This was the first time i saw "the man himself"
Thanks to Martin Vantomme for the press-scan.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Jock McDonald - Seaside 1983
This was the first time i saw "the man himself"
Thanks to Martin Vantomme for the press-scan.
Le Hand of le Frog (Henry the Cheat)
Taken from the forthcoming protest single 'The French Correction' 19-11-2009 a dark day for Irish history and for fair play in general. We will never forget!
The Bollock Brothers Complete Discography
Studio albums
The Last Supper 1983
Never Mind The Bollocks 1983
The 4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse 1985
The Prophecies Of Nostradamus 1987
The Dead Sea Scrolls 1991
Blood, Sweat And Beers 1996
Last Will And Testament 2009
Live albums
Live Performances 1984
In Private In Public 1986
Singles / Maxisingles
One of the lads 1979
Frustration 1980
The Bunker 1983
The Act Became Real 1981
All Of The Lads 1981
We'll be there 1981
Drac's Back 1982
Shame, Shame, Shame 1982
The Slow Removal Of Vincent van Gogh's Left Ear 1982
Oscar Wilde 1983
Are You Durty 1983
God Save The Queen 1983
Horror Movies 1983
The Prince And The Showgirl 1984
Legend Of The Snake 1985
Drac's Back 1986
Faith Healer 1986
Return Of The Vampyre 1986
Harley David 1987
God Created Woman 1988
Brigitte Bardot 1988
Don't Call Us, We Call You 1992
My Way 1995
Where Is My Girl 1996
Cyber Polaroid 2005
Compilations
D Wing 1981
Bollock Brothers, Bollock Sisters 1986
'77-'78-'79 1986
Family Album 1986
Mythology 1989
14 Carat Gold 1993
The Best Of The Bollocks 1994
Dancin' Masters 1994
The Sex Pistols Vs. The Bollock Brothers 1996
What A Load Of Bollocks! 2000
25th Anniversary 2001
Jesus Lives 2001
Twice The Balls 2002
Ladykillers 2007
Review The Bollock Brothers in Genk 22 mei 2009
Marc Vos: "Jock MacDonald het prototype van de sympathieke overjaarse punker"
Bron Het Nieuwsblad 30-05-09
Marc Vos, reporter MazzMusikas
Genk - The Bollock Brothers, de punk-en new wave band met Schotse, Engelse en Belgische bezetting, stipte Genk aan voor het lanceren van hun nieuwe Album 'Last Will and Testament' op vrijdag 22 mei in het Jeugdcentrum Rondpunt 26. In het voorjaar bracht frontman Jock McDonald reeds een bezoekje aan het jeugdcentrum op uitnodiging van vzw HexenKessel, organisator van het HexenKessel Rock Festival. Genkenaar Marc Vos, reporter van het online muziekschrift MazzMusikas, schreef een review over het optreden dat u hier kan lezen.
Fragment van het optreden op 22 mei 2009 met 'Faith Healer'
Levend anachronisme
The Bollock Brothers are back in town. 15 jaar na de vorige plaat van dit Schots/ Engels/Belgisch gezelschap en zowat een jaar na het overlijden van hun toetsenman Big Mark Humphrey, zijn ze terug met een nieuwe plaat, Last Will And Testament, die ze in Genk in première kwamen voorstellen, mede dankzij HexenKessel vzw uit Genk.Toegegeven, ik had er voor het optreden sterk mijn twijfels bij, of dit levend anachronisme van een band nog wel moest eigenlijk.
Zouden de The Bollock Brothers 26 jaar na hun culthit 'Horror Movies' live nog iets ten berde brengen dat nog interessant was ? Maar dat was dan toch een beetje buiten de waard gerekend, in casu Jock McDonald en co. Niet dat The Bollock Brothers zichzelf nu ineens au serieux zouden nemen, verre van, dan zouden het trouwens de Bollock Brothers niet meer zijn. Was de groep namelijk begin jaren tachtig niet begonnen als een uit de hand gelopen grap, en hielden ze zich in het begin niet vooral bezig met het door de mangel halen van punknummers van hun grote voorbeeld The Sex Pistols ?
The Bollock Brothers zijn terug met een nieuw album, Last Will And Testament (Foto's: Belgin Özgünes)
God Save The Queen
Het concert begon erg leuk en origineel, The Bollock Brothers kwamen van achter in de zaal in stoet naar het podium gewandeld, voorafgegaan en muzikaal begeleid door een groep doedelzakspelers, die ook op het podium nog een stukje muziek ten beste gaven, om dan stilletjesaan overstemd te worden door de gitaren van The Bollock Brothers.
En de setlist? J'en y passe maar volgende songs kwamen zeker voorbij : Cyber Polaroid, Jesus Lived Six Years Longer Than Kurt Cobain (!). En natuurlijk kwamen gisteren de Sex Pistols ook aan bod, en de covers van Pretty Vacant en God Save The Queen kregen een snoeiharde gitaarversie mee, gezongen door de gitarist, en gelukkig bleven de keyboards achterwege.
Frontman en boegbeeld van The Bollock Brothers poseert met 'Harley David / Son Of A Bitch' op z'n t-shirt, een cover van Serge Gainsbourg en een hit voor de groep.
Nacht Und Nebel
Deze muziek toverde alvast een glimlach van herkenning en plezier op het gezicht van velen, dit was best een zeer aangenaam wederhoren, al dan niet gevoed door nostalgische gevoelens uit een lang vervlogen (punk)tijdperk. En de 'hits' ? Ja hoor, ook die werden gespeeld: het na al die jaren nog niet versleten en nog steeds grappige 'Horror Movies', ook 'The Bunker' en natuurlijk ook het geweldige en door het publiek luidkeels meegebrulde Harley David / Son Of A Bitch, een cover van Serge Gainsbourg, die naar verluid best wel opgezet was met de versie van The Bollock Brothers (zodanig zelfs dat hij zijn eigen live versie een beetje aanpaste aan dat van de Bollockbroertjes).
Het leuke nummer 'Henry The 8th' werd om onverklaarbare tweemaal gespeeld, zonder dat daar verder gewag van werd gemaakt. De leeftijd misschien? Soit, bij de BB is zoniet alles, dan toch heel veel, mogelijk. De Belgische drummer van de groep Patrick, die in een vorig leven nog gedrumd heeft bij Nacht Und Nebel, mocht van achter zijn drumstel een versie van 'Beats Of Love' zingen. Ook gitarist Michael Dempsey (vroeger nog bassist bij The Cure, op hun glorieuze platen Three Imaginary Boys en 17 Seconds) kreeg een solospot en bracht zowaar een vrij slordige maar toch genietbare versie van 'After Midnight' van Eric Clapton.
Jock Mc Donald met een sjaaltje om de nek van Celtic Glasgow, zijn favoriete ploeg
Sympathieke overjaarse punker
Ja, het was me wel een allegaartje van allerhande muziekjes, maar wel een sympathiek en genietbaar allegaartje. De BB staan namelijk voor een avondje leuke ontspanning, niet meer en niet minder, en er mag al eens gelachen worden, dat vooral eigenlijk. Jock MacDonald is dan ook zowat het prototype van de sympathieke overjaarse punker, met zijn grappig kostuum met schots ruitmotief en zijn sjaaltje van voetbalclub Celtic Glasgow, naast muziek toch zowat het belangrijkste element in zijn leven.
Hij deed er alles aan om kontakt te zoeken met het publiek, deelde pintjes uit aan de fans op de eerste rij, liet de mensen regelmatig een stukje meezingen, schonk zelfs een een vinylexemplaar van de nieuwe plaat weg aan een jongen op de eerste rij die in een rolstoel zat, en zichtbaar zat te genieten van de show. En de voetbal, ja de voetbal, daar ging het ook dikwijls over : dat Genk ("the hometown of Danny Mommens, wow...", aldus Jock) de dag daarna de bekerfinale speelde (en ondertussen ook gewonnen heeft ook !), en natuurlijk nog maar eens over Celtic Glasgow en bla bla bla...
Diverse festivals
Een van de mooiste momenten van de avond was een indrukwekkend eerbetoon aan de Sensational Alex Harvey Band, door middels van een cover van deze groep waarvan ik jammer genoeg de titel niet weet, maar het was alleszins een prachtig en meeslepend nummer. En dit, volgens Jock McDonald, van "een van de beste live bands ooit", wat natuurlijk nogal overdreven is, maar we vergeven het de man graag, meegesleept als hij was door zijn enthousiasme voor de muziek van deze groep. Hij gaf ons ook nog mee dat Alex Harvey was gestorven in België, als gevolg van een hartaanval, wachend op de ferry in Zeebrugge.
In augustus zijn de Bollock Brothers nog te zien op diverse festivals in België, oa. de Fonnefeesten in Lokeren en de Paulusfeesten in Oostende, en in november is er een clubtour met verschillende concerten in België.
Bron Het Nieuwsblad 30-05-09
Marc Vos, reporter MazzMusikas
Genk - The Bollock Brothers, de punk-en new wave band met Schotse, Engelse en Belgische bezetting, stipte Genk aan voor het lanceren van hun nieuwe Album 'Last Will and Testament' op vrijdag 22 mei in het Jeugdcentrum Rondpunt 26. In het voorjaar bracht frontman Jock McDonald reeds een bezoekje aan het jeugdcentrum op uitnodiging van vzw HexenKessel, organisator van het HexenKessel Rock Festival. Genkenaar Marc Vos, reporter van het online muziekschrift MazzMusikas, schreef een review over het optreden dat u hier kan lezen.
Fragment van het optreden op 22 mei 2009 met 'Faith Healer'
Levend anachronisme
The Bollock Brothers are back in town. 15 jaar na de vorige plaat van dit Schots/ Engels/Belgisch gezelschap en zowat een jaar na het overlijden van hun toetsenman Big Mark Humphrey, zijn ze terug met een nieuwe plaat, Last Will And Testament, die ze in Genk in première kwamen voorstellen, mede dankzij HexenKessel vzw uit Genk.Toegegeven, ik had er voor het optreden sterk mijn twijfels bij, of dit levend anachronisme van een band nog wel moest eigenlijk.
Zouden de The Bollock Brothers 26 jaar na hun culthit 'Horror Movies' live nog iets ten berde brengen dat nog interessant was ? Maar dat was dan toch een beetje buiten de waard gerekend, in casu Jock McDonald en co. Niet dat The Bollock Brothers zichzelf nu ineens au serieux zouden nemen, verre van, dan zouden het trouwens de Bollock Brothers niet meer zijn. Was de groep namelijk begin jaren tachtig niet begonnen als een uit de hand gelopen grap, en hielden ze zich in het begin niet vooral bezig met het door de mangel halen van punknummers van hun grote voorbeeld The Sex Pistols ?
The Bollock Brothers zijn terug met een nieuw album, Last Will And Testament (Foto's: Belgin Özgünes)
God Save The Queen
Het concert begon erg leuk en origineel, The Bollock Brothers kwamen van achter in de zaal in stoet naar het podium gewandeld, voorafgegaan en muzikaal begeleid door een groep doedelzakspelers, die ook op het podium nog een stukje muziek ten beste gaven, om dan stilletjesaan overstemd te worden door de gitaren van The Bollock Brothers.
En de setlist? J'en y passe maar volgende songs kwamen zeker voorbij : Cyber Polaroid, Jesus Lived Six Years Longer Than Kurt Cobain (!). En natuurlijk kwamen gisteren de Sex Pistols ook aan bod, en de covers van Pretty Vacant en God Save The Queen kregen een snoeiharde gitaarversie mee, gezongen door de gitarist, en gelukkig bleven de keyboards achterwege.
Frontman en boegbeeld van The Bollock Brothers poseert met 'Harley David / Son Of A Bitch' op z'n t-shirt, een cover van Serge Gainsbourg en een hit voor de groep.
Nacht Und Nebel
Deze muziek toverde alvast een glimlach van herkenning en plezier op het gezicht van velen, dit was best een zeer aangenaam wederhoren, al dan niet gevoed door nostalgische gevoelens uit een lang vervlogen (punk)tijdperk. En de 'hits' ? Ja hoor, ook die werden gespeeld: het na al die jaren nog niet versleten en nog steeds grappige 'Horror Movies', ook 'The Bunker' en natuurlijk ook het geweldige en door het publiek luidkeels meegebrulde Harley David / Son Of A Bitch, een cover van Serge Gainsbourg, die naar verluid best wel opgezet was met de versie van The Bollock Brothers (zodanig zelfs dat hij zijn eigen live versie een beetje aanpaste aan dat van de Bollockbroertjes).
Het leuke nummer 'Henry The 8th' werd om onverklaarbare tweemaal gespeeld, zonder dat daar verder gewag van werd gemaakt. De leeftijd misschien? Soit, bij de BB is zoniet alles, dan toch heel veel, mogelijk. De Belgische drummer van de groep Patrick, die in een vorig leven nog gedrumd heeft bij Nacht Und Nebel, mocht van achter zijn drumstel een versie van 'Beats Of Love' zingen. Ook gitarist Michael Dempsey (vroeger nog bassist bij The Cure, op hun glorieuze platen Three Imaginary Boys en 17 Seconds) kreeg een solospot en bracht zowaar een vrij slordige maar toch genietbare versie van 'After Midnight' van Eric Clapton.
Jock Mc Donald met een sjaaltje om de nek van Celtic Glasgow, zijn favoriete ploeg
Sympathieke overjaarse punker
Ja, het was me wel een allegaartje van allerhande muziekjes, maar wel een sympathiek en genietbaar allegaartje. De BB staan namelijk voor een avondje leuke ontspanning, niet meer en niet minder, en er mag al eens gelachen worden, dat vooral eigenlijk. Jock MacDonald is dan ook zowat het prototype van de sympathieke overjaarse punker, met zijn grappig kostuum met schots ruitmotief en zijn sjaaltje van voetbalclub Celtic Glasgow, naast muziek toch zowat het belangrijkste element in zijn leven.
Hij deed er alles aan om kontakt te zoeken met het publiek, deelde pintjes uit aan de fans op de eerste rij, liet de mensen regelmatig een stukje meezingen, schonk zelfs een een vinylexemplaar van de nieuwe plaat weg aan een jongen op de eerste rij die in een rolstoel zat, en zichtbaar zat te genieten van de show. En de voetbal, ja de voetbal, daar ging het ook dikwijls over : dat Genk ("the hometown of Danny Mommens, wow...", aldus Jock) de dag daarna de bekerfinale speelde (en ondertussen ook gewonnen heeft ook !), en natuurlijk nog maar eens over Celtic Glasgow en bla bla bla...
Diverse festivals
Een van de mooiste momenten van de avond was een indrukwekkend eerbetoon aan de Sensational Alex Harvey Band, door middels van een cover van deze groep waarvan ik jammer genoeg de titel niet weet, maar het was alleszins een prachtig en meeslepend nummer. En dit, volgens Jock McDonald, van "een van de beste live bands ooit", wat natuurlijk nogal overdreven is, maar we vergeven het de man graag, meegesleept als hij was door zijn enthousiasme voor de muziek van deze groep. Hij gaf ons ook nog mee dat Alex Harvey was gestorven in België, als gevolg van een hartaanval, wachend op de ferry in Zeebrugge.
In augustus zijn de Bollock Brothers nog te zien op diverse festivals in België, oa. de Fonnefeesten in Lokeren en de Paulusfeesten in Oostende, en in november is er een clubtour met verschillende concerten in België.
Bollock Brothers on Sinner's Day
1-11-09 Ethias Arena Hasselt
Horror Movies Live at Sinner's Day
Beats of love Live at Sinner's Day
Horror Movies Live at Sinner's Day
Beats of love Live at Sinner's Day
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Bollock Brothers - Dortmund
Bollock Brothers - Dortmund, FZW, 15.01.10
Frank - 19.12.09
Es gibt Dinge, die passieren mir wirklich nicht oft, z.B. dass ich mit 39 zu den Jüngsten auf einem Konzert gehöre. Letzten Freitag war es aber mal so, die Bollock Brothers waren mal wieder in Dortmund und deren beiden ersten Platten hatte ich mir mit 15 gekauft.
Viele der heutigen Fans waren damals wohl schon einen Tacken älter. Etwas anderes hat mir der Abend aber auch gezeigt, die schon ein wenig älteren Jungs von den Bollock Brothers machen unheimlich Spaß, ich habe schon lange keine Band mehr gesehen, die so locker und ungezwungen so viel Spaß auf der Bühne hatten. Setlist? Wofür? Das geht auch ohne! Und wenn man mal den Einsatz deswegen verpasst, na und, fangen wir doch einfach nochmal an. Toller Kontrast zu dem Perfektionismus vieler heutiger selbstverliebter Bands.
Begonnen hat der Abend noch ohne Sänger Jock mit dem Intro zu Faith Healer, doch vor Jocks Einsatz dann der Break. Jock ordentlich mit Anzug und Schal, würdiger Auftritt. Okay, dann eben noch nicht. Nach der Begrüßung der Dortmunder Fans ging es dann aber richtig los, und zwar gleich mit "Horror Movies". Ich dachte noch: "Hey, bitte nicht gleich die coolen Songs zu Beginn verbrennen". Wie blöd dieser Gedanke war, wurde mir während des Gigs immer wieder dadurch bewusst, dass ich mich an andere neue alte Songs der Bollock Brothers erinnern konnte. Scheiße, ich muss mir jetzt endlich mal eine neue Nadel für meinen Plattenspieler holen, damit ich mein Vinyl wieder reaktivieren kann oder ich versuche mir die Bollock-Brothers-Alben schick remastered als CDs zu besorgen.
Das Publikum scheint den Gig genauso genossen zu haben wie ich. Überall sah man sich im Takt bewegende und vor allem laut mitgrölende Fans. Songs wie "Harley David Son of a Bitch" und "Four Horseman" gingen allen textsicher von den Lippen. Eine Überraschung für mich war dann irgendwann "King Rat", echt ein klasse Song! Zwischen den Songs schöne Ansagen von Celtic-Fan Jock McDonald. Da wurde, wie es sich gehört, die Celtic-Dortmunder-Fanfreundschaft beschworen und natürlich auch die Freundschaft zwischen den Bollock Brothers und ihren Dortmunder Fans durch zahlreiches Anstoßen und Zuprosten gepflegt. Probleme gab's nur als Jock seinen so geliebten Whisky-Cola nicht bekam. Auch der Versuch, ein Date mit seiner "Schwester" für ein Whisky-Cola zu versprechen, fruchteten zunächst nicht. Schließlich klappte das mit dem Getränk aber doch noch.
Leider bekomme ich hier nicht die komplette Setlist zusammen, erinnern kann ich mich noch an "Henry VIII." und "Jesus Lived Six Years Longer Than Curt" beides live absolut klasse. Neben der glänzend aufgelegten Band lag das aber auch an dem Publikum, das hin und wieder die Gesangparts für sich forderte, sodass Jock sein Mikro lieber ins Publikum hielt als selbst zu singen. Ein weiterer Höhepunkt war "Pretty Vacant" bei dem Chris und Richard ihre Instrumente tauschten und Richard den Gesang übernahm. Als dann die Zugaben anstanden, ließ es sich die Band nicht nehmen "Henry the 8" ein zweites Mal zum Besten zu geben. Schade, hätte mir den Song mit dem Text von "Le Hand of le Frog" dazu gewünscht (googelt mal danach). Zu guter Letzt kam dann doch noch "Faith Healer" und so schloss sich dann der Kreis an diesem Abend, so wie er begonnen hatte.
Fazit: "Um so älter der Jahrgang um so besser", gilt für die Bollock Brothers auf jeden Fall! Da ist es echt egal was für ein Könner man auf einem Instrument ist, oder was für ein geiler Sänger man ist, ein Konzert braucht für mich vor allem Charisma und das haben "Jock and the bhoys!" Hab schon lange nicht mehr so auf einem Konzert gelacht und soviel Spaß gehabt. Danke Jock!
Fotos:
... mehr Fotos der Bollock Bothers
weitere Bandartikel
•Fotos: Bollock Brothers - Dortmund, FZW, 15.01.10
... alle Artikel zu "Bollock Brothers"
Links:
offizielle Bollock Brothers Site
Bollock Brothers bei MySpace
Frank - 19.12.09
Es gibt Dinge, die passieren mir wirklich nicht oft, z.B. dass ich mit 39 zu den Jüngsten auf einem Konzert gehöre. Letzten Freitag war es aber mal so, die Bollock Brothers waren mal wieder in Dortmund und deren beiden ersten Platten hatte ich mir mit 15 gekauft.
Viele der heutigen Fans waren damals wohl schon einen Tacken älter. Etwas anderes hat mir der Abend aber auch gezeigt, die schon ein wenig älteren Jungs von den Bollock Brothers machen unheimlich Spaß, ich habe schon lange keine Band mehr gesehen, die so locker und ungezwungen so viel Spaß auf der Bühne hatten. Setlist? Wofür? Das geht auch ohne! Und wenn man mal den Einsatz deswegen verpasst, na und, fangen wir doch einfach nochmal an. Toller Kontrast zu dem Perfektionismus vieler heutiger selbstverliebter Bands.
Begonnen hat der Abend noch ohne Sänger Jock mit dem Intro zu Faith Healer, doch vor Jocks Einsatz dann der Break. Jock ordentlich mit Anzug und Schal, würdiger Auftritt. Okay, dann eben noch nicht. Nach der Begrüßung der Dortmunder Fans ging es dann aber richtig los, und zwar gleich mit "Horror Movies". Ich dachte noch: "Hey, bitte nicht gleich die coolen Songs zu Beginn verbrennen". Wie blöd dieser Gedanke war, wurde mir während des Gigs immer wieder dadurch bewusst, dass ich mich an andere neue alte Songs der Bollock Brothers erinnern konnte. Scheiße, ich muss mir jetzt endlich mal eine neue Nadel für meinen Plattenspieler holen, damit ich mein Vinyl wieder reaktivieren kann oder ich versuche mir die Bollock-Brothers-Alben schick remastered als CDs zu besorgen.
