March 1991. I’m coming to the end of five years as a scholarship boy at a top boarding school. It’s been – oh yes – an education. I’ve bullied, I’ve been bullied, I’ve hidden myself away, I’ve learned a lot about institutions and very little about the bits of real life that happen in between them. I’ve fallen for music. I’ve discovered – though I’ve no idea yet how important this will be – that I’m much more comfortable putting words into the world than I am a physical presence. And as such I’ve stumbled into being the nominal editor of the cosy, unrespected, unread school magazine.
What’s in this journal? It has endless reports of a sport only a few thousand people have ever played. It has indifferent landscape photography. It has an anonymous gossip column (which I write) mostly about the editors of its inky, photocopied school rival. Which also has an anonymous gossip column. Which I also write. It has creative writing – oh god, the creative writing. In my first week I’m sent a long poem in iambic tetrameter about the poet’s copping off with an unfortunate girl at a school disco. “She kissed me like a hoover would / A lot of suction. It felt good.” Reader, I published him. And faked a letter of complaint in the next issue.
What has this to do with that band of my fellow poshos, The Clash? Well, the magazine also publishes music reviews, of schoolboy bands. The bands are always awful, the reviews are by convention always encouraging. Except as a music lover I decide it is time to Take A Stand, and so I commission a scathing review of a particularly braying group whose repertoire is mostly punk rock cover versions. “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” among them.
I got the writer to take an obvious line – how nauseating to see the anthems of punk sung by the scions of the ruling class, blah blah. Good rabble-rousing stuff, utterly hypocritical of course. It was a fairly gross spectacle to be sure but there was a lot of emotion I wasn’t ready to examine lurking behind my reflexive hate. What I was really expressing wasn’t an incipient preciousness about punk authenticity but a more deep-felt unease and resentment about rock and the uncomplicated, well-worn hedonism it had come to represent. The boys getting up on stage and playing punk rock weren’t rebelling against anything much but they were doing more than I was, with my knotted, paralysed suspicion of everything. But if breaking out of that suspicion meant sinking into the cosiness of rock, was it really worth it?
And then suddenly “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” was at number one, and my personal identity crises were being played out across pop. It’s The Clash at Number One! But from a jeans ad! But still, The Clash! But so what? Half the NME got excited, half cued up the “He who fucks nuns….” quotes. As for me? I hated the song, and the band, even more.
But why? OK, the anti-Clash argument in a nutshell: they were – by this point, for sure – a big sloppy rock’n’roll hug, a four-headed walking reassurance that nothing had really changed in the 70s, that rock could still be about – could again be about – riffs and leathers and blokey mob-handedness. But more abstracted – they didn’t seem to be in it for sex or money or even religion, politics perhaps but also just a sense that rock was in itself still a good idea. The Clash Are The Rock’n’Roll Preservation Society: that was how their fandom came over by 1991. And maybe that wasn’t their fault, but all their branding – that “Last Gang In Town” stuff – seemed to point to it. It repulsed me. I didn’t want to join any gang that would have me as a member. How fortunate that no gangs were asking!
More than Queen, more than Maiden, more than B**** A**** even, this hit stank of the past, all the more strongly because so many people around me seemed to think it wasn’t the past. And so I find it very hard to listen to now – my dislike of it is still located in the vicious roil of being 17, semi-detached from the repetitive ramalama knock-off I hear when I put it on. I even like some Clash songs now, but not this. In the pub I suggested maybe it was their “Rainy Day Women” – an irritating crossover hit – but that’s not quite right.
So let’s strain for objectivity. Good chugalug riff. Vocals a bit clearer than usual – I like Mick Jones more than Strummer as a singer. The mood? I guess I quite like how the goof-off Spanish backing vox undercut the apparent tension in the thing, provide an illustration of the matey delights awaiting the boy if he goes, but the sullen, finger-jabbing attack of it reminds me too much of The Stranglers (and who would want this moaner to stay, anyhow?). And then the double-time bit starts and I just can’t keep up the pretence – I’m 17 again, and I still just hear this as rock music, and rock music as an institution, a school I can’t wait to leave.
