We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Copyright & Credits

  Foreword by The Baker

  Introduction: Drowned Out by the Sound

  Chapter One: Rebellion into Money

  Chapter Two: What Is Clash?

  Chapter Three: Ready for War

  Chapter Four: Turning the World

  Chapter Five: Out of Control

  Chapter Six: Got to Get a Witness

  Chapter Seven: Gonna Be a Killing

  Chapter Eight: Movers and Shakers Come On

  Chapter Nine: Knife of Sheffield Steel

  Chapter Ten: Ain’t Diggin’ No Grave

  Acknowledgments & Sources

  About the Authors

  About Akashic Books

  To my father Merlin and grandfather Otto, who were farmers, ranchers,

  and coal miners; and to my mother Anna Margaret Vik.

  To my son Soren, my daughter Sevgi, and

  my beloved Tulin.

  To Jesús Arias and Martin Jenkinson, both gone too soon.

  —M.A.

  To “Budgie,” my dear wife, Lisa D. Quinlan Heibutzki:

  your inspiration, love, and support mean everything.

  To Anthony Salazar (1965–2005):

  yeah, you were right, it worked out for the best . . .

  To Don Hargraves, Tim Easterday, and John Hilla:

  the mission continues. Kick down the doors!

  —R.H.

  So the forces gathered together

  against the thorn a-piercing in their side

  A brave new world is beckoning

  so the olden world must die . . .

  —Old English folk ballad, c. 1986

  foreword

  jewels from the wreckage

  by barry “the baker” auguste, loyal clash foot soldier, 1976–1983

  The Baker in action, handing a restrung guitar to Joe Strummer midsong. (Photographer unknown.)

  At long last, The Clash’s final incarnation has been definitively chronicled. Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki have brilliantly filled in the blanks of the “Clash Mark II” era, including its eventual implosion. And while set three decades ago, the political, social, and economic evils The Clash battled against then are just as relevant today, if not more so. Both Clash fans and general readers alike will be moved by this tale of onstage conquest and offstage turmoil, so deftly woven into the fabric of the charged politics of that time.

  Although the seeds of discontent were sown long before, 1983 was The Clash’s time of bitter harvest. By one measure, the year held the band’s greatest triumph—headlining the first day of the US Festival, before 250,000 people—but also witnessed an astonishing act of self-immolation.

  Joe Strummer’s DIY film noir Hell W10, shot in early 1983 when the band was on break, foreshadowed the tragedy. By the movie’s end, the villain, Mr. Socrates—enthusiastically played by Mick Jones—and his empire are wiped out. By September, that would be the case in real life.

  The irony is inescapable: Mick freely accepted the villain’s role, and would be thus portrayed to the press after his purge. This suggests Mick was a voluntary scapegoat; his expulsion was the purifying remedy for The Clash’s maladies, just as that of Nick “Topper” Headon before him.

  Mick was axed from the band in a scene plotted long in advance. Few knew it was going to happen. Although valid reasons for the dramatic act were apparent, it hit those close to the band like a death in the family; a killing, even, committed by brothers. There could be no neutral ground. Friends and acquaintances were forced to choose sides, and it would be years before many felt comfortable enough to associate socially or professionally again.

  I know, because I lived it. I served alongside Joe, Mick, and Paul starting in the summer of 1976, hauling gear and doing whatever else needed to be done while still a teenager living at home. I signed on shortly after Bernie Rhodes assembled the band, was there when Topper joined in spring 1977, and witnessed Bernie’s dismissal in 1978 and his return in 1981, forming a fateful alliance with Kosmo Vinyl, who had become the band’s ad hoc mouthpiece in the interim. Aside from the first show at the Black Swan in Sheffield, I was at every show, rehearsal, and recording session.

  No one knows what we went through during those years marching up the hill—only us! As Joe once said, “We went to hell and back!” Words are inadequate; it is impossible to convey the anguish of endless months of touring; nonstop revolving hotel rooms; a different town every day; the months of monotony in studios with endless retakes and overdubs; brain-numbing repetition done out of duty and devotion. We had to turn into some kind of machine, or we would have gone mad. Or maybe we did . . . PTSD isn’t confined to soldiers. But I’d do it all over again, for such was The Clash’s irrepressible sense of mission, a calling I embraced.

  That level of dedication always comes at a cost, however. To maintain my own sanity, I ignored the excesses of rock and roll to single-mindedly focus on the equipment and work needed to enable the band to perform, record, and rehearse. I didn’t waver from that purpose until September 1983, in a head-on collision of interband politics, personal resentments, managerial manipulation, and road-weary exhaustion.

  Once reinstated in 1981, Bernie had set about reconstructing the band he had originally created, resurrecting his Stalinist regime from 1976, with Kosmo’s assistance. By 1982, the duo was pounding the table about all manner of band diktats, with Bernie barking the orders and Kosmo cracking the whip to keep everyone in line. From Topper’s removal; the decision to support The Who and to play the US Festival; to the eventual firing of Mick—the two of them were relentless. Joe found himself caught in an escalating tug-of-war between the band’s founding fathers, Bernie and Mick.

