We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Yet there were some other notable critiques. The Göteborgs-Posten’s July 1 review commented on the set’s lack of new material: “This year’s Clash are just a pathetic echo of the past.” Per-Åke Wärn, a Swedish photographer who had been impressed by earlier neo-Clash shows seconded this: “I felt like I was watching a Clash cover band.”

  This take held some truth. Festival shows tended to be what White derisively described as “playing the greatest hits.” The absence of new songs was striking, especially since the long-awaited record was supposed to emerge soon.

  Sheppard had his suspicions: “There’s probably some kind of conversation somewhere between Joe and Bernie as to how we’re gonna represent these songs eventually. How do you recreate this [new] record with real people? There isn’t a drummer on it, so how do you go out and play those songs?”

  Strummer was in charge of the set list, so the paucity of newer material might have also suggested growing discomfort with the direction taken in the studio, combined with disenchantment toward Rhodes. It also hinted at doubts about the worth of the new songs—and, by extension, the power of the neo-Clash.

  White—hardly in the best shape himself, facing excruciating stomach pain from stress and excessive alcohol intake—would later write about a conversation with Strummer not long before the Roskilde show where the singer admitted to his deep depression. White responded to him with typical flippancy: “Have a fucking beer, man. That will cheer you up.”

  White remembers Strummer reacting with stark self-awareness: “A beer? You think it is that easy? That simple? There’s no way I can’t do that. One beer leads to two. Then three and another and another. I will end up drinking ten. Or twenty. Or fifty. It won’t stop.” Although White says that Rhodes was present and was able to help Strummer lift his spirits, the broader challenge of what was likely a combination of clinical depression and alcoholism was simply pushed aside.

  * * *

  While Strummer wrestled with intensely difficult issues, including how—or whether—to press forward with the new Clash, the Reagan administration revealed no qualms about its course in Central America. Effectively barred from arming the contra rebels—who Reagan called “freedom fighters” in the mold of George Washington, despite their bloody deeds and scant popular support—the government was making the rounds to allies to drum up financing, with very mixed results.

  As The Clash had prepared for its return to action at Roskilde, the CIA had helped draw the feuding contra factions into a single entity, now known as the United Nicaraguan Opposition. On paper, this made for a more effective and supportable entity; in reality, little had changed. The contras remained better at sowing terror and killing civilians than defeating Reagan’s Sandinista nemesis.

  With Congress blocking its way, and facing battlefield reverses, the Reagan administration decided to make a play straight out of a spy novel: it would sell arms to Iran through the shadowy brokers Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar, in order to free the hostages held by Iranian ally Hezbollah. Most incredibly, White House aide Colonel Oliver North was to direct the middlemen to channel the Iranian payments to the contras, neatly dodging the congressional ban.

  The timing was exquisite. According to the New York Times, on July 1 President Reagan publicly denounced bartering with terrorists; yet only two days later, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane met with David Kimche, who was in the US on behalf of the Israelis who had met with Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar. In this meeting, the arms-for-hostages deal was first outlined.

  On July 16, McFarlane met with Reagan and came away empowered to go forward with the Iranians and Israelis. Selling arms to an enemy in order to ransom hostages held by terrorists, then using the profits to evade US laws forbidding military aid to the contras, was audacious. It was also most likely illegal and surely politically explosive. Richard Nixon had faced impeachment for less.

  Three days before Reagan chose to wager his regime on this desperate ploy, The Clash played the Rockscene festival in Guehenno, in a remote region of France. For Sheppard and the others, Rockscene came off as an impersonal event: “We literally flew in, did the gig, and flew out.” It was a bit odd for them to be there, for, as Rolling Stone reported, on that day—July 13, 1985—“seemingly every major rock act on earth played the Live Aid concert for African famine relief, hosted primarily in Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium and London’s Wembley Stadium and broadcast to over a billion people worldwide.”

