May 11, 1979, saw the release of The Clash’s second EP. If their first, Capital Radio, raised some eyebrows by only qualifying for the status of Extended Play through the inclusion of a song fragment and an interview, The Cost of Living can have left no one feeling disappointed. It boasted four full-blown songs, all of a very high standard, not to mention witty, deluxe packaging (a gatefold sleeve whose front was made up to look like a packet of washing powder, a picture of a scattering of coins amusingly hidden inside the pocket holding the record and a raised middle digit obscuring its barcode). It felt like half a brand-new album.
Furthermore, the record pointed a way forward from the aural blast of Give ’em Enough Rope to a more melodic but nonetheless powerful extrapolation of the original punk idea. It certainly gave an accurate indication of where The Clash would go on their next album, London Calling, not least in the slick, widescreen mixing-desk work of Bill Price, who shares production credit with the band as a whole. Price only further cemented the Clash–Mott The Hoople connection: he had been the engineer on Mott.
The EP was actually recorded on the sly, The Clash using time paid for by the producers of Rude Boy at London’s Wessex Studios in January 1979. These sessions were intended for the purpose of overdubbing Clash live performances in said film. The EP was not released in the United States but reached no. 22 on the UK singles chart. Although its contents were aesthetically unimpeachable, sonically it suffered from its appearance coming a few years before the fashion for 12-inch singles. The tracks sound better on CD than they did on the original vinyl, where grooves had to be scrunched up to accommodate double the normal number of songs for a 7-inch disc.
It goes without saying that there were naysayers about The Clash’s new record. In the case of the lead track, it has to be conceded that the doubters had some sort of a point. It went beyond the simple fact that, in deciding to record a cover of the Bobby Fuller Four’s 1966 U.S. top-tenner “I Fought the Law” (no. 33 in the UK) and placing it at the start of the record, the group seemed to be shamelessly attempting to garner the sort of airplay that their own more provincial compositions were largely unable to. Moreover, this recording suggested something later borne out by events: that it marked the point where The Clash began moving into the realms of a generalized rebellion, a stylized rock ’n’ roll bad boy aura. This involved almost inevitably a crossover with the Americana supposedly anathema to them. “I Fought the Law” was the perfect example of a process which, though perhaps inevitable, unavoidably had the smack of compromise.
Although the Bobby Fuller Four made the song famous, it has an interesting and little-known backstory. It was first recorded by The Crickets in their post–Buddy Holly incarnation, written by one of Holly’s replacements, Sonny Curtis. One would imagine that if The Crickets were to have a viable recording career without Holly, this would have been the song to effect that, but in 1960 it was squandered as a B-side. Others saw more fully the song’s potential, and it had acquired more than one cover version before Bobby Fuller issued two separate takes on it. His second had an elongated, trebly riff as infectious as its title vocal refrain and its singular percussive effects.
That the song is a wonderful outlaw anthem can’t be disputed. It also can’t even be accused of the sort of irresponsible crime-chic which can be alleged of Clash songs like “White Riot” and “What’s My Name”: as the second line of every chorus makes clear, the law won the fight. However, it is a quintessentially American outlaw anthem, its tableaux of six-gun hold-ups and rock-breaking chain-gang prisoners being far removed from the somewhat less larger-than-life crime-and-punishment scenarios to be found in the UK. Additionally, references to the jailed criminal being separated from his “baby” are not things in the vocabulary of the Briton.
All of that being true doesn’t mean that the Clash version is not very enjoyable. They completely punkify “I Fought the Law,” turning the strummed, trebly riff into a wailing, plucked affair, throwing in accompanying crunching rhythm guitar work, and providing an additional level of excitement via a blistering drum track. The word “and” is left hanging in the repeat of each chorus, with the original’s repetition of the line about the law winning replaced, in almost a parody of punk’s intensity, by even more crunching guitar.
Curtis also wrote (with Jerry Allison) the more gentle-natured “More Than I Can Say,” a hit for both Bobby Vee and Leo Sayer. Fuller’s fate was less pleasant: he was dead within only a few months of his biggest hit, an ostensible suicide considered by some to be a murder.
It barely matters from this end of history, but for the sake of their credibility The Clash might have been better advised to make “Groovy Times” the opening track on the EP. Not only is its subject indisputably British, but it is the most important cut on the record in marking a way forward for the punk movement. It stylishly blew a gigantic hole in the notion that the spirit of punk could only be manifested in high decibel levels, minimalist chord progressions, or even guitars that were amplified.
By 1979, both punk musicians and their fans were beginning to tire of thrash, which was a semi-pejorative term to describe British punk’s studied freneticism and minimalism long before it became a designation for a genre of music. Even if the punk bands hadn’t begun to feel that they’d made their point about the rock aristocracy’s self-indulgent virtuosity, the artist’s natural quest for new horizons would have provided the impetus for change in any event. Seventy-nine was the year punk rockers showed themselves to be less embarrassed about more melodic sounds and higher production values. In fact, it could be said that The Jam had beaten The Clash to it on this score: their 1978 album All Mod Cons had audaciously mixed the spirit of punk with the sonics of R&B-inflected pop. However, “Groovy Times” takes the process of evolution even further.
The track is propelled by strummed acoustic guitar, admittedly mixed up to unusually high levels but still a shocking departure into gentleness compared to everything else yet released by the group. The soundscape is decorated by toots of mouth harp, tasteful flecks of electric guitar, and speckles of classical guitar. Headon heralds the instrumental break with a pattering roll across the full span of his kit almost as if to give the listener time to prepare for a surprise. The mellifluous, delicate, acoustic guitar solo which follows is certainly that, as well as delectable.
Despite the quasi middle-of-the-road arrangement, “Groovy Times” has a grim tone. The chorus—consisting of the repeated title phrase—is singalong, but sarcastically so, for this is a composition drenched in blood. The song arose from Strummer’s dismay at the way British soccer fans were beginning to be fenced in at stadia to prevent pitch invasions. It was a trend that had started after an infamous incident in April 1974 when First Division side Manchester United went a goal down to local rivals Manchester City in a match that could doom them to division relegation after an unbroken thirty-six years in football’s top flight. Pitch invasions were something of a tradition, but had previously had a generally benign quality, such as the famous jamboree attending a spectacular goal scored by Ronnie Radford of minnows Hereford United against glamour club Newcastle United in a 1972 FA Cup tie. The pitch invasion at Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground was a deliberate attempt to cause the match to be abandoned so as to make the result void. It also had a malevolent tinge that raised the issue of players being in physical danger by dint of it confirming hooliganism’s graduation from the terraces to the pitch. By the next season, Manchester United supporters were—in tabloid newspaper parlance—“caged.” Other clubs began to follow suit.
One can debate whether the move was right or wrong: it certainly seemed an unfortunate necessity at the time, although did ultimately result in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster when ninety-six Liverpool Football Club fans lost their lives because the fences meant they couldn’t escape the crush of an overcrowded terrace. In any case, the lyric is the usual scattershot Clash concoction, moving from a first verse that pretty accurately summarizes the vistas of boarded-up shops and heavy police presence that were becoming depressingly familiar in the streets around football grounds on match day, to a second verse in which Strummer melodramatically talks of police gunshots and dead bodies (fatalities were, in fact, rare at football), to a non sequitur of a third verse about a TV presenter who has abandoned his former values. Counterpointed with all this bleakness is the rosy insistence of housewives (possibly fictional ones in commercials) and the media that times are good.
“Gates of the West” is the second song on The Cost of Living to indicate a way out of punk’s stylistic cul-de-sac without sacrificing its values. Although not predominantly acoustic like “Groovy Times,” it delivers its own surprise in being rendered in an effervescent soul style. It’s a novel type of soul, however: Jones sings this example of a genre born and developed in Detroit and Memphis in his London accent.
Moreover, “Gates of the West” finds The Clash for the first time acknowledging the emotion of happiness. “Stay Free” was almost their first life-affirming song, but its emotionality and tenderness is too rooted in the ungenerous supposition that the narrator and the subject are the wise ones in a world comprised of fools to qualify. In contrast, although “Gates of the West” finds the band immodestly acknowledging that many people think they are great artists, the track also boasts a humility and big-heartedness. In fact, it’s big-hearted enough to be able to concede that whatever the misgivings that the group expressed about cultural imperialism in “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,” America remained a land of awe and wonder for them.
“Gates of the West” details Strummer and Jones’s thoughts on the United States and their band’s growing stature in the music industry, prompted by their trip over the Atlantic to finish Give ’em Enough Rope, at whose sessions they worked on a version of the song, which they were then calling “Rusted Chrome.”
Whatever the nationalist self-assertion involved in the punk movement, the extremity of its anti-Americanism was no more genuine than its disavowal of the achievements of past rock acts. Just as the punk generation’s disgust with the increasing irrelevance and flatulence of established rock artists couldn’t wipe away boyhoods spent fantasizing about being their musical heroes, nor could it make them forget the fact that many of those heroes—as well as rock per se—hailed from across the Atlantic. While the American dreck bought from American networks by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Independent Television (ITV) may have been irritating, the inhabitants of the British living rooms into which so many hoary episodes of Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man were broadcast would still all jump at the chance to visit the States. America remained a land of myth and glamour, of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, cowboys and Indians, yellow taxicabs, soaring skyscrapers, gleaming Cadillacs, hamburgers, Coca-Cola, and other such phenomena impossible to imagine happening or originating in gray, drizzly, low-key, low-waged Britain.
It wasn’t just this that gave America a mythical status, however. It was then a land far more distant to Britons than it is now. Few of The Clash’s generation had had the opportunity to see it firsthand because up until September 1977, when Laker Skytrain began offering round-trip tickets to the States for £118, the cost of transatlantic flight was so high that it was primarily restricted to businessmen and the rich.
And, of course, rock stars. The Clash (airfares paid by their record company) naturally exulted in the privilege of being in a country only recently completely beyond their reach, a privilege by which all their mates and relatives would also naturally be mightily impressed. The lyric of “Gates of the West” marvels that they have relocated from usual climes like North London’s Camden Town Station to 44th and 8th in New York. “I should be jumping, shouting that I made it all this way,” it says, with the chorus positing a receptive American audience in the form of characters it calls Eastside Jimmy and Southside Sue. However, a note of ambiguity is injected, with The Clash communicating that it’s difficult to get too carried away at their hot status considering all the injustice and suffering they see around them in the Home of the Brave.
It was a canny move to allow Jones to take the vocal. Jones is a hugely underrated vocalist whose intense emotionality can lift a song from the realms of the very good to the great. This is a case in point. He audibly takes an almost blush-making delight in bringing his music to the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll.
As if The Clash’s development hadn’t been underlined enough by The Cost of Living, the EP closes with a re-recording of “Capital Radio” that constitutes a handy—and astounding—barometer of their progress in the twenty-five months since they first laid down the song.
The motivation for the revisit was actually the band’s dismay that their fans were having to shell out extortionate sums for the NME EP, which had already become a collector’s item. However, the souped-up, broadened-out, better-played, more clearly sung version of that scraggly original coincidentally served to illustrate that this band were developing at a lightning pace and not sacrificing an iota of beef in the process.
It starts almost tauntingly with a piece of noodling on acoustic guitar before one of Jones’s trademark “one-two-free-fours!” unleashes, what might be termed these days, a re-imagining. The pace is faster, Jones peels off guitar-hero runs of which he would not have been capable in 1977, and a new humorous, spoken-word section features some superb blurred drum work from Headon.
Of course, the conscientious gesture by The Clash in providing a new version of this song in no way reduced the silly-money prices being fetched by the NME EP: the whole point of completists is that they want every different recording. The original “Capital Radio” is now freely available on CD, where it has been renamed “Capital Radio One” to differentiate it from the Cost of Living version (a confusing re-titling for Britons, as it looks like a conflation of the names of radio stations Capital Radio and Radio One, plus it can cause a muddle with 1981 Clash B-side “Radio One”). “Capital Radio Two”—as the re-recording is now known—soon began to have its own rarity status because the Cost of Living EP was quickly deleted, with its tracks remaining uncollected on album ironically long past the point where the first “Capital Radio” had been made fairly widely available on American rarities album Black Market Clash.
A 48-second mock advertisement closes The Cost of Living wherein Strummer in a cod Jamaican accent proclaims to the backing of “I Fought the Law” the EP’s availability. Because it was ignored when Clash compilations were assembled, this mini-track became even more rare than either version of “Capital Radio” ever was. These days, of course, the Internet has made obsolete the very idea of a piece of music being rare (as opposed to the disc on which it was issued).
When Epic Records refused to release The Clash’s debut album in 1977 on the grounds of it being too abrasive for American ears, it made many wonder whether the world had moved on in any way in the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll in the more than a decade since The Who’s classic single “My Generation” had been greeted with incomprehension by a U.S. label who thought the iconic feedback was a mastering error. Ordinary Americans—always more intelligent than countrymen who have power over them—responded by simply buying The Clash on import. Its sales of 100,000 copies are reputed to have made it the most successful import in history up to then. In July 1979, Epic—probably mindful of the fact that all the profits from those imports were going to CBS in Britain—finally gave in. With follow-up Give ’em Enough Rope having long been available Stateside and with The Clash’s third album actually not far off, the label agreed to a domestic release for The Clash—albeit on their own terms.
For the U.S. version of The Clash, Epic jettisoned—apparently arbitrarily—“Deny,” “Cheat,” “Protex Blue,” and “48 Hours” to make room for singles and B-sides. (The album version of “White Riot” was additionally replaced by the single version.) As those singles hadn’t been released in America, no extra sales would have been conferred—except perhaps from those who had bought the import and who could now be expected to purchase the new edition to get hold of the hard-to-find 45s. The completely anachronistic “I Fought the Law” was also tossed in, while the running order was shuffled. In an apparent final declaration of no faith in the product, the label added a free single containing “Groovy Times” and “Gates of the West.”
It was an American record company behaving in a way to which British groups were long used. Everybody knew that Beatles and Stones albums up to 1967 were “buggered about with” by the “Yanks.” Just about every other member of the so-called British Invasion also found their long-playing artistic vision traduced via the dropping of cuts (a means of enabling the creation of additional albums), the jumbling of running orders, the throwing on of tracks that in their homeland had only ever been intended as singles, B-sides, and EP tracks, and—worst of all—the deployment of an artificial stereo processing which rendered previously raw and powerful music antiseptic and thin. Although by 1979 the “rechanneled stereo” issue no longer existed in an industry that had left mono behind, The Clash’s art had otherwise been subjected by Epic to quintessentially American record label philistinism.
