chapter nine
knife of sheffield steel
Strummer, Sheppard, White, and Simonon scale the speaker stack, Roskilde Festival, June 29, 1985. (Photos by Per-Åke Wärn.)
Bernie needed something earth-moving, ground-shaking, monumentally amazing. And so, what the world has been given is Bernie’s idea of a monumentally earth-shaking, amazingly modern genius record.
—Nick Sheppard
The massacre now is over / and the order new enshrined . . .
—Old English folk ballad, c. 1986
The five members of The Clash stood closely together, singing Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop.” With guitar, bass, and drums silenced, the voices surged and swelled on their own, brassy and determined. Onlookers joined in, howling out the lyrics.
The spare words contained a compelling message. Brought to a global audience by the film The Harder They Come, the song told of karmic justice. As author “Toots” Hibbert explained, “It’s a song about revenge, but in the form of karma: if you do bad things to innocent people, then bad things will happen to you. The title was a phrase I used to say. If someone done me wrong, rather than fight them like a warrior, I’d say: ‘The pressure’s going to drop on you.’”
The Clash had often sung the roots-reggae classic like this on the busking tour. The five voices intertwined with each other and the audience’s, the melody ringing out clear and strong. The sound was stirring, and suggested unbreakable solidarity.
The scene evoked their audacious sojourn across northern Britain, immersed in their audience, living off what they earned each day. But now the band was not scuffling on concrete, playing for spare change. The Clash was onstage at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, before more than fifty thousand fans, most of them essentially invisible to the musicians standing on a distant stage.
It was June 29, 1985, nearly six weeks since the band had last played, without amps and microphones above Vic’s Café in Glasgow. The shift of venue can only have been jarring. Yet The Clash did not show it onstage. Most likely they were just glad to be playing again for a live audience, however far removed.
Beyond the several-dozen busking gigs bashed out over barely more than two weeks, this was only the seventh show The Clash had done in almost thirteen months. This was an astonishingly languid pace for rebel rockers who had promised to outwork metal bands and banish lightweight pop as 1984 dawned.
The group had returned from its triumphant, energized trek through the north only to find itself falling into the rabbit hole of the new album once again. The lyrics of “Pressure Drop” took on another relevance—for the weight had descended squarely on the weary, heartsick Joe Strummer.
Certain pretenses were falling away. Vince White was working late one night on final bits for some of the songs at Strummer’s house when the singer began rolling and smoking one joint after another. White was already aware that Strummer had fallen off the wagon, and didn’t make a big deal of it, even joining in, though pot was not his preferred vice.
According to White, an abashed Strummer still sought to explain this deviation from his public pronouncements, saying, “I’m under so much pressure.” When the guitarist reassured him, “Don’t worry about it, it’s only rock and roll,” Strummer went on: “I know what you think about spliff, but I was under so much stress, like Bernie and that . . . A friend was round, it was there . . . and I just smoked it, you know? I felt so much release, and it all—the pressure, Bernie, the band, everything—just DISAPPEARED!”
If this seemed facile self-justification, the weight was real—and working on the album only made it heavier. The laborious process, with each move dictated by Rhodes, killed virtually every bit of joy the singer found in the creative process.
Even the good bits carried a double edge. Whereas busking had reawakened his love for the simple, organic interplay of humans and instruments, the new record being born was anything but. Yet Strummer saw Rhodes as somehow essential to The Clash, and to himself as a person. How could the singer shatter this bond to preserve the one with the band, to remain true to himself as an artist?
While Simonon remained vaguely neutral and curiously disengaged, the position of White, Howard, and Sheppard was clear—the band’s biggest single obstacle was one of its main creators. If Strummer knew they were right, he couldn’t seem to find the strength to face down the manager. How could he, when Rhodes was a Clash cofounder as well as a father figure?
There was no easy answer, and a spiritually depleted Strummer found it hard to muster the determination. His mother was clearly terminally ill, and the singer had recently learned he was to be a father for the second time. The conflicting pulls were immense, and Strummer had chosen the path of least resistance, drifting closer and closer to disaster.
After the busking tour, Strummer had finally attempted to confront Rhodes. But the resourceful manager turned it against his detractors. Sheppard: “As soon as we got back to London, the whole fucking power trip was back. We had this meeting in Holland Park—a fucking conference room in a hotel, for God’s sake!—it was weird, you know? We started off: ‘Joe has talked to Bernie about how we feel.’”
A breakthrough seemed imminent, but it was not to be. Sheppard: “Bernie just turned it around: ‘This man’s Joe Strummer, he’s a hero, he’s a god, he’s a voice of the people, how dare you . . . You’re all just scum. You’re this, and you’re that, you’re a coward, you’re middle class’—that type of stuff—and just built Joe up.”
Rhodes skillfully reframed the argument to portray the band as selfishly burdening an already overwhelmed singer. He got his hoped-for result: Strummer—and, apparently, Simonon—did not definitively stand with the others and Rhodes emerged firmly in control. Sheppard sighs at the recollection: “If you’re told ‘You’re brilliant’ enough, you believe it. And Joe was brilliant, he was the voice of a generation, and all that stuff Bernie said. But this move just got us straight back into his power play, basically. And Joe let him do it.”
Sheppard allows, “It was maybe the last time Bernie was able to do a number on Joe,” but the turning of the tables was deeply dispiriting to the band. A crucial opportunity to set a new course had been lost.
Strummer later offered a self-acquitting version of the events to Jon Savage: “When we came back to London after that busking tour, we felt we had something good going inside the group, but as soon as we came back and met Bernie and Kosmo in Holland Park . . . Bernie didn’t like that it was slipping out of his control, so somehow he put a stop to the good feeling that we had.” This is an odd way to describe the verbal abuse Rhodes unleashed on the dissenters on their return, a situation where Strummer had much power but chose not to use it.
Michael Fayne had been amazed by the busking tour, but harbored few illusions: “You’re out there hitchhiking, you’re depending on each other, on people you don’t know . . . You have faith that you’re gonna have a place to sleep, you’re gonna get enough money to be able to get to the next town somewhere, and so forth . . . and it was great, right? But then they finished, and you’ve gotta come back and face reality, the reality you’ve created in the first place.”
For Fayne, the issue was clear: “Joe never got rid of Bernard, so what did they think was gonna happen when they got back, you know? Bernie’s not gonna just disappear! They came back, and all of the incredible vibe of that tour dissipated—because Bernie’s back in control, essentially.”
Rhodes’s trump card was his grip on Strummer. Fayne: “Without making Joe sound weak, what happened is almost like Stockholm syndrome,” referring to the way hostages can develop sympathy for their jailers. “Joe had been captive for so long by this person, man, he actually believed he couldn’t take up shit with him. Bernie can get in your head. I’ve seen Bernie make grown men cry—this guy is fierce, man! I mean, I’ve never met anybody like him, you know?”
Rhodes’s ace in the hole was not simply personal—it was contractual. Having already been ejected once from the band, he had sought to be protected this time around. Strummer was now bound to Rhodes by law. There could be no easy exit from this not-so-congenial embrace.
* * *
For their part, the miners had fought the law but had not won. As a result, they were now at the mercy of Thatcher’s National Coal Board. As Jonathan and Ruth Winterton reported, “Within one month of the end of the strike, the NCB had announced twelve pit closures . . . Two months after the strike ended, the first closures were announced in Yorkshire”—the starting point and heart of the strike. “Over a few months, fourteen [more] units were to be closed, with manpower reduced at other sites.”
