By 1988, Joe Strummer had long stepped away from the height of The Clash's explosive fame, but the band’s legacy remained raw and unresolved. Though the group officially split in early 1986, Strummer spent much of 1987 and 1988 reflecting on the band’s rise and fall. “The Clash were f**ed by success,”* he told Ann Scanlon in a 1988 feature. “We were singer/songwriters and the better we did our craft… the more it removed us from the frame of where we were writing from.” Strummer’s growing discomfort with the band’s detachment from its roots echoed a theme he’d revisit in later projects — that fame was corrosive when it replaced lived experience .
Even after the band’s dissolution, The Clash’s influence reverberated. At a Pogues gig in Kentish Town, Strummer unexpectedly jumped on stage to perform London Calling and I Fought the Law, later telling Scanlon that it was “exactly what I’ve been going on about — the Bop Message”. That Bop Message — keep it simple, say it from the heart — became central to how Strummer approached creativity in the late '80s. Witness Ann Scanlon, who recalled how Strummer picked up a guitar and teaspoons and played an impromptu session to an audience of just me. It wasn’t performance; it was communion .
Outside of spontaneous moments like those, Strummer’s post-Clash years were increasingly introspective. In 1988, he provided music for Alex Cox's film Walker and briefly stepped in as The Pogues' frontman. Asked about revisiting his Clash years, he admitted in a BBC interview, “I was too afraid to face the band after Mick left. The vibe just died.” But even then, fans like Vivien Goldman noted the undiminished affection: “People still stop him in the street. The Clash’s music was political, but Joe’s voice made it personal.” By 1988, The Clash was no longer a band — but it was still a cause.
Mick Jones, meanwhile, had fully shifted his creative energy to Big Audio Dynamite, where he fused punk, funk, and samples into a postmodern sound collage. “I’ve always been into mixing it up,” he told Melody Maker in May 1988. “Clash stuff was very live and direct. With B.A.D., I wanted to try a more cinematic sound — like a radio signal from a different station.” Although their communication was strained, Strummer later admitted he “respected Mick’s instincts, even when I didn’t get what he was doing.”
Paul Simonon, ever the stylist and visual architect of the band, had largely withdrawn from music by 1988, focusing on painting and visual design. Topper Headon, whose drumming defined the band’s tightest grooves, was facing personal struggles, later describing the period as “a total mess — I was completely gone” (NME, 1999 retrospective).
SOUNDS26th March 1988, "Retro Special: The Great Fire of London", 3 pages.
Retro Special:
The Great Fire of London
RETRO SPECIAL THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
After the punk epidemic of '76, THE CLASH's ascent to fame was swift. But their subsequent decline was both drawn and painful. ROBIN GIBSON charts their rise and fall; BARRY LAZELL provides the discography of the vinyl they left behind.
MICK JONES and Joe Strummer rok do house
THE GREATEST crime The Clash committed in the eyes of their peers was to endure.
There were always going to be problems. Soon after Sniffin' Glue's Mark P had brilliantly eulogized their first album with the words "The Clash album is like a mirror. It reflects all the shit. It shows us the truth", Joe Strummer was announcing:
"We have just been told that 'Remote Control' is to be our next single."
That little CBS decision was only one of many incidents which started the avalanche of accusations of sell-out and compromise which would dog the group's entire career.
By the end of 1977 and the release of their finest single, 'Complete Control'—their angry, arrogant, and heartfelt riposte to the aforementioned release—dull-headed realists were gloating over the fact that, as they'd suspected, the revolution would not take place as advertised.
But if The Clash made rash statements and empty promises, they were only as many as were necessary to light the tinder. Sex Pistols aside, The Clash were the single group without whom punk rock would never have become the power it did. Polite, realistic dissent was no good. The point of this caper was to believe you were party to an arson attack on the very foundations of society.
And when they were bawling matter that the battle cries came from the frazzled throat of a (fairly old) rock 'n' roll devotee, and the copyright was owned by a multinational corporation.
What mattered was that for one brief, glorious, naive period, anyone with a glimmer of vitality believed there was going to be a revolution. Referring either to memories or snippets of footage from the 1977 White Riot tour that are hauled out for punk documentaries, the incredible energy and anger suggest that similarly briefly, Joe Strummer might just have thought he would lead it.
In deciding to endure, The Clash knowingly set themselves up for everything the Sex Pistols avoided by imploding. The myth of The Clash would be gradually and painfully debunked.
But The Clash still sounds like one of the greatest albums ever, with its frantic charge of raw guitars, its scathing—and often hilarious—speedfreak lyrical rampage through every evil that beset an urban teenager (and every authority or convention that might conceivably be to blame) and its vicious lurch through Junior Murvin's 'Police And Thieves' presaging their ethnic obsessions. It's still a crash course in rock 'n' roll.
Between then and the long-awaited Give 'Em Enough Rope, they succinctly trumpeted all their strengths and failings in the short course of three singles—their strengths with 'Complete Control' and the brilliantly stark and emotional reggae of '(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais'.
Their failings came clear in 'Clash City Rockers', the first real evidence of their romanticising of simplistic rallying cries. "Nuthin-gettsa-better-ada-Clash City Rocka!" snarled Strummer between leftover scraps of 'Janie Jones' anti-work ethic. But it was a great record. The Clash often made great records while mouthing fictional propaganda.
Give 'Em Enough Rope was a great record too. By this time the 'Clash City Rockers' mentality had reached the point of objective pathos on 'Last Gang In Town'. And the songs which scoured the same streets that The Clash had burned up—'Stay Free', 'Cheapskates', 'All The Young Punks'—reminisced rather than reported from the spot. But they were lucid, raw and impassioned.
All the grumbling over the choice of arch-heavy rock producer Sandy Pearlman seems a bit silly now. Give 'Em Enough Rope is raw as hell, full of righteous anger and nine-tenths uncomplicated rock 'n' roll.
There were few real clues about the big shock coming.
London Calling, its furious, passionate title track preceding it as a red herring, pulled out all the hip rock 'n' roll stops Strummer and gang could muster. The sleeve was a pastiche of Elvis' first album. Veteran illustrator Ray Lowry had handled the artwork and the production was by an even more veteran Guy Stevens. It was a double album. The Clash, in three short years, appeared to have reached their Exile On Main St. It had taken the Stones ten.
Basically, London Calling was The Clash coming clean and also revelling in Americana. It's still a rock 'n' roll tour de force, tripping almost faultlessly through myriad variations on blues, ska, rockabilly and reggae, all styles stamped indelibly Clash. Superficially, it had little to do with Britpunk circa '79.
But London Calling addressed much the same concerns as The Clash always had. Instead of the cool tongues of the Westway and Camden Town, however, it was speaking in every cool tongue it fancied.
YOUNG GUNS of Brixton
Unselfconsciously it roped in Montgomery Clift, card cheats and Cadillacs along with 'The Guns Of Brixton' and 'Clampdown'. It really didn't give a toss if it had allied the spike with the quiff. By 1979 The Clash had become an impossible marriage of the defiant swagger that typifies all great rebels and a seemingly invincible conviction that revolution was still on the cards.
But trying to expand on this expanse with Sandinista!—triple!—they really screwed up. Sandinista! sounds even more sprawling and patchy now than when it was released, lost in a maze of eclecticism, druggy jargon and a bewildering array of guest musicians from Mikey Dread to Ellen Foley and back via Lew Lewis. At first, there seemed to be enough good moments to justify its existence. But in hindsight, it's clear whole sides of the thing could have been binned.
Sandinista! is the only moment in The Clash canon where charges of dilettantism stick. Until now they'd been responsible for popularising styles; Sandinista! found them affecting styles which were fashionable. The funk is particularly bad.
The title of the LP and its ridiculously over-ambitious embracing of hip political causes meant detractors had a field day. Incidentally, at least one reason for its rambling impotence could be detected in side six's dubwise excursions. The Clash were stoned out of their minds.
It took until 1982 for them to fashion a new album, and its title, 'Combat Rock', invoked plenty of advance cringing. It turned out to be their best shot since 'The Clash', assimilating influences rather than aping icons, in a tight 12 tracks split between outrageously good songs and intoxicating, filmic half-songs.
'Combat Rock' contained less posturing than their last three albums combined; yet it contained their most romantic rock 'n' roll classic in 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go', one of their best hard-as-nails anthems in 'Know Your Rights', and in 'Straight To Hell', their greatest ever mix of street poetry and political anger.
Despite its awful packaging, 'Combat Rock' was honest. It might have featured Allen Ginsberg, Taxi Driver, and Futura 2000, but it was potent, inventive, and inspired. Its brilliance is even more of a paradox considering what a shambles 1982 was for The Clash: Strummer disappeared, Topper Headon left, and they found themselves supporting The Who at Shea Stadium. But they weren't to succeed the old lags. They disappeared.
In fact, there's nothing much more worth recalling. The group finally fragmented in 1983. Mick Jones unveiled Big Audio Dynamite in 1985, and they've made two albums which combine his poignant vocal delivery with hi-tech instrumentation and a froth of socially-aware jingles in a subtly credible version of the Sputnik future-rock ethos. They're hardly explosive.
Meanwhile, The Clash, in name at least, lumbered on until '85, Strummer and Paul Simonon consorting with a trio of young, loutish clones trying to 'get back to basics'.
To this end, after a protracted absence, they made 'Cut The Crap'. All that's worth knowing about the LP—a lumpen, terrace-chant farce—is that when I called CBS last week to ask for a copy, no one in their press office, catalogue, or sales departments had heard of it.
It's the final irony that Strummer saw fit to release this pseudo-rebel nonsense in the same year that rock itself lined up both its middle-aged granddaddies and its dowdy post-punk wonders for Live Aid. Ironic not only because The Clash had come to mean so little and the complacent AOR mainstream so much, but because 'Cut The Crap' was claptrap from a parody of a group who, in their prime, stood on equal footing with the finest, most effective rebels rock has ever spat out.
Postscript: typically perversely, Strummer's brilliant new Walker soundtrack has finally expressed his fascination with ethnic music and Latin romance better than any of 'Sandinista!''s spaced-out gestures. This fact seems to tally with the man's reported state of unpressured contentment. But don't write him off as a contrary bastard just yet.
“Strummer interview.”Record Mirror, vol. 35, no. 13, 26 Mar. 1988, p. 26.
The last great Rock n Roll Band
THE CLASH why they were such a great rock 'n' roll band + discography and Joe Strummer interview
why they were 'the last great rock'n'roll band' plus interview with Joe Strummer
THE LAST GREAT ROCK 'N' ROLL BAND
THE CLASH. A rock myth, some say. But doesn't mythology suggest something distant, something long gone?
Sure, it was 12 years ago in the parched summer of '76 when the Clash first hit the drought-stricken streets of Britain, hell bent on chaos and solid rocking. And sure, it was 1985 when the group, fractured by the loss of guitarist and founder member Mick Jones, finally burned out, over-fuelled by success.
But look around you... The spirit of the Clash lives on with every sleaze bag rock outfit that takes the stage. It can even be found deep down in the hearts of those who deserted punk for pop stardom; the Clash gave them enough rope and they hanged themselves on it.
The Clash is no more, but its constituent parts are all still rocking on. Mick Jones has gone on to discover beat boxes with the moderately successful Big Audio Dynamite. Bassist Paul Simonon now has his own band called Havanah 3AM. Drummer Topper Headon made a solo album before being carted off to jail last year on drug offences. And singer Joe Strummer?
After striving to keep the Clash together in the post-Jones era, he has acted in a feature film ('Straight To Hell') and contributed music to three film projects; the Alex Cox films 'Sid & Nancy', 'Straight To Hell' and now 'Walker', set in the country whose rebels gave the Clash the title for their fourth LP, 'Sandinista'. All this while overseeing the first ever Clash retrospective album 'The Story Of The Clash Volume One'. Now that they're back in the charts, Ian Dickson looks back at the career of the last great rock 'n' roll band: "comprised of people who didn't give a shit what it sold but did give a shit, no cared desperately what it was and what it said." It was this attitude that moved the Clash to promise their fans that they would never appear on 'Top Of The Pops'. It was a promise they never broke.
"Not going on Top Of The Pops was the one way that we could say times had changed," explains Strummer with pride. "I hated it when punk bands like the Pistols and the Damned and the Exploited went on. And I laughed my head off when the Exploited record sank 90 places after the public saw what they looked like. Did they think they were going to be millionaires because of that? The Clash improved the cultural life of this nation by not going on because it meant that you had to leave your f**king living room to go and see us. Almost every real group in Britain today was formed at a Clash gig."
Strummer is still rueful of the fact that his fellow Clash founder member sought his kicks elsewhere shortly after the band really 'happened' (in record company terms) with their album 'Combat Rock' in 1982.
"Every time I listen to a Clash record," says Strummer, "I think 'Jesus, what a great rock 'n' roll guitarist Mick Jones is; one of the best. It seems to hit the soul and stay there. But he got influenced by that Pete Wylie anti-rock stuff in the early Eighties. Wylie said 'It's rockist man' and Mick took it a bit to heart. He took it to mean he was old fashioned. In the end I felt I had to beg him to play guitar."
The thought of Strummer hob nobbing with Hollywood film moguls will no doubt perplex some die-hard Clash freaks, but 'Walker' is his third collaboration with Cox. Why did Strummer agree to write the score?
"There comes a time in every rocker's life when he realises he'd better get off the stage for a while," spits Strummer. "And rather than become a milkman or a cabbie, which I shall no doubt get to, Cox gave me a chance to do the score for 'Walker'. Now, without Cox, imagine me, an ex-punk rocker going to Hollywood and saying 'Give me a score!'. They'd have said 'F**k off out of here you toe rag!'."
"I don't think you can name me a meat market more vicious than Hollywood. Nobody gives a shit about you there. Cox already had some big shot Hollywood guy doing the music but that fell through. I dunno, maybe Cox looked at me and thought 'Hey, this f**ker will do the music for cheap'. But I was still grateful for the chance to do it."
Strummer has grasped the chance to test himself with the severe discipline involved in writing a film score. But if you think that, like so many other rock stars, we've lost the chief punk to that elephant's graveyard of Hollywood, forget it.
Strummer is about to start work on a new solo album which he says is going to be "Cheap and deep". Yeah, you've heard it before; old rockers never die they just... blah blah blah. But with Strummer, believe it.
"You have to understand that I live inside rock 'n' roll," he concludes philosophically. "Like from 1963, I've never thought about anything else. That's a long time, but I never will think of anything else. I will live and die and be judged inside rock 'n' roll."
TOPPER HEADON
Headon was the last member to join the recognised line-up, replacing Terry Chimes who played on the Clash's debut album under the pseudonym of Tory Crimes. And it was Chimes who rejoined following Headon's expulsion in '83. He released a solo album in '85, called 'Waking Up', based on the big band jazz sound of the Fifties. Topper is currently serving a nine month prison sentence for drug related offences.
PAUL SIMONON
Paul Simonon was the bassist who stuck with the Clash after the 'other two' had left. This didn't really work out for the lad, but the good news is that he's back with his new band Havanah 3AM. According to Strummer, this new project of Paul's is well worth a listen.
MICK JONES
Mick Jones left the Clash amid a whole host of rumours concerning his commitment to Clash ideology. What is perhaps nearer the truth is that Jones became disillusioned with rock music as such. It's no secret that Jones became bored with his role as guitarist and frequently experimented with synthesisers and new musical techniques. When Jones finally emerged with his new band, Big Audio Dynamite, in 1985, he did so alongside his old cohort, the dreadlocked film maker Don Letts. 'The Bottom Line', BAD's first single, was an unholy mish-mash of beat boxes, sampled noises and Jones' revitalised rock riffs. BAD were an instant success, and have to date provided the most successful fusion of dirty rock and hip hop.
STRUMMER AND THE 'NEW LOOK CLASH'
When a band starts to disintegrate it's hellishly difficult to maintain the same level of affection from the fans. To carry on with a new line-up is usually pure folly. Once Jones and Headon had left, the cries of "call it a day" were nothing short of deafening. The purists hadn't bargained on Strummer's need to carry on. Along with bassist Paul Simonon, Strummer enlisted the services of three new members. Greg White, who was asked by Strummer to change his name to Vince (Strummer thought Greg sounded too American) and Nick Sheppard both played guitar while Pete Howard joined on drums. Strummer, determined to take the Clash back to the people, took the band out on a nationwide busking tour to promote the new album 'Cut The Crap'. Vince/Greg White is now busking, Nick Sheppard has gone on to form the group Head.
THE CLASH - DISCOGRAPHY
SINGLES WHITE RIOT b/w 1977 – March 1977 REMOTE CONTROL b/w London's Burning – May 1977 COMPLETE CONTROL b/w The City Of The Dead – September 1977 CLASH CITY ROCKERS b/w Jail Guitar Doors – February 1978 (WHITE MAN) IN HAMMERSMITH PALAIS b/w The Prisoner – June 1978 TOMMY GUN b/w 1-2, Crush On You – November 1978 ENGLISH CIVIL WAR b/w Pressure Drop – February 1979 THE COST OF LIVING EP (inc: 'I Fought The Law', 'Capital Radio') – May 1979 LONDON CALLING b/w Armagideon Time – December 1979 BANKROBBER b/w Rocker's Galore... UK Tour – July 1980 THE CALL-UP b/w Stop The World – November 1980 HITSVILLE UK b/w Radio One – January 1981 THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN b/w The Magnificent Dance – April 1981 THIS IS RADIO CLASH b/w Radio Clash – December 1981 KNOW YOUR RIGHTS b/w First Night Back In London – April 1982 ROCK THE CASBAH b/w Long Time Jerk – June 1982 SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO b/w Straight To Hell – September 1982 THIS IS ENGLAND b/w Do It Now – September 1985
ALBUMS THE CLASH – April 1977 GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE – November 1978 LONDON CALLING (Double Album) – December 1979 SANDINISTA! (Triple Album) – December 1980 COMBAT ROCK – May 1982 CUT THE CRAP – November 1985
Daily Mirror, 29 March 1988, "Joe Goes West", page 15.
Joe Goes West
JOE GOES WEST
★CLASH star Joe Strummer is leaving Britain and emigrating with his family to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Joe—back in the charts with a rerelease of I Fought The Law—has spent long periods out of Britain working on film and music commitments. Joe and girlfriend Gaby leave their Notting Hill house next month, with nanny and their two daughters.
1 PRESSURE DROP .................................................... The Maytals
2 WRONG 'EM BOYO ............................................... The Rulers
3 BRAND NEW CADILLAC ....................................... Vince Taylor
4 TIME IS TIGHT ....................................................... Booker T & The MGs
5 I FOUGHT THE LAW .............................................. Bobby Fuller
6 ENGLISH CIVIL WAR ............................................... Traditional
7 ARMAGEDDON TIME ............................................. Willie Williams
8 POLICE ON MY BACK ............................................ Eddy Grant
9 POLICE AND THIEVES ........................................... Junior Murvin
10 SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO ......................... Rolling Stones (You what? - Ed)
Strummer in full flight
1 1977 ...................................................................... 45 B-side
2 THE PRISONER ....................................................... 45 B-side
3 THE CALL-UP ........................................................ 45 A-side
4 HITSVILLE UK ........................................................ 45 A-side
5 CITY OF THE DEAD ................................................. 45 B-side
6 48 HOURS ............................................................. 'The Clash'
7 DRUG STABBING TIME .......................................... 'Give 'Em Enough Rope'
8 RUDIE CAN'T FAIL .................................................. 'London Calling'
9 REBEL WALTZ ......................................................... 'Sandinista'
10 INOCULATED CITY ................................................. 'Combat Rock'
Clash covers and classics courtesy ofNMEcity rockers Thrills and Kelly
Daily Mirror, "WE BROKE THE LAW..", Thursday 24 March 1988
'WE BROKE THE LAW..'
'WE BROKE THE LAW..'
★ THE million-selling Clash were always "a drugs band," says 35-year-old guitarist Joe Strummer. "The only great Clash song that was written and recorded when I wasn't stoned was This Is England," says Joe who’s just finished the sell-out Pogues tour.
"We were into reefers, and I took some coke in the States. We all had our moments with cocaine—but it never lasted too long."
But in an interview with NME, he adds: "Cocaine’s the worst drug."
Ex-Clash drummer Topper Headon is now serving time for having heroin—and can't have missed the irony that the re-release of I Fought The Law is a hit.
SOUNDS 2nd April 1988, "Be Bop a Lula. Here's Joe Strummer", full article (text), scans missing
Be Bop a Lula. Here's Joe Strummer
ORIGINAL PAGES WANTED **** (have the original text but don't have all the orginal pages)
Page 26 3D/2017 April 2 / 2020
BE BOP A LULA HERE’S JOE STRUMMER
Ann Scanlon finds Joe Strummer busking in a London cafe and talks to him about The Clash’s past and his own future working on movies
Just within earshot of the barrow-boy cries on London’s Notting Hill market is a cramped cafe, offering whiskey-laced coffee and early morning refuge to anyone who needs it.
For the past four years, Joe Strummer has stared into an empty cup, half-listened to the crackle of a caffeine-stained wireless and reflected on a broken past and perpetually uncertain future.
As the former leader of one of the most influential bands of the last decade, Strummer had plenty to think about. And it took an awful lot of coffee before he was able to understand how The Clash had allowed such anger, passion and street sensibility to dissolve into complacency, confusion and parody itself.
‘The Clash were f**ed by success,’* he realises now. ‘We were singer/songwriters and the better we did our craft and we tried to do it real good the more it removed us from the frame of where we were writing from.’
But it wouldn’t be Strummer to wallow in coulda-always-beena-contender contemplation for ever. Armed with the hard-learned lessons of the past 12 years, he’s back in the ring with an impressive soundtrack, Walker, and a clear vision ahead.
Until recently, it was Alex Cox who provided the main outlets for Strummer’s brooding madness. When the latter gatecrashed a Sid ‘N’ Nancy party in 86, Cox invited him to work on the score and Strummer ended up writing the central song, Love Kills.
A few months later, Cox gave Strummer a lead role in his spaghetti spoof Straight To Hell and subsequently asked him to appear in Walker.
Shot in Nicaragua, Cox’s fourth movie outlines the life of William Walker, the American soldier who declared himself President of Nicaragua in 1855. Unlike Straight To Hell, which revolved around a small clique of the director’s friends, Walker drew on a huge pool of Hollywood stars and features the talents of Ed Harris, Miguel Sandoval and Marlee Matlin. Strummer’s acting capabilities are hardly stretched as Faucet The Dishwasher or as a battle extra.
‘If I had any less of a role then I wouldn’t be there at all,’ he says. ‘It would be best if we had it on video so I could press pause and say, “Look, see that guy holding his hat running through the back of the battle scene — that’s me!”’
‘Although I do have another scene where I dive into a river with a rope and try to lasso these naked women who are washing their clothes in the water.’
Strummer and his Straight To Hell co-star Dick Rude were inevitably written in as comic relief to the serious storyline but, as Walker was cut from its original three hours to half that length, most of their efforts ended up on the cutting room floor.
‘At some point Alex decided that he had to reach the Rambo audience, which you can understand. But really his audience is the people who’d go up to the Gate cinema or the Scala, we could have sat and enjoyed a two and a half hour Walker, and now it seems to fall between the two stools.’
‘I think Alex started with both a great script and crew of actors. They were real professionals, no complaints, no tantrums, Ed Harris would sit down in the dirt with the extras, but everything was still very uptight.’
‘As soon as we got there it was (adopts phoney drawl), “Right, this is dead serious. This is a five million dollar picture” and personally I didn’t enjoy the ten weeks we spent there.’
