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Complete Track-listing of the album CLASH – The Story of the Clash Volume 1 2LP

Track-listing Disc One:

1. The Magnificent Seven (12" version) – 4:27
   (original version from Sandinista!, 1980)

2. Rock the Casbah (US single mix) – 3:42
   (original version from Combat Rock, 1982)

3. This Is Radio Clash – 4:10
   (A-side of non-album single, 1981)

4. Should I Stay or Should I Go – 3:06
   (from Combat Rock, 1982)

5. Straight to Hell – 5:30
   (from Combat Rock, 1982)

6. Armagideon Time – 3:50
   (B-side of London Calling single, 1979)

7. Clampdown – 3:50
   (from London Calling, 1979)

8. Train in Vain – 3:10
   (from London Calling, 1979)

9. The Guns of Brixton – 3:12
   (from London Calling, 1979)

10. I Fought the Law – 2:35
    (from The Cost of Living EP, 1979)

11. Somebody Got Murdered – 3:34
    (from Sandinista!, 1980)

12. Lost in the Supermarket – 3:47
    (from London Calling, 1979)

13. Bankrobber – 4:31
    (A-side of non-album single, 1980)

Track-listing Disc Two:

1. (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais – 3:58
   (non-album single, 1978)

2. London's Burning – 2:09
   (from The Clash, 1977)

3. Janie Jones – 2:04
   (from The Clash, 1977)

4. Tommy Gun – 3:14
   (from Give 'Em Enough Rope, 1978)

5. Complete Control – 3:12
   (non-album single, 1977)

6. Capital Radio One – 5:18
   (preceded by Circle Line Interview Part 2; from Capital Radio EP, 1977)

7. White Riot (single version) – 1:59
   (album version from The Clash, 1977)

8. Career Opportunities – 1:51
   (from The Clash, 1977)

9. Clash City Rockers – 3:57
   (non-album single, 1978)

10. Safe European Home – 3:49
    (from Give 'Em Enough Rope, 1978)

11. Stay Free – 3:37
    (from Give 'Em Enough Rope, 1978)

12. London Calling – 3:18
    (from London Calling, 1979)

13. Spanish Bombs – 3:18
    (from London Calling, 1979)

14. English Civil War – 2:34
    (traditional, arranged by Strummer/Jones; from Give 'Em Enough Rope, 1978)

15. Police & Thieves – 6:00
    (from The Clash, 1977)

LP

CD

Melody Maker, 23 March 1991 Story Of Page 37

COMPLETE CONTROL? THE CLASH

THE STORY OF THE CLASH (CBS) ANDREW MUELLER

AND so The Clash get a Number One single 10 years after they split because they're featured in a jeans commercial. The record company falls over itself in its haste to re-release this poorly-packaged-and previously comprehensively reviewed and fawned-over - collection and the old men of the music press embarrass themselves ever further in their quest to pander to the lowest common denominator. Christ, what a sorry state of affairs. The ironies are so obvious they hardly need pointing out, but they do provoke an appropriate question: put bluntly, does anyone really still give a flying f*** about this band?

So they've stood the test of time. Their memories prodded, their nostalgia tweaked, people still buy their records, still wear the tee-shirts, and all that. Whacko. The same applies to Free, Bobby Vinton, Berlin and Steve Miller. The unpalatable but nonetheless undeniable fact is, these days, that you could sell the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on the back of an attractive enough ad campaign. The charts are full of ghosts and people are celebrating. Record companies are content to bung out the same old tosh time and time again rather than unbolting their wallets for new bands, and they're being applauded for it!

Okay, okay, so that's not the point. The argument goes that this particular exhumation is okay, to be encouraged, because, well, because it is The Clash, after all, who were and always will be The Greatest Rock'N'Roll Band Of All Time, and, hey, we are all well up on what's going on these days, but really these youngsters just haven't got it, have they, and they don't write them like they used to, you know drone drone creak ramble ramble where were you in '78 BORING BORING BORING!

The Clash made some great records, sure. "London Calling", and all that. They also conspired to produce some bog-awful crap that would shame current Rolling Stones ("Give 'Em Enough Rope") or the most overblown Emerson Lake & Palmer ("Sandinista"), though no-one seems to remember that any more. It's also worth observing that their relevance to modern pop music (except in the tiny minds of Manic Street Preachers and their newspaper equivalents) as she now is amounts to the grand total of four-fifths of f*** all. Dinosaurs? We're talking great big scaly ones the size of your house that eat trees and make the earth shake when they walk. Clump clump plod shudder.

The band, however, had the good grace to break up when they saw their sell-by date approaching and are therefore hardly to blame. The ghastly, grotesque hand-of-death nostalgia industry that is hell-bent on choking the remaining life out of the charts is.

The record isn't bad. The motives are deserving of bitter contempt. Ignore it.

ANDREW MUELLER

NME, 26 March 1988 STORY Page 32

STYLE INTO REVOLT THE CLASH

Steven Wells

The Story of the Clash Vol 1 (CBS double LP/CD-punktraitors!)

THE SCHOOL hippy played me some Sex Pistols, I mean - what a stupid name! A Genesis worshipping, NME-reading prefect delivered a hysterical lecture on how punk was a 'hype'. I didn't know what a 'hype' was but knew it must be something to do with drugs. I borrowed Steven Boocock's copy of The Clash album and it blew my tiny mind.

The Clash were black combat jackets covered in defaced Union Jacks. They were politics and adolescent sexlessness and guitars as assault rifles and 1968 and The Right to Work and The Who and The Stones. I had no idea what sex was like but I knew it couldn't be this good. It wasn't until I'd screamed my lungs to shreds, bruised myself to a pulp and had my "Vomit on the Aged" badge nicked at the Victoria Park Anti Nazi League concert that I realised that I'd got every single lyric wrong. And I didn't give a toss. (Cor!-reader's voice.)

'The Story Of The Clash' features 'London's Burning', and 'White Riot' from the first album. Brutal, deliberately incoherent and purposely inarticulate. 'Janie Jones', probably the most misinterpreted pseudo cockernee garble Strummer ever constructed, can now be listened to and laughed with. 'Career Opportunities'- I mean, how many other great songs about unemployment can you name? (One. 'Living With Unemployment' by the Newtown Neurotics)... Only 'Police and Thieves' sounds tired and silly and dated.

'Capitol Radio' and 'Hammersmith Palais' still sound good, but not as good as remembered. 'Clash City Rockers' is hilarious-this was a funny band. 'Complete Control' is a pop orgasm, messy, repetitive and three minutes long (squelch squelch).

It wasn't until last year that I finally forgave 'Give 'em Enough Rope'. The Clash were turning into overpaid, overdubbed, overdrugged lumpen 'rockstarscum'. Posing in front of barricades, shooting pigeons, acting like pinheads. Every time they were asked a political question Joe talked shit, feeding out a phoney working class moron pose he thought was cool, Mick would grow his hair and Paul Simonon sucked his cheeks in and looked sultry. In Rude Boy they reached new depths of inanity, the film was a head-up-the-arsehole attack on the Anti-Nazi League.