The NUM could do little to stop this savage downsizing. Its smaller sister union of safety inspectors, NACODS, fought a few rearguard actions to ensure that the closures went through the proper review procedure. As Thatcher had intended, however, they could only slow the bleeding, not stop it. One of the pits slated for closure was Cortonwood, where the strike had begun.
While the miners were at work again—at least till their pits closed and they were let go—the divisions remained. Even as they worked side by side, strikers shunned those they still derided as “scabs,” refusing to even speak to them.
These fractures split the mining towns themselves. Even families were torn apart by choices made and promises broken. The vitality of these hamlets depended on the pits, for even those not employed there counted on the money miners would spend in the community. The closure of a mine could effectively doom the village itself. The residents knew this, so any betrayal during the life-or-death strike was hard to forgive. Years would pass but many wounds remained unhealed.
The divisions in The Clash were nearly as bitter. Rhodes’s brutal reassertion of authority, added to Strummer’s abdication, was a hammerblow to Sheppard, White, and Howard. They were now totally at the manager-cum-producer’s mercy.
While recording had relocated to London studios, the mind games continued. White recalls working for days with Strummer to get guitar fills that both loved—only to have Rhodes summarily dismiss the lot. A disgusted White laments, “Joe made a half-arsed attempt to stand some ground. But it wasn’t nearly enough.”
White went back to the fretboard, working for “three days and nights” on tight, rehearsed guitar parts. Once again, Rhodes berated him, and at one point brusquely ordered him to play three impromptu notes very slowly. When it wasn’t quite right, White was made to do it again and again. After four hours and dozens of takes, a still-unhappy Rhodes summarily dismissed the demoralized guitarist.
White was not the mercurial manager’s only victim. Fayne remembers, “There was one particular day where Bernie came into the studio. I was blazing it, just listening to the guys. The door swung open, and he ran into the room, picked up a mic stand, and started to smash the drum kit up, while Pete was sitting there . . . Oh, it was wild, man! Pete just jumped up and tore off, and Bernard walked out.”
As usual, there was a point. Fayne: “Bernie didn’t want any connection with the past, you know? He wanted to take this forward, to control it, to mastermind the whole thing, and what they were doing was a bit too reminiscent of what it was.”
This had its value, but to Fayne, the madness overwhelmed the method. “If he’d had a pair of ears, in two seconds Bernie would have gone, ‘Oh, man, that’s wicked, man! Carry on.’ But he didn’t. He was tone deaf, he didn’t know a tune if it slapped him in the face.” The cumulative damage was serious; Howard, for one, had come to loathe Rhodes and regret being in The Clash at all.
Then worrisome mixes of the new record began to circulate. White recalls being horrified to hear “The Dictator” with “weird synthesizer sprayed all over it . . . out of tune.” When he pleaded with Strummer, calling it a “bloody ridiculous mess,” the singer responded, “It’s brilliant, it’s wild!” White: “Joe brushed me off . . . [He] was locked into his own world.”
One late addition to the record at least provided some fun. Several dozen of the Clash family and friends were invited into a studio to do backing vocals for the songs. The massed voices conveyed the sense of something immense and communal. Sheppard: “I think they were added to make that connection of when that massive crowd sings ‘We are The Clash,’ the idea is that The Clash belongs to the audience, you know—the audience are as much the band as the band is.”
The backing vocals evoked the titanic sing-alongs of the busking tour. Sheppard: “It was done after the tour, but I don’t know if Joe had come up with the idea as a result of the busking. I have a feeling it was more to do with Bernie, to be honest, and as I’ve said before, you know, Bernie did have some great ideas.” In any case, the guitarist remembers that night fondly, unlike most of the recording.
White had found a new rehearsal space and, with Sheppard, Howard, and sometimes Simonon, poured frustrations into relentless practicing. Sheppard: “Basically, me, Vince, and Pete found a fuckin’ horrible rehearsal room in Finsbury Park and did nine- or ten-hour days for two, three months. We went there every day, and we played the set, and we turned into a different band, as a result of the busking tour, and as a result of all that training.”
Asked how they could push on so intently given the circumstances, Sheppard demurs: “We had nothing else to do, really.” Yet their dedication to The Clash, however battered, was also real. Ironically, with recording finally done and Rhodes distracted by mixing the album, some creative space developed. Sheppard: “We had no supervision from Bernie at all. Paradoxically, that gave me a lot of self-confidence. The three of us certainly got very, very tight.”
The grind proved productive as the trio gelled more and more as a unit—and finally got a chance to show it when three European festival shows were announced, starting in late June with Roskilde in Denmark. Sheppard was glad for the respite from the endless rehearsals but had few illusions about the motivation for these performances: “These were moneymaking gigs, big festival shows.” Even so, the band came to them with something to prove.
The six agonizing weeks since the return from busking also seemed to be belatedly solidifying something for Strummer. Sheppard: “We were on the bus on the way to Roskilde, Bernie was ranting as usual. But this time I saw Joe give him a look of pure hate and disgust . . . Later I realized that Joe had stopped believing in him.” Soon it became clear that the showdown meeting had slowed the disintegration of Strummer’s relationship with Rhodes, but not reversed it.
This was hardly the best time for internal combustion, however. Roskilde was the band’s biggest show since the US Festival. While The Clash were one of the headliners, the context was now quite different than 1983. While other bands had scaled the top of the charts, The Clash had gone more than three years without a new record, much less a new hit—an eternity in the fickle world of pop music.
The band’s star was in danger of fading. Nonetheless, the musicians remained ambivalent about playing the game on anyone’s terms but their own. The pressure from CBS was growing, adding to the internal tensions, friction that burst into the open at a shambolic preshow Roskilde press conference.
Although often viewed as Rhodes’s cat’s paw, in a way Kosmo Vinyl was as much his captive as Strummer was, and nearly as weary. While The Clash was immensely important to him, he was worn down by the constant struggle. In principle, the exhausted consigliere was on the way out, but he just couldn’t seem to find the will to finally make the break. Years later, Vinyl was loathe to discuss what happened that day at Roskilde. Even so, it is clear that he had been wound up tight by Rhodes beforehand and dispatched on a mission of confrontation.
The acrimonious press conference came off like a page torn out of a farcical US Festival playbook. Vinyl regularly interrupted the proceedings, sparring with the assembled journalists as well as Strummer, seeming to supersede him as the band’s voice. Even the normally reserved Simonon joined the conflict. Asked if punk was dead, the bassist snapped, “It stands right in front of your eyes!”
The local newspaper, Göteborgs-Posten, blasted the band over the contentious exchanges, opining, “The Clash is obviously a band in big trouble.” Sheppard recalls, “We didn’t take part in any question-and-answer scenario. We were there for a bit, and it was chaotic.” He and the others soon left.
Adding to the bad vibes, Strummer griped about the festival for being allegedly money hungry. It seemed an odd critique, given that the band was being well compensated for playing. It was also arguably misinformed, for the festival retained some of its original hippie idealism, donating much money each year to various charities. Strummer was likely unsure about the wisdom of playing at all, given his skepticism about the stadium-rock world—but of that he said nothing.
The rancor foreshadowed what would be a consequential, if hardly smooth performance. Both an audiotape and a video recorded by fans document the show. The latter conveys palpable excitement in the crowd, bopping restlessly to reggae before the band’s set, with homemade Clash banners waving, all eyes focused on the empty stage.
