We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  She found no artifice involved: “When such vast amounts of money can be made out of pop, The Clash seem to see their role as a vehicle for others to use. It is the people who must advocate and demand the changes, but the band will help by getting people together in one place to listen to the sounds of defiance.”

  Such a politically charged rave in the pages of Sounds—whose stock in trade often seemed to be cynical takedowns—was unusual. Mandy Rhodes’s words are an indication of the special power of this unique moment. The writer granted it might be “a dream world” of “self-delusion” but the hope generated was palpable.

  If the tour showed that rock still “meant something,” where could it go from here? The limits of the journey were apparent, as the band pressed against the bounds of what was possible without amplification, arrest, or outright mayhem.

  For now, The Clash moved on to nearby Glasgow. Once again, the band arrived late but had good luck. Art school student Gillian Farmer was at a café/bar called Nico’s with two friends when the band came in on May 15. Startled, she built up her courage and walked over to ask Strummer for an autograph. “Sorry, we don’t do that,” Farmer recalls him responding, coolly but graciously.

  Undeterred, Farmer struck up a conversation with White, asking about where the band was staying. When he responded that they didn’t have a place, Farmer blurted out an offer to stay at her flat, “never expecting for a second they’d say, ‘Well, that would be really cool.’” She was shocked when White swiftly agreed, turning to Strummer to say, “Hey, Joe, it looks like we have a crash for the night!”

  Thus began a whirlwind of shows in what would be the last stretch of the busking tour, starting at the nearby Fixx Pub on Miller Street, not far from Barrowlands where the new Clash had first played in the UK only fourteen months before. Farmer helped them make connections at other spaces, including the Rock Garden pub, the Cul-de-Sac bar at the nearby university, and Vic’s Café at Glasgow’s art college.

  “Phones were ringing off the hook,” Farmer says, as the word spread about the next day’s shows, beginning at three p.m. at the Rock Garden. One lucky fan, Paul Henderson, “met The Clash by chance, sitting on the stairs of the art school.” After going for a beer, Henderson went to the impromptu gig at the Rock Garden, and was riveted: “The crowd was singing along so loudly!”

  Another fan, Tony McCormack, was headed to the pub for an afternoon pint: “When I turned into Queen Street, I saw a large crowd congregated around the door and they had door staff on too, which was very unusual for Thursday lunchtime.” When the doorman told McCormack that The Clash was playing downstairs, he first thought it was a joke, “as he knew I was a Clash fanatic.”

  When it became clear this was not a put-on, McCormack begged without success to be let in. He waited nonetheless and then cornered the band when it emerged. Told that the group was headed to the Cul-de-Sac, McCormack rushed there. The show, however, had been canceled due to congestion.

  McCormack was not deterred. “The Cul-de-Sac doorman said they were going to Dukes next, so off we went!” McCormack was beginning to doubt his judgment “when the door opened and in walked The Clash . . . no hangers-on, just the five of them.” McCormack offered to buy them a beer, only to have Strummer reply, “No, we’ll get you one, as we’re playing for beer and food.”

  The place was soon packed. The band kicked off with “Pressure Drop,” “Guns of Brixton,” “Bank Robber,” and “Brand New Cadillac.” With a hundred folks milling around outside, the authorities came to investigate. “Strathclyde’s finest turned up to be met with ‘Police on My Back,’” McCormack remembers. “[The Clash] were told to get outside as there were too many people inside and a mob outside.”

  This directive was actually welcome. Farmer recalls, “Joe saw all the people outside and said, ‘Let’s give the people what they want!’” Once outside, according to McCormack: “The Clash duly broke into ‘I Fought the Law.’ Loads of wee Glasgow women were hanging out their windows [to see what was happening] as a couple of hundred Clash fans sang and danced about like maddies.”

  When the band went into “Straight to Hell,” McCormack recounts, “it was eerily quiet.” The ever-resourceful Howard played the drum part on a windowsill. McCormack: “The police panicked as more and more people turned up and sent The Clash back inside and only let the number back in that met with fire rules.”

