The Clash

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Sandinista! (Remastered)
    Sandinista! (Remastered)
    Sandinista! (Remastered)

    In 1980, The Clash named this 36-song album after Nicaraguan insurgents, experimented with disparate genres and sonic abstractions, and refused to edit themselves. Yet their punk spirit is alive throughout—from the organ-drenched gospel of “The Sound of Sinners” to the Dadaist noise collage “Silicone on Sapphire” to ambient dub blast “The Crooked Beat”. “Police on My Back” is straight-up punk-in-the-streets, and “Hitsville U.K.” is Euro-pop pretty. There’s even a jazz cover (Mose Allison’s “Look Here”). The album reveals a great band brave enough to fail, although they come out heroes.

  • London Calling
    London Calling
    London Calling

    100 Best Albums Looking back, it’s funny that The Clash started out as a punk band. Not because they weren’t rebellious, but because they always seemed too absorbed by tradition and continuity to deliver the sonic and sociocultural rupture punk promised. If the Ramones’ take on “California Sun” and “Do You Wanna Dance” goofed on the naivete of early-'60s pop-rock, The Clash’s version of “I Fought the Law” was deadly earnest, a declaration of shared values with the rock myths that punk supposedly helped end. If the Sex Pistols had been suicide bombers, The Clash were ascendant generals, adapted to present terrain but romantically steeped in the past. As great as the band’s first two albums had been, they’d mostly worked off a blueprint of punk that by 1979 had started to look a little limited, even retrograde. Installed in a makeshift practice space adjoining an auto body shop, they started rehearsing covers in styles seemingly outside their comfort zone: reggae, soul, rockabilly, pub rock. Soon, whatever allegiance they still had to punk as a social movement was eclipsed by their newfound power as a band unto themselves. In other words, London Calling not only replaced stylistic concision with experimentation (a move pushed even further with 1980’s Sandinista!) but marked the moment when The Clash became bigger than punk. What was—and is—remarkable about London Calling wasn’t just how much ground it covers, but how comfortably the band stakes their claim to it. They’re heavy (“Death or Glory”, “Hateful”), they’re light (“Revolution Rock”, “Lover’s Rock”), they sing about public struggles (“Clampdown”) and private relationships (Mick Jones’ “Train in Vain”) and advance the old chestnut that our inner lives are always products of our outer realities. Take “Lost in the Supermarket”, the story of how an alienated kid from the suburbs seeks freedom through shopping because shopping is the only model of freedom capitalism gave him. In other words, politics on London Calling aren’t just something that happens at the polls, but at work, at home, when we’re pretty sure nobody’s watching. Musically, the punk fascination with American soul and Jamaican reggae (“Train in Vain”, Paul Simonon’s “The Guns of Brixton”) that had developed in part out of a connection between blue-collar English workers and immigrant laborers from the West Indies broadened into something more eclectic: the Tex-Mex/reggae hybrid of “Rudie Can’t Fail”, the bilingual sloganeering of “Spanish Bombs”. What had once been framed as a local struggle—poor white English kids searching for a future in the face of diminishing prospects—became international, the plight of working-class people generally, the ballads of the common man. “El Clash combo,” Joe Strummer sings on “Revolution Rock”. “Paid 15 dollars a day/Weddings, parties, anything/And bongo jazz a specialty.” Anyone forced to run themselves down for money—now or then; black, white or otherwise—can understand. As for “bongo jazz”, the joke is that the band has probably never played it in their life, but could definitely figure it out if that’s what you were paying for. London Calling marked not only a maturation for The Clash, but a crucible for punk in general. A month before it came out, Public Image Ltd.—a band fronted by former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon—released Second Edition, an album that took punk’s general nihilism away from the streets and towards the avant-garde. Hardcore was happening in the States; New Wave—a term essentially used to brand pop or rock music with punk energy for a more mainstream audience—marked an evolutionary step away from politics towards neutral fashionability: punk lite, in a way. And The Clash, operating under the principle that the biggest platform gives one’s message the widest reach, continued to try and reconcile marginal ideals with the fact that they had a UK Top 10 on their hands. A few months after London Calling came out, the band did a brief, explosive tour of the US, at one point stopping at San Francisco’s Warfield theatre (a venue that hosted Bob Dylan a few months earlier and would host the Grateful Dead 15 times later in the year). Surveying the room before the show, Strummer was bothered by how close the seats came to the stage. He asked if the house manager could take out the first couple of rows. The manager worried what he would tell customers annoyed that their seats were suddenly gone. He replied, “You tell ’em Joe Strummer took ’em out so they could dance.”

