It’s not unusual to see someone described as an original skin, but for now original bootboy seems less of a thing. Although I caught the end of the skinhead reggae boom via the tunes that made the UK charts off the back of that scene in the early seventies, I was too young to embrace its fashions. When I started secondary school in 1973 bootboy gear was all the rage but the look was more associated with football than music. What did we listen to? Some of the bands on Mark Brennan’s Where Have All The Boot Boys Gone? (Cherry Red) compilation – like Mott The Hoople, Sweet and Slade.[1] But there’s also stuff here I didn’t hear at the time and other tracks that belong to a later era.
Brennan’s 3-CD celebration of yob rock on Cherry Red clearly takes inspiration from some other recent various artist collections. A major influence is the series of Boot Power 1970-1979 compilations that used to be available online – compiled without rights clearance, so perhaps unsurprisingly they now seem to have disappeared. The Boot Power series mixed late-seventies punk and earlier sounds, and songs from them can be found on Brennan’s new compilation.
The opener on this new set is ‘You Don’t Have to Be in the Army to Fight in the War’ by Mungo Jerry. It was the title track from a 1971 album that was followed by the band’s Boot Power long player in 1972. So Mungo Jerry kicking off this comp could be seen as an acknowledgement of one of the anthology’s major sources of inspiration. That said, Mungo Jerry are best remembered for chart schlock like ‘In the Summertime’ (1970) and none of the bootboys I knew back then liked them.[2]
I’d say the first tune on Brennan’s compilation is one of the weaker tracks, but it seems a good choice both as a nod of appreciation and for another reason. After Mungo Jerry’s lead singer Ray Dorsey performed ‘In the Summertime’ on a 2017 BBC documentary about freemasons, it became well-known that he belongs to the Chelsea Lodge No. 3098. Given that conspiracy theories about freemasons are a prominent part of much far-right discourse, having Dorsey open this selection of yob tunes is going to turn boneheads right off the release.
Another source of plunder and crossover for Brennan are the licensed Junkshop Glam compilations released by Cherry Red – via their RPM subsidiary – who are also issuing this Boot Boys set. There is a fair bit of repetition between those albums and what’s here. See in particular the single disk Glitterbest UK Glam With Attitude 1971-1976 (2004) and the 3-CD All The Young Droogs (2019) platters.
Controversially, Brennan has included William Shakespeare’s ‘Feeling Alright’ in his selection. Shakespeare was the stage name of Australian John Stanley Cave (1948-2010) whose career came to an abrupt halt after he was convicted of child sex abuse in 1975. While Shakespeare doesn’t appear to have been a serial sex offender like Gary Glitter, his kiddie fiddling is known about by those into junkshop glam and many stay clear of him.[3]
Another strand to the material Brennan is picking through is what’s become known as street punk. I love the song the compilation takes its name from by Slaughter and the Dogs, and ‘Borstal Breakout’ by Sham 69, and ‘Total War’ by The Lurkers and ‘I’m Civilised’ by Menace (Islington’s finest) – but I was going to see these acts live back in the day and bought the records when they first came out, so I don’t need them on yet another compilation. But maybe you do!
I had to laugh about the inclusion of The Rezillos’s cover of ‘Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite’. It’s fabulous and now very well-known because it was featured in Jackass: The Movie (2002) – but anyone who saw the band live 45 or so years ago knows they are an archetypal art school act and not part of the ‘swathe of non art school punk outfits’ touted by the Cherry Red press release as typifying this new compilation.