Score: 3
[Logged in users can award their own score]
THREE???!!!
Dear God!
Indie snobbery never dies!
That’s not a criticism, by the way, it seems to be a universal truth. This is a pretty tedious record, listened to now – I never had much time for the Clash though I now associate them with my 5 year old who has an old vinyl copy of London Calling in hsi room which he plays endlessly. 3 is a bit harsh, but I’d not go above 5.
Had never heard it before the advert but was vaguely familiar with a handful of their other previous hits. Love the guitar sound throughout, the rowdy vibe and the tempo shift towards the end stops it getting boring. 7 or 8 for me (Rock The Casbah being a 9).
“Rock The Casbah” is quite entertaining – way more so than this – but obviously best used by Will Smith.
The Clash didn’t really make a habit of straight-ahead old-school love songs, so who is “she” meant to be? Allegorically, I mean — presumably she isn’t an actual person.
#5 Apparently it IS – one of Meat Loaf’s backing singers.
Wow. That’s getting the boot in. Then I realise I’m pretty ambivalent about it – coming into pop in the early 80s, The Clash were already dinosaurs to me, and in 1991 this felt like a weary interruption in an exciting year (second term at university, off my box on Balearic/Italo dance music at all times). I appreciated the riff well enough but hated the clumsy double-time chorus, and dismissed The Clash altogether because I was into pissing off the rockists down the hall bar.
Oddly, the reissue of ‘Train In Vain’ later in the year started to tickle my interest, but ‘Should I Stay…’ was too imperfect (maybe, ahem, too obvious).
I ran a school paper too. It was mainly a vehicle for me to survey musical tastes, and ‘Thriller’ emerged as the school’s favourite single. My music teacher went for Ashton, Gardner & Dyke’s ‘Resurrection Shuffle’.
“one of Meat Loaf’s backing singers” <– ALLEGORY OVERLOAD
I’d give it six, and remark that it’s, again, something I don’t need to hear ever again.
Still reckon “Sandinista” the classic though.
“but obviously best used by Will Smith”
not feeding the troll here
What a tremendous review, though I’d argue the “3” is just too low–perhaps you should’ve recused yourself and put an asterisk in. & I think comparing “Should I Say” with “Rainy Day Women” is pretty on point–a friend once described the latter as “the Dylan song morons love,” harsh but relatively accurate in my experience. “Should I Stay” is in my bottom tier of Clash singles today: it’s repetitive and it just jabs away at you. In theory, it should be a 4 or 5, but I give it far too much leeway because of what the Clash meant to me at the time.
Because when I was in my teens I certainly was in the group who considered the Clash “the Only Band That Matters” and the last great rock & roll band, etc. Perhaps the US perspective is different—the Clash, though they did get a couple hit singles towards the end of their career, never seemed like the rock establishment at all, or any sort of preservationist society—they weren’t played on the radio that much, so they still seemed like outsiders. Even in the late ’80s, they sounded fresh and adventurous, to the point where even their pop compromises (like “Should I Say”) seemed justified–the message getting to the masses, as inane as that seems now.
So I suppose I’m coming at this record from the opposite end: I’m overrating it, because when I hear it now, I’m 17 again as well, but music like this was one of the few good things I had in going on in my life then–it represented getting out of my hometown, it suggested an alternative; it was the future. An 8.
The rest of the band figured that as it was Mick Jones’ song, he should pick the b-side as well.
To which he chose “Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite, forcing it to be a double a-side.
Which somewhat annoyed the rest of the clash.
I should point out what I didn’t find space for in the review = that, yes, my characterisation of the Clash as firing the flames of anti-rockism in Young Tom is based on a hugely unfair appreciation of their output, which as Sandinista apparently shows had plenty of globe-trotting adventure. But you only need look at the sleeve of this reissue to understand that it wasn’t that side of them that was winning the legacy war in 1991!
My favourite Clash song is the impeccably canonical White Man In Hammersmith Palais.
#11 I usually find that ‘Rainy Day Women’ is the song Dylan-haters use to bash him.
# 7 – Your music teacher had good taste, Matthew!
Re the legacy: Jon Savage wrote a powerful review somewhere* of the first compilation (1988 I think) as a disgraceful slab of band-approved revisionism, programmed and ordered to streamline their lamest and most mythologised dimensions, and edit away much of what was so contradictory (and therefore interesting) about them early on. Obviously all bands do this on their compilations, but the Clash were meant to be different.
I actually quite like the bit where it speeds up, and dislike “Rock the Casbah” a LOT more.
*It’s collected in Time Travel
This one positively reeks of JABOF! Their hearts weren’t TRULY IN IT were they?
Oh, but I loved this song. And like many, who’ll cite White Riot or London’s Calling, or even Rock The fupping Casbah over this, I agree. It’s throwaway regurgitated shit, but I can’t help it. I should hate it, but the stupid opening riff and the back-of-the-studio hollering (Joe?) just set me up to get my feet stompin’ and fists pumpin’ with pavlovian regularity. I love it enough to give it a 9!
screamy bit + Spanish backing vox = 7
best Clash song = probably “Lost in the Supermarket”
Not a surprising Tomscore, it has to be said, but it’s nice to know he was at one point a teenager just as anti-authority and surly as doubtless Joe Strummer was
I don’t mind Should I Stay, but as a overall package it’s desperately lacking its original double A side. I wouldn’t describe myself as an affociando but Straight To Hell is a reminder that the Clash were always more than just skinny-jeaned rock revivalists.
Re 13: The “globe-trotting adventure” always seemed like more grist to their myth, to show how well they understood the oppressed. The influences were rarely assimilated – how well does their take on Police And Thieves stand up against the Junior Murvin original, or London Calling/Sandinista! against subsequent black/white British pop – say, Massive Attack? It just doesn’t.
The sight of them dancing in the background while b-boys break dance in Clash On Broadway is hilarious.
And that’s without even mentioning the “last gang in town” stuff!
#20: I’d say the Clash’s reggae generally has held up okay. “Police and Thieves” is nowhere near the class of the original, but the intensity and the commitment of the band to the material is still compelling for me (the Clash were sort of like folkies when it came to reggae, for good and ill). Plus they generally had good taste: Junior Murvin, “Armagideon Time.” I like the Simonon reggae tracks in particular. Only real misstep is their version of “Pressure Drop,” which is a mess.
but yeah, the hip-hop era of the Clash seems a bit ridiculous now (though I still like “Overpowered by Funk,” dumb as it is).
More than any other band, the way that I respond to The Clash is dictated by context. Sometimes when I hear them they seem to completely hit a spot that nobody else ever quite has, finding a mythology and excitement in living in the city, and then placing the singer and listener within that narrative, the romanticism of which can be overwhelmingly exciting. And then often they just sound like a posturing rabble of fools to me. The best way to induce the first reaction is to listen to ‘London Calling’, the best way to induce the second is to play their dimwit version of ‘Police & Thieves’.
‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go?’ is a song that has its own ideal context – as a 1982 double A-Side with my own favourite Clash song ‘Straight To Hell’, a vastly ambitious attempt to construct a global narrative of the sufferings induced by capitalism and colonialism that takes in deindustrialised Britain, US junkies and Vietmanese war babies. Having held himself up to ridicule by trying to achieve so much on one side of the single, Strummer and the listener has certainly earned the ability to derive goofy fun from ‘Should I Stay’.
Heard on a sodding jeans advert nine years later, the song seemed to signify a dispiriting nothing. Turning rebellion into money, indeed…
#21. Although ‘Police & Thieves’ raises my hackles, ‘Police On My Back’ – the Eddy Grant song on Sandinista – is the business.
