“London Calling”: The Clash song with a hidden secret
Nothing beats a musical Easter egg, apart from perhaps a real one; from the occult-adjacent art of backmasking (AKA playing a recorded sound backwards) to hidden tracks buried deep in the wax, rock and roll has long been a medium for the clandestine.
Rob Halford of heavy metal titans Judas Priest famously landed the band in hot water and was taken to court over the use of backmasking to deliver alleged subliminal messages in the song ‘Love Bites’, while in the Pink Floyd song ‘Empty Spaces’ from their 1979 masterpiece The Wall, Roger Waters’ voice can be heard saying, “Congratulations. You’ve just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the funny farm, Chalfont…”
In the ‘90s, after ten minutes of silence following ‘Something in the Way’ on Nirvana’s seminal Nevermind, the abrasive hidden track ‘Endless, Nameless’ kicks in, a song uncredited on the sleeve and missing from some of the album’s initial pressings, and then there was Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell, who decided to howl his actual mobile number at the end of the 2004 track ‘Vice’, a move his fans took, unsurprisingly, as an invitation to give him a bell.
Very much the daring musical innovators themselves, The Clash were somewhat the outliers of the punk movement, determined to craft a musical legacy that would endure long after the DIY safety pin piercings had fallen out, rejecting the genre’s ‘live fast, die young’ nihilism and looking to the future by weaving the rhythms of reggae and ska into their politically charged sonic tapestry.
‘London Calling’ represented the band at the height of their power: an apocalyptic transmission detailing the myriad ways in which the world might end, from Ice Ages and starvation to the crushing weight of war. Joe Strummer, a self-confessed news junkie, drew his imagery of doom directly from the headlines, as he told Melody Maker in 1988, “I read about ten news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us”.
The haunting refrain “London is drowning / And I live by the river” wasn’t just a poetic metaphor; it was an actual fear, for, at the time, concerns were mounting that a Thames flood would submerge central London, which led to the construction of the Thames Barrier that came into operation just three years after the song’s release in October 1982. Strummer also took aim at police brutality with the line, “We ain’t got no swing / Except for the ring of that truncheon thing”, a nod to the standard-issue equipment of the Metropolitan Police.
Seeing a band lashing out against injustice and rebelling against an establishment that felt increasingly suffocating, The Clash stood as the very essence of punk, and thoughtfully also remembered to leave a surprise for the listeners beyond the lyrics, because as the song’s frantic energy begins to dissipate towards its end, a strange, rhythmic bleeping emerges through the static of the fade-out. It isn’t a studio glitch or a synth experiment, but Mick Jones using his guitar pickups to create a piercing, staccato tone. Specifically, he is tapping out the Morse code signal for SOS, a final, desperate distress signal to reiterate the song’s urgent sense of emergency while mirroring the imagery of a city sinking beneath the waves.
If Jones was inspired by anyone in this clever guitar move, it was most likely Joe Walsh of the Eagles, who has a lifelong passion for Morse code that began in his youth, famously using Morse code guitar lines on several occasions to spell out messages like “Register and Vote”, while his Duesenberg Alliance Series guitar even features his name spelled out in Morse code in the fretboard inlays.
While it was probably just some spur-of-the-moment brilliance from Jones, this little Morse-coded Easter egg is yet more proof that The Clash were always thinking about how to innovate and how to keep their fans on their toes, and by burying this secret, the band planted seeds for new generations of fans to enjoy, something not a lot of punks spent much time thinking about.
