We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Indeed, Vinyl had tried to kickstart the collaboration by bringing the two together in a hotel room on the US sojourn. A tour can prove a difficult venue in which to midwife new material, however, and there were no results from the meeting. “I took it as a compliment,” recalls Sheppard, “but it seemed a bit forced really.”

  Given that finding a new songwriting partner could relieve some of the weight on Strummer, it seemed worth a second try. Yet no such opportunity for swift entry into either a studio or creative collaboration appeared to be in the offing. As White bitterly recounts, after the band’s return “it was just pointless rehearsals for me, Nick, and Pete. Joe was nowhere to be seen. Nor Paul.”

  White allowed that, initially, Strummer’s absence did not seem worrisome. Even before America, the singer “was turning up less and less to rehearsals. I don’t think it was because he couldn’t be bothered, but more that he was extremely self-conscious about his voice . . . He seemed more comfortable singing in front of forty thousand people than four.” But as days stretched into weeks, concerns mounted.

  Sheppard remembers how an uncertain stasis became the new reality: “As soon as we got back from America, it started to get very weird, dysfunctional, straightaway. Joe disappeared from rehearsals . . . We didn’t really see him. Paul was around sometimes, and not around other times.”

  This was a jolting turnabout from the constant motion to which the new members had become accustomed. More to the point, it seemed at odds with the talk of a platoon bonding under fire, the urgency of The Clash’s unfinished job, the promises of a new record knocked out swiftly, with fire and finesse.

  One key player was not making himself scarce, much to the chagrin of White: “Bernie began turning up more and more at rehearsals . . . delivering spiteful verbal tirades at the three of us, making sure we knew how inadequate we were, how tenuous our situation was, how we had to be more ‘happening.’”

  While Sheppard and Howard were perhaps more immune to Rhodes’s harangues than White—“I tried to build a thick wall in my brain against [the attacks] but it kept falling down”—it left all of them even more confused and demoralized.

  Rhodes was privy to a bigger picture and perhaps feared Strummer was slipping out of his control. In part, this was because family life had reclaimed its priority upon the singer’s return. Strummer surely needed time to regenerate and reconnect with his wife and daughter, but such concerns had little place in Rhodes’s vision for The Clash—hence his squeeze on those still in his grip.

  According to Chris Salewicz, “Bernie didn’t believe that the group was yet ready to record.” Rhodes: “The live thing was working, but Joe wanted to rush into the studio. He was worried when he heard Mick was getting [a new band] together.”

  Both Rhodes and Vinyl also believed the band simply didn’t yet have enough top-notch tunes. As the latter explains, “After the US tour, Joe was trying to come up with material and do lyrics. Meanwhile, the other guys were in rehearsal with on-site recording facilities—and what did that produce?”

  Sheppard, White, and Howard unanimously agree that they were never encouraged to write new songs, but instead were asked to rearrange existing Clash songs or record covers. Vinyl remembers it differently: “All of them were asked to record something they wanted to record. It turned out to be covers because there wasn’t anything else to record . . . It became apparent that they were not songwriters,” at least not of the caliber that The Clash required.

  The situation bred contrarian responses. Sheppard: “I recorded The Temptations’ ‘Just My Imagination’ because it was the least punk thing I could think of.” Vinyl admits that the trio “weren’t taken on board as songwriters,” but still insists, “The opportunity was there.” Sheppard’s response: “I worked on a funk riff at nearly every sound check on the US tour hoping that Joe would pick up on it, but he never even noticed, to my frustration.”

  Sheppard understood a deeper challenge, the result of being a latecomer to the band: “If you’re going to write songs with someone, you need to be their equal. Your voice needs to be heard and appreciated. There is also the question of the magic that needs to happen, and that needs to be allowed to happen.” The perpetual boot camp created by Rhodes hardly nurtured creative expression.

  The main exception had been “In the Pouring Rain.” Vinyl granted, “Something good had become even more impressive” thanks to Sheppard and the others. Even so, “The time it took to happen was too long . . . We just didn’t have the time.”

  Sheppard had his own analysis: “I need to be able to hear something in a song that inspires me to take it somewhere. With some of Joe’s songs, I didn’t—and when I did, the ideas were apparently not good enough,” at least for Rhodes.

  This remains—in Sheppard’s words—“a bone of contention” within the neo-Clash camp. It is true that, despite later missteps, Jones had helped set a very high artistic standard. Vinyl: “It was intimidating. Look at what you are competing against—that immense Clash catalog! No one thought it would be easy.”

  This was a key crossroads for the platoon. That this collaboration really wasn’t even tried suggests either cynicism underneath the idealistic rhetoric or—more likely—exhaustion.

  Whether by design, miscommunication, or necessity, Strummer now felt the creative weight resting on his shoulders alone. Vinyl: “I don’t think Joe thought it was going to be as hard to come up with material as it turned out to be. As Joe came to see more was on his plate than he realized, the pressure compounded.”

  Sheppard: “With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve no doubt that huge amounts of thought were being given to how the record would be made. Of course, no one communicated this to us; it would have been too direct and sensible.” As it happened, he was correct—but in ways no one could have guessed.

  The germ of a shocking twist was growing in Rhodes’s mind. Unbeknown to all save perhaps Vinyl, the manager had begun to doubt the wisdom of a return to the sound of the first record. Rather—in an ironic echo of his nemesis Jones—Rhodes now wanted a great musical leap forward.

  This ambition fell within the best Clash tradition, and Vinyl would later claim that “a return to the first record was never our intent.” This contradicts Strummer’s own words, but also begs a fundamental question: how could this be done? Given Strummer’s own raw rock proclivities, and the reality of personnel chosen to undergird the “back to basics” drive, it was hard to see how a vaguely imagined reinvention of The Clash could be realized.

  Rhodes did not yet have answers for this conundrum. It may have served his purposes for the momentum of the US tour to ebb, and for Strummer and the band to remain—for now—in creative and personal stasis.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the miners remained stalwart, but the defeat at Orgreave convinced their leadership that the present course was untenable. While left-wing critics like Alex Callincos and Mike Simons of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) argued, “The Battle of Orgreave could have been the beginning of a real attempt to win the strike by mass picketing,” soon the pickets were sent elsewhere.

  The coking plant would never again see mass picketing. As the SWP duo lamented, “In the wake of the police riot at Orgreave, many people were sympathetic to the argument that the police were now unbeatable. The miners had tried to use the methods of 1972, and had failed.”

  Although Callincos and Simons disagreed with the idea that the miners should concentrate on “winning wide sympathy . . . building a broad alliance around their objectives,” it was hard to deny that Thatcher had learned the lesson of Saltley Gate. Her newly militarized police force had proven its worth in turning back the miners—and now Thatcher sought to win the public relations battle as well.

  She got unexpected aid in this mission when the BBC implicated the miners in sparking the Orgreave violence by inaccurate editing on its evening broadcast. By placing images of miners fighting back before images of the state-sponsored brutality, the program suggested th
e police were simply acting in self-defense. While a later edition corrected the order of events, the damage was done.

  A mock-up of the blocked Sun cover. (Artist unknown.)

  This error was mild compared to the daily deceit dished out by British tabloids, chief among them the Sun, owned by right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Sensationalist in their coverage and hewing only loosely to journalistic ethical conventions, these newspapers were also entertaining and popular.

  Following Murdoch’s lead, other tabloids excoriated alleged union corruption and violence. One planned Sun cover portrayed Scargill as Adolf Hitler, raising his arm in a Nazi salute next to the headline “Mine Fuhrer.” While this cover was ultimately scrapped thanks to the refusal of the unionized Sun workers to print the paper, others nearly as provocative appeared regularly at newsstands.

