Clash

The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in

engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin

a nuclear error, but I have no fear

London is drowning and I live by the river

(Strummer/Jones)

Released in Britain in December 1979 and arriving in the US in January 1980, "London Calling" was the album that cemented the Clash's reputation for good. The band's third album, following the successful "The Clash" and the less successful (but equally worthy) "Give 'Em Enough Rope", the new record immediately came across as an ambitious work destined to leave its mark for decades to come: a double LP produced by Guy Stevens, its cover soon became a rock icon in its own right. Speaking of which, not everyone may know that it quotes the cover of Elvis Presley's debut album, dated 1956. Twenty years later, in 1976, the Clash were the young upstarts singing "no Elvis, Beatles and Rolling Stones". In 1977 the punk movement exploded, and in that same year Elvis Presley died.

On the brink of 1980, a lot had changed: the Sex Pistols had split up, Sid Vicious was dead, and English punk had conquered the States. The Clash, who had nonetheless remained standard-bearers of that movement, began to change shape: shedding their "city rockers" image and leaving behind a fair amount of naivety, the four musicians started not only looking toward the future but, for the first time, also tried to come to terms with the past that punk had so often disowned. The revolution of '77 had burned out early because it hadn't managed to build, or rather hadn't been able to rebuild after tearing everything down; the Clash, however, striking out on their own path, succeeded in doing so: by reclaiming the past, they sought values with which to make sense of the present, so as to project them into the future.

The album itself is likewise suspended between past, present and future, starting with its iconic cover referencing Elvis's debut. Placed side by side, the two covers share the same graphic layout; both feature a black-and-white photo taken during a live performance. While this openly declared similarity is striking, functioning as a tribute to an indestructible American myth, on the other hand the parallel also highlights what looks like a jarring contrast: the photo on the original cover shows Elvis belting out a song with guitar in hand; the other, by contrast, immortalizes Clash bassist Paul Simonon in the act of furiously smashing his instrument on the ground during a concert at New York's Palladium.

The cover's great communicative power lies precisely in its contradictions: it offers a perfect example of the Clash's love/hate relationship with the States and its mythologies. The contrast also seems to evoke the generational clash on which punk had built its whole creed. And yet, the act of quotation also carries within it a way of moving beyond that clash, through the reclaiming of one's own ideal past. After all, punk had been a renewed explosion of rock and roll: in 1977, the death of the "King of rock and roll" coincided with the rebirth of the original r'n'r spirit in the guise of punk. But it was only with "London Calling" that this legacy was fully absorbed into consciousness: the young Elvis of the '50s was no longer a father figure to be rejected (that role, if anything, belonged to the bloated Elvis of the '70s), but became instead a guardian spirit, the symbol of that original rebellion which had given birth to rock culture. The generational clash thus turned into an awareness of an inter-generational phenomenon. As "London Calling" quickly took on the stature of a masterpiece, its cover ended up becoming even more famous, and paradoxically more "classic", than the one that inspired it.

The release of "London Calling" marked a genuine watershed: it signaled the end of the '70s, but also the end of an entire musical era. In its immediate aftermath, an entire generation of young listeners sensed, perhaps already with a touch of nostalgia, the definitive twilight of "historic" punk - the movement that had largely been identified with the story of the English bands who had fuelled and sustained it. Punk rock, having by then exploded in the US and set off down the rugged road of self-production, was turning into something quite different from what it had originally been; a band like the Dead Kennedys, forming in San Francisco in those very months, seemed a world away from Strummer and co., who had nonetheless been among the leading figures of that same movement.

From the album's very title, the London of '77 is already viewed from a distance: the setting is no longer that of the "Westway", the outer suburbs, the small punk clubs and the garagelands. The style of the songs differs from that of "White Riot" or "Complete Control": of the nineteen tracks making up the album (originally eighteen plus one hidden track, "Train In Vain"), not a single one could still be called "punk" in the stereotyped sense the word had come to acquire with the arrival of the "second wave". And yet, despite all this, "London Calling" is precisely the finest fruit of British punk: a masterpiece that would not have been possible without that experience and which, even as it moves past many of its limitations, carries its essential spirit forward into the rock landscape of the decades to follow.