That said, Strummer was glad of the opportunity to visit Nicaragua and — just as on Straight To Hell, he had preferred to ‘method out and sleep in a battered Dodge’ — so himself and Dick Rude skipped the luxuries of Managua’s Hotel Intercontinental for a rented house in Granada.
‘Nicaragua was just like being in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book. There’s nothing to do except sit outside on rocking chairs, rocking the mosquitoes away. You’d sit there in the afternoon and feel so clear in the mind that it was like being on a different planet.’
Because they were filming in the south, the Walker crew were well out of the war zone. But Strummer — who once dealt in the polemics of Sandinista and the more specific Washington Bombs — still maintains his support for the Sandinistas.
‘Nicaragua is a country with nothing, and the Sandinistas are the first to admit that they’ve made every mistake in the book. But when they took over from Somoza (the dictator who was deposed in 1979), the first thing they did was to teach everyone to read and write and make sure that there was some sort of medical care.’
‘There’s a guy called PJ O’Rourke who writes in f**ing Rolling Stone and represents the typical, “Hey, dude, let’s party” segment of America and probably doesn’t even know where Nicaragua is. Anyway, he went down there to slag it off, and of course he can go into a supermarket and see all the empty shelves, but he’s not talking about the real issue which is that America supports any kind of fascist dictator so long as he ain’t a commie.’*
It was while Walker was being filmed in Granada, that Cox asked Strummer to write the score.
‘I banged the stuff off in two weeks. I had my trumpet, violin, myself and two suitcases in this house, and every day I’d take a couple of songs to Al.’
Less straightforward, however, was the actual recording when Strummer had to explain his arrangements to more than a dozen musicians in a San Francisco studio.
‘That was incredibly nerve wracking. I felt completely paranoid all the way through the first side because The Clash would just record, Bang! Bang! and that was it.’
There’s a song called Omotepe, which he wrote with one finger on the piano, and when he explained it to the pianist:
‘I was almost apologising for its simplicity. But she just said, “I think that’s tough,” and gradually I began to feel better.’
‘But it was only when we cut the second side country style that it was more like rock ’n’ roll and I could say, “This is how it goes, boys.” We’d do ten takes: a slow one, a long one, a fast one, a funny one — that’s the way rock ’n’ roll was made.’
On completing Walker, Strummer returned to London and, within weeks, a guest appearance with The Pogues at Camden’s Electric Ballroom led to a three-week tour of the States with them.
‘It was funny how it happened,’ he smiles. ‘I’d met Jimmy The Red, a well-known drinker around Notting Hill, and he was telling me that he’d been to Narcotics Anonymous, had given up everything and was feeling great.’
‘So I decided to knock drinking on the head for a month, went home and was sat there feeling all smug with my new decision when the phone rang and The Pogues’ manager Frank Murray said, “Joe, you’re gonna come to New York with us in three days’ time.”’
Standing in for ailing Pogues guitarist Philip Chevron refuelled his enthusiasm for playing live.
‘There’s something about thrashing an instrument to the limit and that’s what really appealed to me about The Pogues — the sheer physicality of the music. I’d just done Walker and I loved the way we could really rock the house with a tiny little thing like a mandolin, rather than bludgeoning everyone into submission with a huge wall of sound.’
‘Philip Chevron is a fantastic rhythm guitar player, and it was scary enough to learn all that stuff let alone try and play it at 900 miles per hour.’
Four days after the last of these Pogues gigs, Strummer was back in LA writing a score for Permanent Record, a US movie dealing with teenage suicide.
This time he put together The Latino-Rockabilly War, a six-strong band which mixed psychobilly with Latin and jazz, and includes Zander Schloss of Circle Jerks and Poncho Sanchez, one of the most respected Latin/jazz musicians on the West Coast.
‘I wrote all the songs in two weeks,’ says Strummer, ‘and that’s the best way to do it, cos we’re being too damn precious. There’s not enough people pushing themselves to write.’
‘Instead of rewriting they’ll endlessly tart it up and take it to Memphis and take it to New York and take it to this magic mix master or that. Too much money is spent papering over the fact that it’s shit in the first place.’
Ever since Strummer heard The Rolling Stones’Not Fade Away as a ten-year-old in boarding school, he has thought of nothing but rock ’n’ roll.
‘It’s the only thing that’s living to me,’ he claims. ‘I shall live and die and be judged by it.’
God knows, he even sold his marriage vows for it. In 1974 he married a complete stranger, who needed immigration status in order to travel abroad, and used the resultant £100 to buy the black Telecaster that he has used every night since.
‘I’d like to get divorced,’ he shrugs, ‘but I can’t find her.’
It’s not something that Strummer — now the father of two daughters — thinks about from one year to the next.
‘I’ve been with Gabrielle for ten years and we don’t need a piece of paper to tell us we’re together.’
And although he now accepts that The Clash have split for good, he and Mick Jones are closer than ever.
‘Mick’s daughter Lauren and my daughter Jazzi are the best of friends – a terrible duo – so I see him all the time. I see Paul too and I’m going to go and see Topper, who has been detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.’
Strummer is curious as to what Topper will make of the recent spate of Clash reissues.
‘When I heard that they were going to release I Fought The Law I had a predictable reaction,’ he admits. ‘But then I rang up Rob Steiner at CBS and he explained that he was a long-term Clash fan but hadn’t got I Fought The Law because it was released on the since-deleted EP, and now sells for £45. Until then I hadn’t thought about it in terms of the audience, and Rob convinced me that he’d made the right decision.’
Together with Jones, Steiner subsequently worked out a track listing.
‘Story Of The Clash Volume One was my idea of a joke. I’ve got no right to assume that there will be a second volume, but this double album is made up of all the main stuff and I think we’ve got an interesting odd bag that might fit on a single LP in a couple of years’ time.’
For today, though, Strummer is back in his favourite Notting Hill retreat, staring into another cup of coffee but surer of his next move than ever.
‘Sitting here these past four years listening to the stuff out of that,’ he nods in the direction of an old radio behind the counter, ‘I’ve realised there’s no Bop Message. And I’ve decided that I’m going to deliver The Bop Message to anyone who’ll listen.’
‘It’s nothing to do with be-bop. I call it The Bop Message cos I’m differentiating it from all the drivel that I hear on the radio, which has no message to me except that some f**er wants to be famous.’*
It was while Strummer was working with The Latino-Rockabilly War, in a tiny studio in LA, that he fully realised the potential of The Bop Message.
‘Most of the studios in LA look like the London Rock Shop, but we found this Mexican place called Baby ’O, which was just a simple wooden room. I’ve got a song called Thrash City, which is going to be released as a single off the Permanent Record soundtrack and I asked my friend Jason Mael to bring his Super 8 camera and shoot a video.’
‘He just shot it as we were recording and the whole thing cost 650 dollars. That to me is The Bop Message.’
But although Strummer’s message and method is simplicity itself, he is only too aware that promoting The Bop Message won’t be quite so easy.
‘Right now, I’m a one-man operation and it’s lovely and clear. I’ve got nobody to please but myself and that’s the way I want to keep it.’
‘Walker sold 15,000 copies in America, but there’s never been an advert. It’s not on the radio and the film died in a week. So I’m not dispirited by those figures cos what that means is that there’s 15,000 hipsters in America who searched out Walker and found it.’
‘I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle to maintain so I can almost operate on that level. Whereas if I was trying to compete on a mega-mega level I’d have to have all these wankers polishing my mix and polishing my haircut. I’m just not interested enough in Joe Strummer to push Joe Strummer the way Madonna must push Madonna.’
Strummer might have resigned himself to indie sales figures, but he’s planning to return to the road nevertheless.
‘Touring is like a drug. You forget what it was like to be high on that drug, but when someone comes along five years later and gives you another taste, you’re addicted again. And on The Pogues tour, I really felt the bite.’
‘But what really annoyed me,’ he continues, curling his top lip into that famous snarl, ‘was that for 13 numbers the audience would be rocking away, having a great time, but as soon as I stepped up to do I Fought The Law and London Calling all these tossers would suddenly start gobbing.’
‘I’m going to go back onstage and when I do I’m going to play everything from Keys To Your Heart to Rock The Casbah — I insist on playing my back catalogue — but the first person to gob at me, I’m gonna jump offstage and have that Telecaster right through the centre of their head.’
‘But,’ he stresses, ‘I don’t want my songs to be about my hotel rooms or my ego. I’m a one-man operation, and I’m not interested in becoming a superstar cos you can’t write.’
Strummer’s train of thought is interrupted by a stray busker who wanders over and unwittingly asks, ‘Can anyone tune a guitar?’
Within minutes the guitar is at the centre of a fully-fledged session, a café regular singing while Strummer and his friend Roughler Ray keep rhythm.
‘I am a sincere man,’ echoes Strummer, translating from the singer’s Spanish, ‘the most thing I want in life is to spit my words out into the air.’
And then he’s lost again, keeping time with his teaspoon as simply and effectively as he’d banged out one-finger piano patterns for Walker.
Joe Strummer might have been unsure about where he was going or even of what he was doing, but he could never lose sight of himself.
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LISTEN! exclusive great in depth podcast about Joe Strummer plus archive written interview
Former Sounds music journalist Ann Scanlon was close to the late and great Joe Strummer. She wrote the really good interview below and has also just released this in depth podcast with Pat Gilbert – the best biographer on the Clash.
I can still remember the way I felt as I walked down west London’s Lancaster Road and headed towards the Warwick Castle pub on one of the first sunny afternoons of 1988. I was going to interview Joe Strummer. What would he be like? I’d interviewed lots of musicians in that first year that I worked at Sounds — even someone who I respected and admired as much as Tom Waits — but no one who’d had such a formative impact on life as the lead singer of The Clash.
Musically, visually and in all the things they said and did, The Clash were the perfect band: a teenage dream, far too beautiful to beat.
Thankfully, Joe Strummer turned out to be everything I’d hoped he would be, and a little bit more. When the pub closed, he suggested that we carry on talking in a cafe around the corner — the kind of place where they lace the drinks with spirits — and it was there that he told me about The Bop Message. The keep-it-simple, say-it-from-the-heart philosophy that informed everything he ever did. Then right on cue, I suddenly found myself at the centre of an impromptu session which involved a guitar, teaspoons and Joe Strummer singing to an audience of just me.
I met him again a few weeks later, backstage at Kentish Town’s Town & Country Club after he had played London Calling and I Fought The Law onstage with The Pogues. The Sounds feature had yet to be published but he greeted me like an old friend, enthusing about The Pogues and saying that they had just delivered exactly what he had been telling me about — The Bop Message.
The next and last time I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Strummer was in San Francisco in October 1991. He had just taken over as frontman of The Pogues, following Shane MacGowan’s recent departure. I was there to write an article for Melody Maker but Joe told me that, if he was really being Shane, there would be no interview until I had kept drinking pace with him through some of his favourite haunts.
Ever the gentleman, Joe insisted, ‘Annie gets to ride shotgun’ and, as we climbed into his friend’s pink Cadillac and sped through the streets of the Golden Gate city, I wondered what the teenage me would think if she could see me now.
We eventually did the interview at 5am, sitting on the bathroom floor of Spider Stacy’s hotel room in order to avoid the full-scale Pogues party that was still raging on outside. Joe provided his own soundtrack, a rockabilly tape compiled by Jim Jarmusch, and I remember him saying, quite seriously, that the only person who could possibly have stepped into Shane’s shoes (apart from himself) was Gene Vincent.
Sweet Gene Vincent, Shane MacGowan and Joe — the title of that Sounds feature now makes so much sense. Be Bop A Lula Here’s Joe Strummer: part 50s-style rocker delivering The Bop Message, part Irish-hearted Minstrel Boy bound for heaven.
I hope he’s singing Be Bop Alleluia among the angels now.
Evening Standard, Culture clash, 11 April 1988, p.6
Culture clash
NEWS that the former Clash guitarist Joe Strummer, 34, has joined the bandwagon Rock Against the Rich won't be troubling his bank manager.
By the most conservative estimates, the reformed punk is a millionaire himself, though such contradictions have never worried the musician (if that's the right description) in the past.
With Rock Against the Rich he'll be touring 13 British towns attacking young, upwardly-mobile values—in particular house-buying which he feels squeezes out pensioners. (There are of course few in Notting Hill where he owns a large house with live-in lover).
Supporters of the tour will also be delighted to learn that the Clash's first compact disc has just "gone silver"—i.e. passed the 100,000 mark.
When the tour ends Mr Strummer is emigrating, I understand, to a fine home among the mud huts in Mexico.
Angela Thomas, The Stage and Television Today, A potential live wire, 12 May 1988, p.21
A potential live wire
CHANNEL 4 - Wired
MONTHS before Wired went into production it was being hailed as the answer to the prayers of anyone over the age of 20 with more than a passing interest in pop music.
It's always dangerous to promise to deliver something which obviously involves promising all things to all men and it's not surprising that this new series only partially succeeds in what it set out to do.
The first show certainly offered a mixed bag, with, it would seem, virtually something to please everyone – ranging from Whitney Houston on gospel music, to rappers Public Enemy on the relationship between their controversial music and the Black Power movement of the sixties, and Joe Strummer on life after The Clash. But while each interview was interesting enough, there was a very real sense that in trying to please so many varied audiences, the producers were cramming the show with far too much to allow the interviews to dig deep enough below the surface.
It is perhaps too early to judge the two presenters, Tim Graham and Leonore Pemberton, but certainly in the opening show neither seemed able to give the programme a much needed distinctive stamp of originality.
Personalities aside, the most disappointing aspect of the first show was the way it failed to provoke any reaction from the viewer – it's always worrying when a new series incited little more than disinterest.
It is possible the show has itself fallen victim to its own hype and will in time establish itself in the same way The Tube did towards the end of its run.
Malcolm Gerrie, the man behind The Tube and now this series undeniably has an eye and an ear for what works on the music TV scene but, although this is undoubtedly far superior to the far from lamented Roxy and at least not as self-consciously trendy as the Tube, the need for a little more restraint when it comes to choosing the content of each show is glaringly obvious.
Despite the overall problems of the first show, the mixed bag certainly included some interesting and entertaining items notably the piece on the politics of Public Enemy and rapping, and the interview with Joe Strummer, but other items like Sade's live performance fell surprisingly flat.
The promise of the series and the pedigree of its producers has however been enough to win it a sponsorship deal of £1.5 million from Pepsi-Cola International. And the deal which involves the sponsorship of the series in 25 major international markets will allow Granada Television International, which is funding the shows, to sell the series ready-packaged with two Pepsi Cola commercials per one hour show.
With sales assured there's always the risk that the producers will avoid tampering with such a financially successful formula.
It would, however, be a great pity if Gerrie and producer partner Jonathan Hewes allow such considerations to get in their way – the first show has proven their ability to attract both big name guests and unknowns but unless the later interviews manage to do more than skim the surface then all we will left with is just another mediocre music show.
Spencer Bright, Evening Standard, Metropolis: "Rock Against the Rich & Combat rock", 30 June 1988, p.31
Rock Against the Rich & Combat rock
Rock Against the Rich
Photo: On the front line Joe Strummer saws his power breakfast before taking to the barricades, Geoff Dowen
Clubrunners Rogue have folded their Friday night at Brixton's Fridge café after a violent street heavy outside the venue left one man hospitalised overnight with 16 stitches. Roguebays Chris and Sos say two of their poses were peremptorily refused party—and that the Fridge security staff then "set on" the duo who work in retail fashion. They threw one guy against a moving road, dragged the other down the road by his feet, kicked and beat him viciously and then left him in the street unconscious," they claim.
"It was pre-meditated and totally unnecessary. These people are animals—they're supposed to protect the public—not attack them." They are now considering whether to press charges.
But The Fridge says that's not the whole story.
"These people used to work with Rogue last year but weren't in any way connected with our arrangement with Chris and Sos. They arrived at 2am demanding to be let-in. The club was full, we had two people—legally when we came capacity we're not allowed to admit anybody else and we explained that this they weren't having it," says a Fridge PR.
She claims Chris and Sos were called to the lobby where the club's management asked them to clarify the situation to their associates and invite them to return next week.
"It was down to Chris and Sos to sort it out," she says, "but they didn't. There was a on the street. I don't know what happened exactly. Chris and Sos haven't returned our calls. It could've been a great night—but perhaps they're a little inexperienced for a club like this."
The Fridge have now put together a six week summer season of visiting DJs from clubs around Europe. Rogue, who also host Wae's Heavy Duty Wednesday night slot, are looking for a new Friday venue. CD.
Cartoon
"He's flown in especially from his tax haven to be with us today!" TOM JOHNSTON
Combat rock
Joe 'I'm not a millionaire' Strummer rants against the rich
SITTING in the shade of a sunbrella,the space capsule elevators whirring up and down,and the fountain bubbling away. Joe Strummer would have had a hard time trying to disguise himself as a city slicker. The only slick thing about him is his rockabilly hairdo.
As expected, the trappings of City wealth do not impress Joe, headliner—the Red Rock Against The Rich tour Twins' stars at the Fridge Tour Trusts. Even so, he enjoyed his power breakfast of kippers, pulled tomatoes and toast at Rotor Britannia, the Rotor Brothers' café in Finchley Square, housed in a slice of American office mail.
Rock Against The Rich is being organised by the shady characters of anarchist group Class War. Socialist Joe owns an aboul at own house in Notting Hill which I bought for £7400 in 1953. I think I am well-off, but I am not a millionaire, unfortunately," he says.
"Hypocrite might be reel-tilled back against The Rich, but I don't see why someone can't has been successful and get down and raise some money for people who are not."
"To me it is not directed against private people. It is against corporate brutality."
Joe takes a naive and romantic view of Class War and did not appear to fully appreciate their philosophy. He prefers to ignore some of the more bizarre and brutal beliefs of Class War. They support the typhoon on the Broadwater Farm Estate and the murderer of Dr Keith Blackford because it was an example of "working class action as an expression of community feeling."
Even lynching is fine if the "community" think it is fit. "It's a rapist got caught by a local community and they decided to hang home. That's fine for me," says Matt Runacre, a member of Class War, who is booking the acts on the Rock Against The Rich tour."
Class War hope to raise £15,000 from the nationwide tour which will be shared among various groups including paying the legal fees of the so-called Cynon Valley Coal Train Fighters; the Association of Island Communities, based on the Isle of Dogs; and a Scottish anti-poll tax grant.
Joe will be paid £5 a night expenses for his bit of fun, "so he can buy a packet of fags and a few pints of beer!" He is backed by The Latino Rockabilly War. They appear on his new single Trash City, from the soundtrack album Permanent Record. Joe is paying their air fares, accommodation and wages out of his own pocket. So he will be more than £5000 down.
Joe and his band will Rock Against The Rich at the Electric Ballroom on 7 July, and also play the Tabernacle in Notting Hill for another cause on 30 June.—SB.
1988 Albert Transon Clash Manuscript by Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer's 1988 "Albert Transom" Manuscript - An Overview
1988 Albert Transon Clash Manuscript by Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer's 1988 "Albert Transom" Manuscript - An Overview
Origin and Content of the Manuscript
In January 1988, Joe Strummer penned a 15-page typed manuscript recounting the story of The Clash, writing under the pseudonym "Albert Transom." Albert Transom is presented as the band's fictional long-time valet, and through this alter ego Strummer tells a colorful autobiographical account of The Clash's journey icollector.com. This manuscript ultimately served as the extensive liner notes for the compilation album The Story of The Clash, Vol. 1 (1988) icollector.comen.wikipedia.org. It stands out as Strummer's only written narrative about The Clash's history, essentially his autobiographical magnum opus on the band rarebookhub.com. At roughly 5,000 words, it is the longest piece of prose Strummer ever wrote, since he typically confined himself to songwriting and did not publish a memoir. The text is written in a humorous, anecdotal style, rich with firsthand stories from the band's early days through their heyday icollector.com.
Narrative and anecdotes: In the manuscript (and printed liner notes), "Albert Transom" describes formative Clash episodes with vivid detail. For example, he recalls the band living in a "filthy squat...down a steep stone stairway into the basement of an old Victorian ruin in West London" amid "a dense cloud of flies," illustrating the poverty and squalor that fueled their political outlook icollector.com. He gives a first-person account of the infamous Notting Hill Carnival riot of 1976, writing how "one lonely Coca Cola can" thrown at police sparked a cascade of debris and "the Notting Hill riot of 1976 was sparked...soon there was fighting ten blocks in every direction." Strummer notes this chaos as the inspiration for The Clash's debut single "White Riot" icollector.com. Many tales center on the band's rowdy performances - Transom details an early TV appearance where The Clash refused to mime "White Riot" and ended up in a brawl with the show's director (an anecdote he underscores with a handwritten addendum about the band "laughing at the idea of miming" before getting ejected) icollector.com. He also chronicles a 1977 open-air festival in Liège, Belgium, where a barricade and hired Hell's Angels security led to fans being pepper-sprayed with mace - the band incited the crowd to tear down the fence, resulting in "500 people on stage" while The Clash kept playing icollector.com. Another story recalls an all-out riot at a 1980 Hamburg show: Strummer (as Transom) describes "war from the off - forget the music it was swing the mic stand round your head time" as punks stormed the stage. German police hauled Strummer off for hitting an unruly fan with his guitar - a sobering incident that made him realize "you cannot fight violence with violence" - though not before the police chief privately commended him with a grin and "whispered 'Gut for you!'" after hearing he had clobbered a violent heckler icollector.com. These colorful vignettes, among many others (including cameos by figures like Bo Diddley, Devo, Roxy Music, etc.), give the manuscript its candid memoir-like value. Strummer imbues the tales with wry punk humor and insider perspective, making the reading as entertaining as it is informative icollector.comicollector.com.
Notably, Strummer ends the manuscript in character by hinting at more stories to tell: "If I had to sum it up, I'd say we played every gig on the face of the earth and that's what it's all about... I've just heard they'll give me some room on Vol. 2 so maybe I will be able to tell the bits I've had to skip or leave out."en.wikipedia.org. This tongue-in-cheek promise of a "Volume 2" was never fulfilled - no sequel ever appeared, since The Story of the Clash Vol. 2 (a mooted live collection) was never released. Thus, the 1988 Albert Transom manuscript remains a one-of-a-kind document - the sole comprehensive first-person chronicle of The Clash written by Strummer himself icollector.com.
Provenance and Auction History
The original typewritten manuscript - dated January 24, 1988 - was typed on lined notebook paper (8.5″×11″) and includes handwritten annotations by Strummer (minor spelling/punctuation corrections and a note in his own hand) icollector.com. After serving its purpose for the album liner notes, the fate of this manuscript for many years was largely unknown to the public. It eventually surfaced in the early 2010s with a clear chain of custody. The document was kept among the personal archives of Gerry Harrington, who had been The Clash's road manager and later Joe Strummer's manager. (Strummer had a habit of giving away or not retaining some of his memorabilia, and Harrington ended up holding various Clash-related items.) In February 2013 - shortly after Harrington's passing on Feb. 9, 2013 - a collection of Clash artifacts from his estate was consigned to RR Auction (Amherst, NH) archives.lincolndailynews.com. These items were part of a "Marvels of Modern Music" specialty auction and included Strummer's instruments, contracts, and the Albert Transom manuscript itself.
At auction on February 21, 2013, the manuscript was advertised as a highlight lot. The catalog description lauds it as "Strummer's autobiographical magnum opus - his only written account of The Clash," underscoring its rarity and importance rarebookhub.com. The lot (No. 417) was listed with a hefty estimate of $10,000-$15,000, reflective of its uniqueness icollector.com. Ultimately the manuscript sold for around $8,800 (the hammer price plus buyer's premium came to roughly $8,710-$8,892) rarebookhub.com. The winning bidder's identity was not made public, but it is presumed to be a private collector given the auction format.
