by Chris Harris
The Clash didn’t just make the bet music since the Beatles. They made rules. Rules about what a band could be, what it could refuse, and what it didn’t have to do just because the industry expected it. Their integrity wasn’t just a gimmick for an image. For years, they treated principle like a discipline, not a badge.
Which is why Should I Stay or Should I Go is such an uncomfortable story. Not because it’s anywhere near their greatest song, or even their most important single, but because it became the perfect case study in what happens when time rewrites meaning. The song didn’t change. The world around it did.
When Should I Stay or Should I Go first appeared in September 1982, it didn’t arrive as some great cultural landmark. Released as a double A-side with Straight to Hell, it peaked at No. 17 in the UK. It was a hit, but not an explosion. It lived inside the Combat Rock era, a period when The Clash were already being pulled between mass exposure and the values they’d built their reputation on and the cracks were beginning to appear.
The values mattered because The Clash weren’t “ethical” in a vague, fashionable sense. They were ethical in a way that made them awkward to handle. They famously refused to perform on Top of the Pops, resisting the expectation to mime their own songs and play along with the rituals of pop success. Their refusal wasn’t just stubbornness; it was a statement, and it hardened their image as the band that wouldn’t be absorbed by the machinery. They would have been commercially more successful had they acceded to the demands of the then powerful TOTP.
That reputation became part of the mythology: the group with the most integrity, the band who didn’t treat politics as branding, the artists who held the line when it would have been easier to cash in. Their greatness wasn’t just musical, it was morality, performed in real time, with consequences.
But by the mid-80s, the machine broke. The Clash didn’t end in a perfect crescendo. They fractured, exhausted by internal tension and splintered loyalties. The group officially split in January 1986, and from that point on, “The Clash” existed less as a working entity and more as a historical force, an iconic legend, an inheritance that still grows.
Then, in 1991, the song returned, not through the band, but through a brand. Levi’s used Should I Stay or Should I Go in the “Pool Hall” advert, packaging it as a shorthand for cool. It didn’t just revive the track; it reframed it. The single was re-released and this time it hit No. 1 in the UK. The Clash’s biggest chart moment came not from a new record or a reunion, but from a jeans advert.
This is where the discomfort lives, because it’s hard to square with the old rules. The Clash were the band who wouldn’t perform on Top of the Pops, the group who treated commercialism with suspicion, yet here their most famous “moment” was delivered through pure commercialism. Not even music industry commercialism, but advertising.
When the decision was discussed afterwards, Mick Jones’ attitude was often framed as relaxed: Levi’s were cool. They weren’t the enemy. Levi’s were part of the culture, part of rock ’n’ roll uniform. It’s an argument that makes sense in one way, because Levi’s aren’t weapons or oil or banking, but it also reveals how much the framework had shifted.
Because the key question isn’t whether Levi’s were cool. The key question is whether The Clash, while functioning as The Clash, would have accepted that reasoning. Almost certainly not. The band’s integrity came from refusing the logic that art exists to lubricate commerce. “Cool” wasn’t the point; principle was.
The reality is during their functioning tenure the request from Levi’s would have been laughed out of the room, not, oh wow how cool.
So yes, the Levi’s moment signalled something real. Not that The Clash were frauds, and not that their history was rewritten, indeed the cover of the other Combat Rock single has the motif ‘The Future is Unwritten’, but that the aura cracked and when the principles that had once been actively enforced began to drift into nostalgia.
This is what happens when bands become heritage. Integrity becomes something you inherit rather than something you practise. Legends get repackaged because legends are valuable, and the catalogue outlives the ethical posture that produced it. The Clash didn’t surrender their place in history, but the rules they once lived by became easier to bend once the band no longer existed as a living collective.
The strangest part is this: it didn’t damage them. Their standing wasn’t dented. Their greatness wasn’t reduced. London Calling doesn’t become weaker because Should I Stay or Should I Go sold jeans. If anything, the advert introduced them to a new generation who then went digging deeper, beyond the riff, into the politics and the fire.
So maybe that’s the final truth: time moves on, context shifts, and even the most principled band gets caught in the drift. The Levi’s advert blurred the lines, and it did mark a breakdown in the aura The Clash once carried. But it didn’t rewrite their legacy. It can’t change all of those albums, videos and photos.
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