Eighteen Years Gone

I've mentioned it here a few times before, but a large box of records arrived at our door in the summer of 1977, courtesy of my father, who was based in London, at the time, as a correspondent for Forbes magazine. He’d befriended someone from CBS/Epic Records, who gamely passed onto him a crate of promo LPs to send home to my sister and I.

 

Victoria and I divvied up the albums by artists we were already aware of, and then spent the rest of the summer gradually investigating the newer stuff we were unfamiliar with.

 

I gravitated towards one particular LP that featured a trio of pugnacious-looking troublemakers on the the cover. It sounds quaint to suggest in 2020, but when we dropped the needle on the first track below, it was like our speakers exploded and the concussion blew a hole in the living room wall.

 

Life, as they say, was never the same.

 

Rest in peace, Joe Strummer — eighteen years gone today.