introduction

drowned out by the sound

Unused Cut the Crap promo poster, late 1985. (Clash photo by Mike Laye; poster designer unknown.)

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile? Was it simply that these people were now buried under a pile of toddlers?

—Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours helping the camera to falsify reality . . . The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence.

—David King, The Commissar Vanishes

The air was sweat-soaked and electric. Five musicians could barely be glimpsed amid a mass of humanity. Three men flayed acoustic guitars, while a fourth pounded drumsticks against the metal and plastic of a chair.

The fifth—a flame-haired singer in a green T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves—exhorted the crowd from a slightly elevated perch. Dog tags jangled as he sang without a microphone, his head nearly touching the low ceiling of the cave-like space.

The vocalist provided a visual center to the happening, but his voice was lost in the din. The unamplified guitars were similarly submerged, with only the rhythm cutting through to the back of the small room.

Such technological shortcomings seemed to matter little. Hundreds of voices howled as one: “Breaking rocks in the hot sun / I fought the law / and the law won / I needed money ’cause I had none / I fought the law / and the law won.”

The song echoed poverty’s desperation, its doomed protagonist reduced to “robbing people with a six-gun.” If evoking a mythical American West, its theme also fit with the present locale: Sunderland, a port city in northeastern Britain.

Once Sunderland had been “the largest shipbuilding town in the world,” according to the BBC. Now, the ships were gone, factory gates padlocked and rusty, with the area also hemorrhaging mining and other industrial jobs. A battle waged over the past two years to forestall an even bleaker future had not ended in victory.

Yet if the lyrics were grim, the spirit in the Drum Club discotheque on this evening in May 1985 was anything but. Joy met defiance as crowd and band became one giant chorus, spitting in the eye of a cruel fate.

We may have lost, the voices seemed to say, but we are not defeated.

* * *

A British rock band called The Clash was the catalyst for that rousing Sunderland night. By the time the group performed this audacious impromptu concert, they had become the single most popular unit to rise out of the UK punk explosion, thanks to their 1982 breakthrough album Combat Rock, with its hit singles “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

Over the ensuing decades, The Clash’s stature has only grown, with commentators regularly placing them in a rock pantheon next to an earlier generation’s demigods such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This development—including their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—is not without irony, given the band’s populist, antistar stance. Nonetheless, as an Arabic version of the antifundamentalist “Casbah” by Algerian rocker Rachid Taha suggests, The Clash’s global cultural influence is vast and spreading, as befits a band that consciously strove to think in planetary terms.

In the fall of 2013—nearly thirty years after that Sunderland show—The Clash released Sound System, a massive box set. While the long-defunct unit had been the subject of several such compendiums, this one was clearly meant as the final will and definitive testament of one of the twentieth century’s most important rock groups.

Described by Rolling Stone magazine as collecting “all of its albums,” Sound System was a vast and weighty document. Designed to resemble that 1980s urban icon—the boom box cassette deck—the set also contained unreleased music and videos, a poster, a book, magazines, badges, stickers, even Clash dog tags. “I’m not even thinking about any more Clash releases. This is it for me, and I say that with an exclamation mark!” band cofounder Mick Jones told Rolling Stone at the time.

Yet, for all of Sound System’s vaunted completeness, there was a striking omission: the band’s sixth studio album, Cut the Crap. Although the record cracked the UK Top 20, with a similarly high-ranking single, “This Is England,” it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any mention that a final version of The Clash, without guitarist Jones and drummer Nicky “Topper” Headon, had played 120-plus shows, nearly 20 percent of the band’s total gigs.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise. The film Westway to the World and its companion tome The Clash—the other two volumes that, with Sound System, effectively comprise the authorized Clash canon—also omitted the same for all intents and purposes. None of the final two years of concerts—such as the Sunderland show—were included in the comprehensive list in the big pink coffee-table book, which credited “Strummer Jones Simonon Headon” as its authors.

It’s true that two of those four—Jones and Headon—were absent from Cut the Crap. Nonetheless, the record’s exclusion was extraordinary, only justifiable from a narrow perspective that has hardened over the years. This view not only dismisses the album but the band’s last version itself—popularly known as “The Clash Mark II”—as lead-footed punk pretenders unworthy of serious scrutiny.

