Mick Jones had been the heart of the Clash – providing the emotion, the yearning, the melody, the groove – and without him, the band were reduced to a two-dimensional mess, a relic desperately trying to stay angry and relevant. With the Strummer-Jones writing credit now laughably transformed into Strummer-Rhodes (manager Bernie Rhodes, who was also in the production seat, credited as Jose Unidos), the balance between Jones’s ear for a melody and Strummer’s lyrical voice was a thing of the past. It’s the only Clash album not to feature Jones and, boy, is he missed. (Official band documentary, Westway To The World, doesn’t mention it, choosing instead to pretend the band finished with the sacking of Mick Jones.) If there was any justice in the world, right now, somewhere on a street corner in England someone would be holding Bernie Rhodes by the collar and kicking him repeatedly up the arse for what he did to Cut The Crap.įrom the electric drums and synthetic horns of Dictator, its over-crowded dogs-dinner of an opener, the band’s last studio album is a chaotic, phoney jumble – and such a stain on The Clash’s name that, apart from anthemic single This Is England which appeared on 2005 best of The Essential Clash, it is rarely even acknowledged by the band themselves. Here then are there their albums, rated from worst to life-changing first. Musically and lyrically, The Clash refused to be “little Englanders”, embracing a world beyond their roots, drawing on rock’n’roll, reggae, calypso, jazz, folk, blues, soul, and sometimes bolting them together (or taking them apart) with a genre-busting experimentalism that they rarely get any credit for. It was about us, about you, about the big wide world that waited for you. Their music wasn’t about how deep they were or how troubled, how wasted they were on drugs or the pressures of fame.
Most rock’n’roll is solipsistic and inwards-looking – but from London Calling onwards, The Clash looked outwards. Because while they were in love with the rock’n’roll woah – and made music for people with Ford Cortinas and dead-end jobs – London Calling, Sandinista! and Combat Rock are albums for grown-ups, albums you take with you after the anger subsides, when you start being less self-obsessed and begin to look out into the world.
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