Now, of course, everybody knows that you can only rely on a pop star in a trendy communist T-shirt to do one thing - and that's act like a pop star. It's the example of The Clash, like a third world economy sunk by US aid into a quagmire of corruption, that makes me so grateful for clean cut young fools like Bragg.

'Safe European Home', 'Tommy Gun' and 'English Civil War' were a cleaner Clash but still hard enough. Sadly missing is 'Julie's Working for the Drug Squad' a lyric within which Strummer reaches heights of sardonic cynicism that prime Ray Davies couldn't match. Next album and the one after that, both well over-represented here, were sloppy, muso ramblings studded with flashes of the old spunk. The Clash wanted to be Che Guevara a bit but, most of all, they wanted to sniff Mick Jagger's boxer shorts.

The Clash were the catalyst that made (makes) punk such an intensely political 'youth culture'. They were the first break away from the pretentious hippyness of punk's London roots-putting anti-racism firmly on the top of the agenda, making 1977 the year of Rock Against Racism as opposed to 1976's Rock Against Being Bored In Artschool.

And this is a package put out by a subsiduary of a Japanese Multinational. That's not ironic, it's just one of rebel rock's silly little contradictions.

Melody Maker, 26 March 1988 STORY Page 34, Paul Mather

THE RIGHT PROFILE THE CLASH

THE STORY OF THE CLASH... VOLUME ONE CBS PAUL MATHUR

YOU look back over your shoulder and you get a crick in your neck. So you look forward and you end up squinting so much that you walk into a tree. Then this thing comes along and tickles your fancy and next thing you know you're coming on like the Old Man Of The Sea. So you go down the shoppin shopping centre and you grab this seven-foot chap with a tattoo on his face that says "CIDER" and you tell him some stories.

You tell him the one about Bernie Rhodes standing in the middle of the 1976 Notting Hill riots going "where's my glasses? WHERE'S MY GLASSES?" And you tell him the one about how Joe Strummer could never sing and keep his knee still at the same time. And when you start talking about the energy, the pressure drop, the liberation that felt like broken glass, he stops hitting you so hard. And then you spoil it all by sobbing. Twenty eight songs from a gorgeous flame of an Incarnation. Twenty eight moments that have soundtracked snogs and vomit and love and loss. Twenty eight edges. Just pop.

Only just.

And it starts with the end. Ironically, but inevitably, The Clash's most commercially cherished moments came when they strapped on their funk fakery and swaggered into the muddled shapes of "The Magnificent Seven" or "Radio Clash" or "Rock The Casbah". This empty music, drenched in the now familar self aggrandisement, but bereft of anything that even thinks about rhyming itself with irony. "Straight To Hell" is at least a mad tumble, a glockenspiel rolling slowly down a mountain as the call to arms turns to quiet stoicism. Three years back and you're into "Armagideon Time", a far more effectively controlled harbinger of doom, psychedelic reggae from a time when the genre meant more than hanging around parties pretending you cared deeply about Haile Whatsisface so you could scrounge a few Rizlas off someone. This one yelps and dips with rumpled abandon, which is quite different from "Jah Jah Blah".

As the second side takes us back to some of the group's more eccentric moments, you youngsters will be able to understand more clearly why grown men and women go dewy eyed at the merest mention of turn-of-the-decade Clash. "Clampdown" roars quietly as it nestles up against the resolutely lightweight "Train In Vain"; "Guns Of Brixton" hurls out the worst vocal performance in the history of pop; "I Fought The Law" and "Bankrobber" find Topper rehearsing for reality, and "Lost In The Supermarket"... well... it changed the way that every manjack of us visited Sainsbury's. It's ludicrously easy to be glib about the speed freak paranoia that matted much of The Clash's output, but something like "Somebody Get Murdered" still has a frantic resonance eight years after its conception.

The second half of the double album is The Clash at the heart of your darkness. They kick start a ravaged purity that becomes appreciable only in terms of delicious moments. The laugh in "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais", the desolate echo at the end of "London Calling", the roustabout clatter of "Complete Control", even the throwaway venom of "White Riot" that led Andrew Darling to think the words went "quite right, quite right..." Strange days indeed.

The eminently trustable Tricia Romane is largely responsible for the selection here, and in the content of Side 4, has pulled enough spikey shards from the wreckage to justify The Clash's aerosol splatter across Rock's Rich Tapestry. "Spanish Bombs", "Stay Free" and "Safe European Home" need no context, no justification, no sepia-tinted snaps nothing, in fact, but love.

The messy dictates of responsibility see The Clash as responsible for Lightening Strike, just as The (retrospectively dull) Sex Pistols spawned Sputnik and the pop marauders The Buzzcocks impregnated the wobbly loins of The Wedding Present. Still, in the Rebel Rock, The Clash inspired the most valid argument yet for slipping on a pair of leather breeches and falling over in bars. It's a great story.

THE LAST GANG IN TOWN

Next week cbs release 'the story of the clash', a double album that documents the glory days of one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands ever. Four years on from the group's bitter and acrimonious demise, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon look back at the way they were.

MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
JOE: "Mag Seven" was really Mick getting into rop and funk and the first records that were coming out of New York. Paul was making "All Washed Up", a film in Vancouver, with Steve Jones and Paul Cook and so we got in the bass-player and organ-player from the Blockheads. And I said to Whatroy" "Ere, you're a funky man. Play something funky." He'd just got in from the airport, he put his bass on and did it. Topper and Mick fell in, I had a rap written and we just cut it like that.

PAUL: This basically reminds me of me and Kosmo, of when we were in this hospital and these cops and doctors were bringing in these people with gunshot wounds. This guy was wheeling in a corpse and he recognised me as being in The Clash and started doing the rap, you know.

ROCK THE CASBAH
PAUL: This is the song that gave us a wider audience. It was pretty good for us and, thinking about it, it was pretty good for me coz, just after it charted, I'd got hold of this old secondhand motorcycle and I was driving round California on it and this cop pulled me aver, told me to put my hands on my head and started asking me these questions. Then he recognised my accent, then he recognised me coz he knew about "Rock The Casbah". So we shook hands and we left on good terms. He even asked me for my autograph.

JOE: This is all Topper Headon, he did it in about half an hour. I wrote the lyric and it's really about the Ayatollah and Islamic Fundamentalists, because I'd just heard you got lashed for having a disco record and lashed for having a bottle of whisky so I thought I'd poke some fun.

Actually the first verse is about Bernie Rhodes, the first two lines: "Well, the King told the Boogeymen you have to let that raga drop." It's because everything we were playing was going six minutes and we used to joke that anything over six was a raga. Anyway, that struck me as funny and it took me on to thinking about the desert, even though ragas are Indian, and then on to the Ayatollah. I hate all that fanaticism. I also hear it's a sham, that they only turn on all that fervour when there's a TV crew around.

