The Cost of Living E.P. by The Clash

The Cost of Living, the Clash's EP of 11 May 1979, came in a gatefold sleeve and caught the band mid-leap. Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon produced it with Bill Price at Wessex Studios in Highbury, London, and you can hear them stepping away from the snarl of the first two albums toward the wider, American-flavoured rock and roll of London Calling.

The centrepiece is their blazing take on Sonny Curtis's "I Fought the Law", which stayed in their live set for most of their career and which Strummer kept singing with later bands, the Pogues among them. "Groovy Times" and "Gates of the West" lean into folk rock, the latter a wide-eyed account of the band's first taste of America. They also re-recorded "Capital Radio" after hearing that copies of the original EP were fetching silly money, stretching it out with a long outro. Jones blows harmonica under the alias "Bob Jones".

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