What is the best song on “London Calling”?

One thing that all 3 of us Wizards agree on is that “London Calling” by The Clash is one of the greatest albums of all time. We all chose it in our Top 50 albums poll that we did back in December 2012. In fact, at least one of the Wizards says it’s his all time number 1 favourite.

Of course, we’re hardly alone in this opinion. Rolling Stone famously named it as the best album of the 1980s. (Although it was released in 1979 here, it came out in January 1980 in the USA.) Listeners to our podcast number 5 might also remember Hull troubadour Ted Key paying tribute with this fantastic song.

We decided to conduct a little experiment and try to put the 19 songs from the album into some kind of order. We each ranked the songs giving 19 points to our favourite, 18 points to the 2nd favourite etc.

Here’s how the voting turned out.

Here’s a Spotify playlist of the album in the order we ranked them.

Of course, you’ll be wanting to see that in graph form, right?

Click to see in all its full size glory

Some interesting things about those results:

• We’re reasonably in agreement about the “worst” 4 songs.
• Lover’s Rock is collectively our least favourite song on the album. And yet we all agree that it’s a bloody awesome song and better than most bands’ very best song! Just listen to it.
• 2 of Chorizo’s favourite songs on the album (Hateful & The Right Profile) ranked pretty low overall.
• 2 of Kicker’s favourite songs (Guns of Brixton & I’m Not Down) ranked pretty low overall.
• The title track is Kicker’s outright favourite and Rebel’s 2nd favourite. It would’ve walked this poll if it hadn’t been for the measly 6 points given by Chorizo, who blames over-familiarity with that particular song for his relatively low ranking.
• All 3 of us unanimously agree that The Card Cheat is the 9th best song on the album. Weird.
• Overall the favourite song is Death or Glory narrowly beating Spanish Bombs by 1 point.

Death or Glory wasn’t actually chosen in the top 2 by any of the Wizards! But it did score quite highly from all 3 of us. This is how democracy works. That’s how the UK ended up being run by one party that didn’t win an election and another party who didn’t even finish in the top 2! Or alternatively as Dennis from Auf Wiedersehen Pet would say “Everybody gets what nobody wants!” Isn’t democracy great?

Have we got it right or are we talking bollocks? Vote for your favourite here.

What’s that you say, dear reader? What a pointless exercise. What is this obsession with ranking? Why do music fans feel such a compulsion to put things in order of preference? Why not just accept that all of the songs are great and it’s a great album? Isn’t that just extreme nerdery? Well yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. We accept that it’s extreme nerdery but rest assured, it isn’t just extreme nerdery.  We did have a reason for doing this.

We’re about to record our 2nd World Cup podcast which features a song for every one of the 32 competing nations. So that’s how we decided that “Death or Glory” would be the song to represent England. The winning song-title’s quite appropriate I suppose, and definitely a good job that “Spanish Bombs” didn’t pip it to the post then.

And remember kids, he who fucks nuns will later join the church. That is a fact and it has apparently been tested by research.

More Clash related articles on trustthewizards.com

• Joe Strummer 1952-2002
• Clash City Rockers
• Punk’s not dead, it’s just gone to Aldi
• Musical calls to arms
• The Greatest Running Playlist. Ever!!

More World Cup related articles on trustthewizards.com

• Podcast number 24: World Cup Special
• Podcast number 24a: World Cup Special 2 [coming soon]
• Video for our alternative World Cup anthem “Win It For The Pensioners”
• Download “Win It For The Pensioners” [it’s for charideeeeeee]