Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash

Great Book. Wonderful for a different look into the Clash for a story that hasn’t been completely told before.

very well written

Well written book that not only tells the story of The Clash and their music, but sets the larger social and musical context of the times. My only real criticism is that Gilbert uses the word "arguably" a bit obsessively.

Every page has something really interesting. Tons of stuff. Paul refusing to go on the dole and resorting to eating left over flour glue paste to fight off hunger after having posted flyers around town, Joe not really initially fitting in to the first arrangement of the band, due to his age and background, the London punk scene in 1976 not being anything known, much less well known, when The Clash began. I could go on, but I need to get back to the book.

Love the Clash and very happy with this book. Great details and love the back story. It came on time and is in great shape for a used book...

Received item as advertised & in a timely manner!

Everything you ever needed to know

Recommended to everyone who really likes The Clash and Joe Strummer!

Great

This is a must read if you are interested in an important period in the history of rock and roll. But be warned, this well researched book will destroy many of the myths about The Clash and their part in the British Punk scene. Don't get me wrong, I have been a huge Clash fan since I was a young teen in the late 70's. They remain my all time favourite band. But this book destroys many, many myths that the band and its management have carefully crafted over the years. I am not going to spoil it for the reader; however, what you will see is that The Clash were far more about drugs, sex, money, ego, and power than about revolution. The fact that this book is about 10 years old, is still in print, is exhaustively researched, and the author is highly regarded (and hasn't been sued) leaves me with an uncomfortable problem. The Clash, those heroic rock and roll rebels of my youth were very much ambitious, mostly middle class young men that wanted to be rock stars. In a very cold and calculated way, they found fertile ground in the angry and rebellious hearts of late 70s and early 80s working class kids. They were in many ways genuine, yet they had and still have no problem being a party to their record label and management "turning rebellion into money." For example... The Clash's $200, 2013 box set - Sound System

There are a few things you should never see being made if you want to continue enjoying them. Sausages and rock music come pretty well up that list. There is nevertheless a kind of perverse fascination in reading Pat Gilbert’s account of The Clash’s brief, fruitful career culminating in a train crash ending made almost inevitable by the very forces that made them good in the first place. There are so many, often self-generated, myths surrounding the band that a part of Gilbert’s job in writing this account was to unravel them and dig into fuddled memories in order to construct a different story, although the alternative version he creates is often no less extraordinary. Reading the 2009 revision it’s clear that there’s still more to be clarified or denied, or confirmed but with a bizarre slant. For example, throughout most of the account we have a vision of Bernie Rhodes as a cross between pantomime villain and capricious Svengali, and yet at the end we find there was no early plot on his part to oust Mick Jones and replace him with Steve Jones, and that CBS found him to be a welcome, stable interface with the band. Given the number of books dedicated purely to deconstruct the recorded music Gilbert perhaps wisely spends very little time on this. It’s a shame though that his account of the band’s live appearances is so skewed to problems and the US, which almost makes it feel like I made up the times I believed I saw them, other than the RAR event at Victoria Park. He writes about the appearances in Paris during which Futura 2000 painted the backdrop of the stage while the band played, but not of the at least one occasion this happened in Brixton. Or did I really make that up? There is similarly too little background to the, at the time quite odd, in some people’s minds, appearance of Joe Ely (a country singer!) at a “punk” gig as The Clash’s support in Camden. If you only have this book to go by, you’d think that only happened in the US. Leaving quibbles aside, though, Gilbert’s account is well worth the read, and rather than detracting from enjoyment of the band’s music will possibly give it a whole new life. However, if there is a book out there that gives a more thorough account of The Clash Live in the UK I’d like to read it.

Thoroughly enjoyed this read. He writes in a well researched and well referenced manner but also with a good sense of the humour in the story.

A real treasure of a book -- captivating from the first pages, if you're a music fan (especially of course a Clash/punk/reggae/ska fan) and an avid reader. I loved the rich detail. A huge amount of work went into writing this, and it shows. The author knows their stuff and has talked to everyone they could, even the bit players; not just the band and a few others. The author also knows the music well and the media (movies, new stories, etc) that have made it legend. Great photos inside, too. One quibble, if any, might be that there are SO many names, places and such cited in this book that it's easy to get lost. My feeling though is that this is unavoidable, to capture the complexity of The Clash's story. It's a messy tale, with complex characters, and to leave out the details would give a false impression of a simple rise-and-fall sequence. I went right out and bought a bunch of Clash CDs/DVDs I didn't have while halfway through the book, and found new love for the Clash songs I already knew so well. The writing is good overall. Sometimes words are used too often (you'll hate me for this, but the author uses 'quiff' again and again for hairstyles, and this distracted/annoyed me), and it's not top-notch prose, but the author's passion is evident. You feel like they were right there in the thick of it, taking notes the whole time. Really fantastic!