LONDON CALLING NEW YORK NEW YORK
by Peter Silverton

How’s this for a surprising musical coincidence? Frank Sinatra cut his version of "New York, New York" the same summer that the Clash recorded "London Calling" in 1979. That nearly simultaneous expression of optimistic striving and dystopic modernity is the jumping-off point for London Calling New York New York, a tale of two cities and two songs that came to exemplify them.

Peter Silverton, the veteran English author and journalist who died in 2023, did numerous interviews and in-depth research to dig deep into the history and impact of the two songs on their respective cities. Combining musical scholarship, cultural analysis and personal memoir, London Calling New York New York is rich with wit, fascinating digressions and scholarly insight. He addresses nostalgia, mythmaking, family, crime, war, art, terrorism, politics, film, fidelity and propaganda. Salting the story with tales from his own colorful life, Silverton ranges back and forth across the Atlantic and over centuries, taking in the almost biological connection between the cities, the songs and their creators.

From the Great Fire of London to a White Castle in the Bronx, from the Thames to the Hudson, Joe Strummer to George Gershwin, Noel Coward to Jay-Z, Primrose Hill to Yankee Stadium, Maggie Thatcher to Fiorello La Guardia, Silverton marshals connections and coincidences to illuminate the creative process and its enduring cultural impact. 

As Silverton writes in an author’s note, “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. It reaches back to my decades-long light friendship with Joe Strummer, my presence at several significant early performances of ‘London Calling’ and at Joe’s West London cremation in December 2002.”

Hinged around a pair of epochal songs, Pete Silverton's tale of two cities is a masterpiece that you will read right through to the end without putting down. This multi-faceted, compulsively readable work: complex in both structure and erudite (but never pedantic) thought ranges across the entire 20th century and before and beyond. Part autobiography but without a hint of unseemly narcissistic ego, Pete Silverton's role in the tale is as an enlightened Greek chorus. Often through the experiences and words of others — his wife, his kids, his friends, lesser and greater name archetypes — he unravels his (our!) culture and himself.
I always knew Pete was a great writer. But I didn't know he was this good. London Calling New York New York is a masterpiece.
—Chris Salewicz, author of Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer

A clever idea — paralleling Clash and Frank Sinatra recordings that came out the same year (1979) — deftly executed by the late British journalist Silverton. Its 206 pages are filled with the kind of original insights that leave you thinking about both songs and acts like you never had before.
—Gary Graff, Oakland Press

paperback $20.00 ISBN 979-8-9898283-5-7 
eBook $8.95 ISBN 979-8-9898283-6-4