Ironically, The Clash found itself amid another strike, although of a far less essential commodity than coal: Carlsberg & Tuborg, the leading Danish beer brewer, was facing a lengthy and determined work stoppage. This made for a significantly more “dry” festival than usual, a situation Vinyl wryly noted. Rebounding from his odd performance at the press conference, the punk raconteur provided a spirited, good-humored introduction for the band.
As Vinyl bounded off the stage, Howard set down a terse, relentless rhythm. Recognizing the introduction of “Complete Control,” the audience began to spontaneously sing the “whoaooah whoaooah” backing vocals. As they did, White and Sheppard hit the song’s clarion chords, simultaneously becoming illuminated by spotlights. Mostly hidden in shadows, Strummer began to sing as the tune gathered momentum, the focus still on the guitar duo.
When the song exploded into full force, the singer leaped onto a walkway that extended into the crowd, his white denim fatigues shining in the intense lights. While Strummer sported his usual Mohawk Revenge T-shirt, he had not worn that hairstyle for some months. Vinyl, however, had recently trimmed White’s coif into the war cut, maintaining the band’s Mohican quotient.
Strummer urged the crowd on, shouting out off mic, dancing at the edge of the walkway, his leg pumping. Simonon, Sheppard, and White bounded around the stage behind him, with the rock-steady Howard anchoring it all.
When “Complete Control” crashed to its end, the frontman greeted the crowd, announcing, “London calling to the faraway towns!” as the band launched into the next song. Strummer’s desperate ranting of the US Festival was nowhere to be seen, replaced by a palpable desire to engage the distant audience as an ally.
Although White and Sheppard had now been part of The Clash for nearly two years—and Howard even longer—Strummer still introduced them as “the new boys.” Years later, Sheppard laughed good-naturedly about this, but was quick to emphasize, “By then we completely owned the material, be it old or new.”
Such confidence showed in the performance. The band segued smoothly from “London Calling” into energetic versions of “Janie Jones” and “Safe European Home”—the latter’s catchy two-note guitar opening reappearing for the first time since 1978—then into a newly dusted-off “Hate & War” with Sheppard on vocals.
The impact of the busking tour was noticeable, with the interplay of the four members out front authentic and unforced. Strummer leaned easily on Sheppard’s shoulder as the guitarist kicked out the opening chords to “Garageland” and all four regularly clustered near the mic on the walkway, rubbing elbows as if out on the streets playing for spare change.
When a spooky “Armagideon Time” slowed the tempo, the band appeared relaxed, in command of the gigantic stage. Simonon even set down his bass for a turn at break dancing at the beginning of “Magnificent Seven.” Strummer, in turn, led Simonon, Sheppard, and White out onto a massive speaker stack for the song’s climax, the three guitarists sitting and playing, with Strummer on his feet singing.
After the musicians climbed down from their perch, they launched into “Rock the Casbah,” an animated Strummer prowling the stage with the mic stand on his shoulder. As the guitars crashed into one another, the singer climbed onto the opposite speaker stack, jumping down to shout out the climatic “Allah!” at the end of the song, his arms opened to the heavens.
Strummer’s banter between songs was lighthearted. He checked to see how many folks understood English, and joked about the famously ugly English weather to kick off a revamped “Three Card Trick.” This was the first public evidence of the radical musical surgery involved in the new album; the song was now hitched to a jaunty ska chassis. While the changes were not necessarily improvements, the tune fit nicely into the groove the band had crafted.
As Clash shows went, this one seemed strikingly free and easy—possibly too much so for some tastes. In the shadows, Bernard Rhodes was seething, incensed that the show organizers were apparently ignoring a preshow directive not to film the band for rebroadcast. Determined to assert himself, he turned to Vinyl, dispatching his loyal lieutenant to the mic at the end of “Three Card Trick.”
The evening’s good vibes came to an abrupt end as Vinyl came running onstage, waving the band back and commandeering the microphone. As the confused musicians retreated, Vinyl gruffly announced, “Hallo, hallo! If you don’t stop filming the show up here, there will be no more show . . . There will be no more show while they continue filming—everybody stop!”
This was a jarring intrusion. Even if the promoters were breaching an agreement, this unnecessarily disruptive protest would inevitably stall the band’s momentum. But Rhodes was rarely one to use a scalpel when an ax was available.
As the unit regrouped, Strummer reached for a gentle way to restart the set, beginning an a cappella version of “Pressure Drop.” The singer motioned to his band to keep their instruments silent, while encouraging them and the audience to join in the chorus. After a few rounds, the band kicked in, launching the voices to the far reaches of the festival grounds.
Strummer poured it all out, jumping up and down, leg pumping, rousing the crowd. Then, as the song neared its end, Strummer again silenced the instruments and beckoned all—including Howard from behind the drum kit—to sing together at the front of the stage, creating a huge chorus with the crowd.
It was a powerful moment and an implicit rebuke to the acerbic manager. Sheppard: “That was our nod to the busking thing, when we did ‘Pressure Drop’ at Roskilde, and Pete jumped off the drums, and we all sang it, kind of, a cappella. It felt good, like we were together again.”
With connection between audience and band reestablished, Strummer stepped back for a blazing Sheppard-led version of “Police on My Back,” followed by Simonon taking the lead on “What’s My Name.” Bouncing back to the mic, Strummer asked for “some help to sing ‘Spanish Bombs’!” The band kicked off the song, seeming to have hit its stride again.
Suddenly, the stage went dark. The music grew quieter and slowly dwindled to silence midsong. Silhouettes of Strummer and Vinyl could be seen in urgent conversation. The crowd erupted in confused whistles, cheers, and chanting as shadows contended vigorously with one another onstage.
After a few minutes of dimly glimpsed chaos, the lights and PA came back on to reveal Vinyl midrant: “If they do not stop filming entirely, there will be no more Clash tonight. They say they have stopped but they haven’t. So if they do not stop, there will be no more Clash AT ALL!”
Amid boos, whistles, and cheers, Vinyl incited the crowd: “We come here to play for the people here at the festival, not a bunch of arseholes sitting at home on television. And all these people are trying to do is rip you off!” The raspy Cockney-toned agitator paused, then shouted, “Now, do you want the filming stopped?” As the crowd roared its assent, he asked, “Do you want The Clash?” When the affirmative tumult grew even louder, Vinyl beckoned the band back onstage, roaring, “Well, let’s hear it then: The Clash, THE CLASH—come on!”
Unlike Strummer’s US Festival exhortations, this seemed less like an attempt to impart a crucial message and more like a tantrum from a prima-donna band. The unit itself, of course, was the main victim of the interruption. Strummer was visibly peeved, as once again they had to fight desperately to regain lost momentum.
As the band hurried back on, Strummer barked, “Let’s go, let’s go!” Even while scrambling to their positions, White and Sheppard ignited a sledgehammer “Clash City Rockers.” The upbeat performance faced considerable inertia; one might have thought it made more sense to just pack it in for the night.
Instead, Strummer anchored himself at center stage, rallying the band to the attack. Often The Clash played its best in the most challenging of circumstances, and this night was no exception. With short, sharp commands, the singer urged the band through “London’s Burning,” “Clampdown,” “Bankrobber,” and into a moody “Broadway.” This sprint seemed about far more than simply pleasing the crowd; it held the sense of a band fighting for communion with its audience.
