Big Audio Dynamite - V. Thirteen

The year is 1980. You stroll down a London street with today’s knowledge, a fifty-year head start on the common man and the elite alike. What do you do with this unprecedented power? Do you get in on the ground floor of emerging businesses like Apple and Microsoft? Stick a few quid on West Germany to win the European Championship? Or do you tell anyone who’s heard of The Clash that, in six years, Mick Jones and Joe Strummer will work on an experimental funk rock album together and watch their head explode? Honestly, the last one is tempting purely for spectacle. 

Yes, you read it right, if you weren’t already aware. After being kicked out of The Clash in 1983 and with the failed band T.R.A.C (Top Risk Action Company for long), Mick Jones formed Big Audio Dynamite in 1984. Recruiting Don Letts, bassist Leo Williams, Dan Donovan on keys, and Greg Roberts on the kit, Big Audio Dynamite set out with a funk-infused mission plan to make everyone forget about The Clash. While that part didn’t exactly happen (and is a fabrication) the band created a whole host of great music, experimental post-punk that did what it wanted to and would delicately jam in any genre to achieve it. 

So, imagine the surprise of anyone who followed the punk legends and also didn’t read the first paragraph of this article that, in 1986 for their second album No. 10, Upping St., Big Audio Dynamite reunited with a familiar face. Joe Strummer’s influence is obvious – the anti-government sentiment quota of the album was met after he wrote down about six words – and it creates a great album that feels like The Clash themselves could have written, supported, and shaped by all the experimental genre elements that Big Audio Dynamite did so well. If you’ve got time, take a listen to the whole album; it’s one of those where basically any of the tracks could have been massive and it’s criminal that the vast majority of them didn’t. 

That certainly made this weeks pick more difficult, mind; there is an absolute laundry list of tracks that came out of Big Audio Dynamite that we could have picked to feature as our prestigious Rock Song of the Week pick this Friday. But, V. Thirteen wins out by virtue of me being the one picking it. The perfect blend of Clash-esque power chords and social discontent and grooving funk rhythms and bass, it is the earworm to end all earworms that you will likely find yourself waking from sleep humming along to. It gets our (my) stamp of complete approval and, as such, must be listened to as loudly as possible as soon as possible. Our lifelong dream of making sure everyone has heard every single rock song ever created depends on it.