The Clash: Up The Hill Backwards
Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 29 May 1982

HALF PAST ONE on Portobello Road. Past the chippy, opposite the bookshop, within earshot of a man with an amplified mouth-harp honking and scything through Little Walter's greatest hits.

The sun comes down hard on the cast of the street parade, on the bikes and push-chairs and the stalls, a crowded pavement where money changes hands, time is passed and everybody seems to be waiting for something different to happen.

And it does: one by one, The Clash appear. First Paul Simonon, dressed in his usual black, then Mick Jones in khaki pants, bleached denim jacket and huge Rasta cap, then Joe Strummer, greasy, stubbled and buttoned into his trench-coat.

OKAY! HERE WE GO!JOE'S BACK AND TOPPER'S GONEWHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

That's approximately what Kosmo Vinyl had said a couple of hours earlier on the phone, so we deal with that.

This is Saturday, while the F.A. Cup Final is going on, and the previous Thursday, The Clash reunited in Amsterdam to play the last ever gig with Topper Headon. Strummer had returned after weeks of rumours – working as a navvy in Marseilles, fished up out of the river in Glasgow, what did you hear? Did you believe it? – from a sojourn in Paris, during which time two career politicians in dead schtuck with their punters while their countries were falling to pieces embarked on a joint military adventure to distract attention from the home front and wave a few flags around, an entire British Clash tour was cancelled and rearranged, and Combat Rock had reached number two in the album charts.

Obviously, there are a few things to discuss.

First Topper. Why'd he go?"It was his decision," Strummer replies. We're squeezed into a booth in the corner caff: Strummer hunched in the corner, Simonon and Jones opposite, Kosmo Vinyl at an adjoining table and Bernard Rhodes leaning over Strummer's shoulder anxious to answer the questions first.

"I think he felt...it's not too easy to be in The Clash. It's not as simple as being in a comfortable, we're-just-entertainers group, and he just wanted to do that, just play music. He's a brilliant multi-instrumentalist – what used to be called that – and it's a bit weird to be in The Clash at the moment. Well, it was. He has to sort of strike out in another direction, because I don't think he wants to come along with us. There are things that we all want to do..."

"We all feel the same," Jones chips in, "and he don't, really."

"We're going to continue as a trio," resumes Strummer.

"I'm going to play the drums," announces Simonon brightly.

"We're gonna get some guest drummers in, and they're gonna play with us whenever we want to make a record or play some shows."

OKAY. Why'd you vanish? "Me? (Who'd you think, Lord Lucan? – Ed). It's a long story." Gonna tell it?

Strummer sighs. "Well...it was something I wanted to prove to myself: that I was alive. It's very much like being a robot, being in a group. You keep coming along and keep delivering and keep being an entertainer and keep showing up and keep the whole thing going. Rather than go barmy and go mad, I think it's better to do what I did, even for a month.

"I just got up and I went to Paris...without even thinking about it. I might have gone a bit barmy, you know? But anyway, I went to Paris, and I knew that there'd be a lot of people.. the fans were disappointed, the road crew had sold their motors to pay the rent fucking around with this lot. I knew a lot of people were going to be disappointed, but I had to go and I went and I'd recommend anybody else to do that if they have to.

"And once I got there...I only intended to stay for a few days, but the more days I stayed, the harder it was to come back because of the more aggro I was causing that I'd have to face there."

What about the agreements that you'd broken by going? Were you thinking of them?"Yeah! We'd never blown out other gigs except for the time that Topper got stabbed in the hand with a pair of scissors. Even when the gear doesn't arrive and we're in a foreign city and the trucks are held up at the border, we'll still play the show by borrowing stuff off the support band or whoever we can get it from. We've got some pride in that direction – the show must go on blah blah – than to cut out permanently, you know?"

So what would have happened if you hadn't gone?"I think I would have started drinking a lot on the tour, maybe. Started becoming petulant with the audience, which isn't the sort of thing that you should do...but it's very different now that Topper's left. It's back to the old trio now," he concludes with what can only be described as anticipatory glee.