It was odd, then, when Strummer began “Broadway” singing to himself, turned away from the crowd, hand to his head. The singer channeled the song’s downtrodden protagonist as if tens of thousands were not there, just a “bum” giving testimony to a passerby on the street. “I’m telling you this mister / don’t be put off by looks / I been in the ring / and I took those right hooks,” Strummer sang, his head jerking back, miming the jarring blow. “And I’ve worked for breakfast / and I ain’t had no lunch / I been on delivery / and received every punch . . .”
As the music rose and the song’s hobo came out of his shell, so did Strummer. Turning to face the crowd, the frontman roared out the words. While White and Simonon joined him up front and Sheppard stomped in the back, Strummer turned one of Sandinista!’s lesser numbers into an urgent soul exorcism.
Even as the song’s last jazzy sigh dissipated and Strummer allowed himself a satisfied “Yeah . . .” White peeled off the brittle, relentless opening notes of “Brand New Cadillac” and the band was off again, rampaging through the rest of the set: “I’m So Bored with the USA,” “Tommy Gun,” and “I Fought the Law.”
Feedback screamed, and Strummer pointed to Howard, calling out the final salvo, a blistering “White Riot.” Sheppard, White, and Simonon careened around Strummer, driving the song to a thunderous climax. The band bounded offstage briefly, and then charged back for a rough-hewn reprise of “Garageland.”
This repeat was unprecedented, suggesting Strummer had a point or two to underline. The song was a vow of continued commitment to the band’s roots, surely relevant given the size of the venue. However, as Sheppard notes, it also could be seen as “a coded reference to the backstage issues” with Rhodes, who held Strummer in thrall with one of the “contracts” that the song references.
One of the few details that Vinyl remembers from that night is “how angry Joe was at me and Bernard” for interrupting the show. The disruptions of the band’s performance echoed the way Rhodes had thrust himself into the album, to the dismay of the actual musicians and, often, to the detriment of the music.
For Sheppard, the band’s solidarity in the face of obstacles was heartening: “Looking back, I felt a sense of release. The worse the backstage machinations got, the better the gigs, both musically and emotionally, so I was really happy at Roskilde.” White also recalls feeling good about the show—at least until one fan told him backstage how much better Mick Jones was than him.
It had been a gripping, determined performance. While Rolling Stone would later headline a short clip of the show as “The Clash End on a Low Note,” it might have been the last great Clash show, against all odds—including the impediments thrown in the band’s path by its own management.
Yet there were some other notable critiques. The Göteborgs-Posten’s July 1 review commented on the set’s lack of new material: “This year’s Clash are just a pathetic echo of the past.” Per-Åke Wärn, a Swedish photographer who had been impressed by earlier neo-Clash shows seconded this: “I felt like I was watching a Clash cover band.”
This take held some truth. Festival shows tended to be what White derisively described as “playing the greatest hits.” The absence of new songs was striking, especially since the long-awaited record was supposed to emerge soon.
Sheppard had his suspicions: “There’s probably some kind of conversation somewhere between Joe and Bernie as to how we’re gonna represent these songs eventually. How do you recreate this [new] record with real people? There isn’t a drummer on it, so how do you go out and play those songs?”
Strummer was in charge of the set list, so the paucity of newer material might have also suggested growing discomfort with the direction taken in the studio, combined with disenchantment toward Rhodes. It also hinted at doubts about the worth of the new songs—and, by extension, the power of the neo-Clash.
White—hardly in the best shape himself, facing excruciating stomach pain from stress and excessive alcohol intake—would later write about a conversation with Strummer not long before the Roskilde show where the singer admitted to his deep depression. White responded to him with typical flippancy: “Have a fucking beer, man. That will cheer you up.”
White remembers Strummer reacting with stark self-awareness: “A beer? You think it is that easy? That simple? There’s no way I can’t do that. One beer leads to two. Then three and another and another. I will end up drinking ten. Or twenty. Or fifty. It won’t stop.” Although White says that Rhodes was present and was able to help Strummer lift his spirits, the broader challenge of what was likely a combination of clinical depression and alcoholism was simply pushed aside.
* * *
While Strummer wrestled with intensely difficult issues, including how—or whether—to press forward with the new Clash, the Reagan administration revealed no qualms about its course in Central America. Effectively barred from arming the contra rebels—who Reagan called “freedom fighters” in the mold of George Washington, despite their bloody deeds and scant popular support—the government was making the rounds to allies to drum up financing, with very mixed results.
As The Clash had prepared for its return to action at Roskilde, the CIA had helped draw the feuding contra factions into a single entity, now known as the United Nicaraguan Opposition. On paper, this made for a more effective and supportable entity; in reality, little had changed. The contras remained better at sowing terror and killing civilians than defeating Reagan’s Sandinista nemesis.
With Congress blocking its way, and facing battlefield reverses, the Reagan administration decided to make a play straight out of a spy novel: it would sell arms to Iran through the shadowy brokers Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar, in order to free the hostages held by Iranian ally Hezbollah. Most incredibly, White House aide Colonel Oliver North was to direct the middlemen to channel the Iranian payments to the contras, neatly dodging the congressional ban.
The timing was exquisite. According to the New York Times, on July 1 President Reagan publicly denounced bartering with terrorists; yet only two days later, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane met with David Kimche, who was in the US on behalf of the Israelis who had met with Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar. In this meeting, the arms-for-hostages deal was first outlined.
On July 16, McFarlane met with Reagan and came away empowered to go forward with the Iranians and Israelis. Selling arms to an enemy in order to ransom hostages held by terrorists, then using the profits to evade US laws forbidding military aid to the contras, was audacious. It was also most likely illegal and surely politically explosive. Richard Nixon had faced impeachment for less.
Three days before Reagan chose to wager his regime on this desperate ploy, The Clash played the Rockscene festival in Guehenno, in a remote region of France. For Sheppard and the others, Rockscene came off as an impersonal event: “We literally flew in, did the gig, and flew out.” It was a bit odd for them to be there, for, as Rolling Stone reported, on that day—July 13, 1985—“seemingly every major rock act on earth played the Live Aid concert for African famine relief, hosted primarily in Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium and London’s Wembley Stadium and broadcast to over a billion people worldwide.”
Even if slightly diminished by the lack of a recent hit, The Clash was a glaring omission from the Live Aid bill. When a disappointed White inquired why the band wasn’t playing, Vinyl explained that bad blood existed between Strummer and show organizer, Bob Geldof, formerly of the Irish punk-pop act Boomtown Rats.
Neither this explanation nor the reappearance of the Sex Style Subversion banner as the backdrop at the show pleased White, much less Howard or Sheppard. Yet the band played well, with Strummer once again refraining from confrontation, despite his aversion for the stadium setting.
The only barb came from Vinyl, who marred an otherwise rousing introduction with a slap at the festival’s name—“I’m sure the promoter would like me to address you as ‘Rockscene,’ but I can’t think of a name that is more fucking patronizing in the world!”—before calling out once again to “hip-hoppers, punk rockers, young ladies, pill poppers, black toppers, and showstoppers!”
White was upset not to be playing Live Aid, and was left cold by the audience and vibe that day. Sheppard remembers the show more favorably, feeling that the band presented itself powerfully, albeit with a “greatest hits” set that once again contained only a single new song, “Three Card Trick.”
But if all seemed copasetic onstage, behind the scenes division was deepening. Strummer took White aside before the show to say he was splitting with Rhodes who—ironically enough—had stayed back home to watch Live Aid. By now, White never knew what to believe when Strummer spoke. Nonetheless, he came away sensing that the end of The Clash—or another new beginning—might be near.