Yet it has to be admitted that the American version of The Clash—the cover of which featured the same image as on the UK issue but with a blue instead of green border—was not completely bereft of thoughtfulness. How else is one to describe the sequencing of “Complete Control” after “Remote Control”? Or the fact that “White Riot” is followed by “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais”? Some even detected a similar inter-track dialogue in the other pairings on the original vinyl side one: “Clash City Rockers”/“I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” and “London’s Burning”/“I Fought the Law.”
However, it wasn’t this revealed understanding of the band’s music that mollified Strummer about the U.S. version of the album. “It was a relief to see it go out ’cos they didn’t want it released in the first place,” he told this author in 2002. “If you’ve never heard of the group before, it’s kind of a good bunch of tunes really. It wasn’t the days or the time for concept albums. Punk was quite throwaway so we didn’t sit around sniveling because the track order was changed . . . Punk was more about getting a message out rather than worrying about the details. We felt that we had our say on the tunes and we got sick of arguing with them.”
The “good bunch of tunes really” attitude held sway with the public: the American The Clash reached no. 126 on the U.S. chart, two places higher than Give ’em Enough Rope. We will never know how much higher it would have gone had the U.S. version and import-copy sales been combined, but it was still a handy way-paver for their third album. It was also a hit with critics: in Robert Christgau’s Village Voice review, he gushed, “Cut for cut, this may be the greatest rock and roll album . . . ever manufactured in the U.S. . . .”
The third Clash album would, like its predecessor, bequeath a single.
Those inclined to cry “sellout” were probably not mollified that “London Calling” was the album’s sole spin-off 45 and had an otherwise unavailable B-side. Nor that it was technically itself otherwise unavailable when it appeared—that status only lasted the seven days before the release of its identically titled parent album in the UK. However, such issues lacked potency this time around, for, courtesy of a deal struck by the band with their label which had a delightful element of getting one over on a corporation, London Calling was a double set retailing for the price of a single album.
“London Calling” is a song rooted in political debates which now seem quaint and antediluvian. In 1979, the Cold War was still raging and—come the following year and the ascension of the hawkish Ronald Reagan to the American presidency—was soon to reach its zenith. That the Americans and Russians were so antagonistic was disturbing to say the least: they had missiles trained on each other in various parts of the globe that could destroy all life on the planet many times over. With the word “nuclear” therefore possessing for many pejorative connotations, it only made more disturbing the accident at Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, in March 1979. Although the partial meltdown at a civilian power plant was ultimately not considered to have caused major health or environmental damage, it occurred in the very month of the release of The China Syndrome. Not only did this motion picture portray safety failures and cover-ups thereof at a nuclear power plant, but said fictional power plant was located in Pennsylvania, the American state in which Three Mile Island was situated. For all these reasons, the last year of the Seventies was one in which both nuclear weapons (synonymous with the phrase Mutually Assured Destruction, with its ’nuff-said, beyond-parody acronym) and nuclear power (the waste from which was known to remain toxic for thousands of years) had reputations which stank to high heaven.
When Joe Strummer’s romantic partner suggested a song based on nuclear issues, the result was something that rather disproves those who accuse The Clash of being an overtly agitprop band. While the group of course leaned in that direction, Jones’s and (especially) Strummer’s intelligence militated against manifestos. In the hands of The Tom Robinson Band or even The Jam, the issues of nuclear weapons and nuclear power would have led to sloganeering and/or preaching. Strummer’s song (unusually, he was the prime mover behind the melody as well as the lyric) is a somewhat more humorous and opaque take on the issue.
Although Strummer stirs unease with references to a nuclear error and the breakout of a war that unleashes the terrifying prospects of engines ceasing to run, thinning wheat crops, a flaring sun, and a burgeoning ice age, he also can’t stop cracking jokes, if morbid ones. Using the conceit of a BBC World Service transmission—“This is London Calling” was broadcast in Received Pronunciation across the globe by the corporation at the start of radio programs—his narrator warns not to look to the capital: London no longer swings except for the police truncheons whistling down. He also warns against looking to rock idols for salvation.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a major political organization in Britain at the time of the composition and release of “London Calling.” It has since withered on the vine, testament to the fact that the public’s anxiety about nuclear weapons all but evaporated once the Soviet Union began to break up in the late Eighties and its constituent parts became allies of a sort of the NATO countries. Nuclear power to some extent also ceased to be an issue, not because disturbing accidents stopped happening but because it became less popular among governments as a means of generating a way to keep the lights on. Even the song’s references to the possibility of London being submerged are antiquated. The Thames flooding the capital was a background fear in Britain for many decades—as prevalent as the dreaded prospect of the Big One in California today—but was finally put to rest in 1982 with the completion of the Thames Barrier. “London Calling” is therefore now absolutely bereft of its once cutting-edge topicality. Moreover, judged on paper, parts of the lyric are whimsical, even risible. There are non sequiturs like references to a drug-addled friend nodding off, Strummer’s own recent hepatitis infection, and even zombies. The sense of an arbitrary stream-of-consciousness is added to by Strummer’s statement that the fact that London is drowning doesn’t bother him because he lives by the river, a reasoning that has no logic and is only thrown in because in real life he was currently domiciled along the path of the Thames. Yet, the track feels denuded of power neither by its irrelevance or its quirkiness. Part of the reason for this is that enough time has passed since the end of the nuclear era for its status to have made a transition from embarrassingly dated to accurate snapshot of a bygone time. Part of it is the sheer excellence of the lyric, whatever its whimsicality: it’s both insistent (to which, of course, Strummer’s emphatic, impassioned vocals contribute) and highly colloquial (“And you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!”).
Mostly it’s due to the symbiotic relationship between the biting songwords and the intense music. It’s as though no other subject could be married to this instrumentation. Instantly catchy from the moment one hears its incredibly sustained synchronized, two-note guitar lick, “London Calling” shortly moves toward utterly haunting. Mick Jones’s continual ghostly vocal echoing of the title phrase and the ominous rumbling bass runs are the perfect accompaniment to Strummer’s breathless recounting of catastrophe. The groove of the song is so tense that it feels ready to blow up at any moment. Headon maintains a pitilessly fast clip throughout. The instrumental break finds Strummer cawing dementedly and guitars squalling as if in imitation. The instruments are pared back for an ominously subdued final section. When proceedings end, it’s in the ultimate, literal sense. Jones enunciates one last desperate radio ID but there is nobody left to hear: the entire population of the world has disappeared in the shadow cast by the mushroom cloud to end them all, and Strummer’s warbling of a line from Guy Mitchell’s/Tommy Steele’s hit “Singing the Blues” is cut off in mid-stream.
Despite the apocalyptic subject matter ostensibly rendering it chart-unfriendly, its sheer, compelling power ensured that “London Calling” achieved the band’s highest placing on the UK chart while they were still extant. However, rather than no. 11, it could conceivably have made pole position. Certainly, it’s rather interesting to learn the identity of the record that did top the chart in the late-December/early-January time frame that the Clash record’s release date made the obvious juncture for such an eventuality. If Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”—a brooding chant about the iniquities of the British education system—could be the nation’s Christmas number one, there is no reason to believe that, in other circumstances, “London Calling” couldn’t.
That the Clash never had a UK top ten single in their lifetime, let alone a chart-topper, was a consequence of one of the principled stands they were wont to take. This particular one would cause them serious commercial problems in their homeland over the entire course of their career: their refusal to accept invitations to appear on Top of the Pops.
That the power then held by the BBC’s Thursday night TV chart program was inexplicable to non-Britons was summed up by comments made by American Roy Thomas Baker to John Tobler and Stuart Grundy for their 1982 BBC radio series about his profession, The Record Producers: “One of the minor gripes I have about England . . . is that you can’t have a hit in England, unless it’s played on Top of the Pops . . . Now if people don’t like it, that’s fine . . . but what annoys me is if they don’t get the chance to hear it. One of the reasons that the first Queen album was a hit over here but not in England, was that over here the FM/rock stations played ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ on the radio . . . It wasn’t a hit in England basically because it wasn’t on Top of the Pops, and that’s the bottom line to it.”
That Top of the Pops—with odd exceptions—only featured records that had already made it into the charts was hardly contemptible: it had outlasted all other television pop shows since its arrival in January 1964 specifically because of its populism. The problem arose because of the concentration of power in the British media. Once a record had generated sufficient sales through word of mouth and/or radio play to make it into the charts, and therefore become eligible for inclusion on Top of the Pops via a studio appearance or the playing of a promotional film, the record was guaranteed to do even better. Because Top of the Pops was the only regular program dedicated to popular music on any of the nation’s three television channels, the entirety of the country’s pop demographic watched it. A record’s sales would therefore skyrocket after just one appearance. Records which hadn’t appeared on the program were not debarred from the charts either formally or informally, but that virtuous circle of exposure meant that the upper reaches of the charts inevitably tended to be dominated by records that had been heard and seen on Top of the Pops.
The opportunity of an appearance on Top of the Pops was therefore a privilege that no musical artist could afford to turn down. Nor would many want to: so ingrained was the program in the nation’s psyche, and so much was a Top of the Pops appearance a barometer of success, that it was every aspiring musician’s dream to be seen on it. The only people who declined were members of the rock aristocracy who were too dignified, rich, or possessed of an albums-oriented fanbase to feel the need to bother anymore. Until punk. There was never any question of either The Sex Pistols or The Clash agreeing to turn up at the BBC’s famous circular building in White City, London, to promote their latest product. As the enemies of society, the very idea of the Pistols peddling “Pretty Vacant”—the first of their opening trio of singles the corporation did not ban—on an inane, mainstream show like Top of the Pops was absurd. As for The Clash, Strummer explained their hostility to the program in a Clash mini-biography given to journalists with their second LP: “. . . they refused to appear on ‘Top of the Pops’, considering it an old pop TV show left over from the 1960s, which requires performers to mime along as their record is played at a low volume somewhere in the distance.”
It should be clarified that this did not mean that either group’s music was not represented on the program at all. Sex Pistols fare was seen and heard on Top of the Pops via promotional films (or videos, as they would increasingly be known). While The Clash were so absolutist as to even ban their “promos” being aired on Top of the Pops (they got into a tussle with CBS about the label wanting to supply the corporation a clip of “Tommy Gun”), this meant that they were running the risk of the show’s resident scantily clad dance troupe Legs & Co. (successors to the mantle of Pan’s People, disbanded in 1976) performing one of their famously literal, inevitably demeaning interpretations of their art as it played over the monitors. This very fate befell The Clash’s “Bankrobber” in 1980: the sexy dancers appeared behind jail-type bars in leotards striped to resemble a cartoon burglar’s top, bandanas across their faces, hurling money into the air and holding up a sign reading “This is a stick-up.” Not that this happened often: any musical act known to not currently be aboard who declined to make a Top of the Pops studio appearance would—as much as such was possible while maintaining the show’s validity—be punished in the form of their record not being represented except by a title card in the chart rundown.
The Pistols’s and The Clash’s problem was not with—as has often been erroneously reported—miming per se. After all, they pretended to sing and play unplugged instruments in promos. Rather it was the whole cheesy aura of the show, which as well as Legs & Co. (whose decorative function some found sexist) featured unctuous presenters (all, incestuously, BBC radio DJs), banal banter, garish backdrops, and fatuous screen effects. The musicians didn’t even mime to their actual records. In another example of the disproportionate power of the trade unions of the era, Musicians Union rules dictated that the BBC oblige the acts to lip-synch to a re-recording of the single made in their representative’s sight, one whose one-day turnaround made a mockery of the care invested in the laying down of the record over weeks or even months. Meanwhile, the show’s title was so familiar that nobody thought about it anymore, but even that was steeped in old fartdom: Britons had stopped referring to the charts as the “pops” long before its first broadcast. In short, The Clash didn’t like Top of the Pops because it catered not to rock culture but show business sensibilities. Not only was it not cool, it was in no way interested in being so.
Yet in declining to make Top of the Pops appearances, The Clash were cutting their own throats. (The fact that the Pistols cut their own throats by unraveling in all but brand name would shortly make their non-appearance policy moot.) Every musical act, no matter how edgy, uncompromising, or alternative, wants an audience. The Clash were shutting themselves off from large parts of their potential demographic. Of course they might be inclined to assert that in getting to the cusp of the top ten without consenting to a Top of the Pops performance represented a triumph in itself, but The Clash were always speaking in interviews of their desire to convert unenlightened music lovers to their music and beliefs.
Other New Wave groups who considered themselves to have an anti-showbiz attitude distinct from previous generations of artists were happy to appear on the program. Among them numbered The Adverts, The Boomtown Rats, Generation X, The Jam, Sham 69, The Rezillos, Stiff Little Fingers, The Stranglers, and X-Ray Spex. Their oft-repeated rationale that they were taking on the system from the inside was not without validity. Few would claim after witnessing their glowering and/or frenzied performances that lip-synching on crassly decorated sets before bopping teenagers had somehow robbed them of their integrity. (Yes, not even when Jimmy Pursey took to prefacing Sham 69’s appearances with a variant of “ ’allo, mum! ’oo’s on Top of the Pops, then?”)
The most significant of the aforementioned artists are The Jam. The Woking band had by 1979 become almost synonymous with The Clash, so similar on one level were the two groups’ styles and philosophies. By rejecting the chance to put their wares before the widest public possible, The Clash had to sit and watch as The Jam achieved the dream The Clash had always harbored but which their ethics had denied them: racking up number-one hit singles with records combining hard-hitting music and lyrics of social protest.
In June 1979, Strummer told the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray that the refusal to appear on Top of the Pops was “tough shit for us now, because all we get is 22 or 23 in the chart, but in the long run it’s gonna be for the best.” It was a not untypical Strummer admission of regret coupled with a meaningless addendum of defiance. The Clash were not, individually, men who found it easy to admit they were wrong. Their group identity was so steeped in declarations of integrity as to virtually make a refusal to back down a badge of honor. With them having nailed their colors so firmly to the mast of their contempt for Top of the Pops, they could never make a U-turn. If they were ever so inclined, of course, they would have been conscious of the fact that there were plenty of journalists on, and correspondents to, the music press who would be ready to denounce their betrayal of values. So they stuck to their guns, even as they did other things which signified they were losing touch with their original ideals—for instance, the way that Strummer for promotional purposes became increasingly close to The Sun, a British tabloid whose pro-Thatcherite values were the quintessence of most everything he despised.
