Cock Sparrer - Forever

We are older for much longer than we're young. Though identity is forged in a roiling mass of hormones and adolescent passions, whiplash snaps of mood and circle, a stumbling procession of twentysomething mistakes, we spend a far longer period of our life letting those hard convictions and iron poses unspool gradually, shifting slowly and corrupting and tarnishing bit by bit with the implacable accretion of years. Which way these convictions bend, which rude form they calcify into is up for grabs, but those early formative thrusts, that first show, first pill, first shuddering wrack of heartbreak, those fights and triumphs continue to loom larger in the imagination and sense of self.

Bands are similar most of time. When we think of the Buzzcocks we remember first the pristine crop of perfect singles that they cranked out in the half-decade of their original incarnation, rather than their reunion which has been going steady for 28 years now. Wire are sixteen albums deep into a forty-odd year exploration of weird sonic places yet their name is perhaps still most likely to conjure the yelping headrush pogo of 12XU.

Cock Sparrer have, like Wire, been rolling along for coming up on half a century now, first formed as a bunch of teenagers in 1972, and they've long been a band that dealt in more than that rush of youth.

Their greatest album Shock Troops, released in 1983, was already moving past the hopeful bloody throb of some early punk being filled with songs that one could, had the term not already been taken, easily define as in attitude and ethos as 'post-punk': the keen political cynicism of Watch Your Back, Take 'Em All chronicling the casual cruelties of a music industry ride experienced and survived, Where Are They Now? calling to account some of 77's champions (Joe Strummer, Julie Burchill, Tony Parson, Jimmy Pursey) for their failure to stick by the ideals they espoused to their wide-eyed audiences hungry for something different (as of 2017 the answer to that question with regards to its subjects is : dead, cunt, cunt, engaged in an ongoing legal (and possibly philosophical) disputes to which of the two currently touring versions of their old band is the 'real' one). Even Shock Troops most confident declarations, We're Coming Back, England Belongs To Me, are songs of return and reaffirmation, in the face of doubt and fears, they're not mindless new bravery.

It's probably no surprise that Cock Sparrer later penned punk's finest old lad song to date, Because You're Young, a song that bolts the emotions of Yusuf Islam's Father and Son (a song of such weaponised paternalistic ruefulness that even its usage in a slick dayglo blockbuster like Guardians of the Galaxy can evoke a tickle of genuine feeling) to the a series of crunching ringing chords and that East End bellow. This is a song that paints the inevitable clashes and missteps of youth with the sharp fondness of distance and time-worn experience. And that was released a full 23 years ago.

And it's now been a decade since their last album, 2007's Here We Stand, similarly full of songs impossible without a long life behind them like Did You Have a Nice Life Without Me?, a long-ago love ruminated upon wryly.

What has a band that's been around that long, been old that long, really got to say anymore? Where are they now?

Well they don't like social media for one thing. And yes that sounds like worst fucking old bloke shit imaginable, but somehow by taking an angle so far ignored by a thousand fuckshit hack thinkpieces, they make it entertaining. Cock Sparrer's take on the issue is that social media is just grassing on yourself, a perspective so far unconsidered and a whole lot more entertaining and plausible than any other I've encountered. The fact that it's also as catchy as anything helps, even if the idea of them referencing Linked In takes a while sink in.

Less explicitly dealing with the internet but still there in its bones, Nothing Like You is the song about the feeling of watching people you grow up with warp and shift rightwards, and in this day and age seems to apply most directly to the feeling of seeing someone you went to school with post an incoherent facebook rant about how great Nigel Farage is. "I  was born in a house like you/On a street like you/In a town like you" it bellows over the driving guitar and the same drumbeat they've been using since John Belushi was alive.

The album is smooth sounding. The riffs are wellworn and comfortable (I've Had Enough particularly recalls tourmates Rancid's Junkie Man), the guitar leads cut through with purpose, the vocals are warmed by decades. Nothing's unpredictable but that's really not the point here. Oi! has long been a cousin of pop-punk and its singalong anthems, leviathan choruses, terrace proud, that undeniable thrill of many voices drawn into one are utilised though in more than just platitudinous statements of unity.

