Some punk stuff

The Clash looking dapper.

I think that without punk there would be very little decent guitar-based rock music around today. When I hear overrated prog rock rubbish like Radiohead I thank my lucky stars for people like The Sex Pistols and The Clash.

Pistols' bass guitarist Glen Matlock has just published an updated edition of his autobiography I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol (Reynolds & Hearn). I thoroughly recommend it, if only to discover that Wimbledon Common was the natural habitat of more than just the Wombles back in the mid-1970s(you'll have to read the book!).



Glen Matlock looking dapper, 1976

The Clash have a singles collection out at the moment. As I have most of their important stuff on tape and CD (hark the non-iPod wearing techno-sceptic!)I don't think I will be buying it, but don't let me stop you! There also seems to be a couple of new biographies of the late Joe Strummer/The Clash around. However, the article below is from the horse's mouth ie Clash members Paul Simonon and Mick Jones.
I just hope I can dress as well as those pair when I hit my 50s!



Paul S (L), Mick J (R).

'We were the soundtrack to a punch-up': The Clash burst on to the scene 30 years ago and, as Alexis Petridis discovers, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones are still keen to stir things up
The Guardian, Friday November 3, 2006

On the sumptuous new Clash Singles box set, there is a track recorded in 1977 and prosaically titled Interview With The Clash on the Circle Line. Nestled as it is among (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, Bankrobber, Should I Stay or Should I Go and their equally remarkable B-sides, the sound of a youthful Tony Parsons quizzing the band, over the noise of the Underground, is likely to be overlooked.

Nevertheless, if you manage to stick it out, you eventually hear something rather striking. "We don't agree on hardly anything," says guitarist Mick Jones. "Basically we 'ate each other." "I don't think enough of you to 'ate you," counters Joe Strummer. "I 'ate the fuckin' both of you," says bassist Paul Simonon. There's laughter, but there's also a definite hint of tension: this, you think, could turn nasty any moment.

Three decades after the event, Simonon agrees. "It was there from day one, there was always verbals going on, there was always competition." He breaks into a grin. He has a gap in his front teeth. "At one time, I used to watch the others on stage and think, look how high he's jumped. I'm going to jump higher than that. Right, I'll get on the drum riser and jump off that."

Sitting in a west London private member's bar 29 years on, Simonon and Jones are enormously affable company. "We soon made up after the band split," says Jones. "We were back to where we were before, close friends." But, you occasionally catch a glimpse of the tension that first fuelled, then destroyed, the Clash. They both look fantastic - rather thrillingly, in their 50s, they still look like members of the self-styled Last Gang In Town - but their characters are poles apart.

Jones is sentimental and emotional about the band and its demise. He jumps from his seat to illustrate wild moments from the band's history, imitating the producer Guy Stevens throwing chairs around during the making of London Calling, or Joe Strummer tripping up a roadie on stage, or how the band went out of their way to provoke the makers of Rude Boy, the ill-fated 1980 attempt to turn the Clash into film stars ("Did we run 'em ragged? Not 'arf!"). He mentions the cosmic significance of the fact that he got on stage and played with Strummer one last time, a couple of weeks before the latter died from a congenital heart defect in December 2002. When the conversation reaches the records the band made after he was fired in 1983, he excuses himself from the table: he makes a joke about it on his return, but there's no mistaking he's still upset. It's pretty clear Jones would have loved the band to reform to play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York, a plan that was being mooted around the time of Strummer's death. "I wish we'd done more," he says. "I wish we'd done another record around about that time. When the Sex Pistols reformed, I know they thought about writing some new material, but nobody wanted to hear it, they just wanted the old stuff, but I think if we'd have got back together again, we'd have made a new record and it would have been where we were at now. We could have done something."

