Was this pruning “superfluous branches . . . that bearing boughs may live”—or something more akin to murder? To those tossed on the scrap heap, Sheffield steel now cut the flesh of those who created it, a working class that had defeated fascism, awed the world with its industrial accomplishments, and built the might of Great Britain, an island-nation that once ruled a vast global empire.
Workers created this wealth, but did not own it. After the crushing of the miners’ strike, fewer and fewer remained who felt it was worth asking why.
On October 25, 1985, the Cortonwood colliery closed for good. “The last cage-load of miners on a production shift came up at lunchtime, to be met by a posse of journalists,” the Star detailed. “Many miners, still bitter about defeat in the strike, refused to speak, but those who did made it clear they believed the fight had been worthwhile.”
* * *
Cut the Crap arrived in this heartless Britain that was striding boldly into the new, treading thoughtlessly on the old. Lacking all but the most basic promotion, it would rise to #16 in the UK charts, and #88 in the US, before falling away into an abyss, already cast off and disowned by most of its makers.
The album’s vast political ambition could nonetheless be glimpsed dimly via a “CLASH COMMUNIQUE OCTOBER ’85” on the inner sleeve. Dashed off by Rhodes, it was nestled next to the lyrics for three of the album’s twelve songs—the only ones Strummer had apparently left behind before his abrupt exit.
The grammatically eccentric blurb read: “Wise MEN and street kids together make a GREAT TEAM . . . but can the old system be BEAT?? no . . . not without YOUR participation . . . RADICAL social change begins on the STREET!! so if your looking for some ACTION . . . CUT THE CRAP and Get OUT There.”
Even more than the risky, erratically realized music, this earnest screed came off a bit awkward, even cartoonish. White predictably found it horrifying—“more soap-powder rebellion”—but even a sympathetic observer could see it lacked the nuance, depth, and humor Strummer had so often brought to The Clash’s radical politics. Much like the album itself, the broadside presented an inviting target.
Reviews in the UK music press were predictably merciless. Mat Snow wrote a withering NME critique, “No Way, Jose,” a sarcastic smack at “José Unidos,” the pseudonym chosen by Rhodes to suggest that Strummer had coproduced the record. Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting likened Cut the Crap to a shipbuilder trying his best to recapture old glories, only to see them “banged back together by a man holding the blueprint upside down.” Only Jack Barron in Sounds refused to join the hazing, bestowing 4.5 out of five stars on the album.
More measured responses could be found in the USA, with the self-appointed dean of American critics, Robert Christgau, awarding it a B+. Although that seems a fair assessment, a steady stream of invective and dismissal would rise, tarring the record—and the whole neo-Clash experiment—as a failure.
If this take was unfair and ahistorical, such were the times into which the record had been born: an “England grown cold” in the words of Jon Savage. This context mattered. It gave birth to the neo-Clash experiment and provided the effort with lasting relevance, no matter its ultimate defeat. Indeed, those last songs, even when never fully realized, had much to offer to the challenges of that moment, and of many moments yet to come.
In his definitive 1991 punk tome England’s Dreaming, Savage called Cut the Crap “an ambitious and moving state-of-the-nation address with innovative use of rap rhythms and atmosphere.” This hardly reflected the critical consensus about the deeply flawed yet important record, but was not far off the mark.
By then, praise mattered little, for the band once called The Clash had long ceased to exist, except in the hearts and minds of its fans.
chapter ten
ain’t diggin’ no grave
Immigrants being evicted from “The Jungle,” October 2016. (Photo by Philippe Huguen/AFP.)
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
—Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Riot police encircled a restless, angry mass gathered on a cool fall day. Shoving ensued where the lines briefly intersected, as frustration and fear threatened to burst into violence. A new life lay beyond the police line, but raw hope was hardly a match for batons and body armor wielded with military discipline.
It could have been the British miners facing off with police, struggling to save jobs and communities, but it was now thirty years later and two hundred miles to the east of the coalfields where that titanic conflict had decided the course of a nation. This was the new world born of that losing struggle—and others like it—playing out its contradictions at a sprawling shantytown called “the Jungle.”
This makeshift colony of immigrants nestled at the edge of Calais in northwestern France, just across the English Channel where the two countries were now connected by a heavily trafficked tunnel. These people had mostly fled desperate areas of the Middle East and Africa, riven by grinding poverty or devastated by wars that ignited after the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Having lived through untold horrors, they now hoped to make their way to a better home.
On this day in October 2016, a sign at the Jungle’s entrance claimed over eight thousand ragged, weary souls lived there—perhaps 1,500 of them children—but no one really knew for sure. What was clear, however, was the determination of French officials to dismantle the camp, to disperse the mass, and, in the process, most likely dash dreams of making it to the United Kingdom, their promised land.
The Jungle had become a flash point for conflicting visions of Europe and the world. Some saw the camp as a festering sore to be lanced, its residents scarcely more than animals, with walls needed across once-open borders. Others saw the Jungle in more human terms, not without danger, but filled also with suffering and aspiration, a prick to the consciences of rich Westerners.
On a concrete overpass just outside the camp, an anonymous yet acclaimed graffiti artist called Banksy offered his take: a life-size stencil of billionaire Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, portrayed carrying a small bag of clothing like a refugee in one hand and an original Mac computer in the other.
A statement made the connection: “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources, but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7 billion in taxes—and it only exists because [the US] allowed in a young man from Homs.” Banksy’s words were backed up by money and supplies donated to the camp.
Some well-intentioned souls tried to preserve the artwork behind glass, but such was a pipe dream, as the reclusive street artist knew. Soon enough, even more anonymous hands had made his art their own. The figure of Jobs now formed the I in a huge black and red message: LONDON CALLING.
The scene suggested that if The Clash had ended with a whimper more than a bang thirty years before, its reverberations continued to ripple into the world.
“I know human misery / down in dusty shanties,” Joe Strummer sang in “The Dictator,” mocking inequality and indifference: “But my palace ain’t for you scum.” The song had sought to make the suffering of the “third world” real for “first world” audiences. Now the worlds were merging into one in the Jungle, equidistant from the wealthy European capitals of Paris and London.
Although this rising reality of “one world, not three” was something The Clash
had struggled for, this new vista was hardly the stuff of its dreams. Sometimes the Money God seemed ascendant everywhere, with profit forever worth much more than people, who were largely pawns on the chessboard of global finance. “We ain’t gonna be treated like trash,” vowed “We Are The Clash,” but all across the human frontier, millions upon millions of lives were being thrown away.
This was not how it was supposed to be. If The Clash, the miners, the “New Deal” Democratic Party, and so much else had gone to the ground in the hard-fought mid-1980s, the promise of a new world dawning seemed immense. With opponents defeated, Reagan and Thatcher had turned to realize their vision of vast horizons with liberty, economic growth, and prosperity for all.
“The Big Bang” became the name for the explosion of financial deregulation unleashed by Thatcher in 1986. Part of a broader “bonfire of regulations,” it ushered in a new era where the market was allowed free rein, offering myriad profit-making possibilities to the corporate sector and, thus, it was said, to the economy as a whole. While the US savings-and-loan crisis that erupted around the same time—abetted by Reagan’s similar deregulation—suggested danger as well as opportunity, few in power took notice.
By 1986, dark clouds of Rhodes’s legal reprisals against Strummer loomed. The band was all over except for lawyers and accountants clocking billable hours. Freed from touring, recording, and rehearsals, the members mostly retreated to their own corners to contemplate what life held next.
The wreckage was significant, but not without bits of mordant comedy. Sheppard describes an increasingly forlorn Rhodes: “So I started getting woken up every morning by Bernie. The phone in the flat was a pay phone in the hall, and it would ring every morning, I’d be in my fucking pajamas, on the phone with Bernie, half asleep, and him going on about, ‘You shouldn’t be listening to fucking Roland Kirk—you should be fucking out there, and doing this, you know, you’re not happening,’ and all this. At one point I finally said, ‘Bernie, why are you ringing me? Why are you ringing me?’ And he said, ‘Beause there’s no one else.’”
Among the missing was Kosmo Vinyl, who had no stomach for legal contention. The consigliere finally made good on his desire to leave the music business behind. Devastated by the band’s collapse and disgusted with a country he saw falling fully into Thatcher’s grip, Vinyl made a new home in New York City.
Rhodes did manage to gain full ownership of Cut the Crap, among other concessions. But while he was undeterred in his fight for the Clash carcass, others were more reflective. Michael Fayne, for one, defends him: “Bernie paid my bills, and bought me clothes—treated me like a son! So I’ve got a lot of respect for Bernie, in that way, because of the way he treated me.”
Still, Fayne admits, “But I know how he treated some other people,” adding, “Bernie should have just started a whole new band, without Joe, without all those guys—I don’t know why he didn’t do that. I suppose, if you’ve got a cash cow, you want to milk it for as long as you can. I think that’s basically what was going on.”
“We can strike the match / if you spill the gasoline”—draft of a never-produced Idea matchbook cover. (Designed by Eddie King.)
Draft of “We Are The Clash” sleeve for a never-released single. (Designed by Eddie King.)
Draft of sleeve for never-released “Are You Red..y” single. (Designed by Julian Balme.)
This is not entirely fair to Rhodes, for his idealism was real, albeit largely untethered to any consideration for others. He was a man who dreamed big, and dreamed of revolution. The Clash was perhaps his greatest dream. Letting go of this band was not easy for the irascible but dedicated manager.
Similarly, White found it difficult to move on, indulging in gratuitous sex and excessive drink after also breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. When he confronted Strummer about his abdications as bandleader, the singer admitted, “It’s all my fault.” But seeing Strummer seeming whipped and broken proved a slender satisfaction. “There was no arguing with Joe, he just agreed with everything you said, even if it was wrong,” White later wrote.
White’s time in The Clash would leave lasting damage, almost as if he had fought in a war, or joined a pernicious cult. This comparison might seem over the top, but the experience was deeply dehumanizing in many ways for the newer members who felt chewed up and spit out. Strummer knew it, later confiding to an interviewer, “I hope we didn’t fuck up their lives too much.”
