We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Whether Strummer or Rhodes knew of this turn of phrase is unclear, but they were aware of the group. While the courage of the Weather Underground was undeniable, its effectiveness was less certain. Self-criticism in their hands soon appeared to be less a tool of democracy than a means of control. This was not so different than in Mao’s China—or, some felt, within The Clash itself.

  As Strummer touted self-criticism, he denounced groups who operated like businesses. He noted, “We did eight gigs with the Who and looked at them and thought, ‘Is that the end of the road? Four complete strangers, going on for an hour and then off?’” Strummer’s stand was clear: “I want to be friends with the members of my band . . . I want [us] to be a real team, not a stage-light team.”

  Like self-criticism, this made sense in principle. However, the regular hectoring by Rhodes—in practice the main critic, and rarely of himself—undermined morale.

  So did the gap between Strummer’s pronouncements and the fact that the three newer members were paid minimally—£150 a week, about $225—and often felt treated like hired help; janitors wielding a “guitar broom,” as White put it. The trio swiftly grew to dislike the band meetings in which Rhodes held forth on all manner of perceived failures and sometimes goaded others to do the same.

  It was not an easy situation. The Clash was an unlikely combination of Top 10 pop stars and would-be revolutionaries. Howard, White, and Sheppard knew they could not expect to play a fully equal role in the band immediately. To suggest by word and deed that such full membership depended on working hard to earn the necessary trust hardly seemed out of bounds, and they granted as much.

  Nonetheless, a practical reality was that The Clash, legally, was now a limited liability company whose members were Strummer, Simonon, and Rhodes. This reinforced a second-class status for the others that chafed against the oft-stated desires to have a fully bonded platoon and contribute to genuine equality in the world.

  Nor did it make much sense to treat members of the team so harshly that at least one—Peter Howard—began to call band meetings “Bernie’s dehumanization sessions.” If onstage The Clash set such contention aside in order to try to give it all to the moment, such unnecessary abuse didn’t make matters any easier.

  Given punk’s antiauthoritarian inclinations, this was also incentive for acting out, such as White’s impromptu bathroom liaison in Stockholm with Rhodes’s girlfriend. At best, this was White’s effort to strike back at Rhodes—who he had quickly grown to loathe—in the most painful way possible. At worst, it suggested that White had the impulse control of a three-year-old. Neither option was glad tidings for a band with such an ambitious agenda, in such a challenging moment.

  This discord in the ranks wasn’t visible onstage. With the band playing night after night, the five began to truly gel musically. As the tour crossed Europe, The Clash continued to draw large crowds and enjoy ecstatic fan reactions.

  The home front was never far from Strummer’s mind. Before a crowd of seven thousand in Düsseldorf, West Germany, he paused after “This Is England” to note acidly, “I’m warning you, very soon it’s going to be Margaret Thatcher über alles,” referring to the German national anthem that was associated with the Nazis.

  Once again Strummer could be accused of hyperbole, yet some truth lurked. While all may have seemed quiet back home, it felt to some like the calm before the storm. Ever since the NUM had banned overtime, close observers were waiting for the other shoe to drop. That shoe fall would not be long in coming.

  Yet while the war dance between Thatcher and the miners was worrisome, other developments were even more alarming. In Milan, Italy, Strummer dedicated the song “Jericho” to “all of you who went to Comiso and stood there in the pouring rain, to tell them we don’t play a Yankee game . . .” The Comiso military air base was the Italian equivalent of the UK’s Greenham, receiving US cruise missiles and thus becoming the venue for mass protests.

  By the time Strummer spoke, the missiles had already arrived at Comiso despite the outcry, as they had at Greenham and Molesworth in the UK. Their mid-November arrival caused uproar in the British Parliament. Labour leader Neil Kinnock called it an act of “reckless cynicism . . . that makes Britain a more dangerous place today than it was yesterday.” Thatcher responded that it was “not true” that deploying cruise missiles meant escalating the nuclear arms race.