THIS IS RADIO CLASH
JOE: That's ripped straight off Queen, "Another One Bites The Dust. When Mick ripped it off we went, "You know, it's a bit of a rip-off isn't it, Mick?" And he went, "Well, hang on a minute." And instead of going "Bom bom bom bo bo bo bo bo bom", he went Bom bom bom bombo bo bo bo bo bom." That's the only difference. And we got rightly slagged off by Kid Creole for doing that.

PAUL: Well again, I was going through custorns in America and I got pulled to one side and I thought, "Oh no, I've had it now. He's gonna send me back to England." Which I've always dreaded. Anyway, he takes me right through passport, through baggage and customs so I thought I was really in trouble. But it turned out he liked "Radio Clash" so much he was just giving me privileges, you know. It's true all this.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO
PAUL: When this was recorded none of us were really talking to each other so I suppose its title was horribly appropriate in terms of how I felt at the time.

JOE: This is a classic Mick Jones tune. It's one of the few love songs that we did. In the background there's me and Joe Ely howling Spanish that had been translated for us by the Ecuadorian tape-operator who phoned his mother to get it down. I've had some Spanish people tell me it's rubbish, but I've explained that it's Ecuadorian Spanish and got off the hook.

STRAIGHT TO HELL
PAUL: I really like this one. I love the line "King Solomon never lived round here". It seemed profoundly poignant to me and, also, any person that's lived in in the the inner inner city can relate to that one.

JOE: Mainly it's about rejection-it deals in four verses with four different situations. The first one is about unemployment here and up north. I can't remember what the second verse is. The third is about the Amarasian children in in Saigon. And the the fourth verse, I can't remember what that is either. There was a verse about the junkies in Alphabet City, but I think we might've cut that one out.

ARMAGIDEON TIME
PAUL: This is funny, you know, coz it was our first reggae song. I was heavily into reggae and whenever I had an idea for a song and played it to the others they'd immediately start playing it regae which wasn't always what I intended. But, me not being the musician, I felt a bit helpless, like not the leader. I don't have that problem now coz I've got my own band.

JOE: We always had a a good good eye eye for reggae covers, you know. We learned this one the afternoon we played the Monterrey Pop Festival. We were in a rehearsal room and we put on the original and played along with it. When it stopped it was like the safety-net had been taken away. I don't know what it sounds like now, but then I haven't got a record-player in my flat.

CLAMPDOWN
PAUL: This was about shop-floor fascism and, I suppose, in so far as I worked in John Lewis' carrying carpets and not being a skilled worker, I did get the shit end of the stick. So I know something about that.

JOE: Mainly it's a song about freedom, or the lack thereof, then for some reason it goes into an anti-nuclearrant. I think Three Mile Island must've happened just before. This happens quite a lot besause I write from line to line. If I get to line four and find I've gone onto another subject completely I have to go back otherwise it would be totally indecipherable. It really annoys me because I write in a flood. I write the sort of thing that comes to you when you're lying in bed thinking.

TRAININ VAIN
JOE: Now that's a love song. It's another one that Mick wrote completely. Underneath the mix on the outro I'm playing a dynamite organ solo, the first and last one i ever did. And I was quite disappointed when the lads tuned it way down.

PAUL: No big deal, just a track added at the last moment. One of three love songs on the album. We never did that many love songs, I suppose because everyone else was, and we reacted against that.

GUNS OF BRIXTON
PAUL: Yeah, I'd read this book called "The Harder They Come"-that was the initial inspiration-and also I was living in a basement at the time and I was kind of scared that the police would come bursting in throught the front door because they obviously wouldn't ring the bell. So you could say that partly through paranoia and desperation I wrote that lyric. I'm proud of that song coz it's the first song I ever wrote and now it's on this album. A bloke in Texas covered it in Country & Western style because he reckoned it reflected the struggle between North and South, which I can't see myself. I hate it but Joe and Mick love it.

JOE: In the intro there's a strange sound of ripping. You know those Velcro seat cushions that stick to chairs? We kept pulling them in the control-room when we were listening back to it and we got so into it that we took the chairs out in the studio and recorded it onto the track.

I FOUGHT THE LAW
PAUL: It reminds me particularly of this time in Scotland when these cops started on Joe. He dropped a bottle and they just piled in so I ran up and jumper on top of them and eventually they beat me off and charged me. Anyway, i was in the police car and this cop turned round and said to me "Where are you from?" and I said "London" and he said, "Well, this is Scotland" and smacked me in the mouth, You know, I fought the Law, smack, and the Law won.

JOE: I was leaming to play the piano and I chose this one to learn from. Me and Mick got into it but it was two or three years before we recorded it. The writer, one of Buddy Holly & The Crickets, Sonny Curtis, he said "What the hell is that?" when he heard it. He didn't say if he liked it.

SOMEBODY GOT MURDERED
PAUL: I like this song a lot, it's very emotional. I can't really say very much other than that. Emotional.

JOE: It's about the carpark attendant in the World's End flats that was stabbed to death for five pounds while i was living there. I came across the scene the next morning and there was a small pool of blood on the ground. In fact the song was commissioned by Jack Nietsche for the film "Cruising" with Al Pacino pretending to be a gay guy when he was a cap. We wrote the song but we never hear from Jack again.

LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET
PAUL: This one just makes me laugh. A song about packets of tea and tins of beans. Having said that, it's got a lot to do with Mick's childhood.

JOE: Everybody blames Mick for this but I came up with the chorus and the verse and he wrote the tune. A lot of people go "That Wimpy Bullshit!", but it was me sitting in the World's End flats-there's a big supermarket next to the carpark. You know when your mind goes blank and you find yourself wandering through all this bright, garishly lit stuff and you don't really know what you want or why you're in there. I always lose my shopping-list.

BANKROBBER
PAUL: This song was our biggest hit and I think it was one of our best. Great song, great video. The head of CBS couldn't stand it so he delayed its release. Those were frustrating times.

JOE: I wrote that one. In fact, what's funny is that it took us five months to convince Maurice Oberstein to put it out and when he did it sold itself, there was no promotion, nothing. I also heard it was a big hit in the prisons, that every time it was played on the radio all the prisoners would sing along.

WHITE MAN IN HAMMERSMITH PALAIS
JOE: Things used to be a lot more fun. I hate to say that but...all-night reggae concerts? When do we ever have that now? I was trying to talk about revolution and how we weren't ever gonna have any because who had an answer to the British Army? I was really getting at the division between the black rebels and the white rebels and the fact that we gotta have some unity or we're just gonna get stomped on.

PAUL: This song is about being a white person in a place like Brixton. Going to blues parties and being the only white boy there. When I was a kid I wasn't so afraid of that, it's when I got to be a teenager that that feeling about race got to be a lot more powerful.

LONDON'S BURNING
JOE: It's about sheer boredom, it meant that London was burning with frustration. The city felt alive to us, we could feel that the punk scene was just burning open at that time. It was a great summer that.