  This relentless assault by right-wing scandal sheets was effective in swaying public opinion. They were aided by the timidity of the more mainstream press, whose “objectivity” often appeased the government. The clearest evidence of this came when only one of the seventeen major UK papers published the iconic John Harris photo of the unprovoked police assault on Lesley Boulton at Orgreave.

  The result was predictable. On June 30, the Economist reported that only 35 percent of the British public supported the miners. A Gallup poll in July showed that 79 percent disapproved of the methods used by the NUM. Both confirmed—in the words of Thatcher biographer Moore—“a growing view that the NUM, and Scargill in particular, were committed to unjustified violence.”

  This was precisely the narrative that Thatcher sought to foster. On May 23—before the confrontations at Orgreave—she spoke of “an ugly streak of violence” that “has disfigured our television screens night after night. Reports appear of those who have been intimidated because they seek to go to their place of work, to pursue their occupation, and to support their families . . . Trade unions were founded to protect their members from threats and bullying. And yet there are leaders who could say the word to stop violence, but who fail even to condemn it.”

  This spin was inspired, reframing flying pickets as “violent” and the maintaining of union discipline as “intimidation.” Even as police roadblocks made a mockery of freedom of movement and speech, and Thatcher unleashed the power of the state to tap phones and sow chaos inside the NUM, the true threats to freedom and democracy were . . . miners struggling to save their livelihoods.

  The police even claimed that Scargill was not attacked, but had simply fallen down and hit his head. In the highly charged atmosphere, it was hard to know what to believe, unless one witnessed events directly. With the combined might of the state, the police, and the corporate media, Thatcher and Murdoch were able to largely control public perceptions in ways that Orwell had warned about.

  Yet as Callincos and Simons note, “The defeat suffered by the miners at Orgreave had a contradictory effect.” Even as the skewed coverage led much of the public to question the strike, the brutality led a smaller but still significant group “inside and outside the mining communities to think about [the strike] in much more general political terms, as a broad class issue.”

  The miners, then, had potential new allies. While most were from the larger labor movement, others came from more unlikely sectors. This solidarity from a committed minority of the broader public gave hope to the striking miners.

  “The battle is getting hotter,” Strummer sang in “Armagideon Time,” and there could be no truer summation of Great Britain in the summer of 1984. Yet as the moment cried out for action, the singer was paralyzed. After eight months of nonstop motion, he was exhausted, hurting, brooding about choices made.

  Gaby Salter was overjoyed to have her husband back, even if he seemed dogged by shadows she didn’t quite understand. “Initially I thought perhaps he was out of touch through living in the bubble of the world of The Clash for so long,” Salter recalls. “I never doubted Joe’s integrity at the time but I do think that he was pretty naive and allowed himself to be hoodwinked, especially by Bernie . . . I sat back silently waiting for [the new Clash] to implode.”

  This could surely happen—but Strummer might come apart first. Salewicz: “Joe [was] coming out with all that stuff about going back to basics, but if you look at him, the state of his soul [was] fairly evident. You’re not convinced that he’s convinced. He also seems extremely angry . . . actually imploding with anger.”

  In “Clampdown,” Strummer argued that “anger can be power.” Clearly that emotion had driven many of his greatest achievements. But anger directed within can turn poisonous. Salter: “It wasn’t till later that I recognized what was happening: Joe was depressed.”

  This was not a new issue. In 1982, Strummer had spoken about his ongoing struggles with Mikal Gilmore: “Suicide is something I know about. It’s funny how when you feel really depressed, all your thoughts run in bad circles and you can’t break them circles. They just keep running around themselves, and you can’t think of one good thing, even though you try your hardest.” While Strummer added, “But the next day it can all be different,” his road had remained rocky. Salter also knew what few others did: Strummer had returned home to find his mother was likely terminally ill, facing a struggle with cancer.

  Vinyl also knew about this latest heartbreaking development, but wasn’t in a supportive mind-set. Similarly exhausted by the uphill grind, and burned out on the music business rat race, Vinyl had put Rhodes on notice of his desire to leave. He had not yet told Strummer or Simonon, fearing that they would feel betrayed and even more burdened—especially the struggling singer.