Though of course they can do that if they want, and do it better than almost anyone. The album's bookended by a couple of solidarity anthems, One By One and Us Against the World, that are vague enough to apply to literally anyone but delivered with enough force to bring you along for the ride, get you singing along by halfway through the first chorus. Both recalling We're Coming Back in mode and One By One making explicit reference to their history, echoing Take Em All and namechecking Here We Stand.

Indeed, throughout the album the band's long history trails behind them, but it's used as weight and engine, lending depth and power to the songs that might seem trite in the hands of a band without their standing.

The chunky stomp of Believe displaying that dismissiveness that drove Watch Your Back still in full-force."You gotta try to enjoy life but that's a hard sell/When there's so many bastards in the world." Can't really argue with that. Believe also has a contemporary reference to internet trolls, more evidence of a band living in the present, aware of what's happening around them and not just falling into simple nostalgia.

Their penchant for character pieces like Riot Squad represented in songs like the bitter Family of One, the dismissive Contender which features maybe the best line on the album, "You were a bit of a cunt/But boy did you have some front", possibly the platonic ideal of an Oi! lyric. Even when you're old you still get your back put up by right dickheads.

Gonna Be Alright could be a companion to Because You're Young, here instead of a paternalistic headshaking at some teenage tearaway, it's aimed at the father seeing their daughter move beyond their parental grasp into a life of her own. Like that older song it has a tender sweetness built into it, one that is reinforced by this album's sweeping sincerity. There might be an implication that the person the song is directed at is on their way out and worried about a future they can't control. Punk is so good at screaming itself up in righteous fury at heavy fuckin wounds, massive sweeping blights, like police violence, toxic masculinity, nuclear war, that seeing that anthemic power pinpointed down to one terrifying personal moment of dark truth jars.

Every Step of the Way at first seeming like a similar number to Cockney Rejects' 2012 reactionary banger Your Country Needs You, instead morphing into something more. It's sung from the perspective of some rough-hewn guardian angel, standing beside people at the crucial moments that rise up before them to be fought through, not just war, but prison, cancer. Placing these more quotidian battles in the same lineage as the lionised fresh-faced soldiers of popular history. It's a fair stretch, but the depth of earnestness with which this whole album is delivered dares you to dismiss it as corny. The refusal to wink at itself, despite an obvious self-awareness that this band have long possessed, slowly comes into focus as something that could perhaps be thought of as dignity.

Like on Somebody's Brother, Somebody's Son, eschewing the gangfight bravado for the rawer useless consequence, a haunting breakdown of a life unlived, two families rended by a futile act.

Of course it's not perfect, even more so than Every Step of the Way, I've Had Enough skirts a certain Harry-Brown conservative line though it at least acknowledges the pointlessness of its self-pity. "We thought we were heroes/But it was just another day". Still, it's something of a misstep for a band that's been singing about thing's being kinda shit for 40 years sing about how uniquely bad it is that things are really shit now. I guess we all have days when we're all just fucked off with it.

But it doesn't succumb to such darkness and frustration. The London anthem In My Town finds the band still ready to roll on out and, despite the passage of years, maybe get on a bit of a mad one in a place that made them as "the night has secrets waiting to be found." It's not about a great night that they had many moons ago, it's about the fresh feelings possible, even if the environment that they're in is an intimately familiar one, Which is really what this album is. A certain balm at times but filled with life and loves, pains and pangs. A real life lived in a real tough world, the things that fall by the wayside, the ones that we hold close throughout it all. The things that matter.

Because where are they now? They're right here. How long will they be here? Well, not forever. We know that. But a while yet.

Off With Their Heads - Home

Off With Their Heads have been making great gruff punk rock that combines the horrifying despair that builds and corrodes inside too many of us with the explosion of pop-punk joy for a while now. They've always thrived on that dissonance, the gap, (the beauty between?), the sense of brokenness you feel a lot of the time splitting open into a big soaring chorus of Oi!-caught pain where the anguish is ameliorated not by any particular positive step, but merely by the fact that for this second the loneliness and isolation has been collectivised into a fists-in-air sweatsoaked pit singalongs, shit-off-your-shoulder catharsis.

Home does offer more of the same screaming-in-the-dark for a bunch of it, but it also has some stuff which is straight-up fucking inspirational, Focus on Your Own Family is like a miniature SELF-HELP book bolted to a Rivethead or Banner Pilot or Manix song where all advice starts with "FUCK EM ALL!" and continues "DON'T EVER LISTEN! DON'T EVER COMPLY! NEVER BE SCARED! NEVER BE FRIGHTENED! HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH!" and the bits of the album with this tone are reminiscent of the sharp edges where Henry Rollins' stuff goes from that tight twitching wireball of brokenbone angst to the nuclear-powered punch-a-mountain-in-the-face fightspiration of a line like "I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become." ( I was looking for a particular Rollins line to illustrate my point but I couldn't find it but it didn't really matter as EVERY SINGLE QUOTE IS LIKE THAT!) And that jump out of the tormented blue mess of hard drugs and hospitals and hate songs to that kinda (yeah maybe a little) cheesy yeah-I'm-gonna-live-this-life-and-you-are-too swerve  is all the more powerful from coming for a band that's worn suicide in its lyrics like a studdedpunkvest armour.

That is not to say the screaming in the dark, which still happens on this album, is not a useless thing, not an unimportant thing to do, not fucking relevant.

When I was 18 and living in college accommodation depressed I played Johnny Hobo and the Freight-Trains incessantly, a band whose entire oeuvre was about self-destruction and self-hatred, all the sorts tales of brokendown squatparty awfulness that just in their very existence made me feel less alone because of the way they articulated a bunch of the shit I was stuck on, stuck in, and I carved the chorus to Harmony Parking Lot into the back of my bass-guitar with a penknife and made a typo which I was unreasonably annoyed with myself about. I even loved the almost unlistenable early demo stuff with drum-machines, feeling like shit all the time, it made me feel a little better to know that someone else was feeling like shit all the time too, so when the songwriter Pat the Bunny disbanded the band and tried a more positive tack with his next project Wingnut Dishwasher's Union first came out I was not as into it as it was trying to be more hopeful and I didn’t want to be more hopeful, I just wanted to be miserable and nihilistic with someone else so I didn’t really listen to them that much so maybe Focus On Your Own Family could really run cold with some people, come across as too corny, but the interesting thing about Focus On Your Own Family is that it's soaraway believe in yourself mantra is tucked right in the middle of the album. A less confident band would stick the positivity, the rising empowerment anthem at the end and leave the listener on the upwards finish, throwing you back out with a sense of purpose, but that would be triter and less interesting that what OWTH do, which is constantly switch up in their writhing pain, yeah that'd be to cheapen and diminish the documents of impossible/everyday struggle that populate the rest of this album. Cos there isn't a snap-out-of-it moment with bleak shit like that, there are ups and downs and boy are there downs.

Also, the despair and self-loathing that OWTH have dealt with has usually focused on its application, the loneliness and ache that and the ruined relationships and long scorched-earth nights that result from living in a way where some of the time, or a lot of the time, you feel like you'd got something closer to a spikey rebarred concrete lump for a heart, that if a surgeon opened you up they'd find something closer to the grey-green of the Antikythera mechanism than anything resembling a functional muscle that can sustain life, that could ever be used as a metaphor for love or strength or forbearance by even the most optimistic poet you could find.

And here there is that, of course. There is angry disassociation on SHIRTS: "I don't feel like me/whoever that's supposed to me." There is failure and hopelessness in Nightlife "I know I’m sick and I’m not right. I’m so fucking tired of living this life, I made for myself, I’m sorry that I cannot get past what keeps me away from the light." There is a scary sense of a malicious otherness squatting parasitically inside you, pulling you away from life as it seems to run for other people, drawing a borderline between you and what you might call normal or you might , if one was taking it from one particularly seductive sort of angle, you might call 'good' on Always Alone: "Something inside, you'll never know, keeps me from feeling the things that are so/standard for most but not for me". Resignation on the fading buzz of Stolen Away: "I'm not gonna change after everything I've been through." There is a whole lot of discomfort punk thrust into anthems, rock and roll lovesongs terrified that this love is not enough, and half-crooned bummer numbers (stuff along the lines of their Don't Laugh, I'm Totally Serious from All Things Move Towards Their End) all packed to disintegration with the raw squirming honesty of a teary-eyed teenage livejournal post. Hearts sewn to sleeves with dental floss and circled like an A with Snuggle lyrics.

But as well as those moments when it's just hitting those same present painspots, screaming in the alltime dark, and as well as those moments when it's trying to move up and onwards, attempting to light a way forward, there is another way it moves, there's a  digging for the root, a coming together of an expose of the cause of this ugly wonk shit that lives and gurgles, something they've hinted at that before on songs like Janie, which is rerecorded here, ("This is why I cannot tell you what you deserve to know.").

