Clash related letdowns

[daredevil]

Evil Darling from the STH soundrack was letdown for me when i first heard it. After the awesome Love Kills and Dum Dum Club, i was expecting a great uptempo rockabilly song, not a slow moody one.

[Heston]

Evil Darling from the STH soundrack was letdown for me when i first heard it. After the awesome Love Kills and Dum Dum Club, i was expecting a great uptempo rockabilly song, not a slow moody one.

I wasn't impressed at first but it really grew on me.

[daredevil]

Evil Darling from the STH soundrack was letdown for me when i first heard it. After the awesome Love Kills and Dum Dum Club, i was expecting a great uptempo rockabilly song, not a slow moody one.

I wasn't impressed at first but it really grew on me.

It took a lot of listens, but I ended up liking it.

[coffeepotman]

Seeing Joe live in 89 at the Palladium was a let down, maybe I was expecting too much, I don't know, I've never heard a boot from this show so all I have is my memory to go by. The other RLW shows I've heard are pretty good

[Chairman Ralph]

Streetcore - I still can't get into this album no matter how many times I try. The live versions are so much better and I saw him everynight at St. Anne's.

I'll leave it at five..Oh wait CTC, well that's just shit and the biggest letdown of them all.

Well, Streetcore was still in a work in progress when Joe died -- so not surprised you'd find the live experience of it so much more compelling.

CTC was the mother of all letdowns, at least for me, especially after my brain tallied the disconnect between the "everything and the kitchen sink" style of production, versus how those handfuls of new songs had sounded on the tour preceding it.

I have to say I totally disagree about Tighten Up, I think the songs were there. They weren't stretching one groove over 6 mins like they did with a lot of the songs on the other 3 LPs by the original line up. And anyone who can stop dancing when the wonderful Other 99 comes on must have a musical heart of stone!

I was actually a bit disappointed with 10 Upping St. I totally loved the first album and was quite excited when I heard Strummer was going to be involved in the follow up. C'mon Every Beatbox was the lead off single and that amped up my expectations that they were gonna be rocking a bit harder but still great. I then found the album to be a bit of a damp squib when I heard it.

Beatbox, Beyond the Pale, V13 and Sightsee MC were great but I found the rest a bit lacking. The version of Hollywood Boulevard that was on the original vinyl was horrible, weak as piss. Thankfully they beefed it up a bit for the CD release but there are other weak spots on the album. Ticket is a b side at best and Dial a Hitman sounds awkward and contrived. And despite Strummer's lyrical involvement I don't think it comes anywhere near the debut album on that score.

Agreed on both counts. Tighten Up contains some of Mick's brightest melodies (Applecart, Mr. Walker Said, Other 99, Rock Non Stop), plus the sound benefits as a shift from the more "beatboxy," groove-oriented approach of the first two albums. Which I loved, as well, but when my mind wants a break from that, Tighten Up does the job.

On No. 10: as you say, once you get past the great songs (Beatbox, Beyond The Pale, V13, Sightsee MC), it's slow going for these ears, though I have to say, I've always had a soft spot for Ticket -- the lyrics (an immigrant guy's struggles against the society that doesn't want him) seem more relevant now in the age of Trump than they did at the time. I do wish they'd made the rapping sections more comprehensible -- Don's saying some interesting stuff, but I can't make most of it out, which dilutes the overall effect.

My other reason for liking Ticket has more to do with my late friend Tony's reaction to seeing so many bylines on it: "Wow, you mean it took all five of you guys to write this? C'mon, Mick, you can only get so communistic!"

Limbo The Law has a great chorus married to a repetitive, clunking rhythm track -- so it needed a more distinctive melody to make it stick. Dial A Hitman struck me as a contrived attempt to catch the first album's vibe, but never played it too much, so it didn't matter. Ditto for Sambadrome, which doesn't sound like anything else on No. 10, but it never really grabbed me, so I tended to skip that one, as well.

The albums that stick in my mind as disappointments are Earthquake Weather, Higher Power, F-Punk, and Entering a New Ride, with EW the biggest cockpunch given that I was so excited to hear a Joe Strummer solo album. Those latter BAD records just sound uninspired or fizzled out.

Agree overall, though I've always had a soft spot for Higher Power -- it strikes me as more of a solo album than a BAD (or should I say, BA, rather?) record, or even a band record, for that matter. But it actually grew on me after the first half dozen listens or so.

Still, I quite like it and don't really get the love for Permanent Record. Think the songs on that are bang ordinary, though seems I'm well in the minority on that.

There's an outtakes CD floating around that has some better, quirkier stuff (Louisiana Turnpike, Plymouth Roadrunner) that should have made the album (before the powers that be forced Joe to share it with the odds and ends that make up side two). You got me digging around for it, but I can't seem to unearth it right now.

I enjoy the sound of those songs -- just simple, bang 'em up rock 'n' roll -- but I'm less enamored of the lyrics, which hail from what I call Joe's Stream Of (Nonsense) Consciousness era, as I've called it here before.

I'm with you, not a record I dig out very often. Excluding the Walker soundtrack, I think his only top notch songs prior to EW were Love Kills and Evil Darling.

With you, except on Love Kills -- I found it odd that, after complaining so much about CTC's use of drum machines, that he did likewise with his first major post-Clash effort. I think the song is fine, but I've just never been terribly enamored with how he dressed it up, production-wise. I actually found myself playing the B-side (Dum Dum Club) a lot more, and hoping for more efforts along those lines.

[coffeepotman]

Great post! Agree, I liked Dum Dum Club more than Love Kills. It's a good song, for a movie soundtrack, but I really thought a combination of Mick and Joe could produce something better than Love Kills. There were 3 Love Kills songs floating around one by The Ramones and one by the Circle Jerks and in 1986 I liked both of them better than Joe's.

[coffeepotman]

I just found an old thread called "The Worst Clash Related Song" and it seems that Boogie With Your Children is most despised and I can't argue with that but also that isn't much love for the Combat Rock B-Sides which I happen to really like, all of them