Combat Rock 40th anniversary reissue coming soon?

[chocolatejesus]

Whats up with the omission of Mustapha Dance in both this Release and Sound System?
Its a B-side of their super successful Single and a real banger.

[APACHES67]

I was waiting For Inoculated City complete Version from Rat Patrol but i find a useless Out of Bond's, i hoped to have unreleased songs(Once You Know, Boy from NYC, Cool Confusion Instrumental, Hell W10, Cinders, Capitol Air...)but i have a blank side D. See you next with Combat Rock 50 Anniversary! No CBS...No Claim with Bluff and Swindle!

Boys from NYC???? Cinders???? Never heard of them. Where have you heard about?

Cinders - Suzi Ronson. Nothing to do with Combat Rock.

"This was recorded as a favour to Mrs. Ronson during demos at EAR studios off Elgin Avenue in 1981. Gary Barnacle played sax not John Lennard. The song was never developed further." - Info from Baker Glare.


Boy from New York City. Clash II soundcheck which is instrumental and I think is actually a run through of Tommy Tucker's Hi-Heeled Sneakers. Unless there is another version I'm unaware of.

Capital Air. Belongs with Sandinista! for my money. It's had an official release on the Allen Ginsberg box set and a sampler CD of the box set. I've got the sampler.

Thath's right "Marky Dread" (nothing to do with Combat Rock) but as a Clash fan i spent enough money, so i would be happy to have more unreleased songs on The People's Hall instead of only one("He who dares...") i deserve it. "Cinders" by the way is from 1981("Radio One" from 1980 and already edited as Bside), so it could be released in The People's Hall more than "Radio One" and more than a useless "Outside Bond's", even because (as you know) the music is made by The Clash, Suzi Ronson is credited for the lirycs. Instead we Have "Outside Bond's" while "Cinders" buried maybe forever. I claim to CBS unreleased songs from 1981 like "Walk Evil Talk", "Hell W10","Once You Know","Cinders", "Cool Confusion Instrumental" , Inoculated City" complete version....instead of an empty D side, bad joke from CBS. It's like they want a revenge against "London Calling" with half price and "Sandinista" almost half price.

Sure but I don't want "Cinders" on a CR release any more than I do "Radio One" neither belong on it. I understand your frustration as "The People's Hall" offers very slim pickings for the people. "Radio One" isn't even a Clash track. So it makes no sense at all to me as to why it was felt necessary to include it. Maybe it's a hint that there'll be no expanded Sandinista! ever.

I think it's a real shame Mick has chosen not to release the full Rat Patrol as it's practically all out there now and will be bootlegged for ever and a day. Better to have a good sounding official release. But at the end of the day it's Mick's decision and as much as I dislike it I respect it.

I too prefer an official release of Rat Patrol 2lp without the official Combat Rock instead of Peoples Hall, we could have more unreleased in HQ

[IkarisOne]

I don't know why, but all of these recordings - CR or RP - call to mind the image of a tiger that was once free and fierce out in the wild, but was then castrated, drugged and put in a cage for the public to gawk at.

[IkarisOne]

This Tom Carson review of Autoamerican is very much worth a read, I think a lot of what he says will strike a chord with some folks here.

Automerican is a very weird and filler-ridden album that was saved from the cut-out bins by two big hit singles. Like I said, the record companies didn't care what was on an album, just so long as they had singles to sell. This was when records were on a twelve-month sell-cycle (at most) and not the two to four year cycle you'd see in the post-Thriller era. They just wanted product to pitch, not masterpieces.

Blondie’s Autoamerican is a terrible album, but it’s bad in such an arcane, high-toned way that listening to it is perversely fascinating. After Parallel Lines gave Chris Stein a carte blanche, it was only a matter of time until he started living out his fantasies of himself as a deep thinker.

Since he could always be counted on to hedge his bets, however, he cannily managed to sustain the illusion that he still cared about rock & roll on Eat to the Beat. That illusion is surely dead now. And Stein is no longer depriving the world of his “genius,” because Autoamerican is his LP all the way. Indeed, it’s such an anthology of intellectual onanism that it’s almost the rock equivalent of a godawful Ken Russell movie.

