Fighting rock fatigue with the Clash by Dave McCullough
Article published in Sounds, 17th July, 1982 | Part 1 here:
The Clash | Armed Combat | Part 2 | We want to be free; if possible. I’d rather be free than go down as a has-been. Just to regurgitate. It’s very difficult for us, you know. Because that first album just keeps on getting more and more relevant!
DMcC: ‘Career Opportunities’ is truer than it ever was. And you’re playing it again!
STRUMMER: Yeah, it’s getting heavier. It’s hard to live with, because I sort of said it then in one go. and now I’ve had to go on from there; it’s tough. But I enjoy it. My ego’s enormous. I even enjoy being corny. I enjoy BEING THE CLASH.
DMcC: That’s extraordinary. That’s mainly the reason why you were shot down critically after the first album. And why, I think, the Rolling Stones comparisons are applicable.
STRUMMER: True. I think they’re applicable too. Mick I think is . . . that early Mick Jones is definitely besotted by Keith Richards. It’s true! It has to be said. I myself was much more of a Stones fan when I was a kid than anything else.
I think ‘1977’ was an attempt to kick that out. Make a new space to work in. But I don’t respect the Rolling Stones any more. Their creativity is nil.
I think it’s definitely down to punk rock, the fact they’re playing all these early songs again, it kicked them in the bum so hard they’re having to do and re-record that good stuff again.
If it hadn’t been for punk rock they’d be writing songs about owning Rolls Royces. Punk rock rejuvenated the Stones.
Punk was the only fad that ever moved me. And it was mainly down to that thing of, Anybody Can Do It. That idea is so important still. As soon as we’re into techno rock, all that shit . . . you have to be a bit, you know, clever or scientific to play that.
The Clash | Armed Combat | Part 2
DMcC: The Clash have a muscle, a dynamo still live. Even in the sense that a New Order have too . . .
STRUMMER: Yeah, I know we’re old fashioned but I still go for the Raw-get up there and do it.
DMcC: It’s almost like exorcism night after night —trying to kill off the Stones’ influences, tradition.
STRUMMER: Live, you see, is what saves us. Like the Stones, we’re a live band. I love playing those songs, that idea of the four of us. I mean, the Clash are ABOUT these four geezers trying to bluff their way through, it might be a load of old tat but THAT’S the Clash.
DMcC: I see Townsend’s trying to flog his new solo LP by continually linking together you and Paul Weller. As I do I suppose! But do you have any empathy towards Weller?
STRUMMER: I really like Weller, as a person. We’d get on really well if we met in a room. But, to be quite honest, I think he’s in a non creative situation. And I feel the set-up of the Jam doesn’t do him . . . Weller enough to be Weller!
I respect him but I expect so much more from him too. I used to think he’d be one of the great white soul voices. But I . . . can’t seem to hear it these days. I’m worried about that. Yeah, even though he always slags us off, Weller, yeah he’s a cool cat all right . . .
DMcC: Did you get married. . . ?
STRUMMER: Oh no, I’m already married. I married a non British for £150 to buy that black guitar I played tonight. I can’t manage to get divorced though. I . . . can’t seem to find my wife. That is, I can’t seem to remember her surname. This sounds ridiculous I know. But that name . . . it just ) it won’t come back to me. It’s like a novel.
DMcC: What about the runaway ‘attempt’?
STRUMMER: I just got up and went! my girlfriend’s mother is in jail in France, so I had a personal reason to go there, but I did literally get up and go. I went to shake the Clash up, to shake the Clash fans up, to shake the Clash haters up. To shake myself up too.
It was a bravado thing. I mean, we’ve done six years of this. I still think we can go on to be relevant, still be viable and realistic.
What I was thinking at the time was, Mick Jagger‘s 38 whatever and he’s still up there prancing around. Somehow I wanna avoid that. I really want to avoid it.
The Clash | Armed Combat | Part 2
DMcC: You’d have to do more runners . . .
STRUMMER: Jagger did something pure and good in his youth . . . and now he has to recreate it. I have to avoid that at all costs. I don’t know how but I’ll try.
“We’ve got this self-destructive streak in the Clash. If we think we shouldn’t do something, we’ll do it. We’re supposed to be out there struggling for attention with all the other super groups.
But none of them have our self destructive urge, the NME I’ll tell ya had a headline on us that said, ‘Up The Hill Backwards’. I looked at it and I thought, It’s f***in’ TRUE! Ha ha!
DMcC: It’s wilful though. It’s like the Lennon and McCartney cliches. The Clash are definitely Lennons.
STRUMMER: It is wilful yeah. But I think we’ll continue to exist on it. Boy, would we be f***ed if we ever made it!
DMcC: Number two. Close . . .
STRUMMER: That was great to be accepted in our home land for that we’d give up everything, everything we’ve meant in any other country all over the world. I think, Jesus do we really mean that little in England? Has it got that bad? It’s better to deal with the situation though, to face it.
DMcC: Whereas Dylan seems to be heading back to the Clash’s rock and roll style, the Clash seem ironically to be heading towards the narrative style of the likes of Dylan, Morrison and Joni Mitchell. There’s that kind of richness on ‘Combat Rock’, that’s what I’m saying.
STRUMMER: Van The Man, I know a lot about him from 101ers days. I think he started to go off it a bit when he moved to America. His true experience I felt belonged to N Ireland. But ‘Cypress Avenue’ —that was his soul. ‘Astral Weeks’ is so f***in’ BRILLIANT – and then he moved over here and went down the pan.
It’s a good parallel to do with a lot of people as well. Maybe it’s true, every writer has just one good book in him or, with us, maybe only two good albums. Maybe we should all pack it in after doing something great, I don’t know. It remains to be seen.
But, Jesus, ‘Cypress Avenue’ and ‘TB Sheets’ — I just knew he’d lived those songs and been to those places. ‘Madam George’ . . .
The Clash | Armed Combat | Part 2
DMcC: People will find this funny — Strummer’s into THESE things after all.
STRUMMER: Yeah well I’ve got to be honest. I defy anybody to say ‘Cypress Avenue’ isn’t soul I thought Morrison’s genius was he could take one phrase, or even a word, and stretch it out unbelievably, play with it . . .
‘STRAIGHT TO Hell’ seemed to me to be about heroin.
STRUMMER: Not really. It’s about having no place in the world to live. Kids growing up with Thatcher, being denied education, being denied their actual piece of this world they’re entitled to.
Verse one’s about ‘Amerasian’, which is an actual kosher word now, that’s offspring of American GIs-they’re really looked down upon in their homeland and they’re not allowed to go to America . . . Verse three does deal with heroin. All the junk they sell to people to kill them off with . . .
DMcC: Heroin from personal experience?
STRUMMER: I’ve never taken heroin and if anyone comes round with it I just tell them GET OUT. Anybody who deals with that is a right idiot. I think junk’s evil, no doubt abut that.
All that Burroughs’ Junkie stuff about them saying, We don’t need sex when we’ve got junk – that is so real life it’s not true!
It’s so insidious – its trick is, you think you’re the one in control, you walk a very subtle line with it, then one morning you wake up and you think you’ve got the flu and you discover your body’s running on the stuff. You can’t do without it anymore.
Most addicts, yeah, they say it’s cool, they’re not reliant on it. they are . . . I’ve given up all drugs this year. I’ve said a thousand times already on this tour, Thanks but no thanks. That’s GOOD too, I love saying it. A lot of them are vampires, they think they can suck a piece of you by giving you some cocaine free. That’s their way-in to being friendly with Joe Strummer. Thanks but no thanks!
DMcC: That’s almost where the Clash’s sense of style comes to a halt . . .
STRUMMER: I’ve always hated that image of the rock star as an out of it shambles. These guys, some of them, the Stones and that, they’re GUILTY these guys for killing a lot of people by saying that junk is style. They’ve killed people in the name of style.
If drugs are style man, then let’s forget it. Let’s all be bank assistants or stock brokers.
The Clash | Armed Combat | Part 2
DMcC: Style to the Clash is more balanced again. And it seems to mean being proud of your body.
STRUMMER: That’s true. You see it’s not a preoccupation of youth to look after your body, but when you get a bit older you find it’s useless f***in’ yourself over. I feel if you look good you’re turning people on. When we’re driving round in the car and I see this real smart black guy, it just makes my day.
DMcC: Again, that’s a very innocent thought; and it’s what you’re berated for because it seems false. You’re too innocent for your own good.
STRUMMER: Boy, I never knew how great Britain was till I’d been all round the world. I mean, you can walk into a pub in Soho and it’s like a Fellini film! All these different people decked out all different from each other. The Americans know nothing at all about style I’ve had an overdose of mediocrity like this all round the world.
DMcC: What about England politically? Does it meet your satisfaction as well?
STRUMMER: I heard on the radio the other day about a group of drunks from Missouri who tried to phone Maggie Thatcher and they got through! It’s said they tried to phone Ronald Reagan afterwards and they got no answer . . .
The Falklands thing seems like double dealing to me how they wouldn’t give the Falkland islanders British passports and then they sent our boys out there to get killed. I’m just shocked that it could happen at all. Shit, I must be old fashioned, but I thought we were civilised.
DMcC: That seems surprising, given your interest in war.
STRUMMER: True, I am interested in war, but it’s an anti war interest. We haven’t the experience of war that our fathers had; our fathers were out there fighting right on the line. I certainly would have gone to fight Hitler. It was black and white then, no doubts about it.
