We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

The crowd was restless. The lead singer pacing back and forth in the spotlight—resplendent in a bright-red Mohawk—knew it. After sparring with some outspoken show-goers, the slender figure stepped to the front of the stage, defiant, eager to confront: “What you see here is one rat shouting . . .”

  Few might guess that this man was identifying himself with one of the victims of the rat-catcher of Hamelin, the Pied Piper, who—legend has it—ended that town’s infestation by leading countless rodents to their deaths with his hypnotic music.

  The hubbub continued unabated. The singer ignored the catcalls and continued on: “What you see here is one rat making his piteous moan!” As the crowd struggled to make sense of this, he unleashed a jarring denouement: “Okey-dokey, the Pied Piper of Hamelin can be found . . . I’ll be ready for war!”

  With that, the four figures shrouded in shadow behind him sprang into action, hurtling into the light with sound and motion. The funky drums and clipped chords of “Are You Ready for War?” cut through the sweat- and cigarette-soaked air, and the “rat”—Joe Strummer—flung himself into the swirl of word and beat.

  For reasons both topical and musical, “War” had come to sit early in the nouveau Clash set, usually in the third slot after “London Calling” and “Safe European Home.” The tune operated on multiple levels. Listeners might find their feet moving to the rhythm, and their minds opening to a frightening reality. This could be a song for those who wanted to both dance and riot.

  “War” was made for this scary moment, speaking powerfully to the danger that faced the world in the early days of 1984. “Free your mind and your ass will follow” funk pioneer George Clinton had proclaimed more than a decade earlier. While this song sought the same kinetic connection with its audience, it offered not trippy idealism but urgent reality, targeting the Pied Pipers of world war.

  The words were nursery-rhyme simple, but made their point: the nuclear competition between the US and USSR endangered the entire world. “No use running in a mobile home / everywhere is a target zone / hell is ringing / on a red, red phone.” There was no escape, only urgent confrontation. As Strummer said elsewhere at the time, “The atomic age is upon us already, it’s time to wake up!”

  This “sea shanty,” as Nick Sheppard described it, sported an infectious beat with two guitars crunching and slicing in quick succession—a spoonful of sugar to make the bitter medicine go down. When the song asked, “Are you ready for war?” it was a cautionary tale about possible destruction and a call to arms.

  Onstage, Strummer wore a T-shirt designed by longtime Clash ally Eddie King that went well with his new hairdo. Mohawk Revenge, the shirt proclaimed, with an anonymous Mohawked punk and ghostly 1984 hovering in the background. The actual front of the shirt—Strummer wore it back to front—was equally striking. Two American paratroopers with hair trimmed into austere Mohawks stood face to face, evoking the infamous Sex Pistols “gay cowboys” shirt.

  Instead of shocking with sexually graphic juxtaposition, however, this shirt suggested deadly serious resolve, for these men were preparing for the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. The scene captured them grimly applying war paint to each other, with a giant boom box added by King as a backdrop.

  Repurposing the Stars and Stripes photo as The Clash prepare for D-Day.

  Freedom is more vital than a job, Mohawk Revenge, 1984. (Both T-shirts by Eddie King.)

  First published in the US military journal Stars and Stripes in 1945, the photo had been brought to King’s attention by Paul Simonon some years earlier. “Kosmo knew me from when I worked next door to him at Stiff Records,” King recalls. “We became friends, and through him I met the rest of the band.”

  King assisted Julian Balme with Combat Rock–era Clash graphics, designing T-shirts and record sleeves. King helped Balme turn one of Vinyl’s drawings into perhaps the most gripping and resonant of all Clash images: the words KNOW YOUR RIGHTS nestled beneath an open book with THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN written in bloody letters on one page, juxtaposed with a pistol-shaped hole on the other. The stark tableau was itself flanked by a large red star that evoked the band’s socialist orientation.

  The new shirt had been a collaborative effort with roots stretching back to 1982. As King says, “Paul gave me a copy of the ‘Mohawked’ D-Day paratroopers and said, ‘Put this on a shirt!’” This motif had struck a chord within the Clash camp. Impressed by the vehemence of the Mohican-wearing Travis Bickle character in the film Taxi Driver, and unsettled by their pop breakthrough, first Vinyl and then Strummer adopted this militant look early in the Combat Rock era.