Three seems fair. A dull underacheiving song by a band that were capable of things far better, and even, just occasionally, quite special.
But, let’s face it, a few gems apart, the Clash were basically the Who of their day – highly overrated and woefully inconsistent.
The AA-side ( as I recall it being, but chart stats don’t now seem to back that up) by “Big Audio Dynamite 2” as I think they were styling themselves then would be lucky to get two out of ten, though. Sub-Pop-Will-Eat-Itself-more-or-less-before-they-went-properly-dancier drivel.
I never listened to Strummer’s World Service radioshow (called “London’s Calling”, inevitably). But the clips of it that were used as a framing device in Julian Temple’s otherwise annoying and sloppy documentary — I hate Julian Temple! — I really rather warmed to; he came across (admittedly posthumously) as the genial uncle of worldwide rebel rock, and I was always happy he favoured Spanish-language rock so much, when almost no one else does.
“almost no one else” –> ie in the UK
Light Entertainment Watch: The Clash were notoriously television-averse because they meant it, man;
ALRIGHT NOW!: with The Clash, Tom Robinson Band (1979)
SO IT GOES: with Tony Wilson, Jon The Postman, Steel Pulse, Matthew Kaufman, The Clash, Ian Dury (1977)
SOMETHING ELSE: with The Clash (1978)
NOW! watch: SISOSIG opened disc 1 on Now 19, a very good selection on the whole, including Green Gartside’s final Everyhit bow:
1. The Clash : “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
2. Scritti Politti feat. Shabba Ranks : “She’s a Woman”
3. The Source feat. Candi Staton : “You Got the Love”
4. The KLF feat. The Children Of The Revolution : “3 a.m. Eternal”
5. C+C Music Factory pts. Freedom Williams : “Gonna Make You Sweat”
6. Nomad feat. MC Mikee Freedom : “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion”
7. EMF : “I Believe”
8. 808 State : “In Yer Face”
9. Massive Attack : “Unfinished Sympathy”
10. MC Hammer : “Pray”
11. Kim Appleby : “G.L.A.D.”
12. Kylie Minogue : “What Do I Have to Do?”
13. >>bunnied<<
14. 2 In A Room : "Wiggle It"
15. Vanilla Ice : "Play That Funky Music"
16. Jesus Love You : "Bow Down Mister"
17. Enigma : "Sadness (Part I)"
18. Praise : "Only You"
It seems appropriate for The Clash to have a hit as a piece of commercial nostalgia. I could never become excited by the band in the first rush of punk – never wanted to be in their gang -and for me they seemed left behind by bands from the post-punk era of the late 70s and early 80s. Their disdain for appearing on TOTP seemed to reflect a lack of populism which contradicted their stance of being down with the kids. I’ve become more tolerant of their music since then and don’t mind this too much but wouldn’t choose to hear it.
In 2002, I went to T In The Park up in Balado. Being from Cumbria, it was actually the easiest festival to get to, a group of us decided we wanted to go to a festival and that was the natural choice. In retrospect, the bill wasn’t brilliant and, despite the weather being really very good, we actually spent an awful lot of time in the King Tut tent, where I think I finally understood heritage rock.
Not The Clash exactly, obviously, but Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros. Stood at the back of the tent, it seemed I was in a crowd that hadn’t been seen anywhere else in the festival – everyone in the tent was probably 15 years older than us, maybe more in some cases; it is possible that every single person over the age of 50 at the festival was in the tent and a decent proportion of those who were over 40 were in there too. My first impression was that the band was pretty decent (in a vaguely competent but forgettable sort of way) but the crowd weren’t really into it. They finished their first song and launched into the next and everyone went crazy – 40 year old skinheads with arms around each other’s shoulders singing along to Rudie Can’t Fail, old blokes with actual tears in their eyes bawling along to every note and inflection. For me, it was pretty weird, I can tell you. Then the next track came along and the crowd went back to being utterly placid. Next up was Straight To Hell (I think) and everyone went crazy again.