The Clash would continue to have minor British hits until they expired, but there is no getting away from the fact that being Top of the Pops “refuseniks” robbed them of the large audience the quality of their music deserved.
Quite remarkably, the B-side of the “London Calling” single boasted a track every bit as good as the A-Side. “Armagideon Time” is a sensuous reggae first recorded by Willie Williams in 1978, although it began life as an instrumental variously known as “Real Rock” and “Reel Rock” by a group variously known as the Soul Vendors and Sound Dimension. The Jamaican music industry tradition of recording new vocals over old tracks has ensured that there has been some rancor over the song’s publishing. Although the composition of “Real”/“Reel Rock” was originally partly credited to Coxsone Dodds—owner of the studio in which it was recorded—The Clash credited it to Williams. It is now attributed to Williams and Jackie Mittoo, a musician who was influential on the day of the recording by the Soul Vendors/Sound Dimension.
Although packed with motifs alluding to the Old Testament that will only fully make sense to Jamaican Rastafarians of the era (not least the play on words in the title), it also has a haunting, apparently socially conscious vocal refrain—“A lot of people won’t get no supper tonight,” with the “supper” replaced by “justice” in its repeat—tailor-made for The Clash.
The Clash’s version is—as you would expect from them at this stage—heavier and faster than the original, but it is no musical hybrid like “Police & Thieves,” “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais,” or “Safe European Home.” Instead, it is the group’s first authentic reggae. It also enriches and broadens the source. A spiky flourish of a guitar riff—counterpointed by organ warbles—and a pulsating bottom-end are built on to create an extraordinarily opulent arrangement. An additional, vaguely oriental guitar riff is replicated on tubular bells. Firework sound effects complete a brooding impression of trouble about to kick off at any moment.
The track also reveals that Strummer is truly beginning to come into his own as a vocalist. The man at whom the old guard had always laughed for his muffled and sibilant delivery was learning to overcome the impediments created by his broken front teeth via an absolute commitment to the material, one that was on a higher level than such things as his inarticulate loss of control in the final verse of the album version of “White Riot.” What is remarkable about his emoting here is that it doesn’t feel like artifice, the feelings-to-order standard for a singer in front of a microphone, but instead a spontaneous welling-up of genuine compassion and anger.
And then there are instances of brilliance that are down to serendipity rather than planning and application. At around the three-minute mark of “Armagideon Time,” a voice suddenly intrudes on the proceedings, demanding “Alright, time’s up. Let’s have you out of there!” The band break off, with Strummer insisting that the owner of the voice not push them when they’re hot. Then as if on a signal from him—indeed on the very word “hot!”—they launch back into the song, which continues—exquisitely—for a further three quarters of a minute.
The intruding voice belongs to sharp-dressing Clash aide Kosmo Vinyl who, before the recording, opined that all the great singles in history had lasted no longer than 2:58. It was a silly piece of absolutism, the type of which is often heard from music lovers of his pose-adoring, rock-myth-loving generation. Both he and Strummer would have been perfectly au fait with the fact that such a rationale dismissed “The House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals, “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan, “Hey Jude” by The Beatles, and sundry other titanic rock classics. However, something about the assertion appealed to the rock ’n’ roll romantic in Strummer, possibly because it stirred fond memories of all the sub–three minute rock classics that proliferated in his boyhood, as well as provoked bad memories of the fashion for the bloated epics purveyed by the likes of Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Yes that punk had insisted was a case of Emperor’s-New-Clothes elaboration without improvement. Accordingly, Strummer told Vinyl to stop the band when they had reached that crucial point beyond which there were supposedly only diminishing returns. When Vinyl did that, though, Strummer rebuffed him because he had concluded that the group were on fire.
Instead of ruining the take, the interruption ratchets up its power. It makes the listener jump on the first listen, as well as on those subsequent occasions when he isn’t prepared for it. It feels like an organic part of the record, like some piece of verbal interplay inserted to heighten the drama: the enunciated words and their tone have the smack of the loud-hailer barking of a police officer at a street demonstration. Adding to an air of serendipity-verging-on-miracle is the fact that Simonon maintains his throbbing bassline throughout Vinyl’s intrusion, almost as though he is keeping intact the thread of the music for a full-scale resumption he always knew was going to occur.
“London Calling” was the subject of the first-ever Clash 12-inch single. For a brief moment in the early to mid-Eighties, the 12-inch looked like the future of music. A single that was the same size as an album was a concept that sounded strange at first, but the wider dynamic range conferred by a 12-inch disc containing only one or two tracks was a revelation.
However, 12-inch singles quickly became a source of mild controversy. Conscious of the need to persuade consumers that it was worth shelling out the extra money for the new format, record companies and artists began to throw on enticements. They usually did so in the easiest and cheapest way possible: extended mixes and remixes—artificially lengthened or differentiated versions of the A- or B-sides or both. The sound effects and looping integral to this process had the upshot of compounding what was already a grand sense of pointlessness with buffoonishness. That sense of tomfoolery was underlined by the fact that extended mixes and remixes were often given fatuous parenthesized subtitles like “Day Mix” and “Night Mix.” This entire phenomenon was profoundly depressing to people beginning to get agitated by an increasing mechanization of music, whether it be via the growing prevalence of synthesizers or the creeping spiritual insipidness of a medium that (punk notwithstanding) had been losing its sociopolitical timbre for the best part of a decade. Although 12-inch singles could occasionally generate worthy records—New Order took advantage of the medium to purvey “Blue Monday,” a groundbreaking piece of electropop of 7½ minutes’ duration, which they refused to release on 7-inch because it would have been either brutally cut or muffled—the overwhelming impression about them was of an adjunct to an artist’s canon that could be entirely disregarded. Some artists seemed to be embarrassed by the issue. The sleeve of one 12-inch single by Eighties UK pop act ABC bore a sticker carrying an almost defiant statement that the contents were exactly the same as the 7-inch and that the purchaser had the choice of which to buy according to his own preferences.
The vogue for 12-inch mixes—and indeed vinyl itself—was brought to an end by the advent of the age of the CD, where sound quality (and disc size) was uniform. However, the half decade or so in which 12-inch singles flourished has ensured that all recording artists active in that era have discographies littered with aesthetically negligible variants of songs in their core canon. The multiplicity of versions of the same song and the similar titles given them often bring about confusion. For instance, many is The Clash expert who can unhesitatingly reel off the band’s corpus up to the 1981 12-inch single “This Is Radio Clash,” whose additional tracks, “Radio Clash,” “Outside Broadcast,” and “Radio Five,” invariably cause them to stumble in their litany. Even The Clash get confused by these four variations of the same song: the single’s tracks have been known to be given incorrect titles on compilations.
The onetime prevalence of 12-inch singles created an additional problem when the phenomenon of box sets took off. Many music fans are adamant that those box sets that come attached with a claim of comprehensiveness should live up literally to it by rounding up everything commercially released by the relevant act: B-sides, original tracks from multi-artist compilations, cuts from promo-only releases, and all other forms of rarity, including mixes which only nominally make a track different to its template. Some Clash fans were therefore dismayed when Sound System, the massive twelve-disc Clash box set of 2013, omitted—as well as “Outside Broadcast” and “Radio Five”—alternate mixes of “Armagideon Time” (“Justice Tonight” and “Kick It Over”), “Bankrobber” (“Robber Dub”), and “Rock the Casbah” (“Mustapha Dance”). Yet despite their apoplexy, it’s unlikely that many of them would profess to enjoy listening to any of the omitted tracks, which may be an indictment of completist fans but is indubitably also an indictment of the very invention of 12-inch mixes and remixes.
Having said all of that, The Clash thought laterally when it came time for their first 12-inch mix. “Justice Tonight” and “Kick It Over”—versions of “Armagideon Time” of a cumulative length of nine minutes that appeared on the B-side of the 12-inch single of “London Calling” (the A-side of which featured the same versions of “London Calling” and “Armagideon Time” as on either side of the 7-inch)—were an immersion into a style of musical experimentalism in which the group were already deeply interested: dub. “Dubwise stylee,” to use the Jamaican vernacular, is a reggae tradition dating from the late Sixties. It involves removing a record’s vocal track and manipulating elements of its instrumentation, typically by echo, delay, drop-out, repetition, and extension. Often the only songwords will be snippets of the excised vocal track that are made to skitter weirdly across the soundscape. (The very titles “Justice Tonight” and “Kick It Over” constitute an allusion to this, being phrases lifted from the lyric of “Armagideon Time.”) Some conventional (mostly First World) musicians find this process ridiculous. Others think good dub has a mesmeric, dreamlike quality.
As reggae enthusiasts, The Clash could be expected to have an affinity for the dub medium. Admittedly, the results were qualitatively not too dissimilar to the more modern technique of the extended mix, but “Justice Tonight” and “Kick It Over” could at least be said to have a motivation more elevated than the usual arbitrary and half-interested impetuses behind a 12-inch mix. Sure enough, there would be many more dub versions of Clash songs after this. Nor was this restricted to locations synonymous with musical afterthoughts such as 12-inch singles or B-sides of 7-inch singles: almost a sixth of their triple Sandinista! album is comprised of dubs.
The Clash initially toyed with calling their new album The Last Testament, but—possibly concluding that this would be a case of self-mythologizing a conceited step too far—instead made London Calling, released on December 14, 1979, the only Clash album, then or now, named after one of its songs.
They began recording the long-playing follow-up to Give ’em Enough Rope at Wessex Studios in late August 1979. That the album had been worked through in a rehearsal space beforehand was probably crucial to its quality, circumventing those problems faced by bands who effectively “rehearse” their first albums in live settings and are then surprised that subsequent albums—recorded when they aren’t so readily able to hone new material—are less assured. Bar the mixing, the album was finished a month later.
The rehearsal space was Vanilla Rehearsal Studios in Pimlico, southwest London. Their previous Camden Town base, Rehearsals Rehearsals, was no longer available to the band because London Calling was the first Clash album not recorded with Bernard Rhodes at the group’s management helm. The Svengali figure who had to some extent molded their image, attitude, and even song subjects had been sacked in October 1978 over his dictatorial approach. Mick Jones’s cocaine hauteur had lately been both irritating his colleagues and making them doubt his commitment to the punk ethos, but Rhodes’s suggested solution of ousting him in favor of Sex Pistol Steve Jones was going too far. Simonon’s girlfriend, Caroline Coon, managed their affairs for a brief period after that. Although technically Blackhill Enterprises were their new managers, The Clash always seemed slightly discomforted by the fact of their affairs being overseen by a mainstream team whose other clients had included Pink Floyd, no doubt partly because of the inevitable sarky comments from music journalists.
Perhaps recruiting Guy Stevens as their new album’s producer was a response to this, as though the band were seeking to replace one eccentric-verging-on-demented true believer in the multi-faceted power of rock with another. As well as having overseen the demos The Clash cut for Polydor, Stevens was yet another link to Mott The Hoople, having been the manager of Mick Jones’s heroes.
However, although Stevens is credited as producer of London Calling, eyewitnesses seem to agree that his quasi-psychosis reduced his real role to merely that of cheerleader, and even sometimes obstacle. Jones and Bill Price appear to have been the real producers, with Price in the subservient role. Price told Marcus Gray in his exhaustive/exhausting book on the album, Route 19 Revisited, that Jones’s dominance even extended—following The Clash’s departure of the studio for an American tour with the mixing process not yet begun—to transatlantic phone instructions. Despite the guitarist’s undoubted maestro position, the resulting album has Price’s sonic stamp: London Calling possesses the same widescreen, larger-than-life attributes as Mott, also engineered by Price. Whoever is mainly responsible, London Calling is one of the best-produced albums of all time, so rich, layered, and slick as to impact on the listener’s senses to almost dizzying effect. That and the often joyous tone to the songs make it easily the most accessible thing The Clash released in their career.
To which the response of many detractors was, “That, sir, is your charge”—or its, no doubt, profane punk equivalent. A significant number of critics thought London Calling an atrocious betrayal of principles. This wasn’t so much represented in the reviews—although Garry Bushell of Sounds dismissed it in precisely those terms—but in asides in features on and reviews of other groups over the following months: the on-going low-level warfare then made possible by the multiplicity and frequency of British music papers.
To The Clash, the brickbats must have been bewildering. Not only were they on the crest of an artistic wave, but by intricate maneuverings they had pulled off a coup that lived up to all their man-of-the-people rhetoric. The band had been annoyed that CBS had insisted on a retail price of £1.49 for The Cost of Living rather than the one pound that was their preference. They had requested of CBS that the new album feature a free single, and, once that objective had been secured, innocently suggested the single be in 12-inch format. In neglecting to stipulate a maximum content for the gratis single, CBS ensured that the band were free to include the same number of tracks on this second disc as one might expect to find on an LP. This, and the undertaking the band had secured that the album have a recommended retail price of £5, meant that The Clash were providing their fans a double album for the price of one, albeit a fairly short one (around 65 minutes, where a standard double-album length was approximately 80). Strummer described it to Chris Bohn in Melody Maker on December 29 that year as, “our first real victory over CBS.”
However, those disgusted with the record were not about to be mollified by either value for money or patent aesthetic excellence. With the growing consensus that the musical definition of punk was becoming passé and a dead end in which nobody with any sense was going to stay, few expected The Clash to continue sounding like they had on their first album. The objection was that the album proved that The Clash had completed the “going bloody American” process allegedly begun by their second album.
There were certainly now nods in their music to American pop luminaries and stylings, from Phil Spector to Stax soul. The values of other U.S. hit-makers seemed implicitly embraced in keyboards, horns, an overall exuberant tone, and ultra-slick production methods. The leap in logic that critics and died-in-the-wool punks made, however, was that such things were the sole preserve of residents of the U.S.A. or those who aspired to their alleged values. The album had a considerable reggae element, which, while it didn’t constitute an insistence on their Englishness (their accents and vernacular continued to serve that purpose), hardly suggested artists disdaining any music except commercially safe mainstream American rock. Moreover, in no sense did the album’s American-set songs like “Koka Kola” or “The Right Profile” accept the assumptions of American supremacists. Even the Yankophilia of the cover “Brand New Cadillac” was partially an illusion: it was written by Vince Taylor, more transatlantic than American.
