The Clash - Audio Ammunition Documentary - Part 1 "The Clash" (1977)

The world changed for me I would say in 1963, basically when the Beatles came out and then I sort of grew up during the Carnaby Street era. I was growing up in a very exciting time and I went to go see the Rolling Stones play at Hyde Park. Not just last week. In 1969. Pretty much all day I was like wading through the crowd going "excuse me excuse me, excuse me", and eventually I got there just before they came onto the front. The first record I would have bought would have been "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" maybe and the first Rolling Stones records. In fact, I can really remember where the first time the music hit 'cause I was sent to a boarding school and it was quite rough, yeah. It was sort of dog-eat-dog. I think going to school was a bit of a shock That's the real change for me having to go to school and realizing that it is a regime that you have to live under in which you are told what to do, when to stand up, when to sit. Joe: I can remember hearing "Not Fade Away" by the Rolling Stones coming out of this huge wooden radio in the dayroom, very loud. They always kept it on very loud. I remember walking into the room when it went Ching cha cha ching a ching ching And later I found out it was Gene Pitney on the maracas making that record swing. And that's the moment I thought this is something else. This is completely opposite of all this other stuff we're having to suffer here. It was really a brutal situation. And that was the moment I think I decided, here is at least like a gap in the clouds or here's a light shining. And that's the moment I think I fell for music. I think I made a subconscious decision to only follow music forever you know. That would be the way to live. For me, one of the musical times the world changed for me was seeing the Beatles play the Palladium, you know the Royal Variety Performance when John Lennon said "..those in the expensive seats, rattle your jewelry" and I can vividly remember that and I can also remember seeing The Who on Top of the Pops for the first time seeing Keith Moon. But music really changed completely for me when I met these guys. That was, if I had to say one thing it was walking into rehearsals and bumping into these two guys and Joe. When Terry Chimes quit on us very early we had to find another drummer and we must have tried every drummer that then had a kit. I mean every drummer in London. I think we counted 205 drummers. And every drummer that ever came up in a group for the next ten years after that definitely had tried with us. For example all the New Romantics or all those groups, Rusty Egan, John Moss, every drummer that ever became anything, in his infancy definitely tried out with us. Paul: People were turning up with so many tom-toms bass drums, snares and cymbals, and then once they'd setup after about an hour I'd go, okay now this song's called "London's Burning" it's really straightforward just need a straight beat and by the way what's your influences? And they'd say "oh Billy Cobham or Ginger Baker" and I'd go "ok ok". Straight beat and it's like every time they were unable to do a straight beat even though they had all this equipment, whereas Topper actually was able to do both. Joe: A rule of rock n roll says you're only as good as your drummer and that is really true because if you try and imagine a group and the drummer is falling apart then no matter what you're putting on top its gonna fall apart like a house without a foundation. Finding Topper Headon was fantastic because he'd done what we call a chicken-in-a- basket circuit where soul groups come in from the US and picked up a British group and from the age 15,16 he'd been around playing the chicken-in-a-basket circuit with soul legends. And I went off and toured with the I.G.s and did various other bits and pieces and we met up again watching The Kinks and he had completely changed. All the hair had gone and everything, short. He had a black-tie and a white shirt. Whereas I was still pretty much the same. But he looked a lot more interesting and he said come down to audition for the new group. I thought, I said yes then I woke up the next day and I thought, naw I didn't really like the last group, you know what I mean. and then he phoned me up the next day and I went "I'll come down this afternoon", I was still in two minds. And then I went and bought the New Musical Express and there was Mick and there was Paul and Joe and they got this big record deal and I thought ... down I went. He could play funk, soul, reggae didn't faze him. I mean that's really why the Clash became an interesting musical unit in its future was the fact we had Topper Headon on the kit. And he had incredible strength and stamina. If you didn't have stamina you'd flake out and finding someone who not only had the chops but the strength, the stamina to do it was just the breakthrough for us. If we hadn't have found Topper Headon, we would have never ever got anywhere. Topper: Between the three of them they had tremendous charisma, right and it was just something I never experienced before that they were trying to get me to join the group or hoping I'd be good enough to join the group but at the same time trying to frighten me away with the haircut thing and change your clothes and dump your wife and ... Mick: Now we didn't really say that Topper: No you didn't say dump my wife but I did anyway. I wish you had said it. They gave me the album to learn and one of the tracks that hit me the strongest was "Police & Thieves" because I'd never really listened to that much reggae before. Paul: I grew up in areas where reggae was all generally featured and coming out as a sound out of most people's houses in the area and the bass, people would always say back in that time "The thing with reggae is the bass is always playing the same thing over and over again". That's like missing the point. If you go to a proper dance hall and you hear bass how it should sound in relation to those records, you understand that it's actually choreographing your dance steps. And so for me when I was practicing along to playing bass, I'd hear the reggae and it was a lot easier to hear the bass than it would be on a general rock'n'roll record cause it was generally buried a bit. taught me feel, to a point Mick: The idea of that kind of arrangement was very much the idea for the groups that come before us,The Beatles and so on. They used to at the early stage cover contemporary R&B songs like "Money" or "Twist & Shout", the songs around at that time, you know. And it was very much like "Police & Thieves" was a big hit in '76, you know so it was the same idea about covering the records but it was a reggae song. But was like doing your own thing to it Joe: We didn't try and play reggae as if we were from Jamaica. We kinda clubbed it to death in our own punk rock way which worked, I mean the song was strong enough to stand our sort of standing around and kicking it. But that led on to great things in the future, Lee Perry & Bob Marley heard that and they were hip enough not to diss it cause by rights they should have said "Ya heathen mon, you ruin the works of Jah" you know? Joe: Well, a lot of groups have told me in the years past that when they first heard "White Man in Hammersmith Palais", they could not believe what they were hearing because we weren't supposed to come out with something like that at the time. We were a big fat riff group. We were like rock-solid beats and coming out with "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" was really unexpected and these are the best moments of any career when you kind of come out with what they're not expecting. That is one of the finest records we've made. Topper: It's got that dodgy hi hat sound where it's a broken hi hat actually When you let the hi hat go, the clutch was making a note as it hit the top And we left it in there and it sounds kind of clever. I like to think, anyway. Paul: That first album was like our statement of where we stand and how we feel about our circumstances. And in some ways was quite a good representation of where we stood as individuals as a band, really.