According to the Facebook page of the excellent Slicing Up Eyeballs (and who am I to argue with them?), today marks the … gulp…31st anniversary of the release of Combat Rock by ye olde Clash. Let’s review, shall we?
Some might suggest that the well had already been poisoned by that point, put off by the arguable excesses of the sprawling Sandinista that preceded it. Personally speaking, I remember actively wincing when my mom walked into my room one day whilst I was blasting “Train in Vain” off of London Calling and chirpily remarking “Now, THIS I actually LIKE! (for more on my mother’s feelings about Punk Rock, click here).
Funnily enough, my family’s first taste of the Clash came via a box of records sent home to my sister and I by my father. He’d been sent to England by Forbes magazine in the late 70’s to be their London bureau chief, and befriended someone from Epic/Columbia Records. As such, in a rare moment of good-footedness, he rightly assumed that my older sister and I would greatly appreciate a box of freebies. A big crate of vinyl arrived, and my sister and I hungrily divvied it up (she taking the disco and funk records, I taking the gratuitous rock selections). Among the latter came Pure Mania by the Vibrators and the first Clash LP (UK edition), both of which went into heavy rotation on the family stereo (“Janie Jones” being the living room favorite). My mother and step-father hated it. It was thus christened “essential” immediately afterwards.
By 1982’s Combat Rock, however, the fatigue was clearly setting in. Sure, both “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and the inescapable “Rock the Casbah” became ubiquitous radio staples, but for those of us lucky enough to have been on board prior to those singles, one couldn’t help feeling a bit let down for some reason. The Clash being populist was a given. The Clash being popular (or at least suddenly liked by people who’d otherwise be listening to Journey or friggin’ Michael Jackson) was just weird.
I bought it, of course. It inarguably lacked the fire of previous efforts, but there is undeniably some great stuff on Combat Rock, notably the call to arms that is “Know Your Rights” (although the live version on 1999’s From Here To Eternity trumps it) and the atmospheric “Straight to Hell” (more recently sampled to excellent effect by M.I.A.) “Overpowered by Funk” kinda tries too hard (where the band once leapt over stylistic parameters with ease), but it still enjoyable.
My favorite track on the record, ultimately, was the one below. “Inoculated City” was a comparatively quiet little ditty about the fog of war and the machinations of military propaganda . I used to play it back-to-back with Elvis Costello’s “Beyond Belief” on a weekly basis on my college radio show, not that anyone was listening.
In any case, crank it up and hoist a cold Singha to Combat Rock.
People are keen to point to Combat Rock as “the final” Clash album. It sure felt that way, but that’s not actually the case. Their final album was technically the roundly-maligned Cut the Crap in 1985 (which found Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon flanked by a trio of new dudes who weren’t Mick Jones, Topper Headon or even Terry Chimes). It’s seemingly been stricken from much of the band’s histories (nary a track from Cut the Crap appeared on the sprawling compilation, The Story of the Clash: Vol 1….perhaps they were waiting for Vol 2?), and, admittedly, it’s not very good. The single, “This Is England,” is actually okay, if truth be told.
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