30 August 2013 (Day 242) – Sandinista!

I couldn’t be bothered having to go through the bother of selecting a theme or albums for todsay and so decided to immerse myself in a single work.  Thus it came to be that I ploughed through one of my favourite triple albums:

(# 570) The Clash – Sandinista! (1980)

In some respects, Sandinista! is very much like George Harrison’s mighty All Things Must Past being that each album combines an initial double album of brilliant new material and a third disc of more experimental stuff.  In both cases, I’ve always been intrigued by the third disc but ultimately felt that these have done both artists a huge disservice in obscuring the sheer brilliance of the two discs.  Had only these discs been released, it is no doubt in my mind that both double albums would today be regarded as out and out masterpieces. 

In terms of Sandinista!, I would go a step further.  Track by track, the first two discs are more consistently brilliant than London Calling, their acknowledged masterpiece.  Although both albums are sprawling epics, the tracks on Sandinista! appear to share more of a theme.  The way I hear it, the album seeks to make sense of Britain’s declining place in the world as revolutions in third world nations start to take root (as clearly heard in tracks such as The Call Up, The Equaliser and Washington Bullets) in the face of American political and cultural dominance (refer to tracks such as Hitsville UK, Junco Partner, Ivan Meets GI Joe and Something About England.)  As such, the album incorporates a great deal of what we could now describe as “world music”, incorporating reggae and dub, calypso, gospel, jazz and soul elements.  More importantly the album’s rockers such as Somebody Got Murdered and Police On My Back hit harder than anything on its predecessor. 

The third disc is fairly ramshackle and this might very well have been the point.  Containing a number of dub versions of tracks for the first two discs, and tracks like Version City, Kingston Advice and The Street Parade, this disc seems to be referring to the chaotic state of displaced persons either within their own nations or as poor immigrants to the United Kingdom where chances for what Australians would call “a fair go” a either fairly limited or non existent (Career Opportunities). And this sense of chaos comes across most forcefully in the, unfortunately, close to unlistenable, Mensforth Hill which is Something About England played backwards with dubs placed on top. Overall, the entire package is an album that has fascinated me for decades, and will continue to do so for a long time.  The next time race riots erupt in Britain, take out this album and play it and a great many things will suddenly become clear.