Gear Timeline
Mick Jones bought his first guitar — a Gibson Les Paul Junior with a P-90 pickup — because Johnny Thunders used one. This is the specific biographical fact that establishes both his starting point and his musical sensibility in a single sentence: a teenage guitarist in London who looked at the New York Dolls and heard something true and wanted to play the same guitar that the Dolls’ lead guitarist played. The Johnny Thunders connection is the direct line from the glam-punk tradition of the New York Dolls to the specific guitar character that Mick Jones developed — the Les Paul Junior’s raw, biting P-90 tone through the Marshall Plexi aggression of the early Clash recordings. The Junior served as his main guitar until late 1977 or early 1978, when it was smashed at a gig — an event that was immediately celebrated in punk mythology as the kind of equipment casualty that defined the punk approach to guitar as a weapon rather than as a precious object. He then switched to the regular Gibson Les Paul, and the evolution of his guitar collection from the Junior through the Les Paul Standard and Les Paul Custom to the London Calling arsenal of vintage Gibsons and Mesa Boogie amplification is the story of a guitarist who started with the punk ethos and developed it into something musically more sophisticated without ever abandoning the energy that the Johnny Thunders inspiration had established. The Junior got smashed. The Les Paul Standard arrived. The Mesa Boogie followed. And Mick Jones became one of the more quietly influential lead guitarists of the punk era — the musician who demonstrated that punk’s energy and rock’s musical sophistication were not mutually exclusive, and that the Les Paul through the Mesa Boogie could serve both simultaneously.
The Journey
Michael Geoffrey Jones was born on June 26, 1955, in Wandsworth, London, to a Welsh father and a Russian Jewish mother. He spent much of his early life living with his maternal grandmother Stella in South London — his parents having separated when he was young — and attended Strand School before going to art school, “because I thought that’s how you get into bands and stuff.” The art school background is the specific cultural context shared by a significant proportion of the British rock musicians of Jones’s generation: the art school environment of the 1960s and 1970s was where design thinking, aesthetic awareness, and the specific combination of intellectual ambition and creative irreverence that characterised the best of British rock were developed simultaneously. Jones went to art school to get into bands, and he did.
The Clash formation — from the London SS proto-punk band through the brief period with Keith Levene to the stable lineup of Jones, Strummer, Simonon, and Chimes — established Jones’s specific role from the beginning: lead guitarist, melody writer, the more musically accomplished of the two guitarists in a band where the rhythm guitarist was the political philosopher. This division of labor — Strummer’s political urgency combined with Jones’s musical sophistication — is the specific creative dynamic that produced the Clash’s best material, and it is visible in the gear choices: Strummer’s clean Telecaster through the clean combo amp, Jones’s Les Paul through the Mesa Boogie with the MXR Phase 100 and Roland Space Echo adding atmospheric depth. The punk rhythm guitar and the rock lead guitar, in the same band, serving the same political vision.
His dismissal from the Clash in 1983 — terminated by Strummer amid tensions about direction, commercial success, and the specific personal and creative frictions that the Rat Patrol/Combat Rock period had accumulated — ended the primary creative partnership and led to the formation of Big Audio Dynamite with Don Letts in 1984. BAD’s specific contribution — incorporating hip-hop, electronic music, sampling, and world music influences into a rock guitar context that maintained Jones’s specific melodic and harmonic sensibility — is the post-Clash documentation of his musical intelligence applied to new creative territory. The Mesa Boogie loyalty continued into the BAD period and beyond, with Jones using Mesa Boogie Lone Star 2×12 combos in later touring contexts.
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” — the song Jones wrote and sang that became the Clash’s only UK number one single (reaching number one on re-release in 1991, a decade after its original release) — is the most commercially celebrated guitar moment in his catalog. The riff is simple, the chord progression is direct, the energy is immediate: the specific qualities of the best Clash guitar moments applied to a love song rather than a political statement. Jones’s vocal on the track — cleaner and more melodically precise than Strummer’s characteristic roughness — demonstrated the specific vocal versatility that had always been present in the Clash’s two-frontman identity. The guitar, the vocal, the Production — all Jones, in the specific creative space that the Clash at their commercial peak occupied.