PAUL: Reminds me of when me and Joe were doing absolutely nothing, just being bored sitting in a squat feeling totally apathetic. I've got over that now, I've realised it's down fo me. Since The Clash I've picked up me paintbrush, bought another motorbike and read a lot of books about bullfighting.

JANIE JONES
JOE: This is a Mick Jones number about an office worker which he wrote when he had to take a job in an office. There's some lines about opening letter-bombs because he had to open the mail around the time the IRA were sending letter-bombs.

PAUL: One of our earliest songs. We used to play it so fast. It just makes me think of how excited we were at the time, playing so, so fast.

TOMMY GUN
PAUL: It's about terrorism, though I can see how you might think it's an anti-war number. Basically it's a story about somebody who's on a gun run. They're hiding, running and shooting.

JOE: It's actually an anti-terrorist song. I still agree with that lyric, I think terrorists are on a massive ego-trip, far worse than popstars. Imagine running into Rome Airport and spraying down a load of women and children then calling yourself a hero. Was it written around the same time I was wearing a Red Brigade tee-shirt? Yes, it was, in fact, as a reaction to what I'd done personally. It wasn't something to be proud of. It was probably written a week after the Victoria Park rally.

COMPLETE CONTROL
PAUL: Yeah, "Complete Control", that was a joke. It just makes me think of bloody CBS and of when they sent us to Amsterdam. That's it.

JOE: It's a Mick Jones tune, a stormer. Lee Perry produced it but I think Mick turned the guitars up after he'd left which is fair enough because it didn't sound so good with a reggae mix on it. In fact, I would say that Mick Jones was the producer of this entire set. It was about CBS, but CBS never felt anything. They've still got all of us by the balls. Except Topper. They slung him off the label.

CAPITAL RADIO
PAUL: Capital Radio were the ones who were supposed to be the adventurous new saviours of radio and they were worse than Radio 1. They're still worse.

JOE: Now, like a lot of people in London, I wish they'd license all the pirates and let's have a free city because in New York there's 10,000 stations, and in Paris and in Los Angeles. And here, in London, where we're living on the same planet, they say, "Ooh No, we can't have that because of the Emergency Services". Don't tell me we've got more Emergency Services than New York f***ing City. That's a load of bullshit.

WHITE RIOT
JOE: Some dimwits accused us of being fascist. I mean, if you read the verse it says "Well, black people know how to sort their problem out, they just get hold of a brick and chuck it throught a window". Really it's saying that white people are so f***ed up and intellectual that they can't seem to get any unified thing together. And I like the way that "white" and "riat" nearly rhyme.

PAUL: it just reminds me of when me and Strummer were throwing bricks at the police at the Notting Hill Carnival. It was brilliant, the coppers were standing there and they couldn't do a thing. We could throw bricks right at them. It was brilliant, it was great.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
JOE: Mick came up with the idea for this one because we were laughing about the careers master at school and Mick said "Hey, why don't we write a song called 'Career Opportunities' for a laugh? So we just banged that one out.

PAUL: Yeah, there was this line in it about old people and pensions and Mick wanted me to sing it. Anyway, I basically refused because I didn't like the idea of Strummer singing this song then me coming in with this line about pensions. So Strummer went off and rewrote the song. I was basically Strummer's filtering service, anytime he wasn't sure he'd ask me.

CLASH CITY ROCKERS
PAUL: This is quite a famous one. Me and Mick we had a punch-up in this little car going down the motorway but Joe and Topper came off worse because they couldn't get out of the way. Anyway, me and Mick ended up not talking to each other for ages so when we got to the studio to record "Clash City Rockers" Joe had to run between me and Mick telling us what the other ane wanted us to do.

JOE: Again this was misunderstood. There was a music called Rockers, it was a kind of Ska. People took it to mean a gang, you know, Clash City Rockers, and I meant it as a Rockers tune from Clash City. We liked to use our name in the songs, I learned that off Bo Diddley.

STAY FREE
JOE: This is a song Mick wrote about his schooldays and his best friend at school, Robin Banks, who ended up in prison. I think he's out now.

PAUL: Yeah, about Mick's childhood. Again a song think anyone can relate to. Friendship and that.

LONDON CALLING
JOE: I wrote it because I read about 10 news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us, like the ice age is coming and the sun's getting closer to the earth and London's gonna drown next time there's a heavy rain.

Also, I was annoyed by a lot of people who came down to London and seemed to roam through the streets of Soho. They didn't want to come in the bars and drink with us or see our movies or dig the capital. So the first draft of that was a London song. And Mick said "That's not important, write about something that's important." So I broadened my scope. We were very influential at the time and I tried to debunk us. I said "Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust". You know, don't look to us, don't look to us. Do it yourself.

PAUL: I like this a lot. Making the video in the rain. What with the lyrics. We were lucky.

SPANISH BOMBS
PAUL: Kind of a musical history of the Spanish Civil War. The music was really good too.

JOE: We were riding back from Highbury one night in a minicab when the ETA were blowing up a lot of hotels on the Costa Brava. They happened to mention on the radio newscast, you know, "Spanish bombs reported tonight..." and I thought, for no sensible reason, there's got to be a song called "Spanish Bombs". Also DC10s were crashing all over the place and I'd also been thinking about Granada in 1936 when the repression was really extremely heavy.

ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
PAUL: Basically George Orwell's "Animal Farm". We had little pigs on the sleeve. I'm not sure that it worked as a Clash sleeve. It was a bit silly really.

JOE: I was looking a bit forward into the future there, looking at the repression. At the fine we were really worried about the National Front gaining a foothold because 110,00 people voted for them in the local elections and, for a time, it seemed bigger news than it is now. Although there still will be an English civil war.

POLICE AND THIEVES
PAUL: Well, one thing that sticks in my mind is what the guy from The Police said. I read somewhere he though we'd ruined it, he reckoned we'd taken the reggae feel out of it which is what we intended to do. We made it into a punk song, we gave it energy and strength which is what those times were about.

JOE: My conception of it was "Great, a reggae tune, let's do it like Hawkwind!" But Mick was more intelligent. I like it a lot because we're using punk language, we're not going "Ninky dinky dinky poo" like The Police were to do a few years later. It was punk reggae, not white reggae. We were bringing some of ourroots to it, not trying to mimic someone else's. I wish really we could've stayed that pure.

Modern Clashics

THE CLASH have their double retro classic compilation collection released through CBS on Monday.

'The Story Of The Clash Volume One' contains 28 tracks, most of which have been long deleted. It spans their career from their first LP to the worldwide success of 'Combat Rock'.

Here goes with the track listing: Side One: 'The Magnificent Seven', 'Rock The Casbah

'This Is Radio Clash', 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go', 'Straight To Hell', 'Armagideon Time'.

Side Two: 'Clampdown', 'Train In Vain', 'Guns Of Brixton', 'I Fought The Law', 'Somebody Got Murdered', 'Lost In The Supermarket', 'Bank Robber'.

