We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

Some of the neo-Clash’s best songs—the monumental “In the Pouring Rain,” as well as “Jericho” and “Sex Mad War”—inexplicably would not be chosen, perhaps because Rhodes did not see them as easily adaptable to his new approach. Whatever the reason, their exclusion hinted at a possible disaster lurking.

  Meanwhile, a catastrophe of far greater magnitude still loomed. With Reagan’s reelection, few saw any obvious exit from the nuclear standoff between the two superpowers. The American president could hardly be expected to back down, having earned four more years to pursue his aims.

  For its part, the Soviet leadership seemed a bit stuck, with war hawks ascendant, partly thanks to Reagan’s aggressive rhetoric. As power transitioned from one ancient, ailing leader to another—Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko—the course toward a devastating East-West collision remained unchanged.

  Behind the scenes, however, Reagan was feeling chastened. While he did not yet know about the near miss averted by Stansilav Petrov’s diligence, briefings he had received after the Able Archer 83 maneuvers made him realize, perhaps for the first time, that the Soviet Union genuinely feared a US first strike.

  This assessment was buttressed by information that Thatcher’s government received on Able Archer from a highly placed Russian spy, Oleg Gordiesvsky. Thatcher aide Rodric Braithwaite explained, “What Gordievsky made clear was that the rhetoric that she and Reagan were using was terrifying.” The informant’s report, Braithwaite noted, “gave an insight into the way officials and senior people in the Soviet system felt about the Western threat to them. Reagan and Thatcher had only ever thought the other way, about the Soviet threat to them.”

  The significance of this shift was huge. As analyst Peter Burt wrote in 2013, “Previously secret documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that, rather than climaxing in a nuclear Armageddon, the [Able Archer 83] moment became a turning point for Thatcher’s cabinet, pushing [them] to rethink their relationship with the Soviet Union.” It also did so for Reagan himself.

  US words and actions had almost sparked global holocaust. According to Burt, “Thatcher herself apparently delivered the chilling message to President Reagan, hoping to convince him to moderate his rhetoric and actions. Gordievsky’s analysis was an epiphany for Reagan—who met the spy personally—convincing him that the time had come for a new relationship with the Soviets.”

  Wide-ranging arms-control talks had been arranged for January 1985 in Geneva. The jockeying for position beforehand, however, suggested any breakthrough was unlikely. Reagan made it clear that his “Star Wars” initiative was not up for discussion. The Soviets, in turn, said that without progress on this front, no advance could be expected elsewhere. The momentum toward global conflagration seemed likely to remain unchecked.

  It was unclear how either side could back down. This was the danger inherent in the incendiary rhetoric that both Thatcher and—especially—Reagan had used. Then, at this critical juncture, a new player was introduced into the mix.

  On December 16, 1984, Margaret Thatcher welcomed a rising Russian leader to her country home, Chequers. Little known outside of his country, Mikhail Gorbachev was from a younger generation than the old-line Soviet leadership. With an engaging personality that distinguished him from typical Eastern Bloc apparatchiks, Gorbachev had won growing praise from Soviet watchers who suspected that present leader Konstantin Chernenko was terminally ill.

  Gorbachev had signaled his top priority the day before in remarks upon his arrival at Heathrow Airport. “Opportunities for the prevention of nuclear war exist,” the Soviet insisted. “These opportunities must be used to the full.”

  At Chequers, Gorbachev pressed this agenda. Years later, he described how “I unfolded in front of Margaret a diagram divided into one thousand squares. I said that if all nuclear weapons stockpiled primarily by the US and the Soviet Union were divided into one thousand parts, then even one of them would be enough to cause irreparable damage to all life on earth. Why continue the race, what is the point of this insane competition?”

  Thatcher responded that the arms race had been forced upon the West by the Soviet Union’s buildup, and its failure to renounce world revolution as its aim. Gorbachev countered, “It was the US that had started it all—it invented the nuclear bomb and used it in Japan, when there was no military need for it, just the political calculus.” The US drove this deadly race, Gorbachev concluded. Thatcher demurred, arguing the West simply sought to deter aggression.

