Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Return of the Last Gang in Town by Marcus Gray The cult of the roadie. When people talk about the 1980 film Rude Boy nowadays, they call it "the Clash movie". It featured the band, portraying themselves, and a selection of great live performances. But they were not the notional stars of the film. That was a young man called Ray Gange, the Rude Boy of the title. Rude Boy is a strange piece of work, stuck in that always awkward place between documentary and fiction. Uncomfortable and (in some cases) reluctant amateurs struggle to portray themselves, or people who share their names. To describe Gange's's own performance as wooden would be unfair: wood can't drink heavily and look embarrassed while mumbling its lines. The original 1960s rude boys were sharp-dressed, gang-affiliated young Jamaicans. A decade later, the Clash appropriated the term as a romantic catch-all for their own followers. At first, the 20-year-old Ray Gange on the screen seems to be an archetypal Clash fan, albeit one lucky enough to be offered a job as a roadie. But it soon becomes clear that the pro-capitalist and borderline racist views he expresses are at odds with the values championed by his new employers. During the period of filming, spring 1978 to spring 1979, Margaret Thatcher was on the verge of assuming power, and racism was a major issue. Joint producer-directors David Mingay and Jack Hazan pushed for Gange to challenge the band. Thus, the screen Ray Gange is partly the real Ray Gange, partly a composite of other Clash hangers-on, and partly the film-makers' zeitgeist indicator. The shiftlessness and drunkenness are authentic Gange, though: it's not easy to hump amplifiers with a can of Special Brew stuck to your lips, so Gange didn't bother. Here, Mingay and Hazan had no choice but to run with the result, playing up his haplessness. When the Clash finally lose patience and leave him stranded, the question is not so much why as why so long? After watching the rough cut of Rude Boy, the band certainly had regrets. They instructed Mingay and Hazan to cut it to 50 minutes of straight concert footage, and when the pair refused, the band withdrew their support. The most recent DVD reissue of Rude Boy seems to agree about its key selling point, offering the option to "just play the Clash". For the record: the 20-odd blistering live performances would never have been captured had it not been for (the real) Ray Gange, who first pointed Mingay and Hazan in the Clash's direction. By the time the film was released, Gange was in Hollywood with a green card - working on a building site. He quit, involving himself with various "band projects" on the local punk scene, and picking up occasional work as a TV and film extra, though Rude Boy remains his only credit on imdb.com. In late 1982, he moved back to his native Brixton. Asked to sum up what he has done since, he offers "band management, record label owner, narcotics vortex, art degree, parent, and get old". He no longer drinks or smokes, and is a full-time father and a part-time artist who hopes to show his paintings and sculptures on a website by the end of the summer. Now heavy-set and balding - but affable and surprisingly healthy-looking - he recently played an Italian assassin in an unnamed short, which "may never see the light of day". He's also in a video for Radio London, recorded this spring by the Devildolls Rock'n'Roll Street Gang in support of the Strummerville foundation. Meanwhile, the screen Ray Gange appears to have acquired cult status. The real Gange insists it was only ever "journalists" who concerned themselves with a political analysis of either Rude Boy or his role, anyway. These days, people are simply impressed that he was there and has the film to prove it. "It's a source of identification for a lot of the band's fans," he says. "They weren't expecting an existential De Niro-esque tour de force." And, he adds, he's happy to hear film offers from anyone who knows they won't be getting De Niro. · Marcus Gray is the author of The Clash: Return of the Last Gang in Town. Cash city rockers. The Last Gang in Town is back! And although the surviving members of the Clash will be remaining firmly in their rocking chairs, no bank is safe. By the time they head for the hills again, they'll have made out like bandits without firing off a rim-shot, flashing an axe, or even raising a bass in anger. This Monday sees a tri-partite Clash release: the illustrated autobiography The Clash (selling for £30), the live compilation DVD (£12.99), and the CD (£11.99). You wait a whole year for more Clash product, and then a three-part cross-promotional multimedia extravaganza comes along all at once. Integrity was high on punk's list of watchwords, and the Clash set themselves particularly lofty standards, promising their fans value for money and no exploitation of their followers. "There will be no six-quid Clash LP, ever!" Joe Strummer guaranteed Sounds' David McCullough in 1979, failing to consider the effects of