In America, hope was fueled by the election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, at the head of a vibrant multicultural coalition, followed by the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and the insurgent 2016 presidential campaign of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Economic inequality was back on center stage, and socialism no longer seemed a dirty word. Between the cracks in capitalism’s seemingly immaculate veneer and the withering of authoritarian pseudosocialism, broader political horizons again seemed possible.
Darker forces, however, were also unleashed. The rise of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News as the source of a right-wing “alternative reality” seemed the logical culmination of the reactionary power of the tabloid assault on the miners. This media powerhouse helped foster the Tea Party movement in America, which took Reagan’s antigovernment rhetoric to new depths of fanaticism.
In the ensuing chaos, an egomaniacal billionaire con man was able to ride the surge of desperation and disillusion into the White House. Donald Trump revived Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and the “law and order” mantra of Nixon. Benefitting from a covert Russian hacking campaign, he coarsely summoned the ugliest bits of America—racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim bigotry, greed, and more—to build a movement that narrowly won the electoral college, though not the popular vote.
Trump is surely disgusting as a person—“morally bankrupt and pathologically dishonest,” in the words of the Washington Post editorial board—yet he has a certain malevolent genius. While Trump is hardly “a champion of the forgotten millions” as one commentator claimed, he did speak to a very real pain.
Bitter fruit whose roots stretch back to 1984–85.
Kosmo Vinyl resurrected the spirit of The Clash with a fiery “Cisco Kid” art series opposing Donald Trump.
When factories and mines closed, dreams died with them, and lives turned to self-destruction. For the first time in modern history, life expectancy actually began to fall for America’s white working class. In 1984, Joe Strummer blamed Reagan’s rise on the drug culture; in 2016, blue-collar areas suffering an epidemic of opiate addiction voted disproportionately for Trump.
As the New York Times wrote, 2016 “brought to the surface the despair and rage of poor and middle-class Americans who say their government has done little to ease the burdens that recession, technological change, foreign competition, and war have heaped on their families.”
Earlier that same year, British politics were rocked by the triumph of “Brexit,” when UK voters narrowly chose to leave the European Union. Although this move promised to severely injure the country’s economy, it was sold as a reassertion of national sovereignty eroded by economic change and immigration.
The pain that helped birth both President Trump and Brexit can be traced right back to Reagan and Thatcher, together with erstwhile opponents who shifted rightward for political expediency. Trump scratched out his win with the help of the Rust Belt, where working-class voters deserted the Democratic ticket. The margin was slender—some forty thousand votes switched in three states would have reversed the verdict—but sad and scary nonetheless.
Similarly, Brexit triumphed thanks to defecting Labour voters in England’s north, including depressed coal-mining areas like Newcastle, Sunderland, and Stoke-on-Trent. If Brexit, like Trump, was powered by anti-immigrant animus, it also reflected class desperation. As the Nation’s London correspondent D.D. Guttenplan noted, “The losers in globalization’s race to the bottom [used] the only weapon they had to strike at a system that offered them nothing.”
“The god that failed” here was the “free market” deified by Reagan and Thatcher. Yet a left now seen as drifting away from class struggle did not benefit. New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter has noted how the market-fundamentalist gospel was “brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted forty years ago.” The rise of this aggressive far right inevitably evoked the specter of Europe’s fascist past.
For Vinyl, the moment seemed frighteningly familiar. The aging agitator returned to the fray, fashioning his art into a weapon. Working relentlessly, Vinyl spat out a series of neo-Situationist “Cisco Kid vs. Donald Trump” broadsides in the months before the US election, all to no avail. Vinyl: “The morning after Trump won, I had the same feeling of utter defeat as after the miners were beaten and The Clash had broken up—just sick to my soul.”