I’d like to see the world under one government that’s the trouble. I see the world as human beings and something like the Falklands or Israeli war, I just can’t get a hold of it, even though it was right we grabbed the islands back. How many were killed out there? Would you have gone out there?
The truth was with the teenage Argentinians out there who were told lies, that’s the real tragedy . . .
I just feel the capitalist system is unfair to the people who do the work, that’s what we’re attacking all the time in the Clash. On the other hand the Soviets worry me just as much. Look at how they put down Solidarity . . .
I just think we could TAKE CARE of people better. I haven’t got any forceful plans to solve it all, I just feel there’s a better way of doing it. To hell with nations, let’s have a single government.
DMcC: With ‘Sean Flynn’, even despite its unusual nature for the Clash, there’s still that rushing into politics, that’s always been characteristic of you . . .
STRUMMER: . . . I just feel uncertain, confused. Like The Revolutionary Communist Party, they tried to be our friend over here. But I didn’t rush in there: I wanna know what I’m getting into.
I think Karl Marx has a lot of good things to say. But look at how the Soviets took it, the way they still have an upper class . . . which is what the Clash have always been trying to GET RID off.
YOU EVER feel you should be creating in a different area? Writing novels maybe . . .
STRUMMER: Definitely, more and more. Like I said, I’m thinking now, What am I doing up on stage? Who are these big fat guys in yellow security tee shirts in front of me? I feel I could get into something else. Half of me wants to cut out, write a book or do a film. I’m very into films now. But then I think, while we’re up there we might well make it good.
DMcC: Do you ever feel rock, being such a wild form of expression and so raw in your terms of carrying it out, that it could ever kill you?
STRUMMER: Sometimes, a few times I’ve felt it could kill me. I received a plimsole on the head on this tour and I thought some one had shot me. I’m not kidding. When you’re playing away the farthest thing on your mind is something slamming into your brain from a distance.
Get this! This is really humiliating. I was playing one night, concentrating on my guitar, a spotlight blinding my eyes so I couldn’t see a thing and suddenly someone throws a jacket, a big thick jacket and it goes right over my eyes.
I’m playing away and I can’t get it off! It’s sort of stuck round my head and I’m still trying to sing into the microphone. What can you do? I must have looked ridiculous . . .
Then another night a firework, a really vicious thing an MX80, went up my trouser leg and it was the leg I keep time with. I’ve still got the scar. Here, look at that . . .
DMcC: Not much style in all that.
STRUMMER: There certainly isn’t . . . I mean, about playing live, that’s our outlet and if gig’s are becoming old hat in Britain, which they certainly appear to be, then I really can’t see how we can survive over there.
I certainly think punk was the most exciting thing to happen to music. Nothing has moved me since. I certainly don’t subscribe to the thickness that’s going about, I’d rather have articulacy and intelligence in music.
DMcC: The lyrics to ‘The Clash’ were averagely thick! Cave-man like . . .
STRUMMER: Cave man like! Yeah, well perhaps cavemen were in style then and they aren’t so much needed now. Also, it was sincere when we did it.
Perhaps every cave-man style still rules, perhaps it’s just that I don’t appreciate it anymore. I don’t know.
DMcC: You essentially write pop songs. Can you see yourselves part of, what even people like the top of, the new pop hierarchy in Britain?
STUMMER: We’ll definitely be outside it. We’re always outside everything that’s going on! And good on us, I say. We’re one of the few still burning. Even so, I prefer to be under cover I have to feel like a real person to write songs. I have to feel I haven’t made it in order to continue to write.
Truthfully, I was a bum. I was evicted from a flat, I was rowed about from one labouring job to another, a lot of what I’m now saying is still stemming from that experience. Not from THIS.
Not from Le Parc and all its chic. If this was my whole life I’d dry up quicker than a river . . .
The Clash | Armed Combat | Part 2
DMcC: Your private life, your girlfriend, is still important?
STRUMMER: Yeah, I’d go insane without it. I’m no drug addict but I think I’d . . . if I hadn’t something back home it would be ludicrous. I don’t want to destroy myself just yet. I still have something to say.
It’s so easy to be a casualty, to die young. F*** it! It’s much harder to struggle on I reckon. I feel like jumping out of windows loads of times but I decided one day to survive. Because I realised it was much harder . . .
But imagine being 19 and having hits! Bam, you’ve disappeared in a fortnight. It’s horrible, and I’ve been spared that thank God. It’s got to do your head in. I mean, imagine being Haircut 100?
Imagine, Strummer can.
WHERE TO close: right, I’ll close with Strummer hearing me babbling about the narrowing of rock, its denigration its possible destruction, the ‘death of music’: “Yeah, hopefully!”
The Clash are back in the black again.
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