Side Three: '(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais', 'London's Burning', 'Janie Jones', 'Tommy Gun', 'Complete Control', 'Capitol Radio', 'White Riot', 'Career Opportunities'.

Side Four: 'Clash City Rockers', 'Safe European Home', 'Stay Free', 'London Calling', 'Spanish Bombs', 'English Civil War', 'Police & Thieves'.

RAW TALENT STEWART KIRKPATRICK

ANYONE who takes the trouble to look in a record shop will see that there has been an increase in the number of records on sale by groups such as The Clash, The Stranglers and The Sex Pistols. A quick perusal of the charts reveals that The Clash have re-released "I Fought the Law" and "London Calling".

Why have these groups, which were formed in the seventies, started to reappear? Firstly, it is because the record companies have taken an interest in them The Story of The Clash, Vol.1 is now on sale.

But the companies are also reacting to public demand as record buyers again become inter-ested in punk rock.

Punk music developed as a reac-tion to the sounds of the early to mid-seventies, and anyone who has heard Tavares will know why.

This music was generally regarded as empty, glitzy and over-polished. In contrast the import-ance of punk rock lies in the actual playing rather than in the sophistication of the production

The differences are not confined to production. No matter what you think of the bands of the early seventies you have to admit that technically they could sing and play well. Punk rockers, on the other hand, could perform neither task spectacularly well.

The attraction of their music is that it was imbued with an energy that is lacking now. Much of this energy came from the fact that, as Joe Strummer of The Clash put it, they had to struggle to play their instruments.

But the main impact of punk comes from the anger in the lyrics. The punks were an open rebellion against society; all the bands regarded it as hypocritical, monetaristic and sick. Individual expression of this rebellion varied from group to group.

For example, The Sex Pistols gave us: Wanna destroy the passer-by 'Cos I, I wanna be Anarchy

The Stranglers, on the other hand, merely expressed the disillusion involved in coming to grips with society in general: "No more heroes any more."

There were two basic camps among the groups who were overtly "political" the anarcho-rockers such as The Sex Pistols and the revolutionary groups such as The Clash. The anarcho-rockers sought to destroy society and rejected all aspects of it.

The revolutionary groups saw things just as bleakly, but unlike the anarcho-rockers they sought to change society rather than annihilate it. The Clash were undoubtedly the most political and socially conscious of all the punk groups. They tried to bridge the chasm between races and put forward socialism as the only solution:

"White youth, black youth Better find another solution

Why not 'phone up Robin Hood And ask him for some wealth distribution"

The messages in common with most messages had no overall effect. There never was Anarchy in the UK and the punks eventually became themselves what they had always opposed. Johnny Rotten is married to a millionairess, Joe Strummer has a nanny to look after his kids and The Stranglers do cover versions of old songs by The Kinks. The records in the shops tend to be compilations of old punk albums, designed to rake in the cash. As a result punk is dead.

Or is it? For there would seem to be hope still lurking in the cor-ner. Mick Jones, formerly of The Clash, launched BAD (Big Audio Dynamite) in 1986 and has had varying success with it. The social message is still there. While we endured songs about how "I Want to Wake Up with You", BAD held forth on AIDS.

Joe Strummer is also going back on the road. His Rock Against The Rich tour is designed to strike a blow for those who cannot afford to live in today's society. Symboli-cally the tour finishes in London on September 10, National Anti-Yuppie Day.

If there is to be a punk revival then the groups will have to jump a ten-year generation gap to get in touch with the record-buying public. They will have to compete with not only frothy romanticism but pre-packaged heavy metal and Stock, Aiken and Waterman et al. Maybe Levis will use "I Fought the Law" in a commercial. No. I can't really see it.

LET'S GET BACK TO NORMAL

K. WHAT about the new line-up. Any changes?

P. Not really. There's still the four of us and Carnille Hinds on bass but we've used more horns. They're on nearly every track.

K. You dropped them for a while. Were you scared that people might think they were too permanent and just there to fill space?

P. Two reasons really. One was money, they cost so much dough, you know. If you want good horn players you've got to pay for them. But there's a very unhealthy attitude among a lot of musicians. They might have been playing for a year in some small-time band and all of a sudden they're big-time and charging you the earth with the attitude "I'm hot, I'm bad, I can charge you £300 an hour" and not all of them are that good

K. Do you feel you're patronising anyone in your songs. I mean I'm on the dole, I know I'm on the dole so do I need reminding?

P. I don't know if I've got the right to write about poverty and depravation but I've got an opinion on it. I don't come from the North and I haven't had to split up to find work down South but that doesn't mean I can't have an opinion on it. Half the books ever written wouldn't have been written if it was just down to personal pref-erence. The Bible is an opinion and so is "Das Kapital". I can un-derstand your point but it's a very thin line between feelings.

K. Has your success led to any 'extreme'" extravagances?

P. What's excessive to you might not be to me and vice-versa. Like you can talk about "cultural" extravagance and some of these geezers in bands who spend about £1,000 a week on cocaine could say "This is my culture". I can also say that all these "beer boys" who go down the pub and drink six or seven pints is very excessive to me. They've all got beer guts by the time they're 21.

K. Is it good to have all different cults at gigs?

P. I don't know whether it's good to have punks, skins and rockabillies set apart at gigs. It can be dangerous, but if you can go abroad it's not like that. We're too frac-tionalised here. Take Germany and Japan, people come to see us because they enjoy the music and not the colour tie I'm wearing. I wish we could rebuild this country and break to tally with tradition and character. We could have so much more fun. But we're here and it's a shame. There's a lot of creative people but we only seem to give them praise when they're dead. We seem to have this inferiority complex which shows in our ag-gressiveness to every-thing, particularly among the working class.

K. So what about the change?

P. It's just a lack of confidence on our part, including myself. Everyone can't make it, but it would be good to change ourselves so we can relax a bit more in-stead of putting on a show. Like this North-South divide thing. It's there, sadly, but it's there economically and men-tally. We seem to live up to our stereotypes more, like the North thinks all Southerners are soft and have lots of jobs to go to. It's true but there's a lot of pigsties here too.

K. A lot of people think you've gone soft?

P. It comes down to personal preference. If they don't like the sound of the music fair enough, but what is "going soft" meant to mean. If I hear U2, to me they're very soft but I saw Cameo and they were one of the hardest, baddest bands I ever heard. The Style Council play music they like to hear and if people want to hear loud guitars and thrashing drums, then fair enough.

K. Did that frighten you, having that "spokesman of a generation" label pinned on you? The fans might have expected you to have glowed in the dark or something?

P. Yeah, exactly. I thought it was a ridicu-lous statement. I never took it seriously and I never accepted it. The Press like these easy tags to hang on people. They probably founded the "Weller's gone soft brigade".

K. I saw a Nelson Mandella demonstration earlier. He committed no crime yet some of our leaders have committed thousands and are free. Something's wrong isn't it?