Das Publikum scheint den Gig genauso genossen zu haben wie ich. Überall sah man sich im Takt bewegende und vor allem laut mitgrölende Fans. Songs wie "Harley David Son of a Bitch" und "Four Horseman" gingen allen textsicher von den Lippen. Eine Überraschung für mich war dann irgendwann "King Rat", echt ein klasse Song! Zwischen den Songs schöne Ansagen von Celtic-Fan Jock McDonald. Da wurde, wie es sich gehört, die Celtic-Dortmunder-Fanfreundschaft beschworen und natürlich auch die Freundschaft zwischen den Bollock Brothers und ihren Dortmunder Fans durch zahlreiches Anstoßen und Zuprosten gepflegt. Probleme gab's nur als Jock seinen so geliebten Whisky-Cola nicht bekam. Auch der Versuch, ein Date mit seiner "Schwester" für ein Whisky-Cola zu versprechen, fruchteten zunächst nicht. Schließlich klappte das mit dem Getränk aber doch noch.
Leider bekomme ich hier nicht die komplette Setlist zusammen, erinnern kann ich mich noch an "Henry VIII." und "Jesus Lived Six Years Longer Than Curt" beides live absolut klasse. Neben der glänzend aufgelegten Band lag das aber auch an dem Publikum, das hin und wieder die Gesangparts für sich forderte, sodass Jock sein Mikro lieber ins Publikum hielt als selbst zu singen. Ein weiterer Höhepunkt war "Pretty Vacant" bei dem Chris und Richard ihre Instrumente tauschten und Richard den Gesang übernahm. Als dann die Zugaben anstanden, ließ es sich die Band nicht nehmen "Henry the 8" ein zweites Mal zum Besten zu geben. Schade, hätte mir den Song mit dem Text von "Le Hand of le Frog" dazu gewünscht (googelt mal danach). Zu guter Letzt kam dann doch noch "Faith Healer" und so schloss sich dann der Kreis an diesem Abend, so wie er begonnen hatte.
Fazit: "Um so älter der Jahrgang um so besser", gilt für die Bollock Brothers auf jeden Fall! Da ist es echt egal was für ein Könner man auf einem Instrument ist, oder was für ein geiler Sänger man ist, ein Konzert braucht für mich vor allem Charisma und das haben "Jock and the bhoys!" Hab schon lange nicht mehr so auf einem Konzert gelacht und soviel Spaß gehabt. Danke Jock!
Fotos:
... mehr Fotos der Bollock Bothers
weitere Bandartikel
•Fotos: Bollock Brothers - Dortmund, FZW, 15.01.10
... alle Artikel zu "Bollock Brothers"
Links:
offizielle Bollock Brothers Site
Bollock Brothers bei MySpace
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Michael Fagan & The Bollock Brothers part 2
God save the queen
1983
Vinyl 7" Single
Arranged By - Michael Fagan
Engineer - Iain O'Higgins
Producer - Jock Mc Donald
From the album "Never Mind The Bollocks 1983"
Licensed from Charly Records International APS, Copenhagen, Denmark
℗ 1983 Charly Holdings Inc.
© 1983 Charly Records Ltd.
God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb
God save the queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
In England's dreaming
Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future, no future,
No future for you
God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves
God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems
Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid
When there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future, your future
God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves
God save the queen
We mean it man
And there is no future
In England's dreaming
No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future,
No future for me
No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future
For you
1983
Vinyl 7" Single
Arranged By - Michael Fagan
Engineer - Iain O'Higgins
Producer - Jock Mc Donald
From the album "Never Mind The Bollocks 1983"
Licensed from Charly Records International APS, Copenhagen, Denmark
℗ 1983 Charly Holdings Inc.
© 1983 Charly Records Ltd.
God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb
God save the queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
In England's dreaming
Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future, no future,
No future for you
God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves
God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems
Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid
When there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future, your future
God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves
God save the queen
We mean it man
And there is no future
In England's dreaming
No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future,
No future for me
No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future
For you
Michael Fagan
Intruder Enters Queen Elizabeth's Bedroom
Early on Friday morning, July 9, 1982, Queen Elizabeth II woke to find a strange man sitting at the end of her bed. The man, dressed in jeans and a dirty T-shirt, was cradling a broken ashtray and dripping blood onto the royal linens from a lacerated hand.
The Queen kept calm and picked up the phone from her bedside table. She asked the operator at the palace switchboard to summon the police. Though the operator did pass the message to the police, the police didn't respond.
Some reports say the intruder, 31-year-old Michael Fagan, had planned to commit suicide in the Queen's bedroom but decided it wasn't "a nice thing to do" once he was there.1 He wanted to talk about love but the Queen changed the subject to family matters. Fagan's mother later said, "He thinks so much of the Queen. I can imagine him just wanting to simply talk and say hello and discuss his problems."2 Fagan thought it a coincidence that he and the Queen both had four children.
The Queen attempted to summon a chambermaid by pressing a button, but no one came. The Queen and Fagan continued to talk. When Fagan asked for a cigarette, the Queen again called the palace switchboard. Still no one responded.
After the Queen had spent ten minutes with the mentally disturbed, bleeding intruder, a chambermaid entered the Queen's quarters and exclaimed, "Bloody hell, ma'am! What's he doing in there?" The chambermaid then ran out and woke up a footman who then seized the intruder. The police arrived twelve minutes after the Queen's first call.
How did he get in there?
This wasn't the first time that protection of the royal monarch had been found lacking, but it had supposedly been increased since the 1981 attack on the Queen (a man fired six blanks at her during the Trooping the Color ceremony). Yet Michael Fagan basically walked into Buckingham Palace - twice. Only a month before, Fagan had stolen a $6 bottle of wine from the palace.
Around 6 a.m., Fagan climbed the 14-foot-high wall - topped with spikes and barbed-wire - on the southeast side of the palace. Though an off-duty policeman saw Fagan climbing the wall, by the time he had alerted palace guards, Fagan could not be found. Fagan then walked along the south side of the palace and then along the west side. There, he found an open window and climbed in.
Fagan had entered a room housing King George V's $20 million stamp collection. Since the door to the interior of the palace was locked, Fagan went back outside through the window. An alarm had been set off both as Fagan entered and exited the Stamp Room through the window, but the policeman at the police sub-station (on palace grounds) assumed the alarm was malfunctioning and turned it off - twice.
Fagan then went back as he had come, along the west side of the palace, and then continuing along the south side (past his point of entry), and then along the east side. Here, he climbed up a drainpipe, pulled back some wire (meant to keep pigeons away) and climbed into Vice Admiral Sir Peter Ashmore's office (the man responsible for the Queen's security).
Fagan then walked down the hallway, looking at paintings and into rooms. Along his way, he picked up a glass ashtray and broke it, cutting his hand. He passed a palace housekeeper who said "good morning" and only a few minutes later he walked into the Queen's bedroom.
Normally, an armed policeman stands guard outside the Queen's door at night. When his shift is over at 6 a.m., he is replaced with an unarmed footman. At this particular time, the footman was out walking the Queen's corgis (dogs).
When the public learned of this incident, they were outraged at the lapse of security around their Queen. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally apologized to the Queen and measures were immediately taken to strengthen palace security.
1. Kim Rogal and Ronald Henkoff, "Intruder at the Palace," Newsweek July 26, 1982: 38-39.
2. Spencer Davidson, "God Save the Queen, Fast," TIME 120.4 (July 26, 1982): 33.
Bibliography
Davidson, Spencer. "God Save the Queen, Fast." TIME 120.4 (July 26, 1982): 33.
Rogal, Kim and Ronald Henkoff. "Intruder at the Palace." Newsweek July 26, 1982: 38-39.
© Jennifer Rosenberg
About.com Guide to 20th Century History
Early on Friday morning, July 9, 1982, Queen Elizabeth II woke to find a strange man sitting at the end of her bed. The man, dressed in jeans and a dirty T-shirt, was cradling a broken ashtray and dripping blood onto the royal linens from a lacerated hand.
The Queen kept calm and picked up the phone from her bedside table. She asked the operator at the palace switchboard to summon the police. Though the operator did pass the message to the police, the police didn't respond.
Some reports say the intruder, 31-year-old Michael Fagan, had planned to commit suicide in the Queen's bedroom but decided it wasn't "a nice thing to do" once he was there.1 He wanted to talk about love but the Queen changed the subject to family matters. Fagan's mother later said, "He thinks so much of the Queen. I can imagine him just wanting to simply talk and say hello and discuss his problems."2 Fagan thought it a coincidence that he and the Queen both had four children.
The Queen attempted to summon a chambermaid by pressing a button, but no one came. The Queen and Fagan continued to talk. When Fagan asked for a cigarette, the Queen again called the palace switchboard. Still no one responded.
After the Queen had spent ten minutes with the mentally disturbed, bleeding intruder, a chambermaid entered the Queen's quarters and exclaimed, "Bloody hell, ma'am! What's he doing in there?" The chambermaid then ran out and woke up a footman who then seized the intruder. The police arrived twelve minutes after the Queen's first call.
How did he get in there?
This wasn't the first time that protection of the royal monarch had been found lacking, but it had supposedly been increased since the 1981 attack on the Queen (a man fired six blanks at her during the Trooping the Color ceremony). Yet Michael Fagan basically walked into Buckingham Palace - twice. Only a month before, Fagan had stolen a $6 bottle of wine from the palace.
Around 6 a.m., Fagan climbed the 14-foot-high wall - topped with spikes and barbed-wire - on the southeast side of the palace. Though an off-duty policeman saw Fagan climbing the wall, by the time he had alerted palace guards, Fagan could not be found. Fagan then walked along the south side of the palace and then along the west side. There, he found an open window and climbed in.
Fagan had entered a room housing King George V's $20 million stamp collection. Since the door to the interior of the palace was locked, Fagan went back outside through the window. An alarm had been set off both as Fagan entered and exited the Stamp Room through the window, but the policeman at the police sub-station (on palace grounds) assumed the alarm was malfunctioning and turned it off - twice.
Fagan then went back as he had come, along the west side of the palace, and then continuing along the south side (past his point of entry), and then along the east side. Here, he climbed up a drainpipe, pulled back some wire (meant to keep pigeons away) and climbed into Vice Admiral Sir Peter Ashmore's office (the man responsible for the Queen's security).
Fagan then walked down the hallway, looking at paintings and into rooms. Along his way, he picked up a glass ashtray and broke it, cutting his hand. He passed a palace housekeeper who said "good morning" and only a few minutes later he walked into the Queen's bedroom.
Normally, an armed policeman stands guard outside the Queen's door at night. When his shift is over at 6 a.m., he is replaced with an unarmed footman. At this particular time, the footman was out walking the Queen's corgis (dogs).
When the public learned of this incident, they were outraged at the lapse of security around their Queen. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally apologized to the Queen and measures were immediately taken to strengthen palace security.
1. Kim Rogal and Ronald Henkoff, "Intruder at the Palace," Newsweek July 26, 1982: 38-39.
2. Spencer Davidson, "God Save the Queen, Fast," TIME 120.4 (July 26, 1982): 33.
Bibliography
Davidson, Spencer. "God Save the Queen, Fast." TIME 120.4 (July 26, 1982): 33.
Rogal, Kim and Ronald Henkoff. "Intruder at the Palace." Newsweek July 26, 1982: 38-39.
© Jennifer Rosenberg
About.com Guide to 20th Century History
Michael Fagan incident
Michael Fagan was the intruder who broke into Buckingham Palace and entered Queen Elizabeth II's bedchamber in the early hours of July 9, 1982. The unemployed Irish father of four children managed to evade electronic alarms, palace and police guards. Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Memorial. ... Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor; born 21 April 1926) is Queen of sixteen sovereign states, holding each crown and title equally. ... is the 190th day of the year (191st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... Foot guards is a term used to describe elite infantry regiments. ... The security, as distinct from the ceremonial bodyguards or military protection, of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom and of members of the British Royal Family is entrusted to the Metropolitan Police.
This actually had been his second successful attempt to break into Buckingham Palace. Upon his first attempt, he scaled a drainpipe, briefly startling a housemaid. She called security, but they decided not to act.
He entered through an unlocked window on the roof and spent the next half hour wandering around. He tripped several alarms, but they were faulty. He viewed the royal portraits and rested on the throne for awhile. He entered the Post Room, where he drank half a bottle of Californian white wine before becoming tired and left. This article is about the beverage.
On the second attempt, an alarm sensor actually had gone off upon detecting him. A worker in the Palace thought it had happened by accident, so he silenced the alarm, Fagan having gone unnoticed.
On his way to see the Queen, he had broken a glass ashtray, lacerating his hand. Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor; born 21 April 1926) is Queen of sixteen sovereign states, holding each crown and title equally. ... This article does not cite any references or sources.
The Queen woke when he disturbed a curtain after which he sat on the edge of her bed talking to her for about ten minutes; the Queen was only able to raise the alarm when he asked for a cigarette after giving her one. She calmly called for a footman who allegedly held the intruder until police arrived. The incident happened as the armed police officer outside the royal bedroom came off duty before his replacement arrived. He had been out walking the Queen's dogs. A footman is a male household servant.
The incident caused shock to all, as one unarmed man could manage not only to enter the Palace but even went as far as to see the Queen herself while she was asleep. However, the Queen's calm nature had become better noted. She was calm even upon seeing in her room a strange man with a bloodied hand, and remained calm while conversing with Fagan for about ten minutes.
Since it was then a civil wrong rather than a criminal offence, Michael Fagan was not charged for trespassing in the Queen's bedroom.
He was however charged with theft (of the half bottle of wine, value £3), but the charges were dropped when he was committed for psychiatric evaluation.
In 1994 aggravated trespass or the act of trespass with the intent to disrupt or obstruct a lawful activity became a criminal offence (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 68). “Unlawful entry†redirects here. ... The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 was an act of parliament brought into law by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
In 1983 Michael Fagan recorded a version of the Sex Pistols song "God Save The Queen" with British band The Bollock Brothers.
© www.statemaster.com
This actually had been his second successful attempt to break into Buckingham Palace. Upon his first attempt, he scaled a drainpipe, briefly startling a housemaid. She called security, but they decided not to act.
He entered through an unlocked window on the roof and spent the next half hour wandering around. He tripped several alarms, but they were faulty. He viewed the royal portraits and rested on the throne for awhile. He entered the Post Room, where he drank half a bottle of Californian white wine before becoming tired and left. This article is about the beverage.
On the second attempt, an alarm sensor actually had gone off upon detecting him. A worker in the Palace thought it had happened by accident, so he silenced the alarm, Fagan having gone unnoticed.
On his way to see the Queen, he had broken a glass ashtray, lacerating his hand. Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor; born 21 April 1926) is Queen of sixteen sovereign states, holding each crown and title equally. ... This article does not cite any references or sources.
The Queen woke when he disturbed a curtain after which he sat on the edge of her bed talking to her for about ten minutes; the Queen was only able to raise the alarm when he asked for a cigarette after giving her one. She calmly called for a footman who allegedly held the intruder until police arrived. The incident happened as the armed police officer outside the royal bedroom came off duty before his replacement arrived. He had been out walking the Queen's dogs. A footman is a male household servant.
The incident caused shock to all, as one unarmed man could manage not only to enter the Palace but even went as far as to see the Queen herself while she was asleep. However, the Queen's calm nature had become better noted. She was calm even upon seeing in her room a strange man with a bloodied hand, and remained calm while conversing with Fagan for about ten minutes.
Since it was then a civil wrong rather than a criminal offence, Michael Fagan was not charged for trespassing in the Queen's bedroom.
He was however charged with theft (of the half bottle of wine, value £3), but the charges were dropped when he was committed for psychiatric evaluation.
In 1994 aggravated trespass or the act of trespass with the intent to disrupt or obstruct a lawful activity became a criminal offence (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 68). “Unlawful entry†redirects here. ... The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 was an act of parliament brought into law by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
In 1983 Michael Fagan recorded a version of the Sex Pistols song "God Save The Queen" with British band The Bollock Brothers.
© www.statemaster.com
Monday, January 18, 2010
Oi! – The Truth by Garry Bushell
Let’s hear it for Oi! - the most exciting, despised and misunderstood youth movement of all time.
After 21 years we’re still winding up the mugs.
Back in 1981, Oi! managed to outrage all shades of polite middle class opinion, right, left and centre.
To this day the hippy Left perceive Oi as a kind of cultural cancer. To the establishment, Oi was an upstart from a tower block slum who wouldn’t keep in line. He was raucous and obnoxious, a human hand-grenade with a menacing disregard for authority.
At best, Oi bands and their fans were viewed as gurning barbarians gleefully pissing in the coffee house latte. At worst, they were seen as modern day brown shirts responsible for the riots in Southall, Toxteth and the rest. Either way, Oi was too hot to handle.
To the fast-talking wide-boys who adopted its name however, Oi was something else entirely. Stripped down to basics, it was about being young, working class and not taking shit from anybody. It was anti-police, anti-authority but pro-Britain too. A lot of the Oi kids liked a fight, and yeah, this is no whitewash, there was a far right element among them but this was 1980 when the far right were polling 15 – 20 per cent of the vote in inner-city wards. It would have been a miracle if there hadn’t been NF sympathisers in the audiences. What matters is that Oi never suffered from Nazi violence the way Sham 69 and 2-Tone had. The ag that blemished those early Oi! gigs was strictly football related.
Discovered in the summer of ’81 (well into its second wind) by a mass media rocked to its foundations by weeks of riots and youthful insurrection, Oi found itself on the sharp end of the sort of tabloid crucifixion usually reserved for the more macabre mass murderers. Corrupting its meaning, the same media immediately tried to bury it. Inevitably their version of events was as watertight as a kitchen colander in a tropical monsoon. They said Oi was for skinheads (but it was always more than that), that all skins were Nazis (and only a minority ever were) and that therefore Oi was the Strasser brothers in steel-capped boots (but the bands were either socialists or cynics…)
To really understand Oi, you had to be there….
Oi’s roots were in Punk, just as Punk’s roots were in the New York Dolls, but they weren’t the same animal. For starters Oi was the reality of Punk and Sham mythology. Punk exploded between 1976 and 1979 because stadium rock had been disappearing up its own jacksie for years. The album charts were full of po-faced synthesizer twiddlers and pretentious singers belting out meaningless pseudo-poetic lyrics.
Punk seemed different. It was raw, brutal and utterly down to earth. Punk sold itself as the voice of the tower blocks. It wasn’t. Most of the forerunners were middle-class art students. The great Joe Strummer, whose dad was a diplomat, flirted with stale old Stalinism and sang about white riots while living in a white mansion. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood tried to intellectualise punk by dressing it up in half-inched Situationist ideas, all the better to flog their over-priced produce to mug punters.
Sham 69, from Surrey, were the first band to capture the growing mood of disillusionment. Street punks were disgusted both by the proliferation of phoneys and posers and the Kings Road conmen with their rip-off boutiques. But how much did Sham’s Jimmy Pursey really know about borstals, football and dole queues, and how much was he feeding off the people around him? The Last Resort’s Millwall Roi might have overstated the case but he summed up a common attitude when he wrote ‘I wish it was the weekend everyday/But Jimmy Pursey didn’t get his way/He liked to drink but he didn’t like to fight/He didn’t get his fucking homework right.’
Cockney cowboys? As Julie Burchill once observed: “It must have been a bloody strong wind the day the sound of Bow Bells reached Hersham.”
The Oi poloi didn’t need Punk’s proletarian wrapping paper – invented backgrounds and adopted attitudes, accents and aggression – because they really were the cul-de-sac, council estate kids the first punk bands had largely only pretended to be. The forerunners of Oi! were bands like Cock Sparrer, Menace, Slaughter & The Dogs and the UK Subs although none of these bands were as successful as Sham whose raucous brand of football chant punk dented the Top Ten three times.
Before he went potty, Jimmy Pursey gave the kiss of life to the two bands who defined the parameters and direction of original Oi – the Angelic Upstarts and the Cockney Rejects.
Singer Tommy ‘Mensi’ Mensforth and guitarist Ray Cowie, known as Mond, formed the Upstarts in the summer of ’77 after getting blown away by the Clash’s White Riot tour. Childhood mates, they had grown up together on the Brockley Whinns council estate in South Shields and later attended Stanhope Road Secondary Modern school (Mensi got expelled from the local grammar school at thirteen for delinquency.)
Mensi worked as an apprentice miner after leaving school. Forming the band at 19 was his escape route from the pits. Mond worked as a shipyard electrician right up until their first hit. The Upstarts’ original drummer and bassist quit after violent crowd reactions to their first gig in nearby Jarrow, to be replaced by bakery worker Stix and bricklayer Steve Forsten respectively. The band were also soon to recruit the services of Keith Bell, a self-confessed former gangster and one-time North Eastern Countries light-middleweight boxing champ, who as manager, bouncer and bodyguard was able to maintain order at early gigs on the basis of his reputation alone.
The Upstarts soon attracted the attention of the Northumbria Police Force, who haunted the band’s early career like a malignant poltergeist. Police interest stemmed from the Upstarts’ championing of the cause of Birtley amateur boxer Liddle Towers who died from injuries received after a night in the police cells. The inquest called it ‘justifiable homicide’. The Upstarts called it murder, and ‘The Murder of Liddle Towers’ (b/w ‘Police Oppression’) was their debut single on their own Dead Records. Later re-pressed by Rough Trade, the song’s brutal passion was well received even by music press pseuds, although not by the Old Bill who infiltrated gigs in plain clothes. Charges of incitement to violence were considered. Only the Upstarts’ mounting press coverage dissuaded them. For their part the band were uncompromising. They appeared on the front cover of the Socialist Workers Party’s youth magazine Rebel soon after and accused their area police of being largely National Front sympathisers.
