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Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash
Details the story of three young men--Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Paul Simonon--who formed a band designed not only to redefine the music business but also to change the world
528 pages, Paperback
First published September 18, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 24, 2008
Joe Strummer, rest in peace, signed my copy!!!
December 1, 2007
Blahhhh blahhhhhh blahhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... Oh, God, dude lighten up and have some fun telling this story. If I never see the words "Mott the Hoople" again it'll be too soon. Awesome subject! Too dry. This book lacks the vitality and infatuation-level excitement that are the best parts of what this band was. You're better off watching a good documentary about them - at least that way you get the story and some whale-ass performances to watch. Keep this one on hand for reference reading. I've tried to read if from beginning to end and found it as torturous as reading The Hobbit.
November 28, 2022
Easily the best Clash biography. Especially informative about life up to the release of the first record and after the sacking of Mick Jones.
December 6, 2022
Excellent book for me. I like the Clash a lot but didn't know much about their history before now. After reading this book I can feel that I perhaps bought into the Clash 'myth' more than I'd expected. After reading a slew of rock biographies, mostly about people that were interesting but not necessarily whom I had any respect for, I guess I should have been prepared to find out that these mythological punks were all too human. Whatever! It's all done and dusted and I remember the feeling of the pedestal I had them up on!
I found the post-Clash chapters interesting too, as most of the band seemed to struggle with finding their identities after the breakup, and everyone, including themselves, wondered about what could have been.
I found the post-Clash chapters interesting too, as most of the band seemed to struggle with finding their identities after the breakup, and everyone, including themselves, wondered about what could have been.
April 15, 2010
The ultimate rock biography about the only band that madders. Meticulously researched. Unflattering at times. Yet it only added to my admiration for the band and especially for Joe Strummer. Truly one of the great visionary, revolutionary artists of the 20th century. I also recommend Passion is A Fashion for all you Clashophiles out there.
August 13, 2023
“You think you’re really boss… you probably like the Clash.”
– Michael Stipe, improvising lyrics at an early R.E.M. show in 1980
“When Joe [Strummer] made his decision [to join the Clash], he was leaving a growing concern playing a style of music he had always loved for an almost completely unknown and unproven entity [punk, a growing trend at the time]. [It has been] implied that to base such a major life choice on superficial things like clothes and attitude was indicative of a certain shallowness of character. […] Even if clothes alone had been enough to persuade Joe to sign up, what of it? Popular culture and the mass media had developed hand in hand with rock & roll. As early as the late ’50s, it was almost impossible to experience contemporary music without it being placed in some kind of visual, social, and cultural context, all of which were bound to have some kind of influence on the consumer. Some people profess — and a very few genuinely manage — to judge music on its own merits and ignore all the trappings. Fine. But however knowledgeable about music or musically gifted they may be, if they deny that — from Elvis Presley onwards — popular music has been at least as much about image, attitude, and hype as ‘the riff on stage’ (or on disc), they are not only kidding themselves, but also failing to understand a large part of its impact an appeal.” – _Last Gang in Town_, pp. 154-155
Rock & Roll is an undeniably fertile subject, and there should be a million great books about it, but sadly, that isn’t the case, and it may not be the case until we’re all dead and it’s studied for the immaculately powerful medium it really is, or was, since surely it can’t last forever. A century from now, we won’t distinguish the ’60s from the ’70s from the ’80s, which will eradicate a certain prejudice in evaluating the material, and I can’t even imagine how beneficial it will be for people to have so much of the past to draw on, in this and other media. A lot of the people reading this will live to see the day when the first Bugs Bunny cartoon, “The Wild Hare,” is a hundred years old. Can you imagine?
The distance of history, I think, puts anyone at an advantage, and the few rock books that have achieved greatness all have a certain sense of detachment from their subjects while maintaining a degree of absolute passion. One of the best non-reference books about rock music is Marcus Gray’s absolutely monumental (even if you don’t care all that much about the band) It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion. I knew Gray had written a book about the Clash, one of my other favorite bands, and I knew that one of the things I loved about the R.E.M. tome was that it was not a standard chronological biography, which is what his Clash book, Last Gang in Town, is. The British rock journalist Gray turns a delicious phrase and, for all his personal fandom, takes a measured and cynical approach. I knew that Gang would be a lot of fun to read, and I was right.
