Joe Strummer Jon Savage, unpublished, 30 May 1988

I'D LIKE to start with the busking tour - can you tell me what the point of that was? I

think Bernard suggested the busking tour. The point of it was he sensed that The Clash had become too prey to his ideas, he realised he had it under his thumb too much, and there wasn't a lot of life in there, so he said to us - what he expected us to do was to go up north, somewhere like Bradford and live in a house while we I don't know what. We just went up and kept moving, and to me it was the best tour that we ever did.

Where did you play?

I know you played in Leeds. We played a lot of gigs in Leeds, and in Glasgow, in York, we didn't get to play in Manchester, cos my voice had gone by then.

About twenty gigs?

More, much more. We would knock off eight or ten a day, we'd play in any pub, any club anywhere. The sets were ten numbers, maybe seven numbers the whole band. Three acoustic guitars and a pair of sticks. Pete would drum on anything, mostly a plastic chair. We played in some university in Glasgow or Edinburgh anyway, Paul and Nick and Vince would play acoustics and I'd just sing.

Was that all Clash stuff?

We played a couple of Cramps stuff, some Clash stuff and maybe a couple of standards. We used to play Movers and Shakers.

You didn't tape them did you?

No. There are tapes circulating around the north, apparently, and there are tapes of us rehearsing in someone's flat in, I don't know what city.

Was that it after that, or did you do another tour after that?

When we came back to London after that busking tour, we felt we had something good going inside the group, but as soon as we came back and met Bernie and Cosmo in Holland Park, later I understood that Bernie felt it was slipping from his control, 'cos he didn't know where we were, and we only came back 'cos I'd lost my voice. Bernie didn't like that it was slipping out of his control, so somehow he put a stop to the good feeling that we had at that moment.

I fell out with Bernie after we returned from Munich, where we recorded the tracks, somewhere between that and when he began to mix it.

So the LP's release was something you had no control over?

Absolutely none. But Bernie's trip was at the time, he wanted to know what it was like to be Mick Jones. Mick used to sit in that seat where you arrange the songs, and produce them, and once he'd encouraged me and the rest of us to get rid of Mick, I didn't realise until after the Cut the Crap sessions that that was Bernie's trip. He was fed up with organising tours and stuff, he wanted to get right in on the music. He hated song writing 'cos it was the one mysterious area where he couldn't go. He hated that. He wanted to reduce songs to slabs of bacon off the roast, he didn't see why it should be strange. He hated the tortured artist thing that Mick would lay on him, it was slightly out of his grasp. He used to say to me, I've analysed life so completely - that it's boring. I used to look at him and think, that's insane. Song writing was one of the things he didn't understand how it was done, and he resented that, he wanted to do the pop Svengali thing, he could make the boots, the t-shirts, the look, the direction, everything, but when it came to the songs, that was the one thing that he couldn't understand.

Maybe that's what Bernie should have done?

Come on then Bernie, Malcolm is doing it. Come on!

Is that why he had his nose done?

I think that was just to make himself more beautiful.

There's a lot of stuff to get through. But I'd like to talk about where the 101ers started. Where you played, what the arena was at that time.

I'd been on a busking tour of Europe with Tymon Dogg, and when we came back he moved into the squat at 23 Chippenham Road, we were loose kind of people, we had two squats going, and one was at 101 Walterton Road, and the other was at Chippenham Road. Eventually we took over the whole area, 'cos 23 ran the local restaurant, that tea room, and we put the group together that everyone would go and see. I always felt that the cultural life of all those hundreds of squats around Elgin Avenue and Shirland Road, eventually our two squats were the lifeblood of the area, 'cos none of us were into heroin, or alcoholics, you know. We managed to be good. After I came back from that busking tour I moved into 101, more to get away from Tymon - you know when you've been very close to someone in very harrowing circumstances? I continued busking in the underground, but it got too heavy, when they started putting microphones and speakers in the tunnels, so I was looking for a way round it.

I looked into the Elephant and Castle pub on Elgin Avenue and I saw this Irish trio playing. We weren't even allowed in that pub, if they saw us they threw us out 'cos they knew we were squatters and they didn't want it. I was looking at this Irish trio playing and I thought, I could do that! So I thought it would be a good way to get over the summer, I thought it would be an easier way of earning money than running from these transport cops down the tube. It seemed like less hassle. This was '74.

Me and Tymon went to Europe in '74 so it would have been late summer '74. I went back to 101 and tried to put a group together. Big John was trying to learn the saxophone, and I got Patrick to play the bass, but we had no money or equipment. I had this friend called Dick the Shit, who I still owe this money to, I borrowed his bass guitar and amp and speaker, and suddenly we were happening, we had a bass rig, which we set up in the basement, and we begged borrowed or stole stuff until we had a drum kit and I bought a guitar for £20 off Mickey Foot's brother, a Hofner. Somehow we got hold of a drum kit. Antonio, this guy from Chile, 'cos after the right-wing coup in Chile we had a lot of refugees come over and two of them moved into our squat, Antonio, who was a drummer, and the sax player, who's still going, made a song called Rubber Hammer, Alvarro.

None of us could really play except for Alvarro, and he'd been playing in rock'n'roll bands for years, playing horn, we had a sax section, with him and Big John, Patrick on bass, Antonio on drums, we had a group, but we learnt six numbers: Bony Moroney, Gloria, Route 66, Too Much Monkey Business and two others. So we managed to get a gig at the Royal College of Art, where there was a Chilean refugee's art exhibition, we went down and set up our pathetic equipment, a mike stand that required two bricks to hold it upright. There was like two people there, and we played our five or six cruddy rock'n'roll numbers.

This Chilean guy came down saying, get out of here, you're playing this imperialist rock'n'roll! And I thought, blimey! This guy's got a hard-on, you know, and we split.

There was this teacher who lived with us called Ros, and I said we should hire the room above the Chippenham as a club, but we were scared to do it, and this girl Ros physically dragged me over to the Chippenham one day and forced me to ask the landlord to hire the room on Wednesday nights. It cost a quid for the room. We called it the Charlie Pig Dog Club, 'cos there was a dog in the squat that was a cross between a pig and a dog.

Then every Wednesday night we'd go up there, and charge 10p to get in, I leafleted all the squats in the area, and soon we had quite a jumping scene, we'd learn a couple of numbers every week and add them to our set, and we learned standing in front of those gypsies and squatters and lunatics - you can't really learn unless you're playing to people. You see the effect of what you've done. We were also doing gigs at the Brixton Telegraph, we did another Chilean benefit, and Matumbi were heading and they lent us their equipment. I always thought how great that was, 'cos we were a really dishevelled looking bunch of people, dressed in rags.

There were so many squats then, that's all gone.

There were streets and streets, a real community. There were certain areas that were being left to run down, the councils hadn't got it together.

You could see London visibly decaying through the early 70s.

Elgin Avenue was because someone in the council had decided they were going to knock all these down, about a hundred fine Victorian terrace houses, and it was between deciding and them actually knocking them down that the squat culture flourished on that street.

To go back a bit, how did you get to be a busker?

I did that because Tymon Dogg, who was the musician of our community at that time, I went with him bottling as it's called, because you're supposed to have a fly in a bottle in one hand and collect money with the other hand, and the musician knows that you haven't stolen any money if the fly is still in the bottle. It comes from Mississippi, that's why you're called the bottler when you're collecting. I used to collect for him. I knew I wasn't any musician, I was already about twenty-one, and I never played, so I got a ukulele, and I used to play Chuck Berry songs on this ukulele.

One day in Green Park, down in the tunnels, he said to me right, I've just heard there's a patch going at Leicester Square, you do this patch and I'll go off to the next one. And suddenly there I was alone, for the first time in my life, and a thousand people came rushing past, and I was going "Sweet Little Sixteen dingadingadingading" I thought, wow, I'm playing, and there's no-one here to help me!

Did you get any money?

Yeah, we used to prefer what was called the loony shift, between ten and eleven or later in Oxford Circus or Leicester Square, where everyone is drunk, or out on the town, and they see a couple of ragamuffins, and they go heey, give 'em a tenner, I mean 10p. So we used to earn somewhere between four and five pound an hour. Good money. I found the highest paid hour was the loony hour. There was a slight drawback 'cos some drunks would come through and they'd try and - somehow the fact that you were defenceless down there always protected you, in the end.

It wasn't so violent then, though.

Not like it is now. It changes so slowly you don't notice.

So when did you leave school?

I left in June '70 at seventeen and went to the Central School of Art in the September, and then by June '71, that was it.

You did a foundation course?

Yeah. I applied to Stourbridge and Norwich and was refused by both. I remember coming back from Norwich, I was apprehended on the train without a ticket with my portfolio, and slung off at this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere, with this huge portfolio, so I dumped the portfolio in a skip and hitched back to London, and that was the end of my art career.

Did you not like it?

I was in boarding school, locked up really good for nine years, and all of a sudden you're staying at a hostel in Battersea, with no-one to say what to do, where to go. It was 1970, and there was drink and drugs, and by the end we were doing acid and I never went near the art school.

I went to university in '72 and the place was awash. I've still never seen so many drugs in one place. It was just that time.

Yeah it was an experimental time, it was great. It was bit much for a young guy to handle. By the end of the year we'd moved into this rented house in Palmer's Green, me and the most partying people on the course, we were getting really wild. We were examining the way to live.

Where did you go to school? City of London Freemen's School?

It's in Ashtead, about five miles south of Epsom. It was mixed. If it hadn't been mixed it would have been really hell. I ran away when I was nine. I didn't get very far. Me and this guy who was slightly older, Paul Warren, he said, come on, let's run away. I said yeah, let's go, and we left one Tuesday lunchtime. We were walking near Epsom and we saw this policeman and we knew it was the middle of school hours and he was bound to say what are you two doing, so we took this long detour, and while we were walking, the geography master came by in a car. Bundled us in, and back at the school this fascist guy shouting at us, how dare you leave school without your caps, and I remember thinking, what an idiotic question. We're running away, man, you don't run away with your cap on. It was only a couple of weeks after my ninth birthday. My dad was in the Foreign Office, so I think he was in Tehran, but the place they put me in was really horrible. Before that I hadn't been in England at all. I'd had a great life, in Egypt and Mexico and Germany. It was great. But suddenly it was like Tom Brown's Schooldays.

I went to that school, Rugby!

Oh my god.

So what did you do after you left Central?

A dead loss, you know. A couple of the guys from art school who were as wild as I was, and like me hadn't managed to get in anywhere else, we ended up in a place called Dowhouse Farm in Blandford in Dorset 'cos Robert Basie knew Jeremy Cooper whose father owned the farm, so we worked the hardest that year on the farm.

Then we moved back to London and got a horrible flat in Harlesden where there were about ten of us living. We hadn't discovered squatting yet. A lot of people were already squatting, but I got a job in an Allied Carpets warehouse, as a sign painter, which was quite a good groove for about three months, until they asked me, are you going to get into this seriously, and I said, you must be fucking joking, I was just doing it for money to keep body and soul together, and as soon as I said that I was back on the carpet cutting floor.

Then I came back one time after I'd been for a drink at the Memphis Bell with this girl I was friendly with from the local supermarket, and I arrived back at the flat and there was this police car outside the flat, and all our stuff was being thrown out of the window. The Irish landlord had bunged the cops a few quid to get rid of us.

Me and Tymon had found this black guy in the park who'd given us a fright, and being hippies we'd invited him back to our place to live, 'cos he didn't have anywhere to live. And as soon as the landlord found out we had a black guy living in the flat, he nicked our giros. I wasn't getting a giro, but some of the others were. We'd all been evicted, a gang of toughs had rushed in, beat everybody up, slung 'em out, he'd bunged the cops a few quid.

It was when I started to learn about what was justice and what wasn't. I started learning about the Rent Act, but when I got back from the warehouse, all our stuff was in the road, and the cops were there, laughing at us.

Up to that moment I'd been doing it by the book - you rent a flat, you try and find some way to get along. I actually had a copy of the '65 Rent Act' on me, and I went along to the cop and said you can't do this according to section whatever, opened it up and he went, don't fucking tell me about the law, Sonny Jim, you know?

From that moment on, if we wanted a house we just kicked the fucking door in. We wanted electricity, we just jammed wires into the company head. Bollocks.

Had you lost touch with your parents?

From the time I went to London they freaked out, as people used to say. Obviously I fell out with my parents. But you know what it was like at boarding school, you had to become somebody on your own at the age of nine, and it's hard to get back. I suppose I resented them without being aware of it. My parents were somebody I saw once a year from then on. They were five thousand miles away in Tehran. The Foreign Office paid for one flight a year, then Lord Plowden came out with a report that recommended they paid for two. So after a few years I could see them at Christmas and in the summer, but for the first few years I saw them in the summer. And at half term when all the other boarders were going thank Christ we're getting out of here, for me sometimes we'd go to Scotland and stay on my mother's farm. Pavlova Britain was my friend at school, he was the drummer in 999. Me and him were a deadly duo. He used to take me down to his father's farm in East Sussex. I fell out with my parents from the age of nine, I suppose, and freaking out in London didn't help.

How do you get on with them now?

They're dead. When The Clash became really happening, my father for the first time in his life was really proud of me. That helped. But you can't really heal a lifetime's just because your records are selling. It's not his fault, it's mine, I never really got off my high horse. I didn't know I was sitting on it, but I realise it now.

Men don't get off that high horse until their late twenties, early thirties.

Now, I'd be able to say to him, cor what a lot of shit we've been through together. But we were touring Italy when he suddenly took ill and died. I hate not having that final conversation with him.

So for eighteen months you squatted and had a good time?

Well no, I had another adventure. We were sleeping in Dave and Gail Goodall's flat in Edgware Road, they had a two room flat. This was in between Harlesden and squatting. I was holding down that carpet job, and what was the upshot of it? All our records were smashed. We were slung out of the flat illegally. I went to the Harassment Officer at Brent Council, I was the only one of our group who really cared to follow things through. I went to a hearing and they stitched me right up. There were these eight law students up at the back and I remember screaming at them, I'm not something to fucking study, this is people who've been done over. They hustled me out, it was a rent tribunal.

Anyway me and Tymon were sleeping on this kitchen floor. I had acquired a drum kit through a swap in my last year at school, and it was in the garage in my parents' bungalow in Purley, and so I knew a friend of mine had got into art school at Newport in south Wales, so I hitched down there. I knew a girl at Cardiff art school and I went to see her and she said basically, piss off. I went to see Forbes in Newport and I thought I might as well stay in this town cos I can't make it in London, it was too heavy, there was nowhere to live and so on. I

got the drum kit down to Newport and bartered my way into the art school group by swapping the drum kit. It was called The Vultures. We played the art school and the Kensington Club in Newport. We used to do Can't Explain, Tobacco Road, r'n'b. I took jobs there, I was grave digging there for three months during the winter of '72/'73. I was cutting grass on Malpas estate.

