A ‘race riot’, the press called it in July 1981, helping ferment a summer of inner-city violence that spread across the country. At a time when the National Front (NF) and British Movement (BM) were recruiting among just the same milieu Oi! appealed to and emerged from, associations with the far right gained currency once a pub hosting a gig in Southall was burnt to the ground by Asian youths resistant to a contingent of skinheads gathering in an area with a history of racist antagonism. More seriously, Oi!’s embrace of skinhead culture led to charges of glorifying violence and worse. Bushell’s coining of the term raised accusations of Oi! being a media construct, its class-focus rendering an unintended parody of lumpen youth. The parameters of Oi! were vague and led to much intra-punk musing on what – if anything – distinguished a punk band from an Oi! band. The controversies surrounding Oi! are well-known. Nevertheless, a range of punk groups – many signed to the No Future record label (catalogue numbers running Oi 1 to Oi 24) – lent support, providing Oi! with outposts across the UK.įeel the rage, breaking out 9 Infa Riot, ’Feel the Rage’ (1982). The term itself referred to an exclamation designed to attract someone’s attention and was much favoured by the Cockney Rejects. 6 Garry Bushell, ‘Oi! -The Column’, Sounds (17 January 1981): 11.īushell, a Sounds journalist who compiled Oi! The Album in 1980, located Oi! in a punk lineage that ran through the blunt social realism of Sham 69 onto the Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects and, by 1980–81, the likes of the 4-Skins, Infa Riot and The Business. Oi! was one such strand, initially conceived by Garry Bushell as ‘a loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Inevitably, perhaps, such contradictions saw punk disassemble into a range of sounds and styles into the 1980s. With nothing on our feet 5 Sham 69, ‘Song of the Streets’ (1978). If punk, taken generally, was a protest, then it was inchoate and fraught with contradictions. 4 Jon Savage, ‘New Musick’, Sounds (26 November 1977): 23. More to the point, an evident fascination with abjection and mental breakdowns, with violence and alienation, might suggest an implicit protest but it could also indicate deeper existential musings or just morbid obsessions (a ‘new musick’, Jon Savage riffed on what later became known as post-punk). Indeed, much that came packaged as punk was affected and facile. Many bands rejected the political readings projected onto them, preferring – as in The Damned’s case – to explain their sped-up rock ‘n’ roll as expressions of youthful exuberance: kids being kids. Punk’s praxis bore a mix of critique and social commentary, but often it was fuelled by a vaguer sense of adolescent angst or anxiety. The cultural and political concerns manifest through punk bore bohemian, art school and radical influences that dispelled interpretations focused solely on ‘songs from the street’ (to quote Sham 69). 3 Simon Frith, ‘Beyond the Dole Queue: The Politics of Voice’, Village Voice (24 October 1977): 77–9. Simon Frith, among others, was swift to dispel any easy correlation between punk and the ‘dole queue’. 2 Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).Īs always, things were more complicated. For politicos, academics and cultural commentators, punk served as a reflection of socio-economic tensions, a creative protest that went beyond the dire state of Top of the Pops or the diminishing returns delivered by rock’s ageing pioneers. In the music press and newspapers, punk was explained as a splenetic response to rising unemployment and crumbling inner-cities. Not for nothing did early interpretations align punk with the climate of ‘crisis’ enveloping the UK in the mid-1970s. And many did, ushering in a (new) wave of gob, vomit, filth and fury that splattered across an aesthetic defined by rips, tears, slogans and provocative signifiers. Certainly, the modus operandi of a music made simply, without recourse to technical ability, allowed for those with something to say to say it. Titles drawn from 1976–7 – ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘White Riot’, ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours!’, ‘Great British Mistake’, ‘No More Heroes’, ‘Right to Work’ – reveal a disaffection that found creative outlet in youthful upsurges of noise, art, style and performance. Punk appeared to provide an ideal conduit for the English protest song.
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