FEATURE:
The Right Profile
The Clash’s London Calling at Forty-Five
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EVEN though its forty-fifth anniversary…
IN THIS PHOTO: (L-R) Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer of The Clash on the road with a baseball bat, in the California desert in February 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Bob Gruen
is not until 14th December, I wanted to feature The Clash’s London Calling now. It is one of the all-time great albums. I am going to come to some features soon. In December 1979, when Punk was rising and Disco was declared dead, The Clash put out their third album out at an interesting and changing time. More sophisticated than most Punk around them, there is plenty of urgency and rawness, though various genres are mixed together beautifully. Recorded at Wessex Sound Studios in London over a six-week period, London Calling arrived after a spell of writers’ block from Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. At a time when bands such as Blondie were mixing Punk Rock and New Wave, The Clash added their own take. They went far beyond that. Incorporating Lounge Jazz, Reggae and R&B, the band tackled and spotlighted racial conflict, unemployment and social displacement. I have taken quite a bit from Wikipedia for this. To give an overview of the album. I will go deep with London Calling. I wonder whether there is anything special planned for the forty-fifth anniversary. A new vinyl reissue or some form of celebration. There are some really interesting features about London Calling. This feature explores the gear the band used for the recording. I would also suggest people read features such as this which help contextualise London Calling. In December 2019, the BBC wrote as to why the album is still relevant. I think, sadly, it is an album relevant today. Simply because a lot of the issues it highlights in 1979 are still present today. This new wave of fascism in the U.S. is something that would definitely have compelled a band like The Clash in ’79.
I want to start off by bringing in a feature from The Ringer from 2019. Marking forty years of a seminal album, they looked at the lead-up to the release of The Clash’s third studio album. How their sound and vision truly evolved. I think London Calling is one of those albums that anyone can pick up and be affected by. You do not need to know about The Clash and their history or the context of the album. Even if you were not alive in 1979, you can relate to what The Clash are singing about:
“The Clash’s first two LPs, 1977’s self-titled debut and 1978’s Give ’Em Enough Rope, thrilled critics and galvanized a large and loyal following. Now it was up to them to consecrate their standing as the biggest band in the world, or at least “The Only Band That Matters,” a nickname they had self-applied. Brimming with talent, energy, and esprit de corps, the Clash sensed they were close to something monumental—a commercial breakthrough and a masterpiece. They had material to spare and an unbreakable date with destiny. They just needed someone to bring it all together, to bring it out of them. They sorted through their options. And then they hired Guy Stevens.
“To the Opium Dens / To the Barroom Gin”
But why Guy Stevens? Thirty-five years old at the time of the album’s recording, Stevens had a well-earned reputation as a surly and dangerous figure, a historic consumer of speed and alcohol who had done hard time for possession in London’s Wormwood Scrubs penitentiary. The notion of retaining Stevens as producer understandably sent a chill through the Clash’s label, CBS. It was like hiring Sam Peckinpah to helm a Hollywood blockbuster. What could possibly be the rationale? Even the Sex Pistols, for god’s sake, had ultimately elected to work with the decorated industry pro Chris Thomas for their big commercial swing.
But for the Clash, it had to be Guy. Trouble was, no one could find Guy. No one had a number for him, and anyway he never stayed in any place very long. Joe Strummer combed the pubs of Oxford Street, where Guy was known to dwell. It took a while but he finally discovered Stevens slumped over a bar, the specter of a much older man. “Have a drink!” Guy insisted, and Strummer obliged. London Calling was off and running.
“So What Will All the Poor Do With Their Lives / On Judgment Day?”
I’m suspicious of anyone whose heart doesn’t swell during “Spanish Bombs,” the deeply moving, remarkably catchy account of a doomed group of antifascist insurgents pinned against the rocks and ultimately slaughtered by General Francisco Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a hit, but wait until you hear it. The Clash are a bit like The Wire. The atmospherics and storytelling tend to be so spectacular that it is only in the gripped and exhausted aftermath of experiencing a song that it might briefly flash before your mind: Wait, am I learning?
