It seems like everyone I know grew up listening to this album, but I missed out somehow. I remember going to a disco in Horsell at the end of 1979 — possibly my first ever date, in fact, and it was a blind one — and the title track came on, and I asked my companion (was her name Anne?) if she liked the Clash. I can't remember her answer. The relationship had been holed below the waterline right at the beginning when I went round to her house (our respective parents knew each other — that was the connection) and I was asked if I wanted to play a computer game. I'd never used a computer before. The programs were on a cassette tape, and you wired up the cassette player to the black and white TV somehow. There were no graphics at all, just numerical read-outs of how far your capsule was from the moon's surface, the speed of descent, the amount of fuel left, and the weight of the fuel. I crashed every time. Crashed and blushed. I felt so stupid, angry with myself since I was good at maths and should have been able to work it out, yet here was this girl who knew how to handle computers. She was a bit short for me, so I'm not sure it could have ever come to anything.
After that I suppose I went back to A Farewell to Kings for a while, and it wasn't until nineteen years later that Tim gave me a copy of London Calling for my birthday. In the intervening period I must have absorbed some of the album, but I suppose I was (and I know this is not fashionable nowadays) more of a Sex Pistols man. I thought that, if the Pistols were Jean Baudrillard or Guy Debord, the The Clash were Jurgen Habermas — more worthy, more coherent, more carefully articulated (I've actually read Debord's Society of the Spectacle
I saw Bob Dylan a couple of times at the Brixton Academy last year, and on both occasions he started the encore with the first verse of London Calling.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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