Super Classic Album: The Clash - The Clash (1977)

The blog’s resident Clash expert Craig Stephen goes way back to ground zero …

London, 1976. It was just one year in one city but the British capital was about to explode in a frenzy of snotty, sneering and obnoxious punk bands that would shake up the music scene for the next decade and more.

Three bands led the revolution: The Sex Pistols, formed in a pub in 1975 and the first to gig, The Damned, the jokers in the pack but the first to release a single, ‘New Rose’, in November 1976, and The Clash, formed in July of that year and fronted by the formerly known John Mellor, hitherto the singer/guitarist of a second tier pub rock band called The 101ers.

 The Clash’s route to becoming the finest of the punk bands, and for that matter one of the greatest rock bands of all time, can be pinpointed to April 1977, just nine months after forming, when their fiery debut was unleashed. While they were beaten in the British punk album race by The Damned by two months, they were still well ahead of the daddies of the scene, the Sex Pistols, whose Never Mind the Bollocks didn’t see the light of day until September.

 If The Clash, the album, sounds rushed and a little incoherent that’s understandable given it was written, demoed and recorded in a few weeks. Albums done in such a manner are often critically lambasted but that’s usually because the band is being hurried by their record label to follow-up a successful album. But The Clash had nothing to follow-up to.

The rushed environment clearly had little bearing on this 14-track incendiary piece of vinyl. It’s a glorious snapshot of three creative forces – Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon – gelling quickly. These were men of different backgrounds who found remarkable common ground in a disgust of 1970s Britain.

Strummer possessed a yobbish bark while Jones sang in a more measured, lovers rock tone. Lyrically, Strummer was more forceful as exposed by his changing of Jones’s ‘I’m So Bored With You’ to the deliberately confrontational ‘I’m So Bored With The USA’ of which the opening line is: “Yankee soldier/He wanna shoot some skag/He met it in Cambodia/But now he can't afford a bag.”

Eschewing rock’s traditional themes of love, lust and other menial emotions, The Clash was about boring jobs with horrible bosses (‘Career Opportunities’) in a city aching with apathy and tedium (‘London’s Burning’) where “Everybody's sittin' round watching television”. It’s an England where the hippy manifesto of peace and love has been replaced by Hate and War.

It's an album containing several brief adrenaline bursts like ‘48 Hours’ (1.34), ‘What’s My Name’ (1.40) and ‘Protex Blue’ (1.42) - a throwaway ode to a condom brand with typically lurid lyrics.

The album closer, ‘Garageland’ is a witty riposte to music reviewer Charles Shaar Murray’s infamous line that The Clash were a garage band “who should be left in the garage with the engine running”. But it isn’t full of loathing for the writer, instead it’s a celebration of being a start-up group which is so loud the neighbours call the council to complain.

As much as it veers into comedic youthful angst, there are a couple of tracks that piloted them as a conscious activist band. One was the single ‘White Riot’ - an unfortunate title in an era when the fascist National Front were scooping up disillusioned working-class votes (what’s new, different name and shirt, same racist politics) - but it is important to note that it is a rousing call to arms for the white working class to follow black people’s lead in fighting back against oppression. “All the power in the hands/Of the people rich enough to buy it/While we walk the streets/Too chicken to even try it”.

Meanwhile, the cover of Junior Murvin’s reggae anthem ‘Police and Thieves’ slows the frantic pace right down. Murvin’s original was released in the UK in July 1976, a month before the Notting Hill Carnival riot and became the de facto anthem for disgruntled black youth.

Murvin and his producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry both denounced it, but attitudes among the reggae community dissipated with Bob Marley and the Wailers inspired enough to write ‘Punky Reggae Party’ in 1977 and Perry later worked with The Clash.

On its release, punk commentator Tony Parsons wrote in the New Musical Express that: “Jones and Strummer write with graphic perception about contemporary Great British urban reality as though it’s suffocating them,” while Mark Perry declared in his own fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue: “The Clash album is like a mirror. It reflects all the shit. It shows us the truth. To me, it is the most important album ever released.”

Elsewhere, reviews were encouraging to the point of gushing that this was the most exciting record in years. It’s hard to disagree with some of that to be honest.  The Clash was the most exciting record since The Stooges’ debut in 1969, and few if any albums released since 1977 can match its raw power, anger, angst and disillusionment. Once that punk energy dissipated, The Clash would find new styles to explore and write socially aware songs that resonate to this day.