Official police action might have been dropped but unofficial harassment continued unabated. Mensi claimed he was constantly followed and frequently stopped, searched and abused by individual officers. The band blamed unofficial police pressure for getting them banned from virtually every gig in the North East of England – via the promise of raids, prosecution for petty rule breaking, opposing licence renewals and so on. The Upstarts got the last laugh though when in April ’79 they conned a Prison Chaplain into inviting them to play a gig at Northumbria’s Acklington Prison (where ironically Keith Bell had finished his last sentence). 150 cons turned up to see a union jack embellished with the words ‘Upstarts Army’, a clenched fist, the motto ‘Smash Law And Order’ and a pig in a helmet entitled ‘PC Fuck Pig’. The band hadn’t managed to smuggle in a ‘real’ pig’s head (they usually smashed one up on stage) but the cons revelled merrily in the wham-bam wallop of rebel anthems like ‘Police Oppression’, ‘We Are The People’ (about police corruption), and a specially amended version of ‘Borstal Breakout’ retitled ‘Acklington Breakout’.
The Daily Mirror splashed with ‘Punks Rock A Jailhouse’ (wrongly identifying me as the band’s spokesman.) The Prison Governor and local Tories did their nuts, with Tynemouth MP, the appropriately named Neville Trotter, condemning the gig as ‘an incredibly stupid thing to allow’. Only Socialist Worker printed a true record of the gig, quoting Mensi telling prisoners they’d be better off in nick if Thatcher got elected that summer, and urging punks to vote Labour as ‘Thatcher’s government will destroy the trade union movement’. (In reality Mensi’s brand sub-Scargill patriotic socialism was far removed from the SWP’s revised Trotsky-lite posturing).
The band’s salty populism and savage post-Sham punk attracted a massive following of working class kids in the North East, the self-styled Upstarts Army, while the power of their debut single convinced Jimmy Pursey to form his JP label with Polydor. The Upstarts were the label’s first signing and also their first sacking after a jumped-up Polydor security guard tried to push the band about. He took on Mensi in a one against one fight and went down like the Belgrano. Polydor dropped the band. They never bothered to ask for Mensi’s side of the story. Soon after the Upstarts signed with Warner Brothers. Their second single, the Pursey produced ‘I’m An Upstart’, was released in April ’79, charted, and was chased hard by the ‘Teenage Warning’ single and album
The Cockney Rejects were also the real deal, this time the sons of dockers from London’s East End, but their music wasn’t political. Thirty years of lame Labour local government had stripped them of any world view except cynicism. Their songs were about East End life, boozers, battles, police harassment and football.
I met them first in May ’79. Two cocky urchins adorned in West Ham badges bowled into my boozer spieling back-slang and thrust their tatty demo tapes into my hand. Like them it was rough, ready and suffused with more spirit than Mystic Challenge. I put them in touch with Pursey who produced their first demo tape. These songs re-emerged as the Small Wonder debut ep ‘Flares & Slippers’ which included the essential guttersnipe anthem ‘Police Car’ (‘I like punk and I like Sham – I got nicked over West Ham…’). It sold surprising well and earned them the NME epithet of the “brainstorming vanguard of the East End punk renewal”, (although the student-orientated rag was later to virtually ignore Oi! until its arrival in the headlines forced their hand.)
The kids were the Geggus brothers Mickey and Jeff, the latter soon known to the world as Stinky Turner. Both had been good boxers – neither of them had ever been put down in the ring, and Jeff had boxed for the England youth team. They had little trouble transferring their belt onto vinyl. The Rejects’ story began in the summer of ’77 when seventeen-year-old Mickey was first inspired to pick up a plectrum by the Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’. Incubating in back garden performances in their native Canning Town as The Shitters, the Rejects only emerged as a real group after council painter Mickey recruited twenty-one-year Vince Riordan as bassist in 1979. Previously a Sham roadie, Vince (whose uncle was Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie) had marked time with loser band the Dead Flowers before he heard the Cockney call. Drummers were to come and go with the regularity of a high-fibre diet until Stix transferred from the Upstarts in 1980.
Live, the band hit like a mob of rampaging rhinos, with Mickey’s sledgehammer guitar the cornerstone of their tough, tuneful onslaught. Schoolboy Stinky was a sight for sore eyes too, screwing up his visage into veritable orgies of ugliness, and straining his tonsils to holler vocals best likened to a right evil racket. I was the Rejects’ first manager – although those stories are best left for another book - and I stayed with them until Pursey and I had negotiated an EMI deal for them. After that, I bowed out to let a man I assumed was a pro take over. He was Pursey’s manager Tony Gordon, who went on to handle Boy George (in the management sense). So little was money my motivation, that my price for signing the band over was a £100 meal at the Park Lane Hilton (I went with Hoxton Tom and our wives – Tony begged us to get him a receipt). In retrospect Gordon was bad for the band. They really needed a Peter Grant figure, someone tougher and smarter than they were, to keep their energies channelled in a more umm, artistic direction.
Under Tony Gordon, the Rejects’s career soared briefly then crashed and burned. After getting evicted from Polydor’s studios for running up a damages bill of £1,000, the band got stuck into serious recordings with Pursey at the production controls. Their second EMI single ‘Bad Man’ was superb, like PiL on steroids, but it only made the fag end of the charts. Their next release, a piss-take of Sham called ‘The Greatest Cockney Rip-Off’ did better, denting the Top 30. Their debut album ‘Greatest Hits Vol 1’ did the same, notching up over 60,000 sales.
Unlike the Upstarts’, the Rejects’ first following wasn’t largely skinhead; in fact at first skins didn’t like them. Stinky’s school pals the Rubber Glove firm aside, The Rejects crew came from football and consisted largely of West Ham chaps attracted by Vince’s involvement and disillusioned Sham and Menace fans. Famous faces included Gary Dickle, Johnny Butler, Carlton Leach, Andy Russell, Andy Swallow, Hoxton Tom, Binnsy, H and Wellsy. Even as early as November 1979, their Hammers support was so strong that mass terrace chants of ‘Cockney Rejects – oh, oh’ were clearly audible on televised soccer matches – to the tune of Gary Glitter’s – Hello Hello I’m Back Again’.
Many of the East End Glory Boys swelled their ranks a little later, realising for the first time that here was a band exactly the same as them.
The first stand-alone Oi scene developed around the Cockney Rejects and their regular gig venue, the Bridge House in Canning Town, East London. It became the focus for an entire subculture. In 1980, this was the LIFE!
None of these faces were “Nazis”. Most of them weren’t political at all, beyond the sense of voting Labour (if they bothered to vote at all) out of a sense of tradition. A tiny percentage was interested in the extremes of either right or left. As a breed they were natural conservatives. They believed in standing on their own two feet. They were patriotic, and proud of their class and their immediate culture. They looked good and dressed sharp. It was important not to look like a scruff or a student. Their heroes were boxers and footballers, not union leaders. Unlicensed boxing was a big draw, as were the dogs and stag comedians like Jimmy Jones and Jimmy Fagg. They liked to fight around football matches – the West Ham ICF (Inter City Firm) were fully represented at most local Rejects gigs. The young men oozed machismo, but some of the women were just as tough. But they weren’t mugs. These were bright kids and a surprisingly large number of them have gone on to carve out successful businesses in fields as diverse as the music industry, pornography and clothing manufacture.
They’re the ones who didn’t end up in jail of course.
They related to the Cockney Rejects because at the time at least the Rejects mirrored their audience. Rarely in rock history have a band and their followers been so identical.
The Rejects and the Upstarts had plenty in common – shared management, shared experiences of the Old Bill, shared class backgrounds – and were soon identified (by me) in the music press as the start of something different, a new more class conscious punk variant, which was known at first as ‘Real Punk’ or ‘New Punk’ and which had little in common with 1979’s self-styled punk rockers in their second-hand images and wally bondage pants. It was a pairing they obviously approved of with both bands frequently jamming together at each other’s gigs. Unlike Sham, the Rejects had little Nazi trouble. They wrote off the threat from the British Movement (we called them the German Movement) in their first Sounds interview. “We can handle them,” said Stinky. “If anyone comes to the gigs and wants to have a row, we’ll have to row. Pursey couldn’t do that. We’re not gonna take no bollocks.”
Strong words that they had to back up the first time they played outside of the East End, supporting the Upstarts at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. When a large mob of BM skins started harassing punks in the audience, the Rejects and their twelve-handed entourage (including two of the fledgling 4-Skins) took ’em on and battered them. Mickey Geggus commented: “Our gigs are for enjoyment. No one’s gonna disrupt them or pick on our fans. Troublemakers will be thrown out – by us if necessary.”
The only other major run-in they ever had with the far right was at Barking station the following February, and once again the master race contingent got bashed. Most of the Rejects’ London gigs were trouble free, especially the ones at the Bridge House, which was to London Oi! what the Roxy had been to Punk. Managed by Terry Murphy and his tough boxer sons, the Bridge never had a serious punch-up or any sieg-heiling. No one dared step out of line against the Murphys. Son Glen, the former barman, can now be seen playing George Green on TV’s London’s Burning.
The Angelic Upstarts also fought – and won - a couple of sharp battles against the far right. They played numerous Rock Against Racism gigs too, including one at Leeds where the band sported SWP ‘Disband The SPG’ badges. Like the Rejects their real ag came from other areas – principally their manager, Keith Bell. Sacked by the band when he started to knock them about, Bell and his henchmen set about trying to intimidate Upstart fans, even assaulting people buying their records, before threatening Mensi’s mother, smashing her house windows and making threatening and abusive phone calls to her. Reprisal incidents included Mensi and one time Upstarts drummer Decca Wade smashing one of the Bell firm’s car windows and a midnight visit to Bell’s own home by Decca’s dad, club comedian Derek Wade and Mensi’s brother-in-law Billy Wardropper who blasted one of Bell’s henchmen in the leg with a sawn-off shotgun. Hitting back, Bell threatened to kill Wade Senior. Three of his cronies set fire to a stable belonging to Mensi’s sister causing almost £5K worth of damage. In ensuing court cases both Bell and Billy Wardropper were jailed while Decca’s dad copped a year’s suspended sentence. Presiding Judge Hall told the Upstarts team: “I accept that all of you suffered a severe amount of provocation, which was none of your seeking. But at the same time I have a duty to condemn the use of firearms, particularly a sawn-off shotgun.” The Upstarts’ recorded their opinion in ‘Shotgun Solution’: ‘Shotgun blasts ring in my ears/Shoot some scum who live by fear/A lot of good men will do some time/For a fucking cunt without a spine’.
With the Rejects, football was the trouble. And it was understandable because they’d been fanatically pro-West Ham aggro from the word go. Even at their debut Bridge House gig they decked the stage out with a huge red banner displaying the Union Jack, the West Ham crossed hammers and the motif ‘West Side’ (which was that part of the West Ham ground then most favoured by the Irons’ most violent fans). Their second hit was a version of the West Ham anthem ‘Bubbles’ which charted in the run-up to West Ham’s Cup Final Victory in the early summer of 1980. On the b-side was the ICF-pleasing ‘West Side Boys’ which included lines like: ‘We meet in the Boelyn every Saturday/Talk about the teams that we’re gonna do today/Steel-capped Doctor Martens and iron bars/Smash the coaches and do ’em in the cars’.
It was a red rag to testosterone-charged bulls all over the country. At North London’s Electric Ballroom, 200 of West Ham’s finest mob-charged less than fifty Arsenal and smacked them clean out of the venue. But ultra-violence at a Birmingham gig really spelt their undoing. The audience at the Cedar Club was swelled by a mob of Birmingham City skinheads who terrace-chanted throughout the support set from the Kidz Next Door (featuring Grant Fleming, now a leftwing film maker, and Pursey’s kid brother Robbie). By the time the Rejects came on stage there were over 200 Brum City skins at the front hurling abuse. During the second number they started hurling plastic glasses. Then a real glass smashed on stage. Stinky Turner responded by saying: “If anyone wants to chuck glasses they can come outside and I’ll knock seven shades of shit out of ya”. That was it, glasses and ashtrays came from all directions. One hit Vince and as a Brum skinhead started shouting “Come on”, Micky dived into the crowd and put him on his back. Although outnumbered more than ten to one, the Rejects and their entourage drove the Brummy mob right across the hall, and finally out of it altogether. Under a hail of missiles Mickey Geggus sustained a head injury that needed nine stitches and left him with what looked like a Fred Perry design above his right eye. Grant Fleming, a veteran of such notorious riots as Sham at Hendon and Madness at Hatfield, described the night’s violence as the worst he’d ever seen.
Taken to the local hospital for treatment, Geggus had to bunk out of a twenty-foot high window when ‘tooled-up’ mates of the injured Brum City fans came looking for him. Back at the gig, the Londoners emerged triumphant from the fighting only to discover all their gear had been ripped off – total value, two grand. The next morning, the Cockney contingent split into two vans – one that went on to the next gig at Huddersfield, the other containing Mickey and Grant that went cruising round the city looking for any likely punters who might know the whereabouts of their stolen gear. Incidents that morning in Wolverhampton Road, Albury, involving Geggus, three locals and an iron bar, resulted in Mickey being charged with malicious wounding. Eight months later, both he and Grant had the luck of the devil to walk away with suspended sentences.
Maybe as insurance, in the summer of ’80, the Rejects played two
Bridge House benefit gigs for the Prisoners Rights Organisation, PROP, arranged by me and Hoxton Tom with the help of Terry Murphy. Tom’s aunt was involved with London PROP because his uncle, Steven Smeeth, had been jailed for his part in George Davis’s doomed comeback caper. The gigs were two of the best I’d ever seen the band play.
Brum had meant the end of the Rejects as a touring band however. They had to pull a Liverpool gig when literally hundreds of tooled-up Scouse match boys came looking for confrontation. Road manager Kevin Wells was threatened at knife point. At first Mickey seemed to revel in it all, acting like he was living out some Cagney movie. The band’s second LP called, surprisingly enough, ‘Greatest Hits Vol 2’, reflected his apparent death wish with sleevenotes boasting ‘From Scotland down to Cornwall, we dun the lot, we took ’em all. On the song ‘Urban Guerrilla’ he spoke these words: “Some folk call it anarchy, but I just call it fun. Don’t give a fuck about the law, I wanna kill someone.” Me? I think he meant it.
But in the long build up to the trial, a change came over Mickey. He swapped his little blue pills for ganja and started to mellow. Correspondingly, the Rejects’ music began to move away from hooligan racket towards more mainstream rock. 1981’s ‘The Power & The Glory’ sounded like The Professionals. 1982’s ‘The Wild Ones’, produced by Pete Way, was more like UFO. And if 1984’s ‘Quiet Storm’ had been any more laid back it could have been bottled and sold as Valium. ‘The Wild Ones’ remains a great rock album, with stand-out tracks such as City Of Lights; but the old fans were actively hostile to their new sounds, while abysmal marketing meant potential new fans never got to hear them. Stale mate.
The Angelic Upstarts lost their momentum in 1980 as well, getting dropped by Warners in the summer. And although they were snapped up by EMI, going on to release their finest studio album, ‘Two Million Voices’ in April ’81, they barely played live and fans were getting frustrated.
During 1980, hooligan audiences, especially in South East London, found new live laughs in the shape of Peckham-based piss-artist pranksters Splodgenessabounds, whose brand of coarse comedy and punk energy scored three top thirty singles that year. Their debut single, ‘Two Pints of Lager’ was a Top Ten smash. Tongue in cheek, I dubbed them ‘punk pathetique’ along with equally crazy bands like Brighton’s Peter & The Test-Tube Babies and Geordie jesters The Toy Dolls.
Singer Max Splodge insisted: “The pathetique bands are the other side of Oi! We’re working class too only whereas some bands sing about prison and the dole, we sing about pilchards and bums. The audience is the same.’ Pathetique peaked in the autumn of 1980 with the Pathetique Convention at the Electric Ballroom. West Ham’s bootboy poet Barney Rubble was Man of the Match.
Elsewhere a second generation of hardcore Oi! bands had been spawned directly by the Upstarts and the Rejects. The Upstarts inspired Criminal Class from Coventry, and Infa-Riot from Plymouth via North London. The Cockney Rejects inspired the ferocious 4-Skins, and Sunderland’s Red Alert. Edinburgh noise-terrorists the Exploited also cited the Rejects as their major influence. In London, a whole host of groups sprang up around the Rejects too including Barney & The Rubbles and Stinky’s Postmen combo. A movement was evolving at the grass roots.
I called it Oi!
Oi! was and remains a Cockney street shout guaranteed to turn heads. Stinky Turner used to holler it at the start of each Rejects number, replacing the first punks’ habitual ‘1,2,3,4’. Before him “Oi! Oi!” had been Ian Dury’s catch-phrase, although he’d probably nicked it from Cockney comic Jimmy Wheeler whose catchphrase had been “Oi, Oi that’s yer lot.” Entertainers Flanagan and Allen first used “Oi!” as a catchphrase in their 1930s variety act.
As I was compiling ‘Oi! – The Album’ for EMI (released in November 1980) more like-minded combos sent demo tapes from all over the country. There was Blitz from New Mills, The Strike from Lanarkshire and Demob from Gloucester. But the first real challengers for the Rejects crown were the 4-Skins. They made their debut supporting the Damned at the Bridge House in ’79 with Micky Geggus on drums. The 4-Skins developed through various line-ups playing low-key London pub gigs sporadically before arriving at their definite line-up towards the end of 1980: Gary Hodges, vocals; Hoxton Tom, bass; Rockabilly Steven Pear, guitar; and John Jacobs, drums. There was a real charisma about the band, and their raw brand of barbed-wire roar was blessed with a driving dynamism. Their stand-out song was ‘Chaos’, a horror movie fantasy of urban chaos and skinhead takeover. But most of their three minute blasts of fury concerned unemployment and police harassment (‘ACAB’, ‘Wonderful World’), the horrors of war (‘I Don’t Wanna Die’), thinking for yourself (‘Clockwork Skinhead’) self-pride (‘Sorry’) and class (‘One Law For Them’).
Both the 4-Skins and Infa-Riot were emphatic about the need to learn from the Rejects’ mistakes and get away from football trouble. The 4-Skins favoured no one team (Hodges was West Ham, Hoxton, Spurs, Steve, Arsenal and Jacobs, Millwall) and no one political preference (Hoxton was a liberal; Steve left Labour; Jacobs apolitical; and Hodges was a reformed right-winger very pro anti-unemployment campaigns). Infa-Riot were the same, professing no football affiliations. Mensi wrote their first Sounds review and he and Jock McDonald got them their first London gigs. Musically, they were a lot like a lither, wilder Upstarts. Like most Upstarts-influenced groups Infa-Riot played gigs for Rock Against Racism (an apparently noble campaign that was actually a front for the extreme Left SWP). Criminal Class played RAR gigs too, and a benefit for the highly suspect Troops Out Of Ireland movement.
The 4-skins refused to play RAR gigs, not wanting to be poster boys for Trotskyism.
The Oi! bands converged to publicly thrash out their stance at the Oi debate held at Sounds in January 1981. Everyone agreed on the need for raw r’n’r, and the sense of benefit gigs, but there was a heated difference of opinion on politics. Stinky Turner was violently against politics and politicians. Mensi argued that Labour still represented working class interests and claimed that “the Tories still represent the biggest threat to our kind of people”. It was the same divide that had always separated the Rejects and the Upstarts. They managed to be agree about reclaiming Britain’s Union flag for the people and, erh, that was it.
Although a few black and immigrant kids were into Oi, it was mostly a white working class phenomenon. The West Indian kids into Oi were cockney Blacks like the now famous Cass Pennant who’d rejected the pull of Rastafarianism and reggae. No Oi! band professed racialist or Nazi leanings (in fact Demob had two mixed race boxers in the band) and the teething trouble that dogged early gigs was all to do with the football legacy bequeathed by the Rejects. As Punk Lives commentated later “Anyone who went to Oi! gigs could tell you you didn’t get sieg-heiling at them…ironically Madness and Bad Manners had most trouble with Nazi skins at the time. All Oi! went on about was class”.
For the first half year of Oi the movement there were only two bad incidents of gig violence, both around Infa-Riot. The band headlined the first ‘New Punk Convention’ at the tail end of 1980 with the Upstarts and Criminal Class. It ended in disaster as Poplar Boy West Ham fans slugged it out with a smaller Arsenal crew led by the then infamous Dave Smith who followed the Upstarts.
In March 1981, Infa-Riot played the Acklam Hall in West London with Millwall skinhead band the Last Resort. Tooled-up local Queens Park Rangers supporting skins and straights besieged the venue looking for West Ham. At one stage they tried to smash their way in through the roof. Ironically, most Hammers Oi fans were safely in Upton Park at the time, watching their boys battle a Russian team.
The model of the sort of gig the bands wanted came in February 1981 with the second New Punk Convention, this time held at the Bridge House with the 4-Skins headlining (and introduced by the king of rude reggae himself, Judge Dread). The pub venue was packed far over capacity with a motley crew of skins, working class punks and soccer rowdies drawn from the ranks of West Ham, Spurs, Millwall, QPR, Arsenal and Charlton. There wasn’t one ruck all night.
This gig set a precedent for peaceful co-existence that lasted even when Oi! shifted venues to Hackney’s Deuragon Arms. It was living proof that Pursey’s old dream of the Kids United could happen. But united for what? It was around this time that I and the leading bands entered into a conspiracy to pervert the course of youth cult history. We held a conference to plan the way the Oi! movement could develop in a positive, united manner. The idea was not only to arrange gigs and set up an Oi! record label, but also to plug away at the central theme of the folly of street kids fighting each other over football teams. We wanted to give Oi! a purpose by playing benefit gigs for working class causes.