P. Yeah! It frightens me. We should play a part in changing it. Look at Reagan putting three million dollars into the Contras Nicaragua where those thugs and terrorists burn down villages, kill children and rape women. Reagan is the biggest terrorist going and we have to sit back while all this madness and killing goes on. We should be rid of him and his kind and get back to normal.

ALBUM REVIEWS

ONE THE CLASH: When Mick Jones -

THE STORY OF THE CLASH. VOLUME and Joe Strummer decided to put the Clash out of its post-punk misery, a generation wept. The Clash were the most political, perhaps the most talented, of the swarm of British punk bands, even if they did rank below Rotten's mob in terms of energy and impact. Their inevitable and deserved suc-cess is captured in every respect on "The Story" - a pleasing, seldom tedious and often shocking account of one of rock's greatest bands. A fitting epitaph. Amen.
(C.B.S.)

Clash scores

SOMETIMES its best to let sleeping dinosaurs lie; the supergroups who rocked around the world in years gone by, are all too often now to be found rocking around the universal equivalent of the Bracmor Rooms.

A re-release of a band's back catalogue is frequently tentamount to climbing back into platforms and Nares good for a nostalgic laugh, but best lett to moulder in peace.

But, praise the Lord and pass the CD, there are honourable exceptions and "The Story of The Clash Volume 1" is one of them.

Although punk was eventually kicked to death by a John Travolta disco mix, The Clash collection is teeming with songs which still sound startingly fresh.

This double-album - 28 tracks in all- are imbued with an energy which is missing from the current Stock, Aiken, Waterman school of music.

Although some tracks such as "Tommy Gun" and "The Guns of Brixton" are more likely to raise a laugh rather than hackles, the glory days come alive with numbers such as "London's Calling", "Straight to Hell" and "Bankrobber'.

Although The Clash are dead and gone Joe Strummer writes movie soundtracks, Mick Jones has gone BAD, and Topper Headon is doing a spot of porridge the music posturing and passionate-remains. As the man said, no more heroes anymore.

By Top Radio One DJ Simon Mayo

FORMER new wave legends The Clash are back in the news with the reissue of the single I Fought The Law and a double compila-ion album of their best songs The Story Of The Clash.

Actually it doesn't feature their biggest hit London Calling and don't expect it to crop up on Volume 2. Former main man Joe Strummer tells me that calling this Volume 1 was just a joke.

Don't expect any sort of Who style live reunion either because Joe told me exclusively tha although he's giving up acting to "get back to songwriting and rocking he's already got him-self a new band together called Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War.

Soundtrack
This name may have something to do with the fact that he'd just done the soundtrack to the film Walker which is set in Latin America. He says though that he was determined not to turn out a typical film soundtrack.

"I'd heard soundtracks with songs on them that only last 20 seconds and I told myself that if I ever got into film songwriting I would want to make something that stood up as an album; a track to smooch to, a track to dance to, and so on.

"Because Walker was a 19th Century American and the film is set in Nicaragua I almost did the Ennio Morricone bit of putting in whistles, grunts and whiplashes. But I managed to avoid it."

A DECADE AGO The Clash were in the vanguard of a musical assault designed to outrage public opinion and bludgeon the pop establishment to their knees.

Now those punk pioneers have been repackaged for the mature mass market on The Story Of The Clash Volume One (CBS, 4602441), a 28-track history tracing their career from '77 to '82. And although time has in-evitably weakened the impact a mite, Jones, Strummer, Simonon and Headon still pack quite a punch fans who take the opportunity to sample their old heroes in CD clarity should certainly blow any cobwebs out of their high-tech system.

The Volume One tag suggests a sequel is in the pipeline, but most of their best-known material The Magnificent Seven, Straight To Hell, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, London's Burning, Bank Robber etc 18 featured here on a collec-tion that offers a stiff dose of high-fibre sound that should pep up the most jaded aural diet.

THIS week Beat It starts something new. Every month we will be reviewing the latest top albums and CDs. We will be giving you all the info, facts and guides to what records are really happening.

More than just a mere punk outfit
The Story of The Clash (Vol 1) CBS: The demise of The Clash in the early Eighties left a vacuum which still exists.

More than anything they were about excitement, emotion and pas sion. Other groups like U2 have attempted to take over the the mantle. but by comparison seem to be just a load of epic emptiness.

That The Clash didn't establish themselves as the greatest band since The Beatles was entirely their own fault, though. They believed too much in their original punk ethos smash the sys-tem, don't play the re-cord companies' game etc. and refused to play on programmes like Top of the Pops.

But in Joe Strummer and to a lesser extent Mick Jones, they had two of the best songw-riters in the business.

And this double com-pilation proves it, especi-ally on the first two sides which have such classics as Rock the Casbah. Straight to Hell and I Fought the Law.

These songs are fun-ky, ballad-like and fren-etic respectively, making nonsense of the myth that The Clash were a mere punk outfit.
OK, earlier tracks like White Riot and Janie Jones (also featured here) owe a fair bit to the pop revolution of 77, but these boys were much more than wham, bam, thank you ma'am merchants.

To anyone too young to have heard The Clash before, here are a few words of advice: BUY THIS RECORD.

Good value... The Clash

Former new wave legends The Clash are back in the news with the reissue of the single 'I Fought The Law' (which was apparently mostly recorded in the studio toilet) and a double compilation album of their best songs 'The Story Of The Clash'.

Actually, it doesn't feature their biggest hit 'London Calling' and don't expect it to crop up on Volume 2 either. Former mainman Joe Strummer tells me that calling it Volume 1 was just a joke. Don't expect any sort of Who-style live reunion either because Joe told me exclusively that although he's giving up acting to "get back to songwriting and rocking" he's already got himself a new band together called Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War.

Soundtrack
This name may have something to do with the fact that he's just done the soundtrack to the film 'Walker' which is set in Latin America. He says, though, that he was determined not to turn out a typical film soundtrack.

"I'd heard soundtracks with songs on them that only last 20 seconds and I told myself that if I ever got into film song-writing I would want to make something Clash is his way of life that stood up as an album; a track to smooch to, a track to dance to, and so on.

"Because Walker was a 19th Century American and the film is set in Nicaragua I almost did the Ennio Morricone bit of putting in whistles, grunts and whiplashes. But I managed to avoid it."

Fists flying
One thing he doesn't reckon he'll be able to avoid is being spat at when he and the band go out on tour. "I expect I'll get through four bars of the first number and have to dive into the front row, fists flying to stop the spitting. I hate it, but I don't suppose it will ever go away.

THE CLASH were always ro-mantic youngsters, preaching half-baked political ideas and believing in "roots, rock, rebel."

But despite that, or rather because of that, they were the last truly great, cool rock band.

Three years after the last incarnation of the group split up, C.B.S. have decided to release a double L.P.-"The Story Of The Clash, Vol. One"-containing 28 songs.

Springing out of punk in 1976, The Clash quickly moved away from its restrictions, dabbling with reggae on the way and later becoming the first white rock band to experiment with Rap.

