The Clash have a tendency to attract trouble wherever they go. Not because they're malicious trouble-makers, but because there's something about their stance that authority can't tolerate.
Latest event happened last Thursday, at the Bilzen Jazz Festival in Belgium. Normally a staid trad jazzers bop, this year Bilzen were presenting their first ever Punk Night featuring Elvis Costello, the Damned and the Clash.
The audience were mostly hippies, with a sparse front line of punks who'd picked up on the fact that the iconography of today's teen rebels includes safety pins stuck through the ear, from the media.
In front of the stage there was a wide press enclosure, with a few press rattling round inside. Then there was a big barricade, a fence of (barbed?) wire. Behind that fence, the kids were enclosed, scrabbling to get a decent view of the bands. Elvis Costello commented on the obvious stupidity of the arrangement, while backstage the Clash and the Damned were laying bets about who were going to get the fences down first.
As to the kids — every time one of them whacked at the fence, one of the exceptionally heavy security thugs would literally slap them in the face...
The Damned onstage commented bitterly — "This looks more like Belsen than Bilzen." They were right.
The kids began throwing things, out of sheer frustration. As the guards' hostility grew more brutal, the missiles the kids hurled into the press pit grew more dangerous. From empty beer cans to full, from pebbles to rocks- to bricks.
When the Clash started their set, the kids aimed at the stage,
desperate to make their presence felt, desperate to get through, break down the barriers. Joe's guitar was ruined, Paul Simonon
got hit-by a brick on the shoulder, and his cabinet busted.
"Half way through the set I got a brick right through my cabinet — it's a drag 'cos it cost quite a bit of money. But we finished the whole set. We had to stop during 'Police And Thieves' 'cos Joe jumped down into the press pit 'cos guards with helmets were hitting the kids with barbed wire. We wanted them to pull down the barricades 'cos it was just like a prison camp with all that barbed wire fence round," said Paul Simonon, back in the safety of London.
"I was just onstage with all these things coming over ... but it's different when you're there onstage with people watching you, you're there to do something, and you get such a tremendous feeling, you feel like a god, 'cos you've got control over so many people who want to see you play. You feel invincible even when the bricks are coming over..."
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