We Are The Clash. Mark Andersen
a song, you could tell he was nervous. He would run through the song, just him and guitar. As he did, he’d kind of sneak a peek at me, see how I was reacting.”
Fayne didn’t remember being that impressed by the new songs, but did recall that one tune with the words “This Is England” caught his ear. If Strummer picked up on the lukewarm reaction, he was not deterred. The singer continued to knock out new tunes, to be fleshed out once the band was whole again.
Strummer’s plans were helped when a new guitar player was found via auditions hastily arranged by Vinyl: Nick Sheppard, former lead guitarist of the Cortinas, a defunct first-wave punk band from Bristol in southwest England.
Though the auditions were for an unnamed band, Sheppard had a pretty good idea who it was. As the guitarist recalls, “I was out at a pub not long before the audition came up and ran into Joe, Paul, and Kosmo. I happened to overhear them talking a bit, going on about ‘he’s got to go.’ Had no clue at the time, but in retrospect, it was pretty clear who the talk was about.”
Hundreds came to the auditions, but Sheppard stood out. He was from the same original punk generation as Strummer, Simonon, and the rest. The Cortinas had been popular enough to earn their own brief liaison with CBS in the late seventies, but not so high profile as to be a distraction. Sheppard: “We had the same influences, came up in the same school, if you will . . . We understood each other.”
While the Cortinas scarcely shared The Clash’s politics, Sheppard had solid left-wing credentials: “I grew up in a family of trade unionists and Labour supporters, and I was, in that respect, politically aware—I knew what side I was on.” Finally, Sheppard was a big Clash fan, having seen the band live many times.
Once Sheppard was in the fold, the band went into intense rehearsals. Strummer unveiled more than a dozen new songs, which the new lineup began to hammer into shape. Their work, however, was shadowed by rumors that Jones and Headon were readying their own version of The Clash.
While this prospect gnawed at Strummer’s self-doubt, a less sentimental Rhodes saw it as a direct threat. Jones had been critiqued for working through lawyers while in the band; how much more likely was legal action now?
In strictly commercial terms, “The Clash” had become a lucrative brand, and Rhodes wanted to preempt counterclaims. He urged Strummer to make it clear in song that nothing from Jones and Headon could be the real item.
Sheppard witnessed the dynamic: “You got the sense then that some new songs were ‘made to order’ in a way, that Bernie had said to Joe, ‘We need a song called this or about that.’ Joe would listen, but he is a serious writer, right? So what he would come up with would be his own vision in the end.” The process produced a song that would define the new band to fan and foe alike: “We Are The Clash.”
The title was a bit obvious. Even for a band renowned for self-referential anthems like “Clash City Rockers,” “Radio Clash,” “Last Gang in Town,” and “Four Horsemen,” it seemed a step too far. Predictably, it would be swiftly lampooned as a laughable echo of “We Are The Monkees,” the theme song of another manufactured band favored by Rhodes.
While the song may have started out in that territory, Strummer took it to a deeper and more resonant place. He understood Rhodes’s desire to protect the Clash “brand,” but such an angle struck him as altogether too businesslike. For Strummer—as with Rhodes, ultimately—The Clash was something far more profound than a commercial venture, more than even a band . . . but exactly what?
The surge of right-wing power added urgency. “The world is marching backward fast all the time!” Strummer declared at the time. “Everything I read is bad news, apart from the Sandinista thing in Nicaragua.” A tantalizing idea began to percolate out of his soul-searching. Strummer’s thoughts intersected with Rhodes’s directive, but went beyond.
Strummer’s inspiration began with the Clash audience. Ever eager to engage with fans, Strummer had been touched by encounters on the 1982 tour of the Far East. In Japan, for example, one conversation had turned to family members killed in the US atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Strummer was already riveted by the nuclear danger; this made it even more real.
Strummer shared another anecdote from the tour with Sheppard, who recalls: “These aboriginal guys came to talk to him after the [Queensland, Australia] show about their situation. And then he got a phone call saying that the police had gone and busted up their house, because they’d dared to go backstage and talk to these white guys.” The ugliness of the incident, the deep racism it represented, and the courage of the fans “really left an impression on him,” according to Sheppard.
The Clash had once articulated voices from Brixton, Camden Town, Notting Hill, the West Way. Now they had come to embody something broader, rising up from the global grassroots: a rainbow of peoples, united by a shared spirit. The fans’ enthusiasm and ability to relate their struggles to themes in Clash songs affected Strummer, fueling the band’s own ambitious musical and topical trajectory.
This growing fusion also reflected the fact that The Clash came alive in concert—in Strummer’s words, “working together with the audience.” Keeping all of this in mind, the singer wrote a couplet that became the central metaphor of the new song: “We can strike the match / if you spill the gasoline.”
First heard as a demo recorded at Lucky Eight in November 1983, “We Are The Clash” utilized blunt yet cannily arranged butcher-block chords to stake its claim. Propelled by Howard’s powerful drumming, its chorus asserted, “We are The Clash / we can strike the match” with the follow-up line “if you can spill the gas” repeated twice and drawn out, the focus shifting from artist to audience, to what could be created together. Fittingly, it seemed designed for a gigantic sing-along.
The song was now less about “protecting the brand” than making it clear that—as Strummer would later insist—“when I say that ‘we are The Clash,’ I’m talking about considerably more than five people.” The song was an example of how a nudge from Rhodes could result in something profound in Strummer’s hands.
This exploded the concept of The Clash, launching it past the realm of “rock band.” If the song embodied Strummer’s punk populism, other lyrics tied the fate of this fusion to larger global struggles. “We don’t want to be treated like trash,” the song insisted—yet across the world so many were, in so many ways.
The end of 1983 was a particularly powerful moment in this regard, for reasons both practical and symbolic. Strummer had long been a fan of writer George Orwell. This independently minded British socialist had authored the dystopian classic 1984, which portrayed a suffocatingly oppressive world where language itself had been corrupted to serve as a tool of social control.
Orwell’s blistering critique—aimed equally at fascism and Stalinism—reflected his belief that relentlessly seeking and speaking truth was central to human liberation. The idea resonated with Strummer, as did Orwell’s critiques of British imperialism and the violence of poverty, and his desire to abandon his privileged background to be in solidarity with the poor and working classes. The singer’s emphasis on truth telling as the core of The Clash’s revolutionary mission echoed Orwell’s own imperatives.
The references were everywhere: the band’s debut single “1977” ends with a spooky echoed “1984!” On the embattled “Anarchy” tour, Strummer had refitted “Protex Blue” with lyrics that warned, “Big Brother is watching you.” Graphics from the film versions of 1984 and another Orwell masterpiece, Animal Farm, appeared in The Clash songbook and on the cover of 1978’s “English Civil War” 45, respectively. Strummer had even revised history once, suggesting that the 101ers’ name was a reference to Room 101, 1984’s torture chamber.
Orwell had intended 1984 less as prophecy than as a warning of what was already unfolding in the late 1940s when the book was written. Still, its impact imbued the year 1984 with a sense of destiny. Much like 1977—the year when “two sevens clash,” according to some Rastas—the fast-approaching new year had an ominous sense of converging, perhaps even world-rupturing forces.
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