Vinyl was not alone in his darkness. As Trump and his administration touted “alternative facts,” George Orwell’s 1984 shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Global tensions that had receded after the end of the Cold War reignited, stoked by what the New York Times described as Trump’s “chilling language that evoked the horror of a nuclear exchange” in threatening North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” As a result of the president’s bellicose rhetoric—along with the looming threat posed by climate change—the hands of the Doomsday Clock were moved to two minutes before midnight in January 2018, even closer than in the fear-drenched days of 1984. Meanwhile, Muslims faced attacks and immigrants endured a renewed wave of deportations, with all bracing for far worse perhaps yet to come.
This moment was pregnant with danger. But possibility also glimmered. The massive protests that greeted President Trump, the raucous town hall meetings fighting to preserve health care, the surprising Labour surge led by Jeremy Corbyn, the outcry after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire, born of the Thatcherite “bonfire of regulations”—all suggested what Vinyl already knew from his Clash years: the future remains up for grabs, the final tale is not yet written.
At The Clash’s second-to-last show ever in July 1985, the mouthy firebrand had roared, “This here rhythm ain’t never gonna stop—it’s gonna rock you to the front till the very last drop!” Later, he worried that the words might seem pretentious. In fact, they not only evoke the irrepressible spirit that made The Clash a band that touched lives deeply and indelibly, but also carry meanings that still resonate.
Vinyl was talking about the power of art and audience, how this communion could generate an energy that was particularly powerful at the stage front, the nexus between band and crowd. The word “front,” however, also echoes The Clash’s martial metaphors. The extraordinary force that pulled one into the vortex of performance could also push outward, propelling the listener onto a battlefield, to the front line where human need cries out for defenders.
Joe Strummer’s old namesake Woody Guthrie evoked a similar concept:
Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain’t free.
Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be . . .
No human being has the strength to take that stand every day, with untiring consistency. Strummer’s foibles described herein recall Phil Ochs’s famous disclaimer, “I could never be as moral as my songs.” Still, while knowing that words—including his own—could often be all too cheap, Strummer refused to surrender, continuing to believe that time can march with charging feet.
In mid-1982, as the centrifugal forces that would rend and reassemble The Clash gathered, Strummer told Mikal Gilmore, “I’ll tell you what real rebellion is: It’s something more personal. It’s not giving up. Rebellion is deciding to push ahead with it all for one more day. That’s the toughest test of revolt—keeping yourself alive—as well as the cause . . . It’s the only rebellion that counts: not giving up.”
This was a simple yet critical insight. Vinyl recalls how Strummer kept a NUM button on his leather jacket for years after the band’s end: “When I asked about it, Joe told me, ‘A miner gave it to me—how heavy is that? It doesn’t get any heavier!’” If this was a tip of the hat to the “never say die” miners, Strummer also knew that wearing badges was not enough, that action spoke loudest.
His best tribute to that lost struggle came whe
n Strummer mounted the stage in support of striking firefighters only a few weeks before his untimely death in December 2002. Mick Jones was in the audience. During the encore, Jones spontaneously joined his old partner for three songs, including “White Riot,” the anthem they had come to blows over during the long run-up to their final fracture.
Fate brought the pair together onstage one more time, not on a lucrative reunion tour, or for suits holding big-money tickets at a Hall of Fame soiree, but for striking workers, fighting the harsh winds of post-Thatcher austerity. That night, the best spirit of The Clash lived again, if only for a few moments—just as it can any time, anywhere that human creativity, determination, and compassion rise.
If the band “The Clash” is gone forever, such an idea of “The Clash” can be with us always. “Ideas matter,” the biblical scholar Marcus Borg has written, “much more than we commonly think they do, especially our worldviews and values, our ideas about what is real and how we are to live. We receive such ideas from our culture as we grow up, and unless we examine them, we will not be free, but simply live out the agenda of our socialization.”
Borg’s point that our sense of what is possible is often constrained by our society could have come from Joe Strummer himself. In 1984, the Clash frontman insisted, “Money doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m talking about preventing the world from going backward, finding a decent economic order where the poor are taken care of and everyone gets an even break. I’m talking about getting the world round to that kind of sanity, which is chiefly what we’re trying to do in The Clash.”
