Record Mirror, 24 May 1986, Photos by Adrian Boot

Where Now for The Clash?

Is that really Joe Strummer? Has Paul Simonon actually joined Hill Street Blues? And - believe it - do we really have a rare photo of Mr. John Lydon smiling? But what’s with the costumes, the grins, and the general air of post-punk bonhomie?

You might guess they’ve been drinking—but no. The real reason behind this uncharacteristic peace of mind? They all appear in the fab new video for Big Audio Dynamite’s latest single, “Medicine Show.”

Yes, sir. All is well in the ex-Clash camp once more. Mick Jones and his new crew are finally able to let go of the past—even Cut the Crap is tactfully avoided. Here we have Joe Strummer dressed like Rod Steiger’s cop in In the Heat of the Night, Paul Simonon locked and loaded like a streetwise enforcer, and John Lydon cracking an actual smile.

As the curtain falls on this surreal reunion, we’re left with one lingering question: Whatever happened to Slaughter and the Dogs?

Caption (from the video shoot):
“It's midnight, I'm wearing a spare tyre around my stomach, my last record was slaughtered, and I'm standing next to this guy with a gun. Just where the hell are the Sandinistas when you need them?”
– Joe Strummer contemplates his strange new video career.

First solo single Love Kills this week

Page 6 EX-CLASH vocalist Joe Strummer releases his first solo single Love Kills this week. Written and produced by Joe, the song is the theme song from the forthcoming film Sid And Nancy, telling the tragic story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. The flip side is Dum Dum Club also written and produced by Joe. (See mega interview on p16). RS

Return of the Last punk in town

Page 16 THE RETURN OF THE LAST PUNK IN TOWN "I'm A Hopeless Case, I'm A Hopeless Romantic, Really Out Of Order." Joe Strummer grapples with the spirit of rock 'n' roll in the age of the gutless careerist. Joe Strummer talks about the break up of the Clash. Joe Strummer talks about what excites him. Joe Strummer returns in an in depth rm interview. Read on... Story: Jim Reid Photography: Joe Shutter

He walks into the cafe, 10 years, 10 left hook. All that road work, all that sweat and still the blows come. Blows straight into the guts of what this man is all about. A romantic. Clever or stupid, a romantic. Sometimes he's the last punk in town. Sometimes he's the welterweight champ of rock 'n' roll swagger. But he ain't swaggering today. He's on edge. Three dark years and Joe Strummer is ready to walk into the sunlight. But steady. Bobbing and weaving through Soho, big quiff the right side of Eddie C, one liners from the greatest rock 'n' roll film never made, he rides a body blow, and tells me what's been on his mind.

"I've just been thinking about rock 'n' roll. Part of that is I really want to get to know myself. I don't wanna fool anybody by saying I'm something that I'm not. It's good to have a period of self examination. I just realised that if I was being totally honest I'm more like... rock 'n' roll, poetry, a beat up Dodge in the middle of the night driving down the road. If I'm being totally honest these are things that excite me."

He means it, deep down inside, where the new haircut bands don't go. Deep down, he ain't cautious or businesslike or cowed by all the money there is to be made. He means it. And he's got a lot of soul in his motorcycle boots. Those motorcycle boots are tapping away nervously in a West End drinking club on a hot afternoon. Set 'em up Joe. Longer. And the return of Joe Strummer.

The return comes gift wrapped in three chords, a song called Love Kills from the Sid And Nancy film. A dirty, growling Strummer tune that well and truly knocks the last Clash LP, Cut The Crap, into the shit.

"Last Christmas I bumped into somebody in a boozer and we ended up gate crashing the end of shoot party for Sid And Nancy," he says. "They'd just finished shooting in England, so they threw a party at the Portobello Basin. The producer of the film accosted me in the toilet and then the director (Alex Cox) asked me for a tune. And I said 'yeah, yeah, you want a tune' and put it into the back of my mind. It was in the back of my mind, but I just kept avoiding it. Then the director phoned up and asked me to come down and see the film. I went me down there to hate it, y'know? But I ended up writing the tune after I'd seen the picture."

"It was very odd seeing the film. The first blast was a shock, I wasn't prepared for it. One minute you're just walking down the street in 1986, the next you're in the middle of punk London, with all that thrashing about. I noticed I was kinda tapping my foot on the floor, jigging about. I looked around and saw I was rockin' to it. It was great to see it. I tried to look at the film through the eyes of someone who was 14 or 15, someone who was too young to remember all that shit."

They could still think "God, that's exciting." I didn't feel nostalgic, I just wish that this time could be more like that time.

"I'm sure young people who see the film are gonna contrast it with today's more polite, predictable system. I think it could be a catalyst - that film, not in a dramatic way, but in a slow way. Bring that kind of thing back into people's minds, back into conversation."

Maybe I hope so, but I doubt it. We're too far down the road, record companies have too much stake in every inch of music, for that sort of grassroots explosion to happen again. But maybe...

Whatever the outcome, it's clear that Strummer's vision of rock 'n' roll hasn't changed. A purist at heart, his grasp on music relies on an almost mythic belief in the spirit of something that used to be called rock 'n' roll. It's an enthusiasm well past its sell by date in these cynical, calculating times. It's a myth riddled with stupid macho excesses. But its essence, distilled and bunged onto vinyl, has always pushed rock music to its most extreme, intense, joyous statements. Strummer knows this and he lives with that knowledge. It eats at him. It eats him up, even though he knows it's outmoded. It's cranky; when all you need is a producer, a stylist and an expensive camera... cranky - but...

"Yeah, you're right," he says. "Completely and utterly, especially when it comes to the business new pop world. But I just know that these sounds I'm chasing, when I get 'em onto a disc and people hear them, they're gonna go, 'I'll have that.' The sound will always affect the human heart, it always has done."

"The process of launching a new pop band these days just chisels that thing out of a tune. Songs go through so many production phases, they come out so smooth. I just know that somewhere in some dirty studio someone is putting something down onto vinyl that is real bushy."

"Sometimes I wake up at night and realise that there are 900 million songwriters in 900 million rooms with 900 million beat boxes and synth machines going bong, binky, bong. They're wasting all their time getting all that shit together, they should be thinking 'what is this drivel I'm writing, who wants to hear this?' You gotta make it and take people, capture them with what you got. I try and keep my energy on the construction of the tune, the meaning of it, what it's for."

There are some who would say that the last Clash LP, Cut The Crap, lost that direction somewhere. What went wrong?

"They're my songs," he says. "I think some of them are fairly good. I told Bernie, (Clash manager Bernie Rhodes), 'that I didn't like the way he mixed it. He took charge and just bluffed from there. I would only take charge of a project when I get really inspired, when I know it's either gonna be the way I envisaged it, or my head's gonna burst open. I can't understand why he took over the project and then delivered what I considered a damp squib.'"

After the LP was released last winter, Joe did a runner. He headed for the hills and went to Spain. Since, and to this day, there has been constant music biz speculation as to the future of The Clash. Love Kills is a solo Strummer single and latest rumours suggest that manager Bernie Rhodes and Clash mouthpiece Kosmo Vinyl are going to take the group's name and do it all themselves.

"I'd say that was possible," says Strummer. "Only because I am au fait with the insanity behind the lines. It wouldn't surprise me."

But whatever the situation, it was clear that The Clash were coming to pieces a long time ago.

"To me the day it fell apart was when we kicked out Topper," he says. "Let me tell you, we were in Simenon's basement flat, it was dark and raining outside. We'd just come from an open air festival in Holland and we told Topper he was falling apart and he had to go."

"He split the flat, devastated. He walked around the block in the rain and he came back. This little basement, imagine it, we're all in there and he come back. That's when my heart went 'ping', y'know, I'll never forgive myself for shutting my mouth. When my heart went ping it just rose up in me to say 'look, he's come back, that's enough isn't it? What more do you want? Let's work with him, let's help him.' Instead, I just shut my mouth, like everyone else in the room. Mick, me, Paul, Kosmo and Bernie. To me, from that day on it was never any good anyway."

And then Mick Jones went.

"Mick was being very difficult, right? Sometimes I feel that I've only been a pawn in the game between Mick and Bernie. If you wanna look at the Clash story, the titans in the struggle within the Clash have been Mick and Bernie."

"They put it together and then Mick said 'let's get rid of Bernie', so we got rid of him. Three years later I said, let's bring him back. So we brought him back and then Bernie said 'let's get rid of Mick'."

"So... we got rid of him, know what I mean? It's like riding a see-saw. In fact, the best times were when it was just me, Mick, Paul and Topper. We didn't have a manager and we were putting triple albums out and getting no royalties. That was what it was all about, that was when we were a team."

And maybe they will be again. Strummer certainly admires the work Jones has been putting into BAD.

"I think what they're gonna do next is gonna be great. The first LP was just mopping out the territory. I think Mick's really gonna deliver something now. I'll go out and buy."

But will the Strummer-Jones writing partnership ever start again?

"I intend to write with Mick in the future for sure," he says. "I've really begun to understand why we work together. Mick drinks white tea with no sugar, I drink black coffee with three sugars, y'know? I was thinking about this the other day, I was imagining those cups on a tray... that's the way we work. We take care of separate areas of the scene."

And essential to that scene was Strummer's cut glass polemic. From tower blocks to global politics, he beat his words around a native, natural sense of justice and gut anger. It wasn't as explicit as Bragg or Weller, and it was shot through with a lot of rock 'n' roll bravado, but when Rock Against Racism cemented an alliance between punk and the left, Strummer was there.

What does he think of the Eighties' closer definition of pop and politics, Red Wedge and the like?

"I kinda think, rightly or wrongly, that I started some of that, I was in there with a big influence. As such, I feel I owe it to myself to allow my mind to be free and make its own decisions. No matter how much they might go against the party line, y'know what I mean - the 'of course you believe this' party line."

"Y'know, when I look at Bragg and Weller and Dammers I kinda sense that I'm missing from the line-up. But I just feel that after eight years of Thatcher, surely that's all you need to tell you to vote Labour. If you don't know to vote Labour now, a few decent rock 'n' roll shows ain't gonna change your mind."

Maybe. But it's clear that Strummer's invective doesn't take to organised politics. He has kind words to say about all the prominent Wedgers, but you won't find him at any committee meetings. It's that 'rock 'n' roll spirit' again. Rightly or wrongly, this is the man who would be the third Blues Brother. And Blues Brothers just have to go.

When Joe Strummer walked into the cafe at the beginning of this interview, he shaped up like a good 'un. The welterweight champ of rock 'n' roll gesture was coming back into the ring and he had no regrets.

"Don't leave anything with regrets," he said. "I like to toy with my regrets in order to learn from them. The last two or three years have been a serious pack up for me. All the way down the line. I really needed a year to pick over every moment."

"You know those times when you're thinking about something so awful, that a sound just escapes from your lips and you shout out loud? I felt near to that, I really did."

"For me, I really feel I've deserved a lot of stick that's come my way. But there's nothing like seeing all sides of life. It's all right to walk through town when you're a hot potato, but it's also very educational to walk through town when you're a cold potato. I really tried to appreciate it. Get some kind of understanding."

A new single, a love of hip hop, a proposed film with Alex Cox in Spain, nights down at Gaz's Rockin' Blues in Soho - Strummer is back...

"I'm a hopeless romantic, really out of order. I really have to keep away from the bevvy, 'cos I can go right over the top. There's nothing I like better than going to some foreign city, don't know where the hell you are, and drink all night. Nothing I like better than that. That's being completely honest. Go to a city, go out at night and see what happens."

Let it happen, Joe.

LOVE

Strummer and Jones Get Back Together on Love Kills Single and BAD Album
Sounds — 19 July 1986

Joe Strummer and Mick Jones are working together again for the first time since the demise of The Clash.

They are currently in New York, mixing and producing the new Big Audio Dynamite album, Worse, which is due for a September release.