Background: Art School, Johnny Thunders, and the Les Paul Junior That Got Smashed
The Johnny Thunders inspiration — the specific act of buying a Gibson Les Paul Junior because the New York Dolls lead guitarist used one — is the foundational creative reference point for Jones’s entire guitar identity. Thunders was the first commercially prominent punk-adjacent guitarist to make the Les Paul Junior’s raw, P-90-driven character the center of his guitar identity, and his influence on the London punk scene was specifically about the specific guitar combination: the Junior’s single P-90 pickup, the low-budget guitar that produced the specific biting, direct, unrefined tone that the New York Dolls’ proto-punk approach required. Jones absorbed this in the early London punk context, chose the same guitar, and developed the specific guitar identity that would evolve from the Junior’s rawness through the Les Paul Standard’s warmth and the London Calling arsenal of vintage Gibsons.
The London SS — the proto-punk band Jones formed with Tony James — is the specific pre-Clash context where the Johnny Thunders influence was first applied professionally. The London SS’s lineup included Terry Chimes and auditioned various members (including Topper Headon, who joined later) before dissolving into the Clash’s formation. The proto-punk context of London SS — oriented toward the New York Dolls, the Stooges, and the MC5 rather than toward the British pub rock that preceded it — established Jones’s specific musical sensibility as more American rock influenced than the typical British guitarist of his generation, which explains the specific Les Paul-and-Mesa-Boogie combination that would later emerge as his primary identity.
The art school background’s specific contribution is the aesthetic sensibility — the visual intelligence, the understanding of image and presentation, the awareness of how music exists in a broader cultural context of style and visual identity. The Clash’s visual presentation — the clothes, the graphics, the specific image of the band — reflects the art school aesthetic awareness that Jones brought to the creative enterprise alongside his musical contribution. The handwritten album sequencing note for London Calling that went on display at the Museum of London exhibition is the physical artifact of this aesthetic intelligence: someone who thinks carefully about sequence, about flow, about how the album exists as a designed object as well as a collection of songs.
His period of exile after the Clash dismissal — the years between the Clash’s dissolution and the BAD breakthrough — was navigated with the specific resilience of a musician who understood that his musical identity was sufficiently strong to survive the specific commercial disruption of being fired from one of the world’s most celebrated bands. Big Audio Dynamite’s specific approach — incorporating electronic music, sampling, hip-hop rhythms, and world music into a rock guitar context — was both a creative departure from the Clash and a natural extension of the Clash’s musical breadth. The Mesa Boogie went into the BAD sessions. The Les Paul Customs went into the BAD sessions. The ear for melody and the commitment to musical quality went into the BAD sessions. The Clash ended; Mick Jones’s music continued.
The Rig: Mick Jones’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
Jones’s first guitar was a Gibson Les Paul Junior with a P-90 pickup, which he bought since Johnny Thunders used one. The Junior served as his main guitar up until late 1977 or early 1978 when it got smashed at a gig. The Gibson Les Paul Junior’s specific character: a single P-90 pickup in the bridge position, a mahogany slab body without the arch or binding of the Les Paul Standard, and the specific raw, biting, unrefined tonal character of the P-90 in that specific construction context. The Junior’s P-90 provides more presence and bite than a PAF humbucker, with a specific single-coil-adjacent quality that gives the Clash’s earliest recordings — the 1977 debut album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope — their particular guitar character. The Junior got smashed, as punk guitars do. Its loss was the catalyst for the more expensive and more tonally refined Les Paul Standard that followed.
For the London Calling sessions, Jones drew from an arsenal including a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard sunburst. The 1958 Les Paul Standard is the specific instrument that represents the peak of the original Les Paul production run — the figured maple top, the late-1958 wide-pattern PAF humbucker pickups, the mahogany back and neck, and the specific tonal combination that makes the 1958-1960 Les Paul Standards the most sought-after and most valuable production electric guitars in rock history. The 1958 Standard’s PAF humbuckers provide the warm, harmonically complex, sustaining tone that the London Calling lead guitar work required — the specific warmth of the pre-ceramic, pre-high-output vintage humbucker that produces harmonic complexity rather than aggressive midrange saturation. The “Stay Free” solo — described as “perhaps his best musical moment” — was played on this configuration, the vintage Les Paul Standard producing the specific warm, singing lead tone through the Mesa Boogie’s natural amplification.