It seemed pretty apparent to me that no-one was there to hear any new material but to glory in the past and I finally understood why bands like The Stones can go on world tour after world tour whilst churning out stuff I thought irrelevant – it dawned on me that people just want to hear the stuff from when they were a kid, to feel like they used to when they first heard the song in question – Don Draper does all this stuff far better than me in the last episode of the 1st series of Mad Men. It’s pure nostalgia.
I learned later that The Mescaleros were apparently none too happy about churning out The Clash stuff every other song whenever they played. Supposedly Strummer said, we’ll play them because that’s what people want to hear, so play them they did.
6 months later, Joe Strummer was dead.
What does this have to do with SISOSIG? Well, it’s in the charts because of the jeans but I suspect it sold because some were searching for that piece of nostalgia – enough to get it to #1. It doesn’t really have anything to do with 1991, or at least what I think of when I think of music from 1991 – even though, as Tom points out, it seems to be part of a general throwback that we’ve already seen in the entries for this year. It seems simply to be some people reliving their youth by buying a lump of plastic. And, as evidenced by what happened 6 months after I saw JS and The Mescaleros, if that’s what you want, you should grab it while you can – so good for those that bought it, in my view.
I don’t mind some Clash, though unlike the consensus that appears to be developing up thread, I think Sandinista an unfocused mess that really needs the best stuff extracting from it to be worth listening to; I actually prefer the much maligned Give ‘Em Enough Rope. SISOSIG is not one of my favourites though – it’s a good riff but pounding the listener into submission with it is not the way I would want to go unless the riff is quicker in tempo or the song shorter. The double time bits, as others have mentioned, elevate the song, as do the Spanish shouts.
And yet, marking on a curve, I really don’t see how this can be a 3. The last record marked at 3 that I think should be higher is She by Charles Aznavour, all the way back in 1974. I understand that Tom’s mark is a personal thing, coloured by his own formative years – but for me it’s a 5. Perfectly average and not much more.
Always thought ‘Protex Blue’ or ’48 Hours’ would have made more sense soundtracking that particular advert… It was a lazy thumbs-in-the-beltloop head-nodder in 1982, 1991,and in 2011. ‘Train In Vain’ proved that Jones could do that sort of thing well when the mood took him, but this is nothing-tossed-off stuff (maybe due to the fact the directions offered to him by BAD at that point were more appealing).
4.
I have always thought there was something off about this song; I don’t enjoy it very much, and I was 13 when it was new, and didn’t have any particular baggage about it. It’s just *too* simple. To me it’s a form/content problem. The form is fine, but the content is moronic. I wouldn’t give it a 3, but I might give it a 4. There should be a wikipedia category for bands who hit #1 with one of their worst songs.
Haha! Great review; precisely the wrong mark. I don’t know what the rest of you are doing, agreeing with it as if it were an objective thing. This is an 8. (Excellent post from Cumbrian too btw)
Two things elevate it for me, the difference I guess being that for me they elevate it quite high. They’re the same things everyone else has identified – the double-time section and (especially) the call-and-response vocals. I’m reminded of the Eno bit quoted in Fortress of Solitude (I don’t know where it’s originally from I’m afraid) about the importance of the answering backing vocal in pop, how a disproportionate number of classic records have that feature. It’s those records’ way of enveloping us in the song, I think the argument was. This is one of the more unusual examples of the trick, but it pulls it off well.
I heard a samba bloco doing this recently and it was quite wonderful. They (I suppose through necessity) went with a heavier beat throughout, effectively replacing the slightly pedestrian opening with the double-time bit (or triple-time or triplet-time, whatever it is that makes samba groove) all the way through, and it worked great.
Excellent review even if the score is too low. Admittedly this is the one Clash song that Status Qua could cover and do total justice but it doesn’t even sound to me as if they’re holding it in high regard.
