We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  This new obsession was simply the latest twist in a lifelong affection for R&B, soul, and other black musical forms, such as the vintage reggae records that Rhodes sold as a market trader in the seventies, alongside hand-printed silk-screened T-shirts he’d begun designing.

  During his exile from The Clash, Rhodes had produced a handful of singles for Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Subway Sect, and Johnny Britton. All appeared on Oddball Productions Limited, a company he had established in 1979. On returning to the fold in 1981, Rhodes had overseen remixes of “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Call-Up” that appeared, respectively, as “The Magnificent Dance” and “The Cool-Out.” Both were credited to “Pepe Unidos,” an alias for Rhodes, Strummer, and Simonon.

  None of these ventures suggested an affinity for the stripped-down rebel rock the new Clash had vowed to tackle. Rhodes was someone who did not “want to be associated with mainstream rock and roll,” former road manager Johnny Green says. “Bernard wasn’t interested in that.” He wanted to make something new.

  Rhodes saw Fayne as key to this plan, the man to program the drum machine to his specifications. Fayne: “That’s why Bernie was bringing in these hip-hop tunes, and trying to brainwash me with it—because he wanted more soldiers to push this down the band’s throat, and move forward.” Having dispensed with the guitarists and bass player, Rhodes was now preparing to sideline the drummer as well.

  This prospect alarmed Fayne enough to register his concern: “I wouldn’t even have used a drum machine, you know! It was so cold, and so removed to what the hell The Clash was about—it couldn’t be any more alien. I, for the life of me, couldn’t figure out why Bernie would go to that extreme. I remember trying to get into deeper conversation with Bernie about the whole situation and being told quite sharply, ‘Listen, we are The Clash,’ meaning him and Kosmo.”

  This shocking statement turned Strummer’s populist anthem on its head, and defied any commonsense assessment of the band. But Rhodes was deadly serious. Fayne: “Bernie meant he and Kosmo were going to take the situation and make it work, regardless of what was going on. I thought that was quite arrogant, but it was kind of like, just letting me know who was boss.”

  This brusque rebuff was sufficient to get Fayne to fall into line, just in time to participate in the next step of Rhodes’s plan. Fayne recalls, “Me and Bernie flew to Munich to find studios and to find personnel—I didn’t understand it all at the time. It was my first trip out of the country, so I was just psyched to be out of the UK, you know? And we were in Munich, we went to loads of studios, and also went to see a few musicians. And it was only then that I realized that: ‘Hold on a minute, there’s something else going on here that I wasn’t aware of.’”

  Michael Fayne still up for the fight, years after Weryton Studios baptism by fire.

  The realization took Fayne’s breath away: “Bernie wanted to reinvent The Clash. He had made up his mind that he was going to produce the record, hands down, and he wasn’t going to take, actually, much advice, or listen to anybody else.”

  Sheppard would later attribute Rhodes’s stance to panic: “What do we do with Mick Jones out of the picture?” However, it seems more born out of an ego-fueled contest with Malcolm McLaren, who had found success as an artist in his own right. Stretching in the same direction, Rhodes now saw himself as the one to build upon Strummer’s songs, a mastermind producer like Menudo’s Edgardo Díaz or Trevor Horn who had made UK hits like “Relax” and “Two Tribes” with Frankie Goes to Hollywood by replacing the band in the studio with session musicians, including, for a time, Gallagher and Watt-Roy.

  Rhodes has never acknowledged any competition with McLaren, but it seems apparent. Quizzed about it in 2013 by filmmaker Danny Garcia, the indefatigable agitator responded that he was responsible for turning McLaren on to jazz, reggae, and hip-hop. Rhodes: “Fact is, I was producing records using different name tags well before (McLaren’s ’83 breakout hit) ‘Buffalo Gals’ was thought of.”

  While possibly true, such dismissals convinced few of those nearest to Rhodes. White: “[Bernie] wanted to be part of the band, really. He wasn’t content with being just the manager. Malcolm had done this ‘Duck Rock’ thing, with hip-hop. I think he just wanted to get a bit of that, some artistic recognition.”

