RUDE BOY - THE MOVIE
MARCH 1980 MELODY MAKER

Clash Movie. Rude Boy

`Rude Boy’s the movie featuring the Clash, has been in the works for two years and is now being held up by rows between the film-makers and the band.

MICHAEL WATTS reports.

“Rude Boy” is a dispassionate, sometimes glum, but always immensely truthful account of the punk years, as seen with the perspective of the band which represents punk’s political wing.

It’s been made by director Jack Hazan and his co-writer and editor, David Mingay, the team which in 1974 produced the highly acclaimed semi-docurmentary about David Hockney, “A Bigger Splash”. That film was extraordinary for its style, length, method of filming, and the reactions of its subjects when they eventually were confronted with themselves on screen. “Rude Boy” has followed that pattern, to the point where the Clash and their new managers, Andrew King and Peter Jenner of Blackhill Enterprises and PR Kosmo Vinyl, are considering legal action against it.

Filming began in 1977. Despite their distance from the rock scene, Hazan, who is 40, and Mingay, 33, felt the culture shock that was reverberating from punk.

“What previously had seemed beautiful and correct had changed,” says Mingay. “When the Clash played the Rainbow and the seats were ripped up, it was just after the Irish bombs had gone off in London. There was an atmosphere about the Clash, and what they were doing was a long way from swearing on TV, which apparently launched the Pistols big.” Mingay visited punk clubs and found

in Ray Gange, a kid from Brixton, the films symbolic link with the times. Gange was bored and restless, seeking both excitement and purpose in his life. He was working in a sex bookshop but trying to get a roadie’s job with the Clash.

Hazan and Mingay moved in on gange with their cameras. In “Rude Boy’ they have shown his frustrations in the context of the prevailing political mood and of the Clash’s lifestyle.

Scenes from the odious Derek Day, the National Front’s branch member from Hoxton, ranting out- side a school, are intercut with Jubilee footage and Marches and concerts for Rock Against Racism. Gange is busted and fined on a trumped-up drunk and disorderly charge when provoked by police. He discusses the NF with a skin- head friend in a poolhall plastered with Anti-Nazi posters and the skin erupts with a diatribe against communists, Ray later responding With a venomous criticism of the RAR mentality.

Life for him is mostly joyless (a mood reinforced by Hazan’s photo- graphy, which leaves an impression of darkness and claustrophobia). He’s seen receiving a desultory blow-job in a ladies’ toilet. “Don’t call me love’,” he warns the gum chewing punk, “ `cos I don’t believe in it.” Afterwards, when he returns from cashing social security money, he finds she hasn’t bothered to wait for him. He shrugs. There is no loss because he had nothing in the first place. He’s chiefly sustained by his enthusiasm for the Clash, and especially, it seems, his relationship with Joe Strummer.

Two key scenes involve a conversation between Strummer and Ray. In the first, near the beginning of the film, they argue in a pub about the merits of Left and Right politics. Gange is the working-class kid on the make, wanting the country mansion and the lackeys. Strummer, trying to defend the Clash’s support for RAR, tells him that one day “some guy is gonna come to your country mansion and blow your head off”. The discussion ends, amusingly, in alcoholic befuddlement.

But in the second scene, towards the films end, Ray is more desperate.. He has had the roadie’s job he wanted, but quickly lost it; and he’s acquired a drinking habit. He offers a beer to Strummer who, pounding mercilessly away at a piano, disregards it. “No thanks. Gave it up,” he says tersely. “It was fuckin’ me up.” Then he turns briefly. “What you gonna do with yourself, any- way?” he interrogates. “You re always drunk.”

“You make me feel fuckin’ old,” Ray mumbles in seIf-pity.

“You shouldn’t get involved,” Strummer counsels, and moves back to the keyboard. Ironically, he’s singing “Let The Good Times Roll”.

“Rude Boy” reflects the rootlessness of kids like Ray who turned to punk rather for its value as a sup- port system than for the anarchic comedy proposed by the Pistols; but it also shows the effect of time and success on rock movements, and how ultimately they fail their followers.

Early in the film a Clash gig is disrupted by the fans’ good- humoured invasion of the stage, yet a later tour is notable for its strict organisation. No-one climbs and reaches the band. “The money has tightened up,” tour manager Johnny Green informs a crestfallen Ray, who has appeared at a gig looking for a spare bed and a job.

