Sham 69
Kings and Queens (Creative Man)
by Jon Sarre
Pop quiz time for all you punk scholars!
Q: Sham 69 frontman Jimmy Pursey can best be described as:
a) An intelligent, politically-conscious working class youth who sought to unite punks, skins, teds, and mods through the anthemic message of his music, and although his laudable efforts were undermined by misguided violence on the part of his band’s fans, he still served as an inspiration to similarly-minded kids in both England and the U.S.
b) A lowest common denominator hack who couldn’t articulate his utopian program beyond bumper sticker slogans due to his colossal lack of imagination, and gave hope to simple-minded communal wanna-be politicos like 7 Seconds and hopeless fashion victims like the Exploited.
c) All of the above.
The answer is a matter of perspective (kinda like which is the better rag, Forced Exposure or Maximum RockNRoll). But it’s clear that Sham 69 were one of the first of the early punk bands to straddle the uneasy no-man’s land between the Sex Pistols’ basic rhetoric (“Any kid can be us, mate”) and the Clash’s (“Any kid can lead the revolutionary proletariat, mate”). Dave Parsons, the guitar player for most of Sham’s career, brought the Pistols’ inspired amateurism to the party (although he sure as hell wasn’t Steve Jones or Glen Matlock) and Pursey supplied the one-dimensional lyrical content (Strummer was a master theoretician by comparison). Slade and the Small Faces provided the rest.
The songs collected on this disc, recorded between 1976 and 1978, do hold up today. Actually, better than most first- and second-generation U.K. punk (such as the Damned, X-Ray Spex, or the Stranglers). Everything chugs along like you’d expect it to, and after listening to the first verse of most of the songs, you pretty much know all the lyrics (who needs that interactive CD-ROM shit?). Lyrically is where Sham 69 gets grating. Listening to some geek yell “U-l-l-l-lster, there ain’t no winners!” over and over again is kinda like hearing a buncha geeks chanting “Four more years!” or “Defense! Defense!”, which is to say it’s almost totally meaningless (but for some reason, I have no problem with the cretin from the Cosmic Psychos babbling, “You got me crawlin’ up the wall, I ain’t no spider.” Maybe cos I couldn’t picture him writing the song immediately after seeing a similar line spraypainted on a building).
That’s just my opinion, though. For anyone who doesn’t have a problem with Jimmy Pursey’s sophomoric lines, Kings and Queens has plenty of Shamarific hits: “I Don’t Wanna,” “Ulster Boy,” “Tell Us the Truth,” “If the Kids Are United,” etc. Fight the power, mate.