  Stuck outside in the resulting chaos, McCormack and his friends waited till the band left, then followed them in a cab to the Mayfair Reggae Disco. McCormack explains, “They did a storming set of all the famous Clash reggae stuff, finishing with ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais.’” From there, The Clash headed off to a final set at the Windjammer Pub, but McCormack went home, savoring a day of Clash-chasing that had been “perfect.”

  The Clash-mates roused themselves the next morning, going with Farmer to perform what would be their final show of the busking tour—and, as it turned out, the final time they would ever play in the UK. The gig was at Farmer’s school, the Glasgow School of Art, in a space above Vic’s Café, at noon on Friday, May 17.

  The show’s atmosphere was “unbelievable,” Farmer says. “It was packed, people at the door, just clambering to get in.” The band began with “Cool Under Heat,” then swiftly ran through “Straight to Hell,” “Guns of Brixton,” “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” “Pressure Drop,” “Bankrobber,” “Police on My Back,” and “Brand New Cadillac.” “Everyone [was] cheering and singing along,” Farmer recalls. “They were so massive, everyone knew all the words to all the songs.”

  Photos from the concert capture Sheppard, White, and Simonon playing at gale force. According to Farmer, Howard was in back “hammering the hell” out of a plastic chair, the treble of the metal arms punctuating the bass sounds created by the seat and back. Resplendent in a fiery-red quiff and dark green Kent State T-shirt, Strummer was raging out front, riding the thunderous acoustic hurricane as the band brought the show to an end with a rampaging “White Riot.”

  Then it was over. Later, Farmer would remember Strummer as distant and quiet that last day in Glasgow. “The only time I caught Joe in a good mood was dancing to [a record of] ‘Route 66,’” Farmer later wrote. “He really didn’t seem to be in a happy space—until he got on the stage, then it was incredible.”

  This moodiness could have been ordinary brooding, or just an exhausted singer protecting his tour-ravaged voice. Nonetheless, Farmer felt that “looking back, it did seem to have the sense of something that was coming to an end.”

  The band decamped for the train station from Vic’s Café. Farmer went with them, stopping to have a curry and then seeing them off on a train to Manchester, ostensibly to continue the tour there. But this, like rumored plans to play Liverpool, Carlisle, and Birmingham, was not to be.

  Sheppard: “We set up to start busking in the city center of Manchester and Joe had completely lost his voice. And we realized, ‘We can’t go on, because you’re in a bad way, man, you’ve gotta go home now.’”

  Years later, Strummer ruefully said much the same, admitting to Jon Savage: “We didn’t get to play in Manchester, ’cause my voice had gone by then.”

  It was a sudden, intuitive end to what had been an extraordinary seventeen days. Sheppard “We just went, ‘That’s enough. We can’t do any more than this.’ So we got the train home. It was a bit sad, really, when we finished, but there you go.”

  The tour seemed like a new beginning for The Clash. Sheppard says, “It would have been a great thing to do originally,” instead of the somewhat forced California jaunt. Certainly these two and half weeks had been a marvelous balm for the band, going a long way to restore urgently needed solidarity.

  But had The Clash found the answers they had been looking for? At least one de facto member of the team remained outside this newfound unity: Bernard Rhodes. As it happened, he held the ace of spades in his hand.

  chapter nine

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  Strummer, Sheppard, White, and Simonon scale the speaker stack, Roskilde Festival, June 29, 1985. (Photos by Per-Åke Wärn.)

  Bernie needed something earth-moving, ground-shaking, monumentally amazing. And so, what the world has been given is Bernie’s idea of a monumentally earth-shaking, amazingly modern genius record.

  —Nick Sheppard

  The massacre now is over / and the order new enshrined . . .

  —Old English folk ballad, c. 1986

  The five members of The Clash stood closely together, singing Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop.” With guitar, bass, and drums silenced, the voices surged and swelled on their own, brassy and determined. Onlookers joined in, howling out the lyrics.

