My favourite band growing up were the Manic Street Preachers, a Welsh rock act that rose to prominence in the early 90s and who were initially derided for being Clash rip-offs that stole their songs, their look, their entire schtick from Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. Even today, their records are peppered with Clash covers – and I usually skip them. Throughout my quarter-century engagement with the Manics, I have studiedly resisted the urge to go back and explore the music of the Clash, probably because of a general disinterest in or disaffection from anything that predated the 1980s. Now that I’m finally listening to London Calling for the first time, it’s uncomfortably obvious how the fledgling Manics were inspired by – and extensively pilfered from – the oeuvre of their heroes.
And yet the Manics didn’t indiscriminately adopt everything from the Clash. They’re clearly indebted to the hard rock and politicised lyrics, but around a quarter of the songs on London Calling are ska or reggae influenced. The album’s musical eclecticism has given some commentators cause to question whether or not this is really punk at all. Certainly, a lot of it wouldn’t sound out of place on Never Mind the Bollocks. But then there are the aforementioned reggae songs, while an even bigger influence is surely Springsteen, despite the Clash’s stated hatred of complacent arena rock. The anthemic, saxophone-inflected stylings of songs like “The Card Cheat” and “Clampdown”, coupled with Strummer’s hoarse, blue collar, fresh-from-the-docklands vocals, are highly redolent of Born to Run.
In my opinion, though, London Calling is identifiably a punk album. The preponderance of a punk musical style, coupled with the uncompromising hardness of the music – including the reggae songs – and, above all, the determinedly anti-establishment tone and message of the lyrics; the spirit of the album is punk, even if the instrumentation occasionally veers off in different directions. That said, the comparison with the Sex Pistols is instructive. Never Mind the Bollocks is a blistering fireball of nihilistic hatred, expressive of a wanton desire to tear down social institutions for the sake of carnage, all underpinned by an insatiable appetite for destruction. London Calling shares this anti-establishment vibe, yet its rage is rooted not in unreasoning misanthropy, but in a deeply held sense of social justice. If Johnny Rotten was the pantomime villain of punk, then Joe Strummer was one of the good guys. The Clash offer positive values and solidarity, whereas the Pistols offered only a narcissistic and spittle-flecked war on everything which, as I alluded to in the review of Never Mind the Bollocks, pointed to a curious, clandestine affinity for the neo-liberalism of the 1980s.
The more authentically Marxian credentials of the Clash are evident from their consistent siding with the oppressed, the underclass, the despised, the damned of the earth. The backdrop for their urban morality tales is frequently provided by the city of London. The opener and the album’s title track is, of course, a classic of the punk genre; an hysterical and apocalyptic fever dream which envisions Britain’s capital in the grip of nuclear disaster, mass flooding, and police brutality. But other songs offer sympathetic, sometimes amusing portraits of London’s most wretched denizens, living shadowy lives in the warrens of the city and embroiled in fractious relationships with its heavy-handed police force. “Jimmy Jazz” is a ne’er do well on the run from the cops (to whom Strummer, our smartass narrator, signally fails to lend any assistance), while “Rudie Can’t Fail” articulates the perspective of a Jamaican rude boy who most definitely will not consent to growing up and getting a job, but who will instead continue to drink “brew” with his breakfast. “The Guns of Brixton” predates the riots of 1980, but it poignantly relates the atmosphere in a district populated predominantly by immigrants, blighted by poverty, and in constant conflict with the law. The song comes close to suggesting that Brixton’s inhabitants should go down shooting rather than allow themselves to be taken alive by the cops.
If these songs focus on the victims of state power and police brutality, then another quintessentially radical point on London Calling’s political agenda relates to the baleful influence of mass consumerism and a culture of compulsory, almost punitive work, which Strummer evidently considered inimical to the spirit of youthful rebellion. His lyrics constantly warn of the dangers of getting sucked into the spiral of employment, money, and status seeking, lest these should prove corrosive to the revolutionary impulse. The sad and gentle “Lost in the Supermarket” relates the tragic tale of a middle-class suburban nobody who seeks their sense of identity – a “guaranteed personality” – at the shopping mall. “Clampdown”, by contrast, is more bilious, a tirade against economic systems that aim to steal our best years, as well as the governments that enforce them. Tellingly, this song references St. Petersburg and South American dictators, just as it indicts the economic slavery of the West, indicating that Strummer’s denunciation of work was universal, rather than tied to Cold War politics. Most brilliantly, “Spanish Bombs” draws a striking contrast between the awesome bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War and the invasion of Iberia by Northern European tourists in the 60s and 70s, which turned the entire coastline of Spain into a building resort, despite nobody asking any questions about how many people were buried underneath the swimming pools.
The Clash find some time away from the campaign trail to tackle one of rock’s most diligently mined themes; drug addiction. Even here, however, they use this – presumably, profoundly personal – topic to make a political point. “The Right Profile” is an incongruously jovial ska song about the American actor Montgomery Clift, whose disfigurement in a car crash led to years of drug and alcohol abuse, “the longest suicide note in Hollywood history,” while “Koka Kola” tells of rampant cocaine consumption in the corridors of political and financial power. Clearly, then, whereas songs like “Jimmy Jazz” and “Rudie Can’t Fail” encourage us to sympathise with the deficits and self-indulgences of down-and-outs, “The Right Profile” and “Koka Kola” paint denunciatory pictures of the various frivolities of the rich, famous, and powerful. More generous – though harrowing – portraits of addiction can be heard on “Hateful”, a tale of utter servitude to one’s drug dealer redolent of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”, and the epic, rousing, Springsteenian “The Card Cheat”, an account of gambling addiction in which the song’s protagonist pays with his life for cheating at cards.
For the Clash, then, where you are in the hierarchy determines whether or not your moral weaknesses and vices are worthy of celebration or condemnation. They punch up, never down. Surprisingly, though, toward the end of the album they slip in a few unexpected moments of unLeninist personal reflection. “I’m Not Down” – from what I can tell – is about refusing to surrender to depression or fear, though perhaps this too could be interpreted as incipiently political, given Strummer’s repeated warnings about retreating into self-contained middle-class solipsism and the damage that this can do to the revolutionary spirit. But the closing song, “Train in Vain”, is unmistakeably personal, a rather bitter denunciation of an ex-girlfriend for failing to show loyalty at a decisive moment in the relationship. What this means, in practice, is that an album frequently held up as an uncompromising punk manifesto ends with Joe Strummer complaining about his bird.
In my opinion, London Calling is too long. It’s peppered with cover versions, some of which (like “Brand New Cadillac”) admittedly sound pretty great, but which dilute the album’s originality (I’m generally not a fan of including cover versions on albums). Moreover, from my point of view, the white-boy-does-reggae songs can be comfortably dispensed with. Some of them are interesting, but again, they dilute the musical cohesiveness of the album – though with that said, a couple of the more forgettable hard rock moments like “Lover’s Rock” and “Four Horsemen” were surely born to be B-sides. Overall, the album is bloated; a tighter, twelve-track version would have comfortably been a 10/10 album and the defining classic of punk music. Nonetheless, even in its current form, London Calling is packed with great songs and ideas, and it’s highly evocative of the dingy, tumultuous spirit of London in the late 70s. It largely eschews the wanton misanthropy of the Sex Pistols in favour of an anti-establishment message which, if translated into a political program, would probably have been amenable to the extreme left of the Labour party. That said, the unexpected pivot toward bourgeois sentimentality on “Train in Vain” is perhaps indicative of the fact that, in the end, punk was more about the poses than the politics.
7/10
Highlights: “London Calling”, “Spanish Bombs”, “The Card Cheat”