A movie, in fact, is what the record transparently aspires to be. The conception, so far as I can figure it, treats American pop culture, or teenage subculture, in science-fiction terms as a kind of lost Atlantis: a legendary civilization made extinct by the disappearance of the surplus-goods society that fostered it. As an idea, this is one of those notions that feels like a cliché, even when you can’t think of anybody else who’s done it. It’s too easy, though certainly feasible, depending on how it’s worked out. Here, it hasn’t been worked out at all. The theme is just a convenient touchstone to unify a lot of fairly ephemeral material that’s patched together by a few repeated images and some graceless chunks of pretentious narration.

Autoamerican opens with an instrumental dirge called “Europa” (the Old World everybody had to leave, get it?) that’s ludicrously portentous. Scored in the pastiche style of wretched soundtrack music, it’s so promiscuously ethnic that, if it had characters, they’d all have to be played, in fortissimo, by Anthony Quinn. The album closes with nothing less than that classic anthem to solipsism, “Follow Me,” from Camelot (a reference as thuddingly clever as “Singin’ in the Rain” at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange).

Oddly enough, there isn’t a single rock & roll song on the LP. Instead, we get MOR ballads wrapped in highbrow trimmings, funk played as cocktail music, an imitation-dub rap song and three (counting “Follow Me”) pieces of fake-Tin Pan Alley, swing-era crooning.


Even when camp isn’t the actual musical style, it’s still omnipresent as an attitude. As Stein expounds upon and fills his hobbies (art films, sci-fi, kitschy artifacts) with hot air, he deflates rock & roll in order to demonstrate his superiority to it.

He’s so exclusively concerned with creating a modernist manifesto that he’s dispensed with all the pop paraphernalia — e.g., hooks, rhythm, structure — that keeps an audience listening.

His sense of pop culture itself is rarefied and coldly elitist: everything, in short, that rock & roll joyfully meant to clear away. Why would anyone make an album about pop that’s totally devoid of humor, brashness, good times and physical energy? Who knows. (It’s as if the jaded, enervated rich of Last Year in Marienbad had passed the time by translating old Ronettes singles into French.)

And while he’s expressing his contempt for pop, Chris Stein shamelessly embraces every snobbish cliché of current avant-garde thinking. The only things he seems to care about are the knowing little musical touches: the tinny, abstract-funk guitar lines borrowed from Talking. Heads, the tendentious panculturalism of it all.

You may be wondering what happened to Deborah Harry. Stein’s largest mistake — or, alternately, the clearest sign of his arrogance — is his willingness to shortchange Blondie’s biggest asset. It’s not just that Harry sounds foolish reciting Autoamerican‘s bits of narration — the way they’re written, so would Laurence Olivier. Her voice is all wrong for the tunes, too. She can’t project nonchalance, wit or verbal sophistication and is denied any chance to utilize that peculiar metallic urgency characteristically found in her finest vocals. Without opportunities, she seems lost, as if she’d wandered onto the wrong record.

Even in the least stylized compositions, Harry sounds listless and dazed, barely there. And when she does try to show some sass and spunk — in the rap that (all too typically) gives “Rapture” its title — she’s sunk by the leaden, schematic lyrics.

The rest of the group is almost as absent: the star parts all go to the brand-name sessionmen brought in for the LP, and at least half the songs are carried by horns (Caribbean and bullfight) or strings (MOR and pseudoclassical).

Though Blondie’s days as a sloppy but inspired trash-rock band are long gone (and more missed than ever), here the group doesn’t even get to trot out the bombastic AOR chops that producer Mike Chapman gave them as a substitute on Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat. Only “T-Birds” reaches for the old panache, and it’s stopped cold by another bit of limp exhortation.

