We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  So it was with The Clash, more or less, which was making a leap of faith of its own. “We went to a pub on the North Cascade Road in London,” Howard recalls. “We had consumed an inordinate amount of alcohol—and Joe said, ‘We’re going right now.’ And I said, ‘We can’t do this, I don’t have a bank card, I don’t have a credit card.’” But, as Howard knew well enough, turning back wasn’t an option.

  White recalls, “We were allowed to take ten pounds as starting money. No more. No bank cards. The rest was up to you. You had to survive on what you earned, playing in the streets. If you couldn’t make it like that, you didn’t deserve to call yourselves a band.” Though it later turned out that apparently both Strummer and Simonon brought credit cards as a last resort, the spartan nature of the endeavor was real enough. Most importantly, all would share in any hardships.

  Feet would not be sufficient locomotion for this journey, however, and the band was proving to be a hard sell to passing drivers. Tired of languishing on the roadside, the group made a tactical decision to split up in order to seem less imposing. White explains, “Joe told us to meet at the pub nearest the train station in Nottingham.” The musicians duly fanned out down the road.

  Now on his own, White was aware of the absurdity of the situation: “The world-famous Clash, stadium rockers, standing with guitars, our thumbs out, one by one trying to flag rides holding out bits of cardboard!” He was the first to be plucked from the roadside.

  While White’s journey proved uneventful, Howard had a more entertaining time: “We are all decked out in these leathers, right? The guy who picked me up looked me up and down, then basically spent the whole trip to Nottingham kind of hitting on me: ‘Well, you must have had a homosexual experience in your life . . . Maybe when you were at school . . . ?’ And I was going, ‘No, really, honestly, actually, I haven’t.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but have you ever thought about it?’ And I was kind of going, ‘No, no, I’m just in this band, actually . . . sorry.’”

  Slowly the troops reconvened in the preordained pub. Only the lead singer remained unaccounted for. At last, with his bandmates’ anxiety growing, Strummer arrived just before closing time with two female fans he had serendipitously met at the train station. The duo agreed to put the band up for the night. Howard: “Yes, we met in the pub, got a place to sleep from people we didn’t know. The next morning we did our rehearsal under the bridge. It’s all terribly cinematic . . . A fucking great idea for a movie, in fact.”

  Setting up near the shopping precinct, the band nervously launched its busk, setting out a guitar case for coins. The Saturday-morning shoppers proved to be a tough crowd, however, unimpressed with the musical wares on offer. Having accumulated only £2.38—according to White—after an hour’s labor, the band decamped to a nearby sidewalk outside a sprawling Marks & Spencer next to a record store.

  Confident in their new venue, the band worked up versions of the reggae classic “Rivers of Babylon” and the Buddy Holly/Rolling Stones/Bo Diddley–beat chestnut “Not Fade Away.” Curiosity seekers began to circle about. Soon, someone recognized the band, and coins began to fill the guitar case: £20 in less than an hour, enough to buy food and drink at a nearby pub.

  From there, the band went to busk at a central gathering point, Old Market Square, and then on to numerous other spots, including “a tiny pub set in a cliff” according to White. The interactions were unpremeditated, unforced, marked by the sheer surprise of discovery, the pleasing shock of the seemingly impossible.

  One Clash fan, Stuart Nock, was making his way to the Garage Club with a friend after a gig. “We could hear the strains of someone busking ‘Career Opportunities’ floating down the street,” Nock later wrote. “I remember commenting that ‘someone thinks they’re The Clash.’ We rounded the corner of the small street the Garage was on—and there were The Clash playing out on the street!”

  The sight was jarring but energizing, dissolving the barriers between performer and audience. Nock says, “There were only three or four people watching. As we got up to them they had just finished the number. Joe asked what we wanted to hear. Someone said ‘White Riot’ and they just launched into it. [Later] they came into the club and held court in the bar and were very friendly.” This turned out to be the last show for the evening, for, as White remembers, “our voices were shot already . . . and Joe reckoned we better rest up or we’d never make it.”

