LONDON CALLING

Rip It Up, Issue 34, 1 May 1980, Page 8

LONDON CALLING

Jeremy Templer

Rudeßoy & Clash

Ray Gange is the "rude boy” of a new film by the directors of A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan and David Mingay. Ray works in a Soho sex shop and knocks about with a skinhead friend whose right-wing politics he unhesitatingly adopts. He likes the Clash’s songs but he doesn’t like them mixing politics with music. Which is just what Rude Boy does. The film opens in a Brixton council estate (broken windows, walls covered in graffiti the lot). It shows the confrontation between police, the National Front and the SWP in the East End. We see Maggie Thatcher on the campaign trail with calls for a stronger police force. Plainclothes detectives survey a Brixton busstop by video and later arrest a black gang of pickpockets. Paul Simonon and Topper Headon of the Clash shoot pigeons from the roof of the band’s rehearsal studios and are arrested. When the case goes on remand Ray joins the Clash as a roadie on their Out On Parole tour. And throughout the film there’s live footage of the Clash in concert with songs such as "Police and Thieves”, "I Fought the Law", "White Riot” (with Jimmy Pursey finding his way onto the stage to make a complete fool of

himself) and "London’s Burning”. By the end of the film Ray has been thrown off the tour and is back where he started, working at the sex shop. Meanwhile the Clash has become a going concern, a band on its way up. Mick Jones and Joe Strummer are shown in the studio recording tracks for the second album before the Clash sets out on another UK tour. Clash manager Bernie Rhodes has been sacked. And Maggie Thatcher is seen waving outside number ten. While Rude Boy offers some revealing insights into the lives of the Clash as individuals and as a working rock band, it also questions the Clash’s lifestyle and the political and social effectiveness of their songs. For Strummer, caught like the "Street Fighting Man” of the Rolling Stones song, there’s nothing for it but to keep on playing. Even though, as he tells Ray on the tour, "I'm sick to death of this life. I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.” Rude Boy is sometimes laboured in its urgency to be understood but it’s a minor fault in light of the film’s considerable achievements. What else can a poor boy do, indeed.