The revolutionary regime went to war in 1980 with neighboring Iraq, ruled by a quasi-socialist dictator, Saddam Hussein. The US had broken off relations with Iran after the hostage crisis, and animosity lingered. Reagan moved to support Hussein and his regime, reckoning that the enemy of an enemy is a friend.
The blowback was immense. Westerners—especially Americans—in Lebanon became targets for shadowy Islamic groups over 1984 and the first months of 1985. While some were government operatives like CIA officer William Buckley, most were not. Iran-linked groups abducted the likes of Peter Kilburn, a librarian at Beirut’s American University; Catholic priest Lawrence Jenco; Presbyterian missionary Benjamin Weir; and Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson.
Reagan had benefited from the political damage inflicted on Jimmy Carter by the Iranian hostage crisis, and hawkish Republicans since Nixon had excoriated their opponents for making the US look like “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Now it was Reagan who was helpless. The Marine barracks bombing and spate of kidnappings were deeply embarrassing and infuriating to him.
While The Clash was on the busk in northern Britain, Reagan reached out to Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, asking for his help in winning the release of the hostages in Lebanon. According to the New York Times, at about the same time, Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile who was “under pressure from Iran to find arms in the West, made contact with a Saudi businessman, Adnan M. Khashoggi, who introduced him to Israeli operatives.”
The New York Times later noted that Ghorbanifar “had raised the issue of ransoming hostages in a meeting in Hamburg, West Germany, with Iranian officials and Theodore C. Shackley, a former CIA agent.” In due time, the Times continued, a secret CIA memo “suggested the possibility of selling arms to Iran as a way of blunting Soviet moves in the region” and freeing the hostages.
In public, Reagan continued to blast the idea of “making concessions to terrorists.” Behind the scenes, an operation involving this unlikely cast of characters—plus a few more—was taking shape.
Far from this cloak-and-dagger scenario, The Clash was confronting another ugly reality. If the US tour had provided what Sheppard described as “a cocoon” at the outset of the miners’ strike, this jaunt destroyed it. The band could offer little but salve for wounded souls, though that was appreciated. “We are lads that don’t have a lot of cash, we’re in college or we’re on the dole,” one fan told York Radio, speaking for many peers. “So, today, after ten years of success, to come around places like York and Leeds and play gigs that are free, that really means a lot to us lot.”
Whether by instinct, design, or coincidence, their travels took them through the heart of poststrike Britain. Sheppard would later revisit heartbreaking conversations he had with members of mining families, ruminating, “The busking tour wasn’t really about music, it was about us getting back in the real world.”
Years later, the Nottingham Post reported that The Clash played a miners’ benefit at a much-loved independent record store, SelectaDisc. They also performed at The Bunker in Sunderland, where Billy Bragg had done one of his own strike fund-raisers. One fan, Tony Keen, remembers the band dedicating “North and South” to the miners at another show. Even White was photographed wearing a miners’ strike benefit T-shirt during this time.
It is hard not to wonder what this sort of tour could have done during the strike itself—to help keep spirits up, to raise awareness and funds, to rally the troops. While such a tour had been deemed impossible before, the mere fact of what The Clash was now doing made that claim seem no longer credible.
The music—when it was audible to the growing crowds—was also stronger than ever. The acoustic guitars and voices mixed well. Howard was a marvel, inventively using whatever percussion “instrument” he had at hand; Tony White saw them twice, lauding the drummer’s “fantastic drumstick work.”
Bootlegs from York and Newcastle reveal the band gelling in its new acoustic format, but there was also a more intangible factor at work. What the songs lost in volume—lacking any amplification—they gained in emotional ballast.
For a London band to play “North and South” in this context was very significant, but other songs resonated as well. “Garageland” had seemed a bit defensive opening the warm-up shows before the US Festival, but a bootleg version from the Newcastle Subway sounds utterly convincing. “Career Opportunities” had sounded sound hollow on a Shea Stadium stage, yet rang true on the streets of northern England. The pathos of “Straight to Hell” was even more poignant, performed in the very places where “railhead towns feel the steel mills rust.”