At the time I was living on the Ferrier estate in Kidbrook, South East London, as was Frankie ‘Boy’ Flame. And bands frequently made the pilgrimage here to stay in our maisonette while they were playing London or just to shoot the breeze in the Wat Tyler pub. Some petty jealousies and band rivalry existed, but the Oi! scene was far more united than any other youth cult in British history. We tried to build on that.
The first Oi! conference was a small affair attended by reps from the Rejects, the 4-Skins, Splodge, Infa-Riot, the Business and the Last Resort, the latter two being the latest recruits to the burgeoning movement. The Business were then known as ‘pop-oi’ because of their tuneful anthems. They came from Lewisham, South London. They were fronted by Mickey Fitz, who like guitarist Steve Kent, had attended Colfe’s Grammar School in Lee (as I had done) and had developed a terrace following which peacefully included West Ham, Chelsea and Millwall. Kent was a truly talented musician. The Business were managed by West Ham vet Laurie Pryor who was also known as Ronnie Rouman.
The Last Resort were a skinhead band from South London via Herne Bay, Kent, based around the Last Resort shop in Petticoat Lane, East London and financed by the shop’s owner Michael French. They too saw Oi as being bigger that skins. “Oi is uniting punks, skins and everyone,” growler Millwall Roi told Sounds in their first interview. “Now we’ve just gotta get away from football.”
Lee Wilson of Infa-Riot agreed. “Oi is the voice of street kids everywhere,” he said. “That’s why we’re gonna grow, that’s why we’re gonna win.” And Oi was growing all the time. By spring, as I was compiling the second Oi compilation “Strength Thru Oi” for Decca (released May ’81) over fifty bands had aligned with the movement, including the Oi/ska squad the Buzz Kids whose singer, Garry Johnson’s lyric writing far outshone his vocal ability. He’d already had some lyrics published in a poetry collection by Babylon Books called “Boys Of The Empire”. I encouraged him to ditch the band and branch out as Oi’s first entirely serious poet. Johnson’s humour and his bitterly anti-establishment verses added yet more credence to Oi!, as did the plethora of good fanzines that had sprung up around it – the best being Rising Free, Ready To Ruck (which became New Mania) and Phase One. In June a second Oi! conference was held in the Conway Hall at Red Lion Square, attended by 57 interested parties including reps from bands all over the country. There was much concern voiced about the movement’s violent image, which was felt to be unjust. The sublime Beki Bondage from the Oi-bolstered punk band Vice Squad complained that the aggressive skin on the front of ‘Strength Thru Oi!’ made the movement look too skinhead orientated. Everyone agreed. And once again conference voted unanimously to back pro-working class campaigns. Ron Rouman was delegated to write to the Right To Work Campaign that week to set up gigs. The main themes of the day were the need to unite working class kids, and stick together. Punk Lives called it “a glimpse of the future Oi! could have had.”
When the 4-Skins, the Last Resort and the Business played a gig at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall six days later, the riot that surrounded it and the acres of hysterical newsprint that ensued drowned out that possibility, and any chance of Oi getting a fair hearing, for good.
WHEN THE shit hit the headlines during 1981’s summer of discontent, I sincerely believed that the truth would out. That the smears against the Oi bands would be laughed at in the same way that the slurs against the Sex Pistols and The Clash had been. The whole idea that the bands had gone into Middlesex to provoke a race riot was absurd. We’d been talking strike benefits, not NF marches. No Oi band had sported swaztikas like the Sex Pistols had done. No Oi band had sung lyrics like “too many Jews for my liking” as Siouxsie Banshee did. No Oi band had lifted their name from the SS like Joy Division had done…
What contributed to Oi’s undoing however was the movement’s utter hostility to the middle classes in general and the trendy left in particular (see the Garry Johnson/Business anthem ‘Suburban Rebels’). So as well as incurring the wrath of the right-wing establishment, Oi also alienated the left-wing of the middle class media whose backing had seen the punk bands through their own particular backlash and who were later to defend rap and hip-hop which were far more violent than Oi had ever been, and anti-semitic to boot. Besides me, there was no-one else in the media to defend the bands. Very few rock journalists had ventured into the East End to see the gigs. (Indeed the idea that the NME was ever THE punk paper is a complete myth. That paper rubbished Anarchy In The UK and their first review of The Clash suggested they "should be returned to the garage, preferrably with the motor running." Parsons and Burchill loved Joe Strummer and co for their politics alone.)
The Oi! bands and their fans were guilty of that most terrible of crimes – being white and working class with chips on their shoulders.
Ironically Alan Rusbridger, now the editor of The Guardian was the only journalist to give the Oi bands a fair hearing…
The superficial evidence against Oi seemed strong – the Southall riot and ‘Strength Thru Oi’. The Oi! gig at Southall’s Hamborough Tavern had been arranged by West London 4-Skins’ fans fed up with having to travel to the East End to see the shows. The press painted sinister pictures of skinheads being ‘bussed’ into a predominantly Asian area. FACT: there were just two coaches hired by the Last Resort who hired coaches to transport their away-firm of fans whenever the band played anywhere outside of South London. TV and radio reports gave the impression of skinheads battling Asian youths and the Police. FACT: the Oi fans were all inside the Tavern enjoying the gig when the first Asian petrol bomb sailed through the window. The cops were protecting the Oi kids. The press said the peaceful Asian community had risen spontaneously to repulse right-wing invaders who had terrorised the town. FACT: there’d been just one abusive incident involving young skinheads from Mottingham, Kent, in a chip shop earlier in the evening. “They probably asked the geezer how many rupees a packet of chips cost,” Max Splodge later shrugged.
The sheer quantity of petrol bombs used by the Asians indicated they’d been stockpiling them for some days before. The young Asians were definitely on the offensive. Young white Oi fans were assaulted by Asian youths on buses going TO the gig, and a minibus containing Business fans from Lewisham and radical poet Garry Johnson was attacked by Asians wielding swords without any provocation (see Johnson’s book The Story of Oi for full details). In fact the apparently placid Asian community was to riot again within the week with no ‘outsiders’ to pin the blame on.
The idea that the bands had gone to Southall to deliberately provoke a race riot just to be able to cash-in on the ensuing publicity is just daft. It goes completely against everything they’d been trying to achieve for the previous eight months. The 4-Skins manager Garry Hitchcock said “If we’d really wanted to go to Southall and smash it up, we’d have come with geezers – and left all the birds and the kids behind”.
“People ask why the Oi bands played Southall,” commented Hoxton Tom, “but you’ve gotta remember, in them days any gig was welcome. No one thought for a minute that there’d be trouble there. The Business had played Brixton before. The Last Resort had played Peckham, we’d played Hackney often and they’re all areas with large black populations, and yet those gigs were always trouble free. Oi had to break out of the East End to have any chance of growing.”
To the mass media, the events of July 4th were manna from heaven: Yobs. Immigrants. Anarchy. The Thin Blue Line… But the Oi crowd were reluctant participants. As soon as it was obvious real havoc was brewing, the Oi bands attempted to negotiate with the Southall Youth Movement through the police. They didn’t want to talk. “We didn’t want trouble,” said Tom, “but that’s all they had on their minds”. Under attack, the Oi-polloi had no other option but to fight a defensive rear-guard action and retreat. The Hamborough Tavern was razed to the ground. And the press distortion began. According to some reports right wing hate leaflets had been found in vans the following morning – the same vans that had been torched. Were the leaflets printed on asbestos? Hacks even descended on the Bridge House and tried to bribe kids into sieg-heiling for their cameras. One was kicked out of the pub by Si Spanner who was Jewish. But who cared about the truth? Storm-trooping skins made shock-horror headlines.
The fighting at Southall could have been worse. Scores more Oi! fans were turned back by the police before they’d even got to the gig, including Indian workmate of Hoxton Tom’s (the press never mentioned the few black, Asian and Greek kids inside the Tavern). Ironically, reports of a race riot on the radio induced mobs of West London bikers to rush to the scene eager to stand alongside their old enemies, the skins, against the Asians. The cops turned them back too.
I take full responsibility for ‘Strength Thru Oi’. I gave the album its title. But it was never knowingly a pun on the Nazi slogan Strength Through Joy. Let’s be honest, who knew? How many people my age were that up on Third Reich sloganeering? The Skids had released an ep called Strength Through Joy earlier that year, and that’s what I based the pun on (asked later, Skids singer Richard Jobson – now a dapper TV movie reviewer - said he’d taken it from the Dirk Bogarde’s autobiography). It was either that or The Oi Of Sex which I dismissed as too frivolous. Doh!
Selective quotes from my sleevenotes were used by the Daily Mail to fit their theory of Oi’s ‘brown shirt’ philosophy. Naturally this meant they had to omit the favourable mentions of black sportsmen, including Jesse Owen, the American athlete who’d triumphed so dramatically at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The fact there wasn’t a single racist lyric on the album didn’t seem to matter. Criminal Class’s ‘Blood On The Street’ actually made the point that black and white youth faced the same state oppression.
The biggest argument they had was the picture of the aggressive skin on the front cover. This turned out to be Nicky Crane (a gay Nazi who later died of AIDS). Here’s the truth: the original model had been West Ham personality and then body-builder Carlton Leach. Carlton had turned up for one photo session at the Bridge House that didn’t work. He never turned up for the second one. Under looming deadline pressure I suggested using a shot from a skinhead Xmas card which I believed was a still from the Wanderers movie. In fact it had been taken by English skinhead photographer Martin Dean. It wasn’t until the very last minute, when Decca had mocked up the sleeve that the photo was sufficiently clear to reveal Nazi tattoos. We had the option of either airbrushing the tattoos out or putting the LP back a month while we put a new sleeve together. Said Splodge manager Dave Long: “Blame it on youthful impetuousness but the wrong decision was made. It was a mistake, but it was an honest mistake. There’s nothing else on that LP or in Oi that could possibly be construed as dodgy.”
Another crucial point the critics skipped over was that it wasn’t only me who hadn’t realised the picture was of Nicky Crane. The far right hadn’t either. That album had been out for two months before the Daily Mail ‘exposed’ it (and me!) and yet not once had it been referred to in right-wing publications. It was a bitter irony. Me, at that point in my life a dedicated socialist (used to having “Bushell is a red” chanted at me at gigs), accused of masterminding a right-wing movement by a newspaper that had once supported Mosley’s Blackshirts, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, and appeasement with Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War Two…
In retrospect I think I’m more embarrassed by Crane being a poof.
Southall proved the catalyst for a spate of anti-government riots and there was no doubt where the Oi! bands stood on that issue, with the 4-Skins, Blitz and the Violators celebrating the popular uprisings with songs like ‘One Law For Them’, ‘Nation On Fire’ and ‘Summer of ‘81’.
In Sounds and in his book The Story of Oi, Garry Johnson called on black and white youth to unite to fight the Tories. Sounds and I started libel proceedings against the Mail, while the Oi bands now shaped up to deal with a problem that had never seemed and issue before – Nazism.
Naturally the far right loved it. YNF organiser Joseph Pearce (brother of Soft Cell’s Stevo) popped up in the press out of nowhere claiming that the Oi bands were the musical wing of the National Front. Pearce had never even been to an Oi gig.
Out of journalistic interest, I surveyed skinheads in the Last Resort shop on the Sunday after Southall. Most of them cited some immigrant ancestry from Irish to Pakistani through Russian Jew. Last Resort fan Khalid Karim from Leytonstone who was half-Pakistani swore he had never been hassled at any Last Resort gig. ‘Gappy’ Eddie from Poplar claimed to personally know at least thirty ‘non-white’ skins, including West Indian skins from Hackney, Brixton, Ladbroke Grove and Walthamstow, a half-Pakistani suedehead from Dalston and another half-Pakistani skin called Rob from Wimbledon who I remember was always at Oi gigs taking pictures. Sixteen-year-old Nicky Holder from Lewisham named other non-white skins – Gary Singh from Belvedere, West Indian Colin McClean from Lewisham, Arab skin Mushti from New Cross, and a huge black Orpington skin called Sanya. Jewish skinhead Tony Stern from Epping claimed to know “loads of Jewish skins and no one gets any trouble, where are all the ‘Nazi’ skins now, that’s what I wanna know.” Danielle Lux, from an orthadox Jewish family, was always down at the Hackney gigs. She is now something important at Channel 4.
When Socialist Worker ran a report based on the Mail article, it was inundated with letters from socialist skins and punks complaining how out of touch it was. Sheffield skins wrote to Sounds to say that the month before 500 black and white skinheads had marched together in protest against Unemployment and police harassment bearing placards proclaiming ‘Jobs Not Jails’. SWP skin poet Seething Wells was outraged by the all-skins-are-nazis line, pointing to the literally thousands of Northern skins and rudies who had swelled June’s anti-Nazi Leeds Carnival. He might have mentioned Liverpool’s ‘Skin Fein’ republican skins too.
It was harder to get the truth into the nationals. A freelance journalist called John Glatt came and spoke to skinheads at length and filed a sympathetic report to the News Of the World. His copy was slashed and distorted to make a cheap sensationalist slob story.
Even if Oi had just been a skinhead phenomenon it was dishonest and dangerously lazy journalism to suggest that anything more than a small minority of skinheads at this time were Nazi sympathisers.
The Oi bands realised that simple facts weren’t enough to win the propaganda battle. They had to prove their protestations of innocence. Garry Hodges went on TV to say that the 4-Skins would play an anti-racist gig as long as it was organised by an independent body, although the band split before it occurred under the tremendous pressure and after just one more gig – advertised as country band the Skans! - at a Mottingham pub. The Business declined to play RAR gigs for the old ‘RAR as Trot front’ reasons, but instead put together their own unwieldy named ‘Oi Against Racism and Political Extremism But Still Against The System tour with Infa-Riot, Blitz and the Partisans. Infa-Riot played a Sheffield RAR gig and Blitz played at the Blackburn leg of the Right To Work March.
After Southall, a few of us met up with Red Action, a working class street-fighting splinter from the SWP, to clear the air about Oi. Their leading member Mick O’Farrell even contributed a poem to the fourth Oi! album sleeve. It was a short-lived union, however. Although they called themselves socialists, Red Action were led by Irish nationalists and we disagreed passionately about Ulster and the Falklands.
In late August 1981, I complied the third Oi! album, ‘Carry on Oi!’ Released by Secret Records in October 1981. Eager to stand by the bands, I reformed my own late 70s band The Gonads to contribute Tucker’s Ruckers to the compilation. On first release it sold 35,000 copies. Melody Maker’s review stressed that Oi’s intentions ‘weren’t to divide but to unite the working classes’. The same month The Exploited smashed into the top forty with ‘Dead Cities’ (shame about that Top Of The Pops appearance), while The Business released their superb debut single coupling ‘Harry May’ with ‘National Insurance Blacklist’ – an attack on the unofficial employers’ blacklist operated against militant trade unionists in the building trade. Paradoxically, the period from September ’81 to the end of ’82 saw the strongest ever Oi! releases thanks to Secret, and the excellent Malvern label No Future’s series of twenty-two singles from the likes of Blitz, the Partisans, Red Alert, Peter & The Test-Tube Babies, and Derbyshire ‘Clockwork Orange’ band the Violators. Punk Lives mag calculated that Oi sold over two million in the first four years (by 2001, total sales by Oi groups and groups influenced by Oi stand at well over eleven million).
Recognising its significance left-wing playwright Trevor Griffiths wrote a play called Oi For England which was broadcast by the ITV in April 1982 as well as being taken round England on a tour. The play was more than a little far-fetched. It featured four unemployed skins in an Oi band approached to play a Nazi gig, and revolved around their arguments about it and the riot outside. What Griffiths seemed to be saying however was that in any group of skins, you’d have one susceptible to the lure of race and nation, one drawn to class struggles, and two who couldn’t give a toss about politics.
Unfortunately, Oi’s vinyl health during 1982 wasn’t reflected on the streets. The 4-Skins split, then reformed with drummer Jacobs on guitar, new boy Pete Abbott on drums, Hoxton Tom still on bass and roadie Panther (Tony Cummins) on vocals. Later Millwall Roi sang with them. But by then Tom was the only surviving original, and sales had slumped almost out of sight. They split for good in 1984.
The Rejects were dropped by EMI in ’81, disowned Oi for HM, and didn’t play again for over a decade. The Upstarts soldiered on, playing the US punk circuit in ’82 but musically they went down the khazi. Under pressure from EMI the Upstarts released a poor synth pop saturated sell-out LP ‘Still From The Heart’ that flopped miserably. (Infa-Riot tried a similarly doomed direction change, releasing an LP of unbelievably ‘ordinary’ rock in 1983 before finally breaking up the following year). The Upstarts were the subject of a Channel 4 documentary in 1984, but their chart success was long behind them.
The Last Resort never ever got to the singles stage, they weren’t allowed a life independent of Micky French’s boutique. What he wanted was a house band, a singing advert for his t-shirts. Before Southall he opposed moves to send the bands on a US tour – he wanted the scene to stay at the small club level. The cynical claimed he didn’t want commercial competition for ‘his’ skinhead clothes market.
Sadly the Resort suffered when their London fans smashed up a pub in King’s Lynn called the Stanley Arms. Virtually the same crowd were also involved in a BBC televised ruck with local skins at Benny’s Club in Harlow. Both incidents happened in January ’82, at a time when everyone else was trying to prove that Oi! meant more than rucking. The Last Resort split with French later in ’82 to re-emerge as The Warriors, but back then they were never sufficiently motivated to build on their potential.
The Exploited meantime had shed their skin look, adopting a mutant Mohawk image and becoming the darlings of the Apocalypse Now punk revival. Singer Wattie went on to close down two thirds of Western Europe to other punk bands by smashing up dressing rooms. Losing gifted guitarist Big John (to Nirvana!) along the way, the band play on to this day.
Back in ’82, Blitz and The Business had clearly emerged as the new vanguard Oi desperately needed. Blitz specialised in belligerent boots ‘n’ braces brickwall Oi - pure youth anthems like ‘Fight To Live’ ‘Razors In The Night’, and the haunting ‘Warriors’. Their debut LP ‘Voice Of A Generation’ went top thirty and was the Oi LP of ’82 but they were never that hot live. A disastrous gig at the Hammersmith Clarendon at the end of ’82 was the beginning of the end. In ’83 Blitz split in two, their former engineer Tim Harris taking over from the popular Mackie as bassist (Mackie later formed the short-lived Rose Of Victory with Blitz guitarist Nidge Miller) and pushing the band into trendier synthesiser sounds with scant public appeal. They didn’t last into ’84.
The Business split and got punkier. Guitarist Steve Whale (ex-Gonads) contributed greatly to their harder sound. They were haunted by politics - internal and external. To back-up their ‘Blacklist’ song, Business manager Ron Rouman and the Oi organising committee (an ad-hoc body set up after Southall) met with blacklisted building worker Brian Higgins and other trade union militants to organise a big pro-union benefit gig. But the band bottled out and sacked Rouman, replacing him with bikers’ pin-up Vermilion Sands. Deprived of Rouman’s drive and terrace connections, the band fell apart. The Business reformed in 1984 and were smart enough to realise you had to tour to survive (ironically they signed to Rouman and Mark Brennan’s Link Records). They have been playing ever since to growing audiences, especially in the USA where they inspired another Oi wave.
Back home though, Oi as we first knew it died at the end of ’82. It never had room to grow, and its vanguard fell apart ignominiously. To paraphrase Mao, it was like a stream, when it’s moving it stays healthy, but when it gets blocked up and stagnant all the shit rises to the top. The Oi stream was definitely blocked up. And the poor quality of the new combos showcased on the fourth Oi LP ‘Oi Oi That’s Yer Lot’ (produced by Mickey Geggus and released by Secret in October ’82) confirmed it. The new bands were either too unoriginal, too weak, or (in the case of Skully’s East End Badoes, too limited in their appeal to a square mile of Poplar) to mean anything.
And when great Oi-influenced bands did break through in ’83 they all fell at early fences. Croydon’s Case were cracking – they specialised in a ballsy brand of high-octane pop fresher than Max Miller chewing polos in a mountain stream and were fronted by the exceptionally expressive Matthew Newman. Case attracted acclaim from most quarters (including the Daily Mirror and Radio One) but fell apart when Matthew swapped the stage for domestic bliss with Splodge co-vocalist Christine Miller. Similarly, Taboo rose from the ashes of the Violators and specialised in non-wimpy pop. But the band split when wonderful, vivacious vocalist Helen decided to get pregnant and leave.
Finally there was The Blood, one of the best Oi bands ever to come out of Blighty. Emerging out of the wild excesses of Charlton’s Coming Blood, The Blood’s debut LP ‘False Gestures For A Devious Public’ was an invigorating blend of Stranglers, Motorhead and Alice Cooper influences which hit the UK Top Thirty and was voted one of the year’s best by the Sounds staff. On stage they were awesome and OTT in equal measure. They filled blow-up dolls full of butchers’ offal and cut them up with chainsaws. And their lyrics were a cut-above the usual, with lines like ‘The Pope said to the atheist, "In God’s name I do swear, you’re searching blindly in the dark for something that ain’t there"/The atheist said to the Pope: "There ain’t no getting round it, you too were searching in the dark for nothing…but you found it".’ But the band were lazy bastards who never wanted to tour, and the days when you could scam your way to chart success were long gone.
Cock Sparrer reformed in ’83 and recorded the LP they always should have made, ‘Shock Troops’ (Carrere), but they never had chart success in the UK again. Modesty forbids any mention of the Gonads, considered by many to be the finest Oi! band of them all (see Back & Barking for the proof in handy CD form).
At the fag end of ’83, Syndicate Records launched a new series of Oi! albums which lacked both the bite and the sales of the originals – ‘Son of Oi’ was nudging up to the 10,000 mark when Syndicate went bust in December ’84, that bankruptcy itself a reflection of Britain’s shrinking Oi market. The two best new bands were Burial and Prole (the latter a studio creation put together by me and Steve Kent). Scarborough’s Burial cited Oi and 2-Tone as forebears and mixed the sounds of ska and rowdy bootboy punk in their set. The only Oi! band to have any success were the Toy Dolls who scored a top ten novelty hit with their version of ‘Nellie The Elephant’ at Xmas 1984.
As British Punk degenerated after its ’81 boom, the skinhead scene became a political battleground and turned sour. The cream of the ’81 generation went Casual. A few even turned rockabilly. Meanwhile Nazi kids who’d never been part of Oi started turning up at the gigs, obviously attracted by the media’s ‘reporting’. When they found the truth was different, they turned nasty: Garry Johnson was beaten up by Nazi skins in Peckham. I was attacked by a mob of fifteen Nazis (not skins) at an Upstarts gig at the 100 Club. Si Spanner was stabbed by the same nazi who’d tried to stab Buster Bloodvessel. Attila The Stockbroker, the left-wing Oi poet/wally, was whacked on stage in North London. Infa-Riot were attacked at the 100 Club by Nazis. You get the picture.
In East London, it was a different story - the British Movement were taken out of the frame by the Inter City Firm. In early 1982, Skully and other Oi regulars had organised a march protesting about the jailing of their fellow ICF member Cass Pennant. The BM threatened individuals, putting pressure on them to cancel this "march for a nigger". The following Monday the ICF had been planning to take on Tottenham fans (as West Ham were playing Spurs that night). Instead they confronted and smashed the East London neo-Nazis who were drinking in the Boleyn Arms. They were never a significant presence on the West Ham terraces again, but they remained a problem elsewhere.
When they couldn’t find Oi bands to toe the master race line, the neo-Nazis created their own nationalist skinhead bands around the Blood & Honour banner. Skrewdriver, the veteran punk band first featured on Janet Street-Porter’s punk TV documentary in 1976, came back as skinheads and were the cornerstone of the new hate-punk sound. Opposing them were a raft of equally extreme Trotskyist bands and performers, like the Redskins, the Newtown Neurotics, Attila and Seething Wells.
Quietly, and apart from all the polemics, a small, smartly dressed alternative skinhead scene developed underground. Hard As Nails fanzine reflected this growing trend. It was run by two young kids from Canvey, Essex, both Labour Party members. But they insisted the mag was about style, not politics. They had some cross-over with the scooterist scene which flourishes to this day, with thousands subscribing to George Marshall’s marvellous Pulped mag and enjoying a drip-feed of classic Oi CDs from Mark Brennan’s splendid Captain Oi!, the world’s leading punk re-issue label.
This fine volume will tell you the rest of the story in detail. In my view, the British Oi scene didn’t really perk up until Link Records came along in 1986, and gave a platform to bands like Section 5 and Vicious Rumours. But Link couldn’t reverse the decline. In Britain Oi fizzled out and turned to shit for many a barren year. But the fuse we lit went on to detonate explosive scenes around the globe. For the past two years Oi! has been booming in Malaysia (where they angrily insist that Oi is not about black and white uniting, it’s about black, white, yellow and brown). There is even an underground Oi! scene in Red China.
Oi had taken off in most European countries by the mid-eighties. But the Yanks made the music their own. Oi was always viewed for what it was in the States: a distinctive brand of street-punk. It was hardcore bands like Agnostic Front who first invited the Business to play there. The first US Oi bands were formed in 1981. The torch was carried later that decade by great bands like Warzone and The Press, the socialist Oi! band from New York whose anthem Revolution Now was directly inspired by the Gonads. But the US of Oi! really took of in the 1990s, with inspired outfits like Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys, plus The Bruisers, the Anti-Heroes and The Reducers. One of the best Oi-influenced bands were Operation Ivy, whose ska-punk numbers were punctuated with oi-oi terrace chants (this has become a ska-punk tradition). Operation Ivy became Rancid, one of the hottest of the 90s punk bands. Another major US punk band NOFX played Oi songs and were unashamedly influenced by Blitz and the Partisans.
Incidently the world’s largest organised tour against racism happened recently in the USA, featuring bands like Less Than Jake and The Toasters, and was sponsored by the Moon Ska label which is now run by rotund Oi stalwart Lol Pryor.
In April 2001 I walked into the Virgin mega-store in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, and was delighted to find a joint Business/Drop Kick Murphys CD not just in the racks but being played on the store PA system. Upstairs in the book department the latest issue of Spin magazine had put together their Top 50 most influential punk albums ever. Oi! – The Album, the record I had compiled for EMI 21 years previously was in there with these words: ‘The white riot becomes a soccer riot: Oi! was punk dumbed down to a hilariously catchy chant and a knee in the bollocks.’ Not perfect but at least there wasn’t a sniff of any Nazi nonsense…unlike in Britain where apparently professional journalists like John Sweeney of The Observer feel free to trot out same old lies without ever checking the facts.
Posers who work for Kerrang and Metal Hammer still refuse to write about the Business even though they gleefully write about bands who cite South London’s finest as their inspiration.
And even last year, CD manufacturer Disctronics declined to re-press well-known “Nazi” CDs like ‘Oi Oi Music’ by The Oppressed (the world’s leading anti-fascist Oi band!) and ‘100% British Ska’.
Yeah, we still wind up the mugs.
The latest miscreant is Robert Elms. His book, The Way We Wore, starts with a lovingly accurate depiction of skinhead fashion in the sixties but goes on to dismiss Oi out of hand. Yet it’s clear from the text that Elms has no personal knowledge of the Oi scene, had never been to any gigs and has only a tenuous idea of when Oi happened and which bands were involved in it.
It’s an odd book. Elms, an LSE graduate, lost his father at a young age and clearly looked up to his tougher brother Reggie and his skinhead pals with something approaching misty-eyed hero worship. He’s hot for hooliganism (“working class teenage boys liked to dress up; working class teenage boys liked to fight”), and praises its “violent brilliance”. Yet strangely although gang warfare and terrace culture are fine in 1969, kids just like his brother’s gang ten years later are completely written off.
Elms admits (crassly) that he was attracted to punk by the awful rip-off fashions created by Vivienne Westwood; and by the politics of the Clash (nothing wrong with that). The music never really came in to it. To him, Oi was an ugly “monosyllabic” thing (unlike those colourfully polysyllabic cults such as Mod, Punk, Goth, Ted etc.) He manages to link the Southall gig with the death of Blair Peach, who was killed by the SPG more than two years before, simply because they happened in the same town. He writes that the “predominantly Asian area…was set alight during a riot at an Oi gig in a pub,” disingenuously failing to mention who was throwing the petrol bombs and who was doing the rioting…
Inevitably by the early Eighties, Robert was closely associated with the New Romantics (i.e. the camp clown end of British youth cults) and was busy writing pretentious poetry for Spandau Ballet. In fact, Elms gave them their name – taken from Spandau prison which housed one Rudolph Hess. That kind of Nazi flirtation is so bold and decadent, don’tcha know? Spandau wrote some quality pop songs, of course, and I have to admit to a tinge of jealousy regarding Elms’s love life (he dated Sade), but his views on Oi are laughably poor journalism. Besides, it’s hard to be lectured by someone who finds Blue Rondo A La Turk more exciting than Cock Sparrer, and Steve Strange more noteworthy than Hoxton Tom. Make your own mind up which has the most lasting worth.
Will Oi ever become respectable? I doubt it. But I do know this: the movement that NME once said I had “invented” is still going strong as it enters its third decade. And the message is still the same as it always was.
Oi’s self-definition of ‘having a laugh and having a say’ got it right on the button. The laughs were ten a penny for Jack the Lads knocking back pints and pills and pulling at the pubs, rampaging at the football grounds and revelling in rebel rock’n’roll at the gigs. Oi reflected that, but it also cried out against the injustices weighed up against the young working class. In that sense Oi was a real voice from the backstreets, a megaphone for dead-end yobs. At its best it went beyond protest, and dreamed of a better life: social change; the kids united.
© Garry Bushell; 13th May, 2001
After 21 years we’re still winding up the mugs.
Back in 1981, Oi! managed to outrage all shades of polite middle class opinion, right, left and centre.
To this day the hippy Left perceive Oi as a kind of cultural cancer. To the establishment, Oi was an upstart from a tower block slum who wouldn’t keep in line. He was raucous and obnoxious, a human hand-grenade with a menacing disregard for authority.
At best, Oi bands and their fans were viewed as gurning barbarians gleefully pissing in the coffee house latte. At worst, they were seen as modern day brown shirts responsible for the riots in Southall, Toxteth and the rest. Either way, Oi was too hot to handle.
To the fast-talking wide-boys who adopted its name however, Oi was something else entirely. Stripped down to basics, it was about being young, working class and not taking shit from anybody. It was anti-police, anti-authority but pro-Britain too. A lot of the Oi kids liked a fight, and yeah, this is no whitewash, there was a far right element among them but this was 1980 when the far right were polling 15 – 20 per cent of the vote in inner-city wards. It would have been a miracle if there hadn’t been NF sympathisers in the audiences. What matters is that Oi never suffered from Nazi violence the way Sham 69 and 2-Tone had. The ag that blemished those early Oi! gigs was strictly football related.
Discovered in the summer of ’81 (well into its second wind) by a mass media rocked to its foundations by weeks of riots and youthful insurrection, Oi found itself on the sharp end of the sort of tabloid crucifixion usually reserved for the more macabre mass murderers. Corrupting its meaning, the same media immediately tried to bury it. Inevitably their version of events was as watertight as a kitchen colander in a tropical monsoon. They said Oi was for skinheads (but it was always more than that), that all skins were Nazis (and only a minority ever were) and that therefore Oi was the Strasser brothers in steel-capped boots (but the bands were either socialists or cynics…)
To really understand Oi, you had to be there….
Oi’s roots were in Punk, just as Punk’s roots were in the New York Dolls, but they weren’t the same animal. For starters Oi was the reality of Punk and Sham mythology. Punk exploded between 1976 and 1979 because stadium rock had been disappearing up its own jacksie for years. The album charts were full of po-faced synthesizer twiddlers and pretentious singers belting out meaningless pseudo-poetic lyrics.
Punk seemed different. It was raw, brutal and utterly down to earth. Punk sold itself as the voice of the tower blocks. It wasn’t. Most of the forerunners were middle-class art students. The great Joe Strummer, whose dad was a diplomat, flirted with stale old Stalinism and sang about white riots while living in a white mansion. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood tried to intellectualise punk by dressing it up in half-inched Situationist ideas, all the better to flog their over-priced produce to mug punters.
Sham 69, from Surrey, were the first band to capture the growing mood of disillusionment. Street punks were disgusted both by the proliferation of phoneys and posers and the Kings Road conmen with their rip-off boutiques. But how much did Sham’s Jimmy Pursey really know about borstals, football and dole queues, and how much was he feeding off the people around him? The Last Resort’s Millwall Roi might have overstated the case but he summed up a common attitude when he wrote ‘I wish it was the weekend everyday/But Jimmy Pursey didn’t get his way/He liked to drink but he didn’t like to fight/He didn’t get his fucking homework right.’
Cockney cowboys? As Julie Burchill once observed: “It must have been a bloody strong wind the day the sound of Bow Bells reached Hersham.”
The Oi poloi didn’t need Punk’s proletarian wrapping paper – invented backgrounds and adopted attitudes, accents and aggression – because they really were the cul-de-sac, council estate kids the first punk bands had largely only pretended to be. The forerunners of Oi! were bands like Cock Sparrer, Menace, Slaughter & The Dogs and the UK Subs although none of these bands were as successful as Sham whose raucous brand of football chant punk dented the Top Ten three times.
Before he went potty, Jimmy Pursey gave the kiss of life to the two bands who defined the parameters and direction of original Oi – the Angelic Upstarts and the Cockney Rejects.
Singer Tommy ‘Mensi’ Mensforth and guitarist Ray Cowie, known as Mond, formed the Upstarts in the summer of ’77 after getting blown away by the Clash’s White Riot tour. Childhood mates, they had grown up together on the Brockley Whinns council estate in South Shields and later attended Stanhope Road Secondary Modern school (Mensi got expelled from the local grammar school at thirteen for delinquency.)
Mensi worked as an apprentice miner after leaving school. Forming the band at 19 was his escape route from the pits. Mond worked as a shipyard electrician right up until their first hit. The Upstarts’ original drummer and bassist quit after violent crowd reactions to their first gig in nearby Jarrow, to be replaced by bakery worker Stix and bricklayer Steve Forsten respectively. The band were also soon to recruit the services of Keith Bell, a self-confessed former gangster and one-time North Eastern Countries light-middleweight boxing champ, who as manager, bouncer and bodyguard was able to maintain order at early gigs on the basis of his reputation alone.
The Upstarts soon attracted the attention of the Northumbria Police Force, who haunted the band’s early career like a malignant poltergeist. Police interest stemmed from the Upstarts’ championing of the cause of Birtley amateur boxer Liddle Towers who died from injuries received after a night in the police cells. The inquest called it ‘justifiable homicide’. The Upstarts called it murder, and ‘The Murder of Liddle Towers’ (b/w ‘Police Oppression’) was their debut single on their own Dead Records. Later re-pressed by Rough Trade, the song’s brutal passion was well received even by music press pseuds, although not by the Old Bill who infiltrated gigs in plain clothes. Charges of incitement to violence were considered. Only the Upstarts’ mounting press coverage dissuaded them. For their part the band were uncompromising. They appeared on the front cover of the Socialist Workers Party’s youth magazine Rebel soon after and accused their area police of being largely National Front sympathisers.
Official police action might have been dropped but unofficial harassment continued unabated. Mensi claimed he was constantly followed and frequently stopped, searched and abused by individual officers. The band blamed unofficial police pressure for getting them banned from virtually every gig in the North East of England – via the promise of raids, prosecution for petty rule breaking, opposing licence renewals and so on. The Upstarts got the last laugh though when in April ’79 they conned a Prison Chaplain into inviting them to play a gig at Northumbria’s Acklington Prison (where ironically Keith Bell had finished his last sentence). 150 cons turned up to see a union jack embellished with the words ‘Upstarts Army’, a clenched fist, the motto ‘Smash Law And Order’ and a pig in a helmet entitled ‘PC Fuck Pig’. The band hadn’t managed to smuggle in a ‘real’ pig’s head (they usually smashed one up on stage) but the cons revelled merrily in the wham-bam wallop of rebel anthems like ‘Police Oppression’, ‘We Are The People’ (about police corruption), and a specially amended version of ‘Borstal Breakout’ retitled ‘Acklington Breakout’.
The Daily Mirror splashed with ‘Punks Rock A Jailhouse’ (wrongly identifying me as the band’s spokesman.) The Prison Governor and local Tories did their nuts, with Tynemouth MP, the appropriately named Neville Trotter, condemning the gig as ‘an incredibly stupid thing to allow’. Only Socialist Worker printed a true record of the gig, quoting Mensi telling prisoners they’d be better off in nick if Thatcher got elected that summer, and urging punks to vote Labour as ‘Thatcher’s government will destroy the trade union movement’. (In reality Mensi’s brand sub-Scargill patriotic socialism was far removed from the SWP’s revised Trotsky-lite posturing).
The band’s salty populism and savage post-Sham punk attracted a massive following of working class kids in the North East, the self-styled Upstarts Army, while the power of their debut single convinced Jimmy Pursey to form his JP label with Polydor. The Upstarts were the label’s first signing and also their first sacking after a jumped-up Polydor security guard tried to push the band about. He took on Mensi in a one against one fight and went down like the Belgrano. Polydor dropped the band. They never bothered to ask for Mensi’s side of the story. Soon after the Upstarts signed with Warner Brothers. Their second single, the Pursey produced ‘I’m An Upstart’, was released in April ’79, charted, and was chased hard by the ‘Teenage Warning’ single and album
The Cockney Rejects were also the real deal, this time the sons of dockers from London’s East End, but their music wasn’t political. Thirty years of lame Labour local government had stripped them of any world view except cynicism. Their songs were about East End life, boozers, battles, police harassment and football.
I met them first in May ’79. Two cocky urchins adorned in West Ham badges bowled into my boozer spieling back-slang and thrust their tatty demo tapes into my hand. Like them it was rough, ready and suffused with more spirit than Mystic Challenge. I put them in touch with Pursey who produced their first demo tape. These songs re-emerged as the Small Wonder debut ep ‘Flares & Slippers’ which included the essential guttersnipe anthem ‘Police Car’ (‘I like punk and I like Sham – I got nicked over West Ham…’). It sold surprising well and earned them the NME epithet of the “brainstorming vanguard of the East End punk renewal”, (although the student-orientated rag was later to virtually ignore Oi! until its arrival in the headlines forced their hand.)
The kids were the Geggus brothers Mickey and Jeff, the latter soon known to the world as Stinky Turner. Both had been good boxers – neither of them had ever been put down in the ring, and Jeff had boxed for the England youth team. They had little trouble transferring their belt onto vinyl. The Rejects’ story began in the summer of ’77 when seventeen-year-old Mickey was first inspired to pick up a plectrum by the Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’. Incubating in back garden performances in their native Canning Town as The Shitters, the Rejects only emerged as a real group after council painter Mickey recruited twenty-one-year Vince Riordan as bassist in 1979. Previously a Sham roadie, Vince (whose uncle was Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie) had marked time with loser band the Dead Flowers before he heard the Cockney call. Drummers were to come and go with the regularity of a high-fibre diet until Stix transferred from the Upstarts in 1980.
Live, the band hit like a mob of rampaging rhinos, with Mickey’s sledgehammer guitar the cornerstone of their tough, tuneful onslaught. Schoolboy Stinky was a sight for sore eyes too, screwing up his visage into veritable orgies of ugliness, and straining his tonsils to holler vocals best likened to a right evil racket. I was the Rejects’ first manager – although those stories are best left for another book - and I stayed with them until Pursey and I had negotiated an EMI deal for them. After that, I bowed out to let a man I assumed was a pro take over. He was Pursey’s manager Tony Gordon, who went on to handle Boy George (in the management sense). So little was money my motivation, that my price for signing the band over was a £100 meal at the Park Lane Hilton (I went with Hoxton Tom and our wives – Tony begged us to get him a receipt). In retrospect Gordon was bad for the band. They really needed a Peter Grant figure, someone tougher and smarter than they were, to keep their energies channelled in a more umm, artistic direction.
Under Tony Gordon, the Rejects’s career soared briefly then crashed and burned. After getting evicted from Polydor’s studios for running up a damages bill of £1,000, the band got stuck into serious recordings with Pursey at the production controls. Their second EMI single ‘Bad Man’ was superb, like PiL on steroids, but it only made the fag end of the charts. Their next release, a piss-take of Sham called ‘The Greatest Cockney Rip-Off’ did better, denting the Top 30. Their debut album ‘Greatest Hits Vol 1’ did the same, notching up over 60,000 sales.
Unlike the Upstarts’, the Rejects’ first following wasn’t largely skinhead; in fact at first skins didn’t like them. Stinky’s school pals the Rubber Glove firm aside, The Rejects crew came from football and consisted largely of West Ham chaps attracted by Vince’s involvement and disillusioned Sham and Menace fans. Famous faces included Gary Dickle, Johnny Butler, Carlton Leach, Andy Russell, Andy Swallow, Hoxton Tom, Binnsy, H and Wellsy. Even as early as November 1979, their Hammers support was so strong that mass terrace chants of ‘Cockney Rejects – oh, oh’ were clearly audible on televised soccer matches – to the tune of Gary Glitter’s – Hello Hello I’m Back Again’.
Many of the East End Glory Boys swelled their ranks a little later, realising for the first time that here was a band exactly the same as them.
The first stand-alone Oi scene developed around the Cockney Rejects and their regular gig venue, the Bridge House in Canning Town, East London. It became the focus for an entire subculture. In 1980, this was the LIFE!
None of these faces were “Nazis”. Most of them weren’t political at all, beyond the sense of voting Labour (if they bothered to vote at all) out of a sense of tradition. A tiny percentage was interested in the extremes of either right or left. As a breed they were natural conservatives. They believed in standing on their own two feet. They were patriotic, and proud of their class and their immediate culture. They looked good and dressed sharp. It was important not to look like a scruff or a student. Their heroes were boxers and footballers, not union leaders. Unlicensed boxing was a big draw, as were the dogs and stag comedians like Jimmy Jones and Jimmy Fagg. They liked to fight around football matches – the West Ham ICF (Inter City Firm) were fully represented at most local Rejects gigs. The young men oozed machismo, but some of the women were just as tough. But they weren’t mugs. These were bright kids and a surprisingly large number of them have gone on to carve out successful businesses in fields as diverse as the music industry, pornography and clothing manufacture.
They’re the ones who didn’t end up in jail of course.
They related to the Cockney Rejects because at the time at least the Rejects mirrored their audience. Rarely in rock history have a band and their followers been so identical.
The Rejects and the Upstarts had plenty in common – shared management, shared experiences of the Old Bill, shared class backgrounds – and were soon identified (by me) in the music press as the start of something different, a new more class conscious punk variant, which was known at first as ‘Real Punk’ or ‘New Punk’ and which had little in common with 1979’s self-styled punk rockers in their second-hand images and wally bondage pants. It was a pairing they obviously approved of with both bands frequently jamming together at each other’s gigs. Unlike Sham, the Rejects had little Nazi trouble. They wrote off the threat from the British Movement (we called them the German Movement) in their first Sounds interview. “We can handle them,” said Stinky. “If anyone comes to the gigs and wants to have a row, we’ll have to row. Pursey couldn’t do that. We’re not gonna take no bollocks.”