So what did Simonon and Jones feel about the wandering Joe's pilgrimage?"Well, I felt that anything he does is all right," replies Jones, staring out from under his cap. "Obviously we were disappointed that we weren't going off on tour and everything, and we were disappointed that some of our fans would be disappointed, but – I said this before while Joe was away – I felt sure that whatever he had was a good reason. And he's such an extraordinary person that it was fine: we could handle it. Hold the fort was what we did."

Were you in contact while Joey was away?"No," volunteers Simonon. "We knew he was all right because he phoned his mum. He'd told her to keep schtum but I think Kosmo wore her down."

While you were away, did you consider not coming back at all, doing the full vanish?"I don't think I had the...it's pretty hard to do that, to disappear for ever."

"Bernie was saying," says Jones, indicating in the general direction of Rhodes' manic grin and impenetrable shades, "'Now this is like Brian Jones or Syd Barratt or something, now you're one of these group' so it is possible to vanish forever. Okay! We're The Pink Floyd now! And," he continues, warming to his theme, "Joe was Syd Barratt."

Yeah, but he didn't vanish physically.

Jones considers this. "Ah no, that was Vince Taylor, wasn't it."

Was Joe thinking while he was away about what was going to have to be different when he got back?"No, not really, I was just pleased to have an...escape. It's great bunking off work, really great – as you well know – and it was a bit of that. I was just enjoying being alive. I just wanted to prove to myself that I was alive...that I existed, that it wasn't over. It was okay. We're doing this firstly for ourselves..."

"And it helps clear the air, anyway" – Simonon – "The fact that he went just cleared the air and made you realise more of where you stood individually as well as to two other people, three other people, or whatever. I knew he was coming back."

Strummer picks up the thread again. "I was saying that we're supposed to be doing this for ourselves, and when you lose sight of that, you're in trouble, because you start to think, 'Those people out there don't really care' – that's the people who come and see you and buy your records. It's been a bit of a desert for us lately, but we're Number Two this week with the album – which is a real shock, I can tell you..."

OBVIOUSLY! While the sheer fact of a record's presence in the charts is not necessarily a relevant signifier, Combat Rock is the most extreme and direct Clash album since the first, and its ready acceptance and acknowledgement by the purchasing public indicates that there's far more support than is often supposed both for The Clash themselves and for the militancy that they once again represent.

See, The Clash had become first accepted, then absorbed, then declared quaint, obsolete, null and void. As soon as it became 'safe' to like them and they started touring the States, it then became 'safer' not to. It was a short step from American pundits hailing them as the new greatest rock band in the world – the new Stones! The new Who! – to British True Punks and post-rock hipsters alike to regard them as just another Anglo-American success story, like Costello before he withdrew, or The Pretenders. Not hard enough for the Oi Polloi, too rockist for the dancetariat.

And I mean they really show their roots: there's good old Greasy Joe with his rockabilly fetish, and Ranking Paul skanking with the system, and Mick's such a poser, always playing too loud...

Plus all this romantic rebel guerilla chic, all the ethnic snippets...hopeless, boys. Hopeless.

The trouble is that – in the wake of Combat Rock – none of that washes any more. X. Moore did the album all due honour a couple of weeks ago, so it only remains to state that it's a very clear album: the work of people who know exactly what they want to say and exactly how they want to sound. There is virtually no 'hard rock': none of the bull-dozing rabble-rousing power-chord anthems left over from Give 'Em Enough Rope, none of the easy warmth of parts of London Calling, none of the musical tourism and lucky-dip oddments of Sandinista. They haven't united their sound and their vision more perfectly since their first LP, though both have broadened almost beyond recognition in the intervening period.

Listen to the way Strummer sings 'Straight To Hell' or 'Ghetto Defendant'. What you're hearing is not a presumptuous or impertinent attempt to associate with the alleged glamour of revolutionary war or urban repression, but genuine compassion for the victims of organised human stupidity and greed; an expression of a desire to draw attention to intolerable circumstances and to mobilise public opinion towards eradicating them. I don't know about you, but I respect that compassion.