  However, the shirt did not materialize immediately. “I did a sketchbook design using the photo and came up with the slogan Mohawk Revenge with the intention of producing a T-shirt,” King recalls, “but I never got around to it.” As the band drifted, paralyzed by internal divisions and the ambivalent impact of their Top 10 success, King moved on to other endeavors.

  In late 1983, King was called up for a new tour of duty: “Bernard conducted an informal interview up in Camden. Flipping through my sketchbook, Kosmo spotted the design and said, ‘Can I show this to Joe?’ who was rehearsing across the road. Ten minutes later he came back: ‘Joe wants this on a T-shirt!’”

  The motif gained yet another facet when the band read about Peter Mortiboy, an eighteen-year-old punk who was fired in late 1983 from his job at Rolls Royce. The cause of Mortiboy’s termination? His spiky Mohawk that—according to a Rolls Royce spokesperson—represented a “safety hazard.” Angered by this injustice, Vinyl and others in the Clash camp got involved helping Mortiboy.

  Eddie King (in a photo by Nick Sheppard) created edgy, provocative graphics that complemented the neo-Clash’s raw style. His T-shirt for Mohawk Revenge (see previous image) used a photograph of the back of Peter Mortiboy’s head.

  A newspaper clipping of Mortiboy. (Photographer unknown.)

  While nothing ever came of plans mooted for a band or a record with Mortiboy, King designed a T-shirt as a tribute. It used an image of the back of Mortiboy’s head, with Mohawk Revenge as well as Freedom is more vital than a job juxtaposed with the photo. I’m not going to be blackmailed could also be glimpsed in small type on the edge of the image.

  According to King, “Mohawk Revenge then became the theme as opposed to just a reference to the D-Day photo.” The slogan was multifaceted, he explains, drawing together “this Native American element, hardcore punk, and the military aspect, as well as this sense that an uprising is being attempted, a fight back.”

  A deeply politicized artist, King was energized by his conversation with Rhodes and Vinyl, and eager to sign on to the new campaign: “Bernard really doesn’t like the way things are, he really, really does want a revolution! That inspired me, and I was excited to work on the shirt and anything else the band wanted.”

  Clearly Strummer agreed, as the Mohawk Revenge shirt would almost always be on his chest for Clash shows over the next few months. With the front photo of the paratroopers now emblazoned with The Clash and Out of Control, the shirt suggested that the band found itself in its own D-Day moment.

  While Europe, appropriately enough, was soon to come on the itinerary, The Clash followed its Barrowlands concert with dates in Manchester, Leicester, and Bristol. The shows quickly sold out, and audience reaction was strong, if not universally positive. While devotees of Mick Jones or British pop were likely unsatisfied, this rough-and-ready Clash was proving to be blisteringly good.

  Given that it had less than two months under its belt, the band was on top of its game, and Strummer was in good spirits. The vocalist’s freshly cut Mohawk signaled confrontation, beginning with his own audience. In Leicester, he wrangled good-naturedly with some fans—including die-hard gobbers—and introduced himself as “Mick Jones” before “Are You Ready for War?”

  Near the end of the set, shouting erupted in the crowd as Strummer announced “Tommy Gun.” The singer waved off the band and stopped to listen. Hearing a litany
of Jones-related complaints, Strummer spoke gently: “Can I ask you one question? Who understands why we had to change?” When only a few people raised hands, he responded, “Well, that means I have to tell the rest of you . . .”

  With that, Strummer’s voice shifted, rising from a conversational tone to a near scream: “The Clash was going nowhere—it was going to DIE! GOODBYE!” When this explanation failed to settle the matter, the singer challenged with biting humor: “What’s your contribution to the scheme of things? What color are your underpants? This is the question that must be answered! I’ll have the [tabloid scandal rag] News of the World on you . . .”

  Satisfied with his repartee, Strummer then let the music talk. A twin-guitar crescendo ensued, heralding the long-delayed song, followed quickly by an equally fiery “I Fought the Law.” This one-two punch was intended to leave anyone hard-pressed to deny that a genuine Clash was in the house.

