“Are you taking over or are you taking orders?”
The Chaos of Punk
IN AUGUST 1975, David Bowie conducted an infamous telephone interview with the NME. “Over here,” he said from his current base in Los Angeles, “it’s bright young Americans, you know, the lilting phrase before the crashing crescendo. In England it’s a dirge—the days are all grey over there.” As the singer rambled on about “Philistine” culture and moral decline, interviewer Antony O’Grady asked what the next step was. “Dictatorship,” Bowie replied firmly. “You probably hope I’m not right. But I am. My predictions are very accurate.”
Even allowing for the fact that Bowie was so icebound by cocaine that he would later be unable to remember much about the period at all, how must his home country have looked from a distance of eight time zones? The United States and the UK both suffered from declinism, but the narratives were different. Shaken by Watergate, disillusioned Americans perceived their government as wily and treacherous, capable of complex Machiavellian plots to deceive the nation. By contrast, Britain’s rulers seemed too feeble and incompetent to plan any such thing.
After thirty years, postwar consensus politics was under terminal strain. Conservative prime minister Edward Heath had been brought low during the oil crisis by the imposition of gas rationing and a three-day working week, followed by a national miners’ strike. Labour’s Harold Wilson, returning to Number 10, was faced with a plunging pound and quagmire economy, governing to a soundtrack of angry picket lines and IRA bombs. In April 1975, the Wall Street Journal concluded a gloatingly gloomy editorial with the words: “Goodbye, Great Britain, it was nice knowing you.”
Fiction told a similar story. In J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, a modernist tower block became an exaggerated metaphor for Britain, as power cuts led to class war, atavistic brutality, and the emergence of rival demagogues. Street gangs ran riot in the brutalist dystopia of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. The new sci-fi comic 2000 AD was about to introduce the fascistic, postapocalyptic lawman Judge Dredd.* Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark and Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age depicted a paralyzed nation on the brink of some sinister metamorphosis. Bowie’s drug-addled führer fantasies, unbeknown to him, echoed conversations in the drawing rooms of the elite, where excitable industrialists, newspaper columnists, and military men spoke approvingly of Pinochet’s example and talked of a coup to save Britain from the Marxist menace.
“People [forget] what genuine flux the society was in,” says the former punk-era musician Tom Robinson. “We were thinking so short-term. It really felt like, ‘The end of the world is nigh—who knows what’s going to happen?’ All the old certainties were being shaken.”
WHEN I INTERVIEWED A DOZEN OR SO punk veterans to mark the thirtieth anniversary of 1977, the scene’s turbulent breakthrough year, I asked them what punk was opposed to. Some offered “long hair” and “guitar solos,” but nobody mentioned police harassment or unemployment. Whereas 1960s musicians tend retrospectively to overstate their rebellious intent, punks are more inclined to play it down, as if politics was some pretentious distraction from the real business of music. Indeed, the Clash’s Joe Strummer, who died in 2002, was the only member of punk’s first wave who was happy to call his compositions “protest songs.”
Age played a part. The oldest member of the band, Strummer had been fifteen when antiwar demonstrators clashed with police in Grosvenor Square in 1968: old enough to thrill to the revolutionary spectacle unfolding on the TV in his suburban living room but too young to go along and throw some bricks himself. “I always felt like I was coming on the field of a great battle twelve hours after the battle was over,” he later reflected, “so the casualties were all lying on the field but the battle was gone.” Although his father’s thoroughly establishment occupation as a Foreign Office civil servant would often be held against him, Strummer was a keen student of the counterculture. At art school in London, the young man born John Mellor took the name Woody (after Guthrie) and began learning the guitar. Soon dropping out of college, he styled himself as a hippie hobo, living in squats and busking his way around Europe.
Older still was Bernie Rhodes, who was thirty when, in May 1976, he introduced Strummer to guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon, and thus became both midwife and manager to the Clash. Rhodes was charismatic, mercurial, egotistical, and inspirational. “The Clash was a bit like the Communist Party, with Bernie as Stalin,” Simonon once quipped. He was the intellectual whetstone on which Strummer could sharpen his mind. “Joe was his own man and didn’t need any goading to be political,” says the DJ and filmmaker Don Letts, a close friend of the Clash. “But Bernard recognized the tradition that Joe was in and maybe helped focus his aim. He understood the history of the counterculture and joined the dots way back.” Rhodes urged Strummer, “Write about what’s important,” and the singer eagerly rose to the challenge. In September 1976, he told new punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue that the Clash were there to educate listeners about what was happening in Britain. “The situation is far too serious for enjoyment, man,” he said sternly.
