Let Fury Have the Hour by Antonino D'Ambrosio

Author:Antonino D'Ambrosio
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568587202
Publisher: Nation Books

WHEN THE TWO SEVENS CLASHED

By Carter Van Pelt

When Bob Marley sang his 1977 reggae-stepper “Punky Reggae Party,” he called out “The Damned, the Jam, the Clash. . . . ” Marley may have overlooked the Pistols’ reggae-loving Johnny Rotten, but few in the London punk movement were drawn to the party with the passion of the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, and nobody did more to represent reggae to the punk rock scene.

Members of the Clash grew up in close proximity to the Jamaican community that relocated to England in the post–WWII period. Paul Simonon’s “Guns of Brixton” is a direct reflection of this experience, as is Strummer’s “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” The latter documents Strummer’s night in a Jamaican dance hall in West London, as he explained in 1991: “All over the world people are oppressed and in London there were the dreads and there were the punks, and we had an alliance. England is a very repressive country. . . . Immigrants were treated badly. “So these people had a sense of pride and dignity, and when we went into their concerts, where we should have had the grace to have left them alone. . . . “And they didn’t jump us, they didn’t stomp us, they didn’t beat the seven shades of you-know-what out of us. . . . “They understood that maybe we needed a drop of this roots culture. And ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ is a song that was going through my mind while I was standing in the middle of the Hammersmith Palais . . . in a sea of thousands of Rastas and dreads and natty rebels. That song was trying to say something realistic.”

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