We Are the Clash

by Mark Andersen

  The untrammeled pursuit of profit enabled by computer-age technology was corrosive in so many different ways. Marx and Engels had foreseen this in The Communist Manifesto, arguing, “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.”

  This constant swirl of change brought vast moneymaking opportunities, but it could also unsettle human society to a frightening degree. The poetry of lines like “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” should not distract from the agony that was implied, the loss of meaning and direction for lives now adrift in an ever-shifting commodity stream.

  For Marx and Engels, this dislocation would strip away illusions, enlightening in the most concrete, hopeful sense—the development of class consciousness that would shred the false promises of capitalism: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” While the full accuracy of this optimistic interpretation remained to be seen, some element of truth was present. This never-ending disruption, mixed with the growing inequities, was bound to generate a potent backlash.

  In part, this was seen in the ascent of Islamic fundamentalism. Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and, later, the Islamic State fed off the pain generated by the West’s economic, cultural, and military imperialism. Although most Muslims opposed such entities—and indeed were their main victims—the brutality fed a new narrative. After the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, Islam was seen by many as the enemy in a “clash of civilizations,” replacing vanished Soviet communism.

  A more hopeful face of dissent came with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on New Year’s Day 1994. On November 30, 1999, a motley band of protesters shocked the powers-that-be by shutting down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. This was the first of a series of street confrontations with elite institutions of global capitalism, stretching from Washington, DC, to Quebec City, to Genoa, to Davos, and beyond.

  As protest swung back into the headlines with Seattle, Strummer had found his artistic and spiritual footing again with a new band, the Mescaleros. With these compatriots as collaborators, Strummer revived his past fire in songs both new and old. In interviews, he began to resemble the punk rabble-rouser of yore again, if with greater humility and ever-present self-deprecation.

  “I’m proud that we have ridiculous aims, because at least then we ain’t gonna underachieve,” Strummer had said amid the neo-Clash fervor of early 1984. The reinvigorated singer may have remained unwilling to reprise such ambition, but he paid homage to those with similarly lofty aims, in particular the DC punk band Fugazi.

  Formed in 1986, Fugazi had its roots in “straight edge” progenitor Minor Threat and “Revolution Summer” luminary Rites of Spring. The unit was part of a wave of subterranean bands that rose to stratospheric heights of popularity for the underground. Beginning with Nirvana’s 1991 hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” some of these vindicated Strummer’s 1984 aim of bringing “rebel rock” to the top of the charts, thanks in no small part to MTV and major label backing. Fugazi stood out in its resolutely independent stance, refusing to sign a record deal, make videos, or otherwise accommodate the corporate-rock world.

  Strummer had once dismissed such outliers as a “tempest in a teacup.” Having finally escaped his CBS-contract straitjacket, however, the singer had something of a new perspective. He now seemed to recognize that the musically ferocious, clean-living, and politically radical Fugazi—dubbed “America’s Clash” by none other than Sounds—had accomplished much of what he, Simonon, Rhodes, and Vinyl had stretched toward in their failed attempt to reinvent/purify The Clash.

  Ironically, The Clash had scored a posthumous #1 UK hit themselves, thanks to the use of “Should I Stay or Should I Go” in a Levi’s advertisement. Strummer was ambivalent about this, but as he had not written the song, he had little say in the matter.

  When the subject came up in a 1999 interview, discussion ensued about the ugly intraband legal battle sparked when Dead Kennedys’ lead singer Jello Biafra turned down a similar request for use of their song “Holiday in Cambodia” for a commercial. When an interviewer suggested that Biafra didn’t accept the offer simply because the price wasn’t high enough, Strummer wryly noted, “They always said that, didn’t they? Everybody’s got their price . . . But what about Fugazi?”

