[Tony] Parsons had established a “reality test” for music, Springsteen passing, the Clash not. But this only exacerbated rock’s wider authority crisis. Aggressively (unwinnably) jockeying to be more real than itself, with self-conscious pop playacting bracketed off as a sin against social realism, this cockpit for the young, the male, the anxiously energetic, was setting out on its long retreat down from glam towards premature dad-rock.

As it evolved through the 70s and 80s, the music press engineered its imagined community round a clash of different styles; a shared family quarrel, or perhaps a family of shared quarrels among the consumer pointers, with “rock” less one type of music among others than the agreed-on central platform on which all these quarrels took place.

And the truth was I fucking hated the Clash, and I still hate the Clash. I quite like the first album. And even more than the Clash, I hate blokes who love the Clash. Is that ideological enough for you? [Barney Hoskyns]

The other thing is because of the nature of the managers and because of the nature of what was happening, the Clash is what we would now consider to be a boy band. [Paul Morley]

I’m trying to tell people that really you should be listening to Delroy Wilson, and not Pete Townshend or Paul Weller. [Penny Reel]