  While a dogged defender of the Soviet system, Gorbachev exhibited a sense of humor that left Thatcher astonished. The Russian leader later recounted, “At some point, our conversation became so tense that some of those present thought that it would have no continuation. And then I said to Margaret that I had no instructions from the Politburo to persuade her to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” Grasping the joke, Thatcher broke into laughter, her smile suggesting that a connection of lasting importance was being forged.

  For five hours, Gorbachev and Thatcher contended. At the end of the session, Thatcher was left heartened. In a back-channel note to Reagan, the Tory prime minister relayed, “I certainly found [Gorbachev] a man one could do business with,” adding, “I actually rather liked him.”

  Communist and capitalist find common ground: Gorbachev and Thatcher, December 16, 1984. (Photographer unknown.)

  * * *

  Even as die-hard capitalist and committed Communist were finding common ground, relationships within The Clash were deteriorating dangerously. By January 1985, the action had relocated from London to Munich’s Weryton Studios. Fayne recalls, “Bernie really liked the studio manager and the vibe of the place. It was a little sterile for a punk record, I thought—it was ultra-clean, they were ultra-modern, but I was just glad to be along for the ride.”

  Working with Norman Watt-Roy and various German session musicians, Fayne and Rhodes quickly began constructing rhythm tracks for the songs slated for inclusion. Meanwhile, Strummer had returned to Spain, this time with Gaby Salter and their daughter Jazz. Jesús Arias was struck by the difference in Joe’s mood: “He was really happy and upbeat, excited for the album to be recorded.”

  This positive attitude would soon be tested. Once in Munich, Strummer realized the reality of the tortuous process he had accepted. Many of his songs needed to be torn apart and reconstructed in radically new ways, piece by piece, with session musicians. Progress was agonizing.

  Rhodes was proving no more amiable in his new role, and the atmosphere was tense. Simultaneously laughing and cringing, Fayne recalls, “We found these German musicians—drummers, string arrangers, all sorts of people—it was crazy. One day we had a shitload of these people into the session . . . I actually don’t know what happened to this day, because it was so chaotic!”

  Given the scope of Rhodes’s vision, some turmoil was unavoidable, but Fayne felt the manager-cum-producer’s naïveté made it worse: “Bernie would have an idea, and he’d think, just because you have an idea, it’s going to work! Okay, you do have to have an idea, right? But then, you have to construct a framework around it, in order for it to become something of substance. And he didn’t bother with any of that. He’d just sort of shout, ‘Right, you do this and you do that,’ and, ‘You do that, and you do this,’ you know? And it was just chaos.”

  Rhodes’s drive was undeniable—but the path he had chosen was treacherous. Fayne: “He had this utopian vision of The Clash becoming an even bigger band. If he could just modernize it, and spruce it up a bit, he could create something new. But if you have something that works, if you want to ‘future-ize’ it, you tweak it. You don’t fucking come in a room and paint everything, and then decide the curtains are wrong. You don’t, because then you lose the people that love you for who you are.” This sensible take was lost on Rhodes.

  The Clash had not made its name by following common sense, though—and Rhodes was no mere manager. He had always been part of the band. Years later, an older and wise
r Strummer acknowledged, “Whatever The Clash was, it had a lot to do with Bernie.” Not all was wasted effort. Rhodes was slowly gathering his team, including enlisting Weryton engineer Hermann Weindorf—whom he dubbed “Young Wagner”—to play keyboards and synthesizer.

  When none of the German guitarists proved adequate, Sheppard was suddenly and unceremoniously summoned. Although the guitarist was glad to be included after all, any relief he felt dissipated under a deluge of bad news. Sheppard: “I’d come up with these guitar lines in the demo sessions with Joe, but once we got to Munich, they were dismissed out of hand by Bernie . . . because I’d come up with them: ‘You came up with that, it can’t be any good.’”

  The brutal dismembering of the group to which Sheppard had given so much of himself over the past fourteen months had also left him demoralized: “By the time I got to Munich, I didn’t feel like I was in The Clash at all. I didn’t feel like I was part of any commando gang that was going to take over the world with rebel rock. I just kind of went with a guitar and no idea of what I was going to be faced with.”

