Flossie T Sheep

Mark E. Smith has never been one who to give the greatest of interviews to media types anyway, he's always been one to be awkward and difficult and he has always been a facetitious sarky grumpy-faced git and this appearance of his was no exception if you don't anything about MES and The Fall then you would probably think he was an arsehole and a twat the way he acted but its nothing i haven't seen or read or heard before, i am certain John Peel would've probably applauded him anyway because he generally thought Mark E. Smith was a genius and one of the best frontmen in Britain plus i don't think he's the kind of guy who likes to indulge in the usual "he was so great, he was a star, a legend" kind of platitudes that so many people in the media went on about Peel. i think he was probably just being realistic about his relationship with John Peel and told it like it was just because Peel loved The Fall and worshipped the ground they walked on didn't mean to say Mark E. Smith knew anything more than anyone else knew about the man himself, i think the pair of them had a mutual respect for each other but i don't think they were bosom buddies. he did say that Peel got him into reggae and German music through listening to his show so i think thats maybe the most sentimental thing you'll get of Mark E. Smith, i am sure he'd rather keep his own personal feelings to himself instead of doing it through a Newsnight Q&A to be honest with ya, i reckon John Peel was probably laughing at Mark E. Smith making Gavin Esler squirm a bit in his Newsnight chair anyway;)

maybe you should ask The Needles that question' date=' i believe Le Reno Amps are down in Glasgow now too, why don't you get their opinions? do i become an even bigger winner if i mentioned Badfinger, The Alarm and John Cale then?

you sound like you were too young to actually understand how shit a country Britain was to live in during her time in power but yeah she was a lovely woman she was;) she used riot police to intimidate and attack people striking for better rates of pay, she also removed the unions so people were forced to accept what they were being given and go back to work. she removed many industries that were costing the government money so ultimately that meant people losing their jobs and deregulating public-owned utilities and services like British Telecom and British Gas and privatising them so that meant that fatcats could hike up their prices to use these services they now owned and line their own fucking pockets! don't believe me?, then go look up the name Geoffrey Robinson and find out for yourself there was also a lot of unemployment around that time as well and especially around the area i came from, people were barely scraping by on the social security money they were getting, she never seemed to truly give a shit about the people who were out of work, her government was only ever about removing anyone opposing her decisions and making the rich get richer by reducing income tax for the people earning higher incomes and then on top of that, she goes and introduces the poll tax, a tax that was last imposed way back in the fucking Dark Ages!, that one explained a lot about her mentality, i was surprised she didn't impose decisions to start beheading people in the Tower Of London or hanging people at Traitor's Gate sometimes, not only content with making the working classes pay income taxes that continued to rise every single year, she goes and introduces another tax as well! yeah she really sorted out everything for the record, John Major was only voted into power because people had gotten tired of Thatcher and Tony Blair only got voted in because people were tired of Britain being ruled by Conservatives for the best part of 20 years, and it doesn't matter who got voted in either because its the same set of rules that are applied but under a different coloured banner;)

i think the main reason some people are sceptical of The Clash is because of the band they were before they became The Clash - The 101'ers, they were playing some awful trad rock/50s style rhythm & blues music that teddyboys were into and then overnight they cut their hair, stuck some slogans on their shirts and started yabbering on about Marxism, i think thats why some people around that era were pissed off with them because they were perceived to be jumping on a bandwagon so to speak. i think the Ruts were probably more authentic with their politics than The Clash ever were i think another reason people disliked The Clash was because they seemed to view the whole thing as a competition and missed the point of it all, Strummer even said himself "we want to be bigger than the Sex Pistols" and it wasn't meant to be about being the most successful band or being bigger than anyone else, it was these big bloated rock dinosaur bands they were trying to destroy in the first place

i think Henry Rollins is a person who doesn't take himself too seriously, his humour is more self-deprecating than you would probably think go see one of his comedy shows and you'll see for yourself, i saw him at an Edinburgh Festival show a few years back, he isn't the greatest stand-up comedian you'll ever see but he's got some pretty amusing stories from Rollins Band and Black Flag tours

you obviously don't know very much about The Clash then

Silly Thing was a Steve Jones and Paul Cook composition, it had nothing to do with the band as a whole.