Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk

Abstract

[What is punk?]: That’s an open question. It always was. You can’t put it into words. It’s a feeling. It’s basically a lot of hooligans doing it the way they want and getting what they want.

        John Lydon (1978)¹

Writing in late 1981, the punk poet Garry Johnson described Oi! as being ‘about real life, the concrete jungle, [hating] the Old Bill, being on the dole, and about fighting back and having pride in your class and background’.² For Garry Bushell, who adopted the term in late 1980 as the title for a compilation LP designed to reassert punk as a form of ‘working-class protest’, Oi! comprised ‘a loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. In the context of a Britain racked by mass unemployment and simmering social tensions, bands such as the 4-Skins, Blitz, The Business, The Exploited, Infa Riot, and the Last Resort were presented as a ‘teenage warning’ to the ‘smug politicians and greedy bosses’ who had ‘destroyed whole communities and thrown an entire generation on the scrapheap’.³ Oi!, Bushell surmised, was ‘anti-pose, anti-privilege and solidly pro-working class’; a ‘reaffirmation of punk values’ divorced from the art school influences and music industry machinations he deemed to have neutered punk’s original spirit of rebellion.⁴

No sooner had Oi! been defined as a street-level expression of revolt, however, than it was embroiled in controversy. On 3 July 1981, a gig at the Hambrough Tavern in Southall involving three bands aligned to Oi! was attacked by local Asian youths objecting to the arrival of a large skinhead presence in an area with a recent history of racial conflict.⁵ Come 10 p.m., and the pub was ablaze beneath a hail of petrol bombs; the next day, newspaper front pages were dominated by images of cowering police officers, burnt-out vehicles and stories of a ‘race riot’.⁶ By extension, therefore, Oi! was presented as the musical expression of racist, neo-Nazi skinheads. From the Daily Mail to the NME and onto sections of the far left, Oi! was accused of flirting with the language and imagery of National Socialism to provide a conduit for ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes to feed their way into popular music.⁷

In terms of cultural and political history, it is this second interpretation of Oi! that has tended to hold sway. If mentioned at all, Oi! is typically dismissed either as a lumpen by-product of punk’s death throes or a cog in the wheel of the transnational ‘white noise’ movement initiated from within the National Front (NF) over the 1980s.⁸ As a result, shorthand reference to Oi!’s being ‘right wing’, ‘Nazi’, or ‘racist’ now pepper more general accounts of pop, punk, and late twentieth-century British culture.⁹

This article seeks to present a more nuanced reading of Oi! To be sure, Oi! contained elements that contributed to its demonization. The media association of skinheads with racial violence was crudely superficial and often exaggerated, but it harboured a kernel of truth.¹⁰ Similarly, Oi!’s combination of social resentment and patriotism provided a potential pathway to and from the far right. But Oi! also comprised a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was a rather more complex phenomenon; one that reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’, and formal political organization. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

Such a study takes its cue from the basic Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ (CCCS) thesis that aspects of youth culture may be read as sites of ‘resistance’ to prevailing socio-economic structures, class relations, and cultural hegemony.¹¹ In so doing, it does not thereby assume that such cultures were (or are) coherent, homogenous, or wholly self-contained. Nor does it subscribe to a particular methodology proposed from within the CCCS. These, after all, were varied, though tended to assume that subcultures enacted a stylistic response to shifting socio-economic, cultural, and political relations in society.¹² The CCCS’s arguments remain contentious and have given rise to numerous critiques pointing to their overly theorized approach and tendency to prioritize certain socio-economic, racial, gendered, spatial, or ‘spectacular’ expressions of youth culture at the expense of others.¹³ Nevertheless, the underlying premise of the CCCS remains relevant to the current article for three principal reasons. First, because it was developed at a particular historical juncture during which youth cultural styles and class divisions in British society were thrown into sharp relief.¹⁴ Not only did the CCCS form part of the political and cultural history of the post-war period, but its reading of youth culture also helped shape the contemporary responses to the subject discussed below. Secondly, the basic premise of youth culture harbouring implicit and explicit political meaning has an obvious relevance to punk, which emerged replete with political signifiers and positioned itself as a confrontational form of cultural expression. Thirdly, the relative lack of an empirical basis on which to place the CCCS thesis provides opportunity for the historian to test it against the intended meanings and motivations of those participating within the culture. In this instance, to what extent did the political meanings projected onto Oi! reflect the views held by those involved in or associated with it?

For the historian, moreover, the article proposes that youth cultures and popular music provide a portal into the formative thoughts, aspirations, and concerns of a not insubstantial (and often overlooked) section of the population. With regard to Oi!, an analysis of its bands, audience, and ephemera reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments ongoing within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption).¹⁵ Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity.¹⁶ This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’.¹⁷ In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

The objective, therefore, is to reassess, contextualize, and explain the contentious nature of Oi! in order to recover a marginalized voice that offers insight into aspects of broader socio-economic, political, and cultural change. In particular, emphasis will be placed on Oi!’s class rhetoric and use of locality as key components of class-cultural identity.¹⁸ Implicit, too, is recognition of Oi!’s overt masculinity. Though women formed an integral part of the wider social milieu from which Oi! emerged, its bands and core audience were primarily male: the focus of the article reflects this.¹⁹ In terms of structure, the article is divided into three sections. Oi! will first be located within the broader trajectory of British punk. Competing interpretations of Oi! will then be discussed with regard to wider debate on the politics of youth culture that emerged over the 1970s. Finally, Oi!’s predominant motifs will be outlined in relation to the working-class milieu from which it emerged. If Oi! offered a view from the dead end of the street, as Garry Johnson insisted, then this article hopes to historicize its vision of a blighted early 1980s’ Britain.