I was the king of the fly-mo. But that fell apart after a while and I went straight into the squatting.

It was very organised then as well. Didn't you have a squatter's union?

Yes we did. We had a lovely bit of paper printed: "This premises has now been occupied." We knew all the legal ins and outs. You'd go in there, bang, change the locks, yeah. Property is nine tenths of the law, we were really organised.

So you had the 101ers, and this club which was jumping. What happened then?

They were going to close the boozer down, 'cos it was getting out of hand. The cops were coming down every week. Some gypsies started to move in. When we were living at 101, on one side of us we had a house full of junkies, and they managed to put light bulbs in, but the council had been through ripping out anything, water, lights, smashing floorboards and so on. We'd go in there and rebuild them, the wires. We had an expert who'd come down, and he was the bravest guy. I saw him jamming wires into the company head, right into Battersea power station, I've seen him blown back across the room, showers of sparks thirteen feet long.

These junkies had got their lights going but there were no switches, and I went round there to see this guy who played harmonica, there he was lying in this room with only a mattress in it, with this bulb burning away. There isn't any way of turning it off - we have to unscrew the bulb. That was on one side, these junkies lying there with these bulbs burning away day and night, and on the other side there was a gang of really terrible alcoholics, you know those people who are usually in the park. God, the horrible fights and shit, it was the pits.

One day Dan Keller came to the door, and I went like this, pretending to hit him, cos he was a bit of a dozy boy, just for a laugh, and down the bottom of the steps this guy was walking by, and he pulled a hatchet out of his pocket, and he ran up the steps going Aaaaaaagh!!!

I pulled Dan in and shut the door, but it had been kicked in hundreds of times and it was just cheap panels, and the hatchet came right through the door and he was screaming, YOU KILLED MY WIFE!!! One move, anything could happen.

Eventually Alan Jones from Melody Maker, who's now the editor but at the time it was his first reporting job, I'd known him from Newport, he was a student at the college. I got him to come to the Pig Dog, hoping that we'd get a bit of press, and he wrote four lines at the bottom of their gossip column. Me and Big John took this four lines down to the Elgin and we showed it to the landlord, and he read it and said, right lads, Monday then. I'll give you ten pounds. That's when we got onto the circuit. That's when The Pistols first came across me. Sid Vicious - I don't think John did, but anybody who was anybody eventually turned up down there on Thursdays. Although we didn't realise it, we were at least playing very fast music.

I went to talk to Roger, and he said by that time the original pub rock bands got really boring. Dr Feelgood started it, but you had the rougher faster 101ers, the Count Bishops, people like that. I suppose that's true.

Those earlier pub rock bands disappeared up their own arseholes trying to play like Memphis Sweet Style, but we couldn't play at all, we knew how to bash the shit out of a number. By the time we hit the Elgin, it was Snakehips Dudanski on drums, Evil on lead guitar, me singing and Mole on bass.

When did Boogie come in?

After Boogie got out of prison, for some reason he was into the music, and he used to come down and say he could get us played on Charlie Gillett's programme. So we taped some music and sent it to him, and we all crouched round the radio in the squat. By now we were squatting over at Orsett Terrace, and Charlie Gillett goes, what's this, sounds like hundred mile and hour race along rubbish, and he didn't even play it, just dismissed it in half a sentence. What a crushing blow that was. Tiberi had said he could get us on the radio.

I was the one who christened him Boogie, 'cos the first time he came round the squat he was smoking Winston and at the time a packet of Winston seemed rather glamorous, almost like having a Cadillac, so I called him Boogie after the John Lennon, Dr Winston O'Boogie, remember? When he pulled out his fags I said, you must be Dr Winston O'Boogie. And the Boogie bit stuck.

With him and Mickey Foot helping us we started to become a real little operation. Mickey was a contact from Newport. He was attending the college of art.

He did the Black Arrows amongst all that as well. Him and Bernie were a right little team for a while, after The Clash started. Bernie needs to have a lieutenant.

Malcolm had Nils, and then Boogie.

Mick Jones sacked Mickey Foot for speeding up 'Clash City Rockers'! I suppose Cosmo took over that role. But it wasn't bad speeded up, I think Mickey was probably right. There are few honourable men in these stories, but Mickey was one of them.

Did you meet the Pistols first, or Bernie first? How did it all happen? You're with the 101ers, you're doing well.

We're doing well, we've got a single out, but I got a feeling that we were invisible, we were working very hard, loading the van, driving up north, unloading, playing the gig, loading it up again, driving down again, unloading again 'cos we didn't want to get the gear nicked.

We did twelve gigs in fourteen days in places like Sheffield, and we couldn't afford to stay up there, it was up and down every day. We were invisible, we weren't getting anything in the papers. Then one day the Sex Pistols were supporting us at the Nashville, and that was when I first saw them. I walked through the corridor, and we'd done our sound check and in came these Sex Pistols people, I remember looking at them as they went past: Rotten, Matlock, Cook, Jones, McLaren, and coming up the rear was Sidney, wearing a gold lamé Elvis Presley jacket, and I thought groups in those days didn't talk to each other, it was extremely cut-throat.

You fought for gigs, but I thought I'd talk to them, and I said to Sid, that's a nice jacket you've got there, mate. He looked at me and went, yeah, it is, I got it down at Kensington Market. We were humans, talking. Then I walked out onstage while they were getting their sound check together and I heard Malcolm going to John, do you want those kind of shoes that Steve's got, or the kind that Paul's got? What sort of sweater do you want? and I thought, blimey, they've got a manager, and he's offering them clothes! To me it was incredible. The rest of my group didn't think much of all this, but I sat out in the audience, there can't have been more than forty people in the whole boozer, they did their set, and that was it for me.

The difference was, we played 'Route 66' to the drunks at the bar, going, please like us. But here was this quartet who were standing there going, we don't give a toss what you think, you pricks, this is what we like to play, and this is the way we're gonna play it. Regardless of whether you like it or not. That was the difference.

Did Lydon say anything to the audience?

Yeah, he pulled out this huge snot rag and blew his nose into it, and he went, if you haven't guessed already, we're the Sex Pistols. Really, come on, you know, and they blasted into 'Substitute', or 'Submission', or something.

The material they were playing at first wasn't that different from what you were doing, was it?

No. They were doing 'Stepping Stone', which we did occasionally, but they were light years different from us. They were on another planet in another century, it took my head off. I understood that this was serious stuff, they honestly didn't give a shit. John was really thin, and kept blowing his nose between numbers. That's almost all he'd do between numbers. The audience were shocked. That's when I fell out with the rest of the group, 'cos after that I started going down to Tuesday nights at the 100 Club, it started happening there. That's when Bernie came up to me and said, give me your number, I want to give you a call about something.

That was it, the last few gigs that we had booked, the Pistols took them over. We had supported Kilburn & The High Roads at some north London college or other, and a couple of Nashville slots, but I split the group up, cos Bernie called the squat and Dan Keller, the bass player at the time, pretended to be me, and that's when I said, it's not happening. Evil was wearing Hawaiian shirts, and I was saying, look at what's happening, we've got to move with the times, and they thought I was going mad. They were probably right, but it was certainly more interesting than what we were doing.

You were suddenly faced with the present. And the future, and you had to make a decision, it was an emotional thing. It was a case of, jump that side of the fence or you're on the other side. It sorted people out. That t-shirt that Bernie designed, Which Side of the Bed? Brilliant, but it was so clear. I thought that was the finest thing he ever did.

That t-shirt was the reason that Mick Jones first spoke to Bernie. They were in the Nashville, again. Mick was looking for a piano player for the Hollywood Brats, or whatever was the name of the group he was in at the time, and he thought that Bernie might make a good piano player cos he had an interesting t-shirt. That's how they first conversed, over that t-shirt.

Anyway, Bernie called me at the squat and Dan pretended to be me, and didn't tell me about the call, we had a gig that night at the Golden Lion, Bernie and Keith Levene came down. By this time I'd fired Evil, and had Martin Stone on guitar, and I saw Bernie and Keith and went outside and spoke to him, and I decided to go with him at that moment. The next day or two I met him at Paddington and we drove to Shepherd's Bush to the squat where Paul and Keith and Mick and Viv Albertine were staying, and put the group together.

So that story about Portobello Road wasn't true?

Lisson Grove Labour Exchange? You see I was gigging around, and I'd just done a gig at Acklam Hall with the 101ers, it was a really good one, and the next morning I was signing on at Lisson Grove and I was aware that there were these people staring at me on this bench, and as I was queuing I was thinking there was going to be a ruck. It was Paul and Mick and Viv, and they'd seen me, in the weeks that Bernie had pulled Mick and Paul out of London SS and put them together, and they'd seen me at gigs around the manor, and that's why they'd been staring at me. I didn't talk to them, if they'd have come up to me, I'd have probably swung at one of them. Get it in first, 'cos when people stare at you that long, y'know, and Lisson Grove was the worst place on earth. I'd seen them but never met them, and it wasn't until Bernie drove me round.

What was it like, that squat?

Their squat was a bit nicer than the ones round here, it was above, there was an old biddy living down below, and the electricity was still in place. It looked slightly more like a normal home.

Didn't you play your first gig in Sheffield?

Yeah, the Mucky Duck at the Black Swan, supporting the Pistols. It was really funny. We had a number called 'Listen', which started with an ascending progression of a couple of bars which began the set for some reason, and Paul had never played a gig in his life, and he got up, nervous, and went right up the scale.

Why didn't you come in?

I wasn't much of a musician myself, and I was waiting for the D note or something, and he started to go up the frets one by one-it threw us right off, we all just collapsed laughing. For a while the Pistols didn't see us as a threat, cos we were mates and all part of the same scene.

And the Bernie and Malcolm connection, I suppose. By that time Malcolm and Bernie had fallen out over the swastika thing-not the chaos armband but the swastika armband, 'cos Bernie was a Jewish refugee from the oppression in Europe, or rather his mother was, so it was close enough for him to take that seriously, whereas I don't know where Malcolm came from. Malcolm didn't give a shit, he was selling Nazi memorabilia in the shop, and I also heard that Bernie was upset about the little boy t-shirt. I agree with Bernie, it was messing with things they didn't understand. At the 100 Club when Siouxsie asked to borrow our equipment for her first gig, Bernie said no, not unless you take off that swastika armband.

What were the Pistols like at the Black Swan? I get the impression they were really brilliant at those northern gigs in the summer.

They were brilliant, they were firing on all strokes. We had a sort of Roxy Music audience. The Pistols had had a few Jonh Ingham articles, right, that one in Sounds, but it wasn't a lot for people to go on. It was a Sunday and I remember being amazed that at least two or three hundred people turned up. Girls in leopard skin overcoats, the tail end of that Roxy thing, sharkskin suits, that type of thing. They were very receptive.

That must have been the best time for them, cos they were beginning to find their audience, and they didn't have all the hassle?

Yeah, they weren't expected to be Rotten. They were enjoying their music, and they were being very courageous too. Like, new numbers were coming up.

Did you talk to them much at that time?

Me and Rotten never got on. Couldn't be expected to, really. I got on very well with Glen and Steve. I still get on well with Paul. He's a nice geezer. But what impressed me with Steve, we'd have this game going where he'd come up to me with his guitar and go, what's that? He'd be holding down a chord, and I had to look at his fingers and go, it's a C ninth. That shows that Steve had probably stopped nicking them and started playing them only a year before, and yet he could do much more exciting chords than I could, I was still into, just slide your fingers up and down like that. But Steve was already into jazz shapes and inversions, he really knew his fret board. It was brilliant. And he got that sound, straight into a Fender Twin Reverb, no pedals, it was the way he hit it.

What sort of numbers had you worked out for that first gig?

I suppose some of those ones that I can't identify, 'Listen' and a few of the Clash standards. I suppose we had about ten numbers.

Did you wear the paint-spattered gear?

Yeah, we didn't have anything else. It was cheap. All the stuff about Pollock was a bit of a veneer on it, 'cos what actually happened was Bernie rented that British Rail warehouse in Camden Town and we painted it. We didn't have any overalls or anything, no clothes at all. We got all covered in paint and saw it was a good cheap way to put an image together, something to wear onstage. We didn't have the backup of the Sex boutique, Bernie had already broken away from that. Paul knew something about Pollock, he'd just come from art school.

So it was a bit like the Who, smashing up the instruments and then calling it auto-destruction?

Yeah, after the fact. But it was out of necessity. We had to adapt what stuff we could find in second-hand shops, which was really horrible. We used to take jackets round to the car spray shop in the railway arches round the corner and say, Okay Pete, give us a spray.

You were wearing that jacket in the first showpiece gig?

Then we got into stencils and stuff, I think Bernie got us into that.

How much was Bernie guiding you and packaging you?

Very much so, I would say. He said to us, write about what's important. He never actually said write about this or that, but he used to watch us rehearse and say this is good, this is bad. He was very creative, his input was everything.

Where did his ideas come from? He seems like an old-style coffee bar intellectual?

Right, he'd read all the books, knew all the trends. He probably suggested, after the Pollock business, look at Jasper Johns, and we ended up stencilling words on. I never knew much about that Situationist stuff, to this day, but he probably suggested that we write words on our clothing.

So the next gig you played was the Showcase?

Yeah, then a few gigs supporting Crazy Cavan at the Roundhouse and ULU.

What was the point of the Showcase?

Just to get a bit of press, but not many people turned up. There was about seven people there. It was quite hard to find.

How many gigs did you do with Keith?

Six or seven, I'd guess.

The fest was after Keith had left, wasn't it?

The tape was the 23rd of September, maybe August. 'White Riot' was written after the bank holiday in August, so we would have been working on it in September. Is 'White Riot' on that tape? No, we were still working on it. The reason for all the chat was that Keith broke a string, he had to go find a string, put it on and come back out, tuned up. I don't know why we didn't just kick into the next number-that's what I'd do now, 'cos we had three damn guitars. After that gig Bernie was laughing. He said, where did you get those old Johnny Rotten scripts from?

I used to always have a transistor radio with me, 'cos there were those cool pirate stations, you could flip between them. I was carrying a radio at the riot, 'cos I remember somebody tried to mug it off me. I didn't let 'em. But we didn't have spare guitars then, so I just switched on the radio and held it up to the mike. Dave Goodman was hip enough to put a delay on it, and it happened to be a discussion about the bombs in Northern Ireland, and there were some journalists who couldn't believe that it hadn't been set up. It was pure luck. I suppose, instead of having something to say. It's just reminded me what that radio was about.

We'd decided, as a question of purity, that we were never going to say anything in between numbers. It probably only lasted a few gigs, but we'd stand there all solemn in between songs, but then when someone broke a string...

