I also deeply enjoyed Viv Albertine’s engaging memoir, Guitars Clothes Boys, and a monograph in the “Kill Your Idols” series called The Clash by David Quantick. Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming and Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces are essential to understanding punk.
WORST TIME TO PLAY CLASH ROYALE FULL
The tome The Clash, full of the group’s own oral history, was key. Many thanks to the band’s assiduous chroniclers. It’s based on the British release history of the band’s albums and singles, with American alternatives, outtakes, and other stuff duly noted. What follows is an account of every song the Clash released, ranked in order from worst to best. (“The band’s machine room,” as Strummer called him.)Īnd by the time of Sandinista! and Combat Rock, they were citizens of the world with the Late Cold War Blues, broadcasting on soi-disant pirate radio from New York, with a pair of guitarists, discomfited brothers, fighting among themselves, heroically.Īnd what happened after that? Well, read on. (For the most part, Strummer wrote the lyrics to Jones’s music, but on many songs those lines blurred.) They had a tall good-looking guy, Paul Simonon, on hand, who, somewhat miraculously, turned into a strong bass player, and, on and off, a powerful and appropriate drummer, Topper Headon. That would have unthinkable at the band’s early days, when they made their name being the Sex Pistols’ less nihilistic cousins, barking out punk aperçus like “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.,” the avatars of a scene whose very name was synonymous with uncommerciality.Īs time went on, we could suss the group out: a slightly poetic and deceptively able guitarist, Mick Jones, tied to a diminutive but full-throated buffalo of a front man, Joe Strummer, whose lyrics were a maelstrom of political doggerel, but always (well, generally) with a deeply human heart.
After the demise of the Sex Pistols, they remained the reigning aesthetic embodiment of an authentic, radical art movement rife with provocations and contradictions. They recorded the equivalent of nine records in six years, including two or three of the greatest rock-and-roll records ever, and possibly the greatest album of all time ( London Calling) along the way. And they did what they did, made the world come to them, and felt guilty about it.
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