In 1983, Cock Sparrer released the aforementioned Shock Troops, an LP that fully embraced the booming singalongs Oi had become known for. “When you look out at a Cock Sparrer gig, there’s just as many boys as there are girls,” says McFaull, “and there’s just as many 16-year-olds as there remember it from the first time around.” And to Cock Sparrer, the diversity of their fans has been part of what makes these shows worth playing. But while their followers might have different styles, the bands - along with countless others, including Rancid, Agnostic Front, and the Dropkick Murphys - are clear descendants of their sound. The first night, openers Murphy’s Law, a band that helped create the 1980s New York hardcore sound, attracted a sea of shaved heads tonight, the Unseen - who, a decade later, helped start street punk renaissance out of Boston - bring in a more colorful (and spiky) crowd. It took two more years for the band to reconvene, but the new direction would eventually lead them to make Shock Troops, one of the most influential albums of the era. Their luck changed in 1980, when “Sunday Stripper,” their pub-rock ode to a part-time exotic dancer, was included on the seminal Oi! The Album, a Sounds-produced compilation that officially gave a name to the back-to-its-roots second coming of punk.
– but they couldn’t find an audience in New York or Los Angeles, so the band limped home to England, believing Cock Sparrer to be a thing of the past. Cock Sparrer tried to keep going, selling their possessions for one-way tickets to the U.S. Rejecting Decca’s safety-pin direction, the band split from the label in 1978. We never really bought into that.”Īlso Read Roxy Music Wrap Up 50th Anniversary Tour With a Look Back at Their Underrated Influence
That was over west with McLaren and the Pistols and the Clash. “And we said, ‘Bollocks you do.’ And that was all happening in a different part of London, anyway. “It was one of those things where everybody said you have to wear these clothes to be a punk,” says McFaull. “Wearing clothes that look they pool from jumble sales.” “Imagine five collectively imageless Cockneys,” declared the British music newspaper Sounds. While McFaull embraced the Rotten-Idol snide vocal style, and their sound was every bit as urgent as Northern Ireland’s Stiff Little Fingers, they refused to dress the part. Four years later, as record companies clamored to cash in on the growing punk craze, they signed to Decca Records. They formed in 1972 as an adolescent super-group of sorts, assembled from their school’s garage bands. The original Cock Sparrer - frontman McFaull, guitarist Mickey Beaufoy, bassist/songwriter Steve Burgess, and drummer Steve Bruce - is, in fact, older than punk.
In a few hours, hundreds more will arrive to watch McFaull’s band, Cock Sparrer, for the second sold-out night in a row. Dressed in a worn black hoodie, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the 59-year-old for just another middle-aged British workingman that is, if you hadn’t seen him whip a room of a thousand into a frenzy the night before, hundreds of them shouting along to every word of the 17-song set. “We’ve got to be honest, we don’t know how long this is going to run for us,” says Colin McFaull, sipping a beer on a Saturday afternoon in the bar of Brooklyn venue Warsaw.
0 kommentar(er)