For the 1979 London Calling sessions, Jones drew from an arsenal including a black 1965 Les Paul Custom and 1970s Les Paul Customs in red and white. The Les Paul Custom — the “Black Beauty” variant with the ebony fingerboard, multiple binding, and the specific Custom specification that distinguishes it from the Standard — provides a different tonal character from the Standard: brighter due to the ebony fingerboard’s harder material, with the specific mid-focus that makes the Custom’s PAF humbuckers more cutting and more precise than the Standard’s warmer voice. The multiple Custom examples — the 1965, the red, the white — confirm Jones’s specific preference for the Les Paul family breadth rather than a single primary instrument, using different examples for different songs and different sonic requirements.
For at least part of the recording of the London Calling title track, Jones used a Gibson ES-295 — a rare, hollow-body Gibson archtop with a gold finish that was produced in limited quantities from 1952-1958. In the London Calling video, Jones can be seen playing a Gibson ES-295, a rare guitar that it’s been suggested did make several appearances in the studio during recording. The ES-295’s specific character: a fully hollow archtop with the specific warm, resonant quality of the hollow-body construction, producing a different tonal character from the solid-body Les Paul family — warmer, more acoustically complex, with the specific feedback potential of a fully hollow instrument at high volumes. Its use on the title track adds a specific tonal dimension to the recording that the solid-body guitars don’t provide.
A late-1970s black Fender Stratocaster was used for several songs on London Calling, most notably “Jimmy Jazz.” All of these instruments were stock, as far as we know. The Stratocaster’s single-coil brightness and the specific in-between pickup position character of the late-1970s Strat provide a completely different tonal voice from the Les Paul family’s humbucking warmth — the specific Fender single-coil clarity and quack that suits “Jimmy Jazz”‘s specific jazzy, loose character rather than the Les Paul’s rock warmth. Jones’s willingness to use the right guitar for the right song — rather than defaulting to a single primary instrument across all material — is the mark of a musical intelligence that understands the instrument as a tonal resource rather than as an identity statement.
Several Bond Guitars were donated to Jones by his good friend Andrew Bond, who made the guitars. Bond Guitars — the British-made guitars from the Bond Electraglide and related models — are distinctive instruments with integrated fretless fingerboards and unconventional electronic configurations. Their presence in Jones’s collection reflects both the friendship with Andrew Bond and the specific experimental aesthetic that the art school background and the Clash’s musical openness encouraged.
Amps
Jones on the other hand experimented a lot with amplifiers in the studio, favoring Mesa/Boogie combos, particularly the Mark I and Mark II, which he ran into a Marshall 4×12 cab. The Mesa/Boogie Mark I — the original Boogie designed by Randall Smith, the small combo that became the foundational high-gain amplifier of 1970s and 1980s rock — provided a completely different tonal character from the clean Fender approach that Strummer used. The Boogie’s specific multi-gain-stage preamp design produces a voicing that can go from clean to high-gain in a way that the single-stage Fender Twin or Music Man couldn’t, and the combination of Mesa/Boogie combos into Marshall 4×12 cabinets — using the Boogie’s preamp character with the Marshall cabinet’s speaker response — produced the specific rich, warm, high-gain lead tone that London Calling’s guitar work required. Jones later changed to Mesa Boogie amplifier with two Marshall 4×12 cabinets that he used throughout the rest of his career with The Clash.
During the early times with The Clash, Jones used a Marshall Plexi amplifier as well as occasionally a Fender Twin with a 2×12 cabinet. The Marshall Plexi’s EL34-powered warmth and natural saturation at appropriate volumes — the same amplifier documented throughout this series as the foundational British hard rock amplification — provided the early Clash guitar tone before the Mesa Boogie became Jones’s primary amplification. The transition from Marshall Plexi to Mesa Boogie represents the evolution of Jones’s tonal requirements from the pure Marshall character of the early punk recordings to the more gain-capable Mesa Boogie character appropriate for the more musically sophisticated post-1978 Clash material.
Effects
For effects, Jones mainly used MXR pedals including a Phase 100 Phaser. The MXR Phase 100 — a four-stage phaser with ten speed settings via a rotary switch — provides more phase modulation options than the simpler MXR Phase 90, with the Phase 100’s ten-position switch enabling a wider range of phase speeds from the slowest, most atmospheric sweep to faster, more aggressive phase rates. The Phase 100 appears in the London Calling production on specific songs — “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and others — where the phased guitar adds the specific shimmer and movement of phase modulation to the Les Paul’s warmth. Playing the straightforward vocal melody off Jones’s simple, perfect classic rock chords is a masterstroke, adding backbone to a song that otherwise is happy to jag away into funky guitar licks, cloaked by an MXR Phase 100, and whirring organs.