Before the Clash, Rhodes’ intellectual sparring partner had been Malcolm McLaren, a brash but insecure art-school dropout with a mania for big ideas. Chief among them was situationism, with its love of pranks and slogans and its enduring associations with the student uprisings of Paris 1968; he claimed he had been at that year’s Grosvenor Square protest. The two had become friends in the 1960s and came together again in 1974 at McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s provocative Kings Road boutique Let It Rock (later renamed Sex). What McLaren dreamed of was a band to go with it.
McLaren’s first thought had been to front the group himself—he even took singing lessons, before deciding that he was too old for the job. He wrote to a friend: “I have the idea of the singer looking like Hitler, those gestures, arm shapes etc. and talking about his mum in incestuous phrases.” What came his way was the Strand, a ramshackle outfit comprising working-class Londoners Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, and Warwick Nightingale. But Jones wasn’t much of a front man, and McLaren needed a singer who could fulfill his multiple ambitions for the band: to become Britain’s answer to the thrillingly volatile New York Dolls, translate his scatter-gun ideas into songs, and, more prosaically, promote the Kings Road shop.
One regular visitor to the shop was a skinny, hunched, green-haired teenager called John Lydon. At the age of eight, he had been bedridden for a year with meningitis, which left him with bad eyesight and intense unease with his own treacherously fragile body. When his Irish Catholic parents settled on the Six Acres council estate in London’s Finsbury Park, he attended Catholic school. “I learnt hate and resentment there,” he told writer Jon Savage. “And I learned to despise tradition and this sham we call culture.” Furthermore, he felt a burning sense of social rejection. “It’s the repressive class system that destroys any hopes of people like me,” he said. “We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the education and we were looked down on even when we did educate ourselves. It was a hopeless situation.” By the time he first walked into Sex, all of this had left him with a profound sense of unbelonging. “Which is oddly enough the warmest feeling,” he says with a brittle, cawing laugh. “You can wear it like a coat—it wraps around you.”
So when Lydon auditioned for McLaren in August 1975, he was on a completely different page than his bandmates and manager. “I suppose Malcolm’s idea of the Sex Pistols was a Labour Party version of the Bay City Rollers,” he later sneered to writer Robin Denselow. Jones, Cook, and Matlock (Nightingale was gone by now) wanted to play hard, fast garage-rock like the Stooges and the MC5; Lydon loved reggae, Captain Beefheart, and saturnine prog-rock misfit Peter Hammill. They appeared to hate each other on sight. Right from the start, the Sex Pistols were an unstable compound, destined to explode.
IT IS ENTIRELY APT that they were formed in 1975, a year in which it seemed everywhere that time was running out and some violent transformation was imminent. You could hear it in reggae’s dire prophecies, in Bowie’s fascist daydreams, and in the last-chance mania of New York bands such as the Ramones, who appeared in the first issue of a significantly titled new fanzine at the end of the year: Punk. “There was nihilism in the atmosphere, a longing to die,” the New York writer Mary Harron told Jon Savage. “Part of the feeling of New York at that time was this longing for oblivion, that you were about to disintegrate, go the way of this bankrupt, crumbling city. Yet that was something almost mystically wonderful.” But in New York, that death drive had a sly, knowing quality, and Harron was both shocked and thrilled by what she saw when she visited London the following autumn. “I felt that what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience.”
New bands sprang up, warrior-like, from the dragon’s teeth sown by the Pistols in 1976—the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Adverts—while some existing ones were reborn. Joe Strummer was fronting the fast-rising 101ers when the Pistols supported them in April 1976; within weeks he had quit and formed the Clash. “The Pistols had to come in and blow everything away,” he said later. “They were the stun grenade into the room before the door could go.” Meanwhile, a clique of extravagantly dressed suburban teenagers known as the Bromley contingent, some of whom would later form Siouxsie and the Banshees, gravitated towards the Sex Pistols via Vivienne Westwood, their style an amalgam of Weimar Germany, S&M, gay fashion, and A Clockwork Orange, their preferred drug amphetamine sulphate, their politics imponderable. Everything happened very fast. “What had begun as an excuse to annoy people,” writes Savage, “quickly took on an almost messianic flavor as the inner circle surfed through the city on a diet of sun, sex, sulphate and swastikas.”
The swastika was emblematic of punk’s addled politics. Although some punk offshoots would later overlap uneasily with neo-Nazi groups, in 1976 the symbol connoted nothing more sinister than a desire to outrage hippies, liberals, and the older generation which still took vocal pride in defeating Hitler. In the United States, where the Stooges’ Ron Asheton had flaunted the swastika as far back as 1969, the Ramones and the editors of Punk dabbled in Nazi imagery and espoused a trashy, grooveless, inauthentic, distinctly white aesthetic, without ever tipping into outright racism. “I don’t think anyone wanted to read too much depth into it: it was more emotional,” said Punk cofounder Legs McNeil. The critic Lester Bangs attributed this vogue to “a reaction against the hippie counterculture and what a lot of us regarded as its pious pussyfooting around questions of racial and sexual identity, questions we were quite prepared to drive over with bulldozers.”
During that summer in London, the scene was so far under the radar that punks were able to throw all these wild, half-understood ideas into the air and let them fall where they may, not fearing the consequences. Nothing was fixed; anything was possible—at least for a short while. Ironically, one victim of punk’s flirtation with fascist iconography was the most passionately antiracist of all the bands. When the Clash played Lanchester Polytechnic in November, the student union, misunderstanding one particular lyric, refused to pay them. The offending song was called “White Riot.”
BRITAIN IS NOT A COUNTRY accustomed to heat waves, and the summer of 1976 took everyone by surprise. Average temperatures were their highest since at least the seventeenth century, while month after rainless month produced crop failures, yellowed lawns, emergency water rationing, and a bizarre plague of ladybugs. The last weekend of Britain’s scorched summer was a seismic one for punk. On Sunday, August 29, McLaren hosted a remarkable triple bill at the Screen on the Green in Islington, north London. The Sex Pistols were supported by the Buzzcocks and, playing only the third gig of their short life, the Clash. With several A&R men in the crowd, it was an underground movement’s first step towards the mainstream.
At the same time, a few miles to the west, the annual Notting Hill Carnival was taking place. It had been founded as a gesture of defiance after the race riots of 1958, when white mobs attacked West Indian homes, and had quickly become a red-letter day for London’s black population. As second-generation immigrants came of age, the nostalgic island sounds of soca and calypso were steadily eclipsed by the militant thunder of reggae. “The whole idea of being black and British had no meaning then, so we were looking to Jamaica, looking to America,” says Don Letts. “What were we, man?” he asks himself, pacing the floor, spliff in hand. “I don’t know what the fuck we were. We were black and deadly.”
By 1976, against a backdrop of racist policing, the carnival was coiled with tension. The police stationed 1,600 officers at the event, octupling the previous year’s manpower. “You went there thinking, ‘Great, a day of freedom,’” recalls Letts. “When you approached the carnival, that illusion was immediately shattered. Trust me, when you walk past a bunch of cops sniggering at you, it doesn’t set the day up right from the get-go.” While punk’s standard-bearers played in Islington, West Indians ominously chanted, “Coming down, coming down” on the streets of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove.
On Monday, the carnival’s second and final day, Strummer, Simonon, and Rhodes paid the Grove a visit. The reggae-loving Simonon had grown up in Notting Hill and, prior to that, Brixton, another hub of Caribbean life in the capital, so black culture held no mystique for him. But Strummer felt like an outsider, plugged into a different tradition of dissent. On arriving at the carnival, the trio began dancing to the reggae sound systems. Around 5 p.m., however, police attempted to arrest a young black man for alleged pickpocketing and were met with a hail of bricks and bottles. “We were there at the very first throw of the brick,” Strummer remembered. “All hell broke loose.”
Strummer was caught in the surging crowd, losing sight of his friends. The next time he saw Simonon, a few minutes later, the bassist was throwing a plastic traffic cone at a police motorcyclist. The pair tried to set fire to a car but, comically, couldn’t keep a match lit long enough in the breeze. A return visit to the carnival that evening, with curious Sex Pistols associate Sid Vicious in tow, was aborted in the face of hundreds of hardcore rioters. “That was when I realised I had to write a song called ‘White Riot,’” Strummer told Jon Savage, “because it wasn’t our fight.”*
“If you lived in the streets of London you could have foretold it,” says Letts. “It wasn’t a black and white thing: it was a wrong and right thing. We’d all had enough, it’s just the black people who were brave enough to pick up a brick.” All of the Clash had witnessed prejudice and police harassment in various forms, but they weren’t themselves regularly stopped and searched by the police, or threatened by racist thugs. Just as white American folk fans had been entranced by the “authentic” grit of Delta bluesmen, and 1960s white radicals had mooned over the Black Panthers, Strummer was intoxicated by the justified wrath of the carnival rioters, as opposed to the docile apathy of white youth, only he had enough self-knowledge to accept his own apartness. He was in the riot but not of the riot.