Bedeviled by Rhodes’s never-ending windups, and Strummer’s erratic behavior, White turned to Simonon with his worries about the band’s fate. According to White, the bassist was the picture of equanimity: “Ever since this band began it’s been on the cards. There hasn’t been a single day when it might not end at any moment . . . even in the beginning. I don’t worry about it. I just take each day as it comes.”
When White asked if Simonon was annoyed to not be included on the new album, he shrugged and replied, “Bernie knows what’s best. He is . . . difficult, but it’s for the best.” Eventually, Simonon would question the wisdom of his faith in the manager. For now, White knew he, Sheppard, and Howard were on their own.
Two weeks later, the band was at yet another festival, this one set up by the then-Socialist government of Greece in a partnership with the French Ministry of Culture. No tapes of the show survived, and once again The Clash, alone among all the bands on the bill, refused to allow filming.
Both Sheppard and White remember it as a barnburner. White: “It was a blinding show. At the final count I realized I played my best. And we as the band had reached our best.” Nursing his tender stomach, White also played the show entirely sober for the first time and found it surprisingly satisfying.
Sheppard felt the same, viewing the night as one of the best realized of the more than 120 concerts the new Clash had played: “Athens and the few other shows we did after the busking tour made the group musically. There was another corner that we turned there, in terms of a dynamic.” It didn’t hurt that there were 40,000-plus fans on hand, as frenzied and fanatical as the Italians had been the previous fall.
To Sheppard and White, horizons still seemed to beckon for the band.
If the guitarists were cautiously bullish about the future, the singer was harder to read. In public, Strummer gave no indication of doing anything but staying the neo-Clash course. An interview for Greek television in advance of the Athens show underlined this stance. The film crew interviewed an animated Strummer in a Straight to Hell T-shirt with fifties-style rolled-up sleeves, hair slicked back, and dog tags glinting in the sun on a busy London street.
In the clip, Strummer shared hopes for the future: “We have a new record that is going to be released sometime in September . . . and we just wanted it to be up—‘up,’ as in not ‘downer’ music. We are sick and tired of people complaining and not coming up with any answers.” This echoed his past ambivalence about “protest” music, much of which seemed uninspired “complaining” to him. Strummer: “I don’t think complaining music goes a long way to anything.”
Pumping clenched fists, then snapping his fingers, the singer went on: “We wanted to deal with reality, but we want it to be ‘up’ so when people hear the record they felt like they can get outside and deal with their lives, rather than . . .” Strummer fell silent, pointing to the ground with both hands—indicating people being depressed all the time, presumably—before sweeping his arms across the camera frame and declaring, “There’s too much heroin in London!”
Oddly, he did not reveal anything about the record’s radical musical shifts, simply responding to a question about differences from the old Clash by saying, “We’re a bit more rocking now,” before appearing to lampoon modern synth pop with an air pantomime of keyboard playing contrasted with guitar.
After dismissing love songs and describing his preferred lyrical subject matter as “reasons for living,” Strummer celebrated the fact that the current Greek government was Socialist and denounced Thatcher’s regime, calling it “the opposite of a Socialist government,” and proclaiming, “It doesn’t work.”
More specifically, the Tory approach didn’t work for everyone, as was suggested by the growing national divide. While granting that London’s economy was buzzing, Strummer urged the journalists to “travel up north and see what they’ve got there—they’re really crying for some kind of a life, that’s all they want, a life!”
The eye-opening experiences on the busking tour seemed palpable as Strummer pressed his point: “We tried a conservative government and it doesn’t work. I’ll tell you one thing for sure: next election here in this land, they are going out!”
This Strummer seemed as passionate as in early 1984, covering much the same ground. Dismissing definitions of punk that saw it as “a special hairstyle or a brand new leather jacket or a certain kind of studs,” Strummer argued, “Punk was an attitude that just said: ‘We don’t believe you.’ We were being told we didn’t have a right to exist because we were too unemployable, there was no future for us—and punk had the guts to step up and say, ‘I don’t believe you! I have the right, I have been born the same as you and I have the right to exist!’”
The singer was smiling but emphatic, first clenching his fist, then pointing straight into the camera to declare, “That is punk and that is why we will go forward!”
It was a gripping performance, albeit with a few worrisome elements. Strummer seemed slightly manic. He also seemed a bit off center, ending the chat by sweeping up the female interviewer for an impromptu jig, laughing as the camera rolled. Even so, the overall impression was of a singer still up for the fight.
With such a Strummer back at the helm, the promise of the new Clash seemed redeemable. Despite all the internal chaos, at least Sheppard and White hoped the band still might be coming together, not falling apart.
Much depended on the new record. Fan anticipation was high, the album was soon to be out, and European dates had been set for October, with tour plans for the Far East and beyond in the new year. Although Howard remained dubious, Sheppard and White dared hope that Strummer would finally split with Rhodes and definitively side with them, and all would be well.
This scenario was possible, perhaps even plausible. Sheppard, White, and Howard continued to put their backs into rehearsals as if it were reality. And yet Strummer didn’t always share his true feelings with them. A radically different course of action was beckoning the beleaguered singer.
At the Rockscene festival, Strummer had attacked Reagan from stage for allegedly continuing to push the world toward Armageddon. However, after months of go-nowhere arms control talks, something was starting to shift.
On July 3, the Soviet Union announced that Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were going to meet—the first summit in eight years, since before superpower relations froze over with the invasion of Afghanistan and Reagan’s election. Given how close the world had come to nuclear holocaust in late 1983, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” as Winston Churchill had once said.
Gorbachev’s arrival, combined with Reagan’s post-1983 conversion, would open a hopeful new era. Initially, Gorbachev viewed the elderly president as “not simply a conservative but a political dinosaur.” Reagan was similarly skeptical, despite Thatcher’s advice—refusing to give up his “Star Wars” missile defense plan, for example—but the personal relationship that developed helped to thaw the ice.
Reagan deserves praise for facing down right-wing attacks for supposedly becoming “soft” on the USSR. Still, as American foreign policy analyst Strobe Talbott argues, it was Gorbachev who “changed the dynamic” and took the real risks: “Gorbachev was determined to take the Soviet Union in a radically different direction—away from the Big Lie (through glasnost), away from a command economy (through perestroika), and away from zero-sum competition with the West. Reagan came to recognize that Gorbachev’s goals, far from being traditional, were downright revolutionary.”
Had Strummer been aware of these shifts, it might have been a ray of hope penetrating the thick clouds shrouding his mood. This darkness gave birth to a new realization that came—definitively, dramatically—after hearing the near-final mixes of the new record, the fruit of Rhodes’s own revolutionary vision.
Whatever the quality of Rhodes’s contributions to the new album, no one should doubt the depth of his commitment. In the months after the return from Munich it became an all-consuming passion. “Bernard would have never let us take the time in the studio that he took mixing the album!” Vinyl laughs.
Even someone as traumatized by the tortuous process as Sheppard would later admit, “Bernie’s basic vision, mixing punk and electronic music to update the Clash sound, in itself, had something to it.” By now, the results of this experiment were becoming clearer. “This Is England” had been chosen as the first single, to be issued before the album itself. Rhodes mixed and remixed it endlessly, knowing the song would set the stage for the broader press and fan reception.