  Meanwhile, three of the five nominal Clash members remained in London, unsure if their services would ever be required.

  For Simonon, this was neither unusual nor necessarily unwanted. His bass skills were solid but he was hardly a virtuoso, and he had often absented himself from past sessions, especially as Jones’s musical ambitions had grown. In this case, he had intentionally stepped back, explaining, “Mick was in charge during Combat Rock, so I thought Joe should have his chance.” This made some sense—except that Strummer was not actually running the show.

  For the others, the exclusion was insult added to injury. Sheppard knew the cost of Rhodes’s constant manipulations: “Things got incredibly surreal, and dysfunctional. Me and Vince, Pete, probably Paul as well, and I think Joe—we all started feeling very divorced from any semblance of a group.”

  This may have been precisely Rhodes’s intention, for any group solidarity could have foiled his plans. It’s true that The Clash had never put much stock in recording in a conventional way. While both their first record and London Calling had been banged out as a unit, this was the exception rather than the rule. Little of Sandinista! had involved all four members playing at the same time. Indeed, key bits were done by hired hands, such as the iconic bass riff of “Magnificent Seven,” which was written and played by Norman Watt-Roy.

  The current situation was unprecedented, however. Rhodes was neither a trained musician nor a very experienced producer. A cornerstone punk ethic was that “anyone can do it, you learn by doing.” But rarely had anyone with such a thin musical background taken such a central role in a band as popular as The Clash. Fayne: “At the time, I wasn’t a producer myself, I was barely an engineer, but even I thought it was crazy. I thought it was suicide.” If Rhodes’s stance was “punk,” it was reckless as well as destructive to the cohesion of the actual band.

  Probably no one felt the sense of betrayal more keenly than White. Ground down by Rhodes’s never-ending mind games, the musician was almost relieved to skip the sessions. Even so, White had worked hard to sharpen his guitar skills, as was obvious by the growing power of his live fireworks with Sheppard. To be excluded was not simply a blow to his ego, but just another brick in the wall separating him from Strummer, who he had seen as the band’s rightful leader.

  White was already incensed by the singer’s collaboration in Rhodes’s “divide and conquer” strategy. His disgust had been made worse when, by chance, he saw Strummer lighting up a spliff in secret after one of the miners’ shows. “So what was that NO DRUGS POLICY he was always banging on about to the thousands of fans at shows and radio interviews and rags?” White later wrote. “He’s the star and nobody really cares about being TRUE to any PRINCIPLE whatever.”

  Howard was feeling similarly. At the same Brixton show, Rhodes had corralled the band for a meeting and suddenly asked them what they each would do with a million pounds. “I suppose it was intended to get us to think about what our priorities were,” Howard related years later. “But it came off in an ugly way, as generally was the case with Bernie.”

  Like the others, Howard recognized this as the setup for a brutal “self-criticism” session. No longer willing to toe the Clash line, White gave an intentionally cynical response involving girls, booze, and a sea cruise—and got the lashing he fully expected. Likewise, Sheppard chose to tweak the lion’s tail by joking that he would use it to get his somewhat protruding ears done. “I was giving Bernie the needle, as he had gotten a nose job,” Sheppard laughed later.

  Perhaps the cheekiness of Sheppard’s remark gave the manager pause, for Rhodes didn’t rise to the bait. According to White, Sheppard went on to talk about creating a nonprofit recording studio to help new bands. As the rest of the band gave suitable answers, the meeting wound up without further eruptions. White recalls groaning inside at Strummer’s idea to split the money between a revolutionary group—seemingly Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, still facing a US-backed “secret” war—and the workers of Corby, a devastated UK steel town.

  When White bemoaned Rhodes’s query and Strummer’s response to Sheppard and Howard, the drummer exploded. “Don’t you get it, Vince, don’t you fucking get it?” White remembers Howard as shouting. “Don’t you realize Joe already has a million quid? Whatever he wanted to do with a million pounds, he’s done it!” Recalling Strummer’s comfortable home off Portobello Road—bought outright, with cash, Strummer had told White—the guitarist realized Howard was right.

