London Calling New York New York

Peter Silverton

Out Now

Available from

Rocket88books.com

Hardback £25

eBook £8

“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…. A factual, fun and fascinating read.” Don Letts (filmmaker, DJ, artist)

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 Pete 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’.  Joe’s response was to laugh incredulously and ask, “How can that be?”

“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.” Lenny Kaye (musician, producer, author)

This book is Peter’s explanation of how that came to be. As he 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.”

“I always knew Pete was a great writer.  But I didn’t know he was this good.” Chris Salewicz (author of Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer)

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.

“Equal parts music biography, personal memoir, autoethnography, and psychogeography, London Calling New York New York is ultimately unique.” Tony Fletcher (author of The Clash: The Music That Matters)

Throughout this extraordinary tale of two cities, Peter 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.

Author Peter Silverton was a journalist, author, and ex-school friend of one of John Joseph Mellors, 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, Peter travelled on the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy Tour bus, despite Joe wanting him ejected; he was kept aboard by Glen Matlock, with whom Peter wrote I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol (1990). Peter and Joe remained friends, albeit with intermittent contact, for the rest of their lives.

During a forty-year writing career Peter 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 York in the final two and a half years of his life, finishing it months before failing health halted his creative process.

The book’s cover was designed by Peter’s son, Spike Silverton.

Buy the book HERE.