This was as close as The Clash would ever get to Woody Guthrie playing around campfires for hobos and migrant workers. When Strummer later described this as “the best tour we ever did,” he was no doubt thinking of such communion: singing “hard-hitting songs for hard-hit people,” in Guthrie’s words.
This point, while real, could be overstated. The Clash were playing bars, colleges, and shopping districts, not union halls, picket lines, and immigrant camps. Still, their accessibility to the audience and the powerful interchange with them was astounding, heartening, and unprecedented for a band of its stature.
Playing at Grey’s Monument in Newcastle, the band ran afoul of the police again. The landmark honored Charles Grey, a peace advocate and champion of civil and religious liberty. Not surprisingly, the plaza was a popular venue for street musicians, religious speakers, and protesters. It was not a spot the busking Clash was about to miss.
“Joe just kind of appeared and said, ‘We are The Clash,’ and they started playing,” one fan recounted years later. “A large crowd quickly gathered and the police turned up and duly got ‘on their back.’” Sheppard laughs: “These Newcastle coppers told us to move on. That was the only time I felt threatened in the whole tour. They breed them rough up there [in mining country] . . . We just looked at these fucking tough guys and went, ‘We’re not arguing with them!’”
The Clash “went about thirty yards off in the direction of the central station and started playing again by an underpass,” the fan recalled, “by which time I couldn’t see them any more in the melee that quickly developed.” From there, they went on to busk at the Exhibition Park Subway, before decamping to The Station, then bouncing back to Sunderland for sets at Gollum’s Bar and the Drum Club.
Many of the shows seemed magical. “Joe was fearless, absolutely fearless on that tour,” Sheppard says.
Howard echoes those sentiments: “Joe was unstoppable. Everybody’s saying, ‘Let’s go and busk outside a university, or in a student-y area . . . because, you know, they’ll go fucking crazy, they’ll have us all for dinner, and they’ll give us this, that, and the other. And Joe was going: ‘No, let’s find the roughest fucking club, let’s go and busk outside there.’”
A larger lesson was present, as Howard notes, one rarely learned in the typical rock star “bubble”: “There you have a classic example of the things that you start to learn about people, because you really wouldn’t know too much about that, in the environment of being driven to a gig, and having security, and nobody allowed backstage . . . and all that kind of stuff.” The drummer pauses, and then continues: “But all of a sudden, you’ve got, like, really hard-bitten people coming out of a club, and then we’d play like ‘Pressure Drop’ or some other reggae classics. And as soon as we started playing, these Rastas sort of visibly wilted, then one maybe would kind of know who we were. And you’d be in this situation with people who, if you saw them [back home], you would shit yourself. Then, all of a sudden, you’re in their house. You’re drinking their rum. You’re sitting there, you’re eating their food. And actually, it became one of those, if you like, real experiences. That’s why it was really good.”
Sheppard: “We were looked after [on that tour]. It was amazing, the hospitality and respect we were shown by people.” The connection was visceral and direct; Strummer later said, “I never felt closer to our audience th
an on that tour.”
Howard: “A lot of people who saw us busking didn’t say, ‘It’s a shame they had a dustbin instead of a drum kit,’ they said, ‘I’ve seen The Clash now.’”
Sheppard: “Necessity is the mother of all invention, right? It was a mixture of luck, and working it, and that was what was cool about it. It was a really organic thing: ‘How do we make this work? Let’s latch onto these guys, they actually live here. What songs are we gonna play? How do we get to the next town? What are we gonna eat? Fuck, I’m cold—let’s go and buy some fabric, and cut it into red strips, and make scarves’ . . . that kind of thing, you know. And we pulled together, man—it was great. That’s what was good about it. We all pulled together.”
The power of the platoon had reappeared. This happy development, however, highlighted how far this tour was from the dehumanizing process of recording the new album, marching to the rigid cadence of Rhodes’s electronic drums. The destructive aspects of the Clash manager were high on the agenda for at least Sheppard, Howard, and White, who tried to get the message through to Strummer. Sheppard: “One of the great things about that busking tour is that we spent all of our time together. And we had some pretty serious sit-down discussions: ‘You know what, Joe, that Bernie guy’s fuckin’ . . .’ We said what we thought, you know? And he listened. He listened.”
Howard agrees: “I would sit there and go, ‘I don’t really know what the hell Bernie and Kosmo are up to. I don’t know what they’re talking about anymore. Every time they come in, there’s a different harebrained scheme, something else, you know—something else that’s even more fucking wack than the last time . . . I suppose we were gently trying to convert Joe to getting away from Bernie. I didn’t think he was the right man for the job at the time. I thought Bernie was doing the wrong thing by everyone involved. I did feel that getting away from him for a certain amount of time would give us all a bit of perspective.”
Strummer took it all in, sometimes commiserating with his bandmates, but giving little indication of his own position.
There was little time for sustained reflection. When the musicians arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 13, they were back to the streets. Every new town could be hard at the beginning, and Edinburgh was no exception, with indifferent shoppers hurrying past them.
White wrote later, “We were there for nearly an hour, and not even a penny.” Yet the guitarist was not really worried, having seen how the band’s fervent support protected them: “The Clash reputation was there, everywhere, providing a soft buffer against any real hardship.” As if to prove this point, the band asked a young guy in a biker jacket where they should go and he pointed them to La Sorbonne, a run-down haunt largely frequented by students.
One such student—and longtime Clash fan—Martin McCallion, had been shopping for a new wallet in a department store on Princess Street when he walked out to an astonishing sight: The Clash in full fury on the sidewalk. Although the musicians were finishing up, they announced the upcoming La Sorbonne show.
McCallion hurried to rally his friends at the nearby university: “There were no cell phones or Internet at the time, of course. We didn’t even have phones in our rooms, just one for the whole floor out in the hall. But I called up everyone I could think of to tell them about The Clash playing La Sorbonne.”
By now, the band had settled into the semblance of a routine: busking in the streets during the day to promote a slightly more conventional show at a club or pub at night, which helped raise the money to get to the next town. A bootleg of the Newcastle Exhibition Park Subway set captures Strummer inviting the crowd to the Gateshead Station that night. There, in turn, Strummer announced to the crowd, “We’re on the bum,” before passing the hat for “some drinking money.”
The La Sorbonne show was everything McCallion and his friend Tony Keen had hoped for: “La Sorbonne was a small kind of ratty space, with a tiny stage. It was comfortably full, and you could hear and see the band just a few feet away. They didn’t have amps or microphones, but they were incredible!”
In another fortunate twist, The Clash had been introduced to Jimmy Boyle, whom Sheppard describes as “a real hard-nut criminal who had kind of turned his life around.” Once called “the most violent man in Britain” after being jailed for murder, Boyle had experienced an awakening via art therapy programs while in prison, ultimately becoming a renowned sculptor.
Sheppard: “Boyle started the Gateway Exchange, a halfway refuge, an attempt to get people off heroin, which was big in Glasgow and Edinburgh at the time. He brought us over to check it out.” Sebastian Horsley, one of Boyle’s coworkers, described the initiative as “a sort of last-chance saloon for people coming out of prison, coming off drugs, and those with mental health issues.”
After Gateway, Boyle also introduced The Clash to Wester Hailes, a sprawling “council estate”—equivalent to a US public housing complex—that was home to both heartbreaking social problems and innovative programs of social uplift. The band was deeply moved, donning Gateway Exchange shirts for several gigs.
Strummer remarked at the time, “We have the highest regard for the Gateway and for communities like Wester Hailes. We met the people there and heard about what is happening, everyone feeling a part of something, realizing that, by getting together, they can improve their situation.”
