Music: The Best Gang in Town

The Clash offers visions of a rock-‘n ‘roll apocalypse

A word from a fan in Berkeley, Calif:

“I like the Clash because they’re not disco. They’re not fat, bald, aging hippies in hot tubs.”

A reflection from the Clash singer Joe Strummer, backstage at Berkeley: “We shouldn’t have played here. It’s a university town. They’re boring snobs.”

Standoff. Stalemate.

It is a curious situation, not without a certain undercurrent of irony. The Clash, an English band of four tough-strutting musicians who together lay down the fiercest, most challenging sounds in contemporary rock, has just finished up an

American mini-blitz on behalf of their new album Give ‘Em Enough Rope: ten days, seven cities, stretching from Berkeley to New York, stirring up waters that flow far too free and easy. “American audiences like music to keep you happy,” observes Drummer Nicky (“Topper”) Headon. “It’s music for you to drive home by.” “It’s the most dreadful thing,” Lead Guitarist Mick Jones declares scornfully. “The Aerosmiths, the Foghats, the Bostons—they’ve kind of signed themselves out.”

All around London, the Clash sings straight to—and, in a sense, even speaks for—a generation of working-class kids not only cut off from the social mainstream but disaffected from the smug, cushy sounds of most contemporary pop. Stateside, the audience is different: students, trendy punks, artists and camp followers who cruise the punk periphery like tourists looking to score a season box for the apocalypse. No wonder that, after only the first American date, Joe Strummer was already sounding a little homesick.

In England, the lashing, defiant sound of the Clash has scored well on the charts. Their songs drive hard and mean business. Just the titles give a taste of the action: Last Gang in Town, Guns on the Roof, Drug-Stabbing Time. In the U.S., air play is scarce. Easy enough to figure that stations programmed for the lulling sounds of California rock or the dull throb of disco might not take to a Clash tune like Tommy Gun. There is even some civic concern about violence at the concerts, to which Strummer replies, “There’s as much violence at our concerts as any bar” —or, he might have added, at your run-of-the-mill Aerosmith concert. Even with this uncertainty and resistance, the new album has sold upwards of 50,000 copies so far, indicating that there is still an audience for the kind of challenging, combustible music that has not been matched since the Stones or the Who.

Or, for that matter, the Sex Pistols, with whom the Clash is continually compared, although, as Headon says, “we’re nothing like the Sex Pistols. We don’t set out to shock people through being sick onstage or through self-mutilation.” Jones elaborates: “I never was one for sticking a pin in me nose.” The Clash, though hardly elegant instrumentalists, makes far better crafted music than the Pistols ever did. The sheets of sound they let loose have the cumulative effect of a mugging, but the songs, full of threat and challenge, never mean to menace. They are, rather, about anger and desperation, about violence as a condition more than a prescription. Last Gang in Town, a fleet, bleak vision of the immediate future with London deeply riven by intramural combat between “rockabilly rebels,” “skinhead gangs,” “soul rebels” and “zydeco kids,” is in part a smart parable about musical rivalries. Even more to the point, it is a shrewd reflection on class and generational warfare, as Strummer sings, “The sport of today is exciting/ The In crowd are into infighting/ . . . It’s brawn against brain or knife against chain/ But it’s all young blood flowing down the drain.”

Although the Clash assaults some familiar enemies (cops, narcs, soldiers and teachers), the group has no safe targets — not even themselves. Cheapskate is a bit of ironic bemusement about rock stardom, both its perks (“Just because we’re in a group you think we’re stinking rich/ ‘N’ we all got model girls shedding every stitch”) and its permanence (“I’ll get out my money and make a bet/ That I’ll be seeing you down the launderette”). A fever-blister rocker called Safe European Home concerns the lads’ attempts to seek out some brothers in Jamaica, where “every white face is an invitation to robbery” and “Natty Dread drinks at the Sheraton Hotel.”

Mick Jones, who writes most of the Clash repertoire with Strummer, hopes that their music can be “an il lumination.” Such an ambition might seem unsuitably lofty but for the fact that the group comes from a tradition that uses music not only as an outlet but as a force, an effective instrument of social change. “The record company’s making out we’re politicians, and that’s a load of stuff,” sneers Strummer, but Jones may cut a little closer when he recalls the title of his school song, Servants of the State to Be. “It was the high hope that you would become a civil servant,” he says. “That was the best you could do. But rock ‘n’ roll changed the way I look at society.”

Jones, Headon and Bass Player Paul Simonon are all 23; Strummer is the band’s senior citizen at 25. Two come from broken homes (Jones: “I stayed with me gran and a lot of wicked aunts”) and have logged long hours doing manual labor and running the streets. Even Headon, whose father was a headmaster and whose mother was a teacher, says, “I used to steal a lot and run with a gang,” and figures he would be in stir today if he had not beat out 205 other drummers at a Clash audition. Out of the pieces of a shared precarious existence, the Clash has fashioned music of restless anger and hangman’s wit, rediscovered and redirected the danger at the heart of all great rock. — Jay Cocks