Classic Album Revisited: The Clash - The People’s Hall (1982/2022)

Craig Stephen on the bonus album released when Combat Rock gained its obligatory 40^th anniversary deluxe spurs in 2022:

Here at everythingsgonegreen we really need no excuse to review a Clash album … even when we’ve done it before. So, yes, I have reviewed Combat Rock, the last great Clash album, and you can read that here.

But the album’s re-release comes with an additional collection, The People’s Hall, recorded around the same time, but has been kept under wraps until now.

People’s Hall has been dubbed a cash-in and a luxury item for collectors. I’d say otherwise. Having played this several times I’d say it is a collection that stands on its own. Yes, it is a mixed bag and the snapshots of chitter chatter from the crowd outside a gig (‘Outside Bonds’) could really have been ditched, but that’s the exception to the rule. This is well worth buying even if you have Combat Rock already. 

Here's the condensed backstory: in December 1980 The Clash released the beguiling and beautiful triple album Sandinista! and in May and June of the following year played what would become a 17-show residency at New York’s Bond’s Casino to promote it. Those shows have gone down in musical history.

Before a tour of Asia, the band rehearsed and recorded at The People’s Hall in London, from where 11 of the tracks were recorded (the exception being ‘Outside Bonds’, obviously). It’s the bridging period between Sandinista! and Combat Rock, and you can discern the development going on. Some of the tracks were re-recorded for Combat Rock or ended up on B-sides; some were taken no further.

‘This Is Radio Clash’ was released as a single at the end of 1981. This version, which effectively opens People’s Hall, contains slightly different lyrics. Apart from that it doesn’t differ greatly from the single version. But the original version of ‘Know Your Rights’ veers greatly from the Combat Rock take. While all the crucial elements are there Strummer sings the lyrics straight, but on the finished version he sounds more mocking, and the guitars are edgier. I’d say they tidied it up pretty neatly for the version that the world knows now and gave it a new interpretation.

 Among the highlights is an extended and looser version of ‘Sean Flynn’ (Errol Flynn’s son who disappeared in south-east Asia while working as a photojournalist). As I listen to this particular track I feel I am being transported to the rail tracks and fields in rural Thailand where the photo session for the Combat Rock cover was taken. It’s magnificent, it feels as if The Doors are in Saigon having a jam session and letting it all out. 

‘Futura 2000’ draws from sessions with New York’s graffiti artist of the same name, revealing some raw and ready proto hip hop and contains one straight bassline played endlessly to great effect. ‘Radio One’ allows reggae great Mikey Dread to do his own, inimitable thing, ‘Midnight To Stevens’ is a tribute to bonkers producer Guy Stevens, and there’s tracks like ‘Long Time Jerk’ and ‘First Night Back In London’ that were relegated to B-sides when they deserved much better. Add in the instrumental ‘He Who Dares or Is Tired’ and you have something of a party punch. That was never served up to revellers.

At the same time The Clash worked with The Beat’s resident toaster Ranking Roger for versions of ‘Rock the Casbah’ and ‘Red Angel Dragnet’, both of which were omitted from People’s Hall and issued as a stand-alone single to fleece more money out of Clash fans.

People’s Hall was a working project for a new album but Combat Rock was the second life of a rolling project, with Mick Jones’ intention to have the band’s fifth album stretch to over an hour and be called Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg. The Clash were always drawn to different sounds and their love of reggae is renowned but this album would have been expanded to soak in Jones’ love for New York funk and hip-hop, and dub. 

The band and its mercurial/autocratic manager Bernie Rhodes instantly dismissed it. Jones was gutted and barely attended the remix sessions, which is understandable as he would be witnessing another producer, Glyn Johns, slash and burn his cherished work to create what we have now as Combat Rock. Rat Patrol has since been bootlegged to hell and back but it still needs to be given a full and official release. Why it hasn’t is a mystery given so much unreleased Clash material has already been resurrected.

Nevertheless, while you wait, indulge in this intriguing bonus album which, despite what some critics might say, offers another side of The Clash and takes the listener to another time and world, to the emerging hip-hop scene, to post-war Vietnam, and to … well, wherever you want to be.