The Clash album ‘Combat Rock’ gets 40th-anniversary reissue
Read More
Credit: Press / Album Cover
‘Straight to Hell’: Revisiting The Clash and ‘Combat Rock’ 40 years later
All was supposedly well in the world of The Clash. In 1982, the legendary punk rock band’s financial situation was strong, buoyed by the surprising commercial success of 1979’s London Calling, and they were in the midst of a fertile creative period thanks to the 1980 triple-LP Sandinista! — the band had even reunited with their original manager Bernie Rhodes. Everything seemed to be going well. There was only one problem – Joe Strummer was missing.
Not just “he’s off at the pub” missing, but legitimately M.I.A. missing. Calls to his house went unanswered, and no one had seen the singer since doing an April 28th radio interview. The Clash not only had the release of Combat Rock coming up in two weeks, but also a UK tour that was set to kick off in a few days. Behind the scenes, the disappearance had originally been secretly proposed to Strummer by Rhodes, but now that the gambit was actually in motion, Strummer decided that Rhodes should be in the dark as well.
“I thought it would be a good joke if I never phoned Bernie at all,” Strummer said in The Future Is Unwritten. “He was going to be thinking, ‘Oh, where has Joe gone?’… And I ran the Paris Marathon, too.” That part is true, and Strummer reportedly clocked a pretty good time. But in the three weeks between his disappearance and his eventual discovery, The Clash were forced to cancel their UK tour and release Combat Rock without knowing the whereabouts of their lead singer.
It was indicative of just how dysfunctional The Clash were just below the surface. Although it proved to be the band’s critical and commercial peak, Combat Rock was also very much the end of an era: following its release, drummer Topper Headon was fired as his drug addiction continued to spiral out of control. Having disagreed with rehiring Rhodes and remaining unhappy with the mixes that had been made of the album, Mick Jones would follow Headon out the door a little over a year after Combat Rock was released.
Knowing how chaotic the situation was inside the band, one might expect Combat Rock to be similarly disjointed and fraught. Instead, the album finds The Clash at their sharpest and most refined, pairing the direct simplicity of their early years with the best elements of their experimental and sprawling recent works. Genres like dub, new wave, reggae, and jazz could all flow freely while the group cut down on the fat for maximum impact.
This proved to be contentious, as Jones wanted the album to be longer and more directly influenced by dance music and extended seven-inch singles. It was yet another instance where Jones found himself in the minority. Despite being largely passed over during the sessions, Jones would ironically have the last laugh as his biggest contribution to the LP wound up being the album’s most enduring single, the pop-punk masterpiece ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’.
The other major single had little to do with punk – ‘Rock the Casbah’ was a piano-heavy jaunt that was a rare composition spearheaded by Headon. Having recorded nearly the entire backing track alone, a fresh set of foreign-phrased lyrics from Strummer was all it took to finish off the catchiest and most atypical Clash single of all time. With strong pop appeal, ‘Rock the Casbah’ was the one and only top ten single The Clash ever landed in America, topping out at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100.
Combat Rock is frontloaded with its most well-known songs, with the call-to-arms ‘Know Your Rights’ being followed by the album’s two singles. But Combat Rock truly starts to form its identity once it starts getting into its lesser-known material, starting with the dub-influenced ‘Red Angel Dragnet’. Featuring references to both the Guardian Angels of New York City and Taxi Driver, bassist Paul Simonon steps in for his final contribution to the Clash catalogue.
What follows is a fascinating reflection of where The Clash might have gone throughout the 1980s, had they kept themselves from imploding. The melancholy bossa nova ‘Straight to Hell’ and the airy jazz tune ‘Sean Flynn’ deal directly with the aftershocks of the Vietnam war, while ‘Inoculated City’ takes a swipe at the brainwashing that can overtake anyone in times of war. The Clash were still highly political, even as their style of music was becoming harder and harder to pin down.
‘Overpowered by Funk’ shows off Jones’ preferred direction for the band, indulging in dancefloor-ready rhythms and Talking Heads-like keyboard lines. ‘Atom Tan’ is a rollicking call-and-response tune about nuclear annihilation, while ‘Ghetto Defendant’ combines the band’s long-held interest in reggae and a stark spoken word vocal from poet Allen Ginsburg. By the time you reach the album closer, the gentle narrative piece ‘Death is a Star’, Combat Rock succeeds in positioning The Clash as one of the most ambitious and exciting rock bands in the world.
It wasn’t meant to last – as Rhodes continued to favour publicity stunts over actual management, The Clash somehow found themselves in front of stadium crowds, opening up for The Who. Faced with a ludicrously successfully but creatively stifling future, the band fought constantly. The success of Combat Rock often took a back seat to the conflicts that erupted almost daily in its aftermath, and when Jones finally left in late 1983, there was very little creative energy or enthusiasm remaining from The Clash.
Not that it stopped Strummer from recording Cut the Crap in 1985 with a bunch of musicians who no one would recognise as The Clash. Rhodes staged a full takeover, insisting on co-writing material and creating the final arrangements of songs. Strummer was now alone on an island with the man whom Jones had warned about bringing back into the fold, but it was too late – Cut the Crap bombed, leading Strummer to disown the album and disband The Clash permanently.
That makes Combat Rock the final Clash album in everything but name. But Combat Rock doesn’t sound like the end of a story. Rather, it feels like hearing The Clash find their path towards the future in real time. The use of keyboards and genre-blending mixes was nothing new, but the band had finally found a way to weaponise it for mass consumption. ‘The Only Band That Mattered’ was starting to truly fulfil the promise of their moniker, and that promise still feels bittersweet knowing the actual conclusion of The Clash’s story, even with 40 years of hindsight.
