I'm hearing music from another time...
Now I come to a tricky question: how do I approach writing about an album that I know as well as the sound of my own breath? London Calling is one of my top 5 desert island albums (maybe top 3, hell, maybe even top 1). The only album, unless I'm mistaken, that I've purchased 3 times. It's also one of the most written-about albums ever. What can I possibly write that will feel new, necessary, & sufficient? This is why I believe in critical subjectivity; the only story that hasn't been told about London Calling is my own.
I remember the first time this album really clicked for me, I found myself thrashing around in the car screaming along to "Rudie Can't Fail." I think that song, plus "The Right Profile" & "Wrong 'Em Boyo," are the root of my love of horn arrangements in rock music (although I disliked most of the ska-punk that was popular when I was in high school), & I'm certain my love of half-time choruses comes straight from "Rudie."
I'm fascinated by the compounding of nostalgia, & "Spanish Bombs" is a nostalgia fractal. I will attempt to map it here: today, I have nostalgia for when I discovered this album in 1999. Listening in 1999, I had false nostalgia for 1979, when the album was made, 6 years before I was born. Hearing "Spanish Bombs," I also have nostalgia for 1992, the childhood year I spent in Spain. Writing the song in 1979, Joe Strummer had false nostalgia for the Spanish Civil War, which occurred 15 years before he was born. Because "Spanish Bombs" is actually a love song, dedicated to Strummer's girlfriend Paloma Romero, a.k.a. Palmolive, the drummer from The Slits, who was born & grew up in the Francoist shadow of the war's aftermath. I am normally wary of songs that seem to romanticize war, but I can't escape the gravity of lovely lyrics like "The hillsides ring with 'free the people,' or can I hear the echoes from the days of '39? With trenches full of poets, the ragged army," reminding us that the past is never past if we can still feel its reverberations, the fascist regime that stained his beloved's childhood--"my señorita's rose was nipped in the bud." It's an uncharacteristically emotionally naked song for Strummer to write. I see your trauma, the song says, I understand your wounding, & I love you forever. "Yo te quiero infinito." The yearning of a songwriter in 1979, the yearning of a teenager in 1999, my own yearning in 2022 for times that feel increasingly simpler as they dissolve into memory, all combine to bring this song to my ears, with its gorgeous clean chords that speak of the untrammeled expanses of youth. "I'm hearing music from another time" indeed. "Spanish Bombs" is a candidate for best song on a flawless album.
Then there's the consumerist anomie of "Lost in the Supermarket" (for years I irrationally hated Billy Idol because I thought he ripped off this song for "Dancing With Myself"), the first time we hear Mick Jones's fragile, pleading lead vocals on the album. I've always said Mick's voice had the same quality as his guitar tone, as if it would break like glass if struck too hard. But it's Strummer's backing vocals that come in at the end of this song that really sell it; the harsh sociopolitical background realities, everpresent & threatening the false capitalist serenity. Simonon's bass is also tasty on "Supermarket"--people like to shit on him as the least talented Clash member, but his creative basslines liven up songs like the title track, "I'm Not Down" with its searching, aspirational ascending chord progression, & of course, "Guns of Brixton."
The Clash convinced their label to allow them to package a free single with the LP. They then, quite innocently, asked if the single could be a 12", & the label acquiesced. Since the label never specified how many songs could be on this 12", the band added a whole 9-song LP, providing their fans with a double album for the price of a single album, a great example of how you can play record label politics & still be punk as fuck. This has nothing to do with my own experience of the album (especially since, as I said, I paid for it 3 times), but I think it's a fun anecdote.
I don't give ratings on here--because come on, how old are we?--but if I did, London Calling would get one of the few 10/10s I'd ever bestow. Everything about this album is perfect. I'm gonna go play it again.
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