‘Here Comes the New Punk’: Oi! and British Punk, 1976–84

Oi! presented itself within a particular narrative of British punk. Most obviously, it drew from the class rhetoric and inner-city iconography that first helped define the emergence of bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash in 1976. Early coverage of the Pistols made much of their coming from ‘the wrong end of various London roads’, with tales of petty-crime, violence, vandalism, and remand centres serving to present an image of ‘deprived London street kids’ from ‘working-class ghettoes’ who stood in marked contrast to the wealthy rock ‘aristocracy’ of the 1960s’ generation and the ‘middle class, affluent or university academics’ of 1970s’ progressive rock.²⁰ Oi!, in many ways, provided a continuation of Tony Parsons’ view of punk as ‘amphetamine-stimulated high energy seventies street music, gut-level dole queue rock ‘n’ roll, fast flash, vicious music played by kids for kids’.²¹ It picked up on the social reportage of bands such as The Clash and The Jam, whose songs were seen to offer ‘a mirror reflection of the kind of 1977 white working-class experiences that only seem like a cliché to those people who haven’t had to live through them’.²² And if, as Julie Burchill insisted, punk was ‘reality rock ‘n’ roll’, then Oi! sought to authenticate her description of early punk gigs as ‘like being on the terraces’ with audiences comprised of ‘working-class kids with the guts to say “No” to being office, factory and dole fodder’.²³

Of course, punk’s genesis was far more complex than it first appeared.²⁴ Not only were many of its early protagonists from distinctly suburban or middle-class backgrounds, not least Joe Strummer (The Clash) and the core of the ‘Bromley Contingent’ that formed the Sex Pistols’ early audience, but also the politics, strategies, and designs that Malcolm McLaren, Vivien Westwood, and Jamie Reid used to cultivate punk’s image revealed long-standing art school and counter-cultural pedigrees.²⁵ From this perspective, punk’s adoption of working-class signifiers was part of a broader arsenal of symbols designed to ‘threaten the status quo’.²⁶ Working-class revolt—be it represented through delinquency, rock ‘n’ roll or even militant trade unionism—was aligned with emblems of political ‘extremism’ (anarchy, swastikas, Marx), explicit sexuality, inverted religious symbols, and criminality as a challenge to the bastions of the British establishment.²⁷

As this suggests, punk married social commentary with stylistic innovation to forge a populist but subversive cultural force that dramatized, reflected, and commented on the wider socio-economic and political climate of its time. Not surprisingly, it soon fractured beneath the weight of its own inner-tensions; a split often portrayed as dividing those who saw punk as a medium for cultural and musical experimentation (the ‘arties’) from those who held fast to its claim to represent ‘the kids’ on the ‘football terraces’ and ‘living in boring council estates’ (the ‘social realists’).²⁸ In truth, punk’s trashing of pop’s past led to a range of sometimes overlapping musical styles and subcultural forms emerging from the debris.²⁹ But even amongst those who remained avowedly punk, there existed by the turn of the decade a mesh of mutating sub-scenes: the anarchist bands inspired by Crass; the proto-gothic tribes gathered around Siouxsie and the Banshees and the early Adam and the Ants; the hardening punk thrash pioneered by Discharge; the guttersnipe rock ‘n’ roll of the Cockney Rejects; not to mention the numerous provincial scenes concentrated on local venues, record labels, squats, fanzines, and shops.

Oi!, then, was rooted in a post-Pistols lineage that stretched from bands such as Cock Sparrer, Menace, and Sham 69 through the Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects. Each played aggressive stripped-down (punk) rock; each brought punk’s class rhetoric to the fore; and each claimed to engage with aspects of young working-class life from authentic experience. Theirs were songs of youth cultural antagonisms, work (or the lack of it), football violence, petty crime, police harassment, and a suspicion of authority in all its forms.³⁰ They rejected punk’s supposed elitism—its art school heritage and the haute couture of McLaren and Westwood—in favour of its rhetorical populism, drawing from a wider sense of working-class youth culture to which punk was but a part or a continuation. ‘We wanted a band that could reach other people like us’, Cock Sparrer’s Garrie Lammin argued, ‘other football supporters, ordinary kids who couldn’t afford to get into all that King’s Road shit’.³¹ And as punk began to fragment into competing tendencies, so bands like the Angelic Upstarts and the Cockney Rejects came to stand for what Garry Bushell in Sounds contended was the ‘Real Punk’, not ‘the tail end of a decaying, fatally flawed movement, but the start of something newer, realer and harder than the rest’.³²

The term ‘Oi!’ itself was taken from a Cockney Rejects song, ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’, though it held a wider cultural significance. Not only was it a cockney shout that reflected the street-level focus of the bands and their audience, but it served also to affirm Oi!’s working-class heritage.³³ This, in turn, was given expression in its appeal to skinheads, the overtly proletarian youth culture that first emerged in Britain during the later 1960s.³⁴ The original skins had fused a ‘hard mod’ style with images and sounds derived from the newly arrived Jamaican rude boys to forge a starkly working-class alternative to the so-called swinging sixties of the mainstream pop and hippy counter culture. Their 1970s’ equivalent seized on the aggressive urbanity of punk, aligning themselves with bands such as Sham 69 to prompt a skinhead revival that continued into the 1980s (and beyond). More than that, however, the term ‘Oi!’ referred back to music hall and variety; it complemented the repeated references to working-class culture—pubs, football, boxing, the bank holiday beano, Butlin’s, the betting shop—that peppered Oi! releases, interviews, and articles.³⁵ Like 2-tone, which Bushell also championed and which shared an audience with Oi!, it comprised a fusion of youth cultural forms: where 2-tone combined punk, ska, and early reggae in a cross-racial alignment of skinheads, mods, and rude boys, so Oi! sought to integrate punk music with terrace culture in an amalgam of punks, skins, and ‘herberts’ (meaning ordinary working-class youth, often proto-football casuals).³⁶ As a result, some ambiguity existed as to just what differentiated punk and Oi!, though the term mostly applied to bands that were avowedly working class and included a non-punk, often skinhead, contingent amongst their audience. Oi!, Lee Wilson of Infa Riot insisted, was punk made by and for ‘ordinary geezers … punks, skins, bootboys. It ain’t about safety pins and rainbow hair anymore’.³⁷

Initially, the bands most closely associated with Oi! were located in and around London. The Cockney Rejects, as their name suggests, were based in the East End, whilst the Angelic Upstarts had relocated to London from the north-east by 1980. In terms of gigs and meeting places, pubs such as the Bridge House in Canning Town, the Ancient Briton in Poplar, the Lord Northbrook in Lee, the Barge Aground in Barking, and the Deuragen Arms in Hackney formed hubs of the emergent scene, whereat bands such as the 4-Skins, Cock Sparrer, The Business, and Infa Riot played or were regulars (see Fig. 1). Just off Petticoat Lane, too, the ‘Last Resort’ skinhead emporium became a site of information and exchange, giving its name to a band formed out of Herne Bay in Kent. Following a Sounds article designed to promote this ‘new breed’ of punk, coverage of Oi! then extended further afield to encompass bands from the north of England (Blitz, Red Alert), the Midlands (Criminal Class, Demob), Wales (The Oppressed, The Partisans), and Scotland (The Strike). The paper also published an irregular ‘Oi!—The Column’ from 1981, alongside Oi! charts compiled by pub DJs and readers. By mid-1981, some forty bands were aligned to Oi! in one way or another, making it an integral part of what was a resurgent punk scene in 1981–2.³⁸

Figure 1

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The 4-Skins playing at The Bridge House, Canning Town, circa 1980–1.