According to one Clash biographer, Marcus Gray, The Clash Mark II was drilling out “heavy metal” versions of the unit’s classics, “reducing every tune to a primitive staccato stomp . . . with its original melody, subtlety, texture, and meaning hammered into the ground.” They are deemed “a Clash cover band” by another, author/filmmaker Danny Garcia. One wag even recorded a reworked version of their latter-day anthem “We Are The Clash” as “We Aren’t The Clash.”

A few brave souls have dissented from this chorus of dismissal, most notably writer Jon Savage, who described Cut the Crap as a “moving state of the nation address.” Savage even singles out “This Is England” as “the last great British punk song” in his magnum opus, England’s Dreaming. Such voices, however, have largely been drowned out by the sound of a naysaying echo chamber.

Over time, the ripple effects of this critical razzing have taken a toll. Ironically, Cut the Crap’s roundly panned “electro-punk” production is often held up as proof of the group’s lack of talent. Consider this Saturday Review summary: “Pathetic stabs at updating the sound with multiple layers of overdubs and synthesized drum machines only point out the limitations of the group’s playing abilities.” A damning take—yet, as it happens, the record was hardly created by The Clash Mark II as such, and didn’t fairly represent their skills or live sound.

Thirty-odd years after the album’s release, such attitudes also persist in critics’ bibles like the All Music Guide, which writes off Cut the Crap as “formulaic, tired punk rock that doesn’t have the aggression or purpose of early Clash records, let alone the hardcore punk that the new band was now competing with.”

Going one step further, Rolling Stone entirely dismisses the neo-Clash in a November 2012 “Flashback” column titled “The Clash Say Goodbye at the 1983 US Festival.” While admitting that a new lineup continued to play live after Mick Jones’s exit, the magazine sneered, “But that’s like a Rolling Stones tour without Keith Richards. It doesn’t count, and the whole thing has basically been erased from history. The Clash as we know them ended at the 1983 US Festival.”

Case closed; roll the credits and be done with it. For many of the band’s chroniclers, this post–Jones/Headon version of The Clash is to be classified alongside other egregious artistic faux pas of ego-addled and/or cash-hungry rock pioneers—the Doors going on for two albums without Jim Morrison, the Velvet Underground sans Lou Reed, John Cale, or Nico.

This disdain is heightened by a new reality: in the twenty-first century, zombie versions of once cutting-edge bands stumble on for years after death—Dead Kennedys without Jello Biafra, the Misfits without Glen Danzig, Black Flag without anybody but Greg Ginn . . . the list goes on and on. Except for an occasional compilation appearance of its blazing twilight-era anthem “This Is England,” The Clash Mark II has seemed similarly undead, fated to remain one of rock’s great untouchables, unfit for public consumption.

Mick Jones famously described his ejection as “the greatest mistake in rock and roll history”—but that might be expected. More curious is the fact it has been hard to find defenders of The Clash Mark II even from those who played in the band.

In his later years, Joe Strummer hardly uttered a kind word about the unit that he more than anyone else created. Clash Mark II axman Vince White wrote Out of Control, a blistering exposé of the behind-the-scenes chaos and dysfunctional machinations in the band; in Danny Garcia’s book The Rise and Fall of The Clash, final drummer Peter Howard bemoans a foregone opportunity to join hard rockers AC/DC in order to stick with the doomed neo-Clash. While far less vitriolic than White or Howard, guitarist Nick Sheppard has jokingly allowed that this unit might be seen as “the only cover band I’ve ever played in.”

By contrast, Clash cofounder Paul Simonon has reaffirmed the motivation behind the expulsion of Jones, and asserted the worth of the final songs. However, even he doesn’t defend Cut the Crap, faulting manager/cofounder Bernard Rhodes for undoing the album with his dictatorial ways. Quipping, “If The Clash was the Communist Party, Bernie was our Stalin,” bassist Simonon now casts Rhodes as essentially pulling off a musical coup d’état in the studio.

Indeed, in an interview for the Big Issue with Jones and Headon after Sound System’s release, Simonon claims Cut the Crap is “not really a Clash record . . . It hasn’t got Mick or Topper on it.” Jones then delivers the coup de grâce, joking that “for the benefit of Stalinist revision, [Cut the Crap] has been expunged.”

Given all of this, it might fairly be asked: should one notice, much less mourn, the exclusion of this one record from this one box set?