Not insignificantly, the West Indians also had the right music. By the mid-1970s, white Britons still had no vital form of musical protest to call their own. Despite fitful, late 1960s gestures such as “Street Fighting Man,” British rock’s dominant modes in the following decade were distinctly artistic and escapist, from the elaborate fantasias of progressive rock through the bucolic daydreams of folk-rock to the arch, sci-fi androgyny of glam. But reggae had everything: fascinating characters, sonic derring-do, social comment, and end-of-days drama. It was irresistible. “We did feel like we were on the frontline of Babylon,” journalist Vivien Goldman told writer Simon Reynolds.
Recorded in February 1977, “White Riot” is on high alert from the opening police siren to the final burglar alarm. It takes roots reggae’s sense of emergency and translates it into sheer velocity. On the other side of the single, the Clash offer their response to Culture’s “Two Sevens Clash.” “In 1977,” glowered Strummer, “Knives in West 11…Sten guns in Knightsbridge.”
THE SEX PISTOLS MARKED THEIR SIGNING to EMI in the autumn of 1976 with a debut single even more formidable than “White Riot”: “Anarchy in the UK.” Lydon had been introduced to the titular concept by McLaren’s friend, Jamie Reid, who designed all of the band’s record sleeves, but he was not particularly interested in Bakunin and Kropotkin. His concern, he told Jon Savage, was not “political anarchy, because I still to this day believe that anarchy is just a mind-game for the middle classes, but personal anarchy, which is quite different.” McLaren and Reid attempted to flood Lydon’s mind with such cherished ideas as situationism, but they could not dictate what he did with them, nor, more importantly, how he delivered them. One cannot detach the words from the voice, and the voice seemed to scream up from the void.
“Anarchy in the UK” was a thunderclap, a declaration of war, a sick joke. Johnny Rotten introduced himself to the world with the words “Right! Now!” a stage laugh, and an assault on the language itself, rolling his rs with satanic relish and forcing anarchist at gunpoint to rhyme with antichrist. His bandmates’ love of rock ’n’ roll, beefed up by Chris Thomas’ production, gave it an irresistibly thrilling muscularity, a wild, liberating glee. It is at once absurd and genuinely disturbing: comic-strip villainy warping into real slash-and-burn rage. Who, or what, you might have asked in 1976, is this creature? And what does he want?
Lydon-as-Rotten sounded literally unhinged, snapped off from mainstream thinking, whirling into new and chaotic territory with no indication of where he might dock. Protest singers have an ideal outcome in mind, but Lydon here resembles a terrorist whose demands are obscure and, one suspects, impossible to satisfy. “They didn’t know which direction we were coming from,” Jamie Reid told Savage. “In the same week we could be accused, quite seriously, of being National Front [fascists], and in the next breath you were mad communists and anarchists.”
Towards the end of “Anarchy in the UK,” Lydon spits out paramilitary acronyms—the MPLA and the opposing Irish guerrillas, the UDA and the IRA—in a way which renders them laughable and meaningless. These days, he says, “I don’t believe in extreme politics. When you go to one extreme or another you’re negating one part of your personality and I think that’s a dangerous move.” Which is very sensible, but dangerous is exactly how he sounds on “Anarchy.” This does not sound like someone carefully weighing options and finding a middle path. It sounds like someone dancing amid the flames and rubble: “Get pissed, destroy!”
On the night that changed Lydon’s life forever, however, he did not seem particularly terrifying. It was December 1, and the Sex Pistols’ new EMI labelmates, Queen, had dropped out of an appearance on Thames TV’s Today show, so they were airlifted in at the last minute, with unforeseeable consequences. When you watch this footage now, it seems far more bathetic than outrageous. The host, Bill Grundy, is a pompous, drunken fool, in the process of needling himself out of a career. The band and four members of the Bromley contingent (including Banshees Siouxsie and Steve Severin) look shockingly young and green. The infamous swearing—“tough shit,” “you fucking rotter!”—whiffs of schoolboy mischief rather than sedition.
