The Clash have made a very good record.

This is going to make the rest of the review awkward.

London Calling, newly arrived on these shores after its British release last month, contains more ideas than most bands will manage in three albums. Unfortunately, The Clash have put most of them on this one.

There are nineteen songs here. Nineteen.

The group that once seemed capable of regarding three minutes as an intolerable concession to bourgeois excess has made a double album.

A punk double album.

One assumes the triple live set is being held for Christmas.

What is more troubling is that London Calling isn't even particularly interested in being punk.

There is reggae here. Ska. Rockabilly. Rhythm and blues. Soul. Something perilously close to jazz. There are horns. There is piano. There are songs that swing.

At several points the musicians sound as though they may actually have rehearsed.

For The Clash, this constitutes a constitutional crisis.

It begins magnificently.

The title song is everything one might reasonably want from this band: ominous, economical, ugly in exactly the right places. Paul Simonon's bass arrives like machinery starting beneath the floorboards. Topper Headon doesn't so much keep time as enforce it. Mick Jones stabs at the song from the edges while Joe Strummer sounds as though he has just been handed proof that every unpleasant suspicion he has ever entertained was correct.

This is The Clash at their best.

The problem is that they apparently became bored with being The Clash approximately four minutes later.

“Brand New Cadillac” comes roaring out as rockabilly, which is either a joke or a warning.

Then “Jimmy Jazz” strolls in.

Strolls.

The Clash.

I have checked the sleeve twice.

There is something perversely entertaining about hearing a band that built its reputation sounding like four men trying to escape a burning building suddenly playing with swing, but one cannot escape the feeling that the building was part of the appeal.

By “Hateful,” the record has begun demonstrating the central difficulty of reviewing it: nearly everything works.

This is extremely inconsiderate.

The rhythm section, in particular, has become alarmingly good.

Simonon has always understood that bass does not require a permission slip to be interesting, but here he has become the record's gravitational center. He can play something blunt and menacing on one song, then slip into reggae on the next without sounding like an Englishman who bought the appropriate record three weeks ago.

Headon is even more impressive.

There is a looseness to his playing now that ought to destroy the band's old attack, but instead gives it more force. He can push, swing, drag behind the beat, sit inside a reggae groove and then return to straight rock without announcing the transition with a small flag.

This sort of versatility is admirable.

It is also precisely the sort of thing punk was invented to save us from admiring.

We were told, not very long ago, that virtuosity was beside the point.

Now The Clash seem determined to become good at everything.

There is an ideological problem here.

“Rudie Can't Fail” may be the clearest evidence.

It is infuriatingly enjoyable.

The horns bounce around, Strummer and Jones trade vocals, the rhythm skips rather than charges, and the entire thing carries itself with the irritating confidence of a band that has discovered it can leave home without its leather jacket and still be recognized.

The same is true of “Wrong 'Em Boyo,” which wanders even farther into ska and Jamaican music.

Again: good.

Again: why?

There is a fine line between expanding one's vocabulary and forgetting what one was trying to say.

The Clash have not merely crossed that line. They appear to have stolen a car.

To be fair, when they return to something resembling their original language, they remain formidable.

“Clampdown” is exceptional.

It may be the best song on the record.

Here all the new musical confidence actually serves the old urgency. The arrangement builds rather than merely explodes. Jones and Strummer sound sharper because the band now understands dynamics well enough not to hit everything at full volume from the first bar onward.

This is growth.

I dislike admitting this.

But it is.

“The Guns of Brixton” presents the opposite problem. Simonon takes the vocal, the song settles into reggae, and The Clash once again sound less like a London punk band than students conducting exceptionally successful field research.

It is well played. It is convincing. It has atmosphere.

And still I wonder how many genres one band is required to visit before customs starts asking questions.

“Lost in the Supermarket” is stranger still.

The Clash have written a pop song.

Not a pop song in quotation marks.

