The Clash - Clampdown [LIVE]

London Calling - Song by Song

9. Clampdown

A song that was originally titled “Working & Waiting” and one that was written instrumentally before The Clash headed to the studio to record the album, it took Joe Strummer a while to write the lyrics, which probably explains why it had a working title of “For Fuck’s Sake” for a short time following the Vanilla Sessions.

Marcus Grey described the song as a “truly claustrophobic industrial assault” in his book ‘Route 19 Revisited’ and its hard to disagree. He went on to say that it was “a song about how easy it is for normal everyday people to find themselves condoning despicable things by failing to object”, a reasoning that really strikes a chord and succinctly assesses the songs incredible reliability, something we witness night after night when our audience loudly sing this back to us. Its a true fan favourite that has adorned all of our setlists and we can’t envisage playing a show without it. The Clash debuted it in September 1979 in Minneapolis and it was a mainstay in their set until they broke up.

Friend of the band Kris Needs previewed the album before release in ZigZag and spoke of Clampdown as having a “Metallic piledriver beat emphasising the monotony of factory work”. Indeed, Toppers drum beat is a straight 4/4 with little to no drum fills on the toms following the intro and the occasional crash of a cymbal to emphasise chord changes. The guitars are straight to reflect this conformist marching beat and Joe’s lyrics compliment a masterpiece. We could write multiple thesis length essays on the lyrics but the author himself put it perfectly when speaking to Melody Maker in 1988. Joe described it as “a song about freedom, or the lack thereof”, because after all, we all grow up & calm down despite our resistance and our anger.

Probably the most notable cover version of Clampdown was by Bruce Springsteen in 2014, when he pulled it out of nowhere at a gig in Pittsburgh in a not so subtle nod to the city's proximity to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A frustratingly near miss for our singer as he saw Springsteen twice that week in Nashville & Charlotte but was flying home the day of the Pittsburgh show. Regardless, its a great version with Tom Morello on lead guitar and well worth checking out if you've never heard it.