THE CLASH RULE THE NEW WAVE

THE CLASH RULE THE NEW WAVE

FEATURES

Simon Frith

Anybody who knows anything knows that the Clash is the best band in Britain; what is difficult to decide is if, in 1978, this means anything to anyone else.

Dunno when the Clash story started for them; for me it began a year or so ago. Punk was making its way from local fun to national obsession and while the Sex Pistols grabbed the shock horror press publicity, it was the Clash who bugged rock writers. Interviews established them as punk's political band. Great copy, as they attacked the rich and rock stars, delivered lectures on the political economy of being young and out of work, proclaimed a new English music: No Blues! If the Pistols seemed kinda suspect as Spokesmen of the New Generation, what with Malcolm McLaren and his sex shop, the Clash seemed to know just what they were doing and had a rich series of lyrics to tap: "White Riot," "London's Burning," "Career Opportunities." Their clothes were sprayed with quotes—"Knives In W.l!", "Stenguns In Knightsbridge!"—and for hip politico rock writers like me, always eager for something to ease the conscience and prove that, despite all appearances, we are still hip and political, the Clash, whom at that stage I'd neither seen nor heard, were obviously the New Wave band to get behind.

Then the band signed to CBS and I decided to find out for myself.

Turned out to be a dreadful mistake, the interview. It was the first they did for the company and the press office was as nervous as I was. First time, the Clash arrived just as I left and all I got was two blank faces, staring expressionless at the busily businessy sales staff eddying around them. By the next week it had become a bigger deal than I was ready for. All the group and their manager and an interview room. I left my notes at home and had forgotten in a week everything I'd once intended to ask. Three in the group: Joe Strummer, singer and rhythm guitar, Mick Jones, guitar, PaulSimenon, bass. No one seemed very sure if they had a drummer or not (Nicky Headon was yet to be signed full time) but, for the moment, I couldn't even tell which of the three was which and had failed dismally to absorb the introductions. They all looked London ordinary to me and their only punk characteristics weren't spray paint messages but luminous socks and short trouser legs. They looked like scruffy kids a decade after their time and their manager, Bernie Rhodes, looked just the same but older and shorter and more tetchy.

These people, I remember thinking, don't know the rules of the rock game, not even lesson one, Being Nice To The Interviewer. The Clash kept getting up, strolling round. Someone left the room in mid-conversation. Mick and Paul talked to each other. I felt like a prison visitor, tolerated as a diversion but not much relevant to the boys' real concerns; in better circumstances they wouldn't even have noticed me. "Look," said Bernie, "what are you doing this for? What do you really know about us? What do you care for?" The others got interested again: "Yeah, what are you doing here?" Bernie asked me to put my fingers tight in my ears while he has a little group discussion. I got a headache and the band, amused at my discomfort, relaxed a bit.

But not much. A desultory series of hesitant questions, occasional answers. The Clash passed vaguely through their story: school, boredom, music as something to do, Joe with the IOIers, Mick with London SS, pub bands, rhythm and blues, 'til the Sex Pistols revealed how much more relevant music could be to their lives. Bernie met Joe and told him to stop writing rubbish, start writing what he knew about. And what he knew about was hanging around in London, what was going down on the unemployment line. And when the Clash finally got together, it wasn't to play the comfortable rock 'n' roll the pubs and clubs liked to hear, it was to scramble gigs wherever they could: a pub in Guildford filled with squaddies from the local army camp, who pitched into each other, too pissed to even know the Clash were on stage; little places where violence was the routine since long before the Clash were thought of, and where the bouncers cracked first at the new, punk barrage of anger; little places because the big places, then, wouldn't have them. In Aylesbury, local hippies drew up a petition to keep punk away; in Wales, local Christians had a service outside the hall and denounced punks as Antichrist though, as the Clash said, "they wouldn't know the Antichrist if he hit them across the face with a wet kipper."

