And Who Reinvented It
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Punk changed popular music for good – and for the better. But it wasn’t a revolution so much as a reformation, a process of sloughing off a decade of excess and perversion to get back to the one true faith of rock ‘n’ roll. Punk believed that rock should be do-it-yourself simple and that anybody could become a three-minute hero. True punks knew that instrumental virtuosity, like any graven image, was never to be worshipped.
The early English punk scene was not a mass movement but a small, clique-ish circle consisting of the Sex Pistols, the Damned, Generation X, and a few others. But the only true revolutionaries among the bunch – musically or politically – were the Clash.
Where the others sought simply to be provocative, the Clash arrived with an actual – if not always clearly formed – political agenda. Songs such as “White Riot,” “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” and “Safe European Home” spoke openly about issues of race and class in Britain. The Clash were unabashedly left-leaning, and even named their fourth album after a Central American communist movement: Sandinista!
The band was forever badgering its label to keep the cost of new releases down – a policy that frequently worked to its own fiscal detriment. One of the earliest 45s, “Complete Control,” attacked their record company for releasing a single against the band’s wishes.
Yet the most revolutionary thing about the band was its approach to music. The nucleus of the band, formed in 1976, was guitarist Mick Jones, singer/guitarist Joe Strummer, and bassist Paul Simonon (original drummer Terry Chimes was soon replaced by Nicky “Topper” Headon). As they saw it, punk wasn’t a set of musical rules; it was freedom, a chance to express every enthusiasm and exasperation precisely as it was felt, with no worry about how the audience or the record company would react.
“London Calling” epitomized that attitude. Its scale and ambition were self-consciously epochal. The album pushed well beyond the hard-fast-and-simple aesthetic that typified punk at that time, particularly in London and L.A. The initial critical response to the album, released in Britain during the final month of the 1970s (its U.S. release came a month later), was tepid, with some reviewers believing the band had stumbled. But in retrospect, that’s not hard to understand.
With time, “London Calling” came to be proclaimed the group’s masterwork. Rolling Stone, in a recent tabulation of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” ranked it at no. 8, sandwiched between two other acclaimed double albums, the Rolling Stones’s “Exile on Main Street” and Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde.” Not only is it the only punk album in the Top 10, it’s a good 25 places ahead of its nearest contemporary, the Ramones’s self-titled debut. (The Sex Pistols’s “Never Mind the Bollocks” doesn’t even make the list’s Top 40.)
The 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition of the album being released today by Sony is meant to further reinforce its place in the rock ‘n’ roll canon. In addition to the original’s 19 songs – a track listing that includes the band’s first U.S. hit, the Mick Jones-penned “Train in Vain” – the triple-disc package includes “The Vanilla Tapes,” a long-lost 21-song collection of demos recorded at the band’s rehearsal studio, and a DVD with a 30-minute documentary on the making of “London Calling.”
Given the group’s traditional resistance to record-company gimmicks, having the album enshrined in a commemorative edition may appear a tad unseemly. But the Clash had great expectations for “London Calling” from the beginning, telegraphing their ambitions through its cover design, which aped the typography and color scheme of Elvis Presley’s first album.
There’s a similar awareness of rock roots in the music. Where the band’s previous albums evoked a two-tone musical universe, in which the only alternative to the rat-a-tat riffage of punk was a raucous appropriation of reggae, “London Calling” was a veritable smorgasbord of rock styles, its platters groaning with everything from rockabilly twang to jazz-inflected swing, seasoned liberally with dub bass, disco backbeats, and big, brassy ska horn arrangements.
The band’s interest in exploring rock roots is supposedly what inspired the Clash to hire legendary producer Guy Stevens for the album. The band saw Stevens, whose credits included albums with Traffic, Free, and Mott the Hoople, as someone who could navigate through older rock styles without having the music’s roots-consciousness slip into knee-jerk Americana. “We’ve done it the American way, and it don’t work,” Strummer later sneered to the American rock magazine Creem.
That utterly English sense of priorities is spelt out most clearly midway through the album, when the band launches into a ragged-but-game stab at the R &B chestnut “Stagger Lee,” then abandons the ersatz New Orleans groove for the more familiar pulse of Jamaican rock steady and a cover of the Ruler’s oldie, “Wrong ‘Em Boyo.” Even the rockabilly was homegrown: The Clash preferred having a go at Englishman Vince Taylor’s “Brand New Cadillac” to dipping into the catalog of such Americans as Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent.
The Clash always had a chip on its shoulder as far as the United States was concerned. Although the band toured relentlessly in the U.K., it performed only seven shows on its first American outing, in support of 1978’s “Give ‘Em Enough Rope.” Each show in what they called the “Pearl Harbor Tour” opened pointedly with “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” A stop in Washington, D.C. found Strummer telling the audience that he thought the White House looked like “a dog ranch.”
This iconoclasm played well in the British press. But “London Calling” was ultimately a bigger hit on this side of the Atlantic, selling more than three times as many copies during its initial chart run (625,000 versus 180,000 in the U.K.). Nor did American interest end there: The sly agit-pop of “Rock the Casbah” in 1982 landed the band a Top 10 hit. For a while, these anti-Reaganite Brits were the face of punk rock for millions of Americans.
It couldn’t last, and didn’t. Headon’s drug problem forced him out of the band just before “Rock the Casbah” (which he wrote) struck gold. Personal conflicts forced Jones’s exit a year later. Strummer and Simonon soldiered on with new members, but the fact that the final album, 1985’s “Cut the Crap,” opened with a song proclaiming “We Are the Clash” seemed proof enough that they weren’t.
Nor was anyone else. The most striking thing about the band’s legacy is how utterly singular it has proven. There have been no shortage of bands eager to ape the sound of its early singles (Rancid, for one), but it’s hard to think of any rockers – punk or otherwise – who could match the Clash’s ambition, musical scope, or fearlessness.
While many of their peers hit the nostalgia circuit with reunion tours, the members of Clash declined, and the death of Strummer in December 2003 seemed to put any possibility out of reach. But what would we expect? Revolutions aren’t made for reruns, after all.
Mr. Considine is a writer living in Toronto.