With "London Calling", for the second time (having already signed to CBS in 1977), the Clash found themselves making a decisive choice. It wasn't a painless one: some of the more hardline old fans felt betrayed by a band accused of having gone "conservative", of having sold out to the market and adopted rockstar posturing. And yet the decision to make an album like "London Calling" would prove to be fully vindicated, not only by the well-deserved success with both audiences and critics but, in hindsight, by its longevity, its enduring modernity and the great lesson it offered. It takes very little to notice that on this record the Clash were passing through a period of extraordinary balance, one they would only partly maintain on the following "Sandinista!", and even less so on "Combat Rock"; at that moment, they were becoming a point of reference and a model for many bands then taking their first steps - starting with Shane MacGowan's Pogues, all the way to U2 - before going on to exert their influence, more or less directly, on countless bands throughout the '90s.

Although far removed from any redundant technicality, and equally distant from the arty pretensions that some post-punk groups indulged in, the Clash of "London Calling" had grown both musically and lyrically. Between the music and the words, the songwriting partnership of Strummer and Jones delivered some of the finest songs of the Clash's career: Joe Strummer was going through a period of great inspiration and had discovered a genuine poetic streak; Mick Jones proved himself an excellent composer with an almost obsessive attention to arrangement, while also revealing a voice perfectly interchangeable with Strummer's: the "public", militant songs were entrusted to Joe's voice, while the more "private", intimate moments went to Mick's clearer tone. But it was also thanks to the solidity of the rhythm section that the Clash achieved such great results; the importance of drummer Topper Headon, a musician with a jazz background, is often overlooked, and on "London Calling" he gave ample proof of his own inventiveness. On bass, Paul Simonon had matured through contact with a variety of musical influences, some of which he himself introduced into the band's repertoire. Finally, "London Calling" also expanded the instrumental palette, bringing in horns, piano, percussion and more.

One must not, however, fall into the trap of seeing this as a break with the past: the band gave up none of its original traits; it simply grew more aware of its own means and aims, without contradicting itself or forgetting its roots. Rather, "London Calling" showcased a great quality the Clash had actually always possessed, one that meant they never wrote the same song twice: variety. Variety of timbre first of all, with the alternation between Strummer's and Jones's voices, but also variety of rhythm. On "London Calling", bassist Paul Simonon even writes and sings a track himself ("The Guns Of Brixton"). To find such versatility in English rock, you'd have to go all the way back to the Beatles.

Moreover, this intrinsic variety of the band pairs beautifully with another kind of variety that is the true stylistic hallmark of the record. What's striking about this album, and what makes it an implicit master class in "rock history", is the sheer plurality of genres and sub-genres, influences, rhythms, cultures and counter-cultures brought together within it. In truth, even this wasn't really a radical shift in perspective for the band: from the very start, the Clash had tackled reggae, and had been the first to forge that singular fusion of punk-rock and reggae. It was Bob Marley himself who acknowledged their contribution, name-checking them in the song "Punky Reggae Party". The band's was a genuine calling, unlike the Police, who approached reggae in a rather superficial way, without any authentic interest in that musical culture.

In 1979, the quartet's musical horizons opened up in every direction: alongside the reggae they had already explored, they revived rock'n'roll and other sounds, drawn from different sources yet united by something in common. The range on display is truly vast: from one song to the next, you move from the "pure" rock, so to speak, of "London Calling" or "Death Or Glory", to the volcanic rock'n'roll of "Brand New Cadillac", a Clash-style reworking of a 1958 Vince Taylor tune; from the authentic reggae of "Revolution Rock" to the equally "authentic", if distinctly Clash-ified, reggae of "The Guns Of Brixton"; passing through the jazzy sounds of "Jimmy Jazz", the ska of "Wrong 'Em Boyo", the funk-ska of "Rudie Can't Fail", the Spector-esque symphonic sweep of "The Card Cheat", the surf reverb of "I'm Not Down", the Latin American echoes of "Spanish Bombs", right up to the pulsing, modern emo-pop of "Lost In The Supermarket"; and there's still plenty more to discover from one song to the next. The genres seem to merge and blur into one another, only to reveal shared roots, much like the cultures that underpin them. The result of all this variety is, then, anything but scattered: the Clash manage to find the common soul running through a series of disparate musical impulses and, by reinterpreting them through a modern lens, turn them all into "Clash sound".

