100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #3 The Clash – London Calling

Released: 1979

The release of The Clash’s third studio London Calling was accompanied by a simple tagline, lauding them as ‘The only band that matters.’ For the high minded quartet this phrasing was a typically hubristic cross between rational self assessment and outright propaganda, but at the time it felt like the truth, or as near to it as made no odds.

With that status came a particular sort of pressure, a tourniquet knotted further by the Sex Pistols’ messy implosion, the sacking of their manager/svengali Bernie Rhodes and John Lydon’s extraordinary, thrilling rebirth in Public Image Limited: Whatever punk was then had come to a crossroads. In response Strummer, Jones, Simonon and Headon went to shut out the noise by decamping to a rehearsal space in Pimlico, before riskily bringing in the eccentric Mott the Hoople producer Guy Stevens to work up material as ambitious as their slogan implied.

What emerged was something remarkable, a double album which fused together a slew of musical waypoints but retained the anger, sociopathy and menace which still more than lingered in early Thatcherite society. It’s lyrics found solidarity in revolution, explored folkoric totems like Stagger Lee and also evinced higher brow subjects like the Three Mile Island disaster and the Spanish Civil War; Simomon would later retort to those claiming they’d sold out that travel had broadened their minds. “We’d gone international” he told Esquire in 2004 “And that was what we wanted from day one.’

The title track was as aurally stark as anything previously in their canon. To a knuckle hard chopped guitar riff elements of punk, reggae and tribal rock all vied with each other to be the most incendiary, whilst Strummer’s lyrics directly addressed the crisis of longevity that led to the movement’s own demise with ‘Now don’t look to us / Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust.’ Charged and anthemic, it was the sound of an outfit that had reached it’s transcendental peak. Excess of all kinds and intra-group turmoil would derail them later, but as the decade came to an uncertain close, it was evidence enough that The Clash were still – just – the only band that mattered.