By the end, the strong, simple statement made by “White Riot”, the song which is at the heart of the film, has been diluted to Mick Jones’s painfully earnest “Stay Free” and the merely playful “I Fought The Law”; by the end a new movement has arrived in mod - “clean and tight-arsed,” as Hazan says. Still Hazan and Mingay say they admire the Clash for having tried to be true to their ideals. “The pressures on them are tremendous,” Mingay confesses. “You are what the music press sets you up as, because your every move is chronicled there, and so the demands from the fans are greater even than those from the business

“There’s also a lot of stealing from other bands if they know that you’re not going to appear on Top Of The Pops, say, which the Clash have never done and which- would’ve broken them as a Top 20 band. I think they’ve plotted the way for a lot of people, and at the same time struggled to develop musically themselves.”

But the film is less a commitment to the Clash, or even to Ray Gange, a character who resents working- class involvement in punk being manipulated by forces like the media than it is a clear eyed observation of two years in their lives Politically everything comes out of the people in the film, says Mingay commenting on his and Hazan’s attitude to the material

The two worked in a highly individual way. Just as in ‘A Bigger Splash”, where over three years the camera intruded at intervals upon Hockney and his friends, Hazan directed his subjects to act out real scenes from their lives which perhaps had happened a few days or only a few hours before. The dialogue was either invented or written up from an actual conversation, much of it by the Clash.

This “existential film-making”, as it’s been called, is exciting because of all the day-to-day uncertainties: the film has no tangible end, and is therefore more “real”, whereas in cinema verite, for example, the action is generally compressed into an allotted filming schedule. Hence the two hours ten minutes length of “Rude Boy”. The result is curiously stylised. A film that naturally takes its tone from its characters and subject matter, not the vision of its director: since the principals are “actors” speaking their own lines, it is neither wholly documentary nor completely fictional.

In “A Bigger Splash” this technique admirably suited Hazan’s portrait of Hockney’s narcissistic world, but the lack of dramatic climaxes makes for odd viewing in a film with a rock background There’s plenty of lively concert footage of the Clash, and there are many moments of gritty humour, often supplied by the band, whose court appearances for various mis-demeanours are the films running joke; the dialogue is acute and authentic, and there are some telling images: the road manager wandering a hotel corridor, dressed only in a blanket. so that Ray can pull off a quick screw in his bed; or the camera surveying Strummer’s bathroom, littered with pill bottles, and fastening upon a flick knife - drugs and violence and rock `n’ roll.

Yet “Rude Boy” is fundamentally concerned with the Clash’s lyrics, as “A Bigger Splash” was about Hockney’s art; it doesn’t set out to expose the Clash, as “Gimme Shelter’ did the Stones or Don’t Look Back” Bob Dylan. It’s a very be familiar rock film, one nearer to neo realism than any other genre.

Hazan and Mingay claim they made a point of assuring the band they would not be depicted as pop stars.

“I told the band there’d be nothing about their sex lives,” says Mingay, “and it because a joke with Joe that we’d never show him in his underpants.”

But equally they intended to retain their independence as film makers: they were not asking for money from the Clash or their record company, CBS (in fact, most of the backing for “Rude Boy” - which has cost at least £500,000, according to Hazan has come from London theatrical impresario Michael White). They did, however, require the Clash’s co-operation, and from the start this was not always readily given. Much of this problem has lain with the band’s changes of management, which has passed from Bernard Rhodes to former rock writer Caroline Coon and now to Blackhill, a company founded by hippies.

Rhodes, who originally approved of the film, says: “It was hard work to get the group interested in the project because they were losing interest in me; it was difficult enough to get them to accept Ray. In the end they were going to get paid a certain amount, but basically it was supposed to be a labour of love.”

The actual filming had its ups and downs. At one point, when the Clash announced they were about to do a TV film, Hazan threatened to throw his footage in the bin; he says, however, that at the last minute Strummer informed him: “Don’t worry, Jack - you don’t have to use the bin.”

Shooting ended in February this year, and in August an unfinished version was shown to the band, Andrew King and Kosmo Vinyl. It was then that difficulties began in earnest for, although Hazan had thought it was generally well received, the next day he got a call from King demanding that the film be cut to’ a 50 minute presentation of the Clash.

