Phony Beatlemania

The following is excerpted from a Guardian interview with Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash, and for me, it sums up everything that made the band great. Maybe they really were the only band that mattered.

Talk turns to 1977, the B-side of their debut single White Riot. As statements of cocky intent go, it still sounds startling, matching a musical scorched-earth policy - "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones!" - to what sounds like a call to immediate armed revolution. Jones claims the lyrics have been misinterpreted, and the song is a little more altrusistic than it seems ("the 'Sten guns in Knightsbridge' thing wasn't like we had Sten guns in Knightsbridge, it was like, we're concerned about that kind of thing, it was around the time of the Spaghetti House siege"), but yes, he concedes, it would be nice if someone wrote something as iconoclastic as that today. "They could say, no U2, Jay-Z or Beyoncé in 2007," he chuckles, then suddenly looks a bit folorn. "But it's never going to happen, is it? I don't think things mean as much now. It's been so reduced now to the sliver of the end of a boiled sweet. They've done such a job on us, no one's ever going to be able to think like that any more. But you can't wait around, you've gotta do something. But the thing is" - his voice takes on a slightly conspiratorial tone - "if you have lunch, you can't do it. You've got to do it instead of having lunch. If you say, let's have lunch, you'll talk about it and you'll never do it." He takes a slurp of his bloody mary. "We used to just do it."

A brief silence is broken by a laconic voice. "Mick," says Simonon softly, "we couldn't afford lunch."