Twin forces of decline—the economic decay of Britain and the waning powers of the rock aristocracy—created the musical movement that was punk.
It’s difficult to convey to those who didn’t experience it the perennial sense of crisis in Great Britain in the Seventies. Not long after the turn of the decade, it already felt like an age since the nation had been able to fool itself into believing that, in a post-Empire era, it retained an importance by dint of the world turning its eyes toward its pop culture. Time magazine may have conferred the adjective “swinging” on London in April 1966, but the UK’s contemporaneous currency and labor crises were already working to undermine even the small amount of national pride that engendered.
From 1966 to 1974, the position of prime minister in Britain was the exclusive preserve of two men: Harold Wilson of the center-left Labour Party and Edward Heath of the center-right Conservative Party. (The “Mr. Wilson” and “Mr. Heath” whose names are cooed by The Beatles in “Taxman.”) In that time, Wilson’s party won three general elections to Heath’s one, although the clear-cut dominance that implies is an illusion created by the vagaries of Britain’s electoral system. Not that it mattered much: at the time there was little to choose between the two parties as a result of the long-standing “Post-War Consensus.” During the Second World War, the rich sheltered from German bombs cheek-by-jowl with the poor in London’s Underground stations, with the consequence that the ruling classes properly understood poverty for the first time. Accordingly, in the first post-war general election in July 1945, both of Britain’s major parties offered a platform designed to appeal to the newly altruistic sentiment in the air: the creation of an all-encompassing welfare state.
Labour won that election by a landslide, and by the time they left office in 1951, many millions of Britons knew—courtesy of National Assistance—the once-unimaginable relief of not having the worry of joblessness-induced penury. Old age, meanwhile, was stripped of its association with terrible suffering or humiliating dependence on younger relatives by virtue of a pension system. Courtesy of the National Health Service—predicated on medical care free at the point of use—the sick no longer literally died for inability to pay doctor bills. Once created, the welfare state could never be abolished by any political party that continued to be in the business of re-election. The new order thus engendered was newly susceptible to Keynesian economics, which dictated that the answer to economic problems was for government to spend its way out of them. Government had plenty of money to spend, courtesy of a unanimous belief in progressive taxation levels.
There were eventually other improvements in the quality of post-war life separate from the installation of a welfare safety net. The loosening of Hire Purchase agreement terms—essentially the precursor to the credit card—saw the proletariat begin to fills its homes with consumer goods beyond the dreams of its parents. This gave many of the low-waged a stake in society, a sense that the system was not necessarily there to oppress them and could reward them for effort. Yet while this may have diluted the allure of full-blown collectivism, let alone revolutionary ideology, it did not make Britain a land of tranquillity. As the decades wore on, the sound track to British life was increasingly bellicose pay demands.
Britain has always been seen as a country riven by class division. Over the course of the twentieth century and beyond, the class system became progressively less pronounced (and in the Sixties being proletarian was actually a virtue). However, although caste divisions are nothing like as pitiless today, visitors to the UK continue to proclaim themselves shocked at the fact of how laughable it remains that white-collar and blue-collar workers might move in the same social circles.
Seventies Britain was still a place where people were judged by their accent or their education. To many (not by any means all middle- or upper-class) the idea of someone with a cockney or scouse or Glaswegian accent working as a lawyer, banker, or television presenter was absurd. Barriers to advancement were not even always informal: up until 1986, it was nearly impossible to gain a job as a stockbroker unless you had attended a public school (British parlance for a private school wreathed in history and tradition).
So ingrained were notions of class and privilege that some members of the Establishment clearly felt that democracy itself could be an affront to what they considered the natural order. It was later claimed by MI5 officer Peter Wright that in the Seventies the British secret services manipulated the financial markets to cause a run on the pound in an attempt to discredit the Wilson government and cause the electorate to remove it from power.
While the militancy of the trade unions might have been counterproductive, for many on the left it was the inevitable consequence of maltreatment in the workplace. Britain’s workplaces were at least leaving behind the rigid attitudes that still prevailed in the Sixties and which were summed up by Ian MacDonald in his book Revolution in the Head: “. . . all males below one’s own level being addressed by their surnames as if the whole country was in the army.” However, in the Seventies, there existed a more-than-insignificant residue of that authoritarianism: workers were treated like cogs in a machine, and little value was attached by their overlords to their opinions or rights. The division between the workers and management created a confrontational ambience. Extreme practices that in other counties might have been the stuff of parody were, in the UK, day-to-day reality: any employer who allowed the slightest blurring of demarcation of trades—such as a plumber picking up an electrician’s cable—or failed to agree to negotiated manning levels—such as two employees lifting a piece of equipment that could easily be handled by one—could, and often did, find themselves the victim of a mass walkout. Few in Britain, left or right, disputed that there was a “them and us” situation on factory and office floors. Related to this, was a chronic overmanning in British industry.
That division of class was reflected throughout society. Up until 1985, the BBC, which broadcast two of the nation’s three television channels and had a monopoly on national radio, employed someone to secretly vet employees for left-wing sympathies. Newspapers frequently carried stories of how some bewigged, elderly member of the judiciary had expressed bewilderment at a common phrase or social trend, or had even incarcerated someone in the courtroom for saying the wrong thing or smiling at an inappropriate moment. Such arbitrary exercise of power was subject to no comeback: nobody had the power to fire a judge. If corruption wasn’t a problem among the judiciary—they generally earned far too much to bother—the same could not be said for the police, especially London’s Metropolitan Police. Allegations of frame-ups at the time were many, and in the following decades—when many convicted on terrorism and murder charges had their life terms quashed by the appeal courts—were proven to be more than the conspiracy theories and mischief-making alleged at the time (including by some members of Parliament).
Whatever stake the never-had-it-so-good working class might feel they had in society was, therefore, purely a financial one. For many of them, it remained difficult not to perceive figures of authority—which description encompassed bosses, employers, judges, politicians, broadcasters, and others—as “posh,” a byword for people with such different life experience and values as to have no idea about, and no interest in, them, their beliefs, and their lives. Going on strike, therefore, seemed not just the logical thing to do when the working man and woman had a grievance about their treatment in their place of work, but the only course of action that would be taken seriously.
Thrown into this mix was an unusual link between labor and the executive: because the trade unions funded the Labour Party, they had a massive influence on party policy both in and out of government. It was difficult for Labour governments to resist union suggestions about labor legislation or pay and conditions in nationalized (and even private) industry. When they did, and unions called strikes, many of them (if not quite as many as popular memory suggests) were non-balloted—“wildcat”—strikes. Moreover, a strike could easily bring the country to a standstill. Rail, coal mining, steel, electricity, gas, post, and the telephonic system were all nationalized (or, to use the term more common in America, “socialized”). Moreover, cross-industry “sympathy” strikes were perfectly legal. Not only did legislation make it nearly impossible to dismiss difficult workers, but breaking strikes was also rare because of a sense of solidarity among workers, as well as the persuasive powers/intimidation (delete according to opinion) of “flying pickets” (mobile pickets who could literally number in the thousands).
Accordingly, confrontation between organized labor and both employers and government defined British life in the Seventies. That decade was pocked by news footage of picket lines, power blackouts, and spiraling inflation, which averaged 13 percent per year and in 1975 reached a peak of 25 percent. Unemployment rose inexorably. Pay rises of 20 and even 30 percent achieved by unions inevitably resulted in industry passing on its increased costs to the consumer, with those mushrooming retail prices then prompting a fresh pay demand. The 1973 oil crisis only made the situation worse. With the miners currently striking in protest at public-sector pay caps and with imported coal too expensive to make up the shortfall their industrial action was causing, the nation was reduced in 1974 to a state-mandated three-day working week in order to conserve electricity.
Nationalization caused other problems. Anyone wanting a telephone installed had to wait several months before the General Post Office would oblige, such was the inertia induced by state monopoly. If the gas board or electricity board was coming round to read the meter, people had to take the day off work to let them in upon pain of disconnection. If that was due to inferior technology for reading meters, it may be the case that the lack of impetus for improving that technology came from a lack of competition which made companies unresponsive to consumers. Moreover, energy prices were often raised not because of necessity but because it was a handy means of indirect taxation for the Exchequer.
The British have always been admired for being able to laugh at their own country, but in the Seventies the nation’s self-deprecation took on a quality of self-loathing. A popular motif of UK stand-up comedians of the era was that the sign “Made in Britain” on any consumer good was shorthand for substandard. That British workmanship was a laughing stock was another manifestation of both centralization and union power. When the muscle of unions meant that workers could win almost any dispute with management, there was little incentive for conscientiousness. This worked on a macro level, too: nationalized industries always had the comfort blanket of a government bailout. Moreover, even much private enterprise was deemed too big to fail: when car manufacturer British Leyland entered bankruptcy in 1975, the government—desperate not to add more numbers to the unemployment rolls—took it into state hands. The latter company was another boon to comics, a byword for bad practice and low productivity, while Derek Robinson—Communist union convener of the company’s Longbridge plant in Birmingham—was made a tabloid pantomime villain (“Red Robbo”) by virtue of his apparent determination to bring his members out on strike at the drop of a hat.
This all created another vicious circle: the worsening balance of trade created by the resulting preference for cheaper and more reliable foreign goods only further jeopardized Britons’ jobs and standards of living.
It is no exaggeration to say that unions could bring down a government. In the wake of the miners’ opportunistic strike for a 13 percent pay rise during the oil crisis, Edward Heath called an election specifically on the issue of whether it was the unions or the democratically elected government who ran the country. Although it could be argued that it was less labor muscle that saw the Tories consigned to opposition in 1974 than the vagaries of the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system (the Conservatives won more votes than Labour but lost the election because they secured fewer seats in the House of Commons), the election would never have been called had not Heath been frustrated in his attempts to maintain a pay restraint policy. Naturally, the incoming minority Labour government adopted a craven attitude toward unions—or even more craven than usual—to avoid the same fate. Little wonder that, in January 1977, 53 percent of respondents to an opinion poll stated that a trade union leader (Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union) was the most powerful man in the country. (Prime Minister James Callaghan was nominated by 25 percent.)
Britain’s continental neighbors during this period looked askance across the English Channel at what they called the “Sick Man of Europe.”