  This was no idle query. Acclaimed punk/hip-hop photographer Glen Friedman recounts a head-turning Fugazi anecdote: “I witnessed the legendary music mogul Ahmet Ertegun coming backstage to try to get this ‘unsignable’ band to sign with him. He offered them ‘anything you want’ and said, ‘The last time I did this was when I offered the Rolling Stones their own record label and $10 million.’ Fugazi politely declined and [band cofounder] Ian MacKaye then changed the subject and continued to talk about their shared love of [the music of] Washington, DC.”

  Such tales led Strummer to remark, “Ian’s the only one who ever did the punk thing right from day one and followed through on it all the way.” When the singer returned to DC in 1999 for his first show there in a decade, he paid tribute to Fugazi during a fiery new song, “Diggin’ the New.” In a SPIN interview in 2000, he singled out Fugazi as embodying “the true spirit of punk”—a compliment MacKaye later returned, referencing the audacious busking tour of 1985.

  Twinges of Strummer’s regret over the fall of the neo-Clash experiment can be detected here. Still, nobility can be found in defeat as well as in triumph. If the last version of The Clash, like the band as a whole, failed to accomplish their lofty aims, the effort was hardly in vain.

  Sadly, Strummer never seemed to stop apologizing for that time, even once going so far as to say, “We never played a good gig after Topper left.”

  This was silly and insulting. White called Strummer “an asshole” for the remark, then made his broader case: “Joe kind of artfully manipulated The Clash II period in his subsequent interviews as to say it was all just a big mistake—but clearly it wasn’t, ’cause it was two years of touring, you know?” Yet while Strummer admitted to liking “This Is England” and the busking tour, the overall sense he left was one of embarrassment, especially over the firing of Jones.

  Rhodes offers no apologies, while resisting revisiting the time in any depth. In 2013, he told this book’s authors, “A few years ago I was approached by publishers to do a book giving my side of the story, but I had no time . . . Though the past is quite important to me, the future is where my thoughts are most active.” (Ironically, a Rhodes memoir is now slated for release in the fall of 2018.)

  Nonetheless, Rhodes’s anger and pain is evident: “To sum up: I had an idea for a great, creative, and politically radical rock group. Found the people, got the thing moving, success arrived, parasites moved in and drugged the musicians with bullshit, etc., in the process gradually erasing our close friendship. My role with the group—particularly Joe—became ‘I take the blame, they get the credit.’”

  Although Rhodes may have a point here, he is not above his own historical revisionism, claiming, for example, “It was [Joe’s] idea to have a drum machine on Cut the Crap and of course I had to deal with it.”

  The manager is on firmer ground in arguing, “Fact is, the album works good, the artwork is cool, and ‘This Is England’ still inspires.” Rhodes’s website contains a couple of dozen fan reviews of Cut the Crap that share this more upbeat view, defending the record as “unjustly neglected,” “a solid punk masterpiece,” and “an all-out return to the punk ethic the band had been straying from.” The headline of another section of the website reads, “Popular Thieves and Unknown Originators.” It is clear in which catego
ry Rhodes sees himself, and not without some justification.

  Intriguingly, Rhodes’s old ally Simonon defended Cut the Crap’s exclusion from the Sound System box set, saying, “It’s not really a Clash album,” due to the absence of Jones and Headon. Yet overall, the bassist has been far less apologetic about the era than Strummer, in one interview reaffirming directly to Jones, “We were right to fire you.” While Simonon has belatedly criticized Rhodes’s role, he nonetheless insists that the final Clash “had some really good songs.”

  This seems more accurate than Strummer’s dismissals. Michael Fayne recalls that time as “a baptism by fire,” but says, “Something good came out of that. Without that experience, where would I be?” For him, the band’s mix was too combustible, the aims too impossibly high, but all the more glorious: “The Clash were always gonna fail, if you look at the initial ingredients and characters. They were always gonna fail, that was inevitable. But, man, what a way to go out!”