  Bernie did help the band break through in America, but in the process ripped apart their very DNA. Mick became increasingly isolated, and scarcely helped his cause by acting the prima donna, at odds with the Clash “anti-star” ethos. The contradictions became inescapable: to prove a punk band from the squats of London could conquer the world, The Clash had to become the very thing they set out to destroy. In the end, it just proved too high a price to pay.

  This was the “unanswerable dilemma” at the band’s heart since its creation: how do you go to the top level of the music business and still stay true—and be seen to be true—to your ideals? As original drummer Terry Chimes had predicted, mass success called everything into question.

  The dilemma was unbearable to Joe. In desperation, he adopted Bernie’s military platitudes about having to cut off the gangrenous limb in order to save the body, and how we all must be marching in the same direction.

  It still confounds people today: how could Bernie even consider that he could fire both Topper and Mick and still have a band? I was one of those skeptics. Yet The Clash, in its purest form, was Bernie, and Bernie was a fundamental extension of them. His relationship with the band was so intimate and personal that, in the end, he would rather demolish it than see it become obsolete. Evolve or die! Tragically, he didn’t see that there was more than one way to evolve.

  When Mick was dismissed, I instinctively knew I was next for the chop. So I left of my own volition bearing no one any ill will. I had given The Clash more than seven years of my life and had worked as hard and as loyally as anyone could. But I’d done my job and it was time to leave. Regime change required a total purge. I shook hands with Joe and Paul and said goodbye, quietly slipping down the stairs of Rehearsal Rehearsals for the last time.

  Like the band, I had given it my all—and then, suddenly, it was over and done. The rupture was painful and complete. After the end of my Clash story, I had no contact with any of my comrades for years, never saw The Clash Mark II p
erform, and never even heard anything off the album that was created . . . so total was my break with that scene and the people involved.

  Eventually, I tried to piece together some of the fragments from my Clash years, but it was a profoundly difficult undertaking. I refused all interviews for over thirty years. Even when I finally decided to speak, I only wanted to contribute to Clash-related projects that would rise above the cheap name-calling and petty finger-pointing that inevitably rise in situations that have run their course. The endeavors needed to have genuine substance, be deeply researched, offer a different perspective, and, above all, exhibit the highest probity, integrity, and honesty.

  This book is precisely that for which I searched. Andersen and Heibutzki obviously love The Clash, believe in the band’s values, and try to live by them. Their continued passion and idealism is refreshing, a sign that The Clash did not labor in vain, that listeners were touched deeply and indelibly. Both took to heart Joe’s plea for his audience to become activists, as is shown by their community work, especially Andersen’s involvement with the celebrated punk-activist collective Positive Force DC and inner-city advocate We Are Family. Both take their role as writers and historians equally seriously, as shown in the artistry here and in their other books. They write with care and sensitivity while doggedly pursuing the truth, letting the chips fall where they may.

  In reading this book, I found my way back into Clash World, learning for the first time of the trials and tribulations—and grand aspirations—of the last version of The Clash, a Clash I never believed in and of which I was never a part. Astonishingly, I found myself moved, angered, and even inspired all over again. While the world was on the edge of thermonuclear destruction, Central American wars raged, and the coal miners confronted Margaret Thatcher’s bully boys, the new Clash struggled to create something real of their own, building upon—but going beyond—past glories.

  Now I can see that The Clash Mark II was an attempt to find an answer to the unanswerable dilemma. Even if they didn’t locate one, there was drama and value in the effort. I’m tempted to say their flameout was inevitable, but those last two years were an attempt to evolve, to get back to basics, to walk that fine line between commercial success and staying true to your roots.

  It is true that an essential chemistry was lost with the firings of Mick and Topper. With all due respect to the skills of Peter Howard, Nick Sheppard, and Vince White, that intangible factor could never be replaced by merely slotting in proficient musicians. Yet, from what I’ve heard and read, I believe they had a chance to succeed had they just been left alone, to do what musicians do naturally: to gel together, to create an alchemy of their own.

  It seems that spark was never allowed a chance to fully flourish, given the managerial dictatorship they had to perform under. Bernie was a visionary, and Kosmo a true believer, but their relentless agitation—in addition to other immense personal and political pressures—ultimately drove the band off the rails, and Joe into psychic meltdown. Yet this book shows that, amid the chaos, something of worth, something recognizably Clash-like was nonetheless forged.

  This account of The Clash’s final chapter is stark and unsentimental, exhilarating and occasionally brutal, set against the sociopolitical background that impelled the band. Andersen and Heibutzki depict the 1980s world stage with razor-sharp insight, chronicling the gradual surrender to Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s gray, greed-driven vision. It is a cautionary tale, every bit as bleak as Orwell’s 1984, and it is, alas, where we now reside. This is not a story of defeat, however, but a mission to retrieve jewels from the wreckage, so that the future might flourish.

  Beautifully constructed and brilliantly written, We Are The Clash is a chronicle as complex and powerful as its subject. I was riveted, unable to put it down. No Clash collection will be complete without this epic addition. This book challenges us to recall what was best about “the only band that mattered” and then strive to live up to our own best in this new, frightening, but possibility-filled moment.

