Number One from 18th May 1981 for two weeks
Back in the early nineties a label called Connoisseur Collection issued a series of thoughtfully compiled records called “The Indie Scene”. Each documented a year in the life of British independent labels, and while it was occasionally guilty of inauthenticity (even the most liberal definition of “indie” shouldn’t include The Stranglers releases on United Artists) the booklets were enthusiastically written and informative, and some of the CDs contained material which had been unavailable in a digital format before.
Despite this, missing from these compilations was any kind of (even passing) reference to the early eighties punk scene. Whether this was due to rights issues or master tape problems is a question, but cynical old me suspects that it was probably because those bands didn’t fit the narrative, despite their overwhelming popularity in underground terms. I can imagine the conversations in the office – “Post punk? Definitely, that’s going in. Industrial? Of course. Synth pop? Well, we can hardly leave Mute out of the story. Hardcore Punk? Forget it. Nobody is going to buy these compilations to listen to one minute and thirty seconds of a man grunting and raging against the failings of a supposedly liberal Western society while a group thrash away behind him”.
Whether my assumptions are correct or not, I generally feel the rush of enthusiasm for these releases has been wiped out of indie history. It fits the story in one respect, in that all these groups were operating outside the mainstream, had a distinct sound, passion and purpose, and were sometimes played by John Peel, but they certainly don’t neatly fit the preferred mainstream BBC 6 Music narrative, the backwards looking one with its tidy cuts and edits to the messy edges of the story.
In addition, punks in general had a significantly reduced visibility by the early eighties. They were still apparent, but seemed to have become more of a small town phenomenon; similar to the way in which you don’t see motorcycle gangs in urban areas anymore but one miraculously emerges as soon as you take a day trip to Cheddar, punks now seemed to have become a phenomenon of the bored suburbs and strange between-city outposts rather than the troubled estates.
Punk, though, had both infected other genres and itself splintered into many different factions and forms. The Oi scene, championed and promoted by future tabloid superhack Gary Bushell, seemed to imagine an alternate universe where Sham 69 were the artistic champions of the movement and not The Clash or The Pistols. Then other “punk pathetique” groups like Splodgenessabounds and Peter and the Test Tube Babies occupied the gleefully childish fringes of the movement, as if they had decided that refusing to act like a grown up and celebrating, rather than railing against, the daft trivialities of daily life was one of the most anarchic and free-spirited things a human being could still do (I might be inclined to agree with them).
Then there was hardcore punk, though how long it took before anybody actually referred to it as such in the UK is open to question. Bushell didn’t seem to talk as enthusiastically about those bands, though he certainly gave them space. They were harder, heavier, nastier and, for all their relative musical amateurism, more Metal than the first wave of British punk bands.
Stoke-on-Trent’s Discharge were pioneers of the British movement, and the “Why?” EP shows us how they did it. It’s akin to Wire’s earliest work in that each song is a short, mean stab which doesn’t take up more time than it has to – the EP consists of ten tracks but is over in less than twenty minutes. Completely unlike any of Wire’s work, however, this is persistently, relentlessly harsh, a distorted and furious cacophony which barely stops for breath. Cal Morris’ vocals practically invent the doomy guttural chant of modern metal, while the group surge, clatter and charge behind him.