Two years before the Clash released their masterpiece, London Calling, I had already had personal experience of the group’s world-changing powers. On October 20, 1977, I was 15 and the Clash came to Belfast to give us our first live punk-rock experience. A last-minute insurance hitch meant that the show was cancelled. Sensing a conspiracy by the powers-that-be, the audience spilled out on to the streets and a riot ensued. Even in that trouble-torn city it was unprecedented, fought not over religion or politics but by a youth hungry for rock’n’roll.
Back in their room at the Europa hotel, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon held court, doling out potent marijuana and accommodating the customary horde of followers on their hotel floor. Although there was disquiet the following week when Melody Maker printed photographs of the group posing at the city’s barricades, the Clash became a catalyst for Belfast’s music scene without playing a note. In the ensuing months, a vibrant and non-sectarian scene consisting of fanzines, bands, clubs and record labels sprang up in the city’s cultural wasteland.
That’s why the Clash’s North London HQ, Rehearsal Rehearsals in Camden, seemed like a natural port of call on my first visit to the metropolis, in early 1978. Despite the disappointing second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the band was a beacon founded on the idea of rock as a community. The Clash’s fraternal ethos was a sharp contrast to the rapidly unravelling Sex Pistols and the antagonistic Johnny Rotten.
The band weren’t at Rehearsal Rehearsals when I pitched up, but their manager, Bernie Rhodes, was. He appeared to be an even shiftier character than he had been painted in the press, which may have been because he was about to be ousted from the Clash camp.
“We’d just had enough of each other, to be honest,” recalls Simonon now. “But Bernie had been so important in giving us the attitude that carried on throughout the Clash — watch your back, play your cards close to your chest. He was a very impressive man, a father figure really because one way or another we’d all come from broken homes.”
Advertisement
Cut loose from Rhodes and the prying interlopers who would turn up unannounced at Rehearsal Rehearsals, the Clash went to ground at Vanilla, a small rehearsal room above a garage in Pimlico. It was there that they road-tested the songs and performances that would make London Calling an album so premonitory that Rolling Stone magazine named it the album of the 1980s, even though it was recorded and released in 1979. This was the record that blew away any lingering doubts that the Clash were barricade-posing, corporate-sponsored rebels.
Emboldened by their live work, particularly in America, where they had played with Bo Diddley and Lee Dorsey, the Clash emerged as multicultural giants seemingly able to turn their hand to any idiom they chose. The Strummer and Jones writing partnership was never more resolute or insightful, touching on subjects such as the tensions of childhood and family (Lost in the Supermarket, Death or Glory) and apocalyptic fever (the title track, Working for the Clampdown). There was atomic-powered rockabilly (their cover of Vince Taylor’s Brand New Cadillac), pop perfection (Train in Vain), guerrilla reggae (Guns of Brixton) and the endless struggle of assorted smackheads, rude boys and wild-eyed desperadoes (Rudie Can’t Fail, The Right Profile, Hateful and Jimmy Jazz). If their self-titled debut had been a call to arms, London Calling was something else. Driven by Strummer’s impassioned determination, it was a crash course in reality from a band of true blood brothers.
The 25th anniversary edition won’t be a double for the price of a single album, like the vinyl original, but it does include recordings from the Vanilla studio and a bonus DVD of The Last Testament, a documentary directed by Don Letts. Strummer isn’t here to witness the release (he died of a heart attack in December, 2002), but Jones is confident that he would approve.
“We have the life experience of what we went through together, we know what counts. We know where to go with dignity,” Jones says.
Advertisement
A few years ago Strummer told me how he had written the London Calling title track. Like the narrator of the song, he was living by the river in Chelsea in a block of flats that looked down on the house in Edith Grove in which Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had lived in the 1960s.
“It was Mick (Jones) who told me to make the verses better. This is where we worked best — one guy’s expertise comes in where the other guy falls short,” Strummer insisted.
London Calling has many potent testimonies to this assertion. Often presumed to be a Jones original, Lost in the Supermarket was actually a Strummer song penned for the guitarist who he would sack four years later.
“We were that close then we were at the point where we were writing songs for each other,” Jones recalls. “But it was as much about Joe’s childhood as it was about mine; I never lived in the suburbs. But I was touched by that song. He seemed to instinctively know things about me that we had never even talked about.”
Although the group had dropped one surrogate father, London Calling was made with the help of another, Guy Stevens. The producer can be seen on The Last Testament documentary stirring up mayhem during recording sessions at Wessex studios, creating the tension of a live show.
Advertisement
“He did bring an electric energy with him,” grins Jones. “He would really talk us up to believing that we were the band who could bring rock’n’roll forward.”
“His history was phenomenal,” adds Simonon. “He got Chuck Berry out of prison and introduced the Rolling Stones and The Who to American R&B. He was the human conductor and we were the means by which he was going to transmit his energy through the recording studio on to vinyl.”
For all its swagger, London Calling was a cautionary album. Heroin, the drug that would become a scourge of the inner cities in the 1980s, makes several appearances.
Simonon: “Before the Anarchy in the UK tour the UK punk scene was innocent and focused. Then the Heartbreakers came to Britain.”
Jones: “They brought something that we didn’t know anything about.”
Advertisement
Simonon: “Certain characters fell for it, and Sid Vicious was the main contender.”
Headon, the powerhouse drummer, would also become an addict. His sacking, followed later by Jones’s dismissal in September 1983, would spell the end for the Clash. To the familiar culprits — drugs, personality and musical differences — must be added the phenomenal work rate.
The group did manage to outlive the differences that pulled them apart, and Strummer spent his final years as tightly bonded to his compatriots as he had been when they made their greatest music. Like thousands of others, what first drew me to the Clash was that Strummer seemed like an idealistic older brother. Years later, he told me not a day went by when he didn’t think of his older brother, David, who had been involved with the National Front and had committed suicide when Strummer was 18.
“It was obviously a painful memory for Joe,” says Simonon. “But I think what helped was that in a way we became his brothers. When we came together it was like dysfunctional human beings getting together and making a family. That’s what you can hear on London Calling.”
London Calling: 25th Anniversary Edition is out on Monday on Columbia Records
Advertisement
Punk icons
The photos were taken by Pennie Smith during the Clash’s first major tour of the US. Towards the end, fatigue and frustration led Paul Simonon to smash his bass, the iconic cover of London Calling. “I didn’t want that image,” Smith remembers. “I thought it was too grainy to blow up. But that’s one of the reasons I loved working with the Clash — they were so visually literate.”