Covers Week Part 7

Yesterday Swiss Adam over at the Bagging Area mentioned the new Clash box set of cds, dvds. posters badges etc that comes in a ghetto blaster shaped box which  will set more than a few men of a certain age's  pulses racing especially at the very reasonable price,  but it's cds. The release that has made me review my lack of finances again and search, to see if there is any spare cash floating about is the vinyl remastered box set of all the studio albums with the exception of Cut The Crap. I have to admit that this has got me salivating, as my copies of both London Calling and Sandinista are a bit worse for wear, whether this justifies the investment in the box set is another story and trying to convince L of the validity of my argument may be a step too far but it would be good to listen to Sandinista without all the background noise there is due to my poor care of the vinyl. In my defence,  the vinyl is not in great shape due to my drunken attempts to try and convert anybody and everybody to the brilliance of said album, mostly to no avail.

On Monday I stated that I didn't rate that many cover versions of Clash tracks but that the Clash had  done some excellent covers in the past. It was not my intention to finish off this week's posts with something by the band as, well that would be a bit obvious and also, surely everybody who visits this blog already owns copies of everything the band has ever done. But things changed last night.

But first the back story.

A few weeks ago Max declared that he wanted to be a punk, we are still not sure where this came from but stupidly we decided to humour him and on our return from France my copy of Never Mind The Bollocks and more disturbingly Public Image, Metal Box and Album were liberated from the cd shelves. The next thing I knew I was roaring at him, much as my father had done to me,  to turn down Bodies and explaining to him that DMs were too expensive for school shoes, he's bloody nine, ffs! He is especially taken by John Lydon and has been watching interviews on YouTube and the Winterland concert, especially No Fun over and over. Last week he watched Punk Britannia, I expected him to fall asleep during the first episode but he was still awake when episode three started, I know bad parenting but I thought, it's better for him than the bloody X-factor.

Getting to the point of the post, last night he was watching Winterland again and I said, "do you want to see the most exciting piece of live punk footage?" well it is for me anyway, and he said sure, so I typed the clash and I fought the law into YouTube and as if by magic the promo was there.

As I said above, I did not intend to post the Clash doing a cover but sometimes it is worth posting the obvious, 'cause we tend to forget how brilliant this band were and when you see a kid some thirty four years after the recording, watch with a big smile on his face and at the end video can only say "wow" you know that he knows that he is experienced something a bit special.

Strummer once said "Any pimple-encrusted kid can jump up and become king of the rock'n'roll world" but what he failed to say was that very few over thirty years later can make another kid nearly say to his father "fucking hell!"