inflation (£6 then is worth approximately £22 now). From the moment they signed a recording contract in 1977, the band were in continual conflict with record company CBS over creative freedom, as celebrated in the third Clash single, : "They said we'll make you lots of mon-ee/ Worry about it later." Instead, the band put their mon-ee where their mouths were, going into debt to ensure both the double album and triple Sandinista! sold for the price of a single LP. In 1979, Joe Strummer told Creem's Dave DiMartino the Clash would only enjoy significant commercial success in America 20 years after the event. "It'll be like on TV," he sneered. "39 Greats from Old England. That's how you like it over here, don't you? Repackaged nostalgia." And so it has come to pass. The Clash's output during their lifetime was prodigious, and there was little unheard material left in the vaults when they finally split in 1985. Once CBS was taken over by Sony in 1988, the repackaged nostalgia begain in the usual forms: compilations and reissues in the USA and the UK. By 1999, when From Here to Eternity, an album of (mostly) previously unreleased live performances, was issued at the same time as ' Grammy-winning official band documentary, Westway to the World, it looked as though there was nothing left to release, that everything had been already been compiled to completion. But then all the bases were thoroughly covered all over again. By the end of last year, posthumous releases included two double-CD best-ofs, two single CD singles collections (both called The Singles), an expanded B-sides compilation, two triple-CD box-set overviews, an. A- and B-sides singles box set, an extravagantly extended 25th Anniversary special edition of London Calling, a programme of remastered CD reissues of the band's entire album back catalogue (including the compilations), a singles video collection, and a DVD reprising and expanding upon that. This from a band that released five albums (The Clash, Give 'Em Enough Rope, London Calling, Sandinista and ) in its classic form, followed by one (Cut the Crap) so poorly regarded that it was written out of history and no material from it was ever included on the compilations. Well, at least until its reissue in 2000. In fairness, the nature of the music marketplace has evolved over the years and attitudes to "old music" have changed. And, naturally, the Clash and their dependents deserve a pension plan. But what gets the fans tutting in the internet forums is that the band have always refused to admit to a profit motive even while the quality control - never complete with the Clash - has deteriorated. In the case of almost every post-split CD, one or more members of the Clash are given credit for song selection, remixing, sleeve notes and/or cover design. In-house filmmaker and band buddy Don Letts has helmed all official DVDs. Wherever possible, a member of the Clash is also credited with initiating the project, most of which are marketed as munificent gestures to the band's followers. And the content of the releases of "new" material is presented not as a business decision, but as the result of some Inspired Clash Discovery. There can be no suggestion that the flood of Clash product has been the result of Sony refusing Complete Control to the band. A typical case: in 2004, the special edition of London Calling came about because Mick Jones chanced upon the long-lost album demos in a seldom-visited lock-up. That's right. While other middle-aged music business veterans make reissue decisions around the conference table, the Clash's schedule is apparently dictated by eureka moments in storage facilities. So what's on offer this time around? Advance publicity for Atlantic Books' 2008 lead non-fiction title promises "an exciting new book about the Clash, in their own words and pictures", "hitherto unseen photographs and interviews" and "unprecedented access to the Clash archives". There's no denying that The Clash is a handsome career overview in the gravitas-bestowing coffee-table style of The Beatles Anthology. Atlantic make no secret of the fact that the Beatles book is their model. But how new is this "exciting new book"? The Clash's text derives from interviews filmed for an earlier documentary, in this case Westway to the World. Admittedly, the Beatles book took its interviews from an earlier documentary, too, but the difference is that the Beatles releases - also including three CDs of unreleased material - were staggered over five years and shared the same title, while the Clash's are separated by a nine- year gap, and don't. "I spent between 12 and 17 hours with each band member," says Mal Peachey, the book's editor, who conducted the interviews in 1999. "Less than a third of each interview was used in the finished film." The third that was used is self-evidently the most interesting part of the iceberg, though, and The Clash also includes other interview material that has appeared in print before, most obviously from the Clash On Broadway box-set booklet notes. Many of the