This chapter explores the ways in which a band such as The Clash illustrates the tension in popular music between aesthetic judgement and political influence, that is, between making more interesting art and reaching more people. Original member Keith Levene evidently had rather more adventurous musical tastes than the rest of the band. If the guitarist had continued working with The Clash, it is possible that the group may have taken more interesting musical directions. A flavour of what Levene would have added to the band is evident when we consider the composition of the only song for which he receives a writing credit on the debut album, ‘What’s My Name’. While the early departure of the gifted guitarist in all likelihood narrowed the creative range of The Clash, it also perhaps allowed them to have greater political influence. It is unlikely, after all, that the palpably more avant-garde tastes that Levene would showcase in his future work would have allowed the band to reach the mainstream audience that they had always craved.

Fanzines did not begin with punk and, in many ways, represented a continuum of radical, underground printing. This chapter looks at examples of pre-punk, countercultural publications. It also makes clear how punk often built on structures put in place prior to 1976–77.

The political disposition of The Clash was a matter that divided opinion from the very outset. For their fans, it was the songs that the band crafted together that provided the spark for an entirely different viewpoint on the world. For their detractors, in contrast, the group were often considered to be merely another cog in the machine of the culture industries, and were, therefore, part of the problem rather than the solution. In this chapter, the authors focus on one particular moment when these countervailing readings of The Clash came into sharp relief. In the summer of 1980 the band played a free outdoor concert in the centre of Bologna. While the gig drew an enormous audience of enthusiastic fans, it was also the setting for protests from local radicals self-styled as punx. The chapter traces these threads through the recollections of some of those who were associated in different ways with the Bologna concert. Their disparate renditions of what happened that night and its significance offer some insight into the enduring facility of The Clash to mean entirely different things to different people.

Fanzines were integral to a 1980s ‘indie’ culture that evolved out punk’s commitment to DIY. As the producer of Kvatch and co-founder of Sarah Records, Clare Wadd was at the heart of all this and here recalls how fanzines helped facilitate the networks and opportunities to cultivate a distinct and influential youth culture.

Kirsty Lohman uses the Dutch fanzine Raket to frame a discussion of self-censorship and boundary-drawing practices in punk. These were issues that were of particular importance in a subculture that has, since its inception, been contested on the political as well as cultural level.

While the early songs written by The Clash were firmly rooted in certain neighbourhoods in West London, over time the imaginary of the band would become ever more closely connected to the fabled streets of New York. In the early 1980s, as the four-piece faced incessant criticism from their erstwhile champions in the British music press, they would find a rather warmer reception from American audiences. In this chapter, the author offers a critical exploration of the complex relationship between The Clash and their adopted town of New York. One of the more progressive outcomes of the American odysseys that dominated the latter half of the group’s career was their enthusiasm for emergent and multicultural musical forms. They would, for instance, become the first white artists to record a song inspired by the then nascent black American genre of hip hop. Although The Clash would remain sincere champions of a multicultural society, the chapter casts doubts on whether this message had any real impact on an audience that was overwhelmingly white and would only become more so when the release of Combat Rock confirmed the band as a major stadium act in the United States.

The appeal of The Clash often seems to hinge upon the band’s passionate denunciations of a world ever more animated by the impulses of profit and war. While the band are well known for their sense of passion, this chapter suggests they should also be remembered for their profound, but often overlooked, sense of pathos. This thread of melancholy is traced to twin principal sources: the autobiographical detail of the peripatetic and abandoned figure of Joe Strummer, and the ever more despondent geopolitical context in which the charismatic front man crafted his indelible lyrics. While the songs that The Clash committed to vinyl might well be heard as documents of political defeat, it is perhaps that particular feel of pathos that lends them their abiding, maybe even contemporary, political power. Drawing on the work of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, it is argued that the vein of ‘left melancholia’ that courses through the band’s back catalogue identifies them as resources for political struggle in the here and now, requiring us to act as ‘ragpickers’ gathering the cultural tributes from our dismal past that map a path towards a more progressive future.

Mike Diboll looks back on his life, connecting his experience as young punk producing a fanzine to his later experience in the midst of the Bahrain revolution. By so doing, he suggests a new way of writing about the punk experience, going beyond history writing, discourse analysis and cultural studies based approaches to reveal how punk pasts can be used in personal-political presents to enable personal-political agency for social and political justice, and to effect therapeutic or curative transformations in a context of a neoliberal mental health pandemic.

The aim of this chapter is to explore how the psychic and the social intersect within riot grrrls’ reframing of the gendered body. It highlights how the fanzine context further complicated such a relationship, giving rise to tensions that played out in the zine writing integral to riot grrrl’s culture and politics.

By examining the Manchester fanzine City Fun, David Wilkinson asks how fanzines captured the conflicted and evolving politics of the British counterculture as it mutated, fragmented and fed into punk, post-punk and beyond against a backdrop of collapsing post-war welfare-capitalism and the rise of Thatcherite neoliberalism.