The first two thirds of the book are, save one pointless rant about the Clash’s failure to adopt “a female perspective," flawless. Gray engulfs the reader in the intricate history of the London punk scene, and makes no misstep in defining all the ways in which the “myth” of the Clash was a fabrication. He talks about how they in fact came from middle class backgrounds, he addresses the deliberately hidden depth and intelligence of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones (explaining why Strummer suddenly became five times more articulate after the Clash’s breakup), and shows how they intentionally misled the press to make themselves look like badasses. And he also quite convincingly makes the case that the purity of the music and the band’s belief in it survive through all this.
Like most people, Gray is put off by the Clash’s dramatic change in ideology in the early ’80s, though he does offer some fascinating — if strangely rushed — material on the events leading up to the sellout accusations and Mick Jones sacking. Thereafter, things get increasingly sad and dire. Gray points out, correctly, that the band slowly dropped their once-strong convictions one by one as opportunities rose. He is not entirely unsympathetic to this, but more than I would be (the only thing I am unsympathetic to is how horrendously and rapidly the quality of the music fell beginning with COMBAT ROCK). Where Gray missteps is by seemingly ignoring his own point that the Clash, while they always meant well, were never the immaculate idealists and mythical warriors they put themselves up to be. He points this out many times and yet is quick to claim that every compromise — the first comes in 1978, eighteen months or so after the band formed — is a slap in the face of fanbase, and moreover a betrayal of the Clash’s original concept. What concept?
The entire idea of the Clash is that they are completely defined by intentions, by the notion that convictions change and develop as much as personalities, and most of all by the fact that contradiction is at the very root of everything. Not only is it in the songs dating back to the very first record (“White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” while cocksure, is also weary) and difficult to miss by the time of the skeptical politicism of SANDINISTA!, it’s in the text: the very name, the Clash, is a questioning of how rock & roll and ideology can combine or collide, and it begs the same question about human beings and stars.
I’m sure Gray knows this, but he seems determined to establish his own Critical Myth while debunking the Clash Myth, playing up the “sellout” moves. It makes for excellent reading, but there is a small feeling that Gray is somewhat in denial about how many steps ahead of the audience the band frequently was. If he were to write this book in fifty or maybe even twenty-five years, after all the NME and Melody Maker bad blood has faded, it would not be driven by philosophy as much as by fact, because there would be so much less to refute. The book is absorbing and, at times, outstanding, but I think he could have done even better.
I think what might have gone wrong is defined rather eloquently by the introduction. Punk, Gray says, hit him at an impressionable age, and much of his teenage and young adult life was shaped by it, and he was among the fans who watched the Clash crumble to dust at painful speed. Nicholas Schaffner worshipped the Beatles, but he asked many cynical questions about them that made his book great. Marcus Gray doesn’t worship the Clash, so he asks many cynical questions about them, which is good, but, having been left with a feeling of disappointment by their direction, is also perhaps too accepting of detractors, much like a milder and more readable version of Donald Spoto in his ridiculously downbeat Hitchcock biography or Stephen Gaines in the terrible Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys (which actually makes up shit, the last thing you need to do when writing about somebody as outrageous as Brian Wilson). One important difference: Last Gang in Town is a good book, and almost certain to remain the essential Clash reading. If nothing else, it certainly is a powerful portrait of how pop culture shapes people today and how image-making has become perhaps mankind’s premier tool.
Meanwhile, I find myself missing Joe all over again. One of the great ironies of my life is that when I found out that this hero of mine died — he was a hero as much for his contradictions and humanity as for his musical and ideological convictions — I was, natch, in a supermarket.
– Michael Stipe, improvising lyrics at an early R.E.M. show in 1980
“When Joe [Strummer] made his decision [to join the Clash], he was leaving a growing concern playing a style of music he had always loved for an almost completely unknown and unproven entity [punk, a growing trend at the time]. [It has been] implied that to base such a major life choice on superficial things like clothes and attitude was indicative of a certain shallowness of character. […] Even if clothes alone had been enough to persuade Joe to sign up, what of it? Popular culture and the mass media had developed hand in hand with rock & roll. As early as the late ’50s, it was almost impossible to experience contemporary music without it being placed in some kind of visual, social, and cultural context, all of which were bound to have some kind of influence on the consumer. Some people profess — and a very few genuinely manage — to judge music on its own merits and ignore all the trappings. Fine. But however knowledgeable about music or musically gifted they may be, if they deny that — from Elvis Presley onwards — popular music has been at least as much about image, attitude, and hype as ‘the riff on stage’ (or on disc), they are not only kidding themselves, but also failing to understand a large part of its impact an appeal.” – _Last Gang in Town_, pp. 154-155
Rock & Roll is an undeniably fertile subject, and there should be a million great books about it, but sadly, that isn’t the case, and it may not be the case until we’re all dead and it’s studied for the immaculately powerful medium it really is, or was, since surely it can’t last forever. A century from now, we won’t distinguish the ’60s from the ’70s from the ’80s, which will eradicate a certain prejudice in evaluating the material, and I can’t even imagine how beneficial it will be for people to have so much of the past to draw on, in this and other media. A lot of the people reading this will live to see the day when the first Bugs Bunny cartoon, “The Wild Hare,” is a hundred years old. Can you imagine?
