London Calling (63 page)

I interviewed the Clash for
NME
a week later and asked Joe Strummer about the violence at punk gigs. His attitude was clearly ambivalent. He had initially
told me: ‘We’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-Racist and we’re pro-creative. We’re against ignorance’, but
throughout the interview he was playing with a flick knife which, at one point, he held right in front of my face to make
a point. Strummer:

Suppose I smash your face in and slit your nostrils with this, right?… Well, if you don’t learn anything from it, then it’s
not worth it, right? But suppose some guy comes up to me and tries to put one over on me, right? And I smash his face up and
he learns something from it. Well, that’s in a sense creative violence.
⁸

A side of Strummer remained fascinated by thuggery, part of his attempt to transform himself into a working-class lad when
in reality he was a middle-class public schoolboy, son of a diplomat, who had made a conscious effort to adopt a working-class
accent. He carefully adapted his vocabulary, use of language and mannerisms, slurring his words to disguise his plummy voice.
Few things were authentic in punk and the pretence that they were all working class was the most absurd. As the culture critic
Peter York wrote: ‘The most fantastical part of punk, the most irritating part of it, was the altogether lurid ideas it put
about about what it was to be working class in the mid-seventies.’
⁹

Looking back on the punk movement in 1998 Johnny Rotten commented: ‘I know there was a Pistols, then you got that very nice
middle-class copy called The Clash which was really a band all about sloganeering. Oi Oi for the upwardly mobile! And then
you get all this other stuff.’
¹⁰
Rotten never liked the Clash, though he liked the musicians in the band. The Clash rapidly transformed themselves from a
punk band into a world-class rock ’n’ roll band, reaching a vastly larger audience and still managing to get across something
of a political message. Of all the bands, they were the most successful at using punk as a vehicle for political change and
songs such
USA’, ‘London’s Burning’, ‘The Guns of Brixton’, ‘Julie’s been Working
for the Drugs Squad’ and ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ give an idea of the scope and range of their message.

Dick Hebdige saw the punks as responding directly to their social situation: unemployment was at its highest since the war,
lack of opportunity, a lack of facilities for young people, sink schools and sink estates. London was the target of IRA bombs
on shops, restaurants and tube stations, so nowhere felt safe. Football matches were also unsafe, disrupted by waves of football
hooliganism with multiple stabbings, dart throwing and invasions of the pitch. Most punk bands were in their late teens or
early twenties, but the foot soldiers were younger, many of them still at school and most of them living at home. They felt
disengaged, a lost generation, but by living at home they absorbed the casual racism and reactionary ideology fed their parents
through the television and the right-wing tabloids. Very few punks went to college or read books.

Punk was their reaction to all this: the utopian ideology of the hippies had obviously failed, a point made over and over
by the tabloids and willingly absorbed by the punks. The much-vaunted left-wing anti-racist stance of the punks is largely
fiction; a revisionist assessment by sociologists and the punks themselves rewriting their own history to make it more acceptable.
They were inarticulate, barely educated, unable to give form to their feelings, and struggling to create their own language
to deal with the situation: the ripped and torn clothing, the safety pins through the cheeks and lips, the swearing and heavy
macho stance, the self-harm, the antagonism towards hippies, the claim to be working class even though a large number of them
were middle-class suburbanites. Hebdige wrote: ‘The punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisis which had filled the airwaves
and the editorials throughout the period and translated it into tangible (and visible) terms.’
¹¹
Though some of it was phoney – Billy Idol and Chelsea singing about the ‘right to work’ had many people in stitches – much
of it was a relevant and honest attempt to articulate their lives. Johnny Rotten:

my whole attitude towards the Pistols was ‘This is going to be an
honest
band’… It started out as a laugh, right? Being asked to sing in a band!?! I just thought ‘Whoopee! Ha Ha! What fun! A bumpkin
like me who can hardly be bothered to talk.’ And then I took myself a little serious. And I found I wasn’t scared shitless
of yelling in a microphone and it was really good fun. And ’cos they couldn’t write words I did all that – all the literature.
It suited me fine.
All the things I’ve wanted to moan about all my measly life I got into songs. Whoopeeee!
¹²

Vivienne Westwood and Johnny Rotten got on very well initially because they both went to church, though he was a Catholic
and she was C of E. John attended mass and took confession every Sunday with his mother until after they recorded ‘Anarchy
in the U K’. McLaren later claimed: ‘I never could feel comfortable in his presence because I felt this dreadful Catholic
guilt.’ This was one of the big differences between the punks and the hippies; whereas the hippies celebrated love and sex,
almost to the point of obsession, the punks were repressed and almost asexual. Johnny Rotten’s famous comment to Caroline
Coon, ‘Love is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises’, summed it all up.

