Bernie did help the band break through in America, but in the process ripped apart their very DNA. Mick became increasingly isolated, and scarcely helped his cause by acting the prima donna, at odds with the Clash “anti-star” ethos. The contradictions became inescapable: to prove a punk band from the squats of London could conquer the world, The Clash had to become the very thing they set out to destroy. In the end, it just proved too high a price to pay.
This was the “unanswerable dilemma” at the band’s heart since its creation: how do you go to the top level of the music business and still stay true—and be seen to be true—to your ideals? As original drummer Terry Chimes had predicted, mass success called everything into question.
The dilemma was unbearable to Joe. In desperation, he adopted Bernie’s military platitudes about having to cut off the gangrenous limb in order to save the body, and how we all must be marching in the same direction.
It still confounds people today: how could Bernie even consider that he could fire both Topper and Mick and still have a band? I was one of those skeptics. Yet The Clash, in its purest form, was Bernie, and Bernie was a fundamental extension of them. His relationship with the band was so intimate and personal that, in the end, he would rather demolish it than see it become obsolete. Evolve or die! Tragically, he didn’t see that there was more than one way to evolve.
When Mick was dismissed, I instinctively knew I was next for the chop. So I left of my own volition bearing no one any ill will. I had given The Clash more than seven years of my life and had worked as hard and as loyally as anyone could. But I’d done my job and it was time to leave. Regime change required a total purge. I shook hands with Joe and Paul and said goodbye, quietly slipping down the stairs of Rehearsal Rehearsals for the last time.
Like the band, I had given it my all—and then, suddenly, it was over and done. The rupture was painful and complete. After the end of my Clash story, I had no contact with any of my comrades for years, never saw The Clash Mark II perform, and never even heard anything off the album that was created . . . so total was my break with that scene and the people involved.
Eventually, I tried to piece together some of the fragments from my Clash years, but it was a profoundly difficult undertaking. I refused all interviews for over thirty years. Even when I finally decided to speak, I only wanted to contribute to Clash-related projects that would rise above the cheap name-calling and petty finger-pointing that inevitably rise in situations that have run their course. The endeavors needed to have genuine substance, be deeply researched, offer a different perspective, and, above all, exhibit the highest probity, integrity, and honesty.
This book is precisely that for which I searched. Andersen and Heibutzki obviously love The Clash, believe in the band’s values, and try to live by them. Their continued passion and idealism is refreshing, a sign that The Clash did not labor in vain, that listeners were touched deeply and indelibly. Both took to heart Joe’s plea for his audience to become activists, as is shown by their community work, especially Andersen’s involvement with the celebrated punk-activist collective Positive Force DC and inner-city advocate We Are Family. Both take their role as writers and historians equally seriously, as shown in the artistry here and in their other books. They write with care and sensitivity while doggedly pursuing the truth, letting the chips fall where they may.
In reading this book, I found my way back into Clash World, learning for the first time of the trials and tribulations—and grand aspirations—of the last version of The Clash, a Clash I never believed in and of which I was never a part. Astonishingly, I found myself moved, angered, and even inspired all over again. While the world was on the edge of thermonuclear destruction, Central American wars raged, and the coal miners confronted Margaret Thatcher’s bully boys, the new Clash struggled to create something real of their own, building upon—but going beyond—past glories.
Now I can see that The Clash Mark II was an attempt to find an answer to the unanswerable dilemma. Even if they didn’t locate one, there was drama and value in the effort. I’m tempted to say their flameout was inevitable, but those last two years were an attempt to evolve, to get back to basics, to walk that fine line between commercial success and staying true to your roots.
It is true that an essential chemistry was lost with the firings of Mick and Topper. With all due respect to the skills of Peter Howard, Nick Sheppard, and Vince White, that intangible factor could never be replaced by merely slotting in proficient musicians. Yet, from what I’ve heard and read, I believe they had a chance to succeed had they just been left alone, to do what musicians do naturally: to gel together, to create an alchemy of their own.
It seems that spark was never allowed a chance to fully flourish, given the managerial dictatorship they had to perform under. Bernie was a visionary, and Kosmo a true believer, but their relentless agitation—in addition to other immense personal and political pressures—ultimately drove the band off the rails, and Joe into psychic meltdown. Yet this book shows that, amid the chaos, something of worth, something recognizably Clash-like was nonetheless forged.
This account of The Clash’s final chapter is stark and unsentimental, exhilarating and occasionally brutal, set against the sociopolitical background that impelled the band. Andersen and Heibutzki depict the 1980s world stage with razor-sharp insight, chronicling the gradual surrender to Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s gray, greed-driven vision. It is a cautionary tale, every bit as bleak as Orwell’s 1984, and it is, alas, where we now reside. This is not a story of defeat, however, but a mission to retrieve jewels from the wreckage, so that the future might flourish.
Beautifully constructed and brilliantly written, We Are The Clash is a chronicle as complex and powerful as its subject. I was riveted, unable to put it down. No Clash collection will be complete without this epic addition. This book challenges us to recall what was best about “the only band that mattered” and then strive to live up to our own best in this new, frightening, but possibility-filled moment.
Dedicated to Mickey Foote (1951–2018), Clash sound engineer and producer of the first album.
Clash guitar tech Digby, The Baker, and Joe Strummer in the foyer of the Iroquois Hotel, NYC, midtour. (Photographer unknown.)
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