NY Times Reviews New Clash Biography

Back in September, we'd posted about the new self-titled Clash biography that was about to be published in the UK. I haven't heard any first-hand accounts yet, but it's rumored to be the must-own for any Clash fan because this isn't any ol' biography, this one was actually written by Strummer, Jones, Headon, and Simonon and includes never-before-seen photos and commentary. Seems it finally came out in the States last month.

THE CLASH By Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon
Illustrated. 384 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $45

At first glance, the Clash is an unlikely subject for such deluxe treatment. The group blasted out of London as part of punk’s first wave; it opened for the Sex Pistols on the 1976 “Anarchy in the U.K.” tour, on which more than two-thirds of the dates were canceled out of terror, securing the new movement’s reputation. Over the next seven years — a neat parallel to the Beatles’ recording career, in fact — the Clash would create some of the greatest rock ’n’ roll of all time (Rolling Stone named “London Calling” the best album of the 1980s), only to split apart just as the band was achieving commercial success in the United States.

In the intervening years, and burnished by the singer/rhythm guitarist/folk hero Joe Strummer’s death in 2002, the Clash has become the lone punk representative in the classic rock canon. It has attained rarefied status as one of those bands with more books published about them than total albums released.

The text for “The Clash” is drawn mostly from interviews conducted during five days of filming for the Grammy-winning 2000 documentary “Westway to the World.” If this limited access doesn’t always allow topics to be pursued in the greatest depth, it’s enough to give a sense of the four personalities involved: Strummer, the group’s romantic conscience; the lead guitarist Mick Jones, the musical explorer with a head for pop; the bass player Paul Simonon, a rookie musician but the band’s soul and style guru; and Topper Headon, the stereotypical drummer just out for a good time (“Once I’d done my bit we were told to go home, so there wasn’t any trouble or damage bills”).

At least, that’s the easy read of the Clash lineup. The reality is that each one of the foursome comes across as thoughtful and serious about a project so superficially raw and explosive. The most effective part of “The Clash” is the band members’ plain-spoken retelling of their family lives: Jones and Simonon were both products of severely broken homes; Strummer, later known as the populist voice of punk, was the ­Turkish-born son of a diplomat and learned to rebel at boarding school. “I could see from an early age,” he says, “that authority was a system of control which didn’t have any inherent wisdom.”

For the children of an impoverished, racially torn England, punk was a way to fashion a new identity and strike back at an increasing sense of powerlessness. “Part of punk was that you had to shed all of what you knew before,” Strummer says. “We were almost Stalinist in the way that we insisted you had to cast off all your friends, everything you’d ever known . . . in a frenzied attempt to create something new.”

Even the band’s name was an instinctive reflection of the era. “We were in a confrontational situation all the time,” Simonon says. “There was a clash of colors, clash of people — it’s kind of self-­explanatory.”

Surprisingly absent from “The Clash” is much sense of the group’s political side. Though that aspect of the work has been exaggerated over time, this was, after all, a band that titled one album “Sandinista!” But in the musicians’ own telling, their activist side was far more intuitive than strategic. “We were just picking things out of the paper to write about,” Jones says.

Elsewhere, the guitarist adds, “I was always concerned about how a thing looked just as much as how it sounded and what it was about,” and one thing that certainly shines through in these lavishly illustrated pages is the band’s visual focus; some of the photos are simply breathtaking, and every last show poster and backstage pass demonstrates the group’s near-­perfect sense of style.

Each of the four contributes to this story, but time and again, it is Joe Strummer’s voice, his dramatic sense of language, that leaps off the page. He says of one song inspired by a line of movie dialogue that “it was like holding one end of a piece of string which had a song attached to it,” and as things start to go south for the Clash, he describes Jones as behaving “like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood.”

A rock band is a mysterious thing. Somehow, every once in a while, a few individuals bump into one another, and they look exactly right together and share a focus and an aspiration and the right balance of musical similarities and differences. Then, suddenly, they don’t anymore.

“Whatever a group is, it’s the chemical mixture of those four people,” Strummer says. “It’s some weird thing that no scientist could ever quantify or measure, and thank God for that.” (Source)

Listen: Pressue Drop_The Clash