We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  The New York Times acknowledged this in an article on October 14, 1984, “The President and the Press,” which focused on how Reagan’s handlers sought to stage-manage their agenda by keeping national media outlets on a short leash. Even when the rare presidential press conference did happen, reporters were given little chance to ask real questions. When they did, Reagan turned on his folksy charm to skillfully evade inconvenient queries, smiling all the while.

  The Reagan administration stymied the press in more muscular ways, such as by barring reporters from covering the US invasion of Grenada, an event that provoked little public outcry. According to the Times, “Many people outside the Government appeared to share the view expressed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz: ‘It seems as though the reporters are always against us. And so they’re always seeking to report something that’s going to screw things up.’”

  Whether due to carrot or stick, many agreed. “Reagan had been one of the least scrutinized presidents in our nation’s history,” the Los Angeles Times opined. Perhaps it didn’t matter if the media had failed due to public indifference and administration manipulation, or had come “on bended knee,” kowtowing before the imperial presidency as critic Mark Hertsgaard argued. According to the New York Times, the result was the same: “The press has seldom been relegated to a more secondary role in determining the national agenda.”

  * * *

  Back in Camden, Sheppard, Howard, and White continued to bang away on their own. Simonon occasionally appeared, with Rhodes a more frequent but rarely friendly visitor. If the three hoped their strong performances under challenging conditions in Italy might lure their singer back to the fold, they were disappointed.

  “Joe disappeared,” White says. “It made no difference to us seeing as we never saw much of him anyway.” Nonetheless, this time seemed different: “There was suddenly a lot of concern in the Clash camp about his whereabouts . . . He supposedly hadn’t told anyone where he’d gone.”

  As worry rippled through the Clash ranks about a possible end to the band, White remembers, “Bernie told us that he’d broken up with Gaby and taken time away to sort himself out.” Salter later told White this was not true. The disgusted guitarist “no longer gave a fuck. I was sure that His Royal Highness would resurface when required.” Days turned to weeks and Strummer still didn’t appear.

  Rhodes eventually delivered a sign that the singer was out there somewhere—tapes of what were supposed to be possible new songs. Their arrival hardly inspired joy, for as Sheppard recalls, “They were just raw chords and shouting, no lyrics, no melody . . . Terrible rubbish.” The three were somehow expected to polish these into something of worth.

  The situation seemed absurd. White: “Bernie was very suspicious, very Stalinesque. It was all under wraps, just like top-secret information. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but—looking back on it—it just seems insane.”

  Sheppard agrees: “It started to get pretty nasty, pretty insecure. Attempts were made to explain what was going on, but they weren’t convincing.”

  The trio put their backs into the task, but with dwindling hope. Sheppard explains, “The whole situation was very, very weird . . . It was if we had ceased to be a band of five people after our return from America.” Each day without new songs left them no closer to a studio, no closer to making the landmark record promised.

  Yet the rump of what had been—and might someday once again be—The Clash soldiered on, hoping to make something of the creative chaos handed to them, and for the “platoon” to somehow be remobilized.

  Meanwhile, the much-sought-after Strummer rematerialized in Granada some three weeks after his first visit. He resumed his friendship with Jesús Arias and the members of his brother Antonio’s band, 091, and made a new acquaintance, music journalist Juan Jesús García.

  The two met in inimitable Strummer fashion. Arias: “Joe was so drunk he got lost in Granada. He ran into Juan Jesús García and told him, ‘I don’t know where my hotel is,’ so Juan Jesús took him there.” When a grateful Strummer offered García a gift in return for his kindness, the journalist asked for an interview.

  “Joe said, ‘Okay—let’s meet at this place and time tomorrow,’” Arias recounts. “Juan Jesús thought Joe was so drunk he’d never remember but called me to translate in any case.” When Strummer did appear, the trio embarked on a wide-ranging conversation that gave tantalizing glimpses into the singer’s present thinking.

