I suppose there's nothing I can do

The Clash - 'Train In Vain (Stand By Me)' (London Calling - 1979)

Imagine you are Bill Price, an engineer on The Clash’s third album London Calling; the recording sessions have taken place over the end of the summer and early autumn, and you know that the album’s track listing has been finalised - it is a double album too - and the lyrics are being printed onto the packaging. So it would probably be a surprise when the band’s guitarist Mick Jones invites you to come and listen to the album on a Saturday afternoon, and you find him in the vocal booth recording a new song.

The song in question, ‘Train In Vain’,¹ was scheduled to be given away with British music weekly NME as a flex-disc and was finished by that Monday night. In the end, the NME release didn’t happen, so it was decided to include it on the album after their cover of ‘Revolution Rock’ there was a problem, though - the artwork had gone to the printers, and the record sleeves were in production.

With the song added to the album without any reference on the artwork, the title and position on the vinyl record was scratched into the run out groove on the album’s fourth side. So, despite what some people say about it, it isn’t really a hidden track in the same way that albums in the CD era had. There was no choice other than not to have the name on the artwork because it was a last-minute addition to the master tape. Because of this lack of detail, fans didn’t know what the song was called; you’d assume ‘Stand By Me’ from the lyrics, and there’s no real clue that it would be called ‘Train In Vain’ Mick Jones has said that the song had a rhythm like a train and there was a feeling of being lost.

The lyrics deal with Jones’ relationship with The Slits’ guitarist, Viv Albertine. The Slits’ most famous song, potentially except their cover of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ was ‘Typical Girls’ in which the lyrics mention girls standing by their men (“Typical Girls stand by their man”) in the fashion of the famous Tammy Wynette song. Albertine referenced the titular train in a 2009 interview with Eccentric Sleeve Notes.

‘Train in Vain’, what a beautiful song. It still makes me laugh when I hear it because mmm… I wasn't that bad… I'm really proud to have inspired that but often he [Jones] won't admit to it. He used to get the train to my place in Shepherds Bush and I would not let him in. He was bleating on the doorstep. That was cruel. It's such an odd title; there's nothing in it about a train.

Potentially the train journeys he was making across London to her door were in vain. Given Jones was singing about being beaten up by a gang in 1978 and his general state of mind on another London Calling song, ‘I’m Not Down’ it isn’t hard to imagine that the break-up contributed to his few months of depression during the recording sessions.

There’s more in the lyrics with references to money hardship (keeping the wolves at bay) and how being emotionally sound is more important than being financially sound. Still, there is a sense that he realised that this is over and is looking for closure - we should also consider that we are only hearing one side of this throughout. There is one final tieback to an actual incident - Mick Jones had his flat burgled, and he did need clothes and somewhere to stay.

The song ended up being the final single from the album in the US, released in early 1980, and it ended up being their first song that reached the top 30 of the charts. In many ways, the success of that song puts the band in the shop window in the US for the album after next², Combat Rock, singer Joe Strummer has said that the album was made “about as far from America as you can get” but you can’t deny that this one song changed the narrative of them being part of the British punk scene and made them the kind of band that could start to sell out American stadia and by 1982 ‘Rock The Casbah’ and ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ were gracing the top twenty having had the way paved for them by the airplay that ‘Train In Vain’ received.

In the mid-1990s, the song got another boost when Annie Lennox covered the song on her album Medusa and played the song on Saturday Night Live. A year later, Garbage based the drum loop for ‘Stupid Girl’ from their debut album Garbage on the song, and they just missed the US top 20 and scored a UK top five hit with it - the song features a co-writing credit for Jones.³

1. ‘Train in Vain (Stand by Me)’ for the US market.

2. Recording for Sandinista! started in February 1980 when the song was making waves across the Atlantic.

3. In 2007, when the song was remastered for Garbage’s greatest hits album, the writing credit named all four Clash members.