“London's Burning” by The Clash

"London's Burning" tears through the Clash's self-titled 1977 debut, a song about boredom played like a five-alarm fire. Joe Strummer wrote the words in an old disused house near the Westway, then headed up to Mick Jones's flat, and the two of them knocked it into shape that same night. The title nods to the nursery rhyme about the Great Fire of London, but the blaze here is tedium: kids driving around the city all night looking for kicks, lights crawling along the motorway, one weeknight the same as the next.

Strummer leads the vocals, with Jones joining him and Paul Simonon in on the chorus. Mickey Foote produced it at CBS Studios in London, and an alternate take lifted from the "White Riot" promo film surfaced in May 1977 on the B-side of "Remote Control".

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