The first Clash single of 1981 not to be lifted from an album hardly helped stem the tide of their commercial and perception misfortunes. “This Is Radio Clash,” released on November 20, has an angular, stuttering funk groove that is authentic, not cultural tourism, and the lyric crackles with witty lines like “This is Radio Clash—cashing in the Bill of Rights!” Yet the production is so in-your-face—the continuous, heavily echoed hand claps being particularly wearying—that it undermines the proceedings. The song’s self-obsession was also the kind of thing currently turning people off the band.
The B-side, “Radio Clash,” sounds like a remix of “This Is Radio Clash” but is actually the second half of a very long song. Considering that the ending of the A-side was something of a relief, there can’t have been many who turned it over much. A 12-inch version of “This Is Radio Clash” featured two remix versions of the title track: “Outside Broadcast” and “Radio 5.” The vainglory inherent in such a proliferation of versions of a not-very-good song was the type of thing giving The Clash an air of the ridiculous.
Can we get that world to listen? Not judging by the chart performance. The record climbed only as high as no. 47.
The first sessions for The Clash’s fifth album, ultimately titled Combat Rock, took place in early September 1981 in the Ear Studios rehearsal room, located near Jones’s old stamping ground of the Westway. These sessions doubled as rehearsals for their next live dates. After the completion of said dates, the recording—much to Strummer’s disgruntlement—relocated to Electric Lady because Jones was anxious not to be parted for too long from Ellen Foley.
Recording work was completed in early 1982. Jones, who by now usually acted as de facto producer during the making of the record, initially wanted to release a double album containing fifteen tracks (none of which, incidentally, was “Overpowered by Funk”). That most double albums of the period contained around twenty selections indicates Jones’s growing penchant for extended tracks more resembling groove than song in which he could use the effects pedals with which he was increasingly fascinated. The rest of the band were dismayed by this, as was Bernard Rhodes, who had at the band’s invitation returned to the management helm in February 1981.
Another problem was the mix. Remixes were attempted but were done on the move in foreign studios as the band fulfilled live commitments. Finally, the decision was made by Jones’s colleagues that he wasn’t up to the job, and world-famous producer Glyn Johns, who had worked with luminaries like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, was brought in to provide both the final mix and edits. In Wessex Studios, Strummer and Johns (but not Jones) set to work creating an album that Strummer was openly acknowledging in interviews would be designed to sell. The number of tracks was scaled back to turn a double album into a one-disc set. Of those tracks that remained, running times were brutally cut, with songs losing not just codas but entire verses. Vocal re-recording was done on the tracks deemed commercial enough to be singles, while drums and guitars were brought forward in the mix to make the album acceptable to American radio. The music was also stripped of the sort of production bloops and squeals beloved of Jones.
There’s little doubt that all of these things were necessary both artistically (compare the sonic warmth of Combat Rock to the miserably freezing Sandinista!) and commercially (any more VFM gestures would have bankrupted The Clash, just as, in 1982, it would their now-former management team Blackhill). Yet in their quest to regain lost ground The Clash went beyond practical into the realms of mercenary. The loss of integrity of which The Clash had been accused, often unfairly, throughout their career now actually—by their own terms—did happen.
They agreed to play second fiddle on a string of dates to The Who, a member of the supposedly discredited rock dinosaur generation, and furthermore in the sort of stadiums they had always claimed created a regrettable barrier between artist and fan. When the NME’s Paul Du Noyer went to visit The Clash as they played support to The Who at Shea Stadium, New York, he found them sheltering in their dressing room “two young security guards” who had “argued with their employer over whether they could keep their red plastic jackets.” He also found Strummer candidly stating of The Who, “I have to say that the newer stuff they’re doing doesn’t get to me like the old stuff.” While such things maintained their men-of-the people aura (no other group would so bite the hand that fed them), it was significant that none of the Who dates were in The Clash’s homeland: they knew they would be ridiculed and that the move might even be commercially counterproductive in Britain.