The RR Auction listing provides some physical details confirming the item's completeness and condition. It consisted of 15 typed pages, each with a rough left-edge (from being torn out of a spiral notebook or pad) but otherwise in fine, legible shape icollector.com. There is no indication that any pages were missing; all parts of Strummer's draft were present and accounted for in those 15 pages. In fact, the lot description explicitly notes the manuscript's integrity, mentioning only minor wear (creased corners, the notebook perforation edges) and calling it "otherwise fine" icollector.com. In other words, no pages are known to be missing from the 1988 manuscript - it appears to be a complete draft exactly as Strummer finished it. The few handwritten additions by Strummer show that this was likely his working copy used for finalizing the liner notes text icollector.com. Such provenance details and the presence of Strummer's pen marks lend authenticity and charm to the piece as a memorabilia artifact.
It's worth noting that the provenance via Gerry Harrington explains how the manuscript survived and became available. Harrington had been gifted or entrusted with various Clash items (for example, the same auction included a black acoustic guitar Strummer used in 1986-87, which Strummer had given to Harrington) archives.lincolndailynews.com. Much of Harrington's Clash collection was liquidated in that 2013 sale after his death archives.lincolndailynews.com. Therefore, the manuscript's journey was likely from Strummer's hands in 1988 → to the band/manager's files → preserved by Harrington for decades → and finally to the auction block in 2013. This history also implies the manuscript was not publicly accessible at all until that sale - it remained in private hands within the Clash's inner circle.
Accessibility and Publication Status
Is the full manuscript accessible today? In terms of public access to the content, the Albert Transom manuscript has never been published in full outside of the album liner notes. Its text was originally available to fans only as the printed booklet/inner-sleeve notes included with The Story of The Clash, Vol. 1 (1988) en.wikipedia.orgclash.fandom.com. Those liner notes were quite extensive (and fortunately were retained in later reissues of the album - for instance, CD and cassette versions included the complete Transom essay in the packaging, as noted by reviewers) 991.comtheloserchronicles.substack.com. However, aside from owning a copy of that compilation and reading the small-print notes, there hasn't been an officially sanctioned way to read the whole manuscript. Strummer never expanded it into a book or released it separately. In the decades since, no full transcript has been officially released by the Strummer estate or any publisher, and the text does not appear in any standard Clash biography or liner notes compilation. It remains a unique, standalone piece of writing.
Researchers and dedicated fans can piece together the content from the album's liners or references in secondary sources. For example, the Wikipedia entry on The Story of The Clash summarizes some of Transom's anecdotes en.wikipedia.org, and music journalists have occasionally quoted especially funny or illuminating passages. (One A.V. Club columnist referred to Strummer's liner-note memoir as "hilarious" and full of fistfights, highlighting how unusual and entertaining it was coming from a band frontman rather than a professional writer.) Nevertheless, the full text is not readily available to read online, and one would likely have to find scans or transcriptions made informally by fans. Indeed, only excerpts have surfaced in articles or forums - for instance, Strummer's opening lines as Albert Transom ("Dear Chris, yes it is true. I was their valet from the early beginnings to the bitter end…") have been quoted in a guitar-themed Clash blog garageland.co.uk, and some key passages about the band's early days are cited in the RR Auction description icollector.comicollector.com. But to date there has been no comprehensive, high-resolution scan or official digital release of the entire 15-page manuscript. The auction house did photograph each page for the sale catalog (thumbnails of these typewritten pages were visible on the RR Auction site icollector.com), but those images were not published in high resolution to the general public. The winning bidder would have received the physical pages, and possibly digital scans, but those have not been shared widely as far as known.
In summary, the full manuscript is effectively inaccessible to the public except in its original liner note form. Owning The Story of The Clash album (original vinyl or CD booklet) is the primary way to read Strummer's words in full. Otherwise, fans must rely on third-party descriptions. This situation has not changed since the 2013 auction: the manuscript went into a private collection, and no museum or official archive has published it. Notably, Strummer's widow and estate have curated many of his writings/lyrics in exhibits and books (e.g. Joe Strummer 001 anthology includes lyrics and clippings, and the 2019 Museum of London London Calling exhibit showcased Clash memorabilia), but the Albert Transom essay was not part of those public offerings. Its content lives on through the album liner notes, but the original pages remain in private hands.
Exhibition and Legacy
Exhibitions: To the best of available information, the Albert Transom manuscript has not been publicly exhibited in any museum or gallery. When the Museum of London ran a Clash retrospective in 2019, for example, they displayed Strummer's notebooks, typewriter, and stage clothes - but there was no mention of the Transom liner notes pages. Similarly, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame or other institutions have not reported holding this item. Given that it was sold to a private buyer, any public display would depend on that owner loaning it out. So far, there are no reports of such a loan or exhibition. It's possible that the manuscript has been kept in a private collection since 2013, away from public view.
Publication: No formal publication of the manuscript has occurred beyond the original album insertion. It has never been printed in a book or magazine. Even Strummer's extensive biographies (like Pat Gilbert's Passion Is a Fashion or Chris Salewicz's Redemption Song) describe the existence of the Albert Transom liner notes but do not reprint them in full. Pat Gilbert confirms that Albert Transom was just Strummer writing under a "joke pseudonym" for the Clash compilation's booklet clash.fandom.com. This underscores that the text was meant as an in-joke/bonus for fans at the time, rather than a standalone literary work for mass publication. Strummer himself, in interviews, downplayed any ambition to write books - around the late '80s he said, "I only ever write lyrics. Maybe I'll write [prose] five years after I'm dead." Sadly, he never did publish memoirs while alive, and the Albert Transom piece stands as the closest thing to a Joe Strummer autobiography in writing.
Legacy: Despite its limited availability, the Albert Transom manuscript enjoys a kind of cult status among Clash aficionados and music historians. It's frequently cited as a unique firsthand chronicle of the punk era. The tales Strummer tells as "Transom" add depth to The Clash's mythos, revealing the band's sense of humor and capacity for self-mythologizing. Critics have noted that the liner essay "shed little light for neophytes, but [was] amusing enough" for fans, full of insider references archive.org. In retrospect, it's viewed as an important part of Strummer's legacy. One scholarly analysis of Strummer even highlights that this was the major piece of prose he wrote in his career, underscoring how rare it was for him to personally author narrative text icollector.com. Collectors also prize it highly; the strong auction result (nearly $9k) in 2013 reflected the high demand for a one-of-a-kind Strummer-written document rarebookhub.com.
In conclusion, Joe Strummer's 1988 "Albert Transom" manuscript remains a fascinating artifact of punk history. It is Strummer's own story of The Clash, told in his voice, preserved in a 15-page typescript. The full manuscript itself is now tucked away in a private collection, with no pages missing and no public reproductions available. Its content lives on through the liner notes in The Story of The Clash Vol.1 and through the many anecdotes recounted by Albert Transom that have entered Clash lore. While we may not have high-res scans or a published volume of this manuscript, its legend as Strummer's "autobiographical magnum opus" persists, ensuring that this singular written account of The Clash is not forgotten rarebookhub.com.
Sources:
Auction description of Joe Strummer's "Albert Transom" manuscript (RR Auction, Feb 2013) icollector.comicollector.com.
Rare Book Hub report on RR Auction (Feb 2013), noting "Strummer's autobiographical magnum opus - his only written account of the Clash" and sale price rarebookhub.com.
Associated Press news (Feb 15, 2013) on the auction, confirming items came from manager Gerry Harrington's collection archives.lincolndailynews.com.
The Story of The Clash, Vol.1 album liner notes info (Wikipedia/Fandom), describing the Albert Transom persona and Strummer's authorship en.wikipedia.orgclash.fandom.com.
Excerpts of the manuscript's content as quoted in the auction catalog and other sources (Strummer's anecdotes about squatting, riots, etc.) icollector.comicollector.comicollector.com.
1988 Albert Transon Strummer’s autobiographical magnum opus—his only written account of the Clash Various Auction Houses
Description
Strummer’s autobiographical magnum opus—his only written account of the Clash
Typed manuscript draft for the liner notes to The Story of the Clash, Volume 1, 8.5 x 11, 15 lined pages, January 24, 1988. Strummer writes on the early days of the band under the pseudonym “Albert Transom,” the band's fictional valet, quoted in part below with spelling and grammar retained. He has added a handwritten notation and a few handwritten spelling and punctuation corrections throughout. It is an autobiographical tour de force—the only time Strummer ever wrote out the story of the Clash—that expounds on the band’s general history, their often violent exploits throughout the world, and their musical and political influences. Creases to lower left corners and a rough left edge due to removal from a notebook, otherwise fine condition.
The lasting legacy of the Clash is their politically charged music—they are credited with pioneering the advocacy of radical politics in punk rock. Their influences—politically, musically, and otherwise—are portrayed in humorous detail throughout the manuscript. Starting out in 1976, the band experienced first hand the economic inequality that drove their lyrics, living in a “filthy squat...down a steep stone stairway into the basement of an old Victorian ruin in West London…they walked across the room by stooping to avoid the dense cloud of flies.” They raided bargain bins for cheap records, and Strummer mentions some of their finds: “Bo Diddley lots of Bo Diddley available, first 2 Stones LP’s all the blues ska rock n roll nobody wanted Howling Wolf, Woody Guthrie, Clarence Gatemouth Brown Leadbelly, Bukka White.” While the blues are not an obvious influence, the Clash had a clear admiration for the old bluesmen—they even had Diddley open for them on their first US tour in 1979.
At one point, Strummer writes about his experience at the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976, where “a line of 20 bobbies came pushing through the crowd…one lonely Coca Cola can come floating over and hit one of the helmets, in half a second there were twenty more cans and the crowd drew back suddenly and the Notting Hill riot of 1976 was sparked...soon there was fighting ten blocks in every direction.” These were the riots that served as inspiration for the band’s first single, ‘White Riot,’ released in 1977. One of the first things Strummer writes about is a rehearsal for a television performance of the song: “The lads were doing this tune White Riot…I could dimly hear a viscious argument breaking out between the band and the director [handwritten addendum: the band were laughing at the idea of miming Whit Riot]…we were ejected and this set the pattern for all later visits—everyone marked by a viscious one to one close combat hand to hand fighting.” If their recording sessions were marked by skirmishes, Clash concerts could turn into all-out street warfare.
Strummer describes an “Open Air Mace Festival” in August 1977, in Liege, Belgium: “Some paranoid looney had erected a twelve foot fence across, between the stage and the audience then employed the local Euro Hells Angels to defend the enclosed strip of mud infront of the stage…spraying mace in peoples eyes as they stormed the fence…The lads told the bikers to split and the crowd crushed the fence down and came swarming up the stage front...Now there were 500 people on stage, they left a small space and the lads continued playing.” Rock historian Mikal Gilmore would later call this the moment that best exemplifies the Clash, and notes that it was Strummer who was enraged by the fence separating the stage from the audience, and instigated its destruction by jumping off the stage and trying to pull it down himself.
On their infamous 1980 show in Hamburg: “There was all these rowdy little punk kids we let em in the gig, the boys came out and it was war from the off forget the music it was plant your feet firmly and swing the mike stand round your head time...Anyway der volkspoltzei come in the dressing room after...they dragged off one of our lads for bushing someone with a guitar but released him later when a test showed he was sober, apparently der chief of police said to our boy ‘Are you zee one assalting zese punks?’ When our boy nodded in the affirmative he bent down and wispered ‘Gut for you!’ and slapped him on the back.” It was, in fact, Strummer who had been arrested for hitting an audience member with his guitar, an incident that had a lasting impact on him—he later said it made him realize that you cannot fight violence with violence.
Strummer’s manuscript is a window into the raucous and renegade lifestyle of the Clash from the start. An account straight from the man that was the soul of one of the most influential bands of the last forty years, it is a truly one-of-a-kind piece that would be a cornerstone of any music collection. RR Auction COA.
1988 Albert Transon Strummer's autobiographical magnum opus - his only written account of the Clash - For sale various auction houses.
NOTE: The ending section numbering jumps from 15 to 37 with no intervening content, suggesting possible there may be some missing pages from the original.
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Albert Transon (Joe Strummer) writes
Dear Chris, Yes it is true. I was their valet from the early beginnings to the bitter end. I Alfred Tansom was their valet. In fact the first few months I worked alongside the band at another trade, painting and decorating. You see, the manager Bernie Moon acquired more paper discovering that the band had no mechanical abilities and therefore were useless for the second hand rental business.
Warehouse Painting
He put us to work painting a warehouse in north London (Camden Town it was). Some of the paint went on their shoes, on all their clothes everywhere. There was painting every day happening, never the show. They played every day.
Showcasing the Band
The mechanics in the yard sometimes complained. Six months later I was opening night - I tried to prepare some clothes, rub off a bit of that paint off them, until I was rudely shoved out of the way. The paint is in. They shouted. It was a showcase. In our warehouse, all London’s rock writers had been invited. It was great. There came (the rest claimed they couldn’t find it) with the paint, the music and the family bottle of cheap Greek wine, the legend was born. Ah, the Sex Pistols - now there was there was a well turned out bunch. Such nice boys too.
Touring and Life on the Road
I always used to complain to Mr. Rhodes, “Where’s our boutique?” I used to say. Anyway we pushed them around Britain. It was a waste of time if you ask me. Up and down the country, across the mountains in the dark, we had some charting Americans: Mr. Thunders, Mr. Nolan, Mr. Lure, and Mr. Rath, but everywhere we went - oh dear the press, the regulos maniacs with massed choirs of outraged decency policy. It was awful and all because of a bit of spitting and blinding on the telly. Courtesy of Mr. Steve Jones. Why, even a lorry driver smashed his telly up. (I wonder if you can insure your telly against yourself? I doubt it.)
TV Studio Incident
Anyway so the lads were doing this tour, this white riot, (and quite frankly between you and me the best thing about the band was how they all over in under 2 minutes!) By some combination of sheer bad luck the lads found themselves in a German TV studio. Now I laid some shirts to dry on a heating grill & a few badges dropped through so I removed the grills and... ….
Trouble in Hamburg
I was happily pottering about in the under floor heating when a German gentleman fell through on top of me. I could dimly hear a viscious argument breaking out between the band and the director. (The band were laughing at the idea of miming White Riot.) The German on top of me was screaming unintelligible Teutonic insults. Well, the upshot of it was we were ejected, and this set the pattern for all later visits. Everyone marked by a viscious one on one close combat hand to hand fighting. The lads still have a soft spot for Hamburg as we shall see later. Now, most the French have their own brand of lunacy. The lads were booked to play on French TV, so we all showed up. I set my ironing board up and the band ran through a few tunes and they were sounding not bad at all. Suddenly all the Frenchmen left.
The TV Studio Incident
There we were in a large sound stage with the little Q & O frogs marching out of the door. We didn't think much about it, until a couple of shirts later this sweaty midget with a clipboard and cables plugged into him came running in. At first he would hold his hands pressed tightly against these giant wadges of Kleenex that were bulging out his ears. Then he would wave his arms wildly, then quickly press his hands back over the Kleenex. The band were playing "The Israelites," which is a lovely tune by that Desmond Dekker chap, so I went over to help the poor man. He was wincing in obviously great pain, not being much good at this foreign lingo lark myself, but I saw he had a talkback microphone round his neck since the lads were making a bit of a row. I leaned towards the mix and suddenly another doctor–not a small man in a glass booth–leap up inagony and rip his headphones off. Well the upshot of it was that this chap was in fact the doctor of the TV station and he was attempting to take a decibel reading of the lads because the union had quit fearing permanent deafness amongst its members!
Reflections on Touring
So much for Johnny Halliday! “Wait till you get those mothercap chaps in here I told him,” but they wouldn't listen. Anyway, so it was back to Blighty. But not before the open air Mace festival. I forget where it was, Belgium or France. Interesting gig with those northern chaps Roxy Music no less. Anyway we all showed up, ready to play. I was dead against going out because of all the mud in the first place.
Who ever listened to me. Any road, some paranoid looney had erected a twelve foot fence across, between the stage and the audience, then employed the local Euro Hells Angels to defend the enclosed strip of mud in front of the stage. By the time that the lads went on, the assorted punks and skins of Europe were ready to invade.
The bikers fetched palings of wood and were spraying mace in people's eyes as they stormed the fence. Rocks and cans and bottles started coming over, intended for the bikers, were going everywhere. The lads told the bikers to split and the crowd crushed the fence down and came swarming up the stage front. I hid behind the flight case of my ironing board. Now there was 500 people on my stage.
They leapt a small space and the lads continued playing. The only thing I could think of was Bryan Ferry in his white dinner jacket in the midst of all these anarcho rockers, a sight I was keenly anticipating, however it was not to be. I observed a white limo entering the site. I could see it clearly from my vantage point on the stage.
It came in the backstage EMX exit, drove halfway down the site, stopped, executed a smart U-turn and disappeared. Exit Roxy Music stage right. They came, they saw, they split.
Touring with Other Bands
Anyway, back to the story. Hilda says I should put all this in a book but I can't see it myself, so, anyway, we went for a quick spin round the British Isles with two nice young groups from London – the Subway Sect (such quite lads) and the Slits (all rowdy girls) and had ourselves a fine old time there.
There was still the occasional group of tough boys would turn show up for a row but with the size of the audience increasing the task of attacking three or four thousand punks was obviously a bit out of their league – although the Teds were bloody good at fighting you have to give 'em that – they had plenty of young youths willing to earn a bit of a name for themselves.
One time it was the University of London union dance – with Crazy Cavern and the Rhythm Rockers, very early days, 3rd or 4th time out for us. This was several weeks before the Ted/punk street battles began to hit the nationals. So the local guy in the town I mist have looked it on paper. A good rock 'n' roll band from Wales and to warm up – this new London group. Well, he wasn't up on his street culture. I peered out when the lads were doing the fifth number, it was one I liked to hum.
Chaos at the Venue
Myself, actually, "Protex Blue" it was called, and all I could see were some guys in glasses looking at the stage with all their mouths open and some of Crazy Cavan's fans coming forward, in the nifty little break between the first and second verse I could clearly hear the leader of the gang say "Here's your bus fare home" as he held up five pence.
Anyway the upshot of it was we were barricaded into one of the small rooms at the back and the Teddy Boys were trying to enter. The lads got fed up with the fun all of a sudden and they all picked up chairs and threw the door open, luckily for us there was only two who were prepared to come in - I had a nice young chap called Sebastian helping me out at the time and the leader grabbed his punk tie in his fist and it began to rip a bit, his fist was tattooed all over with mother's and girl's names etc.
The lads raised their chairs higher... he just snarled a few insults and backed out with his cohort who had Eddie Gene and Elvis on the side of his neck. All the lads agreed that Sebastian's tie was much more punk now than it was before. It was a strange time but a real good laugh.
Reflections on the Scene
I have been living in Florida since the band broke up and I bet no one round here still fights street battles solely over haircuts, clothing and music. It was pretty mental. The big match was every Saturday 2pm Sloane Square; first a good mass brawl on the King's Road then a running fight down into the tube station and all over the trains – and extra strange because the lads were always listening to that rockabilly music all the time, that and all that "reggay" music all the time.
Sometimes some of them and Sebastian would go to rock n roll pubs with quiffers greasers outfits to hear some music. Once forgetting they were thus attired they returned from a Teddy Boys dance in North London and went for a late drink at the Roxy Club, let me tell you they had to fight their way out of that one!
The Riot Scene
One fine summer's day they persuaded me to go down the August Bank Holiday Carnival in Notting Hill. We got in a crowded bit under the Westway, a line of 20 bobbies came pushing through with their blue helmets sticking up like in a comic. Then all of a sudden a lonely Coca Cola can come floating over and hit one of the helmets, in half a second there were twenty more cans and the crowd drew back suddenly and the Notting Hill riots of 1976 was sparked. We were thrown back, women and children too, against a fence which sagged back dangerously over a drop.
I can clearly see Bernie Rhodes, even now, frozen at the center of a massive painting by Rabelais or Michelangelo, his arms out as he searches the ground shouting "My glasses! My glasses!"
As around him a full riot breaks out and 200 screaming people running in every direction.
The screaming started it, all those fat black ladies started screaming the minute it broke out, soon there was fighting ten blocks in every direction.
I shan't tell you what the lads got up to in the next few hours and indeed I left it being no place for a man like myself and I had to walk all the way home.
Market Adventures
One Saturday I saw the lads up the market and followed them about a bit and saw how they occupied their time when they "found no was get" up early, buy some bread and steal some butter and cheese from the local supermaket, have some toast and go up on Goldbourne Road.
There they bought a Dansette portable after 45 minutes of wrangling for 2 quid, next some completely mutilated old blues records and almost anything cheap, the 30p bin was mined.
They bought up old Who albums ("The Who Sell Out"), Roulette recording of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Bo Diddley, lots of Bo Diddley available, first 2 Stones LPs, all the blues, ska and rock n roll.
Nobody wanted Howling Wolf, Woody Guthrie, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Leadbelly, Bukka White, Big Youth, Prince Jazzbo, all of it horribly scratched, hence the rock bottom price.
Record Haunts and Squats
Then they would haunt these little arcades of leather jackets and toy cars and ancient radios to little record shacks in the back where a tiny dedicated minority would be packed in, leafing through the racks like zombies, all vibrating to Hank Mizel, all quiffs and petticoat skirts and lumberjack shirts and leather jackets, pictures of Gene Vincent and Bill Haley, the odd pair of pointy toed Cuban heel Chelsea boots snatched for a bargain, 2 quid – "they sell for fifty down Chelsea."
Then it was back to their filthy squat. This was the one and only time I went there. They led me down a steep stone stairway into the basement of an old Victorian ruin in West London. If there were fifty flies in there there were a hundred.
They walked across the room by stooping to avoid the dense cloud of flies.
Hunched over the player, they played these records loud as possible, it was disgusting. I left before they could offer me some of the filth they were cooking up, some of which I had seen them picking up out of the road after the veg market closed up.
When one of the marketers saw the lads sifting the rubbish they deliberately stamped on any whole fruits that they were leaving behind so the lads couldn’t use 'em. I had to walk all the way home that night too.
I remember the Olympics were on and they had two televisions going because on one the picture worked but the sound didn’t and vice versa with the other, more £2 bargains no doubt.
This is what the lads were doing in ’76 at any rate.
The First American Tour
First trip to America. They even took me along, not that I remember much about it except that we played a benefit in Cleveland, Ohio, for a vet from the war.
My other memory is of the splendid gentlemen Mr. Bo Diddley who rode the bus with us as the lads had asked him to play on the tour. He sat up all night, square guitar back in his bunk, bottle of rock'n' rye whiskey in his hand, and told us stories of the road.
Once the lads sang him ten verses of lyrics from one of those old market records they had, but Mr. Diddley claimed he never heard of the song and it all sounded completely new to him! "It was one about the kids who come to his back door and 50 cents up in the night and gives them all a pep talk.
I think one of the lines went "I'm the bloke that wrote 'I'm a man'!" but I'm not sure anyway.
The Last of the Shows
The last of the eight shows on that trip was the Masonic Temple, San Francisco, a show on behalf of Youth Productions. I seem to remember cracker good shows in Washington D.C. and another at the Palladium, New York.
Spitting, Britain, and Bizarre Encounters
The spitting in the U.K. was at its very height when the lads went for a spin round Britain with these two quite chaps from New York, Suicide they were called I think, and I had to apologise to them over the shocking treatment they received.
