1/9/2024 0 Comments Sham 69 sham army readingIt's populist because there's really no point in a desire to kick the boss's teeth in expressed as scented prose. It's working class life as viewed from the inside, as distinct from the anthropological version retold and revised by those who managed to escape and who never ended up having to do a shit job for minimum wages for the rest of their lives, or who were never there in the first place. It's not Lord of the Rings but it was never meant to be. The tale is told as songs with dramatised linking material featuring a very young Pauline Quirke as our boy's long-suffering mum. He wakes up late, misses the bus, is sacked from his job, goes to the betting shop, goes down the pub, tries to cop off with the barmaid, wakes up next day with a hangover and so on. ![]() It's a kitchen sink drama, a day in the life of an average kid without either green hair or bondage trousers still stuck at home in the late seventies. Let's start with That's Life which is essentially a concept album made by a band who wouldn't have been able to pull off such a bold move had they really been so crap and lacking in imagination as has been claimed in terms amounting to ideas above their station. Yet even without the further embarrassment of Jimmy Pursey's songwriting technique which occasionally rhymed certain words with themselves, there are what Wikipedia identifies as football chant backup vocals and an inarticulate political populism, because people who like football are bad and have almost certainly never read The Society of the Spectacle. The difference is that the Anthropod Lithontriptic Band was my friend Graham from school with a tape recorder and an acoustic guitar churning out sarcastic punk anthems which probably only the two of us have ever heard whilst Sham 69 were grown lads and they were on the telly and everything. I think the worst I've heard has been Blackpool from 1997's The A Files, a song celebrating the semi-regular Punx Picnic festivals: Sham 69's supposed crimes seem to have been grounded in the complete lack of art school credentials, and either being a bunch of working class thickies or else appealing to a bunch of working class thickies, as betrayed by all those terrible lyrics - more or less nursery rhymes based on common pairings of you and me, black and white, wrong and right, truth and lies and so on and so forth. I would have been about thirteen when I saw Hurry Up Harry on Top of the Pops and it sounded pretty fucking great to me. My take on this is that it's mostly bollocks and should as such be ignored. As for anyone who might actually have been around at the time, those insisting that the Clash were the best live band they ever saw will almost certainly tell you that the Clash were a much better live band than Sham 69 and those with green hair or equivalent were almost certainly greening up their hair so as to avoid having to hang around with a bunch of football hooligans and those who might wax lyrically or otherwise about their time in the Sham Army will probably never find themselves interviewed by Jon Savage or Robert Elms. If anything Sham 69 have become shorthand for the worst of seventies punk, not least amongst those who probably never really liked punk in the first place. It would be an understatement to say that Sham 69 - and specifically the incarnation of Sham 69 which had hits and broke up in 1979 following the release of The Game - have failed to accrue a posthumous glow of nostalgia in a general sense, leaving aside tittering Stewart Maconie types and those who still turn up to see Sham 69 live, and I suppose the admittedly hilarious Alan Parker the Urban Warrior if anyone still remembers him. Never having heard a single note of Yes which inspired the thought that I might like to hear more, the suggestion conversely reminded me just how many days have passed since I last gave the second Sham 69 album a spin. ![]() Following my review of the Buggles' first album, it was suggested to me that I might like to follow up with a review of Drama, the album recorded by Yes incorporating the Buggles' Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes in the line up.
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