![]() ![]() Most of the forerunners were middle-class art students. Punk sold itself as the voice of the tower blocks. It was raw, brutal and utterly down to earth. The album charts were full of po-faced synthesizer twiddlers and pretentious singers belting out meaningless pseudo-poetic lyrics. Punk exploded between 19 because stadium rock had been disappearing up its own jacksie for years. For starters Oi was the reality of Punk and Sham mythology. Oi's roots were in Punk, just as Punk's roots were in the New York Dolls, but they weren't the same animal. To really understand Oi, you had to be there. They said Oi was for skinheads (but it was always more than that), that all skins were Nazis (and only a minority ever were) and that therefore Oi was the Strasser brothers in steel-capped boots (but the bands were either socialists or cynics. Inevitably their version of events was as watertight as a kitchen colander in a tropical monsoon. Corrupting its meaning, the same media immediately tried to bury it. 2) Oi's legacy is a world-wide street-punk movement which is vocally pro-working class and against racism, unemployment, state bureaucracy and repression.ĭiscovered in the summer of '81 (well into its second wind) by a mass media rocked to its foundations by weeks of riots and youthful insurrection, Oi found itself on the sharp end of the sort of tabloid crucifixion usually reserved for the more macabre mass murderers. What matters is 1) Oi never suffered from Nazi violence the way Sham 69 and 2-Tone had the ag that blemished those early Oi! gigs was strictly football related. It would have been a miracle if there hadn't been NF sympathisers in the audiences. A lot of the Oi kids liked a fight, and yeah, this is no whitewash, there was a far right element among them but this was 1980 when the far right were polling 15 – 20 per cent of the vote in inner-city wards. It was anti-police, anti-authority but pro-Britain too. Stripped down to basics, it was about being young, working class and not taking shit from anybody. To the fast-talking wide-boys who adopted its name however, Oi was something else entirely. ![]() At worst, they were seen as modern day brown shirts responsible for the riots in Southall, Toxteth and the rest. He was raucous and obnoxious, a human hand-grenade with a menacing disregard for authority.Īt best, Oi bands and their fans were viewed as gurning barbarians gleefully pissing in the coffee house latte. To the establishment, Oi was an upstart from a tower block slum who wouldn't keep in line. ![]() To this day the hippy Left perceive Oi as a kind of cultural cancer. LET'S hear it for Oi! - the most exciting, despised and misunderstood youth movement of all time.Īfter 21 years (this piece was written in 2001) we're still winding up the mugs.īack in 1981, Oi! managed to outrage all shades of polite middle class opinion, right, left and centre. "The voice of Oi is unity/No 'them and us' just you and me/Think how strong we could be/United against society'" – Garry Johnson, United, 1981 "45 Revolutions on my stereo, not one revolution on the streets. "What we want's the right to work/Give us jobs not jails/Don't throw us on the scrapheap because your system fails." –The Gonads, Jobs Not Jails, 1980 "They always put the blame on us/And they tell the public lies/But that don't mean that we have lost/Cos our spirit never dies." –East End Badoes, The Way It's Gotta Be, 1982 "Wankers had out leaflets/They never ever let it be/I don't care what they say/But they better not come near me." –Cockney Rejects, Fighting In The Streets, 1979 "Oi! is working class, and anything that is part of, and comes from, the working class has got to be mostly good." – Mick O'Farrell, Red Action, 1981. "All you kids, black and white/Together we are dynamite" – Angelic Upstarts, Kids On The Street, 1981. ![]() "This generation won't keep quiet/Work, work, work - or RIOT!" – The Business, Work Or Riot, 1981 "Oi expresses an us-against-the-world attitude, it's the continuation of the tradition which has its roots in the Teddy Boys of the 1950s." – Simon Frith, sociology lecturer at Warwick University, 1981. "Loud, raw and violent, Oi-Oi is the musical battle cry of the skinheads, and like them it pulls no punches." News Of The World, 1981. Oi! is working class, and if you're not working class you'll get a kick in the bollocks." – Stinky Turner, 1980. ![]()
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