By the time The Clash had finished touring Combat Rock in November 1982 (with a brief addendum of a handful of gigs in mid-1983), they were, it might be assumed, sitting on top of the world.
A half decade of struggle and setbacks—many of them admittedly their own fault—were now behind them. While they could be said to have compromised some of their ideals in reaching a place of financial and career comfort, there was no suggestion that they had betrayed their musical values: Combat Rock rose up the most conservative album chart in the world despite its English accents, political subject matter, and almost avant garde instrumentation. (That it often quickly found its way into American secondhand shops when purchasers discovered it contained few further radio-friendly anthems like “Rock the Casbah” doesn’t diminish the point too much.)
Moreover, they had somehow contrived to rehabilitate themselves in Britain. In April 1982, Strummer disappeared on the eve of a British tour and the release of the Combat Rock album it was intended to promote. He turned up safe and well four weeks later. “. . . it was something I wanted to prove to myself: that I was alive,” Strummer explained to Charles Shaar Murray in the NME on May 29, 1982. “It’s very much like being a robot, being in a group.” The frontman didn’t publicly reveal the truth behind that burnout explanation until a 1988 appearance on UK music television program Wired: Bernard Rhodes had told him to do it as a stunt to drum up publicity. When he did make that revelation, the penny dropped for all those who remembered that back in 1982, week after week, ads for The Clash’s UK tour dates were appearing in the music press long past the point where it would have been assumed all the tickets would have been sold. (One suspects it was only at this point that the band first fully realized that they were considered by many former British fans to be distant and absurd.) In the absence of knowledge of the cynicism that motivated it, something about the vulnerability inherent in the disappearing act turned The Clash from a joke that couldn’t sell tickets into something resembling the men-of-the-people they had been at the beginning. The cancelled tour was rearranged and was a triumph. Their brace of gigs at the 4,300-capacity Brixton Fair Deal not only sold out but was such a seething, joyous affair that the band quickly added another date there. Snide music press comments about the group began to decline. Even the NME was converted. Richard Cook’s review of the opening night at Brixton gushed about “purpose in every turn” and a “florescent razor’s edge.”
However, fissures had started appearing in an apparently rosy picture even before Combat Rock was released. Shortly after Strummer returned from his disappearing act, Headon was sacked. Strummer had become exasperated beyond endurance by the drummer’s increasing unreliability and the way he was making a mockery of his anti-heroin lyrics. At the time, the official reason given for Headon’s departure was “a difference of opinion over the political direction the band would be taking.” Music journalists in the know about the drummer’s habit were generally happy to toe the line/lie. With a U.S. tour imminent, there was little time to rehearse material with a replacement drummer. It was therefore the easiest option for The Clash to ask Terry Chimes to take Headon’s place onstage and help promote an album that, ironically, Topper’s “Rock the Casbah” broke Stateside.
It took The Clash 3½ years to follow up Combat Rock. It will be remembered that in roughly that span of time, they had released their first four albums. By the time that that follow-up album saw the light of day, several further revolutions had occurred in the lives of The Clash.
Chimes played his last gig with the band in November 1982. The real reason was not revealed at the time, but he explained in Danny Garcia’s 2012 documentary, The Rise and Fall of The Clash, that rumblings he was hearing about Jones following Headon through the exit door made him uneasy: “. . . if it was gonna be a completely new band without Mick, it would be a whole new project and I didn’t really feel like getting involved in a brand new band.” Chimes was replaced by Pete Howard.
Although a surprise to those not aware of his drug problems, Headon’s dismissal was as nothing compared to the earth-shaking quality of the announcement on September 1, 1983, that Strummer and Simonon had fired Mick Jones. The reason given was that “Mick Jones has drifted apart from the original idea of The Clash. In future it will allow Joe and Paul to get on with the job that The Clash set out to do from the beginning.” Strummer and Simonon elucidated in subsequent interviews that Jones had become prone to increasingly prima donna–ish behavior and was barely interested in conventional rock music anymore. Although Jones has since admitted that he was indeed difficult, it was still a drastic move. As one critic pointed out, it seemed as inconceivable as The Rolling Stones jettisoning Keith Richards. (Although drugs were not mentioned as a factor, some noted the guitarist’s increasingly cadaverous appearance, often a telltale sign of heavy cocaine use. Interestingly, for a brief while after Jones’s dismissal, Strummer took an anti-drugs line in the press, disavowing the marijuana of which he had been a heavy consumer.)