And you are. When was the last time you thought about Montgomery Clift, the brilliant and troubled Method actor from The Misfits and From Here to Eternity, dead at age 45 under lightly lurid circumstances? “The Right Profile,” Strummer’s wry and sad eulogy to Clift, is a rollicking anthem for a doomed figure who not coincidentally resembled Guy Stevens.
London Calling’s loneliest song is “Lost in the Supermarket,” a meditation on consumerism and the alienation of the suburbs, whose images of consumption and ennui—“I came in here for the special offer”—evoke an escalating sense of dread in an already claustrophobic milieu. In Jones and Strummer, the Clash were gifted with two great vocalists who sounded nothing alike and yet fit together perfectly. Jones’s vocal on “Lost in the Supermarket” conveys all the tender anguish of the song’s shy-but-desperate-for-action protagonist. Joe wrote it for Mick knowing he could never have pulled it off himself.
Toward the back end of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, the closest double-album analog to London Calling, Mick Jagger practically browbeats the listener: “Let it loose / Let it all come down.” It’s tragic and beautiful. It’s giving in without giving up. “Clampdown” is the Clash’s response. Four minutes of pure rage and melody that indicts everyone from the exploitative bosses to the picket line holdouts, it’s the centerpiece of London Calling, taking John Lennon’s caustic critiques on “Working Class Hero” and turning them into actionable steps: “Let fury have the hour / Anger can be power / Did you know that you can use it?”
“When We Were Talking / I Saw You Nodding Out”
Before the Clash, before Mott the Hoople, before Wormwood Scrubs, Guy Stevens had an obsession with American music: Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Link Wray, Jerry Lee Lewis. He prided himself on having every Motown single and every Stax release.
Joe Strummer was playing the piano on a London Calling track and Guy Stevens decided he didn’t like the way the piano sounded, so he rushed out of the control room and poured red wine all over Strummer’s hands and into the piano. This is bullshit. The band didn’t hire Guy Stevens; they enabled him. The problem with people like Stevens is that while they are off on their paths of destruction, someone has to mop up the wine. Someone has to mop up the blood. And someone has to actually record the music. That job fell mainly to London Calling’s engineer and unsung hero, Bill Price, who meticulously and brilliantly oversaw the tedious process of overdubbing and mixing while Stevens went about the business of being a “vibe merchant,” which mainly meant breaking furniture and falling down stairs. But even still, no one disputes Stevens’s contributions to the finished product. He was not facilitator, he was obstacle. He was a duende.
“Trenches Full of Poets / The Ragged Army / Fixing Bayonets to Fight the Other Line”
The Spanish poet, playwright, and revolutionary Federico García Lorca believed that the muse was all fine and well, but for an artist to achieve something greater they needed to engage with their duende. A duende is a demon that exists within us, that sleeps in our bones and feeds on our marrow. When the artist awakens their duende, it is at their own peril and is seriously risky business, because the duende will battle them at every turn and challenge them to be transcendent. And this is often a fight to the end, because by its very nature the duende embraces and seeks out death.
The poet Edward Hirsch says this: “Duende means something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death. It has an element of mortal panic and fear. It has the power of wild abandonment. It speaks to an art that touches and transfigures death, that both woos and evades it.” The duende wounds the artist in order to show them true pain and ecstasy, and the artist who is being driven by a duende (and simultaneously dueling with it) is truly fearless, which lends to limitless creativity and intuition. The duende makes them scream and howl and scratch and claw because their very existence depends on it, and from that comes heroic bravery, surpassing beauty, and an unreplicable artistic innovation and imagination brought to life.
So anyway, that’s why Guy Stevens.
“Don’t You Know It Is Wrong / To Cheat a Trying Man?”
So goes the refrain from the Clash’s ebullient reimagining of the 1923 murder ballad “Stagger Lee,” which concerns the barroom death of a St. Louis gangster named Lee Shelton. Three sides in and we’re a long way from the Thames. But we’re never far from a rising river.
The slow-burning “Death or Glory” is a repudiation in real time of the band’s knee-jerk rebellions of years previous. It’s easy to call for a riot without acknowledging the real-world consequences for those who participate and lack the resources to extract themselves from arrest and the bail process. Besides: “He who fucks nuns / Will later join the church.” The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gem “Koka Kola” is an act of comic revenge against the encroaching advertising world, in the style of early Who, and its future colonization of both our whims and habits.
Finally, at the end of Side 3, there is the piano-driven set piece “The Card Cheat,” a horn-abetted ballad that is probably the most ornate thing the band ever recorded. Stevens is quoted as saying, “There are only two Phil Spectors in the world, and I am one.” This is Stevens’s attempt at “River Deep, Mountain High”; it’s a tale of a hard-traveling gambler meeting a long-time-coming demise.
Side 4 is a tonic. The easygoing Strummer-penned “Lover’s Rock” is an oasis of pure romance amid an endlessly complicated battlefield of global and interpersonal dynamics. “Four Horsemen” is a straightforward reaffirmation of Joe, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon, and Mick: the men making the music happen. “I’m Not Down” is the brilliant Jones-sung final word on all the misery and magic and possibility of the new great depression: “I’ve been beaten up / I’ve been thrown around / But I’m not down.”
The group play to their strengths on a transporting cover of the Danny Ray and Jackie Edwards reggae anthem “Revolution Rock,” apparently ending London Calling on a thematically appropriate act of joyous defiance. But then they turn tricky. “Train in Vain,” the unlisted 19th track, is a Mick Jones tour de force of bouncing hooks and romantic alienation, an instant classic headlined by the desperate Marvin Gaye–worthy exhortation to a lover he can’t stop from leaving him: “You must explain why this must be!”
“I Know That My Life Makes You Nervous / But I Tell You I Can’t Live in Service”
Upon its release, London Calling received rapturous reviews and sold in the neighborhood of 2 million copies—not enough to qualify as a genuine blockbuster but certainly confirmation of the band’s steadily rising stature. The following year’s Sandinista! was more ambitious still—three discs of dub, synth-pop, and straight rock that ran to nearly two and a half hours. That record has no shortage of brilliant and memorable moments, but the overarching lack of focus stands in stark contrast to the ambitious but surgical London Calling. The Clash elected to produce Sandinista! themselves.
Guy Stevens died in 1981, less than two years after his last great triumph. He, too, had fought pugnaciously, but circumstances and substances overwhelmed him. He was 38. That year, the Clash recorded the memorial track “Midnight to Stevens,” a languid, ambling tune freighted with the sort of melodramatic hyperbole that the producer would have loved. “It’s that company trick / We’re all jumping through.”
London Calling is a landmark four decades later, improved by time and the album’s vision of a world growing both smaller in technological terms and more imperiled by permanent class inequity. More so, it is one of the most generous, gratifying, and galvanizing works of art the 20th century has to offer. It begins with apocalypse and then lights a way out. The path is an arduous one and filled with peril. But win or lose, the principled fight is always worthwhile. “Yo t’quierro y finito, yo te querda, oh ma côrazon”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. In 2004, Pitchfork provided their take on the 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition of London Calling. Offering an expanded view of The Clash’s creative mind at that time, it does add extra weight and significance to London Calling. It is a treasure that every music fan should endeavour to own. I do hope that something is released or written about to mark the approaching forty-fifth anniversary of London Calling. It is a seismic album that will always be influential and meaningful. The fact that London Calling still packs a punch all these years later is testament to its genius:
“For those who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, calling The Clash a punk band was (and remains) more a matter of affect than honesty-- in 2004, wholly and completely divorced from a context that never fully resonated with a global audience, The Clash are a rock band, and 1979's London Calling is their creative apex, a booming, infallible tribute to throbbing guitars and spacious ideology. By the late 70s, "punk" was more specifically linked with rusted safety pins, shit-covered Doc Martens, and tight pink sneers than any steadfast, organized philosophy; The Clash insisted on forefronting their politics. This album tackles topical issues with impressive gusto-- the band cocks their cowboy hats, assumes full outlaw position, and pillages the world market for sonic fodder and lyric-ready injustice. A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.
