“White boys trying to imitate the black man”: Why John Lydon accused The Clash of racism
John Lydon is famously difficult to please. If you removed every band that he has ever criticised from his own record collection, the punk frontman would likely only be left with his own Public Image Ltd albums. Over the years, everybody from punk pioneer Patti Smith to his own Sex Pistols bandmates has come under fire from Mr Rotten, but some bands have been regular targets for the contrarian songwriter going back decades. One such group is The Clash, who emerged from the early days of UK punk at around the same time as the Sex Pistols.
It should come as no surprise that Lydon is not a fan of The Clash; as previously mentioned, he isn’t a fan of most bands. However, he appears to have rallied against ‘the only band that matters’ on numerous occasions over the years. When Mick Jones’ band first set foot on the stage at The Roxy in Covent Garden, the Sex Pistols were already firmly established. While there was some crossover in their sound – see the guitar riff of ‘Pretty Vacant’ and its resemblance to ‘I’m So Bored With The USA’, which came out the following year – The Clash quickly diversified their repertoire.
In contrast to many punk bands, Strummer and the gang were keen to espouse the breadth of their own musical taste within their material. This led the band to explore the influence of ska, dub, rockabilly, and hip-hop, among various other styles, which prolonged their relevance for much longer than the bulk of their punk contemporaries. Their love of ska, rocksteady, and reggae became immediately apparent on their self-titled debut album, which featured a seminal cover of Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’.
Seemingly, this love of Jamaican rhythm came from bassist Paul Simonon, who grew up in Brixton, which was one of the most culturally diverse areas of London at the time. Quickly after joining the ranks of The Clash, the bassist managed to imbue their output with these infectious grooves that he had grown up hearing around Brixton. However, this cultural influence never sat right with John Lydon.
Like Simonon, Lydon had grown up in a culturally diverse area of London and found a love for Jamaican music during his adolescence. After leaving the Sex Pistols, Lydon paid a visit to Jamaica in 1978 along with Dennis Morris and Richard Branson, attempting to recruit local musicians and forming the basis for Public Image Limited. This trip was pivotal for Lydon’s career and musical development but when The Clash visited the Caribbean two years later, the PiL songwriter was not best pleased.
“What were they going there for?” he questioned in an interview decades later. “They have no background of multicultural inheritance. I mean, they weren’t brought up in the council flats like we were. They don’t know that. They were like coffee table boys. ‘Oh, let’s go and earn some black friends. It’ll be super.’” While Strummer was indeed a little more middle class than some of his punk contemporaries, Lydon’s apparent attitude that he is more attuned with the historic struggle of Black people because he grew up in a council flat feels awash with colonialism.
Lydon went on to claim that The Clash’s visit to Jamaica in 1980 was detrimental for the band. “It went very bad for them very quickly because that got sussed,” he claimed. This claim can quickly be disputed by the fact that The Clash continued to record Caribbean-influenced punk for another six years, and they were welcomed back to Jamaica in 1982 to perform at the Jamaica World Music Festival in Kingston.
“They had no proper inheritance to be indulging in this kind of music,” Lydon continued. “It’s white boys trying to imitate the Black man music. That’s very hurtful, and, to me, that’s racism,” the Donald Trump-supporting former punk declared. Ironically, the songwriter himself drew upon dub reggae during the early days of PiL. What’s more, his accusations of racism seem particularly laughable given the fact that his entourage was once accused of attacking Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke in a racially motivated incident in 2008.
The Clash were ardent campaigners of anti-racism in the UK, lending their defiant voice to causes like Rock Against Racism and regularly paying homage to Jamaican musicians. They were not appropriating the culture of the Caribbean any more than The Specials, Madness, or Public Image Limited were. Still, attempting to reason with John Lydon seems akin to arguing with concrete.