Most observers agree that Strummer made the dismissal decision after prompting by Rhodes. Jones had, of course, almost been sacked from The Clash at Rhodes’s instigation in 1978. That time, Rhodes’s machinations to discard him ultimately resulted instead in his own dismissal. By the autumn of 1983, with Jones’s diva airs if anything worse than they had been five years previously, Strummer had come around to Rhodes’s way of thinking. One wonders, though, whether Jones’s behavior had something to do with a couple of festering sores. One was the fact of having been assaulted by Strummer backstage in January 1980 after an altercation caused by his refusal to play “White Riot.” The other was the humiliation of being forced to accept Rhodes back the year after that: not only had Strummer threatened to quit The Clash unless their former manager returned but, in the crowning humiliation, deputized Jones to make the overture.
The 1978 attempted dismissal of Mick Jones had been linked to the intriguing prospect of Steve Jones replacing him. Although the Sex Pistol had little of his namesake’s compositional and arrangement genius, he was an exciting guitarist and, in his heedless, Artful Dodger–like behavior, the very essence of punk. If only Strummer and Rhodes had sought out Steve Jones this time around, too. That one of Mick Jones’s replacements was Nick Sheppard of second-tier punk group The Cortinas seems to contain its own health warning. Another seems to lie in the fact that an additional guitarist in the form of Vince White was recruited to help fill the position one man had previously occupied.
There were other worrying signs. One of the first photos released of the new-look Clash saw them posed in front of a temp agency: their combat fatigues and grim expressions looked ridiculous against a backdrop of handwritten signs advertising telephonist and receptionist vacancies. Strummer was increasingly bombastic in interviews, announcing that his new five-man Clash would turn back the clock and recapture the punk fire whose abandonment by the group over the last few years he pronounced a mistake. His punk purism seemed old-fashioned for reasons other than it being a step backward: The Clash’s image and rhetoric was increasingly macho and militaristic. (“In my mind I liken us to a new platoon,” Strummer told Bill Holdship of Creem. “We’re going to go and crawl out in front of the enemy lines, get fired upon and then look at each other to see how we’re bearing up.”) Such talk seemed antediluvian compared to the aura surrounding new idols like Boy George. Strummer publicly ridiculed him, but the Culture Club singer, by dint of being the biggest pop star in the world despite being openly gay and resembling a transvestite, was effecting societal changes that The Clash—for all their bellicose pronouncements and campaigning—had never wrought and never would.
After extensive touring, the new Clash finally had product in the shops in September 1985. The lead-off single for their new album, surprisingly, augured well for it: it was the best Clash song since Sandinista! Moreover, it was, at last, another Clash song explicitly about their home country.
“This Is England” is a track in the tradition of “All the Young Punks” and “Straight to Hell”: a stately paced, heart-wrenching examination of despair, in this case that of the casualties of Margaret Thatcher’s “economic miracle.” Its tone is one almost of subjugation, begging the listener to heed the plight of the cities in the north of Britain, where hope is a forgotten emotion and violence and hatred everyday currency. Programmed drums and wedges of synthesizer strike a surprising note but chime with the dignified tone. In any case, a fat, snub-nosed guitar riff drives the message home in more traditional Clash style. Children’s voices at the beginning tug at the heartstrings. Strummer completes the job by emoting, “I’m never gonna cry no more. . . .”
It has to be admitted that many in Britain would not find the anti-Thatcher polemic of “This is England” heartbreaking at all, but preposterous. By no means were all of those people “yuppies,” the young, upwardly mobile breed about which the country had recently begun to hear. While it is true that never has a prime minister divided opinion in Britain like Mrs. Thatcher, it is in no way true that those divisions were along class lines. Many proletarians saw her as a savior and did not use quote marks when they spoke of an economic miracle.
