Lead singer/lyricist Strummer was not only the elder member of The Clash, but also its soul. Rising out of the British squat scene, he was fascinated by American folk radical Woody Guthrie as well as the dwindling embers of late-1960s revolt. Active with a rising roots-rock band, the 101ers—named after the band’s ramshackle squat—Strummer was wrenched out of his backward-gazing by a blistering Sex Pistols show in April 1976.
Shortly thereafter, he was poached from the 101ers by guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon to front their nascent punk unit. This gifted pair had fallen under the spell of agitator Bernard Rhodes, the catalyst for assembling the band and encouraging them to write about urgent sociopolitical issues.
If Sex Pistols lit the fuse of punk’s explosion, The Clash sought to guide the movement’s subsequent momentum in a constructive direction, making the implicit affirmation behind “no future” rants more explicit and convincing. “We never came to destroy,” Strummer noted to Melody Maker in 1978, adding years later in a punk retrospective, “We had hope in a sea of hopelessness.”
After the collapse of sixties rock idealism, this was a tricky line to walk. Strummer’s ambivalence showed in a March 1977 interview with Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon. Asked how potent a band can be in making political change, he responded, “Completely useless! Rock doesn’t change anything. But after saying that—and I’m just saying that because I want you to know that I haven’t got any illusions about anything, right—having said that, I still want to try to change things.”
Although The Clash was careful never to accept a narrow ideological label, it stood on the revolutionary socialist left, as the frontman acknowledged elsewhere. Given this anticapitalist stance, Strummer admitted to Coon—who later would briefly manage the band after the ouster of Rhodes in late 1978—“Signing that contract [with CBS] did bother me a lot.”
Despite its underground roots, The Clash was not interested in being captured by a narrow subculture. If the Top 10 beckoned, it was in hopes of bringing a message of radical change to the broadest possible segment of the population.
In retrospect, The Clash’s signing to a major label like CBS seems preordained. Capitalism would provide the avenue for reaching the masses that then, in principle, could be mobilized to overturn that same system and build something better. CBS had been home to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other sixties counterculture icons, and even issued an ad claiming “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” in 1968. Already thinly disguised folderol at the time, by the midseventies, such rhetoric could sound dubious indeed. The Clash pressed on nonetheless.
Punks were not the only rebels who strode onto the world stage in the midseventies, however. At the very moment the Republican Party seemed eviscerated by the Watergate scandal, with the Keynesian postwar order appearing unassailable, grassroots insurgent Ronald Reagan was challenging Republican president Gerald Ford, and “strange rebel” Margaret Thatcher had just captured the leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK.
Reagan came to political prominence with his 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of the presidential candidacy of archconservative Barry Goldwater. While Lyndon Johnson won the contest in a landslide, Reagan used his notoriety as a springboard for a successful race for governor of California.
Reagan established himself as the deadly enemy of student radicals protesting the Vietnam War, famously proclaiming, “If there has to be a bloodbath, then let’s get it over with.” In 1976, Reagan’s upstart primary challenge to President Gerald Ford fell just short of victory. Four years later, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, who was wounded by inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan accomplished what his mentor Goldwater had failed to do nearly two decades earlier: bring a newly radicalized Republican Party into the White House.
Over the same period, Thatcher had gone from Parliament backbencher to minister of education in the middle-of-the-road Tory government of Edward Heath. She slashed milk subsidies to schoolchildren, and showed no remorse when protesters chanted, “Thatcher Thatcher, milk snatcher!”
Thatcher watched not one but two Tory defeats by the militant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), in 1972 and 1974. Led by rising Marxist firebrand Arthur Scargill, squads of “flying pickets”—unionists dispatched to blockade strategic locations—not only shut down the UK power grid but also brought down the Conservative Party–led government.
While Thatcher absorbed lessons from the lost battles, she was also there to claim the leadership of the party in 1975 in their aftermath. It was a lucky moment to ascend, for the Labour Party would squander its own turn in power amid economic stagnation and social turmoil. Unemployment and inflation rose, mounds of garbage piled up, and transportation was paralyzed by a series of strikes. “Labour Isn’t Working” was Thatcher’s catchiest campaign slogan.
Thatcher’s most resonant 1979 ad, by Saatchi & Saatchi.
A different take on Margaret Thatcher by an anonymous artist.
Capitalizing on the ennui, Thatcher became prime minister on May 4, 1979. She promised healing, quoting the soothing words of St. Francis of Assisi as protesters confronted the police massed outside the compound. Her radical agenda, however, would create divisions not seen in the UK since the 1600s.
Thatcher came to power determined to complete a mission. Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had approvingly quoted anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin’s dictum, “The destructive urge is also a creative urge,” during the heady days of punk’s birth. With Thatcher and Reagan’s rise, another form of “creative destruction” had now arrived: the “free market.”
Ironically, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had derived the term from the work of Karl Marx. For Marx, “creative destruction” meant that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own downfall. But the phrase became used within “neoliberal” (a.k.a. “free market”) circles to describe actions like slashing jobs at a company in order to increase its efficiency and, in principle, also that of the larger economy.
This process had been at the heart of the wrenching transformation generated by the Industrial Revolution, and was central to capitalism. If essential for economic growth and progress, the cost in human terms could be immense.
This conservative surge provided the backdrop for The Clash’s rise. The tension between the band’s aims and its means led to new groups such as anarchist trailblazer Crass. While inspired by The Clash, these bands were hostile to their compromises, with Crass cofounder Penny Rimbaud noting that “CBS promotes The Clash—but it ain’t for revolution, it’s just for cash.” Strummer countered by calling Crass “a storm in a teacup,” deeming their do-it-yourself stance as “self-defeating, ’cos you’ve got to be heard.”
The Clash’s third album, London Calling, challenged a version of punk that could seem ever more narrow. As Strummer groused, “I don’t want to see punk as preplanned and pre-thought-out for you to slip into comfortably like mod or hippie music or Teddy Boy rock and roll. In ’76 it was all individual. There was a common ground, it was punk, but everything was okay. Punk’s now become ‘he’s shouting in Cockney making no attempt to sing from the heart and the guitarist is deliberately playing monotonously and they’re all playing as fast as possible so this is punk’ . . . God help us, have we done all that to get here?”
To Strummer, punk was a spirit, an approach to life, not a set of clothes, a haircut, or even a style of music. This was possibly convenient for the band’s commercial aims, but his