• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Clash 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 Revolution Rock (£12.99), and the CD Live at Shea Stadium (£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, Complete Control: "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 London Calling 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 Don Letts' 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 Combat Rock) 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.

Load more

  8

Copy Link