Oi! The Albums – Various Artists (Captain Oi)
It’s been a long time coming, but the good people at Captain Oi have finally got around to reissuing the set of albums which gave the label its name. A six-CD set, taking in the complete set of Eighties albums, and the infamous Back On The Streets EP. It’s fair to say, and something Garry Bushell makes clear in the accompanying booklet, that while the first three albums were great examples of what the genre had to offer – hard-edged punk rock with working-class roots which showed through in their lyrics – the quality tapered off pretty quickly across the second three, with a large smattering of studio bands and dodgy poetry, Chas And Dave wannabees, rowdy choirs that sound like they’re stumbling around the East End looking for one last pint on a Saturday night.
It didn’t end well. Overlooking those albums for the moment, there is no doubt that the first three releases in the series (Oi! The Album, the badly named and designed Strength Thru Oi! and Carry On Oi!) were the sound of working-class England at the time. Legends of the punk scene from The Exploited, 4 Skins, Infa Riot, Last Resort and Slaughter & The Dogs rubbed shoulders with upcoming boot boy bands The Strike and Criminal Class, The Business and Red Alert.
Nestling in among these were oddities such as punk poet Garry Johnson, Max Splodge, The Toy Dolls and Peter & The Test Tube Babies, showing the breadth of what Oi was. An initially confusing juxtaposition, until you consider that the underlying influences that united Oi bands was that which held the young working class together. Beer, a bit of a ruck, working in dead-end jobs, chasing girls and making the most of your lot. Oi wasn’t a music, it truly was a way of life, and the first three albums summed it up perfectly, catching the mood of the country in the early years of the 1980s. Sadly, the series declined from here. There were some high points – the fourth album, Oi Oi, That’s Yer Lot included Crux’s Liddle Towers and The Oppressed’s White Flag. The humour that separated them from the straight-laced general punk scene was in evidence here, Attila The Stockbroker giving us Willie Whitelaw’s Willie, Judge Dread making an appearance with The Belle Of Snodland Town, and strange Arthur And The Afters’ Arthur’s Theme. Son Of Oi should have been drowned at birth. In all fairness, the Oi scene had moved on by 1982, but there is very little to excuse the second-rate poetry, forays into pop territory and second-rate punk bands that couldn’t get out of the studio to perform.
Oi Of Sex brought the series to a close. An improvement on the previous album, featuring Cock Sparrer, The Gonads and Vicious Rumours, it too was sadly held back by its reliance on studio bands, many of whom were other acts performing under a weekend name. That the album is rounded off by Garry Johnson crooning If Looks Could Kill tells you all you need to know. Oi was probably the most difficult of the punk spin-offs to understand. Although known for its ‘authenticity’, it was created by a music journalist. A supposedly right-wing musical movement, its songs took a very left-wing stance. A genre known for its violent three-chord approach to punk, but its albums were full of poetry. Serious and yet funny, it was a complete package of inherent contradictions which perversely helped to strengthen it.
If you can overlook the low spots on the later albums and enjoy the highlights, take the enthusiasm and excitement of what the music had to offer at its very best, then this box set shows where the gun was fired that is still echoing around the musical world today. A thousand bands owe their creation to these albums, and all have taken different amounts of the various strands that made up the genre and created large parts of the current punk scene from them.