Strong words that they had to back up the first time they played outside of the East End, supporting the Upstarts at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. When a large mob of BM skins started harassing punks in the audience, the Rejects and their twelve-handed entourage (including two of the fledgling 4-Skins) took ’em on and battered them. Mickey Geggus commented: “Our gigs are for enjoyment. No one’s gonna disrupt them or pick on our fans. Troublemakers will be thrown out – by us if necessary.”
The only other major run-in they ever had with the far right was at Barking station the following February, and once again the master race contingent got bashed. Most of the Rejects’ London gigs were trouble free, especially the ones at the Bridge House, which was to London Oi! what the Roxy had been to Punk. Managed by Terry Murphy and his tough boxer sons, the Bridge never had a serious punch-up or any sieg-heiling. No one dared step out of line against the Murphys. Son Glen, the former barman, can now be seen playing George Green on TV’s London’s Burning.
The Angelic Upstarts also fought – and won - a couple of sharp battles against the far right. They played numerous Rock Against Racism gigs too, including one at Leeds where the band sported SWP ‘Disband The SPG’ badges. Like the Rejects their real ag came from other areas – principally their manager, Keith Bell. Sacked by the band when he started to knock them about, Bell and his henchmen set about trying to intimidate Upstart fans, even assaulting people buying their records, before threatening Mensi’s mother, smashing her house windows and making threatening and abusive phone calls to her. Reprisal incidents included Mensi and one time Upstarts drummer Decca Wade smashing one of the Bell firm’s car windows and a midnight visit to Bell’s own home by Decca’s dad, club comedian Derek Wade and Mensi’s brother-in-law Billy Wardropper who blasted one of Bell’s henchmen in the leg with a sawn-off shotgun. Hitting back, Bell threatened to kill Wade Senior. Three of his cronies set fire to a stable belonging to Mensi’s sister causing almost £5K worth of damage. In ensuing court cases both Bell and Billy Wardropper were jailed while Decca’s dad copped a year’s suspended sentence. Presiding Judge Hall told the Upstarts team: “I accept that all of you suffered a severe amount of provocation, which was none of your seeking. But at the same time I have a duty to condemn the use of firearms, particularly a sawn-off shotgun.” The Upstarts’ recorded their opinion in ‘Shotgun Solution’: ‘Shotgun blasts ring in my ears/Shoot some scum who live by fear/A lot of good men will do some time/For a fucking cunt without a spine’.
With the Rejects, football was the trouble. And it was understandable because they’d been fanatically pro-West Ham aggro from the word go. Even at their debut Bridge House gig they decked the stage out with a huge red banner displaying the Union Jack, the West Ham crossed hammers and the motif ‘West Side’ (which was that part of the West Ham ground then most favoured by the Irons’ most violent fans). Their second hit was a version of the West Ham anthem ‘Bubbles’ which charted in the run-up to West Ham’s Cup Final Victory in the early summer of 1980. On the b-side was the ICF-pleasing ‘West Side Boys’ which included lines like: ‘We meet in the Boelyn every Saturday/Talk about the teams that we’re gonna do today/Steel-capped Doctor Martens and iron bars/Smash the coaches and do ’em in the cars’.
It was a red rag to testosterone-charged bulls all over the country. At North London’s Electric Ballroom, 200 of West Ham’s finest mob-charged less than fifty Arsenal and smacked them clean out of the venue. But ultra-violence at a Birmingham gig really spelt their undoing. The audience at the Cedar Club was swelled by a mob of Birmingham City skinheads who terrace-chanted throughout the support set from the Kidz Next Door (featuring Grant Fleming, now a leftwing film maker, and Pursey’s kid brother Robbie). By the time the Rejects came on stage there were over 200 Brum City skins at the front hurling abuse. During the second number they started hurling plastic glasses. Then a real glass smashed on stage. Stinky Turner responded by saying: “If anyone wants to chuck glasses they can come outside and I’ll knock seven shades of shit out of ya”. That was it, glasses and ashtrays came from all directions. One hit Vince and as a Brum skinhead started shouting “Come on”, Micky dived into the crowd and put him on his back. Although outnumbered more than ten to one, the Rejects and their entourage drove the Brummy mob right across the hall, and finally out of it altogether. Under a hail of missiles Mickey Geggus sustained a head injury that needed nine stitches and left him with what looked like a Fred Perry design above his right eye. Grant Fleming, a veteran of such notorious riots as Sham at Hendon and Madness at Hatfield, described the night’s violence as the worst he’d ever seen.
Taken to the local hospital for treatment, Geggus had to bunk out of a twenty-foot high window when ‘tooled-up’ mates of the injured Brum City fans came looking for him. Back at the gig, the Londoners emerged triumphant from the fighting only to discover all their gear had been ripped off – total value, two grand. The next morning, the Cockney contingent split into two vans – one that went on to the next gig at Huddersfield, the other containing Mickey and Grant that went cruising round the city looking for any likely punters who might know the whereabouts of their stolen gear. Incidents that morning in Wolverhampton Road, Albury, involving Geggus, three locals and an iron bar, resulted in Mickey being charged with malicious wounding. Eight months later, both he and Grant had the luck of the devil to walk away with suspended sentences.
Maybe as insurance, in the summer of ’80, the Rejects played two
Bridge House benefit gigs for the Prisoners Rights Organisation, PROP, arranged by me and Hoxton Tom with the help of Terry Murphy. Tom’s aunt was involved with London PROP because his uncle, Steven Smeeth, had been jailed for his part in George Davis’s doomed comeback caper. The gigs were two of the best I’d ever seen the band play.
Brum had meant the end of the Rejects as a touring band however. They had to pull a Liverpool gig when literally hundreds of tooled-up Scouse match boys came looking for confrontation. Road manager Kevin Wells was threatened at knife point. At first Mickey seemed to revel in it all, acting like he was living out some Cagney movie. The band’s second LP called, surprisingly enough, ‘Greatest Hits Vol 2’, reflected his apparent death wish with sleevenotes boasting ‘From Scotland down to Cornwall, we dun the lot, we took ’em all. On the song ‘Urban Guerrilla’ he spoke these words: “Some folk call it anarchy, but I just call it fun. Don’t give a fuck about the law, I wanna kill someone.” Me? I think he meant it.
But in the long build up to the trial, a change came over Mickey. He swapped his little blue pills for ganja and started to mellow. Correspondingly, the Rejects’ music began to move away from hooligan racket towards more mainstream rock. 1981’s ‘The Power & The Glory’ sounded like The Professionals. 1982’s ‘The Wild Ones’, produced by Pete Way, was more like UFO. And if 1984’s ‘Quiet Storm’ had been any more laid back it could have been bottled and sold as Valium. ‘The Wild Ones’ remains a great rock album, with stand-out tracks such as City Of Lights; but the old fans were actively hostile to their new sounds, while abysmal marketing meant potential new fans never got to hear them. Stale mate.
The Angelic Upstarts lost their momentum in 1980 as well, getting dropped by Warners in the summer. And although they were snapped up by EMI, going on to release their finest studio album, ‘Two Million Voices’ in April ’81, they barely played live and fans were getting frustrated.
During 1980, hooligan audiences, especially in South East London, found new live laughs in the shape of Peckham-based piss-artist pranksters Splodgenessabounds, whose brand of coarse comedy and punk energy scored three top thirty singles that year. Their debut single, ‘Two Pints of Lager’ was a Top Ten smash. Tongue in cheek, I dubbed them ‘punk pathetique’ along with equally crazy bands like Brighton’s Peter & The Test-Tube Babies and Geordie jesters The Toy Dolls.
Singer Max Splodge insisted: “The pathetique bands are the other side of Oi! We’re working class too only whereas some bands sing about prison and the dole, we sing about pilchards and bums. The audience is the same.’ Pathetique peaked in the autumn of 1980 with the Pathetique Convention at the Electric Ballroom. West Ham’s bootboy poet Barney Rubble was Man of the Match.
Elsewhere a second generation of hardcore Oi! bands had been spawned directly by the Upstarts and the Rejects. The Upstarts inspired Criminal Class from Coventry, and Infa-Riot from Plymouth via North London. The Cockney Rejects inspired the ferocious 4-Skins, and Sunderland’s Red Alert. Edinburgh noise-terrorists the Exploited also cited the Rejects as their major influence. In London, a whole host of groups sprang up around the Rejects too including Barney & The Rubbles and Stinky’s Postmen combo. A movement was evolving at the grass roots.
I called it Oi!
Oi! was and remains a Cockney street shout guaranteed to turn heads. Stinky Turner used to holler it at the start of each Rejects number, replacing the first punks’ habitual ‘1,2,3,4’. Before him “Oi! Oi!” had been Ian Dury’s catch-phrase, although he’d probably nicked it from Cockney comic Jimmy Wheeler whose catchphrase had been “Oi, Oi that’s yer lot.” Entertainers Flanagan and Allen first used “Oi!” as a catchphrase in their 1930s variety act.
As I was compiling ‘Oi! – The Album’ for EMI (released in November 1980) more like-minded combos sent demo tapes from all over the country. There was Blitz from New Mills, The Strike from Lanarkshire and Demob from Gloucester. But the first real challengers for the Rejects crown were the 4-Skins. They made their debut supporting the Damned at the Bridge House in ’79 with Micky Geggus on drums. The 4-Skins developed through various line-ups playing low-key London pub gigs sporadically before arriving at their definite line-up towards the end of 1980: Gary Hodges, vocals; Hoxton Tom, bass; Rockabilly Steven Pear, guitar; and John Jacobs, drums. There was a real charisma about the band, and their raw brand of barbed-wire roar was blessed with a driving dynamism. Their stand-out song was ‘Chaos’, a horror movie fantasy of urban chaos and skinhead takeover. But most of their three minute blasts of fury concerned unemployment and police harassment (‘ACAB’, ‘Wonderful World’), the horrors of war (‘I Don’t Wanna Die’), thinking for yourself (‘Clockwork Skinhead’) self-pride (‘Sorry’) and class (‘One Law For Them’).
Both the 4-Skins and Infa-Riot were emphatic about the need to learn from the Rejects’ mistakes and get away from football trouble. The 4-Skins favoured no one team (Hodges was West Ham, Hoxton, Spurs, Steve, Arsenal and Jacobs, Millwall) and no one political preference (Hoxton was a liberal; Steve left Labour; Jacobs apolitical; and Hodges was a reformed right-winger very pro anti-unemployment campaigns). Infa-Riot were the same, professing no football affiliations. Mensi wrote their first Sounds review and he and Jock McDonald got them their first London gigs. Musically, they were a lot like a lither, wilder Upstarts. Like most Upstarts-influenced groups Infa-Riot played gigs for Rock Against Racism (an apparently noble campaign that was actually a front for the extreme Left SWP). Criminal Class played RAR gigs too, and a benefit for the highly suspect Troops Out Of Ireland movement.
The 4-skins refused to play RAR gigs, not wanting to be poster boys for Trotskyism.
The Oi! bands converged to publicly thrash out their stance at the Oi debate held at Sounds in January 1981. Everyone agreed on the need for raw r’n’r, and the sense of benefit gigs, but there was a heated difference of opinion on politics. Stinky Turner was violently against politics and politicians. Mensi argued that Labour still represented working class interests and claimed that “the Tories still represent the biggest threat to our kind of people”. It was the same divide that had always separated the Rejects and the Upstarts. They managed to be agree about reclaiming Britain’s Union flag for the people and, erh, that was it.
Although a few black and immigrant kids were into Oi, it was mostly a white working class phenomenon. The West Indian kids into Oi were cockney Blacks like the now famous Cass Pennant who’d rejected the pull of Rastafarianism and reggae. No Oi! band professed racialist or Nazi leanings (in fact Demob had two mixed race boxers in the band) and the teething trouble that dogged early gigs was all to do with the football legacy bequeathed by the Rejects. As Punk Lives commentated later “Anyone who went to Oi! gigs could tell you you didn’t get sieg-heiling at them…ironically Madness and Bad Manners had most trouble with Nazi skins at the time. All Oi! went on about was class”.
For the first half year of Oi the movement there were only two bad incidents of gig violence, both around Infa-Riot. The band headlined the first ‘New Punk Convention’ at the tail end of 1980 with the Upstarts and Criminal Class. It ended in disaster as Poplar Boy West Ham fans slugged it out with a smaller Arsenal crew led by the then infamous Dave Smith who followed the Upstarts.
In March 1981, Infa-Riot played the Acklam Hall in West London with Millwall skinhead band the Last Resort. Tooled-up local Queens Park Rangers supporting skins and straights besieged the venue looking for West Ham. At one stage they tried to smash their way in through the roof. Ironically, most Hammers Oi fans were safely in Upton Park at the time, watching their boys battle a Russian team.
The model of the sort of gig the bands wanted came in February 1981 with the second New Punk Convention, this time held at the Bridge House with the 4-Skins headlining (and introduced by the king of rude reggae himself, Judge Dread). The pub venue was packed far over capacity with a motley crew of skins, working class punks and soccer rowdies drawn from the ranks of West Ham, Spurs, Millwall, QPR, Arsenal and Charlton. There wasn’t one ruck all night.
This gig set a precedent for peaceful co-existence that lasted even when Oi! shifted venues to Hackney’s Deuragon Arms. It was living proof that Pursey’s old dream of the Kids United could happen. But united for what? It was around this time that I and the leading bands entered into a conspiracy to pervert the course of youth cult history. We held a conference to plan the way the Oi! movement could develop in a positive, united manner. The idea was not only to arrange gigs and set up an Oi! record label, but also to plug away at the central theme of the folly of street kids fighting each other over football teams. We wanted to give Oi! a purpose by playing benefit gigs for working class causes.
At the time I was living on the Ferrier estate in Kidbrook, South East London, as was Frankie ‘Boy’ Flame. And bands frequently made the pilgrimage here to stay in our maisonette while they were playing London or just to shoot the breeze in the Wat Tyler pub. Some petty jealousies and band rivalry existed, but the Oi! scene was far more united than any other youth cult in British history. We tried to build on that.
The first Oi! conference was a small affair attended by reps from the Rejects, the 4-Skins, Splodge, Infa-Riot, the Business and the Last Resort, the latter two being the latest recruits to the burgeoning movement. The Business were then known as ‘pop-oi’ because of their tuneful anthems. They came from Lewisham, South London. They were fronted by Mickey Fitz, who like guitarist Steve Kent, had attended Colfe’s Grammar School in Lee (as I had done) and had developed a terrace following which peacefully included West Ham, Chelsea and Millwall. Kent was a truly talented musician. The Business were managed by West Ham vet Laurie Pryor who was also known as Ronnie Rouman.
The Last Resort were a skinhead band from South London via Herne Bay, Kent, based around the Last Resort shop in Petticoat Lane, East London and financed by the shop’s owner Michael French. They too saw Oi as being bigger that skins. “Oi is uniting punks, skins and everyone,” growler Millwall Roi told Sounds in their first interview. “Now we’ve just gotta get away from football.”
Lee Wilson of Infa-Riot agreed. “Oi is the voice of street kids everywhere,” he said. “That’s why we’re gonna grow, that’s why we’re gonna win.” And Oi was growing all the time. By spring, as I was compiling the second Oi compilation “Strength Thru Oi” for Decca (released May ’81) over fifty bands had aligned with the movement, including the Oi/ska squad the Buzz Kids whose singer, Garry Johnson’s lyric writing far outshone his vocal ability. He’d already had some lyrics published in a poetry collection by Babylon Books called “Boys Of The Empire”. I encouraged him to ditch the band and branch out as Oi’s first entirely serious poet. Johnson’s humour and his bitterly anti-establishment verses added yet more credence to Oi!, as did the plethora of good fanzines that had sprung up around it – the best being Rising Free, Ready To Ruck (which became New Mania) and Phase One. In June a second Oi! conference was held in the Conway Hall at Red Lion Square, attended by 57 interested parties including reps from bands all over the country. There was much concern voiced about the movement’s violent image, which was felt to be unjust. The sublime Beki Bondage from the Oi-bolstered punk band Vice Squad complained that the aggressive skin on the front of ‘Strength Thru Oi!’ made the movement look too skinhead orientated. Everyone agreed. And once again conference voted unanimously to back pro-working class campaigns. Ron Rouman was delegated to write to the Right To Work Campaign that week to set up gigs. The main themes of the day were the need to unite working class kids, and stick together. Punk Lives called it “a glimpse of the future Oi! could have had.”
When the 4-Skins, the Last Resort and the Business played a gig at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall six days later, the riot that surrounded it and the acres of hysterical newsprint that ensued drowned out that possibility, and any chance of Oi getting a fair hearing, for good.
WHEN THE shit hit the headlines during 1981’s summer of discontent, I sincerely believed that the truth would out. That the smears against the Oi bands would be laughed at in the same way that the slurs against the Sex Pistols and The Clash had been. The whole idea that the bands had gone into Middlesex to provoke a race riot was absurd. We’d been talking strike benefits, not NF marches. No Oi band had sported swaztikas like the Sex Pistols had done. No Oi band had sung lyrics like “too many Jews for my liking” as Siouxsie Banshee did. No Oi band had lifted their name from the SS like Joy Division had done…
What contributed to Oi’s undoing however was the movement’s utter hostility to the middle classes in general and the trendy left in particular (see the Garry Johnson/Business anthem ‘Suburban Rebels’). So as well as incurring the wrath of the right-wing establishment, Oi also alienated the left-wing of the middle class media whose backing had seen the punk bands through their own particular backlash and who were later to defend rap and hip-hop which were far more violent than Oi had ever been, and anti-semitic to boot. Besides me, there was no-one else in the media to defend the bands. Very few rock journalists had ventured into the East End to see the gigs. (Indeed the idea that the NME was ever THE punk paper is a complete myth. That paper rubbished Anarchy In The UK and their first review of The Clash suggested they "should be returned to the garage, preferrably with the motor running." Parsons and Burchill loved Joe Strummer and co for their politics alone.)
The Oi! bands and their fans were guilty of that most terrible of crimes – being white and working class with chips on their shoulders.
Ironically Alan Rusbridger, now the editor of The Guardian was the only journalist to give the Oi bands a fair hearing…
The superficial evidence against Oi seemed strong – the Southall riot and ‘Strength Thru Oi’. The Oi! gig at Southall’s Hamborough Tavern had been arranged by West London 4-Skins’ fans fed up with having to travel to the East End to see the shows. The press painted sinister pictures of skinheads being ‘bussed’ into a predominantly Asian area. FACT: there were just two coaches hired by the Last Resort who hired coaches to transport their away-firm of fans whenever the band played anywhere outside of South London. TV and radio reports gave the impression of skinheads battling Asian youths and the Police. FACT: the Oi fans were all inside the Tavern enjoying the gig when the first Asian petrol bomb sailed through the window. The cops were protecting the Oi kids. The press said the peaceful Asian community had risen spontaneously to repulse right-wing invaders who had terrorised the town. FACT: there’d been just one abusive incident involving young skinheads from Mottingham, Kent, in a chip shop earlier in the evening. “They probably asked the geezer how many rupees a packet of chips cost,” Max Splodge later shrugged.
The sheer quantity of petrol bombs used by the Asians indicated they’d been stockpiling them for some days before. The young Asians were definitely on the offensive. Young white Oi fans were assaulted by Asian youths on buses going TO the gig, and a minibus containing Business fans from Lewisham and radical poet Garry Johnson was attacked by Asians wielding swords without any provocation (see Johnson’s book The Story of Oi for full details). In fact the apparently placid Asian community was to riot again within the week with no ‘outsiders’ to pin the blame on.
The idea that the bands had gone to Southall to deliberately provoke a race riot just to be able to cash-in on the ensuing publicity is just daft. It goes completely against everything they’d been trying to achieve for the previous eight months. The 4-Skins manager Garry Hitchcock said “If we’d really wanted to go to Southall and smash it up, we’d have come with geezers – and left all the birds and the kids behind”.
“People ask why the Oi bands played Southall,” commented Hoxton Tom, “but you’ve gotta remember, in them days any gig was welcome. No one thought for a minute that there’d be trouble there. The Business had played Brixton before. The Last Resort had played Peckham, we’d played Hackney often and they’re all areas with large black populations, and yet those gigs were always trouble free. Oi had to break out of the East End to have any chance of growing.”
To the mass media, the events of July 4th were manna from heaven: Yobs. Immigrants. Anarchy. The Thin Blue Line… But the Oi crowd were reluctant participants. As soon as it was obvious real havoc was brewing, the Oi bands attempted to negotiate with the Southall Youth Movement through the police. They didn’t want to talk. “We didn’t want trouble,” said Tom, “but that’s all they had on their minds”. Under attack, the Oi-polloi had no other option but to fight a defensive rear-guard action and retreat. The Hamborough Tavern was razed to the ground. And the press distortion began. According to some reports right wing hate leaflets had been found in vans the following morning – the same vans that had been torched. Were the leaflets printed on asbestos? Hacks even descended on the Bridge House and tried to bribe kids into sieg-heiling for their cameras. One was kicked out of the pub by Si Spanner who was Jewish. But who cared about the truth? Storm-trooping skins made shock-horror headlines.
The fighting at Southall could have been worse. Scores more Oi! fans were turned back by the police before they’d even got to the gig, including Indian workmate of Hoxton Tom’s (the press never mentioned the few black, Asian and Greek kids inside the Tavern). Ironically, reports of a race riot on the radio induced mobs of West London bikers to rush to the scene eager to stand alongside their old enemies, the skins, against the Asians. The cops turned them back too.
I take full responsibility for ‘Strength Thru Oi’. I gave the album its title. But it was never knowingly a pun on the Nazi slogan Strength Through Joy. Let’s be honest, who knew? How many people my age were that up on Third Reich sloganeering? The Skids had released an ep called Strength Through Joy earlier that year, and that’s what I based the pun on (asked later, Skids singer Richard Jobson – now a dapper TV movie reviewer - said he’d taken it from the Dirk Bogarde’s autobiography). It was either that or The Oi Of Sex which I dismissed as too frivolous. Doh!
