Night Beat
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But as involving as the new PiL were, they still couldn’t match the temerity of their audience. Throughout the group’s near hour-long show, punk after punk would scrabble onstage from out of the pressed mass down front, and dance and flail around Lydon or try to pat his red-tufted head, until some beefy security hack would heft them off their feet and toss them over the heads of the audience. At times it would resemble a melee, but in truth it wasn’t: It was a carefully orchestrated ritual (though the punks possessed a good deal more grace, and sometimes restraint, than the guards), and though the punks’ behavior may have seemed an unnecessarily stupid, ruffian activity, it also made for a great spectator sport (probably a great participant sport too, if you prefer bowling from the ball’s perspective).
But all the audience’s excitement, and the pleasure that some of us took in PiL’s musical growth, seemed secondary to one generous, surprising, and revealing gesture by Lydon at the show’s end. “We’re going to do an oldie for ya,” he said in his familiar mocking tone, as the band returned for their first encore. “Sing along—you know the words.” With that, PiL vaulted into a roaring version of the Sex Pistols’ greatest moment, “Anarchy in the U.K.” It didn’t have quite the startling, shearing effect that the Pistols’ rendition of the song did at Winterland in 1978, in their final performance, but it was still damn exciting, and the audience responded by thrashing in near-religious fervor.
In 1996, Rotten made a career out of that moment. He and the original Sex Pistols—guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and the band’s first bassist, Glen Matlock—re-formed for a tour of Europe and America. In one way, it meant nothing, not even nostalgia, since they were simply playing their old songs again but without the context of daring and risk that they brought to every stage they mounted from 1976 to 1978. In another way, it meant a great deal: The late-1990s Sex Pistols showed they were still up to the job of assaulting rock & roll with as much venom and intelligence as anybody, and more important, their shows were reminders of what a damn fine, indelible, and perfect body of rock & roll songwriting (matchlessly inventive anthems) they wrought in their brief, world-changing season twenty years prior. For those few nights in 1996, John Lydon was undeniably Johnny Rotten again, and it seemed wonderfully possible that rock & roll might still be the fiercest, most frightening popular art on earth.
NEW ORDER’S STORY also continued—in fact, still continues. More or less.
At first it was obvious that the band couldn’t immediately surmount the loss of Ian Curtis, who had pretty much shaped and dominated Joy Division’s thematic image. Some fans, in fact, felt his presence was so overpowering that it held the band back onstage. But for all of Curtis’ deadly excesses, he also had a clear-cut point of view: Curtis knew that damnation was what he stood for, and he didn’t flinch from what that entailed.
By contrast, New Order didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what they stood for, except outliving the grim shadow of their past. Just when an audience was finally eager to hear what this band had to say, they lost the personality who had made them notable in the first place. And while nobody in New Order seemed to want to imitate Curtis, nobody in the band seemed up to replacing him either.
In such early singles as “Everything’s Gone Green,” and their disappointing debut album, Movement, New Order didn’t offer much more than a synthesized reworking of their once thick, surging sound. It was prettier and more disciplined than Joy Division’s sound, to be sure, but also less exciting and involving. Whatever was being said about their new life—that of a band that had to live with an ineradicable loss—was never clear. The words, and even the vocals themselves—delivered by guitarist Bernie Albrecht—got lost in tricky mixes that reduced lyrics to a kind of atmospheric filler. As a result, Movement didn’t matter as much as Joy Division’s music or myth had. As the U.K. scene shifted to a more rhythmic aesthetic, Joy Division’s influence diminished, and with it, perhaps, New Order’s best chance for preeminence.
And then in 1983, New Order rebounded with Power, Corruption and Lies—one of the most compelling albums of that year, and nearly the equal to their former achievements with Joy Division. Still, it was pretty much impossible to say what Power, Corruption and Lies was “about” in the way that one could say what Joy Division’s music was about. If anything, New Order seemed to be a band about form. Their version of postpunk sound was a clean, taut, swirling lacework of interlocking guitar and synthesizer motifs, buttressed by a massive, uniform dance pulse—a sound that overshadowed the emotions and meanings within it, to the degree that sound became the sole medium and object of those emotions. This idea first came across in the group’s wondrous 1982 single “Temptation,” but it came into its own fully with Power, Corruption and Lies.
