My Daddy Was a Bank Robber

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Wait, did I say nothing rising to the surface? Spoke too soon. Because this song would be nothing without Joe Strummer singing his most passionate &—yes—beautiful performance. His conviction is the engine that runs this train, seeing through all aspects of sound, vision, & vibe. Ross from Leicester, United KingdomMikey Dread has died since then - hope he'd seen some royalties by then. The Uncut Crap - Over 56 Things You Never Knew About The Clash". NME. London: IPC Magazines. 3. 16 March 1991. ISSN 0028-6362. OCLC 4213418. Bankrobber’ is an interesting one,” Jones once told Daniel Rachel, author of The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters, discussing the song. “I think my dad was a bank robber’s assistant. There was talk of him driving getaway cars. He was a cab driver, but he drove for other people. Joe wrote the words. The songs are like folk songs. They’ve become like traditional songs. A lot of it was based on truth. We made it so everybody could relate to it. It wasn’t exactly the truth; for instance, in ‘Lost in the Supermarket’, I didn’t have a hedge in the suburb. I lived in a council flat. A lot of the time, it got mythologised.” Central to the song is its sense of romanticism. As previously noted, there is no violence in the song, as opposed to what one might find in source material like The Harder They Come or latter-day outlaw gangsta rappers like Tupac & Notorious B.I.G. Compared with these heavy cultural products, "Bankrobber" sounds like the folksong that it is—not afraid to look death in the eye but doing so in a way that feels oddly distanced & refreshing.

Well, actually, I might not be home. I'm going out of town on business. Could you have a friend meet you?" Gruen, Bob; Salewicz, Chris (2004) [2001]. The Clash (3rded.). London: Omnibus. ISBN 1-903399-34-3. OCLC 69241279. It's a reggae song by a punk band. It runs well over 4 minutes without ever changing rhythm, tempo, dynamics, or melody. Its lyrics are meandering—even pointless at worst—with verses & refrains all but interchangeable, rendering any inherent structure meaningless. With all of these elements, the song feels long & repetitive, almost to the level of deadening. The officer led me to a holding cell where I could talk with Dad. I sat in a chair and waited, wondering what I would say. Wearing an official-issue jumper, he entered the room, staring at the floor and looking ashamed. How dare he feel shame! I took the robberies personally: the way I figured, he'd traded me for money. I didn't care that he'd been faced with the worst financial crises of his life or that all those lonely nights with the bottle had clouded his judgment. My only concern was that he'd abandoned me. Money wasn't worth walking across the street for. It certainly wasn't worth robbing a bank for. He'd thrown everything away: his life, our life.Roberts, David (2006). British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London: Guinness World Records. p.33. ISBN 1-904994-10-5. OCLC 64098209. I hear it less as a set of interconnected verses than I do an unintended narrative. If we take the Clash at their word (& the Clash are nothing of not literalists), the old man at the bar can mean "the old man," as in, "My daddy," i.e., the Bankrobber. It makes sense that he never went to prison (he never hurt nobody) & his wisdom about "serving one machine" could be either the life that drove him to bank robbing or a metaphor for the society that gave him the job in the first place.

Topping, Keith (2004) [2003]. The Complete Clash (2nded.). Richmond: Reynolds & Hearn. ISBN 1-903111-70-6. OCLC 63129186.Gray, Marcus (2005) [1995]. The Clash: Return of the Last Gang in Town (5th reviseded.). London: Helter Skelter. ISBN 1-905139-10-1. OCLC 60668626. Needs, Kris (25 January 2005). Joe Strummer and the Legend of the Clash. London: Plexus. ISBN 0-85965-348-X. OCLC 53155325. Young Ian Brown and Pete Garner, later of the Stone Roses, were in attendance at the studio recording session of this single. According to Brown, having heard a rumour that the Clash were recording in Manchester, he and Garner were walking through the city centre when they overheard Topper Headon playing the drums at the city's Pluto Studios: Headon subsequently emerged from the studio and invited the pair in. [5] [6] The full account of this incident is in John Robb's Stone Roses and the Resurrection of British Pop. [7] The Clash's "Bankrobber" is one of those rare songs in which nothing should work, but everything somehow does. Consider then, what I believe to be the creative apex of the song—its center, in which 3 lovely verses float by in an exercise of all that is random yet perfect in the song: