The Clash

The Clash formed in London in 1976 as one of the defining bands of the first wave of British punk, built around the songwriting partnership of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. Bassist Paul Simonon, who had studied art and grew up in Brixton, South London, joined as the band's visual architect as much as its rhythm section, shaping the look that would come to define the band alongside the music.

By the time the band recorded its third album, "London Calling," in 1979, The Clash had begun pulling away from strict punk orthodoxy. Working with producer Guy Stevens at Wessex Sound Studios in London, the band folded reggae, ska, rockabilly, jazz, and soul into its sound, arriving after a period of management upheaval and a songwriting slump for Strummer and Jones.

That album gave Simonon his first turn as a credited songwriter and lead vocalist, on the track "The Guns of Brixton," reportedly encouraged into singing his own words by Strummer after some hesitation. Both Simonon and Jones had grown up in Brixton, a South London neighborhood with one of the country's largest Caribbean immigrant communities and, in that era, a heavily contested relationship with policing under the "sus" laws.

"London Calling" reached number 9 on the UK album chart and number 27 in the US, went platinum in America, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded; Rolling Stone later named it the best album of the 1980s.

Before The Clash existed, Strummer fronted a pub-rock band called the 101ers, named for the Walterton Road squat where its members lived. In May 1976, manager Bernie Rhodes and guitarist Mick Jones approached Strummer after a 101ers gig and gave him two days to decide whether to quit that band and join a new one built, in Rhodes's words, to rival the Sex Pistols. Strummer agreed within a day, and by July 4 the newly formed Clash, with Simonon on bass, was opening for the Pistols themselves.^[1]

Just weeks later, on August 30, 1976, Strummer, Simonon, and Rhodes were swept into the Notting Hill Carnival riot, a violent confrontation between police and Carnival-goers that broke out after officers moved to arrest a young pickpocket in a dense crowd. Strummer later described being present for the very first brick thrown. That experience became the direct basis for "White Riot," released as the band's debut single on March 18, 1977, and included on their self-titled debut album that April.^[2]

The song's blunt title initially drew accusations that the band was flirting with the same nationalist currents pushed by skinhead subcultures and the National Front, a reading Strummer flatly rejected. He argued in interviews that poor Black and poor white Britons were, in his words, stuck in the same boat, and that "White Riot" was a call for white working-class solidarity with Black resistance rather than a call for racial conflict. The band answered any remaining doubt in April 1978 by headlining the Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park in front of roughly 100,000 people, performing "White Riot" that day with Sham 69's Jimmy Pursey.^[3]

The band's fifth album, Combat Rock, was released on 14 May 1982 after sessions in London and at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Roughly eighteen songs were trimmed from a 77 minute draft to a 46 minute single LP with the help of producer Glyn Johns, a process that exposed tension between Mick Jones and the rest of the band.^[10] The record reached number two in the UK and number seven in the US, and remains the group's best-selling album.^[10]

Its second single, "Rock the Casbah," began as music written and recorded largely by drummer Topper Headon, with new lyrics from Strummer, and became the band's only US top ten hit, peaking at number eight.^[9] Headon, whose heroin addiction had deepened, was fired days before the album's release, and Jones was dismissed after the 1983 tour.^[10][11]

The title track of that album took its name from the BBC World Service station identification and began, by one account, in a taxi ride in which Strummer and his then-fiancée discussed Cold War fears and the risk of a Thames flood. It reached number 11 on the UK singles chart in January 1980, and its video, directed by Don Letts, was filmed on a boat on the Thames in the winter rain.^[12] Strummer, Jones, Simonon and drummer Topper Headon recorded it amid debts, a management change and a dispute with CBS over whether the record would be a single or a double album.^[13]