"Clash City Rockers" by The Clash

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Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?

Today's prompt is:

A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.

Well, I mean. If the golden age of music is 14, as the old saying has it, then we're talking about 1978. Let's go straight to the top, then, with The Clash, and 'Clash City Rockers', indeed. Can't go far wrong with that.

What does it mean to me? I first became aware of it by hearing friends who already had it, singing it. Brendan, I think. And the first time I heard it might have been at a gig by the band he was in with Friendy, The Varicose Veins, doing a version of it.

I certainly didn't buy it when it came out (14, remember), but a couple of years later, at one of the Glasgow record shops. Possibly Listen Records on Renfield Street, but it might have been the Virgin Megastore, down the bottom of that street — or rather its continuation, Union Street — on the corner with Argyle Street. I think it probably was, because they had a lot of space and kept a lot of browsable back catalogue.

Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.

'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'

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I picked this up at a stall at the local market a few weeks ago. It’s a slim volume, taking its title from the Ramones' song ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and subtitled, ‘A Brief History of Punks at War’. Alli Patton is a music journalist from the southern US and this slim book takes a look at how punk, from the 70s through to the 20210s, has been used to resist war, and call for peace and justice.

She starts with Stiff Little Fingers and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and moves on through apartheid South Africa to Chile during Pinochet’s regime and punk bands in East Germany during the Cold War.

And then beyond that, decade by decade. There are always wars and oppression, and it seems there are always punk bands resisting and calling for peace.

Worth a read, and she includes a YouTube playlist of some of the artists she covers.

Searching for the Man

The state of internet search these days is such that it can be hard to find things that — while you don’t know they’re there — you know must be there.

It’s as if the search engines give up after a bit and just show more links to the same videos. Or lyrics sites, in this case. I found myself at the Wikipedia page for answer songs, and idly scrolled through it. Mainly I wondered what they’d say about ‘Here Comes Your Man’, by the Pixies. If you’ve swum in the same pools of the indie/punk/post-punk floodwaters as me, you’ll have long realised that Black Francis must have written that song, in part at least, as an answer to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. (Note the formulation of the title from the first album; many people and versions characterise it as ‘Waiting for My Man’, since that’s what the lyrics say.)

There was no reference to the song on the page. Slightly odd, I thought. I looked at the song’s own page. No reference there to the Velvets or Lou Reed.

If you doubt the connection, just listen to the two songs. There’s the riff on the Pixies song, plus all the references to ‘waiting’ in it, as well as the obviousness of the title. Sure, it’s not only that, or even, really, about ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ in any sense. But it’s unthinkable that the one didn’t inspire the other. Let’s not forget Black Francis wrote, in another song, ‘I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed/I like Lou Reed.’

Others must have written about this, I thought, and started googling around. Well, I use DuckDuckGo, but you know. And I even tried switching to Google. Nothing came up, except for the odd little Reddit post saying, ‘Hey, this song’s a bit like that song.’ Yet you’ve got to imagine — it’s hard not to imagine – people will have written about it. Music journalists, bloggers… hell, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned it before now.

But nothing turned up. I’m sure those pages are out there, lost for now in the deep pools of the web. But the search engines just don’t want to go there anymore.

Tying Ribbons

I was looking into answer songs because I’d been reading the page on ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, and it mentioned there being an answer song.

I was looking at that page because we were talking about the origin of people tying yellow ribbons when they’re waiting for someone to come home. I thought it might have originated with the song. It was certainly the first time most of us here in the UK heard the expression. When Americans festooned buildings with yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage crisis, it seemed like a reference to the song.

But the page suggested the origin is much older, possibly going back to the US civil war. So much for that.

We were talking about yellow ribbons because people are displaying them again: waiting for the remaining hostages in Gaza to be freed.

Israel’s government is doubtless guilty of war crimes, probably crimes against humanity. And October the 7th was a crime against humanity. I’m all for freeing Palestine, but free the hostages too, and if you can get rid of Hamas too while you’re doing it, so much the better.