The collective elements of sound on that album (still New Order’s best) feel as if they’re about a great deal indeed. The sharp-edged arpeggiated guitar lines and swathed synthesizer webs on “Your Silent Face,” “Leave Me Alone,” and “Age of Consent” interweave over pulsating dance patterns as though the sound were meant to put across a vital meaning—yet as if that feeling and meaning were simply the expression of the sound itself. By comparison, the vocals aren’t much more than a fine touch of emotional embellishment, putting forth some surprisingly axiomatic notions of romantic desperation as if it was finally time to acknowledge the truth of Ian Curtis’ dissolution. Yet the words aren’t what carry Power, Corruption and Lies’ substance. Even the best vocals and lyrics on the album pale beside the eloquence of the guitars and synthesizers which surround and overwhelm them.
Power, Corruption and Lies was a synthesis of rhythm, texture, and emotion, existing for its own pleasure. In 1983, it sounded like rhapsodic, impassioned pop: music with a force of human heart that counted all the more for the hard truths it had to withstand to find its own confidence and soul. But New Order never really surpassed that moment. They went on to make several more albums, some rapturous-sounding, some forgettable, and none that ever helped make up for what they lost on that fatal day in May 1980.
WHAT WOULD HAVE happened if a group dared to resurrect or reinvent punk in Britain with the same mix of arrogance and vision that the Sex Pistols once flourished? No doubt that group would have been condemned and resented as Johnny Rotten’s band was—which is just what befell the most controversial and perhaps most important British band of the mid-1980s, a ragged-looking, glorious-sounding quartet called the Jesus and Mary Chain.
Like the Pistols, the Jesus and Mary Chain played music that was immediately a shock, music that demanded you come to terms with its perspective, if only to reject or fight it. The group’s early singles, “Never Understand” and “Upside Down,” pitted lovely tunes and dreamy vocals against screeching feedback and relentless pandemonium—a mix that, as one British writer put it, suggested a plausible teaming of the Beach Boys and Cleveland, Ohio’s, late 1970s great avant-garde pre-punk band, Pere Ubu. This approach was both acclaimed and derided in England, where the Jesus and Mary Chain, much like the Sex Pistols, largely had to be seen to be heard. (The band’s early concerts reportedly incited strong reactions—sometimes outright crowd convulsions—just like early punk.)
While the group’s 1985 debut album, Psychocandy, didn’t win over many detractors or break through the hegemony that ruled that period’s British and American radio, the album nonetheless showed that the Jesus and Mary Chain’s musical conceptions probably had both substance and mileage. The band’s mix of mellifluence and noise held up beautifully over Psychocandy’s forty-minute-plus length. Every track on the album had a life and magnetism of its own, and they all sounded affecting, galvanizing, and inventive.
But for all the brave new territory Psychocandy staked out, at times it seemed to summarize or refashion pop-punk style instead of breaking with it. Between the album’s wailing dissonance and lovely melodies, one could find allusions to many musical parents, not merely the Pistols (while the Jesus and Mary Chain caught that band’s howl
ing guitar sound, they preferred patient rhythms to galloping ones), but also hints of the Beatles (Jesus’ “Just like Honey” took “Love Me Do” and fused it with “Helter Skelter”), elements of mid-1960s pop styles (imagine Motown as it might have sounded played by the Seeds and produced by Phil Spector), and, of course, strong echoes of such earlier trailblazers as the Velvet Underground and Joy Division.
Psychocandy proved among the finest, most provoking British albums of the mid-1980s. By balancing sweet melodies and raw cacophonies so powerfully, the Jesus and Mary Chain were saying that dreams and anguish, hope and fear, are necessary counterparts in both life and music. By asserting that obvious truth, the group reinvented (if only briefly) punk’s original courage and vision, on the band’s own terms.