The short answer is that the purging of Cut the Crap—and a concurrent excision of the neo-Clash era—matters. It not only leaves out a crucial chapter in the story of an entity that has been described as “the only band that matters” but it helps subvert what made the unit much more than simply another pop group.

In fact, the Clash Mark II period is a fascinating window into a band of immense vision and passion—as well as fundamental contradictions—as they wrestle with the meaning of success. In addition, this tale plays out against a backdrop of extraordinary sociopolitical drama, the passing of one era of modern history into another: a vibrant epoch that, nonetheless, is fundamentally more cold and cruel.

The Clash Mark II songs that Simonon defends not only document this moment when the world turned, but can also illuminate a possible better future. Contrary to the many voices that ridicule this Clash era, there is a powerful—if sometimes heartbreaking—story here, together with profound moments, words, and music, including works worthy of standing next to the best that The Clash created.

While we will defend this position with exhaustive, painstaking documentation and tightly constructed arguments, this book began with our own experiences as longtime followers of The Clash. Both of our lives were radically changed for the better by our encounter with the band, its music, look, and ideas, including those on display in its last incarnation.

Of course, personal experience, however profound, can only go so far to provide convincing historical evidence. Another crucial bulwark for this project is more broadly based and impossible to dismiss. As the Internet has enabled sixty-plus bootlegs from the band’s final period to be widely circulated, a counterpoint to the “critical consensus”—and The Clash’s own rewritten history—has risen. In a striking example of grassroots resistance, a whole segment of Clash fandom now refuses to allow the band’s last two years to be “expunged.”

These live tapes give the lie to those who dismiss the post-Jones Clash. In short, the passion is palpable, and the performances are compelling, with many of the new songs rivaling the power of the Strummer-Jones classics. These raw documents constitute a lasting rebuke to those who would write The Clash Mark II out of history. They provide not just the foundation of our narrative here; they—as much as live tapes from the earlier Clash years—are also crucial fuel that animate our ongoing personal, creative, and activist endeavors.

Without denying the seamier side of the period, or whitewashing the dysfunction that doomed this last stand, we will strive to take the artistic accomplishments seriously, while also trying to place the failures—or even betrayals—in context, with relentless pursuit of truth and sympathetic assessment of human frailty.

This begins with an honest appraisal of the band’s origins. The Clash was mostly assembled from relative strangers by manager/agitator Bernard Rhodes and given a challenging set of orders: in the words of Strummer, “to be bigger than anybody else but still keep our message.” That their mission of freedom and anticapitalist revolution was somehow to be brought to fruition via the corporate rock world only serves to highlight what longtime Clash roadie/confidante The Baker has called the band’s “unanswerable dilemma.”

This profound tension is the taproot of the band’s final quest. If The Clash’s aims were perhaps doomed from the start, they nonetheless made for an exhilarating ride, one that resonates still, not only for aging fans, but also those discovering the band today. Far from being an embarrassing mistake best forgotten, this neo-Clash era is actually a fascinating and instructive conclusion to their trajectory as a band.

The final phase of this story begins in revolt against basic commercial common sense: the ejection of the authors of two and a half of the band’s three hit singles. Even so, it was not insanity. Without a risky course correction, The Clash could easily have become just another gaggle of rock stars lost in an antiseptic bubble, becoming the very thing that they claimed to despise. This final, desperate effort to bottle lightning yet again, in the end, lends an even greater depth to The Clash’s saga.

Obviously, “the Clash franchise”—the phrase of Mark II guitarist Sheppard—doesn’t believe this. The fervor to scrub away traces of these years is perhaps understandable, given the pain involved. After all, Jones was denounced and summarily purged from a band he helped assemble, Headon’s heroin addiction led to his heart-wrenching expulsion, and Strummer then had to live with guilt over what he came to view as his ego-driven betrayal of close friends.

However explicable, the stance is still disappointing. If The Clash exemplified punk’s “give us some truth” impulse, then facing reality to find the lesson beyond the pain seems essential. To rewrite history, erasing key players from the scenario in a way not so different than Stalin’s falsification of the past—documented in David King’s haunting book, The Commissar Vanishes—seems unworthy of a band as ambitious, principled, and gifted as The Clash.

Finally, we will place this tale squarely in its sociopolitical context, with the result that figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher will be nearly as central as The Clash. This approach may not be popular with some more music-centric readers. Indeed, a growing number of people now tend to view The Clash as simply a great rock band: a tendency that, at once, is both obvious and odious.