In 1979, another government was brought down by the unions, but not in the way one might expect. The victory secured by the Conservatives over Labour that year was down to the chaotic conditions created by the wave of public sector strikes in 1978/79, popularly dubbed the Winter of Discontent and characterized by rubbish being uncollected and the dead being unburied. That 1979 victory by the Conservatives epitomized the strange brew of the nation’s problems and the prevailing crisis of confidence on the left. The Tories picked up votes from areas they never previously had because for many millions of working-class people who might ordinarily be sympathetic to collectivist ideology, unions were responsible for the crises afflicting their country. Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher was a figure with ideas for clamping down on wage demands and the right to strike that might be termed hard-right, but a measure of the complicated times is the fact that British novelist Graham Greene—notably left-wing his entire life—said that, had he lived in his home country at the time of the 1979 general election, he would have voted Conservative. Little could better summarize the way that the problems of the Seventies left many Britons’ assumptions and belief systems shaken to the core.
Roughly in the middle of that tumultuous decade came punk rock.
Punk musicians were disenchanted not just by their gray, broken society but also by a similarly dysfunctional rock scene. Rock, a form of popular music that had always been associated with rejecting convention, had become moribund, its aging idols evidently no longer keen to excel artistically while at the same time being plainly as keen as ever to succeed financially. The Sex Pistols played their first gig in November 1975. They were a new breed. They extended the traditional irreverence of rock ’n’ roll to previously hallowed totems, dismissing The Rolling Stones—for more than a decade the epitome of the rebel—as Establishment and spurning the long hair which for the same amount of time had been a yardstick for the rejection of conventionality. They accordingly captured the imagination of a certain subset of society. Their disgust with virtuoso self-indulgence in rock and advocacy of a back-to-basics musical credo inspired both a following and a wave of bands who emulated their attitude. Of course, part of this was false: whatever their recent failings, the back catalogs of the Stones, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Kinks, et al., were precious to them. However, destroying those whom one really loves is in the best Oedipal tradition.
Rhythm guitarist and vocalist Joe Strummer (born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, in August 1952; raised in Warlingham, in the county of Surrey just outside London, when not at boarding school) saw the Sex Pistols firsthand on April 3, 1976, when his R&B revivalist group, the 101’ers, found them to be their support at a gig at London venue the Nashville. He was exhilarated by their rejection of the cheesy show-business approaches by which rock had become infected. He told Record Collector in August 2000, “I saw the future—with a snotty handkerchief—right in front of me. . . . Their attitude was, ‘Here’s our tunes, and we couldn’t give a flying fuck whether you like them or not. In fact, we’re gonna play them even if you fucking hate them.’ . . . Punk hit London and suddenly, which side of the line were you on?”
The 101’ers’s fate was sealed when Strummer was approached by Bernard Rhodes, who wanted to set up a band like the one managed by his friend, Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren. That Rhodes band became The Clash. Although Rhodes’s penchant for self-mythologizing, spurious left-wing ideology and even comical speech impediment seems to have made some reluctant to acknowledge his contributions to The Clash, there seems little dispute that he was key in assembling their personnel, devising their image, and nudging them toward political subject matter. On the latter, Strummer told Gavin Martin of Uncut in September 1999, “He would listen to rehearsals and the famous quote he came out with was, ‘Write about what you know.’ Which was just as well, because we couldn’t have written about Mick’s girlfriends forever.”
The Mick referred to in that quote is Mick Jones, born in Clapham, southwest London, in June 1955 and raised in various areas of southwest London. While Strummer might have been The Clash’s voice through his trio of roles as stage front man, main lyricist, and main press spokesman, Jones being a man with an effortless knack for melody and arrangement made him as important, even if his lyrics never matched the best of Strummer’s street-poet songwords. The two formed the songwriting axis of the group.
Paul Simonon (born in Croydon, then just outside London, in December 1955; raised in Brixton, south London) was picked for the band primarily because of his heartthrob looks rather than musical ability. At first his basslines were written by Jones, and taught him by rote. Keith Levene was third guitarist for a brief period, and although he was technically more proficient than any of his colleagues, the consensus was that his departure from the ranks in September 1976 after five gigs had the effect of streamlining the group to its optimum configuration. The band was completed by drummer Terry Chimes, a diffident man who always had the air of a semi-detached member simply because he had no interest in the band’s political bent or self-aggrandizing ways.
The Clash’s entrée appeared on March 18, 1977: the single “White Riot” backed with “1977.” (All dates herein are for UK releases unless otherwise stated.) Joe Strummer was motivated to write the A-side’s lyric out of fury that his race weren’t prepared to mount violent demonstrations against social injustice in the way that black youths had in the riot that attended the 1976 Notting Hill carnival.
Afro-Caribbean immigration to Britain began in earnest in 1948 with the Windrush Generation, so called because of the title of the ship that brought the first lot of Jamaican immigrants to the country following the signing into law of the 1948 British Nationality Act, which gave a commitment to allow any resident of the Commonwealth (essentially what used to be the British Empire before the process of the granting of independence started) the right to settle in the United Kingdom. A clash of cultures soon followed. Crime committed by blacks was massively disproportionate to their numbers: by 2009, the Home Office revealed that they accounted for well over 60 percent of street robberies in London despite only representing about 15 percent of the capital’s population. The consequent targeting of black male youth by police officers—now commonly referred to as “racial profiling”—inspired deep resentment at its discriminatory and even abusive application.
The Notting Hill carnival is an annual event in west London and is largely Afro-Caribbean themed and organized. The high attendance levels necessitate a large police presence. As such, it created a ready-made flashpoint where black grievance against heavy-handed police tactics might erupt into violence. Such transpired to be the case on August 30, 1976. Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon were caught in the middle of the conflagration, with some reports even having one or both of them as participants in terms of throwing stones at police and trying to set alight a police vehicle. The experience got Strummer’s creative juices flowing. In “White Riot” he bellows that he wants “a riot of my own” as he lambasts himself and his fellow Caucasians for being chicken, spurning civil disobedience in favor of education.
It was sometimes said that The Clash’s recordings of “White Riot” were performed at half the speed the song was always played live. That applies especially to this version, which is a different take to that which would appear on the band’s eponymous debut album. Although the single has a certain power—and sounded unspeakably raw in the MOR wasteland that was the mid-Seventies—it sounds absolutely tame in comparison to the variant on The Clash. Strummer’s rage isn’t done justice by the relatively measured accompaniment and bobbing beat, even if the sound effects that don’t feature on the album version—police sirens, smashing glass, alarm bells—add a certain gritty frisson.
Despite its flaws, “White Riot” is the equivalent of The Who’s “I Can’t Explain”: an introduction that became a signature song. It also punched way above its weight in the sense of achieving a chart position—no. 38—incongruous for the scant radio play its confrontational, uncommercial bent engendered.
Like almost all self-generated Clash tracks up until the Sandinista! album, “White Riot” was credited to Strummer/Jones, a publishing attribution that made perfect sense to rock consumers used to seeing joint credits like “Lennon/McCartney” and “Jagger/Richards” in the parentheses beneath song titles on record labels. Although Strummer and Jones were undeniably the compositional axis of The Clash, the mechanics behind the public façade of collaboration were—as with the aforementioned Beatles and Rolling Stones songwriting teams—complicated. Sometimes they wrote alone; more often together. Although it was never the case that either restricted himself to one role, it would be fair to say that Strummer specialized in one department, Jones another. As Strummer, slightly tactlessly, summarized to Gavin Martin of Uncut in September 1999, “It was obvious from the start that Jonesy was great at melody and totally useless on lyrics. So it dovetailed into me—not so bad on the lyrics, not so great on the melody.”
Up until 1976, dismissal of established rock icons had been almost sacrilegious except in terms of the commonly aired grievance “Not as good as they used to be,” a phrase which itself implied acknowledgment of respect for past artistic achievement. As mentioned, The Sex Pistols broke that mold of veneration with interview comments in which they sweepingly dismissed the artists without whom they would never have been inspired to venture into music-making, and, if some of their rhetoric was willfully provocative, that itself was in the celebrated rock tradition of rebelliousness and callowness. It should be recognized, though, just how genuinely cheated many people had come to feel in the last few years each time they purchased a new album by the Stones, an ex-Beatle, Bob Dylan, or Eric Clapton and found it was either mediocre, somnambulant, or both. The key line—and effectively chorus—of “1977” is “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” an articulation of punk’s Year Zero credo: that the rock idols who had made their name in the Sixties had outlived their usefulness as either interesting artists or totems of social progression. Or in more colloquial terms, they were a bunch of old farts who didn’t understand the kids anymore.
If “1977” is a shot across the bows of the rock aristocracy, that’s not all it is. Its lyric also targets a group who, like the rock aristocracy, could only view an increasingly gray and strife-torn Britain from veritable ivory towers: the ruling class. The lyric bristles with talk of sten guns and knives being flourished in upmarket areas of London like Knightsbridge. It is asserted that in the remainder of the titular calendar year, being rich will not necessarily any longer be an advantage.
It would become a motif in Clash interviews that the band’s lyrics had been misunderstood, the most common example of which gripe being, “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” “1977” provides the earliest example of this phenomenon. Strummer told Allan Jones in Melody Maker on November 25, 1978, “We have been misunderstood . . . I imagined sten guns in Knightsbridge pointed at me. But people took it to mean that we had them and we were pointing them at other people.” Similarly, Mick Jones told Alexis Petridis of The Guardian on November 3 , 2006, “The ‘Sten guns in Knightsbridge’ thing wasn’t like we had Sten guns in Knightsbridge, it was like, we’re concerned about that kind of thing, it was around the time of the Spaghetti House siege.” The trouble is that it’s not necessarily possible to take such denials at face value: The Clash’s interviews are littered with lies, half-truths, and rationalizations, partly the result of their early absolutism in lyrics and myth-making when holding court to journalists, partly the consequence of their subsequent squirming attempts to explain away their previous posturing dishonesty and studied belligerence, with the added complication that in some cases, as in the origin of “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,” they seem to have made a transition into believing their own falsehoods.