In Crawley one chap with no hair sprang up and gave Mr. Vega a good solid punch in the head! But "these Yanks are tough you know," after some delay he managed to finish the number.
I had to laugh one time in Bradford when I was awakened at the Kings Motel at dawn. I looked out the window and saw a loop of naked people running around, jumping in and out of the ground floor windows. Then I saw the Bradford police hauling off one of our lads and both suicide!
Seems our lot had been smoking reefers in the foyer and the night clerk had phoned the rozzers in on them. Oh well, perhaps this was the tour where Cumberland Gap Donald took the rap for the drummer in the town of Dundee.
The Gritty Gig Circuit
Splendid piles of masonry, some of those theatres there in the British Isles! The Electric Circus in Manchester! Almost like an abandoned cinema in a sea of rubble. What great nights we all had there.
Punk was like an earthquake: people were screaming and shouting! It was blazing hot inside in the middle of winter. Another great place was the Motor City Roller Rink in Detroit.
The Jackie Wilson Medical Fund Show
Michigan. It was a show for the Jackie Wilson Medical Fund and his wife attended, and on that trip the lads had requested a special touring painter.
We were late. The lads were doing "You Can't Judge a Book" at the soundcheck, when the crowd rushed in, all streaming to the stage front across the vast concrete floor. They were all grinning with delight. The lads kept playing and finished the number.
Then one of our lot went "Ladies and gentlemen" (even though it was still the soundcheck) "Mr. Lee Dorsey," and there was a giant Smurfs house built on the stage for some reason. And as I looked up, one of the little Smurf windows swung open and sitting there was Mr. Lee Dorsey himself smiling away and waving to the cheers!
Remembering the Details
Those are good memories, although it all becomes a blur just because people are telling you it's important to remember. Imagine if I asked you to give an account of everything you'd done since April 1976. The benefit shows seem to stick out maybe because they were a bit more special than the average gig night and you took merryxwhite a definite notice of it.
Jamaica
Once down in Jamaica I accompanied the lads not because there was any stage togs to be done but it was one of the perks of the job now and again to go on a bit of a holiday.
On this one Mr. Mickey Dread had returned to Kingston and we all went with. Mickey took us to Channel One in a part of Kingston where even the wild dogs moved in packs and they were doing a couple of tunes.
They did "Junco Partner" and they were doing "Kingston Advice" when I had a nap under a few palms. I was woken up by Mickey Lynch and I'll never forget the sight out in the road— he was dead agitated and pulled me right out of there quick quick and outside all the lads, the guitars, and everybody were packed into this tiny Renault of Mickey's! It was the sort her farmers or students drive with a little back bit but tiny! Tiny!
What had happened was you had to bribe the neighbourhood or you can't cut a tune, so a hasty retreat was in order if not for our sakes but for the Natty Congo's (Mr. Dread's backing band) anyway.
Electric Ladyland
I'm sure we went to New York straight after and the lads cut "Sandinista!" in Electric Ladyland. Some of the lads always took to "stay at" the Iroquois Hotel on 44th and Times Square.
We stayed there every time we came for years but other groups began to use it and the Irish bar was changed but we checked in originally 'cos the lads insisted that James Dean had lived on the eighth floor during the early fifties.
There was a barbershop where he was supposed to have hung around, it was in the foyer. The lads used to have great fun pointing to the block outside and telling strangers on the street "you see that? Dappy Duck once sat there." Incidentally I'm pleased to see that they are bringing out a new Dappy Duck film soon.
Thamasat University in Bangkok
However once we played the Thamasat University in Bangkok, Thailand and when people ask me what it was like all I can remember is I spent the gig doubled up behind the back curtain with my hand over my mouth 'cause of the sight of of all these blokes in turbans doing the pogo, then some of the turbans began unravelled and it all began to get into a big orange tangle.
While they kept thrashing about, the other thing I remember was the curious sight of these young monks at a market cafe. They had all the shorn heads and saffron robes and sandals and beads and wooden items on straps, but everytime a girl came by they all got up and went "Corrrr! Hey baby! What you doing tonight! Corrr! Yeah, yeah baby!" and all that stuff.
Hamburg Gigs and Tour Life
First time we went to Hamburg it was really cool. We played to mostly young Teds and young toughs in a club on the Reeperbahn. One guy was undoing the shoelaces of one of our lads all the time and got a kick in the mush for it.
A young, small, spindly chap, we spoke to him after, he didn’t seem to mind. One season later though punk had hit and there was all these rowdy little punk kids. We let ’em in the gig, the boys came out and it was war from the off. Forget the music, it was plant your feet firmly and swing the mike, stand round your head time. At both sides of the hall stood a well dressed German public. Seemingly they stood politely through the music, then continued watching the riot without any change of expression as if “this is quite interesting” type of look. Anyway, der Volkspolizei come in the dressing room after with a huge man mountain of a lad. He pointed to one of our lads: “Is you!!” He screamed in broken English, “It is you! You kicked me last year – but this time you haf gone too far!” Seems like the spindly chap had grown up.
The upshot of it was they dragged one of our lads for bushing someone with a guitar but released him later when a test showed he was sober. Apparently, DDR chief of police said to our boy “Are you zee one assaulting zee punks?” When our boy nodded in the affirmative he bent down and whispered “Gut for you!!” and slapped him on the back. Next time the lads played Hamburg half the German army was arrayed around the hall – a birdseed warehouse in an industrial zone and it was a very quiet gig.
Tough Venues
What’s the worst city to play? Vienna! It means nothing to me!
It was fast living though. One time when we stayed at the Grand Hotel in Sheffield or Leeds and it was burning down I saw three firemen with helmets and yellow oilskins and axes. I saw them rush into the room of our soundmen Mickey Foot, and wake him up.
Shine powerful, shine powerful torches into his eyes, throw the lights on, order him to get out and into the street.
He said “Yes yes oh very well,” rushed out the door again, then I watched him roll over and go back to sleep, even though I lost my shoes in the panic I had to smile and have a good laugh at that. Mr. Baker (crew boss) who once said when we visited the bridge on “The River Kwai” “We are here to forgive Albert, but not to forget.”
The Guru and Group Management
I think he was quoting the monument but I’m not sure. Also there was Raymond (the Clash “don’t bush the probe”) Jordan (in charge of security), one of the gentlemen of this world, who said, "I saw a road once and it was going nowhere..." They refused to say any more. We dubbed him "the guru" after that. Mr. Bernie Rhodes and Mr. Kosmo Vinyl as always. When Bernie wore a straw boater at a Who show in Philadelphia I knew then! The Flanagan and Aleen of pop group management.
London Calling and the Road to Monterey
Down in Pimlico on the "London Calling" sessions there was a little concrete tennis court across the road. The band used to use it for street footer which is soccer but it's legal to shove your opponent down on the ground or grab him round the head from the back with both your arms etc.
They almost couldn't play music till they'd had a two hour football match, those were good sessions with Guy Stevens and Bill Price (especially the football).
One day in Pimlico we got a call from Chet Helms and we were off to Monterey for a 3 day event. We were, and in the immortal words of Mr. K Vinyl, "I walked out on stage that night expecting to see the Woodstock Nation arrayed before me and I found myself looking at Harringay dog track stadium instead!
With two or three people in the middle putting out little white folding chairs..." We flew out from London and somehow men from the festival met us at the airport. "Hi guys!" he said, "Which one of you is the soundman?"
The lads looked around. "We forgot to bring one," stated one of the lads. Eventually, "Well gee you better get one quick don't you think guys?... Er... I know a good one in town! Oh yeah, what's his name? What's his name?... Er... Shorty." "Shorty! In that case we'll have him!" declared the lads and the second U.S. tour was off to a flying start.
US Tour
Somewhere on that tour a bunch of blokes from Frisco called Devo came to the show.
Afterwards I spoke to Sandy Pearlman (production 2nd L.P.), who'd been helping out at the out front mixing desk 'cos I'd seen Devo's red flowerpot hats all clustered round him after the show.
Seems they had wanted to know what amps we were using because they wanted "that sound." Sandy says he told them it wasn't the amps but the way the instruments were struck that got "that sound."
I couldn't even imagine what Devo were on about – I'd always assumed that the awful racket that I heard backstage was what the punters got out front – and who on earth would want to sound like that?
Anyway I haven't even touched upon the great times we had in Italy on numerous visits (all good & chaotic), and in France and Spain and in Spain nights forever etched on the memory and Portugal! Lisbon, that White City lying there in the sun as we crashed its alleyways like dying rats with hangovers!
Rats with Hangovers and Global Touring
When I think of all the dockside bars the lads dragged me into – I shudder at the thought of what could have happened. Somehow, being as the ladsformed a unit that created music. This somehow was understood by even the drunkest, toughest truck driver and they were allowed to take a few liberties.
Far off places
Well I’ll skip over the 8am fight in the Garbage Men’s Cafe in Genoa, and Iceland and Oswego, ah that Australian tour!
First Auckland, Wellington in N.Z., then Sydney (7 nights), Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Japan.
Yes you took me there, seven nights in Tokyo, or the seventeen nights on Times Square in Manhattan, the gig in Hong Kong, Laredo, El Paso, the shows in Omaha, Boise Idaho, even Lubbock not to mention the rest of Texas.
The time in Dunfermline Kinema, the groovy backdrop (thick plywood) was pushed over by a disgruntled fan and it nearly flattened the drummer. Incidentally it was him and the bassman who made the funniest quips along the road.
We all liked a good laugh.
The time in Newcastle when we found a dart embedded in the backdrop or another time in that town when they smashed the plate glass doors to get in. What the band really liked and tried to find as often as possible was a place to play where there wasn’t any chairs or tables in front of the stage.
In America they call this “festival seating” – such as the Palladium in L.A., the boys did 5 nights here with the English Beat one summer.
Tours with Joe Ely and his merry band of men – once Joe Ely took us to see the place where Ozzy Osbourne threw up on the Alamo, whilst relieving himself after a long bus ride (it took the best lawyer in Texas to get him out!) and now in East San Antone all the bars are said to have big posters of Oz.).
Once one of the boys told me that on their first tours they’d smash everything up because the lighting men did, but then it slowly dawned that it was the man who paid for the damage not the lighting men!
I remember a £1400.00 pound bill for a hotel carpet that kept following us around for years, things like that.
Another problem with the seats at the shows was the bills like the one for 350 trashed cinema seats after the Magic Night of May 7, 1977 at the Finsbury Park Rainbow, which was once the Astoria.
There’s a ballroom in Chicago I’ll never forget, jammed up against the elevated railway tracks and a bull ring in the south of France and a strange dinner with Vince Taylor at the Pigfoot in Paris.
I don’t care what this or that critic has said over the years, it’s out among the people, outside the industry, who know about the band and people will always remember the way they’ve been treated, though you might hear different from those who’s job it was to rouse the boys and get them on the bus in the morning. People like Raymond, and J.B.W. and Chuck and Johnny Green and Koz and Mr. Digby.
All in all I’ve got good memories of the lads. I must mention Alex Michon, the quite girl who handmade all the stage togs which were designed between her, the manager and the bassman.
If I had to sum it up I’d say we played every gig on the face of the earth an’ that’s what it’s all about.
I’ve just heard they’ll give me some room on Vol 2 so maybe I will be able to tell the bits I’ve had to skip or leave out.
Yours,
Albert Transom, Jacaranda Apartments
Arcadiaville
Orlando, Florida.
24th January 1988.
Caroline Coon, Published 1988, "The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion", (Clash only), 68 pages.
The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion
Caroline Coon’s 1988 captures the eruptive energy of the UK punk rock scene between 1976 and 1977 through first-hand observations, photography, and interviews. Though centred primarily on the Sex Pistols, the book importantly chronicles The Clash as key figures in the second wave of punk: politically motivated, street-level, and fiercely independent. The Clash are portrayed as heirs to the spirit of rebellion originally ignited by the Pistols but with a more focused and socially conscious vision. Coon documents their early emergence, especially in relation to their rehearsal sessions, fashion aesthetic, solidarity with other punks, and the cultural role they played in shaping punk beyond nihilism and into meaningful resistance.
The book also underscores Bernard Rhodes' influence (shared with Malcolm McLaren) in shaping The Clash, as well as their significant role in punk’s spread to France and their participation in events like the White Riot tour. The band is contextualised alongside groups like The Damned, Buzzcocks, and The Slits—portrayed not as followers of the Pistols but as co-conspirators in redefining British youth identity.
Chapters - Clash only sections
1. 1976 2. Rock Revolution, 28 July 1976, pp. 12–17, Lays the groundwork for punk; Clash mentioned alongside other emergent bands. 3. The First European Punk Festival, 28 August 1976, pp. 25–30, Notes the early identity of The Clash (formerly The Heartdrops). 4. The 100 Club Punk Festival, September 1976, pp. 31–37, Mentions Clash connections and scene development. 5. The Clash, March 1977, pp. 62–68, Dedicated chapter on The Clash – their philosophy, music, and significance.
Clash dates mentioned
13 August 1976, Private performance, A “performance for friends only” by the original line-up (Strummer, Jones, Simonon, Chimes).
24 September 1976, ICA, London, Joe Strummer denounces violence mid-gig; plays White Riot with fury.
December 1976, Anarchy in the UK Tour with Pistols, The Clash played around 8 gigs before being kept off the road due to venue bans.
2 January 1977, The Roxy Club, London, Post-tour performance; signs of growing hostility in punk scene noted.
April 27, 1977, Paris, Caroline Coon refers to this trip and includes a photograph from the performance.
May 9, 1977, Rainbow Theatre, London, A landmark sell-out concert, but the venue subsequently banned them.
Various 1976–77, Benefits vs. profit gigs, Joe Strummer comments: "We make a loss at every gig," attacking profit-hungry promoters.
Early 1977, Unspecified gig, Fan throws seats during their set at the Rainbow. Joe: “We only play our own songs”.
Early 1977 (undated), Unnamed venue, Full live set description includes White Riot, London’s Burning, Janie Jones, 1977.
Other Clash references
6, Mentioned as a band benefitting from Malcolm McLaren's early support.
8, Photo: Paul Simonon and Mick Jones with Viv Albertine at their rehearsal studio.
13, Listed with the Jam, Buzzcocks, Damned as bands inspired by the Sex Pistols
16, White Riot Tour is referenced. Clash lyrics are quoted: "1978, 1979, 1980..."
24, Early days at SEX; Johnny Rotten's entry to the scene; Clash mentioned in this context.
25, Reference to their original name The Heartdrops; their withdrawal from French festival.
62–68, Full chapter on The Clash, including interviews, ideology, and contrast with the Pistols.
1976
The Sex Pistols made their debut at St Martins School of Art on Friday 6th of November 1975. The irate social secretary cut the power after five numbers. Only ten minutes on stage and the band had created the first Them and Us rock schism in over a decade. In the following months most people who heard their music found it repulsive. They booed accordingly.
The Pistols just jeered back, branded the opposition ‘boring old farts’, and carried on regardless.
Not that they had many places to play — the alienated older generation included club and rock concert promoters. When they did appear, news was spread by word of mouth and hurriedly printed hand bills. Early fans were mostly friends of the band, those on the Sex Pistols’ grapevine or isolated nonconformists who had stumbled across them at gigs. At last four belligerent teenagers were shaking up the stagnating rock scene.
The first months of belonging to a new movement which everyone else reviled was like being at a wonderful, subversively bizarre private party.
By September 1976, when over 1000 fans from all over the country came to see the Sex Pistols and seven other new bands at the 100 Club’s First London Punk Rock Festival, the party had swelled to a nationwide celebration.
With very few exceptions, however, the musicians, critics, and record company executives of the rock establishment, condemned the growing phenomenon with attitudes ranging from indifference to apoplexy. They felt assured that if punk rock was ignored it would go away.
■ ■ ■
Dave Dee, A&R, WEA Records: As a musical thing I found it very unmusical. The fact that it isn’t disciplined prevents me from liking it. I can’t see it going any further than it is right now. (Sounds, October, 1976)
John Martin, Cowbell booking agency: I just don’t see any appreciable future . . . I can’t see them outside a club. (October 1976)
Dan Loggins, A, CBS Records: It’s a fad. (Melody Maker, November, 1976)
Phil Collins, lead singer, Genesis: A friend videoed the group on the ‘So It Goes’ tv programme (August) and following all this publicity we played it over out of curiosity and all we found was a lack of talent. (Melody Maker, December, 1976)
Eric Burdon, former lead singer with the Animals: Their music is not important. (Melody Maker, December, 1976)
Derek Jewell, music critic, Sunday Times: The latest musical garbage . . . Punk will fade . . . Its apologists are ludicrous . . . When it dies it will not be mourned. (Sunday Times, November, 1976)
The older generation’s reaction to the new era was understandable. It made them feel redundant.
●
The seeds of punk were sown when the live rock circuit almost died in the early seventies. Discos took the place of live acts — it was cheaper to play records than pay a band. Touring became a marketing device to promote a band’s latest album. The bands who could afford the large sums needed to buy themselves onto these tours were forced to play in pubs to audiences over seventeen who were there as much for the drink as the music. To please the punters in such an unselective atmosphere it was necessary to trot out oldies.
Even original songs had to sound like classics. The emphasis was on well tried R&A formulae rather than innovation. And basically if you weren’t a boozer it was very boring.
Of all the bands that churned around the pub circuit between 1972 and 1976 less than ten were given the opportunity to record. Only the Kursaal Flyers, Dr. Feelgood and Eddie and the Hot Rods made any impression in the charts. In early 1976 the Hot Rods’ energy and high-speed rock began to attract the same teenagers who were going to Sex Pistols’ gigs. But just at the point when they were capable of filling the Marquee twice in one night they dissociated themselves from the New Wave and Punk rock.
As for the hot industry tips for success like Nasty Pop, City Boy Burlesque and Deaf School — who’s even heard of them now?
The Sex Pistols were a dramatic break with the past. For a start they wouldn’t play pubs. They promoted most of their gigs themselves and to those who understood what they were doing, it was obvious that a new rock generation and youth culture was emerging that would be artistically and commercially significant for many years to come. Its power, contrary to later allegations, lay in the fact that it was not created by the media but by teenage musicians and the kids themselves. Their music had a new rhythm and an abrasive style expressing a hunger and need which was no longer satisfied by antiseptic r’n’b and art school burlesque. Detractors, thinking they had stuck a knife in a vulnerable spot, drivelled on about musical incompetence — an argument irrelevant as it was untrue.
Said Chris Spedding, guitarist who had been to many of the early Sex Pistols’ gigs: “The Sex Pistols looked and sounded good. Most groups are pretty boring; they weren't. I find it very weird, all that about them not playing one thing, it’s very that. Obviously, they’ve got their strength.” (Sounds, October, 1976)
Creating the space in which the new era could develop was twenty-eight year old Malcolm McLaren, a trend-setting owner of the Kings Road boutique, ‘Sex’ (currently, ‘Seditionaries’; formerly, ‘Let It Rock’). Physically rather ethereal and unassuming, he was nevertheless possessed of boundless zeal. He became the Diaghilev of Punk.
A Londoner with an art school background, Malcolm went to New York in 1975 and ended up managing the New York Dolls for seven months. On his return he set about making his vision of a rumbling, anarchic, energetic and noisy rock scene, the like of which hadn’t been seen in Britain for ten years, a reality. This ambition, coupled with his sense of fun and adventure, made him the ideal person for aspiring musicians to approach. Their first contact with him was usually when they drifted into Sex to buy, or otherwise acquire, one of his infamous t-shirts. Malcolm would chat to anyone interesting, and if asked for advice he gave it. He seemed to have a canny knack of dealing with the practical details of rock, and as a no-strings-attached matchmaker, career guidance counsellor and creative critic, he was much in demand.
He manages the Sex Pistols, but many bands including the Clash, the Damned, the Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees have benefited from his advice and encouragement.
Photo: Johnny Rotten at the 100 club, April 1976.
●
The first time I heard the Sex Pistols was on the night they first played the Nashville in March 1976. Already I felt excited. For one thing, their name alone invited higher expectations than I would have going to see a group calling themselves Jim Custard Pie. Further, since I occasionally brought clothes from Sex, I had some idea how they would present themselves.
Exactly two years previously I started writing for the Melody Maker. I had interviewed stars as diverse as Alice Cooper and the Bay City Rollers, and I had seen scores of new bands. The Sex Pistols, however, wiped the board. Their performance that night exceeded the sensually ballistic promise of their name. They weren’t responsible for being born with that intangible quality, ‘natural charisma’. But they had it in rather unfair quantities.
What impressed me most, however, was their total disinterest in pleasing anybody except themselves. Instead, they engaged the audience, trying to provoke a reaction which forced people to express what they felt about the music. Quite apart from being very funny, their arrogance was a sure indication that they knew what they were doing and why.
I hadn’t expected to be so impressed. And yet, in a strange way, the Sex Pistols were what I had been looking for in rock ’n’ roll for ages.
A few days later I went to Melody Maker dead keen to write a feature about the band and what I believed to be the importance of the punk scene emerging around them. To say my suggestion was considered premature, if not ludicrous, would be an understatement.
And fair enough. A journalist’s job is to convince an editor of a story’s significance. All I had to do was keep tabs on developments and persist with my case. Five months later, in August 1976, I managed to get a feature in the Melody Maker on punk rock.
From the start I sensed that the Sex Pistols represented more than just a potentially great rock ’n’ roll band. But only because I still had a vivid recollection of something very similar happening before, in 1967, when a new music emerged underground.
The Hippy movement focussed around Psychedelic Rock, played by a new generation of musicians. Like Punk Rock a decade later, Psychedelic Rock polarised first the music industry and then society at large. To start with, the Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine were the most important bands. They couldn’t get bookings at ‘normal’ rock venues. When the Soft Machine played Tiles in Oxford Street early in 1967, they were thrown off the stage after four numbers. In order to play in peace, as it were, psychedelic bands had to promote their own concerts. U.F.O. was the name of the main club, but its actual location moved from one West End basement to another as either the police or the landlord closed it down.
In the early days, Hippies went underground because their philosophy, political beliefs, ‘freaky’ music, weird fashions and permissive life style were considered a threat to society. To survive, an alternative network of clubs, small records stores, newspapers devoted to the political and musical interests of the scene, ‘head shops’ and boutiques, soon sprung up.
Punks are the antithesis to the Hippies in every way, and yet there are similarities. They too are a protest against the Establishment. They have a network of sympathetic promoters, record stores, fanzines and boutiques. Comparisons between the structures of the two movements became strikingly evident. No one ever talked openly about ‘underground’.
But to me, that was what it felt like. By August 1976, I was convinced that the Sex Pistols were the vanguard of a new youth culture which would sweep the country — if not the, er, whole rock appreciating world . . .
This was not news everyone wanted to hear. Many musicians would have a tough time, and record companies would have to write off hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of investments in bands they had signed just before the new era. For a while a breeze blew in my direction, but as more punk bands formed and the Sex Pistols’ following grew, the commercial prospects of the new scene suddenly gave it a more appealing face.
Photo: Steve Jones, Sex Pistols’ lead guitarist in his room in Soho where the band used to rehearse. April 1976. UO Faull
Photo: Fans at Boy, another punk boutique, Spring 1977. Sheila Rock
Photo: Cat Woman and Andy {from Eater) at the Roxy, Spring 1977. Ray STEVENSON
Photo 1, 2: Summer 1976, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones (The Clash) at their Chalk Farm rehearsal studio with Viv Albertine (later of the Slits) and friend JANE ASHLEY
Photo: At the Roxy ANNETTE WEATHERMAN
Photo: Madame Louise, whose club in Soho became the favourite hang-out of the Pistols and their fans in the Autumn of 1976. Ray STEVENSON
1988 was inspired by punk rock musicians and fans. I thank them for tearing the stultifying wraps off rock ’n’ roll and then sharing their experiences with me.
