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The Great Albums

The Clash - London Calling (w/ guest Nick Palmer)

The Great Albums

Bill Lambusta

Music, Music Commentary

4.3760 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2018

⏱️ 124 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Musician Nick Palmer joins Bill to talk about iconic, landmark "punk" album London Calling (CBS/Epic, 1979) by the Clash. Nick describes working his way back from Green Day to picking up Combat Rock and not understanding how anyone could call it punk. Then Bill and Nick talk about Nick's fandom forming fully, the important dichotomy of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, Paul Simonon's surprisingly good bass despite his own self-deprecating description of it, Topper Headon's killer drums, some left wing politics, the Spanish Civil war, Guy Stevens throwing chairs, and much more as we make our way through the album (mostly) track by track!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to the Great Albums podcast. I'm Bill.

0:02.9

And I'm Brian.

0:03.9

And what are we talking about today, Brian?

0:06.1

London Calling by the Clash. What we do here every week on the podcast is take an album of music and talk about what makes it great.

0:36.1

We have the conversation around the music that fans do,

0:39.0

and we wrap it all up with a track-by-track review. Sounds good. Let's do it. And we're not going to be

0:45.4

doing it alone this week, Brian. No, no. We've got kind of an odd, sort of an odd, you know,

0:52.8

an odd situation this week. Yeah, it's kind of like, I'm kind of doing it alone,

0:57.8

but I'm doing it alone with a guest. But Brian, you didn't join us for the conversation.

1:03.3

No, no, I had, everything's fine, but I had a little bit of kind of a family thing pop up literally

1:08.9

at the last minute. And I had to to and I'm so but like we've

1:13.0

never had to do this before but I had to like call you know I had to call Bill uh what was it

1:21.3

like day before yeah the day before and be like hey man I can't get there tomorrow. And, you know, like I said, everything on

1:29.4

the family front is fine now. And I'm sorry to have missed probably to this point, our most

1:36.9

requested album that we had yet to sort of climb up on. Other than Radiohead, but yeah, definitely.

1:45.4

So thankfully,

1:46.9

it was a returning guest,

1:49.2

Nick Palmer from Wax Wave,

1:51.8

and the Dangerose was his past band.

1:54.4

He had joined us last year to talk about Slater Kinney,

1:57.8

and he was an excellent guest,

1:59.3

and,

...

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