The Clash: The Clash [SONY MUSIC]

Why you'll love it

This 180g pressing is remastered and keeps the original UK tracklist, with a custom lyrics inner sleeve. It reached No. 12 in the UK, and Mojo later placed it No. 2 on its list of the top 50 punk albums.

This edition

• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Lyrics inner sleeve

About the album

Four thousand pounds doesn't buy much of a studio these days, and in early 1977 it bought The Clash three sessions in CBS Studio 3 in London across February. Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon cut the whole thing fast and loud, with their live soundman Mickey Foote producing and Simon Humphrey engineering, and CBS had it in British shops by April 8.

"Janie Jones" kicks the door in, "London's Burning" and "Career Opportunities" speak for a city with too little to do and too much to say about it, and "White Riot" took its spark from the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, whose charging police appear in Rocco Macauly's photo on the back cover. The band slow down just once, for a six-minute take on Junior Murvin's reggae hit "Police & Thieves," a crossover that pointed straight at everything they did next. "Garage Land" closes it as a mission statement. Drummer Terry Chimes played the sessions but had already decided to leave, so he's credited as Tory Crimes and kept out of Kate Simon's Camden Market cover shot.

American fans waited until 1979 for a reshuffled Epic version, and plenty of them bought this UK running order on import in the meantime. Thirty-five minutes, fourteen songs, and still enough time left over to start a movement.

Also at Kops: more The Clash on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On CBS / Epic (cat# 88725447011), a reissue of the 1977 album.