Musically, Oi! was best sampled on the series of albums compiled between 1980 and 1984 (see Fig. 2).³⁹ These featured a mix of bands and poets, serving to showcase both Oi!’s roots and the new groups that defined its sound and stance. Each came replete with short essays, stories, and poems designed to locate Oi! within a distinct cultural milieu; on The Oi! of Sex (1984), for example, a series of definitions were listed: Oi! is … ‘having a laugh and having a say’, ‘sharp in brain and dress’, ‘proud to be working class’, ‘2-tone with bollocks’, ‘proud to be British, but not xenophobic’, ‘kiss me quick hats’, ‘turning council houses into mansions’, etc.⁴⁰ An Oi! Organising Committee was also established, comprising Bushell, Lol Pryor, Dave Long, and John Muir, which helped compile the albums, arrange gigs, link bands to labels, and convene conferences in order to provide a sense of point and purpose for the fledgling movement.⁴¹ At the latter, held in January, May and June 1981, bands, writers, and fanzine editors committed to arranging benefits for the unemployed and prisoners’ rights organizations. The music, by general agreement, should be direct and accessible; lyrics were to deal with everyday life and aimed at the ‘kids on the street’. Political affiliation was firmly rejected, though Lol Pryor was charged with contacting the Right to Work campaign initiated by the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) to discuss holding gigs in support. More generally, existing parties on the left and right were dismissed in favour of self-organization and the prioritization of issues deemed relevant to working-class youth.⁴²

Figure 2

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Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2.

Not surprisingly, the Southall riot served to derail much of the momentum gathered behind Oi! prior to July 1981. Thereafter, major label interest cooled (the first two Oi! compilations had been released by EMI and Decca, respectively), gigs became harder to book, and bands previously happy to be associated with Oi! began to distance themselves amidst the ongoing media storm.⁴³ In the short term, attention turned away from cultivating a movement of working-class punk to repeated disavowals of racism or association with the far right. Blitz, The Business, Infa Riot, and The Partisans undertook an ‘Oi! Against Racism and Political Extremism But Still Against the System’ tour; Bushell penned regular articles for Sounds seeking to demonstrate that neither Oi! nor skinhead culture was inherently racist or right wing; contacts with street-fighting anti-fascist groups on the far left (who later formed Red Action) ensured that the accusations levelled against Oi! did not lead to gigs being targeted for bloody reprisals.⁴⁴ Even then, Oi! bands continued to top the independent singles and album charts compiled by the British Market Research Bureau.⁴⁵

By late 1983–4, Oi!—and punk more generally—appeared to have run out of steam. Record sales began to fall; street-level (and musical) fashions continued to evolve; the bands split up, changed direction, or resigned themselves to playing small-scale gigs to a dwindling audience. Within the skinhead subculture, the question as to its politics led to rancour and division, provoking a crisis of identity that manifested itself in disputes over the true essence of skinhead. The ‘sussed’ skin, as promoted by fanzines such as Hard as Nails, was contrasted with the ‘bonehead’: a sense of style and recognition of the culture’s origins were set against ‘tatty’ flying jackets, glue-sniffing, and far-right politics.⁴⁶ Bushell, too, had begun to lose heart by late 1982, writing a provocative article for Sounds that suggested punk had become formulaic, ghettoized, and fatalistic, losing its way to the libertarian sensibilities of anarchists like Crass that he felt ignored the ‘class realities of contemporary British society’.⁴⁷ Thereafter, he continued to support bands fuelled by the same sense of working-class anger that he had first recognized in punk, be it the furious anarcho-thrash of Conflict or the soul-inflected agit-pop of The Redskins, before eventually moving away from Sounds to become a controversial figure in tabloid journalism. As for Oi!, its influence would gestate, later re-emerging to infuse burgeoning scenes in the USA, Europe, and Asia over the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Back in the early 1980s, however, the ‘beat of street’ looked set to be buried beneath the din of dissenting voices.

‘Looking at Us but Not Talking to Us’: Interpreting Oi! from the Outside

Much of the furore that enveloped Oi! was informed by a wider debate rooted in the social and cultural upheavals of the 1950–60s.⁴⁸ For the mainstream media, Oi! became another in a series of ‘moral panics’ linked to the emergence of youth culture as a recognizable component of contemporary society. In other words, it was seen to represent a threat to prevailing societal values and interests as defined by the media and the wider establishment.⁴⁹ Simultaneously, it fed into political antagonisms on the left and right of British politics. Initially, both the far left and the far right displayed antipathy towards the rise of teenage consumption and evolving youth cultural styles that helped distinguish the post-war twentieth century. By the late 1960s, however, the growth of a politicized counter-culture and the tendency for popular musicians to engage with political issues led to discussion as to the meaning of specific (youth) cultural forms and their use as a medium for social and political change. This took place across an intersecting political and academic terrain that comprised the varied contours of the new left, the CCCS, and eventually, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its assorted revolutionary rivals.⁵⁰ It also found its way into the music press, the writers for which often registered counter-cultural and/or political backgrounds that informed their understanding of popular music.⁵¹ By the late 1970s, youth culture was recognized as a site of hegemonic struggle—part of a Gramscian ‘war of position’ that saw activists lay claim to popular music and its associated cultures as a portent for either revolution or reaction. Most successfully, members of the International Socialists (from 1977, the SWP) helped initiate Rock Against Racism (RAR) as a means of reclaiming popular music as a progressive force in the wake of controversial comments on race and fascism by Eric Clapton and David Bowie respectively. This, in turn, combined with the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) to forge a cultural weapon designed to thwart the advance of an NF that was threatening to become the third party of British politics by the mid-1970s.⁵²