Whereas punk drew a dividing line across rock & roll and demanded that you stand on one side or another, the Jesus and Mary Chain drew a line and then occupied it alone, turning that line into a scary and alluring union of two opposing worlds. Jesus and Mary Chain—like the Sex Pistols or Joy Division—pretty much ended up as one of the few that truly made good on the possibilities that their music raised. The band went on to make other terrific records—the mesmerizing Darklands (1987), as well as Barbed Wire Kisses (1988), Automatic (1989), Honey’s Dead (1992), and Stoned and Dethroned (1994). None of them, though, would prove such a wailing judgment of what became of British punk and pop style as 1985’s Psychocandy. All these years later, it is still a record that can thrill you—like the best and worst stolen orgasms of your life—or that can drive you into a bad, spooky corner of your mind and spirit, as if you just finally realized how mad, worthless, wonderful, and disarrayed life truly is, regardless of your best efforts to impose hope and design on to all its unbeatable final disorder.
the clash: punk beginnings, punk endings
“Fuck that shit,” says Joe Strummer, the thuggish-looking lead singer of the Clash, addressing some exultant kids yelling “Happy New Year” at him from the teeming floor of the Lyceum. “You’ve got your future at stake. Face front! Take it!”
In sleepy London town, during the murky Christmas week of 1978, rock & roll is being presented as a war of class and aesthetics. At the crux of that battle is a volcanic series of four Clash concerts—including a benefit for Sid Vicious—coming swift on the heels of the group’s second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, which entered the British charts at number 2. Together with the Sex Pistols, the Clash helped spearhead the punk movement in Britain, along the way earning a designation as the most intellectual and political punk band. When the Pistols disbanded in early 1978, the rock press and punks alike looked to the Clash as the movement’s central symbol and hope.
Yet, beyond the hyperbole and wrangle that helped create their radical myth, the Clash brandish a hearty reputation as a rock & roll band that, like the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen, must be seen to be believed. Certainly no other band communicates kinetic, imperative anger as potently as the Clash. When Nicky “Topper” Headon’s single-shot snare report opens “Safe European Home” (a song about Strummer and lead guitarist Mick Jones’ ill-fated attempt to rub elbows with Rastafarians in the Jamaicans’ backyard), all hell breaks loose, both on the Lyceum stage and floor.
Like the Sex Pistols, the Clash’s live sound hinges on a massive, orchestral drum framework that buttresses the blustery guitar work of Jones, who with his tireless two-step knee kicks looks just like a Rockettes’ version of Keith Richards. Shards of Mott the Hoople and the Who cut through the tumult, while Strummer’s rhythm guitar and Paul Simonon’s bass gnash at the beat underneath. And Strummer’s vocals sound as dangerous as he looks. Screwing his face up into a broken-tooth yowl, he gleefully bludgeons words, then caresses them with a touching, R & B-inflected passion.
Maybe it’s the gestalt of the event, or maybe it’s just the sweaty leather-bound mass throbbing around me, but I think it’s the most persuasive rock & roll show I’ve seen since I watched the Sex Pistols’ final performance in San Francisco earlier in the same year.
I try to say as much to a reticent Joe Strummer after the show as we stand in a dingy backstage dressing room, which is brimming with a sweltering mix of fans, press, and roadies. Strummer, wearing smoky sunglasses and a nut-brown porkpie hat, resembles a roughhewn version of Michael Corleone. Measuring me with his wary, testy eyes, he mumbles an inaudible reply.
Across the room, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon have taken refuge in a corner, sharing a spliff. “You a Yank?” Jones asks me in a surprisingly delicate, lilting voice. “From ’ollywood? Evil place, innit? All laid back.” According to the myth encasing this band, Jones, who writes nearly all of the Clash’s music, is the band’s real focal nerve, even though the austere Strummer writes the bulk of the lyrics. In the best Keith Richards tradition, the fans see Mick as a sensitive and vulnerable street waif, prone to dissipation as much as to idealism. Indeed, he looks as bemusedly wasted as anyone I’ve ever met. He’s also among the gentler, more considerate people I’ve ever spent time with.