Free Palestine from Hamas.

“Mario Y Maria” by Butch Hancock

It’s annoying that the song I want to use for the prompt, ‘Share a song that tells a great story,’ isn’t found on Apple Music. It’s sitting right there in my music library being fantastic, ever since I ripped it from a cover CD from Uncut magazine, back in 2002.

It tells the tale of a pair of lovers that we might describe, in the clichéd form, as ‘star-crossed’. But it’s not a tale of young lovers. Rather, the titular pair are experienced, world-weary (certainly by the end), but they keep on keeping on.

I don’t know if creating this entry will even work with the song not found, but if it doesn’t, I’ll create the post manually. (It didn’t; I did.)

Turns out it’s on that there Tube thing, though.

I got this as a Christmas present some several years ago, and read bits of it. It’s episodic, though — a separate essay on each of the songs, plus an ‘Instrumental Break’ — so I dipped in and out of it. I was encouraged to pick it up again recently because of the name-similarity with a great podcast I’m listening to and keep meaning to write about here: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.

Marcus’s title is overconfident to the point of arrogance by calling the book the history. As if there was and could be only one. To say nothing of the idea that it could be encapsulated in ten songs. Hickey’s is more aware, and he makes the point repeatedly that his is only a history.

But Marcus is a terrific writer, and, like Hickey’s, the title is not literal: when discussing any one song he’ll touch on several others, plus various events in the lives of the artists and the goings-on in the world.

I can’t honestly say that I learned much from this, or retained much of what I may have learned, but it’s a joy to read. The pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.

It seems Facebook still has the odd use, apart from keeping in touch with family and friends who still use it. I popped in late last night, and it told me I had memories on this day. It seems the 29th of October has been a day on which I’ve often posted in the past, because there were several. But the one that really caught my eye was this one:

15 years ago, it tells me, in 2009, I wrote:

Jason Ringenberg doing The Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets Gl Joe’: a thing of rare beauty. Spotify URI: http://is.gd/4Hcr7.

Now that’s quite telling, in several ways. First of all, remember the is.gd URL shortener? Remember URL shorteners that aren’t t.co?

Also, I haven’t used Spotify in a long time, being a happy Apple Music subscriber. But that doesn’t matter. What’s really weird is that I have absolutely no memory of Jason (out of Jason & the Scorchers, as I’m sure you know) doing any Clash song, much less a surprising choice of Sandinista album track.¹ And back then I was listening to Jason quite a lot.

Obviously I quickly searched for it on Apple Music. To find that it’s part of an album. Not one by Jason, though. The Sandinista! Project² is a compilation album of covers of the entirety of Sandinista by different artists.

Why was I not told such a thing existed?

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I was told of it, one way or another. Some passing mention, a mental note, quickly forgotten… maybe it was mentioned in Jason’s newsletter or some such.

I mean, it’s not a totally off the wall idea. It’s subtitled ‘A Tribute to The Clash’, and I’ve had or listened to things like it before. I had something called London Booted once, which was sort of techno-ish covers of some or all of the tracks from London Calling. And I remember listening to a reggae version of that album, or tracks from it, at least.

But this is every track on what is famously a triple album. Yes, including ‘Career Opportunities’ (though not, to be fair, ‘Blowing in the Guns of Brixton’). And the great thing about it is, almost no track is a carbon copy of the original. We get jazz instrumentals, ska versions, rocked-up versions of ones The Clash took slowly, and everything in between. Most of the performers are little known, or unknown, to me at least. But we get Katrina of Katrina and the Waves, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Wreckless Eric, The Coal Porters, and of course the aforementioned former Scorcher.

It is really, really good. Highly recommended if you’re a fan, and even if you’re not, I imagine you’ll find something to enjoy. Go on, find it on your favourite service here.

Incidentally, I love that the label it’s on is called 00:02:59 Records. ‘The band went in/And knocked them dead/In two minutes fifty-nine,’ as ‘Hitsville UK’ says.³

In a way it was surprising that Shane MacGowan survived this long, considering his noted and dramatic habits. But it’s still sad that he’s died.

I count The Pogues as one of the bands I’ve seen live most of all. The only other one that comes close would be The Fall, and either could be the winner. Goes back to 1985, either way.

The Pogues were vey much a band of supremely talented musicians and songwriters. But Shane was the driving force. What they did was to meld punk with Irish folk music. The former, of course had helped me through my adolescent years and would remain a lifelong love. The latter: well, I came from a Scottish Catholic background, so it was pretty familiar, between Scottish folk and Irish songs sung at Celtic matches.

So on the instant that I first heard them — certainly on Peel, and probably ‘Sally MacLennane’, I’d say — they clicked. There was no learning curve, no adjustment to this new sound. It was just there, it belonged, as if it had always existed.

The Pogues may have been inevitable, but Shane was a genius. And his songs, as I wrote when Phil Chevron died were steeped in death imagery.

I’ll leave you with a couple of excellent screen grabs from Twitter (where, just to note, as I write, ‘Sodomy and the Lash’ is trending under a ‘food’ heading, which is just beyond weird.

First, this excellent mashups of the day’s deaths of noted figures:

And this typically topical ‘Fairytale’ reference (even if it does misspell his surname):

So it goes.

To Cambridge, on Thursday just past, and to the Corn Exchange, to see Suzanne Vega. My one-word review: spellbinding.

I had never been to the Corn Exchange before (to be honest I’ve rarely been to a gig — especially an indoor gig — outside London these last thirty-six or so years). But it’s one of those places that feels slightly legendary to me, because I’d see it listed among the tour dates in Sounds or NME back in my youthhood.

Turns out it’s a lovely, clean, modern venue, with Old Speckled Hen on tap. We were seated in the balcony (on the balcony?), which was fine.

And as to Ms Vega: I’m not steeped in her work, so the fact that she essentially played a ‘Greatest Hits’ set was ideal for me. She even explicitly said, ‘I’m gonna play some of the well-known ones early, so people don’t worry that they won’t get them.’

This after she’d opened with ‘Marlene on the Wall’, followed by ‘Small Blue Thing’.

She had one accompanying musician, a guitarist called Gerry Leonard, who has worked with Bowie, among others. He was great, making heavy use of those sampling/looping pedals, making him sometimes sound like three or four players at once.

So, like I say, the whole thing was spellbinding.

I missed posting this yesterday, what with one thing and another. Twenty years ago yesterday, the 22^nd of December 2002, my friend Tony texted me and the other members of our then-band, Burn, to the effect:

Nooooooooo!

Strummer’s dead.

I was at work, and immediately googled for the story. Joe Strummer, dead at 50 from an undiagnosed heart defect. We didn’t hear the reason at once, of course.

I wrote The Death of a Hero at the time. Not much has changed, in some ways. I still play his music, both The Clash and his solo stuff. I sometimes wonder what he’d have to say about the times we live in now.

Hard to imagine he’d have been 70 this year. Such is life, and death.

I was listening to The Specials yesterday because of the sad death of Terry Hall, of course.

I was mildly distracted by this text early in that Guardian report:

The pioneering 2 Tone band rose thanks to the support of Joe Strummer,¹ who invited them to support the Clash live,² and of BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

While not wrong, it ignores the fact that The Specials were bloody brilliant! The piece does make that clear later, to be fair, but it seems slightly the wrong way to weight it.

I also listened to some Fun Boy Three, and they were far better than I remembered, too, both with and without Bananarama.

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been confirmed, there has been a lot of chatter about free speech. Musk, we are told, describes himself as a ‘free speech maximalist’, and there are fears that he’ll have Twitter reinstate the accounts of Trump and other white supremacists.

But I’ve been thinking about Joe Strummer.

More specifically, I’ve been wondering why his ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was popping into my head so often. It wasn’t a problem: getting an earworm of a song I like doesn’t bother me. But I wondered what was triggering it.