Although The Clash’s career began under a nominally leftist Labour government, the threat of a Margaret Thatcher–led, hard-right Conservative administration informed their music from day one, i.e., if things were bad now, how much worse were they were going to get? The reality of “Fatcher’s Britain” when she was elected to power in May 1979 did, for The Clash, fulfill their worst nightmares. Thatcher cut public spending to the bone in the middle of a recession, sending unemployment skyrocketing. Her monetarist policy, in fact, was partly dependent on unemployment: in a country where inflation had hit 25 percent as recently as 1975, wage demands needed to be suppressed, and, for the Tories, one of the most effective ways of doing this was to make people fearful for their jobs. Moreover, the overmanning of industry that was making British firms uncompetitive needed to be rectified. By 1984, Strummer’s anger about the high levels of unemployment engendered by Thatcher’s policies was bottomless. He was to be found strutting the stage of the Brixton Academy née Fair Deal—microphone shaft slung across a shoulder, as was his new guitar-less wont—affirming that by the time of the next election (“ten fuckin’ centuries away”) there would be “nothin’ up north.”
Yet a discomforting thought occasionally popped to the surface of the minds of left-wingers who cheered such rhetoric: that Thatcher had succeeded in conquering the dragons that stalked the land during their childhoods and adolescences. By 1982, inflation (colloquially, the “cost of living,” which the Clash had referenced in the title of one of their releases) was consistently down to single figures for the first time in almost a decade. It would largely remain that way. Meanwhile, courtesy of monetarism and of the outlawing of strikes without ballots and secondary picketing, the number of working days lost through industrial action was 169,000 per month when “This is England” was released, down from 900,000 a month when Thatcher became prime minister. The downward trend would continue. This may not have been a consolation to the unemployed—let alone people whose relatives had committed suicide in despair at their jobless state—but that was not exactly the same thing as a failed policy.
There were many other glimmers of discomfort for the left during Thatcher’s 11½ -year reign. Thatcher was in no way personally likeable in the way of her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, but the reason she secured three successive election victories for her party was that there was little disputing that she was improving the financial lot and the quality of life of most: the days when the lights regularly went out, mass walkouts over petty infringements of union rules crippled productivity, and uncollected rubbish was piled high in the streets were gone and never coming back. Nor was she the snob that her hoity-toity voice suggested. The Conservatives under Thatcher were not the clichéd class of privilege and smugness that led Strummer to coin the phrase “Tory Crimes.” Under her, they became less a party of inheritance and more a party of meritocracy, opening up areas of employment previously denied people not in possession of the right school tie, most notably in the stock exchange. It was striking how working-class accents began proliferating in the media as an apparent consequence of the example of her caste blindness. Through a mixture of cutting welfare and encouraging self-employment, she conferred a pro-enterprise bent to the British character common in America but hitherto considered “pushy” in the UK. While it has to be said that this went hand in hand with a coarsening of the culture—it was notable in the Eighties how many Britons seemed to feel they’d been given license to be personally self-aggrandizing, even obnoxious—it meant that by the end of her tenure the notion of the “wrong accent” was becoming a thing of history.
Thatcher sold off nationalized industries that, previously secure in the knowledge that they could get away with any inefficiency or bad workmanship by virtue of the safety net of government support, gave rise to leaner, fitter, and more customer-responsive companies. The end of the monopoly status of such organizations made if far more difficult for utility workers to effectively hold the country to ransom with industrial action, thus decreasing wage inflation. When she slashed enterprise-deterring high taxation levels from 83 to 60, then 40, percent, it did not, as warned, lead to a loss to the Exchequer in receipts. She started allowing council tenants to buy their homes. Many felt that, because she did not embark on a new program of house building, this had a catastrophic effect on the availability of affordable accommodation. Indeed, during the Eighties, the homeless began proliferating on London’s streets to levels not seen since Dickensian times. Yet council housing began losing its stigma. One of the reasons the World’s End Estate, on which Strummer once lived and wrote songs, is now a far more pleasant place to live is that the right-to-buy scheme, of which many residents took advantage, instilled a proprietorial pride that renting a flat one was destined to never legally own could not.