Organist Jimmy Destri is awarded a moment or two, and his and Laura Davis’ ballad, “Angels on the Balcony,” while somewhat slight, is the album’s nicest and least abrasive number. Unfortunately, Destri is also responsible for one of Autoamerican‘s worst-conceived cuts: “Walk like Me,” a marching tune for a rebellion that you can’t imagine the band actually believes in. Aside from its musical shortcomings — the melody is too flat for the song to be as stirring as it means to be — the idea that the way for teenagers to revolt against society is to follow the example set by blondie™ for murjani™ is truly laughable. Or not funny at all.

Still, you have to prefer Destri’s attempts to make some connection with the outside world to Stein’s bloodless manipulation of it. The best thing about “Walk like Me” is that, on Autoamerican, it sounds out of place: it’s about something. For the rest, I wonder if the reason Chris Stein is so eager to proclaim the death of pop culture is so he can beat the hyenas to its bones.

[evair]

Thank you guys to make my Sunday reading the last 20 pages of this thread.
I love you all still here after 20/30 years.
I'm just happy for this 40th anniversary release.
My happiness comes from Futura 2000 (I loved this version but I hadn't with this audio quality and that's huge) and the unrealeased Know Your Rights (different, it shows the interesting direction Mick was leading the band).
By the Way, Don Letts said he already have the C90 of the original Rat Patrol. We should ask him...

This my yearly post. I return to lethargy.
Love you

[BR16ADE_R055E]

I’ll be honest here - I’m angry! I bought the CD edition despite having serious reservations, having read the info regarding what was on it. I’ve bought everything they’ve ever released from day one, White Riot single, first album with red sticker, freebie Capitol Radio EP in the post etc… Spent hard earned pocket money on those. Spent my paper round money on gigs in Torquay and Exeter and Bristol before I could earn some proper money to travel further afield to see them. Why? Because I love the band but… I’m never gonna play this release again! I’ve spent today playing the version of Rat Patrol that I created from Sound System and the acetate several times in an attempt to cheer myself up. I feel totally cheated and conned by the remaining members now. And I say that that with a heavy heart! What has happened to the band that would haul kids through windows to see their gigs for free, insist on two albums for the price of one, release a triple for £4.99? TeddyB - please pass on my views to Mick! Very, very sad quite frankly!

The CD packaging doesn't even have the pocket in the center to hold the booklet and poster/lyric sheet. What's up with that? If I wasn't careful when first opening it, the booklet and poster would've fallen out. The Clash Hits Back CD has the booklet pocket, so this is odd.

That's strange my copy does. The poster and booklet are in the middle opening.

Here's mine. No opening compared with that of the Clash Hits Back CD next to it:

CR + TPH CD 3.JPG (351.42 KiB) Viewed 1352 times

CR + TPH CD 4.JPG (413.67 KiB) Viewed 1352 times

[BR16ADE_R055E]

I'm hearing a bit of "You Can't Hurry Love" in "He Who Dares Or Is Tired"...

[Mark^Bastard]

I don't know why, but all of these recordings - CR or RP - call to mind the image of a tiger that was once free and fierce out in the wild, but was then castrated, drugged and put in a cage for the public to gawk at.

I couldn't disagree more with RP.

It is quickly becoming my favourite Clash record, knocking Sandinista from the top. The reason for me is that it's the Clash at their most evolved and pure.

Combat Rock however I definitely agree with you. It's a Tiger someone accidentally killed and then put together with all of the parts fitting together wrong, and the bits that were too messed up have been replaced with parts from a house cat.

[Mark^Bastard]

By the Way, Don Letts said he already have the C90 of the original Rat Patrol. We should ask him...

What's a C90? Master tape?

[Mark^Bastard]

I'm pretty late to the party. I still can't really buy the LP of this in Australia without paying crazy import fees, so I'm listening on Spotify for the first time. I'll give my impressions (redundant I bet).

Outside Bonds is useless. I never liked "Listen with Interviews". This is worse. It's like what you'd expect from a 'secret song' or before a 'second song' on an album from the 90's. To actually lead with this is just pathetic. If this disk were to work as a 'compilation' that I'd want to throw on to listen to, this song is immediately

Futura 2000. I had never heard this. Great beat. It's a nice little novelty inclusion. Would have fit nicely with the Ranking Roger cuts.

