We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  At the same time, the revolutionary traditions The Clash drew upon and extended have not been fully vanquished. Margaret Thatcher to the contrary, an alternative can and must be found, our world still can and must be transformed in a more humane, inclusive, genuinely democratic way. Such belief was always central to The Clash, grounding their artful critiques in authentic, galvanizing hope.

  “Find the ace!” Strummer implored, introducing “Three Card Trick” in 1984. This phrase is crucial, for the song portrays capitalism as a grifter’s game designed so the dealer will forever win. In such a rigged system, hope becomes a trick that keeps the oppression intact. As each person buys the lie, one by one, they collaborate in their own destruction, down through the generations.

  But this was not the whole story. The ace, in Strummer’s vision, was the power people can discover by rejecting the lie and banding together: “Who can fight the entire grinding system? Nobody can! But together everybody could . . . I am talking pie in the sky here but still that’s no excuse to sit back and say nothing.”

  There is no cheap grace to be peddled here, however. This book is the tale of a punk-cum-pop group, the moment it strained upward and then crashed to earth, the human frailties that led to that, as well as the human costs incurred. As The Clash plummeted, the Reagan/Thatcher vision took flight, soaring to heights that sometimes make it seem inevitable, undefeatable, eternally ascendant.

  We Are The Clash, however, is ultimately the tale of how we might yet find that long-hidden ace, the one that enables victory in the game-you-cannot-win, the stacked deck of global capitalism, as well as on other fronts.

  As always, it begins simply with the story of a few people, the dreams they had, and what they tried to do to make them real.

  chapter one

  rebellion into money

  “Come on, I need some hostility here . . .” Joe Strummer onstage, US Festival, May 28, 1983. (Photographer unknown.)

  US Festival, May 28, 1983. (Photographer unknown.)

  Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

  —Margaret Thatcher, May 4, 1979

  This here set of music is now dedicated to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the century.

  —Joe Strummer, US Festival, May 28, 1983

  The scene reeked of glorious rock spectacle.

  Once scruffy denizens of British squats, tower blocks, and underground dives, The Clash today occupied the center of the musical universe. Standing on a massive outdoor stage, the band was dwarfed by more than 250,000 people. The roar of the sweating, surging crowd washed over the four slender figures.

  From the back of the audience, the musicians seemed tiny ants on a stage, a pinprick of light, sound, and motion. A gigantic video screen provided the only opportunity for most listeners to connect actual human beings to the tsunami of guitar, bass, drums, and voice being flung at them in the darkness of the arena grounds of the US Festival, near San Bernardino, California.

  “Unite Us in Song,” the festival’s advance publicity had said. The crowd, spurred by music, merged into a writhing rhythmic beast. Holy or unholy, some sort of communion was real here at this instant, in this place.

  This should have been a moment of triumph for The Clash, a time to savor immense popularity won over seven hard years of touring, recording, and wrangling with an often mystified major record label. But as lead vocalist Joe Strummer strode to the microphone midway through the set, his words and demeanor suggested anything but self-satisfaction.

  “I suppose you don’t want to hear me go on about this and that and what’s up my ass, huh?” the singer sneered. As the crowd cheered incongruously, Strummer continued: “Try this on for size—Well, hi everybody, ain’t it groovy? Ain’t you sick of hearing that for the last 150 years?”

  A renewed roar greeted this dismissal, but what did the sound and fury signify? Affirmation? Noncomprehension? Determination to party on no matter what?

  Strummer’s tone shifted to pained earnestness: “I know you are all standing there looking at the stage but I’m here to tell you that the people that are on this stage, and are gonna come on, and have been on it already, we’re nowhere, absolutely nowhere. Can you understand that?” The singer nodded to his bandmates, and muttered, “Let’s do this number!” The quartet crashed into “Safe European Home,” a sardonic, self-deprecating comment on “third world” violence and “first world” cowardice.

  Strummer’s words evoked punk’s “anti-star” idealism. Yet the members of The Clash stood on that stage as rock stars paid—as the singer boasted later—half a million dollars for barely more than an hour of work.

  If the scene evoked untrammeled success, the singer’s apparent anguish suggested something darker and more conflicted. Was this evening, ultimately, anything more than a lucrative commercial transaction?

  In the eighty minutes The Clash played that night, one could have driven west from the festival grounds on Route I-10 and pulled in front of a handsome mansion in Pacific Palisades, a coastal neighborhood on LA’s west side.

  This house was where a transplanted Midwesterner had begun a transformation from aging B-list actor to right-wing icon to governor to, finally, the most powerful man in the world: the president of the United States. Now Ronald Reagan was preparing for a final political campaign, one that in eighteen months would determine whether he’d get another four years to consolidate his counterrevolution.

  Across the Atlantic in The Clash’s homeland, an equally momentous campaign was already well underway. In twelve days, more than thirty million British voters would decide whether to keep Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Sharing a quasi-religious faith in the “free market” and enmity toward “big government,” the two had become partners in what British journalist Nicholas Wapshott described as “a political marriage” that sought to change the world.

