We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Strummer was in fine form, bantering with the crowd. Not all was lighthearted; he introduced “Sex Mad War” by shushing the crowd and urging them “to focus all your minds on sex!” Perhaps anticipating racy rock talk, the crowd cheered.

  Strummer cut savagely through the revelry: “Every boy in this world has gone sex mad, there ain’t no satisfaction. This is dedicated to all the victims of the sex-mad war—the women, the women, the women . . .” On cue, the song exploded to life, earning its place on a set list heavy with the band’s early anthems.

  Likewise, Strummer segued from joking about the uncontrollable feedback—“We have no intention of playing avant-garde music that sounds like this . . . so we’ll just have to drown it out by some old-fashioned human and wood stuff”—to railing against “Ronald Reagan’s favorite hobby: smashing Central America to fuck!”

  Having blitzed through the first show on “pure adrenaline, pure nerve,” Sheppard felt better about the outcome in San Francisco. So did White, whose opening-night jitters—“I didn’t know what I was doing onstage”—gave way to utter abandon: “I just threw caution to the wind. I remember cutting my hand to pieces . . . doing these Pete Townshend windmill things, just fuckin’ going mad.”

  The intent was to present a rougher version of The Clash, with Strummer’s passion cranked up to cover the band’s raggedness. The patchy parts were to be expected, given that the five had been playing together for a month.

  Some observers were unconvinced. In the San Francisco Examiner, Phillip Elwood argued that the “new Clash lacks some of the old fire,” faulting the new lineup for lack of identity overall, and Strummer for erratic onstage delivery. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joel Selvin hammered Sheppard and White: “Neither proved exceptional . . . Even keeping their guitars in tune proved a problem for these two green additions to the world’s most famous punk band.”

  The quintet continued on the road, playing spaces as out of the way as the Spanos Center in Stockton, California, and as massive as the Long Beach Arena—capacity 13,500—followed by Santa Monica’s Civic Auditorium. Mixed reviews continued, with Ethlie Ann Vare complaining that the new lineup “shows more energy than finesse.” Her verdict was stark: “Yes, the new Clash are taking off in a direction. Trouble is . . . that direction seems to be backward.”

  Such slams didn’t discourage the new recruits, who hadn’t been tasked with replacing Jones as much as staking a new claim with punk bravado. Sheppard: “With hindsight, we went out very much challenging what The Clash had done before. [At this point] we weren’t being as musical. We were very in-your-face.”

  Some critics reveled in the defiant energy. After seeing the San Francisco and Santa Cruz shows, Johnny Whiteside of Beano fanzine declared, “This is The Clash, with their beauty and firepower intact, albeit bruised and scabby . . . The [absence] of Jones makes barely a shred of difference.” The Los Angeles Times’ Richard Cromelin agreed, saying Jones’s loss “hardly seems as crucial as the departure of Keith Richards would be from the Rolling Stones.”

  In Santa Monica, Strummer paused to scorch the skeptical critics, exhorting the crowd: “We’re standing here, you’re standing here, so let’s get on with it!” New songs now made up about one-third of each set, sprinkled through the evening, with the shows improving day by day. In a sign of growing confidence, the band unveiled an embellished “Guns of Brixton,” with a haunting harmonica intro from Simonon and jagged lead guitar line courtesy of White. All the venues save the massive Long Beach Arena were sold out, and the crowd reaction was strong.

  Kosmo Vinyl would later print DIY Clash shirts with the words Hip Hop Punk Rock on them, foreshadowing a musical shift. (Flyer courtesy Kosmo Vinyl.)

  Yet Strummer was eager for more direct feedback, even stopping the Santa Monica show to ask the audience to rate the band: “Okay, now we need your vote here . . . Come to the voting section where you shout ‘rubbish,’ or you shout ‘not bad,’ or you shout ‘good,’ or you shout ‘excellente’!” If Strummer’s ritual was done with a wink and a grin, it also suggested residual doubt.

