BOXSET REVIEW: 1980 Brand New Rage (Captain Oi!/Cherry Red Records)
Punk rock might not have been dead by 1980, but it was splintering in a myriad different directions, and this 3CD set manages to chart most of them.
It was an uncertain time for punk; The Sex Pistols were gone, The Damned moving towards a more gothic sound and the Buzzcocks on their way to breaking up after releasing three classic albums. Meanwhile The Clash were busy recording the sprawling mess of a genre-mashing double album that was Sandinista!
Luckily, there were plenty of bands still flying the flag for punk of all shapes and sizes, and this 75-track collection gathers many of them in the latest collection after sets covering 1977, 1978 and 1979.
It kicks off with the Brand New Age, the title track of the UK Subs’ second album, and the song which (sort of) gives this set its name, and plenty of other big hitters from 1980 are also present and correct.
Thus we get classic cuts from some of the biggest names of the day: The Damned, Angelic Upstarts, Sham 69, Stiff Little Fingers, The Dickies, The Stranglers, 999, The Ruts, Cockney Rejects and Skids.
Then there’s the emerging bands who were taking punk in a noisier, angier direction: Discharge, whose Fight Back still sounds absolutely furious, The Exploited, whose Army Life hasn’t dated well, and Anti-Pasti, whose scuzzy, distorted and still magnificent No Government is one of the standout tracks here.
The music they and plenty of others made would come to be known as UK82, but that was much later. Back in the day it was punk, as were bands as disparate as The Wall, Newtown Neurotics, The Boys and UK Decay.
There’s also loads of bands who who weren’t considered punk then, or now, but somehow fit in with the whole ethos; The Fall (whose Totally Wired is another standout), Adam & The Ants (with another classic, Cartrouble), Theatre Of Hate and The Piranhas.
I thought I had a decent handle on what punks were listening to in 1980; as a teenager at the time I was like a sponge, soaking up whatever new sounds the likes of NME and Sounds were recommending.
But there’s loads of bands here I’ve literally never heard of. UXB, Red Rage, The Thrust, The Crime, Murder Inc, Homicide, Embryo (featuring Phil and Pete Ley of Guitar Gangsters!), The Form, The D.S., Innocent Vicars, and quite a few more.
There’s the inevitable ‘what abouts’, as the likes of Crass, Dead Kennedys, Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Undertones are absent, but there’s plenty of good stuff here, and lots of ‘new to me’ tracks, which is surely what comps like this are all about. 7/10.
