Reference: MOJO - Punk: The Whole Story (2006). For more, visit Archive.org
MOJO / Punk: the whole story
Contents (Clash only)
Eyewitness - The birth of punk at the 100 Club Festival, Sept 1976
Sniffin' Glue - How a fanzine became punk’s voice
The Clash Explode! - From squats to stardom: The rise of The Clash
Levene’s Departure - Internal conflicts reshape The Clash
What Happened Next - Post-punk journeys and transformations
Sandinista! — Genius or Folly? - The Clash’s ambitious triple album saga
Eyewitness
1–21 September 1976
100 Club Punk Festival
How The Clash, The Damned, and the Sex Pistols gathered in a London trad-jazz nitespot to start a musical revolution.
1 September 1976
Ron Watts (manager, 100 Club): It was the end of that long, hot summer. I'd been booking The Pistols into the 100 Club for months and people were starting to come from Manchester, Plymouth, Newcastle... A&R had been down from all the major record labels, but they all turned their noses up. It occurred to me that an event — a festival — was needed to put punk on the map. I was informally managing The Damned at that point and I got Malcolm McLaren involved because he was in with a lot of bands, notably The Pistols.
Caroline Coon (journalist and founder of the drug charity Release): When I heard about the festival I told Melody Maker I'd cover it. They didn't like it. But it was obviously going to establish whether there was something real. No one even knew if there were enough bands to constitute a movement. Remember, there were no records in the shops and neither The Pistols nor The Clash had signed to labels.
Vic Godard (Subway Sect): Malcolm wanted as many groups as he could get for the festival. When he saw us, we'd never played in front of an audience and he thought we were so awful that anyone could do it. So he booked us for rehearsals in Chelsea and paid for it. We only had five songs.
Pete Shelley (guitar, Buzzcocks): We'd done the Screen On The Green gig with The Pistols and then Malcolm called and asked if we'd do the festival as well.
Siouxsie Sioux: There was a vacant space and Malcolm was saying, "We need another band." I said, "We've got a band." We hadn't. The next day we rehearsed with Sid Vicious on drums, Marco Pirroni and Steven Severin. We'd just seen The Cry Of The Banshee on TV and thought 'Banshee' was a great word.
Marco Pirroni (guitar, Banshees): We'd had an abortive rehearsal at The Clash's place on Monday. We realised there was no point in trying to learn any songs.
Caroline Coon: I talked with the kids in the queue. Not many had the bondage look yet, but they had nipped chinos, brothel creepers, faces scarred with blades. Their look mirrored the despair of the times.
Andy Blade (vocals, Eater): We didn't know at the time, but the queue outside was like a who's who of people who were going to form bands later — Shane MacGowan, Siouxsie, Gaye Advert, TV Smith, Chrissie Hynde...
Ron Watts: Malcolm and The Pistols were up to something. They kept getting into huddles and going out to the café. I think he was signing them to a contract.
"Sid Vicious took a dislike to Stinky Toys — just because they were French."
20 September 1976
John Ingham (journalist, Sounds): That first afternoon when people were soundchecking, Ron Watts was saying there were going to be hundreds of people that night. People told him he was out of his mind, but he went out, came back and said there were about 500 outside. This was the first time I'd seen a punk I didn't know in the street.
Glen Matlock (bass, Sex Pistols): After Malcolm McLaren showed us the contract, I read through it and took up a point about percentages, but John Lydon was really daft about it. John didn't even bother to read the contract. He just said to me, "You read it then?" I said, "Yeah, I read it." He said, "Well, if there's anything wrong with it, it's your fault." And he signed it without even reading it.
Andy Blade: Ron Watts asked us to play, but on the day he couldn't let us because we were all so young — like 14 and 15.
Ron Watts: Even though I'd advertised the order they'd play in, there was jostling for position all day. There was a real rivalry between The Pistols and The Clash. Sid Vicious was the worst problem. He took a dislike to Stinky Toys, purely because they were French. He had a knife — we had to get it away from him.
Caroline Coon: Siouxsie and Sid were hanging around all afternoon trying to decide if they had the nerve to go on. Siouxsie was very un-self-confident, asking people what she should sing.
Ron Watts: Bernie Rhodes and Malcolm McLaren got into a huge row about Siouxsie wearing a swastika on her arm.
Bernie Rhodes (manager, The Clash): I felt she wasn't aware of what she was letting herself in for. If she used it, we too would be associated with the swastika — she was mucking about with a loaded gun, and we didn't want anything to do with it.
"Onstage, the idea was to annoy people so much that they'd chuck us off."
Siouxsie Sioux: I wouldn't apologise for it because it wasn't political at all. I saw it as just the gear that I wore.
Joe Strummer: The swastika thing went back at least a year. Bernie and Malcolm had worked together designing clothes. Malcolm had come up with this swastika armband and Bernie hated it. So when Bernie saw Siouxsie wearing it, it brought the old fight to a head again.
Siouxsie Sioux: When we went onstage, the idea was to annoy people so much that they'd chuck us off. It was taking the piss out of all the things we hated: Marco with his feedback, me wailing over the top singing Knockin' On Heaven's Door and The Lord's Prayer, Steve trying to turn his bass on, and Sid with his relentless banging.
Captain Sensible (bass, The Damned): Siouxsie was utterly useless. They didn't deserve to be allowed anywhere near a stage. As far as I could make out, she was just this kid with loads of dosh from a to-do family. She was the only person I knew then who could afford to spend £200 a time on S&M gear from Malcolm's shop.
Marco Pirroni: We did a Velvet Underground thing for what seemed like hours. It was horrible. I remember me and Sid looking at each other fed up, so we just stopped.
Ron Watts: I hardly saw any of the music because there was antagonism the whole day between the London and the Manchester punks. I had to break up at least three fights. It was an elitist thing. The London punks could see that their personal little scene was being invaded and they were losing control. It was awful, because that wasn't what punk was about. The old bands had been elitist. The punks were supposed to be different.
Joe Strummer: The Clash were in the middle of this ludicrous Stalinist vibe where we decided it was uncool to talk to the audience. Inevitably, we broke a string, so suddenly there's no music. Luckily, I always used to have a transistor radio with me because there were cool pirate radio stations. We didn't have spare guitars, so I just switched on the radio and held it up to the mic. At the mixing desk, Dave Goodman was hip enough to put a delay on it — and it happened to be a discussion about bombs in Northern Ireland. It was pure luck, but it sounded absolutely brilliant. Apocalyptic.
Roger Armstrong (co-owner, Chiswick Records): I vividly remember one typical McLaren-type stunt that night. He had arranged for all his friends to bring along cameras with flashguns. Then, when The Pistols came on, he got them all to run up to the stage and start shooting, so you had all these flashguns going off, which made it look very impressive.
Steve Mick (Sniffin' Glue fanzine): The Pistols were fucking brilliant. They were really on form. There were kids on chairs, tables... No one in their right mind could say they couldn't play.
21 September 1976
Eddie (drums, The Vibrators): When we turned up, there was no PA system. Luckily we'd played a gig up in Holloway Road the night before, so we agreed to let them use our PA system. It was meant for little pub gigs, so it was really useless — too small for the 100 Club.
Ron Watts: Chris Spedding (renowned guitarist) had been down the club to see a few punk bands play. He really enjoyed it. He sided with them and asked me if he could be on the bill. He wanted to be associated with it.
Eddie: Spedding showed up in the afternoon and said, "Right, so what's this gig I'm supposed to be playing?" It was like he’d seen an advert announcing he was playing but no one had told him anything about it. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in the dressing room learning the chords.
Captain Sensible: The Buzzcocks turned up with all their equipment in Tesco bags. They had these Top 20 guitars which were the cheapest thing you could possibly buy. Most only had four strings and they couldn't even tune them.
Pete Shelley: People like The Vibrators were already better established than us, so they got the use of a dressing room. We just had to dump our gear in a little alcove with seats that had been cordoned off. There was a lot of talk that afternoon about the possibility that The Damned might get signed to Stiff Records. Stinky Toys were good. Their singer screeched incessantly like Yoko Ono. The more excessive you could be, obviously the more you were on the right track.
Knox (guitar, The Vibrators): I had loaned the Stinky Toys guitarist my amp and speakers, and he played so loud that he blew out the speaker cones. So we sounded crap.
Captain Sensible: They couldn't play very well at all, but we were better than any of the others. I spent most of my time standing at the front of the stage shrieking with laughter at the other bands, which didn't much amuse them.