If some leftists now grudgingly concede that, on balance, Thatcher was good for the British economy, and if some go even further by saying that the changes she wrought could not possibly have been made by a government run by the Labour Party because such polices would have been resisted by the very unions that funded it, they draw the line at accepting that she was admirable beyond the economic sphere. Such people continue to assert that Thatcher’s administration was indefensible from a civil libertarian perspective. While it is true that she was often cruelly socially authoritarian—many still splutter with rage when they speak of police brutality during the 1984/1985 miners’ strike—even there the picture is not clear-cut. It was Thatcher’s Conservative government that, by introducing the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, required police officers to record interviews with suspects and witnesses. Before this, methods of gathering evidence had sometimes resembled those in Third World countries, leading to suspicions of many confessions being concocted in police station canteens. During its periods in power, the supposedly less authoritarian Labour Party had never been responsible for such a seismic shift in police practice, any more than their hatred of class divisions had impelled them to shatter class barriers in employment the way the Conservatives did with the “Big Bang” financial deregulation in the City of London in 1986.
Not all of these revolutions had been completed or were even under way in 1985, but by this point many of the people of whom Strummer felt he was a champion had abandoned the ideological ship on which he sailed. By 2002, however, the verdict could be said to be in. That year, this writer interviewed Strummer about the first Clash album (sadly one of his last interviews before his shockingly premature death two days before Christmas). The interview contained this exchange:
That bit at the end [of “Remote Control”] where you’re singing “Repression”, I mean that’s kind of embarrassing isn’t it?
Well it is. But then the times were hot. Yeah. The times excuse it. The tempo of the time.
Talking of the tempo of the time, the backdrop of the album, when you look back, does it kind of surprise you that this social backdrop wasn’t actually Thatcher’s Britain but it was actually a Labour government in power at the time?
I know. This was the real . . . I remember the three-day week. The blackouts. Was it the Grunwick strikes and pickets? It was pretty socio-politically active times.
Does it kind of surprise you looking back that that all happened under Labour?
The surprise is when you see a film like Rude Boy. The beginning of that, it looks like it’s a hundred years ago.
Reading that now, Strummer seems to be avoiding the questions. By this point, he had long since moved out of the inner city, which he had once felt crucial to his songwriting, into the countryside. He had also elected to send his children to private school, something he kept very quiet. Moreover, he struck up a friendship with right-wing journalist, and later Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Perhaps by now he had concluded that the reason that times whose tempo was “socio-politically active” felt like “a hundred years ago” was actually because of beneficial factors in Thatcher’s policies. Certainly, film director friend Julien Temple told Pat Gilbert of Mojo in June 2006 that Strummer “talked in the end about respecting Margaret Thatcher.” Although he may not have ever actually voted Conservative, perhaps Strummer had also concluded—at least in part—that he and his colleagues had been wrong about Thatcherism. If so, he was clearly determined to “keep schtum” about that, too.
Whatever the debatability of the anti-Thatcher message of “This Is England,” its dignity and quality was the reason its parent album came as such a bitter letdown. Cut the Crap—released on November 8, 1985—embraces both the posturing clichés and the cacophonous music “This is England” eschews.
The circumstance of the album’s genesis seem bizarre, starting with the fact that Bernard Rhodes was the producer. The band would appear to have never all been in Weryton Studio, Munich, where it was recorded, at the same time. Rhodes erased material Strummer laid down in the latter’s absence. Norman Watt-Roy played bass on more tracks than Simonon. Watt-Roy’s partner in the rhythm section was not human: in the deepest irony after all Strummer’s scorning—public and private—of Jones’s beat-box leanings, Cut the Crap featured un-rock ’n’ roll artificial drums. (Strummer expressed doubt that Pete Howard is on the album at all.) Another irony is that the two new guitarists don’t even add up to one Mick Jones, although, again, that may be because they were dispensed with, synthesizers often audibly taking their place.
