Super Classic Album: The Clash - The Clash (1977)

The blog’s resident Clash expert Craig Stephen goes way back to ground zero …

London, 1976. It was just one year in one city but the British capital was about to explode in a frenzy of snotty, sneering and obnoxious punk bands that would shake up the music scene for the next decade and more.

Three bands led the revolution: The Sex Pistols, formed in a pub in 1975 and the first to gig, The Damned, the jokers in the pack but the first to release a single, ‘New Rose’, in November 1976, and The Clash, formed in July of that year and fronted by the formerly known John Mellor, hitherto the singer/guitarist of a second tier pub rock band called The 101ers.

 The Clash’s route to becoming the finest of the punk bands, and for that matter one of the greatest rock bands of all time, can be pinpointed to April 1977, just nine months after forming, when their fiery debut was unleashed. While they were beaten in the British punk album race by The Damned by two months, they were still well ahead of the daddies of the scene, the Sex Pistols, whose Never Mind the Bollocks didn’t see the light of day until September.

 If The Clash, the album, sounds rushed and a little incoherent that’s understandable given it was written, demoed and recorded in a few weeks. Albums done in such a manner are often critically lambasted but that’s usually because the band is being hurried by their record label to follow-up a successful album. But The Clash had nothing to follow-up to.

The rushed environment clearly had little bearing on this 14-track incendiary piece of vinyl. It’s a glorious snapshot of three creative forces – Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon – gelling quickly. These were men of different backgrounds who found remarkable common ground in a disgust of 1970s Britain.

Strummer possessed a yobbish bark while Jones sang in a more measured, lovers rock tone. Lyrically, Strummer was more forceful as exposed by his changing of Jones’s ‘I’m So Bored With You’ to the deliberately confrontational ‘I’m So Bored With The USA’ of which the opening line is: “Yankee soldier/He wanna shoot some skag/He met it in Cambodia/But now he can't afford a bag.”

Eschewing rock’s traditional themes of love, lust and other menial emotions, The Clash was about boring jobs with horrible bosses (‘Career Opportunities’) in a city aching with apathy and tedium (‘London’s Burning’) where “Everybody's sittin' round watching television”. It’s an England where the hippy manifesto of peace and love has been replaced by Hate and War.

It's an album containing several brief adrenaline bursts like ‘48 Hours’ (1.34), ‘What’s My Name’ (1.40) and ‘Protex Blue’ (1.42) - a throwaway ode to a condom brand with typically lurid lyrics.

The album closer, ‘Garageland’ is a witty riposte to music reviewer Charles Shaar Murray’s infamous line that The Clash were a garage band “who should be left in the garage with the engine running”. But it isn’t full of loathing for the writer, instead it’s a celebration of being a start-up group which is so loud the neighbours call the council to complain.

As much as it veers into comedic youthful angst, there are a couple of tracks that piloted them as a conscious activist band. One was the single ‘White Riot’ - an unfortunate title in an era when the fascist National Front were scooping up disillusioned working-class votes (what’s new, different name and shirt, same racist politics) - but it is important to note that it is a rousing call to arms for the white working class to follow black people’s lead in fighting back against oppression. “All the power in the hands/Of the people rich enough to buy it/While we walk the streets/Too chicken to even try it”.

Meanwhile, the cover of Junior Murvin’s reggae anthem ‘Police and Thieves’ slows the frantic pace right down. Murvin’s original was released in the UK in July 1976, a month before the Notting Hill Carnival riot and became the de facto anthem for disgruntled black youth.

Murvin and his producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry both denounced it, but attitudes among the reggae community dissipated with Bob Marley and the Wailers inspired enough to write ‘Punky Reggae Party’ in 1977 and Perry later worked with The Clash.

On its release, punk commentator Tony Parsons wrote in the New Musical Express that: “Jones and Strummer write with graphic perception about contemporary Great British urban reality as though it’s suffocating them,” while Mark Perry declared in his own fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue: “The Clash album is like a mirror. It reflects all the shit. It shows us the truth. To me, it is the most important album ever released.”

