We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  According to one village resident, “My kids now call the police ‘pigs.’ I didn’t teach them, they’ve learned it for themselves. I used to see it on the telly, kids in Northern Ireland treating police like this, and thought the parents must be to blame. But now, you don’t need to indoctrinate them. The police do it for them.”

  Betty Cook of Women Against Pit Closures agreed: “We would read in the press before, say about a young black boy claiming he was beaten up by the police, and we would think, ‘He must have done something.’ The strike taught us better; we began to understand [other] people’s problems.”

  Police officials reported to Thatcher that miners “frustrated by the failure of mass picketing are taking to ‘guerrilla warfare,’ based on intimidation of individuals and companies.” With the media largely under Tory control, this escalation—even if understandable—was likely to be self-defeating, as it reinforced Thatcher’s narrative of “union violence” that eroded broader support for the strike.

  The miners saw no choice; they had to win the strike or face death as an industry. Feeling let down by their brothers and sisters in other unions—many of whom feared confrontation with the Tories, lest their own jobs be lost—the strikers turned to each other, with astonishing resolve. As Callincos and Simons detail, “Women began organizing communal kitchens for the striking miners and their families driven by desperation and a realization that clubbing together makes food go further and sharing poverty makes it easier to bear.”

  While hardship mounted, these operations became essential for the strikers’ families shadowed by hunger. Rallying supporters across the land, the women “devised ways to raise money to fund the soup kitchens and soon many became more politically active, joining the picket lines beside their male relations and friends.”

  For women like Cook, the strike also forced a reevaluation of roles previously unquestioned, as she bluntly told the Guardian in 2004: “During the strike, my eyes were opened and after it I divorced my husband. The strike taught me a lot, I had always been told I was stupid by my husband but I learned I wasn’t.” This newly awakened female power would be one of the strike’s lasting legacies.

  Woman feeding a child at a soup kitchen for Cortonwood strikers’ families. (Photo © Martin Jenkinson.) Inset: Coal Not Dole button. (Courtesy of Mark Andersen.)

  While the solidarity of the mining villages was being tested, so was that of The Clash. In photos taken by García in late October, Strummer’s dog tags were obvious—a sign that he recognized that somewhere the rest of his unit was waiting. How would Strummer bridge the growing gap? “He didn’t talk about the new band much,” Arias says. “I never saw him confident about them.”

  Nonetheless, something seemed to shift for Strummer during his second visit to Granada. “I’ve often lost myself / in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake,” Lorca had written, describing something like the process that Strummer had used, first in Paris, then again in Granada, to try to find a way out of darkness.

  If Strummer was unsure about his comrades, the new band was hardly feeling confident in him. Still mulling the mysterious tapes, Sheppard, White, and Howard now received their next gift: sheets of music with nothing but chord patterns.

  While these seemed almost equally useless, the blow was softened—because Joe Strummer delivered them in person during a short visit to the practice space, his first in months. But was anything really resolved? Or had Strummer simply buckled under the immense pressure of manager and record company to return?

  This turn of events marked Strummer’s reengagement with the band—though it would not be smooth. Strummer had intimated to García that the album would be out in February, suggesting recording was imminent. But The Clash’s leader had returned with tidings that were not entirely glad.

  Strummer’s announcements were shared at a band meeting called at a Camden bar. The good news was that—after the latest three-month hiatus—The Clash would finally play live again: a pair of benefits for the miners’ strike at the Brixton Academy in early December, with rehearsals to commence shortly.

  The singer still seemed out of sorts, and this news came off in an ugly way. Sheppard: “Joe sat us down and said, ‘Right, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna play some benefits. It’s a good publicity stunt.’ I thought, ‘Why the fuck would you say that? That sounds really cynical and stupid.’”

  The guitarist remains adamant: “I didn’t believe for a second we did those gigs to further our own career—keeping our heads down would have done that better. My response was, ‘I don’t care why you say we’re doing them; we are and about fucking time!’ If you’re gonna have politics, go do something, you know?”

