We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  Not all was darkness. Strummer relished his fatherly role in many ways. Freed from road warrior demands, he was able to be more present for his kids. He was also able to visit his beloved Sandinista Nicaragua while making films, and headlined a short, chaotic “Rock Against the Rich” tour sponsored by anarcho-agitators Class War in 1988. But Strummer’s guilt never seemed to lessen.

  When one of this book’s authors interviewed Strummer in 1989, the ghosts of the mideighties were still palpable. Asked what advice he’d give musicians just starting out, Strummer’s response hinted at Cut the Crap’s lasting trauma: “Always play the music the way you want to play it rather than the way that somebody you don’t fully know or trust can get in and change it. The better the musician is in control in the music, the better it is going to sound. I’m not saying that nonmusicians can’t contribute—because they can—but [you] can’t trust their judgment all down the line. I’d like the musician to be in control of the music.”

  Asked directly about the final version of The Clash, Strummer demurred: “An idea only exists in a framework of time. Like we can say Marcel Duchamp putting out the urinal in an art gallery and saying, ‘This my piece,’ is much better when we consider it was 1917. Completely shocking—we can’t imagine how shocking that was, of its time! Punk rock was of its time. We didn’t really realize in 1984 that an idea drowns like a fish out of water, out of its time. We thought, ‘Let’s do an experiment to find that out . . .’ We didn’t know we would find that out, but I think I found that out, that punk was of its time, and it couldn’t go again.”

  Strummer even seemed to welcome this passing, in part for the weight taken from his shoulders: “Now we have rap and other things that are heavy, heavy like ‘Fuck tha Police’ and all that. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve just got to drift off somewhere and try not to annoy people. That’s how I see my role: try to write something good, try to record it good, maybe play it around on stages sometimes, maybe not. Maybe do film sound . . . I just try to keep useful. I don’t see myself as having any influence left, or any message left, really.”

  Asked if he hoped his music could still inspire change, Strummer was guarded: “Well, that would be nice, but . . . Life is a funny ride. You go up and you go down. I think both experiences are interesting.”

  Strummer dodged when pressed on how The Clash connected to his work now: “I can’t think of an answer to your question. All I know is: I write a song—why, I don’t know. And when I get up on the stage and sing it—why, I don’t know. There is no answer. Why does the sun rise? Why do we get up in the morning? Why do we drive the automobile down the right-hand side of the road? Why don’t we just do a U-turn and drive it up the other side of the road? I don’t know why . . .”

  A sense of profound melancholy was impossible to miss. In “Clash City Rockers” Strummer had sung “You got to have a purpose / Or this place is gonna knock you out sooner or later.” In these post-Clash years, one friend described Strummer as “a soldier without an army.” While the absence of The Clash as a source of purpose for him was significant, the challenge likely ran deeper.

  Over recent decades, depression has become more recognized as a medical condition, not a personal failing, with treatment options growing. Bruce Springsteen, an artist who was profoundly touched by The Clash, later shared details of his own bouts with darkness. As the New York Times reported, Springsteen “credits medication and the resolve of his wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, with being able to survive the onslaught.” Springsteen: “During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down.”

  Much of this seems to echo Strummer’s own struggles, which were no doubt worsened by often high-functioning but very real addiction. By the early nineties, the acting out had capsized his marriage with Gaby Salter. Sadly, attitudes and knowledge were more limited at the time, and Strummer was loath to seek help. Nor had the Clash camp been set up to provide such enlightened palliatives.

  For some, the sense of an immense opportunity missed is haunting. Fayne: “Joe was tired, really needed help . . . He needed The Clash! Because if he’d had The Clash at the point when all this shit went down, he could have got it all out, in an honest way, and it would have worked. It would probably have been the best Clash album ever, with all those emotions, ’cause you can’t fault Joe for his writing. The problem is if you don’t have the vehicle, you don’t have the vehicle.”

  By this, Fayne meant Strummer needed the Jones/Headon Clash. Apparently Strummer felt the same at the end, even telling Antonio Arias of 091 that a “This Is England” couplet—“I got my motorcycle jacket / but I’m walking all the time”—was an oblique comment on the failings of the new band. This needn’t be a slam on those involved, only an admission of a lack of chemistry. Yet a strong case could be made that Strummer did have what he needed, if only he had trusted it.

  As these pages show, Strummer’s comrades never threw in the towel—he did. White: “Joe didn’t have enough belief in his own vision. He gave too much credit to Bernie for the success of the band, for creating him as ‘Joe Strummer.’” The singer’s true failing might be that he trusted Rhodes, then lunged for Jones, but didn’t stand by the unit who for two years honorably upheld the Clash banner.

  All three have mourned the lack of opportunity to prove their mettle—and, by extension, that of the entire neo-Clash experiment—in the studio. Even Howard, who has tended to be the most dismissive of the unit’s musical accomplishments, admits, “When the five of us were together, there was a certain calm—which was always invaded by Bernie and Kosmo—but if it had been allowed to continue, had been trusted a little more, it could have produced something of lasting worth.”

