White Riot by Joe Thomas (Books 2023, 21) 📚

I picked this up because of the title, taken as it obviously is from an early song by my favourite band. I bought it because it is set in and around the famous anti-Nazi festival in Victoria Park in London. Or at least it starts there.

Though that’s not quite true. It starts even closer to home for me: my kids' primary school is mentioned early on, and many other streets, pubs, takeaways and landmarks that still exist are visited.

Joe Thomas was born in 1977, so he’s doing this from research, not memory, but it captures the area very well, and the time — well, from what I know of those times in London, I think he’s done a great job.

It’s not mainly about the music scene, though. Thomas is a crime writer, and this is, kind of, a crime novel. And becomes more so as it goes on, and jumps to 1983. As you might imagine, given the notoriety of Stoke Newington Police Station of the time, it’s about bent coppers. And one more-or-less decent cop who is — we think — trying to bring them down.

I say ‘We think’, because it’s not finished. It turns out it’s the start of a trilogy, with Red Menace and True Blue to follow. This one was only published this year, so I guess it’ll be a while before we see the followups.

It’s all pretty good. It uses a slightly odd, cut-up sort of style: half sentences, fragments ending in dashes. But it’s very readable. As I say, I was drawn to it by the music and the locations, but I enjoyed spending time with the characters, and the situation is compelling. Real life events are stitched into fictional ones (or vice-versa).

Unsurprisingly, then, it’s a very political book. And surprisingly Thatcher turns up as a character. I’m not sure why Thomas choose to do that. Maybe since most of the characters are on the left, it was to provide some sort of balance. Why not go as far up and right as possible, I suppose. I don’t mean Thatcher is the furthest-right person in it, to be fair: the National Front are heavily involved, too.

The main police character is running ‘spycops’, and has operatives inside both the NF and the loose coalition of groups that oppose them (the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, the Socialist Workers' Party). I expect as the series goes on we’ll see some version of the scandals around that whole business, too.

Penny-Farthings and Paranoia

Watty was wearing a badge, one of the big, old kind. Probably two inches across, round. They used to advertise them in the back of Sounds, NME, Record Mirror (and I think there was a fourth member of the British weekly music press, but I can’t recall it). They always included the size, in old-fashioned imperial units: one-inch, two-inch. Probably inch-and-a-half.

In the early days we wore the big ones. My first one was almost certainly a Beatles one, but I don’t remember what design it had. I do recall a glittery Thin Lizzy one, when I went through my period of them being one of my faves. Wings, maybe? Probably.

Anyway, with punk, the badge size that was considered cool, or even acceptable, reduced. Anything bigger than an inch across would lead to mockery, for sure. Although I think Brendan’s Stranglers badge, saying ‘Something Better Change’ (‘Because I like the song and I like what it says’) was of the two-inch persuasion, but that was in the early days.

Watty’s one, the one that I’m talking about: that was probably even earlier. It was white, with the outline of what I had to get quite close to realise was a penny farthing bicycle. And a number: 6.

‘What’s that about, then?’

‘It’s The Prisoner! Do you not know about it?’ Watty wasn’t too bad in this way, but the default reaction to someone being ignorant of something you liked was mockery, back then, when we were 13, 14. To be honest, probably for a decade or more after that, too. Instead of the healthier attempt to infect the ignorant one with our own enthusiasm. Or at least inform them about it.

I learned, though, that it was a weird programme that was on late at night, and anyway it was over now, so even if it hadn’t been on at a time that I wouldn’t have been allowed to stay up on a school night, it was finished, so there was no chance I’d ever get to see it.

Pity.

Of course, The Prisoner was originally broadcast in 1967-8, so if Watty was watching it ten years later, it does show that repeats were a thing. If only there were a way we could have our own copies of TV programmes. But what a fantastic, farcical idea!

I know it was the early days, because the name ‘The Prisoner’ did not immediately make me think of The Clash. The B-side of ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’ shares a title with Patrick McGoohan’s paranoid cold-war ex-spy drama. I don’t think it has anything else in common with it, but you can’t be sure.