  Conventional wisdom had dismissed Reagan and Thatcher as fringe figures, unlikely to be elected, much less be successful in implementing their creed. As Wapshott noted in a Reuters op-ed, “When Margaret Thatcher met Ronald Reagan in April 1975, neither was in their first flush of youth. She was fifty and he sixty-five. She was the leader of Britain’s opposition; he a former governor of California. It was by no means obvious that either would win power. They bonded instantly. Although born almost a generation and an ocean and continent apart, they found they were completing each other’s sentences.”

  While both held to a conservative Christian faith that was then beginning to gain political ascendancy in the US via Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement, they also bonded around another shared inspiration. As Wapshott makes clear, “Both found validation for their convictions in the works of Friedrich Hayek, at that time a long-forgotten theorist even among conservatives.”

  Hayek was an Austrian economist who had famously contended with Britain’s John Maynard Keynes amid the Great Depression over whether government intervention would ease or prolong the economic turmoil. Hayek had extolled allowing the “free market” to correct itself over time. Arguing that “in the long run, we are all dead,” Keynes espoused ideas about the crucial role of government action which became the basis for much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

  The vanquished Hayek turned further to the right during World War II. In 1944’s Road to Serfdom, he argued that not only did government meddling injure the economy but, indeed, was bound to lead to tyranny. Aided by the publication of an abridged Reader’s Digest edition in 1945, the book found an audience in a slowly building right-wing movement, including with both Reagan and Thatcher.

  By 1983 the two were no longer outsiders—they were rulers with immense power on the world stage. They brought this once obscure Austrian economist—and contemporary acolytes like Milton Friedman—into the mainstream. Both now stood at the pinn
acle of their respective careers, seeking to dismantle the New Deal and Britain’s socialist-leaning “welfare state” postwar consensus.

  If punk offered a bleak forecast in 1976, by 1983 that dark possibility was being made real. Virtually all the other early trailblazers had fallen away. Now the successful but conflicted Clash was one of the last gangs in town, standard-bearer for a vision that took the postwar dream for granted, and sought to push beyond.

  As such, Strummer might be viewed as the nemesis of Reagan and Thatcher, for the two politicians sought not the fulfillment of that dream, but its death. Yet all three in their distinct ways sought to transcend the post-1945 consensus.

  Punk rock had always been about more than simply music. Born largely as a reaction to the self-indulgent excesses and perceived failure of the rock-and-revolution 1960s, it offered a blistering critique of idealism sold out or gone bad.

  Punk’s “ruthless criticism of everything existing” spared no one, and could slip toward nihilist extremes. That made the idea of harnessing music for radical change a perilous venture. Yet beneath noisy blasts of illusion-shattering negation still lurked an unbending belief in the power of music to transform.

  The Clash was defined by this sense of mission. Dubbed “the only band that matters” by record company PR, the band helped crystallize an affirmative, activist vision for punk.

  If the early Clash track “Hate & War” encapsulated the band’s dismissal of the sixties, the musicians nonetheless borrowed from certain currents of that era. Their jagged, relentless music, close-cropped hair, quasi-military garb, and fierce sense of purpose suggested a marriage of Detroit agit-rock legends MC5 with the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

  The Clash was fascinatingly—and sometimes infuriatingly—contradictory. They embodied punk’s “year zero” stance, dismissing the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley in “1977,” the B side of their debut single, “White Riot.” But if the incendiary songs warned of class war, they were made possible through the largesse of CBS Records, then one of the music industry’s behemoths.

  “Punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS!” punk scribe Mark Perry famously declared in 1977. Although proved false by what followed, Perry’s words nonetheless suggested both The Clash’s immense meaning and contradiction: it wanted to be the biggest rock band in the world while somehow remaining “death or glory” heralds of revolution. If this paradox earned The Clash more than its share of criticism, it was also grounded in idealism that was real enough to cause anguish for the man at the center of the maelstrom: Joe Strummer.

  Lead singer/lyricist Strummer was not only the elder member of The Clash, but also its soul. Rising out of the British squat scene, he was fascinated by American folk radical Woody Guthrie as well as the dwindling embers of late-1960s revolt. Active with a rising roots-rock band, the 101ers—named after the band’s ramshackle squat—Strummer was wrenched out of his backward-gazing by a blistering Sex Pistols show in April 1976.

  Shortly thereafter, he was poached from the 101ers by guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon to front their nascent punk unit. This gifted pair had fallen under the spell of agitator Bernard Rhodes, the catalyst for assembling the band and encouraging them to write about urgent sociopolitical issues.

  If Sex Pistols lit the fuse of punk’s explosion, The Clash sought to guide the movement’s subsequent momentum in a constructive direction, making the implicit affirmation behind “no future” rants more explicit and convincing. “We never came to destroy,” Strummer noted to Melody Maker in 1978, adding years later in a punk retrospective, “We had hope in a sea of hopelessness.”

  After the collapse of sixties rock idealism, this was a tricky line to walk. Strummer’s ambivalence showed in a March 1977 interview with Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon. Asked how potent a band can be in making political change, he responded, “Completely useless! Rock doesn’t change anything. But after saying that—and I’m just saying that because I want you to know that I haven’t got any illusions about anything, right—having said that, I still want to try to change things.”

