We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Shaking up the set a bit, Strummer got the band to work up “Broadway” in its place. Since the new band had never played the song, “We had to go out and get a record to figure it out!” Sheppard laughs. At the same time, “Junco Partner,” “Jimmy Jazz,” and “Koka Kola” were also brought up from the basement. None were among the stronger of the band’s catalog—not really a match for the newly dropped “In the Pouring Rain,” or maybe even “We Are The Clash” and “Glue Zombie”—but they added variety, helping Strummer keep his performing fresh.

  Unlike with “We Are The Clash,” Sheppard wasn’t satisfied to see “Rain” disappear: “Some songs have space, you can find your way into them, do you know what I mean? I found the way in on ‘Pouring Rain.’” Stripping out Strummer’s rhythm guitar, Sheppard had experimented with a different arrangement that opened with graceful, descending chords. Slowly shaping it up, he’d shared his ideas with White and the others during free time at sound checks.

  As the tour wore on, Strummer leaned on his absurdist humor. At one show, he dedicated “Armagideon Time” to “anyone who has turned down a Hostess Twinkie and felt the better for it.” In a stiflingly hot Chicago club, he kicked off “White Riot” with a wry query: “What I’d like to know, judging by the temperature in this room—if this is the Windy City, where’s the fucking wind?”

  Above all, Strummer sought solace in his Clash platoon—or at least his romantic conception of it. In New York, he motioned to the rest of the band, telling the crowd, “We ain’t pretending to be friendly with each other when we are standing in front of you. When we go into the back room, we actually are friends. I tell you a lot of famous groups hate each other’s guts, they won’t even get in to the same car with each other . . . I don’t want to go forward into that situation.”

  When the entire band was interviewed by a cable TV show in Toronto, Strummer took this one step further. Asked about his personal life, the singer blurted out, “If you are really serious, you haven’t even got time for a personal life!” Later in the interview, he added, “I have no friends.”

  The interviewer asked the obvious follow-up: Why not? “Because when we started this group we realized we had to dump everything that we’d had previous, and that included everybody we’ve known, everybody we’d lived with.” As Simonon seconded that, Howard jumped in: “Yeah, that’s why we don’t need a personal life outside this group, because this is it. This is it.”

  The reporter probed: “Why don’t you have any friends, is it because your views are so pure that you can’t let in any outsiders?” Strummer nodded: “You can, but it is weakening in some way. You’re getting at it with what you said about ‘pure’—when we put the group together, we tried to reinvent the world from scratch.”

  The journalist persisted: “But when you reinvent the world, you have to invite some other people to come with you . . . ?” Strummer clenched a fist and launched an empathic rejoinder: “Yeah, but I mean ‘reinvent the world’ because we are looking for an idea, not because we are throwing a party!”

  The vision Strummer and the band put forward was a demanding one—the platoon, whole unto itself, tight-knit, self-sustaining, unstoppable. The image presented in the interview was not exactly untrue. The band had surely come together musically, as well as somewhat on a personal level. For example, Simonon and Sheppard had bonded enough for a jealous White to notice.

  However, there were worrisome elements. Strummer seemed to share his inner life with no one in his band. By pushing down the feelings, channeling it into his performances, he might be a riveting frontman—but was he happy, healthy, centered? If not, his creative momentum was not likely to be sustainable.

  Another unresolved tension remained. After soldiers endured punishing boot camps, real effort was made to build group solidarity. This was not so in The Clash, where boot camp never ended. As King ruefully admitted, “Bernard wanted it uncomfortable, he wanted it vital and raw, at each others’ throats. He kept you edgy, on your toes—he would antagonize just to make something happen.” If this approach could accomplish some things, it hardly fostered unity.

  Other factors also tended to divide, including money—specifically, why there wasn’t more of it, especially for the newer members. White tried to get Sheppard and Howard to join him to press Rhodes for more pay midtour. “Fucking socialism in action, I thought,” chortled an unrepentant White later. Finding no takers, the guitarist went to Rhodes anyway, only to be flatly refused and left feeling like a “greedy capitalist.”

