As The Clash bashed out their songs on acoustic guitars, with Howard banging on a borrowed snare drum on a simple stand, the long, snaking line of concertgoers broke. A huge mass quickly formed, enveloping the band, making them almost indistinguishable from the crowd. Close to a thousand people gawked, sang along, or shouted with disbelief outside the hall.
Word traveled inside to where the Alarm was in the midst of its sound check. According to lead singer Mike Peters, “I distinctly remember [Alarm roadie] Redeye bursting onto the stage during the sound check and announcing that Joe Strummer and The Clash were busking to the fans outside the venue. I didn’t believe him at first and thought it was a windup but soon realized it was true. So I dropped everything and ran outside to see what was going on.”
By the time Peters arrived, Strummer was locked in a dispute with the Alarm road crew. Sheppard laughs, “Joe spent pretty much the whole gig talking to the roadies, who’d come out very upset that we’d done this thing—he was trying to reason with them, or protest, or whatever, I don’t know. He didn’t sing any songs really. He just talked to these guys while we sang all the songs—hilarious!”
The Clash amid the crowd outside the Alarm show. (Photo by Tim Beasley.)
Other Paper article, ghostwritten by members of Chumbawamba.
As Peters watched, members of Chumbawamba moved through the throng. “We came prepared . . .” explained a blurb published in the Leeds Other Paper credited to “Dennis the Menace” and “Minnie the Minx.” “We had a banner, our voices and a handheld hydraulic paint dispenser. The banner read: As well as marketing safe rebellion, CBS makes parts for the Cruise murder missiles.”
This claim, which indicted The Clash for effectively funding possible nuclear holocaust, was incendiary. Nobacon, the banner’s main author, “originally read of this connection in a fanzine in the early eighties and took it on trust.” To his dismay, he later discovered it was apparently false information.
For now, however, the war was on. With Strummer still midargument, the rest of The Clash was in full fury, having barely the space to play, nearly swallowed up amid the crowd. Now just yards away, Nobacon took aim and Whalley prepared to unfurl the banner. According to the Other Paper communiqué, “They sang ‘my baby drove up in a brand new Cadillac . . .’ We gave it to them in their ugly faces.”
Suddenly, Strummer, the band, and bystanders were drenched in a spray of bloodred paint. Chaos erupted, according to Nobacon: “We shouted things, we got called ‘wankers.’ We got bottles thrown at us . . . We split.” Chased through the crowd, the duo laughed while making their escape. While exhilarated at the time, both Nobacon and Whalley would later look back on the action with ambivalence.
The Clash seemed to take little notice of the act of sabotage, racing through songs variously remembered by those present as “White Riot,” “Clash City Rockers,” “Police on My Back,” and/or another reggae standard, “Johnny Too Bad.” Sheppard: “I don’t really remember the paint, none of us really noticed, until we all left and realized we were covered in it—it didn’t actually affect us at all. We didn’t know it had happened, because there was so much else going on.”
The performance ended as quickly as it began, again leaving contending memories. White: “Some security from the venue came out and roughly told us we better leave. We were quickly out of there.”
Peters remembers, “The door to our own gig opened and the fans rushed in to get down to the front.”
Howard: “The Alarm was waiting for the audience to come in, so they could go onstage.”’ Sheppard similarly recalls completing their guerrilla mission and leaving as planned. With a crowd following on their heels, the paint-spattered group walked around the corner and set up outside the Faversham Pub, playing for all comers.
One Alarm partisan, Steve Fulton, called the prank “bizarre and ugly,” accusing Joe Strummer of “playing the bully” and “looking the worse for it.” By contrast, Peters called Strummer “my hero,” saying, “I felt sorry for Joe and the band, they were obviously trying to prove some sort of point . . . I could relate to what they were trying to do, as it was the way the Alarm had demonstrated itself in the early days, busking on the subways and performing outside [unfriendly venues].”