Combat Rock spawned multiple singles (“This Is Radio Clash” transpired to the final stand-alone Clash single) and came with gimmicky free gifts such as stickers and stencils. “Rock the Casbah” (June 11, 1982, no. 30) featured a substandard B-side in the form of “Long Time Jerk,” a song that sounds almost like a sequel to Sandinista!’s “Rebel Waltz” but doesn’t have that track’s haunting qualities, not least because of a quintessentially bleep-bloopy production by Jones, who still held sway on what might be termed non-important tracks. However, their September 17, 1982, release didn’t even have the courtesy to exploit the fans by throwing on a previously unavailable B-side. The cut-down version of the parent album’s “Straight to Hell” that featured on the other side to “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (no. 17) would seem an anti-enticement if anything and the sort of philistinism that would have caused an embolism in the Clash camp if imposed by the record company. Yet the record was thought worthy of being made a double–A-side.
In an apparent volte-face over their opposition to crass music industry commercialism, there was even at one point a plan to market Clash Clothes based on their latest militaristic look. Kosmo Vinyl offered the feeble justification that if anyone should make money from their image it should be The Clash. Although that doesn’t seem to have reached fruition, latter-day Clash member Vince White has recalled being told that the Clash camp made a considerable amount of money from merchandising.
And could the fact of Strummer getting his teeth capped have been part of this strategy to play by conventional rock industry rules? Possibly not: he promoted the album with a startling, almost disturbing, Mohawk haircut. Either way, his singing voice was now noticeably clearer and more palatable to the mainstream.
Ironically, few in Britain could bring themselves to be outraged by all this apparent avarice and hypocrisy, simply because The Clash had long been written off as a joke. Many of those still interested in the band felt some sympathy, for these machinations smacked of a battered response to a self-imposed penury going right back to their entrée. “The Clash is everything to me. I have nothing else,” Mick Jones told journalist Paul Morley in the NME of October 13, 1979. “I’m under the impression that I have given up everything else for it. I’m under the impression that I have lost everything: home, personal life, everything. So my dilemma in a way is that I resent the Clash.” Although recent traumatic occurrences like a split with a girlfriend and a burglary played a part in his pain, he was also broke—at a point when The Clash were widely considered to be the incumbent Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World. The new hard-headed, businesslike attitude of the 1982/1983 Clash seemed less a betrayal of values than an exhausted insistence on their right to finally enjoy the fruits of their labor. If the music press didn’t like the fact that some of the things they were doing would, in years gone by, have been considered by The Clash themselves to be a sellout, The Clash probably couldn’t have cared less. Perhaps the fact of them having been unable to do anything right for the UK press over the last few years even motivated them to take a spiteful pleasure in this dramatic subverting of expectations.
The letters in the catalog number of Combat Rock are an implicitly anti-American reference to an El Salvadorian rebel grouping. Yet the album is very American. (When, several months before its release, it was announced that its working title was Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg, the groans of contempt at the military-esque Yankophilia could be heard all over the band’s homeland.) The lyrics refer to New York as much as they do the UK, while the Vietnam War is mentioned or alluded to in no fewer than four of the album’s twelve tracks. However, lyrics aside, there was no aping of American musical forms. The music of Combat Rock is indefinable: a new form that combines elements of rock, funk, folk, and ambient.
With the exception of “Rock the Casbah” and a couple of others, there is an overall lack of immediacy to this music, and the anthemic rockin’ sound that was not long ago their trademark is almost completely absent. Melodies are skeletal, even non-existent, something that is the result of the tracks’ origins as lengthy mood pieces. Some of the tracks are so opaque lyrically and unresolved musically that they feel like the equivalent of abstract paintings. However, the “So what?” reaction dissipates the more one listens and warms to the insinuating rhythms and moving compassion. Symbolically, it is “Straight to Hell,” one of the growers, that gradually reveals itself not just as the best track but as a bona fide Clash classic.