For effects Jones mainly used a Roland chorus or Space Echo effect. The Roland Space Echo RE-201 — the tape echo unit that provides the specific warm, slightly degrading repeat character of magnetic tape delay — adds the specific spatial depth and warmth of tape echo to specific Clash guitar passages. The Space Echo’s character: the first repeat is clearer than subsequent ones, with each repeat losing high frequencies as the tape passes multiple heads, producing the specific “haunt” of a gradually diminishing echo trail. On “Train in Vain” and “Lost in the Supermarket” — documented as songs where Jones used the Roland Space Echo — the tape echo adds the specific dream-pop quality that distinguishes those tracks from the more aggressive punk material. The chorus-drenched leads and dream-pop-esque chords of “Lost in the Supermarket” reflect the Space Echo’s specific contribution to the London Calling production.
The Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo — an enhanced version of the Space Echo with an additional chorus circuit — appears in Jones’s documented effects for the London Calling sessions. The RE-501 adds the chorus modulation of the RE-201’s tape path to a dedicated chorus circuit, producing both the tape echo’s warm delay and the chorus’s harmonic widening. The combination of both effects in a single unit provides the specific lush, atmospheric quality of the London Calling lead guitar sound that distinguished Jones’s contributions from Strummer’s clean Telecaster approach.
For effects Jones mainly used MXR pedals including a Phase 100, a Flanger, an Analog Delay, and a Noisegate. The MXR Flanger — the classic flange unit with the specific jet-sweep modulation — adds a different, more dramatic modulation character from the Phase 100’s smooth phase sweep. The MXR Analog Delay provides analog delay with the warm, slightly degraded repeat character of the bucket-brigade chip technology rather than the cleaner digital delay. The MXR Noisegate controls the high-gain noise floor of the Mesa Boogie at stage volumes — the same noise control function documented for multiple high-gain guitarists throughout this series.
Mick Jones developed a guitar style that integrated punk rock’s raw energy with reggae rhythms, pioneering the adaptation of reggae “skanking” upstroke patterns into punk contexts for a choppy, rhythmic drive. This technique — emphasizing off-beat accents rather than the downstroke-focused approach of standard rock rhythm guitar — appears prominently in “London Calling,” where Jones layered it over aggressive punk backbeats. The skanking upstroke is the physical technique that gives the Clash’s reggae-influenced material its specific rhythmic character: the chord arrives on the upbeat rather than the downbeat, creating the syncopated, open, rhythmic space that distinguishes reggae from rock. Jones adapted this technique to the punk rock context, producing the specific Clash hybrid that made their music immediately identifiable as neither pure punk nor pure reggae but something specifically their own.
The London Calling album — recorded in six weeks at Wessex Sound Studios, produced by Guy Stevens and the band — is the specific creative achievement that justifies the entire Clash career and most of the subsequent critical and commercial rehabilitation of punk as a genre rather than a fashion. Jones’s guitar contribution to that recording is the primary musical evidence for everything that the Clash were accused of promising and delivering: the musical sophistication beneath the political urgency, the technical intelligence beneath the punk commitment, the warm Les Paul Standard warmth beneath the Mesa Boogie gain structure. The “Stay Free” solo — played on the 1958 Standard through the Mark I — is eight bars of melodic guitar that arrive at the end of a song about friendship, loyalty, and the specific tragedy of a friend’s imprisonment, and they say everything that eight bars of melody can say without words: warmth, memory, loss, and the specific quality of feeling that the best guitar leads in any tradition produce when the musician is completely in service of the song’s emotional content. The Les Paul Junior got smashed. The 1958 Standard survived. The music is permanent.
His handwritten album sequencing note for London Calling — displayed at the Museum of London exhibition — is the physical evidence of the aesthetic intelligence that the art school background developed: someone who thinks about sequence, about flow, about how the nineteen songs on the album exist in relationship to each other as a designed musical experience rather than as a collection of individually complete tracks. The handwriting. The sequencing. The Les Paul Standard. The Mesa Boogie into the Marshall 4×12. The MXR Phase 100. The Roland Space Echo. The reggae upstroke skanked into a punk context. All of it, together, in six weeks at Wessex Sound Studios. That is London Calling. That is Mick Jones.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Mick Jones plays guitar as a melodic rock musician whose specific punk context required him to combine technical sophistication with punk directness — to be simultaneously more skilled than the average punk guitarist and more committed than the average technical rock guitarist. His chord voicings — sophisticated F major and G major shapes incorporating C-shape barre variations, moving beyond basic power chords to add harmonic depth — reflect the musical ambition that art school developed and the Johnny Thunders inspiration confirmed as appropriate for a punk context. The Les Paul Standard’s warmth, the Mesa Boogie’s gain, the MXR Phase 100’s shimmer, and the Roland Space Echo’s depth produce the specific guitar sound that the Clash’s musical ambition required: not the clean Telecaster of the punk philosophy but the warm Les Paul of the rock tradition, applied with the energy and commitment of the punk context.
His reggae skanking adaptation — the specific physical technique of the upstroke skank applied to the punk rock rhythm context — is the most technically distinctive element of his rhythm guitar approach, and the element most directly responsible for the Clash’s specific sound. The combination of the skanking upstroke rhythm with the Les Paul’s harmonic warmth and the Mesa Boogie’s gain produces a rhythm guitar texture that no other band in the punk era replicated, because no other band had a guitarist who had absorbed reggae rhythm technique deeply enough to apply it convincingly to a punk rock context.
The lead guitar work — the “Stay Free” solo, the “Lost in the Supermarket” chorus leads, the “London Calling” riff — reflects a different musical sensibility from the punk lead guitar tradition’s preference for speed and aggression. Jones’s leads are melodic, warm, with the specific singing quality of the vintage Les Paul’s PAF humbuckers through the Mesa Boogie’s natural saturation. They serve the song’s emotional content — the specific melody that the lyric and the arrangement require — rather than demonstrating technical velocity. This is the Strummer lesson applied to lead guitar: what the music needs is more important than what the guitarist can show.
How to Sound Like Mick Jones
The Mick Jones London Calling tone requires: a Gibson Les Paul (Standard or Custom, PAF-voiced humbuckers); a Mesa/Boogie Mark I or II (or equivalent multi-gain-stage combo amp) into a Marshall 4×12; MXR Phase 100 for phase modulation; Roland Space Echo or equivalent warm tape delay; and the reggae skanking upstroke technique applied to the punk rock rhythm context alongside the melodic Les Paul lead guitar vocabulary.
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mesa/Boogie Mark I/II (Lead Channel) | Gain: 7; Volume: 6; Treble: 7; Mid: 6; Bass: 5 | The Boogie’s multi-stage preamp gain at 7 provides the specific warm, rich saturation that the 1958 Les Paul Standard’s PAF humbuckers need for the London Calling lead tone. More gain than Strummer’s clean combo; warmer and more harmonically complex than the maximum-gain modern metal approach. |
| Marshall 4×12 Cabinet (Speaker) | Mesa/Boogie head into Marshall cabinet | The specific combination of Mesa/Boogie preamp character with Marshall Celestion speaker response produces the “roaring tone” of the London Calling lead guitar. The Marshall cabinet’s speaker breakup character adds a second layer of warmth to the Boogie’s already warm preamp saturation. Both elements together produce the specific richness of the 1958 Les Paul Standard through this combination. |
| MXR Phase 100 | Speed: 3–4 (slow-medium); Intensity: 6 | Slow-medium phase sweep for the atmospheric, shimmer quality on specific songs. The Phase 100’s ten-position speed switch at position 3–4 provides the moderate sweep that adds movement without obvious effect. Use on the chord passages and clean lead sections where the phase modulation enhances the harmonic complexity of the Les Paul’s vintage humbucker character. |
| Roland Space Echo RE-201 | Echo: 2 repeats; Intensity: 4; Bass: 5; Treble: 5 | Two warm tape echo repeats for the dream-pop, atmospheric quality of “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Train in Vain” leads. The Space Echo’s tape character naturally degrades high frequencies in subsequent repeats — the first repeat is cleaner, the second warmer and slightly darker. This natural frequency loss is the specific warmth of tape echo versus digital delay. |
| Reggae Skanking (Rhythm Technique) | Upstroke on off-beats; choppy; staccato | The Clash innovation: apply the reggae upstroke skank to punk rhythm guitar. Chord arrives on the off-beat (the “and” of each beat count). Mute between strokes for the choppy, open quality of the skank. Practice against a drum pattern that emphasizes the backbeat — the skanking upstroke locks with the snare’s off-beat position rather than anticipating the downbeat kick. |
| Les Paul Pickup Selection | Neck for lead; bridge for rhythm attack; both for balance | Neck humbucker for the warm, singing lead tone of the “Stay Free” solo and similar passages. Bridge for the tighter, more present rhythm guitar. The 1958 Standard’s PAF neck pickup provides the specific warm, sustaining lead voice that makes the London Calling lead work immediately identifiable as vintage Les Paul rather than any more modern configuration. |
Influence & Legacy
Mick Jones’s influence on rock guitar is concentrated in the specific demonstration that punk’s energy and rock’s musical sophistication are not mutually exclusive — that the Les Paul Standard and the Mesa Boogie can serve a band whose political urgency and musical directness are as genuine as any punk act, and that the reggae skanking upstroke can coexist with the power chord punk rhythm as elements of the same musical vocabulary. The Clash proved this. Jones’s guitar work is the primary musical evidence for the proof.
The London Calling guitar work specifically — the “Stay Free” solo, the “Lost in the Supermarket” chorus leads, the specific use of different guitars for different songs (the 1958 Standard, the ES-295, the Stratocaster) — demonstrates a guitarist who thought carefully about what each song required and used the appropriate instrument and effects configuration to serve it. This is the guitarist’s intelligence that the art school background developed and the Johnny Thunders inspiration launched: the understanding that the guitar is a tonal resource to be selected for the right application, not a fixed identity to be maintained across all musical contexts.
Big Audio Dynamite’s subsequent musical exploration — incorporating electronic music, sampling, and world music into a guitar-led rock context that maintained the melodic sensibility and the Les Paul warmth — confirms the creative intelligence that made the Clash’s guitar work exceptional. The Mesa Boogie went into the BAD sessions. The musical breadth continued. The Gorillaz collaboration added another chapter. Carbon/Silicon with Tony James added another. The guitar playing that started with a Les Paul Junior bought because Johnny Thunders used one has developed across fifty years of professional music into one of the more substantial and more underrated bodies of guitar work in the British rock tradition. For the Joe Strummer parallel — the rhythm guitar perspective on the same Clash recordings — see Joe Strummer’s gear history. The reggae influence that Jones adapted for the skanking upstroke connects to the broader reggae-to-punk influence chain that ran through the London music scene of the late 1970s. And the Les Paul Standard and Mesa Boogie combination that defines Jones’s primary tone connects to Neal Schon’s parallel Les Paul/modified Marshall approach — a different commercial context but the same fundamental understanding of what a warm humbucker guitar through a quality high-gain amplifier can provide for melodic rock lead guitar.
The Junior got smashed at a gig. The 1958 Standard went into the Wessex Sound Studios and recorded London Calling. The Mesa/Boogie went into two Marshall 4×12 cabinets. The MXR Phase 100 added shimmer. The Roland Space Echo added warmth and depth. And the art school kid from South London who bought a Les Paul Junior because Johnny Thunders used one became the lead guitarist of one of the most celebrated punk bands in history, and then got fired, and then kept making music with the same Mesa Boogie for the rest of his career. The Clash ends in 1983. Mick Jones does not.
Frequently Asked Questions: Mick Jones Guitars & Gear
What was Mick Jones’s first guitar and why did he choose it?
Mick Jones’s first guitar was a Gibson Les Paul Junior with a P-90 pickup, which he bought because Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls used one. The Johnny Thunders inspiration established the New York Dolls proto-punk guitar aesthetic as the foundational reference for Jones’s early guitar identity: the Les Paul Junior’s raw, biting P-90 tone through the punk rock performance context. The Junior served as his main guitar until late 1977 or early 1978, when it was smashed at a gig — an event consistent with the punk approach to guitars as performance weapons rather than precious objects. He then switched to the regular Gibson Les Paul, eventually building the London Calling arsenal of vintage Les Paul Standards and Customs.
What guitars did Mick Jones use on London Calling?
For the London Calling sessions, Jones used an arsenal of Gibson instruments: a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard sunburst, a black 1965 Les Paul Custom, and 1970s Les Paul Customs in red and white as the primary instruments; a rare Gibson ES-295 hollow-body for the title track; and a late-1970s black Fender Stratocaster for songs including “Jimmy Jazz.” All instruments were stock, unmodified. The choice of different guitars for different songs — rather than defaulting to a single primary instrument — reflects Jones’s specific musical intelligence in matching instrument to song requirement.
