The Clash

Since 1976 · United Kingdom

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London Calling (1979)

London Calling spreads nineteen songs across four sides and refuses to settle into any single genre, moving from the title track's tolling apocalypse through ska, rockabilly, lounge jazz and dub without ever sounding like a band hedging its bets. "London Calling" itself rides Paul Simonon's rolling bassline and Joe Strummer's half-shouted vision of flood, ice age and nuclear error into one of punk's most cinematic openings. Pennie Smith's cover photograph, Simonon smashing his bass onstage, became as iconic as anything on the record. It's the album that proved punk's energy could survive almost unlimited stylistic range.

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The Clash

London Calling · 1979

The Clash formed in London in 1976 around Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, quickly establishing themselves as punk's most explicitly political band, singing about unemployment, racism and the Notting Hill riots while their contemporaries stuck closer to nihilism. Signed to CBS despite the band's own suspicion of major labels, they built a reputation as a ferocious live act before their sound began pulling in reggae, rockabilly and dub alongside the original punk attack.

London Calling arrived in 1979, a double album that abandoned any pretense of a single sound. The band kept expanding outward on Sandinista! the following year before contracting again, losing Jones to internal conflict in 1983 and splitting for good by 1986. Strummer went on to solo work and film soundtracks before his death in 2002, but it's the Clash's refusal to stay one thing that later bands kept returning to.