"You can't have those barricades." Mick Jones almost cries, his facial muscles visibly tightening with emotion as he reflects on the gig from which The Clash have just returned to their hotel.
"You've gotta have all those barricades down. Then you'll find you just don't need them at all.
"But I did my Keith-at-Altamont bit, didn't I?" he laughs ruefully. "You've gotta show 'em you're not scared. That's where Jagger went wrong.
"It's like a street fight: once you show 'em fear you've 'ad it."
"It didn't seem like a gig. It was more like a war," says Paul Simonon, stretching the neck of his conceptually frayed sweater to show where a half brick had landed on his left shoulder and broken the skin.
"One thing that pisses me off is that if someone wants to 'it me they can come and 'it me and I'll 'it 'em back. But it's easy to throw a brick at a stage.
"But anyway I can throw bricks better than them. I showed that at the Notting Hill carnival," he laughs.
"Ah, so all that last night was part of you and Joe's karma," Nicky "Topper" Headon considers drolely.
The opening "punk" night of the 14th Bilzen festival, near Lieges, begins relatively inauspiciously. After a seemingly endless series of Belgian jazz bands, first Elvis Costello and then The Damned do their respective "things."
It is noted, however, that Elvis is intimidated by the large press and ligger area at the front of the stage. It is also noted that this area is "protected" from The People by a thoroughly distasteful concrete and wire ten foot high fence.
One begins to sense that perhaps all those apparently fatuous Bilzen/Belsen puns were, in fact, ominously accurate, and this fact is pointed out to the audience by Dave Vanian as The Damned are about to dive through "Problem Child," their fifth number.
By this time it has already been necessary for Rat Scabies to prowl to the front of the stage from behind his drum-kit to inquire somewhat forcibly: "'Oo wants their arses kicked?"
At least Elvis Costello was largely spared the salvo of beer cans that have punctuated The Damned's first four numbers.
Perhaps the 5,000 or so North European hippies — with a reasonable safety pin contingent — stuck in this field believe this implies a cordial welcome to a punk band. Perhaps they are pissed off by (a) The Fence or by (b) those standing, and thereby restricting their view, by The Fence.
Pausing only for Paul Simonon to liberate the goat whose charred and burnt flesh the promoters are intending to proffer backstage at the end of the festival, The Clash are onstage minutes after The Damned end their set. No evidence of any delaying tactics to tease the audience's anticipation buds.
"London's Burning," "Capital Radio," "Bored With The USA"...
The Clash power rush slams against you, holding you rigid until the warmth that's always present in its slipstream wafts about you. The gnawing tensions of the instrumental and vocal dynamics hold you open-mouthed, near-dumbstruck by the dark, raging intensity that emerges mostly from Joe Strummer's throat.
Also, even though their tower-block backdrop couldn't be put up tonight, the band — especially the three front-liners — are visually stunning.
Stage right, Mick Jones, in ice blue jacket, white pants and t-shirt, prances like a mountain goat on acid. Stage left, Paul Simonon, in white with strategic tears and paint splodges, sways like a rasta who's smoked too much grass. In the centre, drawing together all the disparate forces the deliberate, almost Chaplin-esque, Joe Strummer, in scarlet shirt and black pants.
"Topper" Headon... Well, you can hardly see him. Just a flash of hair and features from behind the kit where he lays it all down, Ringo to the very obviously Lennon side in Strummer.
....The First New Number: "The Prisoner." Close up to the (very excellent from further out in the audience) sound system it's difficult to make the words — something about "German soldiers." It's very staccato, Jones' more trebly, more melodic vocals seeming more in evidence than Strummer's...
....But it's impossible to take in both that and what is now going down with The Fence: the kids at the front have been taking turns to try shifting those kiss-of-death concrete posts and finally they seem to be getting somewhere...
..."WHY IS THIS SPACE HERE???" Joe spews rage into the mic. "VENEZ ICI! VENEZ ICI!!!" — flashes of Lennon addressing the Paris audience at those gigs the moptops played before they left for the States for the first time — "ET MAINTENANT .... 'LES FLICS ET LES VOLEURS'."
Now it's Strummer side-by-side with Dany Cohn-Bendit on the May '68 Paris barricades with empty beer cans landing all around like CS Gas canisters . . . .
All along the line the concrete posts are moving backwards and forwards. If a couple of the kids would just jump on them with all their weight and push them down into THIS SPACE they could all
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