By the time The Clash got to Combat Rock, they’d already done the impossible twice. First London Calling, then the massive triple-album sprawl of Sandinista!.
So naturally the next idea was just as great as the other 2.
Originally the record wasn’t even called Combat Rock. It was a double album called Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg put together mostly by Mick Jones. The thing ran about 77 minutes and had extended versions of loads of songs. Some tracks like “Sean Flynn” were way longer and much stranger.
The band started arguing about it. The label thought it was too weird. Producer Glyn Johns was brought in and the whole thing got cut down into a single album. Whole songs disappeared and others were trimmed down.
So the album everyone knows as Combat Rock is the cleaned-up version of something far bigger and stranger.
And while it became the Clash’s best-selling record, it was also the last album the classic lineup made together before the band started cracking apart.
Anyway — song by song.
Know Your Rights
Joe Strummer starts the album like he’s a government official making an announcement. “This is a public service announcement… with guitar.”
The whole song is basically sarcasm. He lists three “rights” people supposedly have, and each one turns out to be completely useless. One of them is basically the right to die. It was Strummer looking at police violence and government power in the early 80s and saying “this system is a joke.”
Car Jamming
This track came out of the band messing around with funk rhythms and studio noise during the Rat Patrol sessions.
It’s one of those Clash songs where the lyrics feel like fragments of radio broadcasts and street panic. The band had been spending a lot of time in New York around this period and the influence of the city — the noise, the chaos, the nightlife — starts creeping into the sound.
Should I Stay or Should I Go
One of the biggest songs the Clash ever recorded, but the story behind it is much smaller and more personal.
Mick Jones wrote it while his relationship with singer Ellen Foley was falling apart. The lyrics are simple because he wanted it to sound like a straight argument between two people. The Spanish lines in the chorus were shouted by Joe Strummer and friends in the studio just for fun.
Funny thing is the song wasn’t actually a massive hit at first. It exploded years later when it was used in a Levi’s advert in the early 90s, and suddenly everyone knew it.
Rock the Casbah
This one started with drummer Topper Headon messing around on the piano in the studio. He basically built the whole musical track himself.
Joe Strummer then wrote lyrics about rulers banning Western music — something inspired by stories about Iran banning rock music after the 1979 revolution.
The funny twist is that the song later got blasted by American troops during the Gulf War, which is pretty ironic considering how anti-war the Clash were.
Red Angel Dragnet
Joe Strummer had been watching Taxi Driver and got fascinated with the character Travis Bickle.
The spoken lines in the song actually quote parts of the film, especially Bickle’s weird internal monologues about cleaning up the streets. The slow dub rhythm underneath makes it sound like a late-night radio broadcast from a crime movie.
Straight to Hell
One of the heaviest songs the Clash ever wrote, even though it’s quiet.
The lyrics deal with children left behind in Vietnam after American soldiers went home from the war. These kids were often rejected by both American and Vietnamese society.
Years later the song found a weird second life when M.I.A. sampled the melody for her song “Paper Planes”.
Overpowered by Funk
Around this time the Clash were spending a lot of time in New York hanging out with graffiti artists, DJs and early hip-hop people.
The track even includes graffiti artist Futura 2000 shouting vocals. Punk bands didn’t normally mix with hip-hop culture in the early 80s, but the Clash were fascinated by it.
Atom Tan
This one is basically the Clash joking about nuclear war.
Cold War paranoia was everywhere in the early 80s — news about nuclear weapons, fallout shelters, radiation. Instead of writing a serious protest song they turned it into something almost cartoonish.
Sean Flynn
Sean Flynn was a real person — a war photographer who disappeared in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Nobody ever figured out exactly what happened to him. The slow drifting music and echoing vocals make the whole song feel like someone lost in the jungle.
Originally the track was much longer on the early Rat Patrol version of the album.
Ghetto Defendant
This is one of the strangest moments on the record.
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg appears doing spoken word parts while the band plays behind him. At one point he literally recorded some lines while riding around in a taxi with the band.
The Clash loved mixing poetry and politics into their music, and this is probably the most extreme example.
Inoculated City
The background voices in this song are reading advertising slogans and bits of media nonsense.
Joe Strummer was mocking the constant noise of modern cities — advertising, TV, radio, propaganda — all shouting at you at the same time.
Death Is a Star
The weirdest ending the Clash ever put on an album.
Instead of punk chaos, it sounds like a smoky bar band playing in some half-empty club at closing time. After all the politics and noise of the album, it ends with something strangely calm.
Final Thoughts
A lot of people say London Calling is the Clash masterpiece.
And fair enough — it’s brilliant.
But Combat Rock is the album where everything the band had been experimenting with finally collided:
- punk
- funk
- dub
- hip-hop influence
- political stories
- poetry
- weird studio experiments
And underneath it all you can hear the band starting to pull in different directions.
The irony is that while the band was arguing and falling apart, they accidentally made their most successful record. It went to number 2 in the UK and produced the biggest singles they ever had.
It’s messy in places.
But the Clash were never meant to be tidy.
Final Rating: 9/10
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