  As Vinyl remembers, “The situation in the band at the time didn’t take into account any domestic or personal issues . . . Joe was not in a sympathetic environment at all. We were pushing toward something crucial and everything else was secondary.” The consigliere later admitted, “That lack of support is very hard and ultimately not sustainable. But that wasn’t my perspective at the time, I wasn’t thinking of sustainability at the time—none of us were.”

  Strummer was stretched to the limit. Salewicz: “Now his mother has got cancer, Joe’s going to visit her regularly. He’s been in a crisis really ever since Mick’s kicked out of the group, but it’s like . . . there’s a succession of kind of plunging ravines that he’s crashing down.”

  Strummer might not have acknowledged this, for as Salewicz sadly suggests, “He’d run a mile to get away from his emotions.” This was the unreconstructed masculinity shared by most in Strummer’s peer group, heightened by his fraught history with his parents and his harsh experiences of English boarding school.

  “Joe went to public school—not what they are in the US, but these elite boarding schools—and the British public school boy of that time had the bit of your brain that connects to your emotions severed on your first day,” Howard says. “Anybody who feels any emotion is bullied mercilessly . . . it’s not seen as the proper thing to do. I know quite a few public school kids of Joe’s generation, and they haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on in their own heads and bodies. They’re not allowed to be in touch with it.”

  Howard continues, “Such kids are usually wealthy enough, or arrogant enough, or educated enough, or connected enough, that feeling or expressing their emotions isn’t essential—they’re protected from on high. It becomes a habit, hard-wired into you, that you can push all of that down . . . because there are other things that’ll help you through, like money and property.”

  Strummer was never in this crowd’s top echelon, and had stripped away as much of his privilege as possible. But some bits went too deep for easy extraction. Feeling desolation, yet wishing to project positivity, Strummer rarely admitted to his darker emotions. When he did, it was sometimes expressed in artistic terms.

  As ex-Clash comrade The Baker explained, “The concept of ‘not minding that it hurts’ [was] something Joe was very conscious of.” Evoking the example of Lawrence of Arabia “and the abuse he allowe
d and willingly encouraged at the hands of the RAF-enlisted men after the war,” The Baker went on to recall how “Joe went through his own short phase of masochistic indulgence when in 1977 he would slick back his hair, dress like a Teddy Boy, and go off to rockabilly shows and pubs that were famous for being in Teddy Boy territory.”

  As the “Teds” were the deadly enemies of punks, this risked violent attack. Indeed, The Baker recounts, “This tempting of fate, of pushing the envelope further and further, resulted in Joe being badly beaten one night by a Ted in the toilets at the Speakeasy.” When visiting at London’s Western Hospital, The Baker asked the battered singer about deliberately courting assault: “I remember vividly Joe’s response: ‘If you want to create, you need to suffer.’”

  Nineteenth-century British essayist Thomas de Quincey put the notion in more lofty terms: “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.” This idea was central to Strummer’s creative impulse, and part of why he remained deathly afraid of the isolating, cocoon-like life of rock stardom.

  The “redemptive suffering” motif wound through many of the singer’s inspirations. Jesus proclaimed, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and his path was known as the “Via Dolorosa,” the way of suffering. Rastafarian reggae pioneers like Bob Marley celebrated the “sufferers,” the poor in the shantytowns like Jamaica’s Trench Town.

  Strummer found great power in music created out of such oppression. In one interview on the 1984 US tour, he linked reggae and the blues in this regard: “When I heard those blues singers I knew it was for real. ’Cause what did we [British] have? Cliff Richard, Lonnie Donegan, Straightsville. But Howlin’ Wolf, he shouts to the top degree; everything comes out. It’s not feeble, it’s gnnrrraaahh, gnnnrrraaah, and you know it is born out of sufferation.”