While Peters undermined his gracious words with a silly claim—“Here Joe was imitating the Alarm with acoustic guitars”—he was correct that Strummer and company were out to make a point, if mostly to themselves. Their mission, roughly, was to rediscover the joy of playing music, to be among the people, away from the rat race—above all, to feel themselves as a living, breathing musical unit, not pieces in Rhodes’s grand dream.
Even the paint failed to dampen the band’s spirits. Not knowing why the attack happened, or what issues were involved, they tended to blame the upset Alarm roadies. In addition, Sheppard recounts, “At the time, we thought it was really cool. We had blood-red paint all over our leather jackets, it was mad, it was art . . . this Jackson Pollock effect, and it was blood-red, like a badge of honor.”
While Strummer “got hit with most of the paint,” according to Sheppard, he apparently also took it in stride. After all, The Clash had been dealing with disillusioned followers since 1977. Far from aping the Alarm, the singer was revisiting his own busking roots, savoring the simple satisfaction of creating with his back to the wall, scrambling and scraping to make his way by wit and will in the streets. By that measure, the day had been a resounding success.
When the broader motivation for the spray-paint protest emerged, Sheppard took exception: “I found it quite offensive when [Chumbawamba’s Bruce] said, ‘Multimillionaires going back to busking, trying to get street cred.’ There was no ulterior motive from me, Joe, or anybody else. It was literally, ‘How about this? Let’s go and do this. That’d be cool. Yeah, all right. Let’s go and do it.’”
Simonon echoes Sheppard’s sentiments: “[The busking tour] was like starting out fresh again, it was great. ‘We’ll meet you in Glasgow in a week’s time,’ and the idea was to leave everything behind other than the guitars. You couldn’t take any money with you. We survived by our wits.”
Recalling the embattled December 1976 tour with Sex Pistols, the Damned, and the Heartbreakers, Simonon continues: “It was as exciting as the Anarchy tour, you never knew where you were going next. I remember we were in Leeds, it was two a.m., outside this black club, and people were coming out and really digging us.”
Conveniently, such situations could help with finding a place to sleep. Simonon: “There were two guys and they were shocked it was us. They said, ‘Where you staying?’ And we said, ‘We’re not staying anywhere,’ so they invited us to stay at their mum’s! The money we made from busking meant we could go further, we didn’t have a plan of where to go next. There was no rules. You didn’t have to be on the so-and-so plane at twelve o’clock.”
The next day, May 8, The Clash headed to nearby York. Starting out in St. Sampson’s Square, the band busked for passing shoppers then made its way up Petergate to York Minster, one of Britain’s grandest churches. “By the time we got to York Minster, there was a line of three to five hundred people behind us,” Howard remembers. “I was playing my drumsticks on a dustbin lid.” The Clash held forth to their gathered fans and a puzzled crowd there simply to celebrate V-E Day.
By now, the band was regularly playing outside in public, without any permits, to growing crowds. The combination was bound eventually to draw the attention of the authorities, and it did that day. The band was impossible to miss in such a high-profile spot. After a couple songs, the law intervened.
Howard: “The police were all around us, saying, ‘You’ve got to stop now, it’s getting out of hand, there could be damage—if you don’t stop, we will arrest you.’ The drummer laughs: “In England, the beat cops have the pointed hats, and the ones in charge have the flat hats—so one of the flat hats comes over to us and says, ‘You’ve got one more number, and then you’ve got to stop. Could you make it �
�London Calling’?”
The band complied with the order’s first part, but defied the second, instead breaking into “I Fought the Law”—with Howard drumming on the doors of the church itself—before decamping to a nearby pub, Hole in the Wall, to drink and chat with their followers. It was not the last time police would appear on this tour.
The next day at noon, the band materialized at King’s Square, a popular outdoor shopping district where Howard used a bench as his instrument. Stuart Heron—who had seen them the day before at York Minster—recalls, “The square was packed and again the band sounded great.” As this was a popular spot for street entertainers, Heron notes, “This time the police did not try to move them on.”