But the next evening, sitting in the same spot, Mick declines to be interviewed. “Lately, interviews make me feel ’orrible. It seems all I do is spend my time answering everyone’s charges—charges that shouldn’t have to be answered.”
The Clash have been hit with a wide volley of charges, ranging from an English rock-press backlash aimed at what the critics see as reckless politics, to very real criminal charges against Headon and Simonon (for shooting valuable racing pigeons) and Jones (for alleged cocaine possession). But probably the most damaging salvo has come from their former manager, Bernard Rhodes, who, after he was fired, accused the band of betraying its punk ideals and slapped them with a potentially crippling lawsuit. Jones, in a recent interview, railed back. “We’re still the only ones true to the original aims of punk,” he said. “Those other bands should be destroyed.”
THE CLASH FORMED as a result of Joe Strummer’s frustrations and Jones’ rock ideals. Both claimed to have been abandoned at early ages by their parents, and while Strummer (the son of a British diplomat) took to singing Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry songs in London’s subways for spare change during his late teens, Jones retreated into reading and playing Mott the Hoople, Dylan, Kinks, and Who records. In 1975, he left the art school he was attending and formed London SS, a band that, in its attempt to meld a raving blend of the New York Dolls, the Stooges, and Mott, became a legendary forerunner of the English punk scene.
Then, in early 1976, shortly after the Sex Pistols assailed London, Mick Jones ran into Strummer, who had been singing in a pub-circuit R & B band called the 101ers. “I don’t like your band,” Jones said, “but I like the way you sing.” Strummer, anxious to join the punk brigade, cut his hair, quit the 101ers, and joined Jones, Simonon (also a member of London SS), guitarist Keith Levene (later a member of Public Image Ltd.) and drummer Terry Chimes (brilliantly renamed as Tory Crimes) to form the Clash in June of 1976. Eight months later, under the tutelage of Bernard Rhodes, the Clash signed with CBS Records for a reported $200,000.
Their first album, The Clash (originally unreleased in America; Epic, the group’s label stateside, deemed it “too crude”), was archetypal, resplendent punk. While the Sex Pistols proffered a nihilistic image, the Clash took a militant stance that, in an eloquent, guttural way, vindicated punk’s negativism. Harrowed rhythms and coarse vocals propelled a foray of songs aimed at the bleak political realities and social ennui of English life, making social realism—and unbridled disgust—key elements in punk aesthetics.
But even before the first album was released, the punk scene had dealt the Clash some unforeseen blows. The punks, egged on by a hysterical English press, began turning on each other, and drummer Chimes, weary of ducking bottles, spit, and the band’s politics, quit. Months passed before the group settled on Nicky Headon (also a member of Mick Jones’ London SS) as a replacement and returned to performing. By that time, their reputation had swelled to near-messianic proportions.
But nowhere near as stormy as the album. Give ’Em Enough Rope is rock & roll’s State of Siege—with a dash of Duck Soup for comic relief. Instead of reworking the tried themes of bored youth and repressive society, Strummer and Jones tapped some of the deadliest currents around, from creeping fascism at home to Palestinian terrorism. The album surges with visions of civil strife, gunplay, backbiting, and lyrics that might’ve been spirited from the streets of Italy and Iran: “A system built by the sweat of the many/Creates assassins to kill off the few/Take any place and call it a courthouse/This is a place where no judge can stand.” And the music—a whirl of typhonic guitars and drums—frames those conflicts grandly.
THE DAY AFTER the Clash’s last Lyceum show, I meet Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon at the Tate Gallery, London’s grand art museum. Simonon leads us on a knowledgeable tour of the gallery’s treasures until we settle in a dim corner of the downstairs café for an interview.