When The Clash formed in Shepherd’s Bush, West London in June 1976 there was a strong sense, as frontman Joe Strummer would later proclaim, that “the future is unwritten”. At that time, the movement we now call punk rock didn’t even have a name. What did exist was a raucous garage rock group called the Sex Pistols, and this new, rival gang of stylish and articulate art-school rebels – The Clash – sharing the same belief that rock music, dominated by the likes of Pink Floyd, The Eagles and Queen, was long overdue a violent revolution. Within a year, The Clash and Pistols’ incendiary rock’n’roll and anti-establishment message had created the most important cultural upheaval of the late 20th century, soon dubbed ‘punk’. But while the Pistols would disintegrate in 1978 amid their anarchic cry of “destroy”, The Clash went on to enjoy a hugely successful 10-year career, taking their incendiary fusion of rock, reggae, soul and funk to an international audience. The Clash’s creed was unambiguous from the start, and would remained their mission statement throughout their career: “We’re anti-Fascist, anti-violence, anti-racist and pro-creative,” Strummer said in December 1976. “We’re against ignorance.”

The Clash formed from the fragments of a now near-mythical group called the London SS, which never played a gig or recorded a demo, but whose auditions in the winter of 1975/76 brought together nearly all the key players in the first Clash line-up – including manager Bernard Rhodes (a friend and rival of Pistols mentor Malcolm McLaren’s), Mick Jones and Keith Levene (guitars), Paul Simonon (bass) and Terry Chimes (drums). With the addition of the charismatic Strummer, poached from pub rock outfit The 101’ers, in June 1976 the group began rehearsing in a derelict warehouse in the old railway yard in Camden Town. They played their first gig on 4 July, supporting the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan pub in Sheffield. It proved to be an inauspicious start, but the boot camp mentality at The Clash’s warehouse HQ – where the group doggedly rehearsed everyday, including weekends – would soon pay dividends.

In the hot summer of 1976, The Clash began writing the material that would grace their extraordinary debut album released the following year. Rhodes pressed them to write about the everyday issues that confronted them, and they took his advice to heart, crafting classics like London’s Burning (about boredom amid London’s urban landscape), Janie Jones (dead-end jobs) and the anthemic White Riot, inspired by Paul and Joe’s experience of being caught up in the rioting at that year’s Notting Hill Carnival, London’s celebration of West Indian immigrant culture.

By this time – September 1976 – second guitarist Keith Levene was losing interest in the band and was unceremoniously sacked. The result was to create the iconic ‘three frontmen’ line-up of Strummer, Simonon and Jones, whose dynamic stage moves would make their live shows such an incredibly exciting spectacle. Drummer Terry Chimes was next to go: he quit on the eve of the ill-fated Anarchy In The UK tour with the Pistols, of which all but seven dates were cancelled due to the public backlash against punk. (He was briefly replaced by the unknown Rob Harper.) In January 1977, The Clash signed a long-term international deal with CBS Records for an advance of £100,000. Shrugging off accusations from some of the original punk crowd that they’d “sold out”, they launched into a frenetic year of touring and recording. Having brought back Terry Chimes to drum on the sessions for their self-titled debut album, which reached Number 12 in April 1977, they corralled in another former London SS member, Topper Headon, to fill the drum seat. The gifted Topper would quickly turn out to be The Clash’s secret weapon, allowing them in the future to slickly assimilate numerous music styles, from soul, funk, and reggae and jazz, rockabilly and rap.

The Clash had fanfared their love for reggae and Jamaican culture with a punk-ed version of Junior Murvin’s contemporary reggae tune, Police And Thieves, on their debut album. In September 1977, they took their “reggae addiction” a step further, inviting dub legend Lee Perry to produce their Complete Control single, before Joe and Mick set off on a songwriting holiday to Jamaica – much to the displeasure of the Simonon, who’d always wanted to visit the home of his reggae heroes. The following year would see The Clash fuse reggae and punk yet again in their rousing anthem, (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, inspired by Joe’s experience at a reggae all-nighter at the West London venue. Today, many cite it as punk’s finest musical achievement.