  Sheppard: “Who am I to say what the record would have sounded like? Still, things were definitely getting better [musically]. For example, the interplay between me and Vince continued to develop, to get strong. So if we were left to our own devices, as a group of five people, I think we would have made a record that would have done justice to the songs—and there were some great songs. I think we would have made a good record, yeah. Fuck me, it’s not that difficult!”

  Sheppard is quick to admit, “That’s neither here nor there—because that didn’t happen.” Yet if history has any use, it is to provide lessons—and there are lessons aplenty in this ambitious yet failed misadventure.

  But as The Clash’s former members sifted the ashes, Reagan and Thatcher pressed their advantage, remaking the world in their image. This was not all bad. In 1986, Reagan defied pressure from the nativist wing of the Republican Party to pass immigration reform, legalizing millions of undocumented migrants, including many driven to the US by his bloody Central American wars.

  Growing respect between Gorbachev and the American leader helped end the Cold War, pulling the world back from the abyss. Indeed, the two came close to abolishing their nuclear arsenals at the Reykjavik summit of October 1986. Even though the meeting ended without an agreement—due to Reagan’s insistence on keeping his pet “Star Wars” program—it set the stage for dramatic reductions not only in superpower tensions, but in actual nuclear stockpiles.

  Not all went well for the ascendant conservatives. Reagan’s “Iran-contra” gamble crashed on October 5, 1986, when a plane running arms to the contras was shot down. CIA employee Eugene Hasenfus survived but was captured by the Sandinistas. Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer recounts, “The scandal was enormous, resulting in Reagan suffering the worst fall in approval ratings since those numbers were tracked, leaving the White House paralyzed, struggling to survive.”

  Unknown artist weighs in on Iran-Contra scandal and Reagan legacy, 1987.

  By rights, this should have brought down the administration. But while high-level officials were convicted in court for their actions, the “Teflon president” walked away unscathed. As Zelizer notes, “Not on
ly did Reagan stay in office—he ended his two-term presidency with a historic breakthrough [by signing] a major arms agreement with the Soviet Union.”

  And yet, while Reagan was victorious in many regards, he failed to extinguish either the Sandinistas or El Salvador’s FMLN. The latter fought the US-backed military to a standstill, and ultimately emerged as a powerful electoral force after a peace agreement was signed. El Salvador remained violent and impoverished, however, with a network of savage gangs sprouting from the postwar ruins.

  As for the Sandinistas, they lost a 1990 election, but bounced back under the leadership of Daniel Ortega to regain power in the twenty-first century, despite splits in their movement. While their idealism peeled away over time, replaced by growing authoritarianism and corruption, they proved to be far more than a Soviet pawn. If the FSLN did not live up to their initial promises, the same might be said for the Reagan policy that lit the fires of war in the region, but did little to heal the devastation.

  Across the ocean, Thatcher would win a third election in 1987, albeit with a reduced percentage of votes and a smaller parliamentary majority. She would fall in 1990, toppled by public outrage over the so-called “poll tax” and a rebellion inside the Tory party. While the grassroots uprising against the poll tax was sweet revenge for many active in the miners’ strike, the Conservatives remained in power, with Thatcherite rule fully entrenched by then.

  As for the miners, Arthur Scargill’s prophecy turned out to be true: the industry was square in the Tory bull’s-eye. Relentless rounds of pit closures were followed by privatization. The decline was abetted by competition from cheap imported coal and other power sources. By the end of the 1990s, only 13,000 remained of a work force that had been over 200,000 before the strike. While some heralded this as a victory for efficiency, the pain it caused for workers was horrific.

  While Thatcher remained unrepentant, some of her henchmen later admitted to regrets. In 2009, Norman Tebbit, secretary of trade and industry during the strike, acknowledged, “Many of these communities were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs . . . because all the jobs had gone. This led to a breakdown in these communities with families breaking up and youths going out of control. The scale of the closures went too far.”

  Time revealed the righteousness of the strike in other ways as well. A steady drip of revelations unmasked the Tory lies: proof of a closure hit list, of Thatcher’s direction of the dissident miners’ antistrike effort, of brutality, espionage, and deceit from the state forces, seen especially in falsified police statements whose discovery led to the dismissal of all charges for those arrested at Orgreave. Such news stoked old furies, but could not change the course already set.

  That path was solidly to the right. Both Labour and the Democrats would return to power in the 1990s, in the form of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, but much had been surrendered to facilitate this revival. When asked in her waning years what she considered her greatest achievement, Thatcher replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” By this, she was noting the obvious: Blair—who Joe Strummer came to revile as “Tony Baloney”—won his office by remaking socialist Labour into a kinder, gentler Thatcherism.