This was one of the songs the trio felt best about. “The drum machine was based off something Pete had worked out, together with a hip-hop track,” Sheppard recalls. “I took a bit from an old soul song, ‘Clean Up Woman’ by Betty Wright, and kind of turned it backward for the riff.” The result was comparable to what had been done earlier with “In the Pouring Rain.”
The breakthrough was presaged by adjustments already made over months of live performance. The studio version took the advances, realized them more fully, added new dynamite, and blasted the song into the stratosphere. While Sheppard was irked that his spaghetti western bits were scrubbed by Rhodes in favor of what he called “ever more snub-nosed punk guitar,” in this case at least, the nonmusician’s instincts seem on target. The sound was multilayered, but still somehow lean, relentless, hungry, and mean—much like the triumphant Thatcher regime, circa 1985.
The words, of course, bitterly recounted how it felt on the other side, the losing end. Strummer’s partly revamped lyrics vividly evoked cutthroat economic policies, racist violence, police brutality, the Falklands, tabloid sleaze, and social desperation, all leading up to a heart-crushing climax: “Who dares to protest / enough to react like a flame? / Out came the batons / and the British warn themselves / This is England . . .” The song sketched a claustrophobic world that afforded no room for dignity, levity, or redemption—it was the sound of brutal defeat, like “a boot stamping on a human face, forever,” in the words of Orwell’s 1984.
Although the edited 45 rpm version omitted the climatic verse, even this truncated take was an astonishing achievement, going a long way to justify Rhodes’s brusque artistic interventions. Utilizing mournful synthesizer swells, sampled voices, and grim yet engaging drum machine beats, all strapped to a pile-driver riff, the song was a wrenching requiem for the post–World War II English dream Thatcher had now so thoroughly vanquished.
Some of the other songs also turned out well. “Dirty Punk” captured the power glimpsed in its live version, driven by a raw guitar assault, convincingly presenting Strummer’s neo-punk credo in word and sound. CBS even considered releasing it as a single; Sheppard later argued it could have been a hit, and he had a point.
“Are You Ready for War?”—inexplicably renamed “Are You Red..y?”—was sped up, with keyboards, drum machine, and guitar bursts replacing the original’s tight punk-funk grooves. Sheppard hated this revision which, among other things, lost his “DJ scratch” guitar bits and the “sea shanty” swagger. Yet the revamp remained compelling in its own way.
“Dictator” was also profoundly revised; Rhodes’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink production approach was in full effect. Still, it was mildly improved, given that the original had been one of the less successful of the new tunes. White’s distaste for the wild synthesizer flourishes was understandable, and the Central American radio announcer jabbering in the background could also be off-putting. But while some later deemed it “unlistenable,” the resulting aural assault could also be riveting.
“Three Card Trick” and “North and South” were slightly diminished, but were still outstanding tracks. Like several other cuts, “Movers and Shakers” was hobbled by clunky electronic drums, but a catchy mariachi hook—perhaps echoing the lost Strummer/Vinyl demos—played well off the singer’s passionate words.
Other tracks were nearly crippled. “We Are The Clash” was more impressive as a demo two years before. The collective rallying cry so forcefully driven home in countless concerts was nowhere to be found. This polished version added new lyrics that lost the sweep and urgency of the original, muffled guitars that hummed along far too pleasantly, a disjointed multitracked solo, and rinky-dink electro-drums.
Even worse, the song now sounded derivative, its new opening evoking a tepid “Anarchy in the UK.” Elsewhere the massed backing vocals worked, but here they recalled second-string British punk band Sham 69. This was hardly the breakthrough Rhodes had sought, and surely not the paean to communal power Strummer had first envisioned.
Such missed chances abounded. “Life Is Wild” begged to be a raw punk rave-up, but was yoked to boppy synth-drums and keyboards. “Cool Under Heat” struggled to breathe, burdened by an oddly unbalanced mix and splotches of gratuituous synth dribblings. While the choruses were rousing, the verses dragged, trading its live soul swing for a clumsy shuffle.
Some songs were simply misbegotten. While “Fingerpoppin’” sounded decent, the lyrically slight song ranked as average new-wave disco. “Play to Win” had actually regressed from its unfinished demo; while the chorus remained, the verses were gone, replaced by cheesy sound effects and uninspired repartee between Strummer and Michael Fayne.
The engineer later fondly remembered the “live in the studio” interplay as perhaps the only spontaneous moment in the entire process. Nonetheless, like “Fingerpoppin’,” “Play to Win” should have been relegated to a B side, replaced by a neo-Clash gem like “In the Pouring Rain,” “Jericho,” or “Sex Mad Roar.”
The record was indeed unique, if also sometimes a bit of a car wreck. Rhodes’s ambition was energizing; success at realizing it more problematic. “Bernie needed something earth-moving, ground-shaking, monumentally amazing,” Sheppard sighs. “And so, what the world has been given is Bernie’s idea of a monumentally earth-shaking, amazingly modern, genius record.”
The guitarist quickly admits, “A lot of the ideas on the album are good ideas. They’re just not arranged musically.” Calling Rhodes’s approach “chucking shit against the wall, seeing if it sticks,” Sheppard contrasts this with the work of Mick Jones: “You could call Jones a genius, someone who can arrange brilliantly. And so, his arrangements of various samples are incredibly musical.”
This critique is poignant. Moreover, at the time, Sheppard, White, and Howard knew the record did not represent what was possible with the new material and musical prowess that the neo-Clash had amassed, had the band been allowed to engage the challenge itself with appropriate production support.
“The record is not at all representative of the people that were in the band,” Sheppard argues, while also granting this was not unprecedented: “You could probably level the same comment at most of Sandinista! and Combat Rock too, if you think of the other people that played there. For instance, the bass player that was on [the new record] is on ‘Magnificent Seven’ and most of Sandinista!”
Sheppard feels a critical difference lies in who was in charge: “It’s also about the creative control. On both of those records, Mick is pretty much in control of the creative process, at least until you get to the Glyn Johns mix of Combat Rock.”
Yet Jones, despite his artistry, had increasingly lost the plot. And Rhodes’s bold effort was not the “unmitigated disaster” some would later claim. Even Sheppard and Howard later agreed there was value in having a nonmusician involved. “That’s why punk worked, isn’t it?” grants the drummer.
Rhodes’s vision, however imperfectly executed, could be exciting. Strummer’s critique of past records as going in too many directions at once had also been taken to heart. In this sense, the record was arguably an advance on Combat Rock, more conceptually unified and politically direct, and nowhere near as self-indulgent as Sandinista!. Other than a couple of inexplicable choices, the songs were strong, something the production sometimes obscured, but could not destroy.
The new record was not the raw punk return-to-form that Strummer had promised and fans expected. And this was not all bad. Did The Clash exist simply to fulfill such expectations? Moreover, Strummer had agreed to this new direction, since trying to recapture a hallowed past might not be the noble course.
Regardless, Strummer was now horrified by the results. In a stunning reversal, he threatened to take action to stop the record from being released. An acrimonious divorce ensued, for Rhodes refused to waver and Strummer would not be mollified, choosing to let the house fall down rather than relent. Even though contracts existed compelling Strummer to promote the album, he simply walked away. Rhodes would have his album, but he would not have his lead singer.
Strummer later told Jon Savage, “I fell out with Bernie after we returned from Munich where we recorded the tracks—somewhere between that and when he began to mix it.” Savage: “So the LP’s release was something you had no control over?” Strummer: “Absolutely none.”
This account is a bit off, as various band members recall Strummer as hearing early mixes and—in White’s case—even defending them. The essence, however, seems true enough.
