London Calling and the different forms of power

In 1979 The Clash released their third album, London Calling that contained a song with that same name:

  The clash is a British punk band created in 1976 and dissolved in 1986. Its members were 4: Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Nicky Headon; so simply a singer a guitarist a bassist and a drummer. Their music is not only punk but also a mix of ska, reggae, funk and rockabilly.

About the song London Calling, the first thing to know is where the title comes from. In the Second World war, when the BBC radio broadcasted in occupied countries the announcer often identified himself on air by saying "This is London Calling". The title itselfself clearly bears this meaning, this idea of fight against oppression and of facing danger, but a danger of a very different nature. 

The song starts with that idea of war with "now war is declared/and battle come down". The kind of war the band is announcing is explained by the next two lines. It would be a fight lead by "the underworld", some hidden silent force that has been growing under our feet. It is no other than "you boys and girls", the young, who live in this "underworld". The first stanza is then obviously about a recurrent topic in punk music: the empowerment of young people. But against whom are they fighting? Being punk it needed to be the establishment, seen trough the violent image of the "truncheon thing" that policemen hold and hit with. They don't seem to be afraid of it, because they metaphorically use the ring of that truncheon as a "swing", in a play on words with the musical genre of swing, and a humorous image to make fun of the police. They would be comparing the authorities' tools of repression with children's games, making them look ridiculous, something they needed the year Margaret Thatcher, the iron lady, won the elections. In this first verse there are two lines that seem to be out of place: "London calling, now don't look to us!/That phoney beatlemania has bitten the dust.". But looking closely we can see a warning about how this youth should act for change and lead the fight, and that is not blindly following musical idols for the sake of doing it, which is what they seem to think about the "revolution" caused by the Beatles in the 1960s and the bands all around the world that still copied their style in the 1970s, but doing things by itself. What allows to follow this interpretation is another couple of lines right at the beginning of the second verse:"London calling to the imitation zone/forget it, brother, you can go it alone!". It takes that idea of imitation that is implicit in beatlemania making it even more clear that they want to see the opposite, subversion, and then uses the second person to talk to every individual in that imitation zone to tell them that they have the capacity to act "alone". When at the end we can hear “yeah, I was there too/ and you know what they said?/ well some of it was true!” it really sounds like something someone would say about a revolution. The song starts out encouraging rebellion among young people, and by repeating "London calling" every two lines in some kind of partial anaphora, it gives the text a regular rhythm that goes together with the almost military rhythm of the music, apart from making it quite catchy. Repeating constantly these two words is also a reminder of where the message comes from. London is in this song the centre of a communication with the whole world, “the far away towns”, so it’s the place where everything that is said comes from.

Moving on to the chorus, it is clear that suddenly the message conveyed changes. The four lines of the chorus, slightly different from one another, show an apocalyptic panorama where human weakness against the power of destruction of our own universe, and at the same time our own power of destruction, are strongly felt. It is just a list, a descendent gradation of ways humanity could be destroyed, and the inspiration for this is simply the news in 1979. There is first of all a reference to a scientific theory that predicted our interglacial era would at some point come to an end, “the Ice age is coming”. Then on the opposite side, following the theory of an explosion of the sun that would engulf the Earth they say “The Sun’s zooming in”. The line “The wheat is growing thin”, a witty pun with the verb to grow, takes inspiration in the massive and particularly serious food shortages that NGOs and even the UN were trying to deal with at that time. So another apocalypse could be famine.  Further down we hear that “London is drowning”. That alludes to the concern about the river Thames causing floods that year that resulted in the construction of the Thames barrier in 1982. It’s not something that could destroy humanity but it sure would have been a great local disaster and cause many deaths. The chorus doesn’t only talk about how nature, with strength infinitely bigger than humans’, could end with our kind but also how we humans ourselves could be our own doom. There are two references to nuclear disasters in the chorus: “a nuclear error” and “meltdown expected”, probably both references to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident earlier that year, and reflections of the fear of a nuclear war at the beginning of a tense period in the Cold war. There is also a reference to the various oil crises the world had lived throughout that 1970s decade. The band imagines the collapse if “engines stopped running”, again, not apocalypse but a huge, socially dangerous crisis. The accumulation used in this chorus makes the feeling of anxiety grow stronger progressively.

That apocalyptic situation the chorus shows us, either caused by the power of nature, either provoked by humans themselves, sheds light on the verses and gives them a meaning that goes beyond the obvious subversive empowerment. Apart from explaining images like zombies of death, always a nice thing to include in a song for punk bands, it can make us see “the underworld” as some kind of dark safe place where survivors live, and the war not only as an almost metaphoric way to describe a fight against establishment but also as a disastrous consequence of a previous disaster that we need strength to face. The song then becomes an encouragement to survive the world and its hardships, set in this hypothetical time. Lines like “Quit holding out, and draw another breath” go in with that sense of a call to inner strength and courage, in a dangerous world where you “don’t wanna shout”. When in the final two lines of the chorus, after scaring us with the worst that could happen the singer declares “But I have no fear/’Cause London is drowning and I live by the river”, with that contradictory “’cause” that should be an “although”, he himself is showing his bravery, that consists in staying calm even when everything is falling apart. At the very end he goes even further and asks “and after all this, won’t you give me a smile?”, encouraging us, maybe with a touch of irony, to try and not let the most terrible things bring us down completely. London would also be calling at the power of our mental strength.

London calling is about three different forms of power. First there is the power of youth that gives change a chance through rebellion. Then there is the power of destruction that exists in the great forces of nature like the Sun, the climate or the earth and its products, but also within humankind that likes to play with fire. And last but not least there is another human power besides self-destruction which is courage along with the ability to cope with terrible things. We have seen three forms of power but there is only one location of power, in this case the power of communication, and it is London, just as it was in the Second World War.