  Although The Clash was careful never to accept a narrow ideological label, it stood on the revolutionary socialist left, as the frontman acknowledged elsewhere. Given this anticapitalist stance, Strummer admitted to Coon—who later would briefly manage the band after the ouster of Rhodes in late 1978—“Signing that contract [with CBS] did bother me a lot.”

  Despite its underground roots, The Clash was not interested in being captured by a narrow subculture. If the Top 10 beckoned, it was in hopes of bringing a message of radical change to the broadest possible segment of the population.

  In retrospect, The Clash’s signing to a major label like CBS seems preordained. Capitalism would provide the avenue for reaching the masses that then, in principle, could be mobilized to overturn that same system and build something better. CBS had been home to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other sixties counterculture icons, and even issued an ad claiming “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” in 1968. Already thinly disguised folderol at the time, by the midseventies, such rhetoric could sound dubious indeed. The Clash pressed on nonetheless.

  Punks were not the only rebels who strode onto the world stage in the midseventies, however. At the very moment the Republican Party seemed eviscerated by the Watergate scandal, with the Keynesian postwar order appearing unassailable, grassroots insurgent Ronald Reagan was challenging Republican president Gerald Ford, and “strange rebel” Margaret Thatcher had just captured the leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK.

  Reagan came to political prominence with his 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of the presidential candidacy of archconservative Barry Goldwater. While Lyndon Johnson won the contest in a landslide, Reagan used his notoriety as a springboard for a successful race for governor of California.

  Reagan established himself as the deadly enemy of student radicals protesting the Vietnam War, famously proclaiming, “If there has to be a bloodbath, then let’s get it over with.” In 1976, Reagan’s upstart primary challenge to President Gerald Ford fell just short of victory. Four years later, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, who was wounded by inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan accomplished what his mentor Goldwater had failed to do nearly two decades earlier: bring a newly radicalized Republican Party into the White House.

  Over the same period, Thatcher had gone from Parliament backbencher to minister of education in the middle-of-the-road Tory government of Edward Heath. She slashed milk subsidies to schoolchildren, and showed no remorse when protesters chanted, “Thatcher Thatcher, milk snatcher!”

  Thatcher watched not one but two Tory defeats by the militant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), in 1972 and 1974. Led by rising Marxist firebrand Arthur Scargill, squads of “flying pickets”—unionists dispatched to blockade strategic locations—not only shut down the UK power grid but also brought down the Conservative Party–led government.

  While Thatcher absorbed lessons from the lost battles, she was also there to claim the leadership of the party in 1975 in their aftermath. It was a lucky moment to ascend, for the Labour Party would squander its own turn in power amid economic stagnation and social turmoil. Unemployment and inflation rose, mounds of garbage piled up, and transportation was paralyzed by a series of strikes. “Labour Isn’t Working” was Thatcher’s catchiest campaign slogan.

  Thatcher’s most resonant 1979 ad, by Saatchi & Saatchi.

  A different take on Margaret Thatcher by an anonymous artist.

  Capitalizing on the ennui, Thatcher became prime minister on May 4, 1979. She promised healing, quoting the soothing words of St. Francis of Assisi as protesters confronted the police massed outside the compound. Her radical agenda, however, would create divisions not seen in the UK since the 1600s.

  Thatcher came to power determined to complete a mission. Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had approvingly quoted anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin’s dictum, “The destructive
urge is also a creative urge,” during the heady days of punk’s birth. With Thatcher and Reagan’s rise, another form of “creative destruction” had now arrived: the “free market.”

  Ironically, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had derived the term from the work of Karl Marx. For Marx, “creative destruction” meant that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own downfall. But the phrase became used within “neoliberal” (a.k.a. “free market”) circles to describe actions like slashing jobs at a company in order to increase its efficiency and, in principle, also that of the larger economy.

  This process had been at the heart of the wrenching transformation generated by the Industrial Revolution, and was central to capitalism. If essential for economic growth and progress, the cost in human terms could be immense.

  This conservative surge provided the backdrop for The Clash’s rise. The tension between the band’s aims and its means led to new groups such as anarchist trailblazer Crass. While inspired by The Clash, these bands were hostile to their compromises, with Crass cofounder Penny Rimbaud noting that “CBS promotes The Clash—but it ain’t for revolution, it’s just for cash.” Strummer countered by calling Crass “a storm in a teacup,” deeming their do-it-yourself stance as “self-defeating, ’cos you’ve got to be heard.”

  The Clash’s third album, London Calling, challenged a version of punk that could seem ever more narrow. As Strummer groused, “I don’t want to see punk as preplanned and pre-thought-out for you to slip into comfortably like mod or hippie music or Teddy Boy rock and roll. In ’76 it was all individual. There was a common ground, it was punk, but everything was okay. Punk’s now become ‘he’s shouting in Cockney making no attempt to sing from the heart and the guitarist is deliberately playing monotonously and they’re all playing as fast as possible so this is punk’ . . . God help us, have we done all that to get here?”