White was not alone in his assessment of the seventh hell unleashed at Weryton. Fayne felt the heat too, seeking to satisfy Rhodes’s idiosyncratic directives: “The sessions were very labored, you couldn’t really find the vibe. It wouldn’t have been so painful if it wasn’t so contrived. It was awful—I felt like I was a soldier involved in a massacre, who was saying, ‘I’m only obeying orders.’”
If freedom helps fan a creative spark into flames, such liberty was hard to find. Fayne: “I wasn’t doing the work on my own. I had Bernie sitting there. He’d go, ‘Right, we need some of that.’ So I would program that in: dah-dah-dah. Then Bernie would say, ‘How about if we do this and that?’ I didn’t have carte blanche.”
Sheppard has a similar take: “Bernie was out of control, nothing was good enough. And when he didn’t like something, he’s going to tell you in the nastiest way he can.” Unlike Fayne, however, Sheppard didn’t dismiss the concept out of hand: “Bernie was making a brave attempt to do something. I don’t think he thought he was Mick. He was trying to make a record with everything in it. He wanted to make a punk record and a rap record and a modern record.”
Yet such a vision required expertise as well as passion. Sheppard: “He didn’t have the tools necessary to do it. As Joe said, he was trying to create something: ‘Can this thing be packaged? Can this thing be invented? Can you do this?’ Bernie’s idea was good—but it was being done by someone without a musical bone in his body, and no interest in listening to anyone else.”
Nonetheless, granted Sheppard, “A good idea executed poorly can be better than a bad idea with all the technical skill in world.”
However powerful Rhodes’s concept might have been, his ultracontrolling follow-through was further shredding the band’s fabric. “I was trying very hard to arrange things, I did rough mixes, got very involved,” Sheppard says. But as the sessions dragged on and on, past March and into April, the guitarist got ground down: “It was like a war of attrition, you just kind of gave up. I had no critical faculties left. I just did as I was told, stopped asking if it was good or bad. It wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference anyway, because no one would have listened.”
Fayne felt the same—and saw a similar exhaustion growing in Strummer: “He was definitely putting on a brave face, ’cause I know Joe—when he’s happy, you know, he’s got this laugh, which is so contagious. He’s like a little boy, you know, his face would light up, and he’s got this naughty smile. And that was gone. And when you’re done, you’re done—and Joe was done.” Even the ostensible bandleader was not exempt from Rhodes’s mania, as White explains: “Joe was under his tutorship—he sent Joe for singing lessons!”
Nonetheless, Strummer refused to break with Rhodes. Disgusted with the endless not-so-merry-go-round, Sheppard unloaded all of his angst to Strummer over drinks. “I was going on about I was done with it, that I couldn’t take it anymore,” says the guitarist. “And Joe stopped me and said, ‘No, I don’t want to hear it, I have got to believe in this. I’ve got to believe this is the right thing.’”
* * *
Utter, unassailable belief is one of the most powerful forces on earth—though it can still be vanquished. And so it was when, on March 3, Arthur Scargill emerged from Congress House, the London headquarters of the Trades Union Council. Cheers from gathered unionists erupted as he walked to the podium. But when Scargill announced that the NUM executive board had voted 98–91 to return to work without an agreement, shock waves sailed through the crowd.
No matter how unlikely victory seemed, the idea of surrender smelled like betrayal. Even at this late date, pockets of resistance remained, notably in South Wales, where just 6 percent of miners had gone back, and the act of crossing a picket line was enough to make an outcast of anyone who dared to risk it.
From a strategic perspective, however, there no longer seemed any point in denying reality. More than half of the NUM membership had returned to work in February, amid gleeful threats from MacGregor: “People are now discovering the price of insubordination and insurrection. And boy, are we going to make it stick.”
While Scargill had argued in the board meeting to stay the course, he had lost the debate. Now this hero of the working class was booed and jeered by his own. The BBC reported that cries of “no no no!” rang out, and “grown men were in tears, [while] others chanted, ‘We will not go back to work!’”
The labor leader’s voice was ragged with emotion: “We have decided to go back for a whole range of reasons. One of the reasons is that the trade union movement of Britain with a few notable exceptions has left this union isolated. Another reason is that we face not an employer but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police, and the media. And, at this time, our people are suffering tremendous hardship.”
The NUM had held fast on principle, refusing to accept the closure plans. But the union could not prevent them and would not cause more pain to their loyalists for no gain. With this decision, something precious had died—and it was nothing less that Britain’s post–World War II socialist dream.
All that remained were the eulogies. Years later, Tony Benn, often thought of as Labour’s left-wing conscience, spoke in praise of the miners’ struggle: “They were skilled and courageous men who had built the prosperity of Britain. They were treated like criminals by Mrs. Thatcher . . . It’s a story that will never be forgotten.” Labour MP Dennis Skinner added, “It was an honorable dispute. It was the only strike I can recall that wasn’t about pay but was about saving jobs for other people.”
Neil Kinnock also felt the pain. Later he said, “I was deeply saddened by everything in those long months, especially around Christmastime 1984, when things were really bad and it was obvious the miners were going down to a completely undeserved defeat and were still sticking it out. You could not fail to be impressed by the sheer guts of that. It was desperately depressing.”