Suffice it to say that the lyric’s statement that in 1977 it ain’t so lucky to be rich that provides a rhyme for Knightsbridge seems pretty unambiguous. The ambience, meanwhile, is deliberately—and impressively—menacing, although for neither the first nor last time one wishes Strummer had sung his lyric better. The accompaniment is a mid-tempo affair propelled by buzz-saw guitar with a drama-heightening respite and a climax that sees Strummer enumerating the years that will follow 1977. His final resounding “Nineteen eighty-four!” coincides with the music stopping dead, a portentousness more easily understood at the time due to the fact that it was a year which—because still in the future—retained the dread of dystopia injected in it by George Orwell.
Although now considered an impressive opening shot from a group destined for legendary status, it should be noted that several critics found The Clash’s debut record laughable. In the wake of the taboo-busting of The Sex Pistols’s public pronouncements, the band were felt to have a point about the diminishing allure of aging rock icons. (That argument would come to be considered lost in the following decades as the concept of “heritage” acts took hold.) However, it wasn’t only the old guard who found preposterous the implication that these young upstarts whose musical skills were demonstrably rudimentary and whose singer’s syntax was almost comically mangled were the ones to take over the established acts’ mantle. Moreover, that none of the apocalyptical predictions of the lyric of the B-side would ever come true was patently obvious and urban guerrilla posturing as risible as the record’s sleeve, which depicted the band standing in frisk position against a wall so as to better display the political slogans daubed on their clothes. The back cover was more agitprop: inner-city imagery of tower blocks and police officers with quotes about youth culture riots and class warfare pulled from The Floodgates of Anarchy and Generation X, tomes which presumably resided on Rhodes’s bookshelf but which were destined never to be tackled by The Clash’s fanbase.
Despite it being acknowledged that The Sex Pistols were both the originators of punk and its most important artists, it is also widely accepted that the movement/genre’s major artistic statement is The Clash’s eponymous debut long player, released on April 8, 1977.
The LP was recorded in three four-day sessions in February 1977 at CBS Studio 3, London. Although Terry Chimes played drums on the record, he was doing so as a favor, having already left the group at the end of 1976. Various reasons were given down the years for his spurning the wealth and success then staring The Clash in the face, but when he gave his side of the story in his 2013 autobiography Dr. Terry and Mr. Chimes he explained that it was because, as a product of a happy home, he found it difficult being around bandmates whose worldviews and demeanors seemed to be dictated by their unhappy domestic hinterlands. His reward for rendering this favor was to be credited on the sleeve as “Tory Crimes.” This play on words—“Tory” being another name for an adherent of the British Conservative Party—is one of the only party-political statements The Clash ever made. (That the surname of Keith Levene—credited for his contribution to “What’s My Name”—is misspelled “Levine” is probably accidental.)
Ironically, Chimes is second only to Jones in being the album’s most consistent performer, his imaginative patterns always defying the songs’ minimalist structures. Jones’s professionalism on his instrument is a marked contrast to Simonon’s lip-bitten rendering of the Jones-dictated basslines and Strummer’s mostly nondescript guitar and mediocre, often awful, singing. This hardly suggests a good-to-bad ratio liable to produce art much above average, but The Clash is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, its technical deficiencies overcome by the quality of the arrangements, riffs, melodies, and lyrics and by its overall passion, power, and sheer vitality.
In one respect, a technical deficiency even became a virtue. The album’s producer credit is given to the band’s live soundman Mickey Foote, but in reality, CBS staff engineer Simon Humphrey merits that designation. Foote was from all accounts merely a presence who would occasionally throw in ideas. Not that many studio hands would want to lay claim to the producer’s role for this work. The murky mix is undeniably incompetent. However, in one of the miracles of serendipity surprisingly common in art, the maladroit mix improves the record, giving its seething songs an apposite nocturne, menacing atmosphere. It’s difficult to imagine the album sounding quite as good had it possessed more conventional, clean-limbed sonics.
Although lauded all over the world, The Clash had a particular resonance in the UK. This was a British rock album through and through in a day and age when there was—the odd Kinks LP aside—no such thing. It was also that (then) rare beast: a socially relevant album. For many thousands of young people this album described their lifestyle and their mind-set: anthems articulating disaffection with dreary everyday life, low wages, grim employment prospects, power-drunk authority figures and pusillanimous, blustering politicians. Yet the album is somehow exhilarating rather than depressing. This is mostly due to its breakneck pace. Except for “Police & Thieves,” everything here is fast. Short, too. Most of the fourteen tracks are under three minutes. Five are under two minutes. In a counterblast to the rock aristocracy’s preening virtuosity, the band are almost fanatical—sometimes to the point of parody—in their determination to make their point and depart the stage.
Opener “Janie Jones” sets the tone for The Clash. There are better songs on the record —the underrated “Cheat,” for example—but “Janie Jones” is part of an iconic quartet that also includes “White Riot,” “Police & Thieves,” and “Garageland” that sums up the spirit of the album and the times, and that was played in concert by the band throughout their career.
Chimes’ opening minimalist tattoo serves as a businesslike album fanfare. The cut’s galvanizing blurred, continuous lead guitar illustrates the influence of American proto-punks The Ramones. The lyric is a twist on what would be a familiar Clash theme: the aching need to escape the tedium of conventional life. Strummer sings in the third person of an office worker who takes refuge from the gray routine of the shift rota and the photocopy room by rock ’n’ roll, Janie Jones, and getting stoned, in that order.
In 1973, Janie Jones—a former minor pop star—briefly became a household name in Britain when she was put on trial for blackmail, attempting to pervert the course of justice, and controlling prostitutes. She was found not guilty on the blackmail charges but guilty on the others. Many found disproportionate her seven-year prison sentence, large fine, and order to pay costs, and highlighted the way that famous celebrities who were her clients and alleged blackmail victims were ordered not to be named. It was a point of view summed up in a 1982 single titled “House of the Ju-Ju Queen” featuring Janie Jones on vocals and members of The Clash backing her under the pseudonym The Lash. The lyric of this latter record summarized an allegedly two-faced attitude of the Establishment to her notorious sex parties via a line of dialogue from a chief of police: “Later I’ll raid, but first make me behave.” The same juxtaposition was also implicit in “Janie Jones.”
It’s a juxtaposition that has attracted little discussion—or challenge—down the years. Yet its acceptance as a valid broadside against the hypocrisies of the ruling class seems open to question. The facts—long in the public domain by the time “Janie Jones” was written—as well as the guilty verdicts, support the contention made by several at the time of her trial that Jones lured young women into prostitution on the pretext of securing them stardom if they slept with high-placed media figures and that she then threatened them with exposure when they attempted to break free from her professional circle. The Clash may have had grounds for a generalized point about upper-class double standards regarding morality and punishment, but Jones was not—contrary to what might be inferred by their tributes, which also included smilingly posing for photographs with her—some kind of delightful figure of rebellion tweaking the nose of the Establishment.
“Remote Control” is a track The Clash have effectively disowned. For instance, it was the only song from their debut album not to be included in some form on the 1991 Clash on Broadway box set. This is nominally because it was without their consent released by CBS as the follow-up to the “White Riot” single, but one suspects that the main reason for its low visibility is that they find it rather embarrassing.
Although ignorant youthful aggression is the album’s touchstone, Mick Jones’s lyric is so simplistic as to be toe-curling. In the vocal lines that he alternates with Strummer’s, he wails about those who would seek to control the song’s listeners and keep them down, yet these people are referred to only in generic terms such as the civic hall, big business, Parliament, the House of Lords, denizens of upmarket London area Mayfair, and the fat and old. The song is partly the result of The Sex Pistols’s recent Anarchy Tour—on which The Clash were a support act—having been decimated by local councilors following a profane Pistols television appearance: twenty-two of the planned twenty-nine shows were cancelled due to official objection. This penchant for low-level officialdom to arbitrarily flex its petty powers is a valid subject that is not done justice by the song’s lyric. Meanwhile, officialdom’s methods of remote control are no better defined than “Ree-preessh-uun!,” which forms one of the more cringe-making vocal refrains in popular music history. This inchoate assertion of subjugation and litany of banality is compounded by a staccato guitar riff that is merely a transposed hand-clap rhythm well known from the nation’s soccer stadiums.
Yet the track is not entirely without merit. Jones’s inventive guitar solo sees him showing supple-wristed virtuosity despite the era’s prevailing ethos obliging him to make it a model of brevity. More importantly, the combination of his mordant melody and the better parts of his bleak songwords summarize with surprising acuity a particular quality of Seventies London life for those without money. Set aside for the moment Britain’s Sick-Man-of-Europe status. Even without that state of affairs, Mick Jones’s sung lament “Iiiit’s so gray in Lahndan Tahn!” would still have had a resonance, and to some extent still does.
The British are, if not a glum race, then not exactly the life and soul of the party. One can cite several possible reasons for this, not least a median average standard of living well below those of comparable industrialized countries. However, another key reason is the weather. The phrase Seasonal Affective Disorder was not in common currency in the Seventies, but had it been, its use would have instantly caused many British heads to nod in understanding. Britain is indeed gray. The sun doesn’t shine much. It rains a lot, moreover rains in a depressingly feeble, somehow non-elemental way: the famous English drizzle. Even when it’s not raining, the weather can be miserable. Sometimes walking along a quiet street in the capital on an overcast afternoon, one is put in mind by the indiscernible atmosphere almost of the lunar surface.
All of that is implicit in “Remote Control.” Explicit is the aching misery of feeling one is on the bottom of society’s ladder with no easily accessible way to do anything about it and the fact that this is compounded by the paucity of ways to alleviate the misery arising therefrom: in 1977, continental sidewalk culture was out of the question in a land where pubs and venues serving alcohol closed promptly at eleven p.m. The combination of all those things gave rise to the sense of sheer dreariness in England’s capital that, for all its profound faults, “Remote Control” adroitly describes.
In the Seventies, British culture was absolutely drenched in Americana. British weekly “comics” printed primarily in black-and-white on pulp paper had to compete at the newsagents with Marvel and DC “comic books” which, although only monthly, boasted glossy covers and color interiors. So low-key and parochial were British movies compared to American productions with big budgets and glamorous locales that nobody in their right mind going to “the pictures” would prefer to see a British film. The national humiliation attached to this, however, was made easier to stomach by the pleasure the humiliated nation obtained from the superior craftsmanship proffered them by their transatlantic cousins.
