Big Audio Dynamite, April 1986

Open-ended brilliance.

I was a big fan of The Clash but when they split up it was the right time. I was heartbroken watching the band that Joe Strummer kept going for a while under the same name: it wasn’t the same.

Meanwhile, Mick Jones was pursuing a new path and it came to fruition with BAD. (And Strummer did a lot of good stuff later, too.)

Back in the 21st century, Mick Jones has been in the news more recently thanks to the London exhibition of his memorabilia collection The Rock & Roll Public Library.

Incidentally, the State Ballroom, where this gig took place, was famous for appearing in the 1985 film Letter to Brezhnev.

Photo © Gary Lornie

Back to the future

BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE

The State, Liverpool

Melody Maker, April 26, 1986

THE surprising thing was that there were so few old faces. Sure, the gig was sold out but these were new fans, clamouring indecorously for "The Bottom Line", not Clash numbers. Still, the class of '76 missed something, because what Mick Jones is doing is, for 1986, as radical as anything that was happening then.

He doesn't look much different - still in red and white, hair short, confidence long, though no longer skating across the stage and into a rebel pose. He's a more mature presence now, but no less irreverent. In fact, there's a light-heartedness about BAD that was never in The Clash, not least in the tongue-in-cheek approach to myth-making.

On record BAD never quite achieve what they ought to be - a thrilling synthesis of Seventies and Eighties street musics, punk dynamics embracing black dance stylistics; music for the future, with technology not as a gimmick but a tool. On stage, it begins to happen. The eruption that heralds the band's arrival is immediately justified as they slide into the groove already started by the backing tapes, it moves into "Medicine Show", and it's as exciting as anything I've seen on stage for a long long time. The staccato fluency of "BAD", semi-serious semi-rap, proves that this is the genuine successor to The Clash's final, experimental works. Now and then Mick sings alone, slipping into something more conventional, and it's a sad and happy reminder of his older songs. But this is no time for nostalgia.

It all still needs working on. The groove has its limitations, and the predictability on the album seeps into the pace of the live version too. The punk catharsis is missing. This is a mellower energy, that climbs subtly, and the occasional chorus is the nearest you get to some kind of definition, leaving you wanting the climax of some aural violence, or, at least, a bit more melody.

Perhaps that's why then, after two encores, the audience still weren't satisfied, and a 10-minute ovation lasted until we were shown the door. So far, BAD are an open-ended brilliance, and perhaps that's how it should be. Finality, after all, means stagnation, and that was what the class of '76 stood against. In 1986, we need more people like BAD to stand against it.

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