What amplifiers did Mick Jones use?
Jones’s primary amplification evolved from a Marshall Plexi (early Clash, also occasionally Fender Twin with 2×12) to Mesa/Boogie Mark I and II combos, which he ran into Marshall 4×12 cabinets. “Jones, on the other hand, experimented a lot with amplifiers in the studio, favoring Mesa/Boogie combos, particularly the Mark I and Mark II, which he ran into a Marshall 4×12 cab for a roaring tone.” He used this Mesa Boogie into Marshall cabinet configuration throughout the rest of his Clash career and into the Big Audio Dynamite period. Post-Clash, he has used Mesa Boogie Lone Star 2×12 combos for their clarity in hybrid contexts.
What effects did Mick Jones use?
Jones mainly used MXR pedals and Roland effects. The MXR family: Phase 100 phaser (primary), Flanger, Analog Delay, and Noisegate. The Roland family: Space Echo RE-201 tape delay and RE-501 Chorus Echo (both providing the warm, tape-delay character that adds atmospheric depth to the “Train in Vain” and “Lost in the Supermarket” guitar work). The MXR Phase 100’s specific role on “Should I Stay or Should I Go” — adding the shimmer and movement of phase modulation to Jones’s clean chord passages — is the most specifically documented effects application in his catalog.
What is the reggae skanking technique and how did Jones use it?
The reggae skanking upstroke is a rhythm guitar technique where the chord arrives on the off-beat (the upstroke) rather than the downbeat, creating the choppy, syncopated rhythmic drive of reggae music. Jones adapted this technique from the reggae tradition — the Clash’s documented engagement with reggae through their producer Mickey Dread and through the specific London music scene of the late 1970s where reggae and punk coexisted — and applied it to the punk rock context. The skanking upstroke appears prominently in “London Calling,” layered over aggressive punk backbeats, creating the specific Clash hybrid rhythm guitar sound that makes their music immediately identifiable as neither pure punk nor pure reggae but something specifically their own.
What happened after Mick Jones left the Clash?
Jones was dismissed from the Clash by Joe Strummer in 1983, amid tensions about the band’s direction during the Combat Rock/Rat Patrol period. He subsequently formed Big Audio Dynamite with filmmaker Don Letts in 1984, incorporating hip-hop, electronic music, sampling, and world music influences into a rock guitar context that maintained his melodic sensibility and Mesa Boogie amplification. BAD went through various lineup changes, becoming Big Audio Dynamite II and then Big Audio. Jones later collaborated with the Gorillaz and with Tony James in Carbon/Silicon, an ongoing partnership that began releasing music in 2002.
What is “Should I Stay or Should I Go” about and who played lead on it?
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” was written and sung by Mick Jones, featuring Jones on lead vocals (unusual for a Clash track where Strummer was typically the primary vocalist). The song’s chord structure is built around simple I-IV progressions with Jones’s characteristically sophisticated chord voicings, cloaked in MXR Phase 100 phasing and with funky guitar licks that Jones played over the basic punk rock structure. Jones has said the song “wasn’t about anything specific and wasn’t pre-empting my leaving The Clash” — though it was released in 1982 and Jones was dismissed from the band in 1983, making the title’s question strangely prophetic. It became the Clash’s only UK number one single in 1991, re-released following its appearance in a Levi’s television commercial, a decade after its original release.
Related stories
Warren Haynes Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to Gov’t Mule’s Guitar Master’s Rig
Warren Haynes' guitars, amps, and effects — the complete guide. Gibson Les Paul Chester, Soldano SLO-100 modified, Klon Centaur, Emma Discombobulator, and how to nail that Gov't Mule blues-rock tone.
Wayne Kramer Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to MC5’s Proto-Punk Guitar Insurrectionist’s Rig
Wayne Kramer guitars & gear: MC5's proto-punk guitar insurrectionist. Star-spangled Strat, Big Muff Triangle, Marshall stacks, MXR Jail Guitar Doors Drive — the complete rig.
Wes Montgomery Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to the Jazz Master’s Rig
Wes Montgomery's guitars, amps, and effects — the complete guide. Gibson L-5 CES, Standel amps, thumb picking technique, flatwound strings, and how to nail that warm jazz tone.