Simultaneously, the far right itself moved to contest and usurp the left’s cultural turn. Initially, this meant providing bookshops, clubs, and amenities, but was further complemented by efforts to recruit young working-class members from the football terraces, at gigs and in schools.⁵³ Unlike the left, which tended to focus its attention on the content and production of youth cultural forms, the far right’s approach was applied more in spatial terms; that is, the colonization of spaces in which young people gathered and lived.⁵⁴ Organizations such as the NF and British Movement (BM) fixed their efforts on street-level recruitment and, for a time, met with limited success. In areas where growing youth unemployment, ill-conceived urban redevelopment, and notable levels of immigration combined with the wider economic problems facing Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s, as in London’s East End, parts of the West Midlands and Yorkshire, so the NF and BM made in-roads.⁵⁵ Significantly, too, the politicization of youth culture led to some cultural identities being bound up with an affinity to the NF or BM. In particular, an element within the revived skinhead movement aligned itself to the far right, sometimes out of a distorted sense of nationalism or racial prejudice, sometimes simply as an anti-social provocation designed to intimidate, irritate, and affirm a feeling of detachment from mainstream society.⁵⁶

Punk emerged in the midst of all this, its meaning contested by political activists from the left and right. Where eager revolutionary socialists recognized punk as ‘a protest against the frustrations and conditions that afflict working-class youth’, so some neo-Nazis interpreted punk’s use of the swastika as evidence of young people ‘becoming more aware of their white identity’.⁵⁷ On both sides, punk’s sense of opposition suggested it provided a ready pool of disaffection for recruitment and, potentially at least, mobilization. Indeed, Garry Bushell was in 1977 a young SWP member and among the first to enthuse about punk’s being a youthful ‘reaction to a society collapsing around them’. The left, he argued, had a responsibility ‘to channel that rebellion into a real revolutionary movement’.⁵⁸

Such attention brought conflict. In tandem with the success of RAR, under whose banner numerous punk bands played, so far-right interventions became commonplace at gigs over the course of 1977–84. This, certainly, was the case with prototype Oi! bands such as Sham 69, The Ruts, and the Angelic Upstarts, whose working-class ire was coveted by the left whilst also attracting a notable far-right contingent to their audience.⁵⁹ For Sham, it proved to be their un-doing. As the band came under pressure to disavow the fascist element amongst its following, playing RAR gigs and condemning the far right, so their London gigs were regularly disrupted by the NF and BM.⁶⁰ More generally, however, punk tended to resist overt political affiliation; support for a cause did not necessarily translate into ideological commitment. So, for example, if the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten was outspoken in his condemnation of racism and the NF, then he also bemoaned the ‘condescending attitude’ of ‘those hard-line lefties’ who sought to use punk for their own ends; a refrain oft-repeated by punk bands over the late 1970s.⁶¹

By 1980, therefore, the political aspirations that the left and right harboured for punk had failed to transpire. For the left, punk in and of itself was deemed either to have been appropriated by capitalism or transformed into a reactionary musical form through which its listeners’ experiences and expectations were reinforced rather than challenged. In particular, punk’s social realism was seen only to reaffirm the Sex Pistols’ predicted ‘no future’.⁶² Given such a perspective, the left tended to dismiss Oi!’s protest as overly crude; its emphasis on class rejected as a ‘cover’ for reactionary attitudes.⁶³ For the SWP’s Joanna Rollo, Oi!’s ‘smattering of social awareness’ was but part of a more general rhetoric of nationalism and violence that pointed towards Nazism.⁶⁴

Such reasoning was reflected in the music press. Prior to Southall, NME writers such as Ian Penman and Chris Bohn had dismissed Oi! in much the same way as elder critics had dismissed punk: as the ‘utter pits of rock ‘n’ roll’; as a celebration of ‘empty-headedness and grubbiness’; as a ‘caricature of “working-class culture” ’.⁶⁵ After Southall, attention turned to politics, with the predominant motifs of Oi! being filtered through a cultural lens that served to confirm a hardening critique. Oi!’s class-cultural identity was equated with racism; its patriotism with nationalism; its masculinity with misogyny; its audience with the far right.

As noted above, it is undeniable that Oi! contained far right elements in and around it. Both Gary Hodges and Garry Hitchcock of the 4-Skins had been members of the BM in the mid-1970s; sections of Oi!’s audience were affiliated to the far right and ruined many a punk and 2-tone gig proving this to be so; the lead singer of Combat 84, Chris ‘Chubby’ Henderson, had swapped a Charterhouse education for fascist politics and Stamford Bridge by the late 1970s.⁶⁶ Most notoriously, the cover image for 1981’s Strength Thru Oi! LP turned out to feature Nicky Crane, a fascist skinhead whose place in the BM Leader Guard drew attention to an album title that was generally read as a pun on the Nazi slogan, Kraft durch Freude, rather than The Skids’ Strength Through Joy (1980) release of the previous year.⁶⁷ Oi!, too, seemed to revel in a violent image that although relating more to football and youth cultural rivalries nevertheless appeared sinister when seen from beneath the boot of someone like Crane. If, by framing Oi! within a culture of Saturday afternoon and bank holiday punch-ups, Bushell hoped to say ‘don’t smash other kids and fight them … go and smash the government and destroy Westminster’, then he left himself open to criticisms of glorifying violence and pandering to a thuggish image that was often associated with the far right.⁶⁸

