10 Greatest Double Albums In Music History
8. London Calling - The Clash
From the minute that they strapped on guitars, the Clash knew that punk rock was supposed to be more than just a genre of music. When they blasted out of the gate with their first record, Joe Strummer had an axe to grind, and spent the rest of his career trying to push himself forward as a musician to get his point across. If you really want to hit on something powerful, you have to sometimes go beyond punk rock altogether.
On London Calling, The Clash really give us smorgasbord of everything they are capable of, taking cues from whichever musical style suits the song. Though it's easy to just call this a poppier record because of songs like Train in Vain, the band are still in touch with their punk roots on the title track, start to flirt with rockabilly on Brand New Cadillac and even go down the reggae road with Guns of Brixton.
While that might sound like a lot of paper, the band haven't lost their knack for writing hard hitting lyrics either, from Koka Kola taking on the advertising world to Mick Jones showing us the other side of the coin in Lost in the Supermarket, making his way through the world and getting more desensitized as he goes. These were all ordinary men who started the Clash, and they turned themselves into punk myth, but this stands as the biggest example of their legend.