Introduction

The Museum of London is hosting a FREE exhibition celebrating the 40th birthday of the release of The Clash’s third and probably best album, 1979’s London Calling.

In what amounts to one large-ish room divided up by a few partitions they’ve manged to cram over 150 items from The Clash’s personal archive, including notes, sketches, song lyrics, loads of leather jackets, some bondage trousers, a couple of guitars, lots and lots of photos, wall labels explaining the social background of England in 1979, profiles of all the band members and key players in the album’s creation, such as the record producer, the photographer and the designer, newspaper headlines and cuttings from the New Musical Express, fanzines and freebies and badges and various vinyl versions of the LP and single – and, on a big screen dominating proceedings, footage of the band playing live in 1979.

1979

There’s a detailed timeline of what the Clash were up to in 1979:

• in May they checked into the Vanilla Rehearsal Studios in Pimlico
• in August they moved to Wessex Sound Studios in Islington at 196 Highbury New Park, to be precise) to work with ‘shamanic’ producer Guy Stevens
• in September they set off for their second tour of the USA, titled Take the Fifth
• in November they returned to the UK to put the finishing touches to the 19-track double album
• 14 December 1979 London Calling was released and immediately hailed as a classic.

Joe Strummer’s typewriter from 1979

A melting pot of styles

There are quotes from band members littered around the walls. Mick Jones explains that by 1979 punk felt like it was getting narrower and narrower, whereas the band were becoming more proficient and wanted to expand their musical horizons. Hence the inclusion on London Calling of straight crawdaddy blues, jazz, ska and reggae, plus softer songs like Lost in the Supermarket.

Social history

There’s a video of news footage from 1979 accompanied by a brief summary of social history, namely the winter of discontent, rubbish bags piled high in Leicester Square due to the dustman’s strike, the election of Mrs Thatcher to power in May (with a majority of 43, compare and contrast with Boris’s majority of 80), the Iranian revolution which overthrew the Shah in February, the assassination of Earl Mountbatten in August 1979 and, eleven days after the album was released, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Those were the days 🙂

Exhibition highlights

The band and their crew took it in turns to record each other at Wessex Studios on one of the new home video recorders. These tapes have just turned up and are playing on a monitor.

There’s a knackered old mixing desk playing songs from the album, on which you can shift the mixing controls up or down to raise or lower the vocal, guitar, bass or drums on various tracks.

In a sense the highlight, and given a case to itself, is Paul Simonon’s broken Fender Precision Bass. The bass was damaged on stage at The Palladium in New York City on 20th September 1979, as Simonon smashed it on the floor in an act of spontaneous and complete frustration.

Paul Simonon’s smashed-up bass guitar © The Clash

It is mildly interesting to read there was a squabble between the album designer Ray Lowry and the photographer Pennie Smith, who didn’t like the photo because it is out of focus.

Talking of Pennie Smith there’s a wall of photographs by her taken during The Clash’s ‘Take the 5th’ tour of North America in September and October 1979. These are printed and shown here for the first time. It was a selection of them which were used for the album’s inner sleeve.

One of Joe Strummer’s notebooks from 1979, open at page showing Ice Age, which was to become lyrics for the song London Calling.

Joe Strummer’s typewriter used to document ideas, lyrics and other writings

Topper Headon’s drum sticks, which are one of the only remaining items of Headon’s from this time.

The 1950s Fender Esquire used by Joe Strummer during the recording of London Calling.

A handy map of central London with red pins marking the homes, venues, recording studios and other places of Clash interest during this period.

The handwritten note by Mick Jones showing the final and correct order for the four sides of the double album ‘London Calling’.

Mick Jones’s hand-written running order of tracks for the album © The Clash

Clothes

If you like clothes / fashion / punk fashion, you’ll enjoy admiring Paul’s leather jacket, Paul’s uniform cap, Paul’s shirt, Joe’s shirt, Harrington jacket and uniform cap, Paul’s trousers, Joe’s sunglasses and brothelcreepers, with full details of who designed them, and much much more!

Testimony and stories

All this memorabilia is sort of interesting, but I found the the stories told by various members of the band’s entourage much more grabby.

Barry Myers

For example, the DJ Barry ‘Scratchy’ Myers describes how he was given more or less complete freedom to play whatever tracks he liked as the crowd came into each venue – and that The Coasters’ Riot in Cell Block H was a favourite, as was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 16 Tons. He tells us that the night Simonon smashed up his guitar (21st September 1979) the intro track was MPLA by Tapper Zukie. In fact there’s a whole display case devoted to a selection of Scratchy’s records and the very headphones he wore on the tour!

Ray Lowry

Then there’s cartoonist and artist Ray Lowry. Lowry had already had cartoons published in the NME, struck up a friendship with the Clash’s manager after seeing them in Manchester in 1976, and was invited on their Take The Fifth American tour in September 1979. He filled notebooks with sketches and impression, some of which were published back in the NME, and began to think about artwork for the album.