Selective quotes from my sleevenotes were used by the Daily Mail to fit their theory of Oi’s ‘brown shirt’ philosophy. Naturally this meant they had to omit the favourable mentions of black sportsmen, including Jesse Owen, the American athlete who’d triumphed so dramatically at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The fact there wasn’t a single racist lyric on the album didn’t seem to matter. Criminal Class’s ‘Blood On The Street’ actually made the point that black and white youth faced the same state oppression.
The biggest argument they had was the picture of the aggressive skin on the front cover. This turned out to be Nicky Crane (a gay Nazi who later died of AIDS). Here’s the truth: the original model had been West Ham personality and then body-builder Carlton Leach. Carlton had turned up for one photo session at the Bridge House that didn’t work. He never turned up for the second one. Under looming deadline pressure I suggested using a shot from a skinhead Xmas card which I believed was a still from the Wanderers movie. In fact it had been taken by English skinhead photographer Martin Dean. It wasn’t until the very last minute, when Decca had mocked up the sleeve that the photo was sufficiently clear to reveal Nazi tattoos. We had the option of either airbrushing the tattoos out or putting the LP back a month while we put a new sleeve together. Said Splodge manager Dave Long: “Blame it on youthful impetuousness but the wrong decision was made. It was a mistake, but it was an honest mistake. There’s nothing else on that LP or in Oi that could possibly be construed as dodgy.”
Another crucial point the critics skipped over was that it wasn’t only me who hadn’t realised the picture was of Nicky Crane. The far right hadn’t either. That album had been out for two months before the Daily Mail ‘exposed’ it (and me!) and yet not once had it been referred to in right-wing publications. It was a bitter irony. Me, at that point in my life a dedicated socialist (used to having “Bushell is a red” chanted at me at gigs), accused of masterminding a right-wing movement by a newspaper that had once supported Mosley’s Blackshirts, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, and appeasement with Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War Two…
In retrospect I think I’m more embarrassed by Crane being a poof.
Southall proved the catalyst for a spate of anti-government riots and there was no doubt where the Oi! bands stood on that issue, with the 4-Skins, Blitz and the Violators celebrating the popular uprisings with songs like ‘One Law For Them’, ‘Nation On Fire’ and ‘Summer of ‘81’.
In Sounds and in his book The Story of Oi, Garry Johnson called on black and white youth to unite to fight the Tories. Sounds and I started libel proceedings against the Mail, while the Oi bands now shaped up to deal with a problem that had never seemed and issue before – Nazism.
Naturally the far right loved it. YNF organiser Joseph Pearce (brother of Soft Cell’s Stevo) popped up in the press out of nowhere claiming that the Oi bands were the musical wing of the National Front. Pearce had never even been to an Oi gig.
Out of journalistic interest, I surveyed skinheads in the Last Resort shop on the Sunday after Southall. Most of them cited some immigrant ancestry from Irish to Pakistani through Russian Jew. Last Resort fan Khalid Karim from Leytonstone who was half-Pakistani swore he had never been hassled at any Last Resort gig. ‘Gappy’ Eddie from Poplar claimed to personally know at least thirty ‘non-white’ skins, including West Indian skins from Hackney, Brixton, Ladbroke Grove and Walthamstow, a half-Pakistani suedehead from Dalston and another half-Pakistani skin called Rob from Wimbledon who I remember was always at Oi gigs taking pictures. Sixteen-year-old Nicky Holder from Lewisham named other non-white skins – Gary Singh from Belvedere, West Indian Colin McClean from Lewisham, Arab skin Mushti from New Cross, and a huge black Orpington skin called Sanya. Jewish skinhead Tony Stern from Epping claimed to know “loads of Jewish skins and no one gets any trouble, where are all the ‘Nazi’ skins now, that’s what I wanna know.” Danielle Lux, from an orthadox Jewish family, was always down at the Hackney gigs. She is now something important at Channel 4.
When Socialist Worker ran a report based on the Mail article, it was inundated with letters from socialist skins and punks complaining how out of touch it was. Sheffield skins wrote to Sounds to say that the month before 500 black and white skinheads had marched together in protest against Unemployment and police harassment bearing placards proclaiming ‘Jobs Not Jails’. SWP skin poet Seething Wells was outraged by the all-skins-are-nazis line, pointing to the literally thousands of Northern skins and rudies who had swelled June’s anti-Nazi Leeds Carnival. He might have mentioned Liverpool’s ‘Skin Fein’ republican skins too.
It was harder to get the truth into the nationals. A freelance journalist called John Glatt came and spoke to skinheads at length and filed a sympathetic report to the News Of the World. His copy was slashed and distorted to make a cheap sensationalist slob story.
Even if Oi had just been a skinhead phenomenon it was dishonest and dangerously lazy journalism to suggest that anything more than a small minority of skinheads at this time were Nazi sympathisers.
The Oi bands realised that simple facts weren’t enough to win the propaganda battle. They had to prove their protestations of innocence. Garry Hodges went on TV to say that the 4-Skins would play an anti-racist gig as long as it was organised by an independent body, although the band split before it occurred under the tremendous pressure and after just one more gig – advertised as country band the Skans! - at a Mottingham pub. The Business declined to play RAR gigs for the old ‘RAR as Trot front’ reasons, but instead put together their own unwieldy named ‘Oi Against Racism and Political Extremism But Still Against The System tour with Infa-Riot, Blitz and the Partisans. Infa-Riot played a Sheffield RAR gig and Blitz played at the Blackburn leg of the Right To Work March.
After Southall, a few of us met up with Red Action, a working class street-fighting splinter from the SWP, to clear the air about Oi. Their leading member Mick O’Farrell even contributed a poem to the fourth Oi! album sleeve. It was a short-lived union, however. Although they called themselves socialists, Red Action were led by Irish nationalists and we disagreed passionately about Ulster and the Falklands.
In late August 1981, I complied the third Oi! album, ‘Carry on Oi!’ Released by Secret Records in October 1981. Eager to stand by the bands, I reformed my own late 70s band The Gonads to contribute Tucker’s Ruckers to the compilation. On first release it sold 35,000 copies. Melody Maker’s review stressed that Oi’s intentions ‘weren’t to divide but to unite the working classes’. The same month The Exploited smashed into the top forty with ‘Dead Cities’ (shame about that Top Of The Pops appearance), while The Business released their superb debut single coupling ‘Harry May’ with ‘National Insurance Blacklist’ – an attack on the unofficial employers’ blacklist operated against militant trade unionists in the building trade. Paradoxically, the period from September ’81 to the end of ’82 saw the strongest ever Oi! releases thanks to Secret, and the excellent Malvern label No Future’s series of twenty-two singles from the likes of Blitz, the Partisans, Red Alert, Peter & The Test-Tube Babies, and Derbyshire ‘Clockwork Orange’ band the Violators. Punk Lives mag calculated that Oi sold over two million in the first four years (by 2001, total sales by Oi groups and groups influenced by Oi stand at well over eleven million).
Recognising its significance left-wing playwright Trevor Griffiths wrote a play called Oi For England which was broadcast by the ITV in April 1982 as well as being taken round England on a tour. The play was more than a little far-fetched. It featured four unemployed skins in an Oi band approached to play a Nazi gig, and revolved around their arguments about it and the riot outside. What Griffiths seemed to be saying however was that in any group of skins, you’d have one susceptible to the lure of race and nation, one drawn to class struggles, and two who couldn’t give a toss about politics.
Unfortunately, Oi’s vinyl health during 1982 wasn’t reflected on the streets. The 4-Skins split, then reformed with drummer Jacobs on guitar, new boy Pete Abbott on drums, Hoxton Tom still on bass and roadie Panther (Tony Cummins) on vocals. Later Millwall Roi sang with them. But by then Tom was the only surviving original, and sales had slumped almost out of sight. They split for good in 1984.
The Rejects were dropped by EMI in ’81, disowned Oi for HM, and didn’t play again for over a decade. The Upstarts soldiered on, playing the US punk circuit in ’82 but musically they went down the khazi. Under pressure from EMI the Upstarts released a poor synth pop saturated sell-out LP ‘Still From The Heart’ that flopped miserably. (Infa-Riot tried a similarly doomed direction change, releasing an LP of unbelievably ‘ordinary’ rock in 1983 before finally breaking up the following year). The Upstarts were the subject of a Channel 4 documentary in 1984, but their chart success was long behind them.
The Last Resort never ever got to the singles stage, they weren’t allowed a life independent of Micky French’s boutique. What he wanted was a house band, a singing advert for his t-shirts. Before Southall he opposed moves to send the bands on a US tour – he wanted the scene to stay at the small club level. The cynical claimed he didn’t want commercial competition for ‘his’ skinhead clothes market.
Sadly the Resort suffered when their London fans smashed up a pub in King’s Lynn called the Stanley Arms. Virtually the same crowd were also involved in a BBC televised ruck with local skins at Benny’s Club in Harlow. Both incidents happened in January ’82, at a time when everyone else was trying to prove that Oi! meant more than rucking. The Last Resort split with French later in ’82 to re-emerge as The Warriors, but back then they were never sufficiently motivated to build on their potential.
The Exploited meantime had shed their skin look, adopting a mutant Mohawk image and becoming the darlings of the Apocalypse Now punk revival. Singer Wattie went on to close down two thirds of Western Europe to other punk bands by smashing up dressing rooms. Losing gifted guitarist Big John (to Nirvana!) along the way, the band play on to this day.
Back in ’82, Blitz and The Business had clearly emerged as the new vanguard Oi desperately needed. Blitz specialised in belligerent boots ‘n’ braces brickwall Oi - pure youth anthems like ‘Fight To Live’ ‘Razors In The Night’, and the haunting ‘Warriors’. Their debut LP ‘Voice Of A Generation’ went top thirty and was the Oi LP of ’82 but they were never that hot live. A disastrous gig at the Hammersmith Clarendon at the end of ’82 was the beginning of the end. In ’83 Blitz split in two, their former engineer Tim Harris taking over from the popular Mackie as bassist (Mackie later formed the short-lived Rose Of Victory with Blitz guitarist Nidge Miller) and pushing the band into trendier synthesiser sounds with scant public appeal. They didn’t last into ’84.
The Business split and got punkier. Guitarist Steve Whale (ex-Gonads) contributed greatly to their harder sound. They were haunted by politics - internal and external. To back-up their ‘Blacklist’ song, Business manager Ron Rouman and the Oi organising committee (an ad-hoc body set up after Southall) met with blacklisted building worker Brian Higgins and other trade union militants to organise a big pro-union benefit gig. But the band bottled out and sacked Rouman, replacing him with bikers’ pin-up Vermilion Sands. Deprived of Rouman’s drive and terrace connections, the band fell apart. The Business reformed in 1984 and were smart enough to realise you had to tour to survive (ironically they signed to Rouman and Mark Brennan’s Link Records). They have been playing ever since to growing audiences, especially in the USA where they inspired another Oi wave.
Back home though, Oi as we first knew it died at the end of ’82. It never had room to grow, and its vanguard fell apart ignominiously. To paraphrase Mao, it was like a stream, when it’s moving it stays healthy, but when it gets blocked up and stagnant all the shit rises to the top. The Oi stream was definitely blocked up. And the poor quality of the new combos showcased on the fourth Oi LP ‘Oi Oi That’s Yer Lot’ (produced by Mickey Geggus and released by Secret in October ’82) confirmed it. The new bands were either too unoriginal, too weak, or (in the case of Skully’s East End Badoes, too limited in their appeal to a square mile of Poplar) to mean anything.
And when great Oi-influenced bands did break through in ’83 they all fell at early fences. Croydon’s Case were cracking – they specialised in a ballsy brand of high-octane pop fresher than Max Miller chewing polos in a mountain stream and were fronted by the exceptionally expressive Matthew Newman. Case attracted acclaim from most quarters (including the Daily Mirror and Radio One) but fell apart when Matthew swapped the stage for domestic bliss with Splodge co-vocalist Christine Miller. Similarly, Taboo rose from the ashes of the Violators and specialised in non-wimpy pop. But the band split when wonderful, vivacious vocalist Helen decided to get pregnant and leave.
Finally there was The Blood, one of the best Oi bands ever to come out of Blighty. Emerging out of the wild excesses of Charlton’s Coming Blood, The Blood’s debut LP ‘False Gestures For A Devious Public’ was an invigorating blend of Stranglers, Motorhead and Alice Cooper influences which hit the UK Top Thirty and was voted one of the year’s best by the Sounds staff. On stage they were awesome and OTT in equal measure. They filled blow-up dolls full of butchers’ offal and cut them up with chainsaws. And their lyrics were a cut-above the usual, with lines like ‘The Pope said to the atheist, "In God’s name I do swear, you’re searching blindly in the dark for something that ain’t there"/The atheist said to the Pope: "There ain’t no getting round it, you too were searching in the dark for nothing…but you found it".’ But the band were lazy bastards who never wanted to tour, and the days when you could scam your way to chart success were long gone.
Cock Sparrer reformed in ’83 and recorded the LP they always should have made, ‘Shock Troops’ (Carrere), but they never had chart success in the UK again. Modesty forbids any mention of the Gonads, considered by many to be the finest Oi! band of them all (see Back & Barking for the proof in handy CD form).
At the fag end of ’83, Syndicate Records launched a new series of Oi! albums which lacked both the bite and the sales of the originals – ‘Son of Oi’ was nudging up to the 10,000 mark when Syndicate went bust in December ’84, that bankruptcy itself a reflection of Britain’s shrinking Oi market. The two best new bands were Burial and Prole (the latter a studio creation put together by me and Steve Kent). Scarborough’s Burial cited Oi and 2-Tone as forebears and mixed the sounds of ska and rowdy bootboy punk in their set. The only Oi! band to have any success were the Toy Dolls who scored a top ten novelty hit with their version of ‘Nellie The Elephant’ at Xmas 1984.
As British Punk degenerated after its ’81 boom, the skinhead scene became a political battleground and turned sour. The cream of the ’81 generation went Casual. A few even turned rockabilly. Meanwhile Nazi kids who’d never been part of Oi started turning up at the gigs, obviously attracted by the media’s ‘reporting’. When they found the truth was different, they turned nasty: Garry Johnson was beaten up by Nazi skins in Peckham. I was attacked by a mob of fifteen Nazis (not skins) at an Upstarts gig at the 100 Club. Si Spanner was stabbed by the same nazi who’d tried to stab Buster Bloodvessel. Attila The Stockbroker, the left-wing Oi poet/wally, was whacked on stage in North London. Infa-Riot were attacked at the 100 Club by Nazis. You get the picture.
In East London, it was a different story - the British Movement were taken out of the frame by the Inter City Firm. In early 1982, Skully and other Oi regulars had organised a march protesting about the jailing of their fellow ICF member Cass Pennant. The BM threatened individuals, putting pressure on them to cancel this "march for a nigger". The following Monday the ICF had been planning to take on Tottenham fans (as West Ham were playing Spurs that night). Instead they confronted and smashed the East London neo-Nazis who were drinking in the Boleyn Arms. They were never a significant presence on the West Ham terraces again, but they remained a problem elsewhere.
When they couldn’t find Oi bands to toe the master race line, the neo-Nazis created their own nationalist skinhead bands around the Blood & Honour banner. Skrewdriver, the veteran punk band first featured on Janet Street-Porter’s punk TV documentary in 1976, came back as skinheads and were the cornerstone of the new hate-punk sound. Opposing them were a raft of equally extreme Trotskyist bands and performers, like the Redskins, the Newtown Neurotics, Attila and Seething Wells.
Quietly, and apart from all the polemics, a small, smartly dressed alternative skinhead scene developed underground. Hard As Nails fanzine reflected this growing trend. It was run by two young kids from Canvey, Essex, both Labour Party members. But they insisted the mag was about style, not politics. They had some cross-over with the scooterist scene which flourishes to this day, with thousands subscribing to George Marshall’s marvellous Pulped mag and enjoying a drip-feed of classic Oi CDs from Mark Brennan’s splendid Captain Oi!, the world’s leading punk re-issue label.
This fine volume will tell you the rest of the story in detail. In my view, the British Oi scene didn’t really perk up until Link Records came along in 1986, and gave a platform to bands like Section 5 and Vicious Rumours. But Link couldn’t reverse the decline. In Britain Oi fizzled out and turned to shit for many a barren year. But the fuse we lit went on to detonate explosive scenes around the globe. For the past two years Oi! has been booming in Malaysia (where they angrily insist that Oi is not about black and white uniting, it’s about black, white, yellow and brown). There is even an underground Oi! scene in Red China.
Oi had taken off in most European countries by the mid-eighties. But the Yanks made the music their own. Oi was always viewed for what it was in the States: a distinctive brand of street-punk. It was hardcore bands like Agnostic Front who first invited the Business to play there. The first US Oi bands were formed in 1981. The torch was carried later that decade by great bands like Warzone and The Press, the socialist Oi! band from New York whose anthem Revolution Now was directly inspired by the Gonads. But the US of Oi! really took of in the 1990s, with inspired outfits like Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys, plus The Bruisers, the Anti-Heroes and The Reducers. One of the best Oi-influenced bands were Operation Ivy, whose ska-punk numbers were punctuated with oi-oi terrace chants (this has become a ska-punk tradition). Operation Ivy became Rancid, one of the hottest of the 90s punk bands. Another major US punk band NOFX played Oi songs and were unashamedly influenced by Blitz and the Partisans.
Incidently the world’s largest organised tour against racism happened recently in the USA, featuring bands like Less Than Jake and The Toasters, and was sponsored by the Moon Ska label which is now run by rotund Oi stalwart Lol Pryor.
In April 2001 I walked into the Virgin mega-store in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, and was delighted to find a joint Business/Drop Kick Murphys CD not just in the racks but being played on the store PA system. Upstairs in the book department the latest issue of Spin magazine had put together their Top 50 most influential punk albums ever. Oi! – The Album, the record I had compiled for EMI 21 years previously was in there with these words: ‘The white riot becomes a soccer riot: Oi! was punk dumbed down to a hilariously catchy chant and a knee in the bollocks.’ Not perfect but at least there wasn’t a sniff of any Nazi nonsense…unlike in Britain where apparently professional journalists like John Sweeney of The Observer feel free to trot out same old lies without ever checking the facts.
Posers who work for Kerrang and Metal Hammer still refuse to write about the Business even though they gleefully write about bands who cite South London’s finest as their inspiration.
And even last year, CD manufacturer Disctronics declined to re-press well-known “Nazi” CDs like ‘Oi Oi Music’ by The Oppressed (the world’s leading anti-fascist Oi band!) and ‘100% British Ska’.
Yeah, we still wind up the mugs.
The latest miscreant is Robert Elms. His book, The Way We Wore, starts with a lovingly accurate depiction of skinhead fashion in the sixties but goes on to dismiss Oi out of hand. Yet it’s clear from the text that Elms has no personal knowledge of the Oi scene, had never been to any gigs and has only a tenuous idea of when Oi happened and which bands were involved in it.
It’s an odd book. Elms, an LSE graduate, lost his father at a young age and clearly looked up to his tougher brother Reggie and his skinhead pals with something approaching misty-eyed hero worship. He’s hot for hooliganism (“working class teenage boys liked to dress up; working class teenage boys liked to fight”), and praises its “violent brilliance”. Yet strangely although gang warfare and terrace culture are fine in 1969, kids just like his brother’s gang ten years later are completely written off.
Elms admits (crassly) that he was attracted to punk by the awful rip-off fashions created by Vivienne Westwood; and by the politics of the Clash (nothing wrong with that). The music never really came in to it. To him, Oi was an ugly “monosyllabic” thing (unlike those colourfully polysyllabic cults such as Mod, Punk, Goth, Ted etc.) He manages to link the Southall gig with the death of Blair Peach, who was killed by the SPG more than two years before, simply because they happened in the same town. He writes that the “predominantly Asian area…was set alight during a riot at an Oi gig in a pub,” disingenuously failing to mention who was throwing the petrol bombs and who was doing the rioting…
Inevitably by the early Eighties, Robert was closely associated with the New Romantics (i.e. the camp clown end of British youth cults) and was busy writing pretentious poetry for Spandau Ballet. In fact, Elms gave them their name – taken from Spandau prison which housed one Rudolph Hess. That kind of Nazi flirtation is so bold and decadent, don’tcha know? Spandau wrote some quality pop songs, of course, and I have to admit to a tinge of jealousy regarding Elms’s love life (he dated Sade), but his views on Oi are laughably poor journalism. Besides, it’s hard to be lectured by someone who finds Blue Rondo A La Turk more exciting than Cock Sparrer, and Steve Strange more noteworthy than Hoxton Tom. Make your own mind up which has the most lasting worth.
Will Oi ever become respectable? I doubt it. But I do know this: the movement that NME once said I had “invented” is still going strong as it enters its third decade. And the message is still the same as it always was.
Oi’s self-definition of ‘having a laugh and having a say’ got it right on the button. The laughs were ten a penny for Jack the Lads knocking back pints and pills and pulling at the pubs, rampaging at the football grounds and revelling in rebel rock’n’roll at the gigs. Oi reflected that, but it also cried out against the injustices weighed up against the young working class. In that sense Oi was a real voice from the backstreets, a megaphone for dead-end yobs. At its best it went beyond protest, and dreamed of a better life: social change; the kids united.
© Garry Bushell; 13th May, 2001
Eternal Youth - Killing Joke
(This article originally appeared in the NME, a UK-based music magazine, 27 October 1990).
Youth opportunities! It's been a long, strange trip for Youth, currently the swine in Blue Pearl. Stuart Bailie meets him to reminisce about his Brilliant career, from punk scams and Killing Joke to Bananarama and U2.