Via The Rezillos we also get a female voice in the form of Fay Fife, something largely missing from Brennan’s selection despite the fact anything from Nina Martin’s ‘I am Aggressive’ to ‘Violence Grows’ by the Fatal Microbes would have slotted easily enough into his release. Likewise, it wouldn’t have been hard to find a suitable tune from bigger name acts like Suzi Quatro or The Runaways. Or Brennan could have taken a dozen or so songs from the Knuckle Girl series of vinyl comps featuring seventies female acts – volume 3 came out last summer.[4]
Alongside bootboys there were sorts, women were and are a big part of the scene.[5]
Despite many top notch numbers there is an element to Brennan’s taste I don’t share, and that is for hard rock sounds and some associated brickwall punk. If these turn you on that’s cool! But when I saw bands like the Angelic Upstarts or Motorhead live back in the seventies I really didn’t like them. I still love the space rock Lemmy did with Hawkwind but what he moved onto after that just isn’t my thing. Indeed, I much prefer the Pink Fairies version of ‘City Kids’ to the Motorhead interpretation here. Tracking back to Mensi and the Upstarts, great politics but not my idea of a musical good time. That said, for me there are even worse choices in Brennan’s selections, such as hard rock outfit Rose Tattoo,
Staying on the issue of which version of a song is featured, while I dig ‘Violence’ by Mott, I’d have rather had the much more obscure Swell Mob cover. And no mention in the sleeve notes that Johnny Du Cann’s ‘Throw Him In Jail’ that is also included sounds in places like it’s riffing on the earlier ‘Violence’. Among other links not made in the notes are those between featured bands Third World War and The Hammersmith Gorillas. The name of the latter was allegedly chosen to parody the song ‘Hammersmith Guerrilla’ by the former. That said, it’s WWIII’s ‘A Little Bit Of Urban Rock’ that makes the cut here.
For me, the band that best represents bovver boy culture is The Hammersmith Gorillas. I missed their first single when it came out in 1974 – the b-side ‘Leavin’ ‘Ome’ is featured here – and didn’t come across them until I got into punk in the summer of 1976. But frontman Jesse Hector was everything I’d aspired to sartorially pre-punk from the Oxford bags to the grown-out mod barnet and huge sideburns. So just as I got into a new form of anti-fashion, I found the best ever role model for what I was in the process of discarding. Hector perfected the bootboy look.
When it comes to the standard ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’, The Fulham Furies cover picked by Brennan is nice but the Pure Hell rendition stomps all over it. Likewise, The Boys doing ‘Sick On You’ pisses on the Hollywood Brats original that Brennan opts for – that choice probably reflects the fact that Cherry Red have held the rights to the Brats back catalogue for years and this isn’t the first time this Brats tune has been been stuck on one of their compilations.
The novelty songs Brennan plucks from the ether range from the fabulous to the awful. ‘Fuck You’ by Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias comes with sleeve notes stating ‘leader Chris C.P. Lee was a genius’ but perhaps understandably fails to throw in anything about C.P.’s key role in the revival of Mancunian hardman Cliff Twemlow. If you haven’t done so already, check out C.P.’s book The Lost World Of Cliff Twemlow: The King Of Manchester Exploitation Movies.
As far as the novelty cash-ins go, I remember when ‘High Rise’ by The Trainspotters – Radio 1 DJ Mike Reid moonlighting as a plastic punk – was getting heavy radio rotation and it is as irritating now as it was then. Making matters worse, I haven’t forgotten its adaptation to – and seemingly endless use – as a Radio 1 station jingle. And no, I didn’t listen to daytime Radio 1 in the late-seventies but you couldn’t avoid it when you went into shops and caffs. The only good thing about the weaker material like ‘High Rise’ is that it makes other tunes shine more brightly. I though London were okay when I saw them support The Stranglers back in 1977, but set against some of the hard rock and bad novelty tracks here their ‘No Time’ sounds like a pop masterpiece.
I hope this isn’t an issue with the actual CD but the MP3 version I got had a file labelled as ‘Kipper’ by Kipper that when played turned out to be ‘Saturday Night’ by Bilbo Baggins, which was correctly labelled elsewhere in the files. ‘Saturday Night’ makes a reappearance here after already featuring on the same record company’s All The Young Droogs set 4 years ago. Fortunately having first seen the flick Confessions Of A Pop Performer (1975) many years ago, I was already familiar with the fake band Kipper who feature in it. As the sleeve notes state, the segment of Pop Performer that features the tune is well worth checking out on YouTube. Actually a lot of the songs Brennan has compiled have found a second life and then their way onto various compilations via YouTube.
