The Clash (?): Cut The Crap, Rebooted

There are days when you're reminded what a gift the internet can still sometimes be. I was on a random online music trawl when I came across a home-brewed remake of the final Clash [sic] album, 1985's regrettable, and ironically titled, Cut The Crap. 

The tale of Crap is well-trod ground: Having booted Mick Jones from the band in 1983 (a year after drummer Topper Headon departed), Joe Strummer cobbled together a new, imitation Clash and took a stab at a new record. It's a disastrous mess, relentlessly headache-inducing drum machines and silly faux anthems that sound like drunken fans shouting at a soccer (er, sorry, "football") stadium. (While I haven't heard them, apparently some bootlegs from the era show the post-Jones iteration of the Clash to have actually been quite decent live, but Strummer opted to record the LP without the band, just him and his producer/ally Bernie Rhodes, with nobody bothering to step in and say "wow, this sounds terrible!") And it sounded all the worse when stood alongside Jones' excellent debut with his new band, Big Audio Dynamite.

[BTW, I tried to concoct an imaginary great lost final Clash album out of bits and pieces of Big Audio Dynamite, Crap, Strummer solo tracks, and Combat Rock outtakes--it was ultimately an entertaining failure, just too stylistically divergent to work as a coherent whole.]

All of which brings me to Cut The Crap Rebooted, a 2021 project from German punk musician Gerald Manns, released (unofficially) under the moniker Mohawk Revenge. Manns painstakingly isolated Strummer's vocals from the original album, then re-recorded the music, eliminating the messy overdubs and godawful drum machines and making it sound... well, a little more like a Clash record. Or, more precisely, a Joe Strummer demo for a Clash record.

I kinda like it; I think there are some salvageable tracks on Crap, and it's fun to hear them stripped free of the unlistenable din. The original album's lone winner, "This Is England," which had some epic majesty even in it's "real" version, similarly shines here, albeit as a more standard Clash-lite track. But other numbers which fell far short are revived and made at least moderately enjoyable. As a chance to hear this lamented record as an imaginary "what could've been," it's a pretty cool exercise. Alas, given its bootleg nature, the Rebooted LP is only available as a pricey vinyl import; but the whole thing is up on YouTube if you want to give it a try. (I ripped the YouTube version to my computer so I could play it as a proper record on my stereo--not exactly hi-def, but given the nature of the recording, works perfectly fine.)

"Dictator" rebooted:

The original "Dictator" (if you can bear it):

"This Is England" rebooted:

"We Are The Clash" rebooted: