The Clash
London Calling

THE REVIEW

"For me, the Clash are a disappointment; they're liked by the spoiled kids from the posh neighborhoods" Johnny Rotten.

With thirty years under their belt, and four reviews, this site still has kids who call "London Calling" a punk album... But who was John Mellor/Joe Strummer? The son of a diplomat, he had founded the 101ers, a traditional r&b band that played Van Morrison and Graham Parker covers for drunken pub-goers. The turning point for Strummer was when he saw the difference between his band that "tried" to please those drunks and the Sex Pistols who couldn't care less and imposed their subgenre of music.

It was then that the Clash were born with Joe and Mick Jones trying to keep pace with the Pistols at the 100 Club without appearing too artificial. And it wasn't easy, the inconsistency lay in the fact that while the bourgeois Strummer flaunted socialist beliefs and suppressed his love for good old rock, the rotten working-class son John Lydon, who emerged from the council houses of Finsbury Park, without even knowing what singing meant, screeched instead that, for him, left or right was all the same crap.

In short, after pretending to be the Sex Pistols for a couple of years, Strummer and Jones, finally free from that kind of latent competition with that band of madmen that self-destructed during the 1978 American tour, could start working to avoid being kicked out by CBS for not having any records in the charts. They rented a garage near Vauxhall Bridge and started their sessions just like the Rolling Stones had done seven years earlier in that billionaire villa in the South of France. And they came up with the best double album by a British band since "Exile on Main Street".

But "London Calling" is no longer a punk album, the Clash want to prove they can play EVERY TYPE of music, the material developed in that garage is so vast that the producer Guy Stevens (note: he had already worked with Mott the Hoople and Traffic) had to work overtime to bring some order when the band showed up for recording at Wessex Studios. We owe to him a dirty and amphetamine-driven version of an old r&b by Vince Taylor like "Brand New Cadillac" and the inclusion of the Irish Horns' brass instruments (in a Clash album!!!) on all four sides of the double album, which was sold at the end of 1979 at the political price of five pounds.

Brass in the swing of "Jimmy Jazz" introduced by a whistling like a commercial jingle. Brass in the ska of "Rudie can't fail" in which Strummer's voice, who always tended to scream, Jones's, which was rather modest, and Simonon's, who couldn't sing, are really deadly as they alternate and then join in chorus. Brass again in the other wonderful reggae "Revolution Rock", where the keyboards of the skilled session man Micky Gallagher give a calypso touch of Caribbean beach. It is still his piano that provides a tone to "Chard Cheat" otherwise lost in a pompous brass accompaniment (again!) to Mick Jones's...faint voice. Guess which instruments run wild in the ska "Wrong ‘Em Boyo", which revives a black tradition classic like Stagger Lee? And isn't the magnificent arrangement also bursting with brass (with a great sax solo!) of "The Right Profile", led by the rough voice of Strummer that tells us how his favorite actor, Monty Clift, was a lost junkie? I bet now those impatient kids mentioned before will start asking: "...so where the hell is the punk?"

Certainly not in the little pop song "Lost In the Supermarket" where Mick Jones's voice wanders lost among the shelves not knowing what to do while Mick Farren's Deviants had proletarianly looted that same supermarket just ten years earlier (Let's Loot the Supermarket). And neither in the epic and romantically political "Spanish Bombs", with the stunning intertwining of the three voices in the anarchic assault of the civil war. And is it maybe punk the apocalyptic reggae of "Gun of Brixton" with Paul Simonon putting out a tuneless and uncertain voice that in that song you wouldn't change with anyone else's?

No, wait: in "Working for Clampdown", after the strange introduction with Micky Gallagher's Hammond, Topper Headon's drums (great performance of his on this album before being kicked out for being unreliable due to heroin addiction) seems to hammer the right rhythm and Strummer tightens his neck veins against corrupt rulers. "Death and Glory" and "Koka Kola" still highlight the guitars along with Topper's dry drumming, while Joe's ragged singing harks back to that rotten era that seems centuries away for the Clash when in reality only a couple of years have passed.

And the attack of the title track, marshallingly drawn from the Morse code broadcasts with the BBC World Service's jingle, isn't it punk in its torn vision of a London shrouded in fog that would metaphorically descend with Thatcher's election in May 1979? A disaster for Strummer who howls his despair over the failure of old labor socialism and that traverses the album like a sense of impending catastrophe: "...they gave you all you need to blindfold your mind..." (from Four Horsemen).

And isn't the cover also punk with the graphic copied from an old Elvis Presley record where he held his guitar high? But this time Pennie Smith's photograph captures Paul Simonon smashing the bass to the ground during a concert at New York's Palladium. Leaving aside that he must have seen it done dozens of times by an old rocker like Pete Townshend, it seems he just wanted to impress a hot chick like Blondie's Debbie Harry who was in the front row...

Yeah, it's really punk, this record!