  This was not his only cause for concern. As usual, The Clash had carefully chosen opening acts, showcasing Malcolm McLaren’s hip-hop/world music and a then-largely-unknown Latino band, Los Lobos. Despite the return to “punk roots,” Strummer fiercely opposed cultural segregation, seeing such divides as part of an exploitive global system that kept apart people who needed to be together.

  Strummer was eager to expose his largely white US audience to a broader world. He took aim at Top 40 radio and MTV for racism, calling the crowd to protest: “Until they hear your voice, they will keep giving you what they’ve been giving you!” At another show, Strummer noted “Police and Thieves” was not “white reggae,” scorching Police singer Sting for ripping off Jamaican music.

  This echoed his critique of Jones for becoming a musical “imperialist.” Yet even the new Clash was walking a tricky line. Their version of “Armagideon Time,” for example, had little musically to distinguish it from the original Willie Williams reggae version. Such tunes were not unlike what the Police were doing.

  Yet the presence of these songs was critical. The racial divides in music had become massive, especially in the US. Rock was increasingly a white phenomenon, with disco and rap reviled by some rockists as “nigger music.” This ugly mentality was evident at the Clash’s Long Beach show, at which McLaren was harassed by the audience’s less-enlightened denizens. For Strummer, the incident was a flashback to the brutal roasting of hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash when he opened for The Clash at New York’s Bonds Casino.

  Strummer would recall the Long Beach incident as a snapshot of the intolerance behind the Reaganite facade of a cheerfully colorblind, classless society—and a suggestion of how much work remained in getting his message across. After seeing Clash fans shout “You nigger-music lover!” at McLaren, he snapped to one reporter, “That goes straight to Joe Strummer’s head.”

  The band wouldn’t brook such racism. As one Stockton audience member recalled, Los Lobos “was getting booed and the audience was throwing things at them. Two songs into their set, Joe Strummer barges out from backstage, the band stops playing. Strummer yells at the crowd, ‘Shut the fuck up! These guys are going to be great someday and you are going to regret it.’ He marched back behind the curtains, the band fired up again, and everyone got into the music.”

  The Clash wound through California, finally arriving at the Fox Theatre in San Diego on February 1. The show started late due to a standoff with authorities who insisted on a barrier in front of the stage in the 2,800-capacity venue. The band balked, despising such divisions between it and the audience.

  Unable to get the powers-that-be to remove the barrier, Strummer channeled his anger, leading the band through a rousing show. While the newer songs came across well, many of the set’s high points were Clash songs from 1977–78, songs that Jones had disdained playing, calling them “like the nagging old wife.” Strummer, however, had never given up on the tunes, knowing they were important not only for the fans, but for reminding the band of its initial mission.

  Toward the end of a blistering version of “White Riot”—a song that had once brought Strummer and Jones to blows when the latter refused to play it as an encore—were the lines “Are we going backward / or are we going forward?” This echoed the challenge Jones likely would have put to the band. But to Strummer, sometimes you had to go backward to get back on the right path to move forward.

  The crowd’s fervor had grown so intense by the encore that Strummer stopped the show to plead with people to back up so as to prevent anyone from getting crushed on the unwanted security fence. Despite the chaos, the show was a hopeful tour finale. Save for a ragged “Rock the Casbah”—Strummer stopped the song, had the band start it over, only to muff it himself after the last chorus—the group kept up with their singer, and the trek ended on a high note.

  The real test was about to come: a return to th
eir fervent—and demanding—British audience. Such fans could be jealous of the band’s success abroad, and had noticed its lack of focus on home-front battles on recent records.

  London was British pop’s beating heart. Going north to the Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow made sense as The Clash sought to defy commerce and reconnect to its base. Few places throbbed with as much raw anti-Tory sentiment as this rough-and-tumble city, nestled in a hard-hit industrial region. Yet Scottish crowds could be uncompromising, more than willing to confront unsatisfying performers.

