To understand punk one must first understand the band who
mixed art-school sensibilities with working-class ideologies and
political protest, a sense of rock ’n’ roll history with a futurist’s
outlook: that band was The Clash.
More than any other band, The Clash
expanded the notion of what punk
was musically by combining genres
such as reggae, dub, ska, rockabilly,
funk, nascent hip-hop, and much more
besides – then taking it to the world.
The Clash was the only band from the
initial surge of energy that comprised
the London punk scene in 1976-77 to
go truly global and to stick around
long enough to enjoy it. The Sex
Pistols gained international notoriety,
but disintegrated after merely one
studio album, confirming for many of
the old-guard critics that punk was,
indeed, the disposable flash-in-a-pan
movement that they had suspected it
to be.
To understand the inner workings
of The Clash one must first understand
the pyschogeography of the city that
spawned them – London – and the
sociocultural climate of Britain at
the time, both of which the band
inextricably wove into their music and
their aesthetic.
The future members of the band were
all born in the post-war period, when
rationing was only just ending and many
aspects of Britain had changed little
since Victorian times. Crucially, rock
’n’ roll and the creation of the teenager
as a visible demographic and subculture
arrived on these shores during their
adolescence. The members all came of
age in the late sixties and early seventies,when London was placed firmly at the
centre of the cultural universe.
During the period of 1970–1973,
when the members of The Clash were
turning eighteen, the likes of the Beatles
and the Stones had heralded the way
for a new generation of rock bands,
a generation that had dissipated and
diversified into many musical sub-genres
united by a love of electricity: acid rock,
psychedelia, progressive rock, folk-rock,
heavy rock/metal, and glam/glitter rock.
Carnaby Street and the King’s Road
had already swung to a new beat,
Vietnam had politicised the young, the
hippy epoch had peaked with Woodstock
and Altamont, and rock music was
moving in different directions. SomeFrom the early days to the punk explosion