The record’s exuberance seemed a sellout to some people because of the gushing ambience then surrounding American popular culture: it’s less pronounced today, but in the Seventies, the United States seemed to be represented by the toothpaste smiles and smug homilies of television talking heads who seemed laughable compared to the more sarcastic presenters to whom Britons were used. Moreover, it somehow seemed wrong for a band born in the fires of punk—and who still claimed to adhere to its values—to sound happy.
The final confirmation of sellout for some was the cover artwork and album packaging. Pennie Smith’s dramatic in-concert photo of Paul Simonon smashing his bass was reminiscent of The Who’s Pete Townshend’s stage shtick. The lapel-grabbing pink and green jagged lettering was deliberately redolent of the design of the first Elvis Presley album. While the jacket seemed to demonstrate an un-punk sense of being in thrall to rock antecedents, the album’s format of two records contained in a single outer sleeve, with the discs inside housed in separate card sleeves bearing untidily hand-scrawled annotation, was very reminiscent of the design of The Rolling Stones’s 1972 double set Exile on Main St. It felt as if not only were The Clash paying homage to one of the rock gods dethroned by punk, but they were also having the presumption to bracket their latest work with an acknowledged classic.
As with so many controversies stemming from the punk revolution, it seems absurd today that such things were ever issues, and as with so many problems afflicting The Clash it was partly their own fault, inevitable from the moment they wrote “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” A stung Strummer was still complaining about the album’s reception more than two years later when he told the New Musical Express of its genesis, “I never thought about beefburgers once, or Mickey Mouse, or the Statue of Liberty.”
In the heated and uptight climate of the time, it was less easy to see that the album confirmed that The Clash had learned to harness the power of punk without needing to opt for either the sort of minimalism to be found on their first album or the crash-and-thunder evinced on Give ’em Enough Rope. On London Calling, The Clash reinvented the very concept of punk by demonstrating that it could be about a social and artistic conscience rather than a particular sound.
That their music was now glossy and melodic and their lyrics generous and warm was a function of the fact that they were leagues more proficient and leagues wiser than the group that had made The Clash. Their new album was life-affirming, but it was not the syrupy result of a success that had confined them to ivory towers. Their songs continued to acknowledge the harsh realities of the lives of their fans.
The Exile on Main St. similarities weren’t superficial. The Clash did now undeniably sound like the early-Seventies Rolling Stones. However, it was in a punk-positive sense. They were what The Rolling Stones might have been if the Stones had come after punk rather than helped cause it: possessed of a “mateyness” and a tenderheartedness antithetical to those kings of hauteur, and displaying a rebelliousness not predicated on a belligerence that could as easily be rooted in self-aggrandizement as social conscience. And if the Clash were now a rock, rather than a punk, band, they were also the perfect rock band for the post-punk era.
The title track kicks off London Calling in dramatic fashion. Following its emphatic Englishness comes an unexpected journey into Americana, albeit one—as mentioned before—of less purity than might be assumed.
Just as old rockers enjoy only semi-seriously fostering absolutist myths such as maximum single length, so they have penchants for championing and ranking unacknowledged greatness. In The Clash’s 1979 tour magazine The Armagideon Times, Headon called Vince Taylor’s “Brand New Cadillac” “the first British rock ’n’ roll song.” In 1999, Strummer insisted to Kieron Tyler of Mojo, “Vince Taylor was the beginning of British rock ’n’ roll. Before him there was nothing.” The Clash’s inclusion of “Brand New Cadillac” on London Calling was clearly partly a consequence of their romantic conclusion that Taylor had been the real thing unjustly neglected in favor of vanilla imposters like Cliff Richard.
However, it seems safe to assume that another part of their motivation was an additional romantic rocker’s penchant: a love of beautiful losers and damaged psyches. As mentioned previously, Syd Barrett, Peter Green, and Brian Wilson were rock musicians whose talents were decimated to a greater or lesser extent by LSD. Vince Taylor can unquestionably be bracketed in the same sad category of acid casualty. However, in rock fandom one acquires cool by virtue of being au fait with the obscure. To invoke the name of Taylor—either in conversation or via the gesture of a cover version—was hipper than referencing Barrett, Green, or Wilson because fewer people knew about Taylor, who was also a more tragic figure because his decline was not cushioned by the sort of wealth possessed by the others.
In the Sixties, to express concern about the possible harmful effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide would have rendered one instantly unhip. Not that it was unknown that the drug produced ill effects: every “acidhead” had a story of a “bad trip.” However, in that decade society was discarding an authoritarian approach where one’s conduct, dress, and values were dictated by church, state, or employer. This often engendered a with-us-or-against-us climate that rendered one almost a figure of suspicion for raising the possibility of the potential long-term adverse side effects of recreational drugs favored by the young such as LSD. There was another kind of pressure (internal and external) against articulating doubts about acid: users adored it.
For a substance that has no odor, taste, or color, the effects of LSD are reported to be staggeringly vivid and powerful. The effect the drug has of suspending the “gatekeeping” part of the human brain leads to an avalanche of unfiltered impressions, or “sensory overload.” This gets translated into surreal experience: thinking one can see for a thousand miles or feeling that the ticking of a wristwatch is deafeningly loud. Moreover, it’s not only pleasure that is considered to be imparted by the drug, but wisdom too: many is the person who imagines that they have found on a trip the answer to life’s mysteries. Or as enthusiast Ken Kesey once claimed, “LSD lets you in on something.”
The vagueness of that endorsement will immediately arouse the suspicions of the skeptical—as will the fact that Kesey’s own talent seemed to evaporate in a psychedelic haze. After, in the first half of the Sixties, producing two rapturously received novels in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, Kesey seemed to dry up, issuing works very infrequently and to little acclaim. It was difficult not to conclude that his precipitous decline was directly related to the LSD consumption he enthusiastically championed.
Vince Taylor technically had an American upbringing, but Britons can plausibly claim him as their own: he was born in the English county of Middlesex and raised there until the age of seven. Moreover, in the late-Fifties he moved back to Britain to further the rock ’n’ roll career he’d begun in his adoptive America a few years earlier. There, he became part of the first wave of British rock ’n’ roll stars alongside the likes of Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, and Billy Fury. He didn’t have the chart hits those recording artists could boast but did possess something possibly more valuable. Although British rock always had a slightly ersatz feel prior to The Beatles reimagining the medium and exporting it back to its homeland, Taylor’s American accent, squared-jawed good looks, and redoubtable quiff gave him a greater air of authenticity than his new compatriots. That said, the only real semblance of gravitas in a recorded catalog dominated by covers of hoary old rock ’n’ roll chestnuts and generic originals is Taylor’s 1959 self-composed B-side “Brand New Cadillac.” It seems significant that Taylor’s main success was on continental Europe, where acclaim is afforded artists who would be considered negligible in Britain or America: the Lost in Translation syndrome.
Taylor might have been forgotten were it not for the tragic aura that ultimately hung over him. His recording career began dribbling away during the Sixties as drugs took their toll. He seems to have cottoned on to LSD before most in that era, and the legend is that a single acid trip left Taylor permanently mentally impaired and delusional. David Bowie met him several times in the mid-Sixties and recalled a very disturbed man with a messiah complex, babbling about UFOs and formulating plans to found a new Atlantis. Taylor’s condition inspired one of rock’s most famous concept works. Bowie told Paul Du Noyer in Q magazine in April 1990, “. . . he always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock ’n’ roll. I’m not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become . . . There was something very tempting about him going completely off the edge. Especially at my age, then, it seemed very appealing: Oh, I’d love to end up like that, totally nuts. Ha ha! And so he re-emerged in this Ziggy Stardust character.”
Bowie’s 1972 album about a doomed rock star, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was the only great piece of music associated with Taylor—until The Clash decided to record “Brand New Cadillac.” The trouble was, the Taylor song they chose to cover was inevitably provocative for the music press and parts of their fanbase. Cars—let alone iconic and beautiful ones like Cadillacs—were never part of the UK rock landscape. In post-war Britain, austerity meant that it was all Teds could do to scrape together the cash for their fancy clothes, let alone wheels. Even when a youth cult generational change had occurred and an offshoot of Teds—rockers—inhabited a more prosperous society, they could still only afford motorbikes as a mode of transport. The standard of living in the UK remained so far behind that of the U.S.A. that, even into the late Seventies, cruising around in an example of the big-finned beauties seen in films and magazine features remained firmly outside the experience of most of British youth. Hence a song celebrating an example of such was doomed to ring false—especially coming from artists who insisted on Englishness and repudiation of phony Americana. In that context, it’s easy to understand those who felt “Brand New Cadillac” both a retrograde step and talismanic of a loss of principles.
Once again, a dichotomy was eating at The Clash: they might disdain rock star excess, rock archetypes rooted in artifice, and the vulgarity of American culture, but they wouldn’t be rock fans if they didn’t also love those things. The attraction of the rock ’n’ roll dream—the path from poverty to riches and the sort of hedonistic extravagance recently summed up by Ian Dury as “Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll”—was lodged in the soul of every musician of their generation. Leather clothing and quiffs were synonymous with America, but few looked cooler in leather trousers at this juncture than Mick Jones, and few pulled off a quiff better than the increasingly Adonis-like Paul Simonon. And who the hell was going to celebrate the glories of a Ford Cortina over a Cadillac? (Well, actually The Tom Robinson Band, but that is another reason why TRB were never destined to capture the public imagination the way The Clash did.)
Just as clues to the Clash members’ love for the bulk of the back catalogs of the rock aristocracy had inevitably and increasingly begun seeping into their art—it’s difficult to play rock for very long without falling into line with the classic forms which created its appeal—so it must have occurred to The Clash that it would be increasingly silly to continue pointedly ignoring the points of reference of rock, many of which were American consumer durables. It’s true that The Jam—the yardstick against whom The Clash would increasingly be measured—would never write or record a song about such a thing as a Cadillac, but it’s almost certainly for that very reason of glum purism that The Jam’s music—however excellent it often was—rarely achieved the grandeur and excitement of which The Clash were capable.
There is also the proof-in-the-pudding argument. As with much The Clash touched at this juncture, their version of “Brand New Cadillac” is sublime. Vince Taylor and his Playboys’ original may not be great but is a high quality record: the whirling guitar riff is dramatic and flashy, the song has a blues element unusual for rockabilly (down to the first line of each verse being repeated), and the track almost daringly turns gender assumptions on their head (it’s the girl behind the wheel of the titular vehicle, and the guy getting dumped).
When Mick Jones plays the distinctive riff, his attempts to make it more dramatic than the original’s end up causing it to sound almost like a mockery of an archetype, something that Neil Hefti might have rejected as too outrageously over-the-top for even the Batman TV theme. It gives the track a comedic tinge, which can also be misinterpreted as defensive, as in “See? We’re not really serious about this Yank stuff.” Despite that element of the comic, as with “I Fought the Law”—their previous cover version that was allegedly a sellout to the Americans—The Clash beef up the song. Strummer executes brutal downstrokes on rhythm guitar, and the track has an overall greasy, dirty ambience, one that feels apposite in the context of discussion of a vehicle that will not have been a stranger to oil pits and dirty rags. This particularly applies to Jones’s sparks-raising lead guitar, a menacing presence throughout. Comic or serious or both, it would be a real safety-pinned curmudgeon who didn’t conclude that the whole thing is great fun.
Perhaps it is in deference to such types that Strummer (who undeniably sings in an American accent) attempts to provide the track punk credibility by throwing into the lyric “balls” and “Jesus Christ”—epithets Taylor would never have dared put into his original.
The danger with a band whose art is oriented around social commentary is to assume that their every song has political import. It’s naturally understood that the very small smattering of tracks in The Clash’s corpus that could be described as love songs have no social commentary content. However, with the rest, the listener automatically searches for a meaning in the sense of formal protest even where it seems elusive. “Jimmy Jazz” is a case in point. The opening line of this vista of street life states that police have raided a joint looking for a fellow called Jimmy Jazz. This, the use of the Ethiopian phrase “Satta massa gana” and the fact that Strummer sings in a semblance of patois, all lead to the natural conclusion that the story being told is about a Rastafarian facing harassment from the police, something strengthened by a reference to someone called Jimmy Dread, “dread” being a common word with multiple meanings among Jamaicans. At the time, this subject being explored by a British band would more than likely involve a denunciation of stop-and-search tactics employed by police forces. Known colloquially as SUS (“sussed out” being slang for “found out”), they allegedly unfairly targeted young black men.
Yet not even the staunchest critics of London’s Metropolitan Police would have suggested that any West Indian youth was ever subjected by them to the fate detailed for Mr. Dread: his ears and head being lopped off. Contemplating that fact, it becomes evident that “Jimmy Jazz” is merely a demi monde vignette of no ideological bent or profound import—or even linear logic. “A piece of nonsense” is how Strummer described the lyric to the Melody Maker’s Chris Bohn in 1979. (Aside from “Train in Vain” and the cover versions, Strummer wrote all of the lyrics on London Calling.) Strummer—as self-deprecating about his own work as he was self-aggrandizing about The Clash’s significance—was being unfair on himself. It’s more accurate to say that “Jimmy Jazz” is no less a piece of whimsy than “Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad.” The difference is that it’s on a far higher musical plane than that Give ’em Enough Rope throwaway, even perhaps The Clash’s most sophisticated creation up to this point.
Three tracks in, it is becoming clear just how remarkable a leap forward is this album: in 1977, The Clash would not even have been able to think about what they pull off, apparently effortlessly, here: a brass-augmented quasi-swing number. The track begins in muted but remarkable fashion with Jones effecting for several bars a pastiche of the languid style of legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Although the pace picks up, everything is unfamiliar: whistling sounds, strangulated, understated electric guitar, thrumming bass patterns, skittering drums, isolated downstrokes on acoustic guitar, and a horn section. The latter crop up on five other cuts, and their presence is always welcome, often blissful—not least in this track’s central section, where they and Headon strut proudly together into the instrumental break.
