The end of 1983 was a particularly powerful moment in this regard, for reasons both practical and symbolic. Strummer had long been a fan of writer George Orwell. This independently minded British socialist had authored the dystopian classic 1984, which portrayed a suffocatingly oppressive world where language itself had been corrupted to serve as a tool of social control.
Orwell’s blistering critique—aimed equally at fascism and Stalinism—reflected his belief that relentlessly seeking and speaking truth was central to human liberation. The idea resonated with Strummer, as did Orwell’s critiques of British imperialism and the violence of poverty, and his desire to abandon his privileged background to be in solidarity with the poor and working classes. The singer’s emphasis on truth telling as the core of The Clash’s revolutionary mission echoed Orwell’s own imperatives.
The references were everywhere: the band’s debut single “1977” ends with a spooky echoed “1984!” On the embattled “Anarchy” tour, Strummer had refitted “Protex Blue” with lyrics that warned, “Big Brother is watching you.” Graphics from the film versions of 1984 and another Orwell masterpiece, Animal Farm, appeared in The Clash songbook and on the cover of 1978’s “English Civil War” 45, respectively. Strummer had even revised history once, suggesting that the 101ers’ name was a reference to Room 101, 1984’s torture chamber.
Orwell had intended 1984 less as prophecy than as a warning of what was already unfolding in the late 1940s when the book was written. Still, its impact imbued the year 1984 with a sense of destiny. Much like 1977—the year when “two sevens clash,” according to some Rastas—the fast-approaching new year had an ominous sense of converging, perhaps even world-rupturing forces.
“The Clash,” then, might not simply be a band and its audience, but also this charged moment, carrying the sense of an era’s turning, for good or for ill.
This conception of The Clash could seem pretentious, yet was of a piece with the band’s immense ambition. It suggested why, in Strummer’s mind, The Clash was urgently needed right now, not simply as a politicized pop group, but as a cocreated project of artist and audience, as a spirit of struggle.
The high stakes and global sweep involved were evoked by the existing words of “We Are The Clash.” The song opened with a list of peoples—“Russians, Europeans, Yankees, Japanese, Africans”—invited to a “human barbecue,” where “twenty billion voices / make one silent scream.” This Edvard Munch–like image suggested worldwide nuclear war, a final showdown that no one could truly win.
To Strummer, Reagan appeared to be preparing for just such a conflagration, embarking on the largest military buildup in post–WWII history, while cutting taxes for the rich and slashing programs for the poor. Furthermore, never-ending war against a shadowy enemy provided the justification for 1984’s totalitarian control. This, in part, already existed. Both US and Soviet military planners justified their massive budgets by pointing to the danger posed by the other, a circular logic that drove ever greater expenditures and made war all the more likely.
* * *
On September 1, 1983, tensions between the US and the USSR hit a scary crescendo with the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 (KAL 007). A commercial flight from Alaska to South Korea, KAL 007 strayed into Soviet airspace for unknown reasons and was shot down, with a loss of 269 lives.
The Soviets had made a terrible error—one repeated when the US shot down Iran Air flight 655 in July 1988, killing 290—out of paranoia fanned by US bellicosity. This meant no less in terms of human suffering, but it mitigated the supposed barbaric intent, and highlighted the perils created by superpower tensions.
Amid all of this, the US invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983. Touting a supposed Communist threat to the region, Reagan used the chaos following a bloody coup against Grenadian leader Maurice Bishop—a Cuban ally—to intervene. The supposed aim was protecting American students on the island; the result was the installation of a new US-friendly regime.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, the US was asserting its imperial prerogatives over its “backyard.” The message to the Sandinistas and their Cuban and Soviet supporters was clear.
George Orwell’s 1984 hung heavy over Clash-land. (Artwork by Eddie King.)
As 1984 approached, catastrophic confrontation seemed increasingly inevitable. Strummer expressed this fear in another new song, “Are You Ready for War?” Musically, this was one of the strongest of the new batch, and analogous to the bracing punk-reggae of “Police and Thieves.” The song rose off a funky groove but also brought the punk hammer down, creating something new and exciting. Sheppard contributed cutting-edge “DJ scratch” hip-hop guitar noise.
The demo’s other dozen songs cataloged additional concerns. Some were new takes on old topics: the personal and political dangers of drugs (“Glue Zombie” and “National Powder”) and US foreign policy (“The Dictator”). Others like “Sex Mad War”—an attack on rape and pornography from a feminist perspective, riding on a hopped-up rockabilly chassis—explored newer lyrical territory.
A notable focus on the trials of the British working class came through in a trio of hard-hitting songs. “This Is England”—the song that had caused Fayne’s ears to prick up—began as a folky dirge spinning out dark images of “a gang fight on a human factory farm,” only to rev up by song’s end, with galloping guitars, bass, and drums driving home a bleak commentary on Thatcher’s Britain.
The use of the term “factory farm” was striking. These words had been popularized by UK animal rights activist Ruth Harrison: “Factory farms are often owned or highly influenced by corporations and the guiding principle of these businesses is efficiency, producing the most produce and hence profit for the least expense,” with little regard for the consequent suffering—a trenchant critique of Thatcher’s aims.
