According to Price’s handwritten notes on the original lyric sheet, the lead vocal was made up from three passes recorded on tracks 15, 16 and 20, which were then composited to 13. The switchover points are marked on the lyric sheet, and the cryptic line at the end of the lyric—“less LC out got not”—refers to specific words on a particular pass. Strummer, Jones and Simonon each did backing vocals separately, all of which were doubled.

Finally, Mick Jones reinforced the bass theme that starts the song (“Mick DT bass”) on track 14, either on guitar or possibly on bass. The overdubbed tom-tom on track 10 crops up in the same part of the song.

“London Calling” was recorded and mixed on one of the two Cadac consoles that Price had originally ordered in 1975 to replace Wessex’s aging and under-specified Neves. “The Cadac, to my ear, is still probably the best audio signal chain I’ve ever heard,” says Price. “It had tiny little switches and was hard to operate, but it had a frequency response of one Hertz to a hundred kiloHertz, plus or minus 0.1 dB. And that was throughout the entire console, from a line input to the monitor output.”

For the mix of the track “London Calling,” Strummer described an image of the London fog swirling off the river Thames, with seagulls circling overhead. “Joe wanted the track to ‘sound like London,’” says Price. “This suggested the echoes for the mix, particularly the slow repeats in the instrumental.” To capture the “foggy London Town” atmosphere, Price set up a slow, multiple repeat on Strummer’s seagull imitations in the instrumental break. “As this was before good delay lines, we used a Studer A80 on varispeed,” he explains. “In order to adjust it to be in time, I started off putting the drums into the delay and got it accurate before switching over to the vocal. This obviously sounded good to me, because there is a little of the effect on the toms, as well as on Joe’s ‘seagulls,’ in the final mix.” Additional reverb was provided by an EMT 140 plate, set at a decay time of a little under two seconds, and the track was mixed to 1/4-inch, non-Dolby at 15 ips.

Relations between the band and their record company had never been smooth—in fact, an early Clash single, “Complete Control,” had been inspired by CBS’s decision to release the “wrong” single from the band’s first album. So when Maurice Oberstein, the top man at CBS UK, arrived at Wessex in a limousine, apparently in an attempt to hurry things along and get the new album into the mastering room, a scene was almost inevitable.

“This was when Maurice learned that London Calling was going to be a double LP,” recalls Price. “A bit of a brawl ensued that ended up with a rather tired and emotional Guy Stevens lying in the driveway in front of Maurice’s limo so that he couldn’t leave—for quite a long period of time. I remember that, at the time, this did not appear to me to achieve much at all, but thinking about it a little bit more over the years, I think it was probably quite a contribution in influencing CBS to allow The Clash to do what they wanted—to in fact give ’em enough rope. It’s another example of Guy Stevens’ ‘direct injection’ method, and I think it made a big difference. There had been endless arguments, people had been shouting, talking about musicality, talking about profit, talking about how much the sleeve cost, talking about the songs of their lives, and there had been absolutely no meeting point. But the fact that Guy Stevens lay down in front of the limo and had to be carried back into the studio by myself and Jeremy Green—when he finally stopped fighting us—I think made a big impression on Maurice.”

Though the album sessions were originally booked on a sensible Monday to Friday schedule, the band ran out of time toward the end. “After about five or six weeks of recording, the band was booked to play gigs in New York, which might have been the start of a short American tour,” recalls Price. “Needless to say, we were still recording 18 hours a day, seven days a week, up to about two hours before they had to get on a plane to New York. So what actually happened was once the band got to New York, I had a few phone calls with Joe and the rest of the band about how they wanted it mixed—I remember asking if it was okay for ‘Jimmy Jazz’ to sound like a live recording from a smoky old jazz club. So basically I mixed it totally on my own, apart from some very able help from my assistant at the time, Jeremy Green. And I finished the album and flew to New York with it. I was very nervous at the time, I must admit. I met up with the band, who were about to do a gig, and we played the mixes backstage at The Palladium, and basically they were happy with them.

“I think there were a couple of little changes,” continues Price. “‘Armagideon Time’ was definitely part of the album when we were recording it, but it ended up as a B-side. And ‘Train in Vain’ was the last song that we finished after the artwork went to the printers. If you look on a couple of the Web sites, it describes it as a hidden track, but it wasn’t intended to be hidden. The sleeve was already printed before we tacked it on the end of the master tape.”

The completed album was mastered by Tim Young at CBS Studios in Whitfield Street. “He reckoned it was the loudest vinyl he ever cut,” says Price approvingly. Though not their biggest seller (1982’s Combat Rock sold over a million copies in the U.S.), London Calling provided the platform for worldwide success, and, for better or worse, gave the band enough leverage with CBS/Epic to insist that 1980s Sandinista! be released as a budget-priced triple album. By 1986, The Clash had disbanded, but “London Calling” made the UK charts again in 1988 when it was rereleased as a single from the first of several retrospectives, The Story of The Clash, Volume 1. And in 1989, London Calling placed first in Rolling Stone’s “Top 100 Albums of the ’80s.”

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