I can often work out why I get a song in my head. I knew, for example, why I often had The Clash’s ‘The Prisoner ' in my head through the summer. The words ‘The Prisoner ' are written on the whiteboard in our kitchen, along with the titles of the other serieses we’re watching.

And in fact I sing ‘The Prisoner’ every time I hang out the washing, owing to its line referring to ‘hanging out the washing and clipping coupons and generally being decent.’

It clicked today, though. You know how — if you’re an old-school album listener (or just old) like me — when you play an album, one track’s ending often triggers the expectation of the next? So that, when you hear a song in isolation, on a playlist or on the radio or something, and the wrong song plays next, it can be quite jarring?

The song before ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is ‘Techno D-Day’. Joe’s celebration of illegal raves ends with the line, ‘And this is about free speech!’

So it turns out my head was just playing the next song whenever the phrase came up.

God, I have missed this so much. Live music FTW.

I get emails from the Joe Strummer Foundation . The most recent one told me that their artist of the month for September was someone called Gemma Rogers. I hadn’t heard of her, but was interested when I read that she’d had an album launch at Paper Dress Vintage. That’s a place just down the road from me on the Narrow Way. It used to just be a second-hand clothes shop, but now it’s more, I guess.

Anyway, the thought that she might be a local piqued my interest, as well as the JSF recommendation, so I gave her a listen, and liked what I heard a lot.

She was booked to play at a place called Folklore, on Hackney Road, so I thought, why not? In support was Gabi Garbutt and the Illuminations , who I saw once a few years back, because Sean Read, whom I know from round these parts, was producing them and playing in the band. Back then. Not anymore. Not tonight, at least.

Going to a gig in a small venue? No big deal, right? Except… this is the first gig I’ve been to since I saw Glen Matlock. At the end of February 2020.

It felt like quite a step.

But after a bite to eat across the road, we made our way in through forbidding, castle-like doors. Inside is a smallish bar area, and a classic pub backroom. The stage made of two layers of forklift pallets topped with hardboard. It was smoky. Visually, it was like being back in the eighties. But of course, it was stage smoke-machine smoke. Exactly why it filled the air before anyone had taken to the stage escapes me.

Unless it was to show the lasers. It looked like this:

Anyway, Veronica Bianqui brought her Hollywood-fuelled LA tones to Hackney Road. Though it turned out she had been on the bus with us down from Clapton.

I probably enjoyed Gabi Garbutt’s performance most of the three. Because at times? At times they sounded a bit like late-period Clash.

They sounded. Like. The Clash. Combat Rock-era. I think it was mainly the bass player sounding a bit like Paul Simonon. Whatever, I can pay no higher compliment. No higher compliment can be paid.

But Gemma Rogers was also great, with the singalong of ‘Rabbit Hole’ being the highlight. Not often you get the band applauding the audience.

But yes: I had missed it so much more than I realised. Just getting together in room with a hundred or so people, while others make rocking sounds up the front? How could I have forgotten?

I’m a republican, but you’ve got to acknowledge that old Queenie had a good run. Apparently the direct descendent of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I didn’t know.

My favourite story about her is the one about the landrover and the Saudi crown prince.

The weirdest thing about the change of monarch for me? The King’s Speech is an Oscar-winning movie, not something to ignore on Christmas Day.

I was never a huge Meat Loaf fan, but I always liked Bat Out of Hell, and of course enjoyed him in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I’m saddened to hear of his death.

I’ll be playing Bat Out of Hell today.

Or maybe that should be ‘flame one up for Joe’, considering his preferences. It’s the anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death today. Nineteen years. I still miss him.

We subscribed to Disney+ last night, so that we could watch Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. I had thought it was going to be a movie, but it turns out it’s a miniseries: three two-hour episodes. The second drops today, and the third tomorrow.

It’s built from hours of footage that were recorded for the Let It Be documentary back in 1969. I remember watching that once and being disappointed by it. The main problem was that it was presented as a fly-on-the-wall thing, but the fly was aurally challenged.