I finally saw some episodes in the early nineties. I bought some on VHS, along with my friend Johnny, who also hadn’t seen it. But that didn’t prove very practical, as we live in different cities. And VHS was expensive. Two episodes per tape for, what fifteen quid? So that petered out.

Much later I got the DVD box set. And it’s been one of the things we’ve been watching over the last few months. Er, years, maybe. It might have started in lockdown.

Tonight we finally watched the last two episodes. Which were much better than I had been led to believe.

It’s kind of amazing, saturated as it is with sixties fears about mind control, brainwashing, hypnotism. Is anything real after the unnamed main character gets gassed in the opening of the first episode (repeated in the opening credits of almost every episode)? Maybe the whole thing is a hallucination induced by the gas, you know?

There are certainly plenty of actual induced hallucinations or dreamlike states in the series. Which is why you can’t trust the increasingly psychedelic ending.

The whole thing is a mindfuck. I loved it.

Twenty Years Without Joe

I missed posting this yesterday, what with one thing and another. Twenty years ago yesterday, the 22nd of December 2002, my friend Tony texted me and the other members of our then-band, Burn, to the effect:

Nooooooooo!

Strummer’s dead.

I was at work, and immediately googled for the story. Joe Strummer, dead at 50 from an undiagnosed heart defect. We didn’t hear the reason at once, of course.

I wrote The Death of a Hero at the time. Not much has changed, in some ways. I still play his music, both The Clash and his solo stuff. I sometimes wonder what he’d have to say about the times we live in now.

Hard to imagine he’d have been 70 this year. Such is life, and death.

Next Songs, Elon Musk, and Joe Strummer

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been confirmed, there has been a lot of chatter about free speech. Musk, we are told, describes himself as a ‘free speech maximalist’, and there are fears that he’ll have Twitter reinstate the accounts of Trump and other white supremacists.

But I’ve been thinking about Joe Strummer.

More specifically, I’ve been wondering why his ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was popping into my head so often. It wasn’t a problem: getting an earworm of a song I like doesn’t bother me. But I wondered what was triggering it.

I can often work out why I get a song in my head. I knew, for example, why I often had The Clash’s ‘The Prisoner ' in my head through the summer. The words ‘The Prisoner ' are written on the whiteboard in our kitchen, along with the titles of the other serieses we’re watching.

And in fact I sing ‘The Prisoner’ every time I hang out the washing, owing to its line referring to ‘hanging out the washing and clipping coupons and generally being decent.’

It clicked today, though. You know how — if you’re an old-school album listener (or just old) like me — when you play an album, one track’s ending often triggers the expectation of the next? So that, when you hear a song in isolation, on a playlist or on the radio or something, and the wrong song plays next, it can be quite jarring?

The song before ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is ‘Techno D-Day’. Joe’s celebration of illegal raves ends with the line, ‘And this is about free speech!’

So it turns out my head was just playing the next song whenever the phrase came up.

The Clash On Display

Paul Simenon’s Smashed Bas
Paul Simenon’s Smashed Bass

My favourite band have become a museum piece.

Or at least, some of their instruments, clothing, lyrics, and memorabilia are in an exhibition which the Museum of London1 has been running since the fortieth anniversary of London Calling in December. I popped along today.

Clash Shirts and Guitars
Clash Shirts and Guitars

It’s small, but pretty good. The centrepiece is Paul Simenon’s smashed bass from the famous cover photo. It lies under glass on a red velvet cushion, like a fallen warrior lying in state (see above).

It’s actually kind of gruesome. “That’s no way to treat an expensive musical instrument,” as someone once said.

Joe Strummer’s White Telecaster
Joe Strummer’s White Telecaster

I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, I don’t think. Except maybe that Joe had a backup white Telecaster, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use, either live, in video, or in photos. His iconic black one is in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I believe. Or another museum.

Oh, and see the poster in that shot? “Two for a fiver”? When I bought London Calling it was only £3.99. Both times, as I’ve written about before.

Anyway, worth checking out, especially since it’s free. My main complaint: there are a lot of songs that could have been playing, even if they kept it to the relevant album. Instead they had a loop of just three (“London Calling,” “Train in Vain,” and “Clampdown,” the latter two live versions).

Big Display of the London Calling cover
Big Display of the London Calling cover
  1. Which I had never before visited, in thirty-two years living here. ↩

Calling From London

Forgetting for a minute the slightly-disappointing conclusion of a 42-year-old story that we spoke about the other day, this month gives us the 40th anniversary of an even more significant creation, for me at least.

The Clash released London Calling in December 1979. Rolling Stone went on to call it the best album of the 80s, but it got a later release in America. And in any case, many wouldn’t have heard it until 1980. 1

Including me. I remember being at school, at the start of a term, so it must have been January, and Watty saying, “I envy you: you haven’t heard London Calling yet.” That idea of how important the first listen is. I’ve said similar things myself over the years, about various things.

But honestly, I couldn’t tell you anything about my first hearing. I had probably heard the title track — it was a single, after all — and I went and bought the album, most likely at John Menzies in Dumbarton (though maybe at Hall Audio, the nearby hi-fi shop, or Woolies, or Boots, who used to sell records in those days). I do know it cost £3.99, because the band took a reduction in their royalties so it — a double album — could be sold at the same price as a single album. Excellent value, for one of the greatest records ever made.

Though I paid for it a couple more times over the years. Someone walked off with my copy during a party at my student flat in Edinburgh. I replaced it with a second-hand copy, probably from Record Shak (sic) on Clerk Street. Though possibly that was much later and in London. I had a tape of it to tide me over. I do know that the replacement cost the same: £3.99.

The CD must have cost me a bit more, but I didn’t get that until the 25th-anniversary version, with The Vanilla Tapes, the rehearsal-room recordings of early versions of several of the songs.

I could probably tell you a few things about the 7852 2 times I’ve heard it subsequently, though. But it would be better for you to listen to it yourself.

And lastly, just a reminder that tomorrow is the 17th anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death.

  1. Or at any time in the intervening 40 years, to be fair. ↩
  2. Approximately. ↩

The Beats: a Very Short Introduction (Books 2019, 4)

The Beats VSI alongside a heart-shaped pottery gift
The Beats VSI alongside a heart-shaped pottery gift

Since I announced back in October that I’m writing a novel called Delta Blues: Beat Poet of the Spaceways, I thought I should learn a bit more about the Beats. Not that my character is necessarily going to be very like the actual Beats, and maybe her poetry won’t be like theirs either, but you need to know about what you’re using for inspiration, right?

Books in the “Very Short Introduction” series do exactly what their shared subtitle suggests, and this is no exception. You get a brief prehistory and history of the movement, then a look at the major novelists, another at the major poets, and then a piece on their influence.

In common with the last two books I read, The Clash get a mention, because Allen Ginsberg worked with them, adding spoken-word part to “Ghetto Defendant,” on the Combat Rock album.

I know more about the Beats now than when I started, and that’s exactly what I wanted out of this book.

England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, by Jon Savage (Books 2019, 3)

England’s Dreaming alongside a shaving brush

I didn’t start reading this just because I read a book about The Clash recently. In fact I started it sometime last year. But reading the Clash book did make me want to get back to this, and refresh my memories of the early days of punk.

Reading a history of a time you lived through is interesting. Not that I was involved in the events, but I was distantly aware of at least some of them. In the years the book covers I was between 12 and 15. Or maybe just 14, as it only gets as far as early 79. It’s a short period of time, looking back, and they — the Pistols, and most of the other bands too — were incredibly young. They were just 20 and 21 when they signed their first deal. And their second. And their third.

At times Savage appears to think that punk was over when the pistols split, if not before. And generally to have quite negative thoughts about it as it developed Though he undercuts that contempt later, in the appendices and in the notes scattered through the huge discography at the end. He acknowledges the influence of punk, though considers it just to be one of a range of genres or forms that influences popular music. Which is fair enough, though there are still, even today, bands that consider themselves to be punk. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know.

Something that came out of it that surprised me — though doesn’t, now that I know the facts — is that you can no longer get the film of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle in any form (though you can still get the soundtrack album). That’s because it was McLaren’s project, it sets him up as hero, and makes Lydon the almost-unseen villain. Lydon hated McLaren by the end, and eventually won control of the Sex Pistols name and assets in a series of court cases. Presumably he controls whether it will ever be released.

I find this mildly annoying, because I saw it couple of times when I was a student, and enjoyed it, and wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Second-hand DVD copies are available, but they’re mostly pricey and/or being shipped from the States.

I suppose the more recent, documentary film, The Filth and the Fury, might be worth seeing. I see that, like The Swindle, it is directed by Julien Temple. Clearly Lydon didn’t mind his work on McLaren’s film.

What doesn’t come through very much is any sense of Jon Savage himself. What was he doing, and how did he get involved in all this? I gather he wrote a fanzine, London’s Outrage, and he became a journalist writing for Sounds, according to his Wikipedia entry. While he has done extensive research, and interviewed many of the participants, some of the story clearly comes from his being there at the time.

But the only real sense of that we get is that, towards the last third or so of the book, a series of dated, italicised entries appear. They clearly are — or are meant to be — diary entries from the time. Or notes for articles he wrote at the time, perhaps, giving us something of a first-person view of some to the gigs and so on. I would have liked to see more made of these, or more generally about his experience and from his point of view. A book about punk ought to be a bit more gonzo, I think.

But on the whole it’s a great read.

We Are The Clash by Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki (Books 2019, 2)

The book "We Are The Clash" with The Clash's "Cut the Crap" album on CD We Are The Clash with the Cut the Crap CD

This is the book that I mentioned before Christmas. The subtitle is “Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of A Band That Mattered,”1 which captures well its structure. It interleaves the politics of what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic — the miners’ strike, Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, the Iran/Contra scandal — with what was happening with the most political of the original punk bands.

It’s interesting to read a history of a time you lived through and were, however tangentially, involved in. Andersen and Heibutzki more than do justice to their material. The research they must have done is impressive. I know personally that Andersen came to the UK on a research trip, but aside from that they have interviewed the three non-original members of The Clash, Kosmo Vinyl, and various other people who were involved or just had something useful to say.

And they must have spent a lot of time listening to concert tapes and studying set lists — which doesn’t sound like a chore to me, it’s fair to say.

I learned two major things: first, I’d forgotten how good Cut the Crap is. I haven’t listened to it in ages, and when I went to do so on Apple Music, I found it isn’t there. Nor is it on Spotify. I have it on vinyl, but I don’t currently have access to a record player.

Luckily Amazon and CDs both still exist, so I put some more money the way of… Bernie Rhodes, as it turns out.

That’s the other big thing I found out: how — difficult, let’s say — Rhodes was. Not least since he signed the band — well, Joe and Paul: the others were effectively employees — into a contract that gave him, Rhodes, control over the album, as well as the name “The Clash.”

But worse was the way he treated the new members while they were with the band. Constantly haranguing them, telling them they weren’t up to scratch, shouting at them… it’s a wonder they stayed. It sounds like an abusive environment.

Joe could and should have stopped it, but it seems like he was still to some extent in Rhodes’s thrall — Bernie did bring the band together, after all — and possible suffering from depression. Certainly he was drinking heavily, and during that time his dad died and his mum got ill, and he became a father himself. It was a difficult time for him.

I have more to say about the album, but I think that’s for a separate post. For now, this is a great rock book about a little-discussed time in the history of my favourite band.

  1. Good to see the proper use of the Oxford comma there. ↩