We always tried to upstage each other, so at one point, I kicked (Damned singer) Dave Vanian and he went hurtling right off the front of the stage. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, because the stage was only two feet high, but that meant it was easy for the crowd to climb up and mob you. Anyway, he went off the stage and crashed right into Siouxsie.
Pete Shelley: A friend of ours eventually turned up, so we left him to look after our gear and went out to get a burger. As a result, we missed the famous incident with the smashed glass.
Caroline Coon: I was standing up on a chair that I'd dropped against the back wall of the club, so I could see what was going on. I saw things being thrown and there was a commotion — I realized something was happening. I actually saw the glass shatter against the pillar and my impression was that it wasn't Sid who threw it.
Eddie: *People started coming into the dressing room. There was one guy with his forehead gashed open and pouring blood. All we could do was wrap towels around his head. Then a girl came in with blood coming out of her eye. I thought, Christ, if this is what punk's about, you can shove it."
Caroline Coon: The ambulance came first and people were taken away. Then the police Gestapo-ed in, mob-handed, and Sid looked the likeliest suspect so they started frogmarching him out.
Ron Watts: I'm certain it was Sid. He wasn't trying to hit the girl. He was just pissed off at The Damned, because he saw them as the main rivals to The Pistols, so he threw a pint tankard at the stage instead. It shattered on a pillar and glass went into this girl's eye. One of my barmen saw the whole thing. When the police tried to arrest Sid, there were immediately about 30 punks all saying it wasn't him.
SNIFFIN' GLUE
Sniffin' Glue Christmas Special
1976
"We were sat around wondering what to do," says Mark Perry. "Then we thought, 'Oh, let's do a Christmas special for a laugh.' It was having a joke really. Magazines nowadays are designed to fuck — style over content. We were taking everything back to basics. What you saw was what you got. It was a DIY statement and an economic statement."
Sniffin' Glue Issue 5
December 1976
"I disliked The Sex Pistols and their fans when they were really cliquey and slagged off The Damned and Eddie and The Hot Rods. They tried to dictate what was and wasn't punk, but with Sniffin' Glue, we just wrote about what was exciting. We would never be dictated to. Because we thought The Hot Rods were punk, we said so. In the previous issue, I'd argued the point with Joe Strummer."
Sniffin' Glue Issue 3½
September 1976
"Issue 3 came out just before the 100 Club Punk Festival, so I wanted to get a post-festival issue out quick. I put it together the day after the festival and it was on the streets a week later. It's a good issue, it really reflects the time. Mainstream journalists told me it was important that they read Sniffin' Glue to find out what was going on. We were, in effect, the voice of punk."
Advert for Issue 6
October 1976
"This was a complete one-off because we'd had access to a colour photocopier. The article was in a Glasgow paper about the problems with glue-sniffing on council estates. We changed bits of it so that they referred to the magazine. I was invited onto Radio 4 a couple of years later for a serious discussion about glue-sniffing. They tried to blame it all on me!"
PHOTO: (Right) Mark Perry, who put the first Sniffin' Glue together in his bedroom.
"Getting into The Sex Pistols was a lifestyle choice. That's how dramatic it was." — MARK PERRY
It took Sniffin' Glue just a couple of months to become the British punk publication. The magazine hit the streets in the summer of 1976 with cover features on The Ramones and Blue Öyster Cult. The guidebook to the scene, its hand-typed, freehand-drawn, photocopied pages embodied punk rock's ethics in print. Sniffin' Glue was the brainchild of Deptford lad Mark Perry, or Mark P, to give him his punk nom de plume.
"I was a massive rock fan, and went to loads of gigs," he explains. "The first time I remember hearing about punk as such was The Ramones. So I was quite keen to see them when they came over in July 1976, and that was it — I was converted."
With the scene initially confined to a small, mouthy following, Perry recalls an almost religious fervour as people discovered The Sex Pistols: "They were starting to call themselves punks. Straight away, it seemed to be about the actual life you were living in 1976 rather than some old-fashioned American rock'n'roll ideal from the '50s. Getting into The Sex Pistols wasn't like, 'Oh, I quite like this new band.' It really was a lifestyle choice. If you got into The Pistols, you changed your life. That's how dramatic it was."
With only small crowds attending these early gigs, and coverage in the national music papers limited, Perry felt there was room for a new kind of publication devoted to punk.
"I'd written a letter to a music paper in 1973 about Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and that was about the nearest to rock journalism I'd ever come. I had no ambitions to be a writer at all, but they often say that you only have to have one good idea and it will make you. Sniffin' Glue was my good idea and I was in the right place at the right time."
Perry produced the first issue in his bedroom and had 20 copies photocopied. The record shops sold out immediately and soon demanded more.
Sniffin' Glue relocated to a spare room at the Rough Trade record shop and then to Dryden Chambers off Oxford Street. "We had all-night parties there. Bands used to rehearse, every wall was graffitied."
Perry soon came into contact with important contributors — Harry T Murlowski, a photographer and business organiser; Steve Mick, who briefly edited the title; and old school friend Danny Baker. "Danny was definitely a very important person on Sniffin' Glue," says Perry.
However, with punk starting to fade out — Perry cited The Clash signing to major label CBS as its end — and his band Alternative TV starting to take off, Sniffin' Glue closed in 1977 after 14 issues.
"We'd become part of the new punk establishment," he says. "Remember, punk was meant to be anti-hero. I started to think of other ways to put over the message."
So was it tough closing Sniffin' Glue? "Not for me," explains Perry. "It was tough for the people I worked with. I think Danny Baker says it was like his meal ticket going. I didn't want Sniffin' Glue to lose its edge and, looking back, it was the right thing to do. In its time and place, Sniffin' Glue was the best rock magazine in the world bar none."
"I know that sounds really big-headed, but I do honestly believe that."
FOR FURTHER DETAILS VISIT WWW.PUNKMAGAZINE.COM AND WWW.MARKPERRYFREEUK.COM
THE CLASH EXPLODE!
DESOLATION ROW
The Clash began life hungry and penniless in a dilapidated rehearsal studio, but soon they'd become the Sex Pistols' greatest rivals.
"ARE YOU IN or out? You've got 48 hours to decide." As offers go, it was one Joe Strummer couldn’t refuse — he just didn’t know it yet. When future Clash manager Bernie Rhodes approached Strummer after a gig by his band The 101'ers, the singer had little idea what he was getting into, other than a vague notion that Rhodes was putting together a band like The Sex Pistols. However, so smitten was Strummer with The Pistols, even something so nebulous piqued his interest.
Elsewhere in West London on that same day, May 25, 1976, Rhodes' new band members — guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon — were unaware that Rhodes was making any such approach, let alone to Strummer. Paul and Mick had only met Joe twice: once in a dole queue when Strummer thought they were about to attack him, and again in Portobello Road when Jones informed Strummer that The 101'ers were "shit."
No matter. The fast-moving Rhodes was on the phone the next day, shaving 24 hours off Strummer's deadline. It can't have been easy. For all the signs that The 101'ers were a musical dead end, their debut single was about to be released. But a switch had been flicked in Strummer's head — his gut told him the future was here, even if the scene didn’t yet have a name.
Jones and Simonon had been members of London SS, a short-lived band of Stooges and New York Dolls fans that at times included Tony James (later of Generation X), future Clash drummer Topper Headon, guitarist Brian James, and drummer Rat Scabies, who’d later form The Damned. London SS began auditioning in autumn 1975 but never played a gig. After its demise, Jones, Simonon, and second guitarist Keith Levene began trawling London’s toilet venues looking for a singer. Though they hated The 101'ers, something about Strummer's raw delivery intrigued them.
While his band dithered, the day after shortening Strummer's deadline, Rhodes drove him to meet the rest of the band. The pair he met in the living room weren’t what he was expecting — it was the two guys who’d insulted his band and looked ready to mug him. A swift jam later, Strummer's mind was made up. He liked the cut of their jib and returned to his squat to tell The 101'ers they were history.
It was the first — but by no means last — cut-throat career move by The Clash, the kind of behaviour that would define them as both people and a band in their ruthless pursuit of rock'n'roll death or glory.
The 101'ers weren’t the only ones left high and dry. Roger Armstrong, co-founder of Chiswick Records and producer of The 101'ers' impending single Keys To My Heart, found out in equally abrupt fashion.
"I was at the bar of a gig," recalls Armstrong. "Joe came up to me and said, ‘Have I done the right thing?’ I said I had no idea what he was talking about. So he says, ‘I've left the band, I’m in a band with him now,’ and pointed at the skinny kid standing behind him — Mick. What the fuck was I supposed to say? I had a record to put out and suddenly there’s no band to promote it. I was delighted."
"They were hell-bent on success — so focused."
TERRY CHIMES, EX-CLASH DRUMMER
Armstrong bears no ill-feeling today, whether toward Strummer, the rest of The Clash, or Bernie Rhodes. "I really didn’t feel any malice toward Bernie," he says. "Everything was moving so fast then, it was no surprise Joe left — there was obviously something going on with punk, if it even was punk then."
The sway Rhodes held over his new charges shouldn’t be underestimated, though the idea that The Clash were mere avatars for his political philosophies is questioned by Caroline Coon, then a writer for Melody Maker and later Rhodes' replacement as manager.
"The politics always gets put down to Bernie," she says. "He and Malcolm McLaren were old hippies and brought a lot of leftist ideas. They encouraged the bands to be political and the bands were receptive. Bernie wouldn’t have bothered with a band not interested in purveying some of his political ideas, and the band wouldn’t have been interested in a manager only into haggling."
Rhodes moved the group into two rundown rooms in an old gin warehouse near Chalk Farm's Roundhouse, dubbed Rehearsal Rehearsals, and made the band practise daily. It was June — barely two months since Jones and Simonon had teamed up, and Strummer had just joined. Everything moved quickly. The space became their own, with Simonon even living there, joined later by roadie Roadent.
"Paul had very little sense of smell," says Roadent. "We had a faux leather sofa, three sheets, one blanket, and a one-bar heater. Huge rats, no hot water — it was a bit damp, a bit rank."
Securing a drummer, however, was a headache. First was Pablo Labritain, an old schoolmate of Joe's and later a founding member of 999. Though he passed the audition, doubts crept in.
"I wrote to Joe on Monday and said, ‘I don’t think I’m up to the task.’ On Tuesday, I thought, Oh sod it, quit my job and moved into Joe's squat."
It was a relentless period of change and discovery. Rhodes drilled into them the importance of being important — marking a line in the dirt only the chosen few could cross. According to Micky Foote, The 101'ers soundman, it was Rhodes' way of exerting total control.
"Bernie separated people," says Foote. "There was a process of pulling people away from where they were and from their friends. He was fearful of anyone who’d go against him. He’d ring up Rehearsals and say, ‘Who’s there? Oh yeah? Tell him to fuck off — I’ve told Mick not to bring him down there!’"
But Rhodes didn’t see himself as merely a manager. According to Roger Armstrong, he considered the band his property. “Bernie once got Brian James and Glen Matlock together and told them he was forming a punk supergroup with a Pistol, a Damned, and a Clash. Glen asked, ‘Who’ve you got from The Clash?’ and he just spluttered, ‘I’m The Clash!’”
The Heartdrops, as they were now calling themselves, set to work rehearsing. “But we weren’t allowed to make noise during the day,” recalls Pablo Labritain, “so we’d spend all day painting and doing Rehearsals Rehearsals up, then about 5 or 6 we were allowed to start making a racket. It was seven days a week, full on.”
Despite the close proximity, the band were hardly close pals. According to Labritain, there was little socialising — “nobody had any money to go down the pub.” Simonon was so strapped for cash he once ate leftover flour paste he’d used to stick up fliers.
Early rehearsals included songs like 1-2 Crush On You, Protex Blue, Bored With You, Deny, and Short Walk To The Medicine Cabinet (which was quickly dropped). There were no 101'ers songs and, despite Simonon’s constant reggae playlist, no covers either. A name change soon followed.
"Mick and Joe came into my record shop one day and said, ‘We’re not The Heartdrops anymore, we’re The Outsiders,’" recalls Armstrong. “I went to a pile of records and picked out an album by the ’60s garage band The Outsiders. They were crestfallen.” Soon after, Simonon noticed the word “Clash” cropping up frequently in the Evening Standard. “I think they did themselves a favour there,” says Armstrong. “The Clash suited the times and everything the band were about.”