But to thereby define Oi! as racist, right wing, or fascist is to offer a partial—if not wholly distorted—reading of its motivations and content. For a start, the far right’s own attempts to claim Oi! were resisted by the majority of those involved. This was certainly the case with Bushell, who had previously lent support to RAR, contributed to its magazine, Temporary Hoarding, and whose writings made regular reference to ‘twisted Nazis’, the ‘cretinous’ BM, the ‘fringe crackpots of the far right’, and the ‘pathetic Nazi elements no-one else wants’.⁶⁹ Bushell also refused to cover bands that supported or included card-carrying members of the NF or BM among their ranks, leading to his being physically attacked by the BM at an Angelic Upstarts gig in early 1982 and targeted by Bulldog magazine as the ‘biggest enemy’ of the NF (see Fig. 3).⁷⁰ Indeed, the two bands that formed the template for Oi!, the Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects, could each boast anti-fascist credentials. Whilst the Upstarts were stalwarts of RAR, with a lead singer (Mensi; Thomas Mensforth) whose lyrics and interviews espoused the virtues of the British labour movement and railed against the far right, so the Rejects’ anti-politics stance extended to physically confronting members of the BM who sought to cause trouble at their gigs.⁷¹ Just as they dismissed the ‘wankers’ handing out political leaflets at the football, so they and their entourage took affirmative action to eject BM troublemakers from a gig at London’s Electric Ballroom in 1979. Members of the Rejects and the 4-Skins were also among those who later did battle with a Nazi contingent in Barking, winning the turf war and keeping the BM away from their respective bands.⁷²

Figure 3

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Flyers for gigs by the Neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver, 1983. Note comments relating to Garry Bushell on both.

As for racism, a number of Oi! bands followed the Upstarts’ lead in playing anti-racist gigs designed to confirm their opposition to the NF, among them The Business, Criminal Class, and Infa Riot. If The Oppressed’s Roddy Moreno was responsible for later establishing Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) in Britain, then Garry Johnson had already made his position clear in 1981: ‘Oi! ain’t about black v white’, the ‘white working class [have] got more in common with [the] black working class than they have with [the] rich white middle class’.⁷³ Oi!, after all, claimed a kinship with 2-tone, which itself suffered from far-right interventions provoked by the contradiction inherent in the NF’s and BM’s attempt to claim a subculture whose heritage was informed by ska, reggae, and soul. As this suggests, the political affinities within Oi! (and within skinhead culture) were diverse.⁷⁴ As well as the Upstarts, those featured on the Oi! compilation albums included the Battersea-based League of Labour Skins choir (singing ‘Jerusalem’) and the militantly anti-fascist Burial.⁷⁵ Bushell himself had left the SWP by 1980, but he remained a ‘socialist, a trade unionist, and a patriot’ who in the run-up to the 1983 general election insisted that the assault of Thatcherism on British industry and working-class life meant the ‘punk and Oi! line is “Kick out the Tories”—Vote Labour’.⁷⁶ Johnson, meanwhile, explained his politics this way:

If it was law [to vote] I’d vote Labour ‘cos of its tradition and what it stood for when it was formed – power to the people, defenders of the poor and all that. But it ain’t that now, it’s not working class. It’s a middle-class social club! I’m a Militant at heart. I like their policies of, like, the abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy, but I don’t like their leaders. They ain’t working class are they? They might be in Liverpool but not London.⁷⁷

More generally, the majority of bands aligned to Oi! rejected formal politics in all its shape and forms, seeing it as divisive, deceitful, and delusional, particularly those organizations on the far left and right that sought power by ‘climbing on the backs of the working class’. As Cock Sparrer put it:

Everybody’s talking about revolution/ Everybody’s talking about smash the state/ Sounds to me like a final solution/ Right wing left wing, full of hate/ We don’t wanna fight/ Because you tell us too/ So watch your back when you attack/ Cos we might just turn on you … ⁷⁸

Despite the events in Southall, therefore, the NF’s and BM’s attempts to claim Oi! as a means to express the ‘frustrations of white youths’ made limited headway.⁷⁹ Although, as Tim Brown has argued, Oi! cemented the connection between skinhead and punk to provide a musical form through which skins could express their ideas, it did not thereby follow that the far right gained control of its political agenda.⁸⁰ For this reason, the NF moved to establish an alternative in the form of White Noise Records, the forerunner of the Blood & Honour franchise that later served to distribute neo-Nazi music worldwide. The NF had already tried to project a racist voice onto punk through the formation of Rock Against Communism (RAC) in 1978.⁸¹ This had failed to attract more than a handful of bands, though the NF continued to encourage its members to attend, disrupt, and distribute literature at gigs into the 1980s. By 1982, the reformation of Skrewdriver—a Blackpool punk band that had nurtured a skinhead following whilst playing London gigs in 1977–8—allowed for the revitalization of RAC with a group whose singer, Ian Stuart, openly committed to the NF. It was from here that an overtly fascist music scene emerged, with Skrewdriver at the centre of a network of bands that included Brutal Attack, The Ovaltinees, Die-Hards, and Peter and the Wolf.

To sum up, popular references to Oi! have tended to be filtered through competing interpretations as to its point and purpose. In other words, meanings have been projected onto Oi! rather than drawn from it. This was most obvious in the ‘moral panic’ initiated within the mainstream media, but was also true of readings framed by the cultural politics of the left and right. Indeed, the left’s understanding of Oi! was partly informed by a gradual realignment in its relationship with the working class evident from at least the 1960s. If, during the early 1980s, workers were still seen as the bedrock of industrial struggle, then the cultural continuities and patterns of life that had typically defined working-class communities since the nineteenth century were increasingly regarded as incubators of sexism, racism, homophobia, and parochialism. In effect, the ‘white’ working class was seen to have become part of the problem rather than the solution, a bulwark against radical socio-cultural change that was seemingly embodied in Oi!’s territorialism, masculinity, patriotism, and refusal to adopt the language of progressivism. Simultaneously, such characteristics opened Oi! up to approaches from the far right. These, however, were blunted by the fact that Oi!’s emphasis on class, locality, and lived experience allowed for convivial as well as contentious modes of interaction to exist within the working-class communities from which it emerged—hence the history of much British youth culture, including skinheads.⁸² As a result, the far right’s attempts to racially define Oi! were rejected and the NF and BM were forced to develop a distorted variant of a pre-existing youth culture to carve out a cultural space. To quote Cock Sparrer once more:

We don’t wanna be part of no new religion/ we don’t need a boot or a switchblade knife/ We don’t wanna be part of a political dream/ We just wanna get on living our lives …

‘The East End is All Around’: Oi!, Class, and Locality

Attempts to apply a political label to Oi! were bound to fail. As a form of street-level punk, Oi! encompassed a range of perspectives that could not be contained within a framework of ‘left’ and ‘right’. That said, it remained a forum for protest and a means by which those typically denied a public voice could engage with the world of which they were part. What gave Oi! a sense of coherency was its overlapping emphases on class, locality, and youth.

