The Skrewdriver question is, like stagediving, one of punk's spiralling athanastic debates, the sort of thing where you could drop out of punk for 15 years and walk right back in to find people reiterating the same points. All Skrewed Up is an album of catchy nihilistic punk rock that, probably more than any other album of the time, hews closer to the more distant R'n'B origins of the genre, exhibiting a greater truth in the cliche of punk as supercharged rock and roll, which obviously lends a dreadful irony the swerve they took into vile haterock. It also inevitably probably owes a chunk of its popularity for its place as a straight down-the-line punk album made by one of the most notorious bands of all time, a safe way of flirting with the titillation of the taboo, the same proximity to the macabre that gives the hint of the forbidden to Death in June or NSBM, a similar impulse to ghoulish adolescent fascinations with serial killers, Faces of Death videos and the yawning horrors of history. So with that Rocket 88 shake and and 14/88 morbidity, All Skrewed Up occupies its own special acrid little spot in the punk pantheon. Personally, having heard all the hype, I opted to forego listening to it for years, only to find myself at a party where someone put on a super-catchy punk song and I had a conversation that went something like "This is pretty sick. Who is it?" "Skrewdriver." "Ah."
Though since Rock Against Communism and its fellows bloomed out of the insecure turbulence of troglodytic white rage of the late 70s/early 80s, plenty of bands have tilted at ripping Oi! back from its nationalistic posturing, to wipe it clean of its heinous racist taint, the circular inanities of politicised apolitics like Discharger, a phalanx of SHARPies and commie skinheads (bizarrely but somewhat predictably claiming the name 'redskins') like Malaysia's A.C.A.B., Catalonia's Inadaptats, the UK's Blaggers ITA and countless others armed with similar shoutalong anthems and about 8 million songs called R.A.S.H. or Good Night White Pride, just as dozens of bands like Iskra, Iprit, Torture Garden, PunaTerrori etc have sought to lace blackmetal with hardleft and anarcho perspectives.
Those proceeding paragraphs right there are the kind of de rigeur exegesis that springs forth anytime every time the name Skrewdriver pops up. Vanity drive with that swaggering streetrock chomp, that rollicking rhythm and vocals that switch between a bloody rasp and more soulful half-croon, not R.A.S.H. types, but moving with a counterfactual vigour from a world where Ian Stuart's fatal car crash happened 12 years earlier than it really did.
