London Calling
by The Clash
- 136
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 66
- Danceability
- 13
- Acousticness
Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote "London Calling" in 1979, the year it became the title track of the Clash's double album. The title came from the BBC World Service station identification used in World War II broadcasts to occupied countries. Strummer's reference to "a nuclear error" pointed to the Three Mile Island accident earlier that year.
The line about London drowning came from fears that the Thames would flood the center of the city. That worry led to the Thames Barrier. It began operating three years after the song. Strummer's lines on the truncheon pointed at police brutality. The Metropolitan Police carried truncheons as standard equipment. The band's own situation was bleak too. They were deep in debt, had no manager and were arguing with CBS over whether the album should be a single or a double. Punk's boom in England had ended in 1977, and the line about phony Beatlemania biting the dust reflected that.
The band recorded it at Wessex Studios, a former church hall in Highbury in North London, where the Sex Pistols, the Pretenders and the Tom Robinson Band had also worked. Guy Stevens produced it and Bill Price engineered. The song fades out on a Morse code signal spelling S-O-S.
London Calling runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.