Was that idea of being pure very important?

Yeah, we'd look at everything and think, is this retro? There's a picture there of the Chuck Berry is Dead shirt that I painted. If it was old, it was out.

Is that why quite a lot of these songs got the boot?

Yeah, we thought they weren't good enough. I'd forgotten they existed.

Why did 'I'm So Bored With You' change to 'I'm So Bored With The USA'?

I'd gone to the squat in Shepherd's Bush, and Mick had this riff. I thought he'd said I'm So Bored With The USA, so I jumped up and said, that's great. Let's write some lyrics. He said, it's not that, it's I'm So Bored With You. But he agreed that USA was much better. It was more interesting.

When Mick wrote it, it was a love song. But I thought it was more interesting, 'cos Kojak and all that stuff was big at the time. Columbo. That lyric's not bad, even now, although it's cave man primitive-it says a lot of truth about the dictators, Yankee dollar talk to the dictators of the world.

Ted remembers you going down to Rock On and looking for 'Junco Partner'.

By James Wayne, that's the person I learned it off. Ted's first stall was in the back of that one now. There's an interesting guy in there now that I go in and get ancient obscure records off, a guy called Mark the Ted. It's a really great store.

So what was the Screen on the Green gig like?

The Pistols were brilliant that night. We built the stage, and The Outlaw Josey Wales was playing that day, and two of us were elected to sit there and watch the gear, 'cos our gear and the Pistols' gear was underneath the stage while the film was showing during the day. I remember sitting there watching The Outlaw Josey Wales about two and a half times through, and about the third time, three black blokes shot underneath the stage trying to grab some of the gear. We leapt up, grabbed them, and hustled them out the back door-they never got anything.

We weren't very good that night 'cos we were exhausted from building that stage. We were up very early, unloading the scaffolding and building the stage.

Were they playing funny games with the sound mixers as well?

I'm not sure about that.

Somebody said they were. I remember how mean we were to the Buzzcocks, 'cos we were the London crews, and we looked at them sitting in a row thinking, you measly berks from the north, you know? There was no solidarity. Now I really like those Buzzcocks records. It shows how mean we were-we didn't think of them as part of our scene. But they were very good that night, the Buzzcocks.

That was the night that Charles Shaar Murray wrote that we were the type of garage band that should be speedily returned to the garage, preferably with a motor left running. I remember we were slightly pissed off by that.

He had to eat humble pie after that?

I read his things and think, look mate, it's not my fault your crummy rhythm and blues band didn't make it. He's beating us with that stick. Nick Kent had that same thing. I don't want to be a writer-I could never be a writer. Nick had that group, the Subterraneans.

If he hadn't been taking so much drugs, he might have made it. Nick makes me crack up.

'Cos we were taking them as well?

We were all on speed. Not that we could afford it that much, but our drug intake was financially limited. Our idea of a good time was scoring a lump of dope the size of four match heads. Now and then we'd get some blues or a little bit of sulphate, but Keith was much more pro on the speed-sometimes I'd see him with a plastic bag of resiny balls, speed in a very pure form.

Keith began to lose interest, and I lost my temper with him when he rang up and we were doing White Riot. He said, what you working on, the White Riot tune? I said, well, there's no need for me to come up then, is there? I said make that never, man.

Bernie was quite shocked when he arrived at rehearsals and you'd sacked him. Keith was always a favourite of his. When he'd come to the Golden Lion that night, he'd come with Keith. I can see now that he was worried about losing control, 'cos we'd done something without him.

You had a hole to fill in the sound, didn't you?

Mick and Keith had a competition about who was going to be the lead guitar player, so Mick was quite pleased that Keith was sacked.

Did he write anything?

The chorus of What's My Name.

It must have been just before I saw you at Fulham Town Hall. There could only have been about two hundred people at that stage, less. That was the hardcore, those in the know in the West London area. I'd been a real big Kinks and Small Faces fan, and I'd come out and I'd been waiting for it. I'd been out of London for six months and couldn't find any pub rock concerts. I didn't go to the 100 Club, the Pistols weren't playing much at that point, and me and the girl who became Poly Styrene both took speed and went along to this concert-and that was it.

At that concert, somebody asked Bernie if he was Gene Vincent!

What did it feel like doing those concerts? The Pistols weren't playing and you were coming up real fast, weren't you?

No, I don't remember noticing. We were just doing what came naturally-we had a group, a set, a will to perform. From that moment that the Pistols perceived us as a threat, out the window went punk solidarity. We still had solidarity on the Anarchy tour, but the Damned were kicked off the tour pretty sharpish. I can't remember why.

They decided to play for the councillors?

Thought crime! We had to audition to see if our stuff was decent. Imagine!

Tell me about the Notting Hill Riot?

For some reason, we weren't really aware of the carnival, but we knew it was on, so we went down to check it out. It was a lovely day. Me, Bernie, and Paul were under the Westway on Portobello Road, just grooving to the reggae. I can still see that coke can - about twenty coppers came through in a line, and I saw this coke can fly over and hit one of them on the head. Immediately, twenty more cans were in the air, and then the crowd parted to get away from the targets.

There was a whole line of cops crouching, swivelling this way and that, trying to see who they should attack. The women began to scream. Me, Bernie, and Paul were thrown back against the wire netting as the crowd surged back. I thought we were all going to fall down into this bay underneath the Westway, but the wire held. Bernie's glasses flew off. I lost Paul and Bernie for a minute.

Chaos was breaking out all over the Grove. Ladbroke Grove was lined with rebels, and cop cars were speeding through - these Rover 2000s - being pelted with rocks, cobblestones, and cans as they came through. It was like a bowling alley. I thought, fucking hell! and ducked into the Elgin and said, gimme a couple of drinks here! I downed one and took the second outside.

Standing there, I saw Paul with one of those plastic cones. A police motorcycle came bombing down the road, and Paul slung this plastic cone across the road, hitting the front wheel of the motorbike, but the rider managed to keep on the bike and carried on.

Then it was like Zulu. The coppers started coming down from the north end of Ladbroke Grove in a line, and we started chucking everything we could at them. The fight boxed into these six streets here, and we were boxed in with the rest of them. Me and Paul were standing on Lancaster Road, and I hadn't really noticed that all the white faces had gone.

Suddenly this young posse came up, and one said, "Yo man, what you got in that pocket there?" I had this transistor radio, but I also had a brick in the other pocket. I said, "Don't say that shit to me. If you're not ready to fight, what the fuck you doing here?" The posse shrank back, 'cos I was shouting really loud, and eventually an old guy came up and said, "Leave these guys alone."

Then darkness fell and it got really ugly. We trudged back to the squat. Sid was there, and we said, "Sid, where've you been? There's been a most amazing riot." Sid said, "Come on then, let's go and look again."

We went back to have a look. By that time there was a crowd of like five hundred young black guys around the Metro club. We were walking up Tavistock Road, and a black woman leaned out of her window and shouted at us, "Don't go up there boys, they're going to kill you."

We said bollocks, but another black woman came out of a basement somewhere and grabbed us. We could see there were these five hundred youths, the hard core of the hard core. They weren't fighting-they were just standing, because the police were regrouping.

That was when I realised I had to write a song called White Riot. I realised it wasn't our fight. It was the one day of the year when the blacks were going to get their own back against the really atrocious way the police behaved.

I went up on the Sunday and there was this spontaneous chant going on: "Coming, Coming, Coming Down." It was really heavy. There were police everywhere. I thought, "This isn't their party, what are they here for?" That must have been one of the first recent urban riots.

I'd never tried to set light to a car before, but there was a car flipped on its side down on Ladbroke Grove. There was a burning car a couple of blocks away, and I was admiring it, thinking, "What a lovely plume of smoke that car is making." I had a box of Swan Vestas on me, so I approached this car. Two or three young black blokes came up, and we were trying to set this car alight. We never did get it alight.

Who took the pictures there?

Rocco McAuley. He's now a porn photographer. He lived in the squat at Orsett Terrace. I was living with Palmolive-we split up before punk really happened-but we had a Spanish connection and Rocco somehow came in there.

Did you ever go down to the Sex shop?

No, it was completely off my turf. I had no idea what was going on down there. I was in the hippy squat end of the scene.

By the autumn you had Subway Sect in there as well?

Yeah, they were Bernie's discovery. Vic was always very close to Bernie's heart, much more so than the Clash ever were. They were brilliant. Bernie used to tell me he'd get demo tapes and in the middle of a song, he'd stop, and with the tape still running, he'd light a cigarette, smoke the whole thing, and then carry on from where he left off. It's a Vic thing.

Who did the posters for the ICA gigs?

Bernie. We didn't have any books.

The ICA was the famous Shane and Jane incident. Yeah. I've got a good Rocco story there. He's Spanish, he comes to England, marries a woman to stay in the country, and he's just learning English - learning that he wanted to be a photographer. The punk spirit inhabited him, and we were playing either the ICA or the RCA, I can't remember which, and he was taking photographs of us. On the second number, he was just about to take a picture when this hippy jumped onstage and started idiot-dancing. He put down his camera and went, "Will somebody get this hippy off the stage? What is this? I'm not taking a picture till this hippy gets off the stage!"

The next day he found out it was Patti Smith, and he could have sold those pictures to the music press. To me, he was the purest man in the house, because he wasn't going, "Wow, it's Patti Smith! Terrific." He didn't even know. He was seeing it true and clear: there was a hippy on the stage!

What happened at the RCA?

There was a big fight, me and Sid waded in. After bottles started coming over, we'd finished our set, but I knew as soon as we finished I was going to go over there and get stuck in. I could see roughly where it was coming from.

Was that the first time that had happened?

I think so. It was drunken, oldish students. But they were throwing glass bottles, they could have murdered somebody. I put down my guitar at the end of the last number, went straight off the side of the stage. Sid had been really supporting us. I stormed off the stage, through the swing doors into the auditorium, Sid was with me. I saw this student with a beard that I'd recognized from the stage, and hit him so fucking hard, he went down, poleaxed.

It was all dark, and somebody was going, "Hey-" and I turned round and smashed this other guy in the face. Sid was getting stuck in too. I looked round for the rest of the band, and they weren't there. Me and Sid went back after we'd sorted out these bozos, who were chicken and ran away. I said, "Where were you?" They said, "Oh, we got caught in the crowd, couldn't quite get through the glass doors!"

I remember the disco was playing "I Wanna Be Your Dog," it was perfect. It was only my second or third punk gig, and there was this fight going on in the middle of the floor. I thought, Mmm this is something new.

I think it was Edwin Pouncey playing the discs that night, aka Savage Pencil.

How did you get the name The Clash?

For about a weekend, we were called the Psychotic Negatives, then we were the Weak Heart Drops, after a lyric in a Big Youth record. Then Paul thought of the name The Clash.

I think May 2nd, '79 was when the Cost of Living EP came out. I'd designed the cover as a DAZ packet, and on the back, remember they used to have this woman holding up a sheet with a basket of washing going, "How wonderful and white my washing is!" I said to Mick, "I want to make that woman Margaret Thatcher, and I want a swastika in off-white, imperceptibly there." He went, "I'm not having politicians on rock'n'roll records!" So I dropped that idea, but I wish we'd done it, in view of what's happening now. Anyway, who cares about that.

That's where I'm ending the book, with Thatcher winning the election, and the court case. It was the end of an era, and we couldn't survive that era either. We went on and had some success in America for a couple of years, but all the fun had gone out of it, really.

Can you remember much about the CBS negotiations?

Are you kidding? We went down to sign with Polydor, and the cab took us to Soho Square instead - we were completely in the dark. We didn't know anything. Mick was the one who was sharpest about business, but we let Bernie handle everything. We were really the people we were supposed to be. What did we know about record companies and contracts?

What about the Anarchy tour? What can you remember about that?

That was when the balloon went up, because they'd done that Grundy thing, and the Sex Pistols were the hottest news in the country. The Sun and all those papers were following them around, we were confined to hotel rooms, gigs were being cancelled everywhere, and wherever the coach pulled up there was a choir of religious people singing, like from the deep south or something.

I remember going down to the bar and bringing up a tray of pints, because the Pistols definitely weren't allowed out, and they didn't want any of the musicians pumped by any of those gutter people. We felt pretty small just then, because the Pistols were front page news and we were just nothing - bottom of the bill.

The best time we had was in Bristol. We checked into this bed and breakfast, and I was so tired I fell asleep immediately - it was like four or five to a room. Meanwhile Bernie and Malcolm decided this wasn't really happening, and they walked over to the Holiday Inn, checked everybody in there, and everybody moved - but I was forgotten about, fast asleep in this bed and breakfast, till eventually Debbi came and woke me up and brought me over.

Good times were had there. They broke into the swimming pool at night - rock'n'roll madness. That was when Mickey Foot got the scar on his forehead - he got completely drunk and dived into the shallow end of the pool and split his head open on the tiles. He was staggering around, laughing his head off, blood gushing everywhere. Madness.

What was the problem you were having with your drummer at that stage, Terry?

Terry wanted to join a pop group and get a Lamborghini, your average suburban kid's dream, right? We used to have discussions, we were quite rigorous, and when he said this about the Lamborghini, it was heresy! We were laughing and jeering at him, and he took it very seriously, and one day he just didn't show up for rehearsals. He phoned up and said he quit. But he was cool enough to come and do the album with us, because we'd rehearsed the numbers with him.

You had problems finding another one, didn't you?

Yeah, all the drummers that later became known in London, we rehearsed.

Who did you do the Roxy Club on New Year's Day '77 with?

A bloke called Rob Harper, who said he was nineteen but was actually 35. Eventually he became the mentor of the New Hearts, and they dumped him, stabbed him in the back a good one. But he played a tour with us, the Anarchy tour, I think.

Did you feel that gig was in any way special?

It was special in that the club was opening, and we all felt good about that. But Johnny Thunders had just sold me his Gretsch White Falcon, because they were desperate to score.

And you had a shirt with 1977 on it, that's right when you did Harlesden, that was the first time you changed out of the paint spatter stuff?

Yeah, that was when Bernie found Alex Michon, and Paul and Bernie began to design clothes for us. We all threw our bit in. First it was just a zipper here, and it grew into pockets and D-rings and stuff. I think Bernie was probably repeating his Sex shop experience - that painting dead men's clothes wasn't really it, it had gone as far as it could. We moved one step away again.

That was the night the Buzzcocks wore their Mondrian shirts, really cool. I bet they painted that themselves.

When did you do the album, in March? You seemed to move away from personal songs to songs more about issues. Is that fair?

We'd got so involved in the lifestyle of the group that we no longer had lives to write about. I think Bob Dylan feels that today, being singer-songwriters, he hasn't really got a life to write about - it's too far removed from people's ordinary experience.