Labritain soon found out how fitting that name was, becoming the next victim of what Clash associates termed “friendly fire” — the internal politics they’d become infamous for. At a rehearsal attended by all of The Sex Pistols bar Johnny Rotten, Labritain messed up a couple of songs. This, along with his ignorance of obscure ’60s garage bands, infuriated Mick.
"I was very nervous," recounts Labritain. “On one song, Mick said, ‘Do it like this record.’ I didn’t know what he meant, and he went, ‘Ah God, he doesn’t know!’ and stormed off. The next morning, Joe bought me a pint — so I knew something was wrong. He told me, ‘You’re out.’ Funnily enough, I went back for one last jam, and it was great. Mick said, ‘Why didn’t you play like that last night?’ But it was too late.”
By late June, Terry Chimes had replaced Labritain, though the ousted drummer recalls seeing Jon Moss (later of Culture Club) sitting in on one rehearsal. Chimes, a native East Ender, found his ambition to be a rock star matched by his new bandmates.
"This lot were hell-bent on success and very focused," said Chimes. “I realised that was all we had in common — but it was enough.” Or so he thought.
The newly christened Clash were also developing their image. Renovating Rehearsals Rehearsals left their clothes paint-splattered like a Jackson Pollock experiment — something that appealed to both Levene and Simonon. To Rhodes, who’d worked with McLaren on Sex boutique T-shirts, clothes were political. Fortunately, Simonon was a gifted artist with a taste for subversion.
The image caught Caroline Coon’s eye. “I was taking a photo of the band for a piece I was writing and wanted to capture these great paint-splattered clothes. I asked Joe to turn around and put his hands up against the wall — and there on the back of his shirt was the slogan ‘Hate and War’. It fitted perfectly.”
After two weeks of rehearsing, The Clash secured their first gig — supporting The Sex Pistols in Sheffield on July 4, 1976. Excited, they packed their gear into a van at 5 a.m. and hit the road by 7. It wasn’t an auspicious debut. Yet back in London, Rhodes deemed it time for The Clash’s capital debut. On August 13, in front of a tiny invited audience, they performed a showcase at Rehearsals.
"There was a little stage in the corner," recalls Armstrong. “There was a curtain, someone announced them, and they came running on like it was the biggest gig ever. Joe had that wind-him-up, let-him-go element. He didn’t start that with The Clash — he brought that to them.”
"They had absolute conviction," says Coon. “It was obvious that if they could hold it together personally, they’d be magnificent artistically.”
But not everything was as polished as it seemed. The Midnight Special bootleg, from their public London debut on August 29 at Islington's Screen On The Green with The Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, revealed debts to pub rock and their previous bands. Not everyone was impressed.
Charles Shaar Murray wrote in the NME: “They are the kind of garage band who should be speedily returned to their garage — preferably with the motor running.”
Simonon was so strapped for cash, he once ate the paste he'd been using to stick up fliers.
Two weeks and one gig at the Roundhouse later, the true Clash was rapidly emerging. Although Keith Levene didn’t know it, he had played his last show as a member of The Clash at the Roundhouse. The main issue appeared to be Levene's lack of commitment, compounded by his love of sulfate. While the others indulged occasionally, weed and beer were their main vices—when finances allowed.
"If you've got two musicians who want to get their songs played, they're not going to fuck around with someone who can't turn up for rehearsals, who is incapacitating himself," states Caroline Coon bluntly. "However brilliant a musician you are, if you're incapacitated, you can't be part of the group, and the creative force is going to have to let you go."
The initiative seems to have come from Mick Jones. According to Terry Chimes, with Levene once again absent from rehearsals, the others agreed they didn’t need three guitars—and ditched him. The move surprised even Bernie Rhodes, who had always favoured Levene and may have feared that, like Frankenstein, the monster he’d created might turn on him.
Levene’s Departure
Levene's departure created a more relaxed atmosphere. In the following weeks, the band trimmed weaker early songs, replacing them with powerful new numbers like the Notting Hill riots-inspired White Riot. By the time they appeared at the Punk Festival at Oxford Street’s 100 Club in late September, their setlist had solidified into the core of their debut album.
That 100 Club festival also cemented punk’s violent, anti-social myth in the tabloids when Sid Vicious threw a glass during The Damned's performance, injuring a female fan.
For all their talk of riots, hate, and war, The Clash were, at heart, music lovers—not fighters. Though they’d earned a reputation for confrontation after a scuffle between Paul Simonon and The Stranglers' bassist JJ Burnel outside a Ramones gig two months earlier.
