10. The ClashLondon Calling
I was in a band when I was at school with a guy called Simon Booth, and he was a huge Clash fan. When we started playing he wanted to sound like the Clash and I wanted to sound like Television. I remember buying The Clash and buying Give ‘Em Enough Rope, but when London Calling came out I thought, "now they’ve demonstrated they really are the great band from this era". There’s so much scope on it, it’s got everything – it’s got ‘Jimmy Jazz’, it’s got ‘Brand New Cadillac’, it’s got ‘London Calling’, ‘Spanish Bombs’, you can just hear the landscape opening out. Of course after that you’ve got Sandinista!, I remember a journalist once telling me they’d met Joe Strummer and the subject of side six of Sandinista! came up and Joe Strummer said, "only the very brave go there". The brilliant thing about London Calling is, if you remember, on the vinyl copies ‘Train In Vain’ isn’t listed on the sleeve because they stuck it on at the last minute. You get the whole album and think the last thing is ‘Revolution Rock’, then that stops and there’s an extra track – you had to look in the middle of the groove, it was scratched into the run-off groove, the last track is ‘Train In Vain’.