I had no idea the album cover for London Calling was such a straightforward rip-off of Elvis Presley’s first album.

Album covers for Elvis Presley 1956 and London Calling 1979. Notice the slight similarity?

Don Letts

Letts gives an account of the filming of the video for the title track in which he explains that he was such a city kid that he didn’t realise the Thames was tidal or that it rose and sank by up to fifteen feet, which meant he’d booked a boat moored by the river to film on but hadn’t factored in the change of tides. By the time they’d figured all that out it had become night-time and it was raining on a freezing December night, and the band was really pissed off… But it was that which gave it its atmosphere.

One of Pennie Smith’s many photos of the boys, left to right: Mick Jones (lead guitar and vocals), Topper Headon (drums), Joe Strummer (rhythm guitar and vocals), Paul Simonon (bass) © Pennie Smith

Personal reflections

I bought all the Clash’s singles as they came out – they’re in a box somewhere – I’ve got White Riot, Remote Control, Complete Control, Clash City Rockers, White Man in Hammersmith Palais – but I had stopped caring by November 1978 and so didn’t bother to buy Tommy Gun when it came out.

Like a lot of fans I was appalled when, after a whole first album devoted to the frustrations of life in London and England, and telling the Yanks to fuck off (the first album has a track titled I’m So Bored With the USA)… they then proceeded to jet off and make their second album, Give Em Enough Rope, in America with a producer who made them sound like a heavy metal band!!!!

From that point onwards the Clash seemed to become more and more slavishly American, or more and more in thrall to American culture, repeatedly touring America and going on to cultivate their obsession with Central America (their fourth album was titled Sandinista!).

London Calling was their comeback album after the appalling Give Em Enough Rope but really only confirms their American orientation, given that the second and third track are an American blues (Brand New Cadillac and the flaccid chordings of Jimmy Jazz) and half the tracks have got horns and orchestras on, such as the awful The Card. Horns and orchestra?

By this stage a second wave of post-punk bands had come along: Sixousie and the Banshees had released The Scream in November 1978, Joy Division released Unknown Pleasures in April 1979, The Cure released their debut in May 1979.

In other words the punk movement, taken in the purest sense (the Pistols, the Damned, the Clash) may have boxed itself into a 2-minute, three-chord corner, but it had opened the door to a whole new wave of weird and edgy sounds, which was to blossom in unexpected directions, creating the Gothic and post-industrial genres of music to name just two.

In the same month that The Clash were putting the finishing touches to London Calling, Joy Division recorded the early track Ice Age. It comes from a different universe, unlike anything ever heard before.

Next to the savage new worlds of the imagination opened up by Siouxsie or Joy Division, the Clash wearing their bandanas and berets and posing as rock stars in distant America , and their glib obsession with war (Tommy Gun, English Civil War, Spanish Bombs, Combat Rock, Revolution Rock) seemed risible, preposterous. By the time of their fifth album, Combat Rock in 1982, everyone I knew had long stopped listening to them.

Their early presence was a shock to the system, genuinely capturing the reality of violence and threat on the shabby streets of late 1970s London…

Cover of their debut album, the Clash, 1977

But five short years later, this is how they dressed for their live concert at Shea Stadium in New York.

Cover of The Clash Live at Shea Stadium 1982

They had become ludicrous clowns.

A lot later Strummer gave an interview where he said he was proud that The Clash didn’t stay stuck in London and the straitjacket of punk, taking the whole world for their subject – and looking back, you can cherrypick catchy songs from the later period such as Shall I Stay Or Shall I Go? or Rock the Casbah. But they had stopped being relevant or at the forefront of the movement by the time London Calling was released.

The Clash were there right at the beginning, creating a revolution in the language of guitar bands and went on to apply their abrasive, street attitude to the wide variety of existing styles you can hear on London Calling – the Clash do blues, The Clash do jazz, soul or reggae. But bands like Siouxsie, Joy Division and The Cure didn’t just bring a new approach to existing forms – they invented whole new languages, forms and shapes of music, terrifying sounds never heard before, anywhere on the planet.

The Clash set out to explore the existing world of music and, disappointingly, discovered most of it was based in America. Siouxsie, Joy Division, The Cure and a horde of second-wave bands invented entirely new English worlds for themselves (and us) to explore.

So as you might expect, I prefer The Clash’s purer, angrier, earlier tracks from the start of their career. Not much can match up to the drive and venom of Remote Control, I’m So Bored with the USA, London’s Burning or the matchless White Riot – everything you need to know on the subject said in one minute fifty-three seconds.

Still… There’s no denying their early seismic impact, their huge influence, and then their sustained ability to produce good poppy, rocky songs right to the end of their brief career. Thanks boys, thanks for all the great sounds and good times.

This exhibition is a fabulously enjoyable trip down Memory Lane.

Related links

• The Clash: London Calling continues at the Museum of London until 19 April 2020

More reviews

• More exhibition reviews on my art and exhibitions page