"That violence stuff was all rubbish," says Roger Armstrong. "None of The Clash were hard. The only genuinely hard men in those days were the two guys standing at the bar of The Roxy: Phil Lynott and Lemmy."
Just as the path forward seemed clear, another spanner hit the works. Terry Chimes, buckling under daily rehearsals and Rhodes' constant hectoring, announced he was leaving. The only person ever to leave The Clash voluntarily rather than be fired, Chimes had joined because he recognised Strummer, Jones, and Simonon’s relentless drive for success—whatever the cost. But at just 19, he’d had enough.
Rhodes was wrong-footed again.
"When I left," says Chimes, "I thought Bernie would be happy. But he said, ‘Look, you’re the foil. Whenever these guys come up with something, you say what the man in the street or the press would say. If they can get past you, they can get past the world.’”
While honouring gig commitments through November, Chimes' departure left The Clash drummerless—exactly where London SS had been a year earlier.
The ace up their sleeve? They had just secured the support slot for The Sex Pistols' Anarchy Tour—a move that would catapult them into a totally different league.
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
After punk's brief, brilliant explosion, The Clash went dub, The Pistols came back for cash, and three young Californian kids hatched a plan...
NO FUTURE?
The Clash began the 1980s by making Sandinista!, a triple album full of free-wheeling dub and political rhetoric. But for many, it would be seen as punk's greatest folly.
The Clash were playing for high stakes when they entered London's Wessex Studios in August 1980. If they got their fourth album right—and delivered the knockout blow that the American success of London Calling was crying out for—the payback could be beyond their wildest dreams.
So when CBS executives called mixer Bill Price in for a meeting at their London headquarters, they wanted reassurance that the as-yet-incomplete Sandinista! album wasn’t taking unnecessary risks.
"I was explaining how we were halfway through the mixing," recalls Price. "And one of the executives said, 'I hope it's not going to be a double album, is it, Bill?' I said, 'I can guarantee you it's not going to be a double album.' He said, 'Phew! Thank Christ for that.' So I said, 'It's going to be a triple.' They said, 'Ha! Ha! Good one.' I don't think they believed it until the six sides of Sandinista! were delivered to the mastering room."
Six sides. 36 tracks. 144 minutes. A chaotic blend of funk, punk, rap, rock'n'roll, soul, jazz, soca, gospel, musique concrète, and endless dub reggae. All while scoring left-wing political points and avoiding anything resembling a straight pop hit. They even named it after the US-overthrown Marxist government of Nicaragua, and spoke of wanting to play gigs in the USSR and Cuba.
Had the comrades gone insane? They didn’t think so.
"Some bands say we'll do it for fun, yay, pop-beats-surf-whacko-daddio, five-and-six-and-a-hamburger!" declared Joe Strummer. "We're a bit more serious than that."
Sandinista! serious?
SANDINISTA! — Genius or Folly?
Sandinista! is either the finest expression of everything The Clash stood for — or a sprawling folly wearing the biggest flares in the shop. In truth, as the grandest, most unwieldy, incoherent, and bloody-minded statement of their career, it’s a bit of both.
"The problem was," says drummer Topper Headon, "that by the time we got to Sandinista!, we were touring all the time, we weren't writing. We'd begun to fragment."
"Mick wanted it to be a triple album, whether we had the songs or not."
TOPPER HEADON
"I'd started doing too many drugs, Mick wanted to record it all in New York so he could be near his girlfriend... we were four very selfish people really. But we still knew there was this spark — we could turn up to the studio with no material and come away with a triple album, and all these different types of music."
Early signs of chaos weren’t hard to find. The four sides of London Calling had already shown The Clash’s intention to abandon punk orthodoxy. So had the remarkable nine-minute dub mix of Armagideon Time prepared for the 12-inch single of London Calling. Another clue came in January 1980, when the band declared they’d release a new single as soon as the previous one dropped off the charts.
PHOTO: Simonon, Strummer, and Jones on the European 16 Tons Tour, May 1980.
PHOTO: The Clash at the Lacy Lady, Ilford, Essex, November 1976.
PHOTO: (Previous page) Strummer, Jones, and Simonon by the Roundhouse, Camden, North London, 1976.