Though the press offices of both artists claim no knowledge of the reunion—"You can file that one under this week's BAD rumours," said Neil Storey of the Mick Jones office—it was later revealed that Strummer is co-producing the album, though he apparently does not sing or play on it.

Sounds has also been able to confirm the story through several independent sources, including Sid And Nancy film director Alex Cox.

"In the course of doing the Love Kills music for Sid And Nancy, Strummer got back together again with Mick Jones," Cox told Sounds writer Roger Holland this week, *"and they've now gone to New York to co-produce the next BAD album... which is good, because it's that unity thing.

"They're like two halves of this thing and together they're greater than either of the individuals. And if they continue to help each other, then you don't need The Clash, because you've got the Strummer–Jones combination and they just make each other's work better."

Jones and Strummer have been back on speaking terms for over a year, and as the rift between them has healed, there has been continued speculation about when they would work together again.

Love Kills is available through CBS (and is Sounds’ Single of the Week—see page 12) this week. It will appear as the title track on the Sid And Nancy soundtrack album, to be released through MCA shortly.

REBEL ROCKER: JOE STRUMMER
THE RUDE BOY REFLECTS

BY VAUGHN MARTINIAN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BOB GRUEN

I found Joe Strummer in a subterranean lounge of a mid-Manhattan recording studio, sans shoes, dressed in black, and recovering from having slept in the studio the night before. This was not the culmination of a three-day search.

It was late afternoon when we started talking, and late evening when we ended, after countless cups of black coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes—it was time to clear the air. I had last spoken with him two years prior. Gone now was the Mohawk he’d sported then; in its place, the rebel rocker D.A. that I knew.

I was curious about ol’ Joe. Here was this guy, a part of a group called The Clash, the Clash being one of the reasons for kids to get together in a bigger thing called punk rock. Well, The Clash did their thing. We all know what happened. Punk died at the end of the ’70s, and The Clash moved on into the ’80s. In September 1983, the band released a communiqué announcing the dismissal of Mick Jones from the group, citing “artistic differences” as the reason for the split.

While Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon auditioned new members to join The Clash, Jones hooked up with punk filmmaker and former Clash associate Don Letts to form Big Audio Dynamite, whose debut album, This Is Big Audio Dynamite, was released in the summer of ’85. Around the same time, The Clash put out their first LP since 1982’s Combat Rock, the greatly anticipated Cut the Crap. Much speculation about the falling-out ensued.

Since then, Strummer, by his own admission, has been keeping a relatively low profile. This past August saw the release of his single "Love Kills", the title track from Alex Cox’s film Sid and Nancy. Strummer has been further collaborating with Cox, most recently appearing in a role in his latest project, Straight to Hell. As we approach the decade mark of the “summer of punk”, Big Audio Dynamite has just released their second LP, Strummer’s new one is forthcoming, and it’s safe to say that Strummer and Jones are friends. More than that, Big Audio’s new LP No. 10 Upping St. features five songs co-written by Strummer with Jones or other members of B.A.D., and the two appear together as co-producers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re found together again in the studio in the very near future.

NY Talk: How did the song "Love Kills" come about?
Joe Strummer: I went to the end-of-the-shoot party for the film Sid and Nancy in London—we gate-crashed. The director Alex Cox was there, and he got me in the toilet and asked for a song. I’d seen a still from the film. I didn’t like the look of it, and I didn’t like the fact that Sid [Vicious] had big badges on and was wearing a dog collar in the still. I thought it was inaccurate and so I said fuck the film, fuck everything…

Then I went to Spain and produced an LP by a Spanish group called 091 that was number one for three weeks on the national network. I came back, and Cox’s people asked if I wanted to look at a rough cut. Eventually, I got talked into seeing it. I went into the cinema ready to hate it. I saw the film and then I realized—it was a great film.

A few days later I saw a photo of Sid himself with big badges on his jacket—whereas I’d been convinced the day before to say, “Ahh, he never wore a badge like that”. And I understood that all this punk stuff is bullshit. The film’s a good film.

You wrote this song, then, with a good feeling about what you were writing for?
I think the acting from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb is unbelievably good.

Didn’t Sid really fuck it up in the end? It was pretty dismal by himself. What do you think of that?
Well, each one of us is still a human being somewhere along the line. That’s the bit that touches everybody.

Do you think it’s a movie that had to be made?
No more than any other movie, but I don’t like the way people in England treat the Sex Pistols as sacred cows. A band that came out and said there are no sacred cows. I don’t like the attitude in England of “Oi, you can’t touch our Sidney or our Pistols…”

After reading the press release for Sid and Nancy, where it says “The title number of the film was composed by Joe Strummer, former vocalist and guitarist with The Clash,” is it safe to say The Clash are nonexistent?
It’s pretty safe.

You think The Clash got pushed too far from their original concept?
[no answer recorded]

"The Clash was really intense compared to these [new] cats. They just want to stand there and have the right haircuts. That's supposed to make me feel better?"

NY TALK: INTERVIEW WITH JOE STRUMMER
Originally published in NY Talk, page 34

Strummer: I dunno, man. I do it, you write about it. You tell me.

Q: How do you feel about making music now?
Strummer: I like music.

Q: Has Epic, your record company, dampened your views on it?
Strummer: Not in the least. Why should they? All that's crap. The main deal is what's on the record—the rest is irrelevant.

Q: Has the rebellion of punk become a myth?
Strummer: Well, I think the rebellion of anything goes out as soon as it can be sold around the world in Newsweek and Time. The ideas lose their sting. There always has to be original people. For example, in punk—Jello Biafra. You know, there's a lot of good punk music coming out of America. Somebody gave me a compilation album from Austin, Texas, with some good music on it.

Anyway, who am I? Interviews are such bullshit. I mean, I’m just one guy like you, just like any one of those people streaming down the street out there. I change my mind every five minutes. I can't stand it when I get interviewed. People think what you say is then set in concrete. I demand the human right to change my ideas like anybody else. I demand the right to have the wrong opinions if I want...

Q: What do you think about musicians like the Red Wedge and Billy Bragg going around England talking up socialism...?
Strummer: It's pretty good, but for me—eight years of Margaret Thatcher is all I need to vote Labour myself.

Q: I'd say it's about even with us. We've had about seven years of Ronald Reagan.
Strummer: At least you've got a kinda guy with a rock ’n’ roll haircut in the joint. We've got this horrible old bag who just bosses everybody around. The English are sick. They all want to be beaten by nannies wearing leather aprons. Margaret Thatcher is part of this. It’s not political, it's English sexual repressiveness—like the way they beat people in schools.

Q: Everybody wants a matron.
Strummer: Exactly.

Q: How do people regard you guys—The Clash? As just remnants of what was...?
Strummer: I dunno. I’ve been keeping a low profile, I suppose, for about a year now. I haven’t really been going out much in England.

Q: You're married and have two baby girls.
Strummer: I'm not married. I've got two baby girls.

Q: How much of a change did having children make in your life?
Strummer: Well, I think they’re better than records. They’re more fun. I love them. One is two-and-a-half, and the other is seven months. It inspires me to live, you know? I like the way children in your life make you think beyond yourself. It's a very selfless thing to have a kid, you know?

It helps me understand—when I see my girl crawling, then walking, then tottering and learning to speak—it makes me feel better about living and dying. I like it 'cause it's not just some trashy dream concocted on a drunken night, you know what I mean? It's realer than any of that...

Q: Seems like you'd want to take a break from dealing with the whole system and organization involved in doing a record—that it would take away from family time.
Strummer: Well, don't get carried away here. I'm not about to lie down and die just because I had a couple of baby girls, man. Fuck that, I'm still gonna do my shit. You’ve got to make sure they ain't running your life neither, 'cause that's not the right balance. I can sing songs and stuff—I'm gonna do that.

Q: Are you working on a film now?
Strummer: A film? Well, I’m hoping that...

Q: Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell?
Strummer: Yeah, I went to Spain to do that.

Q: How did that come about?
Strummer: Well, me and Alex Cox and Dick Rude and a guy named Tom Richman were hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival, and Alex had a free room. So there were four of us sleeping there and it got pretty funky in this tiny room. From that experience, we had a running joke going about a storyline—an idea Alex had—and then he wrote a script around it with Dick Rude. Now it looks like it's actually going to be made.

But it really started from when we all woke up with terrible hangovers in this shitty little room, dying for lack of oxygen...

Q: Think you’d have a problem doing a video now?
Strummer: We did one. We went to Spain to shoot it. Cox directed it for me, and we got an all-four-channel ban in England.

You know why? Because they didn’t like the way this guy is eating pizza in the video. I kid you not. He’s going like this [demonstrates], with a bit falling out here, and he goes phhhttt, and it all goes on the floor and a little pussycat comes up and starts to eat it. This touching little scene got an all-four-channel ban. Shouldn’t think we’ll see it here either.

Q: How do you feel about the fact that every song coming out now has to have a video?
Strummer: It’s pretty insane, isn’t it? I’m not sure they all do. A video could be a good thing, but I don’t like how they all look the same.

Q: Did The Clash ever have any kind of relationship with the record company? Did you guys let them set up anything for you, or did you do everything independently?
Strummer: We tried to do everything independently. I mean, whether at various times it was Bernie Rhodes managing, or when he was out, Kosmo [Vinyl] would go in and deal for us. We tried very much to keep it completely in-house, a separate thing...

Q: Do many groups have that kind of relationship?
Strummer: I think the smart ones get that kind of thing together.

Q: How were you able to do it, though?
Strummer: Well, Mick [Jones] sort of continued that with Big Audio Dynamite. He’s got an in-house team, and they can just go to the company and say, “Whoa, here’s the record,” and we go, “Here’s the tour dates.” It’s quite good.

Q: Are you all still friendly with everyone from the band?
Strummer: Kinda. I don’t see Topper [Headon] too much—our paths don’t cross—but I’m still mates with him. I’ve seen everybody else lately. Paul [Simonon] is doing some painting now. He’s really quite good at it.

Q: You were a painter at school, right?
Strummer: Well, I did try, yeah. I spent a year in art school, but I was thrown out for being a moron, and I haven’t done anything since. No—I would’ve never made it anyway. It was too much rubbish. They were just teaching us bullshit. They didn’t show us nothing except how to bamboozle our way down the line a bit.

[Pause] Yeah, my heart went out of it when I realized this wasn’t another Michelangelo back-factory, you know? This was just a pillock being paid forty pounds a day to stand around and pinch girls’ bums and teach us jackshit, you know...

Q: What do you do when you get out of school with a degree like that in England?
Strummer: After four years, you get some kind of diploma in art and design, I think it is, and then you go on the dole—or you become a famous artist—or you get a job teaching other people...

Q: The same thing.
Strummer: Exactly. But art school, it used to be seen in England as a place where you can sit down and have a rest, [breathes] you know, think about life and shit. So I saw it as that, really. It gave me some freedom. I had at least a year to sit down...

Q: Have you made a lot of money?
Strummer: No, not as much as I could’ve, but I don’t fucking care.

Q: You could’ve made a lot more?
Strummer: I don’t know, I suppose. We never really sold too many records. We were a good touring group. But we never had any Top 10 UK singles. “London Calling” maybe got to number 11, “Bankrobber” did the same. That was about it in England. And here we only had “Rock the Casbah.”

Sandinista! didn’t sell shit anywhere. London Calling didn’t sell anything.

Q: How about the first few albums?
Strummer: A couple of people bought a copy, and that was about it. I mean, this ain’t no 10 U.S. or U.K. number one hits in a row and we all got fuckin’ white stretch Lincoln Continentals—forget it, jack. I ride the subway along with all you bastards, don’t worry.

