Sham 69

I'll admit to being ill-informed of any later material by Sham. I thought there were some good songs on the first album, and less of interest in the second album. I was probably hearing a lot about the more-hair-than-brains crowds they were attracting and just lost interest in them.

Article by Luke Haines in the latest Record Collector bigging up That's Life 

That's Life?

It's the one that features Pursey arguing with his mum (I think) in between tracks.
Years since I heard it.

I played some songs from that album on my punk/HC radio over the last few years, "Evil way" and "Sunday morning nightmare", mainly for comic relief. "No entry", the b-side of "If the kids...." was intentionally humorous.

Sham were one of the punk bands I genuinely liked back in 77/78, along with Buzzcocks, Stranglers and X Ray Spex. I was only 12 years old in August 1977 and enjoyed the more accessible punk bands at that time. I was too young to grasp Pursey's rather cartoon-ish, exaggerated Cockney barrow boy persona, which, as an East Ender myself, grated on me in later years.

Ms Dayglo maintains that the first few times she saw Sham, they were an exciting, apparently genuine addition to the punk bands at The Roxy etc. I'll just have to take her word for it because after the first couple of singles, they degenerated into a raucous novelty band.

They were the obvious precursor to Oi ! and bands like the Cockney Rejects, who took Sham's "boot boy" persona entirely at face value.

Little did Joe Strummer know what kind of monster he'd spawn when he sang that the truth was only known by guttersnipes.

Oi! was hugely popular in the Essex housing estate I grew up in. I was considered as something of a freak due to my love of US Hardcore. 

My first real band, Juvenile Trash (1983/4), was as an Oi! band ( I forget their name as it was so unimaginative) before I joined and moved them on to a more positive track. We sounded like a fairly obvious mixture of our collective (non-Oi!) influences, such as Dead Kennedys, GBH, Discharge and, regrettably, The Exploited.

Packs of violent skins aggressively roamed the Thames estuary towns of Essex in those days, most notably the utterly terrifying Tilbury Skins, whose name alone caused punks in the region to shudder.