The Pistols didn't write much either after a while. After they sacked Matlock, that was the end, because Matlock was the tunesmith. That shows how crazy they were, just because he liked the Beatles, they sacked him.

With the album, were you trying to write songs about specific things, rather than just write about yourselves?

'Bored With The USA' goes on about heroin coming back in body bags, soldiers becoming addicted, and the way American foreign policy operated imperialistically on any right-wing bastard who wasn't a communist - they'd support them, you know.

Did that come from discussions within the group?

Yeah, after these discussions, Bernie would say, "an issue, an issue, we'll all fall down."

But he never told you what to write?

No, he just said, "Write about what's important, don't write about love, really. Write about what's affecting you, what's important."

To me, a really important thing was from seeing you, I had a particular image of The Clash, then you had that really good piece in the NME, with Tony Parsons - The Circle Line interview - that seemed to change it into something a lot more sociological, more to do with high-rise and tower blocks.

How did you feel about that? Did you feel that confined you?

No, when you're part of it, you're so close to it it's hard to get an overview. Sometimes I wished I could have a weekend off - not that there was anywhere to escape to - but when you're young and stupid, you don't think about anything. You just go straight ahead.

© Jon Savage, 1988

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4 Responses to “Unpublished Joe Strummer Interview Part-1”

• […] 1988 unpublished interview (in 3 parts) […]
  Joe Strummer 1952-2002 « Resurrection Neon said this on December 21, 2009
  

• I live in 23 Chippenham road and am the grown child of the squatters, my parents wee squatting here when joe strummer and Tymom were, and my mum helped run the ‘tea room’.. I remember Micky Foote being around why I was a child and the joe strummer yours are still stopping outside my house regularly… I feel privileged and want to know more
  Alys said this on September 14, 2022
  

• Great blog you have hhere
  Glen said this on March 1, 2023
  

• I wonder who your Mum was, Alys? I knew the folks in Chip road, especially Dave and gael, Tymon and Helen. I moved into 101 Walterton with a bunch of mates from Stevenage just after the band moved out. I also worked in That Tea Room. Crazy crazy times.
  Bernieman said this on February 4, 2024

The end of The Clash - by Joe Strummer

A plan to "hit up the singles scene" with a blitz of five or six releases throughout 1980 stalled at the first hurdle. The sufferation ballad "Bankrobber", featuring Jamaican DJ/toaster Mikey Dread, was recorded after a show in Manchester in February and delivered to CBS boss Mo Oberstein. In Strummer's words, the song's lyric "really twisted his clock", and he refused to release it. But after it sold steadily as a Dutch import all summer, Oberstein relented. The single was released in August, reaching Number 11 in the charts.

1980 was a year of constant touring and another management split from Blackhill. "I don't know why, man," says Joe. "They probably sent us a large bill for their services." With no one apart from former Blackhill employee, press agent, and full-time Clash fellow traveller Kosmo Vinyl to guide them, and with Paul Simonon looking after the accounts, The Clash roamed wild and free.

When they arrived back in New York during a touring break in May, the band were able to indulge their deepest - some would say barmiest - musical excesses, gleefully slipping the leash after the taut discipline of the London Calling sessions.

"That tour of America, we were really stoking - 20 hot gigs in a row. Can you imagine it? Gigs can be sort of so-so, but these were all hot. Flaming hot. Twenty of them - bam, bam, bam, one after another. We hit New York, and we blasted straight into the studio."

Joe continues:

"This is something I must recommend to other groups. Normally after a tour, we used to go home and lie down for a few weeks. But we came off that tour full of go. We had nothing written. You don't write on tour - it takes all your concentration just to survive the gig. Afterwards, you run around town to find interesting hipsters, go to all the hotspots until everything has closed down. The adrenaline is furious. You're wired as hell."

"Anyway, at the end of that tour, we'd had 20 hits - 20 cities in a row. We didn't particularly know anywhere in New York, so we went into Electric Ladyland. Every day, we just showed up and wrote phantasmagorical stuff. Everything was done in first takes, worked out 20 minutes beforehand. What we did was go to the core of what we are about - creating - and we did it on the fly. Three weeks of unadulterated joy."

"We were in New York and I never went out."

He's exhaling a joint now, thinking about what he's just said.

"I never went out in New York! I can't believe it. Maybe once, to get a beer. But it was the most beautiful time ever - to be at 8th Street, in Jimi Hendrix's studio, everything on a roll."

"You know what New York was like then? You'd get up at 10 in the morning, get a cab to go to the studio - rocketing downtown, the driver would stick his hand back with a grass joint. Cool as fuck! I was thinking, 'This is New York.' We'd play until we couldn't stand up. And it was good. I stand by that album. I'm proud of all our records. Even the crap ones."

The album that resulted was the triple vinyl opus, Sandinista!, named after the revolutionary Nicaraguan group Moe Armstrong had told them about.

Its six sides were diverse to the point of collapse - gospel, swing, jigs, skanking reggae, kiddie chorus versions of "Guns Of Brixton" and "Career Opportunities", an experimental instrumental cut-up modeled on The Beatles' "Revolution 9" called "Mensforth Hill", a waltz, a calypso, even Strummer singing scat on Mose Allison's "Look Here". Punk's "no future" credo had been swapped for an all-governing "no rules" policy.

Amid the sprawling indulgence, however, there were bright moments - notably "The Magnificent Seven", a radical departure that was perhaps the first Britrock/rap crossover. Written by Jones after a record-buying trip to Brooklyn, the track pointed toward the direction his post-Clash career would take with Big Audio Dynamite.

"Jonesy was always on the button when it came to new things," says Strummer now. "That stuff we made the week after he came back from Brooklyn with those Sugarhill records - it all still rocks. This was 1980. And I've got to say, the next year, when we played Bonds in New York, the Brooklyn crowd bottled Grandmaster Flash off our stage."

"Now they're all 'hip hop wibbly wibbly wop, it don't stop,' with the funny handshakes and all that. But when we presented it to them then - they bottled it off. Grandmaster Flash doing 'The Message', and it was bottled off."

The group's practical politics were never more evident than in their hard-won album pricing policy. As with the double London Calling, the triple-LP Sandinista! sold for the price of a single album - but only after CBS had demanded a commensurate cut in royalties.

"They said, 'If you want to put out Sandinista! you have to do it for no royalties.' So we said, 'OK, shove it up your bum, that's what we'll do. You think you're calling our bluff - we'll do it.'"

"Of course, they got even more angry when Bruce Springsteen went to them and said, 'How come those Limey tosspots are doing a triple album and I can't do a double?' and then went off and did The River."

For the two tracks with Mikey Dread, they flew down to Jamaica to record at Channel One Studios in Kingston. It was their first time on the island since writing the second album. Strummer remembers it as fun - but hairy.

"We had to run for it. We recorded 'Junco Partner', and it sounded great. All the Dreads were outside cheering. I was sitting at the piano figuring out the chords for the next song. Mikey tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Quick, we've got to go. The drugmen are coming to kill everyone!'"

"We didn't know, but we were meant to pay tithe of honour to these guys. Of course, being disorganised as ever, we didn't have a bean between us. So we jumped in a Renault station wagon - all of us, several other people and all our guitars - and we drove off down the road. But it weren't no Harder They Come-style getaway. It was more Jacques Tati."

But how much of Sandinista! - described in Uncut last year as one of the greatest long-players of all time, a paragon of eclecticism and an index of possibilities - does Strummer think really stands up to scrutiny now?

"All of it," he responds without hesitation, adding: "Ask the skinheads in Perth. They take acid and listen to it all night, the whole way through."

During the Sandinista! recording sessions in New York, The Clash met up with director Martin Scorsese, who gave the group small parts as extras in the Robert De Niro vehicle he was then making - The King Of Comedy. Not that the band made the most of their golden opportunity to star alongside one of contemporary cinema's greats.

"We loused that one big time," says an honest Strummer, still regretful after all these years. "Nil points for us that day. We were meant to interfere with the De Niro and [Sandra] Bernhard characters as they came down the boulevard. There was nothing said and suddenly there's Robert De Niro. Today, I'd know - 'Hey, get in the picture!' - but we just kind of stood there, bumbling around."

In early 1981, there was nowhere left to turn. Strummer persuaded the others to accept Bernard Rhodes back as manager.

"We were drifting and I saw my chance. We wanted some direction to the thing because Sandinista! had been a sprawling six-sided…masterpiece. You got to get out there and fight like sharks - it's a piranha pool. And I wanted to reunite the old firm, like in The Wild Bunch. Get the old gang together again and ride again. I knew we had something in us.

"We didn't know anything about anything. We were buffoons in the business world. Even Mick wanted him back, because he's not stupid and he had to admire Rhodes' ability to make things happen and, even better, to get things over."

"Did we notice the difference? Immediately. It was all his idea to go into major cities with a crew and stay there. We were always noticing that: going into town and out again was kind of unsatisfactory. So it was Bernie's idea to go in there and do seven nights - New York, Sydney, Tokyo. And we did them. The shows were great because you could hang out with people, get a feel for the place, and get the true idiots coming every night.

"When we played Paris, the English punks would come over and they got to know the French punks. There was some nice scenes in the back alleys."

Throughout the latter half of 1980, right up to November 1981, The Clash toured constantly in Europe and America - but never in Britain. During their time away, riots raged in Liverpool, London, Manchester and Bradford. As Thatcher's policies hit hard in the inner cities, the violent confrontations depicted on The Clash's debut album actually appeared to be happening.

In July 1981, The Specials' chart-topping "Ghost Town" captured the mood of urban despair, but the prevailing trends were New Romanticism and bright electro pop - Depeche Mode, Heaven 17, Adam And The Ants, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. In this climate, The Clash were derided as failed rebels, irreverent poseurs - deserters even.

Worse, they were - to deploy a derogatory term coined by Wah!'s Pete Wylie - rockist. All those nasty guitars in an era of synthesisers? Wrong time, wrong place, mate. The Clash were about to be dismissed as brutally as the punks had dismissed the hippies five years before.

With Rhodes back in the driving seat, internal divisions within the band grew. Strummer concurs with lenswoman Pennie Smith's observation that the spats were like lovers' quarrels - they ended as soon as they began - but the signs of a real split were beginning to appear.

In December 1981, Topper Headon was fined Ј500 after being busted for heroin possession at Heathrow airport.

"Unless you accept treatment, you will be the best drummer in the graveyard," warned the sentencing magistrate.

Topper's addiction signaled the beginning of the end for The Clash. It still pains Strummer to talk about how the drummer was sacked.

"Bernie said, 'He's a junkie, he has to go.' Ignorance ruled the day. We knew nothing about heroin."

In fact, it was during the sessions for 1982's Combat Rock at New York's Electric Ladyland, when Headon's addiction was becoming critical, that the drummer devised the brilliant "Rock The Casbah" - a song that Strummer dedicates to him every time The Mescaleros play it, and which became their only American Top 10 single in November '82.

"I saw it with my own eyes - Topper Headon's great talent," says an awestruck Strummer, who had been unaware of the drummer's versatility up to that point. "I swear in 20 minutes he'd laid down the whole thing: bass, drums, piano. He laid them all himself. It took other people by surprise. Jonesy really wasn't into that tune when we released it as a single. We had to persuade him a bit. I think he thought it was a bit comedic."

"When you're concentrating on the latest masterpiece you've carefully put together and someone comes up with something so fast, it can be a little… disorientating," he goes on, the hint of a sneer creeping into his voice.

Jones' "latest masterpiece" for The Clash's fifth album was "Should I Stay Or Should I Go", which would eventually top the British charts in 1991 after being revived for a Levi's advert. Years later, Paul Simonon would recall that, when the song was recorded, Jones and Strummer were barely on speaking terms. It's now read as a direct comment by the guitarist on his future in the band.

Did Joe hear it that way? "No comment." Didn't he tell you what it was about? "You do understand what 'no comment' means, don't you?"

Despite the Sandinista!-style failed experiments - the Allen Ginsberg guest spot on "Ghetto Defendant", the half-cocked rap of "Overpowered By Funk" - the best of Combat Rock showed The Clash reasserting their core values, under siege but fighting.

Far from being a fatuous exercise in gung-ho chic, "Straight To Hell" evoked a mood of fatalism and despair that ranged from dole queue Britain to Vietnam, evincing a rare blend of bruised anger and compassion for victims of war, oppression, and organised human stupidity.

Though Strummer's defiant "Know Your Rights" battle-cry received scant airplay and failed to make the singles chart in April - the same month a British fleet sailed toward the Falklands - Combat Rock itself reached Number Two.

Once-disillusioned fans rallied round the Clash flag. Reviewing the album in NME, journalist X Moore - also frontman for skinhead radical soul activists The Redskins - declared it "an inadvertent counterblast to The Falklands, too important to be lumped with the other dross, by a band too important to tear themselves apart."

According to Strummer, making the album amid simmering tensions and the usual organizational chaos had been an often exhausting and dispiriting experience.

"We were so stupid," he says. "Things got jammed up again. The company needed another album, so we ended up recording on tour. At first, it was just us knocking it out in Electric Ladyland, trying to mix it, and it sucked. We toured Australia, and each night after the show in Sydney we'd go down and mix the album. But, of course, that sucked as well. So we got back home and then we just brought [producer] Glyn Johns in. We had to beg him, really, because he didn't like producing stuff he hadn't recorded. He gave it a go and got it into a listenable shape. He saved it at the 11th hour, really. But otherwise no one knew what they were doing. They say record companies fashion shit, but in our case it was always a shambles waiting to happen."

On the eve of the Know Your Rights tour in April '82, Strummer went missing. Before I've managed to finish the sentence, "Like a rat leaving a sinking ship," he's on the defensive.

"I never left the group!" he insists, setting the record straight - a mythical interlude in a story chock-full of apocryphal rumours - once and for all. "I fucked off to Paris because Bernie Rhodes told me to. He had forgotten about the fact that we had a huge walk-up. It's something I still have. A walk-up means people who don't buy tickets for your shows up-front. You mightn't sell a huge advance. But with a walk-up you'll sell out, piss easy. For me, it's a real honourable thing to have. It means you've got hipsters in the crowds who don't plan things in advance. That's the crowd you want.

"Bernie forgot about it," he continues. "There was a gig in Inverness that wasn't sold out, but we could have filled it easy. He panicked and said, 'Someone's got to break their arm or something, you'll have to disappear.' I felt like disappearing anyway. I was supposed to call him when I went away but I thought, 'This has got to look good.' So I really did disappear."

On Strummer's return from Paris, Topper Headon was sacked from the band and old hand Terry Chimes brought back in. That's when Joe realised The Clash were as good as finished.

"I don't think, honest to God, we ever played a good gig after that," is his honest assessment now of The Clash's final phase. "Except for one night in New Jersey, we played a good one, but I reckon that was just by the law of averages. Out of a 30-gig tour, one night was OK - you've got to say it's a fluke."