  Even if slightly diminished by the lack of a recent hit, The Clash was a glaring omission from the Live Aid bill. When a disappointed White inquired why the band wasn’t playing, Vinyl explained that bad blood existed between Strummer and show organizer, Bob Geldof, formerly of the Irish punk-pop act Boomtown Rats.

  Neither this explanation nor the reappearance of the Sex Style Subversion banner as the backdrop at the show pleased White, much less Howard or Sheppard. Yet the band played well, with Strummer once again refraining from confrontation, despite his aversion for the stadium setting.

  The only barb came from Vinyl, who marred an otherwise rousing introduction with a slap at the festival’s name—“I’m sure the promoter would like me to address you as ‘Rockscene,’ but I can’t think of a name that is more fucking patronizing in the world!”—before calling out once again to “hip-hoppers, punk rockers, young ladies, pill poppers, black toppers, and showstoppers!”

  White was upset not to be playing Live Aid, and was left cold by the audience and vibe that day. Sheppard remembers the show more favorably, feeling that the band presented itself powerfully, albeit with a “greatest hits” set that once again contained only a single new song, “Three Card Trick.”

  But if all seemed copasetic onstage, behind the scenes division was deepening. Strummer took White aside before the show to say he was splitting with Rhodes who—ironically enough—had stayed back home to watch Live Aid. By now, White never knew what to believe when Strummer spoke. Nonetheless, he came away sensing that the end of The Clash—or another new beginning—might be near.

  Bedeviled by Rhodes’s never-ending windups, and Strummer’s erratic behavior, White turned to Simonon with his worries about the band’s fate. According to White, the bassist was the picture of equanimity: “Ever since this band began it’s been on the cards. There hasn’t been a single day when it might not end at any moment . . . even in the beginning. I don’t worry about it. I just take each day as it comes.”

  When White asked if Simonon was annoyed to not be included on the new album, he shrugged and replied, “Bernie knows what’s best. He is . . . difficult, but it’s for the best.” Eventually, Simonon would question the wisdom of his faith in the manager. For now, White knew he, Sheppard, and Howard were on their own.

  Two weeks later, the band was at yet another festival, this one set up by the then-Socialist government of Greece in a partnership with the French Ministry of Culture. No tapes of the show survived, and once again The Clash, alone among all the bands on the bill, refused to allow filming.

  Both Sheppard and White remember it as a barnburner. White: “It was a blinding show. At the final count I realized I played my best. And we as the band had reached our best.” Nursing his tender stomach, White also played the show entirely sober for the first time and found it surprisingly satisfying.

  Sheppard felt the same, viewing the night as one of the best realized of the more than 120 concerts the new Clash had played: “Athens and the few other shows we did after the busking tour made the group musically. There was another corner that we turned there, in terms of a dynamic.” It didn’t hurt that there were 40,000-plus fans on hand, as frenzied and fanatical as the Italians had been the previous fall.

  To Sheppard and White, horizons still seemed to beckon for the band.

  If the guitarists were cautiously bullish about the future, the singer was harder to read. In public, Strummer gave no indication of doing anything but staying the neo-Clash course. An interview for Greek television in advance of the Athens s
how underlined this stance. The film crew interviewed an animated Strummer in a Straight to Hell T-shirt with fifties-style rolled-up sleeves, hair slicked back, and dog tags glinting in the sun on a busy London street.

  In the clip, Strummer shared hopes for the future: “We have a new record that is going to be released sometime in September . . . and we just wanted it to be up—‘up,’ as in not ‘downer’ music. We are sick and tired of people complaining and not coming up with any answers.” This echoed his past ambivalence about “protest” music, much of which seemed uninspired “complaining” to him. Strummer: “I don’t think complaining music goes a long way to anything.”

  Pumping clenched fists, then snapping his fingers, the singer went on: “We wanted to deal with reality, but we want it to be ‘up’ so when people hear the record they felt like they can get outside and deal with their lives, rather than . . .” Strummer fell silent, pointing to the ground with both hands—indicating people being depressed all the time, presumably—before sweeping his arms across the camera frame and declaring, “There’s too much heroin in London!”