Q: Do you think that the counterculture can exist in the U.S., with eight years of Ronald Reagan already sort of numbing out the youth?
Strummer: It’s not the States or Ronald Reagan at all. It’s the time of the century. Seems to me pretty much the same atmosphere throughout the world where I travel—in Europe and in America. Young people, they want to get on, they want...

Q: They want to wear nice clothes, they want to hear some cool records, they want to get on with their life.
Strummer: Yeah, they just want to get on with living. What are you supposed to do—go out there and say, “Hey everybody, show some compassion”? People just push you out of the way.

When I write, okay? When I’m trying to put a whisper of that in a song—you know what I mean, just a whisper—I wouldn’t lay it on thicker than spreading peanut butter with a knife. Imagine we crawled up on top of the Chrysler Building and we had a knife with a dab of peanut butter on it, and we just stroked the end of the rod with it, and left two or three atoms of peanut butter on the very top of the Chrysler Building—that’s about how thick you’ve got to put it on. You know what I’m talking about?

You mustn’t bore people.
(begins to sing) “It’s a good thing you don’t have bus fare, it will fall through the hole in your pocket, and get lost in the snow on the ground, hey, walking into town, trying to get a job, trying to keep your hands warm...”

This song was written by a Jamaican guy in the cold winter in London. It’s for real. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that I kinda started writing songs that were trying to be real, and then a load of other assholes came in and they made it into a big boring mess. I suppose I’m saying that was a product of their laziness. It’s much easier to write songs preaching shit. You try and write something real—that’s the ticket.
[mutters] ...preachy bullshit.

Q: Did you ever lose touch with the realness you're talking about?
Strummer: Well, I make it my number one priority. I’m always aware that you can lose it like that.
[snaps fingers] I’m aware enough when I check my shit to rip it up if it stinks. At least do the world a favor like that.

Q: What do you think happens when, like in New York, all the places for bands to play live are closing down?
Strummer: Well, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Who knows, it might be the start of some scene—like in England, there was a kind of warehouse scene, just records and parties, but because all the clubs were so shitty, that scene kind of mushroomed. Although the cops are really hot on the trail now.

When I started in London, we had to make our own place to play from the word go. What I want to talk about is that in my year off I really thought about rock ’n’ roll only, and I was trying to spot what was gonna happen—to predict the way it was going.

Let me say that the scene in England has hardly been exciting lately. The pop parade, it hasn’t been a good few years, and I’m just trying to detect the cause of that. What I started to imagine is that because there’s so much money to be made by a number-one-selling act, they’ve got the process down tight now from A to Z.

They get a group, they put braids in their hair, they give them a certain kind of video, they get some kind of song, and they sell ’em out—boom. It usually goes. But the whole process has become so water-tight that your genuinely interesting, eccentric, perhaps a little bit out-of-control artist—he’s thrown out the front door of the building a long time ago.

I’m glad we came from another era. We were crazy and we meant it. We were really intense compared to these cats. They just want to stand there and have the right haircut and have everyone admire their suits—and that’s it. That’s supposed to make me feel better?

Q: Could you see your records with censorship labels?
Strummer: I’ve had some “offensive language” stickers and stuff, but really, the main deal is what’s on the track. I wonder sometimes if all these issues are clouding the issue. The Clash, for example, were more into the idea of sticking it to the company—like, “This is three records for the price of one,” you know? We were crazy—but it didn’t help selling the record at all, you know.

Q: Did you like Cut the Crap?
[Pause]
Strummer: Well... not really.

Q: I heard a recording of you guys in Paris, and a lot of the stuff you have on the album was done differently live. Why didn’t you stick with your instinct instead of going into the studio and slickening it up?
Strummer: The true, frank, honest answer to that is—I allowed Bernie Rhodes to take charge of the project as the producer. If Bernie were here, he wouldn’t contradict me if I were to say that the record was done the way he wanted it, from every hi-hat ssssst to the final mix. In fact, I fell out with him in Germany eight months before the album was released, and I was unaware that he was mixing it—or where he was mixing it...

Q: When the three other members... I guess when you released a communiqué, dismissing them...
Strummer: Well, hang on—it wasn’t that bad. I tried to say that it’s not their fault...

Q: So how do we end this?
Strummer: Well, you sit there and we look each other in the eyes and I go—hey, fuck you.

Q: And you walk away.
Strummer: No—you do.

THE HOWLING
PUNK - THE FINAL CHAPTER

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES: "a great whirlpool of noise, pulling the future down." Many moons later DON WATSON recalls the dawn of the great Sioux rising.

AND SO another trip back A to the so-called year zero, more hazy memories from (as the fag adverts might have it) way back then.

Why?

Because nothing really came out of nothing. All great music has the bones of the past buried in its flesh. Punk itself was The Stooges, The Velvets, The Kinks and The Monkees stripped down to their essential appeal. Boning up on the past can't harm and just might.

Because the marketplace has overloaded on the Warhol ethic of Art as Consumption and it's sometimes better to look at the stars of yesterday than to bother with today's constellation of Campbell's soup tins. Because I can't resist the opportunity to dwell on an obsession.

Because the differences between looking back obsessively and looking onwards and outwards is
just a matter of pressure. Because I had a reeeeelapse.

TWASN'T the first time I'd seen past, present and future spontaneously combust. I'd already felt the tacky, black vinyl thrill of Roxy Music (the futuristic dream of some '50s comic, looking like the '80s to define the '70s). I'd seen the light reflected in the glitter teardrop on Marc Bolan's face and plastered my wall with the divine symmetry of the Aladin Sane lightening stripe.

It wasn't the moment that changed my life — that, for what it's worth, was the first time I heard Patti Smith singing "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." It wasn't even the last time I felt that limb-tearing force (there was Pere Ubu, Public Image, The Fall, The Birthday Party, Einsturzende Neubauten and Sonic Youth all yet to come). But the first time I stumbled on Siouxsie And The Banshees, I knew I'd found something I was looking for.

The girl next to me looked at Siouxsie and saw for the first time a female image to identify with. Siouxsie, aloof and a loner, had defined herself and in doing so had defined what the girl wanted to be. Of course the girl didn't quite know what that was, but in the patterns on Siouxsie's face she saw what she wanted to see when she looked in the mirror. Tomorrow she would buy some black hair dye, perhaps even (she tingled at the forbidden thought of it) some black lipstick to go with it...

The skinhead on the other side watched the sweeping frenzy of The Banshees and was impressed.
And me? Well I heard something I just didn't hear in the remainder of the British punk bands, something that whipped the past into a great whirlpool of noise, pulling the future down. It was a sound that captured a moment, held it very still and smashed it into a thousand pieces. I remembered the sleevenotes of the first Roxy Music LP and the description of the feeling of coming across that band for the first time, "Was this 1964 or 20 years on?" That was exactly the way I felt. Later I discovered that was exactly the way they wanted me to feel.

The Banshees, like all greats, had an ambivalent relation to the past. They were obviously profoundly affected by The Velvet Underground (their first rehearsals were augmented by a violin player, giving a Cale-like sound) and there was always a glam campness to their vampish image (remember Siouxsie in Liberace lamé, slicked back blonde hair and Pierrot make-up?). But they held the majority of the past in contempt, torching the dead wood of rock culture that cluttered up around them. They were well aware they were part of something new.

Looking back at old photographs, the most striking thing is the memory of just how bad things were pre-punk. Amidst the mundanity of the rock audience, The Banshees looked like something beamed down from the future, an image of glamour from another age.

Their very first song, the 'Lord's Prayer' collage, performed for the first time at the 100 Club punk festival with Sid Vicious on drums and Marco Pironi on guitar, took lines from "the silliest rock songs of all time" and let them hang, disembodied in the middle of the — litany: The effect was a triumph of mordant humour, the "Twist and shout" command suddenly took on a whole new meaning, calling to mind severed tendons and screams of agony and they gave the sound of knocking on heaven's door the overtone of desperate hammering. It was iconoclasm lapsing into psychosis, the reaction was an uneasy amusement.

PSYCHOSIS WAS what Siouxsie And The Banshees played off. "I'm sorry that I hit you but my string snapped." Something was always fraying on the razor's edge of McKay's guitar, just ready to give. Something was always about to elicit a mad cackle of laughter, something was always very nearly hysterically funny, something was definitely always nearly hysterical.

Jane Suck in Sounds told the story of her hammering a stage invader on the back of the head with the mike stand and spinning away to sing "Got you with a cleaver / Hung you up forever." Of course it probably never happened, but it's a nice story all the same. It's a testament to the sense of danger that surrounded Siouxsie's image that it sounds credible at all.

"I'm just a vision from your TV screen / Just something conjoured from a dream..." 'Mirage' — one of the songs from the period that led up to 'The Scream' — captured in its fractured images something about Sioux. Dubbed the Ice Queen and the Rhienmadchen, Siouxsie was the very idea of glamour, a face snatched from the screen and transformed from a comforting cathode massage to something threatening. She took every line of feminine beauty and sharpened it to bladelike perfection. Siouxsie, the iconoclast, created one of the most individual ikons of all time. "My limbs are like palm-trees, swaying in the breeze." In days of frantic and flailing performances, Siouxsie was perfect grace, the arch of her swinging leg was transfixing.

As she herself put it later: "Back then there really were stars, and they didn't even have to be in a band—you'd just see them walking along the street, they just had it!! I feel really sorry for kids nowadays if their ikons are Nik Kershaw—N Kershaw can only pretend he's a star because he gets his photograph in Smash Hits."

Siouxsie was self evidently a sz before she ever whipped a microphone cord. Just those eyes with their BIFF BANG POW comic book explosions were art in themselves. In the early days of the Bromley contingent, she was a strident fetishistic parody—in spe heels and cupless bra, she was a figure that had walked out of the line drawings of some under-the-counter S&M mag. But walking fantasies are more threatening than cartoon, whip-curling snarls on a 2D page. Her image was one long finger, elegantly raised, topped by a painful looking blood red nail.

It was from this period that the Nazi Go-Go Dancer with the Sex Pistols rumour, recounted in: Parson's and Burchill's Boy Looked At Johnny came about. Actually it referred to just one incident when the cupless and semi-legless Siouxsie and an equally inebriated friend got up and danced on their seats at the legendary Screen On The Green gig. "It's to show that erogenous zones are over-rated," she explained of the outfit, "and tits are no big deal."

The swastika she sometimes adorned herself with, for equivalent and (probably naive) taboo-busting reasons was soon dropped when the reality of the revival of British fascism penetrated. Those who condemn the group as a "bunch of Nazis" usually ignore the fact that, when The Scream finally appeared, it contained a dedication to German anti-Nazi artist, John Heartfield, and that the track Metal Postcard was one of the most chillingly grey penetrations into the evil of fascist mentality. None of the clenched fist statements of the multitude of dogmatists have lasted so well.

Perhaps because they held out for so long, not for any Garageland pretensions, but out of a terroristic resolve to do things exactly the way they wanted, The Scream is one of the few punk debuts that cuts mercury. Like The Pop Group's first and Another Music's A Different Kitchen, it's not only still listenable, it's still an induction of impossible energy.

Mirage is a piece of horizontal grain poetry that seems more strikingly apposite now that the advertising image is once again supreme. Suburban Relapse is perfectly adapted to the times—boredom, lapsing into bursts of psychosis. The reactivation of Helter Skelter, reproduced with the hindsight of the Manson murders, is a chaotic reminder music's power to predict. Perhaps it's in the last of these that the real message of these sheet metal chords lies.

"When you get to the bottom you go back to the TOP!"

——————

THE CLASH

DANNY KELLY rounds off our epic series with a personal, deodorant-free vein-bursting reminiscence of the once greatest group, THE CLASH.

TWASN'T always like last year. 'Cut The Crap', that reflexive twitching of a corpse, the slackened muscles allowing a final fetid evacuation of the bowels, wasn't typical. The Clash weren't always a wretched travesty, a grotesque waste of time and vinyl, a joke.

