"TIME HAS come today. Third of four Music Machine gigs and — surprise! — the ritual bottling of Suicide appears to have been omitted for the once. Alan Vega is up by the mike, moving jerkily from pose to like a series of still-photo slides vaguely synch with the music — pose CLICK pose CLICK pose — while Marty Rev stands solid and immobile beside his control post and the drum machine gets louder and LOUDER and LOUDER and LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER AND ...

And very suddenly they're off. Some of the audience consider the whole set to have been a bad dream and forget about it, others seem to have enjoyed it in a perverse sort of way (what other way is there to enjoy these guys, anyway?) and the general impression is of one of those nightmares that, thankfully, fade after you've been awake a few minutes. . Suicide might well be creepy and chilling and all the other names ... and if their intention was not so patently to Lay Theatre Of Spookery (brrr) on the masses they might actually have achieved their desired effect. As it is, I'd take Throbbing Gristle's "United" over anything Suicide have laid down, but anyway...

As of right now (GMT), The Clash are one of the few bands who can not only make you feel that they're the best rock band in the arena while you're actually watching them, but leave you with that same feeling even after your ears have stopped ringing. While it's ludicrous to assign such a heavy responsibility to any one band. The Clash are certainly one of the magic few who move you and shake you as well as just rocking and rolling you. I mean, I had a cold that night and felt well ! on the rough side of dreadful; didn't think anything could make me want to dance that night. The Clash did, for which we are mostly truly thankful.

It was the first tune I'd seen them in over a year, which allowed the weight of all their changes to hit at once. Success, acceptance and comparative maturity has certainly not mellowed their attack or blunted their blade: their emotional power is now matched with a confident, co-ordinated strength which is well nigh overwhelming hi its impact.

Anyone who honestly expresses a preference for the unco-ordinated, unfocussed aggression of their early days is talking out of nostalgia and I was-at-the-Roxy-and-you-weren't elitism: this is the heyday of The Clash.

Consider: from their first explosive chord each member of the band seems possessed by an inner strength that both draws from and feeds into their collective power. Mick Jones feeds in a Jewish/Celtic sensitivity and elegance and a thinking man's sense of dynamics; Paul Simonon is the rumble of energy from the engine room and the feeling that all that sound is coming straight from him and that he only has an amp on stage to look good; Topper Headon combines science, power and commitment in a manner perfectly befitting a student of the martial arts and Strummer is...

Focus. Not so much a front man as the man in the middle of a front line; the band work through Strummer to get at the audience. His convulsive movements and barking vocals bespeak his position: that of a man holding a live wire. The Clash are an ambitious band: not in the conventional Rod Stewart sense of ambition (i.e. being as rich and famous and important and fawned-over as is humanly possible), but :
ambitious in terms of the projected goals which they have set themselves.

The goal of The Clash is — quite simply — to be the Ideal Rock Band. To display confidence without being arrogant, to be macho without being sexist, to demonstrate strength without ever bullying, to indicate what they consider wrong with the world without whining, to suggest solutions without preaching, to be fashionable and unique without flaunting wealth and encouraging elitism, to play dynamite rock and roll music for dancing and other stuff without getting distracted by bullshit and flummery, to appear larger and stronger than real life without ever suggesting to the audience that there's any reason why they can't do it too ...

Daunting goals, therefore.

The Clash have come too near to making fools of themselves in the past by making loud claims which they couldn't fulfil to wear their integrity so ostentatiously on their sleeves again, but ultimately they haven't copped out and anything which they would have liked to achieve which rockbiz inertia has prevented them from realising has at least been an honest failure. Plus they keep trying, they don't hesitate and the better they get the better they do. And vice versa.

I have respect for these guys, and you should too (all you jerks who put them down in the Bag the other week; have the grace to be ashamed of yourselves). Nothing they do is slipshod, except for one single presentation point. Mr. Strummer:

please step inside these brackets for a second:

I-man want a quick word in your shell-like.

(Joe, your Telecaster nearly always goes out of tune, plus you break a lot of strings. You could get the Tele seen to — after all, there's no reason why the condition isn't curable — or, better still, get a spare guitar so that in case of future guitar catastrophes, you've got something functional to move onto. The Clash are long past the stage , where it's acceptable to bash away at a detuned axe. Okay?)

Best bits: the segue into Da Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" at the end of "Police And Thieves" (itself so much improved since they started playing it that it's nigh-on incredible), the astonishing power of "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" arid the sheer triumph of the closing "Garageland".

And, of course, the encore: the pudgy menace of jammer-about-town Steve Jones, adding weight in more ways than one to a storming "London's Burning", his guitar smouldering like a t'ai-stick fuse linked to a time bomb: his occasional starfish jumps demonstrating just how out of practice he is as a live performer these days.

And then Jimmy Pursey careening on stage to sing with Strummer on "White Riot": it's very easy for a jammer to come on fresh and rested and vibed up when the band is shagged out after a hard set and steal the show. It's to Pursey's credit that he didn't try any cheap upstaging tactics on the by now almost exhausted Clash, but it wouldn't have worked even if he had tried. No-one upstages The Clash.

There's a lot of jamming going on these days: always a healthy sign.

It's quite possible that Britpunk will just go down in rock history as another craze movement . like glamrock or Merseybeat or the Blues Boom or whatever; it'll be forgotten except by devotees and historians. But just as it would now sound ludicrous to describe David Bowie as the greatest of the glamrockers, soon it'll sound stupid and irrelevant to tag The Clash as the best of the punk i bands. Bowie is a master who defines his own terms; so, in their way, are The Clash.

Britpunk may, therefore, slip into oblivion, but rock and roll is never going to forget The Clash.

Hell, they've only just started.

Charles Shaar Murray