Broader historical context is important here. The post-war period was characterized by a range of socio-economic developments that combined to challenge existing patterns of British life. Full employment, growing affluence, and technological breakthroughs in mass media and production each served to facilitate an age of consumption. This, in turn, was complemented by demographic shifts occasioned by expanding educational provision, immigration, patterns of employment, and, to 1960, national service. By the 1970s, however, fault lines were beginning to appear.⁸³ If talk of ‘classlessness’ and ‘consensus’ had always tended to mask tensions bubbling beneath the surface of consumer-based ‘prosperity’, then these were revealed once inflationary pressures gave way to the industrial unrest, rising living costs and unemployment that have since become totems of the 1970s–80s. In response, the political certainties of the post-war period were seemingly undermined, provoking realignments in both Conservative and Labour politics (towards Thatcherism and, eventually, New Labour) and simultaneously providing space for new political formations—often issue or identity-based—to emerge. Economically, British policy moved away from the broadly Keynesian principles that had underpinned the economy from the 1940s towards a monetarist strategy that was extended by the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher following her election in 1979.

The implications of all this would become clear in time. The structural changes ongoing within the British economy—away from industrial production towards the service sector—were accelerated. The power of the trade unions was curtailed via a mixture of legislation and set-piece industrial disputes epitomized by the bitter miners’ strike of 1984–5. Large-scale unemployment, which peaked at 3,278,000 (11.9 per cent) in 1984, became a permanent feature of Britain’s economic landscape, whilst old industrial regions fell into a decline from which many have yet to recover.⁸⁴ More generally, the collectivist, egalitarian principles of the welfare state were replaced by those of individualism, as the nationalized industries were sold off and the private sector blossomed on the back of cheap credit and government incentive. In the long term, Britain was to emerge rebranded as a financial centre geared towards the interests of the entrepreneur. In the short term, the country was beset by inflation, inner-city riots, and intense social conflict as the ‘popular authoritarianism’ that Stuart Hall recognized as the kernel of Thatcherism buried itself in the national psyche.⁸⁵

Oi!’s ‘protest’, therefore, was both a reflection of and response to these realignments. It stood opposed to Thatcher’s assault on the industrial and cultural cornerstones of British working-class life whilst simultaneously baulking at the stultifying bureaucracy of Labour social democracy and rarefied identity politics of the left. Class and locality, rather than formal politics or ideology, served as the prism through which the prevailing concerns of Oi! were viewed and understood. Most obviously, Oi! expressed a class identity that was rooted in the politics of everyday life: in work, the weekend, the community, street, and home. This, perhaps, had been best realized on Sham 69’s That’s Life (1978), which provided a twenty-four-hour snapshot of a working-class lad who gets up late, argues with his parents, gets sacked from work, wins on the horses, goes to the pub, meets a girl, has a fight, and wakes up with a hangover. It captured, as Paul Morley noted in his review of the album, youth’s social and domestic claustrophobia; the sense of someone struggling to control their own life.⁸⁶ But numerous Oi! songs focused on similar topics, recounting low-level struggles with authority and the adventure of a night out or an afternoon on the terraces. Oi! songs reverberated with the sound of concrete and steel; they moved through the backstreets to reveal both the empowerment and the tensions inherent in the adoption of a youth cultural style; they described local characters—Jack-the-lads, plastic gangsters, clockwork skinheads—evocative of the environments from which they emerged. Oi! rarely moralized, concentrating instead on the documentation—sometimes serious, sometime humorous—of a life being lived.

At its most effective, Oi! set the drama of a residual working-class culture against the limited prospects afforded by boring jobs, unemployment, and impending adulthood. Cock Sparrer, for example, contrasted the fear of boredom with the thrill of ‘Runnin’ Riot’, whilst Prole’s ‘Generation Landslide’ depicted the amphetamine-fuelled joy of youth being buried beneath the socio-economic dislocations of the early 1980s and the broken promises of the ‘swinging sixties’. The Business, too, fused boisterous sing-a-longs with pointed social commentary in a kind of celebratory protest. As for the 4-Skins, their set list combined dystopian depictions of a society descending into chaos with blunt affirmations of defiance mediated through a hyper working-class skinhead identity.⁸⁷

In political terms, Oi! concentrated its ire on those socio-economic and establishment forces that served to limit or encroach upon working-class life. The police, government officials, and would-be politicians were berated, whilst overt class warfare was declared in songs such as The Cockney Rejects’ ‘Hate of the City’, The Business’ ‘Sabotage the Hunt’, Garry Johnson’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and The Exploited’s ‘Class War’. The lack of a job or a perceivable future was, perhaps, the most recurrent theme of Oi! A barrage of songs were directed against a Tory government accused of trying to ‘kill the spirit of the working-class man’, most of which demanded work or some kind of future vision be provided for the young unemployed.⁸⁸ Indeed, the ennui of unemployment was typically presented as the fuse wire of the violence depicted in Oi!’s lyrics and the primary cause of the riots that broke out across Britain’s cities in the summer of 1981. In the lexicon of Oi!, working-class youth were ‘human hand-grenades’; the clockwork orange made flesh; a ticking time bomb ready to explode.⁸⁹

Not that formal politics were seen as a solution. Most of those involved with Oi! had come of age under the besieged Wilson–Callaghan governments of 1974–9, an experience more likely to have led to disillusionment than incipient support for Labour. ‘We say bollocks to all politics, left, right, centre’, said The Business’ Micky Fitz, ‘cos in practice it’s always the working class who pay for the politicians’ power games’. ‘We’ve got nothing to do with [politics]’, echoed the 4-Skins’ original bassist, Steve Harmer, ‘there’s nothing worth voting for. They’re all the same’.⁹⁰ There remained some affinity with grass-roots trade unionism, as evidenced in the Angelic Upstarts’ paeans to the miners’ strikes of the 1970s or The Business’ exposé of the ‘National Insurance Blacklist’ wielded by construction industry employers to keep out militants.⁹¹ But the left more generally was portrayed as a haven for middle-class liberals; students, teachers, and social workers claiming to speak for the working class.⁹² Put most succinctly by The Business via Garry Johnson’s lyrics, the left was seen to comprise ‘suburban rebels’, ‘middle-class kiddies from public school’, who played at revolution but knew little of the inequities against which they campaigned.⁹³ This, in turn, fed into Oi!’s suspicion of organizations such as RAR. Where 2-tone was recognized as an organic, cross-cultural expression of racial unity focused on youth cultural style and the depiction of life in the ‘concrete jungle’, so RAR was dismissed as an organization run by ‘extremists’ who ‘didn’t seem to be in touch with ordinary people’.⁹⁴ We should note, too, that such suspicions were also expressed by those involved in 2-tone, as with Pauline Black of The Selector’s fear of being ‘sucked into this sloganizing for whatever left-wing party [and] pandering to middle-class liberalism’.⁹⁵