  Wearing sunglasses and his Out of Control hat, Strummer spoke slowly and quietly, nursing a monstrous hangover. With Arias as go-between, García started off by asking why Strummer had come to Granada.

  Juan Jesús Garcia, Jesús Arias, and Joe Strummer, Granada interview, October 1984. (Photo courtesy of Juan Jesús Garcia.)

  Sipping his “hair of the dog”—carajillo, coffee with cognac—Strummer responded in a low, gravelly voice. “Obviously I am obsessed with Andalusia,” the singer said, then adding a second motivation: “The atmosphere in London is . . . depressing, depressed.” However, Strummer’s most important reason was “to think . . . I wanted to see things clearly, to be objective. I think I am getting there.”

  Asked about the present situation of The Clash, the singer replied simply: “One of reconstruction.” After a brief pause, he elaborated a bit: “To learn from all the mistakes of the past and to understand. To feel the pain of all the mistakes of the past and so to do it better in the future.”

  Pressed on the possibility of Jones returning to the band, Strummer held firm: “No, no. It will not be possible to be The Clash with Mick Jones. Because to be in The Clash, you must be able to self-criticize. And he doesn’t like to be criticized.”

  García probed further, asking how The Clash kept credibility after the ejection of Jones and Headon. Strummer humbly responded, “I don’t know. I guess it’s because we have never tried to be anything but ourselves. We are what we are, nothing more. We don’t try to imitate an archetype or anything like that.” Turning to face the central critique of many current detractors head-on, Strummer asserted forcefully, “I don’t want The Clash to be a parody of ourselves!”

  Evidence of deep soul-searching lay beneath Strummer’s words: “Above all, we have to be honest with ourselves, be able to self-criticize, to analyze ourselves. We have to play with the same passion before one spectator in an empty club as we do with thirty thousand in the audience. When people recognize this, they respect you. In this, we find The Clash’s credibility.”

  Asked if The Clash’s political stance was unaltered, Strummer’s voice rose, immediate, emphatic: “Of course! I think the singer can be the madman outside of society, singing the truth. To be a singer you must live there always—always.”

  A skeptical García pushed back, “How can you be outside the record business in a capitalist world? You have to be inside!”

  Strummer granted the point, yet persisted: “Yes, but the record company can never dominate you, if you have independence, a position of strength . . . [At the US Festival] they asked us to play for half a million dollars. We agreed, and with that half-million you can say to the record company, ‘Don’t fuck with us’—that is independence.”

  Shifting his angle, García then brought up attacks on The Clash by Crass and other newer punk bands. Strummer growled and launched a terse, enigmatic rejoinder: “These groups, they thought the game was . . . easy. They came for the game the way the animals come to the slaughterhouse.”

  When García praised the way Sandinista! and Combat Rock utilized a vast array of musical forms such as jazz, reggae, funk, and blues, Strummer dissented: “No, it’s no good. There is no way that you can play better jazz than a jazz man. A jazz man plays jazz. The reggae man plays reggae. I am a rock man. I am not jazz or blues—I am a rock man, so now I will play rock.”

  The singer then connected past mistakes with lessons for now: “We lost the idea of unity on [those records] but we learned what we should do in the future: it is bes
t to stick to one approach that you grab ahold of and realize deeply. This is the difference between Combat Rock and the new record: Combat Rock was the sound of confusion; the new LP will be the sound of clarity. Mas duro—HARDER. But more clear, because no jazz, no reggae.”

  Strummer suggested recording for the new record was imminent. While this would have been news to the rest of the band, García took it at face value and queried why he would come to Andalusia right before the sessions began. Strummer shot back, “I could not stand one more day in London!” adding wistfully, “I love Granada and I want to write songs for the new record here . . . Granada overwhelms me and gives me the peace necessary to write.”

  When García queried about his progress, Strummer was ebullient: “I don’t want to boast, but I think it is the best writing of my life. The first days here I wasn’t getting anywhere when suddenly—flash flash flash—there were millions of images in my head. It was fantastic. I got into a bar, I stood at the bar and kept writing.”

