Chairman Ralph's Ministry Of Truth

Few letdowns have felt harsher than the Clash's last album, CUT THE CRAP(1985), which lead singer Joe Strummer had deemed necessary to purge the sulking-is-pop-star-ism excesses of his ex-partner, guitarist Mick Jones. Instead of Peter Howard's percussive thunder came clattering drum machines, while synthed-up slickness and intrusive Oi! choir vocals muzzled Nick Sheppard's and Vince White's snub-nosed guitar fire (the defining element of those never-ending European, UK and US tours of January to June '84).

So what did we get? Not magnificence, surely, just clash shitty rockers, a feeling that Vince knows well: “When I actually got a copy of that record, and put it on my own turntable at home, I just knew the game was up it was absolutely terrible.”

However, few details seeped out about the Jones-less crusade, certainly not in the group-sanctioned accounts, like Westway To The World. A similar fog extended to the CD reissues, lately broken by inclusion of CUT THE CRAP's leadoff single, “This Is England,” on The Singles Box Set (2006).

As Billy Bragg once observed, however, “there's two sides to every story,” which leads to my conservation with Vince about his new book, OUT OF CONTROL: THE LAST DAYS OF THE CLASH. In 1994, I'd originally interviewed Vince for my own book, COMPLETE CONTROL: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE CLASH, a project that refuses to die -- like the Jones-less era, it seems. (As the saying goes: "Watch this space.")

First things first: why now, after 20-odd years?

“I can only answer, 'I don't know, I just felt like doing it,'” Vince responds. “I sensed the idea of writing a book, and it [his Clash experience] seemed like a good place to start.” Armed with an agent, those first slogs through the publishing trenches persuaded Vince to self-publish: “The constant thing I got was, 'Oh, the writing's really great, but we don't think we can compete with [the Strummer biography] REDEMPTION SONG.'”

Initially, Vince felt reluctant to revisit his experience, thinking that “what I had to say wasn't what anybody wanted to hear,” he laughs. As if that weren't enough, he weighed the impact of Strummer's 2002 death (“People don't like you to speak ill of the dead, you know?”), and the fallout from the breakup (“I thought, 'Well, the public perception is really CUT THE CRAP, and there's not much I can do about that'”). Yet writing OUT OF CONTROL exerted a cathartic effect.

That feeling grew more pronounced when Vince recalled why'd he been so reluctant. “In a way, I see it as a bit of a conspiracy – it's in everyone's interest to airbrush the past out, keep this myth, and swallow it,” he asserts. “I mean, fans wanna keep it – they want to believe in what they want to believe. Sony makes money from compilations, and you can't go to a newsagent's [stand] without a cover of the Clash on a magazine, 'cause it sells.”

Since its publication, reviewers have focused on OUT OF CONTROL's more gut-wrenching images, of which there are plenty – such as the band's November '85 twilight period, as its last definitive song (“This Is England”) enters the charts, and Vince decides to inquire if he's entitled to more than £150 per week.

“What about royalties?” Vince writes. “It turns out that as I'm not signed to anything then all I'm entitled to is union rates. What's that? £8 an hour for the time spent recording. Fuck all, really.” Eventually, inevitably, the weekly wages are cut off, leaving no other choice but to apply for welfare benefits. Hardly the stuff of rock 'n' roll dreams, is it?

“I tried to take it from a very objective point of view, so it's not like, one long whinge,” Vince says. “People have said that I'm bitter, which I don't really see. They're just projecting what they think I ought to feel, considering the events.” In hindsight, many situations took a black-humored tinge, such as when Bernie Rhodes (the group's larger-than-life manager), reckoned that Vince's actual first name (Gregory) sounded too Americanized.

“I really was 'working for the clampdown,' and Bernie had 'complete control'”, Vince says. “Well, it was a tyranny, with Bernie intimidating and coercing everyone. A real head fuck. But it opened up a big can of worms about the band's integrity, for me, you know, and whether it really matters.”

Long before the Rhodes regime of head-spinning meetings left its mark, Vince maintains that he felt like an outsider in his own band: “The biggest shock, for me, was the discrepancy between the image that I had, and the reality of who these people were.”

“On the one hand, you're represented as a member of the Clash,” he continues. “This is how everyone is perceiving you, when, in reality, I had almost zero control, or any power in what went on, apart from when we played live, or rehearsed in soundchecks. I think that's where we were a band, as a live unit.”

Those feelings deepened in January 1985, when work began on the new album -- which, Vince and Pete discovered, had largely been completed by the time they arrived in Munich, Germany. The five-piece band only played on two B-sides (“Do It Now,”Sex Mad Roar”), leading Vince to comment: “It wasn't really a Clash record, although it had the label, and it's got my picture on the back.”