  This first day set a pattern of impromptu hit-and-run performances—“eight or ten a day,” Strummer later told Jon Savage—lasting any where from ten minutes to an hour. While this modus operandi would be refined over the days ahead, the essence remained: playing for free for anyone who wanted to hear, for as long as their voices could hold out, then crashing on the floors and couches of fans.

  The impact was immediate, as even the cynical White admits: “As the sun went down [on the first day] already a sort of camaraderie had developed. With no ten-ton trucks and television sets and scaffolding and stage barriers and separate hotel rooms and sound check and tour itinerary and no Bernie, we were stripped naked. We were in this together. Equal. Nothing to lose or gain.” For a band hammered into pieces over the past months, this was a welcome balm.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was finding no such reprieve from his most prominent annoyance: the Sandinista regime. The FSLN had convincingly won an election organized for two days before the US presidential contest. Reagan had denounced the electoral exercise as a “Soviet-style sham” and arranged for the most prominent opposition parties to boycott. Though hardly perfect, the election was seen by international observers as more free, fair, and inclusive than those organized by the US amid the terror in neighboring El Salvador.

  Nearly as irksome to Reagan as the Sandinistas was the US Congress—in particular, one representative named Edward Boland. A Democrat from Massachusetts, Boland had made it his mission to thwart the US “secret” war on the Nicaraguan government, which—having been belatedly debated on Capitol Hill—was not “secret” anymore, and of dubious legality.

  After initial reports of a clandestine anti-Sandinista campaign to arm, organize, and direct “contra” counterrevolutionary forces were confirmed in 1982, Boland had sponsored an amendment to the 1983 Defense Appropriations Act to prevent the use of US funds to overthrow the FSLN. Reagan had chafed under these restrictions, and ordered his underlings to find a way to quietly circumvent the ban, exploiting inadvertent loopholes in its language.

  This quest blew up in Reagan’s face. When it emerged that the CIA had mined Nicaraguan ports in violation not only of the intent of the Boland Amendment, but of international law, congressional leaders were outraged. Their spines were further stiffened by pressure from a rising grassroots movement that pledged to resist US war in Central America.

  On March 5, 1985, the Los Angeles Times reported: “The consequences of congressional ire snowballed quickly. By the beginning of this year, Reagan’s policy on Nicaragua was dead in the water. The contras were militarily stalemated and politically divided; the CIA was under public fire for mismanaging the program; and Honduras, the key US ally in the [campaign to overthrow the Sandinistas], was increasingly nervous about the relationship.”

  A vibrant peace movement opposed Reagan’s Central American policy. (Button and bumper sticker courtesy of Mark Andersen.)

  Boland was determined to strengthen his ban. As the nonpartisan Congressional Research Services (CRS) noted, “The continuing appropriations resolution for fiscal year 1985 provided that: ‘no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities 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.’”

  This legislation, the CRS added, “also provided that after February 28, 1985, if the president
made a report to Congress specifying certain criteria, including the need to provide further assistance for ‘military or paramilitary operations’ prohibited by this statute, he could expend $14 million in funds if Congress passed a joint resolution approving such action.”

  Given how badly Reagan had botched public relations for his “contra” campaign, congressional support for a renewed effort was unlikely. So the administration took a new tack, seizing the tools at their command to effectively declare economic war. Using a visit by newly elected Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega to Moscow as proof the regime were “Soviet puppets,” Reagan announced a ban on US travel and trade with Nicaragua on May 1, 1985.

  Coming as The Clash prepared for its busking adventure, this escalation was opposed by most of America’s allies, who saw it as simply feeding and justifying authoritarian tendencies growing within the FSLN. Moreover, it seemed patently insufficient to dislodge the Sandinistas. As a result, the administration continued to seek a way to push the shooting war forward, by hook or by crook.

  Meanwhile, The Clash had traveled to Leeds. When hitchhiking had proven futile, Strummer reconvened the group to plot the next move. The decision was made to pool their remaining busking funds to pay for bus tickets.