Nevertheless, one can fully understand Smash Hits reviewer Pete Silverton who on May 13, 1982, found it as “puzzlingly bitty” as Sandinista! and commented, “If you like the sound of someone scratching their head, you should like Combat Rock.” Even the cover of the album seems confused. Although the new commercial realism had dictated it bear the first color Clash album photograph, Pennie Smith’s picture of the band astride Thailand railway tracks is peculiar: Strummer has half his face covered by a hand; the others seem distracted—but not by the same thing.
Combat Rock contrived to become the most successful Clash work to date. The album reached no. 2 in their homeland, but that was almost immaterial in light of the fact that Combat Rock broke The Clash in the biggest music market in the world, climbing to no. 7 in the U.S. charts. Although The Clash’s enthusiastic and business-minded touring of America helped considerably, the album’s success still seems strange for a country where such left-field music, at that time, was usually commercially untenable.
“Know Your Rights” was released as the precursor single on April 23, 1982. This stripped-back, vise-tight track has the pace and tone of a Cossack dance, and packs a powerful punch through its stabbed, synchronized guitar attack. Strummer is listing three rights to which people are supposedly entitled: to not be killed, to food money, and to free speech. Except he claims they are an illusion, withheld by governments at their discretion. The lyric gives the impression of a first draft in its bittiness and naïveté, but the track’s intense, lock-jaw rhythm is enough to carry the day.
The exclusive B-side of “Know Your Rights” was “First Night Back in London.” A story of facing such oppressive treatment from the British police after foreign travels that it makes the protagonist want to immediately leave his homeland again, it’s a brooding track that would have been a better choice for inclusion than some of the material on Combat Rock, even though Jones’s mix is, as ever, heavy-handed. As a comeback, the single was commercially unconvincing, peaking at no. 43.
“Know Your Rights” provided the opening for Combat Rock. It’s followed by “Car Jamming.” As with several of this album’s cuts, there is ostensibly no real reason why “Car Jamming” should ever command a second listen. The feeling develops of a bridge detached from the song to which it really belongs, for both musical reasons (there are modulations but no discernible chorus-verse structure) and lyrical ones (it’s a stream-of-consciousness musing on the sights the protagonist observes while stuck in traffic, although as those sights include Vietnam vets reduced to homelessness, Strummer is conveniently given the opportunity to trade in his particular form of streetwise poetry). Yet something about it—the balmy air? Joe’s smile-inducing singing?—draws us in and makes us happy to hear it again.
Jones both wrote and sang “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” although Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels’s “Little Latin Lupe Lu” and/or “Sophistication” by The Sharks seem to have provided some of his inspiration. An anthem of hesitation about walking out of a love affair, it has parts rendered in Spanish for no other reason, it seems, than to show off Strummer’s Spainophiliac tendencies again. It’s slightly worrying that this attempt to return to their anthemic rock roots proves slightly beyond The Clash—its stiffness is already a world removed from the easy flowing rock ’n’ roll of the London Calling album—but it’s still pretty good.
Good enough, in fact, that when The Clash sanctioned its use for a Levi’s TV commercial in the UK in 1991, it was re-released and became the band’s only ever number one in their homeland. Unless, that is, we count “Dub Be Good to Me” by Beats International featuring Lindy Layton, a 1990 single masterminded by Norman Cook/Fat Boy Slim that brazenly sampled the bassline of “The Guns of Brixton.” (The matter was settled out of court.)
The American B-side of the “Should I Stay . . .” single was “Cool Confusion,” a piece of reggae which seems to start in the middle. Like most Clash B-sides of the Combat Rock period, its slightness is not helped by the electronic farts with which Jones riddles it.
“Cool Confusion” was not released in the band’s home country at the time. The same is true of “The Cool Out,” a remix of “The Call Up” which appeared on the 1981 American 12-inch “Magnificent Seven” single. (The latter’s lead track was actually a remix of “The Magnificent Seven” titled “The Magnificent Dance” and its version of “The Magnificent Seven” was severely truncated.)