The brass section was facetiously credited as “The Irish Horns” in the album sleeve notes. They were in fact three-quarters of The Rumour Brass, a former adjunct of Graham Parker’s backing band: baritone/tenor saxophonist John Earle, tenor saxophonist Ray Beavis, and trumpeter Dick Hanson. (The group’s Chris Gower was not booked because The Clash were aiming for the sort of brass aggregation heard on Stax records, whose soul styling didn’t usually incorporate trombone.) All their work was recorded in one three-hour session wherein Strummer and Jones hummed the parts they envisaged sitting in the gaps they had left (instructions which The Rumour Brass apparently treated as suggestions only). Astoundingly considering this, the Brass’s contributions at no time sound like either an afterthought or an intrusion, always feeling like an integral part of the soundscape.
Toward the end of the track, we are treated to the sort of aural eventfulness that characterizes many parts of this album and which demonstrates the way that London Calling’s instrumentation and production are very much intertwined. The nonsensical phrase “And then it sucks!” is, as if on cue, followed by an avalanche of strummed and percussive noise. In all likelihood, Strummer was singing over an already completed track and was merely creating the impression of interacting with the players, but it—clearly deliberately—has the effect of a form of call-and-response. Strummer would convey this idea of the vocalist as a godlike figure—the instrumentation at his verbal command—in several other tracks, to bewitching effect.
Such is the aesthetic quality and aural richness of London Calling’s opening three numbers that it’s almost a relief to encounter a slight track. However, it has to be admitted that, with “Hateful,” those who complain of London Calling being guilty of tunelessness and cacophony are on relatively solid ground.
When the album appeared, there were people to be found complaining of it being “all just the same old chords.” In a literal sense, that accusation against such a melodically sophisticated and varied record was patent nonsense. However, the Clash fan was also uncomfortably aware of at least a glimmer of justification to the criticism. Half a dozen tracks on London Calling are untuneful in whole or in part: “Hateful,” “Koka Kola,” “Spanish Bombs,” “Clampdown,” and “Death or Glory” all have sections of melody that are unimaginative and/or monotonous, while “Four Horsemen” has a bridge which clumsily drags on a line or two too long.
Around a third of an album’s tracks having melodic weaknesses hardly seems to warrant the aforementioned charge, not least because of the sky-high quality of those parts of London Calling that are good, and the redeeming humanity and high production values of even the songs with dubious musical content. However, the impression of tunelessness was exaggerated in people’s minds by a couple of factors. One was the hectoring and/or complaining tone of a lot of the album’s lyrics: ears chafing at music they find unpleasurable will be further antagonized by someone bellowing at them grievances about which they may or may not care. The other is a values gap. Those music lovers not steeped in punk—which did not necessarily mean people older than the average Clash fan—were often slightly antipathetic to the New Wave and its traits. That London Calling’s social commentary was not leavened with much romance, that its main vocalist had a conventionally inadequate delivery technique, even the fact that musicians who called themselves punks only a couple of years back were now having the presumption to adopt classic popular musical styles, all played a part in the upturned noses of a certain sector of the record-buying public. To such people, any inelegant sections of music here represented not an inevitable bad-to-good ratio but a manifestation of the naïveté and presumption of musicians who’d decided they’d had enough of that punk stuff but didn’t really know how to play “proper” music. It’s all yet another nuance of the musical debates of the time now disappearing into the folds of history.
In terms of “Hateful” specifically, the cut is probably not helped by following something so opaque as “Jimmy Jazz”: whimsy giving way to mediocrity. Although the frantic narrator of “Hateful” never explicitly cites drugs as his problem, the details of his pitiful condition are commonly associated with heroin, while the phraseology will be familiar to anyone who has heard The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin” or has read the likes of William Burroughs’s Junky. It’s tempting to view the presence on the second Clash album in succession of an unsympathetic depiction of a heroin user as some sort of manifestation of band frustration with Headon, but the drummer has stated that his smack addiction dated from the run-up to the following album, Sandinista!
The lyric is well observed, capturing the simultaneous defiance and self-loathing of the addict, and a relationship with dealers that resembles Stockholm Syndrome, wherein a kidnap victim begins to relate to the person at whose mercy he finds himself. The lyric’s lines artfully resemble a junkie’s disordered mind. This reaches its apotheosis in the last verse, as phrases declaring a drug-induced loss of memory and of mind barge into each other and overlap.
However the lyric can also be ungainly. For instance, when Strummer sings that what his dealer gives him is not free, it should logically be followed by “It’s paid for,” but that line is deferred until the title description is enunciated. This is all carried on something that is either a chant or a rhythm but is not a tune. The track seeks to ape the shuffling sonic trademark of Bo Diddley. As the latter had been The Clash’s support act in January–February 1979 during their inaugural American jaunt (the drolly titled Pearl Harbour Tour) it might constitute a nice sentimental tribute, but it's a disjointed noise. Moreover, the cawing vocal interplay between Strummer and Jones in the verses is oafish. All combine to leave this a negligible cut.
At the end of “Safe European Home,” Mick Jones can be heard adopting a Jamaican accent to declaim one of the half-sung, half-spoken postscripts—something between a speech and a rant—frequently to be found on Clash recordings. One of the phrases that pops up in this postscript is “Rudie can’t fail.” The band then turned the phrase into a song, which closed the first vinyl side of London Calling. Those au fait with the work of Desmond Dekker would have recognized the phrase as a line from his 1967 single “007 (Shanty Town).”
Rudie was a slang word for rude boy, essentially the Jamaican equivalent of what in the 1950s in the West was called a “Juvenile Delinquent” and—like the latter—a term adopted to describe a disturbing new social phenomenon considered to contain the seeds of societal devastation insofar as it suggested on the part of the younger generation debased, or even non-existent, values. The difference was that whereas American delinquency seemed rooted in affluence—unprecedentedly rich American parents being over-indulgent with their offspring, financially and morally—rude boy behavior was spawned of poverty. During a recession in the first half of the Sixties, waves of young men emigrated from the Jamaican countryside to the capital, Kingston. They then turned to crime when they found there weren’t even sufficient jobs for those already resident. The phrase “rude boy” refers to the unsophistication that, from the perspective of the city dweller, goes with rural origins. As their arrival roughly coincided with a metamorphosis of the upbeat ska to the laidback rock-steady and thence reggae, and as there were many songs (pro and anti) released to cash in on the rude boy phenomenon, rude boys became synonymous with a musical form. That process was accelerated by the movie The Harder They Come: Jimmy Cliff’s character Ivan Martin—whose misadventures are sound-tracked by reggae songs—could be posited as an über-rude boy.
More than a decade after Jamaica’s rude boy phenomenon, British musical groups The Specials, Madness, and The Selecter, along with their label Two-Tone, adopted rude boy as a motif vaguely encompassing youth culture-based rebellious attitudes as well as a philosophy of racial harmony. At the end of the Seventies, “rude boy” and “rudie” were phrases therefore very much in the air in the UK, especially among musicians. In late 1979, The Specials even had a hit with a cover of one of those Jamaican rude boy anthems, “A Message to You Rudy.” (The B-side of their next hit was a self-generated rude boy anthem, “Rude Boys Outta Jail.”)
As The Clash’s catalog was already pocked with Jamaican songs, influences, and references, they could plead not guilty to jumping on the bandwagon with “Rudie Can’t Fail.” (Indeed, it has even been suggested in some quarters that the fertilization went the other way, at least in one respect: the entire natty-dressing, pork pie hat–sporting British rude boy look has been claimed to be based on Paul Simonon’s dress sense of the time.) Nonetheless, the suspicion was in the air because The Specials supported the Clash on a mid-1978 UK tour and were then briefly part of Bernard Rhodes’s management stable.
“Rudie Can’t Fail” was written for the sound track of the film Rude Boy, and thereby gave the film its name. (An instrumental version of “Revolution Rock,” also on London Calling, is used as incidental music in the same film.) All the evidence suggests that it was composed as a sort of anthem for the film’s main actor/character, who shared the name Ray Gange. However, just as Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town),” The Slickers’s “Johnny Too Bad,” and several other rude boy hymns were not the unambiguous celebration for which many took them, so “Rudie Can’t Fail” slips in some digs at the rudie’s expense. In fact, it takes the ambiguity a step further by representing both sides of the argument, its lyric being a dialogue between a rude boy and a disapproving (implicitly older) person. The critic condemns the youngster as rude, crude, reckless, and feckless and tells him his salvation lies in calming down and scanning the newspapers for a job. The rude boy responds that he understands his lifestyle makes the man nervous, but “I tell you I can’t live in service.” He further states that he is like a doctor born for a purpose. This reference to reggae record “Born for a Purpose” by Dr. Alimantado (1977), although rather contrived, integrates surprisingly well. The evenhandedness is rather spoiled in the “outro” by a gratuitous mocking of British rude boys for imagining they look pretty hot.
Musically, “Rudie Can’t Fail” is a smorgasbord of different musical styles: reggae, rock, jazz, the Bo Diddley shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm, and even a tinge of calypso can be discerned in its hugely attractive instrumentation, which is propelled by a spiky, twining, fat guitar riff and flarings of brass, and culminates in a closing third that has the ambience of a celebration. Jones on vocals (frequently prompted and shadowed by Strummer) is alternately indolent and defiant.
By 1979, the Spanish Civil War had been over for precisely forty years. However, it still held an allure for leftists. That it was a conflict that the left unequivocally lost was an element all the better for socialists with a romantic penchant for martyr-strewn tragedy. “Spanish Bombs,” the song which opened side two of London Calling, was partly spawned by contemporaneous news reports of Basque terrorist bombings of tourism spots in Spain, which Strummer posits as an “echo” of the conflict of the Spanish Civil War. However, the song also tackles romance of a different sort.
Joe Strummer had such an affinity with Spain that there is now a square named after him in Granada. Perhaps significantly, it was Spain to which he fled when he lost confidence in the final Clash album, Cut the Crap, and decided not to promote it. The affinity was partly the consequence of his relationship in the mid-Seventies with future member of feminist punk band The Slits, Paloma Romero. Romero—jollily rechristened Palmolive by Paul Simonon after the name of a brand of soap—shared a squat with Strummer, her sister Esperanza, and Esperanza’s boyfriend, 101’ers drummer Richard Dudanski. Strummer wrote his first song about Palmolive, “Keys to Your Heart.”
The latter was a lovely tribute—and an impressive writing entrée—but also the sort of thing Bernard Rhodes deemed out of the question for The Clash. Only on London Calling—with Rhodes now no longer in the picture—were the group free to explore the field of romance. “Spanish Bombs” was, in part, a love song and, again, about Palmolive. It wasn’t, though, set in the present: she and Strummer had long since split, and Strummer was now involved in what would be a fourteen-year relationship with Gaby Salter, which would result in two daughters. Jones would also take advantage of newfound post-Rhodes freedom to contribute a love song to the album—one that, coincidentally enough, was also about a former girlfriend who became a member of The Slits (in his case Viv Albertine). Jones’s “Train in Vain,” however, followed far more conventional lines than Strummer’s return to the territory of the love song. So much so that most people who have been enjoying it for a third of a century are probably unaware that “Spanish Bombs” is anything other than political commentary.
“Spanish Bombs” certainly has plenty of the imagery and references one would expect of a song with such a title, including Andalucía, Granada, Federico Lorca, the Guardia Civil, freedom fighters dying on a hill, red and black flags, trenches full of poets, and a ragged army attaching its bayonets. However, in the choruses, a very different message is being conveyed. As though in embarrassment, Strummer doesn’t render it in English, but in what he later termed “Clash Spannish” [sic]. As this means there is not sufficient accuracy in the Spanish to make an exact conversion to English, it doesn’t seem unfair to proffer Google Translate’s deciphering: “I love you infinity, oh I remember you my heart.”
That politics and love were all wrapped up in the same song wasn’t unrepresentative of Strummer and Palmolive’s relationship. The latter told Chris Salewicz in Redemption Song, “. . . part of our courting was about the Spanish Civil War. The fight for freedom really interested him.”
Regardless of the interplay in “Spanish Bombs” between romance and social commentary, one album previously The Clash would have devised a thunderous accompaniment for this song. Now, they came up with instrumentation that, although taken at a fast clip, employs the smooth-rolling, refined attributes of soft rock. It’s an almost shockingly middle-of-the-road ambience for a band with The Clash’s hinterland, especially the tasteful, almost effete, drumrolls that begin and end proceedings. The melody is a trifle repetitive. Strummer and (especially) Jones sound slightly silly when they sing some sections in Spanish (some might uncharitably be inclined to suggest they master English first). That Strummer lazily rhymes “hill” with itself at one point is also grating.
These, though, are jarring notes in a recording that is otherwise sumptuous, the most pleasing aspects of which are Jones’s sleepy lead guitar lines and a huge span of sound framed in either speaker by matching acoustic guitars.
Guy Stevens’s one significant contribution to London Calling (apart from overruling the band’s misgivings about the way “Brand New Cadillac” speeds up) seems to have been in persuading Joe Strummer to read a biography of movie actor Montgomery Clift, whose right profile was the only one seen on-screen after the left side of his face was paralyzed in a car crash.
“The Right Profile” is another track where the mind can’t help reaching for sociopolitical import that is not intended. A condemnation of Hollywood artifice? Some sort of denunciation of Clift for an element of his private life that taste forbids Strummer repeating? It’s neither of these things. It is, though, quintessentially punk. Before punk, nobody would have written a song about a movie star’s decline that wasn’t couched in terms of sentimentality or tragedy. Punk introduced non-judgmental observation to popular music. It also introduced non-romantic callousness. Although Strummer evocatively describes Clift’s sweaty, dependent state in the years following the crash (“Nembutol numbs it all”), the song is ultimately not only whimsy but uncharitable whimsy (at the close, Strummer seems to imitate what he imagines to be Clift’s death rattle). Moreover, “The Right Profile” can’t proffer the redeemingly delightful instrumentation that “Jimmy Jazz” can.
Not that elements of the music aren’t enjoyable. There is a nicely sleazy sax solo, while the tension-building combination of undulating piano and ride cymbal, that precedes said sax solo, is one of those moments that you simply sit through a recording waiting for. However, the doubled-up horn riff is too shrill, the “New York, New York” cooing underlining the mention of that city unnecessary, the crashing piano glissandos dotted throughout unwelcome, and the electric guitar pluckings too prevalent. Moreover, cumulatively these elements—which, as so often with music, take on human characteristics—somehow serve to unappetizingly suggest jeering rubber-neckers at the site of Clift’s accident.
