By the time The Clash released their third album London Calling in December 1979, they had a relatively modest following in the U.S. While they were considered to be one of the premier English punk bands, they had not received much airplay on mainstream radio stations—even those that adhered to the album-oriented rock format. Their self-titled debut album did not get released in the U.S. until more than two years after it hit shelves in the UK in 1977. Both that album and Give ‘Em Enough Rope (1978) reached the Billboard 200, but neither made it to the chart’s upper half.
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When The Clash had a Top 40 hit in 1980 with “Train in Vain,” it wasn’t just a breakthrough for the band—it was a breakthrough for punk. Seminal bands in the genre, such as The Stooges, The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and Siouxsie and the Banshees were either non-entities on the U.S. charts or, at most, had minor hits. The song that wound up introducing The Clash to a larger U.S. audience was one that nearly didn’t get put on London Calling. It was added so late to the album it didn’t even get included on the track listing.
An Unlikely Breakthrough Hit
While London Calling wound up producing one of The Clash’s best-known songs, for several weeks after its release, it appeared that it would be yet another album by a punk band to go largely unnoticed on American radio. Prior to the release of London Calling, The Clash had amassed seven chart singles in the UK, none of which reached a Billboard chart in the U.S. A week before London Calling’s release, CBS Records put out the album’s title track as a lead single in the UK, but there was no lead single in the U.S.
“Train in Vain” did get a boost from The Clash’s U.S. distributor, Epic Records, when it provided radio stations with a “white label” promotional copy of the song in late 1979. Without the promotional single, it’s entirely possible that “Train in Vain” would have never received airplay or been released as a commercial single, because it was hidden on London Calling. It was tacked onto the end of the double album’s track listing and not noted on its sleeve or label.
Were The Clash trying to keep fans from hearing “Train in Vain”? Was it intended as an easter egg to be discovered? The actual reason for the song’s exclusion from London Calling’s packaging entails far less intrigue. The Clash had initially arranged to include “Train in Vain” as a free flexi-disc insert in an issue of NME, but the giveaway never occurred. There was room to add the song to London Calling, but by the time the decision was made to make it an album track, the sleeves had already been printed. There was time, however, to get the track’s name and notation of its fifth position on Side 4 inscribed into the vinyl between the song’s grooves and the label.
Chart Performance and Legacy
Perhaps due to the airplay that “Train in Vain” received on AOR stations, Columbia Records released it as a commercial single in February 1980. It still took another five weeks for it to make its first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100. “Train in Vain” spent 14 weeks on the chart, peaking at No. 23. There would be no follow-up singles from London Calling, but the success of “Train in Vain” likely elongated the album’s stay on the Billboard 200. It spent 33 weeks on the chart, getting as high as No. 27. While this performance paled in comparison to that of The Clash’s 1982 album Combat Rock, it was an unprecedented level of commercial success for a band that emerged from a punk scene.
We can only speculate how the contours of pop and rock music would have changed in the years that followed. Still, it’s hard to imagine The Clash didn’t open the doors for post-punk artists such as The Cure, The Psychedelic Furs, and The B-52s to receive more widespread recognition in the early-to-mid ‘80s than their punk predecessor did just a few years earlier.
“Train in Vain” has enjoyed sustained popularity, perhaps because the immense success of Combat Rock stimulated interest in The Clash’s back catalog. Also, Garbage using a drum loop from “Train in Vain” for their hit “Stupid Girl” has helped to keep the song in the cultural consciousness. It has also been covered numerous times, including by Annie Lennox, Dwight Yoakam, Third Eye Blind, and Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs.
To be sure, London Calling would have almost certainly been The Clash’s most popular album to date, even if “Train in Vain” hadn’t become an unlikely hit single. Punk was already beginning to find broader acceptance, and other tracks from the album, such as the title track and “Lost in the Supermarket,” received AOR airplay. Even so, “Train in Vain” did much of the heavy lifting of making The Clash more familiar to a broader audience, paving the way for “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go” to become big hits on radio and MTV.
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