  Referring in part to a recent decision by NATO ministers to rid the alliance’s stockpiles of outdated nuclear weapons, Thatcher claimed that there now were 2,400 fewer US nuclear warheads in Europe, even with the new arrivals. While technically true, this conveniently overlooked the fact that cruise missiles—small, easily movable, difficult for radar to detect as they could hug the ground, yet far more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were qualitatively quite different than the decommissioned weapons.

  The Soviets recognized this and, as a result, threatened to walk out of long-delayed Geneva arms control negotiations if the cruise missiles were deployed. Thatcher was losing the argument with the public, as polls showed that 59 percent of the British opposed taking cruise missiles. Nonetheless, she pushed back against the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp’s round-the-clock protest outside the base, with police regularly making arrests and evicting protesters.

  * * *

  As all of this was unfolding, Joe Strummer’s personal life was about to change fundamentally. Two days after the Milan show, on February 29, his father Ronald Mellor died suddenly of a heart attack during a gall bladder operation. While Mellor had dealt with heart difficulties for some time, the death was nonetheless shocking.

  The news reached Strummer at the band’s final European date, a Paris show that had been rescheduled to March 1 when an earlier gig was scrubbed by a transportation strike. It would take some time for his band to find out, however, as Strummer played the show without telling the other musicians what had happened.

  His father’s wake and funeral happened two days later on March 3, when The Clash was booked to play a gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse in Scotland. Strummer went to remember his dad, then got in a car and rode to the show. Most of his bandmates still didn’t know what had happened.

  Strummer had become a father and lost his father in a matter of months. Sheppard: “Becoming a parent and losing a parent—these are two of the biggest life changes imaginable. Joe was dealing with them in the midst of trying to resurrect The Clash. The pressure—and grief—must have been immense.”

  Vinyl agreed: “Looking back at it now—and not from my point of view at the time—[the rebuilding of The Clash] is really not happening at the right time for Joe in his personal life, he and Gaby are starting a family, his parents are not well. It happens all the time in a band, a gang, whatever . . . At some point, the other side of people’s lives is going to take over, it’s going to develop. And gang life becomes secondary, in certain aspects. Then you’re trying to juggle, you know?”

  Vinyl also knew Strummer carried deep pain from his childhood and his relationship with his parents—often absent due to his father’s work overseas in the British foreign service—but not much beyond that. Vinyl: “Joe’s childhood was a real off-limits subject. Even to somebody like myself, who was fairly close to him.”

  In a late-1976 interview with Caroline Coon, Strummer let down the wall a bit: “The only place I considered home was the boarding school my parents sent me to. It’s easier, isn’t it? I mean it gets kids out the way, doesn’t it?”

  The bitter words masked a more complex reality. Strummer’s father lost his own parents in a car crash at an early age and grew up in an orphanage with his brother. One can only speculate how this trauma factored into the decision to place Strummer and his brother in boarding school at the ages of eight and ten. In any case, the pain appears to have been handed down to the next generation.

  Strummer spat out adolescent venom to Coon: “[Boarding school] was great! You have to stand up for yourself. You get beaten up
the first day you get there. I’m really glad I went because I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t gone . . . I only saw my father twice a year. If I’d seen him all the time I’d probably have murdered him by now. He was very strict.”

  The harsh remarks hinted at Strummer’s fraught relationship with his father and, by extension, his mother, Anna MacKenzie. While Vinyl senses that much had been left unsaid between the two Mellor men, he declines to speculate further.

  Nonetheless, a man whose childhood was marked by long separations from his parents while at a stern boarding school, who lost his only brother to suicide during that time, would likely carry lasting wounds. Such a person might feel special guilt leaving his own newborn for long stretches as well—but this is exactly what would happen if The Clash were to be tireless road warriors as promised.

