The Clash: Combat Rock - 1982
Know Your Rights is a visceral, confrontational, politically-motivated minimalist opener that sort of harked back to the Give "Em Enough Rope days, as opposed to London Calling or Sandinista! There was a starkness about it, though, that differentiated it from the sound of 1978. It was the first single from the album and had a great 'b' side in First Night Back In London.
The drum-driven, quirky and infectious Car Jamming has always been my favourite from the album. I love the Strummer interjection "hey fellas - Lauren Bacall!" that coms after the actress is mentioned in the lyrics. Its sound is fuller than some of the Sandinista! material, puncher and warmer. The Clash - 1982 style.
Regarding Should I Stay Or Should I Go, unlike many, I have never particularly liked this Stonesy and incredibly popular song, one that won the band many new fans, lots of whom knew nothing about the debut album, including a girl I met at a party who claimed she was a big Clash fan yet only really knew this song and the rest of this album, along with The Magnificent Seven. She was up for it too, but her obvious non-bona fide Clash credentials meant that it was never going to happen. Silly me. Anyway, enough of that, the song was made popular by its use on a TV advert, for Wrangler jeans, I think, and it gave the band a number one hit. Who would believed it? The hit singles kept coming.
Rock The Casbah was largely written by drummer Topper Headon and I have to say that this was an absolutely great single, with a killer chorus and catchy piano riff. Lyrically, it dabbled in middle-Eastern references, with its accompanying video (they were fast becoming "the thing") showing several characters dancing around in Arab sheiks' gear.Red Angel Dragnet is obviously a Paul Simonon song, has a gritty, bassy appeal. Half reggae, half funk, it has a mysterious allure to it added to by Simonon's decidedly odd semi-spoken vocal, assisted by rapper Kosmo Vinyl (no, me neither). He had a strange manner of diction, did Simonon.
Now for a true Clash classic. Straight To Hell is a monumental, evocative Vietnam-inspired behemoth of a song, with an intoxicating South East Asian percussion sound and moving narrative. There is a case for this being one of The Clash's finest ever tracks, it builds up superbly and is packed full of atmosphere, both musically and lyrically. Topper Headon's South-East Asian-style drumming is completely captivating.
Overpowered By Funk bravely tries to continue where The Magnificent Seven left off, with its frantic rhythm, but doesn’t quite get there, for me, despite having good points, such as being packed full of witty lyrics. The guest vocalist is another rapper who I have only heard of due to his appearance here - Futura 2000. Atom Tan, however, saw the point where the album starts to definitely tail off. The accusations of sloppiness and laziness can be levelled at this slightly messy song, which is ok, but doesn't really get anywhere with its slightly clumsy vocals and grating sound.
I have always quite liked the Vietnam mystery and romanticism of the unusual semi-instrumental, Sean Flynn, with its Eastern-sounding soundscape - Joe Strummer was always fascinated by Vietnam and this is also reflected in the "Vietnam chic" of the SE Asian-tropical front cover. Sean Flynn, incidentally, was the son of movie legend Errol Flynn, who disappeared in the Vietnamese jungle during the conflict.
Ghetto Defendant is very beguiling, with its spoken lyric part about Jean Arthur Rimbaud and the Paris commune. This is quite a typical track for this album - apparently full of meaning, portent and importance - full of lyrics about nineteenth century Paris and so on, but maybe just full of pretentious guff, something exacerbated by the presence of legendary sixties beat poet Allen Ginsberg. I do like it, though. It is side two's best track. However, the material so far on this side is acceptable, but, previous to this, The Clash hadn't done simply acceptable, had they?
So, while there was some commercial stuff on here, there was also, as I have highlighted, some sloppy, half-baked material too. Here is where it gets bad. As side two progresses, the songs have become increasingly lazy and unappealing - particularly the melodic but strangely incoherent Inoculated City. Even worse is the rambling, jazzy Lou Reed's Berlin-esque number, Death Is A Star. These latter two tracks tried, but failed, to summon up a post-apocalyptic Diamond Dogs-style urban nightmare. I know where they were trying to go, but they never got there, for me. They remind me of the final batch of comparatively patchy compositions from Sandinista!.The band were seemingly imploding behind the scenes - Strummer and Jones constantly rowing, Headon taking more drugs. These sub-standard songs stand as examples of that, for me. The half-formed, experimental Sean Flynn could also fall into that category, but it has a sort of atmospheric appeal to it. Unfortunately, by the end of the album, I can't help feeling that it had become a patchy one overall. It just seemed to ebb away, losing energy and commitment with each track.
Look - all things considered, it is not a bad album, but only a “good in parts” one - a bit like The Jam's last album, The Gift. You could somehow feel the lack of cohesion within the band's dynamic, though. It definitely comes across in the songs and their running order. The first side of the album is definitely the superior.
Not long after this The Clash, as we knew them, were no more. That was no surprise, really. However, let it not be forgotten that it had been five simply great years. Thanks for the memories and the music.
There were three other 'b' sides, the lively, modern rockabilly of Long Time Jerk (from Rock The Casbah), the industrially harsh, gritty reggae of Cool Confusion from the 12" release of Should I Stay Or Should I Go and the bongos and bass version of Rock The Casbah in Mustapha Dance, also from that track's single release.
There were also three tracks from the sessions for this album that were not used. They were the lazily melodic paean to madcap producer Guy Stevens, Midnight To Stevens, which dated from the pre-Combat Rock sessions in 1981, the oddly jaunty Latin-ish pop of The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too from 1982 and Idle In Kangaroo Court, which had a staccato, jerky Caribbean beat that was pretty difficult to categorise. All these songs would not have been out of place on Sandinista! Actually they would have done ok replacing some of the less impressive tracks on Combat Rock.
Of all the Mick Jones-supervised 2014 remasters, this is the one in which there is little difference between this and the 1999 remaster. The others sound revelatory, not so much on this one, for whatever reason.