At the start, John Ingham understood what was going on and we became partners. Without his technical advice and friendship, writing about punk rock would have been much less fun. We co-wrote Chapter 2. His contribution to 1988 is considerable.
Rory and Allan “Leather ’n’ Chains” Jones, ex-Portobello Hotel, for turning me on in the first place.
Malcolm McLaren, Bernard Rhodes, Jake Riviera, Richard Boon and Andy Czezowski for their creative co-operation. Sophie, Jamie, Nils, Suzanne, Rat Rodent, Al, Boogie, Alex and Chris, Rough Trade, Rock On, Bizzarre, Don Letts, Rick, Ray Stevenson, Erica Eckenberg, Sky Processing, Vivien Westward, Allan Edwards, Al Clark and Tessa, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Ellie Smith, The Ramones and Linda and Seymour Stein for great back-up.
Ron Watts of the 100 Club, who first gave the Sex Pistols a break. Chris Spedding, for knowing what is and what is not inspired musicianship. John Peel and John Walters for their good ears. David “Corky” Cork, promoter extraordinaire, for sanity on the ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’ and the “White Riot tours. Mark P, Harry, Steve, Sandy, John and fanzine writers everywhere for their energy. Michael Chambers for editorial guidance and the enthusiasm to see 1988 through to publication. Ray Coleman for his insight. Viv Goldman, Julia Stonehouse, Paul Simonon, Jo Faull and Sarah Hall, Kate Simon and Sheila Rock for love, friendship and support, certain evenings, weekends and conversations...
The emphasis is on the word looks rather than, as Johnny would have you believe, the word bored. His safety- pinned-together clothes fal around his slack body in calculated disarray. His face is an undernourished grey. Not a muscle moves. His lips echo the down- ward slope of his wiry, coathanger shoulders. Only his eyes show the faintest trace of life.
This malevolent, third generation child of rock ‘n’ roll is the Sex Pistols’ lead singer. The band play exciting, hard, basic punk rock. But more than that, John is the elected generalissimo of a new cultural movement scything through the grass roots disenchant- ment with the present state of main- stream Rock.
You need look no further than the letter pages of any recent rock weekly to see that fans no longer silently accept the disdain with which their heroes, the rock giants, treat them. They feel deserted. The millionaire rock stars are no longer part of the brotherly rock fraternity which helped create them in the first place.
To see and hear rock and roll giants like Bowie, the Who or the Stones is to make them and the promoters ever richer while you waitin queues for days to get tickets, brave a sea of mud and a deluge of beer cans or sit in gigantic garages vainly trying to see the stage let alone who’s on it — which wouldn't be too bad ifyou could hear something other than a distressingly mangled version of your favourite songs.
To see and hear rock giants like Yes, Rick Wakeman or the Pink Floyd doesn't involve such guerilla tactics, and the quality of the sound is often .... see PDF for full text.. Little on The Clash
THE FIRST EUROPEAN PUNK ROCK FESTIVAL
[Snippet] Very little about the festival turned out as planned. Initially the Heartdrops (now the Clash) Richard Hell, the Sex Pistols and Graham Parker and the Rumour were to be the star attractions.
None of these bands eventually played. T
he final line up was: Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Pink Fairies, Roogalator, the Tyler Gang, Nick Lowe and the Damned. The French bands were Il Baritz, Kalfont Rockchaud, Bijoux, Shakin’ Street, Little Bob Story and Pashion Force. The Sex Pistols pulled off the bill because they had been locked in verbal battle with the Hot Rods ever since the night they both played the Marquee. Rotten threw chairs. [he Hot Kods were not amused. The lash also withdrew trom the festival in solidarity with the Pistols... see PDF for full text. LIttle on the Clash
The 100 CLUB PUNK ROCK FESTIVAL
Monday, September 20th: The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Subway Sect, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Tuesday, September 21st: The Damned, Chris Spedding and the Vibrators, the Buzzcocks, and Stinky Toys (from France).
The first mass exposure of Punk Rock to the music press and record industry. On the second day, after an accident in which Dave Vanium’s friend lost her eye, Sid Vicious was arrested. When I tried to find out why, I too was arrested. During most of Chris Spedding’s set I was in the police station with Sid but I was released (and later given an absolute discharge) in time to see the festival end.
24th September 1976
Nothing quite so collectively out of context as last Monday’s queue outside the 100 Club has gathered on Oxford Street for nearly a decade. When the Han Krishna chanters stopped rush-hour traffic in their saffron robes and bald heads and started pinging finger cymbals, there was no denying that the hippy era had arrived.
The six-hundred strong line which straggled across two blocks waiting for the Punk Rock Festival to start was again indisputable evidence that a new decade in rock is about to begin.
Two eighteen-year-old’s from Salisbury were at the head of the queue. ‘I’ve been waiting for something to identify with,’ says Gareth enthusiastically. ‘There’s been nothing for years. I just want to be involved, really.’
Michelle and Bruno are both sixteen. Their hair is short and neat. Their shirts and ties, leopard skin jackets, stiletto heels, pointed toes and dramatic make-up, is echoed down the line — in various inventive variations.
‘They're the best bands around,’ says Michelle, who’s a seasoned fan already. ‘They're playing the music of the people.’
Over the last eight months, a generation of rock fans has been developing an extraordinary sense of belonging together. Excited by the blast of direct energy in the music of the bands playing on the Punk Rock Festival bill, they are creating a new cultural identity for themselves. They have their own clothes, language, ‘in’ jokes and fanzines. There is a healthy comradeship and competitiveness in equal doses. The established bands share their equipment and rehearsal space, and most of the established musicians are encouraging friends to form bands of their own. Apart from the thirty musicians actually playing in the Festival, the audience itself is seething with new talent.
Tim, Pete, George and Bill — all seventeen — are from North London and Southend. ‘We listen to everything from Weather Report to MC5,’ says school boy Tim. ‘But we come here to pick up tips. Our band’s called “1919 Ulterior Motive Five” “cause there’s four of us, see.’
Johnny Moped is there looking to find musicians for his band ‘The Morons’. Chaotic Bass is on the loose. Fat Steve of the ‘Babes’ says he’s rehearsing. Fourteen year old Rodger Bullen, Rat Scabies’ protégé, has just joined ‘Eater’.
The creative buzz and exciting feel that something is ‘happening’ is infectious.
There is a continual stream of criticism and rude abuse poured over each other's favourite enterprise, but having and giving back that kind of attention is part of the fun. “Do It Yourself” could be the motto down at the 100 Club. Everyone wants to get in on the act. Everyone can.
The Subway Sect
The Subway Sect. It’s their first-ever gig. There’s Vic Godard (19) and Paul Myers (bass). Paul Smith (18) has played for five weeks and Robert Miller (lead guitar) for three months. They are familiar faces, having been in the audience at many Pistols gigs. It’s been tough for them to find rehearsal rooms, but after a weekend at the Clash’s spacious studio, their set is debut ready.
Photo: Paul Simonon Cie Chast Pav! Smith (Subway Sect), and Joe Strummer [the Clash), pefore the show, BARRY PLUMMER Photo: Michelle and Bruno at the head of the queue on the first night of the festival, CAROLINE COON
They stalk purposefully on stage and without looking at the audience start a lengthy, foot-finding, tuning-type warm-up. Already they look like they belong together.
‘We're the, er, Subway, pause, ‘Sect’ pronounces Vic, turning at last to face the sea of people before him. And with an abrasive kick, their first number ‘Vo Love’ sucks the silence out of the expectant vacuum in the club. ‘Love is not what we need, we're part of the U.K~ sings Vic, his voice medium pitched and clear. They are unashamedly Pistols inspired. Vic stands before the mike, both arms stretched behind his head just like Rotten used to do. Half way through the set he thrusts his left hand deep into his trouser pocket and stuffs his mouth with little pieces — like pills, or nuts. That’s original.
Their sound is a grind of frantic, jagged dischords which, whether by chance or design, mostly resolve into acceptable patterns of unadorned simplicity. Paul and Robert, standing each side of Vic, their faces screwed up with pungent intensity, flash their fingers across their guitars as fast as white lightning. Drummer Paul, though, seems to float his drumsticks through the air. He chews gum and pounds away with the studied, calm, sauve of a young rating leaning against a wall on his first day of home leave. They're all dressed in underground grey jerseys and casual grey trousers. The effect is utilitarian and bland. It suits their nail-sinking rhythms and doomy lyrics. ‘Everyone’s a prostitute and everyone’s in prison’, are words caught from one number. ‘Nobody’s scared’, ‘Seen it all before’, ‘Beautiful plastic’, are some more. And then, in one of the last numbers, a surprising juxtaposition of positive negatives, ‘We're splitting. The end. Take hold of your life. There’s something you've got to prove.’
At the bar where all through the festival record company P.R.’s, executives, T.V. and radio personalities, musicians, the press and punk scene regulars swap opinions on ‘form’ like Jockey Club stewards, feelings are mixed. Great! Terrible! But Debbie (15) from Bromley, gets it right. In the last two months her hair has been mauve, yellow and raspberry pink. ‘They're good! There I said it,’ she confesses. ‘Theyre good!’
Swastika 'thing' & The Clash/Siouxsie
The Clash planned to let Siouxsie and the Banshees use their equipment at the 100 Club festival, but when their manager, Bernard Rhodes, saw Siouxsie wearing a swastika arm band (which she refused to remove), they withdrew their consent. Why?
‘I felt she wasn't aware of what she was letting herselfin for’ said Bernard. ‘Our equipment ts very distinctive we ve painted it luminous pink. If she used it, we too would be associated with the swastika. Ifelt she was mucking about with a loaded gun and we didn't want to have anvthing to do with it.
‘The whole swastika thing is quite funny really. When Iwas working with Malcolm he went up North and came back with a whole load of bits and pieces with swastikas on them which someone had given him. Eventually Siouxsie wore one of the shirts, more because it was there than anything else. She said that as a svmbol of shock, the swastika was the only thing around. Idon’t think she thought verv much about it. As a symbol, or an emblem it was a random choice. A bad accident. A bit of a red herring. But The Clash are into specifics, not red herrings. If we're going to use emblems, then they should be nearer the mark. People can do what thev want. But we don't think the swastika means anything relevant to us.”
London's Burning
L0ndon's burning with boredom London's burning - dial 999!
All acrose the town, all across the night Everybody's driving with four headlights
Black or white, turn it on, face the new religion
Everybody's drowning in a sea of television.
London's burning with boredon London's burning - dial 999!
Up and down the Veatway, in and out the Lights What a traffic system, it's so bright.
I can't think of a better way to spend the night
Than speeding around underneath the yellow lights.
But now I'm in the subway looking for the flat
This one leads to this block, that one leads to that
The wind howls through the blecks, leoking for a home But I run through the empty stones ‘cos I'm all alone.
London's burning with boredom now
London's burning - dial 999:
CLASH «(Strusmer/Jones)
--------
Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Siouxsie and the Banshees. It’s never the same at a Pistols’ gig nowadays if what is known as the ‘Bromley Contingent’ isn’t there. This inseparable unit are Steve (21), Bill (22), Simon (19) — he sells hot-dogs off a mobile stand during the day — raspberry-haired Debbie and Siouxsie herself.
They first heard the Pistols at their local Tech in January, and they've been faithful followers ever since. They made the trip to Paris in a ropey old car to see their heroes’ first overseas performance, and Siouxsie, shocking in her semi-nudity, got punched on the nose.
She is nothing if not magnificent. Her short hair, which she sweeps in great waves over her head, is streaked with red, like flames. She'll wear black plastic non-existent bras, one mesh and one rubber stocking, suspender belts (various), all covered by a polka-dotted, transparent plastic mac. Over the weeks the Bromley Contingent’s continuous parade of inventive dress (it’s rarely the same two weeks running) has set the fashion. It was only a matter of time before they took their street theatre to the stage.
Apart from Siouxsie, membership of the band was not settled until the day before the festival. Everyone thought, though, that they'd carry out their much advertised plan to sing ‘The Lords Prayer’ spiced up with ‘the most ridiculous rock songs ever written’. Two-tone Steve (his hair is black on top, white at the sides) was on a bass he picked up for the first time the night before. Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten’s friend, and inventor of the pogo dance, was on drums. He had one rehearsal. A mature gent called Marco was lead guitarist.
The prayer begins. It’s a wild improvisation, a public jam, a bizarre stage fantasy acted out for real. The sound is what you'd expect from, er, novices. But Sid, with an unnerving, miraculous sense of timing, flickers a smile, Marco, his guitar feeding back, rolls up his sleeves, and Two-tone Steve, on Marco’s command, starts his minimal thud and doesn’t fluctuate the beat from start to finish of the, er, set. Against this rough corrugation of sound, Siouxsie, with the grace of a redeemed ghoul, rifles the air with a screaching recitative. ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’ creep into the act. Sid just stops. The enthusiastic cheering is a just recognition of their success. If the punk rock scene has anything to offer, it’s the opportunity for anyone to get up and experience the reality of their wildest stage-struck dreams. The bar-flies are horrified.
‘God, it was awful’ says Howard Thompson, an A&R man from Island. But Siouxsie is not interested in contracts. ‘The ending was a mistake,’ she says. ‘I thought we'd go on until they pulled us off.’
The Clash
The Clash They're Great!’ shouts a bespectacled youth half way through this band’s set. ‘I used to listen to Yes and Genesis. But now I listen to the Clash.’ At last, after three months intensive rehearsals and three gigs, The Clash are getting close to top form. We see a glimpse of their very considerable potential.
They have reduced their line-up. Rhythm guitarist Keith Levine is off forming a new band. This has left Joe Strummer (lead vocals and guitar), Mick Jones (lead guitar), and Paul Simonon (bass), more room to move. And this they do, powering through their first number, ‘White Riot’. The audience is instantly approving. The band is fast, tough and lyrical, and they've mastered the way of dovetailing Joe’s mellow approach with Mick’s spikey aggression. They blaze through ‘London’s Burning’ with raging intensity. Terry Chimes (drums) uses the opportunity to undercut his solid bass drum surge with candescent splashes over the high hat. They play eleven of their eighteen songs including ‘Jim So Bored with You’, ‘Protex Blue’ (with Mick on lead vocals), ‘Deny’, and ‘Janie Jones’. They end the set with ‘1977’.
Later, I ask Paul Simonon, who has played bass for only six months, how he feels about the set. ‘I’ve got to get better. I’m never content. I know I can do a lot with the bass. Most of them stand still like John Entwistle. I want to move around and give the audience a good time. And give myself a good time too.’
Joe Strummer, who’s last band was the now fabled 101’ers, has played with very experienced musicians. What was it like playing with someone like Paul who’s learning as he goes? ‘It’s really great,’ he says. ‘When a musician knows all his oats it gets boring. It’s not exciting for them and they start playing for playing’s sake and the emotion disappears. It’s really exciting playing with Paul because there are no rules. My guitar style is really rudimentary and Mick’s is great, so the combination is really interesting.’
The Sex Pistols.
The Sex Pistols. The atmosphere in the club is feverishly high pitched. This is the band everyone’s been waiting for. Not everyone, however, is happy about the Pistols’ growing success and notoriety. The private party is over. The band is public property. It had to happen. But with mixed feelings the band’s throbbing nucleus of fans are holding their breath as their champions start a steady climb to the ethereal reaches of stardom and rock immortality. Will the businessmen spoil them?, is the anxious question.
Already the band has changed — especially Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones. Once Rotten would poke his pretty mug into any camera lens and leer. Now he’s likely to sweep his arms across his face with an Ava Gardner gesture of exclusivity. Jones, once the brooding loner unsure of his sex appeal, is now exuding a magnetic confidence which guarantees a screen of exotic women around him. Glen Matlock and Paul Cook, perhaps because they’ve been less ‘visible’, have yet to zip into their rock star mantles. They will, once their partnership — Glen’s driving fluid bass lines and Paul’s billowing drum storm is recognised as the superb bed-rock of taut rhythmic structures it is.
The band’s fanatical following is growing fast. Fans follow them all over the country from gig to gig. They are the unquestioned stars of the Punk Rock Festival and as they step on stage they are greeted with lung bursting cheers.
‘We've got another Underground at last,’ shouts an ecstatic youth, ‘I’ve waited seven years for this.’
Over the nine months that the Pistols have played together, Rotten has developed his stage presence beyond the realms even his most ardent fans imagined possible. He is still prying open the nether reaches of his personality and presenting audiences with yet another dark fragment from his psyche. Once he moved over the stage squirming and jiggering around like a spinderly, geiger-counter needle measuring radio activity. Rarely was he motionless. Lately, he rarely moves. He can be quite sickeningly still. This deathly, morgue-like stance sets skin crawling, and his lyrics are as suffocating as the world they describe.
He wears a bondage suit for the festival. It’s a black affair, dangling with zips, chains, safety pins and crucifixes. He is bound around the chest and knees, a confinement symbolising the urban reality he sees around him.
The set begins. The band hit their instruments in unison. It’s the fanfare intro to ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ SMASH — and their instantly identifable, careering, evisceral splurge sears the air. The fans go wild. Johnny strains at his jump-suit prison. He breaks loose and burns into ‘I Wanna Be Me’. The crowd sprawls at his feet, a struggling heap of excited bodies. ‘Alright,’ says Johnny calmly disengaging his feet from the melee, ‘all off the stage, chuckies ...’
The photographers fight for better shots, the pogo dancers leap above the crowd, sweat pours and the crush rolls forward and back from the stage like a tidal wave.
The band, lifted by the positive vibes, delivers pin-perfect versions of ‘Liar’ — ‘No Feelings’, ‘Substitute’, ‘Pretty Vacant’ and they finish the set with ‘Problems’ and ‘No Fun’. They are called back for a triumphant encore.
The Sex Pistols were terrific. Compulsively physical. Frightening in their teenage vision of world disintegration. And refreshing in their musical directness and technical virtuousity. Whether their music will make the Top 20 or not is irrelevant. They're doing it for a new generation of rock fans who think they’re fantastic.
The audience on the second night of the festival is conspicuously longer haired and more denim clad. The atmosphere is competitive still but without the reigning kings there’s not the same buzz.
Stinky Toys. Ellie (20), the Stinky Toys’ singer, has calmed down. The night before, when she realised there was no time for the band to play, she’d made a not-too-successful prima-donna exit — kick, push, tut-tut at tables as she ran out into Oxford Street where, it is said, she was saved from wounding herself under a bus.
Her band is very French, i.e. very, very serious. They've frowned for two days and they frown even more when, after three very short numbers, including ‘Under My Thumb’ they get nil reaction from the crowd. There’s Bruno Carone (lead guitar), Jacno (rhythm), Oswald (bass), and Harve on drums. They play completely out of tune even though they spend minutes between numbers ‘tuning-up’. Ellie’s voice, a high pitched whine, has 90% of the older male population diving back to the bar. And yet? Well, even though she sings in English and not one of the words from songs like ‘Pe Pe Gestapo’ or ‘Kill The Pain’ are intelligible, she has presence. You have to watch her. As the band liven-up with petulant anger at the impassive crowd, Ellie, frisking her blond hair out of beautiful blue eyes, does a frenzied dance before the mike. If only the rest of the band didn’t give the impression they want to get off the stage as fast as they can.
Which singers, I ask Ellie, before she dashes off after the set to catch the last train to Paris, have influenced her most? “Brenda Lee,” she says ‘and Glenda Jackson ...’ Umm.
The Damned
The Damned. There’s something very special about this band. They’ve come a long way fast from the night, three months ago, when they played their first gig at the Nashville. Not that they actually played together that night. Each one of them did his own number in a private daze. Out of time, out of key, the cacophony was terrible enough to be great. The band took to the stage like famished maggots to an over-ripe cheese. They are all born performers, without a shred of inhibition. They are more voluptuous, both musically and physically, than the Pistols, and less classically musical than the Clash. But, with these two bands they are the third key-stone to emerge and they are holding up a corner of the canopy loosely covering the punk rock scene.
Rat Scabies is already being tagged a nubile John Bonham. He drums as solid as an express train. Ray Burns, whose lips always glisten with Woolworth’s best pearly pink Tu lipstick, plays bass as if he were Marc Bolan on lead guitar. He’s articulate and sensitive but he chooses to fool everyone with a front as benevolently mad as a village idiot’s.
Bryan James (lead guitar), the band’s ‘elder’, is likely to look up from his guitar, catch Rat and Ray acting out their star trips, and crack up with spontaneous laughter. Their lead singer, Dave Vanium (he gave up his daytime job as a gravedigger last week), looks as if he’s immaculately risen from Dracula’s crypt. On stage he hisses like an angry bat. And, for one so new to the game, he can keep a show going through appalling obstacles.
As they steam blissfully through ‘Neat, Neat, Neat’ and their soon-to-be-released single ‘New Rose’, the sound is atrocious. Vanium’s mike keeps crackling and cutting out, but the show goes on with the minimum of fuss.
Half way through ‘Fan Club’ they take off, pile-driving and crazy fierce, with Bryan pounding the coagulation with a fine treble texture. They are at their best as solid as a coal seam, all fun and raw power.
The Vibrators
The Vibrators and Chris Spedding. They play very few original numbers. They're a punchy little R&A outfit. Chris Spedding hasn’t managed to form a band ideal bunch for him. He wants to play it safe. They know all the old classics.
Their first number (Spedding joins them later) is a bluesy carnage of ‘I Saw You Standing There’. Then they spew into ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. By this time, policemen, plain clothes and in uniform, are mingling with the audience. Everyone feels uncomfortable. People have been hurt quietly. There wasn’t a fight, and nobody knows exactly what happened.
Suddenly, with no more impact than a moving dark blue flash, five uniformed police surround a figure by the bar. He looks surprised. Blank. He’s guided to the exit and arrested. It’s Sid Vicious, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ drummer.
The atmosphere chills perceptibly. Onto the stage leaps Mr. Hunter, the club’s manager. ‘If there’s any more glasses thrown,’ he yells, ‘you'll all have to go home.’ The show starts again for ‘So Messed Up’, the last number. The band screams through it, black and moody, slamming out the last riffs before they make a dash to the dressing-room. Dave, whose girl-friend was one of the injured, runs into the street in time to sit in the ambulance as it heads for hospital.
A glass lobbed at the pillar, hit a spray of beer and shattered. Malcolm McLaren, for the stage, jumps into the audience. O.K. that’s par for the course. But when he gets back up on stage, hit a microphone and sprayed the audience with enough beer to indicate he didn’t want any more missiles flying through the air.
‘Why don’t you serve drinks in plastic cups,’ asked Malcolm. ‘Who do you think we are!’ is the reply. ‘We're civilized down here.’
The show goes on. The first time the Vibrators play ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ and for good measure — with half the audience groaning ‘boring’, ‘old’, and the others leaping about — they wring life into ‘Let’s Twist Again’. Well, they did it! In the dressing room, dripping with sweat, Spedding is actually grinning. He enjoyed himself.
The Buzzcocks. This Manchester band was formed less than two months ago. The front line — Howard Devoto (vocals), Peter Shelley, who plays a chopped in half, second-hand ‘Starway’ and Steve Diggle (bass) are pint-sized. Howard, who doesn’t speak much to the audience — has just dyed his mousey hair orange. All the band’s energy implodes around John Maher’s ace kit. ‘But like sparrows in a sand bath, they throw up a gritty cloud of sound.
Through numbers like ‘Breakdown’, ‘Oh Shit’, ‘Boredom’, ‘Orgasm Addict’, their sound is quaintly compact. But their approach, though very energetic is unnecessarily defensive and calculating. Devoto insists that he is only in a rock band ‘temporarily’ and his self-conscious lack of commitment comes across. He doesn’t laugh much and he hates being on stage.
The festival ends with the Buzzcocks fluttering into the audience and Peter Shelley’s guitar still on stage feeding back. It pounds out a gut-wrenching lub dub, lub dud like the no-feeling sound of a robot’s heartbeat.
The 100 Club had become the ‘home’ of punk rock, but after the tragic accident, punk rock was banned. The scene lost its focus until Andy Czezowski opened the Roxy club in December, 1976. Meanwhile . . .
THE CLASH
When I first interviewed the Clash, in their barrack like studio in Chalk Farm, they had yet to sign a record contract, although they were already one of the punk scene’s favourite bands.
5th November 1976
Three weeks ago at the I.C.A., Jane and Shane were sprawled at the edge of the stage. Blood covered Shane’s face. Jane, very drunk, had kissed, bitten and, with broken glass, cut him in a calm but no less macabre love rite.
The Clash were not pleased. ‘All of you who think violence is tough — why don’t you go home and collect stamps. That’s much tougher,’ roared Joe Strummer. Then he slammed the band’s anthem ‘White Riot’.
[White Riot lyrics]
The song, played with the force of an acetylene torch, is as uncompromising as the other numbers in the band’s repertoire — numbers like ‘Deny’, ‘Protex Blues’, ‘Career Opportunities’ and ‘1977’. To hammer home their impact, the Clash play with enough committed force to bring down the walls of Babylon, Jerico — Heaven and Hell if necessary. And their audiences go wild.
But far from wanting people to hurt each other, Joe Strummer (vocals, guitar), Mick Jones (guitar), Paul Simonon (bass) and Terry Chimes (drums) insist that their aim is to shake audiences into channelling their frustrations into creative outlets. It’s difficult, however, trying to maintain a balance between positive reaction and violence.
How easy it is, though, when you examine the Clash’s background to explain their emotional intensity. Aware that, like the rest of the band, he’d rather not talk about his childhood, I asked Joe where he came from.
‘The only place I considered home was the boarding school in Yorkshire my parents sent me to. It’s easier, isn’t it? I mean it gets kids out of the way.’ Then he adds defiantly, ‘It was great! You get beaten up the first day you get there. And I’m really glad I went because my Dad’s a bastard. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn't gone to boarding school. I only saw him once a year. If I’d seen him all the time I'd probably have murdered him by now. He was very strict.’
While Joe is talking, Paul is sitting next to him pointing and shooting a realistic, replica pistol — bang — at the posters on the walls — bang — at Mick across the room — bang — at Gertie the roadie’s dog — bang, bang — anywhere at all.
‘I get on alright with my parents,’Paul says. ‘But I don’t see them very much. They split up when I was eight. I stayed with my mum but I felt it was a bit soft with her. I could do whatever I liked and I wasn’t getting nowhere, so I went to stay with my Dad. It was good training because I had to do all the launderette and that. In a way I worked for him — getting money together and that — working down Portobello market and doing the paper rounds after school. It got me sort of prepared for when things get harder.’
Paul liked school. ‘I never learned anything. All you done is played about and pissed on the teachers and that. There were forty-five in our class and we had a Pakistani teacher who didn’t even speak English.’
Mick, like Paul, comes from Brixton. His father is a taxi driver and his mother is in America. ‘They kind of left home, one at a time. I was much more interested in them than they were in me. They decided I weren’t happening, I suppose. I stayed with my gran for a long time. And I read a lot. Psychologically it really did me in. I wish I knew then what I know now. Now I know it isn’t that big a deal. But at school I'd sit there with this word “divorce, divorce” in my head all the time. But there was no social stigma attached to it because all the other kids seemed to be going through the same thing. Very few of the kids I knew were living a sheltered family life.’
When he was sixteen, Mick believes, he had two choices — football or rock ‘n’ roll. He chose rock. Why? ‘Because he couldn't afford toilet rolls,’ quips Joe. Mick explains: ‘I thought it was much less limiting. And it was more exciting. I got into music at a very early age. I went to my first rock concert when I was twelve. It was free, in Hyde Park, and Nice, Traffic, Junior’s Eyes and the Pretty Things were playing. The first guitar I had was a second-hand Hofner. I paid sixteen quid for it and I think I was ripped off. But I tell you something I sold it for thirty to a Sex Pistol.’ Everyone laughs gleefully.
Laughter is a cheap luxury when, like Clash, you never have the money for a square meal and when, like Joe, you live in a squat — or like Paul, you crash in your manager’s vast unheated, rehearsal room with no hot water or cooking facilities.
After Paul and Mick left school, they both ended up as casual art students. Mick was already in a group (the London S.S.) when a friend of his dragged Paul down to a rehearsal. ‘The first live rock ’n’ roll I can remember seeing was the Sex Pistols, less than a year ago. All I listened to before then was ska and blue-beat down at the Streatham Locarno. But when I went to this rehearsal, as soon as I got there, Mick said; “you can sing, can’t you?”. And they got me singing. But I couldn’t get into it. They were into the New York Dolls and they all had very long hair, so it only lasted a couple of days.’
Ten days later however, Paul had ‘acquired’ a bass guitar, Mick had cut his hair, and they had formed a group called the Heartdrops (although the Phones, the Mirrors, the Outsiders and the Psychotic Negatives were also names for a day). Then, walking down Golborne Road with Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, they bumped into Joe, who was lead singer of the 101’ers. The meeting was auspicious. ‘I don’t like your group,’ says Mick. ‘But we think you’re great.’
‘As soon as I saw these guys,’ says Joe, ‘I knew that was what a group, in my eyes, was supposed to look like. So I didn’t really hesitate when they asked me to join.’
Joe broke up the 101’ers directly as a result of seeing the Sex Pistols. A few months ago he told me, ‘Yesterday I thought I was a crud. Then I saw the Sex Pistols and I became a king and decided to move into the future.’
Today he says: ‘As soon as I saw them I knew that rhythm and blues was dead, that the future was here somehow. Every other group was riffing their way through the Black Sabbath catalogue. But hearing the Pistols I knew. I just knew. It was something you just knew without bothering to think about.’
What is it about punk-rock which is so important to Joe? ‘It’s the music of now. And it’s in English. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer’s accent. That’s just pretending to be something you ain't.’
Continues Mick: ‘It’s the only music which is about young white kids. Black kids have got it all sewn up. They have their own cultural music, reggae. Basically young white kids are relying on a different time to provide for their kicks.’
But what’s so different about youth today, then, I probe. And there’s silence. Joe stands up and, relishing the drama, he turns to reveal the stark, hand-painted graffiti on the back of his boiler suit: ‘HATE AND WAR’ glare in red and white across his shoulders. It’s the Hippy motto reversed.
‘The Hippy Movement was a failure,’ is Joe’s explanation. ‘All the hippies around now just represent complete apathy. There’s a million good reasons why the thing failed, O.K. But the only thing we’ve got to live with is that it failed. At least you tried. But I’m not interested in why it failed. I'll jeer at hippies because that’s helpful. They'll realise they’re stuck in a rut and maybe they'll get out of it.’
What do they feel about society today? ‘It’s alienating the individual,’ says Mick. ‘No one gives a shit about you. The radio is for house wives. Nothing caters for us. All the laws are against you. Whoever’s got the money's got the power. The Rent Acts are a complete mockery. It’s a big joke. I just have to fuck off into the night for somewhere to sleep.’
Adds Paul, with feeling: ‘At the moment what the Government should do is put licences on clubs so that kids can have somewhere to go. But they’re clamping down on all that. The situation that is beginning to happen now is their fault. If we end up wrecking the place it’s the Government’s fault. They'll bring back National Service and we'll all be sent down to South Africa or Rhodesia to protect white capital’s interests. And then we'll all be slaughtered...’
They may knock society, but they’re all living off the dole aren’t they? ‘Yeah. We get a little freedom from social security. Otherwise I'd have to spend 40 hours a week lifting cardboard boxes or washing dishes or whatever I done in the past. But because we're on the dole — which is £9.70 a week — I can get a rock ’n’ roll band together.’
But someone’s got to work in a factory? ‘Why have they?’ demands Mick. ‘Don’t you think technology is advanced enough to give all those jobs over to a few people and machines? They're just keeping people occupied by making them work. There’s a social stigma attached to being unemployed. Like “Social Security Scroungers” every day in the Sun. I don’t want to hear that. I cheer them. You go up North and the kids are ashamed that they can’t get a job!’
Aren’t they being rather pious when all they are doing is playing in a rock ’n’ roll band? ‘No,’ says Paul. ‘It’s the most immediate way we can handle it. We can inspire people. There’s no one else to inspire you. Rock ’n’ roll is a really good medium. It has impact, and if we do our job properly then we're making people aware of a situation they'd otherwise tend to ignore. We can have a vast effect!’
Oh yeah? Rock stars have usually started out saying they’re going to change everything. Joe reacts first. ‘But you learn by mistakes. The Rolling Stones made mistakes. But I want to do something useful. I’m not going to spend all my money on drugs. I’m going to start a radio station with my money. I want to be active. I don’t want to end up in a villa on the South of France watching colour T.V.’
Do they want money then?
"Yes," says Paul. "Money's good because you can do things with it. Bands like the Stones and Led Zeppelin took everything without putting anything back. But we can put money back into the situation we were in before, and get something going for the kids our own age."
If present performance is anything to go by then we can expect the Clash to put any money they make where their mouths are. Already they are playing nearly as many "benefits" as they are profit-making gigs. Not that there are any profits at all at the moment. The band is struggling harder than ever before to stay on the road.
"We make a loss at every gig," says Joe. "It's the promoters who we want to attack. I bet you can only name one or two who really care about music. I'm amazed there isn't one that really cares about what's happening at the moment. We're really having to get down on our knees and grovel for venues."
Photo: The original Clash line up, at the 13th August performance for friends only: Mick Jones, Terry Chimes, Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon and Keith Levene.
The Clash are more politically motivated than the Damned, perhaps more musically accessible than the Pistols. Their lovingly painted clothes (the same on and off stage, of course) which are acrylic spattered with the ferocity of a Jackson Pollock action painting, have started one of the most creative fashion crazes of the year. And their acute awareness, and ability to articulate the essence of the era which inspires their music, will make their contribution to the history of rock of lasting significance. Happy times are here again...
In December the Clash were one of the bands on the Sex PistolsAnarchy In The U.K. tour. Like everyone else, they came back to London tired, exhausted and stunned at the growing national outcry about the horrors of punk rock which was making it impossible for them to play anything but isolated gigs.
The Clash played the Roxy club on 2nd January 1977, but although the club was still flourishing the atmosphere was beginning to sour. Fights were always part of the scene, and accepted in moderation. The real aggression was reserved for outsiders-the boring old farts. But after Christmas, 1976, there was a significant change in the nature of the aggression. It was as if the bands, especially the Pistols, unable to insult the Establishment without incurring severe retaliation turned in on themselves and their own.
In March the Clash signed to CBS and released their debut single "White Riot".
Joe Strummer 26th March 1977
"Back in the garage with my bullshit detector Carbon monoxide makes sure it's effective There's people ringing up making offers for my life I just want to stay in the garage all night. Meanwhile things are hotting up in the West End alright Contracts in the offices and groups in the night My bumming slumming friends have got new boots And someone just asked me if the group would wear suits. I don't want to know about what the rich are doing I don't want to go to where the rich are going They think they're so clever, they think they're so right But the truth is only known by gutter snipes... We're a garage band and we come from garageland."
Garageland by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones
Those lyrics, written five weeks ago, are among the many indications that the Clash, even though they have signed-up to a record company only a few tones less 'establishment' than EMI, are still reacting.
In the past Joe Strummer would return to his squat from the dead-end gloom of the Lisson Grove dole queue and come up with a sneeringly cynical Career Opportunities. When he and Paul Simonon got caught in the racial no-mans land between charging police and angry black youths at the Notting Hill Carnival riots in 1976, the experience was poured into another rock 'n' roll song White Riot. More recently. Hate And War and Remote Control (written at the time of the banned Sex Pistols tour) were reactions to the general condemnation of punk music.
But considering their formidably exciting stage presence and ever improving technique, it was only a matter of time before a record contract lured them away from their squat/starve/steal life style. A pox on the irony! With CBS's hefty six-figure advance and perhaps two year's guaranteed security, what price songs inspired by street level survival games now? Would they vanish as fast as the ink dries on the dotted line?
"No," counters Joe Strummer, offering Garageland in evidence. "I never want that to happen. After our second gig a critic in New Musical Express wrote that we should be returned to the garage and locked in with a motor running so that we died. Garageland is about that. I was trying to say that this is where we come from and we know it, and we're not going to get out of our depth. Even though we've signed with CBS we aren't going to float off into the atmosphere like the Pink Floyd or anything."
Admirable sentiments which cynics, no doubt, will find hard to believe. But in truth, the band have changed little over the last six months. When I first met them life was tough. Their bright eyes stared out of spotty, unwashed, pallid skins. And no wonder. One night after sticking up posters to advertise an ICA gig they returned to their rehearsal studio so hungry and broke that, over the one bar of their electric fire, they cooked and eat what remained at the bottom of the bucket of the flour and water paste.
Photo:Joe in Red Lion Square
Today Joe Strummer, on a basic £25.00 a week, looks a picture of health, but if anything an adequate diet has sharpened his reactive wit.
"The only person who played White Riot on the radio was John Peel—and he's gone on holiday," says Joe, his voice a mixture of amused incredulity and frustration. "You play our record against any of the other stuff and it just knocks spots off them left, and centre. They must be cunts for not playing it."
He is holding a can of spray paint (colour: War Dance Orange) and that night he sprayed 'White Riot' in huge letters over the tinted glass facade of Capital Radio's offices.
"I want to slag off all the people in charge of radio stations," he continues. *"Firstly, Radio One. They outlawed the pirates and then didn't, as they promised, cater for the market the pirates created. Radio One and Two, most afternoons, run concurrently and the whole thing has slid right back to where it was before the pirates happened. They've totally fucked it. There's no radio station for young people any more. It's all down to housewives and trendies in Islington. They're killing the country by having that play list monopoly. No 2: Capital. They're even worse because they had the chance, coming right into the heart of London and sitting in that tower right on top of everything. But they've completely blown it. I'd like to throttle Aiden Day. He thinks he's the self-appointed Minister of Public Enlightenment."*
"We've just written a new song called Capital Radio and a line in it goes 'listen to the tunes of the Dr Goebbels Show.'"
"They say 'Capital Radio in tune with London.' Yeah, yeah, yeah! They're in tune with Hampstead. They're not in tune with us at all. I hate them. What they could have done compared to what they have done is abhorrent. They could have made it so good that everywhere you went you took your transistor radio—you know, how it used to be when I was at school. I'd have one in my pocket all the time or by my ear'ole, flicking it between stations. If you didn't like one record you'd flick to another station and then back again. It was amazing. They could have made the whole capital buzz. Instead Capital Radio has just turned their back on the whole youth of the city."
Strummer may be irked by the radio stations' lack of interest in his music—and there is a rumour current among record companies who have picked up on New Wave bands that certain august programme controllers only have to look at pictures of a band to pronounce their music 'punk' and ban it—but punk itself is having a day of reckoning. What does Strummer think about the punk scene at the moment?
"I don't think there is one really. The only thing that could count as a 'scene' is the Roxy. And the Roxy is a dormitory. The last time I went I was feeling really uppity. I stood in the middle and looked around and all these people were slumped around dozing! I threw tomato sauce on the mirror and stormed out. And I haven't been back there. I don't think I will go back there. The sooner it closes the better."
From the first night, the Roxy has struggled to stay open. But paying the ever-increasing rent was never as damaging to its survival as the back-biting which resulted in the club's recent atmosphere.
However, bad vibes or not, surely it is better to have somewhere to play than nowhere at all?
"No, I think it's better to have nothing than have that," says Joe, acknowledging that his "selfish" attitude might have something to do with the fact that the Clash are temporarily out of action since drummer Terry Chimes decided to start his own band.
The social scene aside then, what does he think about the way the music has developed?
"All I care about are the groups. If there's good groups then it's got to be good. There's bound to be a lot of rubbish, but I've changed my opinion of the Damned. I've seen them a lot, and I think they're fun to watch. They play good. The only thing I have against them is that they can't play as well as us."
"Number One for me at the moment are the Subway Sect. They've got some good ideas. The Slits are good, too. Palmolive on drums! She's the female Jerry Nolan. But like everyone, they need to do thirty gigs in thirty days and they would be a different group. Then they'd be great. The same with us."
How has Joe been affected by the ban on punk music which has effectively kept the Clash off the road since Christmas?
"I feel really bitter. We've tried our hardest and we've worked and slogged at it. Then we've had drummers quitting, which was just what we didn't need. We wanted to get going and move forward."
"All that business on the Pistols' tour! I hated it. I hated it. It was the Pistols' time. We were in the shadows, in the background. The first few nights were terrible. We were just locked up in the hotel room with the Pistols, doin' nothing."
"And yet for me it was great, too. We had the coach and we had hotels and we had something to do—even though they didn't let us do it that often—we did it about eight times. It was good fun."
"But when I got back to London on Christmas Eve I felt awful. I was really destroyed, because after a few days you get used to eating. We were eating Holiday Inn rubbish, but it was two meals a day. And when I got off the coach we had no money and it was just awful. I felt twice as hungry as I'd ever felt before."
"I had nowhere to live, and I remember walking away from the coach deliberately not putting on my woolly jumper. I walked all the way up Tottenham Road and it was really cold, but I wanted to get as cold and as miserable as I could. Christmas was here and me and Micky Foote, our sound man, had our little bags in our hands and I just felt like the worst thing in the world—that the tour had ended. I wanted to go on and on. The coach had been like home in a way and I didn't want to get off it."
On-stage, Strummer wires himself up into an inhuman dynamo of sweaty, trembling flesh, fearful enough to have one wondering when the ambulance brigade will rush to his rescue with a straight-jacket. While he tilts his bullet head at acute angles, his agonising face screwed into an open wound, he wields his Telecaster like a chainsaw.
His magnetism is totally original—more like an Olympic strongman imploding all his energy into a final record-breaking lift than anything seen on a rock 'n' roll stage before.
Photo: Joe at the Rainbow, 9th May 1977
Off-stage, he's the Clash member with the lowest profile. Guitarist Mick Jones is the most verbal of the trio. He lives with his grandmother on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise overlooking the Westway. He is dark, even more gaunt than Keith Richards, and his pop-rock knowledge is encyclopaedic. At the Kinks' London gig the other week he remarked (usefully) to me: "Andy Pyle, yes. Blodwyn Pig and any other Mick Abrahams band after that."
Bassist Paul Simonon, who was "educated at schools in Brixton and Notting Hill where 90% of the kids were black," communicates more with animal physicality than with words. Like Joe and Mick, he "retreated for a time to art school." He is shy, except on stage, but with a growing reputation as a Sex Symbol. When Patti Smith was here last September she went to the Clash's ICA gig, took one look at him, leapt up on stage and spirited him away with her on the road for two days.
Up until now, Strummer has been mysteriously reticent about his background. Sitting on a park bench in Red Lion Square—in the shadow of an old haunt, Central School of Art—he is more forthcoming than ever before. The interview venue, as I was pointedly reminded, was the site of the International Socialist v National Front demo where student Kevin Brodie was killed. Joe feels comfortable. Trusty Rat Rodent, the band's chef de la route, has supplied some cans of beer.
Much has been made of punk music's tough roots in modern urban dereliction. But Joe is not working class, is he?
"No, I'm not working class at all. My father was born in India. His father died when he was eight, and so he was an orphan. He went to an orphan school. Then, because he was so smart, they gave him a scholarship to University and he was really proud that he'd come from nothing, with no chance, to having a degree—even though it was from the poxy University of Lucknow."
"He came to London and joined the Civil Service as a junior bum. Then he became a not-so-junior bum, and then he reached his high point and became a diplomat going overseas."
"That was my lucky break. He was dead proud of it, and he really wanted me to be like him. But at the age of nine I had to say good-bye to them because they went abroad to Africa or something. I went to boarding school and only saw them once a year after that—the Government paid for me to see my parents once a year."
"I was left on my own, and went to this school where thick rich people sent their thick rich kids. Another perk of my father's job—it was a job with a lot of perks—all the fees were paid by the Government."
"When I was eight he made me sit all these exams for these flash public schools. But I failed the lot. Finally I got into this other crummy school where they have this thing going, that if your brother passed the entrance exam, me, his brother, was let in too."
So Joe has a brother?
*"No. I did have but he's dead. He committed suicide in 1971. He was a year older than me. Funnily enough, you know, he was a Nazi. He was a member of the National Front. He was into the occult and he used to have these deaths-heads and cross-bones all over everything. He didn't like to talk to anybody, and I think suicide was the only way out for him. What else could he have done?"*
"Imagine! You're in the world and you're just too shy to even talk to anybody or even go into a café to have a cup of tea. I suppose he could have gone to the Hebrides but he was too shy to buy a train ticket. He took a hundred aspirins and some other tablets under a bush in Regent’s Park. He was the complete opposite to me really."
It is difficult when talking to Joe not to notice his somewhat decayed excuses for teeth. What happened to them?
"Well, it ain't speed," he laughs. "I just never brushed them. I'm a walking advert for brushing your teeth. I've been brushing them for the last month, though. And also, I got punched in the mouth once and all the ends broke off. That's why they're so jagged. They put a false tooth on the front one once, but it fell off."
The Clash are being accused, you might say, for their intellectual approach to music. They are certainly the most politically aware of the New Wave bands. But I'm suspicious. Until recently Paul thought David Steel was Tommy Steele's brother. Does Joe read at all? Does he know who the Prime Minister is?
"Yeah, I do!" he replies patiently. "I'm on page 984 of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I've read everything that T.E. Lawrence wrote. He was my hero. But I wasn't too impressed by The Mint and I thought the Lawrence of Arabia film was better than the book."
"And Jim Callaghan, right! You know I got a T.V. recently and the other day I was punching between him on one channel and Jimmy Carter on the other. Well, it struck me that Jimmy Carter had more going for him than Jim Callaghan. With Callaghan you get the feeling that if you ripped his bit of paper away from him he'd be stuck there going der der der without a thought in his head. Whereas, when I punched over to Jimmy Carter he seemed to have a lot to say and he never looked at his paper. But I know, they're both robots. Anybody who makes speeches written by someone else is just a robot."
"I don't know whether this is true, but I heard that Fidel Castro, when the mood takes him, just goes to the market place and starts babbling. All the people gather around him and listen to him and he talks for five hours and walks off again. And that to me sounds as if he's got something to say. Whereas these cunts like Carter and Callaghan have probably got fifty people around them telling them what to say. They're just robots."
Would Joe defend the band's position of political awareness then?
"Well, the trouble is the word 'political'. I just leave it as awareness. You get all these smart-alec young groups coming out—and more power to their elbow—sneering 'the Clash, they're too political—who wants to care about that bollocks!' That's, like, the flash thing to say now. But I sit back and think about it, and it strikes me as rubbish. I don't think about Jim Callaghan any more than the newspaper vendor does. Politics, as the word describes itself, means Grey Boredom Talk Long Words Impossible Sentences Rubbish. I don't think about that stuff. I just think about who's doing what to me and what I'm going to do about it. That's what I call politics."
Joe would like the lyrics of the Clash's songs to develop a political awareness in his audience. But how potent does he think a rock 'n' roll band is when it comes to changing anything?
"Completely useless," he replies without hesitation. "A rock 'n' roll group! None of us is going to change anything. Everyone goes 'Punk! Hurrah!' But in three years what do you think I'm going to be doing? What do you think the guys who buy our singles are going to be doing? I'll still be walking around muttering to myself. They are still going to be shovelling shit down some old chute and maybe with their wages they'll buy the Clash's fourth album. Rock doesn't change anything."
Photo: KAY STEVENSON, "Don't touch that dial" Photo: RHY STEVENS, The Clash at the Roxy, Saturday 1st January 1977. Danger stranger, you better paint your face
‘I was left on my own, and went to this school where thick rich people sent their thick rich kids. Another perk of my father’s job — it was a job with a lot of perks — all the fees were paid by the Government.
“When I was eight he made me sit all these exams for these flash public schools. But I failed the lot. Finally I got into this other crummy school where they have this thing going, that if your brother passed the entrance exam, me, his brother, was let in too.”
So Joe has a brother?
“No. I did have but he’s dead. He committed suicide in 1971. He was a year older than me. Funnily enough, you know, he was a Nazi. He was a member of the National Front. He was into the occult and he used to have these deaths-heads and crossbones all over everything. He didn’t like to talk to anybody, and I think suicide was the only way out for him. What else could he have done?”
“Imagine! You’re in the world and you’re just too shy to even talk to anybody or even go into a café to have a cup of tea. I suppose he could have gone to the Hebrides but he was too shy to buy a train ticket. He took a hundred aspirins and some other tablets under a bush in Regent’s Park. He was the complete opposite to me really.”
It is difficult when talking to Joe not to notice his somewhat decayed excuses for teeth. What happened to them?
“Well, it ain’t speed,” he laughs. “I just never brushed them. I’m a walking advert for brushing your teeth. I’ve been brushing them for the last month, though. And also, I got punched in the mouth once and all the ends broke off. That’s why they’re so jagged. They put a false tooth on the front one once, but it fell off.”
The Clash are being accused, you might say, for their intellectual approach to music. They are certainly the most politically aware of the New Wave bands. But I’m suspicious. Until recently Paul thought David Steel was Tommy Steele’s brother. Does Joe read at all? Does he know who the Prime Minister is?
‘Yeah, I do!’ he replies patiently. ‘I’m on page 984 of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I’ve read everything that T.E. Lawrence wrote. He was my hero. But I wasn’t too impressed by The Mint and I thought the Lawrence of Arabia film was better than the book.’
‘And Jim Callaghan, right! You know I got a TV recently and the other day I was punching between him on one channel and Jimmy Carter on the other. Well, it struck me that Jimmy Carter had more going for him than Jim Callaghan. With Callaghan you get the feeling that if you ripped his bit of paper away from him he’d be stuck there going der der der without a thought in his head. Whereas, when I punched over to Jimmy Carter he seemed to have a lot to say and he never looked at his paper. But I know — they’re both robots. Anybody who makes speeches written by someone else is just a robot.’
‘I don’t know whether this is true, but I heard that Fidel Castro, when the mood takes him, just goes to the marketplace and starts babbling. All the people gather around him and listen to him and he talks for five hours and walks off again. And that to me sounds as if he’s got something to say. Whereas these cunts like Carter and Callaghan have probably got fifty people around them telling them what to say. They’re just robots.’
Would Joe defend the band’s position of political awareness then?
‘Well, the trouble is the word “political”. I just leave it as awareness. You get all these smart-alec young groups coming out — and more power to their elbow — sneering “The Clash, they’re too political — who wants to care about that bollocks!” That’s, like, the flash thing to say now. But I sit back and think about it, and it strikes me as rubbish. I don’t think about Jim Callaghan any more than the newspaper vendor does. Politics, as the word describes itself, means Grey Boredom Talk Long Words Impossible Sentences Rubbish. I don’t think about that stuff. I just think about who’s doing what to me and what I’m going to do about it. That’s what I call politics.’
Joe would like the lyrics of The Clash’s songs to develop a political awareness in his audience. But how potent does he think a rock ’n’ roll band is when it comes to changing anything?
‘Completely useless,’ he replies without hesitation. ‘A rock ’n’ roll group! None of us is going to change anything. Everyone goes “Punk! Hurrah!” But in three years what do you think I’m going to be doing? What do you think the guys who buy our singles are going to be doing? I’ll still be walking around muttering to myself. They are still going to be shovelling shit down some old chute and maybe with their wages they’ll buy The Clash’s fourth album. Rock doesn’t change anything.’
Photo:JONY STEVENSON, Mick and friends in the lift of the Plymouth Holiday Inn on the last night of the Anarchy in the UK tour, December 1976
Photo:Joe, Nicky, Mick and Paul in their studio at Chalk Farm near the Roundhouse, April 1977. The car-dump mural was painted by Paul.
Photo:Bernard Rhodes being forced to have his picture taken
When I first met Joe, his 101'ersKey To Your Heart (Chiswick) had just been released. It is now a classic rock-collector's item. But then Joe, like many others, accidentally strayed into a Sex Pistols gig and came away mind-blown. The experience totally altered his approach to music, and the 101'ers broke up. Why?
“When you asked me about that before I couldn’t explain it. Now I realise what happened. You see, I’d always had a basic style but I felt dead lonely. I felt I must be the only guy in London who wanted to play rock ’n’ roll but thought he couldn’t. I still can’t play. Well, I can jam out some chords but I can’t do no lead guitar fiddley bits.
I just couldn’t quite believe I could get up on a stage and play in a group. There’d be a hundred guitarists in the room better than me. I really had to fight myself to do it.
In the group I eventually went out with (101'ers), all the rest could play. I mean, you say play “Happy Birthday” to me and it would take me days to work it out. The other guys could do it straight away. But because I couldn’t I felt dead inferior. Really incredibly inferior. I never realised I was the leader of the 101'ers until after I’d left them. That’s how inferior I felt.”
“Well, then I saw the Pistols. And it just knocked my head right off. Because there were these four guys and I felt just like them. I mean, they couldn’t play so great either. But they were just going so what! And that hadn’t ever occurred to me at all. Because I felt so lonely I didn’t have what it takes to say that. I do now. ’Cause I’ve seen them do it.”
“My band had been blackmailing me in a very subtle way because I couldn’t play. But after I saw Rotten I turned to them and said ‘so what’ too. I thought the Pistols were incredible. They were just going: ‘This is what we want to do and we’re doing it and you’re sitting there and you paid your 50p to get in here so stuff it’. I’d never thought of that attitude. It came to me like a shock from the blue. Before, if a guitarist came around, I thought I had to hide in the back room.”
Does Joe think of himself as a guitarist more than a lead singer?
“Well, I did then. When I got the 101'ers going I got in another singer because I thought I was chronic. I thought he was better than me. But when someone told me he sounded just like me I thought, ‘well, fuck it’. And I became the lead singer again.”
Before Joe stumbled into music, what had he planned to be?
“I went to art school like everybody else. I wanted to be an artist. But when I got there, phew! What a lousy set-up. It just fucked me up completely.”
[WHITE RIOT LYRICS]
Photo:Mick at the Rainbow — JANE ASHLEY
“I'd walked straight out of this dead strict school environment right into a seething orgy. At the time there was loads of drugs at Central and one day I took about fifty trips in a row. I remember finding my way into the studio and it suddenly struck me that the teachers were conning us. They were not teaching us how to draw but how to make a drawing look as if you knew how to draw — which is an enormous distinction. They were just teaching us how to make all the right arty little marks. You'd stand in front of a nude, do all these little marks, waggle your head a bit, smudge a bit and make it look arty. It struck me then this wasn't drawing, in any way. And I never went back.”
Two years of dissipated youth, of casual jobs and unemployment passed before Joe fell in with a busker.
“I was earning some money holding his hat for him. We were down the Underground and I was watching his fingers, and it suddenly occurred to me that if he could do it then so could I. But I was really nervous about actually playing.
Now everybody knows it's dead easy. It takes three weeks and you can play every tune in the book. But in them days I thought it was something you had to slog at for years. There was this big mystique. I'm really angry about people who spread that shit about.
*Anyway. I bought a ukulele. No kidding. I saved some money, £1.99 I think, and bought it down Shaftesbury Avenue. Then the guy I was busking with taught me to play Johnny B. Goode.
Well, there came the day when he said, ‘Right, you do this pitch and I'll head off down Green Park and do the pitch there.’ And he just walked off down the passage. And it was rush hour. And the passage was jammed with people. And I was on my own for the first time with this ukulele and Johnny B. Goode. And that's how I started.”
With the 101'ers, Joe slogged around the pub circuit, recorded Keys To Your Heart, and was on the verge of establishing the band when he had his post-Pistols brainstorm and quit.
“I know the 101'ers were good,” continues Joe, giving himself a rare retrospective compliment. “In fact, as far as sound and excitement went we were much better than Eddie and the Hot Rods. The other guys in the group were twenty-five and twenty-six and they played good because they'd spent a few years getting that far. But they were just too old. What I really wanted was to get in with some young yobbos who I was more in tune with.”
Photo:The Clash at the Rainbow Photo:Fans at the Rainbow throwing seats onto the stage
It was March 1976. The Pistols were causing the first real swell of grassroots rock energy for nearly a decade. All over London, young musicians were going through amoeboid contortions to establish groups of the right personality combinations. Mark P was still a bank clerk with long hair. The Damned were rehearsing. Nightlife was being spiced up with patent leather and stiletto heels.
One afternoon, Mick and Paul, out for a stroll down Ladbroke Grove with Glen Matlock, spotted Joe crossing the road.
“As soon as I saw Mick and Paul I wanted to join The Clash, just because I wanted to look like they looked,” says Joe candidly. “I didn't hear them play until days later. I remember thinking after I'd agreed to join ‘Jesus, I've never heard these guys play!’ Paul was just admitting that he had no idea what his instrument was, that Mick had just taught him the songs and, because he's got a good memory, he knew them parrot fashion. For a moment I thought ‘Oh God’ and then I didn't give it another thought.”
Joe willingly admits how much he has been influenced by Mick and Paul’s style. Off-stage, what they wear today is tomorrow's acme of punk sartorial snazz. On-stage, to compete with their spotlight-grabbing antics, Joe has to fight hard. Would he prefer it if the other two hung back more often?
“Oh no. One of the conditions I made when I joined the group was that everybody had to move. I was the only person who moved in the 101'ers, which is one of the things I hated about that band.”
“The first time I saw Mick put on a guitar he moved like a cunt. We were in a tiny room rehearsing. It was so small we had to crouch around each other. Even so, Paul was slinging his bass around and I thought ‘fuckin’ hell! This guy's got confidence’. He's got more style than Brigitte Bardot. He moves, and Mick moves, and I just always wanted to be in a group like that.”
“It means you can't ease up. We're competing with each other. We've all got to outdo each other. Otherwise, if Mick stopped, everybody would forget about him. He knows it, and Paul knows it, so we've all got to keep going otherwise we'd fade away into the background.”
The Clash have just finished their debut album. With typical independence, they produced it themselves, recording sixteen tracks in seven days. Thirteen of their songs — scorching street poems bolted into split-second rock rhythms — screech after each other on an album which will prove of what metal the New Wave is made. Since the album sound is essentially ‘live’, what, for Joe, were the differences between playing on stage and in the studio?
“On stage I fuck up a lot because I get so carried away I forget to put my hands in the right places. Often I'm playing a fret below what it's supposed to be. And then Paul will be playing a fret above, and it can sound like dog-shit. And there's poor Mick. He's the only one who plays everything perfect every time.”
Photo:The Clash in Paris, 27th April 1977, against their ‘White Riot’ backdrop — a blow-up of the police at the Notting Hill carnival riot
“But when we went into the studio as far as we're concerned it was technically perfect. There may have been a few bum notes but if the whole track sounded good we let them go.”
“I enjoy singing in the studio because you feel big. You're the singer and you put on the headphones and sometimes it comes out and you can't believe how good it sounds.”
“But as far as a general sound difference goes, I can't really say what I'm after because if I knew I'd probably not go after it. Mick's the one who's really into the sound. He's really into the music. He hears arrangements in his head. I can't.”
“For Paul the Clash is a chance for him to strut his stuff. For me the music is a vehicle for my lyrics. It's a chance to get some really good words across.”
Does he find it easy to write?
“No but I'm not telling you why.”
“I learned something once: ‘You can show someone what you've done but you can't show them how you do it.’ And I stick to that. If I tell you how I write, when I next do it my words will haunt me and destroy me completely.”
“For me writing is a big thing. The biggest excitement going is sitting down and writing until you get exactly what you intended to get.”
On stage, the Clash only play their own songs. On the album they've made an exception and recorded a version of Junior Mervin's reggae hit Police and Thieves. It's a salutation, in a way, to the music they most respect after their own.
“It was just a wild idea I had one night. I wanted to play reggae when the band first started but I was talked out of it. Rightly so. There's people like Rotten who say, ‘I'd never play reggae.’ And he says that because he's got too much sense. I mean, who wants to sound like G.T. Moore and the Reggae Guitars!”
“And we can't really play reggae. Who the hell could play them reggae drums apart from a black man. But I wanted to do a Hawkwind version of a song that was familiar to us, and we just did it within our limitations. If it had sounded shitty we'd have dropped it. But it sounded great. There's hardly any reggae in it at all — just a few offbeat guitars thrown in for a laugh — it's all rock 'n' roll. I think it's an incredible track.”
“But don't let’s talk about the album because I can't stand reading interviews where fat cunts sit around swigging Tuborg Cold saying, ‘Well, this time we brought in Rick on violin.’ Who wants to read about them? It makes me want to screw the paper up.”
The afternoon sun sets, and to avoid the chilly air we finish the interview in the warmth of George's Cafe in Camden Town. Conveniently close to the band's rehearsal studio, it is still one of their favourite haunts.
Did Joe think it was going to be difficult to maintain his grassroots credibility now the band was on the verge of becoming wealthy?
“I still come to this cafe for my beans on toast. I don't want anything else. But signing that contract did bother me a lot. I've been turning it over in my mind, but now I've come to terms with it. I've realised that all it boils down to is perhaps two years' security. We might have an argument with C.B.S. and get thrown off! For me it has been a gift from heaven. Before, all I could think about was my stomach. A lot of the time me and Paul did nothing else but wonder where our next meal was coming from. We were hungry all the time. And the dole was threatening to send me to Birmingham on some Government retraining scheme. We couldn't think about the reasons behind anything.”
“Now I feel free to think and free to write down what I'm thinking about. I haven't changed my ways at all. And look — I've been fucked about for so long I'm not going to suddenly turn into Rod Stewart just because I get £25.00 a week. I'm much too far gone for that, I tell you.”
The Clash are often rumoured to be nothing more than the manipulated product of their manager Bernard Rhodes’ svengalian imagination. Bernie met Malcolm McLaren, a close associate of his, at the May 1968 Paris Uprising. How much had he influenced the band?
“He's had a load of influence — especially at the start. He put the group together. And he also put us on the right track, mainly about song content.”
“All songs on the radio — every single one as far as I can judge from my last six days' marathon trying to hear our record played — every single one is about love. And obviously me and Mick were writing songs like that. I mean Keys To Your Heart, in the middle it goes into some kind of squat rock type of mad beatnik poetry, but mostly it's a love song. Bernard told us that was a load of bollocks, and we agreed with him. So we started writing about things that hadn't been written about. He pushed us into it.”
Last year Joe told me “love doesn't exist.” He had been going for a year with Palmolive, the drummer with The Slits. How much is his Don’t-Believe-In-Love line his own rather than his manager's belief?
“Well. I'm not in love so how can I believe in it. I was in love when I was sixteen but since then I can't say I have been. There's been girls that when they're not there in the room I've been thinking about them like uuummmmmm. But as soon as they're in the room with me it gets kind of sour. I can love them providing they don't come near me.”
“Obviously we can talk and philosophise, but we're all just dirty dogs aren't we really. So I just decided to forget love. It's madness, right. Really I only believe in myself. I'm not interested in other people much. I prefer to be on my own. I'm a lone ranger — my idea of a jolly fun time is to sit on my own in a room for eight hours.”
Considering how blaggingly aggressive the Clash’s music is, it's interesting to note how little violence there has been at their gigs. It may be a lucky coincidence, it may be because the breakneck music keeps everyone glued to the action on stage, but it must also be the consequence of Joe’s attitude. “Anyone who thinks violence is tough should go home and collect stamps,” he yelled at the L.C.A. audience.
“Yes, those were the exact words I said, but what I was really trying to say could have been said much better. What I meant was the toughest thing is facing yourself. Being honest with yourself — that's much tougher than beating someone up. That's what I call tough.”
“On stage we're not inciting the crowd to violence — the music just sounds violent. Then if people want to go around punching themselves while it's going on — well let 'em. I don't care. I ain't telling them to go around punching each other up. The music is how I feel, and people can do what they like to it. Obviously if everyone in the audience started stabbing each other I'd freak out a bit and tell them to simmer down.”
Does he enjoy violence?
“If someone treads on me for no reason and I get back at him and knock him over then I enjoy that. I don't think we're tough enough. We've got to get a lot tougher. I mean, no one's going to give you anything in this day and age. Nothing. So, if you want it you've got to take it and be tough about it. But I don't enjoy punching people up for no reason.”
It's time for rehearsal and, with luck, the recruitment of a new drummer. Joe's mood is ambivalent. In one year the Clash, in the vanguard of the New Wave, have seen their music, their attitudes and clothes influence and inspire a new generation of musicians. But because of the ban on punk music, their reputation has been built, somewhat precariously, on fewer than thirty gigs.
----------
After Terry Chimes left the Clash, they auditioned around two hundred drummers to replace him. Then Mick bumped into Nicky Headon, a twenty-one-year-old ex-office clerk who had played drums since he left school.
“I've never performed live but it's getting closer all the time!” said Nicky, the day after he joined the band. “I knew Mick a year and a half ago. For a week I played with the London SS. I really wanted to join the Clash. I want to give them even more energy than they've got — if that's possible.”
Their debut album The Clash entered the charts at No.12. In May they headlined their first national tour, culminating in a sell-out, landmark gig at the Rainbow (who subsequently banned them from appearing there again).
Arthur Dapieve, Jornal do Brasil, "The Saviors of Rock", April 19, 1988
The Saviors of Rock
Jornal do Brasil, "The Saviors of Rock", April 19, 1988
The Saviors of Rock
The story of The Clash, a band that made history, hits stores in May
Arthur Dapieve
Rock died. On some London night in the summer of 1976. Murdered by the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, and Co. immolated it in its own sacred fire. Back then, the genre was bloated with dollars and self-indulgence. Rock had lost its way. And those poor kids, scrawling I hate it on Pink Floyd T-shirts, had every right to kill it—just to bring it back to life. Killing and resurrecting was too much for just one band to handle. The "rise up and walk" moment came with a bang: The Clash. Rock was (re)born.
Recognition tends to come posthumously. The Smiths are proof enough. And with The Clash, it was no different. Now, four years after their departure from this world, England has relit the candles at their altar. Some even speak of reincarnation. All because of an album. Or rather, two—comprising the first volume of The Story of The Clash. The album was released two weeks ago over there and has already peaked at No. 6 on the UK charts (currently sitting at No. 15). And despite naysayers predicting its demise, it's landing here in Brazil just as the original did—two LPs housed in a single sleeve—in the first week of May, courtesy of CBS.
The Clash was born from the collision of two proto-punk bands: London SS (featuring guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and drummer Terry Chimes) and The 101'ers (fronted by vocalist Joe Strummer). The year of their meeting? Of course—1976. The group distilled the nihilistic anarchy of the Sex Pistols into furious politicization—more precisely, Maoist communism. They soon signed a deal with CBS for around £100,000. Their debut album, simply titled The Clash, dropped in '77 (surprisingly, it was even released in Brazil). By then, Chimes had been rebranded as Tory Crimes—"crimes of the Tory," a dig at the Conservative Party. Very subtle.
The following year, with Nicky "Topper" Headon now on drums (Chimes was reportedly dismissed for "ideological incompatibility"), came their second LP, Give 'Em Enough Rope—half of an English saying: "Give 'em enough rope... to hang themselves." The cover featured a cowboy being devoured by a vulture; the back, regiments of Chinese cavalry waving massive red flags. But since rock was dead, it needed to be historicized. That mission was accomplished with 1979's double album London Calling—a dead-serious contender for the greatest rock 'n' roll record of all time. It channeled every influence: rockabilly, ska, reggae, punk, you name it. Themes ranged from consumerism, terrorism, madness, poverty, and crime to abortion and—shockingly—love, as in the gorgeous Train in Vain, the uncredited final track.
After paying homage to the past, it was time to predict the future. Enter 1981's triple album Sandinista!—where The Clash fused everything: ballads, waltzes, calypso, salsa, Afrobeat, gospel, American songcraft, electronic music. They even devoted an entire side (the sixth) to remixes (Version Pardner, for instance, reworked Junco Partner from Side One). The politicization ran deep—from the album's title (a nod to the Nicaraguan revolutionaries) to Washington Bullets ("Washington's bullets want Castro dead") and Charlie Don't Surf, a line lifted from Apocalypse Now. The triple LP cost less than three separate records, and the lyric insert was a DIY fanzine—none of which, of course, made it to the Brazilian edition.
By 1982, Combat Rock arrived—the last LP from the classic Clash lineup. 1985's Cut the Crap was just Strummer, Simonon, and three hired hands flogging a dead horse. Unsurprisingly, The Story of The Clash, Vol. 1 ignores it: the compilation features five tracks from the debut, four from Give 'Em Enough Rope (the only album never released here), six from London Calling, two from Sandinista!, and three from Combat Rock, plus eight singles—28 songs total, curated by Tricia Ronane alongside the band.
Inside the sleeves, the group's former roadie, Albert Tramson (now living in Florida), shares random memories: manager Bernie Rhodes screaming for his glasses mid-riot at Nottingham Hill in '76; Thallandese fans pogo-dancing; touring "a part of Kingston where even the damn dogs travel in packs"—with a promise of more chaos in Vol. 2. Hilarious.
The songs, like Tramson's fictional letter, aren't arranged chronologically or thematically—just the most powerful rock ever made. So iconic that upon the UK release, Melody Maker had Strummer and Simonon annotate them. As befits classics. Listening to the double album, it's hard to believe most tracks were recorded nearly a decade ago—the latest being Rock the Casbah, Should I Stay or Should I Go, and Straight to Hell from Combat Rock (September '82). About Should I Stay..., Simonon reveals it was recorded when band members had stopped speaking. The breakup catalyst was Jones' feud with Rhodes. The manager sued, and Jones issued an ultimatum: "Him or me." The split was ideological: "I said, 'Let's dance,' they said, 'No—let's riot,'" Jones told NME. The schism in rock's most political band pitted the Dance Ideologue (Jones) against the Rebel Worker (Strummer).
The band's creeping schizophrenia—hidden beneath Clash City Rockers' raw energy or Tommy Gun's anti-terrorist fury—slowly surfaces in Stay Free (Jones' ode to childhood friend Robin Banks, jailed for robbery) or Strummer's apocalyptic DIY manifesto London Calling. Simonon tried mediating, merging dance and grit in Guns of Brixton. Was the end near? No—not yet. When Strummer recalls prisoners singing along to Bank Robber on the radio, it's impossible to think this force ever died. It became history.
Rating: ★★★★
Mick Jones (top of stairs, left), Paul Simonon, Joe Strummer, and Topper Headon: the classic lineup of one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all time—The Clash.
Reading Evening Post, 9 March 1988. Column by Simon Mayo.
No Clash Reunion, Says Joe
Former new wave legends The Clash are back in the news with the re-issue of the single I Fought the Law (which was apparently recorded mostly in the studio toilet) and a double compilation album of their best songs The Story of the Clash.
Actually, it doesn't feature their biggest hit, London Calling, and don't expect it to crop up on Volume 2.
Former main-man Joe Strummer (pictured above) tells me that calling this Volume 1 was just a joke.
Don't expect any sort of WHO-style live reunion either, because Joe told me exclusively that although he's giving up acting to “get back to song-writing and rocking”, he’s already got himself a new band together called Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War.
This name may have something to do with the fact that he’s just done the soundtrack to the film Walker, which is set in Latin America.
He says, though, that he was determined not to turn out a typical film soundtrack.
“I'd heard soundtracks with songs on them that last only 20 seconds, and I told myself that if I ever got into film song-writing I would want to make something that stood up as an album: a track to smooch to, a track to dance to, and so on.
Because Walker was a nineteenth-century American and the film is set in Nicaragua, I almost did the Ennio Morricone bit of posing in whistles, grunts, and whiplashes. But I managed to avoid it.”
One thing he doesn't reckon he'll be able to avoid is being spat at when he and the band go out on tour.
“I expect I'll get through four bars of the first number and have to dive into the front row — fist flying to stop the gobbing. I hate it, but I don't suppose it will ever go away.”
Spin Magazine - Volume Three Number Ten, March 1988, "CLASHING OPINIONS" Three Essays by Christopher Hill, Lester Bangs and Brian Cullman, Page 64
CLASHING OPINIONS
The Clash called themselves the only band that matters, and the joke was only half on them. It's time we took another look at those boys. Essays by Christopher Hill and Brian Cullman. Page 64
Page 64
Three pieces by Christopher Hill, Lester Bangs and Brian Cullman
CLASHING OPINIONS
"To honor the Clash with a 'greatest hits' is beside the point. It's as if all there was to the memory of a fire was a handful of used matches." Essays by Christopher Hill and Brian Cullman
Photo: Left: Joe Strummer with suspect rolled object. Below: Mick Jones with very suspect motorcycle goggles. Roberta Bayley Photo: Mick Jones, Bob Gruen/Starfile
The Pogues came to town recently, and Joe Strummer was playing guitar with them. Life out of the spotlight seemed to agree with Joe. He looked hale and ruddy. You could imagine him striding through the door of a country pub in greasy coveralls and muddy Wellingtons, with the other lads from the farm, to order up his pint of bitter and start a dart game. Some dross seemed purged from him, some bullshit fallen away.
He lost himself in The Pogues' corny old Irish rave-ups as if he had nothing to prove anymore, no Joe Strummer persona to assert. For a long while he seemed content to lurk back by the drummer. Then Shane MacGowan called Joe to the mic.
They did "London Calling". A song of the zeitgeist, like "Dancing in the Streets" or "My Generation". A battle hymn of the late Seventies. And it sounded great with tin whistles, fiddle, and accordion; it fit in seamlessly with The Pogues' material - those romantic Irish evocations of the guttersnipe past. Stripped of the trappings of its era, it asked to be judged as a song among these other songs that people had sung for centuries. In the context, it made me think of old IRA lads in a smoky saloon bar, singing songs of 1916. Old causes. Passions spent, rehashed, romanticized. But also the more haunting for the resonance of years that have since folded in on it. It still summoned, all the more powerfully for having survived its moment.
There seems to be a consensus now that The Clash's first album, The Clash, is a great record. Most people who say this feel they've got to recognize punk somehow, but are still uncomfortable with The Sex Pistols. Put the two records side by side. The Clash is a fun album, a spirited album, an album that captures a moment. But Never Mind the Bollocks is a phenomenon. The Clash, though full of bile, were merely playing music. The Pistols, in a dark inversion of gospel music, were witnessing. The Pistols sounded natural, like animals in their element. The Clash sounded like they were working.
In the early days of punk, working hard was good enough. There was so little energy around that you didn't want to quibble. But because The Clash had to try so hard, they fell back again and again on the same simple devices to simulate excitement. The stiffness and repetitiveness of The Clash created a sorry legacy. It is the matrix from which almost the whole American hardcore scene sprang. And I'm not about to get misty-eyed over anyone who incited that dreary jackbooted parade, even if The Replacements did come out of it.
Then The Clash did something great bands do. They made a great album. They learned The Sex Pistols' lesson - energy is god and nothing else matters.
"The popular wisdom says that on Give 'Em Enough Rope, Sandy Pearlman, Blue Öyster Cult's producer, attempted to turn this English noise into arena fare for American teenagers. In fact, few producers ever got themselves more out of the way of a band than Pearlman. The record sounds like he pushed the meters up into the red and left the studio."
The Clash had discovered the central mystery, the joy of rock'n'roll. They'd learned how to dance.
Let me put it this way: around this same time The Clash recorded "I Fought the Law" and did a pretty good job of it. But in "Safe European Home" they actually apprehended the spirit of The Bobby Fuller Four. From those first chords - Mick Jones gleefully detonating that string of explosive charges - you hear a band that won't be denied; it feels like pulling the gate back on a rodeo pen where they've starved some wicked bronco for days. The Clash broke through here into a sublime region where it all becomes game, becomes play. Like at the end of "Safe European Home" where they turn the old fade-out-and-come-back trick into a hysterical, endless coda - Mick Jones wringing rhythmic retching noises from the neck of his guitar, and the band jubilantly volleying yells and shouts back and forth, not willing to let go until they've wrung every drop of life from the song.
There are no moments in rock'n'roll that get you higher than when you hear that happening.
"I saw The Clash shortly after Give 'Em Enough Rope, at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. The Aragon at that time could be a scary place, with maybe the meanest, most wasted and antagonistic rock'n'roll audiences in the U.S. In this setting, The Clash reversed the equation - they themselves actually projected danger."
Strummer was in a fury. Later his anger would turn to bombast. That night it just seemed like he wanted to fight. Like a nasty little pug of a man who'd been squished all his life and now was getting even. Mick Jones was his foil - tall and sallow and full of reserved menace, unleashing great sheets of noise with an agile, poised cool.
"Of course, The Clash fell from this shattering moment, and as soon as they did, they became big critical and popular favorites. They retreated from this moment of wholeness into mere eclecticism."
Well, The Clash got eclectic, all right. They eclected themselves from a great album into a spotty double album into a triple-album self-indulgent disaster. Critics love to see the seamless cloak cut up into patches.
"When a song like 'Train in Vain' gets on the radio, it creates a charged moment, and a kind of communal excitement. Everybody loved 'Train in Vain'. It was the party anthem of the year. It was that perilous moment of underground meeting overground; energy and invention meeting craft and polish. A lot of times, of course, this moment also signals the decline."
"And so The Clash were stars. Rock stars with hit singles. And a big album. Does anyone really like all of London Calling? Give me 'London Calling', 'Train in Vain', 'Clampdown', 'Brand New Cadillac' and you can keep the rest of that album - with its watery, unflattering production, careless songwriting, throwaway performances."
Worse was to follow. Crazily worse, fantastically worse. Of course, I'm talking about Sandinista! They took the rubbish from London Calling and expanded it into three albums.
*"Now, a near-total loser of a triple album is something like the Chicago Bears' 41-0 loss to San Francisco last December. A disaster of such completeness can't be written off as a fluke - it speaks of something rotten at the core. Was Joe Strummer the Mike Ditka of rock'n'roll?"*
"The Clash were very famous for their politics, which were mostly a big joke. In this the rock press must share the blame. Who could listen to a facile rehash of anti-consumerist clichés like 'Lost in the Supermarket' and take The Clash seriously as political thinkers? Only rock critics. And they did."
At their strongest, The Clash didn't need to talk about politics. The exaltation of their best records, of their live shows, couldn't help but inspire kids to pursue the liberation they heard there. To follow that energy to its source was, in some way, to begin to transform yourself, and to start transforming your own little piece of the world. Fans and critics too dumb to see that really rocking out is implicitly a political act in the most profound sense deserve a lifetime full of Sandinista!s.
"The Clash, like the best rock'n'roll, for a moment seemed to offer evidence that the party would be the revolution. The very sound of their music was evidence that the world was a more alive place than you'd thought before, with energies and possibilities they still won't teach you about in school. If they left a legacy of bombast, dilettantism, and compromise, they also left the echo of that sound. And that's enough."
Christopher Hill
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PHOTO: Above: Joe Strummer predicts Stanley Cup victory. Left: Paul Simonon works real hard. Gruen/Starfile
"The thing about The Clash is, their heart was in the right place, but their shoes were on the wrong feet."
The Clash weren't The Sex Pistols, and people never quite let them forget that. The Sex Pistols were a big fine car, even if that car was ultimately driven by mastermind Malcolm McLaren (and even if - maybe because - that car was ultimately driven off a cliff). The Pistols were surrounded by the glamour of anarchy, and they had the good sense to make a lot of noise, make a lot of money, and go up in smoke. That Johnny Lydon has reverted to the moniker of Johnny Rotten and seems willing to reprise "Anarchy in the U.K." as if it were "Whipping Post" is show biz, nothing more and nothing less: the surly ramblings of a smart has-been in search of his own talk show.
The Pistols were a big fine car crash, and for a moment or two they derailed the music business in England, smashed through a few doors, and made glorious headlines. They didn't change things all that much, but they made change possible, they imagined change.
One of the things they made possible was The Clash. The Clash weren't a car, they walked to work; a bunch of lugs with cheap guitars and bad teeth, looking for amplifiers. They couldn't play too well, so they made up for it by playing louder and harder, and, in fact, the better they got as musicians, the less interesting they (and their music) became. At their best, they were their audience (the way, in another age, The Grateful Dead were their audience). They plugged their guitars straight into the crowd, right into the energy and the chaos of London circa 1977.
"I saw The Clash in the winter of '78 in New York in what was then the Academy of Music. My friend Glenn, a musician who usually only listened to Albert Ayler, had gotten tickets and dragged me off to see them."
We found our seats up in the back of the balcony, having avoided most of Bo Diddley's set. Bo had found an aging stripper to wander around the stage in a mini-skirt and white go-go boots and strum a rhythm guitar.
"I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire," he sang. The girl in the mini was trying to do the pony but kept bumping up against her guitar. "I use a cobra snake for a necktie,"Bo growled, pushing back his white cowboy hat. "Come on," he coaxed. "Tell me who do you love?" "The Clash," the audience yelled back. Bo beat a hasty retreat.
The Clash came on, and it was all noise and drums and barking guitars, like a bunch of speed freaks trying to explain The Ramones to a dim-witted friend. "Was that 'Tommy Gun'?" "Nah, that was 'Guns On The Roof'!"
With the noise and the echo up there in the balcony, it was all one giant yowl. "Don't watch the stage,"Glenn said. "That's not where it's happening. Watch the crowd."
And that's when it started to make sense. Looking away from the lights and down into the audience, you could see the energy passing back and forth from the band to crowd and from crowd to band, like a fire being lit, and the wail and the crash and the roar seemed to come from us, from the crowd, to move right through us. It's not that the music sounded any better, but it somehow seemed beside the point; there was something else at work. We were watching four men beat their heads against a wall, and we were watching that wall slowly start to give way.
"Artists draw strength from their audience, but The Clash were their audience, they claimed to live in squats, they were on the streets. Their politics were vague (well, okay, pretty muddled) but well-meaning. Their songs, left-leaning anthems. Look at the titles: 'Revolution Rock', 'Guns of Brixton', 'Death or Glory', 'Spanish Bombs', 'Last Gang in Town', 'Drug-Stabbing Time', 'Safe European Home'. They painted themselves as being the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They painted themselves into a corner."
"Without one-on-one contact with their audience, The Clash would seem as likely to fall into elitist alienation as most bands preceding them, but if it gets to the point that several thousand people want into your hotel room you've got to find some way of dealing with it."
Lester Bangs, NME, Dec. 24, 1977
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At some point, around 1979 or 1980, The Clash became stars and everything about them got bloated. They went from cutting a great double album (London Calling) to making an unwieldy three-record set (Sandinista!), all bluff and bombast and no fire. And from there it only got worse. They started writing songs about themselves (a sure sign that you're taking your temperature just a wee bit too often): 'Radio Clash', 'Hey Hey We're the Clash', and the FM classic, 'We're the Clash and You're Not'. They showed up on MTV with a novelty hit, 'Rock the Casbah'. They turned into one more rock band, just another group with their eyes on the charts, grubbing for hits and sleeping with models. No worse than most, but nothing special. By the time they called it quits, no one really noticed they were gone. Their moment was over, but their moment had stretched on for years, and they packed a lot into those years.
Between them, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote some good and some very good songs: 'London Calling', 'Train in Vain', 'Tommy Gun', 'Should I Stay or Should I Go'. Ultimately, though, The Clash were worth much more than their songs, and the records seem poor reminders of their spirit, sounding as odd and as dated as the Woodstock soundtrack. Don't take the brown acid. Rudie can't fail. Wrong 'em boyo.
"To honor a band like this with a 'best of,' a 'greatest hits' (as Epic is doing this month), is more than a little beside the point. It's as if all there was to the memory of a fire was a handful of used matches."
Brian Cullman
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"They railed against corporate absorption of rock'n'roll - but then held out for a million bucks before they would take the stage." Photo of Paul Simonon, Roberto Bayley
Contents page 3 Volume Three Number Ten, March 1988 CLASHING OPINIONS The Clash called themselves the only band that matters, and the joke was only half on them. It's time we took another look at those boys. Essays by Christopher Hill and Brian Cullman. Page 64
Anonymous, Daily Mirror, News Snippet, We Broke the Law, 24 March 1988, p.17
We Broke the Law
‘WE BROKE THE LAW’
The million-selling Clash were always “a drugs band,” says 35-year-old guitarist Joe Strummer.
“The only great Clash song that was written and recorded when I wasn’t stoned was This Is England,” says Joe who’s just finished the sell-out Pogues tour.
“We were into reefers, and I took some coke in the States. We all had our moments with cocaine — but it never lasted too long.”
But in an interview with NME, he adds: “Cocaine’s the worst drug.”
Ex-Clash drummer Topper Headon is now serving time for having heroin — and can’t have missed the irony that the re-release of I Fought The Law is a hit.
It was strange last month to see one of rock's all-time most involving performers serving simply as a sideman for another band, even one as colorful as the Irish folk-punkers the Pogues. The former Clash leader's more familiar position is at the eye of the rock 'n' roll hurricane.
It's also odd that Strummer, who filled in on rhythm guitar on the Pogues recent U.S. tour, dismisses his recent activity--doing music for the films "Sid and Nancy" and "Walker," a bit of acting, the Pogues gig--as "holiday."
"I just want to go back to rockin',"Strummer said, "but I'm uncertain as to what to actually do. . . . The truth is, I never stopped thinking about rock 'n' roll for a second that I'm on holiday."
The ragged-voiced Strummer led the Clash through a stormy 10-year career that began in 1976 when the London band emerged as the English punk group. Unlike many of their cohorts, Strummer, guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon survived that intense, brief period, first broadening their music and finding a larger audience with 1979's "London Calling," and hitting the Top 10 in 1982 with the single "Rock the Casbah," from the million-selling LP "Combat Rock."
But things were coming apart. Headon had been fired because of his drug use, and Jones was given the boot in '83. There was one more album with a revamped lineup, 1985's "Cut the Crap," but Strummer regrets that move, even referring to that band by a different name: "the Clash Mark Two."
Since then, one of rock's most colorful, impetuous and provocative figures has kept a low profile. Though he claims his creativity is undiminished, he's found that age and fatherhood have changed his priorities, and he's not ready to commit himself to anything like a Joe Strummer rock album right now.
Sitting down for an interview in the small bar of the West Hollywood hotel, Strummer, 35, was sharp, loquacious and given to a salty vocabulary that would make Tom Lasorda blush. But into his second margarita his mood darkened slightly as he considered more cosmic issues.
Carefully balancing a small acoustic guitar on the floor behind his bar stool, he started off, in his thick Cockney accent, talking about music today.
Strummer:"What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers . . . synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records. . . . The roots of rock 'n' roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.
I want to go back to '48 because there's something there that isn't now. But then I don't want to re-create '48, OK, because that would be a jive. So, therefore, I'm kind of just basically juggling with that.
Also I don't like the idea that people who aren't adolescents make records. Adolescents make the best records. Except for Paul Simon. Except for "Graceland." He's hit a new plateau there, but he's writing to his own age group. "Graceland" is something new. That song to his son is just as good as "Blue Suede Shoes": "Before you were born dude when life was great." That's just as good as "Blue Suede Shoes", and that is a new dimension."
Question: What are your feelings looking back at "Clash Mark Two"? Was it a mistake?
"Yeah. If you're allowed to make your mistakes, I think you should. But people don't really like hearing you admit them. Although I'd never wanted to dump on the musicians that were involved in that. . . . Because it was not their fault.
The problem was really that we shouldn't have done it. I felt they were haplessly involved in something that they shouldn't have been involved in, and I always felt bad that when I eventually decided it was forget-its-ville, that it might have reflected on them. 'Cause it shouldn't have."
Q: Why did you do it? Were you trying to prove something?
"Yeah. I was trying to prove that I was the Clash and it wasn't Mick (Jones). . . . I learned that that was kind of dumb. I learned that it wasn't anybody, except maybe a great chemistry between us four, and I really learned it was over the day we sacked Topper, and not the day we sacked Mick. There was quite some time between them. We played a whole tour between those times. But it was the day we sacked Tops.
Because it's between humans. (Clash managers) Bernie Rhodes and Cosmo Vinyl I think perhaps didn't understand that. You couldn't just jigsaw-puzzle it, take out a piece and put in another piece. That it was something weird between four humans that when they played it sounded OK, you know. And that's fairly rare, that's all.
And when we knocked out Topper for excessive drug abuse, I don't think, honest to God, we ever played a good gig after that. Except for one night in New Jersey we played a good one, but I reckon that was just by the law of averages. Out of a 30-gig tour, one night, you've got to say it's a fluke."
Q: Could Topper have continued to function?
"Yeah, considering what happened straight after that when everybody I bloody knew in London was on smack. I mean it wasn't rare, it was like ho hum, who isn't? I think we could have. But then we were ignorant. It was like hoo hoo hoo, the big heroin, horse. I didn't know anything about it. It was only after we fired Topper and my friends began to go down like flies. Now most of my friends in London are in Narcotics Anonymous. They can't even have a glass of wine. Just cigarettes and coffee. It's forever.
. . . I never liked heroin. I never even took it. I might have smoked it once in Holland. I remember the bloke said, "Zis next joint has the heroin in it.' . . . I took like a show puff, the one where you keep it in your mouth. . . . And that was the only time I ever got really near heroin."
Q: Was the Clash as political as people made it out?
"Probably not. I always tried to stress that in the later interviews. I didn't want to pretend to be somebody I wasn't. I kept saying, "Hey you know, we're drug addict musicians." That's what I used to say to journalists--"Hang on, don't get the wrong idea that were carrying around 'Das Kapital' and loads of pamphlets." We had Mott the Hoople records and reefer, you know?
I often felt that all got a bit unbalanced. I kept trying to stress that--"Hang on, we're be-bop guys, we're down in the alley on 57th Street. We're not in there with John Reed and 'Ten Days That Shook the World.' We'd be in the alley with (Charlie) Parker shooting up junk." That's where we were at really. I mean not shooting up junk, but if you had to say which camp are you in I'd have to say hey, we were up Bop Alley. I often felt worried that people thought we were Che Guevara."
Q: Where did the politics come from?
"Don't misconstrue me. I'm a human being. I'm not dumping on what I've done. I mean I know we were doing social (stuff), all right? I just don't like boastin' about it, OK? I know what we were doin'. I know damn well what we did. But I ain't gonna start crying about it now, all right?
But the fact is that we were drug addict musicians first and foremost. We loved Chuck Berry, Slim Harpo. We never heard of Friedrich Engels, you know what I mean? The politics were on the street in front of us, man. I didn't have anywhere to live. Don't ask me where my politics came from. I couldn't find anywhere to live. I was willing to wash dishes. I washed plenty of dishes. I dug graves. I cleaned the toilets. I'm not joking on any of these. None of that is an exaggeration. I did exactly what I say. I washed dishes, made omelets, I dug graves, cleaned toilets. And cut grass in the parks. I did the usual things that young men do. I didn't have nothin' behind me. I didn't have nowhere to live."
Q: What are you proudest of that the Clash did?
""Rock the Casbah." . . . It's such a groove. Long live groove. Screw the rest of it.
Meanwhile can I interject something about "Rock the Casbah" here? The true genius of "Rock the Casbah" is Topper Headon. I was in Electric Ladyland (studio) and he said, "Look, I've got this tune, can I put it down?" I said, "OK, Tops, let's put it down. . . ." He ran out in the studio and banged down the drum track to "Rock the Casbah." And then he ran over to the piano and he banged down the piano track to it, and then ran over to the bass and he banged down the bass part. This is, like, I suppose, within 25 minutes, and "Rock the Casbah" is there, boom. Topper Headon did that in 25 minutes. And now he's serving 15 months in (prison). . . . For partially supplying the heroin that killed some guy."
Q: Where's your home?
"I live in West London. I grew up in Ankara. It's the capital of Turkey. My father was in the foreign office. I was born there. I also have Armenian blood. And Scottish. . . . I grew up 18 months in Turkey, 18 months in Cairo, two years in Mexico, two years in West Germany, then I went to boarding school in Epsom and I visited my parents in Tehran for 5 years, and then Malawi for a few years, and then went to art school, dropped out, became a bum, better chew gum. . . ."
Q: Are you married?
"I have two children, with a girl I've lived with for 10 years. Two girls, aged 4 and 2. And we live in West London."
Q: Are you uncomfortable talking about your personal life?
J:"Do I give that impression? Well I don't hide nothin'."
Q: Did the birth of your daughter change your outlook?
"I'll tell you something. When you see you become part of the cycle of generations, you lose your ego in the process, because you ain't nothin' special. You're just another cipher in the generations. When you devote all your interest into another person, you lose your self-obsession, and that's when you understand what it is. You don't know (anything) without that moment. You don't want anything to harm this helpless being. That's a fantastic change. And that's when you understand what's happening. I never understood anything until my first baby looked at me. I didn't understand (anything). Now I understand."
Q: Are you as driven to create as you were, to make music?
"Creativity don't stop. It just gets more intense if you feed it right. The only people that have to worry about their creativity is the junkies. The coke freaks and the heroin freaks, they're the ones that have to worry. . . . Bet you Paul Simon ain't no coke freak or no junk freak, you know."
Q: Do you feel good about things now generally?
"Oh man, you know. There's certain things you gotta decide in life. . . . If you ain't confronting them--if you ain't thinkin' about man and God and law, then you ain't thinkin' about nothin'. There ain't no use thinkin' about sex or drugs or rock 'n' roll. That's all red herrings. If you ain't thinkin' about man and God and law then you ain't thinkin' about nothin'."
Q: What do you think about man and God and law? Do you believe in God?
"Well, I would say it was about time that you believe in something. And sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll ain't it. . . . A lot of people used to think they were."
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