  At the band meeting later that day, White expected to get roasted by the irascible manager. To his surprise, Howard instead became the focus of fire from both Rhodes and Strummer for supposed lack of commitment, in what White later described as a “mafia meeting.” Invited by Rhodes to either shape up or find new employment, Howard walked out.

  While Howard was brought back in time for the evening show, the incident suggested the internal band situation was more complicated than Strummer let on. That was underscored when White and Howard came to blows onstage at the May 25 show in Denver. Henry David Thoreau—one of those uniquely American “lunatics, individuals, and madmen”—had argued, “Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.” If so, how well was The Clash doing this?

  If aspects of the new Clash appeared dodgy, the music was not. The strongest proof was a refurbished “In the Pouring Rain” which returned to the set in Dayton on May 8. There could hardly have been a more appropriate moment for its reappearance, as the show began a swing through America’s Rust Belt.

  The song had been inspired by what Strummer called the “ghost towns” of the northern UK, devastated by an increasingly globalized economy, accelerated by Thatcher’s polices. It fit the similar doldrums of this once-vibrant heartland. This descent into rust had been worsened by Reagan’s policies. A global “race to the bottom” was underway, one that slashed American jobs in favor of foreign workers who received slave wages while corporate profits boomed. Though cheaper consumer goods also resulted, this was little comfort for previously comfortably middle-class workers who now couldn’t afford even inexpensive products.

  “Rain” was immensely strengthened by the revamp. The verses breathed and built momentum throughout the song. Even if the postchorus blastoff was missed, something extraordinary was coming together, a song worthy of its weighty subject matter: the wrenching pain and dislocation felt in such hard-hit communities.

  Strummer carefully linked Rust Belt tragedy to the ongoing struggles at home, telling one audience that the “situation is bad in the UK, just like this country.” Back on the British picket lines, neither side had been able to strike a knockout blow. A grim war of attrition was developing, a situation that might not favor the miners.

  Realizing this, Scargill decided to target the Orgreave coking plant with mass pickets. Thatcher feared this would become a reprise of “The Battle of Saltly Gate” where striking miners joined with other workers to close the Saltly coke works in Birmingham and effectively win the strike in 1972. Determined to prevent this, the Tory leader put pressure on the police to increase roadblocks to stop flying picketers, and embrace mass arrests and other rougher tactics—effectively outlawing dissent and easing the way for brutality.

  Locked in their alternate reality, The Clash was unaware of much of this. The musicians were now racing toward the end of their sojourn in the US—a tour that, despite the obstacles, had been a significant success.

  Strummer’s exhaustion was starting to show. Introducing “In the Pouring Rain” in St. Louis on May 21, he was boozy and bereft: “All the towns are dead! I mean it! I’ve been in more towns the past eight weeks that I can even think of and they are all dead! They are all dead in Europe, they are all dead everywhere! This is ‘In the Pouring Pouring Motherfucking Pouring Rain,’ jacko!” His outburst muddled the song—not all towns were dead, only those whose hearts had been ripped out by free-market policies—and suggested the singer’s ragged spiritual state
.

  The performance was nonetheless potent, and Strummer showed no further signs of strain that night. He was back on message over the week, announcing “Rain” as “news straight from England!” Audience tapes capture the fan reaction: in St. Louis, one deems the song “fucking great”; in Eugene a few days later, a woman can be heard gasping, “That was beautiful!” at the song’s end.

  So it was. With three weeks of continued growth and polish, “In the Pouring Rain” had become a stunning achievement, on the level of truly great Clash songs like “Straight to Hell,” “Complete Control,” and “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” Sheppard’s descending chords drew listeners into the tale, and White’s leads added to its pathos. The guitars played off one another, conjuring a sense of utter desolation, as if lost in a driving storm, drenched to the very soul.

  Could there be a way to turn this tide, a current that seemed as relentless and unforgiving as the English weather? Perhaps. In the US, it was becoming clear that Mondale—a longtime union supporter who spoke passionately against Reagan’s economic policies—was to be the nominee of the Democratic Party. In May 1984, he also pledged his commitment to ending the nuclear arms race, reaching out to activists like Helen Caldicott to press the issue on the campaign trail.

  Reagan’s team was watching closely. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane later admitted, “We took [the nuclear freeze] as a serious movement that could undermine congressional support for the nuclear modernization program and potentially a serious partisan political threat that could affect the election.” It would not be easy, but most observers thought Mondale had a fighting chance to defeat Reagan, denying him a legacy-sealing victory.

  Meanwhile on the UK picket lines, pressure was growing day by day, as a decisive confrontation loomed. As in America, a bitter contest for the country’s future was underway. Who would emerge victorious remained to be seen.

  The Clash was winding up its US campaign, bone-tired and homesick, but justifiably proud. In Seattle, Strummer sparred with overzealous security while shepherding a fervent crowd so no one got hurt. Communing with three thousand souls packed into the Paramount Theatre, the singer led his bandmates through a blistering set.

  After four months of intense touring, the group was a rock dynamo, with new songs played with a ferocity and skill that made the promise of an amazing new record seem real. The band’s eighty-minute set was clockwork paced, with the final half hour a breathless sprint through highlights of the band’s catalog.

  Just before the show—the second to last on the tour—Simonon mailed a postcard to old friend Moe Armstrong in California: “Howdy! Well, after two months and 20,000 miles of American roads, we are now ready for home!”

  Were they really ready? Outwardly, the collective mood remained as bullish as ever. “We certainly don’t fall into the category of people that are willing to shut up,” Vinyl offered backstage at the University of Oregon. “We like to get in an argument, right? Once you get a big argument going, you get all kinds of people involved, and then you get—maybe you get a few answers.”

  But had the band found its own answers? The unit was not truly unified, and a costly bill for unresolved issues would soon come due. Meanwhile, the band was headed back to a country on the brink of something close to civil war.

  chapter five

  out of control

  Police charge miners at Orgreave, June 18, 1984. (Photo © John Sturrock/reportdigital.co.uk.)

  We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.

  —Margaret Thatcher, July 19, 1984

  Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.

  —Thomas de Quincey, 1845

  The riot shield came down hard, with a sickening crunch. Hit from behind, Arthur Scargill pitched face-first to the ground, knocked senseless.

  It was barely past eleven a.m. on Monday, June 18, 1984. Chaos swirled around the unconscious union leader as riot police and mounted officers assaulted miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield.

  The attacks had been coming in waves for two hours. Many miners had taken off their shirts in the morning heat, shedding their only protection against the savagery. Amid what was effectively a police riot, an impartial observer might have been forgiven for thinking that George Orwell’s 1984 was coming to pass.

  NUM member Arthur Wakefield witnessed the unprovoked assault on Scargill. Ironically, it came mere moments after the union president had rebuked some miners who—angered by the earlier attacks—were throwing stones at police lines.

  The repeated brutal charges sowed panic in the mostly peaceful ranks of picketers. Wakefield recalled, “The lads were climbing the fence on the opposite banking, some of them falling down, being chased by the police on horses and with dogs . . . The ‘cavalry’ are first as usual, then the riot squad.”

  Lesley Boulton, a strike supporter armed only with a camera, was helping a bloodied miner only to be targeted herself by a mounted policeman. John Harris’s camera captured the moment the baton came down. Clash biographer Marcus Gray spoke for many in calling this photo of the officer leaning out to take a full swing at the unarmed female spectator “the most memorable image of the miners’ strike.”

  “I felt the truncheon go past me—just missed by the skin of my teeth,” Boulton explained. “The police were actually having a very good time, they were laughing and joking, enjoying this huge exercise of brutal authority . . . You got the sense that they were just out of control, completely carried away.”

  Such bare-knuckled displays contrasted with the bland assertions of government white papers: “The traditional approach is to deploy large numbers of officers in ordinary uniforms in the passive containment of a crowd.” The real aim, however, was shared in police tactical manuals: to “incapacitate” the miners.

  The Labour Party paper, June 22, 1984—one of the few media outlets to publish this photo. (Photo © John Harris/reportdigital.co.uk.)

  The day had dawned with electricity in the air, but little sense of the carnage to come. In the biggest face-off in the now fourteen-week-old strike, perhaps ten thousand miners and supporters stood across from more than five thousand police, including riot squads and mounted officers.

  The union had been targeting Orgreave for three weeks, seeking to turn the tide in what was not only the biggest industrial dispute in recent British history, but a true struggle for the country’s future. Previous days had been confrontational, with injuries and arrests, especially on May 29, when the riot squads had made their first appearance. At the time, Scargill argued, “The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.”

  Now the NUM intended to make its stand, shutting down the plant, blocking trucks, and cutting off the supply of coke to the nearby Scunthorpe steelworks. To do this, the union needed massive numbers of picketers to overwhelm police lines. Their call had been answered. As Wakefield recalled, “I’d never seen so many of our lads all together, it brought tears to my eyes.” The police had similarly bolstered their ranks.

  This meant a struggle for control at the gates of the plant, one that would begin once trucks were sighted. The strikers didn’t have long to wait. Wakefield: “There was a lot of shouting going on as the lorries went in. It’s eight forty-five a.m., the lads started the chant of ‘Here We Go’ and there was one big push against the police lines”—a literal push by massed miners against a similar clump of government forces. It was turned back, and the first wave of trucks swiftly rolled through.

  This contest was commonplace by now, repeated daily over the past three months. Although very physical, it generally followed certain unspoken rules that limited injuries on either side. Today would be different.

  While some stones had been throw
n from deep in the miners’ ranks earlier, there was little happening when suddenly the lines opened and a phalanx of mounted police emerged with blood in their eyes. Wakefield: “This time the police went berserk and the riot squad charged up the field with the ‘cavalry’ [and] they did something that I had not seen them do before, they turned to where we were standing peacefully picketing and started hitting whoever they came across. I’m thinking, ‘This is it’ . . . I’d never seen anything like it.”

  The police even pursued picketers into the nearby village, brutalizing at will. Broken and bloodied, the miners scattered. “The battle kept going on and off until one p.m.,” Wakefield remembered. “It was like ‘Monday, Bloody Monday.’” There were seventy-nine people hurt and ninety-three arrests, including a shaken but unbowed Arthur Scargill, wearing a United Mineworkers of America baseball hat sent as a sign of solidarity from across the ocean.

  Seventy-one miners would soon be charged with “riot,” an offense carrying a possible life sentence. If this penalty seemed extreme, given that most had done nothing except be on the receiving end of a truncheon, “The Battle of Orgreave” showed how just far Thatcher was willing to go to defeat the miners.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the band whose first single was entitled “White Riot,” whose new songs “This Is England” and “Three Card Trick” warned of batons dishing out bloody “law and order,” and whose singer had just crossed America evoking the unfolding British drama night after night, was doing . . . what exactly?

  The Clash had been home for two weeks from its triumphant US tour, the journey intended to solidify the band and shape up the new songs in preparation for a triumphant “return to form” record.

  The group was now razor-sharp musically, with nine new songs battle tested and well honed. Some unaired demos like “Galleani” and “Out of Control” also had strong potential. If this was not quite enough ammunition for a new album, the reimagined “In the Pouring Rain” suggested that the unit—or at least Strummer and Sheppard—might be able to create other potent new songs in short order.