himself disappointed.

Perhaps the group was just rusty after several months largely spent inactive or in the studio. Perhaps the heavy reliance on new, less familiar material muted the response and the band's own energy; perhaps the new material itself doesn't stand up to the older songs. But perhaps Mr. Pearlman has inhibited their intensity in trying to polish their style. Or perhaps it is the very nature of the punk movement to remain underground, and the volatility of the best bands, their internal instability and the sharply focused yet extremely limited nature of their art, makes long‐term career growth a contradiction.

In any event, it seems clear now that the punk phenomenon, while still fairly strong as a fashion trend, has begun to recede into the everyday fabric of British teen‐age life. But it doesn't have far to recede, since punk is obviously just the latest manifestation of British youth fashions in music and clothes of the sort that have been erupting steadily since the early 1960's. In Aylesbury one could see not only punks but skinheads and hippies and even the odd Mod. And the Clash paid its own debts to the past in the form of an homage to Mott the Hoople, a band of just a few years ago with similar, if pre‐punk, sensibilities. “Punk,” as the hot sensation of 1977, may be on the wane. But punks themselves, in the broader sense of the term, as rude, rambunctious, lower-middle-class British (and American) young people, are just as ever- present as they've been for the past 15 years, and will clearly keep on producing both bizarre sub‐cultural rituals and attire and strong, Violent music.

The Clash themselves see the punk scene as dying, but the best bands capable of carrying on the fight. “We were part of a scene,” said Mr. Strummer, “but the scene is gone. It's changing. It was such an‐intense thing, it couldn't hold. A lot of people without any real ideas tried to jump on the bandwagon.”

“The important thing,” Mr. Jones said, “is that the people who had the ideas originally are still going strong. I think we're going to win this match.”

“Yeah,” added Mr. Strummer with a grin. “This is half time.”

Great night

Sean Regan - I loved it there, great sound and considering it was so wide it never seemed to lack atmosphere.

Tim Watts - Me and missus at the Aylesbury opener. Support wasn't Suicide as on poster but The Automatics ( The Specials), great gig. Right up front with missus, great stuff.

Music press review of Aylesbury gig on Friars site , reviewer reminds us ,best he'd ever seen them , opened with ' Complete control' and ' Tommy gun' encore ' Janie Jones', ' I'm so bored with U.S.A' and ' White riot'.

Andy Bean, who used to know, put on one of the leaflet flyers pleading for no violence as The Clash banned from nearby halls in Hemel Hemostead, St Albans and Dunstable, last one a serious riot, Colleen the missus and mates at that one. Amongst mayhem/ stage invasions she did have a dabble on the drums when band legged it though!

Dave Wiseman - Was there - brilliant as ever!

David Hardaker - Supported by the Coventry Automatics. I remember halfway through the set Terry Hall announcing that from tonight they will be now known as The Specials. Class night.

Al Castle - that was my first friars gig, midweek I think, the clash were supported by the specials (I’m sure it was their first ever gig with this name). Great night

Mike Plowman - It was. I was there too. They'd just changed their name from The Coventry Automatics. Both bands were great that night.

Paul Hutton - Great night

Blackmarketclash | Leave a comment

The Clash, Aylesbury gig 1978.

Photo Mark Jordan - The Clash - | Facebook

Tim Watts and his wife Coleen saw The Clash live five times, including the Friars and Dunstable gigs in 1978

The Clash | Facebook