The best bits of SISOSIG are when the singers are clearly taking the piss – Mick Jones’ camp TEASE!TEASE!TEASE! and Joe Strummers goofy Spanish (was Frank Black listening one wonders?)
As number ones go it’s the definition of a pyhrric victory. I notice the time gap of Levis musical plundering had diminished since 1987.
First a sixties soul favourite, then 70s rock by Steve Miller and now a song only 10 years old by a band whose fans would only really be starting to feel nostalgic. Unless I’m mistaken the Levis tracks that topped the charts after this would be contemporary.
Like trousers, like mind indeed.
I am staggered no one has attacked the lyric. As #32 says, the content is too simple. The Should I Stay Or Should I Go dilemma should be easy to present, but here it is all wrong. As a Viz reader once pointed out, if staying will be double the trouble of going, there’s no choice to make. Go.
Then to compound the issue, there’s the phrase “Exactly who’m I’m supposed to be” – and this is definitely what is sung, lest anyone protest it’s “Exactly who’m I supposed to be?” If someone pleaded to me “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” and then introduced a phrase as ungrammatical as that, I would be suggesting we discuss the use of “whom” before discussing our future.
These mistakes grate every time. I’m surprised at the general negative feelings towards the Clash, but this is not a good record. 3.
My response to the the standard Clash-not-proper-punk-blokey-rock-revivalism argument has always been that if blokey rock can be as sharp, visceral and fun as The Clash, then perhaps it’s not always a bad thing.
I’ve always been a sucker for the last gang in town thing. In 1991 it probably seemed as old hat as it does in 2011 post several back-to-basics rock revivals from The Strokes onwards. But when I first caught onto it in the late nineties, when every other band was a gaggle of pudding-faced mouth-breathers with a string section, it seemed a thrilling escape: that music could be your life, your band your gang and that you could use your music as a recruiting drive for your gang. Although, once I discovered him, it was Adam Ant’s brand of band-as-gang rather than Strummer’s that appealed most to me.
Plus it always seems that last-gang-in-town-haters are like 17-year-old Tom; uptight, self-righteous Morrissey fans suspicious of anything resembling fun: railing against rock’s blokeyness/revivalism/predictability while secretly, actually hating it’s messiness, momentum and joie-de-vivre: dismissing the like of the Clash as dead and dull and then raving over even more retro, predictable, safe stuff: the (imaginary?) enemy against whom Steven Wells used to rail.
That said SISOSIG does seem to embody everything the Clash-haters are talking about: chuga-lugga mid-paced pub boogie. In 1991 aged 9 (actually, it was probably a little later once I got to high school), I heard it as an extention of people like Jason Donovan and Bros wearing leather jackets and quiffs in a late-eighties nod to the fifties: conscious and deliberate rock’n’roll revivalism. I didn’t realise it was seven years old.
It’s far from their worst song; Lord knows they’ve recorded plenty of utter crap, but it’s probably the worst of their big hits (I even quite like Police and Thieves) probably a 6 for me, although I enjoyed it when it came up on random today, so maybe a 7 today!
Fave Clash song, probably Guns Of Brixton, maybe Complete Control.
Not sure about Will Smith doing …Casbah best, but I remember hearing Paper Planes and thinking it was great, but probably only coz it leant on a great Clash riff, then subsequently hearing Straight To Hell and thinking ‘Christ it’s a bit glum and slow compared to Paper Planes!’
#30 – Interestingly enough, I once shared a crowded tube carriage with a bunch of Clash fans on their way back from a Joe Strummer gig. There was a lot of excited chatter about the genius of the man, and all the great old songs he played, then suddenly one of them piped up: “I don’t know if I feel very good about this, to be honest with you”.
“What do you mean?” asked another.
“All this is just NOSTALGIA,” he said with some distaste, at which point everybody went completely quiet for thirty seconds or so, seemingly acknowledging he had a bit of a point. I obviously don’t know what they were thinking, but I suspect they were wondering if this was how they’d have seen themselves living in the 21st Century.