As always, London Calling's title track holds steady as the record's cosmic lynchpin: Horrifyingly apocalyptic, "London Calling" is riddled with weird werewolf howls and big, prophetic hollers, Mick Jones' punchy guitar bursts tapping little nails into our skulls, pushing hard for total lunacy. Empowered and unafraid, Strummer reveals self-skewering prophecies, panting hard about nuclear errors and impending ice ages. He also spitefully lodges some of the most unpleasantly convincing calls to arms ever committed to tape, commanding his followers-- now, then, future-- to storm the streets at full, leg-flailing sprints. Even if The Clash were more blatantly inspired by the musical tenets of dub and reggae, "London Calling" unapologetically cops the fury of punk's blind-and-obliterate full-body windmilling, bypassing the cerebral cortex to sink deep into our muscles. From "London Calling" on, The Clash do not let go; each track builds on the last, pummeling and laughing and slapping us into dumb submission.
And now, we get to watch how it fell together: Using only a Teac four-track tape recorder linked up to a portastudio, The Clash inadvertently immortalized their London Calling rehearsal sessions at Vanilla Studios (a former rubber factory-gone-rehearsal-space in Pimlico, London) in the summer of 1979, several weeks before the album sessions officially opened at Wessex Studios. One set of tapes got left on the Tube. Another got crammed into a box.
The intricate (and generally convoluted) mythology of the "long lost recording" is embarrassingly familiar to rock fans-- even non-completists are awkwardly prone to chasing down bits of buried tape with insane, eye-bulging intensity. With precious few exceptions, the anticipation of a hidden, indefinitely concealed secret generally supercedes the impact of the actual artifact. Still, the possibility of stumbling into transcendence keeps the search heated, and sometimes stupidly dramatic. Earlier this month, Mick Jones bravely explained to Mojo's Pat Gilbert exactly how he uncovered the tapes: "I sensed where they were and that took me to the right box. I opened it up and found them... It was pretty amazing."
Snicker all you want at the supernatural, sixth-sense implications, or at the idea of Jones' third eye blazing hot for misplaced Clash recordings-- the 21 tracks that the constitute The Vanilla Tapes are just revealing enough to justify all the smoky mysticism. The tapes feature five previously unheard cuts-- "Heart and Mind", "Where You Gonna Go (Soweto)", "Lonesome Me", the instrumental "Walking the Slidewalk", and a cover of Matumbi's version of Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me", plucked from Dylan's 1970 album New Morning and reproduced in full reggae glory-- and together they reveal producer Guy Stevens' influence on the final sound of London Calling: muddy, raw, and insistently vague, The Vanilla Tapes see The Clash working hard, but also grasping for a muse.
Professionally, Guy Stevens was best known for "discovering" The Who and producing a handful of Mott the Hoople records, but it was his recreational exploits that carved the deepest cut into Britain's collective pop memory. With a frenzied halo of tightly curled brown hair and a penchant for destroying property, Stevens came to rule Wessex Studios, hurling chairs and ladders, wrestling with engineers, and famously dumping a bottle of red wine into Strummer's Steinway piano. Fortunately, Guy was far more concerned with encouraging "real, honest emotion" than with achieving technical perfection (true to form, London Calling has its fair share of slipped fingers), and consequently, the band's determination at Vanilla, coupled with Stevens' shitstorming, led to London Calling's odd and glorious balance of studied dedication and absurd inspiration.
And if The Vanilla Tapes aren't enough to satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies, there's more. For The Last Testament, documentarian/DJ Don Letts (also responsible for Clash on Broadway and Westway to the World) weaves together bits of live footage, interviews with punk pundits and band members (they spout tiny clarifications between snickers and cigarette huffs), promotional videos, and a few small, grainy glimpses of the band recording at Wessex. The studio shots were culled from footage that, like The Vanilla Tapes, had been unknowingly cardboard boxed for years-- in early 2004, former manager Kosmo Vinyl up a crate containing 84 minutes of hand-held footage of the London Calling sessions. Most of the film turned out to be unusable, but Letts salvaged some revealing shots of Stevens in fine form, wrestling with ladders and banging around chairs, in a curious reversal of classic producer/band hijinx.