  White found Strummer’s latest pronouncement in sync with his own dark suspicions about the Clash mission: “My question mark over all of that, really, with Joe’s integrity, with regard to those kind of things—did he believe them or not, or was he just kind of using them as a tool? Did Joe really care about the miners, what was happening in England? I don’t know.”

  Strummer’s confounding words suggested a continuing internal struggle with despair. White was feeling equally weary: “I didn’t care about miners or Thatcher or Scargill or working-class struggle or fucking anything else for that matter.” His lack of enthusiasm proved wise—for Strummer had another bombshell to drop, once he was sufficiently lubricated with alcohol.

  White: “We’re drinking cognac at lunchtime. Then on to beer and by three in the afternoon, Joe drunkenly informs me that Nick and I aren’t good enough to play on the forthcoming Clash record.” After all the touring and other work to build a powerful new Clash—labor that was clearly paying off, as the live shows proved—this sudden reversal seemed to make no sense at all.

  Years later, White shrugged it off: “Nothing Joe or Bernie said seemed to have a basis in reality anymore. Things just changed from one day to the next, from one beer to the next . . . It was depressing.” Sheppard agrees: “At the same time as the benefit news, it was presented to me and Vince that we wouldn’t be on the record, and that we would be sent off to make some other record with somebody else . . . [It was] just more nonsense stuff.”

  Rhodes’s destructive hand is apparent in this turn of events. The Baker doesn’t hesitate to point the finger: “Joe’s hesitation and lack of direction at the end can surely be attributed to Bernie’s constant haranguing tirades and self-defeating windups.”

  What could be the aim of such tactics? Rhodes faced his own set of pressures, not least from their ostensible employer. As Vinyl points out, “Bernard had an ally in Paul Russell of CBS UK, the part of the company we had technically signed on with . . . He respected The Clash were unlike any other band.”

  Yet there was a financial reality involved as well as an artistic one. Vinyl: “The Clash was one of the few big sellers for CBS UK, it was a feather in their cap, so a lot was riding on a strong follow-up to Combat Rock.”

  This band of headstrong would-be revolutionaries was no record executive’s dream outfit. “At the outset, The Clash was a hard sell,” admits Vinyl. “But as soon as it isn’t a hard sell, it becomes a hard sell again, do you know what I mean? Russell was like, ‘We gave you the space, now where are the goods?’”

  The weight was onerous even for the hard-boiled Rhodes. But it was not the only factor motivating his relentless push on Strummer. The record could indeed have been banged out long ago, per the singer’s often repeated preferences.

  Rhodes had another agenda that was not so open: the new album’s musical direction. This was driven by an artistic intuition that The Clash must move forward, not back. Despite Strummer’s repeated dismissals, Rhodes felt that any leap toward the future had to incorporate elements of the new electro-pop style.

  Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this echoed the view of the banished Jones. While he had dropped both Headon—still lost in addiction—and the idea of launching another Clash, he had a new band: Big Audio Dynamite, a.k.a. BAD
. By early October, the band—which emphasized the hip-hop and electronic elements that had sown such divisions in The Clash—was playing out to good reviews, including opening twice for the Alarm in the north of England.

  Such moves by his nemesis would inevitably worry Rhodes and possibly Strummer as well. Rhodes likely viewed the new record as a way to respond to Jones by keeping the punk edge but adding “modern” touches.

  How was this to be done, who would do it? Given that no one in the present Clash had been recruited with this in mind, and neither Strummer nor Simonon evidenced any interest or proclivity for this, it was unclear.

  Rhodes’s way with his platoon made this more difficult. In Granada, Strummer had touted the benefits of “self-criticism,” urging “all musical groups in Spain and the world to self-criticize—this is the most important thing.” That amounted to an endorsement of the approach that Rhodes had imposed on the band since its beginning, against which Jones had rebelled.

  But if self-criticism in principle made sense, in practice it was often abused. Even as ardent a practitioner as Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground admitted that the results were often “terrible.” In the wrong hands—as often in Communist China and, it seems, in The Clash—this tool for democracy and growth could easily become cover for authoritarianism.