“He obviously had his orders from the band,” says Mingay. “He said there were scenes they objected to, that they were not a political band and should not be represented as such. The next minute he was say ing they were off to Cuba and they had to work in the sugar fields for a day to get a licence to play there. That made me laugh, and he knew he’d given himself away.”
BLACKHILL have refused to comment beyond a reticent state ment from the normally ebullient Kosmo Vinyl that their solicitor had told the Clash not to talk to the press, that they might injunct, and that they had asked for another showing of the film which had been turned down. Vinyl let slip, though, that the band had considered the film boring and also that blacks were represented in a racist rnanner

This wouId seem to be a reference to scenes that run parallel to the main narrative, in which a group of blacks is arrested as pickpockets: at the close of “Rude Boy”, one of them is about to be ground beneath the machinery of British justice To this, and possibly other parts of the film, Hazan and Mingay believe Mick Jones is the chief objector. Apparently, leadership of the Clash rotates among its members, and currently Jones is in the chair.

“Joe said there was nothing wrong with the film when be saw it,” Hazan claims. “He didn’t want to suppress it. But Mick said nothing. Now we’ve heard that he thinks that al the white people are presented as fascists and the blacks as criminals.

Consequently, the band are not lending every assistance with the soundtrack and three weeks ago when Mingay went to see them in the studio where they were completing their third album, he says he met he met with threats to cut him; later, at home, he had to take the phone off the hook because of repeated promises of violence. Yet he left the studio with a tape of a new song, “Rudie Can’t Fail”, which the Clash had written about Ray Gange. “They’re testing you the whole time, Mingay explains. It’s ironic that Hockney, too, disliked their previous film as being “boring and long” after its first showing: “Then I thought, the photography was stunning.” His fashion designer friend, Celia Birtwell, also swore she would take out an injunction.

Hazan, who has a temperamental reputation, remains surprisingly cheerful about the chances of `Rude Boy’ coming out in February or March. “There’s always one person who objects,” he says, but you have to take it right to the brink, and then the person backs down. We don’t mind the Clash seeing the film- but they insist on seeing it with their lawyers. I think they’re a bit confused.” The one person not party to the controversy is Ray Gange, who now lives in California. “He could see no future here,” says Mingay. His job? He works on a building site.

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Rude Boy Film Advert
English Civil War
(12/28/78, London Lyceum)
White Man In Ham Palais
(7/4/78, Glasgow Apollo)
I'm So Bored With the USA
(7/4/78, Glasgow Apollo)
Janie Jones
(7/4/78, Glasgow Apollo)
White Riot
(7/4/78, Glasgow Apollo)
Complete Control
(7/27/78, London Music Machine)
Tommy Gun
(6/7/78, Dumfermline Kinema)
I Fought the Law
(12/28/78, London Lyceum)
Safe European Home
(7/27/78, London Music Machine)
What's My Name
(7/27/78, London Music Machine)
Police and Thieves
(7/12/78?, Birmingham Top Rank?)
London's Burning
(4/30/78 Victoria Park,
Hackney, London)
White Riot
(4/30/78 Victoria Park,
Hackney, London)
Piano Song (studio/film)
Garageland (studio/film)

I'm So Bored with the USA

A Riot of Our Own

Melody Maker

Sounds UK music paper

??? The Manticore Theatre, Fulham [Secret Gig]
in an interview in the NME 15 July 78, two xtra late dates were played, Rafters in Manchester and Fulham.

"Looking through your site yesterday i noticed a mention of a 'secret' gig somewhere, but no mention of the show at (I think) The Manticore Theatre in Fulham sometime in late 1978. It was the same night as a 'secret' show by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers at the Marquee ( I went to The Clash, the girlfriend went to Tom Petty). This show was inevitably broken up by the police after 30/40 mins but no real problem"
Jun 28

Friars, Aylesbury
Jun 29 Queens Hall, Leeds
Jun 30 Top Rank, Sheffield
Jul 1 Granby Hall, Leicester
Poster Ticket De Montfort Hall was one of the best venues in Britain with amazing acoustics, easy to enter or leave and had a decent bar the whole length of one side. Granby Halls was a temporary tin hut of a cattle shed, decades passed its sell by date and acoustically hell on earth (but held 4,500) - Bob Geldolf once spent a whole concert apologising for playing there and the Boomtown Rats did two nights at De Montfort the next tour "rather than ever play Granby Halls ever again".

