The Clash: And you know what they say? Well, some of it was true...

The Clash

London Calling
(1979)
CBS/Epic

 

Ye olde punk rock tends to fall in and out of fashion. Sometimes a legitimate musical touchstone. Sometimes just a safety-pinned Halloween costume. But The Clash get treated better than many of their contemporaries and peers. Took themselves a little too seriously at times? Got a bit indulgent as the revolution turned to shit? Sure.

But there’s still some regard. Their biggest ‘pop’ hit, Should I Stay Or Should I Go, seems to get trotted out every few years to sell something: jeans, perfume, Subarus. Snatches of their songs sampled by The Beastie Boys, Garbage, MIA and more for hits of their own. Even having a surviving member in your band has cachet – ask Damon Albarn, who delights in namechecking Jones and Simonon as sometime parts of Gorillaz or The Good, The Bad, And The Queen.

But for the longterm faithful, the highwater mark of the band – and maybe that whole punk thing, whatever that word now means – was not that song that’s now often drunken karaoke fodder, but something from a couple of years earlier. Something as defiantly old-school as the vinyl double album – the self-styled last gang in town offered London Calling. Two discs, not much of which is not essential, and crossing a widescreen range of styles - redefining not just themselves, but the musical movement of which they were at least nominally a part.

The winter of 1979 was not a real cool time for those bands that emerged in punk’s first spits. The Sex Pistols had already disappeared up the dead end of their own orchestrated outrage. The Damned were well on their way to being a gothic cabaret turn. The Stranglers always slightly out of place weary cynicism becoming a bit meandering and merely misogynistic – admittedly they embraced that and resurrected themselves a couple of years on. A dozen others had already shot their bolts and went back to the obscurity they often richly deserved – Slaughter & The Dogs, The Lurkers, The Vibrators. And yeah, I know some trainspotter will get upset I mentioned their favourite in that selection.

Which pretty much leaves our boys and The Jam as last ‘men’ standing, with both putting out second albums not quite the towering standard of the rest of their careers. Weller’s This Is The Modern World mostly sounding like the rushed effort of leftover songs from their utterly wired debut In The City it probably was. But the artistic redemption of their third, the glorious All Mod Cons had occurred a year earlier – so there were heights to aim at. Appearing at roughly the same time was The Clash’s polarising Give ‘Em Enough Rope. An unashamed attempt to crack the American hard rock market, Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman polished them up – and hating Joe Strummer’s broken-toothed yelps and Mick Jones’ perhaps faux Sarf London accent, mixed the drums up and over most of the words. Nonetheless, some of it is terrific: Tommy Gun’s rapid fire, Safe European Home’s discomfort of finding your dreams of Jamaica were a bit romantic and reality was a bit harder. And those that clunked a bit: Guns On The Roof is not the guerrilla rebellion the title might suggest, but a whinge about being arrested for shooting racing pigeons with an air-rifle. To the barricades, comrades!

So, after the perhaps aptly named Pearl Harbour Tour of the US - but who bombed whom? - The Clash came home, and as a gapfiller flung out The Cost Of Living EP. It’s the one with that ripsnorting version of The Bobby Fuller Four’s I Fought The Law, that’s now probably better known than the original. Wiser, and angry again, they then holed up in Wessex Studios outside London with producer Guy Stevens. Despite having produced things of note like Mott The Hoople, Guy was a bit a wreck. Damaged by the usual rock and roll excesses, but obviously with something to prove, he was the right, er, *guy* to focus the band’s own slightly messed up work ethic.

But something had happened. Maybe just because of all the business shit going down around them, The Clash decided they’d do exactly what they wanted to – they grabbed at a dozen musics they loved, found reserves and talents they maybe didn’t even realise they had. Mickey Gallagher, keyboardist with Ian Dury’s wonderfully bent Blockheads became another eclectic and eccentric presence, and just about fifth Beatle for the increasingly sprawling enterprise.

The creative core of Strummer and Jones had always flirted with other song and performance styles. Reggae was almost The Clash’s second default setting – the six-minute lope of Lee Scratch Perry’s Police And Thieves sitting a little oddly on their debut album amid the two-minute, two chord thrashes. But for what would become London Calling, they just dug into their record collections and musical knowledge. Country, jazz, ska, soul, rockabilly, cabaret – pick one, it’ll likely be in here somewhere. And did it better than anybody.

Let’s deal with this in some old-tech terms – drop the needle nearly anywhere across its two slabs of good old black vinyl and you’ll find something of worth, each song a little world of its own, that somehow all hangs together as a coherent whole.

Some of you won’t even need to get past the opening salvo title track. It’s a call-to-arms, an air raid siren, and rebel yell all in one. Over a couple of verses, you can even throw in a bit of modernly relevant climate change, class warfare, nuclear fear, and even a demystification of their own perceived importance: “…Don’t look at us – phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust”. Why kill your idols, when they’re apparently happy to do it themselves?

The song’s Morse Code SOS coda barely dies away before they lurch back to somewhere around 1955 as they savage a Vince Taylor rockabilly chestnut, Brand New Cadillac. What was that old line about seeing rock and roll’s past, present, and future? Yeah, that. Sidebar: their run at it was only ever meant as a soundcheck warmup, but Stevens had the tape running and convinced them to include it on the album proper. It’s a rehearsal take that actually appears.

Hateful is a kicking anti-drug sneer. Well, more a sneer at the cunce those taking advantage of those on the gear. Cross-reference with drummer Topper Headon’s later yo-yoing heroin use, and Strummer getting the shits with Jones’ overuse of certain combustibles: “If he’s smokes any more hash, he’ll turn into a tree”. Music first, punch cones later. Oh, you want the politics they’re often famous for? OK, Spanish Bombs. Jones tying past and present with some flamenco as Franco’s civil war has “…the echoes of ’39…” link the dispossessed Basques with Ireland’s then-contemporary troubles.

As things got rolling, Stevens offered Strummer a copy of the biography of that perfect morality tale, Hollywood actor Montgomery Clift. Once a challenger to Marlon Brando’s status and star power, Monty’s confused sexuality, drug and alcohol problems (…anyone sensing a theme here?) and a catastrophic car crash saw his decline. The brass band swing of The Right Profile – the title referring to Clift’s ‘good side’ after one side of his face was damaged and paralysed in the auto wreck -  puts it alongside R.E.M.’s tribute Monty Got A Raw Deal as songs that honour their subject. Check him out in The Misfits – the last film of Marilyn Monroe, trivia buffs – as evidence of his gloriously angsty talent. And wind up further with Working For The Clampdown, because that’s a classic Clash diatribe and Doc Martens stomp against authority.

Strummer and Jones aren’t the only ones letting their talents run free. Paul Simonon gets his first writing credit with what turns out to be one of the album’s best known tracks. Guns Of Brixton is a slowburn reggae of police oppression (…anyone else sensing a theme here?) and minorities forced into a corner. Not much imagination is needed to transplant it to last century’s Soweto or Redfern, or last week’s West Bank. And Beats International will always give thanks for that bassline’s existence.

There’s more outlaws and outcasts on Side 3. Wrong ‘Em Boyo starts as a perfectly sloppy attack on Stagger Lee – see Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads version for how messed up that can get – before Joe pulls it up, orders “Start all over again…” and old Stagger gets a breezy ska advisory to change his ways. Koka Kola is corruption “…in the gleaming corridors of the 51^st floor”, and debasing the individual well predating Gordon Gekko. Death Or Glory then declaims the whole ethic – “…it’s just another story”. And The Card Cheat could link them all, the titular character shot down pretty much without ceremony. “It means nothing”. But kinda everything.

There probably many albums which would have The Tao Of Love And Sex in the bibliography, but Lover’s Rock is handily educational to unreconstructed blokes with no idea of how to honour their woman. Four Horsemen is a band determined to debunk their own legend, or maybe just trying not to make the same mistakes as The Pistols – “They were given the foods of vanity/And bit the dust screaming ‘insanity’…” And just when you think it’s over, there’s that fine old tradition of the unlisted track. And perhaps the best one ever. Train In Vain is Mick’s soul affections revealed, and a groove that pointed to where he might go next – although BAD I and II continued in a spirit of grab-bagging a bunch of the past, and adding some new spins to it.

It is the greatest of albums, and not surprisingly The Clash – the men and the myth – never quite matched it. Sandinista followed – emboldened by this one’s artistic triumph, they simply went too far. It’s a triple album, no less. But its six sides would probably have been better being about one-and-a-half. There are a quite a few stinkers abounding whether by experiment, musical or chemical over-indulgence, or just bad judgement. Then, perversely, as the band was tearing itself to bits: Combat Rock – the single album with the hits most people would know. Somehow, that seems strangely right.

That’s the record of their biggest Australian hit – Rock The Casbah, mostly the work of a drummer already on the nod and about to be sacked from the band, again. And Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, written by Jones for his then-girlfriend, American singer Ellen Foley – trivia point: it’s actually her voice on the sprawling operas of Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell if you didn’t know. And even her own We Belong To The Night was bigger here than anything the boyfriend’s combo ever managed in their real time existence.

But all that aside, just take London Calling as a ground zero, and you’ll find something in their canon to get lost in. Do so.