Though he initially appeared to celebrate the violent side of punk, Rotten soon changed his mind. He saw punk as empowering,
a way of energizing his generation into doing things for themselves. He told Jennifer Byrne:

We were there for that sense of rebellion – ‘we’ve had enough of this, thank you’. Nothing to do with violence… it’s about
making our world a better place… I opened a few doors. It’s a shame a lot of trash and mosquitoes came in with the goods.
¹³

He said it was best done through humour: ‘I’ve always said, I thought the Sex Pistols was more Music Hall than anything else
– because I think that really, more truths are said in humour than any other form.’
¹⁴

This is a side of punk rarely mentioned: many of the bands
were
funny. The Damned were almost a comedy act, with Captain Sensible in his frilly white tutu in contrast to David Vanian’s
dramatic gothic posturing in his cape and white makeup. The
Snuff Rock
EP released on Stiff by the street theatre group/ punk novelty act Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias was such an accurate parody
of punk rock themes that some punks took it seriously.

Punk was not a religion or political party, there was no manifesto or agreed platform. Some people, like McLaren, associated
it with anarchy but he was torn by his desire to cause complete chaos and his desire to make lots of money. Sometimes he consciously
enacted the stereotype of the rapacious Jewish manager, talking in the thick middle-European accent he used in the opening
scene of
The Great Rock
’
n
’
roll Swindle
, and on other occasions he appeared to be acting against his own interests, as when he sacked Glen Matlock – their principal
songwriter and a reasonable bass player – from the Sex Pistols and replaced him with Sid Vicious, who wrote nothing and could
not play a note. Glen Matlock had to play Sid’s part on recordings and Sid’s amp was turned off when they were onstage. Which
of the two Malcolms was involved in making the clothes for SEX is hard to say: they were so expensive that only middle-class
kids could buy them, but on the other hand, he encouraged kids to copy them. He told Claude Bessy:

The greatest thing, the most amazing inspiration that I was conscious of and certainly party to, and certainly helped to create,
was this do-it-yourself thing. See, the greatest thing about my clothes were the fact that anybody could imitate them; it
was the ideas that counted, not the manufacturing of them.
¹⁵

It was this encouragement to do it yourself that, in McLaren’s view, spawned the do-it-yourself punk Xerox magazines, the
cartoons, the ripped and torn clothes made from bin-liners and clothes pegs, and gave them the confidence to get up onstage
and perform, even though they could barely play a note. McLaren: ‘I don’t think they considered they could do any of that
before. They always felt inferior… I think the whole punk thing was extremely artistic, probably the most artistic thing that’s
come about for years, really.’ Peter York agreed that they were artistic: ‘Punk clothing and terminology were
so
Post-Modern it hurt. The clothes were literal cut-ups which pulled together bit of previous youth cultures and Art references
in a way that suggested history was a trash-can.’
¹⁶

It was not the Pistols who encouraged their audiences to make their own clothes but the Clash, whose manager, Bernie Rhodes,
had helped compose one of McLaren’s most innovative garments, the ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and
know
what side of the bed you’ve been lying on!’ T-shirt. This listed Rhodes and McLaren’s loves and hates, like a fashion magazine
charting what’s ‘in’ and what’s not, or, to give it greater gravitas, a ‘punk manifesto’. ‘Loves’ included Eddie Cochrane,
Christine Keeler, Pat Arrowsmith, Mal Dean, zoot suits and dreadlocks, Gene Vincent, Alex Trocchi and the strangely conflated
‘John Lacey and his boiled book v St Martin’s Art School’ – presumably meaning John Latham’s chewed book and Bruce Lacey.
‘Hates’ went on much longer and included the Divine Light Mission, Elton John, Bryan Ferry, Tramps, Mars bars, and McLaren’s
rag trade rivals, including Ossie Clark, Nigel Waymouth (Granny Takes a Trip), Biba and Antiquarius ‘and all it stands for’.