professional photographs are well known, and the personal snaps are both familiar and scanty. Similarly, the bulk of the memorabilia is commercial rather than personal. We get a handful of drummer 's "Will this do, Mum?" postcards home, but there is nothing from Joe Strummer's huge cache of notebooks, draft lyrics and on-the-road souvenirs, which have already been the subject of an impressive 2004 exhibition in London. Peachey denies this material is being held back for a new project from Strummer's estate, and - almost unbelievably - dismisses its omission as inconsequential. Topper's postcards aside, there's little indication that the Clash's direct post-1999 involvement amounts to much more than claiming copyright. The press release and cover sticker for the DVD Revolution Rock announce a new documentary directed by Don Letts, featuring "a host of rare and previously unreleased live performances". Instead, it's a collection of 22 live clips, only a quarter of them attributable to Letts, only seven not previously included on Clash releases, with a hackneyed voiceover narration. Just to reinforce the distinctive aroma of old hat, Revolution Rock was released in the USA this April, and has been available via Amazon ever since. "Legendary" and "long sought after by fans", claims the press release for the CD Live at Shea Stadium. The band played two nights at Shea, on October 12 and 13 1982. Producer Glyn Johns recorded both - though persistent buzzing ruined the first night - and Don Letts filmed part of the second for a video promo. The intention was to release a live album in late 1983 to fill an unusually long gap between Clash studio releases. In the event, work was suspended when guitarist Mick Jones was sacked and the writs started flying. Moving house 15 years later, Joe Strummer found a cassette of the second show in his woodshed (it's another Inspired Clash Discovery). Eureka! The project was revived - but shortly afterward, the Clash opted instead to release a live compilation representing all the stages of their career. For much of From Here to Eternity's development, eight of the album's 17 tracks were still due to come from the Shea tapes. Then, at the last minute, seven of these were replaced by superior versions from an earlier 1982 concert. Hardly a vote of confidence in a full release for Shea, then. Similarly, while The Clash takes great pains to point out - and most fans agree - that the "real" Clash was the one with the cordon-bleu drumming of Headon, Shea dates from the period following his dismissal and replacement by the more meat-and-two-veg Terry Chimes. There are other reasons why this is a peculiar choice of show to release. The Clash were supporting the Who, playing to a borrowed audience in the alien surroundings and acoustic nightmare of a baseball stadium. In the rain. "Off balance, out of tune, in total confusion . depressingly ordinary . a 50-minute fizzle", was how Melody Maker's David Fricke reviewed their contribution at the time. Even spit-shined for CD release, it's an efficient rather than impassioned performance, the usual light-and-shade and hit-and-miss of a Clash gig sacrificed for an immediate but uniform hard-rock sound. (Even the reggae and funk bits are hard rock.) All Sony BMG has to offer by way of competition with existing free internet downloads of this and other Clash shows is improved sound and professional packaging. The first part they've achieved, but the 32-page photo-booklet is exclusive to the deluxe limited edition, and for some reason the front cover of both versions seem to depict the Village People trying to stare down the Viet Cong. There had been a rumour of an accompanying DVD, but it hasn't materialised. Attempts to discuss this glut of unnecesasary product with Sony BMG come to nothing because, as the Clash's publicist explains, "The guy responsible for catalogue releases is away on holiday." Don Letts, however, does answer a few questions. He says there's no DVD in the Shea package because the only surviving live footage from Shea has already been released at least twice, most recently on Revolution Rock . which, incidentally, contains the entire sum of the live film Sony BMG owns or can lease the rights to. Also, and contrary to suggestions on the official Clash site about a rolling programme of live CDs, "There are no plans to release any other live albums." Is the barrel finally scraped clean, then? Hardly. Still to come, no doubt: the Clash-era Strummer notebooks; Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg (the original double album-length version of 1982's Combat Rock); and, possibly, the half-dozen unreleased songs that - according to Strummer biographer Chris Salewicz - Strummer and Jones wrote together a year or so before the former's death. Any demos? Scour the outhouses! The Clash: Return of the Last Gang in Town by Marcus Gray. To be notified of new PopSpots entries, follow PopSpotsNYC on Twitter: For questions or comments you can email me (Bob) here. SANDANISTA! - THE CLASH (1980) - ALBUM COVER LOCATION - Camley Street (under the railroad tracks from St. Pancras Station), London. Photo by Pennie Smith. The album cover. (photo by Pennie Smith) . . .and the album cover superimposed over the present day location, Camley Street, London. Learn more about the photo and the research methods PopSpots used to locate the exact location by reading the captions to the photos below. (cover photo by Pennie Smith) From Wikipedia : " Sandinista! is the fourth studio album by the English band the Clash. It was released on December 12, 1980 as a triple album containing 36 tracks, with 6 songs on each side. Anticipating the "world music" trend of the 1980s, it features funk, reggae, jazz, gospel, rockabilly, folk, dub, rhythm and blues, calypso, disco, and rap. The title refers to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, a revolutionary movement who overthrew the Anastasio Somoza Debayle government in 1979. Sandinista! was ranked number 404 on the Rolling Stone list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2003." It contains songs like, "The Magnificent Seven," "Hitsville U.K.," and "Career Opportunities." A cropped version of the original shot by Pennie Smith. (photo by Pennie Smith) A side-view, close-up of the band. They are standing in the same spot as the previous picture, as you can see by what looks like a radio against the brick wall behind them in each picture. (photo by Pennie Smith) In looking for the location of the photo, I ran "pennie smith sandinista" through Google, then limited the search results just to "books," via the drop down menu above the search results. In doing so, I ran across across a book that indicated that the that the cover photo had been taken behind King's Cross Station in London. (The book is titled: The Clash: The Return of the Last Gang in Town by Marcus Gray.) So I found where King's Cross Station was on a map. It's located in north central London, near Camden Town, a neighborhood with a long rock history. Here's a close-up map. King's Cross Station is also located next to another train station named St. Pancras Station. These stations are the London terminus for trains headed to the north of England. Harry Potter fan's will remember King's Cross Station as having the secret platform 9¾ as the starting point of the Hogwarts Express to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Then, using Google Street View, I wandered around King's Cross Station until I came to this street, York Way, on the east side of the station. Though the book had said that the photo was taken at the "back" of the station, I figured this was close enough. Plus the large brick areas looks like a match for the cover. Here's a picture of the same place from a long time ago. I research a lot with Marie Fotini, a photo locations scholar (with an emphasis on Dylan photos), who lives in France and is PopSpots Chief European Correspondent. I wanted her opinion to see if the wall matched up. After looking the length of the wall, she said that it didn't. She also said that in the area behind the words at the top of the photo were beams that seems to be perpendicular to the brick wall. So she looked for some. In her first go-round she came up with this photo from inside the terminal. Along the beams in each picture were a lot of round rivet tops. Then she discovered another part of the terminal that had more pronounced perpendicular beams (circled) . But ultimately, these also didn't match up with the cover. This photo didn't match up either, though the lighting was similar. Then, in her late-night searching, by way of Google Images, she ran across a CLASH fan website, run by Don J. Whistance (www.theclash.org.uk) which said the the photo was taken "behind King's Cross station amongst the Railway arches with small workshops nearby. (my italics)" Someone working with Don had evidently looked into this site before, so we agreed that Marie should look for the "railway arches with small workshops" near the station. (website by the clash.org.uk) These were the photos on that site that were suggested as being near the site of the photo, perhaps in the tunnels behind them. So Marie went looking for old photos showing what was beyond these dark entrances. What we were looking for was a photo of the original site, before it had changed, so we could match the photo perfectly with its present day location. (website and photos by the clash.org.uk) But, in scanning through hundreds of photos of the railroad yard on sites like Google, Getty, and Alamy, Marie chanced up upon this beautifully composed photo, almost Magritte-like in its lighting, that showed the same type of brick wall we were looking for, with the addition of PERPENDICULAR METAL BEAMS above that we were also looking for. Had she found the holy grail of the Sandinista album cover search? The one that gives proof to the location? It seemed too good to be true. Where was it? It turns out it was a stock photo by John Heseltine, distributed by the Alamy Stock Photo Agency of "a railway bridge on Camley Street behind King's