Civil unrest is still on the menu for ex-Clash guitarist Mick Jones who is headed for Stradbally with a reformed Big Audio Dynamite. BRIAN BOYDreports
IT WOULD BE a bit of a stretch to say that ex-Clash guitarist Mick Jones reformed his ground-breaking Big Audio Dynamite group just to play at the Electric Picnic, but when he visited Stradbally with another of his groups, Carbon/Silicon, a few years ago he was mightily impressed. "I remember not wanting to go on," he says. "We had been in the political tent, then we caught some new Irish band who were really good and then we watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They had to come and find us because we were having such a good time and didn't want to have to interrupt our enjoyment of a great festival day by actually singing for our supper."
When BAD reformed in January this year, the picnic was first on their festival hitlist. “It’s a fantastic event,” he says. “It feels more like a collective idea than anything else. I distinctly remember thinking that if ever BAD reformed we’d have to play it.”
Last seen in Dublin as part of the Damon Albarn-led Gorillaz, Jones says it was the Blur frontman who first prompted the reunion. Gorillaz, of course, owe a musical debt to BAD’s genre-hopping musical stylings. “Getting back on the road with Gorillaz made me want to play live again and Damon was always going on about how much he loved BAD,” he says.
“But what was always holding me back was that I just don’t do reformations. Despite many offers, we never reformed The Clash.”
A number of pro-reformation arguments, though, were forcing their way into his head. “I really think we could be a better band now than we were then,” he says. “There was also the case that there was a demand for it and we didn’t dissipate it – we waited a good long time to get back together again. Also, there wasn’t that much riding on it, legacy wise, because we were never really as big as the other 1980s bands. We never got that much airplay on commercial radio, our name doesn’t crop up in retrospectives of the era and because we weren’t defined by the era it became much easier to resurrect ourselves”.
At the time of their 1985 debut and the still great follow-up a year later – 10 Upping Street– the musical world was left a bit confused by what Jones and his cohorts were trying to achieve. Their futuristic blend of dance, hip-hop (then virtually unknown), reggae, punk and funk might sit well with today's audiences but only had a cult following at the time.
“In a sense, if the general music world has now caught up with what we were initially trying to do, then it makes our re-entry all the easier,” he says. “Unlike a lot of other bands from that era, we’re not now chasing an illusion of youth and the set we play now isn’t taken out of mothballs because it reflects how we are as people today and what has happened to us in the intervening years. We’re giving it a contemporary context”.
One of their new songs, Rob Peter, Pay Paul, deals with the current economic meltdown. And it can't be ruled out that even newer material will address the recent UK rioting. The Clash, after all, formed as a direct result of the riots in Notting Hill Gate in the 1970s. There was a recent reminder to Jones just how much his previous band still matter when they were mentioned by US talk show host Jon Stewart who fronts The Daily Show. Stewart's take on the UK riots (he flashed up a doctored picture of their iconic London Callingalbum cover on screen with the word "brawling" replacing "calling") was that the TV coverage looked like The Clash had reformed and were shooting a new album cover. "The Clash were a lot about civil unrest and that filtered into BAD as well," he says.
"There were clear signposts of BAD at the end of The Clash – particularly on the Sandinistaalbum. But then there was this great schism in the band. One of us wanted to be Kurtis Blow and one of us wanted to be Jerry Lee Lewis. It was only much later that Joe and I met midway again. Of course, I regret what happened with The Clash and I still really think that if we had all just gone away for long holiday then the break-up wouldn't have happened".
"We had got to that very exciting stage on Sandinistawhen we were learning how to cross a guitar sound with hip-hop and that was something I really wanted to pursue and did so with BAD, but at the time, Joe felt differently. When hip-hop started, all of us in The Clash could see it was the immediate equivalent of punk rock – this was music from the streets and we soaked it up in those early days in New York when we were recording Sandinistathere. Granted, hip-hop took a much longer time to break through than punk did, which was very much an overnight musical revolution, but hip-hop has now gone on to a much bigger place than punk ever did".
Much was made of the reasons behind the greatest rock’n’roll band of their generation splitting up just as they were reaching the peak of their creative powers, but Jones has a very different version of events.
“The secret truth is that me and Joe never really broke up. Even when we weren’t supposed to be talking to each other and were sworn enemies, he was still slipping me lyrics. A few months ago I was going through a bunch of unreleased BAD material for some reissues and I found four songs that Joe had written for us. That was the thing about him – he was a very impatient songwriting partner, everything had to be immediate to him as a lyricist. So something would happen – even after The Clash had split up – but he’d still be coming around and shoving lyrics through my letterbox. And he’d be on the phone the next day going “have you finished the song yet?”.
Playing the old BAD material now, what strikes Jones is how, while the names may have changed, the underlying conditions haven’t. “We used to sing about Reagan and South Africa but really the same crap is going on today, just under a different name. And while we have tried to place the music into a modern context, there really wasn’t that much tinkering that needed to be done. You turn on the radio these days and things like sampling are now an intrinsic part of the pop music song, but back when we started doing that on BAD records we were seen as being ‘revolutionary’. It constantly surprises me how much of the material we first recorded 25 or so years ago sounds like it could have been written this year”.
Big Audio Dynamite play the Electric Arena stage on Sunday night
