Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
In many respects, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash had a Lennon/McCartney-style songwriting partnership, but with even greater contrast between their writing styles. Strummer often sang overtly political songs like “White Riot” and “Clampdown” in a gruff snarl, while Jones gradually emerged as a gifted melodist, writing more about personal relationships in this higher, brighter voice on singles like “Train in Vain” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”
On most Clash songs, you could correctly assume that whoever’s singing wrote the lyrics. One notable exception is “Lost in the Supermarket” on the band’s 1979 double album London Calling, which features Jones singing a wistful lyric penned by Strummer that was inspired by Jones’s adolescence. Jones sings “I wasn’t born so much as I fell out,” one of the greatest lines in the Clash catalog. “Nobody seemed to notice me / We had a hedge back home in the suburbs / Over which I never could see.”
“He wrote it with me in mind, which is really a touching thing,” Jones said in a 2008 interview with journalist Ari Surdoval. “Everybody thinks I wrote that one, because I sing it, but Joe wrote it for me. It’s not completely accurate, though. We didn’t have a hedge,” he added with a laugh.
The line about the hedge probably brought “Lost in the Supermarket” to mind for Ben Folds, who covered the song on his soundtrack for the 2006 animated film Over the Hedge.
Three more essential Clash deep cuts:
“What’s My Name”
Guitarist Keith Levene was a founding member of the Clash who was out of the band by the time they recorded their 1977 self-titled debut, and “What’s My Name” is the only Clash song with a Levene writing credit. Levene went on to form Public Image Ltd, and died in 2022.
“Charlie Don’t Surf”
One of the most popular tracks on 1981’s Sandinista! was inspired by a line famously spoken by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
“Inoculated City”
Some pressings of 1982’s Combat Rock feature a shorter version of the dystopian, darkly funny “Inoculated City” that edited out the initially unauthorized sample of a TV commercial for the bathroom cleaning product 2000 Flushes.
