—Margaret Thatcher, May 4, 1979
This here set of music is now dedicated to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the century.
—Joe Strummer, US Festival, May 28, 1983
The scene reeked of glorious rock spectacle.
Once scruffy denizens of British squats, tower blocks, and underground dives, The Clash today occupied the center of the musical universe. Standing on a massive outdoor stage, the band was dwarfed by more than 250,000 people. The roar of the sweating, surging crowd washed over the four slender figures.
From the back of the audience, the musicians seemed tiny ants on a stage, a pinprick of light, sound, and motion. A gigantic video screen provided the only opportunity for most listeners to connect actual human beings to the tsunami of guitar, bass, drums, and voice being flung at them in the darkness of the arena grounds of the US Festival, near San Bernardino, California.
“Unite Us in Song,” the festival’s advance publicity had said. The crowd, spurred by music, merged into a writhing rhythmic beast. Holy or unholy, some sort of communion was real here at this instant, in this place.
This should have been a moment of triumph for The Clash, a time to savor immense popularity won over seven hard years of touring, recording, and wrangling with an often mystified major record label. But as lead vocalist Joe Strummer strode to the microphone midway through the set, his words and demeanor suggested anything but self-satisfaction.
“I suppose you don’t want to hear me go on about this and that and what’s up my ass, huh?” the singer sneered. As the crowd cheered incongruously, Strummer continued: “Try this on for size—Well, hi everybody, ain’t it groovy? Ain’t you sick of hearing that for the last 150 years?”
A renewed roar greeted this dismissal, but what did the sound and fury signify? Affirmation? Noncomprehension? Determination to party on no matter what?
Strummer’s tone shifted to pained earnestness: “I know you are all standing there looking at the stage but I’m here to tell you that the people that are on this stage, and are gonna come on, and have been on it already, we’re nowhere, absolutely nowhere. Can you understand that?” The singer nodded to his bandmates, and muttered, “Let’s do this number!” The quartet crashed into “Safe European Home,” a sardonic, self-deprecating comment on “third world” violence and “first world” cowardice.
Strummer’s words evoked punk’s “anti-star” idealism. Yet the members of The Clash stood on that stage as rock stars paid—as the singer boasted later—half a million dollars for barely more than an hour of work.
If the scene evoked untrammeled success, the singer’s apparent anguish suggested something darker and more conflicted. Was this evening, ultimately, anything more than a lucrative commercial transaction?
In the eighty minutes The Clash played that night, one could have driven west from the festival grounds on Route I-10 and pulled in front of a handsome mansion in Pacific Palisades, a coastal neighborhood on LA’s west side.
This house was where a transplanted Midwesterner had begun a transformation from aging B-list actor to right-wing icon to governor to, finally, the most powerful man in the world: the president of the United States. Now Ronald Reagan was preparing for a final political campaign, one that in eighteen months would determine whether he’d get another four years to consolidate his counterrevolution.
Across the Atlantic in The Clash’s homeland, an equally momentous campaign was already well underway. In twelve days, more than thirty million British voters would decide whether to keep Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Sharing a quasi-religious faith in the “free market” and enmity toward “big government,” the two had become partners in what British journalist Nicholas Wapshott described as “a political marriage” that sought to change the world.
Conventional wisdom had dismissed Reagan and Thatcher as fringe figures, unlikely to be elected, much less be successful in implementing their creed. As Wapshott noted in a Reuters op-ed, “When Margaret Thatcher met Ronald Reagan in April 1975, neither was in their first flush of youth. She was fifty and he sixty-five. She was the leader of Britain’s opposition; he a former governor of California. It was by no means obvious that either would win power. They bonded instantly. Although born almost a generation and an ocean and continent apart, they found they were completing each other’s sentences.”
While both held to a conservative Christian faith that was then beginning to gain political ascendancy in the US via Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement, they also bonded around another shared inspiration. As Wapshott makes clear, “Both found validation for their convictions in the works of Friedrich Hayek, at that time a long-forgotten theorist even among conservatives.”
Hayek was an Austrian economist who had famously contended with Britain’s John Maynard Keynes amid the Great Depression over whether government intervention would ease or prolong the economic turmoil. Hayek had extolled allowing the “free market” to correct itself over time. Arguing that “in the long run, we are all dead,” Keynes espoused ideas about the crucial role of government action which became the basis for much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The vanquished Hayek turned further to the right during World War II. In 1944’s Road to Serfdom, he argued that not only did government meddling injure the economy but, indeed, was bound to lead to tyranny. Aided by the publication of an abridged Reader’s Digest edition in 1945, the book found an audience in a slowly building right-wing movement, including with both Reagan and Thatcher.
By 1983 the two were no longer outsiders—they were rulers with immense power on the world stage. They brought this once obscure Austrian economist—and contemporary acolytes like Milton Friedman—into the mainstream. Both now stood at the pinnacle of their respective careers, seeking to dismantle the New Deal and Britain’s socialist-leaning “welfare state” postwar consensus.
If punk offered a bleak forecast in 1976, by 1983 that dark possibility was being made real. Virtually all the other early trailblazers had fallen away. Now the successful but conflicted Clash was one of the last gangs in town, standard-bearer for a vision that took the postwar dream for granted, and sought to push beyond.
As such, Strummer might be viewed as the nemesis of Reagan and Thatcher, for the two politicians sought not the fulfillment of that dream, but its death. Yet all three in their distinct ways sought to transcend the post-1945 consensus.
Punk rock had always been about more than simply music. Born largely as a reaction to the self-indulgent excesses and perceived failure of the rock-and-revolution 1960s, it offered a blistering critique of idealism sold out or gone bad.
Punk’s “ruthless criticism of everything existing” spared no one, and could slip toward nihilist extremes. That made the idea of harnessing music for radical change a perilous venture. Yet beneath noisy blasts of illusion-shattering negation still lurked an unbending belief in the power of music to transform.
The Clash was defined by this sense of mission. Dubbed “the only band that matters” by record company PR, the band helped crystallize an affirmative, activist vision for punk.
If the early Clash track “Hate & War” encapsulated the band’s dismissal of the sixties, the musicians nonetheless borrowed from certain currents of that era. Their jagged, relentless music, close-cropped hair, quasi-military garb, and fierce sense of purpose suggested a marriage of Detroit agit-rock legends MC5 with the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The Clash was fascinatingly—and sometimes infuriatingly—contradictory. They embodied punk’s “year zero” stance, dismissing the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley in “1977,” the B side of their debut single, “White Riot.” But if the incendiary songs warned of class war, they were made possible through the largesse of CBS Records, then one of the music industry’s behemoths.
“Punk died the day