Cut the Crap


Cut the Crap is the sixth and final studio album by the English punk band the Clash, released on 4 November 1985 by CBS Records. It was recorded in early 1985 at Weryton Studios, Munich, following a turbulent period: co-founder, lead guitarist and co-principal songwriter Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon had been dismissed by lead vocalist Joe Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon. Jones and Headon were replaced by three unknowns: guitarists Vince White and Nick Sheppard and drummer Pete Howard. During the tense recording sessions, Clash manager Bernie Rhodes and Strummer fought each other for control over the band's songwriting and musical direction.
Strummer and Rhodes co-wrote most of the songs. During production, Rhodes took charge of the arrangements, track sequencing and the final mix. His production choices, which rely heavily on Strummer's preference for synthetic drum sounds and Rhodes's own inclusion of sampling, were widely derided. One writer described the album's sound as brash and seemingly "designed to sound hip and modern—'80s style!" Rhodes chose the album title, taken from a line in the 1981 post-apocalyptic film Mad Max 2. The recording process and tension between Rhodes and Strummer left other band members disillusioned. White's and Sheppard's contributions are almost entirely absent in the final mix, all of the bass parts were provided by former Blockheads bassist, Norman Watt-Roy and Howard was replaced by an electronic drum machine. Epic Records hoped the album would advance the Clash's success in the United States, and planned an expensive video for a lead single.
On release, Cut the Crap was maligned in the UK music press as "one of the most disastrous ever released by a major artist". Strummer disowned the album and dissolved the Clash within weeks of its release. He performed only one song from the album live during his solo career, and the album has been excluded altogether from most of the Clash's compilations and box sets. The album is also not featured in the discography section on the band's official website. Although it is still generally regarded as the band's worst album, contemporary critics have praised Strummer's songwriting and vocal performance, especially on the tracks "This Is England", "Dirty Punk" and "Three Card Trick".

Background

's internal difficulties during 1983 led to two of its core members being fired: guitarist Mick Jones was seen as adopting rock star posturing that lead vocalist Joe Strummer considered anathema to what the band stood for, and drummer Topper Headon had developed a heroin addiction which left him unreliable. After the band undertook rehearsals in London during June 1983, interpersonal tensions reemerged. The two principal songwriters no longer trusted each other, due to Jones's frequent absence from rehearsals and use of synthesizers. Both Jones and bassist Paul Simonon have said that they refused to sign the contract negotiated by manager Bernie Rhodes, who had earlier been fired due to personal differences with Jones.
The relationship between Strummer and Jones had broken down by this point. Not long into rehearsals, Strummer and Simonon had fired Jones. A week before the official announcement of the dismissal, Strummer, Simonon and Rhodes began to look for replacements and met Pete Howard. The band placed anonymous advertisements for replacement guitarists in the magazine Melody Maker. After auditioning over 100 candidates, they eventually hired unknown musicians Nick Sheppard and Greg White. White took the pseudonym Vince after Simonon complained that he would prefer to quit than play in a band with someone named Greg. Both were given a weekly wage of £100 rather than recording contracts.
Strummer had been the band's principal lyricist, while Jones had written their music. After Jones was fired, the band assumed that anyone could write a punk song. This proved to be a mistake and, unknown to members of the Clash, Rhodes had already conceived his own solution to Jones's departure—he would take control of the music.
Strummer intended the second Clash line-up to encapsulate a back-to-basics approach to punk. The new musicians largely avoided the reggae-influenced style of their two previous studio albums, Sandinista! and Combat Rock. Strummer began to refer to the line-up as "the Clash, Round Two", a phrase adopted by the press as "the Clash Mark II". They booked a short tour of the US West Coast, debuting new songs, which prompted Jones to boast to concert promoter Bill Graham that he was planning his own tour with Headon as "the Real Clash". Jones's lawyers had frozen the band's earnings from both the US Festival and sales of Combat Rock. In response, Strummer wrote the song "We Are the Clash", which, along with "Three Card Trick", "Sex Mad Roar" and "This Is England", was debuted during live appearances in January 1984. In all, the Clash Mark II had written around 20 new songs before entering the studio to record what became the band's final studio album.

