The Who inspired Joe Strummer to break up The Clash in 1986
“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” is one of the greatest lyrics ever written by Neil Young, but it is advice which is rarely heeded within the music industry, not least by Young himself.
In the modern age of countless reunions and anniversary tours, it feels as though retirement is an impossibility for most musicians. Even bands as geriatric as The Rolling Stones or The Who are still jetting across the globe armed with the rapidly ageing rock and roll sounds of the 1960s. If you wanted to, you could quite readily find tickets to see artists older than your grandparents still pogoing around the stage as though the punk explosion of 1976 never subsided. However, one group from that first punk age, keen to burn out rather than fade away, was The Clash.
From their formation in 1976, The Clash, helmed by frontman Joe Strummer, never compromised on their staunch set of moralistic and artistic principles, which gave them a half-life that far outlasted many of their contemporaries from those early punk days. Albums like the Goat that is London Calling, Combat Rock that gave us ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, and even Sandinista! were veritable proof of their openness to the musical landscape.
Their ability to take from the abrasive basis of the punk age and incorporate a range of influences, from Jamaican ska to New York hip-hop, helped them attract new crops of music fans and displayed their penchant for reinvention. However, like everything good and experimental in this world, the group also needed to meet its disbandment.
The sun set on The Clash’s tenure in 1986, scattering a myriad possibilities of why in their wake. For starters, internal tensions and the usual ‘musical differences’ factored into the dismissal of guitarist Mick Jones, while drummer Topper Headon was booted out as a result of his increasingly debilitating heroin addiction, and those two essentially ripped out the heart of the band’s sound.
Cut The Crap followed, with a newly recruited drummer and guitarist, but you only need to listen to that record once to realise that the end was inevitable. On the other hand, Strummer himself once claimed that The Clash called it a day as a result of one ageing band who refused to pack it in themselves.
“One of the reasons The Clash broke up was we saw what The Who were like at the end of their tether. It’s a bad scene,” he told Classic Rock in 1999, adding, “You very quickly turn into nothing. I’ve enjoyed my life because I’ve had to deal with all kinds of things, from failure to success to failure again.”
By the mid-1980s, The Who were a shadow of their former selves, carrying on without their fallen comrade, Keith Moon, and continuing to belt out lyrics like “I hope I die before I get old” as their hairlines slowly receded. What’s more, as Strummer alluded to, the personal relationships within the band suffer after so many decades of touring and being cooped up in a studio together; Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have certainly had their fair share of spats over the years and are in no hurry to tie friendship bracelets.
So, by announcing the end of The Clash in 1986, Strummer prevented them from going the same way: carrying on as they became older and older, increasingly disenfranchised by the music industry and jaded by fame and fortune and prickly interband relationships.
There is, of course, an argument that the band were already at the end of their tether by that time, what with the ugly departure of Jones and Headon, but it seems the memory of a dilapidated The Who was enough to prevent them from ever partaking in a reunion in later years.