For me there’s about 2 CDs worth of good tunes on this 3-CD set [6] – but if you like hard rock it’s probably just the odd novelty track that will prove an aggravation. That said, and leaving aside the question of whether you’d purchase a release featuring a convicted nonce, anyone with a reasonably large music collection – and especially if it includes comps that collect formerly obscure tracks – will probably already have much of what’s here. So it seems this set is aimed at those new to street rock and junkshop glam – nothing wrong with that, we were all new to them once.
Stewart Home
- While we weren’t very sophisticated at age 11 when it came to music, soul was a major part of what most of us listened to, and later on in 1976/77 northern soul was much bigger as a subculture at my school than punk. Some of the kids then went on to be jazz funkateers – another soul scene that was thoroughly working class. ↵
- Fun fact. Mungo Jerry frontman Ray Dorsey has suffered from irritable bowel syndrome for more than 45 years and he blames this on his rock and roll lifestyle – which only goes to prove being famous is shit. I didn’t make this crap up, I found it online – although that doesn’t mean it’s true. It is however indicative of the sort of thing you won’t find it the sleeve notes to releases like Boot Boys because – among other things – they might alienate a music biz big hitter. ↵
- After his spell in prison for statutory rape, Cave became a victim of Dr Harry Bailey’s deep sleep therapy at the Chelmsford Hospital outside Sidney in Australia. Many of Bailey’s patients died or were left mentally destroyed. Stevie Wright – whose ‘Black Eyed Bruiser’ is featured two tracks on from Shakespeare/Cave’s ‘Feeling Alright’ – is known to have suffered brain damage as a result of his abuse by Bailey. The quack committed suicide after the media exposed his fake and dangerous medical practices. A Royal Commission later found Bailey guilty of fraud, misconduct and medical negligence. While the Boot Boys set features sleeve notes, they aren’t particularly detailed and the medical abuse connection between these two Australian performers isn’t mentioned. ↵
- There are major differences between grey market/bootleg fan compilations and fully licensed releases like Boot Boys which includes the ways they circulate – the former often end up banned from sale on platforms like Discogs and eBay. That said, even some of the former are produced with financial gain in mind, and many of those involved in music repackaging as a profession are also fans of the music they commodify. For example, Mark Brennan may be making a living from the things he puts out but it’s clear these sounds also groove him. As an aside, I’ve never compiled an album but if Cherry Red or anyone else wants to give me a job doing that I’d happily accept. I rather fancy repackaging the type of material found on the Knuckle Girl series for the femdom market – as there’s more than a few quid to be found there! That said, it would be more appropriate for a woman to be doing such compiling. ↵
- It isn’t just on the issue of the gross under-representation of women that Brennan’s choices might be questioned. To touch on just one other matter, back when I was a kid some people used rhyming slang invoking soft drinks for racial and sexual orientation slurs and one of those turns up on ‘Get Outa My ‘Ouse’ by Hustler. The track previously featured on Cherry Red’s All The Young Droogs set, where the issue isn’t directly addressed, but the rather more humorous sleeve notes suggest lead guitarist Mickey Llewellyn who sings the song was a former stockbroker – suggesting to me a ‘the middle-class are the worst bigots and are entirely responsible for institutional discrimination’ line of thinking around the matter. The Boot Boys sleeve notes mention Brennan’s old band The Business released a cover version of this song – on which the lyrics were slightly changed, seemingly to remove the homophobic slur – so presumably he realises there’s an issue here, although nothing is openly said about it in the notes to this set. ↵
- When I told a friend who’s spent decades working for record labels I was reviewing Boot Boys and what it was, she told me Oasis were yob rock. Therefore, if there are follow up compilations, I really hope the series sticks with the 70s and doesn’t take us into the 90s. ↵
Creases Like Knives 