Oi!’s derision of the left no doubt contributed to the antipathy that fed the other way. The SWP’s Right to Work campaign never replied to Lol Pryor’s offer to arrange a benefit gig; a meeting between the Oi! Organising Committee and RAR in the wake of Southall did not convince the latter to lend its banner to any of the bands that played the Hambrough Tavern.⁹⁶ Equally, the forthright patriotism of most Oi! bands led its critics to reassert their accusations of far-right sympathies. By the late 1970s, many on the left saw the Union Jack as synonymous with the NF; expressions of patriotism were read as covert racism or a nod to either fascism or British imperialism.⁹⁷ Integral to Oi!, however, was the interconnection of class and place: a sense by which identity was forged, in part at least, within the landscape that a person lived and worked.⁹⁸ As this suggests, Oi!’s patriotism was mediated through the socio-economic and political crises afflicting Britain in the 1970s–80s, which in turn were related to the experience of an increasingly beleaguered working class. Like punk in 1976–7, Oi! bands responded to the sense of decline that hung over Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s, embodying and reflecting back the fears of a media and political establishment that framed the nation within a narrative of decline, decay, and dereliction.⁹⁹ But whereas punk dramatized the crisis, Oi! claimed to speak for the people most affected by it. To take a classic example, Cock Sparrer’s description of a nation’s pride being symbolized in ‘the dirty water on the river’ evoked the changing landscape of their east London roots, wherein the dockyards were closing and the old working-class communities were being dispersed. ‘No one can take away our memory’, they sang, ‘England belongs to me’.¹⁰⁰

Not dissimilarly, Oi! bands tended to present their patriotism as a challenge to both the establishment’s and the NF’s claims on national symbolism. The Union Jack was ‘our flag’, Bushell insisted, ‘not the rich’s … [its] our work that makes them wealthy, our suffering [that] lines the fat scum pockets’.¹⁰¹ If the ghost of the British ‘Tommy’ often found his way into Oi! songs, then he did so as a signifier of working-class sacrifice: a ‘dead hero’ sent to defend his country at the bequest of a ruling class far from the field of battle.¹⁰² More positively, The Angelic Upstarts’ ‘England’ was an ode to those who fought fascism in the Second World War, prefaced with a poem that asked: ‘don’t cross my love with views of hate and forget what those thousands died for’. For Mensi, being English and playing anti-racist gigs complemented each other.¹⁰³

That a sense of national pride could bleed into jingoism and racism was recognized. Bushell, at least, argued that patriotism on its own was an ideological cul-de-sac. ‘What happens when you’re threatened with expulsion from school or the sack from work’, he asked, ‘you can’t just wave a Union Jack, you’ve got to have more to say than that’.¹⁰⁴ Similarly, Oi!’s patriotic claims ran parallel to the sort of heroic-masculine tendencies that typically underpinned the hard right. But the prevailing sentiment that comes through in the songs and interviews around Oi! was that of a refusal to apologize or feel ashamed of either who you were or where you came from: that is to be English/British and working class.¹⁰⁵

Such affinities also worked at a local level. Bands built up local followings (Poplar Boys, Tucker’s Ruckers, football mobs, and other nameless groups of mates), with gigs serving as a meeting point that provided a good night out whilst emphasizing the fact that those on stage were an extension of the audience. Local references (‘the 69 bus down to Canning Town’), acknowledgements, and photos of the bands’ entourage and audience were a typical component of Oi! records. In such a way, locality served as a focus for working-class identification within Oi!, providing social connections that actually and symbolically affirmed common interests, experiences, and concerns.

That said, such localized loyalties were sometimes a source of tension. Though the association of class identity with locality provided a sense of belonging and community, it also lay down a territorial claim that was exclusive as well as inclusive. Oi!’s ‘voice’, too, was primarily London-centric, suggesting its conception of both class and place was often rooted in the capital’s traditional working-class communities. So, for example, the Cockney Rejects’ adoption of football and the East End as symbols of class-cultural identity won them support from West Ham’s notorious Inter-City Firm whilst simultaneously drawing the wrath of rival football fans in and out of London. As a result, the band’s gigs sometimes descended into territorial violence, as on 6 June 1980 at Birmingham’s Cedar Club.¹⁰⁶ And although Oi! bands recognized the lesson of keeping football ‘out of it’, associated trouble would occasionally blight gigs thereafter.¹⁰⁷ By the same token, the Oi! Organising Committee’s objective of ‘pro-youth cult unity’ was undermined by bands such as The Last Resort or The Exploited placing their respective skinhead and punk identities against those of soul boys and mods to rather grim effect.¹⁰⁸

Ultimately, Oi! was an expression of youthful, working-class revolt. In the context of the early 1980s, this tended to revolve around ‘keeping what you’ve got, holding onto what you’ve gained, because if Thatcher had her way, we’d lose it all’.¹⁰⁹ As a result, Oi! had a defensive nature to it; its worldview combined a fatalistic vision of a deteriorating present with a commitment to fight back and salvage the class-cultural signifiers deemed to give life a sense of purpose and excitement. Like punk, it was anti-social; its proponents saw themselves outside of society and refused entry into it. Simultaneously, Oi! aspired to retain the basic principles of the original skinhead subculture: ‘being proud of your working-class heritage, being clean and tidy, and having a respect for people around you’.¹¹⁰ It was, therefore, class-orientated and localized; it was based on group loyalties forged amongst its immediate milieu; it communicated via a sense of style, class, and common reference points located within a residual working-class culture.

