Clash bassist Paul Simonon turns 65 today (December 15th). On the album London Calling, the title track was their biggest British hit during the time they were together, it reached number-11 there, but didn’t chart here. In a 1991 interview, the late Joe Strummer recalled coming up for the idea for “London Calling” while standing in Soho on a day it was filled with people who’d come from all over Britain for an England-Scotland soccer match. He says he didn’t get the lyrics quite right, though, till he played the song to his writing partner Mick Jones.
“I started to think about London in a strange way, and I had the tune going in my head. And the first set of lyrics I put to it, they were off the beam. And I played it to Mick and he said he loved the song. And then he tapped the lyric sheet with his finger and he went, ‘Rewrite that.’ And I understood what he meant, that the song had become more than what I had first considered it as. And, like, he told me to write the message that we were going to call out around the world.”