“The Right Profile,” more than any other track, is emblematic of a fault that occasionally afflicts London Calling: overkill. The richness of London Calling is part of its appeal. It’s not just a matter of the multi-layering common to very “produced” albums, but the fact that every little nook seems crammed with surprises: squiggles of instrumentation or vocals which unexpectedly counterpoint the main musical motifs. Usually, it’s delightful. Sometimes—chiefly “The Right Profile,” but also “Clampdown,” “Death or Glory,” and “Koka Kola”—it tips over into exhausting and claustrophobic.
In writing “Lost in the Supermarket,” Strummer illustrated a drawback with such a politically committed movement as punk: a feeling of an obligation to find cause for complaint where little or none existed. As the title suggests, Strummer uses the supermarket as a metaphor for urban alienation. It’s a well-worn theme. The glaring lights, exclamatory enticements, bland muzak, and depersonalized atmospheres of such places have often caused offense to those of a poetic and/or leftist bent. However, such offense always seems a little manufactured, not just because it seems such a triviality over which to brood when there are so many real horrors and injustices in the world, but because of the fact of the low prices in supermarkets. The discounts such outlets are able to offer their customers by passing on to them the benefits accrued from their purchasing in bulk are a godsend for the cash-strapped. The average working-class mum will have little sympathy for the idea of the supermarket as a source of her oppression. Accordingly, a sense of wide-of-the-target pseudo-protest suffuses “Lost in the Supermarket.”
Strummer has noted in interviews that the song was inspired by the supermarket attached to the World’s End Estate in Chelsea, southwest London, in which he and his girlfriend were domiciled at the time that The Clash were rehearsing and recording London Calling. The name “World’s End” often sounds to those unfamiliar with it like a handle elaborately intended to convey dread, like something from an old-fashioned horror movie. It actually derives from an adjacent pub, itself named after an antiquated method of demarcation of town boundaries. However, it certainly turned out to be appropriate for the council estate completed in 1977 (into which residents began moving in 1975). While some fans of architecture have waxed lyrical about its properties (“What we have at World’s End is the extraordinary efflorescence at the summits of the towers, where the flats are cantilevered out and piled up into an irregular skyline of great romantic appeal,” gushed James Dunnet in BD Magazine, November 2008), those who had to live in it often styled it a “shithole.” Along with Battersea Power Station—visible from some of its flats—the World’s End Estate is one of London’s ugliest landmarks. An above-ground rabbit warren in red brick, including seven tower blocks, it doesn’t seem to bode well for those contemplating entry. Nor does it exactly chime with the refined reputation of the King’s Road on which it sits, even if at the juncture where the King’s Road becomes the New King’s Road, the addition which takes the traveler from upscale Chelsea into less smart Fulham and Putney.
Like most council estates (British equivalent of what Americans know as project housing), the World’s End Estate has been improved in recent decades by the sorts of measures that never occurred to planners and architects at the time of its construction: entry systems and a general conscientiousness about environmental health. Residents being given the opportunity to buy their flats has also created an improved atmosphere. However, it had at the time of Strummer’s residency a terrible reputation for anti-social behavior, vandalism, and violence. As with many such places, it was victim of the sort of vicious circle mentioned previously: its bad name made people unwilling to live in it, which meant the local council (Kensington & Chelsea) had little option but to use it as a dumping ground for those tenants whose previous behavior or rent arrears gave them reduced choice about the properties they were offered. The combination of this and the high number of tenants—up to three thousand on what was originally the largest municipal estate in Western Europe—meant that the problems traditionally associated with council estates were significantly magnified.
Knowing Strummer’s partiality to such notions as the nobility of the working class and the need to suffer to make great art, there’s little doubt that part of him reveled in being located in such a place. That romantic streak would have been further tickled had he been au fait at the time with the fact that Edith Grove—the turning off King’s Road which stood below his front room window—was the location of the early-Sixties flat share of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones of his beloved Rolling Stones. (He only found out later.) He would unquestionably have been aware that the road running parallel to the World’s End Estate on the river side—Cheyne Walk—was the location of Jagger and Richards’s current London homes. Completing the cluster of rock ’n’ roll landmarks, across the King’s Road from the estate—and again visible from some of its windows—was Seditionaries. Formerly known as Sex (and before that Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die; and before that—as part of Paradise Garage—Let It Rock), it was the clothing shop in which a few years previously Malcolm McLaren gathered around him the group that became known as The Sex Pistols.
Strummer’s domicile explains the reference to the 19 bus in “Rudie Can’t Fail”: it was the number of the double-decker he would catch to take him to Wessex Studios. (It wouldn’t have been much good for rehearsals at Vanilla as it turned left, away from Pimlico, at the Sloane Square end of the King’s Road to follow a path to the West End. Having said that, the punks who treated the King’s Road as a punk Mecca—and who would do so until they were worn down by the council’s removal of benches in the second half of the Eighties specifically to prevent their loitering—would have made that journey a mild hassle on foot.)
One of the few things the World’s End Estate did have going for it was its own supermarket. It sat at its base and its red brick made it look integrated into the estate. Although of course open to anyone, not just the estate’s residents, its convenience meant that residents would not have announced that they were going “down the road” for a pint of milk or a packet of cigarettes, but “downstairs.” As well as convenient, the shop was also quite compact, and certainly not the sort of place where any but the youngest of children could find themselves “lost.” Joe Strummer, though, ignores the positives and the problematic facts and writes of it only in the negative.
Some have posited the lyric as possibly Strummer’s most autobiographical. However, this seems restricted to a verse about living in the suburbs as a child. The following verse about having heard at that time the disturbing sound of the people who “lived” on the ceiling screaming and fighting tallies neither with the social caste of Strummer’s family nor his talk of his parents owning a bungalow. However, meshing autobiography and fiction to convey an ambiance is, for the artist, less cheating than tried-and-tested methodology, as proven by the verisimilitude in the detailing of the narrator’s journey from the soporific suburbs to a no-less-alienating high-rise: when he talks of the noises made by kids in corridors and of pipes in walls as his only company, he is evoking quite superbly tower block isolation. Furthermore, the cutting of discount coupons from teabag packets that is also mentioned is precisely the sort of compensatory activity engaged in by the friend- and money-poor.
Although this sort of skillful detail lends an illusion of value to a lyric based on a contrived premise, it’s the music which finally makes the falsity irrelevant. Like “Spanish Bombs,” “Lost in the Supermarket” is axle-greased, air-brushed soft rock. If the funky bass throughout is the only semblance of grit in a track dominated by measured guitar lines and stately drums, that’s not a demerit. The quasi-blandness is actually thematically apposite for a track alluding to identical rows of garish packaging beneath neon strip lighting.
The track is another exemplar of the album’s rich, playful production: the way that the understated guitar break cheekily sneaks from one speaker to another, briefly lingers, and then dashes back is delightful.
Once again, Strummer’s decision to hand his composition to Jones to sing is well judged: Mick’s less coarse voice feels right in the context of such instrumental smoothness and discussion of superficiality. Over and above that, though, Jones’s vocal performance (rendered in almost a baritone that is very unexpected from him) is restrained and polished. When he enunciates the line “Long distance callers make long distance ca-a-alls,” The Clash’s new melodic sophistication and Jones’s increased authority as a singer come together in a moment of gilded melancholia.
According to Clash roadie Johnny Green, the impetus for Joe Strummer writing “Clampdown”—an apocalyptical depiction of a society collapsing into fascism—was rather mundane. Said Green in his 1997 Clash memoir A Riot of Our Own, “At Vanilla, Joe told me ‘Clampdown’ was about parking clamps.”
Some have suspected this to be a joke by either Strummer or Green, both of whom were known for a mischievous sense of humor. Moreover, wheel clamping was a scourge yet to hit Strummer’s home country. (They were first used on the streets of London in May 1983.) However, as a now-seasoned traveler, Strummer would have seen wheel clamps or heard about them: in the States, they had been around since the mid-Fifties. Moreover, it wouldn’t have been the first time that a relatively trivial irritant spun off a Clash song soaked with a grand sense of injustice whose lyric chiefly concerned burgeoning totalitarianism: as we’ve seen, just such a description applies to “Remote Control.”
In the case of the song from The Clash’s long-playing debut, the disproportionate power of local councilors to close down concerts because they didn’t like the cut of performers’ jibs was extrapolated on by Jones in an anthem in which he posited the entire country “under heavy manners” (to use a reggae phrase to be found stenciled on Strummer’s clothes in the early days of the band). With “Clampdown,” Strummer would seem to have used an even more mundane starting point for a flight of fancy incorporating an even more outlandish prophecy, one whose first verse details a disquieting scene wherein a man is having the turban wrenched from his head by somebody demanding to know whether he is a Jew. The instigators of such acts are stated as being blue-eyed—a clear allusion to the Aryan ideal—and to be working for something called a clampdown, implicitly a campaign of oppression based on racialist principles.
The second verse finds somebody kicking against these values, defying a judge who is in the process of handing him down a prison sentence for—again implicitly—declining to follow the clampdown’s edicts. Said person launches into a speech calling for a nationwide rebellion. In the bridge—which is urgent and smooth-following where the verses are staccato—a second-person point of view describes a man fleeing people who are in charge of what is termed a factory. Some have posited this as a slip into the mundane—a typical Clash call to jack in two-bit employment as in “Clash City Rockers” et al.—but that seems an overly literal interpretation of a word that is not necessarily out of place here: concentration camps have certainly often been likened to death factories.
The following verse traces a trajectory of compromise, as the rebel grows up and calms down, dons a uniform, starts feeling important, and drifts into his first murder in the name of a cause he once denounced. The final two verses—performed at half speed—rather lose focus, being almost asides from Strummer about recently toppled dictators and containing another reference to the accident at Three Mile Island, the latter something Strummer acknowledged in interview as also being an influence on the song.
The one thing that Strummer doesn’t seem to have cited as a spur to his writing “Clampdown,” but which almost certainly was, is the growing support among the British public in the late Seventies for the National Front. A far-right party opposed to immigration, it had alarmed some with its electoral advances and growing media profile. In truth, the NF’s potential was limited by first-past-the-post: the Labour-Conservative-Liberal three-party hegemony engendered by a system not predicated on proportional representation made it destined to never gain a seat in parliament, let alone one on a government’s cabinet. Nonetheless, the party’s rhetoric so disturbed and repulsed some that movements like the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism sprang up to combat it. (Some organizations also exploited anti-NF sentiment for their own undeclared purposes: a scene in Rude Boy discusses groups which propounded anti-fascist beliefs without revealing their broader hard-left agendas.) In one of the earliest Clash interviews (the NME, December 11, 1976), Strummer said, “I think people ought to know that we’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist and we’re pro-creative. We’re against ignorance.” The Front aren’t mentioned, but in the climate of the times, it was axiomatically the case that they were the main target of his declaration. The Clash also famously played the Rock Against Racism concert in April 1978 in London’s Victoria Park, the sort of event at which the air would resound with the demo marcher’s chant, “The National Front is a Nazi front/Smash the National Front!”
As well as the final two verses, there are other clumsy passages to the lyric of “Clampdown,” such as the description of the colors of the clampdown merchants’ uniform as blue and brown: no self-respecting fascist would be seen in something so effete, and the colors were clearly chosen to make the line rhyme and scan. However, parts of the songwords are high quality. The duologue between the judge and the rebel manages to be pithy, evocative, and syncopated all at once. Meanwhile, in having the rebel declare, “Let fury have the hour,” Strummer manages to devise a phrase so poetic that it sounds centuries old even though clearly of his own invention.
Despite its grave subject, the lyric is not without humor. The opening line would have been familiar to any Briton who was an aficionado of the zany and post-modern wit of Spike Milligan, a former member of the Goons comedy team whose BBC solo shows often featured him ending a sketch via the lazy/ingenious method of repeating with his fellow cast members the line “What are we gonna do now?” while advancing in stages toward the camera lens.
“Clampdown” has a great melodic bridge (whose quality is further enhanced by the fact that it’s sung by Jones, thus providing a contrast of vocal tones). It also boasts a fine introduction whose brooding, rolling texture and not-quite-decipherable but urgent spoken words have the dark menace of gathering storm clouds. Yet the remainder is disjointed: the song’s riffs and chorus don’t quite inspire the air-punching response for which they aim, and the whole exercise has a feeling, sonically, of running on the spot.
That the music is far more of a mixed bag than the lyric is the biggest surprise about “Clampdown.” Throughout this album The Clash prove so adept at every new musical form they tackle that it comes as a bit of a shock that this attempt at the sort of hard rock anthem of which they had so often proven themselves masters doesn’t come off.
Brooding reggae “The Guns of Brixton”—the final song on side two of London Calling—was Paul Simonon’s inaugural compositional attempt and vocal performance. Much has been made of Simonon’s lack of musical ability. Headon, his partner in the band’s rhythm section, told this author in 2008, “Mick taught him how to play the bass and that’s all he did. He didn’t improvise. He wasn’t what I would call very musical . . . Paul’s role in the band was mainly onstage and in charge of the artwork and the look of the band.” Headon also admitted that Jones played bass on “a hell of a lot” of Clash recordings. Although firsthand witnesses attest Simonon was by no means absent on Clash tracks, from London Calling onward his role in the studio would seem to have been what one might term a secondary bassist, providing a sonic bed while Jones dealt with the more fluid and virtuoso bass parts. However, there is no dispute that the menacing bass riff that runs throughout “The Guns of Brixton” and gives it much of its dark power was both devised and played by Simonon.
Simonon had moved to Notting Hill by the time he wrote the song but had spent large and formative parts of his life in Brixton. The latter, though, probably wasn’t the reason he chose the south London district as the location of his first composition. Brixton is a name synonymous with crime, black culture, and riots, the British equivalent of Harlem or the South Side of Chicago. Consequently, it has both a menace and a romance.
In the second-person lyric of “The Guns of Brixton,” someone is being asked whether, when the police bang on his door, he will come out with his hands on his head or on the trigger of a gun. It would be like a scenario from The Harder They Come transplanted to SW2 even without that film’s name directly enunciated elsewhere in the lyric and the song’s lead character being named Ivan. Of course, it’s another example of silly and irresponsible Clash bravado, one which this time confuses reality with celluloid. Guns were so uncommon in Britain at the time as to make their mention almost fantastic, nor had there been anything resembling a Death Row (the stated possible fate of one of the characters) since capital punishment was abolished in 1969. (That Simonon had been watching too many movies was also suggested by the Guns of Navarone–style title, although it may have been a nod to the reggae record and UK hit of the same name by The Skatalites.) However, in broad terms the sort of confrontation and sentiment depicted is not that unrepresentative of Brixton, then or now.
