The double album that broke the punk fence
By the late summer of 1979, punk’s first uniform had started to pinch, and The Clash answered by recording a double album that refused to stand in one place. London Calling opens on a guitar that sounds like an alarm and a voice that already knows the alarm is late. Joe Strummer does not sneer so much as report. The city in the title is drowning, the wheat is thin, and the chorus still wants you to dance. Released in Britain on 14 December 1979, sold there for the price of a single album, it is the rare double LP that feels like a night out rather than a duty. Nineteen songs, and almost none of them agree to wear the same jacket.
The sessions ran at Wessex Sound Studios, about five or six weeks from August, with Guy Stevens producing and Bill Price engineering. Stevens was not hired for tidiness. The band has described a room run on chaos: chairs, wine, a producer who conducted with his whole body because the songs needed a weather, not a grid. Strummer and Mick Jones had come through a bout of writer’s block and a change of management. What came out the other side was a band that had decided punk was a starting tempo, not a border. Reggae, ska, rockabilly, New Orleans R&B, a little lounge, a little hard rock: each style is played as if the group had grown up on it, because in pieces they had.
Spanish Bombs looks at a civil war and a present tense in the same breath. Lost in the Supermarket, sung by Jones, is the suburb as a kind of exile, fluorescent and lonely. Clampdown and Death or Glory argue with ambition itself. The Guns of Brixton gives Paul Simonon his first real lead, a bass player’s song about pressure and a neighborhood that does not need translating. Train in Vain was finished so late the sleeves had already been printed; it hides at the end of side four, unlisted, and then becomes the hit America hears first. Brand New Cadillac and Revolution Rock are covers treated as news. The original songs answer them in the same ink.
I didn’t want them to use it. I thought it was out of focus.
(Pennie Smith, on her photograph of Paul Simonon at the Palladium, New York, 21 September 1979)
The cover is the other half of the argument. On 21 September 1979, at the Palladium in New York, Pennie Smith photographed Simonon driving his bass into the stage. The frame is blurred. She thought it unusable. Ray Lowry set the pink and green lettering in echo of Elvis Presley’s first album, a private joke that became the public face of the record. A band smashing its instrument, dressed in the clothes of the music it was supposed to have killed: that is London Calling in one picture. Not a rejection of the past. A refusal to be only one chapter of it.
What lasts is the width. Plenty of groups in 1979 could play faster. Few could hold a love song, a war song, and a comedy about rudies in the same hour without the stitches showing. The Clash did it by treating genre as a toolbox rather than a vow. Put the needle down anywhere. The alarm is still ringing, and somebody in the room is still trying to dance to it, which is either courage or good manners. On this record it is both.
