London Calling by The Clash

London Calling, the Clash's third studio album, was a double album that CBS put out in Britain on 14 December 1979, with Epic bringing it to America and Canada the following January. It came out of a rough patch, new management and a bout of writer's block for Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the band's songwriters. Then they holed up at Wessex Sound Studios in London with producer Guy Stevens for five or six weeks from August 1979 and came out with a record that knocks the walls off the punk ghetto.

Strummer sings and plays rhythm guitar, Jones handles lead guitar and vocals, Paul Simonon plays bass and Topper Headon drums, and the four of them charge through ska, reggae, rockabilly, hard rock, lounge jazz, pop and New Orleans R&B as if it were all one long, loud argument. The punk snarl is still in there, but it's wearing new wave threads. The songs stare hard at a Britain of people shoved to the margins: unemployment, racial conflict, drug use, the weight of growing up. Try "Clampdown", "Lost in the Supermarket", "Spanish Bombs" or "The Guns of Brixton" for size, or the title track, which made the UK top 20, and "Train in Vain".

It went top ten at home and made the Clash a name in America, where it went platinum, and it has sold more than five million copies around the world. A decade on, Rolling Stone named it the best album of the 1980s, then ranked it number 8 among the 500 greatest albums in 2003 and 2012 and 16 in 2020. In 2010 the Royal Mail put its sleeve on a postage stamp, one of ten classic British album covers given the honour.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.