In the gloom of a recording studio in London, Joe Strummer is playing a repeated riff on the piano, trying to nail down a new song he's working on.

The door to the studio opens and producer Guy Stevens walks in, trying to get his attention. Strummer ignores him.

For a moment only the piano can be heard until Stevens picks up a bottle of red wine and pours it across the keyboard and over Joe's hands.

Strummer plays on, creating a song that will soon grace the album London Calling.

It's an odd way to make a record, but it's just part of the madness involved in the creation of one of rock's finest albums.

Like so many masterworks, London Calling might have been a very different record.

Disaster strikes on a train

Even before the band began recording they'd courted disaster when their roadie left the demo tapes for the album at a train station.

It turns out the band had been rehearsing and writing songs at a rehearsal space in Pimlico that doubled as a car mechanics workshop.

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They'd recorded the new material on a reel-to-reel tape recorder over several weeks, taking breaks only to play five-a-side football at the local park.

There was real intensity at these sessions, Strummer recalled in one of his last interviews: "We weren't night-clubbing people, all I remember is writing, rehearsing and recording it."

When the time came to move studios, they entrusted roadie Johnny Green with the job of delivering them across town to producer Guy Stevens.

Green stepped onto the train on London's northern line, but the tapes didn't. It could have been a disaster, but the band was in such hot form they didn't really break stride.

The Clash, though, had bigger problems that went to the heart of who they were and the brand of music they played.

The day punk died

In 1979, it's fair to say the band was punk royalty. Socially conscious, they railed against injustice and government indifference to the working class in their songs and they did this within the close confines of punk music.

But for The Clash, this brand of music had become stifling — a kind of musical strait-jacket.

In 1979, it's fair to say the band was punk royalty. ( Bob Gruen )

As Mick Jones put it, "there was a point when punk was getting narrower and narrower in what it could achieve and where it would go. It was painting itself into a corner."

In a warning shot to their fans, The Clash had signed with CBS records. Some cried sell-out.

Others were more brutal, including punk fanzine writer Mark Perry, who told the world, "punk [music] died the day the Clash signed to CBS".

Some bands play it safe — but they didn't

But the controversy didn't end there. The band were now at war with the same record company. The Clash saw the new album as a major statement, almost certainly a double.

CBS warned this would double the price. Lead singer Joe Strummer was furious, believing music should be accessible to all and knowing price gouging would destroy the band's street cred.

Lead singer Joe Strummer knew price gouging would destroy the band's street cred. ( Wikimedia Commons: Masao Nakagami )

In truth, part of the reason they had begun recording themselves was to prove to the company that making an LP didn't have to cost a fortune.

The tapes proved it, but in their heart the band also knew this record needed real care that would bring together all the musical elements they had in mind.

In this environment some bands might have played it safe. They didn't. When it came time to record seriously, the man they chose to produce the album was Guy Stevens.

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He was a producer with an impeccable track record. Traffic, Free and Spooky Tooth were just a few of the groups he'd worked his magic for.

But Stevens was a man on the edge with some interesting working practices.

'Psychic injection' key to iconic record

As the band's recording engineer Bill Price explained, Steven's believed his job was to get the "maximum amount of emotion on the record".

"His chosen technique for doing this was by direct psychic injection," Price said.

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The "psychic injection" might come in the form of a drum cymbal that he'd throw across the room, risking horrific damage to anyone in the way.

His rationale was that everyone needed to be on edge — emotion was everything.

When he wasn't throwing cymbals and pouring wine on pianos, he had other ways of lifting the tension.

"He'd pick up a ladder and then he'd throw that around and then he'd pick up six or seven chairs and throw them against the back wall," guitarist Mick Jones recalls.

In this climate it's almost impossible to believe that a song with the musical nuances of the album's title track could evolve. But it did.

Inspired by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the strikes of Britain's "winter of discontent", the song took its title from the repeated phrase used on the BBC World Service.

It captures the mood perfectly of a world and a nation on the brink.

"London Calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down. "London calling to the underworld, come out of the cupboard you boys and girls."

A homage to Presley

As the album evolved it became clear that this was no simple punk record. Yes, the subject matter still railed against injustice, unemployment and police violence, but the songs ranged in style from rockabilly to reggae, from punk to jazz.

If the song material would test the British establishment, the style of music was also going test an audience used to a strict diet of hard-edged guitar rock.

As it happened, fans would get a hint of this in the cover art.

There, a photo shows Paul Simonon slamming his bass guitar onto the stage in contorted rage.

Paul Simonon was photographed slamming his bass guitar onto the stage in contorted rage. ( Wikipedia: Epic Records )

But the image snapped slightly out of focus by photographer Pennie Smith is framed by the words London Calling in green and pink, clearly in homage to the cover of Elvis Presley's first LP.

On its release the reaction was immediate, with Rolling Stone magazine extolling the album's virtues: "The record ranges across the whole of rock and roll's past for its sound ... everything has been brought together into a single, vast, stirring story — one that, as the Clash tell it, seems not only theirs but ours".

Others have been less kind, including music writer Tom Ward who took a step back.

"The problem with London Calling are its inconsistencies and incoherence. .. there is little that links each track to the other in form and fluidity," he wrote.

Punk changed forever

What no-one was in any doubt about though was this: punk had changed forever.

Three chords were no longer enough. Anger alone would not cut the creative mustard. A movement that had begun barely three years before had dissipated.

In the years that followed, London Calling would be called the greatest album of the '80s.

In the years that followed, London Calling would be called the greatest album of the eighties. ( Wikimedia Commons: Helge Øverås )

The facts are clear, though — it was released in 1979 and it was very much a record of the '70s.

For all its musical variation, its subject matter expressed the last gasp of a decade where disco, disillusionment and discord held sway, hinting only faintly at the next ten years where corporatism would rule and greed would be good.

Editor's note, December 16, 2019: An earlier version of this article said Margaret Thatcher was prime minister at the time of the winter of discontent, but it occurred under the previous Labour prime minister James Callaghan.