What follows is more or less a lazy re-post, but given it is from 10 January 2016, there may well be a few who didn’t see it first time around.
Famously written in the aftermath of disturbances at the Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976, it couldn’t be any further removed from being about a call for some sort of race war, which incredibly was what some media commentators claimed was its subject matter when it was released. It is of course, a demand/plea/call-to-arms aimed at disaffected white youth in the UK, of which there was an ever-increasing number, to take note of the fact that the black community wasn’t afraid to take direct action to get their viewpoint across.
As a debut it was incendiary, raw and quite unlike anything most of us had heard before. I’ll admit, I wasn’t yet 14 years of age and so it kind of passed me by at the time as indeed did all the initial punk songs. But when I eventually did catch on to The Clash around 15 months later, it was great to go back and discover the early material.
The single version differs from the US album version in that it opens with a police siren instead of Mick Jones counting the band in:-
mp3 : The Clash – White Riot
The b-side was an otherwise unreleased song which became a bit of a manifesto for the punk era:-
mp3 : The Clash – 1977
The single peaked at #38 in the charts in early April 1977. Almost 50 years ago, FFS………
I reckon we can all agree that White Riot was truly a cracking debut 45.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 