The Clash Sandinista! CBS
Within a four-minute song on the fourth side of their fourth album, British punk band The Clash switched gears and transformed themselves from urban guerillas into a worldwide political phenomenon.
Washington Bullets, one of the key tracks on the Sandinista! album, marked the moment when the London band, notorious for spewing scorn and bile on injustice at home, grew up and turned their guns on the evils of world politics.
Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro and, most controversially, the White House, were caught in the crosshairs of frontman Joe Strummer's incendiary lyrics. From the atrocity of the failed Bay of Pigs assault, the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and the oppression of Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, it was a tour-de-force snapshot of a world run by despots.
And to emphasise the point, the blood and fire sentiment was juxtaposed against a lilting calypso rhythm and melody more redolent of the lapping seas on a Caribbean beach than a laundry list of dictatorial abuse.
Washington Bullets is a pivotal track on a pivotal album, the band's magnum opus that broke them onto a wider, global audience and almost broke them financially in the process. While Sandinista! is essentially a six-sided political manifesto, it is Washington Bullets that best captures the tension and angst of the times.