“Here at last was art with access to a contemporary, white, English-speaking proletarian culture. It pos­ited kids whose very determination to survive took guts and whose unwillingness to give up the idea of victory was positively heroic”

The Eighth (or Ninth) Annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll

The Seventh (or Eighth) Annual Pazz and Jop Critics Poll

“The Clash may be the greatest rock and roll band in the world… but they haven’t conquered Britain yet.”

“I haven’t been this excited about rock and roll in at least 10 years. First it was isolated artists, then a vanguard, but now it looks like a movement.”

The Clash and the Pistols have established social realism as an essential part of punk ideology, but this does not make their music the “direct expression of the contemporary working class.”