it also carries some truth. It is indeed so that the vision of Thatcher and her political soul mate Reagan triumphed, sometimes for better and often definitely for the worse.
At the same time, the revolutionary traditions The Clash drew upon and extended have not been fully vanquished. Margaret Thatcher to the contrary, an alternative can and must be found, our world still can and must be transformed in a more humane, inclusive, genuinely democratic way. Such belief was always central to The Clash, grounding their artful critiques in authentic, galvanizing hope.
“Find the ace!” Strummer implored, introducing “Three Card Trick” in 1984. This phrase is crucial, for the song portrays capitalism as a grifter’s game designed so the dealer will forever win. In such a rigged system, hope becomes a trick that keeps the oppression intact. As each person buys the lie, one by one, they collaborate in their own destruction, down through the generations.
But this was not the whole story. The ace, in Strummer’s vision, was the power people can discover by rejecting the lie and banding together: “Who can fight the entire grinding system? Nobody can! But together everybody could . . . I am talking pie in the sky here but still that’s no excuse to sit back and say nothing.”
There is no cheap grace to be peddled here, however. This book is the tale of a punk-cum-pop group, the moment it strained upward and then crashed to earth, the human frailties that led to that, as well as the human costs incurred. As The Clash plummeted, the Reagan/Thatcher vision took flight, soaring to heights that sometimes make it seem inevitable, undefeatable, eternally ascendant.
We Are The Clash, however, is ultimately the tale of how we might yet find that long-hidden ace, the one that enables victory in the game-you-cannot-win, the stacked deck of global capitalism, as well as on other fronts.
As always, it begins simply with the story of a few people, the dreams they had, and what they tried to do to make them real.
chapter one
rebellion into money
“Come on, I need some hostility here . . .” Joe Strummer onstage, US Festival, May 28, 1983. (Photographer unknown.)
US Festival, May 28, 1983. (Photographer unknown.)
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
—Margaret Thatcher, May 4, 1979
This here set of music is now dedicated to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the century.
—Joe Strummer, US Festival, May 28, 1983
The scene reeked of glorious rock spectacle.
Once scruffy denizens of British squats, tower blocks, and underground dives, The Clash today occupied the center of the musical universe. Standing on a massive outdoor stage, the band was dwarfed by more than 250,000 people. The roar of the sweating, surging crowd washed over the four slender figures.
From the back of the audience, the musicians seemed tiny ants on a stage, a pinprick of light, sound, and motion. A gigantic video screen provided the only opportunity for most listeners to connect actual human beings to the tsunami of guitar, bass, drums, and voice being flung at them in the darkness of the arena grounds of the US Festival, near San Bernardino, California.
“Unite Us in Song,” the festival’s advance publicity had said. The crowd, spurred by music, merged into a writhing rhythmic beast. Holy or unholy, some sort of communion was real here at this instant, in this place.
This should have been a moment of triumph for The Clash, a time to savor immense popularity won over seven hard years of touring, recording, and wrangling with an often mystified major record label. But as lead vocalist Joe Strummer strode to the microphone midway through the set, his words and demeanor suggested anything but self-satisfaction.
“I suppose you don’t want to hear me go on about this and that and what’s up my ass, huh?” the singer sneered. As the crowd cheered incongruously, Strummer continued: “Try this on for size—Well, hi everybody, ain’t it groovy? Ain’t you sick of hearing that for the last 150 years?”
A renewed roar greeted this dismissal, but what did the sound and fury signify? Affirmation? Noncomprehension? Determination to party on no matter what?
Strummer’s tone shifted to pained earnestness: “I know you are all standing there looking at the stage but I’m here to tell you that the people that are on this stage, and are gonna come on, and have been on it already, we’re nowhere, absolutely nowhere. Can you understand that?” The singer nodded to his bandmates, and muttered, “Let’s do this number!” The quartet crashed into “Safe European Home,” a sardonic, self-deprecating comment on “third world” violence and “first world” cowardice.
Strummer’s words evoked punk’s “anti-star” idealism. Yet the members of The Clash stood on that stage as rock stars paid—as the singer boasted later—half a million dollars for barely more than an hour of work.
If the scene evoked untrammeled success, the singer’s apparent anguish suggested something darker and more conflicted. Was this evening, ultimately, anything more than a lucrative commercial transaction?
In the eighty minutes The Clash played that night, one could have driven west from the festival grounds on Route I-10 and pulled in front of a handsome mansion in Pacific Palisades, a coastal neighborhood on LA’s west side.
This house was where a transplanted Midwesterner had begun a transformation from aging B-list actor to right-wing icon to governor to, finally, the most powerful man in the world: the president of the United States. Now Ronald Reagan was preparing for a final political campaign, one that in eighteen months would determine whether he’d get another four years to consolidate his counterrevolution.
Across the Atlantic in The Clash’s homeland, an equally momentous campaign was already well underway. In twelve days, more than thirty million British voters would decide whether to keep Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Sharing a quasi-religious faith in the “free market” and enmity toward “big government,” the two had become partners in what British journalist Nicholas Wapshott described as “a political marriage” that sought to change the world.
Conventional wisdom had dismissed Reagan and Thatcher as fringe figures, unlikely to be elected, much less be successful in implementing their creed. As Wapshott noted in a Reuters op-ed, “When Margaret Thatcher met Ronald Reagan in April 1975, neither was in their first flush of youth. She was fifty and he sixty-five. She was the leader of Britain’s opposition; he a former governor of California. It was by no means obvious that either would win power. They bonded instantly. Although born almost a generation and an ocean and continent apart, they found they were completing each other’s sentences.”
While both held to a conservative Christian faith that was then beginning to gain political ascendancy in the US via Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement, they also bonded around another shared inspiration. As Wapshott makes clear, “Both found validation for their convictions in the works of Friedrich Hayek, at that time a long-forgotten
