Red sky at night

The Clash - 'Shepherds Delight' (Sandinista! - 1980)

Today’s entry is inspired by a friend from university who loved the Clash. I remember texting them about Joe Strummer’s death in December 2002, talking about the US and UK versions of the debut album and laughing at the song that precedes today’s closing track.

How do you follow up a landmark double album that reaches beyond your punk roots and touches on influences from pop, reggae, and ska to rockabilly, jazz, and hard rock? Clearly, you release a triple album within 12 months that also throws dub, folk, disco and rap on top of everything you did before. The Clash’s Sandinista! is a veritable smorgasbord of an album, but not every sandwich on the board is of the same quality.

In the months after releasing their 1979 album London Calling, stuffed to the gills with some of the best music the band would commit to tape, you could forgive The Clash for slacking off just a little. After all, even The Beatles struggled to get back on the horse in early 1969, and Bob Dylan’s motorcycle cut his productivity after Blonde on Blonde, and with the best will in the world, The Final Cut, Presence, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants and Adore are not career highlights.

So, it’s clear that moving on from double albums can be tricky; The Clash laugh at your conventions and put one in the eye of CBS, their American label, who resisted the idea of a double album (though then happily released Bruce Springsteen’s The River within ten months.)

Mick Jones has said,

I always saw it as a record for people who were, like, on oil rigs. Or Arctic stations. People that weren't able to get to the record shops regularly

So, it is people on oil rigs and at Arctic research stations I want you to picture getting on to that sixth side of the vinyl and two hours into the journey, which has seen highs of ‘The Magnificent Seven‘, ‘Police on My Back’ and ‘Washington Bullets’ and lows of ‘Rebel Waltz’, ‘Mensforth Avenue¹’ ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ before ending us with the knockout 1-2 punch of atrociousness that is ‘Career Opportunities’ and ‘Shepherds Delight’²’. The former is a re-recording of the 1977 song by Ben and Luke Gallagher, sung by the sons of Mick Gallagher (The Blockhead, who played keyboards on this record.) that precisely no one needs to hear, and the latter is an indulgent dub noodling for three and a half minutes.

Oddly, they decided to spend the last minutes of the album with a woozy, laid-back dub instrumental to the melody of ‘Police and Thieves’, a Junior Murvin song they covered more than adequately on their debut record.

This would be understandable if they were running out of material to fill that last side of vinyl, but if you look at the tracklisting and song lengths on the record, you see that. Sides three, four and six average over twenty-five minutes and twenty-five minutes, out a quadrable record with the 144 mins on the album - they even had a few more songs that didn’t meet the cut from non-album singles like ‘Bank Robber’ to offcuts like ‘Blonde Rock n Roll’.

I am happy to declare ‘Shepherds Delight’ the most pointless, knocked-off waste of time we have covered across the almost 200 albums we’ve looked at. You can listen to it below, but please be advised you’d spend the time more productively counting your feet.

1. An instrumental of ‘Something About England’ backwards with overdubs.

2. I know there should be an apostrophe, but there isn’t.