They made the trip from squats in Brixton to being the darlings of middle class American kids, regaling them with their opinions on the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Only two ex-members of the band are still actively involved in music-Mick Jones has con-tinued where The Clash's "Combat Rock" L.P. finished off with B.A.D.; Joe Strummer has a new band and recently released a soundtrack L.P. for Alex Cox's new film "Walker;" whilst Topper Headon is in prison and Paul Simonon has gone back to being an artist/painter.

The new L.P. covers their career well, but includes only one item that will interest Clash collectors-the original rare version of "Capital Radio" which came out in 1977.

But for those who have none of their work, "The Story" is as good a place to start as any.

"WE SAY what we want, right, and people either, like, catch onto it, get hold of it, grasp what we've got, or they won't. It's up to them."

The voice of a young Mick Jones splutters uncompromisingly from the grooves of the original promo version of 'Capital Radio', blissfully unaware that eleven years on, his group's ramshackle music would be pieced back together like an Egyptian vase and be given the glossy repackage treatment.

Not that 'The Story Of The Clash' is any old tack. The fact that the band were heavily involved in the record's conception is evident in the care that's gone into the presentation: the classic dishevelled punk bandidos pics (circa '78) and, vitally, the highly evocative sleevenotes all combine to lead you to the thankful conclusion that at least it's not farcical, the cruellest p*** r*** joke to date. Although, with the passing of time, even the most sacred of musical heirlooms can lose some of its initial impact. Early Clash, with its emphasis on civil unrest, throwing bricks, living in a tower block, being unemployed and so on, may have seemed ever so gutsy under the Labour government of '77, but heard now, under real clampdown conditions, a song like 'White Riot' can sound almost cute, almost...soft.

This was always the trouble with Strummer and his cigarette-chewing boys. They threw caution aside and presented themselves as a supposedly menacing (but actually rather lovable) quasi-urban guerilla outfit, a Popular Front for the Portobello Road, tune-wise infallible but lyrically open to justifiable accusations of naivety and, worse, ridicule.

Improvements came with 'Tommy Gun' and '(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais' and, later, 'Guns Of Brixton' and 'Bank Robber', scratchy rebel guitars toughening up and turning increasingly to reggae now for inspiration as The Clash graduated from street-fighting bravado to outlaw chic.

It may have been just as corny, but the lyrics as well as the songs - defiant, emotional songs - were a whole lot better, and at least the band were being slightly more honest about their basically escapist core. I mean, hell, no two ways about it, 'Stay Free' was a weepie.

By 1982 and 'Rock The Casbah', The Clash had been through an aggressive, one-chord wonder phase, a freedom fighter phase and a romantic 'London Calling' phase. Now they were into quality pop cuts. Now a split was on the cards and the graceless last LP, 'Cut The Crap', was no more than a distant nightmare. 'The Story Of The Clash' is a slice of history and a worthwhile record, but the credibility of the threatened second volume is seriously in doubt.

Former new wave legends The Clash are back in the news with the reissue of the single I Fought The Law (which was apparently mostly recorded in the studio toilet) and a double compilation album of their best songs The Story Of The Clash.

Actually, it doesn’t feature their biggest hit ‘London Calling’ and don’t expect it to crop up on Volume 2 either. Former mainman Joe Strummer tells me that calling it Volume 1 was just a joke.

Don’t expect any sort of Who-style live reunion either because Joe told me exclusively that although he’s giving up acting to “get back to songwriting and rocking” he’s already got himself a new band together called Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War.

Soundtrack

This name may have something to do with the fact that he’s just done the soundtrack to the film ‘Walker’ which is set in Latin America. He says, though, that he was determined not to turn out a typical film soundtrack.

“I’d heard soundtracks with songs on them that only last 20 seconds and I told myself that if I ever got into film songwriting I would want to make something that stood up as an album; a track to smooch to, a track to dance to, and so on.”

“Because Walker was a 19th Century American and the film is set in Nicaragua I almost did the Ennio Morricone bit of putting in whistles, grunts and whiplashes. But I managed to avoid it.”

Fists flying

One thing he doesn’t reckon he’ll be able to avoid is being spat at when he and the band go out on tour. “I expect I’ll get through four bars of the first number and have to dive into the front row, fists flying to stop the spitting. I hate it, but I don’t suppose it will ever go away.”

Photo: Joe Strummer — Getting back to "rocking and rolling." (ES)

Simn Mayor writes every week for teenscene

STRUMMING: FORMER new wave legends The Clash are back in the news with the re-issue of the single I Fought the Law (which was apparently mostly recorded in the studio toilet) and a double compilation album of their best songs, The Story Of The Clash.

Actually it doesn’t feature their biggest hit London Calling and don’t expect it to crop up on Volume Two — former mainman Joe Strummer tells me that calling this Volume One was just a joke.

Don’t expect any sort of Who style live reunion either because Joe told me exclusively that although he’s giving up acting to “get back to songwriting and rocking” he’s already got himself a new band together called Joe Strummer and Latino Rockabilly War.

This name may have something to do with the fact that he’s just done the soundtrack to the film Walker which is set in Latin America.

He says, though, that he was determined not to turn out a typical film soundtrack.

“I’d heard soundtracks with songs on them that only last 20 seconds and I told myself that if I ever got into film songwriting I would want to make something that stood up as an album — a track to smooch to, a track to dance to, and so on.”

Because, Walker was a 19th Century American and the film is set in Nicaragua I almost did the Ennio Morricone bit of putting in whistles, grunts and whiplashes. But I managed to avoid it.”

One thing he doesn’t reckon he’ll be able to avoid is being spat at when he and the band go on tour. “I expect I’ll get through four bars of the first number and have to dive into the front row, fists flying to stop the gobbing. I hate it but I don’t suppose it will ever go away.”

A SLIGHTLY odd double compilation in that it commences, more or less, at the back end of this most elegant punk group's career, and does not get into their inspired early primitivism until sides C and D. Otherwise, what can you say? They had a great sound, an intuitive paramilitary combination of rigid rhythm and Joe Strummer's barked vocals, which they adapted pretty successfully to accommodate the many black musics they loved, especially reggae and rap. An obsessional outlaw chic (which helped make them so photogenic) dominated most of their work, and their rebel posture was deeply romantic, which contrasts very sharply with the pragmatic knowingness of the New Pop which evolved in punk's wake. Few of these songs seem embarrassing with hindsight. Their rage has aged surprisingly well, notably on the original version of their scalding "Capital Radio", till now a limited-edition freebie.

"White Man In Hammersmith Palais" still stands as a quite brilliant piece of sub-cultural reportage, with its laconic rockers beat, garbled words, and evocation of how different groups of metropolitan youths encountered each other in exciting, slightly frightening ways. How times have changed.

Dave Hill

Reviews
Album of the week

The Story of The Clash (Vol 1) CBS: The demise of The Clash in the early Eighties left a vacuum which still exists.

More than anything they were about excitement, emotion and passion. Other groups like U2 have attempted to take over the mantle, but by comparison seem to be just a load of epic emptiness.

