BOXSET REVIEW: 1982: Screaming At The Nation
(Captain Oi!/Cherry Red Records)
If punk wasn’t dead by 1982, it had certainly splintered into 100 different directions, and this latest 3CD set from Captain Oi! tries to piece some of them together into an overview of a scene very different to a couple of years before.
Bands seemed even angrier, but the way punks dressed and behaved seemed more uniform than ever, with black clothes and studded bike jackets and spiked hair/mohawks seemingly obligatory (whatever happened to individuality, eh?).
Musically, anarcho bands seemed to be taking over, but there was also oi!, hardcore, goth, power pop, pathetique and even post-punk to throw into the melting pot.
Angry music for angry times
This 75-track, 3CD set tries to tell the story of punk in 1982, a year in which Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falklands Islands, while women blockaded the RAF airbase Greenham Common in protest at cruise missiles being kept there. No wonder the music was angry…
It kicks off in fairly innocuous fashion with Open Your Eyes, a single by The Lords Of the New Church, a ‘supergroup’ featuring members of The Damned, Sham 69, Dead Boys and, erm, The Barracudas. They had their fans, but it sounds very dated more than 40 years on.
Plenty of the old guard are present and correct: old stagers like Chelsea, UK Subs, The Lurkers and The Damned soldiering on, and the Angelic Upstarts venting their spleen at increasingly divisive PM Maggie Thatcher in the excellent Woman In Disguise.
But it’s the new bands who making their impact felt most: bands like Violators, whose Gangland is one of the highlights here, and Attack, whose blistering Today’s Generation was one of the standout releases on the influential No Future label (whose releases are compiled on an excellent singles compilation reviewed HERE).
The excellent 17 Years Of Hell by The Partisans, another No Future band, takes me right back to my schooldays, and if you thought they were fast and angry, check out the Abrasive Wheels, whose Burn ‘Em Down urged the nation’s youth to torch their schools. No wonder it didn’t get any airplay!
Yes, the youth were angry, which resulted in loads of bands who all seemed determined to play faster than each other, though the real kings of that scene, Discharge, are conspicuous by their absence, as are anarcho icons Crass.
That still leaves the likes of The Varukers, Disrupters, Subhumans, One Way System, Conflict, The Exploited, GBH – in other words, the bands which would retrospectively be banded together as UK82, which I certainly can’t remember being used at the time.
There were lots of more tuneful bands about: Newtown Neurotics, Chron Gen, The Adicts and the criminally under-rated Rudi, to name but a few, and then there’s loads of new-to-me names such as Deadman’s Shadow, Dead Wretched, Death Sentence, Butcher and Zanti Misfitz. It never ceases to amaze how I can be hearing bands for the first time 40+ years on. The pick of this latter batch is Icon A.D., from Leeds, whose Face The Facts is a previously undiscovered gem.
With the Cockney Rejects on their way to becoming a heavy metal band, the Oi! scene is represented by The Business (singing, confusingly, about being Loud, Proud & Punk), Red Alert (whose track gives the set its name), Cock Sparrer (who still hadn’t got round to properly releasing an album!) and the mighty Blitz, whose Voice Of A Generation sounds just as good now as it did back in ’82.
What’s perhaps most remarkable is the fact that about 20 of these bands are either still going, or have reformed in recent years, and remain popular on the live heritage circuit today, with a few even releasing new albums in recent years. Who would have thought it? 7/10.