  Rhodes made a decision to remove the band from prying eyes and ears, away from its past haunts in London and New York. West Germany made sense on a number of levels. It was the homeland of electronic pioneers Kraftwerk and close enough physically to be practical, yet far enough psychically to provide the space—or, perhaps, the complete control—needed.

  The vision was extraordinary. The Clash could at once retain its revolutionary message, advance musically, and continue its commercial ascent. Fayne: “In terms of The Clash aiming to be the biggest band in the world—I don’t think Bernie Rhodes would start anything unless it was going to be that. Bernie always thought big. A lot of that driving force with The Clash being that was from Bernie.”

  To Rhodes, what was there not to like? The record label got a hit and the band got an artistically unassailable album, with radical politics front and center. He would be the director, orchestrating every piece into its proper spot in a vibrant panorama. Of course, human beings rarely like being treated like cogs in a machine, no matter how grand and wonderful. Never mind that there seemed little role for any of The Clash save Strummer—there was little room for any independent creative input in this vision at all. Even if successful, the human price tag of this approach was bound to be immense.

  * * *

  Such costs were already a harsh reality for the strikers and their families. Solidarity events like the Clash benefits and other outpourings of charity and cheer helped to warm what otherwise would have been a cold Christmas. In the new year, however, the weight of a day-to-day slog for survival with no end in sight set in.

  A miner from Silverwood in South Yorkshire put it like this: “Before Christmas, people who were loyal to the union had something to look to. There were supporters bringing stuff down. We didn’t feel so isolated. Now people are actually seeing the possibility of defeat.”

  With hope ebbing as spring loomed, the trickle of miners going back to work began to accelerate. Callincos and Simons note, “The fact that there were no significant power cuts [as a result of the strike] was an important element in the demoralization.” One disillusioned miner shared a take common among his brethren on strike: “We have been told all along: ‘General Winter will do it for you.’ Now General Winter is here, and it’s not been done for us. We can see our backs are against the wall and we’re saying: ‘If we can’t get out of this one way, why don’t we get round the table for a compromise?’”

  By now this was unlikely. Sensing blood in the water, Thatcher wanted unconditional surrender. Her hard-line stance horrified even some in her own party. Former Tory prime minister Harold MacMillan—while careful not to openly criticize Thatcher—took to the Parliament floor to commiserate with the suffering miners: ‘’It breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country today. This terrible strike, by the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s armies and never gave in . . . the growing division of comparative prosperity in the south and an ailing north and Midlands. We used to have battles and rows [in this country], but they were quarrels. Now there is a new kind of wicked hatred.”

  To some, MacMillan spoke more urgently than the latest leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock. Although a coal miner’s son, Kinnock was also a rising politician who had no love for Arthur Scargill. He tried to walk a tightrope, cautiously supporting the miners while criticizing their leaders.

  In part, this was driven by Kinnock’s assessment of political reality, for he had been brought to his position by the landslide defeat of 1983. As Callincos and Simons point out, the election “reflected a massive exodus of working-class voters—only 39 percent of all trade unionists voted Labour in 1983.” Since the electorate had moved to the
right, so too must the Labour Party, Kinnock reckoned—and the new leader could ill afford to get caught up in a losing battle.

  “From Kinnock’s point of view, the miners’ strike was a disaster,” according to the SWP analysts. “It set up a roadblock across Labour’s path rightward and allowed the Tories to attach to Kinnock precisely the sort of class-struggle politics which he was trying to drop. At the same time, a mere refusal to back the miners would bring down on Kinnock the wrath of the Labour left. So he sought to balance between the two sides in the dispute, calling for a ballot and supporting the strike; even-handedly denouncing both police and pickets; pressing the NUM into negotiations; and attacking Thatcher for her intransigence.”

  This sort of lukewarm support left the miners twisting in the wind. Feeling abandoned by the leadership of both the Labour Party and the broader trade union movement, the miners grew bitter and desperate. The majority of the NUM held out, still refusing to knuckle under to the Tories—but they were bleeding into the snow, with more of their brothers breaking down and drifting back. To cross a picket line was shameful and heartbreaking for a good union worker, but on one single day—“Black Monday,” January 21—nearly six hundred returned to work.

  At the same moment, a magnificent celebration unfolded across the Atlantic. Although frigid DC temperatures forced the cancellation of outdoor events, Republicans were marking Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in extravagant style. According to watchdog Senator William Proxmire—who awarded Reagan’s inaugural committee one of his “Golden Fleece” awards marking the waste of public money—nearly sixteen million dollars of taxpayer money was spent for what appeared to be more the coronation of a king than a president.

  If these glittering balls stood in sharp contrast to the suffering of the British miners, the juxtaposition of the homeless people outside the dazzling, bedecked halls was even more poignant. Refusing to join the revelry, the Reverend Jesse Jackson led seven hundred demonstrators in a counterinaugural protest march and prayer vigil near the White House in the snow and cold, delivering what UPI reporter Leon Daniel described as “a stem-winding demand for jobs and peace.”

  The protesters gathered in Farragut Square for a rally where the civil rights leader described President Reagan as a “Robin Hood in reverse, who takes from the poor to give to the rich.” Then, with Jackson wearing a sign saying Jobs Not Bombs, they marched to within a block of the White House, where they kneeled in prayer before heading on for a final rally near the Washington Monument.

  An especially powerful moment came when Jackson halted the march near the Monument grounds to chat with a homeless and jobless veteran named Benjamin Franklin Jones. Sitting on a steam grate and huddled under a blanket for warmth, Jones described his plight to Jackson—a telling illustration of the distance between the idealism manifest in the nearby monuments and a more ugly reality experienced by millions of Americans.

  The encounter seemed to fire Jackson’s oratory to new heights of outrage and eloquence. “There’s a hole in Reagan’s safety net,” the minister proclaimed as protesters stood in the snow at the foot of Washington Monument. “There are more millionaires at the top and more poor people at the bottom.” After attacking the inaugural festivities as “vulgar ostentation” filled with ‘private airplanes, long limousines, and $25,000 dresses,” Jackson returned to the hope-filled themes of his mentor, Martin Luther King Jr. “There will be peace in the valley!” Jackson shouted to the cheers of the crowd. “There will be food for the hungry!”

  Jackson’s words were just the sort that had often stirred Strummer into creative action, energized by a passionate belief he sought to emulate and embody. Hope was in short supply for the beleaguered Clash frontman, however, as it was for so many in his country. Just when Strummer was needed to defend his vision of a platoon banging out a blistering return to the original fire and fury of The Clash, the singer was oddly passive, even resigned in the face of Rhodes’s coup d’état.

  Fayne knew that the new musical direction “was definitely not coming from Joe.” Strummer might have been open to it, as he saw punk as a wide-open spirit of defiant truth telling, rather than a narrow style. On the 1984 US tour, he had dismissed musical labels as meaningless with vigorous good humor: “I refuse to be boxed into anything . . . Punk, funk, junk, skunk—what the hell difference does it make? Does it speak the truth or is it a waste of time? That’s my criteria. I couldn’t care if it was a chorus of choir girls with tinker bells jangling. If it spoke the truth, then that would be it, and there would be no saying it wasn’t.”

  This stance notwithstanding, Strummer had ejected Jones partly due to deep musical differences, including the use of electronic drums and synthesizers. Rhodes’s vision should therefore have seemed a leap in the wrong direction. The singer, however, was in no shape to fight back. Fayne: “By then, Joe was punch drunk, you could see in his eyes that he just didn’t have anything else to give. He would have gone along with anything Bernie said. ’Cause he was hemmed into that situation. He had all of these responsibilities; everyone’s looking at him to do this, that, and the other. You’ve got Bernie going, ‘You’ve gotta do this, you’ve gotta do that.’ And to go through all that turmoil in his personal life too . . . It was an impossible situation.”

  Strummer made the fateful decision to engage fully in Rhodes’s quest, even though it opposed his own vision, repeatedly aired across the US and Europe. As The Clash’s face, its songwriter, and the voice that brought the tunes to life, Strummer was essential to Rhodes as no other band member was. Strummer was also the only one who could thwart the manager’s new dream—but he did not.

  The Baker argues that the singer viewed Rhodes as a surrogate paternal figure, a role that loomed even larger with the sudden loss of Strummer’s actual father. Their relationship was charged and powerful, if not entirely healthy.

  In George Du Maurier’s 1895 novel Trilby, a stereotypical Jewish character named Svengali seeks to hypnotize, mold, and manipulate a young girl, all to turn her into a great singer. Rhodes clearly saw himself in this role vis-à-vis Strummer, once asserting, “He was nothing without me.”

  Asked by one of the authors of this book to clarify exactly what role he played artistically in The Clash, Rhodes drew a parallel to Andy Warhol’s involvement with the Velvet Underground in the mid-1960s, saying, “Without me, you wouldn’t have a group to be writing about.” The combative manager sometimes even claimed to have single-handedly invented punk rock.

  Such pretensions of grandeur could seem laughable, but were not entirely delusionary. Rhodes had been present at punk’s creation, and played an indispensable role in assembling not only The Clash but, to some degree, the lead singer’s persona. Strummer knew all of this, recognizing that, for all his myriad faults, Rhodes carried an undeniable spark of genius.

  Perhaps Strummer’s reluctance to split with his longtime mentor was, in part, because the singer was finally on the rebound creatively. By late December, Strummer had four more new songs beyond the trio debuted at the strike benefit shows. Strummer threw himself into polishing the songs, ones that expressed the hope and liberation he longed to feel, to make real for himself and others.

  In particular, Nick Sheppard was impressed by “Movers and Shakers” and “Cool Under Heat,” which he deemed “soul songs,” anthems in the spirit of Curtis Mayfield. Taken together with the other new songs, “Life Is Wild” and “Play to Win,” the quartet suggested that Strummer wanted to impart a sense of optimism amid one of the darkest moments for both himself and his country.

  Fayne recognized the atmosphere created by the strike in the new tunes: “The strike had an impact on the whole country. If you’re a political writer, you have to echo [what is] around you. Otherwise, you don’t make sense. So it’s depressing, right? The strike really showed the disparity between rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. If you’re a writer, you go, ‘Let’s try to bridge that gap!’”

  Fayne knew this wasn’t easy
—and that Strummer keenly felt Jones’s absence. Strikingly, Strummer seems to be exhorting himself as much as the Clash audience in these songs. They became a way to cheat the darkness, to shake off the shroud, to somehow break through to the other side.

  Although any role in the upcoming recording remained unclear—Rhodes was seeking session guitarists to supplement Strummer’s limited skills—Sheppard and the others helped demo the songs in advance of the journey to Munich.

  Sheppard laughs at the recollection. “It was typical Bernie! On Christmas Eve, I was ordered into Lucky Eight to overdub guitar onto ‘Life Is Wild’ and some of the other newer tracks.” While Rhodes had issued the directives, he was scarcely seen. To the musicians and engineer, this was all for the best. Fayne: “When we did the demos, Bernie was hardly around . . . It was a case of the band coming in and laying them down.” In the absence of the oft-dictatorial manager, Sheppard recalls, “It all went very well, and Joe was very pleased with the results.”

  Such moments gave a glimmer of what might have been, had Strummer held his ground, and the original “new Clash” been allowed to exercise its collective power. “Play to Win,” with a chorus that evoked Strummer’s love for an iconic American pioneer spirit, seemed a bit incomplete. But the others were potent additions to what was now a bulging portfolio of new songs. All exuded a sense of defiance.

  Fayne, however, harbored no illusions: “Bernie knew when it got to the actual recording session he was going to step in and really take over . . . He had heard the songs, and had kind of picked the ones we were going to do in Munich.”