Coventry Specials - did not spot them then as what became one of my favourite bands of the next decade.
 
Suicide - loved by the older, art school types at the back (I went out and bought the album) but hated by the skinheads and younger fans at the front. Half the front were lighting boxes of matches and throwing them onto the stage to set fire to the band, fortunately(?) the other half were pissing into the plastic glasses and throwing them at the band thereby putting out the fires. Joe Strummer had to come on to ask the crowd to let them play as he wanted to see them.
 
Clash - the improved PA was lost on the appalling sound quality of the hall, at the front it was all fuzz and at the back as tinny as hell. Nigel
Jul 2 Apollo, Manchester
Jul 3 Rafters Club, Manchester
A Riot of Our Own mentions a gig at the Apollo going down well and Joe asked for another Manchester date on their day off. Green found a small venue but had difficulty putting up Pauls bomber plane backdrop. A Riot of Our Own pg 61.
Jul 4 Apollo, Glasgow, Scotland
Another extensively chronicled night in Johnny Greens book. The bouncers beating up the fans was re-enacted for the film Rude Boy. See A Riot of Our Own pg89+
Jul 5 Music Hall, Aberdeen, Scotland
See A Riot of Our Own pg89
Jul 6 Dunfermline Kinema, Scotland
Correct info from a late tour poster. Johnney Green also refers to this as a venue on p89. End of White Riot appeared on Scottish TV the day after...
Jul 7 Deeside Leisure Centre, Queensferry, Nr Chester
Resheduled from the 6th? An audience recording was made.

Alternatively... Just looking at your Clash tourography, pretty sure they never played Deeside Leisure Centre in July ‘78, I can remember it being advertised but they never actually played.
Jul 8 Sports Centre, Crawley
Johnny Green says he trapped Micks fingers here and that after a trip top the hospital they all headed for the next venue which was Southampton. A Riot of Our Own p96.

.. after the gig we started towards Three Bridges Rail station, we'd heard we could get a train back to London from there. After ten minutes walk we encountered a group of punks walking back towards Crawley; a large group of skinheads had collected at Three Bridges station waiting for *us*. We walked back with them and hung around near the gig - after awhile the sounds of trouble and sure enough the skins had gotten tired of waiting and were now back in Crawley causing problems. My mate and I managed to get to the venue where the crew were loading out. We expalined what was happening and asked them for a lift back to London [with Johnney Green & Co]; we were dropped off on Streatham High Rd and walked home to Balham." Steve

Confirm story re skinheads (from Croydon). Me and my friends ran across railway sidings at 3 Bridges to escape. Specilas were then known as the Coventry Specials. This is the gig where the skin jumped on stage and lamped Alan Vega from Suicide. Colin
Jul 9 Locarno, Bristol
another confirmed performance in A Riot of our Own and dated the 9th on tour posters and later prom adverts and dates given to music press. However Green states Southamton followed Crawley - he needs to check BMC a lot more often?!.

Bristol followed Crawley not Southampton. I have door stub.
Set list: Complete Control, T Gun, Cheapskates, Jail Guitar Doors, Drug Stabbing Times, Clash CR, Riot, Stay Free, Capital Radio, Police and Thieves segueing into Blitzkrieg Bop, English Civil War, Safe European, What's My Nmae, London Buring, Garageland encores Bored USA, Janine Jones, White Riot. Colin

check Swansea 16 May 1977 - punters comments
Jul 9 Southampton
Jul 10 Town Hall, Torquay
Jul 11 Top Rank, Cardiff, Wales
Jul 12 Top Rank, Birmingham
Suicide, Coventry Automatics (later Specials) and Spizz 77 were supporting.

Steve Jones came on for an encore of 'Pretty Vacant'
Jul 13 Liverpool Empire
Cancelled due to the venue getting cold feet. Reararranged from the Empite to Erics a week later. Also Bob Gruens book pg39
Jul 13 King Georges Hall, Blackburn
Blackburn was a late addition to the Tour. Liverpool was cancelled due to the venue getting cold feet. See below. Refered extensively (p84) to in A Riot of Our Own where Mick got busted by Blacburn CID for possession. The motel he refers to is the Moat House. This is the date bacause it gets a late mention in the NME of the previous week. Steve Jones came on for the encores though the noise and atmosphere was incredible. For the afternoon soundcheck the band performed Desmond Deckers 'The Israleites' (which was about 4.30 for statisticians).
Jul 14 Corn Exchange, Bury St Edmunds
a late addition to the tour and the last night according to johnny Greens A Riot of our Own pg99

I was just re-reading Johnny Green’s “Riot of our Own” and when I got to the bit about the Bury St Edmunds gig (July 14 1978) my mind wandered back almost 30 years, to when I was 16.