  Describing the distance between The Clash’s rhetoric and its reality as “Grand Canyon wide,” White remains skeptical about its impact in any form: “Thanks to the music, you could feel better about yourself . . . But if you took on that revolution, in any meaningful sense, [music] is more like a kind of steam valve, you know, where people let off steam. It’s arguable whether it’s actually getting people to accept the system itself, by being able to listen to loud punk rock music, rather than get out and destroy some of the shit.”

  Even White can’t mask his pride in the band’s power, however: “A lot of people saw The Clash Mark II and got a lot from it, were influenced by it, in a positive way . . . You can’t deny it.” While disgusted by the hypocrisy, when pressed, the guitarist grants that The Clash might have been “a lie that told the truth.”

  Howard has a similar take: “Beyond all the breakdowns, Joe had a pure intent, and I think he believed Bernie had those pure intentions as well. The politic of the band was important, just saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you doing here? Why are you enjoying this, in this way? It isn’t about that. Think about this.’ To be able to plant a seed of ‘just think’ is fucking amazing, incredibly potent.”

  This was by no means easy. Howard: “Joe wanted to say, ‘Just think,’ to a bigger audience, which is a bit of a conundrum, because you’re doing something that relies on communicating with a small audience. Joe was genuinely agonizing about this, going, ‘Look, it must be possible to do something good to a big audience. Why isn’t it possible? It doesn’t have to be shit. Come on, let’s do it.’”

  While the drummer’s bitterness is apparent, so is a respect that can supersede the pain: “I have pondered it for many, many years, and I think that fundamentally pure intent was the reason why we all committed ourselves so much to it, were so affected by it, almost incapable of just walking away from it.”

  Though Howard asserts, “It went on far longer than it should have,” nonetheless “there was something of importance, a real potential. It failed—but having said that, I can’t think of a single thing, at the moment in music, that’s even attempting this, that would even have part of that conscience. I can’t think of anything.”

  Of the three “new boys,” Sheppard views it all the most philosophically, with flashes of easy self-deprecation: “What’s interesting about that whole thing is that The Clash is important culturally—far more important than bands that sold a lot more records. If you actually analyze what The Clash did, it’s very little, in concrete terms. I mean, they didn’t introduce a bill for gun control, or try and get a ‘health care for all’ program through. We’re talking about a pop group, you know, who took drugs, and played songs, and drunk a lot, a bunch of guys, troubadours, wandering the world singing their songs. It’s a phenomenon, you know? Maybe, for our generation, The Clash was the band that mattered.”

  Sheppard sometimes speaks of The Clash in the third person—as if he hadn’t been in it for two years—but pride shines through: “It’s ancient history now, in human terms, but it moved people, made a lot of them look at themselves, at their lives, enabled them to do something that they maybe wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t heard it, which is very interesting, quite surprising. The lyrics obviously touched people, and enabled people, but I think so did the music. [The Clash’s] gift was purely about somehow releasing something in other people.”

  Howard, White, and Sheppard all regard the busking tour as the most powerful validation of the neo-Clash experiment, but for the last of the three, there was a special significance: “When we were in York, we met a couple of wonderful, hilarious guys who were miners—or had been miners—one of whom was called Spartacus, because his dad had seen the film the night before he was born!”

  The memory brings a smile to Sheppard’s face as he continues: “And he was a fucking riot, hilarious—he was like the Johnny Cash song ‘A Boy Named Sue.’ Imagine growing up in a mining village being called Spartacus! These guys are tough, man. These guys don’t take any prisoners. They’re fucking . . . they’re miners, for fuck’s sake. And he’s called Spartacus, you know? And we’re in York, sitting around in the kitchen of somebody’s house, after a bunch of busking gigs, and we’ve had a few beers. These two guys were like a duo of comedians, just had this fantastic, surreal play off each other—they had us in stitches.”