In other words, you couldn’t make out much of the chatter between the guys. That, almost as much as hearing them rehearsing and working on the songs, was kind of the point.

If you were making a documentary like that today you’d probably have all the band members wearing microphone packs, as the participants in reality TV shows do, so that what they said would make it to storage. Back then, though, even if that had been practical,¹ it was far from obvious that the individual Beatles would all have complied. Plus we’d want to hear from Brian,² and Mal, and Glyn, and the other George, as well as John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

That’s a lot of microphone packs. So of course, the original producers relied on ambient miking. It’s fine when the speaker is near one of the vocal mics, or when they’re right under a boom, but otherwise… well, as I say, Let It Be was a frustrating experience.

However, technology has come a long, long, way in the succeeding fifty years. Every word in this is clear as a bell,³ undoubtedly with the help of modern digital audio editing. It’s slightly ironic to note that one of the first things the band say is that the place they’re working in – a warehouse in Twickenham – is acoustically bad. An odd choice of a place in which to work on writing and performing songs.

Anyway, as of the cliffhanger ending of episode one, this series is fucking amazing! Totally brilliant!

But only if you’re a fan. If you only take a passing interest in The Beatles, or (weirdly) none at all, you probably shouldn’t waste your time on this.

The Disneyfication of Christmas

Disney have made a genius move in launching this when they did. We will be far, far, from the only people who took out a subscription to watch this, with the intention of cancelling it after a month.

A month. What’s a month after yesterday, the 25th of November? Oh yes.

All those subscriptions that are due to renew on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? So many of them won’t be cancelled, either just to have things to watch over Christmas, or to keep the kids happy, or because people will forget with everything else going on.

I don’t mind, I’ll probably try to catch up on some of the newer Marvel and Star Wars stuff, of which there is just far, far, too much now, in my humble opinion.

But there’s not too much Beatles.

You’ve probably heard a song off an album – you’ve heard the album, maybe a few times, but it’s just kind of washed over you, not really made much of an impression – you hear a song, maybe on the radio, maybe some random or curated playlist, and you go. ‘Wow! What a great song!’ And then you realise it’s from that album, the one that washed over you.

That’s what singles were for. Still are for, since they’re still released, though it’s not quite the same.

I just had that experience with Radiohead. Kid A never made much of an impact on me, but when I turned BBC 6 Music on tonight, a killer track was playing. Steve Lamacq back-announced it. He was playing the whole album, and the track was ‘The National Anthem.’ I knew Kid A had a track of that name, but it had never really got to me. But there, now, tonight, it was just amazing.

A similar, if inverted, effect is when the album is so good that it kind of drowns out a brillant single. I can only think of one example of that at the moment. If you cast your mind back (assuming it goes that far) to when The Jam released ‘The Eton Rifles,’ it was an incredible song.

But Setting Sons is such a good album that I hardly notice ‘The Eton Rifles’ on it.

Anyway. Singles. Yes.

Great story about interviewing Jonathan Richman, by writing a letter to him and receiving one back.

‘Jonathan doesn’t use the internet, email etc. and has never owned a computer or cell phone.’

– Oscar Zambuto, An interview with American music legend Jonathan Richman – all in handwriting

Though he does have an assistant who can say that.

A screenplay by Mark E Smith, cowritten with Graham Duff? Sounds like it could have been great:

… Smith was an unexplored writer of strange fiction. Duff sums up the narrative of the film: “Essentially, the Fall are trying to record an EP at a studio on Pendle Hill, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of a satanic biker gang and a squad of Jacobites who have slipped through a wormhole in time.”

– John Doran, Satanic bikers, time portals and the Fall: the story of Mark E Smith’s secret screenplay

Never made, sadly, but it’s coming out as a book: The Otherwise: The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was.

‘New single by Belly': not what you expect to see on your phone in 2021. Thanks, MusicHarbor.

However, as I wrote in ‘Colliding Names,’ back in October, this is a different performer with the same name. The Wikipedia article tells us that ‘our’ Belly are active again, though.