These two stances — uncompromising musical experimentation and the urge to go into production overdrive — collided on February 2, 1980, when the band entered Manchester's Pluto Studios with Mikey Dread, the Jamaican deejay touring with them on the 16 Tons UK Tour. Together, they produced Bankrobber, the opening salvo in their long singles blitz. The bass-heavy skank was initially rejected by CBS (though it reached Number 12), but in spirit, it was the first single from Sandinista!.
"I never heard of punk rock before I met The Clash," says Dread. "When I met them, Jesus, I felt sorry for them! They were unwashed, wore old clothes full of holes... but I wanted to push reggae, to make it international — and so did they. I knew I had to help them."
After the 16 Tons Tour's short US leg, mid-March saw the group and Dread decamp to Jamaica to record at Kingston's Channel One Studio. They cut a version of the traditional Junco Partner, first sung by Strummer with The 101'ers in 1975, but had to flee when ghetto dwellers began turning up, seeking a share of these British rock stars' wealth.
Simonon took a six-week leave to Vancouver, appearing alongside Ray Winstone, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook in the film Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Meanwhile, the rest of the band headed to New York — a move mixer Bill Price viewed as critical.
"The record company was very much against it — expense, and control," recalls Price. "In the States, there was no management or authority. Just us. No control."
Landing in New York as hip hop was exploding, The Clash soaked up influences from WBLS and KISS FM, hearing tracks like Kurtis Blow's The Breaks and Spoonie Gee's Spoonin' Rap. With Topper Headon’s precision drumming, they began sessions at the Power Station before moving to Electric Lady Studios, famed for Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland.
Calling reinforcements, Mick Gallagher and Norman Watt-Roy from Ian Dury and the Blockheads joined. On arrival, there were no songs — so they jammed. That jam became The Magnificent Seven. The same spontaneous method birthed Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice), Hitsville UK, Something About England, and Charlie Don’t Surf.
"Songs were actually being written as they were going down," said Strummer. Contributions came from Tymon Dogg (Lose This Skin) and Ivan Julian (The Call Up). Sessions were so free-flowing that Strummer joked, “I can see Hendrix’s ghost around the corner!”
By May, they returned to Wessex Studios, London, for final vocals and mixing — though even more tracks were recorded. Mikey Dread added psychedelic dubs like Silicone On Sapphire and Living In Fame, mocking the 2-Tone movement.
At this stage, it was clear — everything recorded would be used. Critics would later mock the inclusion of Maria Gallagher's childlike version of Guns Of Brixton and the reimagined Career Opportunities by Gallagher’s sons. Then there was Mensforth Hill, a backwards version of Something About England, and Shepherd's Delight, featuring cow and sheep noises.
"I walked into the studio and said, ‘What are you doing?’" recalls Topper. “They said, ‘Recording backwards!’ I asked, ‘Why?’ The answer: ‘Because we haven’t got enough material.’”
With Jones in the control room, Strummer retreated to his Spliff Bunker, writing lyrics amidst clouds of ganja smoke and books on Nostradamus and radical politics.
"Joe was the one with the bigger vision. Mick was very creative, but when he took his guitar off, he was like a 12-year-old... But it worked. That was the energy of The Clash."
— Mick Gallagher
Before wrapping, the Blockheads, dressed as policemen after a Top of the Pops appearance, staged a fake drugs bust at Wessex. “I saw Mick with a huge spliff — sparks flying as he tried to put it out,” laughs Gallagher.
SANDINISTA!
Released on December 12, 1980, bearing serial number FSLN 1 (a nod to Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), the triple LP reached Number 19 — far below London Calling’s Number 9. To sell it at £5.99, The Clash agreed to CBS's harsh terms: 200,000 UK sales before earning royalties. Four months later, Simonon told Rolling Stone: “Debt, debt, debt.”
With Bernie Rhodes back in control, Topper's heroin addiction worsening, no hit singles, and a critical panning, the cracks widened.
Yet, despite everything, Sandinista! endured. Today, its sprawling ambition feels ahead of its time.
"Sandinista! was the end of The Clash as we knew them," says Price. "They lost control. Events controlled them. They still had the music, but... you’ve got to move on, haven’t you?"
THANKS TO ANDREW PERRY FOR THE TOPPER QUOTES.
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