Strummer took The Clash on a bizarre busking tour of the UK in May 1985, after which he quit the band. He later claimed that Rhodes tampered so much with the Cut the Crap tracks—vari-speeding, adding electronic brass, drenching almost everything in terrace chants—that they were unrecognizable to him. Mathematically, this tampering might even justify the “Strummer/Rhodes” writing credit that Strummer was amazed to see given all songs on the finished product. However, Strummer can’t claim to be completely blameless for the low quality and peculiar soundscapes of the album. Vince White later recalled his horror when Strummer enthusiastically played him “The Dictator,” apparently oblivious of how incongruous and out-of-tune were its synthesizer overdubs. It was a product a broken Strummer refused to promote on its release, being more interested in distancing himself from Rhodes and apologizing to Mick Jones for sacking him. When he begged Jones to come back to the fold, Mick declined, having spent several months setting up Big Audio Dynamite (whose debut album appeared within a week of Cut the Crap), thus bringing the story of the band to a pitiful end.
If Strummer was shocked by Cut the Crap, it was as nothing compared to the reaction of Clash fans. In the wake of Jones’s sacking, The Clash had decided to have another Year Zero, only this time the enemies of music with their bloated albums and self-indulgent experimentation were not ELP and Pink Floyd, but The Clash of the last few years. As Strummer explained to Richard Cook of the NME on February 25, 1984, “I go back to our first record and I like the writing style on that record. It’s lean. Trim! Makes a point, then another song starts.” Strummer told Cook that Sandinista! was “brazen stupidity”; Combat Rock half half-good [sic], half-awful. Strummer’s stated intention to take the band back to its roots was welcomed by many fans right up to the point that they found out that this meant a cartoon idea of punk. Some people had thought Strummer at twenty-four looked a bit too old for The Clash. At thirty-three, and now a father, he had put himself in the undignified position of spouting sentiments even more youth-oriented than in 1977. That those youth-oriented lyrics did not ring true, however, was for reasons over and above his relatively advanced years. The risible clichéd Americanism of the album title is representative. Strummer’s rants on Cut the Crap are those of a U.S. youth. His protagonists traverse the slums in cars and have a penchant for “fingerpoppin.’” American or British, the depictions of poverty are stylized and unconvincing.
The crowning glory of the faux punk aura is the sea of “yobbish” chanting in which almost every song’s chorus is drowned. Symbolically, this had been the trademark sound of Sham 69, a band considered a caricature of The Clash. The trashiness was exemplified by the album cover, which simulated a poster glued to a piece of corrugated iron fencing bearing a picture of a sunglassed, Mohawked punk.
Buried beneath Cut the Crap’s sometimes ham-fisted production, often embarrassing lyrics, and frequently weedy music, there are worthy moments. Indeed, it’s notable how superior Strummer’s melodies are to the tunes on Combat Rock. None of this, though, can prevent it being overall a cringe-making self-parody which besmirches a great band’s legacy. Needless to say, the unpromoted and critically unloved Cut the Crap achieved miserable chart positions: no. 16 in the UK, no. 88 in the U.S., the latter a staggering, and possibly record-breaking, turnaround from the top-ten performance of their previous album.
Where Cut the Crap is not dismissed as a joke, it is simply ignored: official Clash product like the Clash on Broadway and Sound System box sets and the Westway to the World documentary give the impression that there were no Clash releases after Jones’s sacking.
“The Dictator” makes for a shocking album opener. The horror induced in listeners by this track’s puny synthesized horn charts, oppressive chanting and glaring, quintessentially Eighties mix was profound. This was supposed to be a return to the snarling power of The Clash? The lyric—one of only a few reproduced on the inner sleeve—proves to be an intelligent and quasi-chilling condemnation of a U.S. foreign policy that saw death squads as a legitimate means to protect a superpower’s financial interests abroad, but the music in which this articulate message is dressed up is so fatuous as to almost completely deny the song emotional resonance.