But a country, like an individual, is more likely to take offense if it is feeling insecure, and by the end of 1976 Britain’s crisis of confidence was crippling. In November, the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, had been forced to cut a humiliating deal with the IMF to save the pound, necessitating substantial cuts in public spending. Unemployment had passed the symbolic one million mark. An ongoing industrial dispute at the Grunwick film processing plant in north London was prompting sympathetic strike action with no resolution in sight. The Notting Hill riots, and attendant fears of racial violence, were still fresh in the memory. The country appeared to be drifting slowly through the night towards an iceberg. And now here were these ghastly apparitions, spouting filth on national television at teatime! As Margaret Drabble wrote in The Ice Age: “All over the country, people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong…. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody.”
Many people were happy to blame the Sex Pistols. The Daily Mirror coined the classic headline, “The Filth and the Fury!” while the Daily Mail asked, “Who Are These Punks?” And the public reaction was real and visceral. The Mirror reported that one middle-aged lorry driver was so enraged that he kicked in his TV screen. Dee Generate, the fourteen-year-old drummer of schoolboy punks Eater, received a brick through the window of his family home. Even McLaren, whose whole modus operandi was épater la bourgeoisie, was thrown into panic by the backlash, which turned the Pistols’ Anarchy tour (supported by the Clash) into an anticlimactic farce of cancelled bookings, fistfights, and sour tempers. “From that day on, it was different,” Steve Jones told Savage. “Before then, it was just music; the next day, it was the media.”
DURING THE ANARCHY TOUR, it was obvious that the Pistols and the Clash had drastically divergent agendas. “I’ve always thought the Clash read books and just copped headlines,” says Lydon. “A much more juvenile approach. And they didn’t actually live a lifestyle according to the stance they were taking—a little bit of an act on their part.”
There was certainly a theatrical aspect to the Clash. Inspired by reggae albums such as the Professionals’ State of Emergency and Prince Far-I’s Under Heavy Manners, they stencilled lyrics onto boiler suits for the cover photograph of “White Riot”/ “1977.” Strummer was fascinated by the activities of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang and Italy’s Red Brigade, far-left groups who had delivered the kind of revolutionary violence that Weatherman had only promised, while at the same time he insisted: “we’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist and we’re pro-creative.” Strummer was torn between the desire for truthfulness and the allure of street-fighting radical chic: a pacifist in uniform. The discrepancy made the Clash electric, neither too earnest nor too nihilistically irresponsible, but it also exposed them to accusations of naïveté and hypocrisy. While Lydon could use his toxic sarcasm as both shield and sword, Strummer was armed with nothing more than confused sincerity. The difference between the two front men was written in their faces: Lydon a snarling gargoyle palpably estranged from his own flesh; Strummer a handsome biker from a 1950s B-movie.
Strummer’s advantage was that he threw listeners a lifeline. The impact of the Sex Pistols was a sudden shock to the system, like resuscitation paddles applied to a struggling heart, but they offered no guidance as to how the patient might then recuperate. Lydon was such an extreme and complex personality that the listener could not follow him—his was a riot of the mind. The Clash, for all their freshness, were more conventional protest rockers, documenting the world around them. To people who inhabited the dole queues, underpasses, and tower blocks of the inner cities, the Clash’s reportage was excitingly familiar; to those who didn’t, it was grippingly exotic. When they released The Clash in April 1977, three weeks after “White Riot”/ “1977,” NME’s punk apostle Tony Parsons purred: “They chronicle our lives and what it’s like to be young in the Stinking Seventies better than any other band, and they do it with style, flash and excitement.”
As a last-minute addition to their debut, the Clash took the bold step of covering a reggae song, Junior Murvin’s election-year lament “Police and Thieves,” which had been on heavy rotation at Notting Hill carnival prior to the riot.* They were initially hesitant—would they be honoring reggae or travestying it?—but they succeeded by foregrounding the cultural differences: Murvin’s keening falsetto gave way to Strummer’s chewy London vowels, Lee Perry’s spacious lilt to a terse rock beat. Much though the Clash admired reggae and black resistance, they knew they were fundamentally apart from it. This wasn’t our fight.
This sense of awkward remove inspired one of the Clash’s greatest songs. In June, after a triumphant White Riot tour in the spring, Strummer accompanied Letts to a reggae all-nighter at Hammersmith Palais, where he experienced a disappointment that can be traced all the way back to Pete Seeger’s politicized folk mission and forward to liberal qualms with gangsta rap. “It was a lot more glitzy than he expected,” says Letts. “He expected, I don’t know, a backdrop of corrugated iron and barbed wire keeping the crowd back. He didn’t realize that the ghetto is something you get out of, not something you want to get into. He realized that was his misconception. Joe would always be questioning the situation and his part in it.” On the reggae-inflected “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” (1978), Strummer chased his faulty assumptions down an echoey rabbit warren of ideas about the limits of revolutionary rhetoric, of punk, and of the Clash themselves. Few protest songs have ever constituted such a long and unflinching look in the mirror, or come so close to admitting defeat.