  The longtime squatter agonized over such contradictions. Still, this was little comfort for those still on meager weekly wages, treated like expendable cogs in the Clash machine. Strummer was also hurting, under immense pressure—but that didn’t make anything better for those he failed to protect. Howard and White came to a bitter conclusion: the singer simply couldn’t be trusted. “Joe was sparking off in all directions,” White recalls. “The separation between him and the band was complete. Separation was everywhere. There was no healing it.”

  Such divisions were everywhere in the not-so-United Kingdom. Perhaps the most painful were erupting in the mining villages themselves, as family members turned against one another over whether to stay the course of the strike.

  As the strike entered its eleventh month, agony and deprivation was growing daily, as was the number of miners breaking rank and going back to work. Any realistic hope of victory was ebbing with each defecting miner. The NUM knew the strike was becoming unsustainable. Yet to surrender meant the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, most likely the death of their industry and their communities.

  As the noose tightened in early 1985, the Financial Times announced, “The mineworkers’ strike, as a living entity with some sap left in it, is over.” The “end game” was now in motion, the paper said: “Mr. MacGregor and the prime minister have an aim . . . to ensure that the end of the dispute makes it wholly clear that ‘Scargillism,’ which they define as a mixture of industrial coercion allied to revolutionary ambitions, must be seen to fail, and fail utterly.”

  Yet, as Callincos and Simons argue, “The Tories weren’t invulnerable. Early 1985 saw turmoil on the world’s financial markets, as the dollar soared and the pound sterling sunk lower and lower.” The Financial Times admitted, “Anxiety about the oil price and the rising dollar may have triggered the sterling crisis, but it seems fairly clear that the effects of the miners’ strike played an important part.” To the SWP duo, “The costs of the strike had been enormous . . . £4 billion seemed like a minimum—far more than Thatcher had spent to reconquer the Falkland Islands.”

  The war comparison was apt, and the mining communities had borne the brunt of the conflict. The battle-weary country was growing unsettled by the suffering, and the government was nervous about its sliding popularity. According to Callincos and Simons, “A MORI opinion poll published in the Sunday Times on February 10 showed Labour and Tories running neck and neck. Only 34 percent of those
polled thought Thatcher ‘a capable leader,’ her lowest rating since June 1981, and 60 percent thought the government were handling the miners’ strike ‘badly.’”

  This is why those authors argue, “Had the NUM held firm, the government’s nerve might have cracked, and the miners at least won terms which secured the reinstatement of [fired] strikers. As it was, the nerves of a section of the miners’ leaders cracked first.” This may be too harsh, for the NUM itself was on the verge of splintering, with a Thatcher-sponsored breakaway union rising in Nottinghamshire, and the rank and file increasingly despondent and divided.

  Scargill used his little remaining leverage to try to avert the worst outcome: the union accepting the government’s right to close mines for loosely defined “economic reasons,” i.e., not making enough profit. As Callincos and Simons point out, “If the NUM was faced with defeat, there was more than one sort of defeat. One was devastation—unconditional surrender by the leadership, and the disintegration of the union as a fighting organization. The other was a defeat in which the miners held together, preserving their organization and fighting spirit.”

  The emotional mettle of The Clash was under similarly extreme stress. The disaffection of White and Howard lessened slightly when Rhodes beckoned them to join the rest in Munich in February. The manager did not want to spring for airfare, however, so the duo had to ride in an equipment van with no working heater through an unusually frigid German winter.

  “Maybe that was one of Bernie’s punishments,” White laughs. “We didn’t know what we did [that was so] bad. And suddenly, me and Pete were driving across Europe. I’ll never forget it—it was in January, with subzero temperatures, the fucking van froze up. The radiator froze, everything froze, the van was totally freezing! And we arrived there, in six feet of snow.”

  Barely escaping frostbite, Howard and White arrived only to find themselves twiddling their thumbs, waiting in the hotel room for a call that might never come. When, at last, White—but not Howard—was asked to the studio, he soon came to regret making the trip. Initially impressed by the progress on recording, White swiftly found himself in a Kafkaesque mind fuck, where nothing was ever good enough and endless retakes were required, punctuated by Rhodes’s tirades.