No less a figure than Topper Headon has suggested that only The Clash’s music has stood the test of time, not its politics, which might be acceptably forgotten. With all due respect to Headon’s immense contributions, The Clash without its politics is a wretched ghost, for its greatness lay in a willingness to push the envelope on all levels. Its music and its message together made it a band that truly mattered, significant in a way few other musical outfits could hope to rival.

As such, to ignore the intimate connection of the final version of The Clash to its specific moment would be foolhardy. As forces clashed on battlefields both real and metaphorical, a turning point can be glimpsed. In 1984–85, a conservative counterrevolution that had been slowly building for at least a decade broke through. As esteemed literary theorist Terry Eagleton notes, “In 1976, a good many people in the West thought Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile?”

While Eagleton jokingly floats parenthood as a possible answer, the matter is at once both more simple and more complex. This query will be as crucial as the question of what happened to The Clash; indeed, the two are quite intertwined.

From this angle, our tale makes much more sense. Jones once summarized his differences with Strummer, Simonon, and Rhodes by noting, “I was going, ‘Let’s dance’; they were going, ‘No, let’s riot!’” But while Jones’s subsequent success with Big Audio Dynamite is undeniable, so is the fact that others felt the moment cried out for something more pointed than inventive beats and the artful use of samples.

This was a time of frightening military buildup, when tens of thousands were slaughtered with US guns in the name of “democracy,” when the Falklands War tipped a nation-altering election. Markets became God, big business shook off the shackles of regulation, and tax rates of the rich and programs for the poor were both slashed while “homelessness” became a new word in the American lexicon. Meanwhile, US workers joined their British compatriots in feeling the pain, despair, and dislocation behind a single consequential word: “deindustrialization.”

If Sex Pistols had warned of “no future” in 1976 with one million unemployed in the UK, how much more grim was 1984 with over three million jobless? With police turned against their own communities, fighting a life-or-death strike with brutality and Orwellian tactics, as the world teetered on the razor’s edge of nuclear destruction? Punk back on the barricades made immense sense in this context, and the final version of The Clash gains immeasurably from that reality.

The Clash was ascending the ladder of success as all of this drama unfolded. This breakthrough intensified its inherent tension between message and commerce. Is it victory to be playing huge stadiums but losing any real hope of an intimate or energizing connection to an audience? Is it success to have a hit with a catchy but lyrically vacuous song like “Should I Stay or Should I Go”? To feel the pressures of fame drawing the band further and further into a bubble of unreality that was the antithesis of the Clash punk-populist stance?

Many in the Clash camp felt these growing contradictions, but none more keenly than Joe Strummer. To try to fight back—reinvent and purify—was a chancy but essential course. The singer embraced this path, at least for a time, together with his final bandmates. Whether they succeeded in these aims is, of course, another matter. Yet one lesson might be that failure can be noble, while success can be a threat not only to your soul, but to the world itself.

What then is one punk band, however gifted, successful, or visionary, before the mountain of might, privilege, and raw avarice that Reagan, Thatcher, and the forces arrayed behind them represented? Not much, Strummer admitted in 1984: “The Clash compared to the Pentagon is smaller than the flea on top of a flea!”

Yet Strummer also acknowledged an intangible but still profound power that the group’s art and ideas could provide. The Clash represented a passionate rebuke to the conservative advance, while not denying the failures that gave Thatcher and Reagan their initial power and lasting appeal. In certain ways, The Clash was responding to the same challenges, the same gap between rhetoric and reality. For a time, its upward trajectory even mirrored that of its deadly opponents, although The Clash’s message would ultimately fail to gain the same social momentum.

If this is in fact so, then the crash of The Clash takes on an even greater resonance. More than any other punk band—or indeed any other rock band—The Clash articulated a vision of a transformed world. If they, like Reagan and Thatcher’s shock troops, had measured the status quo and found it lacking, their remedy was quite distinct: the injection of more compassion, more equality, more freedom-in-community, with all this to be understood and applied globally.

The watchword of Reagan and Thatcher, by contrast, was efficiency—read “profits”—at all costs. In a twisted way, the creative destruction that anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin had called for, that punk had often echoed, was their aim as well. However, the welfare state, government regulation, labor unions, and any impediment to market “freedom” was what they sought to destroy.