  In a sign of how dysfunctional intraband communication could be, Sheppard, White, and Howard only learned about Strummer’s loss a week later. Sheppard: “There was a big to-do about something or other, and all of a sudden Bernie is laying into us, screaming about how we always complain. ‘Look at Joe, he’s just lost his father and you don’t see him moaning about it.’ I was just floored.”

  Strummer didn’t ask for any support with what he was going through, and would have been unlikely to get it anyway. The pace of Clash life was fast, and—as in war—there was little time for comfort or condolence. Even Vinyl himself now bitterly regrets his lack of attention to his friend on this level: “There was just so much to do. We were on a mission. Much like somebody working on a sports team is not that interested in whether one of the star players is having a second child or whatever, do you know what I mean? The guy is thinking about winning the trophy, getting the form back, or whatever it might be. He’s not thinking about their private lives and their fulfillment on that level, you know?” While Vinyl hastens to add, “I’ve changed a lot since then,” at the time, Strummer carried the burden largely alone.

  This meant charging into heavy fire on his own Normandy beach: London, where the band had started, and could expect to face the most skepticism. Shows in Edinburgh, Blackburn, Liverpool, and Portsmouth had gone well. Anticipation was high, and so were ticket sales: two shows at the Brixton Academy—capacity five thousand—on March 8 and 9 sold out so quickly that three additional shows were added, with postponed Irish dates in Belfast and Dublin sandwiched in between.

  * * *

  Yet another front was about to be opened. On March 1, as Strummer was absorbing the news about his father, the director of the South Yorkshire Coal Board announced that the Cortonwood coal mine would close in six weeks. This sudden pronouncement angered miners employed there, as the coal vein in their pit was not exhausted, and the enterprise remained profitable.

  Immediately, agitation for a strike there began, and on March 5 a vote was taken to authorize work stoppage. As the Cortonwood miners went on strike, Ian MacGregor announced that more than a dozen other pits would close in 1984, for a net loss of over twenty thousand jobs. Furious, Arthur Scargill warned that this was just the beginning of a full-on assault that would close more than seventy pits, decimating the industry.

  While this indeed was the plan, Thatcher’s government denied it loudly and consistently, painting Scargill as a hysteric. Nonetheless, the Cortonwood strike spread to other pits. More and more miners came out, determined to make their stand. By March 12, so many were out that Scargill declared it a national strike.

  This decision was swiftly attacked as illegitimate by the Thatcher government, which pointed out that a national vote of the entire NUM membership to approve such strike action was required. In this, Thatcher hoped to split the miners and short-circuit the strike. It is possible the NUM would not have gotten the required majority in a vote, given that a significant portion of Nottinghamshire miners—whose pits were thought to be safe from closure—opposed this action.

  However, other miners whose jobs were on the line resented the possibility that those whose jobs were safe might stand aside and watch their brothers go on the dole. As a Cortonwood miner said, “We won’t give them a vote on whether or not we lose our jobs.” If this was understandable, some worried it was a strategic error by the NUM. Thatcher would batter them for waging an illegitimate strike, thus justifying what would be ruthless tactics to undermine and destroy the NUM.

  Far less convincing was the argument that the NUM was foolhardy to begin a strike as spring approached. MacGregor—and behind him, Thatcher—had struck the first blow. Whether shared with the public or not, there was now a death list. Once these mines were closed, they would almost certainly never reopen—so it was now or never if thousands of jobs were to be saved.

  Thatcher had shrewdly chosen the optimal time for the confrontation. Given what was at stake, however, the miners could not afford to wait for a better moment, which would likely never come. The miners knew it was do-or-die. They took to the picket lines determined to save their communities and defeat Thatcher.

  The Clash take a five-night stand at Brixton Academy. (Poster by Eddie King.)

  “Resistance”—the band’s live fury at Brixton Academy as the miners strike begins. (Photographer unknown.)

  * * *

  As pickets went up in mining communities across Britain, The Clash brought their heavy artillery to the Brixton Academy. This was home, and the band was prepared to fight to retake this ground.

  The NME had put the group on the cover of its February 25 issue in preparation for the homecoming. The resulting article by Richard Cook did not neglect the hard questions, but mixed witty jabs with a sense of taking the band seriously. Cook posed his essential query early in the article: “In nin’een-ady-FORE The Clash are back again. Do we want them back? Do we need them?”

  This seemed the perfect setup for yet another takedown. Astonishingly enough, what emerged instead was a genuine give-and-take, where Cook allowed himself to be touched by Strummer and Simonon’s persistent passion.

  Cook challenged Strummer’s bashing of Boy George and similarly androgynous UK popster Marilyn, saying, “They are doing what you say you want to do, changing people’s attitudes,” albeit in a different way. At the same time, Cook was clearly taken with Strummer’s call for punk to once again be like a blowtorch incinerating the dismal pop landscape.

  Strummer was in fine fettle, ripping drugs, apathy, and right-wing politicians: “It’s all rubbish! With Reagan and Thatcher strolling away to victory . . . That’s why we are back. We’re needed!”

  Simonon: “Basically [we’re] getting on with the job . . . it’s risky. But we are a band that takes risks.”

  Strummer jumped back in: “I aim to outwork all those people and get rid of them. We’ll smash down the number-one groups . . . Pop will die and rebel rock will rule.”

  Strummer paused, then unleashed a final salvo: “I’m saying stop the drugs. Vote. Take responsibility for being alive. I’m prepared to dive back down the pavement again—give me an old guitar and some shoes and I’ll fuck off . . . [but] The Clash has been elected to do a job and it has been neglected. I’d rather have a stab at it with a fresh team. That’s the path of honor for me.”

  Cook found himself grudgingly convinced: “It’s a heroic manifesto, a tidal wave of convictions—and maybe we need a loudmouth bastard like Strummer just as much as we need a boy in braids who says be yourself . . . Their opportunity, at a time when pop is in its most lachrymose and indulgent doldrums, is to recreate their epiphany.” Although Cook felt “this is their last chance,” he also somewhat incredulously concluded: “Is 1984 the year of The Clash?”

  The band was hoping to make this so. The five Brixton shows proved to be fairly epic, with packed houses every night and over-the-top response. Its weapons sharpened by six weeks of steady gigging, the new Clash knew it had to deliver, and it did. The Irish shows were similarly spirited, with massive, joyous crowds.

  Nonetheless, reviews in the UK music weeklies were anything but raves. Lynden
Barber of Melody Maker picked up where Record Mirror’s Reid left off, spewing negativity. Allowing that Strummer’s “heart was (and is?) in the right place,” Barber lacerated with descriptors like “pathetic” and “farce,” terming the whole affair “nothing more than a reactionary surrender to the forces of nostalgia.”

  Some slams were strikingly personal: “Poor old Joe Strummer. It’s 1977 all over again up there onstage and he desperately wants us to believe in it. Moreover, he desperately wants us to believe in him because it ain’t too nice when people get cynical and think you don’t mean anything anymore, especially when you privately realize that they’ve probably got good reason.”

  Not to be outdone for anti-Clash cred, NME published not one but two slams. A review of the opening-night show—Gavin Martin’s “Jail Guitar Bores”—tipped its hat ever so slightly to Richard Cook’s relatively upbeat take, then burned it all down: “This new Clash are no big departure, they are still entangled with all the old faults . . . The calisthenics, the heroic posturing, the riot scenes and war footage are all still there . . . [They are] still hung up on self-aggrandizement.”

  On one hand, The Clash was “posed perfect rebels” engaged in “hollow myth-making.” On the other hand, substance was no-go as well. Strummer’s “disparate declarations on everything from the White House, to welfare, to women’s sorry lot,” only led Martin to complain that the singer “labors his points unnecessarily—a Clash audience (even though mostly white males) knows well the level of political import and intent without having it rammed down their throats.” Describing the night as “the heaviest and most orthodox rock show I’ve ever seen the Clash play,” Martin concluded: “Mostly they were terrible.”