34. The Clash, Sandinista! (1980)

“We planned to release a lot of singles, but we had trouble with CBS,” Paul Simonon, bassist for the Clash, told a reporter early in 1981, referring to recent scraps with the band’s record label. “They said they wouldn’t release ‘Bankrobber’ because it wasn’t commercial. That slowed us down, so we ended up putting everything we had on one album.”

Simonon wasn’t underselling the amount of content the Clash had when he used the word “everything.” The album that serves as the repository for all of the quartet’s creative energy is Sandinista!, a triple album that would be quite a feat in any circumstances. Arriving in record shops almost exactly one year after London Calling, the Clash’s masterful double album, it’s an almost ludicrously flexing of rock ‘n’ roll muscle. They leveled up in other ways, too: Sandinista! reportedly cost three times as much to record as London Calling did, and the band brought in a slew of guests to help out. The rotation of visiting players might have caused a little confusion, as several of them later groused that they weren’t given proper credit for contributing to the composition or production of certain tracks. It’s actually easy to understand how a few details might have gotten lost in the sprawl of it all.

The most significant expansion is in the type of music the Clash were playing. Already icons of punk rock and known for artful incorporations of rhythms, not to mention entire songs, borrowed from reggae artists, the Clash went zinging down any sonic avenue that sparked their collective curiosity. The album opens with hip hop romp “The Magnificent Seven,” inspired by Sugar Hill Gang and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five records discovered by the Clash guitarist and vocalist Mick Jones when he prowled Brooklyn record shops on breaks from recording at various New York City studios. “Hitsville UK” is a tribute to classic Motown hits that features Jones duetting with Ellen Foley, his girlfriend at the time, and “The Sound of Sinners” is heavily indebted to gospel. Topper Headon, the band’s drummer, gets a rare turn as lead singer on “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe,” which moves to a disco groove, and “Look Here” offers a jazzy take on an old Mose Allison song. The ambition is invigorating, but not every sector of the band’s fandom agreed. Calls for staid purity resound loudest when echoing out of the mosh pit, and the Clash heard plenty of complaints.

“It’s music, y’know,” guitarist and vocalist Joe Strummer said to New Musical Express. “The music’s gotta change. I wish people would understand that more and allow for it.”

It’s not as if the Clash in unrecognizable on Sandinista! The abundance includes multiple instances of the band doing what they’d already proved they did better than anyone. “Junco Partner” is a reggae version cover of an old R&B song that had been in Strummer’s repertoire since his days in the 101’ers, and “Police on My Back” is and intense cover of the Equals song. “Something About England” aims well-earned fury at conservative bigotry in their U.K. homeland with lyrics that are so evergreen that they could be applied to current debates: “They say immigrants steal the hubcaps/ Of the respected gentlemen/ They say it would be wine an’ roses/ If England were for Englishmen again.” If anything, the Clash are more fervent about including punk-approved political commentary than before on the triple album, a commitment that Strummer confirmed was a deliberate choice.

“When all’s said and done, you’ve got to take into account what’s happening outside and deal with it,” Strummer told The Los Angeles Times. “I can’t just watch the news and feel it’s none of my business. I’ve got to get involved somewhere along the line, and it gives me satisfaction to think perhaps it’s news to some people, especially young people.”

They Clash literally led with their protests, releasing “The Call Up” as an advance single. With an easygoing tempo, the track is a seething rallying cry against military conscription: “It’s up to you not to heed the call-up/ I don’t wanna die!/ It’s up to you not to hear the call-up/ I don’t wanna kill!” This is not the stuff of guaranteed success on the pop charts; the Clash are long way from selling out. Even titling the album Sandinista! is a statement of purpose, referencing the rebels who had recently taken power in Nicaragua as a means of highlighting the United States’ regular imperialistic meddling in Central America and South America. The band is yet more direct on the cut “Washington Bullets,” singing “The Kokane guns of Jamdown Town/ The killing clowns, the blood money men/ Are shooting those Washington bullets again.” Of course, this straightforward approach had its critics, too, even among the Clash’s rough contemporaries.

“We never wanted to spell things out,” Peter Buck, the guitarist of R.E.M., said when asked about the cryptic, muttered lyrics on his band’s acclaimed debut album, Murmur. “If you want that, go and listen to the Clash. They’re a newspaper. We’re not.”

Impressive as Sandinista! is by any fair measure, even the most devoted defender has to admit there’s a fair amount of filler. Six sides is a lot. Several songs are repeated in dub versions, and the Clash revisit old material, including a new recording of early standout “Career Opportunities,” now sung by the children of keyboardist Mickey Gallagher, who also guests on the album. That it’s charming doesn’t entirely justify its place on the album, even one that roams so freely. Then there’s the extremely odd “Mensforth Hill,” which is “Something About England” played backwards with some spoken word bits and other sonic details layered on top. The blips of insignificance or indulgence are more than counterbalanced by the winners that genuinely feel like they could find a proper home nowhere else, such as the hypnotic “Rebel Waltz,” stealth new wave number “Up in Heaven (Not Only Here),” and the swingy “The Street Parade.”

If the Clash’s expansive plans for Sandinista! were meant in part as an act of defiance against the label that was constantly trying to confine them, they didn’t want to make record buyers pay the price. The group demanded a lower list price than would be expected for the triple album set, keeping at a level more common for a two-platter set. Label bosses initially refused, noting that while the Clash had been promised extensive authority over their U.S. releases, that didn’t apply in the U.K., giving the execs a sort of veto power if the band wanted versions of Sandinista! to match on opposite sides of the Atlantic. They eventually hammered out a compromise: to get their preferred price on the album, the Clash would get no royalties on the first two hundred thousand copies sold in the U.K. and their take would be cut in half everywhere else. Some thirty years after its release, the album finally muscled its way to a silver certification from the British Phonographic Industry, meaning it was was still more than one hundred thousand copies away from getting the Clash a royalty check.

33. Big Country, The Crossing (1983)

Stuart Adamson made his exit from the band Skids following the tour in support of their third album, The Absolute Game. He’d had tremendous success with Slits, including a single that cracked the Top 10 in the U.K., but he was chagrined by his perception that various bandmates were starting to prioritize image management over music. Anyway, he was eager to shape a new sound, one that reflected a longtime aspiration.

“Even before the Skids, I wanted to do things with guitars nobody had done before,” Adamson later explained. “I wanted to use them as integral, even orchestrated elements within a song — not just rhythm and lead guitars.”

Adamson started casting around for a new collaborator, quickly landing on Bruce Watson, a fellow guitarist who’d scuffled around with several new wave bands that never quite broke through. The two set up in ad hoc studio space in a community center in the city of Dunfermline and found they were simpatico partners. They had eight completed songs in their first two months.

“Stuart chose me not for my technique, more my lack of technique,” Watson observed many years later. “I was an ideas guy as opposed to a real technical musician. Every song we did, half written on guitar and half on synthesizer, was an instrumental. Stuart would come up with melodies and lyrics, using lines from books, particularly World War II books, which he read a lot.”

It took a few attempts to fill out the rest of the lineup, but the band had a steady crew soon enough. There was enough interest in what Adamson would do after his time in Slits to book some larger shows and relatively high-profile appearances on BBC Radio. Eventually the band, officially dubbed Big Country, signed a deal with Mercury Records. For their debut album, Adamson sought out producer Steve Lillywhite, spurred by admiration of his work on the XTC album Drums and Wires. Lillywhite was already committed to working on War, the third studio album by U2, and initially declined. When a gap opened in his schedule, Lillywhite agreed to oversee Big Country’s first single, “Harvest Home,” which brought to fruition Adamson’s goal of crafting novel sound from guitars. Befitting the band’s Scottish origins, the guitars ape bagpipe trills and squonks as Adamson wails about economic woes in Scotland (“See where the bowls are empty/ See where the arms reach/ See where the butter melted/ See where the altars creak”). The track is wildly, vividly full. Lillywhite was energized by working with Big Country enough that he pledged to find the time to produce their debut album after all.

Titled The Crossing, Big Country’s first LP is a grand work of sweeping rock music. It often has the scale of the prog rock of the preceding decade, but the sincerity of the band’s interest in smaller, more human stories shears away the grandiose excess that usually made that earlier music into a slog. The thumping hit single “In a Big Country” is the template. It’s tuneful, yearning, propulsive, and disarmingly moving (“I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert/ But I can live and breathe/ And see the sun in wintertime”). Arguably, though, “The Storm” is the better example of the nifty magic act Big Country pulls off across the album; it’s a big, anthemic song that somehow feels lean, focused, and intimate at the same time.

The album is strong throughout. “Inwards” has a splendid clatter to it, and “Chance” makes the band sound like Scotland’s answer to Men at Work. Inspired by the Falklands War, “Fields of Fire (400 Miles)” has a surging energy that suits its agitation about family displaced by militaristic boondoggles: “The shining eye will never cry/ The beating heart will never die/ The house on fire holds no shame/ I will be coming home again.” The songs have a real force to them.

Music critics, especially those that raved about The Crossing, regularly called out the ways the band’s homeland felt very present across the songs. It’s not just the hint of classic Gaelic folk in the way the guitars interplay that inspired those observations. Scotland feels seeped into the material. Adamson himself conceded that was the case.

“In the area of Scotland that I live, it’s quite common for people to have gatherings at home, like after you’ve been out at a dance or a drink or a social occasion,” Adamson told the Associated Press at the time. “And everybody sort of gets up and sings a song, and they’re like old Scottish-Irish folk songs. I think it’s just unconsciously coming out in the way that I write.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.