11. The ClashLondon Calling
The Clash I first remember seeing on TV when I was in my teens and it’s because they were talking about punk in England and how it was coming to the States and how scandalous it was, and The Clash were one of the bands they played. And we were watching them thinking, they look like really cool rockabillies.
A couple of years later I got The Clash album and played it non-stop. It had so much energy and I loved it. At this point we were then about two or three years behind the punk thing in America. Of course there were things going on in America like Ramones and Television and Patti Smith but American punk was different. But by this point I was really into London Calling and I was really into ‘Guns Of Brixton’. Every day after school we’d have these parties and by this point I was in Chicago and we were like the marginalised kids, the outcasts. We were like the geeky, arty, creative, slightly less intellectual preppy kids and we thought we were smarter than then and we were definitely the outcasts. We loved punk so we had these parties round each other’s houses and pogo because we thought that’s what you did. And I kept going, ‘Guns Of Brixton! Guns Of Brixton! Guns Of Brixton!’ over and over and over again! And finally they started calling me ‘Brixton’ and that’s how I got my name. And then Mark E. Smith shortened it to ‘Brix’.