On “Dirty Punk,” as in many places, we are subjected to a mix wherein the lead vocal is almost buried, and, as if to compensate, what sounds like a hired drunken mob renders the chorus with minimum subtlety. However, the Ramones/“Janie Jones” blurred guitar riff is far more like the reaffirmation of the Spirit of 1977 that this album was supposed to be about. The guitar solo is pleasantly grungy, while the anthemic lyric is quite affecting.
Yet the lyric’s reference to acquiring a “great big car” is a jarring note, putting one in mind of affluent America, where punk was merely a fashion rather than an expression of class despair. These touches of self-parody are what serve to make the five-man Clash a blurred Xerox of the band that recorded The Clash. In 1977, The Clash were creating punk as they went along. In 1985, they were conforming to what they imagined were its rules—and not even getting those right. With tracks like this, what the new-look Clash uncomfortably reminded one of was the new wave of punks that had started springing up in Britain at the turn of the Eighties.
Punk had always been explicitly anti-nostalgia: kicking over the traces of a moribund music scene and daring to call revered rebels old farts was its raison d’etre. Inconceivably, a few years after it had exploded, it bequeathed its own revivalists. That by 1980 the original punk bands were evolving into something less ideologically confrontational and less musically primitive was a source of some grievance to new bands like Blitz, Chron Gen, Discharge, The Exploited, and Vice Squad.
These groups might be termed third-generation punks, with The Sex Pistols the first generation (and lodestar) and every band inspired by them (even early converts like The Clash) second generation. They could also be termed the Punk’s Not Dead generation after a phrase frequently heard at the time. The defiant resistance to progress inherent in that phrase was a symptom of a problem. In the hands of these new groups, punk ceased to be a spirit for change and began ossifying into a set of clichés. The image became a rigid uniform of studded leather jackets, tartan trousers, bondage straps, and spiked hair. The music was wrenched back to the brutal minimalism of 1976/1977, with all subsequent advances in style, musicianship, and production dismissed as going soft and selling out.
There were some new aspects. The snottiness that had been a manifestation of the original punks’ disenchantment with both the music scene and the economy now hardened into something more sinister. It came as little surprise to some how the new punk melded so indistinguishably into Oi! music, practiced and consumed by racist skinheads. The other aspect the new generation added was Mohawk and Mohican hairstyles: not part of the original punk look, they are now a routine researcher’s mistake when seeking to visually represent 1976/1977 punk in magazine articles and documentaries.
“We Are the Clash” is a new sort of self-aggrandizing Clash anthem. Aimed not at detractors in the music press or anywhere else outside the Clash family, it is a message to Mick Jones, who, following his dismissal, had let it be known that he considered himself the true custodian of the band’s name. At one point (although possibly after this song’s composition) he even began informing promoters that the band he was setting up with fellow exile Headon would bear the name The Clash. This was something that must have made Strummer rather uneasy. That he was touring with the new Clash without record company financial backing may have suggested to him that CBS/Epic felt that they might decide to confer legitimacy on Jones’s putative Clash. After all, they could only issue records by one band with that title. In the end, Jones didn’t pursue his threat of laying legal claim to the name.
Another Ramones-y riff and a chorus straight from the soccer terraces decorates a lyric in which Strummer manages to rhyme “Clash” with “trash” and “lash.” Despite its reductio ad absurdum of Clash self-absorption, it’s not bad, even if its rabble-rousing intent is undermined simply by the fact that the chorus chanting across the album makes every track sound like a tilt at an anthem.
A track known in concert as “Are You Ready for War?” was subjected by Rhodes to a buffoonish re-titling. Ironically, considering the self-consciousness of the two preceding cuts, “Are You Red . . .Y” recaptures the old anthemic Clash sound without even trying. There’s too much bubbling synth and sequencer work for a traditionalist’s comfort, but this is a punchy, powerful, and (naturally) marching anti-war number, with great call-and-response sequences between Strummer and the backing vocalists, whose parade-ground yelling is for once the appropriate ingredient.
