London Calling

This is an apocalyptic song, detailing the many ways the world could end, including the coming of the ice age, starvation, and war. It was the song that best defined The Clash, who were known for lashing out against injustice and rebelling against the establishment, which is pretty much what punk rock was all about. Joe Strummer explained in 1988 to Melody Maker: "I read about 10 news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us."

Singer Joe Strummer was a news junkie, and many of the images of doom in the lyrics came from news reports he read. Strummer claimed the initial inspiration came in a conversation he had with his then-fiancee Gaby Salter in a taxi ride home to their flat in World's End (appropriately). "There was a lot of Cold War nonsense going on, and we knew that London was susceptible to flooding. She told me to write something about that," noted Strummer in an interview with Uncut magazine. According to guitarist Mick Jones, it was a headline in the London Evening Standard that triggered the lyric. The paper warned that "the North Sea might rise and push up the Thames, flooding the city," he said in the book Anatomy of a Song. "We flipped. To us, the headline was just another example of how everything was coming undone."

The title came from the BBC World Service's radio station identification: "This is London calling..." The BBC started using it during World War II to open their broadcasts outside of England. Joe Strummer heard it when he was living in Germany with his parents.