At the end of 1982, supporting The Who on their farewell stadium tour, Strummer saw The Clash's future. And it was dinosaur-shaped.

"We did eight gigs in super-stadiums, all the biggest joints - LA Coliseum, Oakland Coliseum, Shea Stadium. I realised that was where we were heading and it didn't look good. We just had to crash and die. I never said nothing to nobody about it, but I was in deep shit with that in my mind."

Pennie Smith reckons The Clash fell apart in front of her eyes, as she shot the cover photo for Combat Rock on a deserted railway line in Thailand in March '82.

But first with Chimes and then with Pete Howard on drums, Strummer, Jones and Simonon fought on through a strained American tour in 1983, playing their last show together at the three-day US Festival on May 28, 1983.

That September, a Clash press release was issued, declaring Mick Jones had "strayed from the original idea of The Clash" and had been duly sacked.

"It was all my fault. I let Bernie take over," admits Strummer, ever ready to play martyr for the cause. "I think Bernie wanted to be like Malcolm [McLaren] and find out what it's like to be a musician in your own right [Rhodes' former employer had, by summer '83, reinvented himself as a pop star]. That threw us. We were musicians who never thought about being managers. So when the manager wanted to be musician, we weren't prepared for it."

"Bernie wanted to arrange and produce and shape material. I suppose it must be boring selling stuff that he had no control over. It must be frustrating, like the coach of the football team standing on the sidelines shouting, 'Pass it you c**!'"*

They must want to run in and do it themselves. "It's the same with the music world. If you're doing all the multitude of things these guys do, obviously you're going to start wanting to mess around with the lyrics, get that middle-eight over there. But I didn't see that at the time. Bernie had this sort of rule of terror, because he wanted to maintain his position. Perhaps that's what human beings are truly like. It always seems to go back to the Borgias - power struggles, the machinations of holding on to power. What we should have done after Combat Rock was take a year off. I don't know why nobody turned around and said, 'Look, you've just knocked out 16 sides of long-playing vinyl in five years, you got to take a rest.' Kurt Cobain could have done with that advice, too. Songs don't come often. I'm with The Stone Roses - let's leave a good five years between each record."

And yet, even with Jones gone, there was little time to rest. Strummer returned with a back-to-basics street punk incarnation of The Clash in 1984. Waging war on pretty boy pop, they went on a busking tour and announced that drugs were out.

"That was Bernie's new regime. It didn't last long. After two weeks, we were gagging for it."

Dramatic changes in Strummer's personal life - he became a father for the first time, his dad died suddenly and his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer - undoubtedly allowed Rhodes to gain increased control. A sense of desperation was fuelling him as the band seemed to be imploding, defeated by forces they'd once set out to conquer.

He recalls writing "This Is England", the last great song to go under The Clash's name, on one string of a ukulele, "feeling like a no-good talentless fuck." He didn't even get to hear Rhodes' atrocious mix of the Cut The Crap album until it was released in November 1985.

By then, The Clash were nearly over. They were finally declared dead in December '85.

Almost immediately, Strummer went to see Jones in the Bahamas, where he was working with Talking Heads' Tina Weymouth. Over the course of a long weekend, they got burgled, witnessed a near-fatal car smash, and ended up in a crack house looking to score weed. Strummer's apologies were accepted, and personal difficulties were patched up. But his old partner was doing fine with BAD and didn't want to relive the good old bad old days.

Indeed, subsequent attempts to reform The Clash have always been initiated by Strummer, not Jones - to which he readily admits.

"Yeah," he says, "but I'm not that big on pride, you know? Mick had more occasion to be proud because of what happened and the way it had ended. I had to eat humble pie. I deserved to."

Back-stabbing, bullying, busking: how The Clash disintegrated

(Image credit: Brian Rasic / Getty Images)

The official statement, released September 10, 1983, was brief and blunt: 'Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon have decided that Mick Jones should leave [The Clash]. It is felt that Jones drifted away from the original idea of the group...'

If you had asked anyone in the know, they would have told you that The Clash were dead long before that axe fell. The band had divided into two camps - Mick Jones on one side and everyone else on the other. Strummer, Simonon and manager/svengali Bernie Rhodes constantly rowed with Jones over contentious issues like tour schedules, album lengths and The Clash's musical direction.

Jones had also become obsessed with the New York hip-hop scene and was growing tired of his second banana role in the band. On-stage, Jones had reinvented himself as The Clash's co-lead singer. Off-stage, he spent his time messing around with beatboxes and synthesisers while his Les Paul collection gathered dust in the corner.

On Jones' insistence, a brief holiday break in 1982 had stretched into a nine-month indolence. Not only was nothing being worked on, but the boys were not on speaking terms. The Clash's only activity in 1983 was a mini-tour leading up to an appearance at the mammoth, three-day Us Festival in California.

The Clash were a man short at the time. Drummer Topper Headon had been sacked the year before and his predecessor/replacement Terry Chimes signed up for the Combat Rock tour but chose not to stay on. Following a series of auditions, an astonishingly powerful and prodigious 23-year-old from Bath named Pete Howard came onboard to slam the cans. But Pete was soon to discover that this dream gig was more like a nightmare. The Clash's ongoing, behind-the-scenes dysfunction was not going to make his job an easy one.

Pete: "After the auditions, they basically just said, 'Go away and learn everything.' Not 'these songs' - everything. We had some rehearsals in Notting Hill, and basically Mick wouldn't turn up. If he turned up at all, he would turn up three hours after everyone else had. The tension between Mick and Joe was palpable."

After the Us Festival, the band did very little. "I didn't get a phone call for four months," says Pete Howard. "And then all of a sudden I got this incredibly fucking vitriolic phone call from Joe, saying 'I fuckin' sacked the stoned cunt! Whose side are you on, mine or his?' And I was like, 'Uh-uh-uh… yours, Joe, yours!'"

The band wasted little time in replacing Mick. A series of auditions were held at The Clash's rehearsal space, Lucky 8. The lucky applicant was 24-year-old Nick Sheppard, former guitarist for 70s punk act The Cortinas. Marathon rehearsals were held and over a dozen new Strummer songs were worked on.

"It was more a back to basics approach, after the excesses of Mick's last days," says Sheppard, "[Joe's new songs] were far more of an eclectic bunch of tunes than we ended up with. Lots of world music influences - Latin, African grooves - that kind of thing."

However, 'that kind of thing' wasn't what Rhodes had in mind for the new Clash. 'Back to Basics' was soon upgraded to 'Back to Punk Rock', or 'Rebel Rock' as Joe rechristened it. After a couple weeks of rehearsals, another new guitarist, Gregory "Vince" White, was brought on board. The new Clash became a three-guitar band.

A middle-class boy from a wealthy family, 'Vince' was 'punked'. "Vince's real name is Greg," says Sheppard, "but he was told that he had to change it because it wasn't cool enough. Paul said, 'Name me one cool guy called Greg.' To which Vince instantly replied, 'Gregory Isaacs' [aka 'the Cool Ruler']. That shut everyone up!"

A rowdy new batch of face-punching rants was eventually chosen to be played on tour. Three Card Trick, Jericho, Are You Ready For War, The Dictator, Sex Mad War, Glue Zombie and This Is England displayed rockabilly, funk, reggae, surf and Brazilian influences, but were wrapped up in an iron-hard blanket of guitar aggro that strongly recalled second album Give 'Em Enough Rope.

"I felt a similarity of intent between the new songs and that era, although it was never specifically mentioned," says Nick. "I think the twin Les Paul sound lent itself very well to that style, and songs from that period translated very quickly to the new set-up. Bernie was adamant that we both play Les Pauls: he wanted the Pistols' guitar sound."

After rehearsals, Joe would subject his new band to marathon pub sermons. Strummer was a man on a mission - a mission to save the world from Ronald Reagan and Duran Duran. Combat Rock's success had done nothing but bolster Strummer's messianic complex. The mandate of the new Clash was nothing less than total revolution.

Seeking to secure the Clash name, a mini-tour was booked in Southern California in January '84, a mere few weeks after the new line-up had been in existence. Despite touring without record company support, the dates received a substantial amount of press attention, adding to the pressure on Strummer to make it all work.

The credit or blame for the new Clash would fall solely on his shoulders, and he was touring with a band unaccustomed to large venues. Of the new members, only Howard had played to more than 200 people. And as if there wasn't enough pressure to begin with, Mick's zealous legal team harassed the new Clash at every turn, seemingly just out of spite.

"The pressure on Joe was big," says Pete Howard. "I mean, fucking hell, Bob Dylan came back to see him after we played. And Joe - he was crying. There was a lot to take on. In that respect, I can understand why he had to see himself as being in fighting form. He believed in Bernie as his trainer, very much like a boxer."

Nick: "I always thought we should have done some commando-style secret club gigs before we played any halls or arenas. If you've never played those big stages, there's a lot of adjusting to do."

Without a record to promote and no corporate advertising, most gigs were not on the scale of the 1982 US tour. Except in San Francisco. There the new Clash played to a capacity crowd of over 10,000 gone-apeshit fans. San Francisco was chafing under Ronald Reagan's rule and the new Clash were treated as conquering heroes. It should come as no surprise that a Clash-influenced punk scene emerged not long after in the Bay Area.

After California, the band flew to Europe and found that The Clash were superstars on the continent. They were front-page news in the European music press and headlined larger venues than they were used to playing in the US and UK. Then, in late February, while preparing to play the first of two nights at Milan's Palasport stadium, Joe received news that his father had died.

"I only saw my father once a year [after being sent to boarding school]," Joe had told the LA Times in December 1983. "He was a real disciplinarian, who was always giving me speeches about how he had pulled himself up by the sweat of his brow: a real guts and determination man. What he was really saying to me was, 'If you play by the rules, you can end up like me.' And I saw right away I didn't want to end up like him."

The Clash live at the Brixton Academy, 1984 (Image credit: Getty Images)

Strummer's relationship with his family was strained. Joe once said that if he had seen his father more than once a year he "probably would have murdered him." His only sibling, brother David, had succumbed to mental illness and committed suicide in 1971. In his increasingly volatile state of mind, this latest tragedy was the last thing Strummer needed.

"When we were in Milan, Joe was fucking mental," remembers Howard. "He stayed up for about three days drinking bottle after bottle of brandy, and berating everyone around him for their weaknesses, and just really fucking losing it. We had a couple of days off or something, and we didn't see him. And then he came back. We were all soundchecking and Vince was pissing and moaning saying, 'I can't hear my fucking guitar in the monitor.' And it led to an argument. Bernie was going, 'Look at you. You're so fucking pathetic. You're so middle-class, you're so fucking weak.' He said, 'Look, this guy here's just fucking buried his father, and you don't hear him talking about it, do you?' I remember that time very clearly as being among the worst."

"I didn't find out what had happened until the next day," says Nick. "He didn't know us that well, so I guess he didn't feel comfortable sharing his hurt with us."

In the UK, the pressure was even more intense. For the past four years, the press slagged The Clash for abandoning punk and now they were slagging them for returning to it. Though the NME admitted through gritted teeth that the tour was a 'lightning sell-out', long time Clash-basher Gavin Martin dismissed a Brixton date as 'the heaviest and most orthodox rock show I've ever seen The Clash play.'

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"After the first album, The Clash hardly ever got good press," says Sheppard. "Have a look at the recent NME collection of Clash articles."

The critics were also put off by the paramilitary ambience of the new Clash shows and what Lola Borg of Record Mirror described as their fans' 'total hero worship'. Strummer also had a beef with The Clash's fans due to the revival of 'gobbing' (the charming punk custom of honouring your favourite band by spitting on them). Strummer had contracted hepatitis in 1978 from a well-aimed gob, and following the death of his father he had no intention of humouring this repugnant ritual. After facing a nightly rain of phlegm, Strummer's string snapped. Towards the tour's end, he singled out a gobber and, well, threatened to kill him.

A bootleg of the Brixton Academy gig, March 16, 1984, captures his rage: "Are you a gobber? Have you spat on me? Well, get the hell off here then, you berk!" he shouts from the stage. "Listen! I'm prepared to murder someone tonight! I don't give two fucks! I want some fucking human respect - when I clear my throat, I do it on the floor! I'm serious! I'm prepared to kill someone! I don't give a fuck anymore! Blood - if you want it, let's have it! Let's get down to it! And fuck the lot of you!"

Following this drama, the band then returned to the US for a relentless two-month jaunt. Having experienced several difficult tours, Joe and management laid down the law to the new lads. Joe, obsessed with military metaphors, repeatedly referred to his band in interviews as his 'new recruits' and his 'new platoon'. Bernie, for his part, saw himself as The Clash's drill instructor.

(Image credit: Getty)

Pete: "There was a lot of [the attitude that] when you're on the road, that's it. You don't contact your fucking family. If you do, you're a pussy. No girlfriends on tour, we don't want women around. Bernie used to frequently talk about boxers not being allowed to fuck their wives before a fight. And I do understand where that comes from, because if you're going to look at yourself in the world arena, then you have to be up for the competition."

But Bernie was also more abrasive and abusive. "He'd ask questions like 'What would you do with a million dollars?' to which every answer proved you were an idiot," says Nick. "I stared at his 'new' nose and said I'd have my ears pinned back. It was like being hauled into the headmaster's office, and served as much purpose."

Pete: "It was constantly, every day, 'Right, tonight you're going to wear sunglasses.' And then after that show, it was like, 'You look like a wanker in sunglasses. Never wear them again.' I remember having an argument with [Clash road manager] Kosmo Vinyl once. I was saying, 'This is like being in the fucking Moonies. You've got this fucking dwarf Buddha standing up there handing out dictums, and you have to follow them. I don't think like that, I don't want to live that way.' And he just said, 'That is how it is. You take it with Bernie or you don't take it at all.' And then he went on to tell the story about Bernie turning Joe from a nothing to a something. And he said, 'If you don't believe that Joe is an iconic figure, then that's your issue. But most of the world who know of him do believe that, and Joe believes that Bernie made him that.'"

For all of his middle class pedigree, Vince White was the wildest card in the deck. Though picked primarily for his Townshend-like antics during his audition, Vince had the chops to back up his pose. But there was something feral about him, a hint of barely suppressed violence in his perpetual smirk. Bernie would soon discover he got more than he bargained for when he brought Vince aboard.

"Bernie was going out with this kind of crazy wild-child girl from Detroit who was probably a third his age," says Sheppard. "We were all in a restaurant, everyone was there around the table. And this girl had been flirting around a bit for days. Anyway, she got up and went out. Then Vince, about two minutes later, got up and went out. And when they both came back in, [we knew] they'd been fucking in the car park. I don't know if Bernie sussed it or not, but he didn't give it away.

"My bedroom in the hotel was next to Bernie's, and me and Nick could hear this argument beginning, so we basically brought everyone in, and we were all in my bedroom leaning against the wall, pissing ourselves laughing at Bernie, with that 'ridiculouth lithp' of his, going 'You slag, you fucked my fucking bird? You slag!' To be honest, my respect for Vince went up quite considerably after he'd done that. It was one in the eye from all of us, really."

Nick: "Bernie brought Vince in as 'The Punk' and got what he asked for."

As the tour progressed, Joe introduced subtler tracks from Sandinista! and Combat Rock into the set. Under the heavy duty discipline, the once-ragged band had matured into a raging, razor-sharp, rock'n'roll leviathan. "We were definitely a heavier, more hard rock proposition than the previous incarnation," says Nick. "Our versions of Broadway, Magnificent 7 and Rock The Casbah didn't mess about."

The boys in the band, White, Simonon, Sheppard and Strummer (Image credit: Getty Images)

The reviews praised the power of the band, but questioned the relevance of punk in 1984. Which is not to say punk wasn't still in favour with the punters. The band's entrance into the mainstream had brought a younger and more athletic audience whose approval was often displayed through acts of mayhem. Near-riots broke out at venues in Philadelphia, Chicago and Providence. But as the tour progressed, nerves began to fray. Like the original Clash, the new band soon discovered that Rhodes' Spartan ideals didn't apply to himself: he flew between gigs, while the band spent "three months in a fucking Greyhound bus because we were so fucking middle class that we were used to luxury."

"[That sort of suffering] doesn't make you into an elite, mean killing machine. It just makes you angry," says Pete. "We were at a soundcheck at a gig and Bernie just said something that was just one thing too fucking far, and I just left and packed my bag. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't leave at that point because I would have liked to have fucked Bernie over, for him to have to cancel gigs. But he actually curled around my legs like a fucking cat: 'You know, you've got to understand the pressures, we really value you being in it, blah blah blah.' Two days later, he was being exactly the same all over again."

The band had some good times, too. "We saw Black Flag in Atlanta. We had other great days off in Chicago, Kansas City and Detroit,"* says Sheppard. "Shopping, eating soul food, watching protest marches, being taken out by great looking girls - I've had worse jobs, believe me.

"In Philadelphia, we stayed at the same hotel as The Grateful Dead*. When I got on the bus in the morning neither Joe nor Kosmo had been to sleep, and Joe had this pillow of 'hippy hair': Kosmo had set up a Mohawk barber service in the Dead's entertainment suite and cut mohawks all night!"

Paul Simonon, who had chafed under Mick's excesses, enjoyed his time with the new Clash and acted as a mentor to them. Pete:

"Everybody was sort of muttering, 'If Joe could get away from Bernie, then this thing could be really good.' And Paul was very much of that party. He'd never really stick his neck out about it, but he was one of us mutterers who were going on about Bernie the whole time."

The band returned from their US marathon, ready to go into the studio and do the album. But then came the news that Joe's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Right on the heels of his father's death, the news sent Joe into an emotional tailspin and The Clash's back was broken for good. Joe left the band to fend for themselves. A mini-tour of Italy in September was undertaken without Joe rehearsing with the band.

Joe's sole preoccupation in the second half of 1984 was tending to his dying mother. The Clash withered without his involvement. Rhodes took advantage of Joe's plight and finally seized his long-sought "complete control" of The Clash. He booked a studio in Munich to record a new Clash album, the notorious Cut The Crap.

Most of the backing tracks were assembled by anonymous studio musicians, using the very synthesisers and drum machines that led to Mick Jones' dismissal. Pete Howard was replaced by some dolt with a drum machine, which was like replacing a Maserati with a Matchbox. When White and Sheppard were finally summoned to provide guitar overdubs, they were stunned to discover that the album was nearly complete.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Inevitably, Joe and Bernie soon fell out. Rhodes took the master tapes from the Munich sessions and disappeared. Boxed in by his new contract, Joe was powerless to stop him. He went so far as to track down Mick Jones in the Bahamas and beg him to rejoin The Clash, only to be rebuffed. The album was one of the most disastrous ever released by a major artist and a complete failure artistically and commercially.

To get out of a depression, the band went on a 'busking tour' of the north of England in May '85. Paul Simonon later called it one of the band's best times, but it couldn't last. Strummer called a band meeting in October.

"We sat down, and Joe said, 'It's over'," says Pete Howard. "He gave us a thousand pounds each. I said, 'You followed Bernie's advice, and this is where it got you.' He said, 'Yeah, I know.'"

In 1999, Joe tore himself out of his 10-year retirement, formed a new group and called them the Mescaleros with strong parallels with Clash II: the mix of new, Clash-like material and Clash favourites, along with the multi-guitar frontline, was taken right from Joe's 1984 playbook. After an appearance in Australia in 2001, Joe hooked up Nick Sheppard and healed old wounds.

"Joe apologised for what happened," says Sheppard. "I told him I didn't regret a moment. I know we were never the 'classic' Clash, but I've moved on, made some great music, and have a great life."

Now playing with the highly regarded indie band Queen Adreena, Pete Howard never had the opportunity to square things with Joe. While recording a new album with the Mescaleros, Joe died in his home just before Christmas 2002.

"Before he died, Joe said something in an interview. He said, 'I felt really sorry for Pete, Vince and Nick, because you had a chemistry between four people that worked really well, and there was no way anyone could have replaced that.'

"And I felt somewhat exonerated by that. Because I was limping, mentally, for a while."

Last Man Standing

In 1999, bassist Paul Simonon - the only member of The Clash who was in the band from the beginning until the bitter end - spoke about the last days of The Clash.

"How did it feel after Topper left? A bit empty. I mean, we didn't realise that you were supposed to go on holiday and have a break from each other. We just worked non-stop really, from day one onwards. Inevitably it's gonna catch up on you. Me and Joe were just pretty much sick of waiting for Mick to turn up and problems with his reliability and we just said, 'Well, sod it.' And that was it - we just asked him to leave.

"But it was interesting in a way 'cos one time in rehearsal, Joe got a piece of chalk and drew a line on the floor and said, 'On this side there's the musicians, and on this side there's the entertainers.' And it was Topper and Mick on one side and me and Joe on the other. It was like: so there's a few wrong notes - who cares, really? We want to see some people jumping around, we wanna see some excitement, we wanna be entertained, not us all standing dead still getting it all right. You may as well listen to the record.

"I suppose the end really came when Mick was out of the group. 'Cos with drummers we always had this sort of: they were there, and then they weren't. But when Mick was out that was a big change because the musician of the group had left."

Simonon and Bowie backstage at Shea Stadium, 1982 (Image credit: Getty Images)

"But then again, after Mick left, we had a pretty good time. We did loads of shows around America with these new guys, and we did the 'Busking Tour' which was really exciting [in May 1985, The Clash hitchhiked and busked around the north of England, at one point following Clash-copyists The Alarm from gig to gig]. Why did we choose the Alarm? Why not? Just to wind them up, really.

"It was just being playful. We didn't ever speak to them - they were probably very pissed off. Their bouncers were trying to get rid of us, red paint was chucked at us - it just made it more exciting. It was the last thing we should have done, really, but we had a lot of fun - it was as exciting as the Anarchy tour. You didn't know where you were going to go next or what was gonna happen and I really enjoyed that.

"I think the last show we played was probably in Greece at some festival and that was really great. We had three guitars by that point, so it gave me a bit more space in some ways. I'd been practising break-dancing for some reason and in the middle of The Magnificent 7, I took the bass off and started spinning around. We were just so comfortable on stage by that point, it didn't matter - it just mattered that people got a good show."

- Interview: Scott Rowley

The Clash Albums Ranked From Worst To Best - The Ultimate Guide

Chris Knowles

Chris Knowles is the author of the novel He Will Live Up in the Sky. He is also the author of The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll: The Mysterious Roots of Modern Music, the Eagle Award-winning Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes (RedWheel Weiser), and the critically-acclaimed Clash City Showdown: The Music, The Meaning and The Legacy of The Clash.

He's co-author of The Complete X-Files: Behind the Series, the Myths, and the Movies (Insight Editions), the authorised companion to the long-running TV series.

THE FURY POWER OF THE CLASH

HOW THE ANGER THAT FUELED THE ONLY BAND THAT MATTERED ALSO TORE IT APART

BY MIKAL GILMORE MARCH 3, 2011 rollingstone.com ROLLING STONE page 60

Contributing editor MIKAL GILMORE wrote about the Beatles in RS 1086.

THE CLASH THE MOMENT THAT BEST EXEMPLIFIED THE CLASH didn't come in England, where they helped tear rock & roll history in half. Nor in America, where they fought for a recognition that, once won, helped pull them apart. Instead, it took place in August 1977, at a music festival in Liиge, Belgium. The band was playing before 20,000 people and had been under fire from a crowd that was throwing bottles at the stage. But that wasn't what bothered lead singer Joe Strummer. What enraged him was a 10-foot-high barbed-wire fence strung between concrete posts and forming a barrier between the group and the audience - dividing, as one reporter put it, the privileged from the less privileged. "Why is this space here?" the singer demanded to know. Strummer jumped from the stage and attacked the fence, trying to pull it down, while guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon played on warily. Festival stage guards dragged Strummer back, while the Clash's crew struggled to pull security off Strummer. Later, Simonon told writer Chris Salewicz, "It didn't seem like a gig. It was more like a war."

The Clash were the only performers at the show who tried to do anything about the obstacle. They were more willing to run the risk of the crowd than to tolerate barbed wire that was meant to fend off that crowd. This is more or less what the Clash were about: fighting the good fight that few others would fight. They first made their mark in British music in early 1977 with "White Riot," a provocative song about frustration with brutal authority. It was the time of the Sex Pistols, the band that spearheaded punk as a musical and cultural uprising that blazoned discontent with British society. The Clash would outlast the Sex Pistols and come to epitomize punk, then outdistance the movement with sounds and ambitions all their own, until the band's effective end in 1983. Along the way, they asserted the boldest political worldview of any artists in popular music's history, moving from the narrow obsessions of U.K. punk sedition to the fiery reality of the world outside. The first time I met the band - in London, Christmas week, 1978 - Strummer told me, "We're trying to do something new; we're trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we're trying to be radical - I mean, we never want to be really respectable and maybe the two can't coexist, but we'll try."

But the Clash's story isn't just about ideals. It is also about power, who has it and who doesn't in the real world, and in the band. By the time the Clash's mission was done, they had suffered derision, heartbreak and betrayal, at their own hands. "[As] it got bigger and bigger," Strummer said years later, "I felt worse and worse. It had something to do with what those songs are saying."

★★★ "WE'RE TRYING TO BE THE BIGGEST GROUP IN THE WORLD AND RADICAL AT THE SAME TIME," SAID STRUMMER. "MAYBE THE TWO CAN'T COEXIST." ★★★

MICK JONES, JOE STRUMMER and Paul Simonon - the three enduring members of the band - each came from disrupted family lives, the sort of privation that would cause them to form a new union, but also never to fully trust that union. Jones, who wrote and arranged much of the band's music, was born in June 1955 to parents who quarreled intensely. "They had a bomb shelter in the basement of the flats," Jones recalled in Don Letts' documentary Westway to the World. His grandmother would take Mick down to the shelter when they argued, "and we'd wait for the raid to pass." When he was eight, Mick's parents divorced and his mother moved to the United States, leaving Mick in the care of his grandmother. "Psychologically," he said, "it really did me in." In 1968, Jones found recompense in the guitar power that he heard in Cream's Disraeli Gears, though in the years that followed he favored the more unkempt sounds of the Rolling Stones and Mott the Hoople, and American bands like the MC5, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. He took up guitar seriously in 1972, with the aim of forming a raunchy band. In early 1975, he founded the group London SS - a workshop unit more than anything else.

That same year, Mick Jones met Bernard Rhodes during a rock & roll show at a dingy pub. Rhodes - in some ways the most crucial and troubling figure in the Clash's story - was the son of a Jewish woman who fled Germany in 1945 while pregnant with Bernard, who was born in London's East End (according to Clash biographer Pat Gilbert, Rhodes' mother bought a birth certificate on London's black market to establish his citizenship). Rhodes never knew his father, and perhaps that lack played a part in the curious dynamic that later developed between him and Joe Strummer. When Mick Jones met him, Rhodes was printing T-shirts for conceptualist entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren at the controversial rock & roll boutique Sex, on London's King's Road. Both McLaren and Rhodes had been enamored of the Situationists, a Marxist movement that promoted provocative art ideas as the means to political change and that played a part in the May 1968 Paris revolts. McLaren wanted to apply Situationist principles to London's rock & roll scene, which had grown out of touch with Britain's social realities. He'd been looking to the New York scene that produced Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Talking Heads and, perhaps most important, the Ramones, who created the breakneck template for punk. McLaren was determined to relocate that new sound and attitude to London, yet recast it for a disruptive cultural impact aimed at British social mores and the rock status quo. He found his means in the Sex Pistols, a band assembled by a Sex shop regular, guitarist Steve Jones. Once Rhodes introduced McLaren to John Lydon, an otherworldly singer with a strange charisma soon to be known as Johnny Rotten - the Sex Pistols were ready to move into notoriety and legend. However, McLaren pushed Rhodes away from any oversight of the band. There was a competitive edge between the two men, and McLaren - who envisioned orchestrating the new scene that would outrage popular music - wasn't eager to share the moment.

Rhodes, though, didn't intend to take a minor role in this cultural event; he wanted a band of his own to mastermind. In Mick Jones, he saw a quick learner with a necessary core belief that rock & roll should work as an agitation. Some of the musicians who moved in and out of Jones' London SS were also part of the scene around the Sex Pistols, including Keith Levene, an early guitarist in the Clash. Rhodes was looking for an equivalent to Johnny Rotten, and Jones hoped he'd found that person in Paul Simonon, a lanky young man with craggy good looks. Like Jones, Simonon came from a broken family. His parents separated when he was seven, and in his teens, he lived with his father, an art teacher and devoted communist. Though Paul once proclaimed, "Art is dead it's not the way to reach the kids; rock & roll is," he would also become an art expert, and eventually oversaw much of the Clash's graphic design. When Jones met Simonon in late 1975, he liked the soft-spoken young man's look - cowboy boots; short, swept-up hair; oblivious gait - but Simonon could only chant off-key. Still, Rhodes persuaded Jones to teach him bass guitar: Simonon possessed an insouciant cool that surpassed immediate musical talent.

Others came and went. In 1976, drummer Terry Chimes joined, and in that same year, guitarist Keith Levene would leave. Mick Jones was shaping up as a prolific songwriter, but he didn't have a feral voice, which was what Rhodes wanted: a frontman who could tell hard truths unflinchingly.