As an instruction manual, the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling offers up bits of helpful, ordinary wisdom (he who fucks nuns will later join the church, no one gets their shit for free-- and "Balls to you, big daddy!" is an infallible exit line), but the album's biggest lesson is still spiritual. Like a bit of good gossip or a dog-eared copy of On the Road, Clash tapes tend to get passed around, and wind up forming countless intimate, enduring, and cathartic bonds. That Joe Strummer's handwritten lyrics and modest scribblings have finally been tucked into the liner notes is only appropriate: London Calling is just as precious”.
I am going to wrap up with some words from Rolling Stone from 2021. In their list of the 500 best albums ever, they ranked London Calling at sixteen. I would say that is a fair placing. It is right up there with the best and most significant albums ever released. If you have never heard it or not heard it for a while then do spend some time with it today:
“London in 1979 was plagued by surging unemployment and rampant drug use. The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher had just come to power and there was growing discontentment with the youth. London’s premiere punk band, The Clash were in disarray themselves. Following their second release, they had parted ways with their manager, left their rehearsal studio and hit a major period of writer’s block. One thing was for certain, though, their musical interests had extended beyond punk music and they were keen to explore other genres; Rock ‘n Roll, Ska, Reggae, Rockabilly, Jazz and even an influence from the sounds coming out of New Orleans. They were set up at a new rehaearsal studio and found themselves in a very disciplined and regimented schedule; afternoon rehearsals, followed by late afternoon football, drinks at the pub, and finally more rehearsals. The band created a strong bond with each other during this time which led them to start writing during these rehearsal sessions. And writing and writing. The drought was over and music started flowing out of Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, with contributions from Topper Headon and Paul Simonon.
The result is a two-LP Post Punk record spanning multiple genres and killer songs. The title track discusses the rising unemployment, racism and drug use in England. ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’ is about a fun-loving man with a refusal to grow up; “How you get a rude and a reckless?/Don't you be so crude and feckless/You been drinking brew for breakfast/Rudie can't fail (no, no).” It’s a fun Reggae-Pop song featuring a horn section. ‘The Guns Of Brixton’ is bassist, Simonon’s first recorded composition with The Clash, inspired by the film, ‘The Harder They Come’ (soundtrack featured at #174). Recorded in no more than two takes, Simonon sang his lead vocal while staring directly at a CBS executive that had visited the band in studio. ‘Lost In The Supermarket,’ one of the pop songs on the record, deals with an increasingly commercialised world and rampant consumerism. Inspired by a Taj Mahal concert he’d seen the night before recording, drummer, Topper Headon replaced his snared with a tom-tom drum, giving the drums a non-conventional sound. Brilliant drum performance on this track! While this album spans so many different styles and genres, it remains cohesive throughout. A tight collection of 19 well-crafted songs. It ends with the uncredited ‘Train In Vain,’ a song added after the sleeves were printed, it became The Clash’s first song to enter the Top 30 in the US. Trainspotters might find the drums in the intro sound familiar. Garbage sampled the beat for their 1995 hit single, ‘Stupid Girl.’ Another record with an iconic cover, it features Paul Simonon smashing bis bass on stage in New York because security wouldn’t let audience members stand out of their seats. The cover is a parody of Elvis Presley’s debut record, or a homage, if you will. In the 24 years since the release of that record, Rock ‘n Roll had changed and grown bigger than anyone could have ever expected. Similar to The Clash, they weren’t just another punk group, they had established themselves as a diverse band that had created a refreshing album for the time. To be honest, it still sounds as fresh as ever”.
On 14th December, it is forty-five years since The Clash released London Calling. Such an important album in the history of music, I am looking forward to reading how journalists approach it on its anniversary. Often cited as one of the greatest albums ever released, it is one that…
FEW artists have surpassed.