Recording and production

The album was recorded between January and February 1985, on a 24-track mixing desk in Weryton Studios, Unterföhring, outside Munich, Germany, with some parts recorded in London. Epic Records chose the German studio because the band's finances were dependent on ongoing legal cases, including moves by Jones to prevent them recording under the name "the Clash". Rhodes hired engineer Micheal Fayne on the basis of affordability, and his prior experience with programmed drum machines, which Strummer wanted to use on the album because, according to Rhodes, "Joe wanted to compete with Mick's drum machine thing". Rhodes also employed engineers Ulrich A. Rudolf, Simon Sullivan and Kevin Whyte, who are credited on the sleeve.
Strummer and Rhodes disagreed on the direction of the recordings almost from the outset. Rhodes, credited on the sleeve under the pseudonym "Jose Unidos", had no previous experience with either songwriting or record production. While Strummer had been pleased with his demo versions, he fought against his manager over the album's production. Rhodes believed he had discovered a new genre, seeking to mix electro, hip hop and cut-up technique. He replaced live musicians with synthetic sounds and layered the tracks with audio from TV programs.
Fayne described Rhodes's treatment of Howard as "damaging". Rhodes would begin recording sessions by asking the drummer to play what he wanted, but would inevitably respond to Howard's parts by saying "no, not that", or "no, not that either". In one incident, Rhodes appeared in the recording room and began to "smash the drum kit up", at which point Howard stood up and left. Fayne said, "Bernie didn't want any connection with the past... He wanted to take it forward, to control it, to mastermind the whole thing, and what they were doing was a bit too reminiscent of what it was". Disillusioned and lacking reinforcement or direction from Strummer, Howard seriously considered leaving the band at several points.
Most of the Clash and the production team liked the football-style chants used in some of the choruses. They were in part inspired by the communal sing-alongs the Clash performed during their busking tour the previous year, and thus evoked memories of a less tense period in their career. The massed vocals were provided by several dozen of their friends and families, and several of the inner team remembered those sessions as the only enjoyable period during the album's recording. The only other aspect that the musicians agreed on was the quality and commercial potential of "This Is England", a song into which Rhodes allowed the musicians significant creative input.
Rhodes suddenly ended the recordings and took the master tapes from the studio, after which he added further synthesizer parts. Although Jones's use of synthesizers and samplers was one of the main reasons behind his dismissal, those instruments brought him critical and public acclaim with his next band Big Audio Dynamite. When asked at the time for his opinion on the debut BAD album, Strummer described it as one of the "worst pieces of shit I have ever heard". In 1986, Strummer said that he had liked a few of the tunes but "really I hated it... I didn't hear until it was in the shops." Strummer ultimately lost control of Cut the Crap to Rhodes, and became so disillusioned that at one point he asked Jones to rejoin the band, but was refused.
Simonon does not appear on any of the final recordings; the basslines were performed by Norman Watt-Roy, former member of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, who was not credited on the sleeve. Howard's exclusion from the album has been lamented by many critics. Knowles described him as an "astonishingly powerful and prodigious" drummer, and said that replacing him with electronic percussion was "like replacing a Maserati with a Matchbox". Regretting the decision, Strummer later vowed to never use a drum machine again.

Music and lyrics

The consensus among critics is that the album's production choices distract from otherwise strong songwriting by Strummer and Rhodes. Strummer's vocals are placed low in the mix, sometimes buried underneath electronic drums, synthetic keyboards and studio effects. The sound has often been described as muddy and cluttered due to multi-layered guitar tracks and backing vocals. Many of the guitar overdubs have been considered unnecessary, given that Sheppard and White were both using Gibson Les Pauls and as such their sounds were tonally similar, and there was not significant variation in either their chord progressions or riffs. Rhodes may have felt the need to fill each channel on the 24-track mixing desk. Author Gary Jucha summed up the album as having been produced by a manager whose musical ambitions were overstretched by a lack of experience.
The over-laid vocals in the choruses, which give the football chant feel, were harshly viewed by critics at the time, both because the effect seemed like low-brow rabble-rousing, and they compared unfavorably with Jones's earlier backing vocals. The drums are largely untreated with sound effects which left them sounding dull. Knowles suggested that adding reverb would have helped to create a more organic "roomy" sound, so the songs wouldn't feel "so canned and phony". Against this, the live instrumentation is tight and cohesive. Each of the new recruits was a skilled musician, and they had just come off a tour during which Rhodes had instructed them not to vary song structures or guitar leads between performances.