Coon, Caroline. "Clash tilt for the Top / Clash Personality: Joe Strummer Talks to Caroline Coon." Melody Maker, vol. 52, no. 17, 23 Apr. 1977, pp. 29, 44, 48
Clash tilt for the Top
— Clash tilt for the top: The Clash headline a show at London's Rainbow Theatre on May 9, supported by The Jam, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, and The Prefects. Their 27-date UK tour includes stops in Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Brighton.
— Clash personality: Joe Strummer discusses The Clash's CBS deal, punk's lack of radio support, and his disdain for venues like the Roxy. He reflects on his upbringing, his brother's suicide, and the band's political stance, dismissing rock's power to effect change but affirming his commitment to personal freedom.
— The Clash's UK tour (27 dates), Rainbow Theatre show (May 9), and mentions of The Jam, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, The Prefects, and The Slits as support acts.
Melody Maker April 23, 1977
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Vol 52, No 17, 1977 15p weekly USA/Canada 75c CDC 00524
Clash tilt for the top
The new wave comes to London's Rainbow Theatre next month when The Clash headline a special show also featuring four other young bands.
The concert, on May 9, comes midway through The Clash's first-ever British tour and is the biggest indication yet of the new wave's growing importance.
Other bands on the bill are The Jam, whose debut single, In The City, is available this week, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Prefects.
Support bands for the 27-date tour have yet to be announced, but for the concerts in Edinburgh, Newcastle, St Albans, Maidenhead, Stafford, Cardiff, Brighton, Bristol, West Runton, Canterbury and Dunstable, the other groups will be The Jam, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Slits.
For full details of the tour, see page 3. Joe Strummer of The Clash: see special profile on page 29.
The Jam, talking about their generation page 8
Melody Maker | Vol 52, No 17, April 23, 1977 | Pages 29, 44, 48
Clash personality
Joe Strummer talks to Caroline Coon
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 sneeringly cynical Career Opportunities.
When he and Paul Simonon got caught in the racial no-man's land between charging police and angry black youths at the Notting Hill Carnival riots, the experience was poured into another rock ’n’ roll song, White Riot.
More recently, Hate And War and Remote Control (written around 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 The Clash away from their squat/starve/steal lifestyle. A pox on the irony!
With CBS’s hefty six-figure advance and perhaps two years guaranteed security, what price songs inspired by street-level survival games now? Would they vanish as fast as ink dries on the dotted line?
No counters 24-year-old Joe Strummer, offering Garageland in evidence, I never want that to happen.
After our second gig, a critic wrote that we should be returned to the garage and locked in with a car motor running until 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 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.
In the early days, they returned to their rehearsal studio one night so hungry and broke that, over the one bar of their electric fire, they cooked and ate what remained at the bottom of a bucket of flour-and-water paste.
Today Joe Strummer, on a basic £25 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 (their recent single) 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, right and centre. They must be c- for not playing it.
I want to slag off all the people in charge of radio stations. No 1: 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 f-ed it.
There’s no radio station for young people anymore. It’s totally down to housewives and trendies in Islington. They’re killing the country by having the playlist 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 Aidan 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 on the Dr Goebbels Show’.
They say ‘Capital Radio, in tune with London’. 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.
They could have made the whole capital buzz. Instead, Capital Radio has just turned its back on the whole youth of the city.
Radio stations are not above criticism but what does Strummer think of 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 round 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. The sooner it closes the better.
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 is the groups. If there’re 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 30 gigs in 30 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 background. The first few nights were terrible. We were just locked up in the hotel room with the Pistols, doing 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 that. 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 Court 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 Forte, 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 it 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 straitjacket.
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 forcing all his energy into a final record-breaking lift than anything seen on a rock ’n’ roll stage before.
Offstage, he’s the Clash member with the lowest profile. Guitarist Mick Jones (21) is the most verbal. Bassist Paul Simonon (20), who was educated at schools in Brixton and Notting Hill, where 90 per cent of the kids were black, communicates more easily with animal physicality than with words.
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 and he went to an orphan school.
Then, because he was so smart, they gave him a scholarship and he went 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 goodbye to them because they went overseas 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 think I was dead lucky. I was left on my own and I went to this school where bullying was really in.
It wasn’t a public school. It was a 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 semicrummy school where they have this thing going where, 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. He was a Nazi. He was a member of the National Front. He was into the occult and he used to have these death’s 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?
The Clash are being attacked for their intellectual approach to music. They certainly appear to be 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 up to page 984 of The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (the hardback edition has 1,245 pages). And I’ve read everything that T. E. Lawrence wrote. He was my hero.
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.
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 c——ts like Carter and Callaghan have probably got 50 people telling them what to say. They’re just robots. They haven’t got any personal zing. Like Hitler. He wasn’t a robot, whatever you say about the c-—. Although, look what he did.
Does Joe defend the band’s politically aware stance 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.’
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 exacerbate 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 single are going to be doing? I’ll still be walking around muttering to myself.
They are still going to be shovelling s— down some old shoot and, maybe with their wages, they’ll buy The Clash’s fourth album. Rock doesn’t change anything.
But after saying that — because I want you to know that I haven’t got any illusions about anything, right — having said that, then I still want to try to change things. What does Joe think the important issues are now? What does he feel he is fighting against?
Well, the only thing I’m interested in is my personal freedom. I just want the right to choose. Obviously, it ain’t no use me having the right to choose unless everybody else has too. Everyone’s got to have it, right?
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, pheew! What a lousy set-up. It just f— me up completely.
I’d walked straight out of this dead strict school environment right into a seething orgy! At the time there were loads of drugs and one day I took about 50 trips in a row.
I remember finding my way into the studio and then 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.
Two years of dissipated youth, of casual jobs but mostly unemployment, passed before Joe “fell in” with a busker.
I was earning some money holding his hat. 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 really big mystique. I’m really angry about people who spread that s— about.
Anyway, I bought a ukulele. No kidding. I saved some money, £1.99 I think, and I 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.
Joe’s advance from busker to lead singer was no less opportune. A friend “gave” him a camera which he was quick to exchange for another friend’s drum kit. This he loaded into an old van and drove to yet more friends in Wales.
They, as chance would have it, had a rock band — with a drummer but minus a drum kit. Joe, nothing if not a main chancer, offered them the services of his drum kit on condition he became the band’s lead singer.
I wanted to be the star of the show. He re-named the band The Vultures.
Ambition drew him back again to London. He formed the 101’ers (101, incidentally, is the number of the dreaded room in Orwell’s 1984 where Winston is tortured), slogged around the pub circuit, recorded Keys To Your Heart and was on the verge of breaking the band when he saw the Pistols and quit.
One afternoon Mick and Paul, out for a stroll down Ladbroke Grove with Glen Matlock, spotted Joe across the road. They were sufficiently yobbish enough to yell a 101’ers put-down at him. He stopped in his tracks. Then they asked him to be their lead singer.
I joined The Clash as soon as I saw Mick and Paul, 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 the group, ‘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. Offstage, 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.
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, everyone would forget about him. He knows it and Paul knows it and so we’ve all got to keep going otherwise we’d fade away into the background.
Did Joe think it was going to be difficult to maintain his grass roots credibility now the band was on the verge of becoming very wealthy?
I’ve realised that all that signing boiled down to is perhaps two years’ security. We might have an argument with CBS and get thrown off! For me, it has been a gift from heaven.
Before, most of the time 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 re-training 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 f— about for so long I’m not going to suddenly turn into Rod Stewart just because I got £25 a week. I’m much too far gone for that I tell you.
Considering how blazingly aggressive The Clash’s music is, it’s interesting to note how little violence there has been at their gigs.
It may be lucky coincidence, it may be because the breakneck music keeps everyone glued to the action on the stage, but it must also be the consequence of Joe’s attitude to his audience. He never insults or harangues them in the punk manner. Once he announced from the stage, anyone who thinks violence is tough should go home and collect stamps.
Yes, those were the exact words I said, but what I was really trying to say could have been said much better. Sometimes things you say on stage work, sometimes they don’t.
What I meant was — the toughest thing is facing yourself. Being honest with yourself. That’s what I call being tough.
On stage we’re not inciting the crowd to violence — the music just sounds violent. If people want to go round 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. That 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 everybody to simmer down a bit.
Does he enjoy violence?
Well, there’s nothing better, if you’re having an argument which won’t resolve itself any other way, than smashing someone’s face in. I enjoy violence with honour. 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 us 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.
How does he plan to proceed from here, what does he want to achieve?
I can see all or nothing. I want to write some more gear and I want to work my ass off. I want to get out and do 50 gigs in a row. If they don’t let us it will be too sickening. But if we don’t get a drummer, we’ll be worse off than The Rejects!
PHOTO: Joe Strummer: There’s no radio station for young people anymore. It’s totally down to housewives and trendies in Islington
Melody Maker | Vol 52, No 17, April 23, 1977 | Pages 29, 44, 48