The Clash - football lovers

[kushiro]

Another one of those bands from the 70s and 80s that kept fairly quiet about their love of the beautiful game. Come the 1990s, of course, nobody could do an interview without saying which team they supported.

 

Anyway, it's about time we had a thread about this lot. Here's a list of 'Footy and The Clash' moments to kick it off.

 

1) Mick Jones used to hang around London hotels collecting players' autographs when he was a schoolboy. He remembers how some players, like Booby Moore and Denis Law, stopped and signed, while others completely blanked him. When The Clash made their breakthrough he remembered how bad he felt if a player ignored him, and made sure fans of the band were always treated well. The whole group had the same attitude, as you can see here:

 

 

2) When the band were making their album London Calling in the summer of 1979, they had no social life outside of writing, rehearsing and recording the tracks. Nothing, that is, apart from a daily game of five a side footy, band members joined by their road crew and some kids from the local comprehensive. 'We'd play football till we dropped, then head for the studio and make music', said Joe Strummer. 'We played as a team, then we we made the album in the same spirt' said Mick.

 

3)  The producer of that album, Guy Stevens, had a specific routine he followed every morning. First he'd go to Highbury, where he knew someone on the staff who'd let him into the ground. He'd walk out to the centre circle and pay homage to his hero Liam Brady. Then he'd set off for the studio and try and pass that inspiration onto the band as they recorded tracks for the album.

 

4)  Everyone remembers Euro 96 for Three Lions, but Joe Strummer appears on the 'other' Euro '96 footy anthem, England's Irie.

 

5) The cover of their Sandinista album was a moody shot of the band in front of a wall in King's Cross. The photo had been subtly altered, West Ham graffiti being airbrushed out. Here you can see the album cover and the original shot:

 

6) Joe Strummer would have been especially keen to erase any West Ham associations. He used to watch Chelsea in the late 70s, but always remembered being chased by a gang of tooled up Hammers fans after a game at Stamford Bridge. He was so terrified he stopped going for a while.

 

7) Drummer Topper Headon was mad on footy as a kid, but broke his leg when he was 13. The doctor advised him to find another hobby during his long recovery, and he found a snare drum. He knew instantly he'd found his new passion,

 

8) The band would often find time for a kick around they were touring. These photos of Mick Jones and Paul Simonon were taken in Vancouver after the band had toured Japan. Looks like the Japanese tour T-shirts became a kind of Clash football kit. Pretty stylish, too. 

[SpacedX]

Joe Strummer became a die hard Chelsea fan and a keen hoarder of paraphernalia/ephemera after moving in with his girlfriend who lived on the Chelsea waterfront. Her entire family was Chelsea obsessed. Paul Simonon appropriated the spray paint that defined Clash's early image from running with the shed end in the early 70s (even though he was from Brixton). Not sure what club Nicky Headon supported, but he was pretty talented as a player and as is often the case, less preoccupied with following a team. Mick Jones had lived with his grandmother in Wilmcote House, Paddington - he moved out into the Ladbroke Grove area so QPR was his local team. Steve Jones of the pistols went to school (on the rare occasions he was there) in White City so also followed the hoops. Despite being form Shepherd's Bush himself his band-mate Paul Cook has always been a Chelsea fan, whilst John Lydon being raised on a sink estate in Finsbury Park is a gooner. In fact a lot of the young punks could be seen mingling with the skins and boot boys on the terraces at Chelsea in the late 70s, both always had a sense of danger and intrepidation about them - (even though after the West Ham incident Strummer stayed away for a time). Today they have Ed ****ing Sheeran, John Major and Nigella Lawson. 

 

At least they supported either their local or local-ish sides - I guess that had much to do with the working class roots of both punk and footie - although Joe Strummer was the son of a senior foreign service official...perhaps that's why post boarding school, he discovered football late. 

 

My Dad worked between Imperial and University of Leicester, so I was schooled in both London and Leicester. We lived out near Surbiton and when I moved closer in during my early 20s after a brief time in Kilburn, settled for a while in Battersea. I used to watch both clubs - saunter over the water to the Bridge on occasional Saturday's but more commonly, grab the tube from Putney Bridge - even though the Cottage was a few hundred yards away, (an old mate still lives in the same house right by the ground on Bishop's Avenue), up to Notting Hill, then across to meet up in a pub near Shepherd's Bush Market and on to Loftus Road. I have been a City fan since the age of nine and have never believed in or had a 'second club', but at the time both Chelsea and QPR were similarly shit and in the shadow of their bigger north London rivals. I also liked the close community links that QPR still holds dear which was very much in evidence after the Grenfell tragedy. How things diverge over time. Chelsea were always the much bigger club, but talk about have and have nots. Despite both being in the same borough, QPR are the poorer cousins. The social gradient in London is very acute and immediate. Residents of wealthy areas such as Holland Park are always going to gravitate to the Fulham Rd. not Loftus Road. One of the reasons that cheap flammable cladding was added to the Grenfell Tower was as a low cost way of improving the view from such wealthy areas.  

Edited 23 May 2021 by Line-X