For Paul Simonon’s bass, Price mixed an instrument DI with a Neumann U87 on the cabinet, recording the chosen blend on track 1 and the components on tracks 23 and 24 for safety. The scribbles on the track sheet around tracks 19 to 22 indicate that Simonon made a further two passes on the bass, which Price then composited with the original bass tracks from 23 and 24 onto track 1. The electric guitars of Mick Jones and Joe Strummer were both miked with an Electro-Voice RE20 mixed with a Neumann U87 and recorded to tracks 11 and 12. “Mick’s live guitar on track 11, a mixture of lead and rhythm, was kept for reference,” explains Price. “But he then did two passes of lead on 23 and 24, which were composited back over 11. The tape was then turned over, and Mick did some backwards guitar that ended up on 23 and 24.” Jones also overdubbed his rhythm part, with a double, on 21 and 22.

“Mick is an amazingly accomplished guitar player,” says Price. “Whenever I worked with him, he was always coming up with melodic lines and neat rhythmic accents. And he’s always been very into discovering what he could get out of his guitar. He’s always gone out and bought the latest effects and experimented with them—on ‘London Calling’ he was using a Roland Space Echo.”

Strummer’s original guitar track on track 12, which he played while singing a guide vocal, was not replaced. “Joe’s more of an intuitive guitar player,” says Price. “He used to bash the living daylights out of his guitar when the song demanded it. He also had a sort of unconscious way of damping the chord with his right hand, which used to produce this incredibly urgent, clanging and clashing sound, which I’ve never heard any other guitarist ever produce. Joe always played a Fender, unless it was broken, and then he’d play anything. Joe’s strumming was so intrinsic to him that we used to do his vocals with him strumming an unplugged Fender, because it was the only way he could get into it. And if he didn’t have a guitar there for some reason, Joe would beat his chest with his right fist.”

For lead vocals, Price would normally have used a tube Neumann U47 but decided not to in this case. “Joe has a very bassy voice and at that time was also undergoing a lot of dental work,” explains Price. “This meant if I used the 47, I had to put so much high-frequency EQ on that Joe’s sibilance turned almost into a distorted lisp. The answer was an SM58, which gave punch and clarity without needing too much EQ.”

Another important factor in Strummer’s vocal delivery was the often physical intervention of producer Guy Stevens. “Guy was a very unusual record producer,” recalls Price. “He believed that the record producer’s job was to maximize the emotion and feeling that an artist revealed on mic in the studio when doing the song. And Guy did this by what I call ‘direct injection’—he would challenge the artist verbally and physically, tackle him and bring him to the ground and punch him and stuff, in order to get more emotion out of him when he performed. Funnily enough, this worked better on some people than others. It worked very well with Joe, actually.”

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, November, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved