It’s one of the greatest, most classic double albums of all time – The Clash’s London Calling. Released on December 14, 1979, it was the band’s critical and commercial breakthrough. Music critic Robert Christgau called it “the best double album since Exile On Main Street by The Rolling Stones.”

With songs like the title track, “Spanish Bombs,” “Train In Vain,” “Jimmy Jazz,” “The Guns Of Brixton,” “Revolution Rock,” “Death Of Glory,” “Clampdown,” “Lost In The Supermarket,” and “Rudie Can’t Fail,” the band’s musical output with this record more than confirmed the marketing slogan used to promote them at the time. With London Calling the Clash were indeed, “the only band that mattered.”

Tom Carson, writing in Rolling Stone about the album had this to say:

“Merry and tough, passionate and large-spirited, London Calling celebrates the romance of rock & roll rebellion in grand, epic terms. It doesn’t merely reaffirm the Clash’s own commitment to rock-as-revolution. Instead, the record ranges across the whole of rock & roll’s past for its sound, and digs deeply into rock legend, history, politics and myth for its images and themes. Everything has been brought together into a single, vast, stirring story – one that, as the Clash tell it, seems not only theirs but ours. For all its first-take scrappiness and guerrilla production, this two-LP set–which, at the group’s insistence, sells for not much more than the price of one–is music that means to endure. It’s so rich and far-reaching that it leaves you not just exhilarated but exalted and triumphantly alive.”