A great deal of ink has been expended on the tortured logic that produced Cut The Crap – how songs that worked so well onstage (“In The Pouring, Pouring Rain,” and “Ammunition”) languished in the can, while sub-par material (“Play To Win,” “Life Is Wild,” anyone?) carried the day on vinyl. Still, as far as the rank and file knew, they were proceeding along the “back to basics” blueprint.

After all, he clumsily programmed drum machines, and massed backup vocals – two elements singled out for derision in virtually every review – were nowhere in evidence...at first, anyway...but once they were immortalized, reviewers weren't shy about passing judgment, as this nugget from PEOPLE makes plain: “The group eschews harmonies in favor of ragged choruses shouted in unison as if a drunken soccer crowd had wandered into the recording session.”

By then, the die had been well and truly cast, as far as Vince was concerned. “Well, it was just a gradual, progressive degeneration, you know,” he says. “I mean, I didn't really know what to think. I got cast into this role as 'the lone operator,' so I had to keep my mouth shut a bit, and go along with things. Otherwise, it was just getting too painful.”

There would be one more reprieve in the so-called busking tour (May 2-17, 1985) of free impromptu acoustic shows in northern Britain (Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, York), and Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow). Any public place was fair game, from parks, to pubs, shopping centers, even patrons outside the Alarm's own May 7 show, at Leeds University.

For Vince, the trip made a welcome contrast to the fragmented, piecemeal recording madness that held sway in Munich. “I can't think of any superstar bands going out, and doing that. It put us in touch with reality, with where we were,” Vince says. “It was just five of us on the road, and that really put Joe in his element. So it affected us all in a good way.” On returning to London, “it was just back to the old story, again,” Vince says, “so whatever we'd achieved, it quickly evaporated.”

Following some conventional festival appearances in Denmark (June 29), France (July 13), and Greece (August 27), Strummer made one final, unsuccessful pitch to Jones about regrouping the old lineup. During the fall of 1985, Strummer called a sitdown at his home, telling the new boys he'd had enough; there wouldn't be a Clash for anyone to kick around anymore.

By that point, however, keeping track of the intra-band politics required an increasingly hefty scorecard. All those thoughts of “outworking heavy metal bands,” as Joe so colorfully promised in early '84, seemed long forgotten. “You know, Bernie was off here, and off there, and Joe was [off] somewhere – you just never knew what the truth was,” Vince recalls. “Bernie would say one thing, Joe would say something else, you'd meet up with Paul, and Paul would have some other version of events...I swear, this is the truth!”

In later years, depending on his mood, or the interviewer, Joe chalked up the events to an overly-involved Rhodes, or lack of chemistry, compared to the old group. The latter statements rang false to Vince, “because no chemistry was allowed to develop,” he maintains, “and the reality is that he'd given all the control of the band over to Bernie.”

Time and mystique have a funny way of ensuring that all sins are forgiven. Unlike many of their punk-era peers, the Clash never got around to re-forming, a factor that allows people to read whatever they want between the lines. “Obviously, he [Strummer] wanted to keep his place in history – I think that's what was more important to them, than anything, really,” Vince observes. “If they'd have reformed, they would have ruined the myth.”

Rhodes himself has remained characteristically unrepentant about his role – both in the handful of interviews that he's granted since the Clash's demise, and his website, which claims CUT THE CRAP as a victim of censorship. The accompanying evidence is an array of positive reviews, culled primarily from amazon.com, and squeezed together in all their eye-straining glory. So what's going on there, exactly?

“You know, the thing about Bernie is, he's kind of like an agitator – he has a lot of questions, but very little [in terms of answers],” says Vince, of the former Clash boss's website. “But I don't really know what he stands for, see what I mean? There's a lot of smoke and mirrors, but it's just a lot of vague ideas and words that people can take or make their own kind of conclusions from...”

No prizes, then, for guessing this particular story's moral ... “Well, I think that good things happen in freedom. When there's an atmosphere of freedom, then things tend to value the creative [process],” Vince says.

Vince continued playing after the Clash's demise, although his current priorities are promoting Out Of Control, developing his art (“there's something about someone at 47 holding a Les Paul, trying to be 18. It ain't too cute. Know what I mean?”), and writing more books, too.

And what about those fans who'll never accept Vince as a fully-fledged rocker from Clash City?

“There are hundreds of Clash books out there, blue pills that tell people exactly what they wanna hear, and that's fine,” Vince retorts. "They can be easily found in the religious new age section under 'Church of Joe'. If people think that I'm bitter, or whatever conclusions they wanna make of it, that's their business. The average music fan is so soft, brainwashed and downright pathetic these days anyway that it really makes no difference to me. I don't care. I'd rather they didn't buy my book. They don't deserve it. I'd rather they just bought something to make them happy. You know, like a nice, romantic comedy with a sunset ending!"

* * * For another snapshot from Ralph's projected book on The Only Band That Matters, please check out "Recording Cut The Crap", at blackmarketclash.com. (Go to the 1984 tour dates, then click the "Out Of Control Italy" or "Striking Miners' Benefit Gigs" sections.) * * *