A two-album play: Joe Jackson’s 1980 release Beat Crazy and London Calling by The Clash, from 1979. My thoughts on each album run below that record’s song list.
1. Beat Crazy
2. One To One
3. In Every Dream Home (A Nightmare)
4. The Evil Eye
5. Mad At You
6. Crime Don’t Pay
7. Someone Up There
8. Battleground
9. Biology
10. Pretty Boys
11. Fit
I’m a huge Joe Jackson fan and, as I probably too often repeat, follow him and his muse wherever it takes him and me along with it which has meant punk rock/new wave, reggae, ska, big band, classical, you name it. Yet for whatever reason, it took me a bit to get into his 1980 release Beat Crazy. I bought it, automatic purchase of something by a preferred artist when it came out, listened to it, liked it, liked the driving, musically jagged title cut (sung by bassist Graham Maby) but that was sort of it and I shelved the album for a time. Not sure why, perhaps there were other more immediate albums I was more interested in then.
But once I truly dug back into Beat Crazy, wow. Jackson was still in his early career ‘angry young man’ new wave phase at the time, before the shift first into the jazz/swing covers album Jumpin’ Jive in 1981 then into what’s been described as the ‘sophisti-pop’ of the 1982 album Night And Day which featured the hit single Steppin’ Out. But by Beat Crazy Jackson was already clearly evolving, incorporating new sounds like ska and I found a new maturity or seriousness in his songwriting. It was a darker if (likely due to its darkness) more poorly commercially performing album than his straight ahead debut Look Sharp! and its followup I’m The Man. Those were both socially conscious with biting commentary too, but also ‘party’ records featuring obvious hits like Is She Really Going Out With Him? and I’m The Man.
Beat Crazy made you think. JJ addressed, in the title cut, youth attitudes/culture of the day wrapped in allusions to the Cold War via the lyric “and if the Russians ever come they’ll all be beating bongo drums”perfectly in sync with the music. Then there’s the stirring In Every Dream Home (A Nightmare) tale of relationships including the ‘who is she, really?’ look at a high-class prostitute, the blurred morality of Crime Don’t Pay – “I got a nice suit, I got a nice car, it’s been a nice day, don’t tell me that crime don’t pay” to the racism of ‘black niggers and white niggers’ in Battleground to the superficiality of Pretty Boys to the gender identity issues of Fit. A tremendous album, ahead of its time perhaps, although ‘ahead of its time’ is arguably a cliche phrase, given that it happened at that time so it’s obviously of its time.
1. London Calling
2. Brand New Cadillac
3. Jimmy Jazz
4. Hateful
5. Rudie Can’t Fail
6. Spanish Bombs
7. The Right Profile
8. Lost In The Supermarket
9. Clampdown
10. The Guns Of Brixton
11. Wrong ‘Em Boyo
12. Death Or Glory
13. Koka Kola
14. The Card Cheat
15. Lover’s Rock
16. Four Horsemen
17. I’m Not Down
18. Revolution Rock
19. Train In Vain (Stand By Me) (hidden track on original vinyl double album)
London Calling is so full of great songs it’s ridiculous. In choosing this 1979 release to play and revisiting it after a long time between listens – although like all great albums I can pretty much play it in my head – the depth in terms of the quality and variety of music is amazing. The Clash were, as I recall a sticker on the album wrap suggesting, ‘the only band that matters’ at least at the time and I agreed and embraced them, totally. They rivalled my forever favorites, The Rolling Stones, as my favorite band at that time.
There’s the title cut with the line ‘phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust’ which I on first listen and generally took to be about the quick rise and fall of the Bay City Rollers of the 1970s, although their song Saturday Night was a pretty good guilty pleasure. Others have legitimately suggested it’s a reference to what The Clash was seeing as the decline, already, within just a few years, of punk rock as a movement. Or something of a companion to the band’s earlier song 1977 which contained the lyric “No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones in 1977”. Even as The Clash appropriated, as an homage, the artwork of Elvis’s 1956 debut album for the London Calling cover . . .
By any interpretation, a great song and opener.
Then comes Brand New Cadillac, the Vince Taylor cover spiced up with the immortal not in the original lyrics interjection ‘Jesus Christ, where’d you get that Cadillac!’ which just ‘makes’ the song . . . Train In Vain (Stand By Me) the early single and a ‘hidden track’ to end the original album . . . beyond that . . . the reggae of Revolution Rock, Spanish Bombs evoking the Spanish Civil War but updated by incorporating contemporary issues . . . Lost In The Supermarket’s tale of suburban disillusionment and rampant consumerism . . . the ‘what are we gonna do now?’ call to arms of Clampdown . . . The Right Profile with another couple of stirring screams in the chorus ‘that’s Montgomery Clift honey!’ and ‘but I prefer alcohol!!” And, to me the (literally) killer cut, The Guns Of Brixton with that intoxicating introductory bass line followed by the defiant opening lines ‘When they kick at your front door how you gonna come, with your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun . . . when the law break in how you gonna go? Shot down on the pavement or waiting in death row’ . . .
The excellence is in the maybe not grammatically perfect yet perfectly imperfect lyrics. It’s maybe ‘wrong’, as great art often is, but sounds right, better, it just works. Akin, for just one example, to Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple where the lyrics are so much better – and probably aid in the singing tempo – as released: ‘some stupid (not some stupid idiot, just ‘some stupid’) with a flare gun burned the place to the ground’ and ‘The Rolling truck Stones thing just outside, making our music there’; putting ‘truck’ in between Rolling and Stones takes it from just another lyric mentioning the Stones’ mobile recording studio into a memorable line.
Crazy good album, London Calling. I have friends who swear by the earlier Clash stuff, the raucous debut punk rock album and all that and I get it, I like the earlier material too. But some tend to dismiss London Calling as a sellout for commercial gain. I disagree. First off, one wants to sell records, no? Otherwise, it’s like saying you’ll work for free. Noble maybe, but you have to eat and maintain roof overhead. Further, London Calling is still topical, still political, if that’s what one wants from The Clash, but it’s wrapped in more accessible songs. If that’s ‘selling out’ then I’m all for it because few are going to listen to your lyrics if the musicality of the songs themselves doesn’t first draw you in. And London Calling achieves that. Easily one of the greatest albums of all time.