by The Clash, 1988.
“Greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls!” as Bruce McCulloch said to Kevin McDonald in The Kids In The Hall’s famous “Doors” sketch. But we all have a few, either out of laziness, convenience, or because we were collector scum and just had to have that unreleased track that the band didn’t see fit to issue at the time, but is now tacking on to a package of previously-released material so we will spend $18 for one mediocre cut. But I digress.
The Story of The Clash Volume 1 was my first Clash record. My friend Justin and I went to see The Replacements play and before the show they were playing side 2 of Story over the public address system. I was familiar with The Clash to an extent (armadillos and mohawks, yes?), but my young brain had not yet been seared by “Clampdown” or “Guns of Brixton”. I was instantly hooked, of course, and I vividly remember finding and buying the record the next day. And so began a long love affair.
I still like and listen to Story quite a lot (it’s now out-of-print, replaced by newer Clash compilations). It’s an odd “best of”, much more an overview as the title implies than a straight hits collection. For one thing, maybe five or six of those tracks could be considered “hits” by the broadest definition, and yet it’s four sides of vinyl/two CDs, 24 songs in all - a lot of superlatives for the mere five years worth of material collected here. But then that only goes to show how prolific The Clash were in their brief life.
It does double-duty as an odds’n’sods collection as well, collecting for the first time in one place a number of the band’s non-album A-sides (”This Is Radio Clash”, “Bankrobber”, “White Man In Hammersmith Palais”, et al.) and a handful of rarities (”Capital Radio One”, “Armagideon Time”) alongside plenty of well-known album cuts.
It’s also sequenced in roughly reverse chronological order, putting the later, poppier material first and then burrowing deeper and deeper into the punk bedrock of the band’s catalog, eventually ending with perhaps their most sublime moment: the excellent appropriation of Junior Murvin’s “Police & Thieves”, and the unofficial soundtrack to the Notting Hill riots of 1977.
The “Volume 1″ part of the title has always been a puzzle. Undoubtedly a joke, and perhaps a gentle dig at singer Joe Strummer’s “Clash Mark II” line-up that soldiered on for a short time after the dismissal of guitarist Mick Jones in 1983 (none of the output of whom is featured herein), it also raised hopes, however so faint, of a Clash reunion. It was not to be.
In the brilliant lyrics of Joe Strummer and the arrangements of Mick Jones, The Story of The Clash illustrates why The Clash were dubbed “the only band that matters” in their heyday, revealing in its chapters their progression from just another group of spiky-haired dole-queue dreamers to their ultimate flame-out as stadium rock superstars, charting their eager and insatiable hunger for boundary-pushing experimentation along the way.
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