Elsewhere, reviews were encouraging to the point of gushing that this was the most exciting record in years. It’s hard to disagree with some of that to be honest.  The Clash was the most exciting record since The Stooges’ debut in 1969, and few if any albums released since 1977 can match its raw power, anger, angst and disillusionment. Once that punk energy dissipated, The Clash would find new styles to explore and write socially aware songs that resonate to this day.

Guest Post: 1977 and all that … Turning Rebellion Into Money?

It’s time for another Guest Post, where we welcome our good friend Porky to the everythingsgonegreen pigsty. Porky tries to claim he was “too young” for the first outbreak of punk, but he still has some thoughts about the legacy of 1977 and all that …

This year is the 40^th year of punk, if you take your starting point as 1977, rather than 1976 or 1969, or even 1956.

Punk’s origins are less important, the essence is. The Sex Pistols’ anger, The Clash’s passion, the Slits female revolution, the Saints and Radio Birdman’s honest, upfront bad attitude, the Suburban Reptiles’ uncomfortable Auckland abrasiveness and Bad Brains’ fusion of hardcore punk and roots reggae. These and many other bands shaped music in a way that still has some authority today.

Punk was the kick up the backside music needed in the 1970s, the swift sweep of the broom to prog, American MoR, cockrock and novelty guff that permeated the airwaves and Top of the Pops at the time. Music had become the mere background to lavish costume designs, puerility and daft dances as style supplanted substance.

 It wasn’t just angry; it was political: whether from 1977 (Pistols, Clash, Adverts) to its younger siblings (Crass, Dead Kennedys, The Exploited), on through the ongoing revivalist acts such as NOFX and Rancid, punk has been resolutely anarchist, socialist, feminist, reggae-loving, anti-racist, eco-warrior, and opposed to conservatism. It’s the voice of the disaffected.  

And yet, four decades on, I feel a cold breeze feather my skin as I think of what punk has become. What exactly does punk mean anymore? Is it about rebellion or has it become a nostalgia it’s okay to like? Was it even radical in the first place, and just another phase that the music industry soon latched on to and exploited? Oh my, I never wanted to have these questions floating around in my head. I was too young for the first outbreak, but you didn’t have to live through the Punk War to know what it fought for, daddio. 

So now we have the ungainly sight of John Lydon becoming John Liedown. The antagonistic rebel typified the movement in 1976 when he reflected the views of millions of bored British teens, beaten-down by the threat of rising unemployment and austerity, with Thatcher’s ghastly ‘I’m all right Jack’ vision just an election away.

John Lydon

 Now, Lydon is happy to reveal he thinks ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage is fantastic, Brexit is good for the working class and that Donald Trump is a nice chap and not racist at all. Always an enigma, Lydon carefully crafted himself an image of the apolitical warrior, the man on the street who just wants to stick two fingers to the man. His latest comments seem to suggest he is part of the establishment, happy to promote New Zealand butter.

He is only one, of course, and I’m unaware of any other punks that have drifted to the right. Joe Strummer’s final gig was a benefit for striking firefighters, Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers remains resolutely anti-fascist, and most new punk bands retain some semblance of that bolshy youthful angst.

But what of one of my original questions, has, in the Clash’s words “turning rebellion into money” become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Perhaps the answer lies in the actions of Joe Corre, the son of ex-Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.

On a barge on London's River Thames late last year, the businessman set fire to his ₤5 million collection of punk memorabilia in protest against the commercialisation of the once-feared movement.

Joe Corre

Corre didn’t have anything to lose, he’s already rich, so the excessive worth of his pile of bondage trousers, bootleg recordings and trinkets would never have made a dent in his bank balance.

“Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need,” he said before striking a match to some Sid Vicious posters.

Who indeed is making money from the many punk special publications, the compilation albums and the books reflecting on the productive period from 1976-79 when anything seemed possible? I’d bet my prized copy of The Clash’s self-titled 1977 debut that the people that many punks hated are banking that filthy lucre.

But strip away all the exploitation and murky views and punk remains the one true musical revolution, when hating the British monarchy, opposing the fascist National Front, and wanting a riot of your own was not merely two fingers up to the establishment, it was the voice of an angry, youthful working class.

Now, fuck you. 

You want more Porky? ... you can find him here.