The Clash: Black'n White Drop Outasite
Ian Penman, NME, 4 November 1978
The Clash: Roxy Theatre, Harlesden

WEAPONS EXIST, but some people can't see them for looking.

The Clash take the obvious lines of misrepresentation, superficiality, and hold up the tacky backdrops, the disinfected battleclothes, the turbulent, tubercular grimaces, and most of all the rock instruments as their weapons, not forgetting air rifles - roots rock rebel!

But these plain chaps with art school roots...what is it exactly they have rebelled against? Tell me that! On the basis of this performance, one of the two re-scheduled at the Roxy theatre in Harlesden (immigrant population, heavy industry, how convenient) I for one won't fall in with the future they are supposedly leading us into.

A joyless, emotionless, directionless, self-important music, something like a shambolic HM quartet converted to Mao minutes before a show but still retaining the original ego-pushy set, swaggers and all.

Perhaps this heavy manners street band have finally come to realise that the "street" houses expense and excess as well as the romantic oppression visions. What is this myth about the "street"? Remember, the street is the basis not only of free enterprise (market place credibility?) but of capitalist exploitation...and I'm sure The Clash have been exploited as much there, naked in the street, as much as - more than - anyone.

Which is probably how they come to be in their present sorry state. There are embarrassing runs across the stage, HM poses, hackneyed guitar solos - no idea of how to mix and assert different positions and degrees of sharp rock sound, unlike, say, Penetration.

Headon's drums are leaden and lumpen - I fail to observe any reggae inflexion either there or with Simonon - a different part of the sound from Strummer's rehearsed spastic twanging and Jones' now-engineered playing - that's right, fancy fancy FX.

The Clash's motives? There don't seem to be any anymore.

The Clash is The Clash is The Clash, no relationships between the individual members of the band, or between the band and the audience.

On stage, there's only the disgusting mock stand-and-deliver confrontations, the choreographed bumping into one another. The only concession to the 'kids' came at the very end of the set when Jones stopped sprinting for a second to garble "Alright? Sorry to keep you waiting"...he had to say that.

The Clash are awkward. Unlike their peers - Travolta, Brotherhood Of Man, Dooleys - they have not come to terms with their role of working class entertainers. They aspire; they do not want to be seen to simply perspire.

They have not come to terms with anything beyond The Clash, and now, after all the sycophantic press, after the coke busts, after the second album gap, The Clash don't know what to do with themselves, don't know what to do with rock music, but I and you know what it's doing to them.

The Clash is a dying myth.

© Ian Penman, 1978