Believe me, there was a now-distant time when they were only marginally less vital than breathing, significantly more wonderful than an hour-long orgasm through every pore of your body.
At the same time, though, they were shot through, like seaside rock, with screaming contradictions and a dizzying propensity for being profoundly cringeworthy, brainless and treacherous.
Yeah, just like punk.

SCENE ONE: Nine at night in a Midlands dancehall, Spring 1977. Ankle deep in a slime of water and piss, a lanky youth in paint-splashed fatigues slumps coughing over a toilet handbasin. Glutinous strings of vomit and mucus hang limply from his mouth and nose; his eyes roll sightlessly out of control. There's a desperate, cornered look in them. All the while another youth, cider glass clutched to his navy blue shirt, watches him intently.

SCENE TWO: Five hours later and 25 miles away. Now the watcher stands over a basin, wringing a steady flow of liquid-cider and now-cold sweat—from the navy blue shirt. His ears clang, his head swims, and every muscle in his bruised body glowingly aches.
Though rag-doll drained, he's the happiest person in the world. Ever.

The first youth is Mick Jones, a guitarist with a punk rock group. The second is me. We're linked only by what has occurred between the two scenes, the latest date of the 'White Riot' tour, the latest phosphorescently explosive outburst of sun-hot anger and passion, of sonic war, by Jones' group, The Clash. Yet that maelstrom—in Nottingham—was made by a band less than 30 gigs old. I'd witnessed, wide-eyed, over half of the 'White Riot' dates, a dedication made possible only by an education-triggered relocation in the country's heartland (Leicester) and a shotgun seat in a battered Vauxhall 1100, but motivated by events in London months before....

"HE CLASH are coming!" The Clash... The Clash... The Clash The Clash. In the late summer London of 1976 it wasn't easy to avoid those two words—snowflakes in a blizzard of fevered, word-of-mouth anticipation.

But it was easy to be mystified. Weren't The Clash just another—yawn—punk group? Formed this time by the pair of posey drifters from the London SS? Yeah, an' that Strummer geezer, the one whose fascist brother topped himself in Regents Park, the one who wigged out and chucked his last band, the harmless pub-rocking 101ers, the day after he'd seen the Sex Pistols? What was all the fuss about?

A couple of weeks, and two gigs later, I knew.

First at my local flicks, The Screen On The Green in Islington (a pit that even fleas avoided; capacity—it transpires—20,000!) and then at the menthol-cool ICA, The Clash played sets of such emotional intensity and heartbursting velocity that all previous convictions about music (even about punk) were slashed to shredded slivers. A heart and mind previously bethrothed to soul and reggae were jemmied open to the breathsnatching social, spiritual, mental and physical power of this agonised whiteboy towerblock blues.

The day he quit The 101ers, Joe Strummer said "yesterday I thought I was a crud, then I saw the Sex Pistols and I became a king..." The mornings after surviving The Clash those first times I knew exactly how he felt...

EVEN TO helpless addicts, The Clash's deep, poisonous and eventually fatal flaws were obvious; but so much else about them was perfect. Absolutely bloody perfect...

That friggin' name for starters! Onomatopoeically violent and glowering portentous, it seemed to grab the '70s (a Sir Geoffrey Howe amongst decades) by the lapels and threaten its dreary life with mad-eyed damage. The Clash—no band was ever better labelled.

Nor looked more dramatically right than The Clash in that first year.

With their song titles spray-paint stencilled onto fatigues—like headlines, like battle orders, like accusations and manifestoes—The Clash contrived to sidestep McLaren's grinningly proffered stylistic straitjacket. They were, all at once, berserk TVs, living Dada, guerrilla fighters, a gang and a commando unit.
It was clichéd even then, and obvious laddo rebel rock nonsense really, but somehow The Clash made convincing outsiders, victims, outlaws and renegades. Later it became pantomime parody, but for 12 vital months The Clash made like heroes.

PHOTO: ”WWWAAAUGGH!!!" and all that stuff

And they stood in no-one's shadow, not even the Pistols'. It was white light-plain that Malcolm's bastard squad lived a double life. Shock troops? Yes. Madmen kicking the crap out've rock's bilious remains? Sure. But undisciplined lager-guzzling louts too. Their importance was massive but gestural, their rage communicated with a blunderbuss.

The Clash, by sharp contrast, lanced their targets with stiletto accuracy. Their songs were newsflashes, handouts, calls to arms, and always determinedly avoided punk's curled-lip baby-talk lexicon. Strange to say, given Strummer's torture-victim delivery, but The Clash—their stuff brimming to overflow with prostitutes, corruption, riots, brainwashing, drugs, fire, despair, condoms, pickpockets, DJs, cabbages, kings and kitchen sinks—were punk's most eloquent outlet.

By the time the earthmoving 'White Riot' dates came around, the cataclysmic mindfuck of those first gigs had been augmented by the brutally dense and crude 'Riot/1977' and 'Capitol Radio' 45s (the latter an NME mail-order freebie), and that epochal debut LP.

The Clash was everything that 'Bollocks' promised but wasn't; was terrifyingly ferocious but repeatedly, sometimes even deliberately, hilarious; was the most accurate time-capsule snapshot of Britain in '77; and was an opening blast so singlemindedly engaged and recklessly energised that it borders on the insane. It drove impressionable things like me to those borders too.

Spending a whole day walking in and out of the HMV shop in Oxford Street, repeatedly changing perfectly sound copies of the LP, a scheme to swipe the 'Capitol Radio EP' sticker. I managed six, propaganda material for the doubters.

Believing so stupidly in 1977's 'no Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones...' clenched-fist kiss-off, that the day Presley died I went on a celebratory pub crawl, an act which—I now realise, post-Cave, post-Bleasdale—will ensure that I rot in hell...

...Revelling in the ludicrously fanatical proto slam dancing that characterised Clash gigs. People fainted, people fell, people bled. It was mad.

THE CLASH, you'll be surprised to learn, never declined. Much too slow and graceful that. No, one day, sometime just before Exile On London Calling, the elastic just went.

They wound the rubber to its habitual screaming tautness but instead of express-delivering its jackpot payload of raw energy as usual, it just Ping!—snapped, kaput, finito, game over. Next day, Mick Jones was a satin-clad guitar hero, The Clash—the blessed, holy Clash—just another rock band.

And just as the ferocious inevitability, the stun-grenade suddenness and the sense-dazzling newness of The Clash's swaggering ascendency paralleled balletically that of punk as a whole, so their spiralling nosedive into corporate, clingfilmed, barely-fought mediocrity, mercilessly mirrors the fall from grace of the whole safety-pinned shebang.

THE TWIN demises of The Clash and punk came as no surprise, surely? Both buckled beneath the crippling weight of on-board contradictions too integral to jettison or have surgically removed. The Sex Pistols signed IOUs the rest of punk couldn't hope to honour; only The Clash were mad enough to try. In aiming so high and setting out their stall so unambiguously, they played Deer Hunter roulette with five loaded chambers.

The world changed too. What had seemed tough and clever in 1976—sneering at traditional means of employ—was, just a couple of years later, with school leavers being offered starvation or slavery, looking pretty sick. 'Career Opportunities' indeed!

Things have a natural vigorous lifespan, after which they can't continue with much dignity so I shed no tears for The Clash, or punk. They'd had their run and left several permanent crater-sized impressions (listed recently by Tony Parsons and Charlie Murray) on popular culture's dense cranium.

For most of the best things about punk—both at the time, and lastingly—we have, one way or another, to thank the Sex Pistols. But the Distinguished Services Awards shouldn't stop with them, because while Rotten and Co went about their iconoclastic DIY plastic surgery for pop, The Clash were busy being one of the things they claimed to most virulently despise. Sorry Tone, but for nearly 18 months, The Clash were the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world.

THE FINAL CHAPTER Those were the days?  1977 B.C. (BEFORE CRAP)

———

Page 12 – New Musical Express, 22nd February 1986

INTO THE CELLULOID VOID

Colonial cousin DESSA FOX re-views the initial images of British punk from across the pond

Three cans of film are smaller than an army, and much more persuasive. Tactics manuals ready? Let's get colonised.

Dateline Toronto: home of John Lydon's relatives and the 1980 Film Festival, where The Great Rock 'N Roll Swindle is being premiered in North America. All indigenous NME readers are present. Someone sings No Future in the line-up and, behind this person, snow falls on a $1,000,000 worth of construction equipment. Nastiness abounds: an unconditionally sleazy native Indian panhandles from the white kids, and the cops hustle him along. The cops champ donuts and nudge each other.

Here are the angry youth of Canada, punked to the nines but looking not at all like the jackals of a new necropolis. The angry youth of Canada are in fact standing in a snowdrift wearing expensive imported T-shirts. Jackets are open, displaying Malcy's updated version of magnifying glasses, muzzle-loading weapons, and novel social diseases. All in all, lucre and longing on a cold night, never in the history of punk have nipples been more erect.

As it happens, Swindle was entirely right for a film festival, being literate, organised, and dead good-looking. No grainy hand-held amateur hours here, but a real script and the professional's love of detail. Swindle's values are also the values of a festival promoter, even a cinema owner. Basically, one entertainment manager talks to another entertainment manager about getting bums on seats. The Great Rock 'N Roll Swindle: not a foreign language film.

Speaking of dirt on the lens, one of the more sobering features of verité movies — like Don Letts' Punk Rock Movie — is that documentaries rarely promote the director. Shots of people lounging backstage and great wedges of tour-bus talk do not scream auteur at the viewer. The director's personality isn't the issue. Consequently, filmmakers who let the performers get on with it are treated as witnesses, not as brill artistes. Don Letts must get asked "What was Siouxsie really like?" more often than "And what were you feeling at the time, Don?".

Swindle is nothing more or less than an art student's view of Malcolm McLaren. The film has several art-school virtues — technical lessons well-learned, slyness, imaginative deaths, wit — and one overweening character defect, which is snobbery. If a film could have bad breath, this one would have the halitosis of smugness. This is a film that says,

"Malcolm and Julien know everything, and you know nothing."

Swindle reeks of aloof brainbusting, like those cinema shorts about microchips and scientists at the Arctic Circle.

Meanwhile, back at the auditorium, the freezing cold foreigners are dying to be smugged at. Excerpts from the Bill Grundy Show come on before the main attraction, and are greeted with farts and cheers. Nobody has any idea who Bill Grundy is, except that he looks unmistakably like an asshole. Everybody yells "ASSHOLE" at Bill Grundy. Next up, a BBC lady with a ghastly helmet of curls is saying,

"It's called Punk Rock — they're angry and they're frustrated."

This woman has eyes of a china stoat, and instantly the source of much English frustration becomes clear; nobody could sleep with something like that. Primly, the woman balances a copy of Sniffin' Glue on her knee. She pulls an anguished face. Towers do not open fire, and this seems a shame.

Swindle duly played and ended... After the shouting was over, conclusions ruled the conversations: McLaren was the manipulative one, Rotten the brilliant one, Jones the loutish one. Julien Temple should go far — not only are there at least two gratuitous chase scenes, but a steal from Performance and bonus penises. But most of all we remembered — nay, inhaled — C'mon everybody, Something Else, and My Way.

In North America, audiences went wild, wilder, wildest over Sid Vicious, and this is because he was the most Yankified of the band. Cook and Jones were English-variety lads, and Rotten an ironist; this was about as relatable as curdled Colman's. But Sid looked dumb and vulnerable (refer to Lech Kowalski's D.O.A. for those addled moments). Better than this, he looked like your typical broken-home kid, a breed which hippy offspring everywhere can spot across a crowded screen. The idea of Sid as a debilitating influence on American youth is laughable — small Sid civilisations preceded him all across the continent; slow studies out to do themselves an injury. They lacked style, however, and so failed to become famous.

——

Jubilee

DEREK JARMAN made Jubilee in 1978. Among others, it starred Jordan, Toyah Wilcox, Richard O'Brien and Adam Ant. Jubilee is a film by an artist — as opposed to an arty film — because boffo box office was never the point. (Proof positive; Stuart Goddard wasn't yet the Ant). Jubilee was conceived, shot, and edited as a sort of Method costume piece for nascent ideas. Swindle was economics lessons; Jubilee was well-dressed code.

Essentially, a film like Jubilee is about letting your friends appear more interesting than they really are (the job of artists everywhere). This is a perfectly legitimate practise, as long as the story holds up and everyone takes their clothes off.

Taking off your clothes implies some sort of plot, and Jubilee, unlike Swindle, hadn't the luxury of a built-in sequence of events. Narrative must have its day. To give Jarman credit, Jubilee attempts to place punk in the context of Necessary Insurrections In English History. Unfortunately, however, any number of bloody knives and burning baby carriages falter in the absence of brilliant performers. The Rotten eyes, for example, spell out a more alluring void than just about anyone's suffocation scene. And Jubilee's vocal mannerisms were horribly cabaret-like — remember, if you will, the constant bursts of crazee laughter, and preening lines like

"Artists steal the world's energy."

Worse — the giggles attacked English punk where it was most vulnerable. Where Temple was ruthlessly unsentimental, Jarman let slip the dogs of cosiness. There could be few scenes more demoralising to Punk As We Loved It than the following: after visiting a hippy gardener, a group of wrinkly anarchists climb in their car and wave goodbye.

"Tra-lal", they trill. "Tal".

It's the Famous Five off to buy bondage gear in Devon, and it's so English its blinding.

With the exception of Susan Sidelman's Smithereens — a film we all needed, because it showed that girls lick their wounds the same-but-different — most plotted punk films failed. This is due to a harsh geographical law; a sloppy film narrative is not nearly as entertaining as sloppy flesh on a sloppy stage. For one thing, you can't drink in the cinema.

Rude Boy was the flabbiest offender here — was it a 'commentary' on what dull fans Joe Strummer attracted? Or was everyone dull to begin with? Jack Kazam's effort was a tragic miss, because Rude Boy is the closest punk came to a state-of-the-nation tour documentary. But a post-Roxy Cocksucker Blues it's not, or even Don't Look Back.

Finally, of course, the awful truth; the best punk films were made long before 1976. The American 'B' movie was, and is, the most mesmerising definition of punk on celluloid, as doggedly Dry and as rapturously impure as anyone could wish. Who can top the 'B' movie's sick scripts, or its girls with guns, or its no-future heroes? (begin with Detour's hapless psycho Tom Neal, who, Sid-like, murdered his real-life wife). Certainly the '70s directors showed us the fab gesture, like the sight of Ari Up's knickers twisted around her vinyled knees — surely the fashion innovation of the century. And certainly there are scrappy achievements that never got much of an audience — the films of Scott and Beth B, or Amos Poe, or Joe Rees' on-the-spot tremors. But most of it didn't click. Unlike the B film, punk's directors weren't naive enough, or were hailed as 'artists' later that same day, or simply lacked screening outlets. Some of them were bought out. But lucky for us, the 'B' movie blew a tyre on the way to Hollywood and Vine.

(Thanks to Jon Savage and Archie Tait for the tapes.)

——

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FRONT

ROCK AGAINST RACISM: the origins, rapid rise in support and disastrous decline recalled by STEVEN WELLS.

1976 WAS not a pretty year. Racist attacks on the Asian community were mounting, and the police were making full use of the SUS laws to harrass and contain black youth.

Nazi Robert Relf was turned into a folk-hero by the press for his flaunting of the Race Relations Act and The Sunran banner headlines about "immigrants" living in "five star luxury" at the tax payers. expense. Uncle Enoch popped out of the cupboard waving his "rivers' of blood" skeleton and the braying voices on the Right of the House were calling for a tightening-up of the immigration laws in order to save our precious "British culture" from molestation by brown types.

The far-Right were reaping the benefits of a growing disillusionment with the Labour Government. In several inner-city local elections many Liberal candidates were pushed into fourth place by the rising tide of support for the National Front.

Facism had become a force in British politics for the first time since the 1930s.

It was into this polluted atmosphere that a couple of "pop-stars", decided to add their own poisonous mouthfulls.

David Bowie was first with talk about Britain needing a "strong man" to cure its ills. Then, in what was later claimed to be a drunken stupor, Eric Clapton told a Birmingham audience to vote for the "prophet" Powell to stop "foreigners" turning the country into "a colony".

It was Clapton who provoked the strongest reaction. Letters dripping with anger flooded into the music papers. One of the letters went further than most. It called for a "rank and file movement against the poison of racism in rock music" and it asked those intersted to write to "Rock Against Racism".

Later, Red Saunders, one of the letter's signatories, claimed that

Clapton and Bowie's outpourings were merely symptomatic of the old-guard's redundancy and chauvinism. Certainly, in the five years of RAR's existence, not one solitary pre-punk rock act offered support. RAR was wedded to punk out of preference and out of necessity. It also gave punk its one real distinguishing feature—its loudly and proudly boasted anti-racist stance.

Many reggae bands and other black acts also supported RAR. But, as RAR always insisted, it was primarily a negative organisation in that it aimed to combat racism amongst white youth rather than make pious claims about being able to "help the poor black folk".

Working closely with the newly-formed Anti-Nazi League, RAR thought big and, in May 1978, attracted 100,000 people to a rally in London's Victoria Park.

Other large carnivals followed, most notably in Manchester and Edinburgh. And the music press, which up to this point had given uncritical support, started to go sour. What was the point, it was argued, of getting 100,000 punks to march through London to see a few bands? The very fact that the NF's "Rock Against Communism" in London and "Punk Front" in Leeds had died embarrassing and lonely deaths due to a complete lack of interest suggests that such cynicism was unfounded. And anyway, said RAR's supporters, what was so terribly wrong if

people did just turn up for the chance to see X-Ray Spex for free?

"The shortest playlist in the world is that of the all-Aryan disco," pointed out the ANL's Dave Widgery. RAR was based on the simple truth that pop music is black and white music and that its use by racists is an obscenity.

RAR was launched at exactly the right time to both exploit and grow with punk as it flowered into the first attempt by youth to create and sustain a culture for itself, by itself since the '60s.

It was away from the carnivals, however, that RAR's real strength was showing. RAR clubs had sprung up in almost every city, many in isolation from the organisation in London. Most just ordered the leaflets, the posters and the stickers and started up a weekly or fortnightly club which was often the only venue in the area consistently giving gigs to 'new' bands.

BY 1981, RAR was in trouble. Its debts, largely due to having organised the national Militant Entertainment tour, were crippling. Many of its original members had drifted away. Others had seen the NF's disastrous performance in the 1979 General Election as reason enough to turn from anti-fascist politics towards other priorities—like the Tory government. RAR's paper, Temporary Hoarding, attempted to reflect this change

and directed much of its venom against the "Blue Scum". The attempt to broaden out what was essentially a one-issue campaign was, however, to prove a failure.

RAR was now out of step and, to be brutal, out of touch. Punk, the rose that wrapped itself around RAR's politics, had rotted into self-parody. The very word was now used only by the gluebag brigade. It wasn't a matter of mere unfashionability although even in the frozen north aesthetic tastes do tend to change at least once a decade.

It was more a case of inbuilt obsolescence. But RAR still had one last kick left in it. In 1982, 30,000 people turned out to see The Specials, Aswad and The Au Pairs in Leeds. It was in many ways RAR's crowning glory and it was certainly the only RAR carnival to attract a predominantly black audience. Apart from the music papers, the media completely ignored the concert. Their attention was focussed on Southall where a crowd of angry young Asians had burnt down a pub in which The Four Skins were

playing. RAR at last recognised its own redundancy. Multi-racialism had found its own musical form in 2-Tone and Crass were emerging from the commune to raise the black standard of anarcho-vegitarianism as the political rallying point for the third generation of punks.

——

DRESSED TO KILL

An elegy to revolting youth: NICOLA ROBERTS on the enlightened life and brain death of punk fashion.
WE USE fashion to define ourselves; clothes tell us about the sex, age and status of the wearer. Fashion always has a code, and so it is conformist. But clothes can tell lies and they can be subverted.

Young people often set up their own rules, to differentiate themselves and sometimes to express social disaffection. Teen-anger. Every decade since the '50s has had its youth cults, rebels with or without causes: Beatniks, Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, Skins, Hippies, Afros. All these fashions obscured conventional dress-data (status, age or sex), so they were subversive. PUNK was a confrontation.

"If you put these clothes on you will be a force to be reckoned with."
(Vivienne Westwood)

In the early '70s, youth culture had been drifting off into escapism. Hermaphrodite hippies were freaking far-out of their heads. Gary and the Glam gang ego-tripped on their twinkling futurist fantasies while David Bowie and Slik slunk back to the Golden Years when everyone had nice haircuts. It was all pretend, unthreatening. Kids' stuff. Then a mean lean look began to filter over from New York; bands like Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads. Their hunger-strike chic became much less highbrow in Britain.

"As the job, so the clothes."
(Lettish proverb)

TEN YEARS on, there is a pointless debate about whether punk originated from working-class inertia or middle-class arty-schools.

The non-working, no-future class encompassed both; aDOLEscents. Boredom and hate. Punk was profound negativity electrified into action by teenage hormones. It was coherent and consistent; anti-social, anti-music, anti-fashion.

The fanzine Sniffin' Glue showed the fingering for three guitar chords... "Now go and form a band". Punk was D-I-Y. Destroy it yourself. Slit, ripped, shredded-fashion design seemed as redundant as slick record production when every self-maimed punk was a star to be stared at. But one designer, Vivienne Westwood, stimulated punk with her shop Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die, later simply Sex, and then, given the more sophisticated title, Seditionaries.

"The definition of Seditionaries is to seduce people into revolt, Malcolm (McLaren) chose that word."

Her clothes led a merciless assault on previous notions of 'youth'. Society had overlooked and trivialised young people. Punk spoke for itself and looks were louder than words; music can be turned off, evaded; punk clothes were street combat.

Juvenile style is always moderated for the 'with-it' adult market. Laura Ashley makes clothes for middle-aged minors because youthfulness is attractive, especially in women. But punk fashion, like disenchanted youth, was alien and isolated from the grown-up world. It was lamb dressed as mutton, children exploiting the 'adult' world of sex and violence.

Children have pink cheeks and puppy fat. Punks were thin, ill and vacant a spectacle of wasted youth. They used images of insanity to alienate 'normal' people - bandaged wrists, Johnny Rotten's demented poses and sleeves as long as straitjackets. Deviant behaviour was graphically depicted on T-shirts - orgies, bestiality, buggery, paedophilia. Clothes were censored as well as records: people were arrested possession of illicit apparel; Vivienne Westwood's stock was confiscated.

"We discovered that people couldn't bear any overt sexual statement, but innuendo was all right. I hate innuendo, the sort of Innuendo when Prince Charles refers to things like nappy rash."
(Vivienne Westwood, i-D)

CHILDREN, especially little girls, must be protected from S.E.X. But 15 year old Ariana, singer with The Slits, wore a dirty mac and latex stockings. Punk brought brothel-creeping bondage gear out on the streets. Fishnets, stilettos and crotch-skimming rubber skirts. Bondage pants and studded dog collars. Black leather. Of her (and McLaren's) Sex boutique, Ms Westwood said, "I was trying to reproduce totally, in all its esoterical detail, the kind of rubberwear featured in sex specialist publications, publications, and lay it on ordinary people, office people, secretaries." (i-D)

Bands like X-Ray Spex, the Au Pairs, The Raincoats challenged 'feminity' and punk clothing - make-up and hairstyles, traditional means of beautification - suppressed, satirised or vandalised notions of prettiness and girlie charms. Punk was implicitly feminist, confronting female sexuality rather than mythologising it into earth-motherhood, or avoiding it through separatism.