A second song, “In the Pouring Rain,” opened with clarion chords, followed by words that portrayed a gray vista, drenched in a downpour that evoked the hopelessness settling over the depressed north of England: “I could see as I rode in / the ships were gone and the pit fell in / a funeral bell tolled the hour in / a lonely drunkard slumbering . . .” While the music started off a bit stiff, not quite bringing the aching words to life, dynamic guitar interplay after the chorus lifted the song.
Best of all—musically and lyrically—was the blistering “Three Card Trick,” which likened the capitalist system to a famously fixed card game, three-card monte. The song opened with crushing power chords propelling a stark indictment: “Patriots of the wasteland / torching two hundred years.” Strummer struck directly at the claims of Thatcher and Reagan to be making their countries “great” again, while creating a desert of deindustrialization and unemployment.
This was not overstated. Journalist William Kleinknecht would later describe Reagan as “the man who sold the world,” a critique that could just as easily apply to Thatcher. The duo preached the gospel of “creative destruction”: clearing away the old and exhausted to make way for that which was new and improved.
Such claims were not far from punk’s “Year Zero” rhetoric, but Strummer was having none of it. His focus was on people, on their pain, as “Trick’s” follow-up lines show: “Bring back crucifixion / cry the moral death’s head legion / use the steel nails / manufactured by the slaves in Asia.”
As with the best of Strummer’s lyrics, these lines pack a book’s worth of critique into nineteen words. Subtly equating the Nazis and the Moral Majority, the Clash frontman undercuts the right-wing Christian “law and order” agenda by evoking their crucified founder, while tearing the veil off the interconnected realities of first-world deindustrialization and third-world exploitation.
A more succinct indictment of the Thatcher-Reagan project was hard to imagine. More concretely, the steel references in both “Three Card Trick” and “This Is England”—as well as earlier in “Straight to Hell”—show how Strummer was aware of the devastation of British industry, and
what it represented: the unraveling of a social compact forged in the fires of the Industrial Revolution.
Strummer was ambivalent about the cost of that bargain, as his lyrics elsewhere comparing factory work to slavery suggest. The singer argued, “For the past two hundred years we’ve all been had by an industrial society . . . that only needs workers to fuel its factories and furnaces and whatever. I feel [humanity] has a better destiny . . . There’s a better life to be lived for everybody and by everybody.”
Yet Strummer saw the immense suffering created when factories, mills, and other enterprises closed, taking jobs with them: “Supposedly technology and science was going to save the world, and we should be going forward into a bright future, but [instead] it’s recession, close a factory down, put people out of work.”
To be fair, these trends had predated Thatcher and Reagan, and resulted from globalizing forces that were extremely difficult to resist. But Thatcher in particular was an unapologetic defender of cutting the lifelines for many struggling industries—and those who worked there—in the name of efficiency.
In “This Is England,” Strummer encounters a female mugger holding a blade made of “Sheffield steel,” referring to the most renowned UK steel town, now devastated by cuts. The reference was clear: most of those workers left jobless saw Thatcher as the one who had slashed their industry’s throat.
Steel had been one of the pillars of the British economy since the Industrial Revolution, and its decline could rightly be viewed as a national tragedy. Still, there was one commodity that was even more fundamental: coal.
Orwell noted this in Road to Wigan Pier: “Our civilization is founded on coal. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal miner is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything is supported.” Even steel depended on coke—a coal derivative—for its manufacture. Without coal, the lights went out, metaphorically and literally.
The work could be horrific. Untold thousands had been lost in mining disasters and from diseases like black lung. This underlined the cost at which our world had been built, and who paid the price. As such, coal miners’ rights to better conditions and pay resonated across history—especially in British society.
Once British miners had built a strong union, their unique combination of moral claim and practical power gave them a status unmatched in the country’s workers’ movement. Given their historic role, the miners would tend to have public opinion on their side, and a direct way to inflict pain on the government by causing power cuts—unless proper preparations were made in advance.
By late 1983, Thatcher was keen to complete just this. According to Charles Moore’s authorized Thatcher biography, “Preparations for the inevitable confrontation continued. ‘The first priority,’ Mrs. Thatcher told the meeting, ‘should be to concentrate on measures which would bring benefit over the next year or so.’”
Aware of the growing tension, the miners took action. As Moore notes, “The first rumbles of confrontation were felt on 31 October 1983, when the NUM began an overtime ban in protest at the current pay offer and rumors of pit-closure plans. In a meeting of ministers two days later, which Mrs. Thatcher chaired, it was agreed that the danger of a strike was ‘likely to increase in the second half of 1984.’”
If anything, the NUM’s prohibition of overtime—which would effectively cut miners’ pay, but also slow government efforts to build up surplus coal stocks to guard against a strike—was late in coming. Although Moore reports, “Ministers assumed that the NUM would not be so foolish as to begin a strike in the spring just when demand for coal would fall,” this seems disingenuous, for the Tories would surely seek to provoke a strike at the most advantageous moment.