IF YOU LOOK AT FILMS OF STRUMMER from his childhood (bits can be glimpsed in Julien Temple's 2007 film Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten), you see a playful, frenetic boy mugging before a camera. Even in still images posing with his father, Ronald Mellor, his mother, Anna, and brother, David, 18 months Joe's senior - there's an irrepressible rascal in the young Strummer's face. The mischief stayed with Strummer, but along the way, a wary and haunted quality overshadowed him. His eyes were always flitting, maybe looking for something to trust, or looking for an escape route.

Strummer's father was an English diplomatic officer, his mother a diplomat's wife. It was not a wealthy family, though Ronald's work took the family to faraway places - Cairo, Mexico City, Bonn and Ankara, Turkey, where Strummer was born on August 21st, 1952, as John Mellor. In 1961, concerned that all the travel might prove a detriment to their sons' educations, the Mellors left Joe and David at a London boarding school. Joe felt that his parents had abandoned him and David in an environment that brought out a hardened side in him, and a painful remoteness in his brother. Years later, Strummer talked about how the experience had shaped his worldview: "Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom," he said. "But I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control, and it didn't have any inherent wisdom."

When he was a teenager, Strummer found morale in the same sort of sources that had heartened Mick Jones. In particular, he said, the Rolling Stones' 1964 single "Not Fade Away" transformed him. "That's the moment I thought, 'This is completely opposite of all the other stuff we're having to suffer here.... I decided, 'Here is at least a gap in the clouds.'" Strummer would need the uplift. In the summer of 1970, his brother, David - who, to Joe's dismay, had an attraction to England's neo-fascist movement, the National Front - went missing. A few days later, David's body was found under a bush in London's Regent's Park; he had taken a massive overdose of aspirin. The news of his elder brother's suicide, and the impact of making the formal identification of the body, left Strummer unsettled in ways he could never discuss fully. When punk later became Strummer's means and purpose, he never subscribed to the nihilism some found so romantic. Joe's own anger and grief cut too deep for him to surrender to the romance.

PHOTO: FROM TOP: D BOB GRUEN/WWW.BOBGRUEN.COM: ALLAN BALLARD/SCOPEFEATURES.COM PHOTO: ALL THE YOUNG PUNKS Mick Jones (top) at the Santa Monica Civic Arena, 1979. Above: Joe Strummer, Jones, Topper Headon and Paul Simonon (from left) in November 1977.

Of oblivion, because of the day he'd had to identify the cold reality of it lying in a London morgue. After school, Strummer made a career out of an itinerant life. In 1972, he began playing an acoustic guitar and singing folk songs in London subway stations for spare change, and in 1974, he joined the city's radical squatters' movement, taking over an abandoned residence at 101 Walterton Road and making it livable, rent-free. The collective became the foundation for the 101ers, a band that began by playing early rock & roll and R&B songs. At that time, several back-to-basics rock & roll groups were cropping up at London's small bars and taverns, in a pub-rock scene that included Dr. Feelgood, Eddie and the Hot Rods, and the loose and slapdash 101ers. Joe-who now took on the name Strummer, in deference to his limitations as a guitarist-proved a rough-hewn singer; his several misshapen teeth had given him a guttural embouchure. But he had a galvanic sense of rhythm and an impassioned R&B-informed delivery that made the 101ers a prime draw. In March 1976, Strummer wrote and sang lead vocals on the 101ers' single, "Keys to Your Heart," for Chiswick Records. But in April, Strummer began questioning the band's future, after seeing the Sex Pistols open a show for the 101ers. "As soon as Johnny Rotten hit the stand... the writing was on the wall," Strummer recalled in Chris Salewicz's 2006 biography, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer. "I realized immediately that we were going nowhere, and the rest of my group hated them. They didn't want to watch it or hear anything about it."

By May 1976, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Keith Levene had taken note of the 101ers-in particular, the dynamic lead singer. During a chance meeting on a London street, Jones told Strummer he'd seen him perform with the 101ers; Jones didn't care much for the band, but he thought Strummer was "great." Around this time, Levene took Rhodes to see the 101ers at a pub show, and afterward, backstage, the manager asked Strummer if he wanted to become lead singer for a new punk band that would rival the Sex Pistols. Rhodes gave Joe 48 hours to decide. Within 24, Joe Strummer joined The Clash.

IN 1976, BRITISH PUNK - WHICH HAD burgeoned as a result of the Sex Pistols - was an argument for new intense possibilities, and one of its tenets was to dismiss the past. Joe Strummer was ready for it. "The day that I joined the Clash," he later said, "was very much back to square one, Year Zero. We were almost Stalinist in the way that you had to shed all your friends, or everything that you'd known, or every way that you'd played before."

Bernard Rhodes gave the band an urgent decree: "Write about what's important," he said. "The thing was to be relevant," Strummer said later, "to have some kind of root in human existence." Paul Simonon made another invaluable contribution: He gave the band its name, after noting how often the word cropped up in daily news to describe increasing social and political conflicts in England. "I didn't just stumble upon it," he told Chris Salewicz. "We were so highly attuned to what we needed by then that the word leapt out at me from the pages of the paper." The Clash played their first show on July 4th, 1976, opening for the Sex Pistols. They were kinetic from the start, lurching and crashing about the stage in unruly movements, Strummer pumping his right arm and leg in unison at impossibly high-speed rhythms, working himself into an exhausted frenzy, clinging to his microphone stand so he could stay on his feet.

This was probably punk's most daring and exciting season, but there were occasional impulses that allowed ugly risks, including sporadic melees at shows. A greater concern was that a few regulars in London's punk scene began wearing Nazi fashion as a means to offending British sensibility. When Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees, on the same bill with The Clash at London's 1976 Punk Festival, showed up wearing a swastika armband, Rhodes refused to let her play with The Clash's equipment unless she removed the armband. Siouxsie's display had been a foolish and inexcusable gesture, especially given England's sociopolitical atmosphere at the time. The right-wing, often openly racist National Front was on the rise in the mid-1970s and had fought violently with leftist groups in London's streets. Many punks hadn't yet thought through the political implications of their movement, but The Clash already knew which side they stood on. In August 1976, after witnessing London police provoke a confrontation in a largely Black community-resulting in Britain's worst riot in almost two decades-Joe Strummer found his voice. In the song "White Riot," he pursued the truths underneath the incident:

"All the power's in the hands / Of the people rich enough to buy it... / Are you taking over / Or are you taking orders?"

With "White Riot"-the band's first single, in March 1977-The Clash seized ground as punk's moral center. Whereas the Sex Pistols addressed a darkness at the heart of all things-a rock & roll equivalent of Beyond Good and Evil-The Clash still envisioned a good despite evil. Johnny Rotten sang magnificently of an angry negativism, but it could be taken as a permission to something dead-ended. By contrast, Joe Strummer depicted cut-off lives trapped in tower tenements, minorities and young people subject to authoritarian power systems, bristling to make a hope of their own-even if it meant pushing back. On the back of the "White Riot" single sleeve, The Clash ran a quote from a flier for a controversial art exhibition of a few months before:

"A clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled."

This is how The Clash announced themselves to the world.

THE CLASH'S increasing prominence would also challenge their credibility in unanticipated ways. In January 1977, Rhodes signed the band to CBS Records for £100,000. CBS was one of the biggest labels in the world, and the idea of endorsing a renegade act like The Clash bothered many at the company. Maurice Oberstein, managing director of CBS's U.K. division, dismissed those misgivings.

"There was a level of hysteria in the music industry that this is a music that we shouldn't be involved in," he told Jon Savage in England's Dreaming, a history of early punk in the U.K. "There is an inherent fear of the unknown... It seemed perfectly natural: I'd seen Elvis and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Suddenly, there was another bunch of screamers. The record companies are in business to make money, and I saw the potential that these artists had to be on our label rather than some other label... I wasn't looking at the Clash as a social phenomenon: We were just making records."

It was Oberstein's last point, however, that disturbed somebody like Mark Perry, whose punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue had championed the band.

"If you talk about what the Clash talked about in their songs," he told Marcus Gray, "then they completely sold out... It disappointed me immensely, and I said so. My big quote was, 'Punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS.'"

The criticism stung The Clash, but it also incited them to produce punk's first monumental album. The Clash, released in April 1977, displayed a band with both a raging attack and a tuneful pop sensibility, plus-in a haunting cover of Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves"-an affinity for reggae music that would emerge as a fertile stylistic stream for the group. The album sold well in the U.K., rising to Number 12 on the U.K. album charts, to the bewilderment of many at CBS.

★★★ "THE DAY THAT I JOINED THE CLASH," STRUMMER SAID, "I WAS BACK TO YEAR ZERO. YOU HAD TO SHED ALL YOUR FRIENDS, EVERYTHING THAT YOU'D KNOWN." ★★★

But in the U.S., CBS's Epic Records refused the album and insisted on a more polished effort before presenting the band to American tastes. (The Clash ostensibly had been assured of creative control with CBS, but the label could still decline to release their recordings.) The band accepted the company's suggestion for a new producer, Sandy Pearlman, known for getting a forceful but clean sound with Blue Цyster Cult. By this time, drummer Topper Headon had replaced Terry Chimes in the band. Pearlman marveled at his abilities-especially when Headon played a complicated pattern backward with ease. During sessions that stretched through much of 1978, Pearlman and The Clash layered a sound that was less frantic than the first album's, but was anything but clean; rather, it was a dense blare. Mick Jones, already feeling hemmed in by the punk dogma of rigid harmonic and rhythmic constructions, worked overtime with Pearlman to build the new album's titanic roar.

"There are more guitars per square inch on this record," Pearlman told critic Greil Marcus, "than in anything in the history of Western civilization."

The finished work, Give 'Em Enough Rope, was released in November 1978. It soared to Number Two on the U.K. album charts, but despite Epic's insistence on more professional production, it didn't penetrate the Top 100 in America. (The Clash's first album, which Epic had initially refused to release, eventually fared much better in the U.S.) The slow-to-war American reaction had something to do with how punk was still regarded by many as an anomalous insurrection, though it may have owed as well to the album's cover image depicting a Chinese communist soldier advancing on horseback toward the body of a dead American cowboy.

The illustration wasn't simply a taunting poke at what The Clash saw as America's imperial hubris. It also proclaimed that Strummer and Jones were expanding their gaze beyond the confines of British society and politics and were now considering a world full of fearfulness and deathly struggle. The problems were complex, maybe even lethal. In "Guns on the Roof," Strummer sang,

"A system built by the sweat of the many / Creates assassins to kill off the few / Take any place and call it a courthouse / This is a place where no judge can stand."

Some British critics took issue with these views. Didn't Strummer worry, one interviewer asked in 1978, that he might seem to advocate violent terrorist acts?

"I'm impressed by what they're doing," Strummer replied, "and at the same time I'm really frightened by what they're doing. It's not an easy subject."

But Strummer knew the odds. In "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais," he sang,

"It won't get you anywhere / Fooling with your guns / The British army is waiting out there / An' it weighs fifteen-hundred tons."

In truth, The Clash's political stance not only helped secure their place in rock & roll history, but it also proved prescient. A few months after Give 'Em Enough Rope, Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher came to power as Britain's prime minister, capitalizing on the nationalist sentiment advanced by the National Front. Thatcher's time came and went, and though one could say the same for The Clash, their truths still resonate. In the mournful "English Civil War," Strummer asked,

"Who got caught out on their unawares / When the New Party Army came marching right up the stairs."

More than 30 years later, the song's apprehension still seems to have a place in describing a present moment.

BY THE TIME "GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE" came out, punk no longer existed as the same sort of insurgent experiment. In January 1978, the Sex Pistols toured America and then fell apart. In the aftermath, a new wave of bands began to favor the sort of abstruse post-punk music that Johnny Rotten (who resumed his given name, John Lydon) would make with former Clash member Keith Levene in Public Image Ltd.

The Clash, though, weren't anxious to heed anybody else's directions, and this included the supervision of Bernard Rhodes. For some time, Mick Jones had been growing wary of Rhodes' demands-especially in light of the manager's insistence that he be granted "complete control." Jones also worried that Rhodes might replace him with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, and made a pre-emptive move: In October 1978, The Clash fired the manager who had helped form the band and its purposes.

Rhodes shot back with graceless comments. "I took them off the streets," he said, "and made them what they are!" He later told writer Pat Gilbert, "I didn't realize that Joe was such a coward." However, Strummer-who seemed to need fatherly guidance even as he deprecated authority-had misgivings about Rhodes' dismissal.

"Bernie imagined the Clash," Strummer said in 1991, "and he built it to fit the specifications of his vision. The Clash wouldn't exist without Bernie's vision."

Rhodes won a court order that tied up The Clash's earnings, and the band turned to Epic Records to finance its first U.S. tour; the label grudgingly put forth a modest budget. Though they opened American shows with "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A.," The Clash were nonetheless fascinated with the myths and music of America. This was, after all, a country with remarkable music legacies-folk, blues, R&B, New Orleans jazz, country-western-plus it was the land that had delivered rock & roll in the 1950s. Punk may have claimed to spring self-willed in Year Zero, but The Clash understood that they weren't without essential precursors.

"When you've been into American music as long as I have," Strummer said, "to go there is a trip. To ride across the country-even better, on a bus-is another trip. It was fantastic. I got endless amounts of inspiration from it."

The Clash were nearing a pivotal moment. On one hand, Bernard Rhodes was gone; on the other, CBS Records still didn't have much faith in the band's appeal outside England. The Clash also knew they could not hold to punk's narrow aesthetic without running the risk of becoming static, or a dated curio. With Give 'Em Enough Rope, the band had sung about mortality, politics, freedoms and fates being up for grabs. Now, after touring America, The Clash were finding ways to infuse their themes and their sound with music that was at once historic-in some cases ageless-yet forward-leaning.

The band would bring all these influences to bear on a groundbreaking collection of songs. This time out, The Clash worked with producer Guy Stevens, who was respected for his recordings with Mott the Hoople but also known for drunken and unpredictable behavior. There were accounts of Stevens swinging a ladder over the heads of the musicians and pouring red wine across the keyboard of an expensive piano that Strummer was playing to realize the sound the producer wanted. (Stevens would die in August 1981, from an overdose of a drug he was taking to control his alcoholism.)

What resulted was one of rock & roll's most prodigious works. London Calling (released in the U.S. in January 1980) opened with the doomful undertow of its apocalyptic title track and closed with the surprising ache-and unabashed pop savvy-of Mick Jones' "Train in Vain." In between were 17 other songs, about defiance, revolution, war, apocalypse and death, but also about the freedom to display delight, vulnerability, doubt and courage in the same breath.