Simonon, by contrast, is more laconic and pragmatic. He has a tendency to cap Jones's eager reminiscences with a single, deadpan, softly spoken line. When Jones incredulously relates how the Clash's errant manager Bernie Rhodes refused to pay bail money when Simonon and drummer Topper Headon were arrested for shooting pigeons - "I think he thought being in Brixton nick would do you good!" - Simonon quietly responds: "Well, it did. I knew I didn't want to go there again." When asked how he feels about the Clash now, he says: "It was a memorable time that probably shaped me in my outlook today," like someone dimly recalling national service. He says he spent years working to escape the shadow of the Clash and become accepted as an oil painter: indeed, he's only recently been inspired to pick up a bass guitar again, and join Damon Albarn's latest project, The Good, the Bad and the Queen. Mention of the band reforming for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame brings on a shudder, and that most punk of put downs: "Poxy." "I wanted nothing to do with that Hall of Fame thing. What I wanted to tell Joe was that even if the Clash was to reform, the last place it needs to happen is at the Hall of Fame. First of all, it's three grand for a seat. And also, all that business thing, it's a load of shit. I didn't even want to go to the fuckin' Hall of Fame. It's nice to be given a slap on the back, but, y'know, woo-hah. I'm more interested in tomorrow really."

When the pair talk about the early days of the Clash, it's hard not to be struck by how alien they make Britain of 30 years ago seem, an arcane-sounding lost world, where the cut of your trousers could lead to physical violence: "The fact that you had straight-legged trousers was enough that people wanted to come up and give you some," remembers Simonon. Everything seems different, from the psychogeography of London - "You always knew that if you found yourself in Hammersmith, you had to be careful, because it was known teddy boy country" - to the nature of rock concerts, which in their recollection amounted to little more than a handy opportunity to stage a mass brawl. "We had concerts where the minute we started playing, the room would immediately divide into two sort of groups of louts and they'd just go crunch, bash," says Simonon. "We were just the soundtrack to a punch-up."

"We'd go to a gig in Derby and it would be Preston North End fans and Derby County fans, and it would be exactly the same thing," adds Jones. "The music would start and that was a sort of signal for them to go at it. We'd be on stage, thinking, 'What are we doing?'"

What they were doing was embarking on one of the most extraordinary musical trajectories in rock history. It's been said before, but listening to their singles, what registers most is the Clash's fearlessness and willingness to take on pretty much any musical genre. "I always looked at the Ramones," says Jones. "I really admired them, but I wished they'd do something different after a couple of albums." They mastered reggae so completely that they ended up playing in Jamaica at the Bob Marley festival alongside Peter Tosh - "We gave a good account of ourselves," says Jones - which seems remarkable given that, according to Simonon, they initially didn't want to. "We even wrote a song about it," he says, "called Dig a Hole: 'Dig a hole, bury your guitars, dig some reggae but don't play any.'"

Talk turns to 1977, the B-side of their debut single White Riot. As statements of cocky intent go, it still sounds startling, matching a musical scorched-earth policy - "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones!" - to what sounds like a call to immediate armed revolution. Jones claims the lyrics have been misinterpreted, and the song is a little more altrusistic than it seems ("the 'Sten guns in Knightsbridge' thing wasn't like we had Sten guns in Knightsbridge, it was like, we're concerned about that kind of thing, it was around the time of the Spaghetti House siege"), but yes, he concedes, it would be nice if someone wrote something as iconoclastic as that today. "They could say, no U2, Jay-Z or Beyoncé in 2007," he chuckles, then suddenly looks a bit folorn. "But it's never going to happen, is it? I don't think things mean as much now. It's been so reduced now to the sliver of the end of a boiled sweet. They've done such a job on us, no one's ever going to be able to think like that any more. But you can't wait around, you've gotta do something. But the thing is" - his voice takes on a slightly conspiratorial tone - "if you have lunch, you can't do it. You've got to do it instead of having lunch. If you say, let's have lunch, you'll talk about it and you'll never do it." He takes a slurp of his bloody mary. "We used to just do it."

A brief silence is broken by a laconic voice. "Mick," says Simonon softly, "we couldn't afford lunch."

PS Things to say down the pub when the conversation reaches a hiatus: "Oasis went downhill when they started to think they were the new Beatles rather than the new Pistols..."