The high stakes and global sweep involved were evoked by the existing words of “We Are The Clash.” The song opened with a list of peoples—“Russians, Europeans, Yankees, Japanese, Africans”—invited to a “human barbecue,” where “twenty billion voices / make one silent scream.” This Edvard Munch–like image suggested worldwide nuclear war, a final showdown that no one could truly win.
To Strummer, Reagan appeared to be preparing for just such a conflagration, embarking on the largest military buildup in post–WWII history, while cutting taxes for the rich and slashing programs for the poor. Furthermore, never-ending war against a shadowy enemy provided the justification for 1984’s totalitarian control. This, in part, already existed. Both US and Soviet military planners justified their massive budgets by pointing to the danger posed by the other, a circular logic that drove ever greater expenditures and made war all the more likely.
* * *
On September 1, 1983, tensions between the US and the USSR hit a scary crescendo with the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 (KAL 007). A commercial flight from Alaska to South Korea, KAL 007 strayed into Soviet airspace for unknown reasons and was shot down, with a loss of 269 lives.
The Soviets had made a terrible error—one repeated when the US shot down Iran Air flight 655 in July 1988, killing 290—out of paranoia fanned by US bellicosity. This meant no less in terms of human suffering, but it mitigated the supposed barbaric intent, and highlighted the perils created by superpower tensions.
Amid all of this, the US invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983. Touting a supposed Communist threat to the region, Reagan used the chaos following a bloody coup against Grenadian leader Maurice Bishop—a Cuban ally—to intervene. The supposed aim was protecting American students on the island; the result was the installation of a new US-friendly regime.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, the US was asserting its imperial prerogatives over its “backyard.” The message to the Sandinistas and their Cuban and Soviet supporters was clear.
George Orwell’s 1984 hung heavy over Clash-land. (Artwork by Eddie King.)
As 1984 approached, catastrophic confrontation seemed increasingly inevitable. Strummer expressed this fear in another new song, “Are You Ready for War?” Musically, this was one of the strongest of the new batch, and analogous to the bracing punk-reggae of “Police and Thieves.” The song rose off a funky groove but also brought the punk hammer down, creating something new and exciting. Sheppard contributed cutting-edge “DJ scratch” hip-hop guitar noise.
The demo’s other dozen songs cataloged additional concerns. Some were new takes on old topics: the personal and political dangers of drugs (“Glue Zombie” and “National Powder”) and US foreign policy (“The Dictator”). Others like “Sex Mad War”—an attack on rape and pornography from a feminist perspective, riding on a hopped-up rockabilly chassis—explored newer lyrical territory.
A notable focus on the trials of the British working class came through in a trio of hard-hitting songs. “This Is England”—the song that had caused Fayne’s ears to prick up—began as a folky dirge spinning out dark images of “a gang fight on a human factory farm,” only to rev up by song’s end, with galloping guitars, bass, and drums driving home a bleak commentary on Thatcher’s Britain.
The use of the term “factory farm” was striking. These words had been popularized by UK animal rights activist Ruth Harrison: “Factory farms are often owned or highly influenced by corporations and the guiding principle of these businesses is efficiency, producing the most produce and hence profit for the least expense,” with little regard for the consequent suffering—a trenchant critique of Thatcher’s aims.
A second song, “In the Pouring Rain,” opened with clarion chords, followed by words that portrayed a gray vista, drenched in a downpour that evoked the hopelessness settling over the depressed north of England: “I could see as I rode in / the ships were gone and the pit fell in / a funeral bell tolled the hour in / a lonely drunkard slumbering . . .” While the music started off a bit stiff, not quite bringing the aching words to life, dynamic guitar interplay after the chorus lifted the song.
Best of all—musically and lyrically—was the blistering “Three Card Trick,” which likened the capitalist system to a famously fixed card game, three-card monte. The song opened with crushing power chords propelling a stark indictment: “Patriots of the wasteland / torching two hundred years.” Strummer struck directly at the claims of Thatcher and Reagan to be making their countries “great” again, while creating a desert of deindustrialization and unemployment.
This was not overstated. Journalist William Kleinknecht would later describe Reagan as “the man who sold the world,” a critique that could just as easily apply to Thatcher. The duo preached the gospel of “creative destruction”: clearing away the old and exhausted to make way for that which was new and improved.
Such claims were not far from punk’s “Year Zero” rhetoric, but Strummer was having none of it. His focus was on people, on their pain, as “Trick’s” follow-up lines show: “Bring back crucifixion / cry the moral death’s head legion / use the steel nails / manufactured by the slaves in Asia.”
As with the best of Strummer’s lyrics, these lines pack a book’s worth of critique into nineteen words. Subtly equating the Nazis and the Moral Majority, the Clash frontman undercuts the right-wing Christian “law and order” agenda by evoking their crucified founder, while tearing the veil off the interconnected realities of first-world deindustrialization and third-world exploitation.
A more succinct indictment of the Thatcher-Reagan project was hard to imagine. More concretely, the steel references in both “Three Card Trick” and “This Is England”—as well as earlier in “Straight to Hell”—show how Strummer was aware of the devastation of British industry, and what it represented: the unraveling of a social compact forged in the fires of the Industrial Revolution.
Strummer was ambivalent about the cost of that bargain, as his lyrics elsewhere comparing factory work to slavery suggest. The singer argued, “For the past two hundred years we’ve all been had by an industrial society . . . that only needs workers to fuel its factories and furnaces and whatever. I feel [humanity] has a better destiny . . . There’s a better life to be lived for everybody and by everybody.”
Yet Strummer saw the immense suffering created when factories, mills, and other enterprises closed, taking jobs with them: “Supposedly technology and science was going to save the world, and we should be going forward into a bright future, but [instead] it’s recession, close a factory down, put people out of work.”
To be fair, these trends had predated Thatcher and Reagan, and resulted from globalizing forces that were extremely difficult to resist. But Thatcher in particular was an unapologetic defender of cutting the lifelines for many struggling industries—and those who worked there—in the name of efficiency.
In “This Is England,” Strummer encounters a female mugger holding a blade made of “Sheffield steel,” referring to the most renowned UK steel town, now devastated by cuts. The reference was clear: most of those workers left jobless saw Thatcher as the one who had slashed their industry’s throat.
Steel had been one of the pillars of the British economy since the Industrial Revolution, and its decline could rightly be viewed as a national tragedy. Still, there was one commodity that was even more fundamental: coal.
Orwell noted this in Road to Wigan Pier: “Our civilization is founded on coal. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world