  * * *

  As The Clash prepared for its return to live action, America had gone to the polls. With economic conditions improving for many, and his campaign ads laying waste to Mondale, Reagan soundly thrashed his opponent, winning 59 percent of vote, and nearly all the electoral college tally. Mondale won only Minnesota—his home state—and the District of Columbia.

  It indeed appeared to be morning for the Reagan forces, if not for the country. This triumphant second election seemed to signify a genuine mandate for the president to consolidate and complete his conservative counterrevolution.

  The greatest victor, however, might be seen as apathy, for barely more than half of eligible voters exercised that right. Many of those opting out were low-income citizens who had the most to lose from a second Reagan term. They believed their votes didn’t matter, pollsters reported, that the system was rigged. While not entirely untrue, their absence helped preserve that unhappy status quo.

  Jesse Carpenter was one of those who saw the election as a circus. Carpenter had been awarded the Bronze Star as an Army private in 1944 for carrying wounded soldiers to an aid station in Brittany, France, under “unabated enemy fire,” according to his medal award certificate.

  Carpenter had returned home damaged. Slipping first into alcoholism and then homelessness, he now navigated DC’s streets with his wheelchair-bound best friend, John Lamm. On the night of December 4, the pair came to sleep in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. Not long after dawn, US Park Police found Carpenter lying at the feet of his friend’s wheelchair. He had frozen to death across the street from the presidential mansion.

  The Community for Creative Nonviolence (CCNV)—a direct-action outfit that stood with DC’s homeless—had befriended Carpenter and Lamm. After his death, they won Carpenter the right to a hero’s burial at Arlington Cemetery. “He avoided death abroad to die on the streets here,” said the Reverend Vin Harwell, presiding over the funeral. “His is a story of tragedy, a life disrupted by war, never to fully recover. It is also a story of national tragedy, because this is a nation where millions of Jesse Carpenters are homeless and without help.”

  “Outright outright dynamite / this is the one for the miners’ strike.” Joe Strummer in front of mining village backdrop, Dec. 6, 1984. (Photo by Per-Åke Wärn.)

  Nick Sheppard. (Photo by Per-Åke Wärn.)

  Vince White. (Photo by Per-Åke Wärn.)

  Paul Simonon. (Photo by Per-Åke Wärn.)

  Joe Strummer. (Photo by Per-Åke Wärn.)

  Billboard for the miners’ show. (Design by Eddie King.)

  Draft designs for buttons and posters. (Design by Eddie King.)

  Tickets to the miners’ show. (Design by Eddie King.)

  Montage of mining villages for stage backdrop. (Design by Eddie King.)

  Bunting and stencil designs. (Design by Eddie King.)

  Button design. (Design by Eddie King.)

  Carpenter’s unnecessary death was an indictment of a country grown cold and complacent. When Strummer visited DC in April 1984 on tour, he encountered homeless people sleeping on the street mere blocks from the White House. “What is Reagan doing for people like these?” he growled to a reporter, with the answer self-evident.

  This might seem unfair. Only days before the election, Reagan had agreed to turn a dilapidated federal building near the US Capitol into a model shelter for more than a thousand men and women. This act of generosity, however, only came after one of CCNV’s leaders, Mitch Snyder, embarked on a water-only fast that left him near death. It took fifty-one days and an election-eve appearance by a gaunt Snyder on top-ranking TV news show 60 Minutes before Reagan relented.

  Despite the actions of CCNV and its allies, the death of Jesse Carpenter made hardly a ripple across most of America. Yet only five days before, another tragic death—this one across the ocean, on a road near Rhymney in South Wales—would have a dramatic impact on the fate of a nation.

  Support for the strike in South Wales had been so broad that the area had hardly seen any mass pickets. They weren’t needed. As the strike neared the nine-month mark with desperation and deprivation growing, however, a few broke down and returned to work. Community anger over such “scabs” was intense, leading to daily confrontations as the returning miners sought to go to their pits.