  Strummer was ready to present his own challenge. After a spirited introduction by Vinyl, The Clash hit the stage with “London Calling’s” stirring chords, only to be met with a thin, persistent rain of saliva.

  Gobbing—as this ritual of spitting on bands was known—was one of the less pleasant UK punk habits, and the singer loathed the practice. Even as most of the crowd began singing along, Strummer suddenly halted the song, and bluntly urged other fans to “find the saliva and punch it in the face.”

  Hygienic boundaries reasserted, the band was back into “London Calling,” followed swiftly by “Safe European Home.” As the song ended, Strummer leaped forward, yelling, “House lights, house lights!” When the lights rose on the audience, and the guitarists tuned up behind him, Strummer greeted the crowd with a jaunty, “Good evening to you all! Welcome to the first of this mob in the UK . . .”

  The crowd cheered, and Strummer launched into one of the most emotionally naked raps of his long career: “Yeah, we’ve been away for two years—and I’ve been trying to come to a decision. I’ve been thinking, what the fuck am I doing living? What am I supposed to do with it? How come you all come see it?”

  As the sweat-drenched singer grasped the mic, the last six months of soul-searching poured out of him: “Where is it going, what was it going, what is Clash, where is Clash, who is Clash? These are decisions, you know, I’m thinking . . .”

  If Strummer had sometimes strained for coherence in California interviews, now he cut to the bone: “Become activists! Yeah, any damn thing is better than nothing. Read Che Guevara, paint furniture pink and superglue it onto the sides of city buses. Anything! Become an activist! Turn off the bloody whatever it is . . . Turn off the Jewel in the Crown or Brideshead Revisited. Fuck that! Get off the drugs and all—a waste of time. Get rid of Thatcher before she gets rid of us!”

  As the crowd roared its approval, Strummer insisted, “I’m serious!” After a quick band introduction, he leaned over to challenge the crowd: “And down here? Yeah, down here we got the future . . . If anyone has got any guts, let’s take it!”

  Immediately, gentle chords announced “Jericho,” one of the strongest of the new songs, drawn from the biblical tale of city walls brought down by a trumpet blast. After a couple quiet measures, the band paused for a second only to erupt into full force, the twin guitars lashing out like barbed-wire whips.

  In “The Sound of Sinners,” Strummer had mused about “looking for that great jazz note / that destroyed the walls of Jericho.” Tonight he seemed intent on enacting just that. With references to seemingly imminent nuclear war—portraying Thatcher hiding in a bunker as bombs fell—the song measured up to the Clash classics that preceded it, putting sinew behind the charged words.

  With barely a pause, the band went into two other new songs, “We Are The Clash” and “Sex Mad War,” followed by “Clampdown” and “Guns of Brixton,” both benefiting from the additional muscle of two guitars. Then it was back to two more new songs, “Three Card Trick” and “Glue Zombie.”

  After “Zombie’s” last chords faded, a knot of fans started a Mick Jones chant, causing a wrangle in the crowd. Strummer paused, peering into the darkness, trying to sort out the scene. After listening for a while, the singer wryly remarked, “Perhaps we can have a battle after . . . Perhaps we can have a pro– and anti–Mick Jones fight. Yeah, you might think about that . . .”

  Strummer then led the band into a defiant “English Civil War.” A huge chorus rose from the audience as the song took flight. Then, as if to silence any doubters, The Clash ignited a mix of new and old songs like a string of firecrackers. The response was intense, generating a massive sing-along. Bum notes popped up and the twin guitars occasionally slipped out of sync—but the spirit was powerful. The band ended with a blazing-fast “White Riot” played almost as a vow: Mick Jones might be gone, but The Clash is here.

  As White later wrote, “It was one of the most exhilarating shows I played with The Clash. And it was all down to the audience, their energy. Just bordering on complete destruction. But there was a good thing in there too . . . a spirit there that seemed authentic and true and unlike so many other places we played. They really laid it on the line. And it inspired you—you stepped over the line with them.”