First Night Back in London - Weird intro doesn't add a lot given it's not bridging the previous song or anything. I wonder if there's some story behind it? Like was it always meant to be and was cut off on other releases?

Radio One - We all know it doesn't fit chronologically but I guess some fans won't have heard it and won't look into whether it fits, and find it an interesting addition. I'd prefer this (and Futura et al) appear on a 'Clash and Friends' compilation.

He Who Dares Or Is Tired - Ahh a real new song that is worth hearing. No lyrics but it's a cool instrumental with some detail under the hood. Reminds me a little of something The Slackers would put out 40 years later!

Know Your Rights - This was much different to what I expected. It's a legit 3rd version of the song. I thought it'd be a light remix or demo version of either the Combat Rock or Rat Patrol take. The quality isn't superb. It's the heaviest cut of the song I've heard.

Other Tracks - There's a decent contingent here. They really just tease and show how much better it would be to have this concept properly done. There's a lot of Combat Rock adjacent material already released, including for example the 4 tracks from the radio clash 12", mustaphers dance etc. So this really fails on several levels. It isn't a complete anthology of what is already released, and also doesn't have the full Rat Patrol.

[Marky Dread]

By the Way, Don Letts said he already have the C90 of the original Rat Patrol. We should ask him...

What's a C90? Master tape?

90 min cassette tape. Don will just have a second generation copy of the original.

[Marky Dread]

I'm hearing a bit of "You Can't Hurry Love" in "He Who Dares Or Is Tired"...

Yep as others have stated it feels very similar to "Town Called Malice" by The Jam which in turn borrows from "You Can't Hurry Love".

[Low Down Low]

I'm hearing a bit of "You Can't Hurry Love" in "He Who Dares Or Is Tired"...

Yep as others have stated it feels very similar to "Town Called Malice" by The Jam which in turn borrows from "You Can't Hurry Love".

And Hitsville too. I guess it's just a fairly regular Motown catch?

[Marky Dread]

I'm hearing a bit of "You Can't Hurry Love" in "He Who Dares Or Is Tired"...

Yep as others have stated it feels very similar to "Town Called Malice" by The Jam which in turn borrows from "You Can't Hurry Love".

And Hitsville too. I guess it's just a fairly regular Motown catch?

...and "Lust For Life" by Iggy Pop. It's been used endless times.

"Hitsville UK" doesn't actually use the same bass line but that Motown feel was obviously an inspiration.

[Marky Dread]

I’ll be honest here - I’m angry! I bought the CD edition despite having serious reservations, having read the info regarding what was on it. I’ve bought everything they’ve ever released from day one, White Riot single, first album with red sticker, freebie Capitol Radio EP in the post etc… Spent hard earned pocket money on those. Spent my paper round money on gigs in Torquay and Exeter and Bristol before I could earn some proper money to travel further afield to see them. Why? Because I love the band but… I’m never gonna play this release again! I’ve spent today playing the version of Rat Patrol that I created from Sound System and the acetate several times in an attempt to cheer myself up. I feel totally cheated and conned by the remaining members now. And I say that that with a heavy heart! What has happened to the band that would haul kids through windows to see their gigs for free, insist on two albums for the price of one, release a triple for £4.99? TeddyB - please pass on my views to Mick! Very, very sad quite frankly!

The CD packaging doesn't even have the pocket in the center to hold the booklet and poster/lyric sheet. What's up with that? If I wasn't careful when first opening it, the booklet and poster would've fallen out. The Clash Hits Back CD has the booklet pocket, so this is odd.

That's strange my copy does. The poster and booklet are in the middle opening.

Here's mine. No opening compared with that of the Clash Hits Back CD next to it:

CR + TPH CD 3.JPG


CR + TPH CD 4.JPG

That's odd as my "Hits Back" and "Combat Rock" use the same format.