London Calling - if only for London 2012

If only...

Were he still with us Joe Strummer, born John Graham Mellor, would have been sixty today. He was, as the result of a congenital and undiagnosed heart defect, taken away in December 2002.
Were that not so I can hardly imagine that he would not have been on the stage at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympiad. 'The Clash' was not the first punk band, by any means, but they gave the whole genre wings...
They focussed their anger on sensible issues. In fact the members were from really quite comfortable backgrounds; and while they were genuinely angry they were also rather annoyingly but curiously, simultaneously, disarmingly literate.
This 1979 album was, I think, not just the defining moment of British Punk...

Had it not been for this album, and the inspiration it provided, the whole punk movement might have faded into obscurity - a bright spark, lit for the most part by angry young men in a fit of pique, that lasted for so little time.
There would thus have been no Green Day, just to make a single example.
The bad behaviour in this image is all down to Paul Simonon, who lives on, and so does the bass guitar in question (in bits as destroyed in this rampage, something that he later much regretted doing), in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH.
The inspiration for the album cover is down to that of Elvis Presley's first.

Music and the new politics...

Music has for many decades been intertwined with politics and in 2008, given the rather different and yet complementary situations in the UK and the USA, I reckon it looks like being a splendid year.
We know in rough terms what Gordon Brown and David Cameron like, in music at least, because they have said as much in radio interviews. We know that Tony Blair played guitar and that Bill Clinton played saxophone, but as far as I know we know little about the music preferences of either John McCain or Barack Obama.
Music is very unlikely to directly influence national politics, but it is not to be disregarded. The opposite assertion is not however quite so obvious. Political change, or even a sense of disaffection, can easily do that. One could argue that the rise of punk, at least in the UK, was equally symptom and phenomenon. The payback came a few years later, with a rising resentment at having our lives dictated by government, which is somehow becoming resonant once again. I don't smoke, I never have, and I don't like being in a smoke filled space. I'm not given to playing card games either. If I lack one vice it is gambling - not for reasons of morality but simply because it holds no appeal for me. That doesn't mean I'm averse to making predictions and I can fully appreciate the sentiment that was captured on this album cover in 1980.

Sometimes rebellion is important...

The sentiment reappeared, with a different focus, some years later in northwestern America and Canada, but also elsewhere and certainly not least in Britain. When it comes to it these days few acts have the vision, but then they never did, and fewer still are able to take the risk even in a democracy, when it comes to setting themselves against the political establishment. Here are two that, despite some tough times, have done America proud.

They were no longer angry young men, rather seasoned veterans, and in 2004 this album was to prove a defining moment, not only for Green Day, but also for north American music.

In fact the reverberations went back further than that.

In 2005 they played two concerts in Milton Keynes Bowl, England, on successive nights and the 72000 tickets for each show all sold within two hours; these remain the fastest selling UK single-artist concerts to date.
A little earlier, in 2003, another rather different act was to court controversy, while touring in the UK, and with alarming results back home.

They were starting a live gig in London when Natalie Maines suddenly made that infamous announcement, just after the beginning of the second Iraq war. It was the start of troubled times but, once the tide had changed, they returned triumphant with the utterly uncompromising and unrepentant album 'Taking The Long Way'. That they wiped the floor at the 2007 Grammy Awards, winning five, and in doing so were also the first act to win 'Best Album' and 'Best Country Album' simultaneously, says a great deal.