There is only one thing that has no place in the world of "London Calling": progressive rock (or the various forms of art-rock). That is, the idea that rock ought to make some kind of "progress" toward "art", in a sometimes clumsy attempt to overcome — by imitating classical music or decades-old avant-garde movements — an inferiority complex toward "high" music and "official" art. For all its excesses, punk's great aesthetic revolution had asserted the opposite: in the history of rock (and in art more broadly) there is no evolution, no drive toward ever-greater complexity, and even with technique stripped down to the bone you can still produce work of enormous impact. This is because artistic expression isn't grounded in quantity of technique, nor in formal complexity, still less in any attempt to gain credibility with official art, but rather in what is expressed through technique and form, often by overturning the prevailing concept of art itself. However, punk had only been a practical demonstration of this idea, without yet arriving at a full understanding of it. In the late '70s, as punk was running out of steam, some "new wave" bands — apparently punk's own offspring — returned to the idea of "arty" rock, the very thing the '77 movement had rejected. The Clash, however, refused to be swept along by this change of course, and reaffirmed the anti-progressive aesthetic with a greater awareness than punk itself had shown: from the cover art onward, as we've seen, "London Calling" revealed a renewed interest in "origins", and that was the real novelty. The idea underlying the album is that rock can only be "art" in its most genuine form, and that the origins of rock and roll therefore don't belong to the past, but remain an ever-relevant model: rock is born from a "wild" sound, and throughout its history it keeps returning to that sound rooted in Black music and popular culture. Against the "evolutionist" view of music, and driven by a passion for rock's historical roots, the Clash attempted a kind of genealogy of the genre, recovering above all those Black musical components that punk had often neglected, generating forms of ambiguity in the process.

As for the Clash, aside from some misunderstandings over their military (that is, militant) clothing, they never had any such ambiguity. Despite the hostility they received both from nostalgic old punks and from the new anarcho-punks, the band never forgot its grassroots origins and never lost touch with its audience: telling, among other things, was their decision to sell the double LP at the price of a single album.

As for the social commitment expressed in their lyrics, the Clash took no step backward: without ever subordinating aesthetic and musical concerns to the message (and this is the great difference between the Clash and bands like The Exploited), social themes run through the entire record. The album opens with the ominous tolling of "London Calling", which also opens the door to the new decade, seeming to foresee its anxieties: a few years later, at Chernobyl, the hallucinatory, apocalyptic "nuclear error" imagined in the song would become tragic reality, giving rise to one of the greatest ecological disasters of our time. "Spanish Bombs", a gorgeous acoustic ballad carried by a refined Strummer-Jones duet, recalls memories of the Spanish Civil War; "The Right Profile" is dedicated to the memory of actor Montgomery Clift, one of old Hollywood's "beautiful and damned"; in "The Guns Of Brixton", the message is entrusted to the sound of reggae, which here strikes its darkest chords, made all the more pointed and authentic by the voice of bassist Simonon, born in Brixton, the London neighbourhood that symbolized the struggles of the Black community. In the moving "Lost In The Supermarket", sung by Mick Jones, the musician evokes a childhood spent in the greyness of London's suburbs; but the autobiographical theme also contains an indictment of loneliness within consumer society and unchecked urbanization. The critique of America in "Koka Kola" is the flip side of what's often considered the Clash's "American" album; "I'm Not Down", from its title alone, conveys just how far removed it is from the nihilism of the Sex Pistols and the "blank generation". Finally, the cover of "Revolution Rock" once again entrusts reggae with the call for a "revolutionary rock". As the Clash's music always was, and even more so at the very moment it seemed they had turned their backs on the past.

On "London Calling", their revolution no longer went by the name "punk", but only because that movement had by then completed its mission and run its course: the band didn't disown it, but understood that to truly keep its spirit alive, they had to move beyond the musical and intellectual limits, far too narrow, to which it had been reduced after '77. And yet, if, as at its origins, "punk" means anything that rejects the conventions and expectations society imposes, then the Clash remained punk precisely by refusing to accept any standard formula, by never being what people expected or wanted them to be: proving that attitude goes well beyond simple adherence to a canon, they taught that there are no limits to be placed on one's own talent. The Clash, who were among punk's "founding fathers", never regarded it as a rock sub-culture: if for some that movement had been nothing but a "swindle", or a form of blind destruction confined to the ghetto, for them it sprang instead from a genuine passion for rock and roll, from a shared set of values that it was still capable of passing on to new generations, just as it had to those before them.

(first published in 2003; revised in December 2009)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

13/12/2009