Not some sneering parody where the band pretends to embrace melody while quietly placing explosives beneath it.

A pop song.

A good one.

Jones sings it with something dangerously close to vulnerability, and the guitars shimmer rather than attack. It is catchy enough that one could imagine hearing it coming out of a car driven by somebody who has never once been shoved by a policeman.

This cannot possibly be what was intended.

Then comes “The Right Profile,” complete with brass and a swagger that suggests the band has begun raiding American record collections while nobody was watching.

And that, really, is London Calling in miniature.

The Clash keep finding things.

Old rock and roll.

Reggae.

Soul.

Ska.

American R&B.

Bits of pop.

Bits of jazz.

Bits of everything the original punk purge was supposedly meant to clear from the premises.

They pick these things up, examine them, and discover—rather embarrassingly—that many of them were useful.

There is something historically amusing about watching revolutionaries begin restoring the furniture.

None of this would matter if the songs were weak.

They aren't.

That is the nuisance.

“Death or Glory” is excellent. “The Card Cheat” is absurdly grand and somehow survives its own arrangement. “I'm Not Down” sounds almost optimistic, which from Strummer ought to require a doctor's note.

Even the lesser songs contain moments most bands would happily build a side around.

And then there is the final track, “Train in Vain,” which is not even listed on the sleeve.

Perhaps they were embarrassed.

They should be.

It is disgracefully catchy.

If this is where The Clash are headed, they may soon have the humiliating experience of selling records to people who simply enjoy them.

There is a chorus.

A proper one.

Jones sings it cleanly. The beat moves. The guitar sits exactly where it should. Nothing sounds broken. Nobody appears to be overthrowing anything.

I can imagine American radio liking it.

This is not meant as praise.

The peculiar irony of London Calling is that The Clash have never sounded better while seeming less certain what The Clash are supposed to sound like.

Their first records had limitations.

Those limitations were useful.

They created pressure.

There were only so many things the band could do, so they had to do those things as if civilization depended on them.

Here, suddenly, they can do almost anything.

That is a dangerous moment for any band.

Give musicians enough skill, enough studio time and enough confidence, and sooner or later somebody brings in a horn section.

From there civilization generally proceeds downhill.

Producer Guy Stevens has somehow kept the record from collapsing under all this ambition. The sound is remarkably alive. It doesn't have the sealed, expensive polish that usually arrives once a band begins taking itself this seriously. Things rattle. Instruments crowd one another. Voices arrive ragged around the edges.

Whatever else has happened, The Clash have not become respectable.

Not yet.

But one can see the danger.

Punk mattered partly because it drew a line.

The old rock establishment had become bloated, technical, complacent and pleased with itself. Punk's answer was to remove things.

Remove the solos.

Remove the polish.

Remove the mythology.

Remove the distance between wanting to make music and making it.

That argument was crude.

It was also useful.

And now one of the movement's best bands has made a double album demonstrating that it has developed an extremely healthy appreciation for nearly everything punk supposedly rejected.

Perhaps this is maturity.

Perhaps it is surrender with a better rhythm section.

I suspect London Calling will be praised heavily.

It deserves much of that praise.

It is ambitious, energetic, occasionally brilliant and almost absurdly generous. There are enough good songs here to rescue two lesser albums, possibly three.

But I am less convinced by the larger proposition.

The Clash are most powerful when the world gives them something to push against.

On London Calling, they have begun absorbing the world instead.

That may make them better musicians.

It may even make them a better band.

I am not certain it makes them a more important one.

There is a lesson here somewhere about knowing what to leave out.

The Clash once understood it instinctively.

Now they seem determined to prove that reggae, rockabilly, pop, soul, jazz, R&B and punk can all coexist on four sides of vinyl without killing one another.

Against considerable odds, they have succeeded.

I simply cannot imagine why anyone would want this to become the future of rock music.

Richard Mallory
Stereo Scene
January 1980