Rock byRichard Cook

At the end of the 1990s, people seem to want to think more than ever about the end of the 1970s. The most exhilarating thing about the punk era wasn't its scruffy, monochromatic music but its secretive swarming, the way it threw out scores of groups and records and set up the air of daily insurrection, for nothing more than the subversive fun of it. The subtext was anti-careerist, when most rock groups seemed set on going on for ever. Nothing in it was meant to outlive a butterfly, or so they said. These days there are so many musical counter-cultures that nobody feels the need for anything like punk any more. So there's a nostalgia for something as charmingly naive as a quartet of surly London boys who, in 1977, saw London burning - a city of tower blocks, heroin and police and thieves.

The city survived but the Clash didn't. They stuck it out, in the end, for an astonishing ten years and six albums, including the bewilderingly overblown Sandinista!, an interminable three-record set that might as well have been punk's riposte to Tales from Topographic Oceans. In pure terms, though, the Clash were probably finished as soon as they'd signed to CBS, the kind of corporate behemoth that punk's foot soldiers were pledged to raise arms against. Their first single, "White Riot"/"1977", was an unrepeatable blast that they basically tried to keep on repeating, with the inevitable consequences.

Actually, the Clash turned themselves into a fairly formidable rock band by dint of persistence and the grind of extensive touring. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones weren't the most creative of songwriters, and their negligible output since the demise of the group suggests they had no spark without each other, but the chafing egos in the group made for some combustible excitement to which their best shows could attest. Before they got into geopolitics and fantasies about the Clash as some peculiar focus for worldwide dissent, they turned some of their slogans into genuine songs: "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais", "Janie Jones" and "London's Burning" remind me of the city as it stood then more vividly than almost any other music.

Turning themselves into bourgeois amusements should have turned their stomachs at the time, yet that is pretty much the point of Burning London: a tribute to the Clash, which their kindly label Epic (brother to Columbia) releases this month. Fifteen Clash songs are covered by the usual slew of unlikely bedfellows that this wretched formula - the various-artists tribute album - always seems obliged to stick to. Since none of these albums ever sells in great quantities, they seem more like quota-fillers than something born of the slightest artistic necessity. But at least the proceeds go to charity, which might bring a tear to the eye of any grizzled old punk.

As always, most of the covers are bafflingly redundant. Why do Face to Face feel they have to offer up a note-perfect copy of "Tommy Gun", one of the most lunk-headed setpieces in the Clash songbook? Pato Banton and Rankin Roger bring a Falstaffian jollity to "Rock the Casbah", but it's the kind of novelty track that makes one think of rap's anti-weightwatchers, the Fat Boys. As for Cracker and their country hoedown treatment of "White Riot", it's a joke nobody could want to hear more than once.

Fittingly enough, the album could have been boiled down to a two-sided single. On the A side, I would have Indigo Girls and their clean, bracing acoustic treatment of "Clampdown", which makes the song sound a lot better than it is. On the reverse, it must be Moby and the one extraordinary version in the whole collection, a desolate and almost unearthly rendition of "Straight to Hell", previously one of the Clash's ungainly skank tunes, here - as voiced by the pale, chilling Heather Nova - a cool nightmare. Well worth 99p, which is what I think I paid for my copy of "White Riot" back then.

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