  This slight concession to reality could not mask the radical nature of what The Clash was doing. If the US tour was a bit out of bounds simply for not being tied to the release of a new album, this jaunt was truly off all the maps.

  Sheppard marvels, “The tour had no commercial themes, nothing to sell. I actually didn’t think about it that much, other than, ‘What a great idea! Fuck, let’s go and do that, that’d be great!’ We went, literally, ‘Well, what’s the first place we can go? What’s the first town up the M1? Nottingham. All right, we’ll go there first. Where should we go next? How much money have we got? Well, we’ve got enough to get to Leeds—well, we’ll get the bus to Leeds.’”

  Even the bus could become a performance venue. One fan named John saw The Clash “on a late-night National Express bus from Nottingham to Leeds. It was very exclusive—just me, them jamming at the back, and the coach driver.”

  The absence of basic practical considerations could leave the band in sticky situations. Sheppard: “We arrived in Leeds at ten o’clock at night or something. We’re like, ‘Fuckin’ hell—we’re sitting in the bus station tonight!’ But we just found this club, and we started busking outside it. These two guys literally walked out of the club, and went, ‘Fuck me, it’s The Clash!’ And they were the guys that put us up that night, looked after us, took us home, cooked us breakfast, all that stuff.”

  Howard echoes Sheppard’s recollections: “The theory was that we would live off what we got. I mean, that’s what we did. And it was fucking amazing. There wasn’t any intention to make it a commercial idea, it wasn’t, ‘What can we do with this?’ Nowadays, every bit of it would be filmed for TV or something. But it wasn’t like that, you know—and that made it quite compelling.”

  The lack of commercial calculation is still astonishing. Tony White—who saw the band play to passersby in Leeds’ Royal Court Park—later wrote, “There were no ads in the music press or the broadsheets, no announcements, no press releases or friendly music journalists tagging along with their photographers. There were no publicity campaigns or photo-ops and no daytime TV coverage. Neither were there tour T-shirts, posters, or merchandise of any kind.”

  The whole affair was so far outside of normal rock business practices that Tony White hesitated to call it a “tour.” While this reticence was understandable, it nonetheless reflects commercial, rather than artistic, criteria. If a “tour” refers to a band going from town to town playing for audiences, what else could this be?

  The rejection of commerce in favor of pure enjoyment and artistic striving revealed the power of communal creation and release, past consumer pigeonholes. This was definitively off the capitalist-rock-biz path, especially for a band of The Clash’s popularity. Underground critics who dismissed the group as opportunistic poseurs might well have been silenced by this action. What more powerful refutation of the corporate money machine could there be?

  Not everyone saw it this way. In Leeds, The Clash found itself on the turf of Chumbawamba, a rising anarcho-punk band who shared a squat in Armley, a historically working-class industrial district. Initially one of many bands inspired by Crass, the group was now finding its own voice, driven in part by its experiences during the miners’ strike. Guitarist/vocalist Boff Whalley recalls how the band “began a process of unlearning some of the insular and antisocial ideas we’d picked up from an insular and antisocial political movement.”

  Whalley was referring to the anarcho-punk scene that had produced what were now being called “peace punks.” This subset of punk emphasized vegetarianism, nonviolence, animal rights, and a fierce commitment to anticorporate action and independent labels. Chumbawamba set a high standard even within this DIY crowd by initially releasing its music on only easily duplicable cassette tapes.

  By 1985, however, the band was beginning to show an artistic creativity and ideological flexibility that set them apart from “peace punk” peers. Journalist Aaron Lake Smith would later write, “The British miners’ strike was a decisive event in Chumbawamba’s political evolution . . . Diet and lifestyle became less important than solidarity with organized labor.” The band recorded a benefit single for the miners, distributed pamphlets and food to workers’ families in the nearby Frickley, and even started a theater troupe to perform for miners’ children.

