Eyeswired reviews The Clash in Brixton, 1984

Joe Strummer

British punk rock in its classic form lasted at best three years, 1976-1979, before the bands started getting tired of the limitations of short, sharp three chords songs with anthemic choruses and started looking over the horizon.

The Clash were one of the first to break away, surprising many, myself included, with their third album, London Calling  - a double set ranging across a broader range of styles - and the following, patchy three album set, Sandinista!, which included nods to funk and hip-hop.

The loss of the band's second guitarist and singer, Mick Jones, in 1983 produced an odd reaction. Co-founders Joe Strummer and Paul Simenon, apparently having decided they'd moved too far away from their roots, re-launched the band with three new members, returning to the fists-aloft image of their earlier days in a way that appeared just a bit too retro and desperate to convince.

Rock's Back Pages has just republished my scathing review of the first London show by this  "greatest hits" style version of the band in Brixton, South London. I wouldn't have written this the same way today. After viewing Julien Temple's revealing 2007 documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I saw a different side to Strummer - a vulnerable guy who, after The Clash finally disbanded in 1986, spent several long years in the wilderness looking for ways to get his musical life back on track.

I guess many of us veterans from that time still feel saddened by his shockingly early death in 2002. That means I find the snotty tone I adapted back here, while not entirely unjustified, a bit cruel and over the top. Still, it captures something of the attitudes of the time. Mine, anyway.

Lynda Barker 2012

Blackmarketclash [rare editorial]

Too often London journo's thought The Clash belonged to them as some sort of small private London thing for them personally and couldn't see past the back streets [and bars] of London.

Strummer was right. The Clash' influence deserved to be heard in every corner and of that meant a few London journo's lost their privileges, for that's how they saw it, then that was a good thing.

Touring the USA and producing a broad palette was a sell-out. So was signing to a major label that provided that opportunity. And the journos said, "they're not the same, they've sold out [bercause we don't see them as often in London and they've found a whole bunch of global friends]."

It was sad to see the London music magazines play a pivotal role in first undermining the band, then hammering nails in the bands' coffin.

English youth faced unprecedented assault on their future through high unemployment, social breakdown and a never-ending uncaring Thatcher government. The miners crushed. Ditto the US and Reagan. Hope was a rare commodity and in1984 The Clash represented a mass of hope. Whilst Lynda Barker was drinking Pims and Gin distilled for the right number of years and seconds from her London salary, bemoaning that her AAA pass hadn't come through for free backstage access, Britain was falling apart. Joe was on stage and from the old tapes we know, calling for action. Calling for change. Never had the Clash carried such a powerful message of hope yet Barker is simply ordering a new glass of tipple, sharpening her green pen and looking up words, to sum up, her inward and backwards-looking perspective.
For what its worth, Combat Rock did convey a message with its powerful 7" combo of Rock the Casbah and SISOSIG but beyond that The Clash's mojo was eroding at the hands of Barkers green London pen leaving the band struggling through 1982/1983.

Listening back 1984 was a renaissance. I'd say to Barker put on any 82 tapes and compare it to any 84 tapes. For the many, 1984 was a Clash high point. Pointing at a few plastic 'Punks on 45' with Discharge painted on they're back is a pitiful excuse for a failure to recognise what was happening in Britain/USA and why The Clash were important.

Lynden Barber - Melody Maker, 17 March 1984 

ONCE UPON a time when we were a little more naive than we like to admit, The Clash seemed pretty important, like they were the fuel to the fires of creative rebellion. But now we've grown older, seen promises broken, lyrics mocked, times-a-changed and poses struck, we take them with pinch of salt. RIGHT?  Poor old Joe Strummer. It's 1977 all over again up there on stage and he desperately wants us to believe in it, moreover desperately needs us to believe in him because it ain't too nice when people get cynical and think you don't mean anything any more, especially when you realise privately that they've probably got good reason.

I got the Big Chill watching The Clash at Brixton tonight; found it even pathetic watching the spectacle of a whole bunch of people trying to feel the moment of ignition again - as if the punk rock explosion had been placed inside a bottle for several years and let out again without anything having changed.

Up there on stage Joe's got his microphone stand slung over his shoulder like a weapon and he still seems to think he can shoot Margaret Thatcher dead by commanding one of his guitarists to thrum an "E" chord like a machine gun in the direction of the Houses of Parliament on a weekday.

Perhaps he doesn't even realise that the most he can hope to achieve is a grand old reunion party where he plays the role of the host, poised over the turntable and yelling ceaselessly, "Hey, anybody remember this one?" But then acumen never was one of his strong points, even if his heart was (and is?) in the right place, bless the old sod.

It's a farce because the current Clash show is nothing more than a reactionary surrender to the forces of nostalgia, Punks-On-45, a greatest hits run through, let's-all-pretend-we're-Still-wearing-Pogo-On-A-Nazi-badges-and-head off-down-to-Lewisham, because, let's face it, those were the good old clays and we could actually believe that The Clash were some kind of radical force.

By playing a song like 'We Are The Clash' you are committing all the errors that your generation were supposed to have steered away from - brandishing your name as a fetishistic object, hoping we'll swallow the symbol before getting a taste of what it means. You are nearer to the current John Lydon than you realise - a pantomime for pogo-ers but at least Lydon had the sense to maintain some ironic distance between himself and his new Public Image, or at least an aura of ambiguity, just to keep us guessing as to what he was really up to. But then irony was never a strength of The Clash.

I find it saddening that the things about punk that are still celebrated and scorned are in every single case the wrong things. The easy-to-grasp slogans, the songs themselves, the dogmas, all these are sacrosanct, and woe behold anyone who dares to use an elaborate light show, like Siouxsie, even if it does advance their craft, jolt them out of some stultifying rut.

If The Clash had opened with 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Overpowered By Funk' instead of 'London Calling' and 'Safe European Home', or at least acknowledged their existence, it would have been easier to respect Strummer and Simenon and would have shown their feet to be placed in 1984. Instead - like some casually tossed token to the video age - we get nine TV screens flashing various images; in a hall the size of the Academy it's difficult to see exactly what's flickering away up there.

And the new members - Sheppard, Howard and White? They played well, and I wish them no ill. If the music sounded like one giant heavy metal thrash it's no fault of theirs - the sound of the early Clash has been copied so many times that it will never make the impact it once did.

Sure, there were new songs. Same as the old songs. I guess Strummer reckoned he had to make this "back-to-the-roots" move or risk losing the old Clash audience entirely. The "softer" side was always Mick Jones anyway.

"We Are The Clash"?

Ya boo.