  On November 30, taxi driver David Wilkie was taking a strikebreaker to the Merthyr Vale mine under police escort, as he had done numerous times before. But this time, two strikers were lying in wait to drop a fifty-pound concrete block from an overpass onto the cab. The block crashed through the roof of the Ford Cortina, instantly killing Wilkie and injuring his rider.

  The national revulsion over the killing was immediate and near unanimous, damaging support for the strike even among union partisans. Wilkie was not the first person to die—miners David Jones and Joe Green had been killed while picketing, and three children died scavenging coal—but his death came at a crucial moment, turning public opinion sharply against the strike.

  Gloom spread across the mining communities. With Christmas coming, no money to pay for presents, and precious little good cheer to share, many die-hard union men had to make heartrending choices. Allen Gascoyne, NUM branch secretary in Derbyshire, remembers, “I had a guy come to me at Christmas in tears. He was losing his house. His wife was going to go, he’d got all these debts. I said: ‘We’ve lost, kid, so get back to work.’”

  Despite this advice, Gascoyne himself stayed out on strike, as did most miners, determined to hang on till the bitter end.

  Such was the situation as The Clash prepared to mount the Brixton Academy stage to stand with the miners. Skeptics saw the band as a latecomer to the struggle. “Better late than never,” Sheppard tersely countered. Commencing its first full rehearsals in nearly half a year, the new Clash threw itself into preparing for possibly their most consequential gig ever.

  The Academy was putting itself on the line by hosting an event dubbed “Arthur Scargill’s Christmas Party.” As Simon Parkes recalls, “Established venues such as the Albert Hall and the Hammersmith Odeon wouldn’t touch this gig with a ten-meter pick handle. The last thing they wanted was several thousand angry, hyped-up miners led by, horror of horrors, a punk band.” Left unmentioned was the possibility of retaliation by a government that was always watching.

  Nonetheless, both band and venue fully committed to the show. Long frustrated by The Clash’s inaction, Eddie King was overjoyed to be stepping forward at last: “The police had cut off entire communities, beat up anyone trying to get to them, the government had effectively declared war on parts of its own country, its own populace . . . Everyone wanted to do something
for the miners!”

  King knew the score: “Thatcher had destroyed the entire industrial infrastructure, ripped out the heart of the country. Scargill and the miners were the only viable opposition. It was basically civil war—Thatcher stopped their benefits, seized the union funds, you got thousands and thousands of families without food or heating for their houses, kids dying scuffling for coal scraps.

  “I was on retainer at that time, so only got paid a set amount,” King continues, “but I went above and beyond because it was something we all really wanted to do.” He designed T-shirts, buttons, banners, stencils—“even yards and yards of bunting!” he laughs—all featuring a miner juxtaposed with the Clash star.

  The artist also created a special stage backdrop. King: “It was a massive collage of mining villages, I got photos and blew them up, put them together by hand, it took days and days of work. It was a labor of love.” The result was stunning. “It was like a carnival at the Academy with pictures of miners everywhere!”

  The upbeat vibe was needed. Asked by García in late October if he wanted to talk about politics or Margaret Thatcher, Strummer had let the question hang in the air for a few telling moments before offering a quiet “No.” If this suggested despair about the momentum of events, it surely did not mean an absence of concern. Indeed, as the band practiced for the Brixton miners’ shows, Strummer brought three nearly finished songs for the band to learn.

  One spoke directly to the agony of the miners’ strike. Sheppard: “‘North and South’ was brought to the rehearsals, and we worked that out quickly as a band, along with the two others. The idea was that I would sing it together with Joe.”

  “North and South” was an arresting tune, underpinned by terse, melodic guitar. Its lyrics mourned the gap between a northern England suffering the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression and a prosperous south reaping the benefits of Thatcher’s financial initiatives. Focusing on “a woman and a man / trying to feed their child / without a coin in their hand,” the song asked poignantly, “Have you no use / for eight million hands / and the power of youth?”