The song’s drama is slightly undermined by almost comedic “boing” sound effects, but this is compensated for by the unexpected expressiveness of Simonon’s singing.
“Wrong ’em Boyo,” the cover version which opened side three of London Calling, is actually a medley. That it has a fake false start in the form of a snatch of “Stagger Lee”—a transatlantic late-Fifties hit for Lloyd Price—is reflective of the way that, in a less copyright-conscious age, Jamaican music would on occasion merrily incorporate slices of well-known hits. In this case, it seems to have been done as a means to mock glorification of outlawdom.
“Stagger Lee,” like many other marginally differentiated songs, was inspired by a real-life late-nineteenth-century St. Louis murder made all the more awful by the facts of it being over nothing more important than a card game and by it taking place on Christmas Day. Clive Alphanso composed songs for (but was not a member of) obscure ska merchants The Rulers. His “Wrong Emboyo” [sic] was another rude boy song, this one anti. After using the “Stagger Lee” snatch in an almost Pavlovian way, he then torments listeners salivating for bloodshed by having the lead vocalist call off the band and start all over again with a lecture against bad behavior to a totally different melody: “Don’t you know it was wrong to cheat a trying man?”
Strummer changes the “was” to “is” but makes more profound alterations as well, adding some couplets of his own, for which, as was usual, he doesn’t take any credit or publishing money. His invention extends to his singing: this track evinces more of his omniscient vocalist “thang”: in a moment of silence prior to a rattle of drums, his “Hup!” makes it sound like he is giving the nod to Headon to restart proceedings (that, or gleefully following the trajectory of a leaping frog). When he emits “Yay!” at another juncture, it’s as though he is carried away by the musical jamboree going on around him, rather than simulating pleasure at the pre-recorded activities coming through his headphones.
The Rulers’s 1967 original is a rather downbeat affair. The Clash’s version is breakneck. It’s also incongruously joyous, in large part due to Mickey Gallagher. The keyboardist’s career had begun in 1965 as a temporary replacement for Alan Price in The Animals and was currently ticking over nicely with a berth in Ian Dury and the Blockheads, one of the bands of the moment. He was the additional man in The Clash’s touring party when they mounted their again drolly titled Clash Take the Fifth Tour of the United States in September and October 1979. He pops up in several places on London Calling. Here, his organ provides smooth-gliding castors—to which Strummer’s rollicking “pianner” (as the sleeve notes would have it) is an earthy contrast. Headon’s nimble drumming and percussive effects tease us delightfully with pauses, drop-outs, speed-ups, and delayed re-starts, all cheered on by Strummer. Guitar is barely evident, but it matters little when The Irish Horns are on particularly impressive form. The track ends in a welter of warbling organ, cheek-puffed sax, and extended vocal cooing that is all gloriously self-mocking.
Because it is a non-original and devoid of a sociopolitical message, one rather suspects that this track was initially little more than a fuck-you to CBS, i.e., that The Clash were knocking out a cover to fill up the 12-inch “single” they had hoodwinked their label into including with their new album. If so, rarely has such a gesture of contempt had such pleasurable consequences.
While the brickbats attracted by “The Guns of Brixton” for glorifying violence and outlawdom were reasonable, criticisms leveled at “Death or Glory” were anything but. There are other tracks on London Calling which fit the description of self-mythologizing, but “Death or Glory” isn’t—as some claimed—one of them.
The conclusion was always puzzling to anyone who listened closely. Although Strummer’s enunciation could, as ever, hardly be said to be clear, the track’s lyric—like that of almost all of the songs—was printed inside. The most cursory perusal of it reveals the fact that—despite its apparently defiant motto of a title, and contrary to its anthemic, blam-blam choruses—it is the complete reversal of rebel rock posturing. Rather, “Death or Glory” finds The Clash ganging up with the critics on themselves.
Strummer’s superb lyric exposes the way youthful idealism and No Compromise stances are inevitably eroded by the exigencies of life. The first verse depicts the pathetic mundane domestic situation of a former rebel whose only surviving vestiges of youthful fire are the “LOVE” and “HATE” tattoos on his knuckles. Those knuckles frequently connect with his children’s faces as he takes out his lack of fulfilment on them. It’s like a heart-wrenching scene from a classic British Kitchen Sink film.
The chorus declares that bravado such as the title phrase becomes, in the end, just another story. The second verse focuses its merciless glare on The Clash themselves and concedes that their own anti-sellout mantra is doomed to failure. Not that the band is named, but of whom else could Strummer be speaking when he states that every “yob” mining rock ’n’ roll for gold asserts he’ll die before he’s sold? “He who fucks nuns will later join the church,” is his brutal part-Confucian, part-punk dismissal of that ideal. A sort of coda in which Strummer mordantly recites to a different melody a promise to march a long way and raise hell can only be interpreted as sarcasm, a mocking of the halcyon declarations of rebels everywhere.
Its rough-hewn poetry and naked, self-lacerating honesty mark out “Death or Glory” as one of the best lyrics Strummer ever wrote. The more one thinks about it, the more shocking a self-demystification and expression of doubt it appears. The surprising resistance by critics to the idea of the song being self-effacing rather than self-aggrandizing meant that he never really got full credit for it.
The sonics of “Death or Glory” would have a hard task matching up to its words. It’s pretty good, nonetheless, with the enunciation of the title phrase rousing in spite of the way it’s consciously undermined by the lyric. However, not for the first time on this album, one is struck by the fact that anthemic hard rock doesn’t seem to be where The Clash are currently most inspired. The main riff—like that of “Clampdown”—is too harshly metallic to be attractive. The most impressive musical aspect of the recording is an understated, leisurely introduction consisting of strummed acoustic guitar, delicate electric guitar, nimble drums and almost lachrymose bass.
That “Koka Kola” combines lyrical banality with melodic mediocrity makes it probably the weakest track on London Calling. It’s a view of Madison Avenue culture by someone who has never experienced it firsthand, one so inchoate that, in talking of people jumping from skyscraper windows, Strummer seems to confuse New York’s advertising district with Wall Street, its financial quarter. Meanwhile, while discussion of a snubnose .44 might be a reference to a drug-induced hallucination—conflating Coca-Cola with cocaine is one of the song’s hardly impressive conceits—it also feels like a classic element of an Englishman’s movie-oriented misperception of American daily life. Lines like “Executive decision, a clinical precision” might have a pleasing rhythm, but are empty slogans. The whole thing could be considered a companion piece to The Jam’s similarly secondhand and uninformed depiction of British boardroom life, “Smithers-Jones,” released as a B-side earlier in 1979. Only a snort-inducing comment that someone’s alligator suit and snakeskin boots require a vet rather than a launderette gives a glimpse of Strummer’s usual cleverness.
What is most objectionable about the track, however, is the same problem afflicting “Lost in the Supermarket”: it is pseudo-protest, a song that tackles a subject not because the writer is genuinely concerned about it but because he thinks he should be. Advertising, like supermarkets, is one of those things with pejorative connotations for leftists, some of whom seem to feel obliged to then make the jump into casting it as an active evil, an allegation which never quite convinces. Advertising may be frequently simplistic, loud, and, in extreme examples, misleading, but would life be better without it? Does it not serve a useful purpose in alerting people to products which they might find desirable or useful? And what about the consumerism with which advertising is entwined, also perceived as evil by some leftists (and, to be fair, religiously minded right-wingers)? Would the members of The Clash have been without their Les Pauls, Fender Telecasters, leather jackets, and record collections? Modestly waged and ostentatiously men-of-the-people The Clash might have been, but that was not the same thing as rejecting capitalism for a Spartan life.
Strummer retrospectively implied that the song was more anti-cocaine than anything else. If true, it would only make the song worse. Why not, after all, a song condemning cocaine use among rock stars, where it has always been just as, or more, prevalent than in advertising? That of course takes us down the awkward path that is the public knowledge that all four Clash members—but Jones and Headon, especially—had at one time or another problems with the drug.
Its music is the death knell for “Koka Kola.” Although one of the fastest—certainly the most breathless—of the album’s cuts, it’s in no way exciting. Apart from its bridge, it is tuneless. Even that bridge—a dreamy affair where Jones’s surreal harmony vocals nicely complement Strummer’s vista of a stroll down Broadway in the rain—is let down by the way it untidily throws in a non-rhyming reference to Manhattan at the end as though as an afterthought. Mercifully, “Koka Kola” is, at 1:47, the shortest track on London Calling by more than a minute.
More than any other track, “The Card Cheat” confirms The Clash’s philosophical and musical shifts. The lyric is heartrending: the tale of a man who tries to acquire prosperity through devious means but—fatally—doesn’t realize he is out of his depth in the sinister circles in which he is operating. It seems at times like a companion piece to “Wrong ’em Boyo,” but there is also evidence of Strummer having viewed Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, with its famous chess scene fought for the prize of life. The music is orchestral although there is no orchestra present: standard rock instruments were used but double-tracked to create a pomp associated with the Wall of Sound methods of producer Phil Spector. The cherry on this rich cake is Jones’s singing, suffused with such empathy as to be goose bump–inducing.
“Lover’s Rock,” which opened side four of London Calling, is another Clash song whose title testifies to how confusing can be the Jamaican term “Rock.” It is not used here to allude to rock ’n’ roll but as a designation of a musical style, just as was “rockers” in “Clash City Rockers.” Lover’s rock was a laid-back reggae subgenre popular at the time. Strummer and Jones—singing mostly in harmony—ridicule the style’s overt romanticism with some saucy songwords which, among other things, endorse oral sex as a means to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
The track has been accused of sexism but is really merely ribald. Jones exploits an opportunity to prove he’s not just a hard rocker with some molten guitar lines which lend the track a blissful, summery air that suggests the band were fonder of lover’s rock than they let on and that this may not be the “mickey take” it’s widely assumed to be.
The title of “Four Horsemen” does not refer to the legendary quartet associated with the Apocalypse but that linked to, erm, the Westway. Yes, it’s another Clash song about The Clash. This one is a potted history of the band, but unlike the last one, “All The Young Punks,” is underpinned by positivism—although it must be noted that that positivism is rooted in the kind of bravado that “Death or Glory” so honestly exposed as a sham. The bridge, meanwhile, refers to a “you” that might be the listener: it’s certainly seems in the distasteful Clash tradition of saying “boo-hoo” to people in less fulfilling circumstances than they, and moreover with another unintended Thatcherite subtext (Strummer tells someone that his life being bad is the price he has to pay for lazing around). Other than those caveats, the lyric is witty and clever, and ingeniously gives Terry Chimes a footnote in the band’s growing body of self-mythology as a hiker who “didn’t want a lift from the Horsemen.”
Musically, it’s bitty: there is some exciting grinding guitar work, but the bridge—by going on a couple of lines too long—becomes a drone. A kind of triumph is snatched right at the death: the way the track segues into the following one is sublimely dramatic and enhances both numbers.
It’s a quite astonishing fact that London Calling’s keynote song, tucked away on side four, is rarely remarked on by critics and was barely played live by the band. That “I’m Not Down” is both a stupendously powerful piece of music and a moving affirmation of life in the face of adversity makes it a miniature of the entire album. For many years it was assumed to be a Jones confessional in the tradition of “Stay Free,” not least because it alludes to a rough upbringing and the same recent traumas referenced in “Train in Vain” two tracks later. In fact, it was another of these instances where Strummer would appear to have used a Mick vocal as a shield. Jones, however, acquits himself beautifully, emotionally detailing, over an uptempo backing, various vicissitudes that have afflicted him before insisting in a rousing chorus that he won’t be demoralized (“I’ve been beat up, I’ve been thrown out, but I’m not down!”). The streetwise language (including phrases like “Shown up” and being “done” that may be confusing to non-Britons) add an additional grittiness.
The arrangement is almost dizzying: hooks abound among broiling verses, pugnacious choruses and galloping interregnums. The bridge is simply astounding in its onomatopoeic qualities: descending when Jones refers to sinking further and further into depression, and spiraling, in stages, skyward as Jones describes incrementally bursting out of that depression.
In any artist’s catalog there is a moment constituting perfection, a magical confluence whereby a lyrical, spiritual, and musical peak is reached at the same instant and where an additional layer of craft ensures those elements combining to optimum effect. “I’m Not Down” is that moment for The Clash.
With “Revolution Rock”—into which “I’m Not Down” segues—it’s Strummer’s turn to prove he can “choke you up.”
The song was originally a 1976 Jamaican release by Jackie Edwards, composer of the Spencer Davis Group hits “Keep On Running” and “Somebody Help Me.” It was then known as “Get Up.” In the aforementioned jackdaw tradition of Jamaican music, Danny Ray retooled it later that year as “Revolution Rock.” Following in that tradition, Strummer and company play fast and loose with Ray’s record, turning a basic idea to their own devices. Unlike in the tradition of Jamaican music, however, they engaged in no intellectual property squabble, happy not to take a publishing credit despite the fact that their tweaks immeasurably improved the song: it remains credited to Edwards and Ray.
In The Clash’s hands, the song is transformed from a relatively banal celebration of partying into a call for a revolution, although one of attitude, not burning barricades: in a crackling, witty, syncopated lyric, Strummer aims his ire at the base-level duckers and divers of life, the small-time hoods and the smack dealers who make conditions worse for those already enduring penury. The band hit a fine skank-able groove with loping bass, sinuous lead guitar, and a wide array of percussion, all ably assisted by staccato horn charts and a production which discreetly employs reggae delay and echo technique. Once more, Strummer uses his voice almost as an instrument in the way he cleverly manufactures the illusion of call-and-response routines with already recorded instruments, the most delightful example of which is a moment where the organ sounds some tentative notes and then springs into life when his cry “The organ—play!” seems to give it permission to do so.
However, lest we get the impression from this playful and mischievous tone that there is not a serious message here, Strummer leaves us in no doubt about that in a final verse in which he castigates the rock-hearted, cruel-toned Kingston gangsters who make the already unenviable lot of the poor unbearable. His anguish is clear when he talks of the despair of poverty leading to the sight of “talent thrown away,” and when he describes people dying of malnutrition while cargo food goes rolling by, his voice cracks with emotion.