(African proverb)
"When new clothes are seen, where do the old ones go?"

Sooner or later fashion cashes in, goes mainstream. High Street. Punk lasted two years at the most. Ms Westwood, ever the eccentric, wanted something new.

"You can't go out to have fun if you look drab... I had to design these clothes really. I don't think there is a great big gap between these clothes and punk rock."

So she opened her (Olde) World's End shoppe, full of fall-down socks and floppy bloomers, a ragbag of jerkins, doublets and hose. Outside a huge clock whizzed backwards, inside the floor sloped and dipped. Topsy-turvy land. Adam Ant was singing about pirates and Prince Charming: Punk was centuries ago. Strangle-tight leathers were traded in for loose cottons, bin-liners for eyeliner.

Eighties gender-bending was cosmetic not political, and sex was safe again because Boy George'd rather have a cup of tea. No wonder every 15 year old's mum loved him. The New Romantics were sanitised, saintmartinised. Teenagers were reduced to children playing dressing up, and, because it was such jolly fun, the grown-ups joined in. Vivienne Westwood was featured in Vogue, became the first English designer to exhibit in Paris for ten years and sold her clothes to Macy's.

PUNK HAD generated 'street' fashion which humiliated notions of couture and tailoring; the haughty foreign buyers flocked to grab our zany gear. But all too often, British clothes failed to meet production deadlines or were shoddy if they did. Fashion is an industry, industries prefer not to take risks, so when designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier began to produce expensive, punqué little numeros in Paris Fashion is fickle, it makes its money by being in constant flux, and so it has a duty to reject its precursors, to be different. What's left? We have decided to undo everything punk achieved.

PUNK was inventive, base, confident, aggressive, youthful.

'80s style is self-conscious, materialistic, passive, retrospective, middle-aged,

Is it really so sad to see a pluckily persistent punk in 1986? In this doleful decade it is the is the yapping yuppie 'cafe' society' that's anachronistic.

PHOTO: Roxy style
PHOTO: Seditionaries - open for business

Paul Simonon: ‘I was living off half of Joe Strummer’s dole money when he joined The Clash’

The Big Issue – Music
Source: The Big Issue

Bass player Paul Simonon revisits the early days of The Clash in a new interview – and says although they had no money, they sure had style.

Punk legend Paul Simonon, bass player for The Clash, has shared details about the DIY ethic and community spirit which characterised the band’s beginnings and the London punk scene in the 1970s.

“We were fighting to survive,” said Simonon. “I got kicked off the dole and when Joe [Strummer] joined, I had no income whatsoever. So I was penniless and living off half of Joe’s dole money.

That was really bonding. I remember me and Strummer talking about how mirrored sunglasses were cool and quite intimidating. An hour later, he came back with a pair. I said they look brilliant, and he’d got a pair for me as well.

It says a lot about Joe as a person. That’s called generosity. I try to live like that too. So we walked around looking pretty sharp… but we were bloody starving!”

Paul Simonon was the bass player and artistic director with The Clash, bringing a working-class art school perspective to the punk pioneers that reshaped both music and style in the UK.

In a new interview for The Big Issue’s Letter To My Younger Self, he describes those early years of The Clash – the inspiration, the struggle, and the generosity of his bandmates.

Simonon, whose new LP with singer Galen Ayers is out on May 19, recalls how The Clash had a work ethic to back up their talent. He also describes how growing up in Brixton before moving to West London had influenced him.

“I would tell my younger self to just keep going. At the beginning of The Clash, we were following our instincts and passions. I wouldn’t change anything,” said Simonon.

“We worked so hard. It was all action for the whole period of The Clash. We never had a holiday – we were on a mission.

We toured forever, which was the best thing in the world because travel is the best education. I was fortunate because in Brixton, with the Windrush generations, and then working down Portobello Market as a kid, it felt like the whole world was wandering up and down. So I grew up with broad horizons. It was exciting, enlightening, and made a deep impact on me.”

Simonon was also open about his lack of musical training before starting the band with Mick Jones.

“I went to art school to be a painter. Mick Jones went to art school to put a band together,” he said.

“My friend was invited to try out as drummer for Mick’s band London SS, and I went to support him. They dragged me onto a mic and it was a disaster – but the story is that Bernie Rhodes suggested Mick get rid of his band and start one with me.

It was the same way Bernie was responsible for getting John Lydon as singer in the Sex Pistols – mixing musicians with non-musicians. The magic was that Mick had the patience to teach me how to play bass. For a good period of time, Mick taught me everything – plus I played along with reggae records, which helped.

I guess we’re lucky. We just had a unique ingredient of personalities within the band. And the contribution by Mick, Joe and Topper is immense. When you’ve hardly played bass but you’ve got someone like Topper behind you on drums, it certainly hides a lot of mistakes. That was my jazz phase!”

CONSIDERING that last Tuesday's show at Rock City featured several hip-hop influenced performers, it may at first seem strange that the odd punky globule of phlegm could be seen sailing towards the stage.

On reflection, however, it seems clear that the presence of loveable punk moptop Paul Cook and ex-Clash guitar hero Mick Jones, had caused some poor senile old punk to believe that it was '76 rather than '86.

I actually only caught the end of the set by Cook's band, The Chiefs of Relief, however, so I cannot pass judgment on their performance.

They were followed by the Human Beatbox — very entertaining at first, but of strictly limited potential.

Whistle were very competent, but, as my friend so acutely observed, with all their synchronised dance-steps and polished production, they are not a million miles from The Stylistics.

The main event of the evening was Big Audio Dynamite, and it is refreshing to see, in these days of washed and blow-dried, pop that some bands are still better live than on record.

There are still some problems to be sorted out (some of the songs go on too long and the whole set sagged a bit in the middle), but this is still adventurous, original and exciting.

Something of the spirit of punk is still alive here, but mixed in with reggae, disco, rap and a host of other influences to give it an Eighties freshness.

At the moment it appears that Mick Jones rather than Joe Strummer has salvaged the most from the wreckage of The Clash. CDF

THE Montreux Rock and Pop Gala, that international festival of mime, recently staged to complement the Golden Rose Television Festival, will be screened on BBC1 in early June.

The lengthy line up includes Queen, Genesis, Eurythmics, AHA, Culture Club, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, Bronski Beat, Big Country, Five Star, Lone Justice, Eighth Wonder with Patsy Kensit (who?) and a host of other mostly British stars.

Which all goes to show that Joe Strummer's remark about giving each teenager a guitar on their 18th was totally wrong; what they should get is a busted mike and a tape machine and a cardboard audience to play to — why not, that's how OMD started!

THREE years after their acrimonious parting in The Clash, Mick Jones and Joe Strummer have finally made up.

I discover that guitarist Jones secretly played on the singer's new single, Love Kills, taken from Alex Cox's movie Sid and Nancy, on condition that he was not credited on the record.

It's the first time that the pair have played together on vinyl since The Clash's album Combat Rock four years ago. Soon after that the unpredictable Strummer sacked both Jones and drummer Topper Headon.

After the failure of the new Clash line-up, Strummer asked Jones to re-join the group. But it was too late. Jones had spent nearly two years forming Big Audio Dynamite, now one of the best British bands around.

"Mick and Joe are friends again," says a friend. "They are talking again and Mick very kindly agreed to play on Love Kills. He wanted to help Joe out, but didn't want anyone to know about it."

JOE STRUMMER and Mick Jones are back on friendly terms, and they've served up a monster of a single to celebrate.

The songwriting partnership which put the fire in the original Clash takes production honours on the new 45 by Jonesy's latest venture, Big Audio Dynamite.

BAD's first LP was pretty good, but C'Mon Every Beatbox sounds even better thanks to the grit provided by Strummer.

Iggy Pop, on the other hand, was practising punk-style outrage when Strummer and Jones were barely out of short trousers. And he's teamed up with former Sex Pistol Steve Jones (no relation) for his latest downbeat single.

It had to happen. A major label has taken the DIY sound of Chicago House music and given it an expensive sheen. The Bang Orchestra lack the compulsive appeal of Farley Jackmaster Funk, but Sample That! is still a treat for itchy feet.

This week's rave releases: 1, C'Mon Every Beatbox, Big Audio Dynamite; 2, Cry For Love, Iggy Pop; 3, Sample That!, The Bang Orchestra; 4, Split Personality, UTFO; 5, Stop The Tide, His Latest Flame.

Dear Sir,

I read, with increasing disbelief, the letter from the reader 'Ronnie' who was unable to gain entry to a university gig.

A very valid point was lost in a hysterical outburst of outrageous political statements which ranged from the snide to the puerile.

Everyone knows that you have to be a student or be signed in by a student to be allowed into a college or university gig; there is no political criterion to be fulfilled. How 'Ronnie' makes the connection between political extremism and those who were allowed into the gig, is beyond me.

Apparently he is able to discern a persons political viewpoint by mere sight. What is this intuition he possesses that allows him to do this? Imagine how useful this would be to election canvassers.

Rantings

With all his anti-left rantings (left-wing Communist weirdos', Comrades', etc) he sounded more like that other Ronnie from across the Atlantic Ocean.

Incidentally, bands can do something about these student and guests gigs. When the gigs are booked, bands know who is allowed in. A few years ago The Clash (still relative unknowns) agreed to do a gig in Glasgow on condition that it was 'open'.

To ensure this was put into effect, Joe Strummer queued for a ticket and was refused because he wasn't a student. The gig was cancelled.

Stephen, New Farm Loch Kilmarnock

ALL you overworked seasonal staff can cheer up. Even the stars themselves have served their time and done Christmas jobs . . .

Nick Heyward — "Before I was old enough to know better I got a Christmas job at the Post Office. I'd be out on my bike at 5.30am freezing to death."

Joe Strummer (of The Clash) — "I was put off ice cream for life when I was a carpet cleaner at the London Coliseum. I was on my knees for hours after the pantomime matinee scraping up ice cream dropped by 300 kids."

Marc Almond — "My job was spotlighting actors at a panto in Stockport. The problem was that I invariably got the light on the wrong person."

Nick Van Ede (vocalist, Cutting Crew) : "I worked at a mental hospital in Sussex and for several years spent Christmas Day cheering up patients. Weird, but I enjoyed it."

John Otway—"I was packing records for CBS—and the most depressing thing about it was that none of them were mine."

Brian Foreman (keyboards, Thrashing Doves) — "I was Father Christmas in a department store. I was really getting into it, but my girlfriend left me because she said I didn't exist anymore."

Kim Wilde obviously had far too much pocket money before she made it. "I've never had a Christmas job," she says.

MERRY Christmas? You must be joking. I asked the rock stars about the worst Christmas they have ever spent . . .

JOE STRUMMER (ex-Clash): "Several years ago I spent Christmas in a launderette in Harlesden High Street. I had no money so I spent the day doing my washing."

MARTIN DEVILLE (Sigue Sigue Sputnik): "Discovering that the fat, ugly creature that called himself Santa was actually my dad in drag."

SMILEY CULTURE: "I used to deal in second-hand cars. One Christmas I spent £150 on a car planning to do it up and use the cash on presents. It blew up on the way home."

RICK PARFITT (Status Quo): In Paris in '64 when I was with the Highlights it was desperate—no money and a boiled egg for dinner that turned out to be bad.

BILLY CURRIE (Ultravox): Last year, a long-awaited reunion with my brother ended up in an argument and then a fist fight over whose turn it was to set fire to the Christmas pudding. No family Christmas for me this year.

RAT SCABIES (The Damned): "The group's worst Christmas was in 1984 when we signed our latest record contract. After nine years, 11 managers and five previous record companies we didn't know what would happen next. This is the first Christmas I've ever had some money in my pocket."

DAVID ESSEX: "In 1969 I was on tour with a blues group and we were completely broke. I was forced to spend a night on a bench at Manchester Piccadilly station. As a result, I caught pneumonia and spent the 25th in hospital."

GARY GLITTER: "I reckon this year's going to be the worst. I've strained my back and can't walk. I pulled a muscle trying to pick up my platform shoes—it's not funny, it really happened."

MIKE LINDUP (Level 42): Last Christmas £1500 worth of presents were stolen from my car on Christmas Eve. It put a real dampener on the rest of the holiday.

ROSIE VELA, the American singer who is set to have a hit with her single Magic Smile: "I spent one Christmas modelling flimsy clothes in a 14th century castle in northern Italy in sub-zero temperatures. I needed two weeks in Barbados to recover."

'Plain and simple, the "new" Clash's new album Cut The Crap (sans Mick Jones -- he's now in Big Audio Dynamite)--has got to be the biggest disappointment of the year. Not only haven't The Clash put out an album in three years, but Cut The Crap is seven months overdue, and for more than a year Joe Strummer has been touting this album as the single piece of vinyl to revitalize "punk." Cut The Crap doesn't come close to living up to all its ballyhoo, and it doesn't revitalize a damn thing.

Side One, the album's "punk" side is particularly lousy. "Dictator," "Dirty Punk," "Cool Under Heat," and "Movers and Shakers" are just dogs. They're not exciting, uplifting, creative or anything. The back-up vocals are really annoying.

They're produced so that the band sounds like they're a hundred strong, chanting and screaming like they're taking part in the most spiritual moment is the history of mankind. It's bad enough that they have to beat us over the head any say "Look look, isn't this great -- aren't you inspired! Don't you want to initiate some radical social change." This style is even worse when shangtied in such cruddy songs.

Side Two is better, but not by a lot. The album's single, "This Is England" starts it off and is one of the album's better cuts. Strummer's raspy voice is at its best, the roaring chorus is toned down, the guitars have a much greater range and play well off of the keyboards. If nothing else, "This Is England" proves that the band's now guitarists know how to play more than just power chords.

"Three Card Trick" is another of the album's standouts. It's Caribbean rhythms are very reminiscent of "Revolution Rock" from their London Calling LP.

Strummer shows us his soft side on "North and South." It seems sort of off that one of the only good cuts on the album is a rather "pleasant" sounding pop tune. Such a song hardly befits a bunch of rads like the Clash.

Well . . . this is The Clash in 1986. In "We Are The Clash," the album's one "punk" tune that works, Joe and pals shout "We ain't gonna be treated like trash/We've got one thing/WE ARE THE CLASH!" That's not saying much these days.

—Danny Plotnick

Mick Jones is feeling quite pleased with himself. He has just wrapped up a full day of interviews at Columbia Records' New York offices, playfully dodging questions about why he was kicked out of the Clash. But as he smugly escorts the last journalist to the door, Jones trips over a large cardboard carton.

Jacking his bespangle frame over the box, he brusquely rips it open and discovers a cache of platinum-record awards for Men at Work.

Jones rocks back on his heels and sighs, “Y’know, I never got my platinum award for ‘Combat Rock’... And I never got my guitars back from the Clash, either.”

That is the most Jones has said publicly about his abrupt expulsion from the Clash in August 1983. At the time, his friend, songwriting partner and band co-pilot, Joe Strummer, said he fired Jones because of his rock-star attitude and increasing indifference to the group’s leftist politics.

Jones, however, has stoically refused to elaborate on the circumstances of his ouster or to badmouth his former mates. Nor will he comment on Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon's recent dismissal of Vince White, Nick Sheppard and Pete Howard — the three musicians who replaced Jones and drummer Topper Headon in the group — or their split with manager Bernard Rhodes. Jones also goes mum when pressed about rumors of an imminent reunion with Strummer.

He will only talk about Big Audio Dynamite, his new dub-funk quintet featuring video director and sound-effects man Don Letts. “I’m a hundred percent committed to Big Audio Dynamite,” Jones declares while Letts nods sagely at his elbow. “I’ve always stood by the Clash, and I’m very proud of what I did with them. I want people to give us a chance now.” Yet even Jones’ most elliptical references to the Clash — in this interview, he at first referred to the band only as the “certain group I used to be in” — reveal an unshakable respect for Strummer and a lingering disbelief at his dishonorable discharge.

“When I was in the Clash, they used to call me Whack Attack,” he says with a grin. The reference is to his insatiable hunger for New York rap and hip-hop music. “They accused me of bringing my New York environment everywhere I went with them.”

In fact, Big Audio Dynamite’s pan-ethnic pileup of funk aggression, Afro chug-a-lug and 3-D reggae dub is “the way I wanted to go even then. You can hear it in things like ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘Radio Clash’ and ‘Rock the Casbah.’ I was very affected by loud music in New York clubs. I thought the others would dig it, too,” he adds, sadly.

But, Jones insists, “I would never say anything bad about the Clash. I’ve done a few interviews where people try to get right with me by saying what Strummer and the guys were. It doesn’t work with us. When that happens, me and Don immediately jump to the defense of the Clash.”

They can afford to be magnanimous. Big Audio Dynamite’s debut album, “This Is Big Audio Dynamite,” has shown some staying power despite recent dismal effort by the Jones-less Clash seemed already headed for cult City. B.A.D. has also fared well onstage; though the group plays no Clash oldies in concert, audiences in Britain, New York and Boston didn’t seem to mind.

In Manchester, the first stop on B.A.D.'s late-’85 British tour, “the response from the crowd was a definite ‘Yes!’” Jones exults.

Asked about his first reaction to Strummer’s betrayal of their seven-year friendship, Jones gets flippant. “The first thing I did was go home and go boo-hoo for half an hour.” His announcement shortly thereafter that he was forming his own Clash to compete with Strummer was “definitely a windup. I had no intention of forming my own Clash.” But Jones didn’t think twice about starting another band.

Through Don Letts, a top Clash confidant since his days spinning reggae and punk discs at London’s Roxy club, Jones recruited Rasta bassist Leo “E-Zee Kill” Williams (real middle name Ezekiel), formerly with the experimental reggae band Basement 5. Drummer Greg Roberts answered a newspaper ad placed by Jones; keyboard player and photographer Dan Donovan was the last to join — he was originally hired to shoot band photos. “I wanted to play dance music that made you think,” Jones explains, “with rock ’n’ roll guitar and my quirky voice on top.” But he says he wanted the album to be more bop than bummer. “It’s very important not to be too preachy, to be bumming people out,” he says. “Everybody knows how it is out there. It’s important to say those things, but the tactical problem is how to say them.”

Jones’ search for a solution will continue on the next Big Audio Dynamite record, which he hopes to release this summer. But the Clash is still very much on Mick Jones’ mind, if not his agenda. “I feel like I’ve got a responsibility to the people in the Clash. And I feel like I’ve fulfilled that obligation by coming up with something fresh.”

The Vancouver Sun, Wednesday. Aug 20, 1986

***

ENTERTAINMENT, F7

Clash rift healed, with apology

By ROBERT HILBURN Los Angeles Times

HOLLYWOOD — What happened, Joe?

After helping build the Clash into one of the most compelling British rock groups, Joe Strummer booted partner Mick Jones out of the group in 1983 and spent weeks telling everyone that he had done it because Jones no longer lived up to the band's original idealism.

"Mick was my best friend at one time," Strummer said in an interview in London in January 1984.

"We were partners and I don't dispense with my partners easily but he became indifferent. He didn't want to go into the studio or go on tour. He just wanted to go on holiday. He wasn't with us anymore."

So, Strummer's dramatic interview in a recent issue of New Musical Express, a leading British pop weekly, is nothing short of a public retraction-and apology.

The villain really was not Jones after all, but in large part — Strummer's own ego.

Noting that he has been talking again with Jones and that the two may even be writing together again soon, Strummer added:

"I did him wrong. I stabbed him in the back. Really, it's through his good grace we got back together and we're going to write together in the future. We cover completely different areas so we're not cramping each other's style. That's a good thing, a rare thing and in the last two years I've learned just how good and rare that is."

Page 6D Gainesville Sun, Monday, August 11, 1986

Los Angeles Times

Joe Strummer: Ego caused breakup of Clash

By ROBERT HILBURN

HOLLYWOOD - What happened, Joe?

Strummer's dramatic interview in a recent issue of a leading English pop weekly is nothing short of a public retraction - and apology.

After helping build the Clash into one of the most compelling British rock groups, Joe Strummer booted partner Mick Jones out of the group in 1983 and spent weeks telling everyone he had done it because Jones no longer lived up to the band's original idealism.

"Mick was my best friend at one time," Strummer said in an interview in London in January 1984. "We were partners and I don't dispense with my partners easily... but he became indifferent. He didn't want to go into the studio or go on tour. He just wanted to go on holiday. He wasn't with us anymore."

So, Strummer's dramatic interview in a recent Issue of New Musical Express, a leading English pop weekly, is nothing short of a public retraction - and apology.

The villain really was not Jones after all, but -In large part-Strummer's own ego.

Noting that he has been talking again with Jones and that the two may even be writing together again soon, Strummer added,"I did him wrong. I stabbed him in the back. Really, it's through his good grace we got back together and we're going to write together in the future. We cover completely different areas, so we're not (cramping) each other's style. That's a good thing, a rare thing, and in the last two years I've learned just how good and rare that is."

So what did cause the downfall of the Clash, whose challenging, socially conscious albums like "London Calling" and "Combat Rock" expanded the artistic horizons of punk and helped open the door for such other idealistic outfits as U2?

Strummer seconds the version Jones has generally given in interviews, pointing to tension revolv ing around the 1983 reinstatement of Bernard Rhodes as the Clash's manager.

"Mick and Bernie had never got on... and Bernie sort of coerced me into thinking that Mick was what was wrong with the scene. That wasn't hard because, as Mick will admit now... he (Jones) was being pretty awkward. Plus my ego... was definitely telling me, 'Go on, get rid of (him).'"

At the time of the 1984 Interview, Strummer seemed upbeat and eager to get on with reviving the spark that once surrounded the Clash, which headlined the opening night of the 1983 US Festival.

But it was not to be. The group's subsequent album, ironically titled "Cut the Crap", was a flop last year. Embarrassingly, it was far less interesting than the album Jones made with his new group, Big Audio Dynamite.

Strummer called it quits with the Clash and dropped out of sight.

He is now back with his first solo single, a tune called "Love Kills" that is featured in the film "Sid & Nancy", which is about the tragedy surrounding former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and girlfriend Nancy Spungen, both of whom died in 1978. She was found dead in a New York hotel room and Vicious, who was charged with her murder, later overdosed on heroin.

The single, which features the livelier but similarly spirited "Dum Dum Club" on the flip side, retraces some of the Clash's funk-accented instrumental territory while describing the dangers of obsessions.

Did he think about giving up the music business after the Clash breakup?

"Are you kidding? Have you ever thought what it would be like to be Joe Strummer driving a cab around London?" he said. "To have people in the back go, 'He used to be Joe Strummer'? I've had a fair taste of 'has-beenness' and it's been deserved. The worst part is when people ask, 'Are you Joe Strummer?' and then they go, 'Oh, I used to be a fan of yours.'"

"You seem to have a lot of Clash questions", remarks Don Letts peering at my scribbled list of questions. The pairing of Mick Jones and Joe Strummer on the latest B.A.D. album seems like a couple starting their marriage again after a failed separation. "Though Don Letts never actually admitted it to me it was very clear that old Strummer supplied quite a few sparks of inspiration to No 10 Upping Street". More on that later.

Big Audio Dynamite have yet to move me in any great way. For a start they're pretty faceless. Does anyone know the other three guys in the band? Apart from the classic C'mon Every Beatbox, one true moment of inspiration B.A.D. have yet to scale any musical peaks. Still I'd prefer Jones' ugly mug staring at me from Smash Hits than any of todays plastic pop star scumbags.

I won't waste time with anymore theorizing but will print the interview very much as it was.

YA: "You don't mind talking about the Clash then? I ask Don in reply to his opening remark.

Don: "I wasn't in the Clash. I can only say that I was a Clash fan and thought everything they did, with the exception of the last album was great."

YA: What did Mick think of the last Clash LP Cut the Crap?

Don: "You'll have to ask Mick that."

YA: OK then, what did you think of it?

Don: "It wasn't all there. Apart from This is England I didn't like it. I don't think The Clash even liked it."

YA: You seem to be slowly building up your audience?

Don: "Yeah, we are. It's not palatable stuff and it takes people a while to get into."

YA: You seem to be continually experimenting, even on Upping Street?

Don: "It's better than getting into a formula. We like breaking new ground. A lot of people have a hit and stick to the same thing."

BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE

YA: "B.A.D. basically... was the collaboration just a one-off? I ask about music and rock music."

Don: "I hope not, as I'd sure like to work with him again. He's 100% the real deal. He's great at lyrics and I'm not, so it's good to have a maestro to look up to. He also talks a language I understand."

YA: "Do you think B.A.D. sound like how the Clash would have sounded if Mick hadn't left?"

Don: "You have a point there. The Clash touched on the ideas we have, but they never saw them through."

YA: "Are you still a video freak?"

Don: "Yes! Because telly finishes at 12, I watch a lot of videos – things like Scarface and lots of different stuff."

YA: "Do you still make films?"

Don: "Not anymore. I got fed up with that, and that's why I'm in B.A.D."

YA: "Have you ever tried to incorporate that into the shows with slides and the like?"

Don: "We've done that sometimes, but we really want to be a good live band without all the fucking cosmetics. A lot of people hide behind effects because they're conceptual studio acts who can't cut it live. We dispense with flashing lights, dry ice, and special effects."

YA: "I'd say you sound like a hastily assembled collage of the Clash and Run D.M.C."

Don: "You think so? Maybe we haven't got a sound picture right yet, but we're working on it. There were a lot of ideas on the first LP – I don't think we pulled it off."

YA: "You're still finding your own sound?"

Don: "It hasn't really come across yet. We're getting closer with this LP, and of course, the bit of Strummerization helped."

YA: "I thought Mick was determined to stay away from any Clash references?"

Don: "He isn't ashamed of anything in his past. The Clash were great – what they had that was good, we have too."

YA: "Do people not think this is a Strummer-less LP and not a true B.A.D. one?"

Don: "It's only dangerous if individuals feel creatively stifled. Personally, it felt natural to share the experience of them [Mick/Joe] working together again. We're experimenting – that was part of the experiment. All experiments are risky, aren't they?"

YA: "But songs like Beyond The Pale and Thirteen sound like vintage Strummer."

Don: "True. Once they started working together, it brought out the best in both of them. A lot of the tracks show that."

22 Tuesday, August 12, 1986 READING EAGLE
By Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times

Strummer Jones clash over?

HOLLYWOOD — What happened, Joe?

After helping build the Clash into one of the most compelling British rock groups, Joe Strummer booted partner Mick Jones out of the group in 1983 and spent weeks telling everyone that he had done it because Jones no longer lived up to the band's original idealism.

"Mick was my best friend at one time," Strummer said in an interview in London in January 1984. "We were partners and I don't dispense with my partners easily... but he became indifferent. He didn't want to go into the studio or go on tour. He just wanted to go on holiday. He wasn't with us anymore."

So, Strummer's dramatic interview in a recent issue of New Musical Express, a leading British pop weekly, is nothing short of a public retraction – and apology.

The villain really was not Jones after all, but — in large part — Strummer's own ego.

Noting that he has been talking again with Jones and that the two may even be writing together again soon, Strummer added:

"I did him wrong. I stabbed him in the back. Really, it's through his good grace we got back together and we're going to write together in the future. We cover completely different areas so we're not cramping each other's style. That's a good thing, a rare thing and in the last two years I've learned just how good and rare that is."

So what did cause the downfall of the Clash, whose challenging, socially conscious albums like "London Calling" and "Combat Rock" expanded the artistic horizons of punk and helped open the door for such other idealistic outfits as U2?

Strummer seconds the version Jones has generally given in interviews, pointing to tension revolving around the 1983 reinstatement of Bernard Rhodes as the Clash's manager.

"Mick and Bernie had never got on... and Bernie sort of coerced me into thinking that Mick was what was wrong with the scene. That wasn't hard because, as Mick will admit now... he (Jones) was being pretty awkward. Plus my ego... was definitely telling me, 'Go on, get rid of (him).'"

At the time of the 1984 interview, Strummer seemed upbeat and eager to get on with reviving the spark that once surrounded the Clash, which headlined the opening night of the 1983 US Festival.

But it was not to be. The group's subsequent album, ironically titled "Cut the Crap", was a flop last year. Embarrassingly, it was far less interesting than the album Jones made with his new group, Big Audio Dynamite.

Strummer called it quits with the Clash and dropped out of sight.

He is now back with his first solo single, a tune called "Love Kills" that is featured in the film "Sid & Nancy", which is about the tragedy surrounding former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and girlfriend Nancy Spungen, both of whom died in 1978.

She was found dead in a New York hotel room and Vicious, who was charged with her murder, later overdosed on heroin.

The single, which features the livelier but similarly spirited "Dum Dum Club" on the flip side, retraces some of the Clash's funk-accented instrumental territory while describing the dangers of obsessions. The record is more of a holding action than a sign of new direction.

Though Strummer does not talk much about the single in the magazine interview, he does reflect on the last Clash LP: "Some of the tunes were fair, but really I hated it (the album). I fell out with Bernie (Rhodes) before the final mix. I didn't hear (the album) until it was in the shop... I hadn't heard my tunes since the demo stage."

Did he think about giving up the music business after the Clash breakup?

"Are you kidding? Have you ever thought what it would be like to be Joe Strummer driving a cab around London?" he asked. "To have people in the back go, 'He used to be Joe Strummer'?"

Photo: Joe Strummer, center, is shown surrounded by his reformed Clash in 1985. Clockwise from left, they are Vince White, Paul Simonon, Pete Howard, and Nick Sheppard.

ROBERT HILBURN : STRUMMER SAYS HE WAS BEHIND CLASH COLLISION - Los Angeles Times

MUSIC

ROBERT HILBURN : STRUMMER SAYS HE WAS BEHIND CLASH COLLISION

By ROBERT HILBURN
Aug. 9, 1986

What happened, Joe?

After helping build the Clash into one of the most compelling British rock groups, Joe Strummer booted partner Mick Jones out of the group in 1983 and spent weeks telling everyone that he'd done it because Jones no longer lived up to band's original idealism.

"Mick was my best friend at one time," Strummer told me in London in January, 1984. "We were partners and I don't dispense with my partners easily . . . but he became indifferent. He didn't want to go into the studio or go on tour. He just wanted to go on holiday. He wasn't with us anymore."

So, Strummer's dramatic interview in a recent issue of New Musical Express, a leading English pop weekly, is nothing short of a public retraction--and apology.

The villain really wasn't Jones after all, but--in large part--Strummer's own ego.

Noting that he has been talking again with Jones and that the two may even be writing together again soon, Strummer added:

"I did him wrong. I stabbed him in the back. Really, it's through his good grace we got back together and we're going to write together in the future. We cover completely different areas so we're not (cramping) each other's style. That's a good thing, a rare thing and in the last two years I've learned just how good and rare that is."

So what did cause the downfall of the Clash, whose challenging, socially conscious albums like "London Calling" and "Combat Rock" expanded the artistic horizons of punk and helped open the door for such other idealistic outfits as U2?

Strummer seconds the version Jones has generally given in interviews, pointing to tension revolving around the reinstatement in 1983 of Bernard Rhodes as the Clash's manager.

"Mick and Bernie had never got on . . . and Bernie sort of coerced me into thinking that Mick was what was wrong with the scene. That wasn't hard because, as Mick will admit now . . . he (Jones) was being pretty awkward. Plus my ego . . . was definitely telling me, 'Go on, get rid of (him).'"

At the time of the 1984 interview, Strummer seemed upbeat and eager to get on with reviving the spark that once surrounded the Clash--which headlined the opening night of the 1983 US Festival. But it wasn't to be. The group's subsequent album, ironically titled "Cut the Crap", was a flop last year. Embarrassingly, it was far less interesting than the album Jones made with his new group, Big Audio Dynamite.

Strummer called it quits with the Clash and dropped out of sight.

He's now back with his first solo single, a tune called "Love Kills" that is featured in the film "Sid & Nancy", which is about the tragedy surrounding former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and girlfriend Nancy Spungen, both of whom died in 1978. She was found dead in a New York hotel room and Vicious--who was charged with her murder--later overdosed on heroin.

The single, which features the livelier but similarly spirited "Dum Dum Club" on the flip side, retraces some of the Clash's funk-accented instrumental territory while describing the dangers of obsessions. The record, which is available here as an import on CBS Records, is more of a holding action than a sign of new direction.

Though Strummer doesn't talk much about the single in the magazine interview, he does reflect on the last Clash LP: "Some of the tunes were fair, but really I hated it (the album). I fell out with Bernie (Rhodes) before the final mix--I didn't hear (the album) until it was in the shops. . . . I hadn't heard my tunes since the demo stage."

Did he think about giving up the music business after the Clash breakup?

"Are you kidding? Have you ever thought what it would be like to be Joe Strummer driving a cab around London?" he responded. "To have people in the back go, 'He used to be Joe Strummer'? I've had a fair taste of hasbeenness and it's been deserved. The worst part is when people ask 'Are you Joe Strummer?' and then they go, 'Oh, I used to be a fan of yours.'"

MORE BAD NEWS:

The debate surrounding the Jesus and Mary Chain, the British band whose "Psychocandy" album topped my midyear list of best albums, is whether its intriguing mix of relentless guitar feedback and rather delicate melodies is a gimmick that is going to wear out or the sign of an inventive pop-rock imagination.

The immediate answer is "Some Candy Talking", a single that has just been released by the band in Britain. The record is moving up the charts nicely (No. 9 this week in the New Musical Express), but it isn't the kind of embracing work that makes you feel the band is moving to greater heights. It does away with the "feedback" issue by removing it in favor of a rather straightforward tale of obsession (is that all anyone writes about these days in rock?) that has appealing elements, but mostly seems rather commonplace in its post Velvet Underground moodiness.

LIVE ACTION:

Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks will join in a "Get Tough on Toxics" benefit concert on Aug. 28 at the Long Beach Arena. Tickets are on sale now. . . . Steve Winwood will be at the Universal Amphitheatre with Level 42 from Oct. 18 to 20. Tickets go on sale Sunday. . . . Tickets also go on sale Sunday for Ted Nugent's Aug. 30 date at the Santa Monica Civic and for Trouble Funk's return to town Aug. 29 for a show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Hollywood Palladium. . . . With the Nov. 7 to 10 shows at the Pantages sold out, the Pet Shop Boys have added a Nov. 6 date. Tickets available Monday. . . . New Edition, Morris Day and the Jets will be at the Forum on Aug. 31. . . . Timex Social Club will be at the Palace on Aug. 27, while Chris Isaak is due there Sept. 12. . . . Carl Perkins headlines the Palomino on Sept. 6, while Karla Bonoff and J.D. Souther team up Aug. 27 at the Kono Hawaii in Santa Ana. . . . Plus: Lone Justice at the Coach House on Aug. 22-23 and Cruzados at Bogart's on Aug. 31.