All this opposition confirmed the Clash in their conviction that they were expressing something important, that their music could inspire kids to qhange,. could give the dead-enders soime pride, the assurance to do something for themselves. The only music besides their own the Clash talked about with any warmth was reggae—reggae did for black kids what they were trying to do for whites. And it was the kids who counted, who had to live the life the Clash had been able to escape with music. They were a political band but despised the politicos who'd begun to dip a tentative toe into punk: "They write about it, but it's the kids who take the risks."

"What

are you doing this for? What do you realty know about us? What do

you care for?"

I asked why punk would be any more effective than any other rock form and they didn't really seem to think it would be. Their anger, then, was sustained by their music biz experience—"They're all assholes"—and they were as suspicious of CBS as of me. "Why sign up?" "We want our records to get a number 1 in the charts. We want them on juke boxes. We want to pave the way for more groups." And if they're successful? "Then we'll complain about the punks who are ripping off our taxes."

A good moment to go. "Next time you can ask about our hobbies," someone sneered. On the stairs Bernie visibly relaxed. "Make sure you've got your wallet," he said.

Afterwards I realized what a strain it had been to talk for an. hour to people who didn't like me and cared less if I liked them. It's not something I'd do often and it wasn't good for critical toughness 'cause though I now know that the Clash had meant everything they'd said, I also know now that they bullshit a lot. It was too easy for them to awe a non-young, non-working class, non-unemployed rock writer, frightened of my own ignorance; it was too easy for them to make me take their account of dole queue rock for given. In fact, the Clash are as rpmantic about their audiences as any old hippie and as confusedly prejudiced about the processes of getting to it. Six months later, backstage with Lester Bangs, I bumped into Mick Jones again, who acknowledged my presence at one of the Clash's precious proletarian gigs sourly. "Yeah," said Lester, "you're right. They really don't like you." But by then I didn't care much either.

A year is a long time in rock politics, especially if you're a cynic, and my bad moments with the Clash came back to me last night, watching a new BBC-TV show for teenagers. All these earnest youngsters gathered in the studio and there, in the front row, the Clash, answering questions about politics and racism and the future, just as earnest. The youth club frighteners had become youth club intellectuals and I'm still as confused about the meaning of these punk politicians.

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Which may be very silly, because what I don't doubt is the Clash's marvelous music. I've seen them perform now, often as I can, and I've never heard a duff number let alone an off gig. The most angry,rock 'n' roll music ever, but a solid, collective anger—no selfpity or frustration but a self-conscious sense of limits. As the group has developed (which they have, every last gig), the deeper rhythms and richer sounds have only served to fill out the original aggression. The Clash haven't been gentled. Their music is still as harsh and as exciting as on their excellent album. There has not been a hint of hypocrisy for all the obvious strains of being an honest punk in a dishonest commercial world. The Clash's response to being messed about by CBS was to release a single, "Complete Control," saying so. One result of this has been that the Clash have had the best press in the history of rock 'n' roll. I've never read a bad notice and the good ones appear everywhere, from the humblest fanzine to the most arrogant national music mag. And it's not just the music that's at issue. Lester Bangs' epic 50,000-word Clash piece for the NME was an account of a spiritual experience— something like Larry Flynt meeting Ruth Stapleton Carter. Critics, especially American ones, come away from Clash gigs feeling like Better People.

What I can't decide is whether the Clash's normal audiences feel that way too. There's still a big gap between the group's critical and commercial success. The singles don't make the top 20, the album sold steadily but nothing like the Pistols' or the Stranglers'; CBS still hasn't bothered to release it in the USA. And now it's announced that Sandy Pearlman, of Blue Oyster Cult fame, is being flown in to produce the new Clash LP and I wonder if this marks a real shift of strategy, an acknowledgement that the Clash audience is going to have to include old voyeurs and bores like me.

In the last year the Clash have grown older, couldn't'help it. Their street wisdom is no longer muttered at the entrance of rock's youth club, is no longer sneered at the straight kids*going in. The Clash are inside themselves now, respected elders of the tribe,

A year ago, punk was a gesture— spontaneous, explosive, necessary,but with built-in self-destruct: exit the Sex Pistols. The Clash survived and now it really is down to them to tell us what happens next. After the awakening is over, where do we go for our dreams?