We’re spending a lot of time celebrating Rolling Stone’s Number One album of the 2000s — Radiohead’s Kid A — this month. So consider this a pause to pay tribute to our Number One album of the Eighties … an album so good, it actually came out in 1979. December 14, 1979 to be exact: today is the 30-year anniversary of the Clash’s London Calling. (To be fair, it didn’t hit the states until January 1980). For a mega-flashback, check out the full list here:
• The 100 Best Albums of the Eighties
London Calling was “an emergency broadcast from rock’s Last Angry Band, serving notice that Armageddon was nigh, Western society was rotten at the core, and Rock & Roll needed a good boot in the rear,” RS wrote at the end of the 1980s. In our 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, we call the LP — which ranked Number Eight — “19 songs of apocalypse fueled by an unbending faith in rock & roll to beat back the darkness.”
Look back at the Clash in our archives:
• Joe Strummer on the Clash’s Wild Ride
• The Immortals: The Clash by The Edge
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily