Various artists: 1980 Brand New Rage – album review

Various artists – 1980 Brand New Rage

Captain Oi!

3 CD box set

Out now

The latest Captain Oi! vintage punk collection, Brand New Age, goes back to 1980 featuring tracks from SLF, The Stranglers, 999, Sham 69 and The Exploited.

Punk is such a broad term these days, but this 75-track compilation focusing on 1980 features some of the old guard who fought the first punk wars in 1977, and some of the bands who came after them influenced by their desire to slay the old rock dinosaurs.

One of the great things about Captain Oi! box sets like Brand New Age is you get old stagers like The Damned or Chelsea, and newer kids on the block Like Stiff Little Fingers, alongside the only songs some of these bands ever released. Some of these one-offs are lost gems, and others are so derivative it’s a mercy that those acts called it a day.

Any of us who lived through the early days of punk know it was one of those rare musical movements that changed society’s attitudes, but none of us dreamed that over four decades later many of these bands would still be touring – albeit in a much less energetic way.

The first CD opens with the U.K. Subs’ Brand New Age, and good old Charlie Harper is still out doing his thing, as is Kirk Brandon who offers a trademark bellow on Theatre Of Hate’s Legion.  Adam & The Ant’s poppy Car Trouble – featuring Jon Moss on drums – offers a clear indication of why Adam Ant suddenly became Britain’s biggest pop star.

Charlie Harper’s solo Barmy London Army is a touching tribute to his bromance with Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey, and from up north Salford Jets – featuring BBC Radio Manchester DJ Mike Sweeney on vocals – are looking for a rumble on Don’t Start Trouble.  Former Pistols Steve Cook and Steve Jones formed The Professionals, and One Two Three offers a glimpse into where the band might have gone if they’d stopped squabbling

There’s a decent amount of politics scattered amongst the punk powerpop, and unfortunately quite a lot of pub rock masquerading as punk.  Angelic Upstarts’ Last Night Another Soldier debunks the idea of Dulce et Decorum Est, and Newtown Neurotics are decades ahead of their time on When The Oil Runs Out as we head towards peak oil on a burning planet. The Exploited’s Army Life and Discharge’s Fight Back offer a taste of the harder, faster punk coming a couple of years later.

Aside from The Fall’s Totally Wired, the second disc features some more obscure records and quite a few also-rans. Knox from The Vibrators knocks out a decent cover of Syd Barrett’s Gigolo Aunt, and Anti-Pasti get a bit shouty on No Government, which shows its vintage as Martin Roper screams: ‘no Margaret Thatcher/and no government’.

There’s nice slab of pub rock from The Crabs featuring Auf Wiedersehen Pet star Gary Holton, and a bit of Jilted John style fun from The Elevators on Your I’s Are Too Close Together. Novelty act The Dickies do the theme from Gigantor for no apparent reason, and the tone dead Auntie Pus is a tedious punk in-joke that really has not stood the test of time.  Thankfully the peerless original version of the Stranglers restores some sanity with minor hit single Who Wants The World?, which came in a picture sleeve saying it was only 79p RRP….bargain.

It’s 1980 so it’s a pretty blokey collection, and it’s a relief to hear a female lead vocal on Manufactured Romance’ s Time of My Life, which has a touch of Pauline Murray about it. Girls At Our Best are really good on Getting Nowhere offering two minutes of sheer pop.

The final CD kicks off with The Ruts’ still utterly majestic West One (Shine On Me) released just a month after frontman Malcolm Owen’s early death, but what a memorial this raw tuneful song is. The Boys are punkpop including a burst of Knocking On Heaven’s Door during the sophisticated Terminal Love.

Cockney Rejects are another band still doing the rounds and War On The Terraces is brain dead fun. The Skids were always one of the smarter post punk bands, thanks to Richard Jobson’s stirring vocals, and the late Stuart Adamson is on great form during Animation.

There’s a lot of pretty mediocre tracks, including another pointless cover of the Hawaii Five-O theme from The Dark, and the aptly named Yap Yap Yap by The Piranhas who go a bit Chas and Dave at one point. But the worst offenders are the utterly tiresome Splodgenessabounds with a cover of Two Little Boys, which is about as funny as repeated kicks in the balls.

There are tons of one-off singles on all three Brand New Age CDS from X Press, Apartment, The Form, Red Rage, The Crime, Knife Edge and Coventry’s Homicide. Some of them are pretty decent and others sad rip offs of a genre that was already running out of steam by this point.

Each of the 75 tunes get a comprehensive write up in the accompanying booklet, and features the original picture sleeve, which younger readers may not be familiar with but were such a key part of the vinyl experience back in the pre-digital age.

When you include so many tracks and range of styles you will get some stinkers, but there’s more than enough top tunes to suggest that 1980 wasn’t such a bad year, despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher was about to decimate British industry among many other horrors visited on our nation during this divisive decade.

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Words by Paul Clarke, you can see his author profile here

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Source: louderthanwar.com