The distance of history, I think, puts anyone at an advantage, and the few rock books that have achieved greatness all have a certain sense of detachment from their subjects while maintaining a degree of absolute passion. One of the best non-reference books about rock music is Marcus Gray’s absolutely monumental (even if you don’t care all that much about the band) It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion. I knew Gray had written a book about the Clash, one of my other favorite bands, and I knew that one of the things I loved about the R.E.M. tome was that it was not a standard chronological biography, which is what his Clash book, Last Gang in Town, is. The British rock journalist Gray turns a delicious phrase and, for all his personal fandom, takes a measured and cynical approach. I knew that Gang would be a lot of fun to read, and I was right.
The first two thirds of the book are, save one pointless rant about the Clash’s failure to adopt “a female perspective," flawless. Gray engulfs the reader in the intricate history of the London punk scene, and makes no misstep in defining all the ways in which the “myth” of the Clash was a fabrication. He talks about how they in fact came from middle class backgrounds, he addresses the deliberately hidden depth and intelligence of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones (explaining why Strummer suddenly became five times more articulate after the Clash’s breakup), and shows how they intentionally misled the press to make themselves look like badasses. And he also quite convincingly makes the case that the purity of the music and the band’s belief in it survive through all this.
Like most people, Gray is put off by the Clash’s dramatic change in ideology in the early ’80s, though he does offer some fascinating — if strangely rushed — material on the events leading up to the sellout accusations and Mick Jones sacking. Thereafter, things get increasingly sad and dire. Gray points out, correctly, that the band slowly dropped their once-strong convictions one by one as opportunities rose. He is not entirely unsympathetic to this, but more than I would be (the only thing I am unsympathetic to is how horrendously and rapidly the quality of the music fell beginning with COMBAT ROCK). Where Gray missteps is by seemingly ignoring his own point that the Clash, while they always meant well, were never the immaculate idealists and mythical warriors they put themselves up to be. He points this out many times and yet is quick to claim that every compromise — the first comes in 1978, eighteen months or so after the band formed — is a slap in the face of fanbase, and moreover a betrayal of the Clash’s original concept. What concept?
The entire idea of the Clash is that they are completely defined by intentions, by the notion that convictions change and develop as much as personalities, and most of all by the fact that contradiction is at the very root of everything. Not only is it in the songs dating back to the very first record (“White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” while cocksure, is also weary) and difficult to miss by the time of the skeptical politicism of SANDINISTA!, it’s in the text: the very name, the Clash, is a questioning of how rock & roll and ideology can combine or collide, and it begs the same question about human beings and stars.
I’m sure Gray knows this, but he seems determined to establish his own Critical Myth while debunking the Clash Myth, playing up the “sellout” moves. It makes for excellent reading, but there is a small feeling that Gray is somewhat in denial about how many steps ahead of the audience the band frequently was. If he were to write this book in fifty or maybe even twenty-five years, after all the NME and Melody Maker bad blood has faded, it would not be driven by philosophy as much as by fact, because there would be so much less to refute. The book is absorbing and, at times, outstanding, but I think he could have done even better.
I think what might have gone wrong is defined rather eloquently by the introduction. Punk, Gray says, hit him at an impressionable age, and much of his teenage and young adult life was shaped by it, and he was among the fans who watched the Clash crumble to dust at painful speed. Nicholas Schaffner worshipped the Beatles, but he asked many cynical questions about them that made his book great. Marcus Gray doesn’t worship the Clash, so he asks many cynical questions about them, which is good, but, having been left with a feeling of disappointment by their direction, is also perhaps too accepting of detractors, much like a milder and more readable version of Donald Spoto in his ridiculously downbeat Hitchcock biography or Stephen Gaines in the terrible Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys (which actually makes up shit, the last thing you need to do when writing about somebody as outrageous as Brian Wilson). One important difference: Last Gang in Town is a good book, and almost certain to remain the essential Clash reading. If nothing else, it certainly is a powerful portrait of how pop culture shapes people today and how image-making has become perhaps mankind’s premier tool.
