It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to make your album cover a pastiche of Elvis’ first album, but that’s what Strummer and co. do here. It’s a double album from The Clash, and the songs are much more musically complex than the straightforward punk of their first album.
It incorporates bits of ska, rockabilly,
blues, and jazz. Rudie Can’t Fail, for example, has a ska feel but over a Bo
Diddley beat (where you can’t help but feel like The Clash are intruding into
The Specials’ territory a bit), while Jimmy Jazz is a blues-jazz narrative
about a Mack the Knife kind of character. This theme of young rebels carries
throughout the album, including a shout-out to actor Montgomery Clift who
turned to self-medication to cope with the pain following a high-profile car
accident in the track The Right Profile.
Modern life from subjects as disparate as urban decay and existential angst (“London is drowning, and I live by the river” - London Calling) to alienation in the face of impersonal retail (Lost In The Supermarket), to self-perpetuating class disparity under capitalism (“You start wearing the blue and brown and you're working for the clampdown. So you got someone to boss around. It makes you feel big now”) in Clampdown, a very Marxist manifesto. And with these tracks, The Clash sound more like The Jam, both in the musical style and in Strummer’s angry socially-aware lyrics being easily equal to those of Paul Weller. The lyric that I quoted from London Calling, for example, can be interpreted literally - before the construction of the Thames Barrier the threat of flooding in London was very real. But also a sense that London is "drowning" in decay, and that it's the socially disadvantaged who are going to be more affected (not unlike the literal flooding, actually, because this would have affected what would at the time have been the poorer parts of the East End before Docklands yuppie-fication).
“When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?”
The album closes with a reggae cover that’s an
infectious call to partying over violence, before what was originally a hidden
track Train In Vain, written and sung by guitarist Mick Jones apparently about
his break-up with Viv Albertine of The Slits, and it’s an oddly poppy number
(with a dash of R&B) that sounds more like Wham than it does anything else
by The Clash, but the two together do serve to highlight both the musical
variety of this album, and how much the band has changed from the pure punk of
their beginnings.
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?”
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