The 1970s band Joe Strummer wouldn’t listen to even if you paid him
Far from being a united front of musical revolutionaries fighting in solidarity against the fascist junta of the mainstream music industry, punk rock was always punctuated with vicious rivalries and longstanding feuds between groups, and often, between members of the same group. Even a figure as visionary as Joe Strummer couldn’t quite escape those rivalries.
One of the ‘big three’ of London’s early punk scene, alongside the Sex Pistols and The Damned, The Clash adopted an expansive sound early doors, which saw them survive much longer than most punk revolutionaries. Embracing and incorporating the sounds of ska, dub, rockabilly and, in time, hip hop and experimental jazz, Strummer’s output was always a bit more wide-reaching and experimental than the Pistols, for instance, but that didn’t prevent a rivalry between the pair.
John Lydon, for instance, famously called Strummer a “toss-pot” and cast scorn upon the suggestion that The Clash were among the better punk bands to emerge from mid-1970s London. The famously contrarian Lydon wasn’t alone in that view, either, with Strummer and The Clash attracting a lot of criticism during their heyday, namely for their decision to sign to a major record label in CBS.
Name-dropped in Crass’ ‘Punk Is Dead’ as being sell-outs of the industry, The Clash alienated some of their hardcore audience when they signed that famously exploitative contract, and Strummer was on the receiving end of a fair bit of flak as a result. What’s more, the group’s ever-evolving sound only seemed to increase that criticism among the legions of ardent punk purists in the scene.
“Obviously they just turn on to the sound, and they wanna hear, y’know, DA-DA-DA, that burst of energy,” Strummer theorised in a 1981 interview with the New Musical Express, “And there’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s plenty of groups doing it. And that’s what I always say to them: ‘Well, you’ve got the [Angelic] Upstarts doing it, lots of groups’.”
According to Strummer, though, The Clash were far from being the only group to switch-up their sound, nor were they the only ones to suddenly find themselves with the monetary power of a mainstream record label behind them. “I mean, the Ramones probably don’t get people coming up to them and saying ‘You’ve sold out’, right?” he added, “But I wouldn’t listen to a Ramones album unless you tied me to a chair.”
That rather disparaging take on the CBGB punk pioneers is in line with the transatlantic rivalry between the punk scenes of New York and London, but Strummer didn’t expand upon his apparently passionate distaste for the Ramones.
It is worth noting, however, that the American group were far less expansive in their sound than The Clash, sticking rigidly to their blitzkrieg playing style and unrelenting downstrokes, without the same kind of experimentation that Strummer clearly coveted.
To be fair to The Clash frontman, it appears as though his view of the Ramones softened with time. During the 1990s, for instance, his London Calling radio show, which was essentially a means for Strummer to share his favourite songs of all time, included both ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and ‘Beat On The Brat’ in its playlist, although, it being on the radio, there is no telling whether Strummer was, in fact, tied to a chair at the time.
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