We Are The Clash. Mark Andersen

      Bernard Rhodes and Kosmo Vinyl, with Peta Buswell, head of the NYC Clash office at center. (Photo by Bob Gruen.)

       We have two choices. We can give in and watch social destruction and repression on a truly horrific scale, or we can fight back . . . Faced with possible parliamentary destruction of all that is good and compassionate in our society, extra-parliamentary action will be the only recourse left for the working class.

      —Arthur Scargill, NUM conference, July 4, 1983

       We’ve been away for two years—and I’ve been trying to come to a decision. I’ve been thinking, What the fuck am I doing living? What am I supposed to do with it? How come you all come see it? Where is it going, what was it going, what is Clash, where is Clash, who is Clash?

      —Joe Strummer, Barrowlands Ballroom, February 10, 1984

      On Saturday, September 10, 1983, readers of New Musical Express (NME) were startled to learn that The Clash—as they had known it—had ceased to exist.

      A band statement read simply, “Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon have decided that Mick Jones should leave the group. It is felt that Jones had drifted away from the original idea of The Clash. In future it will allow Joe and Paul to get on with the job The Clash set out to do in the beginning.”

      Clash biographer Marcus Gray later wrote that the news “hardly came as a surprise,” but it was to at least one person: the author of the NME press release, Kosmo Vinyl. “I was shocked by this,” the Clash spokesperson insisted years later. “I was not part of the process that decided whether or not this was going to happen—or maybe I was, but I wasn’t aware of it.”

      Vinyl was well acquainted with the tensions, but never believed it would come to this. Yet it now fell to him to somehow help reassemble that most alchemical of creations: an ambitious and successful rock band that had ejected the authors of two and a half of its three hit singles in slightly more than a year.

      Vinyl: “In the end, the situation was presented in a certain way: ‘Are you on board with this, or not?’ And I decided to go with that. The band, what it represented—it all was too important for me to stand aside.”

      This was no small decision—and other members of the Clash camp made different ones in the “him or us” atmosphere that developed after the purge of Jones. The Baker recounts, “I decided to wash my hands of the whole situation. I never told Joe or Paul that I quit, but I said goodbye and left. They never called me, and I never called them.”

      Equally committed partisans came to different conclusions. Like Johnny Green, The Baker had been suspicious of the upstart. Vinyl, however, had earned their grudging respect. Now, as Rhodes’s consigliere and a band mouthpiece second only to Strummer, Vinyl was key to meeting the challenges ahead.

      “Now Mick’s gone, and we’re thinking, ‘We have Joe and Paul and a drummer,’ you know?” Vinyl recalls. “So we’re not starting from scratch here. How are we gonna go forward now?” If the exact path wasn’t immediately apparent, one agenda item was: a new guitar-slinger, with both the needed skills and of sufficiently stalwart ideological stock.

      * * *

      Five days after the news of Jones’s expulsion, seven people gathered for a meeting at 10 Downing Street. If far less publicized than the internecine strife in The Clash, the meeting would prove considerably more consequential.

      The public would only learn about this secret conclave more than thirty years later via a newly released document, marked, “Not to be photocopied or circulated outside the private office.” Attended by Margaret Thatcher and her closest aides, the meeting concerned Ian MacGregor’s plans for the British coal industry.

      British Steel had already undergone drastic layoffs. Now coal mines—known in the UK as “pits”—were on the bull’s eye. According to the meeting notes, MacGregor’s closure program had “gone better this year than planned: there had been one pit closed every three weeks,” with the workforce shrinking by 10 percent.

      This was wrenching amid the worst downturn since the Great Depression, but the Coal Board now meant to go much further: “Mr. MacGregor had in mind that over the years 1983–85 a further seventy-five pits would be closed . . . The manpower in the industry would be down to 138,000 from its current level of 202,000.” Almost one-third of all coal miners stood to lose their jobs in the next two years.

      This was political dynamite, as was made clear by the precautions taken to avoid disclosure of the plan: “There should be no closure list, but a pit-by-pit procedure,” the notes record before coming to the final paragraph: “It was agreed that no record of this meeting should be circulated.” Another memo written a week later stated that the group would continue to meet regularly, but that there should be “nothing in writing which clarifies the understandings about strategy which exist between Mr. MacGregor and the secretary of state for energy.”

      The secrecy was essential, for the plan was ruthless. As the BBC reported in 2014, “Two-thirds of Welsh miners would become redundant, a third of those in Scotland, almost half of those in northeast England, half in South Yorkshire and almost half in the South Midlands. The entire Kent coalfield would close.”

      It was precisely this sort of wholesale assault that Arthur Scargill feared. While some disliked him as a Marxist firebrand, Scargill’s landslide victory for the union presidency in 1981 reflected both his popularity and the rank-and-file sense that a decisive showdown with the government was coming.

      The sweeping Tory election victory raised the stakes. In 1981 Thatcher had backed down before a NUM challenge; now her position was strengthened considerably.

      At the NUM national conference held shortly after the Tory landslide, Scargill issued a call to action. Warning that Thatcher sought to destroy the industry not only due to lack of profits, but for revenge, he evoked the specter of fascism in 1930s Germany: “We have two choices. We can give in and watch social destruction and repression on a truly horrific scale, or we can fight back.”