Following the Sex Pistols’ split in January 1978, The Clash became punk’s undisputed generals, but they refused to be slaves to the musical blueprint they’d created for themselves the year before. Bringing in American rock producer Sandy Pearlman, the group cut their second album, the punchy and polished Give ’Em Enough Rope, recorded in Ladbroke Grove, San Francisco and New York. By now, relations between the band and the visionary but “difficult” Bernard Rhodes were becoming strained, and the manager was dismissed in October 1978. Give ’Em Enough Rope reached Number 2 in December, and buoyed up by Tommy Gun, The Clash’s first UK Top 20 single.

The group’s trip to the States was the beginning of their love affair with America, which was further fuelled by their first US tour in February 1979, with R&B legend Bo Diddley as support act. Back in London, the influence of rootsy American music – R&B, jazz, soul, Texan garage rock – seeped into the band’s new material, which was committed to tape in August 1979 with the help of lunatic-genius producer Guy Stevens (who’d schooled The Who in soul and R&B in the mid-’60s, before going on to work with Free and Mott The Hoople). The result was London Calling, the double album that many critics consider to be their masterpiece, and which Rolling Stone magazine would later declare as ‘the best album of the ’80s’.

If London Calling had explored exciting new musical territory, and further distanced The Clash from their punk roots, then its follow-up, the triple album Sandinista!, would take their pioneering fusions to extremes. Recorded in London, New York and Jamaica, and released in December 1980, it added dub, rockabilly, disco and rap to The Clash’s musical armoury; in the UK, its ambitious mix of styles and preoccupation with global politics (Sandinistas were Nicaragua’s Marxist rebels) received a lukewarm reception, but in the States it was deemed to be another triumph. By now Bernard Rhodes was back on the team, and his first new out-of-the-box idea was to bin the idea of touring America and instead play a residency at New York’s Bond’s International Casino on Times Square. The gigs – 17 in all – in May and June 1981 were ecstatically received, and, much to the group’s pleasure, The Magnificent Seven was picked up by local black music stations, knocked out by what was arguably the first British rap record.

The Bond’s shows consolidated The Clash’s profile in the States, and their next album, 1982’s Combat Rock, recorded in New York, reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic, spawning the smash hits Rock The Casbah (the music for which was written by Topper) and Should I Stay Or Should I Go. The atmosphere within the Clash camp was volatile at the best of times, and 1982 proved to be a particularly dramatic year. In May, Joe went missing for three weeks – it turned out he was holed up in Paris – and a week after his return Topper was sacked for his addiction to heroin and cocaine. It was a week before a 23-date American tour, so the band called on their old drummer Terry Chimes to fill the vacancy. The year ended with a prestigious support slot on The Who’s ‘farewell’ tour of US arenas – the provenance of The Clash Live At Shea Stadium album, recorded on 13 October 1982.

In some ways, the dates were The Clash’s own farewell tour too. The classic ‘three frontmen’ line-up would play their last gig together just six months later on 28 May 1983, in front of an audience of 150,000 at the Us Festival in San Bernadino, California. Growing friction between Bernard Rhodes and Mick – already increasingly estranged from the rest of the group – led to the latter’s dismissal that August.

Joe and Paul carried on, aided by Pete Howard (drums) and Nick Sheppard and Vince White (guitars), recording the swansong Cut The Crap album with Rhodes as producer; but even before its release in November 1985, heralded by the stirring This Is England single, Strummer had virtually disowned the record and gone into hiding, spelling the end of the band. Eighteen years later, in 2003, the group were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – and rumours were rife beforehand that The Clash would re-form for the occasion. But then, on 22 December 2002, three months before the ceremony, Joe died unexpectedly due to a congenital heart defect. The Clash was over, but their reputation as the greatest rock’n’roll band of their generation, whose uncompromising attitude and steely vision of a multicultural society touched so many people’s lives, still survives in their extraordinary music.

The son of Foreign Office clerk, John Graham Mellor was born in Ankara, Turkey, and would variously spend his early childhood in Egypt, Mexico City and West Germany – wherever his father’s work took him. His parents ultimately decided it would be better to send him to a private boarding school in the UK, and in 1961, aged 9, he became a pupil at The City Of London Freeman’s School in Ashtead, Surrey. The experience scarred him (“I had to pretend my parents didn’t exist”), as did the suicide of his older brother just weeks after Joe took his A-Level exams in 1970. After dropping out of art school in London, he began calling himself ‘Woody’ (as in folk singer Woody Guthrie) and went on the hippy trail, busking with his friend Tymon Dogg, bumming round Europe, and joining a group called The Vultures in Wales.

