We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  That time was coming around again, for Strummer returned to London to learn that The Clash had been booked to play five shows in Italy as part of the “Festival of Unity.” This was an annual cultural extravaganza sponsored by the Italian Communist Party, an exponent of “Eurocommunism,” which sought to recapture the movement’s original aims, challenging both the US and USSR.

  White, Howard, and Sheppard were overjoyed. White: “We were just [feeling], ‘Thank God, we’re going away and doing something, instead of fucking around in a studio every day.’” Sheppard was ideologically pleased as well: “The Communist Party held these huge festivals every year, featuring all different kinds of music, partly to generate funds for the party on the local level—they operate politically at a town council/county council level, with a network throughout Italy—but also to enhance the cultural life of the country.”

  The venue, however, posed more questions about the band. As Gray wrote, “The Clash of ’76 had managed to generate a righteous anger and capture the imagination of the country’s youth on far less fuel than [the miners’ strike]. The Clash of ’84 remained on holiday until September of 1984. When they did reconvene it was to play a series of gigs for the Communist Party. In Italy.”

  Gray would claim, “The motive was chiefly financial,” but this seems unfair. Three months had passed since The Clash last graced a stage. The battle had grown hotter, but no new songs had appeared, no recording had commenced. Like Strummer, The Clash was nearing a point where stasis becomes disintegration.

  The decision to return to the band’s fountain of energy and inspiration—the Clash audience—seemed essential. While it might have been better to be focused on the home front, these shows would help determine if, indeed, a band still existed.

  The summer of 1984 had held high drama for Thatcher, with the chances of victory or defeat shifting like the weather. The Coal Board and the NUM were now in talks. One of Thatcher’s biggest worries was that MacGregor would fold under the miners’ pressure and agree to what she saw as an unsatisfactory settlement.

  When talks broke down just short of agreement, Thatcher recalled later, “I was enormously relieved.” The government assault was intense and multipronged, and Thatcher’s sense of righteousness remained undiminished, but the miners were proving to be a far more tenacious foe than the Argentinians.

  As her authorized biographer Charles Moore recounts, “So uncomfortable did the situation seem that President Reagan took the step, highly unusual in an ally’s purely domestic political difficulty, of writing to Mrs. Thatcher.” Reagan purred encouragingly: “I have thought often of you with considerable empathy as I follow the activities of the miners’ and dockworkers’ unions. I know they present a difficult set of issues for your Government . . . [but] I’m confident as ever that you and your Government will come out of this well.”

  Reagan—a leader of the actors’ union in his more liberal days—had faced down many unions himself. Indeed, his destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981 had been an inspiration for Thatcher, as had his ability to co-opt other unions such as the Teamsters to support his agenda.

  He had his own challenges, however. The day after Reagan wrote his soothing words to Thatcher, Walter Mondale mounted the stage at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco to accept the nomination for president.

  Evoking the diversity in the room—“black and white, Asian and Hispanic, Native and immigrant, young and old, urban and rural, male and female, from yuppie to lunchpail”—Mondale dismissed Reagan and his party as “a portrait of privilege” while describing the Democrats as “a mirror of America.” To underline this point, Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, the first time a woman had gained the vice presidential slot for one of the two big parties in the US.

  “Over the next one hundred days, in every word we say, every life we touch, we will be fighting for the future of America,” Mondale proclaimed. “Four years ago, many of you voted for Mr. Reagan because he promised you’d be better off. Today, the rich are better off. But working Americans are worse off.”

  Describing the Reagan regime as “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich,” Mondale reached out to communities hit hard by deindustrialization: “Three million of our best jobs have gone overseas. To big companies that send our jobs overseas, my message is: We need those jobs here at home. And our country won’t help your business—unless your business helps our country.”

  On foreign policy, Mondale promised to “reassert American values,” pressing for human rights in Central America, the removal of US military advisers, and an end to “the illegal war in Nicaragua”—a direct attack on the current policy in the region. He also blistered Reagan over the nuclear arms race: “Every president since the Bomb went off understood that we have the capacity to destroy the planet and talked with the Soviets and negotiated arms control. Why has this administration failed? Why haven’t they tried? Why can’t we reach agreements to save this earth? The truth is, we can . . . [and] we must negotiate a mutual, verifiable nuclear freeze before those weapons destroy us all.”

  Mondale then evoked one of Joe Strummer’s favorite themes: truth. “Americans want the truth about the future . . . Whoever is inaugurated in January, the American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan’s bills. The budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up. Anyone who says they won’t is not telling the truth.

  “Let’s tell the truth,” Mondale called out, building to a crescendo. “It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” As the crowd roared its approval, Mondale returned to the attack: “There’s another difference. When he raises taxes, it won’t be done fairly. He will sock it to average-income families again, and leave his rich friends alone. And I won’t stand for it. And neither will you and neither will the American people.”

  It was a rousing speech, a powerful vision for America. Clearly relishing his newfound role as truth-teller, Mondale—long criticized from the left as a timid and centrist “old news” Democrat—seemed ready to take the fight to Reagan.

  Across the ocean, another vision had risen. SEX STYLE SUBVERSION read the banner across the back of the stage at Stadio Simonetta Lamberti, a soccer stadium in Cava de’ Tirreni, a small city adjacent to Naples in southern Italy. The provocative yet vague banner—not glimpsed since its debut at the US Festival—seemed an odd match for a socialist band playing a Communist festival.

  As a crowd of 15,000-plus roared approval, a slender man with spiky hair strode to the microphone and let loose: “Hip-hoppers! Punk rockers! Young ladies! Show stoppers! The . . . Clash . . . are . . . out . . . of . . . conttrrroooolllllll . . .”

  As the words reverberated through the stadium, Kosmo Vinyl walked away, his words followed by the spaghetti western tune “Sixty Seconds to What?” While the music swelled, the staccato chords of “London Calling” split the night air. The crowd erupted in waves of pogoing as The Clash burst into the light.

  The sound was tight, seemingly unstoppable. Few outside the band’s inner circle could have guessed that the very first time that the entire five-man unit had been together in over three months was several hours earlier for sound check.

  Sheppard recalls, “We didn’t rehearse once for the shows in Italy. We just went and did ’em. We didn’t see Joe until he was sound-checking in Naples.”

  As it happened, Strummer had arrived in Naples days earlier, but passed up connecting with the band to go out with some locals. Italian fan Luca Lanini remembered, “Joe was in Naples a couple of days before the gig and became friends with some juvenile delinquents of a notorious central slum named Quartieri Spagnoli. He roamed around town with them on the back of their scooters.”

  The company Strummer was keeping and his somewhat rumpled appearance led to trouble when he tried to visit the National Archaeological Museum. Lanini: “Joe wasn’t allowed to enter because of his Mohican haircut and his lion-tamer ja
cket.” After a frantic series of calls, journalist Federico Vacalebre—who had written the first Italian book about The Clash—was summoned and succeeded in getting Strummer into this hall of hallowed antiquities.

  The band knew none of this. Asked if Strummer offered any explanation or apology for his extended absence, Sheppard responded simply, “No, he didn’t.” The sound check itself consisted of Strummer barking out “‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ in F sharp!” and the band doing a swift run-through of the Gene Vincent classic.

  Given all of this, the show went off astonishingly well—a tribute, surely, to the work Howard, White, and Sheppard had put in on their own, with an occasional assist from Simonon. The set didn’t stray far from that established on the US tour, although several key new songs like “Pouring Rain,” “Jericho,” and “The Dictator” were missing. The night also saw the return of the much-maligned “Should I Stay or Should I Go” in the second encore.

  The most intriguing moment came six songs into the set when Strummer stopped to query the crowd: “You must know that we are English, right? Inglese . . . This is what it is like in England tonight!” On that cue, Sheppard hit chunky guitar chords reminiscent of the Modern Lovers’ protopunk classic “Roadrunner” and the band launched into a revamped “This Is England.” If not nearly so fully renovated as “Pouring Rain” had been, the song—which could sometimes seem a bit stiff—benefited from the more even tempo and improved dynamics.