During the Combat Rock sessions, Headon was playing an increasingly smaller role in Clash recording due to his ever-worsening heroin addiction. “Rock the Casbah” was the glorious exception to the rule. The piano, bass, and, of course, drums were laid down by Topper while waiting for the others to arrive at the studio. The short piece of jaunty music was looped to make it a standard length, and Strummer came up with a caustic lyric about the fact that being a rock lover was punishable literally by the whip in fundamentalist Iran. This lyric, because it chimed perfectly with the anti-Iran sentiment then still prevalent in America only a few years after the national trauma involved in Americans being held hostage in their embassy in Tehran for 444 days, became The Clash’s biggest-ever U.S. hit, climbing to number eight. Chauvinism aside, the single deserved its success, being catchy, nimble, and funny.
The June 1982 UK single version of “Rock the Casbah” showed what a remix should really be about. Mick Jones—perhaps to ensure popularity with dance-floor DJs as well as radio jocks—gave it a far more prominent rhythm track. This beefed-up version makes even the splendid Combat Rock original pale in comparison.
“Red Angel Dragnet” is a musically bizarre track, with an EQ-ing which produces “real” sonics, i.e., it sounds like an assortment of musical instruments playing at the same time instead of the sound painting that proper meshing engenders. There is no proper vocal melody: despite pretending not to be, it is spoken-word. The recitation in the middle by Kosmo Vinyl of Robert De Niro’s “All the animals come out at night” speech from Taxi Driver is just a silly piece of Americana and another example of the band’s enthrallment with movies that glamorize violence and psychosis. However, although the weakest on the album, the track has its musical virtues, particularly the pleasing counterpointing of chugging guitar riff and swelling organ.
Its gravest offense is contained in its lyric, inspired by the case of Guardian Angel Frankie Melvin, who in December 1981 became the first Angel to be killed while on patrol, apparently shot dead by a police officer. A Strummer composition, it sees Simonon taking lead vocal it would seem in the manner of Lennon/McCartney doling out a track for Ringo to sing on Beatles albums as a way to keep his fans happy. The alternative theory is that Strummer—just as he distanced himself from his sensitive songs by getting Jones to sing them—was anticipating some sort of backlash to his assessment of the Angels as “a fine thing.”
In the Eighties, the debate on crime had been raging in America for several decades. It would fairly soon cease to be such a burning issue as the downturn in offenses that society had become resigned to never happening transpired to take place. This was the consequence of zero-tolerance law enforcement polices, higher incarceration levels, an abortion-ordained drop in the birthrate among racial groupings most likely to drift into crime or a combination thereof. Before that unexpected salvation, the nation was perennially apprehensive and pessimistic about the issue. Into this atmosphere of fear stepped the Guardian Angels, a volunteer organization who stated their objective as protecting the public in the absence of police resources to do so properly. The Angels were unarmed, but their dress code was paramilitary. Not only was the Angels’s uniform not too dissimilar to The Clash’s military fatigue outfits at this stage of their career, but their berets spoke to the fantasies of every person who’d ever had a Che Guevara poster on his wall, one of which was almost certainly Joe Strummer.
The Guardian Angels, though, were no leftists. Although not formally politically aligned, and although containing in their ranks many volunteers with good motives, they displayed an archetypal hard-right-wing indifference to due process. A common motif of their leadership in interviews was that the Angels never hurt anyone. Journalists who saw them beat up the likes of suspected drug dealers could, and did, state this to be a lie. Moreover, their most famous spokesman, Curtis Sliwa, was a self-aggrandizing fantasist, lodging false police reports to drum up publicity, and only admitting to them when the statute of limitations had passed. Former colleagues suggest that he was responsible for several more stunts, including a claim of an attempted rape of his wife Lisa, also then an Angel. That he is now a conservative talk show host—a profession synonymous with reactionaryism and bullying—is somehow both astounding and expected.
The ultimate vigilante action occurred in December 1984 when New Yorker Bernhard Goetz shot four black men on a Manhattan subway train after he alleged they attempted to mug him. Famously, he was acquitted of the entirety of a battery of charges brought against him except that of carrying an unlicensed firearm. Although Angels did not carry guns, both the actions by Goetz and the verdict of a jury drawn from the crime-weary populace of NYC among whom their brand of street justice had by now become popular have the whiff of a linear thread leading back to the Angels.
The Angels’s popularity was located among the sort of working-class people who dismiss due process and prima facie evidence as the priorities of the “book-smart.” Even though that was partly the result of the Angels operating in an era before camera phones, YouTube, and other potential means of exposing the brutal reality behind their knights-in-shining-armor image, it does bring up the issue of just how right-wing the proletariat often are. It also demonstrates that populism often causes people of leftist bent like The Clash to find themselves batting in an ideological ballpark normally distasteful to them.
Combat Rock’s opus is side one’s 5½-minute closer “Straight to Hell,” a beautiful and moving meditation on the world’s dispossessed. Punning on the Monopoly instruction “straight to jail,” Strummer’s vision flits all across the globe to identify the doomed-by-fate, from inhabitants of English industrial towns cast into unemployment to Vietnamese children sired by vanished GIs to the smack-addled poor of American ghettos. The lyric has the wordplay and colloquialism of beat poetry (“King Solomon he never lived round here”). Strummer’s lonely vocal is bone-chilling, particularly the series of gasps he uses to lead into the final verse. Musically, the track snakes sinuously, carried by a kind of subdued bossa nova beat. Drums, in fact, are the only recognizable components: that the keening background noises are unidentifiable as instruments only adds to the song’s sublime air of mystery.
The album version (more or less) of “Straight to Hell” featured on the 12-inch version of the UK “Should I Stay or Should I Go” single. The original recording featuring a verse excised from the Combat Rock version was one of the few good points about the Clash on Broadway box set.
Restored to Combat Rock at the Wessex remixing sessions, “Overpowered by Funk” sees Strummer playing on the fact that, before it became a term for a musical style, “funk” meant “objectionable.” As the band maintain a (frankly, not that authentic) funk rhythm behind him, Strummer lists in a sort of jive-talk the irritants of everyday life, from urban isolation to overpopulation. “Don’t life just funk you out?” is the defiantly depressed keynote line.
This gives way to a guest rap. The Clash by this point were comically susceptible to anyone with a semblance of an outlaw aura. This description applied to Futura 2000, one of the urban graffiti artists at the time becoming media stars. Futura 2000 designed the cover of the “This Is Radio Clash” single and handwrote the lyrics on the inner sleeve of Combat Rock. He turns out to be less eloquent with words than with a spray can, claiming to be as deadly as a vulture.
Note: The Clash backed Futura 2000 on 1982 single “The Escapades of Futura 2000,” whose A-side was a collaboration between the artist and Mick Jones and whose B-side (same title, instrumental version of the A-side) was credited to Jones.
“Atom Tan” is a downbeat tale of nuclear catastrophe. The track has absolutely none of the vitality, or tunefulness, of the similarly themed “London Calling,” something which one suspects Strummer and Jones taking alternate vocal lines is designed to disguise. The groaned, stretched-out refrain “Oh, he caught an even atom tan” hardly constitutes a classic chorus. However, once again the group’s instrumental chops somehow prevent a negligible track from being completely pointless.
“Sean Flynn” is possibly the strangest thing in The Clash’s corpus. Although it started life as an exploration of the disappearance of photojournalist Sean Flynn (son of movie star Errol) in Vietnam during America’s war with that country, its disconnected, elliptical lines (“Each man knows what he’s looking for”) ensure that nobody would actually know this unless they’d read Clash members’ explanations in interviews. It scarcely matters. It’s an exotic, sultry mood piece sounding like it came straight off the sound track to a movie set in the Southeast Asian jungles. Gary Barnacle provides mournful saxophone before the track departs as mysteriously as it proceeded.
Although he doesn’t get composing credits, from all accounts beat bard Allen Ginsberg collaborated with Strummer on “Ghetto Defendant,” a composition about nineteenth-century French poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud. His spoken poem alternating with Strummer’s singing is unexpectedly successful: Ginsberg’s burr has a gravitas that the reedy raps of Futura 2000 and Kosmo Vinyl simply do not. The track has a genuine tune too and a good elongated, vibrating riff. Plaintive mouth harp underpins choruses which see Strummer asserting that heroin addiction, rather than the forces of darkness, are preventing the poet from instigating the revolution he desires.