Some things, however, irritated Britons about Americans. For instance, American sports were all clearly British sports, only—as in the way of America—blown up to cartoon level. Baseball was just rounders. Basketball was just netball. American football was just rugby, only its players dressed up in helmets and huge shoulder pads like they were going to fight a war. Said players always seemed to be crouched down and enunciating things like “Hup 25! Hup 61!” What they hell did that mean? And why did they call it football when they used their hands?
Why were the bonnets of their cars so bloody big? Come to that, why were they called “hoods”? And why did they say “mom” instead of “mum”? Or call trousers “pants”? Or petrol “gas”? They spelled colour “color,” as well. Stupid.
Some things went beyond irritation and induced contempt. American foreign interventions like Vietnam conveyed the impression of a nation that thought it owned the planet. That the extraordinary wealth and economic muscle of the country prompted the discomforting underlying thought that said assumption might well be justified only made things worse. Media reports of U.S. politicians or public figures being gunned down—unthinkable in Britain where handguns were banned—were startling enough, but the impressionistic notion of American cops, provided by both TV drama and documentary reportage, was of gum-chewing, self-dramatizing brutes barely morally distinguishable from those they apprehended. Also astounding was the apparent proliferation of serial killers in America. Equally astounding in its own way were reports of American judges quipping such things as “That’s all, folks!” as they pounded their gavels to conclude a case. Even British judges—whom nobody could fire—would never behave with such crassness.
“Faakin’ ’ell—what a bloody country!” and “God—only in America!” were the sorts of phrases that often filled British living rooms at the sight of these people who looked and sounded so much like Britons but whose national character and, particularly, flaws seemed to mark them out as extraterrestrials from the planet Moron.
Then there was television, the most pervasive American import. It may be easy to forget the fact in a day and age of Six Feet Under, Frasier, Mad Men, and other peerless American small-screen productions, but American TV in the Seventies was atrocious. Even high production values and a backdrop that was glamorous to Britons by default couldn’t compensate for techniques so hackneyed as to be tut-inducing. Where Britain had gritty, naturalistic cop shows like Special Branch and The Sweeney, America had the bland, formulaic likes of Kojak and Starsky and Hutch. Even UK law enforcement shows which gravitated toward the fantasy end of the spectrum had a twinkle-eyed approach (The New Avengers) or a muscularity (The Professionals) that offset cartoonish qualities. Moreover, all British shows somehow sidestepped the fault that afflicted American product of being laid out, storywise, like a grid. The dazzling beauty of its lead actresses couldn’t disguise Charlie’s Angels’s emptiness. In The Incredible Hulk, the creature always threw antagonists harmlessly onto cardboard boxes and rubbish bins—sorry, trash cans—and his tormented human alter ego ended each and every episode walking into the distance to a piano theme that would be sad had not endless repetition drained it of its original pathos. All American television courtroom scenes seemed to inexorably make their way to the groan-making heated exchange of “Objection, Your Honor!”/“Objection overruled!,” just as every episode of The Six Million Dollar Man seemed to wind up with Steve Austin squinting soberly at a scientist-type as he enunciated the deathless line, “Can we reverse the praw-cess?” Even a supposedly cutting-edge and daring show like Hill Street Blues (or, from a different genre, Soap) was still laughably prescriptive compared to UK television. This creakingly rigid American approach was epitomized, of course, by the episode endings of Hawaii Five-O: it was surreally pathetic how unvarying was its climactic formula of Detective Steve McGarrett instructing his colleague, “Book him Danno—murder one.” Were they taking the piss?
American TV comedy, meanwhile, was just unspeakable. Fifties nostalgia show Happy Days had a wit and warmth to it in the beginning, but it shockingly quickly became so desperate as to bequeath the term “jumping the shark.” Everything else comedy-oriented coming out of the States was guilty of a mirthlessness that was only compounded by infuriatingly presumptuous fake laughter tracks. The best American TV could do comedywise was M*A*S*H, which was enjoyable in its merry gentleness but hardly full of belly laughs. It was inconceivable that “Yanks” could produce anything as hilarious as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers, Some Mothers Do ’ave ’em, or Rising Damp, let alone that they could have the discipline UK writers displayed: British programs didn’t know the concept of jumping the shark because their creators declined to flog them to death and instead made sure they were cancelled at their apex after two or three seasons. The legendary reputation of Fawlty Towers is predicated on just twelve episodes.
Yet, Britons had little choice but to watch American TV shows. The combination of low-ish disposable income, a total of three national channels, and the low market penetration of VCRs all meant that television had a captive market. As buying American imports was cheaper for British broadcasters than original programming, U.S. programs flooded the “telly.”
All of this fed into The Clash’s “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” Strummer snarls and spits his contempt for the culture whose status as originator of his beloved rock ’n’ roll is not quite recompense for the fact that “Yankee detectives are always on the TV.” The backing to this venom is alternately punchy and soaring, and begins with an ear-splitting, acetylene-torch sound that is one of the most intense guitar riffs of all time.
Despite its high quality, this song epitomizes The Clash’s penchant for dishonesty and myth-making in interview. Strummer told this author in 2002 that the composition was a fairly uncomplicated put-down of a lover which assumed a political dimension only through a misunderstanding: “[Jones] said, ‘Here’s one of mine—it’s called “I’m So Bored With The U.S.A.”’ And I said, Great title! So I wrote it on a bit of paper to make a note of it. He went, ‘No, no—“I’m So Bored With You.”’ I went, ‘No, this is better.’ He went, ‘No, no—it’s about my girlfriend.’ I went, ‘Not anymore!’” This variant of a story Strummer had told several times before cannot possibly be true: “I’m So Bored with You” was in The Clash’s early set, played on more than one occasion with its original, non-political lyric intact. Yet Strummer didn’t sound like he knew he was lying. It would seem that he had got so used to telling this story that he had ended up thinking it was the truth.
While myth-making has always been part and parcel of the rock tradition that The Clash loved—from name changes to invented romantic backstories—it sat oddly with The Clash, who, like so many punk acts, insisted they were inordinately genuine. This tension between seeking to tell it like it is in their songs and their determination in interviews to give their biographies and activities a mythos would frequently and increasingly leave them open to ridicule and hostility.
Although the band’s dissatisfaction with the tameness of the single version may have been a factor in their decision to include a different recording of “White Riot” on The Clash, fears of accusations of “selling out” almost certainly contributed to it.
When in 1971 The Rolling Stones released in Britain the single “Brown Sugar,” it marked a watershed. Not one of the Stones’s previous fifteen UK singles had appeared on album. They were works of art and commercial entities in and of themselves. While their first 45 rpm release of the Seventies was indubitably a work of art—to many Stones fans, their greatest ever—it was a commercial entity on a new level. “Brown Sugar” was put out primarily to promote its parent album, Sticky Fingers. There would never again be a “stand-alone” Rolling Stones single in their home country.
Although it had long been the practice in America to both include singles on albums and to release singles from albums, such policy simply seemed crass to natives of the UK. This may have had something to do with the country’s class consciousness engendering a more sensitive antennae when it came to suspicions of being taken for a ride. Either way, British record companies were nervous of harming an album’s potential sales by generating bad will via the act of including tracks available elsewhere.
Come the Seventies, though, times had changed. Rock music was perceived as big business with a future, not a mere flash in the pan to be exploited before the next craze hit. As a consequence of this, musicians began to finally get the riches they had long deserved but which in many cases had been denied them by philistine and rapacious record company executives. However, it can’t be denied that this new mentality also introduced a dismaying corporatism into an art form that had always been implicitly anti-corporate.
Another issue that rang the changes was the fact of the longevity of the idols of the Sixties. Acts like the Stones had now been around so long that the consumers of their product were less likely to be kids spending their pocket money than grown adults parting with some of their wage packet.
For all those reasons, the notion of “ripping off the kids”—taking advantage of those with little money or ability to make sensible decisions—became increasingly less relevant over the course of the Seventies.
Yet these assumptions by the breed that was beginning to be referred to as the rock aristocracy were, as far as British punks were concerned, precisely the point. Bands who no longer felt obliged to issue tri-monthly manifestos on single but instead annual albums simply didn’t feel part of a fan’s life. Consequently, low productivity became as much a bone of contention for punks with regard to their former idols as substandard product and drug-addled hauteur. As such, many former fans of The Sex Pistols reacted with dismay when they learned that their debut album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols (October 1977) was to feature all four of their previously released singles. It reeked of the mercenaryism of the hated likes of Queen, who famously had no compunction about many of their fans paying twice for the same songs. This may have been less to do with band greed than the determination of the Pistols’s new record company, Virgin, to financially cover themselves as they picked up the contract of the most notorious band in the world. However, it was still shocking that the standard bearers for what seemed a new age of integrity should have so quickly appeared to betray their principles.
The Clash would have been acutely conscious of these sorts of sentiments when they set about compiling their first album. Although the fact of its title gave “1977” a limited shelf life, its very topicality had made it one of their signature songs. Yet it did not appear on The Clash. “White Riot” did, but the band elected to fend off criticism for its inclusion as much as they could. The album version of “White Riot” is the only track on the record not to originate from the album’s sessions. It is instead a remix of a recording which precedes their recording contract with CBS, one of the rough demos the band recorded at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield in January 1977 through the aegis of their student friend Julien Temple (later to become a famous film director).
In an example of just how blessed this album seems to have been, it was a decision that was as unexpectedly beneficial as the LP’s inept mix. The album version of “White Riot” is not only profoundly different to the single version but one of the most exciting rock recordings of all time. Sandwiched between Mick Jones’s just-audible “One-two-free-four!” count-in and the track’s brutally curtailed ending is one minute and fifty-six seconds of rage translated into tuned sound. A relentless double-time tempo, flaming guitar lines, and a vocal performance from Strummer that sees the microphone drenched in spittle all contribute to a concoction that is heart-stopping. Sometimes Strummer is so angry that he can’t even form words properly: in verse three, he departs from demanding to know whether the listeners prefer taking over or taking orders (as enunciated clearly in the single version) to growl and howl something agonized and indecipherable.
There was actually another studio version of “White Riot” in circulation from 1998 when, through some vagary of international copyright law, Italian record company Stampa Alternativa managed to get the right to make available the entire demo tape The Clash recorded through the aegis of Polydor before signing with CBS. It appeared on a CD bundled with a CD-sized book entitled The Clash Story (although the product had an ASIN—found on CDs—rather than an International Standard Book Number). Two of these tracks—“Janie Jones” and “Career Opportunities”—had already appeared on the Clash on Broadway box set, but “White Riot,” “London’s Burning,” and “1977” were exclusive.
The Polydor tracks were recorded in November 1976 in Polydor Studios in Stratford Place, Central London. They had been commissioned as a demo tape by the label’s Chris Parry who was trying to impress his so-far uninterested superiors of the group’s viability. The performances feature a Strummer struggling to make his diction clear at the request of Polydor staff engineer Vic Smith. This creates an almost comical incongruity on “White Riot,” which serves to make clear that Strummer’s descent into manic spluttering on the album version is actually the preferable approach.
In “Hate & War,” the contrast between the fluidity of Jones’s lead guitar and the unimaginative stabbing on rhythm guitar by Strummer is at its most risible. Simonon’s stodgy basslines are given unmerited prominence. Despite this, the music—a loping rhythm with several stop-starts—is decent.
Strummer wrote the lyric but, perhaps subconsciously aware of its shortcomings, gave it to Jones to sing. The songwords embarrassingly confuse radical fervor with macho bravado in their declaration, “If I get aggression, I’ll give it two time back.” Jones compounds this shortcoming with a singing style that still gauchely carries traces of the American accent that all of The Clash’s peers had until recently used in their vocals until they suddenly decided to be bored with the U.S.A. There is also a bizarre coda spat by Strummer in which he declares loathing for Englishmen, “wops,” politeness, the police, and “kebab Greeks.” Although any suggestion of racism can be refuted by the sheer all-encompassing nature of his resentments, such scattershot anomie hardly suggests the moral superiority and philosophical certainties on which both this album’s songs and The Clash’s media image were predicated.
The song’s central conceit, however, is valid and interesting. Its title, of course, is an inversion of “Love and Peace” and an extension of the loathing professed by UK punks for the hippies for whom that phrase was famously a mantra. “Never Trust a Hippie” became, courtesy of The Sex Pistols, another punk slogan and was itself a play on the hippie catchphrase “Never Trust Anybody over Thirty.” As with most punk stances, a touch of gleeful affectation was involved in the attitude articulated in “Hate & War,” but, also as with most punk stances, a certain truth lay behind it.
Only ten years previously, the hippies, radicals, and freaks—collectively the “counterculture”—had been the beautiful young people who it was assumed simply by dint of the passage of time would take their values into the centers of power in society. Rather excitingly for the young (and alternative of outlook of any age), this meant that, in a future no further distant than the retirement of the youngest of the “old farts” currently in office, the world would be run by people who were less obsessed with authority than liberty, tradition than new frontiers, formal laws than natural justice, career ladders than personal fulfillment, war than peace. . . . A decade on, however, the world seemed on the surface not to be advancing toward that chilled-out utopia at all, but rather to be either no better than it had been before, or even regressing. In 1977, those in power—seemingly qualitatively unchanged by an influx of younger blood—were committing all the same “crimes” as before: making war, passing censorious laws, demanding conformist lives, and generally failing to evince an outlook that suggested repudiation of old values. The kaleidoscopic tinge of the psychedelic age had drained away and revealed a gray place indeed. The merciless march of time had transformed hippies (shockingly quickly when one thinks about it) from vital, thrusting crusaders for a new world order into irrelevant old farts who represented a failed revolution. Although punks had not reached puberty let alone been politically conscious when the hippies were at their most prominent, they shared this sense of failure. As Strummer said to Caroline Coon of Melody Maker on November 13, 1976, “The hippy movement was a failure. All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.” This was really an illusion and a symptom of both the young’s impatience and their naïveté about how achievable is rapid social change. By just about any measure, life had changed considerably in Western democracies since the heyday of “flower power” and, according to the values of the liberal-left, for the better. Incomes had risen, workplace rights had improved, freedom of expression in the media had been expanded, and liberal reforms had been enacted in the areas of abortion, homosexuality, divorce, racial discrimination, women’s rights, the penal system, and several other areas only recently considered rife with grievous injustice. However, this vast progress was disguised for anyone viewing life from the perspective of the left by the perplexing fact that Western societies remained essentially capitalistic: it would be another two decades before the belief in collectivism and the conviction of the unequivocal evil of the free market began to be restricted to a hard core on the far left. The issue was further clouded by inflation, oil shortages, and industrial unrest. The reasons for these problems were varied and not all attributable to old-fartdom, but they created an overarching impression of stagnation or decay that it was difficult for some not to assume to be a symptom of the persistence of the Old Ways.
“Hate & War” goes some way toward encapsulating that combination of disappointment and contempt that punks felt over the fact that the beautiful people hadn’t bequeathed them the promised social bounty. Like a disproportionate number of young people, punks desired something in which to believe. With Love and Peace having failed as a cause, that only seemed to leave the opposite/photo negative—an example of the way that the punk credo so often ended up being the antithesis of previous youth and rock culture values.
Purposefully or not, “Hate & War” also demonstrates that, in some ways, the punks’ jeering contempt for their predecessors in youth culture is reminiscent of the disdain felt by rebellious teenagers—of any generation—for the supposedly outdated approaches of their parents.
Primitive though the production is on The Clash, that it is also not without keen intelligence is illustrated by the consecutive tracks “What’s My Name” and “Deny.” Both cuts demonstrate apprehension of the need for sonic variety so as to stave off feelings of one-dimensionality, and are accordingly skillfully tweaked to bring about marginal but definite differentiation from the surrounding material.
In the case of “What’s My Name,” this takes the form of guitars treated to echo spookily and backing choruses doctored to confer a surreal tone. This is apposite for a song intended to convey—even more than the hardly cheerful remainder of the songs—dread. Strummer spits out a lyric depicting the adventures of a young urban malcontent: rowing with his dad, appearing in court on disorder offenses, and effecting entry to strangers’ houses with the aid of a “celloid strip.” Jones, meanwhile, displays his arrangement skills with tension-building wailing harmonies. The multiple chanting of the title phrase that constitutes the chorus only adds to the song’s deliciously disquieting feel. Credited to “Strummer/Jones/Levene,” this sole compositional remnant of the Keith Levene lineup of the band is of sufficiently high quality to make one think that a Clash album featuring and co-written by Levene would have been intriguing.
However, this praise comes with a profound caveat. Pretty much everything on The Clash is a hostage to fortune, rife with posturing and a snapshot of the immature mentality of uneducated twentysomethings. Yet in its glamorization—even endorsement—of crime against the person (as opposed to the crime against property recommended by “White Riot”), “What’s My Name” goes beyond that level of acceptable juvenile folly.
To some extent, the lyric is a symptom of how a class-conscious society, particularly at a time of economic difficulty, engenders an almost Robin Hood perspective on crime. As long as the victim is well-off, such a perspective dictates, there can be considered to be a justification for robbing, or even committing violence against, him. Even the act of fighting in the road for which the narrator gets “nicked” assumes the status of a gesture of rebellion when it transpires that the judge who sentences him doesn’t know his identity: it would have been already assumed by the listener that the judge hails from a rarefied public school background because almost all of the British judiciary did in those days; the lack of knowledge of the defendant’s name would have chimed with the conviction felt by many that, to such upper-class figures of authority, working-class people were “just a number.” (This notwithstanding the fact that the judge’s ignorance is a contrived way to lead back into the title vocal refrain.)
Yet the song also dismayingly demonstrates something altogether different to the altruism practiced by a certain Merry Band of Men: the fact that theft and violence can possess a patina of glamour to those too young to fully grasp their effect on individual lives, and too physically sturdy and too materially poor to properly understand that they could one day be the helpless victims of such ordeals. However aesthetically enjoyable is “What’s My Name,” it is, at heart, morally indefensible.
“Deny” is granted differentiation via a fade-in, plus more eerie production treatment of guitar lines and harmony singing. (It also has one of only three fade-outs on the album, the others being those of “Cheat” and “Police & Thieves.”)
Although it is a success on that level, it’s unfortunately on this track that the shortcomings of the album’s rough-hewn production are most apparent. Repeated listens and hard concentration reveal the verses and coda to be remarkably intricate, but the full effect of the nocturnal tapestry created by the interplay of Strummer’s vocals, Jones’s guitar, and the otherworldly backing vocals is somewhat obscured, the sonic murk for once detracting from, rather than enhancing, the power of the music.
In terms of its lyric, “Deny” is the closest thing to a song about a sexual relationship that The Clash dared put on the album, and even then, the climate of the times dictated it be far from a love song. It wouldn’t be true to say that there was no such thing as a punk love song. The Damned’s “New Rose” (October 1976), cited by many as the first-ever punk record, unquestionably fits that description. However, creations of that ilk were thin on the ground. To many punks, love songs somehow seemed a mark of philosophical softness, their composition a deliberate refusal to address the burning issues of a country in crisis. Add to that a pinch of leather-jacketed hard-man posturing—seeming to not need to depend on other people’s affections or approval often inspires awe in the young—and it all led to an attitude to romance best summarized by a quote from Mark Perry, editor of punk fanzine/bible Sniffin’ Glue, who told Val Hennessy in In The Gutter, “What is it when you work it out, a mucky dribble, spunk running down some bird’s leg, just lust.” As such, although it is the only track on this record on which the traditional rock term of romantic affectation “baby” is to be heard, “Deny” is actually anti-romance.
Written in the second person, it constitutes a litany of grievances on the part of a man about a woman (implicitly his lover) who is both a congenital liar (hence the title) and a drug user. Perhaps to provide another buffer against the accusation of soppy love song, the lyric sets the dysfunctional relationship against the backdrop of the punk scene, with one of the narrator’s complaints being that the woman lied to him about attending the 100 Club, the London venue that for a period was one of the few places prepared to host punk acts.
Even despite the sonic murk, the track’s end is sublime: Jones’s hypnotic repetition of the phrase “Whadda liar!” is counterpointed by an extraordinarily sustained spoken-word rant from Strummer that is so varied and lengthy that it sounds like it was scripted but which was, by all accounts, testament to his remarkable powers of stream-of-consciousness spontaneity.
