Complete Control

The lyric is about control over a band's career. The title comes from a band meeting in a pub in Soho's Wardour Street at which Bernie Rhodes said he wanted complete control.

It was recorded at Sarm East Studios in Whitechapel, engineered by Mickey Foote and produced by Lee Perry, who was in London producing for Bob Marley and the Wailers when the band invited him. Afterwards the band went back and reworked the guitars and reduced the echo Perry had added. It was Topper Headon's first recording with the Clash. Released in September 1977 with City of the Dead on the B-side, it reached number 28, the first Clash release in the UK top 30. Listeners to John Peel's show voted it number 2 in the 1978 Festive Fifty, and Rolling Stone ranked it number 361 in 2004.

Reception

Dave Simpson ranked it third among the Clash's 40 greatest songs in the Guardian, and singled out Strummer yelling you're my guitar hero during Jones's solo. In a 1980 interview with the zine Jet Lag, Chuck Berry, asked about new records, said of it that it sounds like the first one. The song first appeared on an album on the 1979 US edition of The Clash.