As for me personally, I would go as far as to say that I hate The Clash. I once houseshared with a very good friend of mine who worshipped Strummer and I explained that I didn’t like the band, to which he loaned me some books about them. I read one, then disliked them even more. I’m not against bands using mythology to further their image, but The Clash embraced such hoary old cliches that I found them hard to admire – of the million and one possibilities punk offered, they took the fifties outsider rebel idea and regurgitated it. Then there was the small problem of Strummer seemingly embracing myth purely to cover up some uncomfortable truths about his own background, which other bands of the era would have been lambasted by the press for. The Clash, however, were regarded as somehow exempt and “special”.
Then there’s the music, which is mostly unimaginative and hectoring. As Julian Cope pointed out, “White Riot” is little more than a tinny Glitter Band stomp, and as I’m fond of highlighting, “The Call Up” is dull and obvious, a real stinker of a single by the standards of anyone in the era. When I first saw the promo clip for the latter, I actually collapsed with laughter at the image of the letterbox having planks of wood nailed over it. Did anyone find any of that posturing and any of that hackneyed imagery powerful?
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” itself is barely much better, being – as several posters have already commented – moronic rock and roll which sets out its stall within the first thirty seconds and then fails to achieve much more. It’s a dumb-ass riff, and admittedly a good dumb-ass riff which could in itself sustain the idea were it not, once again, for the prevailing tinniness and the lack of drive the track has. It slopes along until the chorus and the finale, at which point the band go batshit with their ramshackle thrashing, but somehow sound as if they’re merely pissing around in a rehearsal room somewhere. It sounds too cool for school and lacks commitment, which in a nutshell is actually my major problem with a lot of their output. Perhaps if I’d been born at a different time and seen them live, I’d have got it, but as somebody listening to their studio output, all I hear is a band who are too vain to truly have an impact on me personally, too terrified of the idea that their masks might slip if they break into too much of a sweat.
I was once nearly punched by a Clash fan when he overheard me slating Strummer in a pub (and this was long after Strummer had died, incidentally). He left the bar in a strop instead, and I was warned I’d had a “lucky escape” by his friends. I’ve had other aggressive reactions from fans when I’ve stated my case, which reminds me entirely of the responses the Sex Pistols got when they wore “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirts. Part of the reason I feel some people in my generation struggle with The Clash is because they’ve become sacred figures, Mojo reader favourites, and we have utterly different associations to their original set of fans. Even bearing their original impact in mind, however, there were plenty of more challenging, interesting punk bands to get behind at the time than this lot, who really were just the rockist’s choice. To me, they’re just a puzzlement, another case of the general public siding with the mediocre option.
Oh, and “Top of the Pops”? There’s a common theory that The Clash failed to embrace television for the pure and simple reason that they came across as berks on the box, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with their desire not to sell out. Had that been a particular issue, they’d never have signed to CBS. I’d better stop. I really could just be here typing all day.
That ‘whom’ is grammatically correct, no? The person ‘I’m supposed to be’ isn’t doing anything, so it’s ‘whom’ not ‘who’. Your assumption that it’s short for ‘who am’ is not, I think, correct.
(Is this the most boring critique of The Clash ever, or what?)
Re #24: Good call with The Who comparison: both at their best, a mix of power-pop melody and propulsive rock thrust, but both with a fair chunk of shouty, stompy near-misses to their name.
No, it can’t be “whom” because the verb “to be” is copulative — it links the subject not with an object but with a predicate, which will share the same case as the subject. As in “Who am I supposed to be?”
#36/#37: In between the third paragraph from Tommy and the penultimate paragraph from 23Daves, there is probably something interesting to be said about quite how bands (and perhaps this band in particular) inspire such a polar opposite reaction from some sections of music lovers.
But I’m half way through my third beer and England are playing a relatively interesting game of football against Ghana (probably because Ghana really want to win and we’ve given a chance to a bunch of players described as second choice but should actually be first choice), so I’m buggered if I can articulate it properly.