  Oddly, he did not reveal anything about the record’s radical musical shifts, simply responding to a question about differences from the old Clash by saying, “We’re a bit more rocking now,” before appearing to lampoon modern synth pop with an air pantomime of keyboard playing contrasted with guitar.

  After dismissing love songs and describing his preferred lyrical subject matter as “reasons for living,” Strummer celebrated the fact that the current Greek government was Socialist and denounced Thatcher’s regime, calling it “the opposite of a Socialist government,” and proclaiming, “It doesn’t work.”

  More specifically, the Tory approach didn’t work for everyone, as was suggested by the growing national divide. While granting that London’s economy was buzzing, Strummer urged the journalists to “travel up north and see what they’ve got there—they’re really crying for some kind of a life, that’s all they want, a life!”

  The eye-opening experiences on the busking tour seemed palpable as Strummer pressed his point: “We tried a conservative government and it doesn’t work. I’ll tell you one thing for sure: next election here in this land, they are going out!”

  This Strummer seemed as passionate as in early 1984, covering much the same ground. Dismissing definitions of punk that saw it as “a special hairstyle or a brand new leather jacket or a certain kind of studs,” Strummer argued, “Punk was an attitude that just said: ‘We don’t believe you.’ We were being told we didn’t have a right to exist because we were too unemployable, there was no future for us—and punk had the guts to step up and say, ‘I don’t believe you! I have the right, I have been born the same as you and I have the right to exist!’”

  The singer was smiling but emphatic, first clenching his fist, then pointing straight into the camera to declare, “That is punk and that is why we will go forward!”

  It was a gripping performance, albeit with a few worrisome elements. Strummer seemed slightly manic. He also seemed a bit off center, ending the chat by sweeping up the female interviewer for an impromptu jig, laughing as the camera rolled. Even so, the overall impression was of a singer still up for the fight.

  With such a Strummer back at the helm, the promise of the new Clash seemed redeemable. Despite all the internal chaos, at least Sheppard and White hoped the band still might be coming together, not falling apart.

  Much depended on the new record. Fan anticipation was high, the album was soon to be out, and European dates had been set for October, with tour plans for the Far East and beyond in the new year. Although Howard remained dubious, Sheppard and White dared hope that Strummer would finally split with Rhodes and definitively side with them, and all would be well.

  This scenario was possible, perhaps even plausible. Sheppard, White, and Howard continued to put their backs into rehearsals as if it were reality. And yet Strummer didn’t always share his true feelings with them. A radically different course of action was beckoning the beleaguered singer.

  At the Rockscene festival, Strummer had attacked Reagan from stage for allegedly continuing to push the world toward Armageddon. However, after months of go-nowhere arms control talks, something was starting to shift.

  On July 3, the Soviet Union announced that Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were going to meet—the first summit in eight years, since before superpower relations froze over with the invasion of Afghanistan and Reagan’s election. Given how close the world had come to nuclear holocaust in late 1983, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” as Winston Churchill had once said.

  Gorbachev’s arrival, combined with Reagan’s post-1983 conversion, would open a hopeful new era. Initially, Gorbachev viewed the elderly president as “not simply a conservative but a political dinosaur.” Reagan was similarly skeptical, despite Thatcher’s advice—refusing to give up his “Star Wars” missile defense plan, for example—but the personal relationship that developed helped to thaw the ice.

  Reagan deserves praise for facing down right-wing attacks for supposedly becoming “soft” on the USSR. Still, as American foreign policy analyst Strobe Talbott argues, it was Gorbachev who “changed the dynamic” and took the real risks: “Gorbachev was determined to take the Soviet Union in a radically different direction—away from the Big Lie (through glasnost), away from a command economy (through perestroika), and away from zero-sum competition with the West. Reagan came to recognize that Gorbachev’s goals, far from being traditional, were downright revolutionary.”