  White’s words paid tribute to the “We Are The Clash” idea, how performer and audience together could create something nearly miraculous: “I wasn’t from a socially deprived background, but I understood desperation. Desperation is a state of mind. Where nothing makes sense and there’s pointlessness in being alive. But in that moment you were released from something. You touched a source of some kind where . . . life made total sense for a couple hours.”

  Yet if such liberation lasted only briefly, it was limited, even illusory. Could it persist, to change lives, even help change the world? In the face of the looming life-or-death confrontations between Thatcher and the miners, the US and USSR, in Central America and beyond, such power would be sorely needed.

  The search for identity, for renewed meaning, had brought a reinvented Clash back home to begin making its stand. Strummer meant the new songs and the new band to be a match for the moment—and the real battle was just about to begin.

  chapter three

  ready for war

  Bootleg of the Stockholm show on February 17, 1984, with a photo of The Clash by Jan Bengtsson/Schlager magazine, and a photo of the Salvadoran military with victims.

  The logical consequence of the preparation for nuclear war is nuclear war . . . If the world were to fall prey to such a disaster, we will take with us not only all present life, but the magnificent heritage [past generations] bequeathed . . . We hold in our hands the ability to destroy creation. It could happen any day.

  —Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy, 1984

  Every war, before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. The essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.

  —George Orwell, 1937

  A siren was screaming. Red lights were blinking on and off. It was just past midnight, September 26, 1983, deep in Serpukhov-15, a secret bunker outside Moscow. The message from the Soviet early warning system was clear: a nuclear missile attack from the United States was underway.

  Stansilav Petrov—the lead officer on duty that night—froze in place. The unthinkable event he and his team had trained for appeared to be happening. “The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, backlit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it,” Petrov remembered years later.

  The Oko alarm system was telling him that the level of reliability of that alert was “highest,” indicating there could be little doubt that America had launched a missile. “A minute later the siren went off again. The second missile was launched,” Petrov explained. “Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Computers changed their alerts from ‘launch’ to ‘missile strike.’”

  But something didn’t seem right. Why an attack with such a small number of missiles? The Soviets feared the Reagan administration intended a first strike, but if that was happening, there should be hundreds, maybe thousands of missiles in the air.

  Knowing that his system was new and relatively untested, Petrov swiftly checked with colleagues staffing the radar early warning systems. No missiles had been sighted on their screens. Which assessment w
as right?

  Petrov’s duty was to report this alert. Every second counted, given that US missiles, once launched, could reach Russia in minutes. He was, however, well aware that Soviet forces were on high alert, and that a false alarm might set off a cascade of nuclear dominoes that could end human life on earth as he knew it.

  His career—and millions of lives—was on the line. Petrov made his decision, choosing not to report the alert up the chain of command. The next twenty minutes were agony, but when no missiles landed, Petrov knew he had been right.

  It was later discovered that the “missile launch” had been simply sunlight reflected off the clouds, shockingly misinterpreted by the Oko system. In the twenty-first century, Petrov would be feted as “the man who saved the world” and September 26, 1983, would be “the day the world almost died.”

  At the time, however, Petrov’s gutsy call resulted in a reprimand for disregarding protocol and subsequent early retirement. Nothing would be said publicly about the incident, which deeply embarrassed the Soviet military machine. Many years passed before anyone outside of the USSR’s nuclear program knew just how close the earth had come to annihilation due to mechanical error.

  Petrov took it philosophically, loyal to his country but secure in the righteousness of his action. Meanwhile, the world continued to teeter on the abyss of nuclear holocaust, with most people blissfully, willfully unaware of the danger. Not everyone, however, was willing to accept this quietly, without words of protest.

  Flash forward five months to Colston Hall in Bristol, England, 1,900 miles east of Moscow: named for Edward Colston, a well-known philanthropist who had made his money in the slave trade, this concert venue was packed with two thousand paying customers on the night of February 13, 1984.