  Similarly, Reagan’s crowning victory might be seen in the rise of Clinton and other Democrats who advanced the conservative agenda in ways the happy warrior never could have. Reagan had demonized “welfare queens” supposedly living high off the public dole, a racist trope that was effective at splitting working-class whites from the Democratic coalition. But it was Clinton who “ended welfare as we know it” through “welfare reform.”

  So too with the self-destructive “War on Drugs.” According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war.” The New York Times reported, “During the Reagan years, drug use was also increasingly stigmatized, making the subsidizing of treatment more difficult politically, and the prison population soared as harsher penalties were imposed for use, possession, and sale of illegal drugs.”

  For those who viewed drug abuse as a crisis that required public health intervention, not criminalization, these results were disheartening. Clinton once again sought to beat the Republicans by co-opting their “law and order” agenda. By the time Clinton left office, the US prison population was continuing on its way to over two million, nearly five times what it had been at the dawn of the Reagan era.

  Perhaps the biggest surrender was the way Clinton Democrats cozied up to Wall Street and big business through “free trade” deals and financial deregulation, including the destruction of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act separating the investment and consumer banking industries. These changes were intended to unleash economic energies, and they surely did. But only some benefited.

  As this “neoliberal” vision surged, its ideological rival—the “centrally planned” economies of the Eastern Bloc—dissolved, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although the demise of the Soviet Union was surely a step forward for freedom and genuine socialism—which would be political democracy made real by economic democracy, not a corrupt “dictatorship of the party”—it also supported an emerging narrative of capitalism’s inevitable triumph.

  “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher had often said, and more and more people seemed to agree. One optimistic analyst, Francis Fukuyama, dared to suggest in 1989 that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

  Fukuyama was hardly the first to entertain an “end of history”—he cited Karl Marx as the idea’s “best-known propagator”—but his was a capitalist version of the vision. “Modern conservatism is entirely about the effort to turn selfishness into the great human virtue,” economist John Kenneth Galbraith had once argued. Reagan and Thatcher had done a pretty good job selling the notion.

  “Greed is good,” proclaimed wheeler-dealer Gordon Gecko in the 1987 film Wall Street, capturing the zeitgeist. Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics went global; the unfettered pursuit of profits for a few would ultimately benefit all via the market’s magic, its greater efficiency and innovation. This was not entirely untrue. Mountains of money resulted, but the bounty was not shared equitably. As Vinyl wryly noted, “‘Trickle-down’ turned out to mean them pissing on us!”

  One of the most conspicuous symbols of this was the explosion of the housing market, manifest especially in the gentrification of once-blighted inner-city urban areas. Even hardscrabble neighborhoods like Brixton and the South Bronx were not immune as untold wealth moved into real-estate speculation.

  The division between those who benefited and those displaced was stark. As a select few grew astronomically wealthy, the many remained stuck. While elected leaders could have tried to level the field a bit, this seldom happened. The political system was increasingly captured by the power of concentrated money.

  Like many others who came of age in the punk era, Peter Howard laments what three decades of an unfettered “free market” approach has done to a London that’s still burning—not with boredom, but with the stench of gentrification and an ever-rising cost of living that effectively rules out a lot of creative risk-taking.

  As Howard notes, without squatting—a practice that temporarily lifted the pressures of paying rent—he would never have shed his home city of Bath to pursue his dream. Such leaps of faith are more daunting with astronomical rents and so many people working longer and harder, for less and less money.

  The resulting cultural void morphs into an emptier vision, one driven solely by the brute logic of survival. “If you can’t afford to live in London, you don’t come here. I mean, if you were in N
otting Hill in 1977, everyone you saw was fucking amazing,” Howard asserts. “They had a dress code, or a musical thing they were pursuing, they were in bands. People can’t afford do that anymore. There is no ‘other’ thing that they think is worth pursuing [beyond money].”

  If the “free market” was ascendant, and socialism discredited—for reasons both sound and utterly bogus—capitalism with a human face was hard to find. Barriers between countries fell and institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank gained more and more control, making neoliberal policies essentially mandatory. National self-determination seemed quaint. If one country adopted policies that stymied the rich, the money would simply flow to more hospitable environs.

  “How does a nation—the largest democratic unit the West can claim—exercise its will in a world where capital can roam free and traders can undermine the will of the people by simply shifting resources to countries where labor is cheaper and unions are weaker?” asked Nation writer Gary Younge. The question was inescapable, but no answer was obvious. This reality fueled a global race to the bottom on wages, working conditions, and environmental practices.

  Far from upholding tradition, the “free market” was generating change at a shockingly unprecedented pace. Was Margaret Thatcher a punk rocker as conservative analyst Niall Ferguson had waggishly asserted? If punks had sometimes celebrated chaos and their forebears, the Situationists, had wanted a “revolution of everyday life,” the free market brought it in spades.