  Strummer’s enthusiasm seemed real, as Antonio Arias’s startling first meeting with him would suggest. But the weirdness of the encounter indicated something out of balance, as did the focus on words rather than music, given that the latter was the crux of Strummer’s creative dilemma.

  The singer’s ever-changing mood also suggested it was all more complicated than he let on. At points, Strummer seemed almost schizophrenic. The happiness with his writing expressed to García contrasted with what he shared privately with Jesús Arias: “Joe would say, ‘I’m shit, man . . . I’ve done nothing with my life!’ I’d say, ‘What do you mean? You are Joe Strummer!’” Magnified by alcohol, the self-doubt shaded close to self-hatred.

  When García tossed a softball question—“Do you like some new musical groups?”—Strummer remained silent. When pressed, he finally gave an answer that was, in his own words, “all around town”: “Before I had very fixed ideas. Now I am flexible, I know better than to be fixed. I want to be like the wind or water or trees or clouds; I want to understand everything. So, the answer is: I don’t know.”

  When García pushed on this again, asking if Strummer was interested in popular new rock acts like the Pretenders or the Romantics, the singer responded obliquely: “I am interested in the eight directions.” A puzzled García followed up: “What are these?” Strummer: “When I know, I will tell you.”

  “The eight directions” is a Hindu concept, used in this case apparently as his way of saying something like, I am adrift, with no direction home. So he was, for later in the interview, his “anti” stance of early 1984 reappeared. Ripping current music as “weak shit,” Strummer called for a new musical revolution to be made by the people just learning to play now: “Let’s go forward with the new generations!”

  A sense of uncentered longing rose when Strummer discussed the nature of fame: “Once I was in strange countries with only a guitar and some shoes and nothing else. Once I have done this. I know there will be a time when I will live this life again. I am ready for this life. Success is good, but it doesn’t kill me to be the bum again.” If the return to this motif suggested an admirable humility, it fit uneasily with the reality of his wife and child waiting back in London.

  The gap between Strummer’s aims and his ability to live them yawned ever wider. First, the Clash frontman movingly recalled his former musical partner: “Mick Jones and I were best friends, wrote all the songs together, shared the same passion for Andalusia and García Lorca. We had similar ideas about everything, I liked how he developed within the group, how he played guitar.”

  But, he continued, “Mick started to think that he was a rock star, and didn’t like the self-criticism and self-examination that is part of The Clash. When the band started to get on the terrain of ‘we are the greatest,’ this was dangerous territory, where you can lose perspective on things. We lost the ability to communicate with each other, not just about musical differences. We didn’t understand each other as people. That’s why I told Mick to go.”

  Finally, Strummer confirmed that part of the schism was related to drugs: “Mick went crazy with marijuana—all day, spliff after spliff. It was unbearable. Drugs are a waste of time that destroys people.”

  This was essentially the antidrug stance Strummer had proclaimed across Europe and America for the first half of 1984. But Arias saw a darker side: “Joe was letting down his guard some by the time I met him. It could be funny, in a sad way. One night he was smoking joints, one after another. Then he tells me, ‘I fired Mick Jones because he was smoking too much joints.’” To Arias, Strummer seemed unaware of—or at least unable to overcome—the contradiction.

  Sensing Strummer’s deep pain, Arias was sympathetic, but worried: “Behind the brave face, Joe was utterly lost.” Strummer told García and Arias he had come to Granada to “detoxify from England.” He had a curious way of doing this, marinating in alcohol, pot, and late nights, rarely shaving or bathing.

  Rationalized by Strummer as an artistic catalyst or even a form of therapy, this “bum” lifestyle seemed more indicative of depression or addiction. Aware of this, the Clash frontman tried to not have too much alcohol during the interview, saying to a waitress offering a second carajillo, “No, one is enough. Lots of alcohol is for the nights, the day is for work . . . I have a lot of work to do right now.” Still, Arias rarely saw Strummer less than mildly drunk during this period.

