This is awesome! Thanks so much for sharing. Sheppard is such a class act.
Yes, he is. During all my talks with him, I always came away impressed with how well he seemed to have weathered the experience -- though a lot of that, I think, came down to the simple fact that he had his own life outside of the Clash bubble. He'd already been around the block once, so to speak, with the Cortinas, plus -- he was married, and he also ran a clothing shop with his wife. All of those things really, really helped, in my opinion, even if the resulting fallout wasn't so great. But as he told me, when I interviewed him the first time: "I was a big boy. I knew what I was getting myself into."
i think the book has things pretty spot on, but it's definitely on the left side of the perspective. they are embellishing things a bit. especially the band's playing etc. hey... they want you to cheer on these dudes!
Not sure what you mean by embellishment -- Mark and I were both there back then! That makes the overall perspective a little different than somebody coming along well after the fact, and trying to make sense of the whole thing.
All I can say is, I cheered them on then, too -- I wanted them to succeed, especially after I saw them live on that tour! So I imagine a lot of the book reflects that.
Or, to put it another way -- it'd be a heavy lift to write about somebody you'd struggle to cheer for, which is why people like Mick Wall end up writing about the likes of Meat Loaf. Because they feel they
have to -- "Now that's no way to waste your youth," like the song says.
but yeah... even if they had made the record with a competent engineer and producer, i think it still would've been panned in its day. just not so severely. the band probably wouldn't have lasted very long afterwards. but i do think the record would be received warmly today. one of those... hey... sure it's a roots rock record... not breaking any new ground musically (reductive Clash-lite), but hey it's Joe Strummer. the eighties really fucked up some easy to make records!!
Timing had a lot to do with the outcome, too, i believe. Joe had promised, in interview after interview, that the album would come out in the fall of '84, when the social events he was trying to soundtrack (like the miners' strike) were at a fever pitch. The promise came and went, for various reasons, as our book documents -- and by the fall of '85, when CTC finally does appear, it's smack dab in the middle of the whole electropop thing, which makes it seem like a feathered fish, in many respects.
Or, to look at it another way, CTC arrived three years after the platinum success of Combat Rock. Back then, three years in pop music was a lifetime, and it was quite easy for several trends to have come and gone in that time.
And that's before we get to the supremely tortured nature of the recording process. I felt as confused as anybody else when I bought that record, because I remembered how those songs had sounded live -- and they'd been altered beyond recognition, which added to the disappointment.
As Nick points out in the Mike Peters segment, the biggest travesty was putting Pete on the bench -- and then compounding it, by opting for this half-assed hybrid of "48 tracks of punk rock guitar," as Nick labeled it to me, and all the various electronic elements sort of clumsily tacked onto the underbrush.
Of course, Bernie wasn't the only one who fell prey to the allure of all that technology, and what you could do with it (theoretically). I remember thinking that the biz had totally lost the plot when I read about six-figure sums being plowed into...(wait for it)....
demo studios To me, it's always been take one, two, or however many times of Track A, B, C that we're putting down for posterity, and that's it.
I think it would have been better received if the songs had been recorded properly -- and especially not overseen by a guy (Bernie) with grand conceptual instincts, but zero grasp of the technical aspects, and zero interest (or feel) for roots rock 'n' roll. He might have fared better, if he'd been willing to take other peoples' ideas on board, which didn't happen -- as Michael Fayne details in the book.
But MF was too inexperienced to serve the sounding board role that a great engineer can play, and anyhow, Bernie had constructed a situation where nobody could push back against the path that he'd chosen for the record. Again, I'm reminded of something Nick told me along those lines: "I don't like him, but I don't think his intentions were bad. He wanted to make a record that would sell millions, and establish him as a genius. Surprisingly enough, he failed."
Thank you for taking the time to pass on your perspective. It's nice to read about the feeling of others at this time and their opinion of The Clash MKII. I always felt that they were a strong, solid band live and they would only get better. The problem was the legacy was too much to live up to.
They would forever be compared to the classic lineup and that's something they would never be able to overcome.
See my above comments for some of my thoughts on that score, but I'm curious to see what you end up thinking, once you do finish the book.
