Chairman Ralph's Ministry Of Truth

Getting the old coolness ticket punched is a complicated business in rock 'n' roll: just ask the Lurkers. They were the boys from Ickenham, or “way out west,” as ex-drummer Peter “Manic Esso” Haynes describes it. “There's a sign at the end of the road: 'It's 17 miles to Piccadilly Circus.'” In hindsight, a world farther removed from the Clash's gritty version of “burning London” seems harder to imagine, yet Haynes – like many who experienced the self-styled “Only Band That Matters” – came away with conflicted reactions.

“Well, I would have parted company with anybody with like him, anyway,” Haynes laughs, when quizzed about his reactions to manager Bernard Rhodes – often considered “the man behind the curtain” in Garageland. “Well, I said at the time, 'They remind me of the Monkees, but the Monkees had got better songs.' I met him a couple of times in the early days, at the Roxy Club, and I couldn't possibly have spoke to him – the guy's too bright.

“He's a businessman, comes from a business background – they're [those types of people] opportunistic, they're well-educated. I would have come across as someone who cleaned his house, y'know? I was very much aware of that, as well.”

Indeed: for all the blather about freedom, spontaneity and (lest we forget) “being yourself,” 98 percent of rock 'n' roll grunt work occurs behind closed doors, before the masses ever see or hear it. In this respect, the Clash were not unique: every major band undergoes some type of woodshedding during their career. In Rhodes, the boys certainly had someone willing to push their buttons along those lines – a wee bit too much, perhaps?

“You know the situation – the guy was a sharp businessman, wasn't he?” Haynes says. “He had his eye on the movement, fashion – he had a much better overview of the school system in this country. I wouldn't have had a clue. Really, also, I'd never met anybody like him, as well. He was trendy, of London, it was the arty crowd – we were the boys from the suburbs, you know? We weren't hip. But I remember looking at him, listening to him speak, and I just thought, 'Oh, well, you know, I don't think he's any different from solicitors, or something.'”

From Rhodes's standpoint, any discontented rumblings could be chalked up to the Standard Issue Torchlight-Wielding Puristic Mob – the same sort, one imagines, who'd be writing long and winding screeds like these: “On their last tour I saw [Mick] Jones climbing over amps, holding the guitar behind his head, [to] play a solo all the way through 'Spanish Bombs,' (Anarchy?), dry ice, a Who-style light show, revamped versions of 4-year-old songs and cowboy boots. Thank you Clash for keeping punk rock alive.”

Not having any quarrel with the Clash's live alchemy (“I saw them right at the beginning – I saw them down [at] the Roxy, and I thought they were great”), Haynes's ambivalence about his rivals' political leanings – fact or fiction, real or imagined – inevitably spilled over into the public arena, in the messiest possible way.

“I've got a big mouth,” Haynes laughs. “I'm better than I used to be, but I had an interview in Sounds. I said something like, 'Joe Strummer? They'd [the other members] shove their grandmothers down the escalator if there was something in it for him,' and going on about, 'They're bored with the USA, and they wanna go there – they're bullshitters, anyway,' and that was it.”

What happened next, as Haynes details nearly 30-odd years later, is the stuff of grainy knockabout '60s flicks.

PETE HAYNES (PH): I got a phone call about two days afterwards – well, our managers did. We were based in Fulham. We used to rehearse in the basement of a shop, which Beggars Banquet owned. Beggars Banquet used to own record shops.
CHAIRMAN RALPH (CR):: Right, that's how they started...

PH: They hit the student end of the market, where people would bring in their old albums, and swap them. Anyway, the Clash were rehearsing in this old, disused cinema – and one of our two managers says, “Oh, you've got to be careful what you say, Pete. I had Joe Strummer's people on the phone today, saying, that your drummer's got a big mouth.”

I said, “Oh, well, did they? Well, I'll go down and have a word with them, then.” And they said, “Funny enough, they were asking if you could go down, 'cause they wanna talk to you.” I said, “Yeah, definitely.”
So I went down there – it's ex-squat hippie grunge blokes who've now got their heads shaved, you know what I mean? Not my kind of thing. Anyway, those guys were like, “Who are you, man?” I told them, and Joe came up to me: “You know what I mean, man, we're in all this together, you know what I mean, like...” And I can't really understand what he was saying, his accent was so weird...

CR: What they called “Mockney” at the time, I think...

PH: It's a bit of that, and what I'd call hippie, this squat-land kind of thing. I said, “I haven't got anything in common with you boys – good luck to you, but you're speaking bollocks.”

And he [Joe] said, “Why is that?” And I says: “Well, listen, because I'm not bloody Chairman Mao, or Karl Marx, but I work as a concrete layer – and I think it's bad to lie to people. Now, you've used it, fair place, great. Do what you do, that's good.”

I pissed them off, because I said, “I know you wanna sound like the Rolling Stones, good luck to you,” but it's lying to people. People get lied to all the time – they get lied to by politicians, lied to by teachers, so they shouldn't get lied to by people in groups.”
I said, “That's why I like people like the Dolls – it's camp, it's great, it's decadent, it's rock 'n' roll. They're certainly not telling people how to rule their lives, y'know: 'Let's have a revolution, you know, let's do this, let's do that.'” They all dressed like little fucking puppets from their master's shop, designer revolutionary look this year, as modeled by Joe and the boys – it's just all choreography bollocks.

Anyway, I gave them my rant – and it was just left at that. I'm a pretty decent bloke. So we shook our hand, I said, “Well, best of luck, I'm sorry if you got the wrong end of the stick, boys.” There you go, that was it. That was my meeting with the revolutionaries, who went out to change society.

CR: Looking back on it all – when you wrote the book [GOD'S LONELY MEN], did you feel any resentment that they got so much attention, and you guys never got much critical respect?

PH: No, no it didn't bother us in the slightest. They were playing the game better than we were, you know? And that's what people do, isn't it? I mean, you've got supermodels who are best-sellers in this country – they can't read and write. This is what popular culture is. It wasn't as bad then, as it is now. But these guys are multimillionaires!

CR: Well, that's the thing: do you ever feel a twinge of “what might have been”?

PH: No. We didn't have the songs as a group, and also, you've got to admit that the Clash were a better group – I think we had the edge when it came to whacking it out. But they were more a sort of professional group, and they had a set of songs, they had a performance, and knew what they were doing – they had a business plan, they had a business manager, and it's no surprise, is it? So I wouldn't get upset about it, it's just the way it is.