  Dedicated to Mickey Foote (1951–2018), Clash sound engineer and producer of the first album.

  Clash guitar tech Digby, The Baker, and Joe Strummer in the foyer of the Iroquois Hotel, NYC, midtour. (Photographer unknown.)

  introduction

  drowned out by the sound

  Unused Cut the Crap promo poster, late 1985. (Clash photo by Mike Laye; poster designer unknown.)

  In 1976, a good many people in the West thought Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile? Was it simply that these people were now buried under a pile of toddlers?

  —Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

  Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours helping the camera to falsify reality . . . The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence.

  —David King, The Commissar Vanishes

  The air was sweat-soaked and electric. Five musicians could barely be glimpsed amid a mass of humanity. Three men flayed acoustic guitars, while a fourth pounded drumsticks against the metal and plastic of a chair.

  The fifth—a flame-haired singer in a green T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves—exhorted the crowd from a slightly elevated perch. Dog tags jangled as he sang without a microphone, his head nearly touching the low ceiling of the cave-like space.

  The vocalist provided a visual center to the happening, but his voice was lost in the din. The unamplified guitars were similarly submerged, with only the rhythm cutting through to the back of the small room.

  Such technological shortcomings seemed to matter little. Hundreds of voices howled as one: “Breaking rocks in the hot sun / I fought the law / and the law won / I needed money ’cause I had none / I fought the law / and the law won.”

  The song echoed poverty’s desperation, its doomed protagonist reduced to “robbing people with a six-gun.” If evoking a mythical American West, its theme also fit with the present locale: Sunderland, a port city in northeastern Britain.

  Once Sunderland had been “the largest shipbuilding town in the world,” according to the BBC. Now, the ships were gone, factory gates padlocked and rusty, with the area also hemorrhaging mining and other industrial jobs. A battle waged over the past two years to forestall an even bleaker future had not ended in victory.

  Yet if the lyrics were grim, the spirit in the Drum Club discotheque on this evening in May 1985 was anything but. Joy met defiance as crowd and band became one giant chorus, spitting in the eye of a cruel fate.

  We may have lost, the voices seemed to say, but we are not defeated.

  * * *

  A British rock band called The Clash was the catalyst for that rousing Sunderland night. By the time the group performed this audacious impromptu concert, they had become the single most popular unit to rise out of the UK punk explosion, thanks to their 1982 breakthrough album Combat Rock, with its hit singles “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

  Over the ensuing decades, The Clash’s stature has only grown, with commentators regularly placing them in a rock pantheon next to an earlier generation’s demigods such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This development—including their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—is not without irony, given the band’s populist, antistar stance. Nonetheless, as an Arabic version of the antifundamentalist “Casbah” by Algerian rocker Rachid Taha suggests, The Clash’s global cultural influence is vast and spreading, as befits a band that consciously strove to think in planetary terms.

  In the fall of 2013—nearly thirty years after that Sunderland show—The Clash released Sound System, a massive box set. While the long-defunct unit had been the subject of several such compendiums, this one was clearly meant as the final will and definitive testament of one of the twentieth century’s most important rock groups.

  De
scribed by Rolling Stone magazine as collecting “all of its albums,” Sound System was a vast and weighty document. Designed to resemble that 1980s urban icon—the boom box cassette deck—the set also contained unreleased music and videos, a poster, a book, magazines, badges, stickers, even Clash dog tags. “I’m not even thinking about any more Clash releases. This is it for me, and I say that with an exclamation mark!” band cofounder Mick Jones told Rolling Stone at the time.

  Yet, for all of Sound System’s vaunted completeness, there was a striking omission: the band’s sixth studio album, Cut the Crap. Although the record cracked the UK Top 20, with a similarly high-ranking single, “This Is England,” it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any mention that a final version of The Clash, without guitarist Jones and drummer Nicky “Topper” Headon, had played 120-plus shows, nearly 20 percent of the band’s total gigs.

  Perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise. The film Westway to the World and its companion tome The Clash—the other two volumes that, with Sound System, effectively comprise the authorized Clash canon—also omitted the same for all intents and purposes. None of the final two years of concerts—such as the Sunderland show—were included in the comprehensive list in the big pink coffee-table book, which credited “Strummer Jones Simonon Headon” as its authors.

  It’s true that two of those four—Jones and Headon—were absent from Cut the Crap. Nonetheless, the record’s exclusion was extraordinary, only justifiable from a narrow perspective that has hardened over the years. This view not only dismisses the album but the band’s last version itself—popularly known as “The Clash Mark II”—as lead-footed punk pretenders unworthy of serious scrutiny.

  According to one Clash biographer, Marcus Gray, The Clash Mark II was drilling out “heavy metal” versions of the unit’s classics, “reducing every tune to a primitive staccato stomp . . . with its original melody, subtlety, texture, and meaning hammered into the ground.” They are deemed “a Clash cover band” by another, author/filmmaker Danny Garcia. One wag even recorded a reworked version of their latter-day anthem “We Are The Clash” as “We Aren’t The Clash.”