  Not all was for fun, however: “In the middle of it, Spartacus turned around and said, ‘In that whole period, you know, when we were on strike, and it was really bleak, it was winter, it was fucked . . . We had no money, we had nothing, the one thing we had to keep us warm were those two nights in Brixton, when we came down and watched The Clash.’ They were big fans, obviously—that’s why they were there—and they said, ‘That gave us real warmth, and comfort, and hope.’”

  His voice thickening with feeling, Sheppard brings the story around: “And I thought, ‘Well, fuck, you know—that’s vindicated the whole time I’ve spent in this band, and that one thing, that’s enough. I don’t care what the NME thinks of my time in the band. I don’t care what anybody thinks of my time in the band—because if I’ve done that, that’s enough, you know? To me, that’ll do.”

  Many argue that Sheppard’s Clash was not the genuine article, that no unit without Jones or Headon could be. Yet this is hard to sustain. Was the Chimes version not real, the first album not The Clash? Was it not The Clash playing on the Anarchy Tour, or at the US Festival? If the final Clash played with fire and creativity, touched its audiences, inspired them, does this not matter?

  Ultimately, Sheppard makes a convincing case. A similarly passionate Vinyl seconds the emotion: “Okay, Thatcher won—but at least we put up a fight, right? At least we said, ‘No, we ain’t going along with this, no fucking way.’ Like the miners, we tried to do something, even if it weren’t enough in the end.”

  A fuller sense of the importance of these lost battles of 1984–85 became clear on a single shocking day more than twenty years later. On September 29, 2008, the world economy nearly melted down, with feverish profit-seeking collapsing into a near-catastrophic downward spiral across global markets.

  While the chain of events that caused the stock market nosedive and subsequent world recession—the worst since the 1930s’ Great Depression—are complex, the crisis represented the fruit of the Reagan/Thatcher era as clearly as a devastating flood follows a massive rain. British journalist Seamus Milne later wrote, “A generation on, it is clear that the miners’ strike was more than a defense of jobs and communities. It was a challenge to the destructive market- and corporate-driven reconstruction of the economy that gave us the crash of 2008.”

  Capitalism had not resolved its potentially fatal internal contradictions nor answered the questions of equitable distribution, democracy, or sustainability. Milne’s words ring with truth: “The vindication of the miners’ stand is well understood thirty years later . . . [Their defeat] brought us to where we are today: the deregulated, outsourced zero-hours modern world.”

 
; The crushing of the strike cleared the way for this resurgent capitalism at just the wrong time for the world’s environment, as best-selling author Naomi Klein has pointed out. Global warming emerged into broad consciousness shortly after the events described in this book. In fact, as the New York Times has reported, “The recognition that human activity is influencing the climate developed slowly, but a scientific consensus can be traced to a conference in southern Austria in October 1985”—even as the poststrike lament, “This Is England,” was falling off the charts.

  For Klein, this climate crisis is less about carbon, as such, and more about capitalism. The British miners’ strike might be seen, ironically enough, as a failed bulwark for the environment against what Klein derisively calls the “market fundamentalism” preached by the Reagan/Thatcher regimes.

  This is so, even though many on the left now regard coal mining itself as a brutal relic of the past. Such attitudes are understandable. But while the danger of the work—and coal’s contribution to eco-catastrophe—is undeniable, nothing that exists today would have been possible without the toil of untold miners over the past two centuries. This sacrifice can never rightly be forgotten, in moral terms, nor can the political import of the NUM’s desperate last stand.

  Is our society’s top priority the protection of people, of all life on earth—or is it profit for the few? For Klein, the trajectory since 1985 is clear: “The past thirty years have been a steady process of getting less and less in the public sphere. This is all defended in the name of austerity, balanced budgets, increased efficiency, fostering economic growth. Market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that came knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith.”

  Like climate change, the 2008 economic crisis made one thing, at least, obvious: history has not ended. Although swift action by elite policymakers helped avert the worst possible consequences of the meltdown, the curtain had fallen on one era, and a new drama began to unfold, offering profoundly uncertain outcomes.