The capital is not literally aflame in “London’s Burning.” Instead, The Clash co-opt the title of the English nursery rhyme to posit their city as one being consumed by boredom.
To get a caveat out of the way first, Strummer weakens “London’s Burning” by the way he renders the line he usually sang live as “Dial 999!” (the UK equivalent of 911). Roaring instead, as he does, “Dial nine, nine, nine, nine, nine!” destroys a good couplet (not least because he sounds like he’s enunciating what would be an excruciating rhyme: “To-night-night-night-night-night!”). This is a small misgiving, though, about another powerful blast of invective against sepia-toned inner-city life married to a fine, strident riff and more massed, defiant chorus chanting. For the first time, there is more than one good guitar part: chopped rhythm perfectly complements snarling lead. The track brought side one of the original vinyl The Clash album to a dramatic conclusion with a brief but deafening blast of feedback.
The song began life on a balcony of Wilmcote House, part of the Warwick Estate, Notting Hill, where Jones’s grandmother—who had raised the guitarist after he was abandoned successively by his parents—lived in a flat on the 18th floor. Strummer told this author in 2002, “We’d go and hang out up there, just lean on the rail and look down across where Westway crosses over Royal Oak. We’d spend night after night up there and one night I went home to [my] squat on Orsett Terrace and just sat down and wrote it, whispering because my girlfriend was asleep.” The first two verses of the song are devoted to the Westway. The noisy, soulless flyover that takes motor vehicles west out of London would become a fixture in Clash mythology, a totem of their inner-city origins and concerns. So too would Wilmcote House and buildings like it, to which verse three is addressed, for they represented the way that the powers-that-be had somehow contrived to degrade the lives of the British proletariat even in an era of rising living standards. Significantly, Clash acolyte Tony Parsons of the NME termed their music “Towerblock Rock.”
Tower blocks, also referred to as high-rises, were created with the best of intentions. In the Sixties, British society was obsessed with slum clearances, a process whereby the inner-city poor were moved out of terraces no longer deemed suitable for a decent society by dint of their dilapidation and outdated facilities. Said slums were demolished and replaced by buildings that were not only modern but tall, a handy solution to a housing shortage caused by German bombing in World War II and the rapidly rising population brought about by what Britons then still referred to as the Baby Bulge, the precipitous post-war birthrate rise known to Americans as the Baby Boom. At first, the displaced were grateful: indoor lavatories, central heating, and a general feeling of being a privileged part of a streamlined future created a honeymoon period. Very quickly, however, the drawbacks of tower blocks became apparent. They were soulless, creating little opportunity for neighborly interaction and hence the sense of community that the slums, for all their faults, possessed in abundance. They were also ugly. The sense of their design being futuristic was soon replaced by a consensus that their architecture was grim. The term “New Brutalism”—later shortened to merely “Brutalism”—was coined to describe tower blocks. As a consequence of all this, they instilled little sense of proprietorial pride. This was manifested in vandalism. This problem was squared by the fact that local councils began using the blocks as dumping grounds for anti-social tenants in lieu of a queue of “respectable” families willing to be housed in them.
It even transpired that the logistics regarding building toward the sky were flawed: planning regulations requiring specific distances between blocks meant that it would have been possible to accommodate the same number of people in conventional houses. Disasters like Ronan Point—the partial collapse of an East London high-rise in 1968 following a gas explosion—only added to the impression of one of the biggest catastrophes in the history of social planning.
It was an issue to which The Clash would return, although never as successfully as in “London’s Burning.”
Side two of the album’s original vinyl configuration opened with “Career Opportunities,” yet another display of the band’s apparently effortless ability to compose anthems that instantly rang true for their disaffected constituency. A theme of anti-work defiance—Strummer affirms he ain’t gonna be a shop assistant, civil servant, bus driver, ambulance man, or any other kind of menial worker—is complemented perfectly by an exhilarating militaristic tempo; a clipped, stop-start chorus; and a breathless, drumstick-flailing finale. The cumulative effect is that the listener wants to punch his fist in the air in solidarity.
The title phrase was one familiar from the Situations Vacant sections of newspapers. By snarling in response to it, “The ones that never knock,” Strummer is sardonically playing on the phrase “opportunity knocks,” which itself was famous to most Britons as the title of a contemporaneous cheesy (if very popular) TV talent show.
Rock ’n’ roll stardom had traditionally been viewed by musicians as their potential salvation from a humdrum existence oriented around jobs in which they were not particularity interested and for which the remuneration was not particularly high. Both Strummer and Jones had had some experience of conventional working life—Strummer had been a gravedigger, Jones a clerical worker at a Social Security (the current name for National Assistance) office. They had stomached just enough of that life to confirm their assumptions of it being soul-destroying. Both had opted for the alternative life then open to them through Britain’s generous welfare system: it was very easy to remain “on the dole” for long stretches: no more was demanded of them in exchange for their fortnightly Giro check than that they turn up to “sign on” every fortnight and that they give the impression of actively seeking employment by occasionally visiting a Job Centre.
It was an era where there was little moral compunction about such behavior. Had they contemplated the fact of them effectively stealing from the taxes paid by the very lower-waged whose plight their songs sought to highlight, the Clash members would have quickly squared it with their consciences on the grounds that they didn’t want to be part of the rat race and didn’t care if they were taking from people who had made that contemptible choice. There may even have been a feeling that, when they became rock stars, they would be paying back in taxes and philanthropy anything they’d taken, although that would have been complicated by The Clash’s avowed determination not to follow the conventional path to riches.
Nonetheless, it was an entire mind-set that would have aroused nothing but disgust from the working class of the era of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, the famous novel that depicted proletarian life in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. The workers therein had to work long, grinding hours simply to acquire the basics in a life that had little real meaning and, when work was not available, literally starved because of the lack of any welfare provision. Any such workers who had survived into The Clash’s era would surely have insisted that youth of The Clash’s generation “didn’t know they were born”—that they should be grateful for a lifestyle and opportunities that had been beyond the wildest dreams of the working class in their day, including a mere forty-hour week, as well as a totally free education system that theoretically enabled anyone with the desire to do so to actually redefine their class. The notion of demanding from jobs such things as “fulfillment” would have caused bitter amusement to such old-timers.
It raises the interesting point that the welfare state, contrary to the assumptions of its founders, cannot ever bring about a situation where all the problems of society—particularly the grievances of those on the bottom of its hierarchal pyramid—are definitively considered solved. Even in a world without want, there will always be people unhappy with their lot.
“Career Opportunities” gave way to “Cheat” via a between-track gap unusually short for the vinyl era. This meant nothing in the CD age, let alone the era of the download/individual track purchase, but the impression created by the near-segue–one classic snapping at the heels of another–brought home what a veritable embarrassment of riches was The Clash. “Cheat” is breathless, snarling, and galvanizing. Its quality is further underlined by the fact that, as though realizing that even another brilliant anthem for the dispossessed would be too similar, the band once more vary the sonic tone, this time with some impressive special effects and an intricate arrangement.
Strummer’s lyric sums up a frustration felt from time to time by all who consider themselves on the side of enlightenment in the battle against injustice: the conviction that rules which serve to prevent injustice being corrected should be flouted. “If you play the game, you get nothing out of it,” he avers. As discussed in the section on “Career Opportunities,” this is a suggestion that is immensely arguable: people of older vintage would be inclined to suggest that Britain in the late Seventies demonstrably rewarded endeavor and the adherence to society’s parameters in a way it never had before. This, though, doesn’t make the sentiment completely invalid. Many of the unskilled genuinely feel that avenues to betterment are not open to them, and if their viewpoint is dictated by their lack of formal qualifications and resistance to obeying orders from people of spurious authority, that in itself is often a legacy of a needlessly authoritarian education system which seems to them another way of enabling their oppression. In the UK, schoolchildren are far more likely to see teachers as jailers than benefactors by dint of the existence of school uniforms and the dictatorial atmosphere it produces: endless conflict is created by teachers upholding petty rules that have nothing to do with education, with the result that kids from working-class homes where there is no tradition of, or interest in, educational attainment leave school at the earliest opportunity.
It has to be admitted that all of this po-faced analysis of the validity of the song’s argument seems slightly preposterous in the context of its sonic impact. You would have to be the most horrendous old fart not to be swept up in the exquisite aural assault Jones constructs around the songwords. The arrangement is incredibly complex: starting with an exciting opening salvo from Chimes, through the staccato guitar underpinning Strummer’s barked lyric, through a short instrumental break that soars sky high thanks to it being treated with phasing. Said larger-than-life whooshing gives way to some earthy guitar strumming—creating a sublime contrast —before we’re back to more Strummer condemnations of “goody-goodies,” followed by a respite from which a marching Chimes brings the band forward. This is followed by a fine, taut guitar solo and the emergence once more of phasing to take the song to a celestial fade. The cumulative effect is awe-inspiring: it seems amazing that all this is crammed into just over two minutes.
“Protex Blue”—on which Jones takes the lead vocal—is named after a make of condom (or “rubber Johnny,” hence the closing cry of “Johnny! Johnny!”). Although marred by some unattractive scrabbly guitar, it’s a sprightly depiction of young male lust. The narrator fends off a homosexual importuning him in a public lavatory to purchase the archetypal “packet of three” from a vending machine and is then disappointed when he opens it to find it does not contain the brand he desired: he is worried that they won’t fit him as he ruminates on the lady whose company he had planned to enjoy. The rather glib and staccato nature of the lyric makes the last verse a little confusing. That the narrator is traveling on London’s Underground service —sitting in a tube carriage on the Bakerloo line, then studying the advertisements along the escalator stairs leading up from the platforms—is clear enough, but the songwords throw in a slightly perplexing twist in which, apparently apropos of nothing, he spurns “skin flicks” (porn movies) and insists he wants to be alone.
That “Protex Blue” is one of the few tracks on The Clash that doesn’t bear much sociological analysis is probably down to the fact that it predates Joe Strummer’s influence on Mick Jones’s songwriting. Tony James, Jones’s ex-colleague in the band London SS, has even stated that it was the first-ever Mick Jones original. If true, that would make the track particularly impressive, not just because of its precociously able construction and witty, self-deprecating tone, but because of its punk prescience. Songs depicting the mundane mechanics of preparing for sex phrased in an English working-class vernacular speckled with contemporary references (Jones calls his penis his “P. D. drill,” a type of power tool) were simply not being written in the mid-Seventies. As such, a song whose vintage might have been assumed to render it out of place actually fitted in perfectly on an album—and with a musical movement—that both spurned conventional subjects (especially chocolate-box romance imagery) and delighted in breaching taboos.