  • The Clash (2013 Remastered)
    The Clash (2013 Remastered)
    The Clash (2013 Remastered)

    A perfect storm of power and fury, the 1977 debut from The Clash was the 35-minute Molotov that launched political punk as we know it. A raw, unfiltered dispatch from the first generation of UK punk rock, The Clash called for revolution in three-minute bursts, shouting barbed screeds about class disparity, unemployment and racism over chain-saw guitars—a weaponised attitude that would inspire generation upon generation of outspoken musicians like U2, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine and Rise Against. Just one year earlier, future Clash leader Joe Strummer was a struggling, zoot-suit-clad pub-rocker who found his true calling after seeing a Sex Pistols gig in London. Snatched by manager Bernie Rhodes to join guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon—and later, drummer Terry Chimes—he and the group would rehearse and scheme seven days a week, choosing their name from a word that recurred in Evening Standard headlines. Pushed by Rhodes to lean into politically pointed lyrics, The Clash became ambitious, idealistic fire starters fighting against the forces that create oppression. The band’s first single, “White Riot”, was written after witnessing a conflict between Black youth and police at the Notting Hill Carnival. Why, Strummer posits, can’t poor white kids have a riot of their own? “All the power’s in the hands/Of the people rich enough to buy it,” he sings. “While we walk the street/Too chicken to even try it.” With their trademark rasp-and-roar, The Clash take a stand against the powers that be (“Remote Control”), American imperialism (“I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.”), the dismal state of their hometown (“London’s Burning”), conformity (“Career Opportunities”) and the music industry (“Garageland”). A cover of Junior Murvin’s incendiary reggae song “Police & Thieves” confronts police brutality in the lyrics and points forward to the band’s many experiments with stylistic cross-pollination. The Clash would have more critical and commercial success after fully embracing their role as genre-blurring roots-rockers and New Wavers, but the gnashing, undiluted rage of their debut may be their most important line in the sand.

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About The Clash

Political punk as we know it was born in 1976, when guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Terry Chimes of pub rock group London SS recruited guitarist Keith Levene and guitarist/vocalist Joe Strummer to form a new band. Named The Clash, their first concert was supporting the Sex Pistols, a pairing that set the ideological goalposts for British punk with the Sex Pistols bringing the destruction and The Clash providing the social conscience. The band, which quickly dropped Levene and replaced Chimes with Topper Headon, found lyrical inspiration in the headlines, blending explosive rock guitars and beats gathered from around the world with an ideology that was anti-fascist, anti-violence and anti-racist. Their adrenaline-fueled early records (1977’s The Clash and 1978’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope) gave way to the reggae-inspired rebel music of 1979’s London Calling and disco experiments of 1980’s Sandinista!, which were then streamlined into the platinum-selling anthems of 1982’s Combat Rock. The common thread running through these ever-shifting styles was the group’s condemnation of England’s growing authoritarianism. Burning so bright, hard and fast, it was only inevitable that they’d soon implode. By 1983, Headon and Jones had been ousted from the group while Strummer and Simonon soldiered on through the release of 1985’s Cut the Crap. The Clash broke up the following year, leaving a legacy of in-your-face rebel rock for the ages. Their words still show up on protest signs, their influence is heard in pop-punk and politically conscious bands like U2 and Pearl Jam and their songs are still mandatory listening for conscious punks worldwide.

ORIGIN
London, England
FORMED
1976
GENRE
Rock

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