We Are The Clash

Book excerpt: “An ambitious look at the last days of the Clash . . . as much a political history of the 1980s as it is a look at an influential band in its final years.”—Publishers Weekly The Clash was a paradox of revolutionary conviction, musical ambition, and commercial drive. We Are The Clash is a gripping tale of the band’s struggle to reinvent itself as George Orwell’s 1984 loomed. This bold campaign crashed headlong into a wall of internal contradictions and rising right-wing power. While the world teetered on the edge of the nuclear abyss, British miners waged a life-or-death strike, and tens of thousands died from US guns in Central America, Clash cofounders Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, and Bernard Rhodes waged a desperate last stand after ejecting guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon. The band shattered just as its controversial final album, Cut the Crap, was emerging. Andersen and Heibutzki weave together extensive archival research and in-depth original interviews with virtually all of the key players involved to tell a moving story of idealism undone by human frailty amid a climatic turning point for our world. “The Clash’s final chapter, after guitarist Mick Jones’ 1983 departure, has largely been forgotten—until this book, in which authors Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki argue that the punk pioneers were still creating vital music to the very end.”—Rolling Stone, an RS Picks/New Books “Focuses on a very different moment in the band’s history: the point at which the group splintered in the early 1980s, and its members grappled with an onset of reactionary governments around the world.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn “One of the most rewarding music books you’ll come across this year.”—Johns Hopkins Magazine