Realism met determination in the singer’s words, and the call to action was clear: “We ain’t just some shitty rock band trying to fake our way through. We are really trying to make a difference. People ask me, ‘Can The Clash change anything?’ Of course we can’t. But we can be a chink in the blinds.”
This last point is crucial. Strummer strained to write songs of deep worth, to perform them with fervent passion. But he knew that it took an audience to make them truly live, not just in ecstatic moments, but in changed lives, in new consciousness, in action. Strummer was trying, in the best punk fashion, to point the listeners away from the “stars” onstage and back toward to their own power, their responsibility to be participants, not just spectators.
A quiet reminder of this challenge can be found lurking in the pages of Sound System’s “Service Manual”: the words “It’s up to you” written in ten languages, signaling a global intent. This simple phrase recalls Strummer’s insistence from a Brixton stage, standing with the striking miners, that “The Clash” meant not simply the five members of the band, but everyone in their audience.
This audacious idea, of course, is only as true as anyone makes it, with blood, sweat, toil, and tears. But to act, one first has to believe, past jarring reverses, even seeming defeat, that, somehow, some way, a better world is possible.
“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” In sacrificing his life in a world war against fascism, Antoine de Saint Exupéry honored this vow, inspiring others to act on life rather than accept it as is. This “enabling” of the future is the gift Sheppard spoke of, the “chink in the blinds” Strummer conjured night after night onstage, giving the best of himself in the process.
This is the rhythm that ain’t never gonna stop, the radical claim Strummer staked in “North and South.” As a bleak Christmas approached for tens of thousands of strikers, as the lifeblood of their embattled families and communities oozed into the earth, The Clash spat out words of hope and defiance: “We ain’t diggin’ no grave / We’re diggin’ a foundation / for a future to be made.”
Tens of thousands of lives were touched by such Clash nights in 1984–85, even if subsequent dismissals or revisionism have sought to erase this inconvenient truth. Small, persistent pushbacks have grown, however. Visitors to Duke’s Bar in Glasgow, for example, now walk past a small round plaque commemorating The Clash’s busking show there—a lifetime ago, on May 16, 1985, before the forces of “market fundamentalism” overtook the lives of those who witnessed it.
This all might seem to be dead, dusty history, of little use beyond nostalgia. Yet while the energy of such an experience, in all its ragged, one-off glory, can be tamped down for a period, it can never be completely controlled. Nor, perhaps, can the participants feel compelled to simply settle for less, ever again.
If the last stand of The Clash has elements of tragedy and farce, it is more nearly defined by such sparks of persistence and passion, squeezed out over two years of striving. That time was dedicated imperfectly but powerfully to an idea of how the band might be purified and reinvented to the point where boundaries between fan and performer dissolved, and vast windows of possibility opened.
We are the clash—we are the rub between what is and what can be, between reality and possibility, the arena where truth can bring transformation. And, as Joe Strummer knew, truth often means descending into the house of suffering.
In many ways, this book has been a journey to that place of pain. It has no tale of unvarnished triumph to share. It can hope, however, to carry the ring of truth, of hard-fought battles, stinging defeats, and saving lessons learned. Above all, it seeks to faithfully transmit the restless, contradictory, fully human spirit of the band it celebrates, critiques, and tries to resurrect, in however limited a fashion.
Those now reading this book might be seen as part of the only Clash alive in flesh and blood. If so, take these words as a call to battle. Win or lose, we must spend ourselves again and again on those barricades, in a thousand ways large and small. Anything less is not worthy of The Clash, this band that truly mattered.
“When I say. ‘We are The Clash,’ I mean WE . . .” Joe Strummer in Hip Hop Punk Rock T-shirt with Clash fans at Chicago’s Sears Tower, May 1984. (Photo by Eddie King.)
acknowledgments & sources
We Are the Clash book Kickstarter event. (Photo by Mark Andersen.)
Any book as ambitious as this one will necessarily rely on a vast array of sources to have any hope of success and/or credibility. Four key works were fundamentally important to us, even though our interpretations sometimes differ significantly from theirs, and any errors are, of course, our own. They are: Vince White’s Out of Control: The Last Days of The Clash; Danny Garcia’s film and companion book, The Rise And Fall of The Clash; Nick Hall’s film I Need a Dodge!: Joe Strummer on the Run; and Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer. Vince, Danny, Nick, and Chris were all exceedingly generous with their time and sources. Their works not only form an essential complement for We Are The Clash, but their kindness exemplifies what is best about the ongoing Clash community, as did the support, patience, and inspiration of Kosmo Vinyl, Nick Sheppard, The Baker, Johnny Green, Jesús Arias, Jon Savage, Gaby Holford (née Salter), Alex Michon, and Caroline Coon. Mark Jenkins was crucial in helping us edit and condense this book—an immense amount of work that he did out of love, for no compensation at all. Alex Dent made lots of great suggestions, particularly to add a new opening to the introduction. Kate Crane/Smashpipe and Joseph L. Flatley/TheVerge.com also helped spread the word. Robin Bell rescued us at a key moment with his film production skills, and Luca Lanini and Federico Vacalebre stretched to fill us in on the Italian tour of September 1984. Similarly, Charlotte Manning, Niall McGuirk, Chris Magee, Nichola, and Chris Tipton/Upset the Rhythm provided amazing hospitality during Mark’s research trip to the UK and Ireland, as did Colin Coulter and everyone with the “Clash in Belfast” conference. Craig O’Hara of PM Press and Tim Merrick of The Clash Blog also provided key support and encouragement, while much respect is due to Justin Sullivan of New Model Army for the use of his penetrating, heartbreaking lyrics from “The Charge” for the epigraph that begins this book and helps open Chapter Nine. Antonia Tricarico, Saverio Giovacchini, Athena Viscusi, and Alexandra Getz Escudero assisted us with translations, while Maura Pond helped set up our wearetheclash.com website. Wo
rds can’t sufficiently express our gratitude for these extraordinary contributions—thanks so much, brothers and sisters!
At the same time, both Ralph and Mark have been working on this book in some sense since we each first heard in early 1986 that the new Clash had broken up, archiving clippings and puzzling over unanswered questions. The mystery behind this sudden dramatic crash, the lofty ambitions precipitously abandoned, the enigmatic album Cut the Crap—all of it intrigued and haunted us, marked indelibly as we were by this final chapter of the Clash saga. By the mid-1990s, Ralph had become the first journalist to seek out Vince White, Peter Howard, and Nick Sheppard to try to piece together the tale for DISCoveries and Goldmine magazines. In addition, Ralph recorded conversations around that same time with Johnny Green, Raymond Jordan, Viv Albertine, and numerous other key Clash players. For his part, Mark interviewed Joe Strummer in 1989, seeking illumination about what had happened. Strummer’s responses are published here for the very first time, with maximum thanks to Ian MacKaye for locating the original tape and digitizing it.
These early interviews were supplemented by in-depth follow-ups conducted between 2012 and 2017 with Nick, Peter, and Vince, as well as with Kosmo Vinyl, Jesús Arias, and a broad array of other participants or observers such as Bernard Rhodes, Eddie King, Michael Fayne, Julian Balme, Billy Bragg, Chris Salewicz, Danbert Nobacon and Boff Whalley of Chumbawamba, Per-Åke Wärn, Gee Vaucher and Penny Rimbaud of Crass, Mark Jenkins, Kris Needs, Robin Banks, Jeff Slate, Bill Daly, Tony Keen, and Martin McCallion. Although we didn’t interview Paul Simonon, Mick Jones, Nicky Headon, or Terry Chimes, we thank them for their priceless contributions to a band that has meant everything to us. The Joe Strummer Slept Here interactive documentary by Stephen Hay and Graham Roberts, based in part on the recollections of Gillian Farmer, was invaluable. We also benefited from insights and memories of literally dozens of other Clash observers and analysts—whom we’ve tried to acknowledge in the text—helping us to reconstruct this era with accuracy and sensitivity.
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