Conclusion

Oi! was far closer to what its adherents claimed it to be than it was to what its critics accused it of being. That is, Oi! provided a cultural form that gave voice to the experiences of a particular milieu of British working-class youth in a period of socio-economic and political change. Such a milieu was primarily, but not exclusively, white, male, and working class. Although typically associated with punks and skinheads, Oi! drew from a wider range of cultural resources that both predated and followed on from punk. It referred back to the irreverent and bawdy comedy of the musical hall; to the sense of style and attitude of 1960s’ mod and skinhead culture; to the territorial pride of the terrace and the street corner. By 1980, it related closely to the ‘new mod’ and 2-tone scenes that had evolved out of punk’s scrambling of pop history. In class terms, it was imbued with a collective sensibility of mutual defence and support that fed into a localized culture based around football, pubs, clubs, shops, clothes, and streets.

With regard to politics, Oi! encompassed a range of opinion. Many of those involved came from traditional Labour and trade union families, born into the close-knit working-class communities that formed an integral part of Britain’s labour tradition. Simultaneously, an affinity to class and locality allowed for a conservatism resistant to—or suspicious of—aspects of cultural and social change. Indeed, such a reconciliation of progressive and conservative perspectives had proven essential to the Labour Party’s rise over the twentieth century, before the ongoing processes of socio-economic and cultural development served to strain such a balance from at least the 1960s.¹¹¹ Partly as a result of this, the far right did make in-roads into Oi!’s core audience, serving to divide the scene and reaffirm certain stereotypes perpetuated in the media. But the emergence of ‘white power’ music was in many ways a product of Oi!’s resistance to organized politics of any stripe, left or right. As for racism, Oi! bands tended to reject such accusations but acknowledged that racial conflict existed within the communities of which they were part. The Oi! ‘debate’ of January 1981 recognized tensions between black and white youth as a by-product of socio-economic forces, a diversion that prevented working-class youths from uniting against the ‘real enemy’.¹¹² Cuts and unemployment, Bushell argued, were ‘the two main evils facing the British working class, regardless of creed or colour, and evils which make the fringe crackpots of the ultra-right look as insignificant as they undoubtedly are’.¹¹³

For the historian, Oi!’s significance rests on its providing insight into socio-economic, political, and cultural trends beyond the remit of youth culture. First, those associated with Oi! communicated a very real sense of disengagement from politics in general and mainstream politics in particular.¹¹⁴ In other words, Oi! expressed a form of anti-politics that opened the way for contact with organizations on the political fringe but more typically led to an expression of class-cultural identity rooted in the local community. In seeking to make sense of Oi!’s politics, Bushell recognized in it the ‘seeds of a Clockwork Orange future’, whereby anger and resentment could lead to ‘volatile violent nihilism’. In effect, therefore, Oi! was an attempt to refocus the frustrations of working-class youth away from the ‘demagogues’ and towards more ‘purposeful rebellion’—hence its early conferences and commitment to playing benefits and celebrating the culture from which it evolved. If politics no longer offered a solution to ‘social injustice’, then it was up to the young working class to find their own.¹¹⁵ ‘Sod the system’, Garry Johnson argued, ‘gotta rise above it’.¹¹⁶

Second, then, Oi! revealed some of the anxieties and concerns of a section of working-class youth at a time of rising unemployment and continuing socio-economic change. Not only were traditional working-class industries in decline, slowly giving way to service sector and, by the early-1980s, information-technology-focused jobs, but the shift to monetarism ensured that unemployment became a permanent and deep-rooted problem in British society.¹¹⁷ Add to this cuts in public spending, and songs such as the 4-Skins’ ‘Bread or Blood’, which evoked the East Anglian peasant revolt of 1816 to forewarn a return to the stark poverty and social inequalities of the early nineteenth century, captured the sense of unease that ushered in the 1980s for many British youths. Punk, after all, had been the first post-war youth culture to form in a period of economic depression rather than one of steadily rising living standards. By 1980–1, Johnny Rotten’s prophecies of ‘no future’ and ‘anarchy in the UK’ were even more resonant than in 1976–7.

Third, and related to both the above points, Oi! demonstrated the way by which class identities were forged out of culture and community just as much as in the workplace. Oi! bands recognized themselves as working class, but did so primarily on account of their family backgrounds, locality, and cultural choices. This, too, was an evolving process, with boundaries flexible enough to adapt to wider changes in society. Particular forms of pop music and sartorial style became emblems of working-class youth culture from the 1950s onwards. Oi! was thereby a street-level expression of working-class punk, but its protagonists were often equally enthused by a cultural lineage that took in ska, soul, and reggae as well as punk’s rockier precedents (Small Faces, Slade etc.).¹¹⁸ This, in turn, allowed racial boundaries to be crossed and therefore inform a generational shift in the construction of class identity. Almost paradoxically, it may be argued that in those areas of society where racial tensions were at their most acute, so the processes of interaction and integration were also most able to advance.

Finally, the way in which Oi! and its adherents were castigated in the media forms an early example of what has recently been labelled the ‘demonization’ of the working class.¹¹⁹ There had, of course, always been cultural snobbery and political opposition directed against working-class people. But the shifting political contours of the 1960s and 1970s led to two new offensives being opened up: one in terms of breaking the collective identity of the working class and its organizational resistance to the tenets of the ‘new right’; the other through a reading of cultural-political struggles that cut across—or eclipsed—questions of class inequality. Initially, at least, punk’s threat had stemmed in large part from the Sex Pistols’ working-class belligerence and irreverence. The Pistols were depicted as ‘foul mouthed yobs’; it was Steve Jones, very much an Oi!-prototype, who sparked the moral panic that lifted punk out of the music press and into the wider public consciousness by swearing on live television. Any tendency to see in punk the seeds of working-class revolt soon gave way once the young tearaways ‘having a laugh and having a say’ refused to articulate a suitably prescribed script. For this reason, perhaps, Oi!—like the football hooligans and ‘dead end yobs’ it spoke to—has resisted assimilation into the ‘respectable’ narrative that now binds punk more generally into the nation’s cultural fabric.

Many thanks to Angela Bartie, Tim Brown, Garry Bushell, Kev Clarke, Jon Garland, Keith Gildart, Tom McCourt, Ray Morlham, Gary O’Shea, Andrew Perchard, Lucy Robinson, Andrew Smith, Paul Stott, John Street, Toast, and Coleen Weedon for their help and insight.