  The anguish seemed unending. When not expressed in drug use, it came out in tears. Arias: “We had been in the countryside and were coming back to the city when Joe suddenly sighed: ‘How wonderful it is to be to be alive!’ When I asked why he said this, he said: ‘I had a brother who committed suicide, I loved him. If he had come to Granada he would never have committed suicide!’ and started to cry.”

  Arias: “I thought, ‘This man is very sensitive’—and he was—but he kept breaking into tears at other times too. Then I realized he had a lot of pressure on him, he was coming apart.” Strummer’s guilt was deep and apparent as well; Arias saw him withdraw five thousand dollars from a bank and give it to a beggar on the street.

  The scenario was deeply poignant. Most likely, the singer needed medical help for his depression, grief counseling, maybe even alcohol/drug rehabilitation. Instead, Strummer embraced his pain—as a soul salve and creative aid—and then apparently ran from it into his substance abuse.

  García came away impressed with Strummer’s humility and sincerity. Moreover, Diario de Granada—the local paper for which García wrote—had a genuine scoop. Much to his dismay, however, the article languished. Arias: “The editors didn’t think much of it, they didn’t know who Joe Strummer was, didn’t care. Finally, on a slow news day two or three weeks later, they said, ‘Okay, let’s publish this.’”

  This, of course, was part of why Strummer had chosen to come to Granada. “Here he was nobody,” Arias says. “Joe told me, ‘Being in Spain is like being in Kenya,’ he could get drunk all the time and no one cared.” By the time the Diario de Granada article appeared on November 18, however, Strummer had returned home to face his distinctly non-bum life.

  * * *

  As Strummer was wrestling with his demons and his creative process in Spain, extraordinary drama had been playing out in the United Kingdom. An Irish Republican Army bomb aimed at Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton missed her but killed five others. Emerging defiant and unscathed from the attack, Thatcher’s popularity rose.

  Shortly thereafter, Thatcher pulled off another coup: by utilizing a spy in the labor union ranks and marshaling intense pressure, she was able to get the NACODS strike called off by the union leadership. Any hope of quick victory for the miners vanished with this decision, denounced as a “sellout” by Arthur Scargill.

  As the Guardian later reported, “When [the NACODS strike] was called off, the relief in Downing Street was palpable: ‘The news was announced this afternoon and represents a massive blow to Scargill,’ read the ‘secret
and personal’ daily coal report for Wednesday 24 October” that came to Thatcher’s desk.

  The impact of this sudden reversal was immense. After that day, few neutral observers could see any obvious road to victory for the miners. In addition, the advance work on the legislative front was paying off, as judges were siding with Thatcher’s government against the union. As fines levied on Scargill and the NUM mounted, and control over union funds was taken over by the courts, the strikers were left even more bereft and impoverished.

  Winter had once been seen as a possible savior of the strike, for increased heating demand might exhaust coal stocks and lead to power cuts, pressuring the government to give in. But coal supplies were still high, thanks to the careful stockpiling and the mines defying the strike in Nottinghamshire and beyond.

  This left many miners among the only Britons lacking for warmth as frigid weather arrived. Some families began to scrounge for usable nuggets of coal from gigantic slag heaps. This was an exceedingly hazardous endeavor, and lives would be lost in the process.

  As the police tightened their grip on the mining communities, violence flared. Union solidarity ran deep in these communities. More miners began to trickle back to work, and the struggle to enforce the strike became more intense. “A single scab brought a whole community onto the streets,” according to Callincos and Simons. As a result, villages could be “cut off from the rest of Britain for days while the police occupied it like a conquering army.”

  Strummer was well acquainted with how vague laws against “sus”—“suspicious behavior”—were regularly used against nonwhite youth. He had often critiqued Britain’s police force as “fascist.” This bemused most white Britons, raised with the notion of the friendly neighborhood bobby. Now, however, the constabulary was becoming loathed in the mining towns as the brutal political pawns of Thatcher.