I had taken two extra things to Bury St Edmunds that day - a “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” single sleeve (to be autographed) and one of those piano-style tape recorders (for bootlegging purposes). Positioning myself at the front, right-hand side, I thought life would be easier if I just placed the tape recorder on the stage; that way I could forget about it and enjoy the band. Paul Simonon was over on that side & when he made his darting runs forward he kept kicking the tape-recorder. At first I thought it was accidental, but he kept on doing it. I could see he was getting annoyed, because he couldn’t manage to knock it off the stage. Whenever it went close to the edge I simply stopped bouncing around for a second and moved it back.

Half-way through the gig this typical Camden Town rockabilly type came over and grabbed the tape-recorder. I obviously looked crest-fallen.
“You can come and get it after the show,” he said, not at all unpleasantly. It was Johnny Green of course. But I was still a bit concerned that I would never see it again, and tape recorders (in those days) were expensive items.

After the encores I said to the people I had come with that I was going to try and get my belongings back. I think they wished me good luck. In those days I didn’t really drink, so my only courage was righteous indignation at the loss of my tape-recording equipment. I soon found the backstage area and also the Camden Town rockabilly. True to his word he gave me the tape recorder back, minus the tape. We chatted amiably about the possibility of recording the band live, the reprehensibility of amateur bootleggers and (his words, not mine) the fact that the Clash never really sounded as good as they should when these live recordings surfaced. And then he invited me in for a drink.

What a scene of utter debauchery ! Half pint cans of Heineken and bowls full of peanuts. Mick Jones sitting in a chair looking pleased with himself, Paul Simonon glowering away at nobody in particular (surely not me). I helped myself to a can of lager and some peanuts. Then Mr Rockabilly decided to introduce me to Mick Jones as the person who was trying to bootleg the show. Well, he couldn’t have been more good humoured about it.

“Who’s a naughty bootlegger then ?” he said. “Hold your hand out.”

I held my hand out. He tried to whack it, and I pulled it away just in time. Backstage with the Clash was just like being at school, but with free beer and peanuts. I was probably on my third can of Heineken, sitting on the floor, when somebody said,
“Hey, what are you doing here ?”

“Oh, it’s alright,” I said, “he said it was okay.”

By this time I considered the Camden Town rockabilly as my friend and passport to beer & nuts. He really was a good guy.
The Clash, now I know, had finished their tour. They were in no rush to do anything. They lingered around in the empty Corn Exchange chatting to the fans. They all signed the “White Man” sleeve, even Paul, bless him. And afterwards, if the Camden Town rockabilly’s account is true, the roadies got paid & had a whale of a time.

So, there does exist a tape of that Bury St Edmunds gig. It was confiscated by Johnny Green & was probably recorded over or thrown in a bin, or strewn around the streets of Bury St Edmunds by the road crew. Tim Joyce
Jul 15 Picketts Lock Sports Centre, Edmonton
gig cancelled due to local residents complaints. the Clash also banned from Newcastle.
Jul 21 Liverpool Eric's - Friday evening
They also played an extra show on Friday July 21st at Eric's in Liverpool with the Specials in support. This was in response to the cancellation of the Empire concert and the large demand.
Jul 22 Liverpool Eric's - matinee for under 16's
Jul 22 Liverpool Eric's - evening
the Liverpool show on the 13th - the Empire show was cancelled due to the venue getting cold feet.  They re-scheduled Liverpool to Saturday 22nd July and played two shows at Liverpool Eric's - an afternoon matinee show for under 16's and an evening one.  It was so fucking hot... Paul Simonon mentions the 'ceiling raining' at Eric's on page 39 of the Bob Gruen book - that was the time he meant. 
Jul 24 Music Machine, London
Jul 25 Music Machine, London
Jul 26 Music Machine, London
Jul 27 Music Machine, London