  Had Strummer been aware of these shifts, it might have been a ray of hope penetrating the thick clouds shrouding his mood. This darkness gave birth to a new realization that came—definitively, dramatically—after hearing the near-final mixes of the new record, the fruit of Rhodes’s own revolutionary vision.

  Whatever the quality of Rhodes’s contributions to the new album, no one should doubt the depth of his commitment. In the months after the return from Munich it became an all-consuming passion. “Bernard would have never let us take the time in the studio that he took mixing the album!” Vinyl laughs.

  Even someone as traumatized by the tortuous process as Sheppard would later admit, “Bernie’s basic vision, mixing punk and electronic music to update the Clash sound, in itself, had something to it.” By now, the results of this experiment were becoming clearer. “This Is England” had been chosen as the first single, to be issued before the album itself. Rhodes mixed and remixed it endlessly, knowing the song would set the stage for the broader press and fan reception.

  This was one of the songs the trio felt best about. “The drum machine was based off something Pete had worked out, together with a hip-hop track,” Sheppard recalls. “I took a bit from an old soul song, ‘Clean Up Woman’ by Betty Wright, and kind of turned it backward for the riff.” The result was comparable to what had been done earlier with “In the Pouring Rain.”

  The breakthrough was presaged by adjustments already made over months of live performance. The studio version took the advances, realized them more fully, added new dynamite, and blasted the song into the stratosphere. While Sheppard was irked that his spaghetti western bits were scrubbed by Rhodes in favor of what he called “ever more snub-nosed punk guitar,” in this case at least, the nonmusician’s instincts seem on target. The sound was multilayered, but still somehow lean, relentless, hungry, and mean—much like the triumphant Thatcher regime, circa 1985.

  The words, of course, bitterly recounted how it felt on the other side, the losing end. Strummer’s partly revamped lyrics vividly evoked cutthroat economic policies, racist violence, police brutality, the Falklands, tabloid sleaze, and social desperation, all leading up to a heart-crushing climax: “Who dares to protest / enough to react like a flame? / Out came the batons / and the British warn themselves / This is England . . .” The song sketched a claustrophobic world that afforded no room for dignity, levity, or redemption—it was the sound of brutal defeat, like “a
boot stamping on a human face, forever,” in the words of Orwell’s 1984.

  Although the edited 45 rpm version omitted the climatic verse, even this truncated take was an astonishing achievement, going a long way to justify Rhodes’s brusque artistic interventions. Utilizing mournful synthesizer swells, sampled voices, and grim yet engaging drum machine beats, all strapped to a pile-driver riff, the song was a wrenching requiem for the post–World War II English dream Thatcher had now so thoroughly vanquished.

  Some of the other songs also turned out well. “Dirty Punk” captured the power glimpsed in its live version, driven by a raw guitar assault, convincingly presenting Strummer’s neo-punk credo in word and sound. CBS even considered releasing it as a single; Sheppard later argued it could have been a hit, and he had a point.

  “Are You Ready for War?”—inexplicably renamed “Are You Red..y?”—was sped up, with keyboards, drum machine, and guitar bursts replacing the original’s tight punk-funk grooves. Sheppard hated this revision which, among other things, lost his “DJ scratch” guitar bits and the “sea shanty” swagger. Yet the revamp remained compelling in its own way.

  “Dictator” was also profoundly revised; Rhodes’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink production approach was in full effect. Still, it was mildly improved, given that the original had been one of the less successful of the new tunes. White’s distaste for the wild synthesizer flourishes was understandable, and the Central American radio announcer jabbering in the background could also be off-putting. But while some later deemed it “unlistenable,” the resulting aural assault could also be riveting.

  “Three Card Trick” and “North and South” were slightly diminished, but were still outstanding tracks. Like several other cuts, “Movers and Shakers” was hobbled by clunky electronic drums, but a catchy mariachi hook—perhaps echoing the lost Strummer/Vinyl demos—played well off the singer’s passionate words.