The musicians then paraded through York’s streets, strumming guitars Spanish-style. With about a hundred fans joining in, they made their way to Ripon and St. John’s College for another impromptu show. Howard played a drum loaned by a fan.
Word was starting to get out. The York shows inspired an outpouring of local write-ups, ranging from incredulous (“Clash in York? Now Pigs Fly!”), to jesting (“Punks March on Minster!”), to straightforward and supportive (“Carefree and Trouble-Free as Fans of Superstars Jam the Centre of City”). After an interview Strummer gave to a local radio station was sold to BBC Radio One without permission, the whole nation knew. While Strummer was angry about this chicanery, the chat was a window into the tour’s ardent sense of mission.
Asked why a band with millions of record sales would leave the financially secure pop world to play on the streets, Strummer responded, “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 . . .” Strummer’s voice trailed off, then resumed, even more urgent than before: “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.”
While Strummer disavowed any intent to be “really preachy,” he expressed the disaffection of post–miners’ strike Britain, where shadows of rage and despair were lengthening: “We’re going to have to have an English revolution in about ten years. I think it is possible, and I would like to be involved.”
The desolation of the increasingly postindustrial north was evident everywhere, especially as the band moved to Sunderland, where Sheppard’s brother lived, and then nearby Newcastle. This had been hard-core mining country, as indicated by the expression “carrying coals to Newcastle.” Now, the present was grim and the future seemed even bleaker, with fury and hopelessness festering.
Even White took note: “The farther north we go, the more angry it gets.” Later he recalled how Strummer engaged in Sunderland with local Socialist Workers’ Party militants, who tried to get him to sign on like the powerful soul-punk band the Redskins had done. Strummer deftly resisted: “I totally respect where you are coming from, but I can’t be seen to affiliate with any particular party.” He later defended the SWP activists to an unimpressed White: “Don’t be too hard on them, Vince, they are trying. The system is unfair, it has to change.”
While White was often bored by the politics, the devastation shocked him. After visiting one depressed area, he wrote, “The houses were mostly boarded up with metal and wood. Rows and rows of derelict [small homes]. It was a depressing sight I would see over and over again in the north. Shipbuilding, cotton mills, mining towns—the whole lot had gone to pot. The great British industrial wave had receded, leaving vast communities high and dry . . . just carrying on, going nowhere. Whole communities had been destroyed by the present government.”
This was the bleak vista Strummer had sketched in “Three Card Trick,” “In the Pouring Rain,” “This Is England,” and most recently “North and South.” Sadly, it was not simply the north of England, but the Rust Belt of Reagan’s America, the South Bronx, Native American reservations—so many places across the world. The desperation resonated with Strummer’s personal pain, and helped to fuel powerful newer songs like “Cool Under Heat”—which spoke of “sorrow upon sorrow / ganging up in your head”—and, above all, “Movers and Shakers.”
This song was first heard in public on the busking tour, and its message might be seen as the trek’s credo. Preserved on an audience tape from Newcastle’s Station Club on May 11, the unfamiliar song was greeted respectfully, with little of the raucous singing along that was coming to characterize these shows. Clapping his hands and howling at the front of The Clash’s acoustic assault, Strummer sought to make its hopeful, determined energy palpable nonetheless.
Strummer had once argued that the best songs came from a place of “concrete and hunger.” If so, “Movers and Shakers” was surely one of those. Opening with a stark vignette from the devastated South Bronx—“The boy stood in the burning slum”—the song immediately stakes its claim: “Better times had to come.”
While some critics would dismiss these lines as hyperbole, few who spent time in the South Bronx during the late seventies or early eighties would react that way. At the time, arson was rampant. Often slumlords were literally burning down their own buildings for the insurance payoff, leaving vast patches of vacant lots, with parts of the neighborhood looking like bombed-out nightmare-scapes.
