We Are The Clash. Mark Andersen
redefine what the band was about and reestablish its credibility.”
This was Strummer’s new gospel, soon to be shared wherever he went, and it was galvanizing. That the singer segued quickly from inspiration to asking the guitarist to get a haircut didn’t matter. “I was convinced,” White later wrote.
Having conviction helped, but playing with The Clash—even in a relatively cozy venue like the Arlington Theatre—was an enormous jump for the twenty-three-year-old guitarist. White winces at the memory, recalling missed chords and blown cues, overwhelmed by the hurricane of sound and humanity, not able to move and jump as he wanted while trying to play the songs.
Sheppard recognized the challenge: “Vince was completely out of his depth . . . I had played in big spaces as a support act in the Cortinas, but those stages are huge. You can just get lost.” White nonetheless found the show amazing, partly for the same reason—everything was so hectic and very nearly out of control. As it happened, “Out of Control” was the name of one of the band’s most rocking new numbers, one that White favored.
While the song had not made the cut for the live set, “Out of Control” became the motto of this tour and the new Clash in general. Its energy appealed to White, and reflected the lack of commercial calculation involved with the ejection of Jones and Headon and the return to raw, unfashionable punk rock.
As Simonon would later explain, “We feed off the reaction we get from the audience, then we send it right back out, and the whole thing just spirals out of control in a good way. The tour is called Out of Control and that’s kind of why. It’s really a bit of a wind-up of the press.”
There was another meaning as well, reflecting the band’s unsettled legal situation. According to Clash graphic artist Eddie King, “The Out of Control logo was simply photocopied from a Commando comic book and was placed next to The Clash in all flyers and posters in case of possible lawsuits over the use of the band name. Bernard wanted the possibility to either have the word are flyposted between The Clash and Out of Control so that they could tour as Out of Control, or simply have The Clash cut from the top of posters rather than have to set up a whole new print run.”
Taking aim at those who saw the new Clash as wrecking its commercial future, Simonon continued: “We’re portrayed as this band that goes about smashing shit up, and for us . . . the music is the only thing that’s out of control. We like it to be. What good would it be if we just stood there like dead men onstage?”
Backstage after the show, Strummer perched uneasily next to Simonon for a TV interview, smoking a cigarette and wearing a military hat with Out of Control emblazoned on it. Despite postgig exhaustion, the singer was bursting with a barely contained energy, seemingly ready to leap out at the interviewers.
Asked how the show went, Strummer took a drag, made a fist, and launched: “This is the first of many, now we begin. We wanted to strip it down to punk-rock roots and see what’s left, see how it progressed from there.” Slicing the air with his hands, Strummer went on: “I looked around over the past year at all the folks doing shows and making records and I realized that they’d all gone overproduced . . . I realized there wasn’t any piece of vinyl I could hold on to and leap out of a space shuttle with yelling, feel satisfied with like some real piece of rhythm and blues, a Bo Diddley record.” The singer grimaced and balled his fists intently. “You could just hold it in your hands forever!”
Asked how fans responded to this new, raw Clash, Strummer responded, “I think they were took aback a bit maybe because they see us rushing, rushing with the nerves showing in our faces. But we want to take that nervous energy and turn it into power . . . We want our music to deal with reality, and not skip around it.”
As the interview progressed, Strummer’s targets were varied—corporations, drugs, Reagan, Thatcher, current pop music, heavy metal, musical imperialism—and the verbal blows didn’t always connect. Still, the passion was palpable, and the central message clear: “People want something real . . . everything is blando, blando, blando—let’s have a revolt from the bottom up!”
After Strummer rattled off a long list of upcoming tour dates, the interviewer innocently asked about vacation plans. Strummer reared back in disgust, while Simonon retorted, “We haven’t got time for vacation, we’re there for working!”
Strummer jumped in: “There is no time for vacation! Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, their fingers are like that over the button”—hands shaking, mocking an orgasmic eagerness to set off nuclear hell—“there is no time for vacation. It’s time to get down to it, to have responsibility, to use your vote!”
When the interviewer commented that both musicians seemed happy with the new Clash, Strummer agreed: “We are excited, because at last we don’t have to waste our energy on internal arguments. We don’t have to waste our time begging someone to play the damn guitar!”
After more whipping of Jones’s ghost by both musicians, Strummer unleashed a storm of words: “Now is the time to cut out everything that has been wasting your time, time to get serious. You should have high standards . . . I wish everyone would run into street and smash all their records and burn every record store down . . . tell the business we don’t want something they invented . . . Our flesh is about to be flayed off our faces by a firestorm, we haven’t got time to listen to white people play fake black music . . . Don’t support stadium dog rock!”
The fervent, jumbled rant leaped from Strummer’s mouth as if a dam were bursting. The singer was desperate to communicate—to justify the new Clash? To address this scary moment? To rally the troops to action? It’s hard to tell.
Yet both Strummer and Simonon—in his gentler way—communicated an urgency that was far too often missing from the popular music of 1984. Indeed, more passion was on display in this interview than many of their contemporaries evidenced onstage. As Simonon curtly noted, “So much music these days is so tame, you might as well just go back to bed!”
If Strummer and Simonon sensed an impending “Armagideon time,” others acted as if 1984 was nonstop party time. Culture Club’s Boy George and bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and Wham! celebrated jet-set lifestyles and club-land glamour, spinning out lightweight synth-pop dance tunes that were highly profitable but eminently dispensable.
Sheppard later dismissed such music: “It’s like people watching the big musicals in the thirties—it’s escapism, isn’t it? People trying to avoid thinking about the hard times.” Mick Jones had aligned himself on the “dance” side of the “dance vs. riot” polarity, illuminating what helped lead to the break as 1984 approached.
While The Clash disdained the club crowd, the band also had to account for its own misadventures—beginning with a confrontational appearance on America’s pop showcase, Entertainment Tonight (ET), filmed during the California tour.
ET cohost Dixie Whatley laid it out: “The Clash have returned to the concert trail for the first time in two years. In that time the politically outspoken group has lived up to their name both inside and outside the band. Two members left, with one of them embroiling the group in a bitter lawsuit. The Clash has also had to endure severe criticism stemming from . . . last year’s US Festival where they accepted a payment of $500,000 in the face of their stance as revolutionaries.”
A defensive Strummer first responded with a shot at Boy George and the new pop scene, then unleashed a passionate sermonette: “There are people out there [who] are sick to their souls. They have been at a party too long, they have been taking drugs too long . . . Drugs are over from this minute now!”
A skeptical Whatley shot back: “You don’t take any drugs at all?”
Strummer raised his hands as if to wave the thought away: “I stopped . . . Six months ago I wouldn’t have any more damn pot!”
Whatley: “Is that true for your whole band?”
Strummer: “They’re not into it either. And we’ve come over here and we are telling people if they want to listen.”