London Calling New York New York: Two Songs, Two Cities - Softcover

Silverton, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798989828357

Publisher: Trouser Press Books, 2025

Synopsis

How’s this for a surprising musical coincidence? Frank Sinatra cut his version of "New York, New York" the same summer that the Clash recorded "London Calling." That nearly simultaneous expression of optimistic striving and dystopic despair - traditional pop music and aggressive punk rock -- is the jumping-off point for London Calling New York New York, a tale of two cities and two songs that came to exemplify them.

Peter Silverton, the veteran English journalist who died in 2023 not long after completing the manuscript, did numerous interviews and in-depth research to dig deep into the history and impact of the two songs on their respective cities. Combining musical scholarship, cultural analysis and personal memoir, London Calling New York New York is rich with fascinating detail, scholarly insight and wit, taking detours into nostalgia, mythmaking, family, crime, war, art, terrorism, politics, film, fidelity and propaganda.

Salting the story with tales from his own colorful life, Silverton ranges back and forth across the Atlantic and over centuries, taking in the almost biological connection between the cities, the songs and their creators. From the Great Fire of London to a White Castle burger joint in the Bronx, from the Thames to the Hudson, Joe Strummer to George Gershwin, Noel Coward to Jay-Z, Primrose Hill to Yankee Stadium, Maggie Thatcher to Fiorello La Guardia, Silverton marshals a wealth of connections and coincidences to illuminate the creative process and its enduring cultural impact.

From the author’s note, “This is a story about two songs and the cities they came to represent, those songs’ writers, the two cities’ many other emblematic songs (and their writers) and the two metropolitan cultures: their differences and their similarities. It’s also a personal story: mine. It reaches back to my decades-long light friendship with Joe Strummer, my presence at several significant early performances of ‘London Calling’ and at Joe’s West London cremation in December 2002.”

Praise for London Calling New York New York:
Pete Silverton's tale of two cities is a masterpiece that you will read right through to the end without putting down. This multi-faceted, compulsively readable work -- complex in both structure and erudite (but never pedantic) thought -- ranges across the entire 20th century and before and beyond. I always knew Pete was a great writer. But I didn't know he was this good.
—Chris Salewicz, author of Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer

London Calling New York New York unpacks how Sinatra and the Clash shaped their cities — and how those cities in turn shaped their iconic songs, recorded at the same time but worlds apart… a factual, fun and fascinating read.
—Don Letts, filmmaker, DJ, artist (Big Audio Dynamite)

Equal parts music biography, personal memoir, autoethnography, and psychogeography, London Calling New York New York is ultimately unique. It crackles with the energy that the two eponymous cultural capitals demand of their habitants, yet it maintains a tourist-like inquisitiveness for the various side streets, delivering minute urban details and anecdotes that even this London-raised New Yorker was entirely unaware of. A special book.
—Tony Fletcher, author of The Clash: The Music That Matters and All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music From the Streets of New York 1927–77

Pete Silverton's passionate voice about music lives ever on in this transatlantic voyage between two seminal ports of rock and roll call and response. Illuminating paired music scenes through their iconic anthems, he reveals similarities and differences with a fan's ear-witness to the process of creation and how geography affects the geology of rock as it begins to roll. —Lenny Kaye, author, producer, musician

About this title

About the Author

A prolific feature writer for Sounds in the ’70s and ’80s and later for MOJO, The Guardian and other publications in the UK, Peter Silverton was the author of books such as Essential Elvis, Filthy English and (with Glen Matlock) I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol. He died, after a long illness, in May 2023.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“No, no, no,” said Joe Strummer when I told him that the Clash’s “London Calling” and Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” are the same age. It’s a fact that seems impossible to believe, but it’s a fact, nonetheless. The two recordings are almost exactly the same age. Their birthdays are mere weeks apart.

Joe and I were in a pub in Primrose Hill sometime in the late 20th century, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from the bench on the Regent’s Park boating lake island where his older brother David was found in the summer of 1970 — suicide by 100 tablets of aspirin. That was around the time Joe and I first met, as wayward teenagers — back when John Mellor (the name on his birth certificate) was known as Woody, after Bob Dylan’s mentor Woody Guthrie, and long before he changed it again, to Joe, in 1976.

Ours was a friendship which persisted, loosely, through the subsequent three decades. We shared psychedelic experiments (one featuring a middle-of-the-night police raid) in the late ’60s. In the mid-’70s, I became a devout follower — stalker, almost — of his first notable band, the 101ers, who took their name from the house number of a West London squat. My girlfriend of the time was half in love with him. A poetry lover from rural Essex, she found in him a quintessence of the rough-textured big city glamour she so craved. He had that effect on women, right to the end; ask his wives and girlfriends. Little did my partner know that, like her, he was profoundly shaped by the final tremblings of the British Empire. In his case, a peripatetic childhood of the BBC World Service and second-rank embassies. In hers, a family interned in Japanese camps from 1942 till the end of the war.

In the summer of 1976, Joe and I saw the Sex Pistols and the Rolling Stones together. (Joe waved at Bill Wyman, and Bill waved back.) The following year, a word from Joe got me my first proper writing job. In the late 1970s, I spent time with him in recording studios, in London (though not when he was working on “London Calling”) and in New York, where he and fellow Clash member Mick Jones passed a long night slowly working on a rhyme for “London town.” A few months later, in Paris, we found ourselves in something of a riot at a Clash show organized by the French Communist Party.

Our later meetings were sometimes professional but more often random — like this pub encounter, which was the last time we saw each other before his death in December 2002.

He was looking for a member of Primal Scream who he knew drank in that pub. As ever, Joe wasn’t alone. He always had something of an entourage with him. That evening, it was a bristly teenage skinhead, a fan who clearly — in his own mind, anyway — had appointed himself Joe’s bodyguard for the night.

Joe had a boombox with him. He’d always compiled — and decorated — cassettes, for himself and for others. I’ve still got one somewhere. The cassette in his boombox that night was a collection of his latest passion, 1970s Venezuelan music — the kind of music he played on Joe Strummer’s “London Calling,” his BBC World Service radio programme, which aired for three years prior to his death. The tape played as we sat and talked — loud enough to hear, not quite loud enough to draw complaints. There were no complaints either about the weed Joe was (illegally) smoking. He had that kind of effect on people. A force field of charm which enabled him to — just about — get away with all kinds of bad behavior, as both his wives and most of his work colleagues/comrades would confirm.

When I told Joe about the temporal link between “London Calling” and Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” he cradled his head in his hands theatrically, laughingly seriously. “How could that be? How could that be?”

But it is. Both songs were recorded in the late summer of 1979. As Joe was singing “London Calling” in a North London studio, so more-or-less was Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” in a Los Angeles studio. Even as I type that sentence, even as I know it’s true, I’m not sure I believe it. It’s not just that they’re two very different songs or even that they present two very different ideas of what constitutes a song, with quite distinct expectations of the listener. It’s more than that. The fact is that “London Calling” and “New York, New York” come from different worlds. They belong to different generations — with different views of modern life. Sinatra’s is a show tune, rooted in the precisions and elegances of mid-20th century urbanity. “My parents’ music,” in the words of Barry Myers, who did a two-year stint as DJ for the Clash in their “London Calling” years. The Clash song is — for want of a better phrase — rock and roll.

Edition details

• Publisher: Trouser Press Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798989828357
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 213