Boyle also used his contacts to get a show at Coasters, a well-known club, the following night, May 14. The Edinburgh word-of-mouth assured that “the small acoustic shows” were no longer so small. “A time had been set and word had been spread,” White remarks. “Things were getting out of control.” As the crowds grew, police moved in, shutting down a couple of gigs before they began due to what White remembers as “fire regulations.”
Coasters was larger than most of the other venues and reasonably well established. The Clash built anticipation with a busk in the nearby shopping district. One fan later reminisced, “The band played . . . on Princess Street at the corner of The Mound where there is a speakers’ corner, where basically you can spout off as long as you’re not offensive. They played quite a few numbers before heading off to Coasters with a large following running after them.”
The space was mobbed. McCallion and his friends barely got inside, ending up crunched in a back corner, with more than 1,300 other attendees. After the small La Sorbonne show, this was “overwhelming and not really much fun,” McCallion said. “So many people were singing along, and we were so far back, you couldn’t really hear the band. I don’t think we stayed the whole way though.”
If the night was unsatisfying for those in the back, many others closer to the action were once again transported. Tellingly, the band opened the set with “North and South” before racing through nine Clash classics, with “Pressure Drop” and “Johnny Too Bad” thrown in for good measure.
Sheppard was astonished: “There were about a thousand people in this room. And you could have heard a pin drop when we played, because we didn’t have any microphones, we didn’t have any amplification. So if you wanted to hear us, you had to shut up. So we’d do a song—and it would be absolutely silent. And then we’d finish, and there’d be this massive roar—it was quite surreal and amazing.”
White had a more jaundiced view: “No one could hear anything . . . Later I realized people were just showing up for the band name, the event.”
If partly true, White perhaps misses a central point. As the busking shows grew larger, the band receded and the populist idea that “we are The Clash” became very real. On a live tape from Coasters, one can hear the beat set by the band but not the guitars. No voices are distinguishable except the crowd howling en masse. It was extraordinary: without amps, microphones, or light shows, something grew that was considerably more than five people, sounding immense and undefeatable.
Sounds’ Mandy Rhodes attended the Coasters show, and wrote an article entitled “There’s (Still) a Riot Going On” lauding the band: “Today The Clash could easily pack any venue
they chose. They could follow the dubious example of the Stones if they cared to and charge outrageous prices for a ticket to the spectacle. Instead, they are turning up all over the place from tiny bars where they are greeted with disbelief and open arms to the front door queues of gigs by such as the Alarm . . . to busking on one of Edinburgh’s busiest streets.”
When Mandy Rhodes asked Strummer the purpose of this “bum tour,” the singer responded in an urgent, show-ravaged rasp: “We’re doing the tour for ourselves, we enjoy it more this way. We wanted to get out on the streets again, back to our roots, and find out what direction we should take.”
The interviewer was well aware of the political subtext. In the late seventies, Strummer had argued, “As a group with flash appeal, we can use our privilege to get the message over, tell the people to rise up.” How then, Rhodes wondered, “would the band would go down in an even more downtrodden 1985?”
Strummer sounded defiant: “You saw the spirit of the crowd tonight. They made the night. They have the potential and the energy to change the system. We want Reagan and Thatcher out, we want a change in the system. We’re not saying that we have the answer, though, not at all. That’s why we are doing this tour, to talk to people, maybe to find a way to create change.”
If such talk might seem over-the-top idealistic, what Mandy Rhodes had just witnessed made it seem anything but: “The energy of the audience at the shows was unquestionable. Largely consisting of the young and unemployed, the common allegiance was against ‘the system’ that deprives them of work, accommodation, and any measure of self-respect . . . More now than ever the message of The Clash has to be sung loud to pick up on the feeling in the land.”
The writer was impressed by the vehemence of both band and crowd: “They were inspired and united for once, if only to hear the call for change . . . Regardless that The Clash played without amps or microphones, the message was as loud and clear as ever . . . Using only acoustic guitars and an oil can for a drum, they belted out a battle cry and the feeling was one of solid unity.”
We Are the Clash Page 30