Rhodes, who worked with the early format Sex Pistols when McLaren was away in the States before Johnny Rotten joined, seemed
to mirror almost everything that McLaren did, a few weeks later. Seeing the success of the
Pistols under McLaren’s management, he found himself a group, the Clash, hoping to make them the Rolling Stones to McLaren’s
Beatles. Rhodes had his office in a warehouse near the Roundhouse in Camden where he stored second-hand jukeboxes – one of
his many sidelines – which he now named Rehearsal Rehearsals and fixed up for the band to practise in. Bernie had his own
line in torn, silk-screened T-shirts that he sold from a stall in Antiquarius, so just as the Pistols dressed in ripped, torn
clothing with silk-screened messages, so the Clash were encouraged to personalize their own clothes. First they went through
a Jackson Pollock phase and were covered in splattered paint; then came zips and stencils of words and phrases. (This may
be one of the ideas that supposedly came from the International Situationist group; their predecessors, the Lettrists, had
political slogans written on their trouser legs; there is a well-known photograph by Ed van der Elsken of Jean-Michel Mension
with several texts between his knees and trouser cuffs. Strummer told Jon Savage: ‘Bernie Rhodes was guiding and packaging…
He probably suggested that we write words on our clothing. I never knew much about that Situationist stuff, still don’t today,
but that’s where it came from.’)
¹⁷
Their fans were urged to do it yourself, and they did.

After the ‘Anarchy’ tour, where the Clash played support to the Pistols, McLaren and Rhodes decided that their bands were
becoming a little too independent and needed a firmer hand. Rhodes called a meeting of the Clash at the Ship, on Wardour Street
near the Marquee, and told the band that he wanted ‘complete control’. Strummer: ‘I came running out of the pub with Paul
collapsing on the pavement in hysterics at those words “complete control”.’
¹⁸
Joe and Mick Jones quickly wrote a song, using ‘Complete Control’ as the title, that was released as a single in September
1977.

But first the bands had to find record labels. The Damned had remained true to the do-it-yourself punk ethic and signed up
with Stiff, a small independent label, but McLaren, despite his anti-capitalist rhetoric, signed the Pistols to Britain’s
biggest record label, EMI. Rhodes, who spouted even more anarchic, anti-capitalist ideas than McLaren, followed suit and
signed the Clash to the American giant CBS for the then huge sum of £100,000.

Of course, the high prices charged in SEX and his previous shops made it hard for McLaren to claim he was a true anarchist.
He told Simon Napier-Bell on a talk show:

Only as a fantasy. I was never really committed to it. I just liked causing trouble – like getting £50,000 from EMI for
a group they were afraid to sign but equally afraid to miss out on – then causing so much trouble that they had to drop
them, then getting the money all over again from another company. That’s the sort of anarchy I loved.

But even if the Pistols individually were not politically committed, they delivered a political message with their behaviour
– stage-managed as it often was – and by their lyrics, and many other groups and fans were very influenced by them. They did
change many people’s lives, as did the whole punk movement. Malcolm McLaren:

I didn’t ever consider I was managing a rock ’n’ roll band. I considered myself more a person ultimately concerned in driving
as many people wild as possible with the hope of creating some kind of different social outlook on kids’ lives. To give them
potential for them to realise that they are important and give them a critique in which they can then direct their energies.
¹⁹

And so, all over Britain, kids wrote ‘anarchy’ on their T-shirts with biro and modified their old school blazers. Bands like
the Adverts prided themselves on taking charity shop clothing and remaking it to create punk classics. McLaren kept an eye
open for any new street fashions that he could copy and market.

Punk put the record companies into something of a quandary; even though the bands were pulling in big crowds, the A&R men
only had to listen to a few seconds of playing to know that the energy level could not be reproduced in the studio, and without
that most bands were nothing – none of them could play and in studio conditions their inadequacies would sound even worse.
And as for their energy, it did not take much to recognize that it was largely chemically induced: far from being the energy
of youth, it was the typical behaviour of people who had ingested large amounts of amphetamine sulphate. Speed was the drug
of choice for punks, and lots of it. These were the reasons why the record companies were reluctant to sign up the bands;
there was no way that most of them would ever get played on mainstream BBC radio. Who should they select and market and who
not? In this respect punk certainly challenged capitalism: in a do-it-yourself movement, there are no commodities. The anarchic
side of McLaren celebrated this fact – but he had one of the few bands who were musically gifted and at times Johnny Rotten
was in danger of displaying a rich Irish tenor. McLaren told Paul Taylor: