When the dust and ash settle, it seems that only then can we gain some kind of perspective on an event. Things can be parcelled out, measured and assessed. Of course narratives start competing as well, and histories are written. But history is always written after the fact, that’s its nature I guess. Only lunatics or politicians would look to their actions with an eye on history, as if they were writing a story they already knew the end to.

In this regard I was thinking not about the September 11 attacks but about what have become known as the London Riots, and about a few things that happened to me as well, both in the far and recent pasts. Sometimes in the immediate heat of an extraordinary event something can be understood that cannot be understood in the future in the same way. Something can be said that can’t be said at other times, and can never be said again. I’m not trying to promote a romantic privileging of the traumatic. As someone whose day job involves working with people who have often routinely used violence to make things happen, or with others who have experienced great violence I don’t subscribe to any kind of ‘It’s all good’ theory, or think that people magically benefit from something called ‘closure’. Sometimes it’s just all bad. And when it’s all bad, there can be a kind of bottomless loneliness revealed to life. Suddenly you don’t share a world view with anyone else. Suddenly you have experienced something that another cannot understand or comprehend. Something has gone that you can never get back in any form and something else has been simultaneously revealed that you can never forget.

When I was looking at the footage of the London Riots, I realised that if I turned the volume down on my laptop I could imagine scrolling across the screen as a continuous commentary beneath the images, the lyrics of nearly every Clash song ever recorded. One could start with ‘White Riot’, move into ‘London’s Burning’, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’, ‘Police and Thieves’, ‘English Civil War’, ‘Groovy Times’, ‘Clash City Rockers’, on through ‘Lost in the Supermarket’, ‘Guns of Brixton’, ‘Clampdown’, ‘Something About England’, ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, ‘Somebody Got Murdered’, ‘Police on My Back’, and so on and finish up with the extraordinary ‘Know Your Rights’ followed by ‘Straight to Hell’.

I’m not arguing for the timeless nature of Clash songs – even if they really were The Only Band That Mattered and without whom I would never have known that Prince Far-I even existed. In some ways, as relevant as their songs might appear, they can occasionally seem almost quaint, like strange historical artifacts written in a nearly recognizable language. Listening to the Clash album Sandinista! can be like trying to read a play by Mayakovsky. You know that somewhere they are making a shitload of sense. But who were the Sandinistas again? During the riots an NME editor referenced the Clash and said that they had nothing to say to today’s generations. Which is no doubt true. But beside the point. After all NME probably has even less to say to them.

There are obvious parallels between the 2011 riots and the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1995, the Broadwater Farm riot of 1985 and the Toxteth riots of 1981. And every inner city riot you can think of, at least as far back as Detroit in 1967. Three decades of riots share the same background of endemic poverty, transgenerational unemployment and marginalisation of young people, poor housing, protests at years of police harassment and brutality and institutionalised racism. The difference in the 2011 riots is that they turned into an extended shopping expedition, a kind of reality TV bubble where kids with the naivety usually only found in participants of Big Brother, posted photos of themselves on Facebook proudly holding stolen goods. It was consumerism by any other name, carried out by Maggie Thatcher’s grandchildren, who had known almost from birth, as Joe Strummer sang in ‘Straight to Hell’, that in the new consumer paradise ‘there ain’t no need for ya’.

The London rioters were overwhelmingly male and young with 20 percent being children. It was very much a gendered riot. It’s instructive to remember especially in regard to children, that destructive children generally do to others what has been done to them. The looting of the public treasury by banks and the subsequent burning down of public infrastructure in the name of ‘austerity’ doesn’t just mirror the later burning and pillaging in Tottenham but is a reminder that compared to the wholesale economic destruction wreaked on us by sociopathic financial institutions, lifting a bunch of TV screens and burning some shops is extremely small potatoes.

The Clash nailed the political tenor of the seventies and eighties like no-one else, and in a way that no other band seems to be able to do today in an equivalent way. Once upon a time we had Joe Strummer, Linton Kwesi Johnson and so on. Now we have Bono. These days, The Clash can seem like omniscient ghosts hovering over the devastated urban landscapes of Thatcher’s Britain. The line from the song ‘Clampdown’ – ‘Taking off his turban/They said “Is this man a Jew?”’ – seems like a startlingly prescient sentence for the twenty-first century. It’s as if only now can we understand what the Clash were really on about. But back then they were one struggling voice among many, saying things a lot of people didn’t want to hear. Many Clash songs are about loneliness, which is not surprising given the state of Thatcherite Britain and Joe Strummer’s childhood, a childhood in which he was shuttled around the globe from school to school, country to country. What Thatcher utterly demolished in a kind of vicious scorched earth policy was the social contract that had been constructed after the Second World War, an agreement that emphasised a kind of social cohesion that seems unthinkable today. All of a sudden everyone was utterly on their own struggling to exist in a world of atomised human relationships.

A few years ago I was standing by the side of a busy road in Brisbane, opposite the Rocklea Markets to be precise, waiting for the lights to change so I could cross. It was Sunday morning, and the weekend traffic in Brisbane always has a particularly berserk quality to it, all those parents speeding their kids to dance class, everyone busy shopping before they run out of time. Gazing into space in my usual self-absorbed manner, my eye was caught by a two-year-old boy on the opposite side of the road. He was walking along the edge of the kerb, with no adult or other child in sight. Then like any terrified child in potential danger, proceeded to make that danger manifest by stepping with difficulty off the kerb and onto the road and into the path of the oncoming traffic. In brief, I ran across the road, through the traffic, picked up the child and carried him back onto the footpath. Hurrah for me.

What actually happened was this. I think. And it happened without me thinking it. In about a nano-second. I saw the boy, realised that no-one else had seen him, looked at the speeding traffic, and somehow calculated the vectors of the approaching and passing cars in four lanes of traffic. Then I ran straight through them. As I am virtually innumerate, it wasn’t a conscious calculation. And as I can be a somewhat slow thinker who takes forever to make something happen or even understand anything, I didn’t exactly decide either. It just happened. And then it was over. And nobody else noticed it. The only time I have done anything remotely similar was when I was a lot younger and temporarily chemically enhanced one summer afternoon. It was in Adelaide a few weeks before I saw The Clash there. (When they came onto the stage at Thebarton Town Hall and went straight into ‘London Calling’, I thought my heart would explode.) Anyway I was running to catch a bus, for reasons I forget, but one does things one can’t really justify or remember when one is on acid. I zoomed at chemically enhanced speed across a road only to collide with a speeding VW Beetle. Or would have, and no doubt been seriously injured, had I not reflexively vaulted over the bonnet of the car – and kept on running.

Sometimes it seems that once events gain their own momentum, nothing on earth is going to stop them. The causes of the London riots, like the causes of the September 11 attacks were a long time in the making. But at the same time they were built into the weird neoliberal nightmare, as if they were always going to happen. The vectors were all there, but we had been powerless to do anything to stop them colliding. Two years before the 1981 Brixton riots Clash bassist Paul Simonon wrote ‘The Guns of Brixton’, in which he may well have been describing the death of Mark Duggan in 2011:

You know it means no mercy
They caught him with a gun
No need for the black Maria
Goodbye to the Brixton sun

It’s as if we have all become spectators watching an interminable horror show of unbelievable proportions, that we can’t affect or prevent or act upon, that keeps repeating itself in more grotesque forms. We have become people who are acted upon, and when we ourselves act it is only in the arena of the consumer. Alone, lost in the supermarket, eternally shopping, whatever we might think we are doing. That’s the illusion at any rate.

Just recently after a great deal of thought I confided something to someone, a past event I had never previously spoken of to a living soul. In fact I did my pondering about the possibility of said disclosure while I was working out some Clash songs on my guitar, having been thinking about the riots and so on. (The chords that blow open the beginning of ‘Somebody Got Murdered’, jumping from E major to C sharp minor and back to A major give me goosebumps every time.) Anyway where was I? Yes, I disclosed a past experience of mine to someone, an experience that no-one else knew of, and then realised that I had made a terrible mistake in doing so. All the vectors seemed there. It had all looked good. And then I was stranded in the middle of the traffic with a Mack truck bearing down on me loaded up with the consequences of things I couldn’t undo. And all of a sudden I felt very alone.

But this loneliness, the loneliness that is the risk at the heart of our relationships with each other, is different from the loneliness of the children of Tottenham breaking into shops to steal buckets, pairs of shorts and TVs. If they’d broken into a shop full of bowties they’d all have been dressed up like Frank Muir. They just nicked what was there, because having anything, no matter how crap, is better than having nothing. That’s the loneliness of the dispossessed of Rupert Murdoch’s England; an England in which the police who days before had been revealed to be paid up employees of News Corp, were now enthusiastically breaking down doors on ruined housing estates to arrest ‘looters’. It’s an England that makes The Clash’s version seem like the subject of a nostalgic Christmas card.

In his collection of essays What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, a book that contains the hilarious and frightening ‘Republicans: A prose poem’, Eliot Weinberger quotes the eleventh-century Arabic poet, Ma’arri: ‘Don’t let your life be governed by what disturbs you.’ It’s true that what disturbs us, say our rage against the corporate looting of the planet, cannot continually be the motive force in our lives. On the other hand, resignation isn’t the only alternative. Still, as compromised or as riven or as alone as we might be, discovering what enlivens us has to be as significant as finding out what disturbs us and the archaeology of either is always going to be a fraught process. Strummer once said that The Clash weren’t trying to change the world. ‘If Karl Marx couldn’t do it,’ he said, ‘What chance is there for a bunch of guitarists from Camden?’ The Clash were a band that mattered because they were a group of people that cared. That’s the beginning and end of it. Their songs disrupted the regimes of contempt that dominated Thatcher’s England and now seem systematically embedded in the very fabric of personal relationships, and they spoke of that contempt as they saw it and in the very act of its unfolding. And Strummer particularly seemed to see very clearly how apocalyptically disastrous the contempt, the savagery and the duplicitous nature of English political life was going to be.