Learn English with "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash

Should I Stay or Should I Go comes from Combat Rock, The Clash's fifth studio album, released on 14 May 1982 through CBS Records. In the band's usual songwriting practice, the track is credited jointly to the group, though guitarist and co-vocalist Mick Jones is widely understood to be its principal author. Its lyrics have long been linked to Jones's on-off relationship with the American singer Ellen Foley, a reading Jones himself has downplayed, insisting in a 1991 interview that the song 'wasn't about anybody specific' and was simply the band's own attempt at writing a classic rock song.

The recording carries one of the band's most-told studio stories. Joe Strummer decided, on the spur of the moment, to sing the backing vocals in Spanish rather than English. Nobody in the room spoke the language fluently, so the tape operator, Eddie Garcia, phoned his mother in Brooklyn Heights and had her translate the lyrics over the phone — since the Garcia family was Ecuadorian, the Spanish that ended up on the record reflects that particular accent. Strummer was joined on those backing vocals by the visiting Texan singer Joe Ely, and a shouted 'Split!' audible partway through the track came from Jones being startled when Strummer and Ely crept up behind his vocal booth mid-take.

Released that September as a double A-side single with Straight to Hell, the song had a modest first run: it peaked at number 17 on the UK Singles Chart and number 45 on the US Billboard Hot 100, well behind the album itself, which reached number 2 in the UK and number 7 in the US.

Its real chart triumph came almost a decade later. After Mick Jones agreed to let Levi's use the track in a 1991 jeans commercial, CBS reissued the single, and it climbed to number one on the UK Singles Chart in March 1991 — five years after the band itself had split up, and the only UK number one The Clash ever had.

The song's afterlife has kept building since. It was ranked number 228 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the '500 Greatest Songs of All Time,' and in 2016 it found a new generation of fans when it played a pivotal emotional role in a widely discussed scene of the Netflix series Stranger Things. Between the punk snarl of the verses and that unmistakable multilingual chorus, it remains one of the most instantly recognisable rock singles to come out of Britain.

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