Meanwhile, I find myself missing Joe all over again. One of the great ironies of my life is that when I found out that this hero of mine died — he was a hero as much for his contradictions and humanity as for his musical and ideological convictions — I was, natch, in a supermarket.
August 22, 2021
That sure was a lot of info. You had probably better be a Clash fan to enjoy this one.
November 13, 2025
Otherwise a fine and decent book, but I’m withholding a star just for calling ’Motor City Is Burning’ an MC5 tune as it is a John Lee Hooker one.
Read
August 7, 2008While psychoanalyzing authors is always something of a jejune persuit, I am willing to postulate that Marcus Gray believed in the Easter Bunny until he was twelve; I also feel sure he incinerated ants with a magnifying glass well into his adolescence. How else to explain this dreary exercise? I fought this book to a draw up to page 243, when Gray was describing the shambolic "Anarchy Tour" of December, 1976, at which point no mention of Topper Headon had yet been made. Then I threw in the towel.
The first 66 pages are an encyclopedic account of the bands Mick Jones played in before the Clash, which I kind of enjoyed: a little dry, perhaps, but fun and universal to rock. Little did I know that the only reason for this exhaustive inventory was to expose one of the seminal myths of the Clash. The following 175 pages or so are given to meticulously exploding all of the myths which were built up around the Clash.
Look, I am all for debunking; it can be an entertaining and enlightening approach to a subject. What we have here, however, is a bloodless examination in which no account is taken of what made the Clash worthwhile, why they mattered.
It is as if someone were to write a biography of Barry Bonds, describing in meticulous detail his disdainful treatment of the press, his father's alcoholism, his cheating on his wife and on his taxes, his steroid abuse, his altercations with Jeff Kent (who would be portrayed as a racist faker of car washing accidents) and Jim Leyland (who would be portrayed as a doddering fool who Baseball had passed by). It would not bother to mention:
A.) That Bobby Bonds was a great player
B.) That Barry was successful on nearly 80% of his stolen base attempts
C.) That Barry was the only leftfielder ever to win a Gold Glove
D.) That Barry could hit a little.
This book is written in that spirit. Not only are the Clash revealed as a bunch of hypocrites, so too is Johnny Rotten. What's more, all the journalists who covered the first wave of punk, Caroline Coon, Giovanni Dadamo, Jonh Ingram et al., were a bunch of stooges and dupes, completely taken in by Malcolm McLaren, Bernie Rhodes, and the bands. If Gray had been around then, HE wouldn't have been fooled, no sir. And you know what? He comes across as such a tight-arsed little cunt, that he probably wouldn't have been; you observe a lot about ants when you incinerate them with a magnifying glass.
The first 66 pages are an encyclopedic account of the bands Mick Jones played in before the Clash, which I kind of enjoyed: a little dry, perhaps, but fun and universal to rock. Little did I know that the only reason for this exhaustive inventory was to expose one of the seminal myths of the Clash. The following 175 pages or so are given to meticulously exploding all of the myths which were built up around the Clash.
Look, I am all for debunking; it can be an entertaining and enlightening approach to a subject. What we have here, however, is a bloodless examination in which no account is taken of what made the Clash worthwhile, why they mattered.
It is as if someone were to write a biography of Barry Bonds, describing in meticulous detail his disdainful treatment of the press, his father's alcoholism, his cheating on his wife and on his taxes, his steroid abuse, his altercations with Jeff Kent (who would be portrayed as a racist faker of car washing accidents) and Jim Leyland (who would be portrayed as a doddering fool who Baseball had passed by). It would not bother to mention:
A.) That Bobby Bonds was a great player
B.) That Barry was successful on nearly 80% of his stolen base attempts
C.) That Barry was the only leftfielder ever to win a Gold Glove
D.) That Barry could hit a little.
