30 years on, it doesn’t seem as dumbly-obvious but more of a snapshot of Thatcher’s Britain, a dying gasp of protest as unemployment soared and the miners got crushed. The things that made This Is England seem pedestrian and cliched when it came out (the effects-heavy guitar sound, the terrace chorus, the lyric straining to make a big statement) somehow now give it classic status. ( In 2020, a fan who hated it so much, took it to bits and 're-recorded' it.) Rhodes doesn’t quite ruin the wistful protest song North And South – in the hands of Combat Rock producer Glyn Johns, say, it could have been a keeper – but really only This Is England survived Bernie’s cack-handed, cloth-eared skills at the desk. Bootlegs from the time caught a band on fire and show that some of the songs ( Dictator, Are You Red…Y, Cool Under Heat) actually stand up. Unable to stop it or fix it, Cut The Crap came out, unloved by the people who’d made it. Jones, enjoying his freedom, laughed him off. When Strummer heard it he flew to the Bahamas and begged Mick Jones – then recording the game-changing This Is Big Audio Dynamite – to rejoin The Clash.
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Imagine Swing Out Sister produced by The Exploited and you’ll get some idea of the combination of yobbish terrace chant and soulless 80s production values. The result is an over-cooked pile of sonic spaghetti. Sensing his weakness, Rhodes stepped in – Malcolm McLaren was making music, why couldn’t he? – and took over production duties. The band’s frontman was lost throughout this period, unable to connect with his new band members, guilt-laden at sacking Topper and Mick, and struggling to deal with the deaths of his parents. Cut The Crap is left with the humourless, hectoring, slightly embarrassing side of The Clash, Strummer trying too hard to play the role of the angry punk, complete with mohican to help him get into character. Mick Jones had been the heart of the Clash – providing the emotion, the yearning, the melody, the groove – and without him, the band were reduced to a two-dimensional mess, a relic desperately trying to stay angry and relevant. With the Strummer-Jones writing credit now laughably transformed into Strummer-Rhodes (manager Bernie Rhodes, who was also in the production seat, credited as Jose Unidos), the balance between Jones’s ear for a melody and Strummer’s lyrical voice was a thing of the past. It’s the only Clash album not to feature Jones and, boy, is he missed. Here then are there their albums, rated from worst to life-changing first. Musically and lyrically, The Clash refused to be “little Englanders”, embracing a world beyond their roots, drawing on rock’n’roll, reggae, calypso, jazz, folk, blues, soul, and sometimes bolting them together (or taking them apart) with a genre-busting experimentalism that they rarely get any credit for. It was about us, about you, about the big wide world that waited for you. Their music wasn’t about how deep they were or how troubled, how wasted they were on drugs or the pressures of fame.
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Most rock’n’roll is solipsistic and inwards-looking – but from London Calling onwards, The Clash looked outwards. Because while they were in love with the rock’n’roll woah – and made music for people with Ford Cortinas and dead-end jobs – London Calling, Sandinista! and Combat Rock are albums for grown-ups, albums you take with you after the anger subsides, when you start being less self-obsessed and begin to look out into the world.