Dub dot dash

Working for the clampdown.
The 25th anniversary reissue of London Calling finally came out here last week, and damn it's good. I was surprised at how well it's aged. I remember first hearing it when I was at school - one of my friends had a copy and I went round to his house one weekend to listen to it. I went back to his place the following weekend and taped it onto cassette, but didn't manage to fit it all on one C90 tape, so when I hear it now there's songs on it that I barely know, cos they didn't make it onto my cassette copy. In retrospect, even tho I heard this album around ten years before we recorded the first Hallelujah Picassos album, I can definitely see the influence this album had on me, as a music fan and musician. Connects a few dots, you know? Aint hindsight grand?

C4 played the DVD [that comes with the 25th Anniversary edition] on the making of London Calling earlier in the week, and are screening it again tonight at 10pm. There's some great tales of The Clash taking a break from rehearsing when their record company would come down to visit - they'd go off and play 5 a side football with the record execs, and apparently the games got pretty brutal, with The Clash belting the ball (and the opposition) round the field. Paul Simenon compliments his fellow band members on their footie skills, and describes his own skills by noting that when he got the ball everyone would run away, as what he lacked in skill he made up for with agression. Rolling Stone magazine voted London Calling as the number one album of the 80s; Joe Strummer's reaction? Watch it and find out, I aint giving away all the good lines.


After a week in Jesusland covering the US election, Radar sounds keeen to get home...
"All I could think was that with the result decided I could return home to a country where I can eat at a restaurant without having to look at myriad people with plastic oxygen tubes protruding from their noses and attached to industrial size oxygen tanks." Read his latest column here.