Spring 1981, and the mindwarp is coming in hard. Youth, alias Martin Glover, is staggering along London's Kings Road, half-naked. He's got a massive wad of money and he's setting fire to handfuls of the stuff.
Some time before - hours, maybe days - somebody slipped him a tab of Snoopy acid. This was how Youth ended up running amok outside a Chelsea bank, fried to the eyelids and torching all his savings.
The guy who'd go on to co-write and produce Blue Pearl's 'Naked In The Rain' was arrested wearing just a pair of boxer shorts. Then the authorities put him under psychiatric care, which, perversely, he liked. "The mental home was great," he remembered after. "I went crazy, sure, but then I began to see the funny side of life. I made a lot of friends there, though it was really weird, because I was in the ward for all the flashers. It was quite amusing."
This kind of adventure was fairly typical for the period. Youth was a standard-issue problem child - broken home, erratic education, constantly moving - who'd caught on to punk in an enthusiastic way. He hung out at the Roxy, became mates with John Lydon and cultivated a look that was somewhere between Sid Vicious and Dennis The Menace. He was into Jim Morrison, AC/DC and Aleister Crowley. One NME writer figured he was "willfully deranged and arrogant . . . a spoilt, self-important brat."
When he was 17, Youth cut his first record, 'One Of The Lads'. He was in the 4" Be 2"s, a gang of scam merchants from the late '70s which had John Lydon's brother Jimmy on vocals. Their manager was Jock McDonald, a former pro footballer and 'junior situationist', who'd also given us The Bollock Brothers, hyped up the singing career of Michael Fagin the Buckingham Palace burglar, and pushed a single, 'Why Don't The Rangers Sign A Catholic', by Pope Paul And The Romans.
The 4" Be 2"s signed a few record deals, played in a truck outside the American Embassy, went loopy in Ireland and got arrested everywhere. Youth recalls all this with cool nostalgia.
"I was the only one in that group who could play. It was a punk rock scam and Jock pulled it off. He fleeced a couple of the majors and I made more money than I ever did with Killing Joke. Also, on my first recording session, I told the musicians what to play, and I virtually produced it. It was a club track, with a reggae-disco beat, and Jimmy just shouting 'One of the lads!' in the background. Exactly like Happy Mondays, really . . ."
It was when he joined Killing Joke that the dark energies really started to pile up for Youth. Their record company was called Malicious Damage and the musical fare was brutal, ugly and rhythmic, fused with heavy occult ideas. A frightening exercise in brinkmanship. Even between the group members there was violence and paranoia which led, inexorably, to Youth's freaky scene with the cash and the acid and the boxer shorts.
"That was one of many stories from around that era," he chuckles nervously today. "I can't really tell you what happened in half an hour, because it's quite a longer story than that, I'm afraid. Suffice to say that I was pretty f___ed up at the time, and it still haunts me.
"It wasn't simply drugs either; there was a lot of bad stuff going around at the time, bad people I was meeting. I know at least that no matter what can happen to me in my life, it is never gonna be as bad for me as it was then.
"I know at least half a dozen people who died through drugs during that period, and I think it's terrible. I certainly wouldn't encourage people to go on that journey. I mean, I wanted to go mad at the time - I wanted to go over the edge. And I did, and it scared the f___ing life out of me."
Most of the shit stopped just before March 10, '82 (a heavy cosmic date for occult folk), when Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, fearing a major planetary upheaval, high-tailed it over to Iceland, later coaxing Geordie the guitarist to follow him. No-one was hugely upset; Brian Taylor, the band's manager, commented: "They're the biggest bastards under the sun. They never gave me a day's peace since I met them two years ago. I'm glad they're gone." Killing Joke appeared to be falling apart.
While Jaz was Iceland bound, Youth discovered the sounds of New York FM radio station, Kiss. When I first met him in '85, he was still going mad over old tapes he'd made of Kiss DJs mixing live in the studio. They'd have four copies of the same record playing at the same time, all going through tape loops and echoes and stuff. "It's totally psychedelic!" he raved to me in the middle of a particularly spacey afternoon. "It's like washing sounds and sending them off into orbit - visual sounds. This has changed my life completely!"
With the band Brilliant, he tried to realise some of these new possibilities. The music was more funky this time, with wiggy rock motifs and the occasional screechy Hendrix reference. I remember seeing the band play in Brockwell Park in '84, and they were an entertaining mess - eight rabid characters all going for this out-there sonic muddle. Youth had long dreadlocks and a paint-splattered technicolour greatcoat. He was having an excellent time.
But after January '85 there were just three of them: himself, singer June Montana and (future KLF, JAMMS honcho) Jimmy Cauty. The 'Love Is War' single was a more disciplined and sedate move. It was the first production hit ever for Stock Aitken Waterman. So was Youth greatly impressed by the trio's working methods at the time?
"Some of them. We spent a year recording that album ('Kiss The Lips Of Life') and both me and Jimmy learned a hell of a lot. That was when we realised just how much you could do if you really wanted. They got results really quickly, they didn't spend three weeks on a single, they did it in three days, and I thought that was so refreshing. You don't have to intellectualise it, or go through any of that."
Brilliant finished prematurely in the law courts. WEA Records had forgotten to renew the band's contract, so Youth and co began talking to interested people elsewhere. WEA promptly slammed an injunction on the group. The judge, contrary to expectations, was actually sympathetic to this move, deciding that since the record company "still felt strongly" about Brilliant, and since they had spent so much money (sob, sob) on developing them, that WEA should be given another chance. He permitted the case to go on to a full scale trial.
They couldn't afford a lawyer for all this, so Brilliant just caved in. Now Youth finds his name coming up in the law courts as a dodgy legal precedent - 'Glover versus WEA' is used by company lawyers to cover for all their clerical cock-ups. As a further irony, Youth has recently been contacted by the same company, asking if he'd care to remix some of the old Brilliant stuff!
"I was kinda relieved in a way when it ended," he figures, "because I wasn't really into being a pop performer, which was what our manager wanted us to be. I didn't feel comfortable with the videos and the make-up artists and the photo sessions. I felt too old to be doing that."
So Youth, like Jimmy, who'd got into EST (confrontational self-improvement therapy), put his head down and began spreading his ideas all over the place. He'd been into diversity before; when he was in Brilliant he was playing gigs with Zodiac Mindwarp and working with Kate Bush. He was Zodiac's accomplice on a famous drugs binge in Formentera, which has apparently inspired a book. "Zodiac's written this really hilarious thing," he says. "It's a pack of lies, of course!" Then he plays me a new demo he's done with Zodiac. Very odd.
And what about playing with Kate Bush during the 'Hounds Of Love' sessions? Was she a big Killing Joke fan?
"For me, that was definitely the highlight of my career, life, whatever," Youth responds cheerfully. "I was totally amazed that she was into what I was doing. She's fully aware of so many things, and that became obvious when I worked with her. She just phoned me up one day, and I didn't believe it was her!
"She's very much a perfectionist, and I spent a lot of time working on what I was doing with her. On her third album, 'The Dreaming', she spent a lot of time getting it how she wanted, and it wasn't a commercial success. For the next one, she was in that dilemma of either getting her own studio and doing it her way, or going back and doing something she didn't want to do. She spent two years making 'Hounds Of Love' her way, and that's a very brave thing to do."
Somehow I don't feel that Kate Bush will feel so charitable when she hears what's become of the Balearic-inspired version of 'Running Up That Hill'. The act responsible for this effort is Blue Pearl - Youth and Durga McBroom, the pair who made the Top Ten with 'Naked In The Rain' a few months ago.
Durga is a charming lady from Los Angeles who got a part in the film Flashdance and majored in theatre arts at UCLA. She'd been doing backing vocals for two years with Pink Floyd when she met up with Youth at a show in Venice. They say they've had a terrific working relationship since.
Durga shows me her skateboarding scar, tells me some Brian Wilson stories (who she has also worked with) and confesses that she used to be obsessed with Tatum O'Neal. When she was 12, Durga taped the dialogue to Paper Moon and learnt all of it by heart. A little bit later, she broke into the young actress' beach house and emptied the bubble gum machine. The minx.
Durga is a creative, ambitious person and has a powerful set of lungs, but sadly 'Naked' - the album - is no stunner. So while we've met up ostensibly to talk about all of this, it's hard, because the act have lost the full-on hedonism of their big single, and the LP skids into a lot of cliches along the way. Instead, we shoot the breeze about some of the millions of other connections that Youth's made during his busy time.
For instance, his rowdy behaviour as a child earned him the tag of 'deprived child', and got him into a boarding school in Oxfordshire, where he became mates with Guy Pratt (later with Pink Floyd) and also with Alex Paterson. The latter was then a roadie with Killing Joke, and then emerged as The Orb, via some dance experiments with Youth and Jimmy Cauty.
Sometimes Youth works with Alex on their Wau!Mr Modo label, and sometimes alone. Records you can trace back to these sources involve the likes of Steve Hillage (on the System 7 record), Yazz, Bananarama, the current Yazoo remix and that 'shite' version of 'Hotel California' by Jam On The Mutha.
It seems like Youth's current strength is that he's informed and playful enough to catch underground ideas - whether it's ambient, Balearic, baggy grooves or what - and turn them around in a presentable style. Bananarama, who've known him since they hung out with the punk crowd as teenagers, will endorse this idea.
"He's very excitable, very relaxed, no tension," says Keren. "He just sits there shaking his head and smashing away on a guitar . . . it's almost as if he knows what's going to happen next."
And with his remix commission for U2's 'Night And Day', it's like Youth has taken dance music to the ultimate crossover situation - helping the unsyncopated stadium boys to shake a hoof.
"It was very hard actually," he says. "I had to do a normal mix, like an extended version, and a remix at the same time. And I had to do it with the band - at the Windmill Lane studios in Dublin. I had long talks with Bono about why he wanted to do this and that . . .
"I told them I had a record with this great preacher man - a Baptist sort of guy on it - and they said they'd really wanted to use some of that stuff in the past, but they couldn't, because they'd have got hit for it in the States. I said, Oh, so what did you do? They said, we just phoned up Little Richard, and he did it for us!
"But what they're trying to do is very admirable for the situation they're in. I mean, they don't have to do anything really, but they have to have challenges and to go to musical places they haven't been, and keep getting inspired."
And how does that compare to working with the likes of Bananarama?
"It's just the same, really. Banarama are quite serious about what they're doing, and it's a real challenge to try and do something different with their sound and yet keep it within the parameters of pop. I love pop music anyway, and I'd like to break down some of those prejudices. I've been trying out ideas, like having these two melody lines - completely different - that can go along side by side."
Youth briefly interrupts his laid-back form for a little piece of philosophy.
"All music is, really, a reaction to something or somebody. I've worked with some very talented people and I've walked into a room with them, and there's been nothing there. And I've said, I don't think this will work - there's no reaction.
"A lot of the time, it can click in the most unusual way. With Killing Joke, we hated each other, but we made great music. And that kind of energy is handy!"
Youth opportunities! It's been a long, strange trip for Youth, currently the swine in Blue Pearl. Stuart Bailie meets him to reminisce about his Brilliant career, from punk scams and Killing Joke to Bananarama and U2.
Spring 1981, and the mindwarp is coming in hard. Youth, alias Martin Glover, is staggering along London's Kings Road, half-naked. He's got a massive wad of money and he's setting fire to handfuls of the stuff.
Some time before - hours, maybe days - somebody slipped him a tab of Snoopy acid. This was how Youth ended up running amok outside a Chelsea bank, fried to the eyelids and torching all his savings.
The guy who'd go on to co-write and produce Blue Pearl's 'Naked In The Rain' was arrested wearing just a pair of boxer shorts. Then the authorities put him under psychiatric care, which, perversely, he liked. "The mental home was great," he remembered after. "I went crazy, sure, but then I began to see the funny side of life. I made a lot of friends there, though it was really weird, because I was in the ward for all the flashers. It was quite amusing."
This kind of adventure was fairly typical for the period. Youth was a standard-issue problem child - broken home, erratic education, constantly moving - who'd caught on to punk in an enthusiastic way. He hung out at the Roxy, became mates with John Lydon and cultivated a look that was somewhere between Sid Vicious and Dennis The Menace. He was into Jim Morrison, AC/DC and Aleister Crowley. One NME writer figured he was "willfully deranged and arrogant . . . a spoilt, self-important brat."
When he was 17, Youth cut his first record, 'One Of The Lads'. He was in the 4" Be 2"s, a gang of scam merchants from the late '70s which had John Lydon's brother Jimmy on vocals. Their manager was Jock McDonald, a former pro footballer and 'junior situationist', who'd also given us The Bollock Brothers, hyped up the singing career of Michael Fagin the Buckingham Palace burglar, and pushed a single, 'Why Don't The Rangers Sign A Catholic', by Pope Paul And The Romans.
The 4" Be 2"s signed a few record deals, played in a truck outside the American Embassy, went loopy in Ireland and got arrested everywhere. Youth recalls all this with cool nostalgia.
"I was the only one in that group who could play. It was a punk rock scam and Jock pulled it off. He fleeced a couple of the majors and I made more money than I ever did with Killing Joke. Also, on my first recording session, I told the musicians what to play, and I virtually produced it. It was a club track, with a reggae-disco beat, and Jimmy just shouting 'One of the lads!' in the background. Exactly like Happy Mondays, really . . ."
It was when he joined Killing Joke that the dark energies really started to pile up for Youth. Their record company was called Malicious Damage and the musical fare was brutal, ugly and rhythmic, fused with heavy occult ideas. A frightening exercise in brinkmanship. Even between the group members there was violence and paranoia which led, inexorably, to Youth's freaky scene with the cash and the acid and the boxer shorts.
"That was one of many stories from around that era," he chuckles nervously today. "I can't really tell you what happened in half an hour, because it's quite a longer story than that, I'm afraid. Suffice to say that I was pretty f___ed up at the time, and it still haunts me.
"It wasn't simply drugs either; there was a lot of bad stuff going around at the time, bad people I was meeting. I know at least that no matter what can happen to me in my life, it is never gonna be as bad for me as it was then.
"I know at least half a dozen people who died through drugs during that period, and I think it's terrible. I certainly wouldn't encourage people to go on that journey. I mean, I wanted to go mad at the time - I wanted to go over the edge. And I did, and it scared the f___ing life out of me."
Most of the shit stopped just before March 10, '82 (a heavy cosmic date for occult folk), when Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, fearing a major planetary upheaval, high-tailed it over to Iceland, later coaxing Geordie the guitarist to follow him. No-one was hugely upset; Brian Taylor, the band's manager, commented: "They're the biggest bastards under the sun. They never gave me a day's peace since I met them two years ago. I'm glad they're gone." Killing Joke appeared to be falling apart.
While Jaz was Iceland bound, Youth discovered the sounds of New York FM radio station, Kiss. When I first met him in '85, he was still going mad over old tapes he'd made of Kiss DJs mixing live in the studio. They'd have four copies of the same record playing at the same time, all going through tape loops and echoes and stuff. "It's totally psychedelic!" he raved to me in the middle of a particularly spacey afternoon. "It's like washing sounds and sending them off into orbit - visual sounds. This has changed my life completely!"
With the band Brilliant, he tried to realise some of these new possibilities. The music was more funky this time, with wiggy rock motifs and the occasional screechy Hendrix reference. I remember seeing the band play in Brockwell Park in '84, and they were an entertaining mess - eight rabid characters all going for this out-there sonic muddle. Youth had long dreadlocks and a paint-splattered technicolour greatcoat. He was having an excellent time.
But after January '85 there were just three of them: himself, singer June Montana and (future KLF, JAMMS honcho) Jimmy Cauty. The 'Love Is War' single was a more disciplined and sedate move. It was the first production hit ever for Stock Aitken Waterman. So was Youth greatly impressed by the trio's working methods at the time?
"Some of them. We spent a year recording that album ('Kiss The Lips Of Life') and both me and Jimmy learned a hell of a lot. That was when we realised just how much you could do if you really wanted. They got results really quickly, they didn't spend three weeks on a single, they did it in three days, and I thought that was so refreshing. You don't have to intellectualise it, or go through any of that."
Brilliant finished prematurely in the law courts. WEA Records had forgotten to renew the band's contract, so Youth and co began talking to interested people elsewhere. WEA promptly slammed an injunction on the group. The judge, contrary to expectations, was actually sympathetic to this move, deciding that since the record company "still felt strongly" about Brilliant, and since they had spent so much money (sob, sob) on developing them, that WEA should be given another chance. He permitted the case to go on to a full scale trial.
They couldn't afford a lawyer for all this, so Brilliant just caved in. Now Youth finds his name coming up in the law courts as a dodgy legal precedent - 'Glover versus WEA' is used by company lawyers to cover for all their clerical cock-ups. As a further irony, Youth has recently been contacted by the same company, asking if he'd care to remix some of the old Brilliant stuff!
"I was kinda relieved in a way when it ended," he figures, "because I wasn't really into being a pop performer, which was what our manager wanted us to be. I didn't feel comfortable with the videos and the make-up artists and the photo sessions. I felt too old to be doing that."
So Youth, like Jimmy, who'd got into EST (confrontational self-improvement therapy), put his head down and began spreading his ideas all over the place. He'd been into diversity before; when he was in Brilliant he was playing gigs with Zodiac Mindwarp and working with Kate Bush. He was Zodiac's accomplice on a famous drugs binge in Formentera, which has apparently inspired a book. "Zodiac's written this really hilarious thing," he says. "It's a pack of lies, of course!" Then he plays me a new demo he's done with Zodiac. Very odd.
And what about playing with Kate Bush during the 'Hounds Of Love' sessions? Was she a big Killing Joke fan?
"For me, that was definitely the highlight of my career, life, whatever," Youth responds cheerfully. "I was totally amazed that she was into what I was doing. She's fully aware of so many things, and that became obvious when I worked with her. She just phoned me up one day, and I didn't believe it was her!
"She's very much a perfectionist, and I spent a lot of time working on what I was doing with her. On her third album, 'The Dreaming', she spent a lot of time getting it how she wanted, and it wasn't a commercial success. For the next one, she was in that dilemma of either getting her own studio and doing it her way, or going back and doing something she didn't want to do. She spent two years making 'Hounds Of Love' her way, and that's a very brave thing to do."
Somehow I don't feel that Kate Bush will feel so charitable when she hears what's become of the Balearic-inspired version of 'Running Up That Hill'. The act responsible for this effort is Blue Pearl - Youth and Durga McBroom, the pair who made the Top Ten with 'Naked In The Rain' a few months ago.
Durga is a charming lady from Los Angeles who got a part in the film Flashdance and majored in theatre arts at UCLA. She'd been doing backing vocals for two years with Pink Floyd when she met up with Youth at a show in Venice. They say they've had a terrific working relationship since.
Durga shows me her skateboarding scar, tells me some Brian Wilson stories (who she has also worked with) and confesses that she used to be obsessed with Tatum O'Neal. When she was 12, Durga taped the dialogue to Paper Moon and learnt all of it by heart. A little bit later, she broke into the young actress' beach house and emptied the bubble gum machine. The minx.
Durga is a creative, ambitious person and has a powerful set of lungs, but sadly 'Naked' - the album - is no stunner. So while we've met up ostensibly to talk about all of this, it's hard, because the act have lost the full-on hedonism of their big single, and the LP skids into a lot of cliches along the way. Instead, we shoot the breeze about some of the millions of other connections that Youth's made during his busy time.
For instance, his rowdy behaviour as a child earned him the tag of 'deprived child', and got him into a boarding school in Oxfordshire, where he became mates with Guy Pratt (later with Pink Floyd) and also with Alex Paterson. The latter was then a roadie with Killing Joke, and then emerged as The Orb, via some dance experiments with Youth and Jimmy Cauty.
Sometimes Youth works with Alex on their Wau!Mr Modo label, and sometimes alone. Records you can trace back to these sources involve the likes of Steve Hillage (on the System 7 record), Yazz, Bananarama, the current Yazoo remix and that 'shite' version of 'Hotel California' by Jam On The Mutha.
It seems like Youth's current strength is that he's informed and playful enough to catch underground ideas - whether it's ambient, Balearic, baggy grooves or what - and turn them around in a presentable style. Bananarama, who've known him since they hung out with the punk crowd as teenagers, will endorse this idea.
"He's very excitable, very relaxed, no tension," says Keren. "He just sits there shaking his head and smashing away on a guitar . . . it's almost as if he knows what's going to happen next."
And with his remix commission for U2's 'Night And Day', it's like Youth has taken dance music to the ultimate crossover situation - helping the unsyncopated stadium boys to shake a hoof.
"It was very hard actually," he says. "I had to do a normal mix, like an extended version, and a remix at the same time. And I had to do it with the band - at the Windmill Lane studios in Dublin. I had long talks with Bono about why he wanted to do this and that . . .
"I told them I had a record with this great preacher man - a Baptist sort of guy on it - and they said they'd really wanted to use some of that stuff in the past, but they couldn't, because they'd have got hit for it in the States. I said, Oh, so what did you do? They said, we just phoned up Little Richard, and he did it for us!
"But what they're trying to do is very admirable for the situation they're in. I mean, they don't have to do anything really, but they have to have challenges and to go to musical places they haven't been, and keep getting inspired."
And how does that compare to working with the likes of Bananarama?
"It's just the same, really. Banarama are quite serious about what they're doing, and it's a real challenge to try and do something different with their sound and yet keep it within the parameters of pop. I love pop music anyway, and I'd like to break down some of those prejudices. I've been trying out ideas, like having these two melody lines - completely different - that can go along side by side."
Youth briefly interrupts his laid-back form for a little piece of philosophy.
"All music is, really, a reaction to something or somebody. I've worked with some very talented people and I've walked into a room with them, and there's been nothing there. And I've said, I don't think this will work - there's no reaction.
"A lot of the time, it can click in the most unusual way. With Killing Joke, we hated each other, but we made great music. And that kind of energy is handy!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)