London Calling (album) - Reception and Legacy - Accolades

Accolades

London Calling has been considered by many critics to be one of the greatest rock albums of all time, including Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who said that it sounded more purposeful than "most albums, let alone double albums". In 1987, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times named it the fourth best album of the previous 10 years and said that, while The Clash's debut was a punk masterpiece, London Calling marked the genre's "coming of age", as the band led the way into "fertile post-punk territory." In 1989, Rolling Stone ranked it as the best album of the 1980s. In 1999, Q magazine named London Calling the fourth greatest British album of all time, and wrote that it is "the best Clash album and therefore among the very best albums ever recorded". In 2002, Q included it on its list of the 100 Best Punk Albums, and in 2003, Mojo ranked it twenty second on their list of the Top 50 Punk Albums.

London Calling was ranked as the sixth greatest album of the 1970s by NME, and the second best by Pitchfork Media, whose reviewer Amanda Petrusich said that it was The Clash's "creative apex" as a "rock band" rather than as a punk band. In 2003, London Calling was ranked number eight on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Entertainment Weekly's Tom Sinclair declared it the "Best Album of All Time" in his headline for a 2004 article on the album. In 2007, London Calling was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, a collection of recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance. The album was included in the BBC Radio 1 2009 Masterpieces Series, marking it as one of the most influential albums of all time, some thirty years after its original release.