Like White, Howard carried the scars: “Year upon year, we were being told this, that, and the other by Bernie, and I would go on about the fact that I couldn’t possibly take what he was saying as read. And Joe was saying, ‘It’s like being in the army, you have to . . . Unless we all agree to follow what’s being told, it doesn’t work.’ But, for the exact same reason I wouldn’t have joined the fucking army, I didn’t respond well to that kind of stuff, and I don’t think Vince did either.”
Howard did recognize Rhodes had good intentions, however hard to discern. When the drummer was about to quit midway through the 1984 US tour, the manager actually apologized for the ugly outburst that had caused the standoff, saying: “Look, I’m sorry about the way we talked. I’m trying to arrive at the right idea, but we weren’t getting there. What we’re trying to do is brilliant—it’s big, it’s amazing—and I have to be harsh on you in order to get the best out of you.”
Rhodes’s uncommonly contrite words mollified the drummer who, to his lasting regret, returned to the fold only to face another year and a half of dictatorial chaos. Howard: “We were constantly being battered from side to side on many, many levels: musically, emotionally, sartorially. Every single thing that we did was up for ritual and public annihilation. Not that many people do respond that well to that. Making things difficult for us did not succeed in bringing out the best; it just succeeded in making things difficult for us.”
Yet the trio had persisted. Sighing, Howard explains: “Other than the glamour of the situation, of being in a band everyone knew, the reason why everybody threw themselves face-first into it was because there was a kernel of truth somewhere, buried underneath the negativity, where everybody kind of went, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah—you’re right, that could be it!’ If we just—as Joe had done—exorcised our middle-class demons, and stopped being ‘musos,’ we could actually do something pure, something revolutionary. You did kind of feel like, ‘Okay, if I look hard enough, if I try hard enough, it might be there.’”
This aspiration reflected the band’s staggering ambition, and perhaps it could have been realized. But it could also be a highway to hell. Sheppard seemed to come through better than the others. “Whatever you can say about Bernie, he never let us be pampered rock stars, never let us get comfortable,” Sheppard says. “Of course, he took it too far, but it had some value.”
Howard echoes this: “I think Nick can ride things quite well. And Nick had a far purer punk ethic than any of us did, ’cause he was in the Cortinas and he saw the start of it. Whereas I was listening to fucking prog rock, you know? Now I can see the chaos of any of those things is actually the value of it. That’s the whole fucking point. I can see that now. But at the time, it wasn’t clear.”
Ongoing failures to follow through made it worse. After the break-up, Strummer told White, “I’ll see you’re all right, make sure you’re sorted, get some money . . . you all will,” meaning the three who gave so much only to be jettisoned.
Perhaps Strummer’s low spirits paralyzed him, or maybe the legal chaos created by his untimely departure was too great to make such payments possible. In any case, no money appeared. Soon even the meager wages stopped, and there was one more broken promise to add to the pile.
Ironically, none of the three had signed formal agreements when joining The Clash. So they were not entangled in the legal mess, but also could not pursue compensation for their creative work, and had no rights to anything. By contrast, Rhodes had audaciously claimed songwriting credit equal to Strummer for Cut the Crap.
H
oward: “I never had a contract of any description at all. It’s funny, actually. In all of this, the thing that I think I’m most angry and most bitter about is the fact that I didn’t get any money. They got a lot of money, and I didn’t get any.”
While Fayne expresses relief that he personally was never bound to Rhodes by contract, he adds, “I feel a little bit sorry for Pete, Nick, and Vince, in the sense that I think that Joe afterward definitely felt that he should have stood up. He should have fought, you know, that’s what he should have done.”
Howard understood Strummer’s dilemma to a degree: “After getting rid of Mick, Joe relied on Bernie a great deal more . . . which meant he was probably a little bit lost. He made a decision—and one thing Joe did do in life is, if he made a decision, he would go the whole fucking way with it, you know. Whether you’re making the right decision, or the wrong one, it’s just doing it, and living the consequences. And I think that’s what Joe actually did.”
The singer had walked a rough road, but he hadn’t truly seen the neo-Clash experiment through. As White bitterly notes, “At the end, Joe realized he’d made a mistake—but rather than just deal with Bernie, he just got rid of the whole thing. He decided to fold the whole thing, drop everything like a stone, like a hot potato, and denounce it all, rather than take responsibility for what he had pretty much engineered. That was typical of Joe, at that time, in his fashion, to completely run out on everything—and that included me and Nick and Pete and Bernie.”
Strummer found some distraction after the break-up producing an album by the Spanish band 091, but this was hardly smooth sailing either. The singer would soon largely disappear from public view, parenting a second daughter, Lola, while dabbling in acting and film soundtracks. Julian Balme recalls, “In the late eighties I worked in Notting Hill, around the corner from Joe’s house, and I’d often bump into him in the neighborhood. I do remember him being totally, totally lost . . . He’d given it his all but now was running on empty.”
We Are the Clash Page 35