Headon's heroin addiction grew worse and he slowly became distant from the band while Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon reinstated Bernie Rhodes as manager, a move not welcomed by Jones.

The band had disagreed on the creative process of the album and called in Glyn Johns to produce the more radio-friendly sound of Combat Rock.

Combat Rock would be succeeded by the Clash's last album, Cut the Crap, recorded and released without Mick Jones or Topper Headon in 1985.

[4][5] Strummer and Simonon convinced their bandmates to reinstate the band's original manager Bernie Rhodes in February 1981, in an attempt to restore the "chaos" and "anarchic energy" of the Clash's early days.

[10] Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon stayed at the Iroquois Hotel on West 44th Street, a building famed for being the home of actor James Dean for two years during the early 1950s.

[4] Following the gruelling Far East tour, the Clash returned to London in March 1982 to listen to the music that they had recorded in New York three months earlier.

[23] Biographer Pat Gilbert describes many songs from Combat Rock as having a "trippy, foreboding feel", saturated in a "colonial melancholia and sadness" reflecting the Vietnam War.

[23][26] Other Combat Rock songs, if not directly about the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy, depict American society in moral decline.

[27] The original version of this song included an unauthorized audio clip from a TV commercial for 2000 Flushes, a toilet bowl cleaner.

[25][28][29] The song quotes Martin Scorsese's 1976 movie Taxi Driver, with Clash associate Kosmo Vinyl recording several lines of dialogue imitating the voice of main character Travis Bickle.

Bickle sports a mohawk in the latter part of Taxi Driver, this was a hairstyle adopted by Joe Strummer during the Combat Rock concert tour.

[33][34] Finding himself in the studio without his three bandmates, Headon progressively taped the drum, piano and bass parts, recording the bulk of the song's musical instrumentation himself.

[33] Before hearing Headon's music, Strummer had already come up with the phrases "rock the casbah" and "you'll have to let that raga drop" as lyrical ideas that he was considering for future songs.

[34][35] Following along the same note as Sandinista!, Combat Rock's catalogue number "FMLN2" is the abbreviation for the El Salvador political party Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional or FMLN.

[38] Combat Rock was released on 14 May 1982 and reached number 2 on the U.K. album charts, kept off the top spot by Paul McCartney's Tug of War.

[56] The United States Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Combat Rock as a Gold album in November 1982, Platinum in January 1983, and Multi-Platinum in June 1995.

Nonetheless, he dismissed the notion the band were selling out and believed they were "evolving" on Combat Rock, writing songs at a "higher level of verbal, musical, and political density", albeit in less "terse and clear" fashion than on their early work.

[50] Douglas Wolk said in a retrospective review for Blender that while the record was originally seen as the Clash's "sellout move" because of its danceable sound and two hit singles, the other songs featured "audaciously bizarre arrangements and some of Strummer's smartest lyrics.

"[46] In 2000, Alternative Press called it "the penultimate Clash album ... employing lessons learned in the previous three years ... their most commercially rewarded release ... containing [their] most poignant song 'Straight to Hell'.

It’s definitely better than Sandinista!“[60][61][62] All tracks are written by the Clash, except where notedThe songs added to the fortieth anniversary reissue were titled The People's Hall.