London Calling Review

Nineteen songs, and the band refuses to stay a punk band on any of them. Rockabilly, ska, reggae, New Orleans piano, jazz horns and one lounge jazz detour sit next to each other without apology, and the reason it holds is that Joe Strummer and Mick Jones write about the same thing the whole way through: a country running out of money, a generation running out of patience, and the private cost of both.

Guy Stevens produces by throwing furniture around the room, which is the wrong technique and somehow the right result. The record sounds live, slightly overdriven and permanently about to fall apart, and the polish it lacks is polish it would be worse for having. Spanish Bombs and The Guns of Brixton supply the politics, Lost in the Supermarket supplies the loneliness, and Train in Vain turns up unlisted at the end like an afterthought that happens to be the best pop song here.

Consensus settled decades ago and has only hardened: this is the double album punk was not supposed to be capable of, and it is the first record anyone names when arguing that the movement grew up rather than died. The weak spots are real. A couple of the genre exercises are thinner than the songs around them, and nineteen tracks is more than any band needs. It still plays like one long argument worth having.