30. The Clash, London Calling (1979)

“I remember that things were so up in the air, and there was quite a good feeling of us against the world,” Joe Strummer, guitarist and co-frontman of the Clash, told Rolling Stone several years after the release of the band’s third studio album, London Calling. “We felt that we were struggling, about to slide down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And that there was nobody to help us.”

In addition to their usual skirmishes with their record label, a key contributor to that shared sense of unsupported solitude as the Clash kept grinding away in their rarefied corner of the music biz was the band’s recent decision to part ways with their first manager, Bernard Rhodes. There were multiple repercussion to that particular business decision, including the loss of the rehearsal space that the Clash long took for granted. Adrift and uncertain even as they were ready to get down to the business of making a new album, Strummer and Mick Jones, who shared the task of leading the band, found themselves struggling to come up with new songs. At some point, perhaps spurred by the sense that the forces operating against had grown so daunting that they were entertaining a nothing-to-lose stage, the writer’s block imploded like a condemned high rise. The band secured a scrubby rehearsal space called Vanilla Studios, located in the back of a garage in London’s Pimlico neighborhood, and Strummer and Jones begin sparking off the tight-knit collaboration.

“This is when we worked best together: Two heads are better than one,” Strummer later told Uncut. “Unless you’re superhuman like Bob Dylan — people like that are on another level as far as I’m concerned — then you need a team. One guy’s expertise comes in when the other’s falls short. You up the ante, challenge each other.”

If the Clash was roiling from turmoil around band business, they were even more attuned to the messes all across the globe. Close to home, the ascendency of Margaret Thatcher to the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom signaled regressive times, and the dangerous accident that took place in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the U.S. threatened outcomes that were yet more ominous. Those current events were at the forefront of Strummer’s mind when Jones challenged him about a set of lyrics he’d penning that were largely a prolonged complaint about tourists clogging up sidewalks. Jones told Strummer that he should be writing about more meaningful topics. Duly called out, Strummer channeled all his anger and trepidation about the state of the world into lyrics that singed: “The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in/ Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin/ A nuclear error, but I have no fear/ ‘Cause London is drowning/ I, I live by the river.” Set to a thumping, insistent tune, this song, “London Calling,” was monumental and defining. There’s a reason it become the album’s lead track and title cut.

To produce the album, the Clash hired Guy Stevens, a wild man probably best known for managing and producing Mott the Hoople. Getting him on board was no easy task, not because of any reluctance he had to take on the gig. Instead, no one knew how to find him. Strummer later claimed he went into every pub on Oxford Street that Stevens was known to haunt until he found his quarry slumped on the bar.

If that recruitment strategy suggests a potentially problematic figure to add to the mix, the reality of the situation validates the theory. By all accounts, working with Stevens was often nightmarish, characterized by hurled furniture and spiteful sabotaging of instruments he didn’t want used on the recordings. Engineer Bill Price is widely lauded for going above and beyond to bring coherence to the chaos, but there’s an equally clear consensus that Stevens’s efforts, no matter how disruptive, also strengthened the finished product. In a more straightforward example, the album’s cover of “Brand New Cadillac,” a song first recorded and released by Vince Taylor and his Playboys in 1959, was the band’s rough-take pass at it that was meant purely as a warm-up. After. theClash was done with the rehearsal take, Stevens correctly determined they had all they needed.

“We said, ‘Okay, now we’ll do it proper,'” recalled the Clash drummer Topper Headon. “And he said, ‘No, it’s great, let’s keep it.’ But we said, ‘Hang on a minute, it speeds up.’ And he said, ‘All rock & roll speeds up.’ And that was it.”

To be very clear, the album Stevens helped the Clash shepherd into being is nothing less than an masterwork. London Calling is one of maybe a half dozen rock ‘n’ roll albums that can lay a legitimately claim to being the best ever made. Stretched to a double album length, it still feels like a disappointment when the final runout groove is reached. Enhancing that vibe is the inclusion of the splendid “Train in Vain” as an unlisted bonus track at the end of London Calling, a situation necessitated by the Clash recording it after all the album’s art had already been sent to the printer. It’s like the band, the listeners, and maybe even the album itself are united in a desire that the party not end.

London Calling delivers a string of classics across its four sides. Surely only the most contrary contrarians dispute that “Rudie Can’t Fail,” “Spanish Bombs,” “Clampdown,” and “Death or Glory” are among the best cuts ever issued by the Clash, an artist with no shortage of powerhouse winners. The influences they sponged up are all over the album: early rock ‘n’ roll is deep in the soul of “Four Horsemen,” and there’s a reggae lilt to “The Guns of Brixton,” a song written and sung by bassist Paul Simonon. That reggae appreciation is given more prominence on an artful reworking of “Revolution Rock,” a song that had been recently released by Jamaican act Danny Ray and the Revolutionaries.

Everything clicks so well that the Clash get irresistibly catchy commentary out of any subject that piques their interest: “The Right Profile” makes hollered poignancy out of the tragic descent of Montgomery Clift (“And everybody say, ‘Is he all right?’/ And everybody say, ‘What’s he like?’/ And everybody say, ‘He sure look funny’/ That’s Montgomery Clift, honey”) and “Koka Kola” manages to jab at cocaine culture and rampart commercialism at the same time. There are also some semi-satirical swipes against toxic capitalistic demands swarming the middle class on “Lost in the Supermarket,” a loping yet zippy song that Strummer specifically wrote for Jones to sing. “I’m Not Down” might carry the spirit of the album as well as any track. Smooth and sharp, the song’s lyrics acknowledge there are world of hardships out there, but also asserts, “I’ve been beat up, I’ve been thrown out/ But I’m not down, no I’m not down.”

London Calling was a breakthrough in every way, including commercially in the U.S. The album reached a chart peak more than one hundred places higher than those of the band’s first two albums, The Clash and Give ‘Em Enough Rope (which were released in reverse chronological order in the States). More surprisingly, “Train in Vain” was the band’s first Top 40 single on the Billboard chart. Before too long, the Clash would make even more of an impression in the music marketplace. And for their next studio outing, they’d made the ambition of a double album look modest.

29. Soft Cell, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981)

Marc Almond was bored at university. David Ball was, too. Attending art school at Leeds Polytechnic, the two separately grew disenchanted with the regiment of cramming creativity into heavily bordered assignments, a circumstance they felt was completely at odds with the promise of spirit-jostling freedom that had supposedly been promised. Ball was already seeking an outlet in composing offbeat tunes on his synthesizer when Almond came upon him. When Ball expressed interest in having a collaborator who could put word to his music, Almond jumped into the fray with him.

“We didn’t really know much about music,” Almond conceded to The Los Angeles Times a couple years after that fateful meeting. “We just had some interesting ideas about it. We taught ourselves all we know.”

The duo adopted the name Soft Cell and worked up enough material for an EP, recorded on the back of a two thousand pound loan from Ball’s mum and self-released. What they created was intriguing enough to stir up some attention, and they soon signed to the new label Some Bizzare Records, which had a distribution deal with Phonogram Records. “Memorabilia,” Soft Cell’s first single for the label, was a flop, and it seemed the pair’s time as professional pop purveyors would be short-lived. Phonogram bosses said they’d offer the second chance of a follow-up single. For that, Soft Cell decided a cover might work. Soft Cell’s live sets included a cover of a Northern soul song called “Tainted Love,” which was first recorded by Gloria Jones in 1964. Because the song had become something of a cult favorite in a few U.K. clubs during the nineteen-seventies, Soft Cell though it held some promise as their sophomore single. It was a good instinct. Released in the summer of 1981, Soft Cell’s version of “Tainted Love” was a worldwide smash. In the U.K., it was the top-selling single of the year.

Record buyers were undoubtedly hoping for more of the same sugary pop goodness a few months later when they snapped up copies Soft Cell’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “Tainted Love” was right there on the first side, after all. It might have been a little jarring that it was preceded by “Frustration” which sounded like the result of Joy Division trying to compose a song to be performed on a calliope and included lyrics about a middle class bloke reeling from repression. The big swerve was yet to come, though it was clearly promised by the album’s title.“Seedy Films” is slickly and randy, and “Sex Dwarf” strides even further down a lurid path, exhibit a theatricality that includes titillating sound effects as Almond iterates lyrics such “Sex dwarf, isn’t it nice?/ Luring disco dollies to a life of vice.” These sordid atmospherics weren’t mere shock value. Soft Cell felt they had a mission to counter the likes of Duran Duran and the Human League.

“I thought of of Soft Cell as poorer Northern cousins, the antidote, to those bands,” Almond explained to Mojo a couple decades later. “They were the worst representatives of Thatcher’s Britain, while we were its truer representation, all that underlying sleaziness. Now I look back at them with some affection.”

There’s a riveting sense of freewheeling invention to everything on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “Entertain Me” has a frenetic carnival atmosphere, “Bedsitter” is dreamy with an underlying tension, and “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” proceeds with a swooning elegance. Though “Secret Life” hews closely enough to the “Tainted Love” arrangement to come across as sort of spiritual cousin, it also has twisty curiosity to its construction to feel more discombobulating than assuring. The rebellion against confines that brought Soft Cell together in the first place is evident on the album. That was more or less by design.

“Some people say we are futurists or romanticists just because we’ve got a synthesizer,” Almond said at the time. “All rubbish really. And we will take things as we please.”

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.