"I have lived that kind of day," Jones sang in the album's most affecting verse, from "I'm Not Down," "when none of your sorrows will go away... / But I know there'll be some way / When I can swing everything back my way."

Which is what The Clash had done: they made a masterpiece on their own terms-a work that has been cited as the best album of the 1980s. The Clash had seized an ambitious creative momentum that nobody since The Beatles had accomplished. By 1980, they were already being called "the only band that matters." And nobody has said that about any other band since-and made it stick.

★★★ JONES ONCE REFUSED TO PLAY "WHITE RIOT"; STRUMMER PUNCHED HIM. "YOU'RE LIKE A TEAM GOING ONSTAGE," HE SAID. "NO ONE LETS ANYONE DOWN." ★★★

So far, this may seem like a story of hard-fought idealism. The Clash genuinely shared the political values they expressed, and they never relinquished those beliefs. But The Clash were not an integral partnership like The Beatles, who had grown up together with a mutual history. There had been unease among The Clash since their earliest days-due partly to the unavoidable stress from working and traveling so intensively in such a short period of time. In particular, the relationship between Strummer and Jones was often embattled.

"We have rows almost every day," Strummer said in early 1978, "and we break up almost every day."

Sometimes those tensions flared in nasty ways. Backstage at a Sheffield, England, show in January 1980, Jones told Strummer he wouldn't play "White Riot" for an encore; he was tired of the song. The refusal turned into a shouting match, with Jones throwing a drink into Strummer's face. Joe punched Mick, "hard in the middle of the head," Strummer admitted later.

"There was real savagery in the attack," one witness said. "Mick was crying his eyes out." The band went back on and played "White Riot," but midway through, Jones set down his guitar and left the stage. Even so, there was a lot of affection between these men, and respect for each other's talents.

"Mick was my best friend at one time," Strummer later told music journalist Robert Hilburn.

With Bernard Rhodes gone, things improved for a time. The Clash had London Calling under their belts-it sold well in both England and the U.S.-and when the band assembled to record again in 1980, it had gained an openness to making music in styles outside punk's sonic regimen.

Mick Jones had developed an interest in New York's nascent hip-hop scene, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon delved into reggae dub abstractions more deeply, Topper Headon experimented with jazz-informed rhythmic patterns, and collectively, they kept exploring rock & roll forms, though with uncommon textural elements.

At the project's end, The Clash emerged with 36 tracks encompassing a staggering stylistic diversity that ranged from mellifluous pop and soulful gospel to experimental tape collages, cutting-edge funk, and a poignant children's choral group-much of the music arranged in uncommon structures. It was enough material, Jones insisted, to justify the release of three long-playing vinyl albums in a single package, as Sandinista!

(The title-also Jones' idea-came from the song "Washington Bullets" and was a tribute to the Nicaraguan revolutionary movement that had overthrown corrupt and brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. The Reagan administration was working at the time to unseat the Sandinistas.)

CBS Records was furious with the Clash-not because of the album's implicit Marxist sympathies, but because the band was releasing so much music at the price of a single album. Mick Jones declined any suggestions to cut back on the material, which led to a dividing point in the band's history. Over the years, Sandinista! has been viewed as both a magnificence of riches and as a bounty of disorder and indulgence, though it's a bulwark of originality that still plays beautifully.

In response to the Clash's obstinacy, CBS refused to tour the band, and Sandinista! did poorly in sales. Wounded by the lack of acceptance, Joe Strummer began to suspect that Mick Jones' freewheeling production style had been a fatal flaw. In the years that followed, Strummer would renounce the album as a mistake, though later in his life he again defended Sandinista!

Strummer decided to use the album's failure to correct what he saw as wrong in the first place. In early 1981, he gave the others an ultimatum: If the Clash wanted him to remain, they would have to re-hire Bernard Rhodes.

"I made Joe great," Rhodes told Chris Salewicz. "I knew how it worked."

Mick Jones was stunned. He despised Rhodes, and he felt the band had flourished creatively without him, but Strummer had left him with no options.

"I could quite easily have walked out then," Jones later said. "But it's like a marriage or the people you love: You cling on, hoping it's going to work."

It was during this period that Jones began growing distant within the band, keeping his own hours, enjoying live performances less. It was also a time in which drummer Topper Headon was running into serious difficulties. His extraordinary talents had been essential to the band's musical growth. But early on, he had taken to reckless drunken behavior, and then along the way developed a heroin habit.

In 1979, while in Lubbock, Texas, for a show, the drummer nearly overdosed, and in late 1981, he was arrested at Heathrow Airport for narcotics possession. Joe Strummer was growing disheartened over Headon's intractability and over his fluctuating beats onstage.

Meantime, Rhodes returned with big ideas-and big assertions. When a British reporter asked him how his role with the band had changed, Rhodes snapped back, "I own this group!"

To offset CBS's unwillingness to fund a tour, Rhodes booked the band for a series of dates in Times Square in New York, at Bond's Casino, beginning in late May 1981. Things seemed to misfire almost every inch of the way-fire marshals forced last-minute closures of the club, fans rioted, a disrespectful audience heaped abuse on the shows' openers-rap groups the Treacherous Three, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five-and the Clash themselves delivered off-center performances (owing in part to Headon's drug use).

"Doing that 15 nights in a row, it nearly killed us," Strummer said. Yet overall, the event had a tremendous effect: It hoisted the Clash to headline news repeatedly, in one of the most important cities in the world.

PHOTO: © EBET ROSERTS PHOTO: COMBAT ROCK Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon (from left) in Philadelphia on September 25th, 1982, the day of their JFK Stadium tour opener with the Who

Back in London, Strummer wanted the band to make a more accessible album, with a sound closer to its first effort. Jones, though, wanted the Clash to return to New York, to pursue a more technological and funk-infused direction. Communications became so uncomfortable that the songwriting partners took to collaborating through the mail, and at one session, Strummer drew a chalk line on the floor, dividing himself from Jones.

After Mick Jones thought he had a final version of the album, Strummer rejected the effort.

"Mick, I don't think you can produce," he said.

"You bastard," Jones replied. "I thought you were my friend."

Rhodes brought in Glyn Johns, who had worked in the war zone of the Beatles around the Let It Be sessions, to edit and mix tapes.

When the Clash's fifth album was released in May 1982 as Combat Rock, Joe Strummer's vision pretty much prevailed. Surprisingly, it proved fairly commercial and had the effect of finally delivering the Clash to the masses. Two singles, "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and "Rock the Casbah," made it onto U.S. singles pop charts, and the album itself became the Clash's best-selling. CBS was, for once, eager to put the band on the road.

But after some Scottish dates failed to sell out in advance, Bernard Rhodes panicked and approached Strummer.

"You've got to disappear," he said, figuring that a missing Joe Strummer would make headlines and stir interest.

When Strummer truly vanished-without telling Rhodes where he had gone-the manager panicked again. He hadn't told the other band members about the stunt, and after Strummer missed the tour's first date in Aberdeen, Scotland, a Clash spokesman appealed to him via the press to come back.

When the singer returned nearly a month later (he had been in Paris), he used the occasion for a big move: He had grown exhausted with drummer Topper Headon's promises to overcome his drug problem. Strummer called a meeting of the band and told the drummer,

"You're sacked."

Headon later said,

"I admit I lost track of what was going on, but I think we all did. Everyone was fucked up, whether it was drugs or drink."

Headon's problems grew worse for years-he was massively in debt to drug dealers; he broke a leg and claimed amnesia after falling through a motorcycle-garage skylight (during what police suspected was a robbery attempt); and in the late 1980s, he served a 15-month sentence for supplying heroin to a man who overdosed and died.

In 1998, Headon was so severely injured in a car accident that he was declared dead on arrival at the hospital; he recovered, to learn he had hepatitis C.

Strummer would later admit that losing Headon had been a severe blow to the Clash.

"I don't think we played a good gig after that," he told Chris Salewicz.

Jones had never liked Strummer's decision.

"I wouldn't have sacked anybody," he said.

The Clash persuaded Terry Chimes to rejoin them for their 1982 tour, which culminated in the band opening for The Who at several autumn stadium dates. As Live at Shea Stadium attests, the Clash-even without Headon-were still a superb performing band.

But conflicts between the group's ideals and the reality of its mass success, plus rancor, were taking a steady toll.

In May 1983, the band (now with Pete Howard on drums) appeared before its largest audience-an estimated 200,000 people-at the US Festival, a four-day event outside Los Angeles organized by Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Before Rhodes would allow the Clash to play, though, he goaded them into unnecessarily admonishing Wozniak for greed (the Clash received $500,000 for performing under a banner that read THE CLASH NOT FOR SALE).

As the Clash left the stage, the day's ill will reached its peak in a fistfight between band members and the festival's stage crew. It was the last show the original members of the Clash-Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Joe Strummer-played together.

Strummer had continued to feel that Jones was somehow failing the band.

"Mick was intolerable to work with by this time," he said in Westway to the World.

"When he did show up, it was like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood."

In August 1983, Strummer called a band meeting.

"How have you enjoyed the last seven years?" he asked Jones.

"I think it's time for a parting of the ways."

Mick was sure this was Rhodes' doing.

"I asked the band who they wanted, Bernie or me," Jones later said.

"The group said they wanted Bernie, and then just looked at the floor. I couldn't believe my ears. I stood there for about 10 seconds, stunned. Then I just picked up my guitar and walked out."

Perhaps even Bernard Rhodes had been unprepared for the finality and brutality of the moment. He rushed after Jones and offered him a check.

"Like a gold watch-which added insult to injury," Jones recalled.

"But I took it anyway."

THE CLASH TRIED TO LUMBER on. Rhodes and Strummer re-cruited new members (Pete Howard stayed on drums; Vince White and Nick Sheppard joined on guitars and vocals), but there was no equanimity in the resulting lineup. Rhodes berated the new members regularly, in what Sheppard described as "dehumanizing sessions." When Strummer was around, he failed to intervene. Observers thought he seemed intimidated by Rhodes.

"I went into the situation thinking the Clash is a humanitarian band," Vince White later said. "But the reality is the complete opposite."

Strummer's commitment to the Clash now seemed sporadic; he was dealing with more preoccupying matters. His father, Ronald Mellor, died of a heart attack in early 1984, and then his mother fell ill. When Strummer appeared for rehearsals or performances, he said nothing about this to others.

"There was a point," Mick Jones told Chris Salewicz, "when you got right down to it and you couldn't quite go past. Years later, I casually asked one day, 'How's your mum?' We're in a loo somewhere, having a piss, and he says, 'She's got cancer.' There was stuff like that all inside. Really shocking even to look at."

As Anna Mellor was dying, Strummer sat at her bedside, but he also took her to task for the time she and his father had left him and his brother, David, at boarding school. Later, Strummer would say that he'd regretted not having come to better terms with his father; instead, he gave himself to work, to paying attention to the world more readily than to familial bonds.

In reproaching his mother, Strummer was trying to wrest some sort of hard-won reconciliation before it was too late. He nonetheless visited regularly in her last months, sometimes bringing with him his two daughters, Jazz and the newborn, Lola, to cheer her. Anna Mellor died in December 1986.

On the Clash's final work, Cut the Crap, Strummer shared writing credit with a new partner, Bernard Rhodes. Arriving in late 1985, the album proved a tough listen. Many of its songs had a false bravado about them, and the work's best moment, "This Is England," perhaps implied meanings that Strummer had never hoped for:

"This is England / What we're supposed to die for / This is England / And we're never gonna cry no more."

Strummer considered taking out ads denouncing the album, but instead he convened the band members at Paul Simonon's house and told them it was over. Rhodes wanted to keep the group going with Simonon as the frontman -

"I've got a bunch of assholes," Rhodes confessed, "and I'm going to see it as a bunch of assholes" -

but it didn't happen.

Strummer finally knew what he had lost in his firing of Mick Jones. He later blamed the decision on Rhodes, but in 2003, after Strummer's death, Simonon confided to Jones that the firing hadn't been Rhodes' doing; it was Strummer's incentive.

At the end of 1985, Strummer hunted down Mick Jones in the Bahamas, where his former partner was recording. Joe apologized for what he had done, for the unkind things he'd said in the press, and asked Jones if they could reconstruct the Clash. Mick was grateful for the apology, but he did not want to renew the band. Jones played Strummer tapes of music with his new band, Big Audio Dynamite.

"It's the worst load of shit I've ever heard in my life," Strummer told Jones. "Don't put it out, man. Do yourself a favor."

Strummer spent years in a malaise, regretting how he had ruined the Clash.

"I learned that fame is an illusion and everything about it is a joke," he told Chris Salewicz. He moved to various cities, drank a lot, turned volatile in a flash. He also provided good music for various films including Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy and Walker - and played starring roles in Cox's Straight to Hell (1987) and Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989).

However, his 1989 solo album, Earthquake Weather, felt unfinished and sold only a few thousand copies.

"I had to disassemble myself and put the pieces back together," Strummer said in 1988. "I'd lost my parents, my group. You want to think about things. You become a different person."

Gradually, Strummer worked his way back from what he called his "wilderness years." He'd had two daughters and a long relationship with one woman, Gaby Salter, and when that ended, he entered a happy marriage, in 1995, with Lucinda Henderson.

Beginning in 1999, Strummer made great work again with a new band, the Mescaleros - rhapsodic and forlorn music that searched the world for new sounds, and that was Strummer's way of keeping faith with his earlier values.

"I believe that mankind is inherently good," he told Lucinda, "and that good will always triumph."

Strummer kept hope that he could bring the Clash back together. After learning that the band had been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Strummer hoped to persuade Mick Jones and Paul Simonon to regroup for the occasion.

In the early afternoon of December 22nd, 2002, Strummer tried to fax Simonon a letter making his case. He put on a jacket, took the family dogs for a walk in the cold English air, then returned home about 3 p.m. and collapsed on a sofa. When Lucinda found him, his body was already turning cold. He died of a heart defect he had carried throughout his life, without knowing.

IF THERE IS A TRAGEDY IN THE CLASH's story, it is not that the band members lost faith in one another, nor that Joe Strummer suffered as a result of sundering that faith. The Clash had always run risks. By doing so, they didn't so much change what rock & roll could be, but instead renewed a promise that had always been in the music: That it was a disruption about liberation, about giving voice and courage to people who were too often denied voice. The Clash went further with this vision than anybody - than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan or Public Enemy because they revisited that ideal, in one form or another, over and over, without settlement. Joe Strummer told filmmaker Don Letts, "We were trying to grope in a socialist way toward some future where the world might be less of a miserable place than it is."

That sort of vision feels like something from a long time ago, another story of death and glory. Popular culture rebellions have grown smaller; popular fears loom bigger. The tragedy of the Clash isn't about the Clash itself - that they fought for something honorable yet defeated one another. The tragedy of the Clash is that we no longer allow the room for their sort of voice.