The collaboration with Ginsberg came about after the poet had visited the band during their Bond’s residency. The Clash provided backing to his poem “Capitol Air” on one of these dates. This recording was eventually released on the 1993 Ginsberg box set, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949–1993.
In “Inoculated City,” a double-tracked Mick Jones identifies the reason for the perennial phenomenon of senseless conflict as being a chain of military command in which the individual components do not have the authority to question or overturn orders. The melody is appropriately a brisk, marching one.
The first pressing of the album featured an overdubbed cheerily voiced commercial for a toilet cleaner. One of the first examples of what would become known as sampling, it is, frankly, apropos of nothing except Jones’s penchant for a hallmark of the unsanctioned rap remixes then proliferating on American radio. As it gave the track its title, said title was stripped of its meaning for a period when the commercial was erased as a consequence of legal action by the manufacturer of the implicitly ridiculed product. The commercial has in recent years been reinstated.
“Inoculated City” is a reasonably agreeable listen, but the most interesting thing about it is how it suggests that the natural shelf life of The Clash was coming to an end. The overwhelming feeling it provokes is that we have sort of heard this before: “The Call Up” was similarly pacifist and had the same marching sonics. The same theme of anti-militarism informs all or part of “The Card Cheat,” “Ivan Meets G. I. Joe,” and “Charlie Don’t Surf.” There are other examples of subject repetition in The Clash’s catalog, notably the desperate plight of the unskilled worker, tower block living, the potential for riot, the dreariness of the inner city, and the dangers posed by nuclear power and weapons. While the group had incrementally broadened their subject range over the course of their career, the fact of this repetition shows that there were only so many iniquities against which to rail. The Clash’s preference for the general rather than the specific restricted their room for maneuver: narrowing the focus to individual injustices might have made for less of a sense of recurrence, and even for more powerful songs, but would have taken them into the area of Tom Robinson Band–style topicality for which they’d always shown a reluctance.
It all demonstrated a peril unique to a political band. Such a sense of decreasing returns somehow doesn’t apply to musical artists who specialize in more conventional songwriting: love is a subject that seems to bear repeating in a way that tableaux of inner-city deprivation or denunciations of warmongering do not. That The Clash were, at this point, not long for this world has always retrospectively been put down to internal politics and chemistries. One wonders whether a subliminal sense of theme exhaustion also played a part.
This is a perishability distinct from that created by The Clash’s increasing prosperity. After the already lucrative Combat Rock tour was over, The Clash were asked to perform at the Us Festival in San Bernardino, where their eighty-minute set earned them the sum of half a million dollars. By this point it seems fair to say that they had a certain interest in never again being caught in the middle of a riot, white or otherwise. How many more Clash anthems could be written from that side of the security fence?
When Mick Jones’s post-Clash band—ultimately known as Big Audio Dynamite—first began playing live dates, a component of their set was a song called “She-Beast.” An NME reviewer, taking exception to what he interpreted as misogyny, asked why it was that, in the litany of global injustices addressed by The Clash’s catalog of songs, there had never been any complaint about the oppression of women.
“Death Is a Star,” the closing track of Combat Rock, is almost that feminist Clash song for which the NME scribe yearned, but it doesn’t quite make it. It was The Clash’s response to the growing popularity of slasher movies, in which female characters were disproportionately slaughtered, especially—in an example of incongruous and twisted morality—sexually promiscuous ones. Unfortunately, only band interviews yielded this fact, the vague lyric talking merely of someone watching “the bad go down again” while smoking in a dark cinema. As in “Red Angel Dragnet,” there is also some dissociative semi-spoken-word poetry which only serves to crank up the opaque quotient.
Headon uses brushes and Tymon Dogg plays tasteful piano on a track that might have been an album highlight if only its components could be properly heard: the mix is so quiet that when the song is over it has the same wisplike qualities as a dream that slips from memory even as one tries to recall it. A weird closer to a weird album.