They then started to move away from punk rock into a sound heavily influenced by classic British hard rock bands such as Mott The Hoople, The Who and The Faces, evidenced on their third album, The Adventures of the Hersham Boys. The latter came from their second LP and first full studio album, That's Life. Their major label debut was "Borstal Breakout" in January 1978, followed by UK singles chart success with "Angels With Dirty Faces" (reaching number 19 in May 1978), "If The Kids Are United" (number 9 in July 1978), and "Hurry Up Harry" (number 10 in October 1978). Sham 69 released their first single, "Ulster", on Step Forward Records in August 1977, and its success in the independent charts prompted Polydor to sign the band. Their concerts were notoriously plagued by violence, and the band ceased live performances after one of their gigs at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1978 was broken up by National Front skinheads fighting and rushing the stage. The band had a large skinhead and hooligan following, which helped set the tone for the Oi! movement. Sham 69 lacked the art school background of many rock bands of the time, and brought in football chants, drinking songs and a sort of inarticulate political populism. Read Full Bio They formed in Hersham, UK in 1976. That was not the end of the Sham 69 story, however, as Pursey and Parsons put a new lineup together in 1987.They formed in Hersham, UK in 1976. But his exasperated group eventually, understandably, ceased British live appearances.įinally, after a fraught fourth LP sarcastically titled “The Game” (by then the band had issues with its major label, Polydor), the fed-up group quit in 1980 despite scoring two more Top 50 U.K. Pursey was publicly aghast - the group’s 1977 B-side “Ulster” had decried sectarian bloodshed, he sang with the Clash at London’s 1978 Rock Against Racism festival and he worked with the Anti-Nazi League. Soon, white power National Front members began using Sham 69 shows to solicit converts. (At the time, punks were already under violent attack from other youth gangs for example, in June 1977, nine Teddy Boys ambushed Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten outside a pub and slashed his face with razors.) To the group’s revulsion, its concerts drew copious violent neo-Nazi skinheads. His shouting everyman style, sometimes following pitch and sometimes making it cry uncle, and penchant for sloganeering football (soccer)-chant choruses led to a large, loyal fanbase dubbed the “Sham Army.” That army, however, proved a mixed bag. hit “Hurry up Harry,” he appropriated Ramone’s up-down-up-down sequence from “Beat on the Brat.”) The bellowing, charismatic, lanky, wide-eyed (and caterpillar eyebrowed) Pursey sounded more like Keith Moon singing The Who’s “Bellboy.” Parsons’ riffing had a load of Johnny Ramone’s no-frills, buzzsaw, down-stroking density. Think of a mouthier, more working-class Ramones with a heavy Cockney accent. Yet the band rode guitarist Dave Parsons’ powerful attack and singer Jimmy Pursey’s garrulous “man of the people” persona to Britain’s Top 10 singles chart three times and the Top 20 twice more, while also scoring a Top 10 album and two Top 30s. Its music was a coarser, rougher, more stripped-down cousin, initially discounted by London’s music press (albeit championed by fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue). Surfacing in London from Surrey’s bucolic Hersham, its songs lacked the withering disgust of Sex Pistols, the cutting cultural barbs of the Adverts, the wild abandon of the Damned and the art-attack smarts of Wire, X-Ray Spex and Manchester’s Buzzcocks. punk seemed barebones to mainstream rock fans, Sham 69 seemed simpler yet.
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