The message of “Cool Under Heat” is the affirmation of life in the face of adversity, territory explored so triumphantly, so recently by The Clash in “I’m Not Down.” It’s tempting to perceive the contrast between the verses and the choruses of this track as representing the conflict between Strummer and Rhodes. A good melody and a subtle bongo-assisted groove dominate until we get to the choruses, where the booming terrace chanting kicks gratingly in yet again.
“Movers and Shakers” opens with a piece of unconscious self-parody that is quite probably the worst line ever to appear on a Clash record: “The boy stood in the burning slum.” From there, Strummer enunciates basically the same message as in the previous track. The last verse plausibly celebrates the musician’s life as a way out of poverty, but it’s difficult to take seriously Strummer also portraying the poor as heroic figures for carving out a living as traffic light squeegee merchants.
“This Is England” opened side two. “They own the pack while we play the three card trick” is the crux of following track. What this metaphor means is not quite clear but “Three Card Trick” seems overall to be a rejection of the type of authoritarian law and order policies that become popular in times of recession. The melody (especially in the chorus) proves once and for all that Strummer was, at times, capable of writing tunes on the level of the departed Jones.
“Play to Win” is a bewildering track. The verses are free-form, with Strummer and his bandmates engaging in conversation that drifts in and out of earshot but never into comprehensibility. These brow-furrowing passages give way to soaring (and actually pleasantly melodic) choruses in which the band, en masse, declare that they long for the prairie of the wild frontier. Had this appeared on any other Clash album, we would have accepted it as an example of their propensity to explore other musical styles and cultures, but the rural reference strikes quite the oddest note among Cut the Crap’s evocations of urban decay.
Against a jostling rhythm track and synth runs peppered with brass blasts, Strummer sings in “Fingerpoppin’ ” of dancing the night away while seeking to identify the best girl in sight. The notion of a thirty-three-year-old father strutting his funky stuff for the ladies is not as gruesome as it may sound, but one really wonders where Strummer’s head was at during this stage of his life if his notions of the proletariat were located in such stylized West Side Story territory.
“North and South” is parody to “This Is England” ’s authenticity. Strummer sings, against a slow, would-be poignant backdrop, of an impending riot whose instigators have the objective not of destruction for its own sake, but a better life. In this, they are aided by the power of youth. Ahem. What saves this from sheer contemptibility is the same thing that provides the saving grace on much of the rest of the album: Strummer’s sincerity and compassion. When the melody lilts and Joe talks of a woman and a man trying to feed their child “without a coin in their hand,” we, against all our better instincts, feel our heartstrings given a wrench.
There may be a good song in “Life is Wild,” but it’s well hidden behind those ever-present rent-a-moron massed vocals and a crowded, exhausting mix in which—bizarrely—samples of previous tracks seem to be floating. It provides an approximately confused finale to a chaotic album.
The only genuine recorded legacy of the five-piece Clash is the songs “Do It Now” (the B-side of “This Is England”) and “Sex Mad Roar” (the additional track on the 12-inch version of “This Is England”).
Courtesy of overwhelming massed vocals from the get-go and its anthemic celebration of the underdog, “Do It Now” doesn’t sound different from much of Cut the Crap.
“Sex Mad Roar” is a prime example of the way that the studio versions of the Jones-less Clash songs sometimes had arrangements, lyrics, or titles often almost unrecognizable to people who had seen the band live. “Sex Mad Roar” is one of the few feminist Clash songs but, like “Death Is a Star,” possesses that status not because of its content but via public pronouncement, in this case statements made by Strummer from the stage (e.g., “This is dedicated to all the victims of the sex mad war, either woman or woman or woman!”—San Francisco, January 21, 1984). The song that had been known in concert as “Sex Mad War” appears not just to have had its title changed but to have been diluted. The lyric preserved for posterity by its commercial release has none of the anti-porn content claimed for it in live reviews. It’s also somewhat hard to decipher, but what can be gleaned from the track sounds, if anything, like a lament about horniness, a fairly standard, ideologically neutral rock motif. The brisk and clean music is actually quite decent, if still burdened by those massed vocals.