  Beyond showing that the newer members had continued to stretch and shape the songs, this suggested that—all appearances to the contrary—Strummer was following events on the home front closely. He was nonetheless barely more engaged with the band on this tour than he had been since June, traveling on his own, regularly drinking to excess, seeming detached and aloof.

  To White, Strummer was “out in the stratosphere . . . not exactly a space cadet, more like the galactic general.” Sheppard was a bit kinder if no less concerned: “Joe was drunk pretty much all the time. Sometimes it was good value, other times he was best to avoid. I think he was really upset, hurting.”

  An interview with Vacalebre after the Naples show provided a glimpse of Strummer’s bleak frame of mind. Asked about the Sex Style Subversion backdrop, the singer offered a laconic response: “These three words represent us, we can’t do without it.”

  When Vacalebre brought up the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Greenham Common Peace Camp, Strummer dismissed the groups, saying, “We are not interested in them,” explaining darkly, “War is everywhere, inside us, there is no other peace than what we have now, which is armed, nuclear. Our life is at the maximum peace we could possibly have, unfortunately.”

  Strummer then expressed similar disdain for the massive marches a few months before, saying simply, “Bob Dylan sang about it in 1963.” This seems a reference to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a protest song steeped in despair; in the words of rock critic Mick Gold, it was “impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind.”

  Strummer—allegedly hard at work on new songs for months—also had some startling words to share on that front: “After the tour we’ll concentrate on writing new material. You’ll be surprised when you listen, you’ll snap your fingers, you’ll howl with wonder, it will be different from what you’ve heard to date. Maybe it will be pop, at least in part, and will appeal to women too. You have my word.”

  Strummer only became genuinely effusive when speaking about his recently made comrades, mixing praise for them with a swipe at his home city: “Those street kids have become my friends, introduced me to Naples, such an old, charming city . . . I saw where they live, where they have fun, what problems they have finding work, or having sex with their girlfriends. I liked Naples, it’s alive, sunny, carnal, sensual, not depressing and boring like London.”

  Strummer sounded fatalistic and unmoored, but there was one upbeat development when the band finally came back together. Much to Sheppard’s pleasure, “Joe wanted us to stretch out musically . . . He was really pushing us to jam at the gigs, maybe to test our suitability for the planned new Clash record.”

  This began to show on the second night, September 7 at the Palasport Arena in Rome, another spacious stadium filled with fervent fans. “London Calling” once again opened, this time featuring an extended guitar intro with first drums and then bass phased in bit by bit. The music built gradually and then pulled back to welcome Strummer—fully two and a half minutes into the song—before blasting off.

  An extended quiet section also appeared late in “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” As with the opener, this was a powerful addition, making space for a graceful crowd sing-along and some melodic guitar passages.

  Strummer was very animated onstage, trying out more of what White called his “pidgin Italian” to engage the crowd. He gave an apparently spontaneous—and somewhat off-color—introduction to “Rock the Casbah,” asking the crowd if they know what a “casbah” was. With no answer forthcoming, Strummer held forth: “The casbah in the Middle East is where you go to get down with something, maybe hear some dirty rhythm or something funny with a snake or if you want to do something with a donkey!” Regardless, this proved to be another powerful show, maybe even better than the night before.

  While the band grew more musically assured with each day, Strummer was in a downward spiral. Salewicz writes, “Joe went on a three-day bender, guzzling bottle after bottle of brandy. Raymond Jordan was appointed to babysit Joe through this crisis.” Howard remembers Strummer “screaming in the hotel bar,” and both he and White recollect band meetings where Strummer outdid Rhodes in verbal abuse. “As though Joe was acting as manager, everyone was torn to pieces,” Howard says. “Usually these events ended with someone in tears.”