  Skepticism nonetheless was easy to find—and not simply due to the absence of Jones. In truth, the four big UK music weeklies—NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, followed by Record Mirror—had for years tended to savage anything The Clash did. Sheppard laughs: “Somebody asked me once, ‘Were you hurt by the bad reviews that The Clash got in England?’ And I said, ‘Well, they haven’t had a good review since the first album—and that got panned by some people!’”

  It was not surprising when the first review—by Jim Reid of Record Mirror—found lots to criticize about the Leicester show. Decrying a “stultifying lack of imagination,” Reid wrote, “The reconstituted Clash—three young blades, a Marlon Strummer, and a Mean Boy Paul—are five punky curators with a traveling ‘Museum of ’77.’ Muscular, energetic, and ultimately pointless.”

  Reid wrote that the powerful show put Leicester “under punk rule” for two hours, and allowed, “The issues The Clash deal with are important,” before delivering the coup de grâce: “It’s just that the form they express them in has become meaningless . . . When Strummer screams ‘White Riot’ it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Despite this, one gets the sense that—under his cynical pose—Reid liked the show, ranking new songs like “This Is England” and “Three Card Trick” alongside “the early—and best—Clash.” Conceding that “a Clash show is nothing if not spirited,” Reid concluded with a backhanded compliment: “As an exercise in nostalgia it sure dumps on the Alarm,” a punk-inspired band then making waves alongside the likes of Big Country and U2, who were also summarily dismissed.

  Hardened by past criticism in the weeklies, the band shrugged it off. Vinyl later made it clear the new Clash was “wasn’t meant for them,” as the unit was not interested in the pop-novelty merry-go-round ridden by these publications. “The Kleenex scene,” scoffed Strummer. “Blow your nose on it and throw it away.”

  Another skeptic was harder to dismiss. Since the Victoria Park “Rock Against Racism” show, teenage Clash fan Billy Bragg had begun to make some riots of his own. Bragg: “There was a time in 1977–1978, everyone seemed to be in a band, and every door seemed to be open to young nineteen-year-olds with attitude and short haircuts. It was like a cultural revolution. It was going to change the world—particularly, The Clash were going to change the world. I fervently believed that.”

  Taking the folk troubadour stance and marrying it to an acerbic punk aesthetic, Bragg had won a growing, passionate following as a solo artist. Wielding an electric guitar, a romantic’s heart, an irreverent sense of humor, and a big mouth, Bragg laughed, “When I started out, I wanted to be a one-man Clash!”

  Perhaps because of the band’s role in inspiring him as an artist and budding activist, Bragg had been bitterly disappointed with their trajectory: “It seemed that The Clash had completely lost the fucking plot with Sandinista! I didn’t really even listen to Combat Rock.” He sees this as part and parcel of a broader ennui: “By the mideighties, I’m becoming very disillusioned with all my hopes for punk in general. What’s happening is that the focus is moving toward the New Romantics. Style is starting to reassert its dead hand over content.”

  Wincing at the thought, Bragg continues: “All of the things that I dressed like an idiot for seemed to be coming to nothing—we just seemed to have cleared the way for Spandau Ballet! Everything else was going more and more stylish, more and more huge productions—the idea of going the opposite direction, just one guy with turned-up jeans and white T-shirt and a beaten-up electric guitar was a classic ‘zag’ when everyone else was ‘zigging,’ you know?”

  This was largely the critique that had led to the new Clash’s birth. Nonetheless, Bragg began to roast The Clash in his live performances. Bragg: “I’d been saying onstage that the new band that are out on the road—it would be simpler if they just drop the ‘L’ from the name and just called themselves ‘The Cash.’”

  He later admitted—with a sad laugh—“That was a really nasty thing to say, wasn’t it?”

  The irrepressible Vinyl makes short work of the slam: “Say what you will about the last version of The Clash, but it wasn’t designed in any way as a money-making maneuver. The record company would have been a lot happier with Mick still there . . . What a daft thing for Bragg to say!”

  Billy Bragg and Joe Strummer, Colston Hall, Bristol, UK, February 13, 1984. (Photographer unknown.)

  Daft or not, Bragg then found himself being asked to open for the same band he was publicly criticizing at Colston Hall in Bristol, the day after the Leicester show. On one hand, this made sense. Strummer had said, “I wouldn’t cross the road to buy a record,” except “maybe Billy Bragg’s one.”