“Maybe the busking tour put Joe in a different reality,” Sheppard muses. “It put us all in a very, very different reality for a while there. ’Cause let’s face it, that’s what Joe is. He’s Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, a minstrel, a troubadour. Imagine going back—after doing the tour—and listening to that record. Joe Strummer is not a guy that you associate with drum machines and synthesizers.”
One might ask why the singer hadn’t seen this before. The erratic swings suggest he was worn down by years of struggle in The Clash, by personal grief, by the pressures of family, art, and addiction. So he put his trust in Rhodes, who was more than a manager, or even a mentor, almost a surrogate father. If that trust proved to be misplaced, Strummer’s blindness was a very human one.
This turn of events had enormous consequences for Strummer and the band. Sheppard: “Joe pretty much disappeared off the scene very quickly after the end of that relationship [with Rhodes]. I was at sessions where the record started to get finished in England, sessions that Joe had nothing to do with. He had disappeared, we didn’t know where he was—turns out, he was in Spain.”
In Granada, Jesús Arias found Strummer drinking heavily, shrouded in darkness: “He had nothing good to say about The Clash, about the new record . . . He didn’t want to talk about any of it.” The two went to find Federico García Lorca’s final resting place in the middle of one drunken night. “Let’s dig him up,” Arias recalls Strummer insisting. But the area was a spacious plain where perhaps hundreds of victims of Franco’s fascist forces were buried in a mass grave. Recognizing the futility of this quest, Strummer dissolved into tears.
Arias used their time together to revisit a past topic of conversation: Mick Jones. Arias: “Joe was very down about his personal situation—his father dead, his mother dying, Mick Jones gone . . . I told him. ‘Paul McCartney and John Lennon on their own, good—but together they were the Beatles! Mick Jagger and Keith Richards alone, okay, but together they are the Stones! You and Mick are the same . . .’ I said this over and over.”
Outwardly, the singer still resisted this notion, but inside something was shifting. Jones and Rhodes had cofounded The Clash more than anyone else; a soul-weary Strummer couldn’t imagine the band without at least one at his side. If Rhodes was out . . . then Jones was back in. How this could work legally, personally, or artistically was unclear, but he began to try to make it so.
In Strummer’s absence, band matters began to unravel swiftly, first resulting in blown tour dates. The Swedish daily Expressen reported in September, “The Clash has been forced to cancel their whole tour of Europe including three shows in Sweden. Only half of the band’s original members are part of today’s band—two years ago they sacked guitar player Mick Jones who has now teamed up with former drummer Topper Headon to claim equal right to the name Clash.”
According to Thomas Johansson of EMA Telstar, the promoter for the Swedish shows, “They’ve worked all weekend in England trying to solve the conflict, [but] if Strummer and his band go on tour under the name ‘Clash’ there’s risk of Jones and Headon being able to stop them from collecting the money from the gigs.”
This seemed odd, as the new Clash had already played Scandinavia numerous times, including at Roskilde less than three months before. However, Johansson said, “It’s not until now that the former members have put their threat of suing into action and contacted a lawyer.” Expressen reported that even the “This Is England” 45 and forthcoming album might be abandoned: “Currently the band’s label CBS don’t know if they will be able to release the records or not.”
The story was convincingly told, but it was not true. Sheppard later called it “a smoke screen” meant to cover for the fact that “there was no band to play the shows” because The Clash’s singer was nowhere to be found.
Strummer now believed he had made a catastrophic error, and was trying to make it right—but it was too late. The steel wheels were rolling, and the train couldn’t be turned around. On September 22, a single of “This Is England” appeared with “Do It Now” as the B side of the 45, and “Sex Mad Roar” added to the 12-inch.
Eddie King had parted ways with the band after a dispute with Strummer a few months before. Nonetheless, his striking images graced the single’s cover, put into final form by Julian Balme, who had been recruited by Vinyl to step into the breach.
Two Mohawked punks—one female, one male—were pictured in front of a revised Piccadilly Circus, bursting with Clash commentary: Mohawk Revenge, Cool Under Heat, Club Left, Discussion Disco, Sex Style Subversion. Mixed in were an advertisement promising “eternal sunshine,” as well as one for a strip club and a casino—with a skull and crossbones next to it—and a sign saying, PARTY PLANNED. Looming over all of this, as if in judgment, was a video-screen version of the Lady Justice statue from the London courthouse. Balme: “Eddie was really forward-looking, and his work has been terribly overlooked . . . The Clash was always visually aware, and, to my mind, Eddie’s graphics were brilliant, always breaking boundaries,” all while tipping his hat to punk’s past.
The visuals packed a punch, and the song hit even harder, with the hastily recorded but potent B sides worthy additions. As the first shot in a vinyl neo-Clash offensive, it startled those not expecting to hear synthesizer and drum machine contending with punk guitar. Nonetheless, it was well worth the lengthy wait, seeming to promise a similarly accomplished album soon to come.
CBS hoped that this brash electro-punk Molotov cocktail would find favor with the record-buying public. A promotional onesheet prepared at the time proclaimed, “In light of the band’s three-year absence from recording and performing, it is certainly no understatement to say that radio, retail, and most important of all—the legions of dedicated CLASH fans and fanatics who buy the records and concert tickets—are all literally dying for this record.”
“This Is England” sleeve, designed by Eddie King and Julian Balme.
This ignored the nearly six months of touring the band had done in 1984, as well as numerous shows in 1985. Still, it suggested CBS was ready to pull out all the stops. There would be yellow and orange versions of the cover art, an extensive advertising campaign, and selected dance remixes. A UK video of “This Is England” was to become available in time for the American release, with plans for additional videos. The onesheet concluded: “All these elements are coming together to herald the return of one of the premiere punk bands of the 1980s, and the release of one of our most important records for 1985.”
But as “This Is England” rose to #24 on the UK charts, warning signs were flashing. When Sheppard, Howard, and White went out with Vinyl to film footage for a video, neither Strummer nor Simonon appeared. No videos or live shows would ultimately materialize to support the single. It sank off the charts just before the new album, Cut the Crap, appeared a bit over a month later.
The name was apparently drawn from a snatch of dialogue in the dystopian film Road Warrior. While it was intended to bluntly communicate the new Clash’s initial mission—to vanquish both the weak-kneed pop music and the ugly right-wing politics of the moment—to the demoralized White, Howard, and Sheppard, it seemed as clumsy as some of the synth-and-drum-machine-saddled songs. They had no say in the choice, just as they had no control over the music.
Cut the Crap cover, designed by Eddie King and Julian Balme, with photo help from Mike Laye.
They were still needed, however, to flog the record with live performances, a mission made considerably more difficult by the fact that their singer was missing. White later recalled Rhodes as convening a band meeting to announce that Strummer had gone “mad . . . He’s lost touch with reality.” Yet the never-say-die agitator would not be deterred: “The Clash has always been an idea . . . Now, how to take that idea to the next level!”
“[Bernie] was saying, ‘We’ll find another singer and carry on—seriously!” White says with a shudder. “He certainly had that intention.” This seemed insane. The skeptical trio were still drawing their wages, however, so had little to lose from lingering around to watch the ensuing chaos. White, for one, still hoped their erstwhile leader would return, somehow, some way.
Any hope they had of Strummer riding to the rescue like the cavalry in his beloved western movies was soon dashed. The singer did eventually convene them to officially announce he had split from Rhodes, but informed them at the same time that he intended to try to reform the original band with Jones, even though this utterly betrayed the entire rationale for the past two years.
