Last week I learned Mick Jones (The Clash/Big Audio Dynamite) and Tony James (Generation X/Sigue Sigue Sputnik) have a band (for the past five years, apparently) called Carbon/Silicon. They’ve also recently released an album, The Last Post. I had no idea. The band’s website offers a bunch of free downloadable sound files (which, if you ask me, is very punk rock), so I quickly schooled myself on their tunes in preparation for Friday’s show at Irving Plaza.

The four-piece weren’t interested in nostalgia; instead, they cruised through their set of original tunes with ease. Jones, who wore a gray shiny suit and looks more like an accountant these days, sounded great. Now in his fifties, his voice is still robust. He used nearly every interlude to ramble on in his often indistinguishable Cockney accent and direct people to James’ blog for no apparent reason. At one point after the first or second song, Jones told a joke about a guy who went to see a psychiatrist one night because he thought he was a moth. “How did you know I was awake?” asked the shrink. “Well, I saw your light was on.” Ba-dum dum.
 

Songs like “Soylent Green,” “The News,” and “The Whole Truth” are incredibly infectious and find Carbon/Silicon veering into garage rock territory. Jones and James enjoyed waving the punk flag one more time as they railed against materialism, consumption, tabloids and our dysfunctional culture.

The highlight of the show came at the encore, when Carbon/Silicon eased into a few choruses of "Police on My Back” during their anthemic "Why Do Men Fight?" Jones—who looked like he was pretty baked by that point—went off into freeform stoner speak, talking about land grabs during tours and how our bodies are made of molecules and atoms. Hearing Jones play such an engaging rendition of his old band’s classic song was well worth the price of admission.

In a lot of ways, everything Mick Jones and Carbon/Silicon sang about Friday night mirrored the societal ills—unemployment, war, a recession—which The Clash commented on so profoundly in 1977. Mick Jones might be thirty years older, but the song remains ironically the same for him.

images courtesy of Jonny Sharkbait