* * *
As Thatcher baited her traps, The Clash seemed to have bounced back in record time. While a couple of cuts on the demo seemed hardly advanced from the rattletrap grit of the 1976 Clash—or even the 101ers—the tape as a whole suggested a promising new unit. Far from a narrow punk fundamentalism, the songs conveyed a stronger rock foundation while still leaving room for other flavors.
Strummer knew that, despite any loftier intent, The Clash would rise or fall on its power as a band. Interviewed at Lucky Eight after the demo’s completion, he seemed resurgent, offering paeans to rock’s power: “The real things came off the street, invented by lunatics, madmen, and individuals, they’re the ones that last. I’m talking about your actual rock and roll, rockabilly, even psychedelic insanity rock and punk rock—these things weren’t created by the industry. The industry was running after these things, going, ‘What is it? Where can I get some?’”
The singer sounded ebullient about the new lineup: “In this place, seven years ago, we decided we were going to be bigger than anybody else—but still keep our message. And, in a way, there was no way of avoiding those things that we fell into. So, it’s been good rebuilding The Clash here because we’ve really come full circle, starting out here and coming back here now.”
Strummer then turned philosophical: “You mentioned that it was ‘unfortunate’ that we had to go through these things but I think that is the wrong word. I think it was inevitable. You don’t get issued with a map about how to avoid these things. I think it’s a question of learning, of being burned by life and learning from it.”
Asked finally to share his greatest thrill about The Clash, the singer said: “I get a kick out of it when someone comes up to me and says, ‘Because of your group I went and retook those exams that I failed and passed them all!’ I get a kick of hearing how we influenced people’s lives. ‘Because of your group I am majoring in political science.’ I get a lot of stuff like that.”
This power was real, but the responsibility it entailed was immense. For now, Strummer laughed at the thought that this role might bring him unbearable pressure.
Pieces seemed to be falling into place. Not long after the demo’s completion, however, a wild card was introduced: Greg White, who was living in Finsbury Park, was suddenly drafted as the second guitarist in the new Clash.
This most likely began as an effort by Rhodes to reduce Strummer’s burden. Vinyl was startled but supportive: “I don’t remember exactly where it came from, but I’m thinking it came from Bernard. Joe would not play guitar as much onstage and we would get two guitar players.” And, Vinyl noted, “there were five in the original Clash lineup,” recalling the early guitarist Keith Levene.
Vinyl was surprised by this sudden turn, but it hit Sheppard much harder: “Was I happy? Of course not. One day it was just announced that another guitarist would be joining us. I had no say, and it was hard not to take it personally, even if it made some sense musically, and there had been five in the beginning.”
The move acknowledged another reality: Strummer was a spirited but rudimentary guitar player who, by his own admission, was able to “jam out a few chords but couldn’t do any fiddly bits.” In the heat of a performance, his playing could become even more hit-and-miss, as he lost himself in the moment, “looking for the ultimate wipe-out,” as he once described his attitude toward performing.
In 1982, Jones noted this challenge: “Joe stops playing the guitar a lot, and those are moments where the instrumentation could use a bit of embellishment, so me hands are going all the time.” Though Jones tried “to hold it all together,” he did so with only mixed success, as live tapes from that era sometimes showed.
Live performance is not entirely about hitting all the right notes. Nonetheless, there was wisdom in the idea that songs written for two guitars should be played by such. This interplay was part of the power generated “when two guitars clash” as Belfast’s Stiff Little Fingers put it in a tribute to the band.
This promised to be a boon to Strummer, who was now freed “to go loopy,” as he laughed later. The rub came in finding the right person for this job.
If Sheppard had been a somewhat k
nown commodity, White was anything but. Later Sheppard would admit to uncertainty about whether White had ever played publicly before his gigs with The Clash. White actually had, but he acknowledged the largest pre-Clash crowd he had faced was perhaps less than two dozen. Even so, he had the skills and the looks—and a serious attitude. That’s likely what won him the job.
Feeling lost in a dead-end life, working at a warehouse, White was intrigued and annoyed in equal measure by a NME ad in that read, “Wild Guitarist Wanted.” He passed an initial telephone interview, and joined dozens of guitarists summoned to audition for an anonymous band.
Unlike Sheppard, White only had a vague notion of what band he might be joining. “They kept it very hidden,” he recalls. “I wasn’t totally sure, but there was a rumor that it was [The Clash]. Some people were saying it was Tenpole Tudor, and a few people were saying it was somebody else.”
Auditions took place on The Clash’s Camden Town stomping grounds, at the Electric Ballroom. There, White and the others cooled their heels until it was time to play with a prerecorded backing track. Strummer and Simonon were nowhere to be seen, leaving Rhodes and Vinyl to run the proceedings.
Bored by the process, White entertained himself with a few beers he had smuggled in. He took the stage angry and a bit drunk, swiftly breaking a string, but playing straight through what White later described as “a load-of-crap electronic rhythm-and-blues track,” then stalking off in a huff.
By musical standards, it was hardly a successful audition. But while White’s skills couldn’t match those of some of the other players, his aggro caught the attention of Rhodes and Vinyl, who tailed him outside to get contact information. Later Rhodes triumphantly told Strummer and Simonon, “We found a real street punk!”
We Are the Clash Page 8