Combat Rock says that playtime is over. Strummer says that it's very hard being in The Clash, and if they are taking what they're doing as seriously as the album would suggest, then it sounds like he's right. It's also very hard being around them: not in the sense that they're unpleasant or antagonistic, but they carry an atmosphere of tension with them, just as they did when they were starting out. A very strong sense of purpose.

Combat Rock was – as is obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the logistics of record-making – written, recorded and designed and packaged long before the Falkland Islands represented anything to anybody who didn't have relatives there, but synchronicity is not a myth and this album isn't just selling because it's good product from a popular band. I think it's selling because a large and significant number of people want to hear what it says. There's an edge on the album and there's an edge on The Clash again.

Once again, they are a profoundly unreasonable band. There is a lot of excellent entertainment about, and it is by no means all reactionary, but it is reasonable. The Clash aren't.

"AND we're going to go over to New Jersey and start a four-and-a-half week American tour, and then we're going to come back here and do the British tour that we should have done before – that's if we can find a drummer. After that we don't have any plans."

Mick Jones: "After that, we all disappear."

So what do The Clash want to do?"We want to consolidate something – like us," replies Jones. "Coming together and then exploding out. Out of captivity, the captivity of people's expectations of us...and of being contained by the music industry, that situation of not being able to get out."

So how do you get what you want out of them without them getting what they want out of you?"Simple!" snorts Strummer. "Make sure that you're in a position to be able to say what you want, make sure that you're ahead. But as soon as you're not in a position to do that, if you're not independent enough to do that, if we couldn't keep this thing going to the right pitch, then we'd be...CBS were coming around to us saying, 'Right, we've got these suits here and we've got a nice little number written by Andrew Lloyd Webber..,"

"And a nice idea for a new haircut," interrupts Jones.

"...and that would become what we were putting out. It wouldn't be anything to do with us. You have to be independent enough to remember what you were there to do in the first place, or you're fucked. They've all got their lawyers and their legal scene well worked out before we were even born. It's very hard to go in there and not go under. I mean, the whole game is to get you so that you owe them so much money so that you can't say, 'No, I don't wanna do that' without them saying, 'So how are you gonna pay this?'"

Bernard Rhodes at this point launches a high-velocity dissertation on the subject of Control In The Media and the fact that The Clash don't seem to reap the benefits of the airplay shop-window. (This is, after all, only right and proper. I, for one, don't want a load of depressing rubbish about knowing your rights and not heeding the call-up on my shiny yellow airwaves).

"...in fact," Jones sums up. "We've written a song about it. It's called 'Complete Control' and we hope to have it out for the summer."

Well, you can by-pass the radio if people will buy your singles whether they get airplay or not.

"We can do that because we've always put singles out whether they got played or not. People have said that we should just do albums, but we like singles too! But since 'Capital Radio' we haven't been played on Capital Radio." Mick doesn't sound too surprised about that, as it happens.

"I never thought we'd be Number Two in Britain. I really didn't," Strummer muses. Rhodes quietly tips a slug of brandy into Joe's cup of black coffee. "There really seems to be something against us here...over the last few years, since we started going round the world."

"People don't understand," Simonon interposes fiercely, "what 'Bored With The USA' was about. They haven't got a fucking clue. If people say 'Oh, The Clash did 'Bored With The USA' and they're always going over there'...they don't understand the bloody song in the first place!"

"I think that Britain is really insular" – Strummer – "They don't realise that there is a world out there. People who spend any amount of time in London can't believe that anything outside London exists. I like to travel..."

This would appear to be the case.

Another new factor in the existence of The Clash is the removal of one of the all-time great millstones: their financial debt to CBS Records. This liberation is due to the much-abused and admittedly unwieldy Sandanista!, which has quietly and unsensationally contrived to be purchased by approximately 197,000 people in this country alone. They are now out of hock for the first time, a state of affairs which they find highly satisfactory. It is, after all, at least as valuable in terms of independence as cash.

