Welcome to Album Clash! We start the final leg of our musical road trip as we pay a visit to London and take in the incipient punk scene in the late 1970s. And what a clash we have lined up over the next couple of shows, as two of the standard bearers for punk go head to head in the ring of death - the Clash and the Sex Pistols.

First up it’s the Clash who, despite having come together over a year after the Pistols, beat their mates to the charts by nearly six months with the release of their eponymously titled debut in April 1977. It’s a bumper episode this week because we have quite a bit to get through, starting with the formation of the Clash and the run up to the album’s release - not least of all the incestuous nature of the early punk scene and the various interrelations between the Clash and the Pistols. We obviously talk in some depth about the Clash’s overt political messages (and how they stood apart from a bunch of lads whom we’ll be talking about in a couple of weeks), how their sound developed and grew even through the course of making the album , and we also touch on the clear inspiration that the Clash took from a bunch of New Yorkers by the name of the Ramones.

Also this week:

• we discover a music critic who might be even more insufferable than Christgau;


• Tim commits musical heresy by drawing comparison between the Clash and U2 (!!!); and


• Kev has issues with the length of an album that manages to cram 14 songs into a little over 35 minutes. Honestly, there’s just no pleasing some people…

This. Is. ALBUM CLASH!!!

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***Check out our ‘can’t get you out of my head’ playlist:

Youtube Music: https://t.co/xHKWgpcadA

Spotify: https://t.co/8Exejzv2rg

Enjoy!

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