That The Clash didn't establish themselves as the greatest band since The Beatles was entirely their own fault, though. They believed too much in their original punk ethos – smash the system, don't play the record companies' game etc. – and refused to play on programmes like Top of the Pops.

But in Joe Strummer and to a lesser extent Mick Jones, they had two of the best songwriters in the business.

And this double compilation proves it, especially on the first two sides which have such classics as Rock the Casbah, Straight to Hell and I Fought the Law.

These songs are funky, ballad-like and frenetic respectively, making nonsense of the myth that The Clash were a mere punk outfit.

OK, earlier tracks like White Riot and Janie Jones (also featured here) owe a fair bit to the pop revolution of ’77, but these boys were much more than wham, bam, thank you ma’am merchants.

To anyone too young to have heard The Clash before, here are a few words of advice: BUY THIS RECORD.

FORMER new wave legends The Clash are back in the news with the reissue of the single I Fought The Law and a double compilation album of their best songs The Story Of The Clash.

Actually it doesn’t feature their biggest hit London Calling and don’t expect it to crop up on Volume 2. Former mainman Joe Strummer tells me that calling this Volume 1 was just a joke.

Don’t expect any sort of Who style live reunion either because Joe told me exclusively that although he’s giving up acting to “get back to songwriting and rocking” he’s already got himself a new band together called Joe Strummer and the Latino Rockabilly War.

Soundtrack

This name may have something to do with the fact that he’d just done the soundtrack to the film Walker which is set in Latin America. He says though that he was determined not to turn out a typical film soundtrack.

“I’d heard soundtracks with songs on them that only last 20 seconds and I told myself that if I ever got into film songwriting I would want to make something that stood up as an album; a track to smooch to, a track to dance to, and so on.”

“Because Walker was a 19th Century American and the film is set in Nicaragua I almost did the Ennio Morricone bit of putting in whistles, grunts and whiplashes. But I managed to avoid it.”

Triple Play: The Story of the Clash

THE CLASH

The Story of The Clash, Vol. 1,

*****

In 1981, the British rock group The Clash, then at the top of its popularity, made an appearance on Tom Snyder's late night talk show. Snyder, out of his league, started the interview by saying, "You guys come from the same country as the Beatles...that must put a heck of a lot of pressure you." The other band members looked at each other in confusion, or disgust. This was a band that, from the start, wanted nothing to do with the Beatles or that sort of gusty idolatry.

The Clash was a misunderstood band; even when the band rode atop the rock world, it never quite fit in or found the mass audience it deserved. In England, where they began as the Sex Pistols' chief rival in the punk explosion of the mid-seventies, members of The Clash were stars of the first order. But when they expanded beyond punk's limitations — into reggae, funk, disco, pop, R & B, and that world rhythms (this was a band that did it all) — they were condemned in England for selling out.

And American Release In America, prospects were worse. Their first lp, one of the great punk albums, had to wait two years for its American release because their record company thought it too crude. Even as the group began to explore other musical styles, fans were hard to come by. To a country that wanted to hear about fast cars, true love, partying and melancholy self-absorption. Clash sang about nuclear disaster, American foreign policy, dictators, capitalism and unemployment, among others.

The Clash stands as the most political band in rock history, and its politics sided strongly with the working class, third world countries, immigrants and anyone else exploited by the powers that be — in a nutshell, against American capitalism and American imperialism. Their fourth lp, the three-record Sandinista, bitterly indicted American intervention in Central America just at the time when Ronald Reagan was beginning to wreak havoc there.

While its politics cost the band fans, and perhaps got in the way more than once, it would miss the mark to write them off as propagandists. The Clash was a remarkably committed band, and its message was more humanistic than anything else. The musicians wanted to change the world with their music, promote equality and justice, by changing people's attitudes. After eight years of Reaganism, it's hard to remember that bands once felt their music could make a difference in the world, then than in

London Calling The best example of the band's idealism is the third lp, London Calling, a two-record set which the band refused to have released unless the record company lowered the price to a more affordable level. In 1980, the double album — one of rock's all-time classics — could be had for about the price of a single album — considering the quality, surely the best deal in music history.

The Story of The Clash, Vol. 1, therefore, reeks of corporate saliva: the bogus 'Vol. 1' subtile is ridiculous (the band only released five albums); the horrible liner notes, by some former associate, are plain stupid and hard to read; and the idea of a greatest hits package seems unlike The Clash, although the group did give its consent.

But the music will suffice. Side one shows off the group's grasp of third world music, funk, reggae and pop, while Side Two is a romp through some London Calling cuts, plus the side-closer Bankrobber, off the ep Black Market Clash, which is a joyous reggae ode to stealing money from the rich.

Side Three covers the group's punk era, from their first ly and 1978's Give 'Em Enough Rope, and includes some of the best punk songs ever done. Side four includes cuts from almost every album. From the opening disco cut, The Magnificent Seven, to the closing reggae-rock of Police and Thieves, this is a tour through about every rock style imaginable.

Far from Complete The collection is far from complete, which explains the 'Vol. 1' subtile, Only two songs off the three-record goldmine, Sandinista, are included; especially sad, considering my personal favorite of all their songs. Let's go Crazy, is left off. Such London Calling classics as Rudy Can't Fail, Wrong 'Em Boyo, Death and Glory and Hateful are also notably absent. A three-record set, the serens would have done the trick.

The pop hits, Train In Vain, Rock the Casbah, Should I Stay Or Should I Go, are here, of course, and no collection gives a good representation of the band's punk years and it's truly remarkable talent for breathing life into whatever music its members put their minds to playing.

The Clash broke up after 1982's Combat Rock. At last look, lead guitarist Mick Jones was having mediocre success fronting his own band, B.A.D. (Big Audio Dynamite). Leader singer Joe Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon attempted a reformed Clash a few years ago, with ethical results. Strummer, who gave the band its ideological bite, is writing non-rock movie soundtracks (more recently, Walker) and touring around, tried-evidently drinking hard, with the Irish-punk band The Pegues.

Many have yet to recover from the loss of The Clash. So this collection is a more than adequate reminder of what they were; one of the most intelligent, political, hard bitten and talented rock bands to ever come along. And, yes, along with the Beatles, one of the all-time best.

KEY
*****—a masterpiece
****—great; buy now
***—good; above average
**—fair; hits and misses
*—poor; a waste of time
o - pathetic; a waste of vinyl

Word Count: 1198.

The Clash Greatest Hits Vol 1 (CBS)
Rating: ★★★★

REMEMBER such punk gems as White Riot, I Fought the Law, Rock the Casbah and Train in Vain? Joe Strummer's voice is still the best snarl in rock and nobody has ever come close to the trashbangwallop approach of the Mick Jones / Paul Simenon / Topper Headon rhythm assault.

This is the band at its peak. Essential.

Demon CD Compact Disc Player countery of Studio One, O'Connell Sr., Dublin.

★★★★ Brilliant ★★ Fair
★★★ Good ★ Poor