Those who bought London Calling in its first British pressing remember that it contained a final track not listed on the sleeve. It was more than surprising. Hidden tracks would not be a feature of the music industry until the CD age, and that this was still very much the vinyl age is demonstrated by the fact that, initially, the only billing for the song came in the form of a message carved into that vinyl side’s run-off groove: “Track 5 is ‘Train in Vain.’ ”
Some must have been unsure whether that title was a joke. Leaving aside the vague comedy inherent in it rhyming, those words didn’t appear within the song. In the absence of a publishing credit, some would also have assumed that the song was a cover: its soul groove and lovelorn lyric made it of an archetypical bent like nothing ever essayed by The Clash previously, with the sole exception of “1-2 Crush on You.” Adding to a general air of outside origination was the fact that part of its refrain contained the same words as that in Ben E. King’s hit “Stand by Me,” while another line was redolent of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” Because of a combination of the above, some will even have concluded that the track wasn’t listed because the band were ashamed of it.
Everything soon became clear via Clash explanations in music press interviews. “Train in Vain” was indeed the song’s true title, and a way of avoiding confusion with King’s song: the exact meaning has never been explained but Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” with its train/departure/affair-ending motif, has been theorized as the derivation. It was originally intended to be featured on a disc provided free with the NME, not a send-away offer like the Capital Radio EP, but a flexidisc attached to every cover of one edition. It was unlisted because it was added to the album after the sleeves had gone to the printers.
What the band didn’t reveal was that, as it featured the playing only of Jones and Headon, “Train in Vain” technically wasn’t a Clash track. It had been devised too late for Simonon to be taught the bass part, while Strummer simply refused to appear on anything so soft. Moreover, the band’s explanation for why it was released through the aegis of CBS rather than the NME has been called into question: rather than publisher IPC refusing permission for a flexidisc giveaway as was originally claimed, Jones appears to have decided to “bagsy” it for London Calling when he apprehended the unexpected quality of a cut put together (albeit probably over an already partially completed basic track) in the space of twenty-four hours.
A serendipity was attached to that process of “It’s too good to waste.” “Train in Vain (Stand by Me)”—as Epic re-christened it—would become The Clash’s first American hit, making no. 23 in Spring 1980. It was just the right kind of Clash song for the U.S. market: something that wouldn’t alienate radio programmers with social commentary and whose traditional subject would appeal to the mainstream record purchaser.
Yet steeped as it might have been in archetype and even sentimentality (Strummer continued to be disparaging about the song in concert), “Train in Vain” is, in its own way, groundbreaking.
Before the late Seventies, with a few exceptions like Ray Davies of The Kinks, the only British rock musicians who didn’t affect an American drawl at the microphone were doing so for comedic purposes. This changed with the advent of punk for reasons that were a combination of practicality and credibility. As Strummer said to Caroline Coon in the Melody Maker, November 13, 1976, “It’s the music of now. And it’s in English. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer’s accent. That’s just pretending to be something you ain’t.” However, while it may have been logical to deliver “Towerblock Rock” in a recognizably English voice, because punk was not a medium in which love songs played a large part the issue of how its musicians were to deliver songs based around romance hadn’t much come up. In The Damned’s debut—and love song—“New Rose,” vocalist Dave Vanian trod a middle ground, not emphasizing his national origins, but not going full-out with the Americanisms. The Jam delivered those parts of their repertoires that were love songs in, broadly speaking, American accents even as they insisted on Estuary English for political material. Even when they recorded songs called “London Girl” (1977) and “English Rose” (1978), their hands remained surprisingly unforced as those creations happened to not contain words that would create the dilemma of singing naturally (their own accents) or conventionally/bogusly (American accents), although they did employ “Mum” rather than “Mom” in the former. The Buzzcocks were always more relationships- than politics-oriented in song subject, and singer Pete Shelley certainly declined to Americanize his Mancunian voice.
However, although Mick Jones couldn’t claim to be the first person in the rock era to sing a love song in an unashamedly English voice, when he opted to tackle “Train in Vain”—a recording whose musical style was quintessentially American—in his natural brogue, it was a seismic moment. Hitherto, such a decision might be considered to be “taking the piss,” as patently and deliberately absurd as when Peter Sellers had rendered the modernistic pop lyric of The Beatles’s “A Hard Day’s Night” in histrionic Shakespearian. By singing a soul ballad London-stylee, and doing so very movingly, Jones ensured that no Briton need ever again be scared that performing a love song in the accent of his hometown would sound ridiculous. The whole debate might seem absurd to non-Britons, but this was genuinely revolutionary. It’s certainly interesting that Paul Weller of The Jam went unabashedly English in his love songs from here on.
The song also constitutes another breakthrough, although one limited to The Clash themselves. With the qualified exceptions of “Deny,” “Spanish Bombs,” and “1-2 Crush on You” (that track whose release seems to be proven as misbegotten by it cropping up in this text mainly as an exception to one Clash trait or another), “Train in Vain” was the first Clash song about a relationship. It was destined to be one of the few such creatures in the Clash’s canon, ultimately sharing the status only with the above three tracks and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” (A case can be made for including “Long Time Jerk” in that category, but only a tenuous one.)
The second song on the album about a member of The Slits was inspired by Jones’s recent split with guitarist Viv Albertine. It may also have been inspired by the Slits song “Typical Girls.” If so, Mick would seem to be living up to the feminist complaint of men who don’t listen properly: in said song, Albertine is mocking women who stand by their man, thus stating the opposite of Jones’s allegation here that she had said she would stick with her man and then didn’t. However, the composition comes across as anything but bone-headed. Jones’s voice trembles and whimpers as he enunciates sentiments like “I remember these things the most.”
There are other autobiographical elements in the song: Mick’s statement that his job doesn’t pay and he needs somewhere to stay would seem an elliptical reference to the fact that this rock ’n’ roll star had recently had to briefly but humiliatingly move back into his nan’s flat after a traumatic burglary at his home. That he rattles off the line about needing somewhere to stay with a stylized quasi-machismo of which any Stax vocalist would be proud, however, demonstrates that Jones is not all hysteria.
His following assertion that he doesn’t give a damn about having a place to stay or money to spend as long as he has his departed lover around is affecting. None of this, of course, would mean anything to the average listener who didn’t take an interest in Clash members’ private lives, and Jones wisely keeps things universal by couching the song in classical soul language, that familiar stand-by-me refrain being only the half of it. His talk of heartaches, tumbling dreams, wolves that need to be kept at bay, and explanations necessary from his fickle lover mean that Otis Redding would in no way have found this a foreign lexicon.
For a cut whose completion was rushed and whose personnel is a skeleton crew, the music of “Train in Vain” is amazingly assured and full-bodied. A track whose stylings make it tailor-made for brass doesn’t have any: the Irish Horns’s brief visit to the studio was long in the past. Jones, though, adroitly creates the illusion of brass via harmonica and double-tracking. His main guitar riff is reverb-treated to sound epic. He also throws in the occasional rumbling piano line. Naturally, he handles bass duties, too. The only other musician present, meanwhile, is in his element. A son of a headmaster and a teacher, and a veteran of an act that had opened for The Temptations, middle-class soul-boy Headon had always used punk as a flag of convenience, even if his personality (“nutter” and “psycho” were the flavor of the descriptions flying around) in no way made him out of place in the movement. Probably unable to believe his luck at finding himself back on familiar and much-loved territory, he produces a crisp, hi-hat-heavy performance that creates a fine groove. The fact that the track fades in—making for an equivalent to a drumroll—only adds to a grandeur that the recording has no right to possess.
There was another strand of serendipity to the track’s last-minute inclusion on London Calling: it transpires to be the perfect album closer. After Jones and Strummer have successively broken our hearts with the previous two numbers, the mellow ambience of “Train in Vain” acts like a soothing balm on our exhausted, wracked emotions.
On July 26, 1980, The Clash secured a significant victory in their endless quest to prove that they hadn’t been corrupted by their success. As was often the case, it took the form of being seen to get one over on their record company.
The band had decided to embark on a singles campaign. Their intention was to release a 45 every month, rushing out a new one whenever the previous one started dropping out of the charts. These would obviously be new songs: the policy would hardly be remarkable—indeed, would be seen as contemptible—if based around milking albums. Their audacious plan may have been partly prompted by them being buoyed by their unprecedented chart success with the “London Calling” single, but it was no doubt also due to a penchant for yet another rock ’n’ roll myth: that the best recordings in history are to be found on 7-inch discs.
The campaign would have been one the likes of which there had never been. Even before the turn of the Seventies, when the album became more significant than the single as a means of consuming music, artists restricted themselves to one single every two to three months. Yet the strategy was not completely unreasonable: 1979 had been the best year ever for singles sales in the UK, proving that the non-album market was one record labels ignored at their peril. Not only might the strategy have worked, but with a band of The Clash’s political bent it could have also transformed the purpose of a 45: The Clash were exactly the group to make the single a state-of-the-nation address and to use it to respond to current events almost with the topicality of a newspaper.
Unfortunately, the plan fell at the first hurdle. When The Clash presented CBS with their proposed follow-up to “London Calling,” the label refused to release it. It was almost certainly because “Bankrobber” was the biggest non sequitur imaginable to the instantly arresting, uptempo “London Calling”: a mid-paced, gloomy reggae, and furthermore not a rock-reggae hybrid but the purest reggae they had yet produced. On that level, the label’s stance can be understood. The job of CBS was to make money, and this change in direction just when it appeared that The Clash were becoming as mainstream an act as a band like them could ever be must have been dismaying.
Although no doubt gutted by it, the rejection gave The Clash the type of opportunity they rarely spurned: to portray themselves as martyrs for their art and ideals. It also gave them a chance to do something that wasn’t so easily achieved: score a victory over the record company. The Clash went on strike over the non-release, refusing to do any more work on album tracks they had recently recorded in New York. However, it doesn’t seem to have been this that made CBS climb down so much as something exactly analogous to the way that Epic’s decision not to release the first Clash album had to be reversed because of the embarrassingly high level of import sales. The Clash stable contrived in June 1980 to sneak out “Bankrobber” as a B-side to the Dutch “Train in Vain” single. Alerted to the availability of a Clash song they didn’t have, the British fanbase bought the Dutch record in such numbers that, by July, CBS had consented to a UK release. Quite astoundingly, considering both the fact that so many Clash fans already owned an import copy and the fact of its hard-core reggae nature, “Bankrobber” proceeded to become the second most successful UK Clash single while the band were extant, reaching no. 12.
Again, the single would probably have marched into that top ten territory that would forever be unknown to The Clash during their lifetime had they only been prepared to promote it on Top of the Pops rather than leave it to the mercies of Gill, Lulu, Patti, Pauline, Rosie, and Sue. Although Legs & Co. were perfectly good—and perfectly beautiful—dancers, a less appropriate backdrop for their gyrations than “Bankrobber” is difficult to imagine. It’s the mordant anthem of a man who opts out of the rat race via the felonious appropriation of the property of others (although never with violence). Strummer evokes with superb economy the misery of the petty-rule dominated workplace that the bankrobber sidesteps (“Break your back to earn your pay and don’t forget to grovel”). It’s not only with lyrics that he is improving in leaps and bounds: “That was a song Joe wrote on his own,” Jones said in Redemption Song. Although the melody features changes that verge on generic, it’s also highly hummable.
The group made doubly sure that this would be real-McCoy reggae by recruiting Jamaican producer Michael Campbell, better known as Mikey Dread. Dread supplies a dark, rich, booming, effects-pocked, ultra-authentic mix across the back of which drifts a disembodied, extremely catchy “Aaah-aaah” vocal refrain. Although the viewpoint in Strummer’s lyric that life is necessarily tragic for society’s unskilled is, as discussed, questionable, he and his colleagues are, as ever, adept at injecting it with pathos: “Bankrobber” is simultaneously proud and sad.
“Rockers Galore . . . UK Tour,” the flip side of “Bankrobber,” was actually the backing track of the A-side with Mikey Dread “toasting” on top, hence the publishing attribution “Strummer/Jones/Campbell.” It’s delivered in such heavy patois as to make it difficult to understand, but even if that weren’t the case it would be unlikely to be considered a masterpiece.
In October 1980 came the release in North America of Black Market Clash, a 10-inch album containing an assortment of rarities and unissued material. This peculiar product was the first Clash compilation of any kind, and indeed the only one of The Clash’s lifetime.
It was no banal best-of, however. Usefully for American fans, it collected tracks that were on the UK version of the debut album but not the doctored American one. To those, it added three tracks from the Cost of Living EP, some British B-sides, and “Bankrobber” in a new mix. It also included the then-very-rare first version of “Capital Radio.” Even more intriguingly, it included the never previously heard “Robber Dub,” “Time Is Tight,” and a version of “Pressure Drop” which differed to the one heard on the B-side of “English Civil War” by virtue of horns. “Time Is Tight” is a cover of a percolating Booker T and the MG’s instrumental. The observant will notice that its riff inspired the intro to The Clash’s “Gates of the West.” “Robber Dub” was intended for a 12-inch version of the “Bankrobber” single that was ultimately never released. With Mikey Dread at the controls, it’s a superior example of the controversial form of dub.
Super Black Market Clash was an expanded version of Black Market Clash released in 1993, long after the band were dead and gone and when—one would imagine—such gimmicks as 10-inch records cynically designed as collector’s items were as much a part of history as vinyl itself. However, the original Black Market Clash continued to have a desirability for Clash completists because of the fact that some of its mixes and edits remained unique to it. For instance, on Black Market Clash, “Justice Tonight”/ “Kick It Over” are segued and shortened by two minutes compared to the 12-inch “London Calling” single.
At the time of its release, Black Market Clash was not just a desirable product in the North American market for which it was intended. That it both purveyed new material and rounded up tracks otherwise scattered across only singles and EPs ensured there was a demand for import copies in the UK. Its desirability was additionally enhanced by the fact that some thought had clearly gone into the package. The cover was striking: it bore a photograph—in dramatic negative—of a lone Rasta (Clash friend Don Letts) strolling across a backdrop of an ominous-looking line of police officers at the same 1976 Notting Hill riot that inspired The Clash’s debut single. The triple-meaning of the title was witty, alluding to the cover photograph, the quasi-contraband air possessed by a collection of rarities, and the predominance of reggae on the record.