  Strummer’s erratic behavior was obvious the third night, at Stadio Mirabello in Reggio Emilia. The show started off strong again, with the extended “London Calling,” followed by fierce versions of “Radio Clash,” “Safe European Home,” and “Career Opportunities.”

  Strummer then paused to bring on a young female fan he had met earlier in the day to serve as translator. Calling her “honey” and “baby,” the boozy singer launched into his appeal, which the Italian gamely translated: “Has anyone noticed OUT THERE . . . They have all the bookshops, all the bloody restaurants, everything . . . How come I stand here in this SHITHOLE without even a toilet!?”

  The crowd roared, and Strummer answered his own question—“Because they’ve taken all the money!”—and turned back to the woman, ordering her, “Now tell them, ‘Let’s get down!’” As puzzled fans struggled to absorb this, Strummer coached his admirably patient translator through introductions of White, Howard, and Simonon. Finally, the singer introduced himself, with self-loathing nearly dripping from his tongue: “My name is the biggest fucker in the world! Get it?”

  Strummer dismissed the woman with a curt, “Grazie, baby,” and shouted, “Here is Signore Nick Sheppard!” Amazingly, the transition was seamless. When the guitarist ignited “Police on My Back”—which had now become his main vocal showcase—the set finally emerged from the theater of the absurd.

  After urgent versions of “Are You Ready for War?,” “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” and “Three Card Trick,” Strummer paused again, this time to ask the crowd for requests. When an audience member called out for “Lover’s Rock,” the frontman responded with apparently genuine shock: “‘Lover’s Rock’!? Are you sure about that? You must be crazy, man, you must be crazy!”

  It was a bit of inspired humor, taking dead aim at one of the least successful Clash songs ever—but then Strummer went on to yell, “We’re all fucking crazy!”

  Such a clichéd rock and roll outburst seemed desperately out of character.

  While the band swiftly launched into a slam-bang rendition of “Complete Control,” Strummer seemed anything but in control—a point underlined when the singer then introduced the feminist epic
“Sex Mad War” by praising “the nice-looking women in Italy . . . bella bella bella!” Once again, the performance was dynamic. But even though the rest of the set was equally fervent and well played, no sober observer could fail to be concerned about Strummer’s condition.

  If anything, the tour’s final show at Genoa’s indoor Arena Palasport before more than ten thousand spectators on September 11 was even more electric and chaotic. White later described the show as “a riot,” and he was not far off the mark. In many ways, the evening was a classic Clash performance, with just enough unpredictability and danger to keep any showbiz boredom fully at bay.

  Introducing himself as “Harry the Fucker,” Strummer once again put the knife in his own chest. Beyond that, he led the band through one of its most dynamic, wide-open shows. Sheppard recalls, “Joe was wild and excitable and wanted us to stretch out musically.” One of the fruits of this came early in the set: a gorgeous “Spanish Bombs” that began almost a cappella with Strummer singing over somber drums and muted guitar before building to a ferocious climax.

  If Strummer was a bit “off the rails”—in Sheppard’s words—it could make for compelling theater. “Are You Ready for War?” started strong but partway through Strummer went off, abandoning the usual lyrics, ranting and raving. The band valiantly stuck with the singer, until he literally waved them off, barking an order for them to go into “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.”

  The band complied, but as Strummer hit the song’s climax, he suddenly stopped. Yelling, “Venga! Franco says it’s cool . . .”—apparently a reference to Italian promoter Franco Mamone—the frontman started inviting the crowd onstage.

  It is not apparent why Strummer did this. Sheppard later speculated that the singer was bored and simply wanted to interrupt entertainment-as-usual. It is also possible that he may have felt too much distance from the crowd.

  A few days before, Strummer had defended playing in this series of huge venues: “It’s the only possible way. We cannot do five concerts in Genoa, five in Naples . . . Can you imagine what would happen if instead of being here we chose a small club? We do not want thousands of people forced to stay out of our concerts for the enjoyment of the privileged few.”