Cross station, North London." And it was taken "in 1985 before redevelopment began." That put it closer to when the original photo was taken, in 1980, than to the present day, which was good, as there would be more of the old details. Here it is again, just so that you can see that it was taken in the daytime, with yellow late afternoon sunlight coming in from the left, and light coming in from a gap to the sky in above right. The site where it was located turned out to be about 1/4 mile further from the station than Don's photos, but the photos had been helpful in leading on onward, so thank you Don! So did the Camrey Street location match up with the cover? Here's an aerial photo of the area, with the "railroad bridge" over Camley St. circled (actually Camley St. is more like a tunnel there). So, yes, they are "behind King's Cross" as the book said, but they are technically behind San Pancras Station. Close enough. This is what that area of Camley Street under the tracks, as pictured in the stock photo from 1985, looks like now. The brickwork along the wall had all replaced. So Marie focused on trying to match up the Sandinista picture with the elements in the stock photo of Camley Street. Here were some things that matched up the cover with photo: Blue Box: Exact pipe on the left. Also matching joint where two pipes came together. Red Box: Horizontal Pipe comes in at right place. Yellow Box: There was a one foot wide railing running along the wall. Also horizontal pipes just below it. Green boxes, right side: The bricks in both pictures were indented and cast a shadow. In addition some individual brick makings matched up. Green circle bottom left. There's a hole in the wall in the same place in both pictures. Looking more closely on the hole in the wall at bottom left, you can see that they are both the same distance from the pipe in each picture. There's a slight difference in their height from the ground, but that's probably because of a change in the height of the sidewalk built in the 5 years after the photo was taken. At that point, I had found a more vertical picture of the group and sent it to Marie. (The shot was a little out of focus, so I digitally superimposed a more focused shot of the band in the center.) This picture showed more of the perpendicular beams above them. Did they match up? (photo by Pennie Smith) Marie emailed back with more correspodences, as shown in these colored boxes: Blue box: Pipes match. Orange Box: Beam matches. Red box: Joint matches. Orange Box: Joint with rivets match. Yellow Box: Crevice in brickwork matches. She also showed where the pipe was behind them, when the photographer moved to the right hand side of the picture, and taken them from that angle. (By the way, if you want to see these photos larger, drag them onto your desktop. I'm making them fit to 800 pixels wide via HTML.) At this point I sent the photo to my brother, a lighting expert, to ask him why there were no shadows from the photographer's flash on the back wall. Also, if the group were illuminated from above, why were there no shadows on the two bandmembers on the right? He said the shot was lit from 2 sources: an overhead light, and also from a car's headlights from the right. He said the brightness of the car light obliterated the shadows that would have been on the ground beneath the band members on the right. He also said the photographer took the shot at night, as there was no bright sunlight coming in from the space in the ceiling to the sky. (photo by Pennie Smith) You can see the open space that goes through the tracks from these old-and-new overhead shots taken years apart. The photoshoot took place in the underpass to the left in this photo. Here is the entrance to the underpass. The light on the walls comes from the opening overhead.. Here's what the cover looks like superimposed on the 1985 stock photo by John Heseltine, taken 5 years after the albums's release. Interestingly, Pennie Smith (in 1980) and John Heseltine (in 1985) were attracted to the same urban scene that was both gritty yet beautiful. A contrast that creates a visual "clash." (cover photo by Pennie Smith) And here, again, is what the cover looks like against the background from today. The Clash manifesto. Despite its influence, the Clash has inspired only a handful of books. There’s Marcus Gray’s group history “Return of the Last Gang in Town,” tour manager Johnny Green’s memoir “A Riot of Our Own,” Pat Gilbert’s “Passion Is a Fashion” and Chris Salewicz’s biography of Joe Strummer, “Redemption Song.” It’s a pretty thin shelf for the group that billed itself as “the only band that matters” and that, in the five-year whirlwind of its prime, produced three of the most monumental albums of the punk era, one of which (“London Calling”) belongs on anybody’s shortlist of the greatest rock records of all time. And yet, as “The Clash” (Grand Central: 384 pp., $45) makes clear, the band’s true legacy may be that it couldn’t be encapsulated, that the stridency of its politics and the power of its performances had to be experienced on their own terms. Certainly, that’s the idea behind this book, which comes credited to the group’s four main members (Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Topper Headon), although Strummer died in 2002. A mash-up of interviews and commentary, lavishly illustrated with tour and studio photos, promotional fliers, album covers and even a French comic strip, this is more scrapbook than exegesis, a collage spanning the years from 1976, when the Clash was formed, to 1983, when Strummer fired Jones and effectively ended the group’s supernova run. If you know the story, there’s not much new here, but it is fun to read it in the band members’ words. And the editors get points for ending in 1983, rather than limping along, as the Clash did, until 1985, when in the wake of the egregious “Cut the Crap,” Strummer and Simonon -- the last members standing -- called it quits. David L. Ulin is the former book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of nine books, including “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” the novella “Labyrinth,” “The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time” and the Library of America’s “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” which won a California Book Award. He left The Times in 2015. Subscribers Are Reading. A mother and daughter vanish in Irvine. A husband offers a bizarre story. What happened? Protest Song Of The Week: ‘’ by The Clash. Today, several radio stations celebrated International Clash Day. KEXP Morning Show host John Richards was largely responsible for the idea of a day for the seminal band, The Clash. “The message of The Clash, so influenced by the international sounds they grew up with, is both powerful and uplifting especially now in this time of struggle,” said Richards. “The Clash represents what KEXP is all about–music, rebellion, and pushing boundaries. KEXP is infused by international sounds, songs of protest, and believe strongly in the power of the airwaves to affect change.” As a way of marking the day, Shadowproof’s “Protest Song Of The Week” is the classic punk tune from The Clash called “Clampdown” about repression and freedom, which appeared on the band’s 1979 album, “London Calling.” The “clampdown” is the system that younger people join because they want to make money or need jobs in order to get by and life. But when someone joins the “clampdown,” they are part of the repression and subjugation of people throughout society. Those working for the clampdown entice younger people. As Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote, “They put up a poster saying we earn more than you.” They are also bigoted. “Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?” Strummer and Jones view the workers at factories in fueling the engines of capitalism as “old and cunning.” He warns younger people through the song that they want to steal the best years of their lives by convincing young people to work for the factory. “I’m not working for the clampdown,” Strummer declares. “No man born with a living soul can be working for the clampdown.” Strummer advises, “Kick over the wall cause government’s to fall. How can you refuse it? Let fury have the hour, anger can be power. D’you know that you can use it?” “In these days of evil presidentes,” as Strummer sings, the best thing people with presumably long lives ahead of them can do is not give away their humanity. That’s Strummer’s message: to not become a cog in the machine and become part of the “Clampdown.” As Marcus Gray wrote in his book, “The Clash: Return Of The Last Gang In Town,” the song “seems torn between the fatalistic belief that aging automatically equates with becoming part of the machinery of repression, and the desire to encourage organized resistance with the assertion that ‘anger can be power.'” Part of the backdrop for the “Clampdown” was the prospect of nuclear disaster. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania had a near-meltdown. The event inspired the line, “Begging to be melted down,” which is a terse way of saying citizens of a society deserve misery and despair if they are not going to struggle for dignity and rights. Whether it is capitalism or fascism, the song shows The Clash were keenly aware of how power can corrupt the souls of humans. First one gets to make decisions, then they get the authority to use force, and then they are sanctioned to kill. Authorities are likely to punish those who do not join the “Clampdown,” but that is a point of pride for The Clash. At least they are not growing up and working for the “Clampdown.” In the era of evil presidents, where communities contemplate general strikes and making society ungovernable, The Clash’s call to channel anger into defiance and even organized resistance carries great resonance. Do you really want to be a part of the machinery of self-destruction that leaders like President Donald Trump are expanding? Do you really want to be working for the “Clampdown”? Or will you harness your anger into power?