July 22, 2011

Since they so greatly enjoyed pretending they didn’t care for anything, outside of loud guitars, absurd haircuts, and safety pin-mangled cheeks, Britain’s original punk rockers were relatively vocal about not caring for hippies…never mind that there weren’t all that many hippies to not care for by the time the punk movement took hold in England.

Attentive listeners will detect a passing reference to the matter in the following excerpt from the Sex Pistols’ “Who Killed Bambi”:

The Punk Position

Did you catch it?

Like green snot on a sunflower, then, punks and hippies simply didn’t mix. But one otherwise fully-committed and often quite thrilling punk band, Hersham, Surrey’s own Sham 69, infused many of their songs with an undercurrent of humanism that was closer in spirit to those dope-tokers of yore than they and their working class British audience members were willing to let on. And, in one of the more twisted turn of events of the punk era, the band’s hedging altruism wasn’t enough to keep crowds of raving neo-Fascist thugs from ruining their live performances.

One can always count on neo-Fascists thugs to miss the subtleties.

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Sham 69’s volcanic front man, Jimmy Pursey, formed the group with his T. Rex-loving buddy, Dave Parsons, in 1976. He took the band’s name from a piece of partially faded graffiti that was supposed to read “Walton and Hersham ’69,” in reference to the local football club’s glory days.

This is a particularly fitting origin story because Sham 69’s major contribution to punk was a tendency toward floor-stomping, semi-Neanderthal choruses that sounded like football crowd chants. And, in an unintended similarity to the sport he loved, Pursey and his band mates eventually drew a lot of audience members whose chief concern was pounding the daylights out of whoever stood next to them, just because they felt like doing it.

Don’t get me wrong— these guys were hardly choir boys. There’s a lot of anger and frustration in Sham 69’s music, just as there was in the rest of the punk scene. But, outside of the Jam and the Clash, both of which quickly moved beyond the constraints of a strict “punk” definition, it’s hard to name another band from the period that was so willing to admit not only that they and their audience were all in it together, but that they shared a goodness and decency that might actually get them somewhere if they harnessed its energy. (The Pistols, if you want to compare, contributed the deathless philosophical nugget, “Fuck this and fuck that!”)

Oh, but the Skinheads. Accounts vary a bit, but it’s pretty widely agreed that at one of Sham 69’s earliest shows, there were about 8 people in the audience, three or four of whom happened to be Skinheads, a racist social movement that was briefly in vogue in the late-60s, but had become little more than a club for a dwindling number of jerks and malcontents by the mid-70s. Noting the makeup of the audience, Pursey sarcastically shouted something on the order of “Hey! Skinheads are back!” Then the band exploded into yet another pounding, populist anthem.

That was a mistake. The next few times Sham 69 played, they noted sidewalk queues forming that were loaded with legitimate Skinheads and generally disaffected punks who had already given up on the Sex Pistols’ still nascent scene and decided to shave their heads and start throwing punches just to see what would happen. What happened, unfortunately, was that Sham 69’s shows soon got completely out of hand and started looking like sanctioned brawls with musical accompaniment.

In fact, the band chose to retire from live performances after a 1978 concert mutated into a violent free-for-all involving National Front-supporting white power Skinheads. A few other bands complained that Pursey was too slow on the uptake, that he didn’t try to quell the situation until it was way too late. But the damage was done, and a new, not especially subtle rock genre that came to be known as Oi! had been launched.

In the ensuing years, Sham 69 still recorded, but they were more reminiscent of the early Who and a handful of glam bands than anything that could be found in London’s clubs during the heady days of punk.

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So that’s how it played out, irony buffs. Sham 69 neglected to behave like straight-up nihilists, but the most thoroughly nihilistic assholes in all of England embraced them anyway.

Even then, though, the key incongruity to arise from all this was that one of the tunes Sham 69 crashed out so convincingly during these anti-love fests was “If the Kids are United,” which stands with the greatest of all punk rock singles by the greatest of all punk bands, and is genuinely inspiring in its message of teenage hope and accord.

Listen to this thing and tell me you’re not ready to charge the barricades…and that those fucking Skinheads needed to pay closer attention to the lyrics rather than the jackboot rhythm.

“If the Kids are United”

For once in my life I've got something to say
I wanna say it now, for now is today
A love has been given to grab and enjoy
So let's all grab and let's all enjoy

If the kids are united they will never be divided
If the kids are united they will never be divided

Just take a look around you
What do you see
Kids with feelings, like you and me
Understand him, and he'll understand you
For you are him, and he is you

If the kids are united they will never be divided
If the kids are united they will never be divided
If the kids are united they will never be divided
If the kids are united they will never be divided

I don't want to be rejected
I don't want to be denied
Then its not my misfortune
That I've opened up your eyes

Freedom is given
Speak how you feel
I have no freedom
How do you feel
They can lie to my face
But not to my heart
If we stand together
It will just be the start

If the kids are united they will never be divided
If the kids are united they will never be divided

Not to start a fight or anything, but I dare you to name an officially released Sex Pistols tune that rocks any harder or more persuasively than that! My God, the guitar alone can part your hair, and Pursey sounds like he’s taken up permanent residence at the edge of hysteria. I get a buzz every time I listen to it.

“If the Kids are United” proves yet again one of the elemental truths of great rock & roll— graft a backbone onto that noise, and you have purpose. You also have, whether everyone is ready to receive the message or not, a form of art.

DOWNLOAD: “If the Kids are United” by Sham 69 (originally released 1978.) You could do far worse than downloading all of “The Best of Sham 69: Cockney Kids are Innocent,” though, if you want to loosen a few fillings.

Paul Tatara