needed money ’cause I had none / I fought the law / and the law won.”
The song echoed poverty’s desperation, its doomed protagonist reduced to “robbing people with a six-gun.” If evoking a mythical American West, its theme also fit with the present locale: Sunderland, a port city in northeastern Britain.
Once Sunderland had been “the largest shipbuilding town in the world,” according to the BBC. Now, the ships were gone, factory gates padlocked and rusty, with the area also hemorrhaging mining and other industrial jobs. A battle waged over the past two years to forestall an even bleaker future had not ended in victory.
Yet if the lyrics were grim, the spirit in the Drum Club discotheque on this evening in May 1985 was anything but. Joy met defiance as crowd and band became one giant chorus, spitting in the eye of a cruel fate.
We may have lost, the voices seemed to say, but we are not defeated.
* * *
A British rock band called The Clash was the catalyst for that rousing Sunderland night. By the time the group performed this audacious impromptu concert, they had become the single most popular unit to rise out of the UK punk explosion, thanks to their 1982 breakthrough album Combat Rock, with its hit singles “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”
Over the ensuing decades, The Clash’s stature has only grown, with commentators regularly placing them in a rock pantheon next to an earlier generation’s demigods such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This development—including their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—is not without irony, given the band’s populist, antistar stance. Nonetheless, as an Arabic version of the antifundamentalist “Casbah” by Algerian rocker Rachid Taha suggests, The Clash’s global cultural influence is vast and spreading, as befits a band that consciously strove to think in planetary terms.
In the fall of 2013—nearly thirty years after that Sunderland show—The Clash released Sound System, a massive box set. While the long-defunct unit had been the subject of several such compendiums, this one was clearly meant as the final will and definitive testament of one of the twentieth century’s most important rock groups.
Described by Rolling Stone magazine as collecting “all of its albums,” Sound System was a vast and weighty document. Designed to resemble that 1980s urban icon—the boom box cassette deck—the set also contained unreleased music and videos, a poster, a book, magazines, badges, stickers, even Clash dog tags. “I’m not even thinking about any more Clash releases. This is it for me, and I say that with an exclamation mark!” band cofounder Mick Jones told Rolling Stone at the time.
Yet, for all of Sound System’s vaunted completeness, there was a striking omission: the band’s sixth studio album, Cut the Crap. Although the record cracked the UK Top 20, with a similarly high-ranking single, “This Is England,” it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any mention that a final version of The Clash, without guitarist Jones and drummer Nicky “Topper” Headon, had played 120-plus shows, nearly 20 percent of the band’s total gigs.
Perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise. The film Westway to the World and its companion tome The Clash—the other two volumes that, with Sound System, effectively comprise the authorized Clash canon—also omitted the same for all intents and purposes. None of the final two years of concerts—such as the Sunderland show—were included in the comprehensive list in the big pink coffee-table book, which credited “Strummer Jones Simonon Headon” as its authors.
It’s true that two of those four—Jones and Headon—were absent from Cut the Crap. Nonetheless, the record’s exclusion was extraordinary, only justifiable from a narrow perspective that has hardened over the years. This view not only dismisses the album but the band’s last version itself—popularly known as “The Clash Mark II”—as lead-footed punk pretenders unworthy of serious scrutiny.
According to one Clash biographer, Marcus Gray, The Clash Mark II was drilling out “heavy metal” versions of the unit’s classics, “reducing every tune to a primitive staccato stomp . . . with its original melody, subtlety, texture, and meaning hammered into the ground.” They are deemed “a Clash cover band” by another, author/filmmaker Danny Garcia. One wag even recorded a reworked version of their latter-day anthem “We Are The Clash” as “We Aren’t The Clash.”
A few brave souls have dissented from this chorus of dismissal, most notably writer Jon Savage, who described Cut the Crap as a “moving state of the nation address.” Savage even singles out “This Is England” as “the last great British punk song” in his magnum opus, England’s Dreaming. Such voices, however, have largely been drowned out by the sound of a naysaying echo chamber.
Over time, the ripple effects of this critical razzing have taken a toll. Ironically, Cut the Crap’s roundly panned “electro-punk” production is often held up as proof of the group’s lack of talent. Consider this Saturday Review summary: “Pathetic stabs at updating the sound with multiple layers of overdubs and synthesized drum machines only point out the limitations of the group’s playing abilities.” A damning take—yet, as it happens, the record was hardly created by The Clash Mark II as such, and didn’t fairly represent their skills or live sound.
Thirty-odd years after the album’s release, such attitudes also persist in critics’ bibles like the All Music Guide, which writes off Cut the Crap as “formulaic, tired punk rock that doesn’t have the aggression or purpose of early Clash records, let alone the hardcore punk that the new band was now competing with.”
Going one step further, Rolling Stone entirely dismisses the neo-Clash in a November 2012 “Flashback” column titled “The Clash Say Goodbye at the 1983 US Festival.” While admitting that a new lineup continued to play live after Mick Jones’s exit, the magazine sneered, “But that’s like a Rolling Stones tour without Keith Richards. It doesn’t count, and the whole thing has basically been erased from history. The Clash as we know them ended at the 1983 US Festival.”
Case closed; roll the credits and be done with it. For many of the band’s chroniclers, this post–Jones/Headon version of The Clash is to be classified alongside other egregious artistic faux pas of ego-addled and/or cash-hungry rock pioneers—the Doors going on for two albums without Jim Morrison, the Velvet Underground sans Lou Reed, John Cale, or Nico.
This disdain is heightened by a new reality: in the twenty-first century, zombie versions of once cutting-edge bands stumble on for years after death—Dead Kennedys without Jello Biafra, the Misfits without Glen Danzig, Black Flag without anybody but Greg Ginn . . . the list goes on and on. Except for an occasional compilation appearance of its blazing twilight-era anthem “This Is England,” The Clash Mark II has seemed similarly undead, fated to remain one of rock’s great untouchables, unfit for public consumption.
Mick Jones famously described his ejection as “the greatest mistake in rock and roll history”—but that might be expected. More curious is the fact it has been hard to find defenders of The Clash Mark II even from those who played in the band.
In his later years, Joe Strummer hardly uttered a kind word about the unit that he more than anyone else created. Clash Mark II axman Vince White wrote Out of Control, a blistering exposé of the behind-the-scenes chaos and dysfunctional machinations in the band; in Danny Garcia’s book The Rise and Fall of The Clash, final drummer Peter Howard bemoans a foregone opportunity to join hard rockers AC/DC in order to stick with the doomed neo-Clash. While far less vitriolic than White or Howard, guitarist Nick Sheppard has jokingly allowed that this unit might be seen as “the only cover band I’ve ever played in.”
By contrast, Clash cofounder Paul Simonon has reaffirmed the motivation behind the expulsion of Jones, and asserted the worth of the final songs. However, even he doesn’t defend Cut the Crap, faulting manager/cofounder Bernard Rhodes for undoing the album with his dictatorial ways. Quipping, “If The Clash was the Communist Party, Bernie was our Stalin,” bassist Simonon now casts Rhodes as essentially pulling off a musical coup d’état in the studio.