BOXSET REVIEW: UK Subs – The Albums 1979-1982 (Captain Oi!)
With frontman Charlie Harper approaching the age of 80, UK Subs might have retired from touring, but there’s plenty of mileage left in their back catalogue.
This 111-track clamshell boxset covers the band’s most commercially successful years, when Charlie Harper’s band enjoyed’s six Top 40 singles and four Top 30 albums.
Formed in 1976 in London, they released their debut album Another Kind Of Blues, in October 1979, and it’s rightly regarded as a punk rock classic.
It’s CD1 here, with its 17 tracks boosted by the inclusion of nine tracks from their first three singles, C.I.D., Stranglehold and Tomorrow’s Girls.
If you’ve never heard AKOB, where have you been for the last 45 years? It’s full of songs that still feature regularly in the live set today; as well as the singles there’s I Live In A Car, Rockers, Scum Of The Earth and I Couldn’t Be You, among others.
I always had a soft spot for Lady Esquire and Young Criminals, but I’m sure we’ll all have our own favourites. from this great slice of punked-up R&B.
Second album Brand New Age, originally released in April 1980, is CD2, and it was every bit the equal of the first album, if not better. Its 14 tracks are supplemented by 10 tracks from the She’s Not There EP and the singles Warhead and Teenage – for me the band’s golden age.
As well as Warhead, there’s another stone-cold classic in Emotional Blackmail, with songs like Barbie’s Dead, Organised Crime, Public Servant and Bomb Factory giving them a run for their money. The bonus tracks include two of their best B-sides, Left For Dead and New York State Police.
Like AKOB, BNA featured Harper on vocals, Nicky Garratt on guitar, Paul Slack on bass and Pete Davies on drums – which many fans regard as the quintessential Subs line-up.
The band released umpteen live albums over the course of their storyed career. None of them match the first, Crash Course, which appeared in 1980, and was their best-selling long-player, reaching No 11 in the UK charts.
Recorded at the Rainbow Theatre in London during the Brand New Age tour, the setlist featured the pick of the first two albums, 20 songs in all, with CD3 in this set boosted by the inclusion of the four tracks from the For Export Only 12in single which came with early copies.
Listening to it all these years later brought back vivid memories of having to turn down Charlie’s between-song banter in places so my mam didn’t hear him swearing (how punk!), and being amused by him telling the crowd to stop smashing up the seats and to “stay, stay like statues!” I was only 13, so this was as near to a UK Subs gig as I would get for a while.
All was not well in the Subs camp, however, and by the time Crash Course came out, Slack and Davies had departed, replaced by Alvin Gibbs (bass) and Steve Roberts (drums)
CD4 is the fourth album, Diminished Responsibility, released in February 1981. Consider for a moment – that’s four albums in just over 18 months – an astonishing workrate.
With a new rhythm section on board, and punk starting to speed up as the anarcho bands and what would become known as UK82 took off, the Subs began to sound harder and heavier, and their fans went with it.
The single Party In Paris, on lovely orange vinyl, gave them their last Top 40 single, but all was not well at record label GEM, and it was the only single from the album, with songs like Time And Matter, Violent City and Collision Cult taking them down a different path.
The original 13-track album is expanded to 23 songs by the inclusion of all the sides from the Party In Paris 7in, standalone single Keep On Running (Til You Burn) and Charlie Harper’s Barmy London Army solo release.
I’ve no idea why Keep On Running wasn’t on the album, as it was released just two months later, but it was both their last release for GEM (as the label folded soon after the single’s release) and their last record to bother the charts.
Undeterred, the band signed to new label NEMS for fifth album Endangered Species, which emerged in March 1982 (with the label again folding shortly afterwards!).
It has a real dystopian feel, based around a theme of machines taking over, though its best-known song is Down On the Farm, which was given a new lease of life when Guns ‘N’ Roses covered it for their 1993 album Spaghetti Incident?
It’s certainly a very different-sounding UK Subs to the raw, harmonica-powered one which thrilled thousands of teenage punks, and with no singles released to promote the album, it was no surprise that it didn’t chart.
Of course, Charlie continued to lead the band and an ever-rotating cast of members on a seemingly non-stop tour as one of the only original punk bands who never called it a day.
The UK Subs went on to release an album beginning with every letter of the alphabet, but many were patchy to say the least until the late-career high of the U-Z titles. These early albums are must-haves for any self-respecting punker’s collection, even if they have been re-released countless times. 8/10.
