Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
London calling revisted, 20 Sep 2004
By A Customer
London Calling was one of my first purchases as a young teenager many years ago...which was a long time ago:-).. It sounded great then, just as it does today, brilliant production, every song is just as good as the one before as you go through the playlist and in my eyes, the best Clash album of all time.The demo cd is just that, so dont expect anything too fancy. It is what it is, a pre album demo with some interesting takes of the songs at the early stage of composition. Some takes don't have vocals, some do, but above all, still amazing to listen to after all these years and the unreleased songs are more intersting than you could forsee. The DVD is a bit hit and miss. The interviews were from the same session as "Westway to the world", but leaning towards the london calling era, that I am sure wasn't on the afore mentioned Westway DVD. The black and white studio footage is priceless, with Guy Stevens shown getting up to his jinks such as throwing chairs and swinging ladders about in the live room, but it doesn't really feature the band actually doing much other than jamming for 13 minutes and joe doing a vocal take. Live Features; "Clampdown" (complete song), Train in vain and the London Calling promo video. 5 stars for the original album, it would be four stars for the extra material to be honest, but definitly worth the money overall.
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23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One for the completist, 2 Oct 2004
By A Customer
When I read and heard about the re-release of London Calling, with some previously unreleased material, I was keen to hear it.Way back then, I bought LC on vinyl and was blown away. A few years back I bought a CD copy and I still love every second of this album... BUT... The Vanilla Tapes are nothing more than a curio and freebie DVDs always leave me a bit disappointed... If you haven't got London Calling already, or are a total completist, this might be worth a look, but otherwise just buy the ordinary CD edition (or even an old Vinyl copy!) and save yourself a few quid... Funny. Punk was supposed to be all about fighting commercial exploitation, but this seems to be that and little more...
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bulletins from the front line, 7 Nov 2004
The Clash were perhaps the very embodiment of true punk, with a far higher level of musical versatility than may have been evident to the casual observer at the time. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones made a formidable songwriting partnership, with both immediacy and depth, and assimilated a huge range of musical influences. They were one of the few collection of musicians without Jamaican origins who could successfully play reggae, or their own punkish re-modelling of reggae, without sounding like an insipid imitation. As well as their own reggae or rasta-inspired Rudie Can't Fail and Jimmy Jazz, its influence is throughout and there are two reggae tunes, Danny Ray's Get Up (as Revolution Rock) and the Rulers' Wrong 'Em Boyo, which begins with a snatch of Johnny Otis' Staggerlee And Billy, just as the Rulers version did.
They also cover Vince Taylor's rockabilly classic Brand New Cadillac. When Joe Strummer later sang with the Pogues in place of the ailing Shane MacGowan, it made perfect sense because of the impassioned folk-a-billy sensibilities also inherent in the Clash's music.
The name London Calling comes from the call sign of the BBC's 2LO radio news bulletin, dating from 1922, and is apposite as the band send their own front-line bulletins around the globe half-a-century later. The call sign was retained by the World Service, for whom Joe Strummer was later to present record programmes right up to his untimely death.
The title song was a single in the UK, though in the USA it became the flip of Train In Vain (Stand By Me). Astonishingly, the dazzling Train In Vain was originally written and recorded to be a free cover-mounted single for the New Musical Express, and appeared on the album as a last-minute undocumented extra track when that didn't happen.
The double-album London Calling is an enduring masterpiece, though some of its sonic subtleties were lost in the original vinyl mastering, and far from being locked in a seventies time warp, the record sounds valid and meaningful today.
The original re-mastered CD rectified many of the vinyl shortcomings, bringing out parts of the musical palette that had previously sounded dull, and this new re-master is at least its equal, and often superior. It also sounds leaner, as the 3-second pauses between the tracks have been excised, hence the abbreviated running time.
The Vanilla tapes are demos recorded at a rehearsal studio in Pimlico, made in the final month before album recording proper got underway at Wessex in July 1979. Believed lost for many years they acquired legendary status, partly because Joe Strummer had at one time intimated that the demos might actually become the album, though this was mostly gamesmanship with the record label, as the sound quality is not of a releasable quality for that purpose. It is are a fascinating document of a series of songs in development, though; valuable to those with a serious interest in the band. I imagine it is disc one that will find its way back to my CD tray most frequently, but it is of course nice to have, along with the booklet, a facsimile of the original album insert and a bonus DVD, in a well presented package
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