  The spare words contained a compelling message. Brought to a global audience by the film The Harder They Come, the song told of karmic justice. As author “Toots” Hibbert explained, “It’s a song about revenge, but in the form of karma: if you do bad things to innocent people, then bad things will happen to you. The title was a phrase I used to say. If someone done me wrong, rather than fight them like a warrior, I’d say: ‘The pressure’s going to drop on you.’”

  The Clash had often sung the roots-reggae classic like this on the busking tour. The five voices intertwined with each other and the audience’s, the melody ringing out clear and strong. The sound was stirring, and suggested unbreakable solidarity.

  The scene evoked their audacious sojourn across northern Britain, immersed in their audience, living off what they earned each day. But now the band was not scuffling on concrete, playing for spare change. The Clash was onstage at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, before more than fifty thousand fans, most of them essentially invisible to the musicians standing on a distant stage.

  It was June 29, 1985, nearly six weeks since the band had last played, without amps and microphones above Vic’s Café in Glasgow. The shift of venue can only have been jarring. Yet The Clash did not show it onstage. Most likely they were just glad to be playing again for a live audience, however far removed.

  Beyond the several-dozen busking gigs bashed out over barely more than two weeks, this was only the seventh show The Clash had done in almost thirteen months. This was an astonishingly languid pace for rebel rockers who had promised to outwork metal bands and banish lightweight pop as 1984 dawned.

  The group had returned from its triumphant, energized trek through the north only to find itself falling into the rabbit hole of the new album once again. The lyrics of “Pressure Drop” took on another relevance—for the weight had descended squarely on the weary, heartsick Joe Strummer.

  Certain pretenses were falling away. Vince White was working late one night on final bits for some of the songs at Strummer’s house when the singer began rolling and smoking one joint after another. White was already aware that Strummer had fallen off the wagon, and didn’t make a big deal of it, even joining in, though pot was not his preferred vice.

  According to White, an abashed Strummer still sought to explain this deviation from his public pronouncements, saying, “I’m under so much pressure.” When the guitarist reassured him, “Don’t worry about it, it’s only rock and roll,” Strummer went on: “I know what you think about spliff, but I was under so much stress, like Bernie and that . . . A friend was round, it was there . . . and I just smoked it, you know? I felt so much release, and it all—the pressure, Bernie, the band, everything—just DISAPPEARED!”

  If this seemed facile self-justification, the weight was real—and working on the album only made it heavier. The laborious process, with each move dictated by Rhodes, killed virtually every bit of joy the singer found in the creative process.

  Even the good bits carried a double edge. Whereas busking had reawakened his love for the simple, organic interplay of humans and instruments, the new record being born was anything but. Yet Strummer saw Rhodes as somehow essential to The Clash, and to himself as a person. How could the singer shatter this bond to preserve the one with the band, to remain true to himself as an artist?

  While Simonon remained vaguely neutral and curiously disengaged, the position of White, Howard, and Sheppard was clear—the band’s biggest single obstacle was one of its main creators. If Strummer knew they were right, he couldn’t seem to find the strength to face down the manager. How could he, when Rhodes was a Clash cofounder as well as a father figure?

  There was no easy answer, and a spiritually depleted Strummer found it hard to muster the determination. His mother was clearly terminally ill, and the singer had recently learned he was to be a father for the second time. The conflicting pulls were immense, and Strummer had chosen the path of least resistance, drifting closer and closer to disaster.

  After the busking tour, Strummer had finally attempted to confront Rhodes. But the resourceful manager turned it against his detractors. Sheppard: “As soon as we got back to London, the whole fucking power trip was back. We had this meeting in Holland Park—a fucking conference room in a hotel, for God’s sake!—it was weird, you know? We started off: ‘Joe has talked to Bernie about how we feel.’”

  A breakthrough seemed imminent, but it was not to be. Sheppard: “Bernie just turned it around: ‘This man’s Joe Strummer, he’s a hero, he’s a god, he’s a voice of the people, how dare you . . . You’re all just scum. You’re this, and you’re that, you’re a coward, you’re middle class’—that type of stuff—and just built Joe up.”

