The one person Joe Strummer said “destroyed” The Clash: “It was just awful”
It’s hard to figure out what sparked the beginning of the end for The Clash, but that confusion is what lingered over Joe Strummer like a dark, dreary shadow for several long, hard years.
Strummer would later say that what was really the straw that broke the camel’s back was that they had “run out of idea gasoline”. When, really, it was actually a long, exhausting five-year stint that dragged them to their inevitable, bitter end.
Every bitter end starts somewhere, and yet what was especially strange about The Clash’s was that, in 1983, a year after the thing that started it all, they were on top of the world. The year’s Combat Rock was a huge success. And yet everything started to get weird around this time, starting when Topper Headon’s drug issues pushed him out of the band. Then Mick Jones was fired for being too much of a rock ‘n’ roll fiend. When he showed up, “[he] was like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood,” Strummer said.
But Strummer’s dark cloud only grew stronger the more it all dragged out, with shifting dynamics also becoming something of a haunt whenever he’d look back at it all later. Things with Bernie Rhodes didn’t exactly help things, either. In fact, it was the kind of taking sides and pushing people into corners you’d see on the playground, only to realise later just how much of a naive backstabber you’d been all along.
For Strummer, most of his regrets came with how he was with Jones. And a lot of that, too, looked like it came from how he gravitated more towards Rhodes in these moments. In his disdain for the former member, he fell for other tricks, only to realise the manipulations he’d found himself at the forefront and centre of the whole time.
It’s also the reason why people said Strummer walked around in the late 1980s with this look about him. It was like he was this gloomy presence deep in thought about things he’d done wrong in the band. But as it turned out, that’s exactly what was going on behind those troubled eyes. “I fucked it up by listening to the wrong people,” he later said, per Record Collector.
“That was one of the greatest bands,” he added. “I’ll always regret it. I really stabbed Mick in the back. It was just awful with Bernie. It destroyed me and our group.”
As a lot of processing ensued, Strummer viewed their end in a new light. Drugs and bad habits might have destroyed them, but so too did poor reactions and attitudes. As they fell apart, no one seemed to want to be there for anybody, too caught up in their own sourness to try to figure out a way to save them. One of Strummer’s friends, Robin Banks, even said it pushed him into a dark corner for the best part of ten years. He’d tell him he’d made a “profound mistake”, and that “he felt so guilty about being conned by Bernie”.
But these ruminations, years away from The Clash, while also a prisoner to it, eventually led him back to Jones in search of forgiveness. He’d actually wanted to reform the band, guilt-ridden and looking for creative respite. Jones, of course, denied the offer. A move that probably didn’t surprise Strummer all that much, what with his new venture, BAD. But he did accept his apology, so that probably counted for something.
