10 Messiest Band Splits In Rock Music History
7. The Clash
When you lose a crucial member of the band, it sometimes feels like having to work with a different heart. Since these are the people that you've spent most of your creative life with, it's hard to get the rest of your fans onboard with some new random person sitting at the front of the stage. That didn't mean that the Clash didn't try though...and ended up falling flat on their face.
After the sessions for Combat Rock ended pretty harshly, tension had boiled over to the point where Mick Jones decided to leave the band. For most Clash fans, that would have been the end of it, but Joe Strummer tried to keep the dream alive with a new version of the group on Cut the Crap. What transpired next is one of the saddest endings in punk history, with songs that sounded like they were half finished and new members who could barely play their instruments.
Even the good songs from this era like This Is England don't even feel like proper Clash songs. They're more like a funeral dirge for the entire punk genre, as if Joe Strummer already knew this version of the group was never going to go the distance. Compared to the normal blowups that you get in between band members, you can't help but look at this kind of fallout and just end up feeling sad for everyone involved.