  Rhodes skillfully reframed the argument to portray the band as selfishly burdening an already overwhelmed singer. He got his hoped-for result: Strummer—and, apparently, Simonon—did not definitively stand with the others and Rhodes emerged firmly in control. Sheppard sighs at the recollection: “If you’re told ‘You’re brilliant’ enough, you believe it. And Joe was brilliant, he was the voice of a generation, and all that stuff Bernie said. But this move just got us straight back into his power play, basically. And Joe let him do it.”

  Sheppard allows, “It was maybe the last time Bernie was able to do a number on Joe,” but the turning of the tables was deeply dispiriting to the band. A crucial opportunity to set a new course had been lost.

  Strummer later offered a self-acquitting version of the events to Jon Savage: “When we came back to London after that busking tour, we felt we had something good going inside the group, but as soon as we came back and met Bernie and Kosmo in Holland Park . . . Bernie didn’t like that it was slipping out of his control, so somehow he put a stop to the good feeling that we had.” This is an odd way to describe the verbal abuse Rhodes unleashed on the dissenters on their return, a situation where Strummer had much power but chose not to use it.

  Michael Fayne had been amazed by the busking tour, but harbored few illusions: “You’re out there hitchhiking, you’re depending on each other, on people you don’t know . . . You have faith that you’re gonna have a place to sleep, you’re gonna get enough money to be able to get to the next town somewhere, and so forth . . . and it was great, right? But then they finished, and you’ve gotta come back and face reality, the reality you’ve created in the first place.”

  For Fayne, the issue was clear: “Joe never got rid of Bernard, so what did they think was gonna happen when they got back, you know? Bernie’s not gonna just disappear! They came back, and all of the incredible vibe of that tour dissipated—because Bernie’s back in control, essentially.”

  Rhodes’s trump card was his grip on Strummer. Fayne: “Without making Joe sound weak, what happened is almost like Stockholm syndrome,” referring to the way hostages can develop sympathy for their jailers. “Joe had been captive for so long by this person, man, he actually believed he couldn’t take up shit with him. Bernie can get in your head. I’ve seen Bernie make grown men cry—this guy is fierce, man! I mean, I’ve never met anybody like him, you know?”

  Rhodes’s ace in the hole was not simply personal—it was contractual. Having already been ejected once from the band, he had sought to be protected this time around. Strummer was now
bound to Rhodes by law. There could be no easy exit from this not-so-congenial embrace.

  * * *

  For their part, the miners had fought the law but had not won. As a result, they were now at the mercy of Thatcher’s National Coal Board. As Jonathan and Ruth Winterton reported, “Within one month of the end of the strike, the NCB had announced twelve pit closures . . . Two months after the strike ended, the first closures were announced in Yorkshire”—the starting point and heart of the strike. “Over a few months, fourteen [more] units were to be closed, with manpower reduced at other sites.”

  The NUM could do little to stop this savage downsizing. Its smaller sister union of safety inspectors, NACODS, fought a few rearguard actions to ensure that the closures went through the proper review procedure. As Thatcher had intended, however, they could only slow the bleeding, not stop it. One of the pits slated for closure was Cortonwood, where the strike had begun.

  While the miners were at work again—at least till their pits closed and they were let go—the divisions remained. Even as they worked side by side, strikers shunned those they still derided as “scabs,” refusing to even speak to them.

  These fractures split the mining towns themselves. Even families were torn apart by choices made and promises broken. The vitality of these hamlets depended on the pits, for even those not employed there counted on the money miners would spend in the community. The closure of a mine could effectively doom the village itself. The residents knew this, so any betrayal during the life-or-death strike was hard to forgive. Years would pass but many wounds remained unhealed.

  The divisions in The Clash were nearly as bitter. Rhodes’s brutal reassertion of authority, added to Strummer’s abdication, was a hammerblow to Sheppard, White, and Howard. They were now totally at the manager-cum-producer’s mercy.