The Clash had already declared war on the past. Their 1977 single “1977” said it plainly: no Elvis, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones. Two years later they made a double album that tips its hat to all three and about a dozen other traditions besides, and the contradiction is the whole point. London Calling, released on December 14, 1979, on CBS Records in the UK and in January 1980 on Epic in the US, is the record where The Clash stopped arguing about what rock and roll was allowed to be and just became it. Nineteen tracks. Four vinyl sides. Sixty-five minutes. The argument is structural.
The sessions started in August 1979 at Wessex Sound Studios, a converted church hall in Highbury, North London. Engineer Bill Price knew the room and described trying to get every ounce of ambience out of what was a large but acoustically dead space, suspending microphones high above Topper Headon’s drum kit and blending the results. Headon’s drumming is one of the album’s unsung arguments. The band had come to realize that his skills could carry music across a wide array of genres far beyond punk rock, and the sequencing of London Calling is built to prove exactly that. Mickey Gallagher of Ian Dury and the Blockheads played Hammond B3 organ on the record, and a horn section fills out the low end of the mix on several tracks. The album’s range was not accidental. It was staffed for it.
Producer Guy Stevens was the Clash’s choice, over CBS Records’ objections. Stevens had alcohol and drug problems and his methods were not conventional. During sessions he swung a ladder and upturned chairs to generate what he called a rock and roll atmosphere. He reportedly poured a bottle of red wine across the keys of the studio’s piano while Strummer was trying to play it. He was known to wrestle with musicians to push a more intense performance. None of this sounds like a recipe for a coherent double album. What it produced was a record cut fast and hot, with many songs completed in one or two takes, over a five-to-six-week stretch of eighteen-hour days. The band had demoed the album in full at a rehearsal space they called Vanilla before moving to Wessex, and those recordings set the template. Stevens’ aim, by all accounts, was to preserve the band’s punk energy while letting their musical range breathe.
Side one opens with the title track, Strummer and Jones’s apocalyptic bulletin from a drowning city, drums and guitars hitting in unison from a dead start. No count-in. No introduction. Then “Brand New Cadillac,” a cover of Vince Taylor and His Playboys’ 1959 rockabilly single, lands before the listener has caught their breath. The move is deliberate. The album announces its terms inside the first two songs: punk urgency and rock and roll history are the same energy at different points in time. “Jimmy Jazz” follows with a jazzy, almost lounging feel, and “Rudie Can’t Fail” closes the side with ska horns and a working-class swagger that owes as much to Jamaican sound-system culture as it does to the Westway. Side one alone contains more genre information than most bands put across an entire career.
Side two deepens the argument. “Spanish Bombs” connects the Spanish Civil War to the political violence of the late 1970s, Strummer’s lyrics moving between English and Spanish over a melody that sounds like a lullaby written in a war zone. “Lost in the Supermarket,” written by Strummer but sung by Mick Jones, is a quiet song about suburban alienation, the kind of subject punk was supposed to be too blunt to handle. Then side two closes with “The Guns of Brixton,” written and sung by bassist Paul Simonon, who grew up in Brixton. Its heavy reggae pulse and Simonon’s flat, unglamorous vocal carry the weight of a specific geography. The song is the album’s moral anchor. The emotion in his voice is not performed.
Side three pivots to “Death or Glory” and “The Card Cheat,” the album’s two most cinematic tracks, the latter built on a Phil Spector-scale wall of sound that the band had no business pulling off and pulled off completely. Side four closes with “Train in Vain,” which was not listed on the original sleeve because it was added at the last minute, after plans to include it as a free flexi-disc in an issue of NME fell through. The track’s title was scratched into the run-off groove of side four, and a sticker on the outer cellophane wrapper noted its existence. It became The Clash’s first American chart single, reaching number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album itself climbed to number 27 on the Billboard 200. The fact that their most commercially accessible song arrived as an afterthought, unnamed on the packaging, is either a cosmic joke or the most punk thing about the record.
The cover art is an homage to Elvis Presley’s 1956 self-titled debut, the pink lettering and green text lifted directly from that sleeve. The Clash had declared Elvis dead in 1977. In 1979 they quoted his album cover. NME called London Calling one of the best albums of the 1970s. Rolling Stone called it the best album of the 1980s. It is a rare record that can be claimed by two decades, and the reason is that it refused to belong to either one. That is the whole record in one image: conviction that knows its own history, rebellion that has done its reading. London Calling holds together as a statement because every choice on it, from the sequencing to the production to the unlisted closing track, makes the same case. Rock and roll is a posture toward the world. The Clash spent 65 minutes proving they understood the difference.
