116. Deny

The Clash (CBS, 1977);
composed by Michael Jones & John Mellor

The Clash’s amphetiminic UK debut is the only one of theirs I still listen to with rapt pleasure beginning to end. They gizmoed it up for the U.S. version two years later, and if I was as intent on cracking that market as they had to have been, I might have done likewise, because the original 14-song disc would not have done it – it is just too perfect an evocation of too specific a state of mind. Unlike the cramped urban miniatures on Wire’s debut the same year, there is a weird jolliness to the Clash’s version of mid-‘70s London paranoia, albeit not one iota less bitter. Unlike the other three tracks the U.S. version omitted, this tune is actually catchy, but sitting smack between “What’s My Name” and “London’s Burning,” it lays the whole weird game out: “You’re such a liar / You’re selling your no-no all the time.” The latter is a slang term for salespeople who lose their knack and start talking themselves into refusals over and over. Funnier as it is, this is what “Janie Jones” is about, too. Once the Clash figured out what they were selling, they could not make any more like those.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.