Indeed, one of the Clash’s most endearing qualities was their readiness to acknowledge the pitfalls of their street-fighting stance. On an autumn visit to Belfast, they misguidedly used the Troubles as an authentically ravaged backdrop to a photo shoot. “The soldiers crouching in cubby holes thought we were dicks,” Mick Jones admitted to Melody Maker. “The kids thought we were dicks.” An equally naïve jaunt to Jamaica in November (during which, confessed Jones, they cowered in their hotel, “scared shitless”) inspired “Safe European Home”: “Sitting here in my safe European home, I don’t wanna go back there again.” They could at least take comfort from the approval of Lee “Scratch” Perry, who, while staying in London, produced a session for the band and the exiled Bob Marley’s own tribute to punk, “Punky Reggae Party.” On balance, 1977 was a triumphant year for the Clash, but it proved a fatal one for the Sex Pistols.
WHILE THE CLASH WERE PREPARING to release their debut album, McLaren had big plans for the Pistols. The second issue of his magazine, Anarchy in the UK, ended with a shopping list of rebel icons: “Che, Durruti, the Watts Riots, the Weathermen, the Angry Brigade, the ’72 Miners’ strike, the Levellers et al, Black Power, the Women’s Movement, Gene Vincent.” It went without saying that the Pistols belonged in such illustrious company.
Hastily dropped by EMI, the band, with Lydon’s somewhat unstable friend Sid Vicious replacing Glen Matlock on bass, had found new patrons at A&M, and McLaren wanted their first single for the label to make a splash. He chose a song Lydon had written in the kitchen of his Hampstead squat the previous autumn: “No Future.” They recorded it in March under a new title, “God Save the Queen,” chosen by McLaren because Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee was imminent, and because “No Future” “sounds like an ad for a bank.” Jamie Reid put a safety pin through the monarch’s lip in a détourned version of Cecil Beaton’s official portrait. Everything was in place for a media sensation, until Sid Vicious threatened Bob Harris, host of stalwart TV pop show The Old Grey Whistle Test, and A&M decided they were too hot to handle. Just a week after signing a contract, A&M jettisoned the Pistols and destroyed almost all of the twenty-five thousand copies that it had pressed of “God Save the Queen.” The Clash had “White Riot” and an album ready to go. The Buzzcocks had their Spiral Scratch EP. The Damned and the Stranglers both had debut albums in the stores. New bands like X-Ray Spex, the Slits, and Wire were springing up on a weekly basis. Yet the Pistols didn’t even have a record deal.
McLaren, frantic to get the single out before the Jubilee in June, went knocking on doors and finally struck lucky with the risk-taking independent label Virgin, just in time to release “God Save the Queen” on May 27. Promoting it became a guerrilla campaign. The BBC refused to play it, TV and radio stations shunned the ads, and several high-street stores wouldn’t even stock it. Yet there it was at number two in the charts come the Jubilee, a rallying cry for all those who rejected this flimsy fig-leaf of patriotism, believing that the queen was not a remedy for the national malaise but a vessel for the disease.
The song’s rhetoric is deliberately overheated. Of course, the British establishment in 1977 was far from being a “fascist regime”—to the Far Right, chance would be a fine thing. Lydon’s sarcasm is nuclear, portending a scorched earth. There is optimism submerged in the broiling destruction—“We’re the flowers in the dustbin”—but of a frightening kind. Lydon knew his reggae, and here is Rasta eschatology shorn of religion, a purifying blaze with an uncertain promise. Despite what the tabloids said, Lydon was a deeply moral character, but his morality was scourging in its extremity and opaque in its expression, and if you were not yourself a flower in the dustbin, “God Save the Queen” must have sounded like the end of the world. And this was an era when disparaging the monarch could still be seen as cultural treason. By the end of Jubilee week, Jamie Reid had had his leg and nose broken, and Lydon had been slashed with a machete by a mob shouting, “We love our Queen, you bastard!” How could any band be expected to survive being hospitalized over a pop song?
Overfamiliarity and social change may have drawn the sting from “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen,” but the two most recent songs on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, both recorded in a state of frazzled postassault siege, continue to disturb. On “Holidays in the Sun,” Lydon uses an old situationist slogan (“Club Med: a cheap holiday in other people’s misery”) as the launchpad for a demented pilgrimage to the Berlin Wall, where his fevered brain ricochets between the past sins of a united Germany and the caged paranoia of a divided one, and he babbles the kind of desperate confession that conventional protest singers cannot allow themselves to voice: “I don’t understand this bit at all!”
“Bodies” is an even more frightening window into Lydon’s singular psyche: the story of an abortion, in which the narrative viewpoint skids wildly from third-person observer (“She was a no one who killed her baby”) to reluctant would-be father (“Fuck the fucking brat”) to the fetus itself (“I’m not a throbbing squirm”) with horrifying speed. Lydon delivers the profanities like he’s throwing punches, and the final scream of “Mummy!” like someone jerked awake by a nightmare. To say, as some conservative critics have, that it is a pro-life statement is to ignore the writhing confusion that puts it way beyond politics. You try to get to the bottom of these songs, but you can’t find the bottom. Lydon is throwing stones into a well so deep that nobody can hear the splashes.
Having lived most of their short life in public, it was fitting that the fractious and exhausted Sex Pistols terminated it on stage before a paying audience, at San Francisco’s Winterland on January 14, 1978. “It took us about three years to realise that we weren’t going to change the world,” reflected the NME’s Neil Spencer, who had come of age in the late 1960s. “It took the punks about 18 months.”
THE CLASH RECEIVED THE NEWS of the Pistols’ demise while rehearsing in London and they were shaken. They had been two sides of the same coin: rivals more than friends, perhaps, but punk’s two contrasting visionaries. Now the Clash were alone at the top and the responsibility weighed heavy on their shoulders.
There was, however, a pack of bands snapping at their heels. Sham 69, from Hersham in Surrey, were an instant success that year with a brash, street-kid populism epitomized by “If The Kids Are United,” and motor-mouth front man Jimmy Pursey became a music-press regular, spouting opinions noted more for their forthright energy than for their sophistication or coherence. Sham 69 tapped into the Clash’s blokey, tower-block-rock side, while ignoring their musical curiosity and searching ambivalence. Another Surrey band, the Jam, also trafficked in punchy urban realism for “the kids.” Front man Paul Weller barked, “We gonna tell ya about the young idea,” on “In the City” and called for a “youth explosion” on “All Around the World.” Like their obvious influences, the Who and the Kinks, the Jam’s protest songs suggested a chippy, libertarian antipathy towards anyone in power rather than a left-wing agenda. In fact, Weller notoriously declared that he would be voting Conservative in the next election, though he soon dismissed it as just “a silly comment” designed to irritate the Clash. During the 1980s, Weller would become one of the most vocal left-wingers in rock.
In 1978, that role was briefly filled by twenty-seven-year-old Tom Robinson. The Cambridge-born singer had been treading water in acoustic trio Café Society when he first saw the Sex Pistols in October 1976. “I was kind of ready for a road-to-Damascus moment,” he says when we meet for lunch. “I left after fifteen minutes: ‘This is horrible!’ But I couldn’t forget it.” This coincided with his immersion in gay-rights activism. “I tried to kill myself at sixteen because I fell in love with another boy at school, so when I finally hit London, aged twenty-three, I was going to the opposite extreme and I took to gay liberation like religion.” He watched aghast as the police cracked down on the gay scene in Earl’s Court during the long, hot summer, and offered to write songs for the fledgling Gay Pride parade, including the furiously sarcastic “Glad to Be Gay.” “In the safe, elegant clubs these Glad to Be Gay badges had started to appear, but people would take them off when they left the club,” he says. “And that, coming with what was going on at the dirtier end of the scene, made me want to write a very bitter, cynical song about all the reasons why you wouldn’t sing if you’re glad to be gay. It was only intended to be sung once that day to that select audience.”
But EMI’s A&R man, Nick Mobbs, was still smarting from being forced to drop the Sex Pistols and was looking for a new political band. The Tom Robinson Band (TRB) used the cheerfully catchy hit “2-4-6-8 Motorway” as a Trojan horse through which to smuggle more challenging songs into the Top 40. On the TRB’s debut album, Power in the Darkness (1978), “Winter of ’79” depicted a fascistic near-future in which the National Front ran rampant, gays were jailed, the police behaved like storm troopers, and violence was endemic. “I wrote it in ’76 and it didn’t seem at all certain that everything would still be here in ’79,” says Robinson. “Perhaps I was naïve but to me it did seem like a lot of that stuff in ‘Winter of ’79’ could have happened.”