Although Reagan and Thatcher evoked a sepia-toned bygone era to win support, their policies bulldozed not only statist bureaucracy but that olden world itself, which had been nourished by shared bonds of responsibility and solidarity. The Sermon on the Mount was outdated; in its place was to be a new gospel of self-interest. There is no such thing as society, Thatcher famously declaimed, promoting the idea of individuals acting rationally to advance their interests, guided toward the greater good by their greed, harnessed by the invisible hand of a quasi-divine “free market.”

Perhaps some punks and Thatcherites shared more than might at first seem likely, both disavowing the old ways and embracing individualistic rejection of constraints. Yet The Clash instinctively stretched past both navel-gazing negation and the Money God to seek the promise of a “postscarcity” world, where there was enough for all and humans were freed from drudgery to find actualization.

In the hard place where ambitions contended with constraints, utopian visions crashed upon the rocks of harsh reality. “There ain’t no need for ya / go straight to hell boys” went one Clash refrain; “Fog drowned towns got to fade / wrong side of a scissor blade” went another, pointing toward the fall of the post–World War II assumption—shared, in some sense, by hippie, punk, and miner alike—of ever-rising living standards for all, with the freedom that could buy.

In the end, we live in a new world where capitalism in its most raw form is ascendant, with diminished material expectations for many. On one hand, there has been untold multiplication of wealth; on the other, inequality has risen to levels not seen since the Gilded Age that dawned after the Industrial Revolution. These disparities are growing globally, crushing the poor and opening a huge divide between the rich and an increasingly precarious middle-slipping-to-lower class.

Even 2008’s global economic near-meltdown and the growing specter of climate change may not have shaken the death grip of this iron-fisted version of capitalism. Why not? As Eagleton incisively notes, “It is unlikely that most of the radicals who changed their minds about the system between the seventies and eighties did so simply because there were fewer cotton mills around. It was not this that led them to ditch Marxism . . . but the growing conviction that the system they faced was simply too hard to crack. It was not illusion about the new capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive.”

In other words—and as Thatcher often argued—there is no alternative.

That the period that Eagleton identifies—the decade from 1976 to 1986—is exactly the life span of The Clash suggests a certain synchronicity. And while this is a tale of the last stand of a band with extraordinary ambitions and gifts, it is also the story of their time. This was a moment when The Clash’s own struggle to right their internal balance and thus maintain their deeply conflicted upward trajectory paralleled the rise of other actors, whose vision was the dark mirroring of their own, equal in scope and driven by as much passion.

After performing “This Is England” in Düsseldorf, West Germany, in early 1984, Strummer warned his audience, “I’m telling you: pretty soon it is going to be Margaret Thatcher über alles!” If this comparison to the Nazi regime is overstatement common to the performer class, it also carries some truth. It is indeed so that the vision of Thatcher and her political soul mate Reagan triumphed, sometimes for better and often definitely for the worse.

At the same time, the revolutionary traditions The Clash drew upon and extended have not been fully vanquished. Margaret Thatcher to the contrary, an alternative can and must be found, our world still can and must be transformed in a more humane, inclusive, genuinely democratic way. Such belief was always central to The Clash, grounding their artful critiques in authentic, galvanizing hope.

“Find the ace!” Strummer implored, introducing “Three Card Trick” in 1984. This phrase is crucial, for the song portrays capitalism as a grifter’s game designed so the dealer will forever win. In such a rigged system, hope becomes a trick that keeps the oppression intact. As each person buys the lie, one by one, they collaborate in their own destruction, down through the generations.

But this was not the whole story. The ace, in Strummer’s vision, was the power people can discover by rejecting the lie and banding together: “Who can fight the entire grinding system? Nobody can! But together everybody could . . . I am talking pie in the sky here but still that’s no excuse to sit back and say nothing.”

There is no cheap grace to be peddled here, however. This book is the tale of a punk-cum-pop group, the moment it strained upward and then crashed to earth, the human frailties that led to that, as well as the human costs incurred. As The Clash plummeted, the Reagan/Thatcher vision took flight, soaring to heights that sometimes make it seem inevitable, undefeatable, eternally ascendant.

We Are The Clash, however, is ultimately the tale of how we might yet find that long-hidden ace, the one that enables victory in the game-you-cannot-win, the stacked deck of global capitalism, as well as on other fronts.

As always, it begins simply with the story of a few people, the dreams they had, and what they tried to do to make them real.