  According to Smith, the strike “was the first crack in what would soon become a fissure between Chumbawamba and the [anarcho] punk scene . . . Chumbawamba worked to incorporate themselves into their community in Leeds rather than to be punks standing apart from it. They chose to venture into uncomfortable situations with people who were different from them. As Chumbawamba became closer and closer with the miners, they distanced themselves from ‘the punks,’ whom they increasingly viewed as petty, hard-line, ineffective, and humorless.”

  Still, the conversion was not yet complete. When band members heard the startling news that The Clash was busking on the streets of Leeds, Whalley and vocalist Danbert Nobacon began planning a direct action protest . . . of The Clash.

  This was not very surprising. Anarcho-punk originators Crass had drawn initial inspiration from both Sex Pistols and The Clash. However, they swiftly turned on their catalysts, lambasting both as sold out to the corporate rock world and, in the case of The Clash, in thrall to warmed-over socialist politics.

  Chumbawamba echoed this in a key early song, “Rock ’n’ Roles,” that savaged the scene as simply “one more method of keeping us in line / one more fashion called punk this time.” The lyrics argued, “This planet is being destroyed, bit by bit by bit / and rock and roll is helping to kill it,” before concluding, “We’re shouting loud but we’re facing a wall / of sexist, drugged-up rock and roll.”

  For them, no band embodied this sell-out more than The Clash, especially since they had left the underground with the diverse musical flavors and commercial success of London Calling. The Clash’s revival of Vince Taylor and the Playboys’ hit “Brand New Cadillac” was seen as especially egregious, with its references to an unnamed treacherous woman as “my baby” who forsakes love for an expensive car and, implicitly, a man who can afford such luxuries.

  Both Strummer and Simonon admitted to having been a bit seduced by drugs, money, ego, and other of rock’s self-indulgent charms. The duo hardly celebrated this, though, and the ejection of Jones and Headon was part of a determined effort to regain The Clash’s moral and artistic footing. The busking tour was the most fervent expression of this drive toward purification and revival.

  That motivation was lost on Chumbawamba at the time. Bassist/vocalist Dunstan Bruce later denounced his “former idols,” saving special venom for “a pallid version of The Clash, sans Mick Jones” that now “roamed the streets in search of lost credibili
ty.” Bruce: “They’d done the America, champagne, and [cocaine] thing, and they came back over here trying to prove that they could still relate to the kids . . . To me, it just smacked of insincerity.”

  Bruce’s passion on this issue, and that of his bandmates, was undeniable. Their grip on the actual reality of the now not-so-new Clash was less certain, however. But if Chumbawamba had the quintet in their gunsights, The Clash had its own gripe with another punk-related group.

  In Nottingham, when Howard had noticed the Alarm was there in town too, with plans to play Leeds next, an impish notion formed in his head. In 1984, Strummer had denounced the band as “an imitation of a shadow of The Clash.” Although this may have been unfair to a band with an obvious debt to The Clash but its own sound and style, it was nonetheless heartfelt.

  Fate, reasoned Howard, had given them the chance to take some minor revenge: “I had the idea of playing outside the Alarm gig. I was saying, ‘The Alarm are so, kind of, hairstyle Clash wannabes, that we should go and fuck ’em up, go over there and busk outside. Everyone who’s going into the gig will be late going in.’” While White remembers Strummer emphasizing a desire to play for Clash fans rather than to simply be a wrench in the works, there was a confrontational aspect to the affair. Sheppard: “We thought it would be a really good windup, very punk rock, for The Clash to play outside an Alarm gig.”

  The stage was now set for a face-off between three equally earnest, socially conscious bands, all of which had supported the same side in the miners’ strike.

  As The Clash gathered on the front steps of the venue—the Leeds University student union building—a ripple of disbelief ran through the hundreds of Alarm fans waiting for the doors to open. Memories of what happened over the next half hour vary wildly. White recalls the band kicking off its set with two new songs, “Movers and Shakers” and “Cool Under Heat,” while Clash fan Tony White remembers a “blinding version of [reggae classic] ‘Pressure Drop’” that segued into “Garageland.” All agree that the band played at full tilt, generating a powerful sound that carried far in the early evening air.