His ambition to become a rock’n’roll star got a boost in 1974 when he formed The 101’ers with his squatting-mates at 101 Walterton Road, W9. Soon the band were a fixture on the London pub rock scene, where in April 1976 Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, then scouting for a singer, saw them supporting the Sex Pistols at the Nashville Rooms. ‘Woody Mellor’ – now re-styling himself as ‘Joe Strummer’ (after his attacking rhythm guitar style and man-on-the-street image) – was a month later given an ultimatum to join the fledgling The Clash: he did, and so began the career of punk’s most passionate and articulate frontman, whose lyrics – a poetic mix of politics and profoundly human observations on life – would be widely regarded as some of the finest since Bob Dylan’s.

After nine years fronting The Clash, Joe quit the group in late 1985, spelling its end. He turned to acting and writing film soundtracks (his Latin-inspired music for Alex Cox’s 1987 movie Walker, in which he also had a bit part, is particularly acclaimed), released the solo Earthquake Weather album in 1989, produced The Pogues and fronted them after Shane MacGowan’s departure – and then took a step back from the limelight. He returned in 1999 with new group The Mescaleros; it was while cutting the group’s third album that he died at home on 22 December 2002, as a result of a congenital heart defect. He was 50 years old. Today, he’s feted as a hero of the punk generation and beyond, and his legacy is recognised in the universal regard for him among fans and fellow musicians as one of rock’s greatest ever frontmen and lyricists.

Michael Geoffrey Jones was born in Clapham, South London, and lived for most of his early childhood in a block of flats on Brixton Hill. His father, a betting-shop manager and taxi driver, separated from his mother when Mick was eight years old, after which time he was cared for by his maternal grandmother.

Bright and good at football, Jones attended The Strand School in Clapham, but his interest in schoolwork quickly evaporated once he discovered rock music. The first albums he bought, in 1968, were by Cream and Jimi Hendrix, and that same year he started attending gigs; a 14-year-old Mick is clearly visible, incidentally, in crowd shots from the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park in 1969. Mick’s enthusiasm for music soon became boundless (his biggest heroes at school were the pre-fame Mott The Hoople, whom he followed around on tour), as did his appetite for sci-fi comics and cult literature. He was, according to a schoolmate, “hip before the rest of us knew what hip meant”.

In 1972, Mick formed his first group, the glam-rock-inspired Delinquents. As was customary for budding rock guitarists, Mick enrolled at art school, in his case Hammersmith College of Art and Building, and by the autumn of 1975 he had a new group called the London SS, with his friend Tony James (later of Generation X). It was at this time Mick met maverick manager Bernard Rhodes, who would take him under his wing and help create The Clash. Though the London SS folded without playing a gig, the band auditions held in the winter of 1975/76 unearthed three other members of The Clash’s first line-up: Paul Simonon (bass), Keith Levene (lead guitar) and Terry Chimes (drums). With the addition of Joe Strummer in June 1976, the The Clash was complete.

In the months that followed, Mick proved himself to be a songwriter and guitarist of astonishing flair and originality. Even the music to The Clash’s earliest and punkiest songs – London’s Burning, Bored Of The USA, White Riot – was deceptively complex, with intelligent arrangements and clever interplay between Joe and Mick’s guitars and vocals. By London Calling (1979) and Sandinista! (1980), Mick was adding soul, funk, jazz, rap and disco to The Clash’s early punk rock-and-reggae stylings.

Having cracked the US Top 10 in 1982 with Combat Rock, growing friction between Mick and the rest of the group resulted in his dismissal. Subsequently, he enjoyed an internationally successful career fronting Big Audio Dynamite, before returning to the public eye in 21st century as The Libertines’ and Babyshambles’ producer. Today, Mick plays full-time in Carbon-Silicon, a group featuring his former London SS sidekick Tony James and BAD’s bassist Leo Williams.

Paul Gustave Simonon was born in South London, beginning an unsettled early life that would take him to Ramsgate, Bury St Edmunds and Canterbury before his parents returned to London again in 1959. The family lived in Ladbroke Grove and Brixton, heavily multi-cultural areas which exposed Paul at an early age to the sounds, tastes and fashions of West Indian immigrant culture – an experience that would later have a profound impact on The Clash’s music, image and attitude. When he was seven, Paul’s parents split up; he remained with his mother and younger brother in Brixton, where he would roam the streets till late. In 1966 he was transported abroad for several months when his mother’s new partner won a scholarship to study music in Italy. “One minute we were in an inner-city ghetto and then next we were wandering the streets of Siena and Rome” he explains. Paul celebrated his 11th birthday on the ferry back to Dover.

Back in London, Simonon attended William Penn, a rough comprehensive school near Tulse Hill, where he immersed himself in the emerging skinhead culture (cropped hair, Levi jeans, Ben Sherman shirts, ska and reggae music). Always a mischievous kid, he was now deemed to be “out of control”, and sent to stay with his father in Ladbroke Grove. Paul’s dad painted for a hobby, and encouraged his son to develop his own flourishing gifts as an artist. In 1973, Simonon finished off his schooling at Isaac Newton off Portobello Road and the following year was accepted as a scholarship student by Byam Shaw art school in Notting Hill Gate. It was while accompanying a friend who was auditioning for the drum seat in Mick Jones’s group the London SS, in January 1976, that Mick and manager Bernard Rhodes spotted the future Clash bassist. Paul couldn’t play an instrument, but as he had such a great image, Jones decided to teach him, with Simonon famously painting the relevant notes on the fretboard of his bass.

Mick has described Paul’s contribution to The Clash as “immeasurable”. It was Simonon’s obsession with reggae and dub that would inject an authentic West Indian thread to the group’s music, and it was Paul who was also primarily responsible for The Clash’s striking visuals – not just their guerrilla/rude boy chic, but record sleeves, posters and stage backdrops. His streetwise attitude and hardcore views on what was, and wasn’t, cool contributed significantly to The Clash’s punk edge. He was, as anyone who ever saw the band knows, as much ‘the frontman’ as Joe or Mick, and created an enduring Clash anthem in Guns Of Brixton.

After The Clash ended in late 1985, Simonon briefly moved to LA, forming a new group Havana 3AM, but when they folded in London in 1991 (when singer Nigel Dixon died), he returned full-time to his great love, painting, enjoying a number of successful London exhibitions. In 2006 he re-emerged in The Good, The Bad And The Queen, a critically acclaimed musical project helmed by former Blur frontman Damon Albarn.

Nicholas Bowen Headon was brought up in Dover, Kent, where his father was headmaster of the grammar school. When he was 13, he broke his leg playing football, and it was while convalescing he taught himself to play drums. His ambition at the time was “to be Keith Moon”, though his teenage drumming heroes also included Terry Williams from Welsh rockers Man, and jazz stars Buddy Rich and Billy Cobham. Stints with various jazz, soul, funk and rock outfits led him to an audition in late 1975 for the now legendary London SS, an unsigned pre-punk outfit managed by Bernie Rhodes and featuring Mick Jones on guitar. Nothing came of it – Headon decided to join a professional soul outfit instead – but Jones was impressed by his playing, and in April 1977, when The Clash were looking for someone to replace first drummer Terry Chimes, Headon was offered a try-out and given the job. His first Clash gig was at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm on 10 April; around this time bassist Paul Simonon dubbed him ‘Topper’ because of his apparent facial resemblance to Micky The Monkey in the kids’ comic-book of that name.

As a gifted drummer and multi-instrumentalist, Headon’s talents helped The Clash to assimilate all sorts of musical styles, from funk, reggae and jazz to soul, disco and rockabilly. Headon even wrote the music for the band’s biggest hit, 1982’s Rock The Casbah, though addiction to cocaine and heroin led to his sacking that same year.

Today, a fit and healthy Topper lives near his childhood home in Dover with his dog Yowsah, and, having virtually given up playing drums for 20 years, in 2008 has begun recording again.