Amy Lamé

Original version

6 Music

BBC 6

Music: Rock & Indie

Conversation, guests and an infectious passion for music.

Amy Lamé: The Clash’s London Calling at 40

The Clash’s London Calling at 40

BBC Radio 6 Music - Amy Lamé, The Clash’s London Calling at 40

Amy & Don Letts play out The Clash’s ground-breaking double album London Calling in full.

Amy and Don Letts play out The Clash’s ground-breaking double album London Calling in full - marking 40 years since it was released.

To mark National Album Day, 6 Music gives you the chance to spend an afternoon with The Clash, as Amy Lamé plays out the band’s ground-breaking double album, London Calling in full marking 40 years since it was released.

Amy is joined by guests Pennie Smith (who took the famous cover photo), Don Letts (the band’s friend and Video Director) and their Road Manager Johnny Green to celebrate this archetypal album.

Released in December 1979, London Calling was so influential that, when released in January the following year in America Rolling Stone Magazine called it “the most important album of the 80s”. 

The sound on tracks such as Train In Vain, Lost In The Supermarket, Guns Of Brixton, was a reflection of all the band’s different personalities and a culmination of all their experiences at that time. The lyrics and performances were very personal and affecting to them personally.

As reflected in the famous cover by photographer Pennie Smith, the band wanted the album to be the last rock’n’roll record. Elvis Presley started the ball rolling - lifting his guitar up - in 1956. Twenty-three years later they used the same graphics but showed a guitar being smashed to the floor at a gig in New York. This was The Clash at their most powerful and most prepared – writing, rehearsing and recording as a team with a fellow outsider - the producer Guy Stevens at Wessex Studios – pushing them, often in a very literally sense, to their limits with physical and sonic extremes creating triumphant and revolutionary music.

BBC Radio 6 Music

Classic concerts & sessions from the BBC's vast music store. It's your musical heritage.

BBC 6 Music brings together the cutting edge music of today, the iconic and groundbreaking music of the past 40 years and unlimited access

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Amy Lamé

The Clash’s London Calling at 40

Genres

Brand

6 Music

About BBC Radio 6 Music