Their services were no longer needed, with a small severance payment offered as a consolation prize. The trio who had suddenly been made redundant might have been excused if they felt treated a little bit like trash. Sheppard recalls Howard as floating the possibility of rerecording the album without Rhodes, but Strummer’s reaction made it clear he had closed that chapter and moved on.
Strummer then asked that they not join in any effort by Rhodes to continue on, and all three agreed. It was short but hardly sweet, as Sheppard explains: “We had the meeting at his house, he said, ‘I’m not going to go on, and I’d ask you not to’—and that was it. ‘That’s the end, here’s a grand, sorry—see you later.’”
Shortly thereafter, Strummer was in hot pursuit of Jones to try to get him to rejoin The Clash. As Jones had gone to the Caribbean on vacation, a hilarious quest involving Strummer pedaling around an island on a borrowed bicycle ensued.
While Strummer succeeded in tracking down his former best friend and creative partner, Jones was unwilling to abandon Big Audio Dynamite. Not surprisingly, he enjoyed having complete artistic control, and the unit had its own album coming out soon. The spurned Strummer took a listen to the results of Jones’s efforts and swiftly dubbed it “the worst shit I ever heard.”
This reaction was to be expected, given the duo’s vast musical differences. What Strummer heard was a more artful, but far less political or guitar-driven version of the hybrid Rhodes was attempting. The encounter scarcely repaired the relationship between Strummer and Jones, and it suggested how misbegotten the whole reunion idea had been in the first place.
While this last-ditch idea was dying, another idea was in similar straits. First, Rhodes tried to convince Simonon to take over the vocal spot. When that predictably failed, he got Vinyl to arrange open auditions for a new singer. The whole business unfolded at the Electric Ballroom, where Sheppard, White, and countless other aspirants had strutted their stuff two years earlier, when the possibilities of a retooled Clash seemed limitless.
Sheppard joined in, not really intending to continue on but simply getting leads on possible personnel for a new band: “It was truly surreal—Bernie and Kosmo had somehow convinced themselves it could be done.” It could not, but Rhodes’s desperation was understandable. The album was about to launch, and it would be nearly impossible to promote it, as the band that made it could not perform. Like Strummer, Rhodes likely recognized the bitter taste in his mouth: defeat.
* * *
There were, of course, matters far weightier than the fate of a record or a band. While The Clash was in its death throes, so too was the Cortonwood colliery, the cradle of the miners’ strike. After the stoppage officially ended, the local union had kept the fight alive in its pit by refusing to collaborate in the mine’s closure.
The truth was unavoidable, however: if the union kept fighting the closure, it would lose sooner or later. If later, its members—already stretched beyond reasonable bounds by the suffering of the strike—would forfeit even the token severance payments that might mildly cushion their looming joblessness.
A Sheffield daily, the Star, later reported, “Early in October 1985 the Cortonwood men took a heartbreaking decision to abandon their fight to save their colliery. Faced with the prospect of depriving [those who retired voluntarily] of up to £30,000 each if they prolonged the closure battle, the Cortonwood NUM branch withdrew its objections.”
As a result, “miners’ leaders at the NUM’s Sheffield headquarters, the Yorkshire NUM’s Barnsley headquarters, and at Cortonwood were silent about the votes to give up the fight, which won with a three-to-one majority at the doomed pit.” Three hundred and twenty miners lost their jobs right away; another three hundred and seventy transferred to other mines, with unemployment delayed for some months, or at most a few years.
For these workers and tens of thousands of others like them in what was once the industrial heartland of Britain, a particularly resonant metaphor from “This Is England” might have come to mind: “this knife of Sheffield steel.”
Sheffield made the best steel in the world, so it had been said, when the future seemed bright. But that moment had passed, taking lives, dreams, communities with it. Once the toast of the industrial world, towns in Britain’s beleaguered north, like those in America’s Rust Belt, faced the bleakest of prospects. “The wrong side of a scissor blade” they surely were, and the knife was in Thatcher’s—and, across the sea, Reagan’s—hands.
Was this pruning “superfluous branches . . . that bearing boughs may live”—or something more akin to murder? To those tossed on the scrap heap, Sheffield steel now cut the flesh of those who created it, a working class that had defeated fascism, awed the world with its industrial accomplishments, and built the might of Great Britain, an island-nation that once ruled a vast global empire.
Workers created this wealth, but did not own it. After the crushing of the miners’ strike, fewer and fewer remained who felt it was worth asking why.
On October 25, 1985, the Cortonwood colliery closed for good. “The last cage-load of miners on a production shift came up at lunchtime, to be met by a posse of journalists,” the Star detailed. “Many miners, still bitter about defeat in the strike, refused to speak, but those who did made it clear they believed the fight had been worthwhile.”
* * *
Cut the Crap arrived in this heartless Britain that was striding boldly into the new, treading thoughtlessly on the old. Lacking all but the most basic promotion, it would rise to #16 in the UK charts, and #88 in the US, before falling away into an abyss, already cast off and disowned by most of its makers.
The album’s vast political ambition could nonetheless be glimpsed dimly via a “CLASH COMMUNIQUE OCTOBER ’85” on the inner sleeve. Dashed off by Rhodes, it was nestled next to the lyrics for three of the album’s twelve songs—the only ones Strummer had apparently left behind before his abrupt exit.
The grammatically eccentric blurb read: “Wise MEN and street kids together make a GREAT TEAM . . . but can the old system be BEAT?? no . . . not without YOUR participation . . . RADICAL social change begins on the STREET!! so if your looking for some ACTION . . . CUT THE CRAP and Get OUT There.”
Even more than the risky, erratically realized music, this earnest screed came off a bit awkward, even cartoonish. White predictably found it horrifying—“more soap-powder rebellion”—but even a sympathetic observer could see it lacked the nuance, depth, and humor Strummer had so often brought to The Clash’s radical politics. Much like the album itself, the broadside presented an inviting target.
Reviews in the UK music press were predictably merciless. Mat Snow wrote a withering NME critique, “No Way, Jose,” a sarcastic smack at “José Unidos,” the pseudonym chosen by Rhodes to suggest that Strummer had coproduced the record. Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting likened Cut the Crap to a shipbuilder trying his best to recapture old glories, only to see them “banged back together by a man holding the blueprint upside down.” Only Jack Barron in Sounds refused to join the hazing, bestowing 4.5 out of five stars on the album.
More measured responses could be found in the USA, with the self-appointed dean of American critics, Robert Christgau, awarding it a B+. Although that seems a fair assessment, a steady stream of invective and dismissal would rise, tarring the record—and the whole neo-Clash experiment—as a failure.
If this take was unfair and ahistorical, such were the times into which the record had been born: an “England grown cold” in the words of Jon Savage. This context mattered. It gave birth to the neo-Clash experiment and provided the effort with lasting relevance, no matter its ultimate defeat. Indeed, those last songs, even when never fully realized, had much to offer to the challenges of that moment, and of many moments yet to come.
In his definitive 1991 punk tome England’s Dreaming, Savage called Cut the Crap “an ambitious and moving state-of-the-nation address with innovative use of rap rhythms and atmosphere.” This hardly reflected the critical consensus about the deeply flawed yet important record, but was not far off the mark.
By then, praise mattered little, for the band once called The Clash had long ceased to exist, except in the hearts and minds of its fans.