Kosmo Vinyl recounts that nearly every American college the band had visited last time round had featured a bulletin-board offer to tape anybody's choice of an hour's worth of Sandanista! for around $3. American release of Combat Rock has been delayed so that the sleeve can be reprinted without the 'Home Taping Is Killing Music' health warning. "We don't care how many people tape our records," he declares proudly.

What The Clash are in the process of becoming is – in spite of CBS Records – a genuinely Underground band (I am choosing, thoroughly arbitrarily, to define an 'underground band' as one which is denied access to radio and TV exposure for reasons other than unpopularity). This means that their music actually has to be sought out. To see The Clash you have to go to their gigs (whenever they happen to be), and to hear The Clash you have to buy their record (or tape it off someone else who's bought it). Embarking on this course means an awful lot of hard work: it means that the band have to stay in touch with their audiences and keep their interest – and in the case of The Clash, that also means retaining their trust – in order to make sure that their work continues to be sought out. Especially in the current climate, one is unlikely to hear 'Know Your Rights' or any of the vital album tracks on daytime radio or down the pub.

Current pop wisdom sayeth as follows: in order to create a popular success, something shiny must be dangled in front of people's eyes via electronic media. The only other way is via discos and the club scene, and The Clash are no more welcome there (apart from isolated breakouts like 'Magnificent Seven' and maybe 'Overpowered By Funk' from Combat) than they'd be on a Capital playlist.

Doing it The Clash's way on a worldwide basis therefore demands an insane amount of gigging, and as a famous '60s smart-ass who got very little airplay himself once remarked "Touring can make you crazy". The danger of thereby developing intermittent strangeness of the mental process would seem to be substantially increased by this policy, which would also deliver them right back into the got-to-tour-to-sell-the-records/got-to-sell-the-records-to-finance-the-tour noose that they've just got themselves out of.

The Clash are almost messianic in their intensity when it comes to 'providing an alternative' on the US live circuit. "Maybe they'll just think we're Van Halen with short hair," Strummer will surmise grimly. "Maybe they'll just be grunging out on the bass and drums and guitar."

"Maybe we could put on false beards and stovepipe hats and stick pillows up our T-shirts," suggest Mick Jones helpfully, "and put out a nice country and western song to get on the radio there...then we could do some dance stuff for the hipper areas..."

Three the hard way. I mean, up the hill backwards isn't half of it. In terms of conventional careerism, The Clash are nuts. They are a gang of loonies. They are out of their fucking minds.

They have created an objective which – virtually by definition – debars them from utilising crucial means necessary to achieve it. If they doubt their ability to get successful without getting sucked in, then they'll set it up so that they won't succeed. In other words, not getting sucked in is more important than succeeding on any but the most stringently proscribed terms.

To reiterate: the Clash are totally unreasonable. They work on the principal that the distinction between method and objective is artificial and spurious, and that therefore compromise must be kept to a minimum (noises off: rising murmur of 'CBS! CBS! Train In Vain!' etc). The thing is that the amount of compromise necessary to get a single as hard as 'Ghost Town' or 'Going Underground' on the air does not appear to have been crippling.

However, I admire the Clash's intransigence, and the best of Combat Rock is as powerful as anything anybody's done for a while. Long may they continue to piss everybody off.

JUST NOW there was almost a minute of uninterrupted gunfire on the radio, and the sound was almost too neatly set off by a police siren outside. Right now everybody's supposed to be jacked up to the back teeth with war fever, but just the same there's that dippy song about peace from the Eurovision Song Contest as Number One single last week and Combat Rock mashing up the album chart.

There was a song I wanted to hear just then, but it wasn't on the radio. It went:

"It could be anywhereAny frontierAny hemisphereNo man's landThere ain't no asylum hereGo straight to hell, boys."

© Charles Shaar Murray, 1982