According to filmmaker and disc jockey Don Letts, “London Calling New York New York unpacks how Sinatra and The Clash shaped their cities – and how those cities in turn shaped their iconic songs, recorded at the same time but worlds apart.”
Two songs from and about two cities on different continents, seemingly a generation apart musically and culturally, and yet tied together by time and place. When author Peter Silverton bumped into old school friend Joe Strummer in a pub, he told him that he’d just worked out that The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ was recorded only days apart from Frank Sinatra recording ‘(Theme From) New York New York’. Strummer’s response was to laugh incredulously and ask, “How can that be?”
London Calling New York New York is the answer to that question. As Silverton writes in his introduction, “This is a story about two songs and the cities they came to represent, those songs’ writers, the two cities’ many other emblematic songs (and their writers) and the two metropolitan cultures: their differences and their similarities. It’s also a personal story: mine.”
Peter Silverton was a journalist, author, and ex-school friend of one John Joseph Mellors, the man later better known to the world as Joe Strummer. An early admirer and supporter of the punk scene while on Sounds magazine where he was features editor in 1976, Silverton travelled on The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy Tour bus, and despite Strummer wanting him ejected; he was kept aboard by Glen Matlock, with whom Peter wrote I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol (1990). Silverton and Strummer somehow remained friends, albeit with intermittent contact, for the rest of their lives.
During a forty-year writing career Silverton wrote for major newspapers and magazines on a range of topics, often drawn to musical subjects as eclectic as his taste and interests. He authored several books, including a 2009 best-seller about bad language titled Filthy-English – The How, Why, When And What Of Everyday Swearing (Portobello Books), and was working on several manuscripts at the time of his death in 2023, from a brain tumour. He completed London Calling New York New Yorkin the final two and a half years of his life, finishing it months before failing health halted his creative process.
“I always knew Pete was a great writer. But I didn’t know he was this good.” Said Chris Salewicz, author of Redemption Song: The Ballad Of Joe Strummer about the newly published book.
London Calling New York New York takes the reader on a journey through time and place, from the Great Fire of London to a White Castle in the Bronx, from the Thames to the Hudson, Primrose Hill to Yankee Stadium, with diversions to Eastern Europe, Moscow and Liverpool along the way. It involves a cast of characters not only including Joe Strummer, Frank Sinatra and Martin Scorsese, but also George Gershwin, Noel Coward, Jay-Z, Maggie Thatcher, Fiorello La Guardia and others.
As Tony Fletcher, author of The Clash: The Music That Matters, noted: “Equal parts music biography, personal memoir, autoethnography, and psychogeography, London Calling New York New York is ultimately unique.”
Musician, producer and author Lenny Kaye commented: “Peter Silverton’s passionate voice about music lives ever on in this transatlantic voyage between two seminal ports of rock and roll call and response.”
Throughout this extraordinary tale of two cities, Silverton reminds us that “When one breathes out, the other breathes in,’ and as befits the book’s title and subject, it is being published as a hardback and eBook in the UK by Rockett 88 Books, and as a paperback and eBook in New York by Trouser Press which is owned by Ira Robbins, the first magazine editor to commission Peter as a freelance writer, for a piece about Joe Strummer’s 101-ers, in 1976.
The book’s cover was designed by Peter’s son, Spike Silverton and can be purchased here. Don Letts also said of the book that it’s “A factual, fun and fascinating read.”
