made it a band that truly mattered, significant in a way few other musical outfits could hope to rival.
As such, to ignore the intimate connection of the final version of The Clash to its specific moment would be foolhardy. As forces clashed on battlefields both real and metaphorical, a turning point can be glimpsed. In 1984–85, a conservative counterrevolution that had been slowly building for at least a decade broke through. As esteemed literary theorist Terry Eagleton notes, “In 1976, a good many people in the West thought Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile?”
While Eagleton jokingly floats parenthood as a possible answer, the matter is at once both more simple and more complex. This query will be as crucial as the question of what happened to The Clash; indeed, the two are quite intertwined.
From this angle, our tale makes much more sense. Jones once summarized his differences with Strummer, Simonon, and Rhodes by noting, “I was going, ‘Let’s dance’; they were going, ‘No, let’s riot!’” But while Jones’s subsequent success with Big Audio Dynamite is undeniable, so is the fact that others felt the moment cried out for something more pointed than inventive beats and the artful use of samples.
This was a time of frightening military buildup, when tens of thousands were slaughtered with US guns in the name of “democracy,” when the Falklands War tipped a nation-altering election. Markets became God, big business shook off the shackles of regulation, and tax rates of the rich and programs for the poor were both slashed while “homelessness” became a new word in the American lexicon. Meanwhile, US workers joined their British compatriots in feeling the pain, despair, and dislocation behind a single consequential word: “deindustrialization.”
If Sex Pistols had warned of “no future” in 1976 with one million unemployed in the UK, how much more grim was 1984 with over three million jobless? With police turned against their own communities, fighting a life-or-death strike with brutality and Orwellian tactics, as the world teetered on the razor’s edge of nuclear destruction? Punk back on the barricades made immense sense in this context, and the final version of The Clash gains immeasurably from that reality.
The Clash was ascending the ladder of success as all of this drama unfolded. This breakthrough intensified its inherent tension between message and commerce. Is it victory to be playing huge stadiums but losing any real hope of an intimate or energizing connection to an audience? Is it success to have a hit with a catchy but lyrically vacuous song like “Should I Stay or Should I Go”? To feel the pressures of fame drawing the band further and further into a bubble of unreality that was the antithesis of the Clash punk-populist stance?
Many in the Clash camp felt these growing contradictions, but none more keenly than Joe Strummer. To try to fight back—reinvent and purify—was a chancy but essential course. The singer embraced this path, at least for a time, together with his final bandmates. Whether they succeeded in these aims is, of course, another matter. Yet one lesson might be that failure can be noble, while success can be a threat not only to your soul, but to the world itself.
What then is one punk band, however gifted, successful, or visionary, before the mountain of might, privilege, and raw avarice that Reagan, Thatcher, and the forces arrayed behind them represented? Not much, Strummer admitted in 1984: “The Clash compared to the Pentagon is smaller than the flea on top of a flea!”
Yet Strummer also acknowledged an intangible but still profound power that the group’s art and ideas could provide. The Clash represented a passionate rebuke to the conservative advance, while not denying the failures that gave Thatcher and Reagan their initial power and lasting appeal. In certain ways, The Clash was responding to the same challenges, the same gap between rhetoric and reality. For a time, its upward trajectory even mirrored that of its deadly opponents, although The Clash’s message would ultimately fail to gain the same social momentum.
If this is in fact so, then the crash of The Clash takes on an even greater resonance. More than any other punk band—or indeed any other rock band—The Clash articulated a vision of a transformed world. If they, like Reagan and Thatcher’s shock troops, had measured the status quo and found it lacking, their remedy was quite distinct: the injection of more compassion, more equality, more freedom-in-community, with all this to be understood and applied globally.
The watchword of Reagan and Thatcher, by contrast, was efficiency—read “profits”—at all costs. In a twisted way, the creative destruction that anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin had called for, that punk had often echoed, was their aim as well. However, the welfare state, government regulation, labor unions, and any impediment to market “freedom” was what they sought to destroy.
Although Reagan and Thatcher evoked a sepia-toned bygone era to win support, their policies bulldozed not only statist bureaucracy but that olden world itself, which had been nourished by shared bonds of responsibility and solidarity. The Sermon on the Mount was outdated; in its place was to be a new gospel of self-interest. There is no such thing as society, Thatcher famously declaimed, promoting the idea of individuals acting rationally to advance their interests, guided toward the greater good by their greed, harnessed by the invisible hand of a quasi-divine “free market.”
Perhaps some punks and Thatcherites shared more than might at first seem likely, both disavowing the old ways and embracing individualistic rejection of constraints. Yet The Clash instinctively stretched past both navel-gazing negation and the Money God to seek the promise of a “postscarcity” world, where there was enough for all and humans were freed from drudgery to find actualization.
In the hard place where ambitions contended with constraints, utopian visions crashed upon the rocks of harsh reality. “There ain’t no need for ya / go straight to hell boys” went one Clash refrain; “Fog drowned towns got to fade / wrong side of a scissor blade” went another, pointing toward the fall of the post–World War II assumption—shared, in some sense, by hippie, punk, and miner alike—of ever-rising living standards for all, with the freedom that could buy.
In the end, we live in a new world where capitalism in its most raw form is ascendant, with diminished material expectations for many. On one hand, there has been untold multiplication of wealth; on the other, inequality has risen to levels not seen since the Gilded Age that dawned after the Industrial Revolution. These disparities are growing globally, crushing the poor and opening a huge divide between the rich and an increasingly precarious middle-slipping-to-lower class.
Even 2008’s global economic near-meltdown and the growing specter of climate change may not have shaken the death grip of this iron-fisted version of capitalism. Why not? As Eagleton incisively notes, “It is unlikely that most of the radicals who changed their minds about the system between the seventies and eighties did so simply because there were fewer cotton mills around. It was not this that led them to ditch Marxism . . . but the growing conviction that the system they faced was simply too hard to crack. It was not illusion about the new capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive.”
In other words—and as Thatcher often argued—there is no alternative.
That the period that Eagleton identifies—the decade from 1976 to 1986—is exactly the life span of The Clash suggests a certain synchronicity. And while this is a tale of the last stand of a band with extraordinary ambitions and gifts, it is also the story of their time. This was a moment when The Clash’s own struggle to right their internal balance and thus maintain their deeply conflicted upward trajectory paralleled the rise of other actors, whose vision was the dark mirroring of their own, equal in scope and driven by as much passion.
After performing “This Is England” in Düsseldorf, West Germany, in early 1984, Strummer warned his audience, “I’m telling you: pretty soon it is