Unlike most acts in rock history who are ultimately recognized as great artists, The Clash were disdained by many critics before they had product in the stores. The same, of course, applies to The Sex Pistols: during a changing of the guard, the old order is usually not receptive to the idea of the necessity for its replacement (or, in this case, the replacement of its musical and philosophical values). The derision directed at The Clash, though, was on a deeper level: unlike The Sex Pistols, they couldn’t claim the cachet of being the first example of their type, nor the mantle of Outsider that the Pistols acquired as soon as they started playing live, let alone the glamorous status of social outlaw forced on the Pistols when they became nationally famous after their controversial December 1976 television appearance. Moreover, their rudimentary skills and unconventional approach made The Clash very much an acquired taste in their early days. A confrontational stage manner and grim subject matter—vaguely disturbing to graduates of the Summer of Love—only increased a repugnance factor that even applied with those who had been partial to the bad-boy mien of The Rolling Stones.
Although not too many could sustain that contempt for The Clash once their manifestly high-quality first album was available, it’s also doubtful that quite so many detractors would have been converted without the presence on the first Clash album of two particular tracks: “Police & Thieves” and “Garageland.” Without that brace, the record would have evinced a paucity of three things considered essential to a halfway competent and worthwhile rock release: complexity of instrumentation, emotional warmth, and variety of timbre. Instead it would have been—as well as a rather short album—a collection of tracks limited by their broadly uniform brevity, primitivism, and attitudinal bent. In short, “Police & Thieves” and “Garageland” conferred on the album the breadth necessary to take it from the realms of minor to major work.
Interestingly—almost frighteningly—neither “Police & Thieves” nor (at least up until a month before the release of The Clash) “Garageland” were part of The Clash’s live set before the release of their first album, giving rise to the discomforting suspicion that those who dismissed the band as insignificant at that point in time were expressing a justifiable position based on the evidence presented to them.
“Police and Thieves” was a 1976 reggae single by Junior Murvin, written by him and his producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. Although it hadn’t been a UK hit (that would come in 1980, when it made no. 23), reggae was not in Britain the underground music it was in the United States, but rather a de facto mainstream sound.
The first reason for this was the fact that UK pop chart positions were not in any way dependent on airplay. It was purely sales that determined what appeared in the nation’s charts. If this still left musicians at the mercy of radio programmers, it should be noted that the latter had a less conservative attitude than their U.S. counterparts partly because of the exposure to more alternative sorts of music engendered by that sales-oriented process. The will of the people, not the whims or prejudices of “straights,” dictated the UK charts.
In a country with only three television stations and one national radio channel, and in which commercial local radio had only begun in 1973, the media was compact (and, it must be said, limited) in a way beyond comprehension to the average American. Whereas in America in order to enter the charts a record would have to weave its way into the affections of DJs or programmers in multiples of states of a vast country, in the UK it would simply have to prompt enough people to go out and purchase it after they’d heard it on, say, John Peel’s Radio One program. Either that, or seen it reviewed in one of the music papers, whose proliferation (four) and regularity (weekly) enabled a speedy throughput of promotion and availability information. Once a record had surmounted the hurdle of being deemed broadcast-worthy by a sufficient number of programmers or DJs—both because it had already appeared in the charts and there was no easy way to claim it unacceptable for a family audience—becoming a hit was a relatively easy matter.
An appearance on BBC TV chart program Top of the Pops cemented that hit status. It also underlined the impossibility of consigning reggae, punk, or any other genre to the underground status no doubt desired for it by many in the country’s establishment. The BBC show did nothing more than represent what was currently selling well and was therefore obliged to offer a slot to anybody who qualified.
As far back as the late Sixties, reggae began achieving footholds in the UK chart when skinheads—perhaps a little self-consciously—decided to adopt it as their preferred music. Its slow, lilting, repetitive structures sounded strange—even at first absurd—to the pop consumer’s ear, and many parents of the era were apt to express disapproval of their children listening to “darkie music.” However, the likes of Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” and “It Mek,” The Upsetters’s “Return of Django,” Dave and Ansel Collins’s “Monkey Spanner,” Bob and Marcia’s “Young, Gifted and Black,” and Nicky Thomas’s “Love of the Common People” achieved a popularity in Britain that served to make reggae simply another branch of the tree of popular music. By the time of the point in 1971 when the pastiche record “Johnny Reggae” made a UK no. 3, reggae’s sense of danger and exotica had dissipated.
A similar thing happened with punk. Although a genre that was the epitome of underground in the States, the mass of the British public were exposed to just about all of the major punk acts and records. The Sex Pistols’s first two singles, “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save The Queen,” were banned from playlists for very particular reasons (the first because of a firestorm of bad publicity after their aforementioned profane TV appearance, the second due to the taboo of republicanism in a Royal Jubilee year), but the same fate did not afflict the Pistols’s subsequent records, nor product by Sham 69, The Adverts, X-Ray Spex, Buzzcocks, The Stranglers, The Boomtown Rats, and sundry other acts who were palpably New Wave.
Those acts had little difficulty securing hits despite the supposed anti-commerciality of the harsh and self-aggrandizing punk sound because, New Wave or no, their records were often catchy, as well as intriguing almost by default. Top of the Pops helped because, as the only regular music show on the box, it was the nation’s meeting place for pop and a family viewing staple. Its fifteen million viewers meant that a quarter of the country was regularly tuning in. As such, housewives, businessmen, and babes in arms—as well as those more directly interested—were in the late Seventies treated to the regular sight of spiky-haired malcontents bellowing their grievances into microphones against the show’s usual garish light entertainment-oriented backdrops. (That wasn’t too great a culture shock for Britons, however. Parents had long become used to being reduced to spluttering rage by the sights on Top of the Pops: only a few years before punk had come the mildly grotesque, pouting quasi-transvestitism of Sweet’s Steve Priest and the gilded orangutan image of Wizzard’s Roy Wood.)
The spiritual link between British punk and reggae may have been overplayed by music historians. The punk bands certainly had Rastafarian mates like Lee Perry, Don Letts, and Bob Marley, and incorporated reggae covers and originals into their repertoires partly as a gesture toward a fellow form of outsider/rebel music. However, the speedy tempos and belligerent attitudes by which punk audiences were enthralled was a world removed from the general musical tranquility of “riddim.” While it’s true that reggae shared punk’s lyrical penchant for social protest, the average inner-city youth in Britain did not really feel much kinship with—or, whisper it lightly, sympathy for—the downtrodden black Jamaican.
Nonetheless, reggae was sometimes a big influence on British punk bands either by osmosis (Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols had a long-standing love of the genre) or imitation (The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers were among punk bands who always tried to include at least one reggae number on their albums). “Police & Thieves” (as they rendered the title) was The Clash’s first foray into the medium, and an unexpected triumph. Originally a band warm-up song, it was included on The Clash to bulk it up to a standard playing length without having to resort to lesser originals.
Part of its success is the consequence of it being far more than a cover of the Murvin record. By lengthening and adding intensity to Murvin’s fine but rather soft-focus original, it improves it. Jones’s arrangement—guitars hit on both the off-beat and the on-beat—is sublime, but Terry Chimes’s drumming plays just as large a part in the track’s brilliance. His piston-regular pattern nails itself into the listener’s brain, ultimately inducing a state approaching a trance. Even Simonon puts in a bravura performance with his mesmerizing lugubrious bass throb. Although, at six minutes, it is three times as long as most of the album’s tracks, “Police & Thieves” doesn’t feel bloated in comparison. Instead, its leisurely atmosphericness allows it to make its point in its own time.
The lyric about the misery engendered by criminals and the methods used by the authorities to combat them had, of course, a resonance in life-is-cheap Jamaica that it never could in what Mick Jagger described in “Street Fighting Man” as “sleepy London town.” However, while the words might be a mere cops ’n’ robbers nursery rhyme in the mouth of a child of a temperate welfare state like Strummer, the conviction of his delivery ensures that at no point does he come over as laughable or presumptuous. In fact, the track feels no less valid than material surrounding it informed by direct knowledge.
Toward the end of the track, Strummer is ranting in another of his climactic ad-libs while the instrumentation behind him quietly builds to a towering height. Just as a musical crescendo is expected, his franticly scrubbed guitar abruptly falls away to leave just the spare sound of Jones’s stabbed guitar, Simonon’s calm bassline and Chimes’s piston-regular drumming. It’s a stunning moment. A clear nod to reggae’s “drop out” tradition, it’s as inspired and hypnotic as anything from the average progressive rock virtuoso, but possessed of far more grit.
“48 Hours” tackles the same subject matter as “Janie Jones” and “Career Opportunities” but embraces just about all the musical clichés and ham-fisted means of expression that those songs managed to deftly sidestep.
Its line “Monday is coming like a jail on wheels” is a worthy successor to that melancholy desperation once articulated by The Easybeats as “Monday I’ve got Friday on my mind” (and in less succinctly quotable terms by Fats Domino in “Blue Monday”). That, though, is about the extent of the track’s cleverness. The lyric is lazy, in particular a third, final verse wherein the narrator switches from a straightforward, if hardly poetic, litany of grievances about his unfulfilling, unskilled life to a claim that he can’t make his way around because his legs are broken. Just a little more exercise of the gray matter would have seen Strummer/Jones make the small jump to realizing that they really meant the narrator’s spirit was broken and thus turn a risible line into something with a poignancy the subject deserved.
“48 Hours” is uninspired musically, as well. Not disgraceful as such, but in its marching featurelessness and failed anthemic chorus it’s the only thing on the LP with nothing sonically to write home about. As though realizing it amounts to nothing more than a nondescript bridge between two profoundly superior tracks, The Clash make it, at 1:36, the shortest song on the record.
Charles Shaar Murray has been an intelligent commentator on rock since the late Sixties. He, however, was one of those observers who failed to see the potential of The Clash. The Clash’s first-ever gig was a support slot to The Sex Pistols at the Black Swan, Sheffield, on July 4, 1976. Their second was an invitation-only performance for booking agents and music journalists at their rehearsal space (the tautologously named Rehearsals Rehearsals) in Camden, north London, on August 13. Their third was another Pistols support slot, this one at The Screen on the Green, Islington, London, on August 29. Reviewing the latter event for New Musical Express (known to one and all as “the NME”), Murray said, “The Clash are the kind of garage band who should be speedily returned to the garage, preferably with the motor still running, which would undoubtedly be more of a loss to their friends and families than to rock and roll.” Such a reception to their proper London entrée hardly seems the sort of thing to induce anything other than despair in The Clash. Strummer, though, seemed to be as much honored as angry. “Joe was really excited about this idea of a garage band,” Terry Chimes said in Chris Salewicz’s 2006 Strummer biography Redemption Song. “That led to the song ‘Garageland’.”
Garage rock was a phenomenon that began in America in the wake of the “British Invasion.” Following The Beatles’s storming of the U.S.A. in 1964 and the subsequent cultural takeover by their compatriots, teens up and down America were inspired to pick up guitars and take up drums. Their rehearsal space was usually somewhere conveniently local and free of charge: the family garage. The proliferation of small local labels in the States ensured that it wasn’t too difficult for garage bands with a modicum of talent to make a record. The music heard on such singles was often primitive but also sometimes brilliant, the combination of lack of finesse and presence of naïve enthusiasm making for the likes of primal classics such as “Laugh, Laugh” by The Beau Brummels, “Dirty Water” by The Standells, and “96 Tears” by ? & the Mysterians.
Although groups like Paul Revere and the Raiders and Tommy James and the Shondells both translated their arguable garage band roots into mainstream careers, most purveyors of such records were one-hit wonders. Several of them, however, were in 1972 unexpectedly granted immortality when Elektra Records compiled the double-LP Nuggets, which collected notable examples of the genre. Subtitled Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968, it was one of the first industry releases to evince a genuinely archival approach to rock music. It became one of the half-dozen biggest influences on the UK punk scene, along with the eponymous debut albums of The New York Dolls (1973) and The Ramones (1976), Back in the U.S.A. by MC5 (1970), Raw Power by the Stooges (1973), and The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967).
In his liner notes, Nuggets compiler Lenny Kaye did not use “garage rock” to describe the LP’s tracks. Instead, he said, “The name that has been unofficially coined for them—‘punk-rock’—seems particularly fitting in this case, for if nothing else they exemplified the berserk pleasure that comes with being on-stage outrageous, the relentless middle-finger drive and determination offered only by rock and roll at its finest.” Although the quote indicates that he was not making a claim for devising the term “punk rock,” Nuggets was unquestionably the first place many encountered it, particularly in Britain, where “punk” had not hitherto been part of the lexicon, musical or general.
In 1976, a pair of British music journalists decided to give a new musical movement in their country a convenient handle. Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock told this author in 1999, “Caroline Coon and Jonh [sic] Ingham came up with it ’cos they had to call it something. I think one week there was all of a sudden two major articles. Caroline [of Melody Maker] knew Jonh Ingham of Sounds and they kind of colluded and both decided to call it ‘punk rock’ for want of something else. I didn’t like being called punk rock—neither did John [Johnny Rotten]—’cos we thought it was a loser kind of term and it reminded us of all that Sixties Nuggets kind of thing.”
Joe Strummer clearly decided he liked being called a garage rocker. Perhaps it was because of the intoxicatingly snotty quality of the music to which Kaye referred or its purity of intent, the kind of which can only come from people too young to have known disillusion. Strummer may even have had a notion that the ad hoc amateurism of the garage rock scene was something in keeping with the poverty-dwelling punk spirit, although that would have been misguided: unlike American homes in the Sixties, British households—many of whom still didn’t have access to indoor toilets—could usually only dream of having their own garages. In any event, Strummer defiantly appropriated the garage band title for a powerful new song about the punk movement, thus unknowingly completing some sort of terminology circle.
“Garageland” sees Strummer lament the commercialization of the punk scene and the attendant corruption of its ethos of No Compromise. The Clash, of course, were perceived to not be without sin in that department, what with their receipt of a check for £100,000 as an advance against royalties when they signed to CBS Records in January 1977. As such, it is possibly a certain sense of guilt that motivated the song as much as idealism.
“Garageland” is a farewell to punk and a scene that—reliant as it was on an outsider status that ceased to exist when the punk acts were welcomed in by the music establishment—was dying even as he wrote the lyric. This is shot through with the knowledge of a dichotomy: success involved making money, which would inevitably cause agonizing because, while they hated the imagined values of the wealthy, the band had never been fans of poverty. Strummer’s impassioned declaration that he will not give in to record company executives who want the group to wear suits and that he will have no truck with the rich and their priorities (“The truth is only known by guttersnipes”) is undercut by the overall melancholy, one that is heartrending. Jones’s wonderful melody once again has the attributes of an anthem, but this time it’s the anthem of a defeated, retreating army, an impression underlined by his keening guitar and blasts of mournful mouth harp. It all makes for an unexpectedly thoughtful and poignant closer to the record.
Charles Shaar Murray, incidentally, recanted and became a champion of The Clash.
The Clash came housed in a cover featuring a photograph of Strummer, Jones, and Simonon in a legs-planted pose whose drama was cranked up by it being rendered in negative-effect. The back cover featured a similarly bleached-out photo of a police charge, with the track listing spelled out in scruffy faux-typewriter lettering.
The high UK chart position achieved by the record—no. 12; astounding for a product
with little mainstream media coverage—was one of the things which made some conclude
that The Clash were now the most important punk act. They had started out as quite
open disciples of The Sex Pistols, but the Pistols had fallen behind in the race because
they were unable to issue product as they lurched from record company to record company.
While their being kicked off EMI and
A&M in quick succession naturally enhanced the Pistols’s outlaw credentials, it meant
that, in an era where fans and critics were permanently hungry for product, they hadn’t
even released their second single by the time The Clash issued their debut album.
When The Sex Pistols’s album entrée did appear six months after The Clash’s debut, it was something of a disappointment. Few doubted the awesome and revolutionary quality of the string of singles that had preceded Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols—“Anarchy in the UK,” “God Save The Queen,” “Pretty Vacant,” and “Holidays in the Sun”—but, as previously mentioned, their very presence on the album was ideologically offensive. Moreover, although several of the previously unheard tracks were of very high quality, the album was cumulatively exhausting in its endless stream of invective and relentless wall of guitar sludge. That emotional and musical monotone was exactly what The Clash had managed to sidestep with their own LP, and The Clash’s rough-hewn humanity was in many ways more appealing than the Pistols’s more abstract nihilism.
The Clash became the darling of the younger music critics, particularly those on the left-leaning NME and alternative-minded Sounds, even if that relationship very quickly developed into one in which the music papers adopted the pious role of Jiminy Cricket to The Clash’s supposedly wayward Pinocchio.
By January 1978, the debate about who were the punk figureheads was over: Johnny Rotten’s departure from their ranks meant that the Pistols were history in all but name. The Pistols staggering on without him only added to the sense of their having been usurped by the pretenders to the crown: Sid Vicious, guitarist Steve Jones, or even drummer Paul Cook took lead vocals on record releases (which continued for a further eighteen months) that traded on The Sex Pistols’s notoriety to increasingly cartoonish effect.
Although The Clash put its creators in the vanguard of the New Wave, and although it remains a brilliant snapshot of a particular age and state of mind, a quarter of a century after its release logic dictates that it cannot have the same resonance. With endless strikes and hyper-inflation no longer part of the UK landscape, it has been a long time since a generation was born into such difficult times that it felt self-abnegation to be its appropriate means of expression. Punks who once averred there was “No Future” now have bald spots in place of spikes and mortgages to offset their enthusiasm for white riots. Meanwhile, while social authoritarianism and financial poverty still exist, the endless incremental Western process of reform has ensured they are less pronounced than ever before.
Yet different though contemporary circumstances are, the album doesn’t feel profoundly dated. The reason for this is that The Clash—as they would throughout their career—wisely disdained specific references in their songs to current-day events. Contrast this to the approach of The Tom Robinson Band, a hard-rock act inspired by The Clash who would achieve prominence in 1978. While the very topicality of TRB’s songs temporarily gave them a greater power than The Clash’s works—a “relevance,” to use a common superlative of the day—it also quickly dated them and thereby drained them of resonance. Nowadays, not even its musical excellence can save TRB’s work from largely being interesting in only an abstract sense. It is so peppered with references to half-forgotten public figures, barely remembered proposed government legislation, and now-moot talking points that it sometimes seems as stale and unworthy of attention as an old newspaper. The Clash has avoided acquiring a patina of age because its contents stick to generalities. Essentially, it lists grievances that will always be concerns for the questioning young of any era.
The Clash is now widely revered, regularly featuring in critics’ polls to determine the greatest albums in popular music history. Although this exalted status is justified, it has to be conceded that, in a sense, The Clash always seems the odd-man-out in such tables. Compared to other fixtures of such polls such as The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main St., Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced, The Who’s Who’s Next, Love’s Forever Changes—or, indeed, The Clash’s own later work London Calling—The Clash looks like a presumptuous interloper. How can such a badly produced, rudimentarily played, and often spiritually mean-spirited work be considered fit to stand beside such examples of fine craftsmanship, high production values, and touching compassion? It’s also more of a mood album than most other acknowledged classics, and becomes more so the older one gets. Its moral absolutism and spiritual aggression are the stuff to strike a chord with those who are unfulfilled, property-less, and loveless. Greater nuance of thought comes into play the more emotional validation and material comforts an individual acquires, while less venom seems appropriate the more one’s private life confers peace of mind. This fact was perfectly summarized by American rock critic Robert Christgau in his book Albums of the ’90s when, noting that his two favorite rock albums were the debuts of The New York Dolls and The Clash, he admitted that he didn’t play either of them often because they are “loud and harsh, and don’t fit very neatly into my middle-aged, nuke-fam leisure schedule.”
Perhaps in the end, though, this odd-man-out status is a superlative—just another way of saying that The Clash is a unique album.