This book is written in that spirit. Not only are the Clash revealed as a bunch of hypocrites, so too is Johnny Rotten. What's more, all the journalists who covered the first wave of punk, Caroline Coon, Giovanni Dadamo, Jonh Ingram et al., were a bunch of stooges and dupes, completely taken in by Malcolm McLaren, Bernie Rhodes, and the bands. If Gray had been around then, HE wouldn't have been fooled, no sir. And you know what? He comes across as such a tight-arsed little cunt, that he probably wouldn't have been; you observe a lot about ants when you incinerate them with a magnifying glass.
November 12, 2012
The three stars here isn't meant as an indictment on the book, which is very thorough, but rather probably reflects my level of interest in The Clash. Don't get me wrong, I like The Clash, they just aren't one of my favorite bands. They form part of the soundtrack of my youth, but I don't find their material holding up for me the way some of my favorite bands have. I like Give Em Enough Rope best, when they were still a Punk Rock band, and London Calling blew me away when I first heard it, but I find I don't reach for it anymore. I always enjoy reading about the origins of bands and music; where things come from and their background, and this book pays off on that. It's cool to read about who knew who and what they were listening to and what gigs they were at. Then there's the history of the early pre-Punk band London SS, that included, at some point or other, various members of The Damned, The Clash and Generation X from the early Punk era. Love reading that stuff!So, I read the beginning of the book with relish and then, as it went on, my interest waned and I put it on the shelf. It's a very long, very detailed account, so if you are a Clash fan, go for it. You'll probably really enjoy it.
April 29, 2011
I'm no Clash scholar, so I skimmed over most of the debunking of the "Clash Myth." Which was, to be fair, pretty much all of it. My skimming aside, I didn't really like the way this book sat with me. The way it was organized was hectic. While I appreciated the thematic-grouping attempt (and the cute appropriation of Clash song titles which went along with it), I think some more chronological organization might have been in order. Or at least more explicit, clear statements of when events occurred in relation to another. I was frequently confused, and Gray's tone was unhelpful. He was too busy making his argument against that "Clash Myth" to really present what that myth was or where it came from in a coherent way. I seldom knew who or what he was talking about. And the newspaper-editor in me flinched at his usage of first names to refer to people (particularly when key people have names like "Joe").
That said, there are interesting tidbits to be mined for the uninitiated-into-punk/Clash (like me). And the argument against the "Clash Myth" might interest the initiated. Or those who have the patience to read about 500 pages of disorienting Clashiness.
That said, there are interesting tidbits to be mined for the uninitiated-into-punk/Clash (like me). And the argument against the "Clash Myth" might interest the initiated. Or those who have the patience to read about 500 pages of disorienting Clashiness.
September 26, 2025
If you're in the market for a book that makes The Clash seem boring, you've hit the jackpot. Gray is a dogged researcher, but none of the band members or their inner circle cooperated with this book, and Gray decided to compensate by leaning heavily on contemporary press accounts from when the band was active. This is oddly myopic for a biographer (imagine, say, a biography of Miles Davis that prioritizes whether this or that contemporary reviewer had a bone to pick with him), but, more crucially, it's tedious reading (unless you worked in the UK music press in the '70s and '80s, because Gray has unearthed every snide remark you ever made about The Clash, and treats them like entries from Pepys' diaries).
April 7, 2013
One of my favorite bands of all-time. A great biography of "the only band that matters." I need to read the updated and expanded Second Edition of this book, as it goes into greater detail about the member's post-Clash musical endeavors. I don't understand why anyone who is not a fan of the band would read this book and then review it poorly while stating they weren't much of a fan of the band. Idiots.
December 3, 2007
A little long but a fine history lesson of the "only band that matters". And it ain't all praise.
August 20, 2008
I would have liked this book so much better had a good copy editor been allowed to cull the material. Otherwise, it's a worthy read.
October 28, 2008
I'm a Clash fan. A bit obsessed even, but this is out of control. Too much detail and not enough substance.
July 21, 2010
9/10. Excellent biography. Much better than many such books which lack any real analysis. Author does not pull any punches when considering the band's faults (and merits).
October 18, 2011
Good in depth detailed story of the Clash history. Perhaps a little too detailed. It may spend a little too much time on Mick Jones' pre-Clash bands than absolutely necessary.
July 11, 2012
Great historical record of one of the greatest bands of all time.
November 5, 2014
An awesome book about one of my favorite bands ever. So interesting to see the genesis of them and their evolution.
March 10, 2020
Why would someone who hates the Clash write a book about them?
June 6, 2007
Comprehensive...
January 20, 2011
a not so complimentary bio of the best band that ever was! interesting read none the less.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews