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Or, for that matter, the Sex Pistols, with whom the Clash is continually compared, although, as Headon says, "we're nothing like the Sex Pistols. We don't set out to shock people through being sick onstage or through self-mutilation." Jones elaborates: "I never was one for sticking a pin in me nose." The Clash, though hardly elegant instrumentalists, makes far better crafted music than the Pistols ever did. The sheets of sound they let loose have the cumulative effect of a mugging, but the songs, full of threat and challenge, never mean to menace. They are, rather, about anger and desperation, about violence as a condition more than a prescription. Last Gang in Town, a fleet, bleak vision of the immediate future with London deeply riven by intramural combat between "rockabilly rebels," "skinhead gangs," "soul rebels" and "zydeco kids," is in part a smart parable about musical rivalries. Even more to the point, it is a shrewd reflection on class and generational warfare, as Strummer sings, "The sport of today is exciting/ The In crowd are into infighting/ . . . It's brawn against brain or knife against chain/ But it's all young blood flowing down the drain."
Although the Clash assaults some familiar enemies (cops, narcs, soldiers and teachers), the group has no safe targets — not even themselves. Cheapskate is a bit of ironic bemusement about rock stardom, both its perks ("Just because we're in a group you think we're stinking rich/ 'N' we all got model girls shedding every stitch") and its permanence ("I'll get out my money and make a bet/ That I'll be seeing you down the launderette"). A fever-blister rocker called Safe European Home concerns the lads' attempts to seek out some brothers in Jamaica, where "every white face is an invitation to robbery" and "Natty Dread drinks at the Sheraton Hotel."
Mick Jones, who writes most of the Clash repertoire with Strummer, hopes that their music can be "an il lumination." Such an ambition might seem unsuitably lofty but for the fact that the group comes from a tradition that uses music not only as an outlet but as a force, an effective instrument of social change. "The record company's making out we're politicians, and that's a load of stuff," sneers Strummer, but Jones may cut a little closer when he recalls the title of his school song, Servants of the State to Be. "It was the high hope that you would become a civil servant," he says. "That was the best you could do. But rock 'n' roll changed the way I look at society."