Other songs underlined the sense of imminent disaster: “Up Against the Wall,” “You Gotta Survive,” “Better Decide Which Side You’re On.” “It’s make-your-mind-up time,” he told Melody Maker. “The Tom Robinson Band is unequivocal. Things are moving fast, you can’t afford to fuck about.” The TRB played every benefit gig going and lent their support to young bands like Ulster’s Stiff Little Fingers, whose singles “Suspect Device” and “Alternative Ulster” introduced a courageous new political voice from a province already embroiled in civil war. But Robinson’s new, press-trumpeted role of rock’s conscience troubled him.
“I was a driven, unhappy person,” he says. “It wasn’t like, ‘How can I change the world? I’ll form a band.’ It was, ‘I want to be famous and I want people to know me and validate me as a person.’ And the pressures of overnight fame were such that I was a rabbit frozen in the headlights. If enough people tell you you’re marvellous for long enough, you start fucking believing it. People would ask me, ‘What’s the solution to the situation in Northern Ireland?’ and I’d actually try to tell them! The hubris was just enormous.” After recording a miserable, muddled second album, the TRB split and Robinson left the country for several years. Reflecting on his brief spell as Britain’s most prominent protest singer, he sighs: “It could have been done better, it could have been subtler, it could have done without the phony cockney accent, but given my circumstances, it was all right.”
THE CLASH, MEANWHILE, were able to take their contradictions, chiefly the way that they supported worthy causes while cultivating a macho, us-against-the-world image, and make them compelling. On their second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, Strummer sounded both horrified and enthralled by violence of every stripe, from Westway street fighting to Kingston gunplay to Palestinian terrorism. The world map on the sleeve, showing such hot spots as Ulster and Cambodia, hinted at the internationalist perspective they would bring to Sandinista! (1980) and Combat Rock (1982). “The lyrics of Joe Strummer were like an atlas,” U2’s Bono once said. “They opened up the world to me.”
What is striking, revisiting the febrile debates of the time, is how unfashionable the Clash had become, and how suddenly. “It’s hard when you define a period so accurately,” wrote Jon Savage in Melody Maker. “The Pistols broke up and neatly avoided the issue. Here, the Clash seem locked in time…. From being radicals, they become conservatives.” NME’s Nick Kent, though more enthusiastic about the music, derided “Strummer’s totally facile concept of shock-politics.”
So the Clash’s angry, humane masterpiece London Calling (1979) came out of a siege mentality. To the streetpunk contingent they had lost touch with the high-rises and underpasses which had nurtured them, while to a new breed of more militant and avant-garde postpunks their stance was posturing, self-regarding, and musically reactionary. While the Clash talked of getting their message across to high-school Kiss fans in America, the likes of Gang of Four and the Pop Group maintained that rock ’n’ roll was part of the problem, not the solution. “We’re going for a new direction,” Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham sarcastically told the NME. “We’re gonna sing about cars and girls and surfing and high school and drugs, just like the Clash do.”
Other groups poked fun in song. The Mekons’ brittle, self-deprecating “Never Been in a Riot” was the antithesis of last-gang-in-town heroics, while Scritti Politti’s “Skank Bloc Bologna” sneered at “rockers in the town.” Many of these postpunk intellectuals had soaked up Gramsci and Althusser at university. By their often forbidding standards, wearing a Red Brigade shirt and singing about tommy guns just didn’t cut it.
In one sense, the critics were right. The Clash were retrograde. Despite their embrace of reggae and, later, elements of hip-hop, they did not share postpunk’s contempt for rock ’n’ roll. And they could be gauche and clumsy in their politics. But their flaws were entwined with their strengths: both stemmed from a pell-mell, do-or-die ambition to connect with their audience and live with their contradictions. This is why they had a catalytic influence on such politicized artists as U2, Billy Bragg, Public Enemy, and the Manic Street Preachers, and left a more potent legacy than any of those who found them ideologically wanting. They were the only band of the punk era who possessed a kind of heroism, a quality as old-fashioned and potentially ridiculous as it is inspiring.
“We didn’t have any solutions to the world’s problems,” Strummer reflected a few years before his death. “We were like groping in the dark…. [But] we did try to think and talk with each other about what we were doing, or what songs meant, or what we should do, or what we shouldn’t do. We never let it lie.”