Three weeks at number one from 27th March 1982
“It's so extreme, it's impossible to take offence. Take the League seriously and the joke's on you, mate.” Carol Clerk, Melody Maker.
You sense that music critics had a hard time being asked to pore over Anti Nowhere League’s work and were almost defensive about it. After all, their job is to write reviews which contain at least a few hundred words of imaginative and helpful observations for the modern music consumer. In the case of The League, though, you only needed to hear their first single and its B-side to get a fair impression of what the rest of their work was likely to be about – thunderous chords and an elephant footed rhythm section combined with cuss words and ridiculously extreme lyrical positions.
So it goes with “I Hate People”. A basic descending chord pattern introduces the song and sticks to it like a barnacle, used as the central hook for the bellowed chorus: “I hate people/ I hate the human race/ I hate people/ I hate your ugly face/ I hate people/ I hate your fucking mess/ I hate people/ They hate me”. It goes on to become what could be the soundtrack to a teenage workplace underling’s bad day, set to another misunderstanding in the post room or pathetic practical joke on the production line: “My mother thinks I am a jerk/ Because I hate my bleeding work/ Be like daddy he's sincere/ And don't be true because you're queer”.
Not for the first time since starting this blog, I’m reminded immediately of the Not The Nine O’Clock News song “Gob On You”, which satirised the arse end of British punk rock. “Gob on you/ cause you're far too old/ Gob on you cause your hands are cold/ Gob on you, you're a stupid old straight/ Gob gob gob gob hate hate hate hate” spat Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson. Nobody could fault the team for attention to detail, but in retrospect you’ve got to wonder if they were missing the point – namely, that as music journalists had already freely noted, groups like The League hadn’t really entered the game for serious results to begin with. As punk’s initial light faded, it sometimes felt as if it had split into two factions; the hardcore anarchists who had serious grievances and misgivings and found punk to be a viable outlet for them, and those who just thrived on cartoonish chaos. By trying to parody British punk in the early eighties, comedians inevitably ended up landing slap bang inside the territory of those who weren’t taking themselves terribly seriously to begin with.
“I Hate People” would therefore be a bloody tough record to write about were it not for a strange and slightly worrying "creative decision" the band took in 2006. The release of Anti Nowhere League’s odds and sods compilation album “Pig Iron” saw the inclusion of a previously unreleased track entitled “The Day The World Turned Gay” which their previous label Captain Oi got cold feet about:
“Gay Pride are out there, marching on the town/ they’re holding hands with their trousers down,” sneers Animal, “they’re sniffing each other’s arses like dogs/ they’re being dirty and hanging around in bogs”. In case you wanted to dismiss this as a decadent punkish celebration rather than a criticism, the song continues “Homophobia you say to me/ am I alone in a sick society/ well there won’t be a generation to come/ because we are a dead generation”.
Oddly, it seemed to take a long time before anyone noticed the track, and it was only in 2016 as the group headed off on a national tour that it began to do them damage. Online petitions began trying to ban the group from live venues, which succeeded to an extent, and with absolute inevitability, the band replied with a statement and launched a counter-petition for all those who felt this was an attack on “free speech” and the very notion of punk rock itself. “I Hate People” became one of the central planks in the group’s online defence. Animal wrote: “We have a song called 'I Hate People' and last time I checked there was people at our last show.”
The problem here should be pretty obvious to almost everyone, I would hope, apart from seemingly the band themselves. “I Hate People” can’t possibly be taken seriously because it turns its ire on all of humanity. It’s a ridiculous strop of a song whose intent could only be taken literally if we were to honestly assume that Animal literally hated absolutely everyone – in which case, Anti Nowhere League could never have functioned as a group for more than a week before falling apart. And even if they did truly hate everyone, there’s far more of us than there are the Anti Nowhere League, who are not currently funded as a terrorist organisation and pose little danger; if anything, humanity is a much bigger threat to itself.
“The Day The World Turned Gay”, however, punches down, expressing some unchallenged vile sentiments which turn up on social media as propaganda to this day, hateful stereotypes against a minority of the population. There’s no invention or hint of satire about the song whatsoever, which is just spat out to froth upon the ground and leave whatever impression it may.
Animal has stated that “90% of my inspiration comes from newspaper clippings, television and social media” and therefore neither this song, nor any of his others, are to be taken literally or apologised for. Which begs the question – then what's the point? A joke requires a punchline, which TDTWTG doesn't have, and a deliberately controversial statement requires an outraged response, which the group got (though obviously reckoned without it harming their income). Had The League turned their attention to racial stereotypes in a similar way earlier in their career, there’s no question they would have fallen foul of Rock Against Racism, whose events included many of the original punk artists. So much for the “censorship has no place in punk rock!” argument, then. Tell that to Skrewdriver.
On “The Day The World Turned Gay”, Anti Nowhere League come across like the dangers of every railway station pub in Britain – reactionary, rockist men with large belt buckles on, hanging around the bar high on their ability to upset new customers with barbed jokes about their sexual orientation or appearance, before following them up with “Only joking, love/fella!” - the very kind of dinosaurs punks were supposed to hate to begin with.
On “I Hate People”, they just seem like a rabble of misfits having a bad day in their warehouse dayjob, which is such a stereotypically punk rock situation that little more needs to be said. For such a straightforward band, they seriously managed to tangle a deeply weird mess for themselves, but ultimately they wouldn’t be the highest profile punks on the block to manage that, or even the first. I'm duty bound to remember that one of my favourite bands of all-time are XTC, whose track "My Weapon" was a similarly ill-conceived bit of failed "satire" which caused feminists to protest in 1978. There's such a fine line between clever and stupid.
Away From The Number One Spot
Attak enter at number 19 with “Today’s Generation” which smoulders from start to finish – rumbling, buzzing and thundering over the horizon, only stepping back to let some rogue chiming melodies in during the intro and outro.
In week two, Mobiles enter at 19 with their follow-up to “Drowning In Berlin”, “Amour Amour”. It was supposed to be the single that cemented their career, but it fell five places short of the official Top 40 and proved to be their last record to make any kind of mainstream impression. It picks up the threads left behind by the previous single, continuing to combine sweet melodies with disjointed art-pop ideas – but clearly the public weren’t ready for more.
Meanwhile, Animal Magic enter at number 28 with the awkward Pigbag-esque groove of “Get It Right”, the eerie squawk of jazzy riffs sitting on top of snaking grooves.
In week three, The Business storm straight into the number five slot with “Smash The Discos”, which is all up for demolishing the local nightclub. “Posey leathers wedge hair cuts/ Come on now let's do the sluts/ Now it's time for them to learn/ Punk with vengeance has returned” the group state incorrectly. By the end of the decade most of the revolutionary ideas in music will have arrived by way of the discotheque and no bunch of punks managed to stop them. While the general sentiments in this record may have also found their way into a future indie number one, albeit in a slightly less aggressive fashion, The Business had to settle with a final number two position.
Norwich scenesters The Farmers Boys enter at 23 with “I Think I Need Help”, a threadbare, lo-fi jig around the possibilities of early indiepop. Somewhere in the grooves here the future of C86 could be heard.
Liverpudlians Cook The Books enter at 25 with the mongrelised skank of “Piggie In The Middle Eight”, referencing regional unemployment and the Toxteth Riots. They later changed their name to Cook Da Books and ended up on the Virgin subsidiary 10 Records, primed for success – which ultimately never really came.
The full charts are available on the UKMix Forums.
Number One in The Official Charts
Goombay Dance Band: "Seven Tears" (Epic)
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