Nonetheless, the Labour leader placed the blame at Scargill’s door: “Once he refused to [hold a national ballot], the strike was doomed, because sympathy action by other groups of workers was always going to be limited, and there was always going to be division in the miners’ ranks. And a divided force made Thatcher’s job of hammering the miners much easier.”
Kinnock’s relatively neutral stance also facilitated Thatcher’s assault, however. While Scargill made mistakes, time would prove his central claim: Thatcher aimed to close not simply twenty mines, but seventy-five in total, a plan that would herald the beginning of the end for the UK coal industry. If not for this lie—never confronted, much less countered by Kinnock, who busied himself criticizing Scargill—there is little doubt that the miners would have voted for the strike, a strike they would likely have won.
Thatcher was able to use brute force and deception, marshaling the might of the police, the courts, and most of the media to accomplish perhaps the most crucial aim of her second term: breaking the power of the National Union of Mineworkers. This was a massive win, but one gained without integrity.
If something akin to murder had happened, the NUM was determined to stand proud. On March 5, the vast majority of striking miners returned to work, often marching in step with brass bands, carrying their union banners. A few die-hards continued to hold out for several weeks, before grudgingly giving in. More than seven hundred miners had been sacked over the course of the year, and scores of others faced “riot” charges that might mean life imprisonment.
While it was bitter for the miners not to be able to protect such members from retaliation, as Callincos and Simons write, “Whenever they returned, the miners did so defiantly and with pride. They were beaten, but they had held out for a year against the worst that the state could inflict on them . . . The miners had, in A.J. Cook’s words, fought the ‘legions of hell.’ They, and the women who had endured with them the longest major strike in British history, were all heroes, every one of them . . . They deserved better than what was in store for them.”
The p
rognosis was not hopeful. The Guardian—one of the few major UK papers to be supportive of the miners—mourned the consequences that would follow: “The defeat of the miners will be seen as a landmark in the decline of the industrial working class and advocates of political strike action. It is unlikely that the unions will again mount such a general and coordinated challenge to the authority of the state . . . Union strength and membership was in decline well before the miners’ strike, and that process is likely to accelerate.”
Scargill remained at the head of the NUM, but the union’s back was broken. Having brought the NUM to heel, Thatcher was now free to pursue her “free market” agenda largely unfettered. Still, bitter rage simmered across broad swaths of Great Britain. Those who felt treated like trash vowed never to forget this humiliation, to find a way to take their revenge somehow, someday.
The same week that Scargill’s star was falling, another was rising. As suspected, Chernenko had been deathly ill, and passed away on March 11. Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party only three hours later. At age fifty-four, he was the party’s first leader to have been born after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Unbeknown to Gorbachev’s colleagues and the world, another Russian revolution was beginning.
* * *
As this new era dawned, the 1985 Clash revolution was grinding forward. While a couple of the dozen songs slated for the album had escaped relatively unscathed, most were radically rearranged, even rewritten, featuring electronic drums, synthesizers, and an eclectic array of sampled sounds, as well as guitar and bass.
The result could seem like a jumble. Sheppard: “Bernie didn’t know when to stop. His idea of producing was to cram every conceivable space with something—and he had forty-eight tracks to work with!” Given the painstaking layering of the songs, assembled bit by bit, with each instrument overdubbed separately, it was hard to get a clear sense of the success of the sessions.
One outcome was obvious, however: The Clash had never been so divided, demoralized, or exhausted. “Making the record,” Sheppard recalls, “was quite a long—and pretty horrendous—process. It seemed like an age and I was there for most of it. Joe was there for all of it, and I was the second-longest-serving member, if you like, followed by Vince, followed by Pete and Paul.”
Late in the game, an unexpected bone was tossed to this ragged pack: a minisession with Howard and Simonon. As all five musicians stood together for the first time in months, the unit swiftly knocked out two tracks for use as B sides.
“Sex Mad War” and “Out of Control” were now “Sex Mad Roar” and “Do It Now.” Both were outstanding songs, with revamped lyrics that showed Strummer’s perfectionism as a wordsmith. The former also featured a new coda with eerie interplay between Sheppard and White, hinting at the unit’s untapped potential.
But the session was rushed and unsatisfying, with no chance to overdub or further hone the tunes. The dense, claustrophobic mix made it hard to pick out many of Strummer’s words. Above all, it begged an uncomfortable question: why were these and other blockbuster songs relegated to the back drawer—or left undocumented—instead of forming the heart of the planned album?
This was the closest the band would ever get to Strummer’s original vision for the album: the punk platoon unleashed, guns blazing, for posterity. That idea had been the light on the horizon, the beacon toward which the new Clash had been straining, shoulders to the wheel. It had been their chance to refute the critics and redeem all the frustration of the past sixteen months. The sessions had turned darkly bitter, an experience as likely to kill dreams as to realize them.
