“Took my head off”: the band Joe Strummer said were on “another planet”
As much as punk elders, sitting in leather chairs with their equally leathery skin covered in fading tattoos from the glory days, give an impression of London’s punk scene being a web of rivalries and ongoing feuds, each group at the heart of that scene seemed to be borrowing from one another. Even a group as groundbreakingly original as The Clash might never have existed were it not for the Sex Pistols.
In the light of modernity, the Sex Pistols’ punk credentials are often called into question. They were, after all, a band manufactured by Malcolm McLaren in a proto-Simon Cowell fashion, plucked from the customer base of the shop he shared with Vivienne Westwood.
Admittedly, John Lydon’s recent flurry into right-wing politics and Trump-worship haven’t helped proceedings, either. It is easy to forget, in the midst of all of that, that UK punk probably wouldn’t have happened without the Pistols.
While it was The Damned who made it the airwaves first, with their debut single ‘New Rose’ predating ‘Anarchy In The UK’ by a few weeks, it was Johnny Rotten and the gang who provided an essential spark of inspiration to a litany of other groups, spanning the spectrum from Joy Division to X-Ray Spex. Even their main rivals within London’s blossoming punk realm, The Clash, might never have come together were it not for that manufactured outfit.
When Joe Strummer first witnessed the musical anarchy of the Pistols live, and in the flesh, he was still a member of pub rock outfit The 101ers. “They were doing ‘Stepping Stone’, which we did occasionally,” he shared in a 1988 interview. “But they were light-years different from us. They were on another planet in another century, it took my head off. I understood that this was serious stuff, they honestly didn’t give a shit.”
Inevitably, that experience changed Strummer’s artistic existence forevermore. “The audience were shocked,” he said. “That’s when I fell out with the rest of the group, ‘cos after that I started going down to Tuesday nights at the 100 Club, it started happening there. That’s when Bernie [Bernard Rhodes] came up to me and said, give me your number, I want to give you a call about something.”
Luckily, both for Strummer and the future of punk music, that call happened to be about a new group formed by Mick Jones, by the name of The Clash. Pretty quickly, The Clash became the main rivals of the Sex Pistols, vying to occupy the top spot of London’s ever-expanding punk realm and earn top billing at The Roxy Club.
It is a rivalry that the likes of John Lydon still haven’t forgotten, with the former Pistol once famously declaring that Strummer was a “tosspot” who owed the entirety of his career to Lydon. In the end, though, The Clash far outlived the Sex Pistols, continuing on for years after punk’s relevancy had dipped, using their newfound influences of hip-hop, experimental jazz, reggae, and rockabilly to sustain themselves.
Whether or not The Clash would have still happened were it not for the seminal experience of watching the Sex Pistols is a topic that can be debated indefinitely. Either way, though, it was their pioneering punk attitude that seemed to open the eyes of Strummer to a new, emerging world of musical rebellion – a rebellion that he soon made his own.
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