Yet tens of thousands of people lived there nonetheless, seeking to make a living, to raise families, to build better lives amid economic collapse. Here African American and Puerto Rican teenagers, working with the most basic materials, found their voices and created hip-hop. Strummer evokes that tale: “Fate lay in the hands that clap / muscles to move / the power to rap.” Out of adversity, something beautiful had risen: “He went up on money street / Waving an’ popping to the beat / off his wits and on his feet / he worked a coin from the cold concrete.”
Homeless people now crowded American sidewalks, on what Christian-anarchist advocate Mitch Snyder called “a forced march to nowhere.” For Snyder, this evoked not simply Okies and vagabonds during the Great Depression, but the genocide of Native Americans on the “Trail of Tears.” In the second verse, Strummer finds another protagonist stepping out of this despair “with a red bandanna and rapid wipes . . . where the highway meets the lights.”
Once again, the singer would face criticism, this time for celebrating “squeegee men” and thus seeming to accept a brutal system that drove humans to such undignified toil. This appears to miss the point, for people need to survive before any revolution can be made, and that effort is common sense: “This man earns ’cause it’s understood / times are bad and he’s making good / down on him, but he’s got it beat / he’s working coin from the cold concrete.”
If such lines hardly carry the sledgehammer impact of “Clampdown’s” “kick over the wall / cause governments to fall,” they complement more than contradict those sentiments. In such dire straits, the mere preservation of the creative, fighting human spirit in however small a way can be revolutionary.
As the song pauses before racing to its denouement, it becomes clear that Strummer is, in part, seeking to lift his own flagging spirits. Riddled by pain and self-doubt, the singer offers gentle encouragement: “When I see you down / and I say / That ain’t no way through / Hey! That ain’t no way through.”
The cry “Movers and shakers come on!” could be understood as Strummer’s call to his better self, insisting, “You’ve got what it takes to make it.” All the brooding about the new Clash, all the self-loathing over how he had failed them and himself, comes out: “Movers and shakers come on / even if you have to fake it.”
The final verse brings it home, to Strummer’s own story of being a busker living in a dead-end squat “when a friend was anybody with food to eat.” “It was a lousy life / with a leaking roof,” the singer admits, but “we got up to find the truth.”
Having started the song with the birth of hip-hop, the singer now brought it around to punk’s genes
is. “One day I was a crud, the next I was a king,” Strummer said in 1977, speaking of seeing Sex Pistols for the first time. The power of that moment kicked him into action, and resonated across the years: “Make a drum from a garbage can / allow your tongue to be a man / when that beat propels you off of your seat / you got it made in the cold concrete.”
All the pain, doubt, and depression is cast away as Strummer cries, “Movers and shakers come on!” urging any and all forward. As he does, one last desperate shout of “COME ON!” echoes, met by raucous applause. If the song cataloged troubled situations far from the stricken towns of northern Britain, the defiantly upbeat message could hardly be more relevant to them.
While The Clash played many songs on this journey—new ones alongside their classics, as well as rock and reggae standards—their biggest hit, “Rock the Casbah” was unaired. Yet its antifundamentalist theme, born in reaction to the excesses of 1979’s Islamic Revolution in Iran, was gaining increasingly relevance.
Just as the new Clash had begun to coalesce at Rehearsal Rehearsals eighteen months before, a new phenomenon burst into Western consciousness. Around dawn on October 23, 1983, a militant connected to a new Iran-sponsored Islamic guerrilla group, Hezbollah, drove a truck heavily laden with explosives into the US Marine barracks in Beirut. Two hundred forty-one people died in the resulting carnage, introducing Americans to “suicide bombing.”
A new frightening energy was surging against the arrogant ways of capitalist and Communist alike, while also largely rejecting Western concepts of human rights and freedom. In Afghanistan, the United States supported mujahideen fighting the Soviet invaders and its puppet government, but also found itself denounced as “The Great Satan” by Iran’s Islamic Republic for its own misadventures.
We Are the Clash Page 29