@40: oops I think I mean the complement shares the same case as the subject — the predicate is a slightly different thing. This is the best Clash discussion I ever had.
#37 – re. the “Mojo reader” comment.
Yep, I wonder what the Strummer of ’77 would make of ‘White Riot’ appearing on Total Guitar magazine CDs and the like these days… They’ve certainly got the muso tag hanging around them now, I suppose that is the old “real music” versus “manufactured crap” divide happy to have any one who slings a guitar round their neck into the former camp. Even that needs to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt give Paul Simonon was given the role in the first place purely because he ‘made the bass look cool’
In a parallel universe we’d be talking about ‘Complete Control’ at number one. There’s a 10 if ever there was one. Acerbic, funny, spontaneous… One “I don’t trust you/so why do you trust me?” is worth a million ‘Last Gang In Town’ proclamations.
The comments on Complete Control thus far are dead on for me, probably my favourite Clash track and released in the sweet spot between The Clash and Give Em Enough Rope, when they also released White Man In Hammersmith Palais, which I reckon is their high water mark.
First enjoyable England match in ages – who knew we could have an interesting international football match nowadays?
#43/44 And produced by Lee Scratch Perry, too, the use of space and echo creating a far more convincing Clash-reggae than ‘Police & Thieves’ was.
Plus it always seems that last-gang-in-town-haters are like 17-year-old Tom; uptight, self-righteous Morrissey fans suspicious of anything resembling fun: railing against rock’s blokeyness/revivalism/predictability while secretly, actually hating it’s messiness, momentum and joie-de-vivre: dismissing the like of the Clash as dead and dull and then raving over even more retro, predictable, safe stuff: the (imaginary?) enemy against whom Steven Wells used to rail.
Haha guilty as charged! (I was a terrible puritan at around this point) BUT remember this is 1991, around the time of “Kill Uncle”, so even the Morrissey fans weren’t Morrissey fans then. If you’d asked me at this point who the most exciting band in the world are I’d have said, without a second’s hesitation, Public Enemy.
Who, of course, were in rockcrit terms – i.e. the terms I approached them on – the TOTAL 1991 EQUIVALENTS OF THE CLASH except with rather better beats, but they traded on us-against-the-world vibes more than almost anyone (and I doubt any of Strummer’s hangers-on ever said anything as stupid as that Professor Griff quote). Obviously I’d still rather hear “By The Time I Get To Arizona” than anything in the Clash discography but there was a certain hypocrisy involved nonetheless.
And yes you’re right that a lot of the “last gang in town” irritation comes from the fact that they have ended up being very far from the last.
As for Swells, I doubt that there are many guys who’d have passed one of his purity tests, and I doubt that was the point of them anyway.
I remember reading them feeling that right was on MY side and not on the side of the Clash-worshipping revivalist false punk boyrockers he rightly loathed: part of his talent was to make you feel, mostly, you were on his side.
(this thread has been great so far by the way – this was one of those posts where I hit publish with a sense of impending doom and I have been very pleasantly proven wrong)
By the way can I say how fortunate it was that the young Noel Gallagher wasn’t discouraged by the criticism of his touching poem
” She Kissed Like a Hoover “
Another thing, SISOSIG represents the kind of laddishness that came to the fore in the 90’s. Something about that decade created a kind of post-feminist backlash, the Loaded culture. The dumb-ass nature of this will get me up on the dancefloor, windmilling like a loon as the double-time kicks in, and that’s what I love about it, but the truth is we’re seeing The Birth Of The 90’s Bloke, rising from the corpse of the 50’s rebel/outlaw. And that makes me feel uncomfortable, because I could so easily become that archetypal binge drinking, free spending, boorish lout at the drop of a hat. The type that Cumbrian describes so eloquently above. James Brown would argue it was Primal Scream’s Loaded, but I’d argue this had The Bloke Factor cranked up to maximum. You can dance with a girl to Loaded, not to this though.