The tension in the band was building toward an explosion. In late April, just as the sessions were winding up, it finally came. Sheppard: “On the last day of recording, I was doing some backing vocals. Bernie was on my case again, and I really fucking lost it with him, told him he was a piece of shit, and all that. I really had a go, something I’d never done before . . . It was quite emotional.”
Sheppard’s rage cut through the thick wall of diktat, silencing the irascible manager. “Kosmo was there at the time, at this meeting or conversation where I’d lost it with Bernie,” Sheppard says. “And he suggested that we go off as a group and do something, because we hadn’t been a group for so long.”
The idea struck a chord. Sheppard: “So me and Joe went out for a walk around Munich, which we really hadn’t done that whole time. We bought some oranges, ate them, and talked. Out of the blue, one of us said, ‘Well, the only thing we can do is go busking. What else are we going to do, go and pick fruit or paint pictures? We’re a group, let’s just fuck off and go busking.’ So that’s what we decided, that’s the thing that we would do as a group. We’d go off busking.”
The idea seemed off-the-wall for a massive band like The Clash, an exceedingly chancy prospect. No matter, a soul-weary Sheppard thought—as likely as not, it would turn out to be more loose talk. “We went back to England—I had another fucking run-in with Bernie at the airport—and I just went home to my flat in Wapping and said, ‘Thank Christ that’s over.’ And then Joe said, ‘Right, let’s go.’ To his credit, he was like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna go do it.’”
The Clash was about to embark on its final tour, a last stand the likes of which the rock world had never seen: a ragged, passionate offensive, waged with simple weapons amid the ruins of the band’s—and the country’s—shattered unity.
chapter eight
movers and shakers come on
The Clash and friends take to the streets on their way to Ripon and St. John’s College, York, England, May 8, 1985. (Photo courtesy of the York Press Gazette & Herald.)
We feel we were getting involved in release a record, go on a tour, do this, do that. We began to ask ourselves, What is this all about? And we decided that if we can’t get it with three acoustic guitars and a pair of drumsticks, on a walking tour of England, then . . . We are looking for an answer. We want to know if rock and roll still means anything. This is our attempt to find out if it does.
—Joe Strummer, May 9, 1985
During fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States . . . may be obligated or expended for the purpose of which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual.
—The Boland Amendment
Five figures stood under a bridge next to a canal. As the musicians faced one another, strumming guitars, moving in and out of shadows, an occasional ray of morning sun glinted off their black leather jackets.
This barely secluded spot in the open air seemed an unlikely rehearsal space for one of the world’s most popular rock bands. Nonetheless, The Clash had found itself there, in Nottingham, where the north of England begins.
Armed with acoustic guitars and drumsticks—tapped vigorously on the bridge’s bricks by Peter Howard—the unit ran through several of its own songs, plus rock standards like “Come on Everybody” and “Stepping Stone.” A few moments later, having honed their skills sufficiently for the adventure ahead, the musicians left the shadows, heading for a nearby shopping district.
This was not the only odd locale to recently host The Clash. The previous afternoon the quintet had stood on the shoulder of the M1, one of the UK’s main motorways, thumbs out, seeking to hitch a ride. They made unusual-looking hitchhikers. As Howard laughed later, “We all turned up wearing leather jackets, leather jeans—we must have looked like the fucking Village People!”
If the men were arguably hilarious in appearance, the distance between their Woody Guthrie-esque mission and the rock-star attire mirrored the creative tension in the unit’s founding ambition: to be simultaneously the biggest band in the world and sociopolitical revolutionaries.
The mission’s intent was serious. Recording the new album in such a dictatorial way had strained
the band’s fragile unity. Even Rhodes seemed to recognize that it was critical to restore some modicum of internal cohesion. While hardly converted to a more sensitive style of management, the Clash kingpin knew that the record he was shepherding would need a band behind it.
Rhodes’s assent was duly acknowledged at a band meeting shortly after the return from Munich. As if reflecting the unsettled nature of the group itself, Rehearsal Rehearsals was now history. This longtime Clash stronghold had been lost, under pressure from upscale development planned for the Camden Market area. So the gathering itself took place in yet another peculiar context: a posh Kensington Hilton hotel meeting room.
During the confab, Rhodes was so amenable to a shared band “holiday” that White later credited the concept as “one of Bernie’s better ideas.” The controlling manager actually had not initiated this trek, however, and was no doubt nervous about the band being on its own, out of his grasp.
Strummer later told UK rock writer Jon Savage that Rhodes “sensed that The Clash had become too prey to his ideas, he realized he had it under his thumb too much, and there wasn’t a lot of life in there. What he expected us to do was to go up north, somewhere like Bradford, and live in a house while we did, I don’t know what.” But what Rhodes “expected” was not foremost in the band’s mind. Strummer: “We just went up and kept moving.”
A picture of Jesus had been prominently featured at the back of The Clash’s US tour bus, not far from a huge black, red, and gold banner reading, REBEL PUNK. This latest trek was in the spirit of that itinerant peasant rabble-rouser. “Won’t take nothing for my journey now,” goes the civil rights anthem “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” echoing Christ’s admonition to his disciples: “Take nothing for the journey except a walking stick—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.”
We Are the Clash Page 27