  The band had another agenda as well, however. Bragg—who had never met Strummer or Simonon before the show—found himself on the hot seat that night after sound check. “Joe and Paul buttonholed me about what I had been saying when we met, and I had to kind of sheepishly admit my wrongdoing.”

  Yet Bragg was not really that chastened by the sit-down: “I was already a heretic, so it didn’t really matter.” But when he saw the band live that night, Bragg was transported: “I was dancing in the aisles . . . The spirit was still there, Joe still had the passion, and I thought they were great, actually. They were more musical than the old Clash, I felt—maybe the additional guitar helped.”

  This was no small concession, for as Bragg freely admits, “I was such a Stalinist about The Clash. If they were shit, I would have been, you know, mortified, and sulked off somewhere. The fact that I was bopping in the aisles . . . Clearly, they were still The Clash, whatever else was going on.”

  After seeing the band in action, Bragg also understood their tête-à-tête more deeply: “It seemed to be clear that Joe and Paul really wanted to make a point of proving that they still had it, which is why they were buttonholing me.”

  The new Clash was ready to push the envelope. Pressed to explain what the band gained under its new two-guitar regime, Sheppard—interviewed for Radio West before his hometown debut in Bristol—didn’t hesitate: “A bit of desperation, a bit of energy—a lot of energy—and a bit of new blood. What they need.”

  That no-nonsense ethic held true for other aspects of Clash affairs too. Asked if joining such a successful band meant not having to carry his own gear anymore, Sheppard responded, “I don’t like poncing around while somebody does stuff that you could quite easily do . . . What you [can] do, you do.”

  But many skeptics remained as their campaign prepared for continental Europe. In the face of this, Strummer tried to encourage Sheppard and White. As road manager Ray Jordan recalls “Joe [told] them, ‘If the audiences give you any shit, just give it to them right back . . .’” While Jordan was skeptical himself of the new band, he admitted, “[Nick and Vince] put themselves on the line.”

  It was not simply the guitarists. All the members of the new Clash were fighting for their lives on artistic terms—even as they were doing the same, in some sense, for everyone’s lives, endangered by the threat of imminent nuclear war.

  Strummer had told Mikal Gilmore in 1982
, “We ain’t dead yet, for Christ’s sake! I know nuclear doom is prophesied for the world, but I don’t think you should give up fighting until the flesh burns off your face.” By singing “Are You Ready for War?” night after night—with lines like “I ain’t gonna lay down and die / playing the global suicide”—Strummer was pressing the issue the best way he knew how.

  In California, Strummer had argued rock music was the only way to reach young people. Few issues could be more critical than the nuclear arms race. As Vinyl noted later, “We supported groups like CND”—Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, touted on their 1980 “The Call Up”/“Stop the World” 45—“but at same time, they seemed very middle-class, university-intellectual types. We wanted to reach the kids they weren’t reaching.”

  The single had risen to #40 in the UK, so was only marginally successful in this aim. The songs were gripping nonetheless. “Stop the World” was a raw stream-of-consciousness screed warning of atomic devastation. While “The Call Up” mostly spoke against the draft, it also evoked the Doomsday Clock created by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to dramatize the danger of nuclear holocaust.

  When the Clash single came out just after Reagan’s election, the Clock stood at seven minutes to midnight. In January 1984, however, the hands were moved to only three minutes to midnight, the closest they had been since 1953. While the Bulletin criticized Soviet actions that increased the danger—such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe—by 1984, it was especially alarmed by US policies.

  Ronald Reagan was the Pied Piper that Strummer had warned of in Leicester. The singer was connecting the same dots as influential antinuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, who called Reagan the “Pied Piper of Armageddon” for his disarming style, which made his warmongering seem friendly, even parental.

  Caldicott later elaborated: “At a fundamental level people enjoy being cared for by supposedly strong leaders. This gives them the freedom to avoid the true responsibilities and autonomy of adulthood, with all its attendant details. They can then behave as adolescents needing a father or a mother figure. And Reagan fit this pattern. It was a pity that the father the American people had chosen was not a creative, vital figure, but such a destructive one.”