The Clash

David Quantick The Clash (2000)
I never really got the Clash in quite the same way as at least a few of my contemporaries, but they were a fantastic singles band prior to the execrable Hitsville UK, and the rest I just don't think about. I should probably track down that first album, but their songs divide into either amazing or fucking terrible for me and I can't even tell what distinguishes one from the other, so an entire album - even a reputedly good one - sounds like a bit of a minefield. I stick to the singles, and I really, really, really, needed a copy of the Cost of Living EP so I tracked it down on Discogs and the bloke included this book as a freebie, which was nice.

Prior to reading, I had this vague impression of David Quantick as either readable or at least not entirely lacking in wit, apparently due to association with On the Hour. Closer inspection reveals him to be a former NME scribe who has subsequently generated the kind of CV I associate with Hopeful Herberts of a type I customarily avoid - a few biographies of Mojo magazine cover stars, genial yet slightly acerbic whimsy with a nod to Douglas bleeding Adams, Neil Gaiman was very nice about something or other, and the fucker has even written a Big Finish Who drama.

Well never mind, because I don't know much about the Clash beyond Joe Strummer having been fifth in line to the throne - just behind Will Self - and a string of face-punchingly great singles, so this should be interesting on some level, I decided.

It is interesting, mainly because the story of the Clash is interesting, and I'm reasonably familiar with the territory and most of the other bands who were stood around in the background. My general opinion of the Clash as people is left slightly elevated by Quantick's account, if anything, although Strummer's pretending to be Andy Capp has come to seem increasingly ludicrous over the years, and probably doesn't actually matter. Quantick's book is part of a series called Kill Your Idols which supposedly attempts to biographise the influence of certain difficult to quantify artists, and the Clash count because no-one knows who they were, where they came from, or what they did.

The problem is that Kill Your Idols seems to have been targeted at a young audience, and a young American audience, if this one is any indication. It does that thing with adjectives that YA material always seems to do, apparently having assumed itself to be in competition with either a smartphone or a gameboy, so we have specifically famous friends and bawdy singer Judge Dread; and it panders, twisting its baseball cap to the back and being your homie with references you'll recognise. The relationship between Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes was, for example, kinda like how Pearl Jam were to the Stone Temple Pilots. Sham 69, the Jam, the Ruts and others are dismissed as lumpen copyists while praise is dispensed unto No Doubt, Green Day, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and related unlistenables.

The Clash brought hip-hop and reggae to millions of white people, many of whom refused to listen until the well-rehearsed moronism of the Beastie Boys made it all right to like black music if no actual black people were involved in making it.

Jesus Christ. If all was silence before the Beastie Boys made it okay, then how the fucking fuck did Saint Joe manage to bring the music to millions of white people before they were actually listening to it? The irony of an author failing to understand the Beastie Boys - who were never that complicated a phenomenon - in a book written about the fucking Clash is staggering. Most aggravating of all, Quantick repeatedly takes that populist angle which I seem to recall as having been a particular problem with music journalism in the nineties. If you haven't heard of them, they were most likely really saaaaaaad and can't have been much good, the property of the cool kids, but the new Madonna album is the genuine cool and far more subversive than all your miserable Crass clones etc. Nobody listens to Crass.

Also strange is that something written at more or less the level of an underwhelming fanzine spawned of a media studies course should get an alphabeticised index. In Quantick's favour, his introduction directs the reader towards a couple of other books about the Clash which sound more substantial.

All that you probably need to know about the Clash is to be found amongst the aforementioned string of face-punchingly great singles, and I don't know if the rest matters.