Here it does take that ("I need to find my way back to where I began. Retrace my steps and start again." on Come Find Me, also a song about not doing it alone, asking for help) and as a result of that backwards interrogation it sometimes it feels tonally close to the harrowing beauty of The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree and its searching for some source of the torment and depictions of the intense trauma of growing up in a place where kids should never be made to grow up. It's looking for where this hate and woe got its big break

And in that case here that blame is generally lain at the big-ass wooden door of the church.

Altar Boy Blues probably does it clearest: ("There's only one time around and I choose not to blindly follow the same people that abuse. And I've seen it first hand, they tried to cover it up, I was confused.") but then there's the aforementioned Focus On Your Own Family which is a dig at the nauseating bigots at Focus On the Family, but it's not a scathing attack like something like DK's Moral Majority ("God must be dead if you're alive!") or Amebix's The Church is For Sinners ("The church holds out a bloodstained hand to pass around the hat"), in fact it really doesn't mention those bloviating christknackers at all, just the titular shot, it's a best-revenge-is-living-well kinda deal.

Something of blackhearted pop-punk heathen jolt of Crusades, attacking the consequences most, it's that antireligious spirit free of the smug punchability of people who post Richard Dawkins quotes and Amazing Atheist links on their tumblr (cos while I might agree with Hitchens and his ilk on the basic proposition "There is no god." I'm not down with their addendum "And you have to be a smirking cunt about it."). Attacks on the church not as a point of pride, but as a beatendog biteback at the damage caused, a hate fucking earned, a vicious stab, maybe not so much with personal faith, but with the atrocities it causes and conceals with its structures, when it is codified and socialised, the righteousness that blinds its wearer, convinces them of their goodness as they muck about in some obliterative evil works. I'm writing this as white smoke rises from the vatican and my twitter feed clogs up with pope jokes and my Rudimentary Peni patch burns hot against my punx jacket, so you could say that they're incredibly timely in this, but the truth is, the Catholic church is such an endless procession of vile conceited ignorance and venal hate-garbed boogie-dicks that attacks on their colossal hypocracies have been timely for roughly the last 2000 years.

And not just in the well documented self-serving cover-ups, right in the fucking giddy heart of Catholic doctrine is the weirdo notion of original sin, I mean what sort of fucking person looks at a baby and sees them inherently infected with the badness of the world? I don't believe in heaven but if I did there wouldn't be any sort of equivocation over whether a fucking newborn baby that dies is gonna go there, some shit that the Catholic Church only got done with in two-thousand-and-shitting-seven. I mean, jesus christ. That's the sort of just straight-up view-gnarling philosophy that should be kept the hell away from a developing brain and soul. This album screams "You want a fucking confession?" as Ryan Young's voice snarls and groans and aches as the songs, which are maybe a  little cleaner, a little slower, and the songs constructed in a different kinda way to their earliest fucking classics like Die Young or SOS or Sleeping in Carrie's Car, where they just stick to build-up/race-downhill, crack onwards consistently and punkspeed or chunter determinedly or just scrape painfully down the route like a dying man.

Because above anything else, this is an album which constantly goes against itself, sometimes an atmosphere breaking rocketship love, sometimes a trudge onwards, some, sometimes a nasty little shitwicket moaning alone and uncomfortable and twirling up into itself in misery spirals, sometimes reaching out pleadingly for any sort of help offered. It's  sometimes self-immolation, sometimes an immutable fuck-you punched into brick and poetry. It's not simple. Our moods and convictions don't flow in one direction, don't get simply placed into templates or regular orbits, depression ain't a Freytag Arc, redemption is not a problem to be solved. The only constant on this album, it seems, is movement. Away from something, towards something, escape, return. Always searching. Ever ticking over with the struggles and distance "Always upstream/always against the grain" on Shirts, "Gonna be a rough road/gonna take some time" on Focus On Your Own Family.

"It's a long way back to be anything that anyone could love." is how it's set out on the opener Start Walking. This is an album that gives no clue of when, or if anyone will manage to stop, There's less of a wallow, more of a sense of purpose buts it's a tidal ebb 3 steps forward 2 steps back kinda shuffle as this punk rock tears and rumbles on.

It's a fucking life. Is the home of the title a destination, a place to escape from, or the place we're going towards now? The album can't decide. "Please don't make me go home. I'm wanted less than I'm wanted here." on Don't Make Me Go. "Help me find a home" and those big beautiful whoa-oh-ohs that close out the album on Take Me Out. Maybe it's all those things. "Home" is a odd word in English, it's often a tricky thing to get a student learning the language to remember that you can't 'go to home' (that's what I do in my day job), because when you say "I'm going home" home is an adverb, it's not a place, it's a direction, a qualifier to the action.

Probably the Home Off With Their Heads are running with here is something like Pat the Bunny singing an acknowledgement of confusion on Johnny Hobo's Fuck Cops: "I don't know where home is, but I know that I'm not there now." and once when I was I was 18 and all wrapped up way too tight and deep in these sort of Off With Their Heads topics, those particular Freight Trains songs, my mum earnestly asked me if I was doing okay and all I could really hear was that line so I mentioned it and she kinda cried and I felt weird and ashamed and I needed to listen to punk rock because that's how I dealt. How I deal, when shit gets a bit too sharply human. With punk rock like this. As a companion for the journey, a whisper on the way.

“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster.

Cobra - Tokyo Boicott

OI! OI! Motherfucker! Oi! I dunno know what to say about this beyond: it's an Oi! album. Snotty slurred streetpunk vocals than go into titanic shoutalong choruses that crash down upon you like a quiver of fury rolling through a crowd, chug-a-lug pubrock riffs, Oi!-based puns, everything a good Oi! album should have. It's even got a couple chill moments, in the manner of Cock Sparrer's Out On an Island, like the whistling on Get On The Ship. The music you sing with your friends as you all peg it down alleyways as the cops show up to the rumble. A band that have been going for 30 years and 12 albums and still have songs called Teenage Riot.

Shit Creek - Psychic Hospital

Making explicit the Oi!/gruffpunk connection that Arms Aloft just implicitly acknowledge, channeling Minimum Wage is a Gateway Drug and I Fit Central Heating equally, four songs of catchy, singalong punk rock. Shit Creek got Crimpshrine-grittiness, Mall'd to Death punk-sarcasm and echoes of the smarter-than-your-average-streetpunk Stockyard Stoics sound. Offering an update on Shanghai River's punk decrees on The Rules '012 and closing on the title track's waltzy bit of throaty cascading bar-room melancholy. The D4-skins.

So Scratched Into Our Souls #3: Hard Skin - First Day Angry Song

"STOP THINKING START DRINKING!" - Hard Skin, First Day Angry Song

A couple years ago I had the idea for an essay about pastiches that represent a perfect example of the thing they're pastiching, examples of art that embraced the self-awareness of post-modernism, but rejected the sniffiness of tone that can characterise works of that nature and embraced the silliness and honest joy of the things they were making. I had a big long list of these, and I can't remember all of them and I've lost the notebook they were in, but a few that I can remember include:

• Dr Hook and the Medicine Show's Shel Silverstein penned Sylvia's Mother, a lovelorn teenage break-up song that highlights the absurdity of how seriously young love is taken by the people involved, but also works honestly as one of those teenage love songs because there is an honesty to the melodrama in those situations.
• Alan Moore's Tom Strong, pulp comics which knew pulp comics were stupid a lot of the time, full of odd ape obsessions and laughable over-the-top villains, but still got the reader invested fully in the characters who stumbled into these battles with Nazi seductresses in flying machines and what-not. (Actually, pretty much everything Alan Moore has ever done.)
• Warren Ellis' Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., a massive silly celebration of the purity of comics where people get punched and then explode with its tongue set firmly in cheek.
• Guitar Wolf. ROCK AND ROLLLLLLLLLLLL!
• Hal Duncan's Escape From Hell!, a sacrilegious b-movie in 140 pages that had you cheering all the way.
• Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books, a sharp satire on the excesses of 60s counter-culture and also the ultimate avatar of its joyous reckless abandon.
• Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a really great detective novel where the narrator comments on how many detectives in detective novels get knocked unconscious as he gets knocked unconscious.
• Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.

I abandoned the essay, both because I was incredibly lazy, and I realised that this is such a dominant tone nowadays—a reaction against irony that retains the awareness of your situation that gave birth to the studied irony in the first place—that I was probably writing a book and I didn't have any argument beyond "Hey, look, this is a thing that happens" and that this wasn't a new phenomenon either, there are examples I mentioned just now from 35 years ago and I could probably dig up earlier ones pretty easily, maybe that scene in the classic film noir Rififi that comments on the chiaroscuro aesthetic and underworld obsessions of such films using a shadowplay and song in a club that all the characters visit. I'm sure it goes back much further. (Don Quixote?) But anyway, the point I'm getting to here is that this Hard Skin song I'm talking about falls neatly into that tradition, being as it is a parody Oi! song that is also a great fucking Oi! song.

People get really pissy about Oi! these days. When I asked a DJ at a punk rock night for some Cock Sparrer he said "We don't do Oi." and gave me a look like I'd just asked him if I could shit on his chest. This despite the fact he'd just played Off With Their Heads and they're basically just Cock Sparrer with the working class apolitical anger swapped for introspection and self-loathing.

**If you know what Oi! is and have a brief idea of its history, you can skip the whole next bit. Just press Ctrl+F and type in 'twattitude' and that'll quickly get you to round about the place I actually finally get around to discussing the song.**

I have talked before about the way punk rock borrows and appropriates parts of other styles and cultures that fit its aesthetic, The Clash seizing on bass-driven threat of ska and reggae, World/Inferno incorporating the swirling madness of cabaret and swing. What Oi! did was to take the speed and noise of punk rock and imbue it with the choral emetic that is a football ground terrace chant. It is a great thing to be among people singing the same song. Whether it's the away-end singalongs of "Who's the bastard in the black?" and "We only sing when we're fishing" on one side or Sham 69's "There's gonna be a borstal breakout!" and the Angelic Upstarts' "We're the kids on the street. We're the kids that you meet." on tother. Whatever you're singing, if it's en masse it's pretty thrilling.

See?

The other reason why people dislike Oi! include the supposed far-right tone to the music, because it was explicitly working class and this was a time when a number of working class youths were seduced by the vainglorious xenophobia of the National Front (see Shane Meadows' fine This is England which is set a year or two later but still applies). Oi! bands generally fit into a few categories.

• Avowedly apolitical like Cock Sparrer. Watch Your Back sets out their philosophy perfectly: "Everybody's talking about revolution/Everybody's talking about smash the state/Sounds to me like the final solution/Right wing, left wing, full of hate" Concerned almost solely with the travails of working class youth and instilling pride in people stuck in shit jobs and on the dole. See also: The Cockney Rejects
• Slightly political stuff like Sham 69. They do deal with the topic of politics now and then, but always from the perspective of a dumb kid stuck in a situation beyond his control. There's generally more pity than preaching. Sham 69 played Rock Against Racism. They were anti-cop (George Davies is Innocent), anti-war (Ulster is a song of sympathy for all young people caught up in the old old Troubles). Generally just concerned with the emotions and pursuits of bored, confused young people from the shabbier side of town, and this can lead them into political songs, but just as often will leave them singing "HURRY UP HARRY, WE'RE GOING DOWN THE PUB!" See also: Infa Riot, The Business, The 4-Skins.
• Punk Pathetique like The Toy Dolls. Not quite Oi! A related genre. Goofy working class humour. An absolute refusal to take absolutely anything seriously. See also: Splodgenessabounds, The Notsensibles, The Macc Lads.
• Left-wing Oi! like Angelic Upstarts. The Upstarts were redder than a fucking matador's hanky. See also: The Burial, The Oppressed.
• Right-wing Oi! like Skrewdriver. Skrewdriver's first album was apolitical. Then Ian Stuart junked the rest of the band, hired new people, kept the name and started pumping out disgusting white power bullshit. Also slightly more centrist but still right wing bands like Combat 84 that also fucking suck. The whole RAC (Rock Against Communism, not the breakdown company) shite. Completely fucking stupid pricks who obviously never heeded the cry of "In the real 4th Reich you'd be the first to go" from DK's Nazi Punks Fuck Off and continued to espouse a morally and logically bent philosophy which was in fact aimed at capitalising on their localist insecurities and destroying everything they really loved. Utterly despicable bollocks. See also: a bunch of bands I have never bothered to learn the names of because fuck them. Fuck them.

So yeah, there was far-right Oi!, but it definitely wasn't in the majority, Oi!'s political spectrum covered all the laces of the rainbow,* the idea of its right-wing nature springs both from the often social conservative tendencies of the working class they represented (which always have been reinforced by the pandering and patronising centre-right tabloid rags) and the loudness of the right-wing motherfuckers (also focused upon by the lovely scaremongering tabloid rags), and additionally from the fact that the first big Oi! compilation was named Strength Thru Oi!, an unwitting pun on the Nazi slogan Strength Through Joy. Garry Bushell, the journalist behind the compilation, is not a Nazi. He is a fucking twat though, but there is no totalitarian intent or jackboot fetishism to his twattishness, it's just pure and unbridled smug twattidude like a big pint pot full of piss you're forced to drink every time he pops up on a clip show discussing the few seconds for which he was relevant.

Anyway, let's get to the song. Hard Skin, members of another great comedy punk band called Wat Tyler, put out this glorious fucking self-deprecating singalong. Taking the working class and ramping up the silliness until it's approaching Pathetique levels, but it doesn't really have any actual jokes, it just completely overdoes the straight-laced (black) simplistic approach to life as a series of dog races, pub binges and trips to the dole office with no wish to aim for broader horizons. It's stupid and apolitical, it glorifies drinking and pub-culture at the same time that it rips the piss out of it (The Zatopeks' The Boy Done Good does the same thing in a much more wry and subtler fashion, but fuck subtlety), it's a song which uses the word 'cunt' seventy-eight times. This is the chorus of First Day Angry Song:

"Spent all day in the fucking pub, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt. Pissed my giro up the wall, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt. Spent all day in the fucking pub, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt. Pissed my giro up the wall, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt."

This sort of casual profanity should be familiar to anyone who has spent significant time in a drinking establishment of the sort depicted here. Groups of (mostly) men turning the air so blue, everyone is a cunt, everyone is a wanker, all swearwords are simultaneous rueful descriptions of self, friendly reaffirmations of intimacy, a barrier against strangers and genuine threatening hate speech ready to be directed at anyone who threatens their self-satisfied camaraderie. You can call your friend a cunt but at the same time punch someone in the face if they call your friend a cunt, walking a myriad of complex social tightropes with each profanity dropped casually, each 'fuck' or 'prick' with its own little set of nuances, bellowed angrily at a football game on the TV, let slip smoothly in a laughing demand for a cheapskate friend to finally get a round in, growled menacingly through gritted teeth at the unfortunate sod who just spilt your pint and dozens of other uses sitting in a complex web between these ones. Hard Skin, who are as a parody Oi! band one-step in and one-step out of this mindset, get the idiocy of this steadfast narrow-mindedness, but also appreciate the homeliness of a local pub. They simultaneously use the word as a friendly self-deprecating nod at these idiosyncracies, the "Alright, I guess it's this cunt's round." as you get up to go to the bar, and as angry denunciation of the stupid fucking wastrel who blows all their benefits on beer and betting, the "YOU ARE A USELESS FUCKING CUNTSCRAPE!" bellowed at a drunken prick who's forgotten he was supposed to pay the gas bill. And both these conflicting usages are aimed both inwards and outwards, screaming "I'm a cunt!" at someone is probably just as threatening as screaming "You're a cunt!" at them. And that seems to me to be one of the major parts of punk rock, taking your flaws, acknowledging them, knowing that they're stupid but also knowing that they're a strong and essential part of yourself, using them as armour so you can spit in the face of the world as much as you use them as a platform to be angry at yourself, a weapon to dig and lever into all the chances you missed to pull yourself out of this comfortably depressing little mire.

Also, swearing is just fun. Anything which you're not allowed to do on TV is. Especially if, as I discussed earlier, you're doing it in unison with dozens or hundreds of other people. Now I'm gonna stop thinking and start drinking.

*Interesting factoid: Not sure how true this remains, but for a long time you showed your political affiliation as a skinhead by the colour of the laces on your Doc Martens. White = White Power. Red = Socialist/Communist. Black = Apolitical/trad. Pink = Gay. Something like that. There were more but I can't remember. EDIT: According to one of my knowledgable anti-Nazi friends, it's also a fascist fashion thing. Apparently if you're an acknowledged Nazi then red laces means you've spilt blood in the race war. What charming people.