Month: October 2023

What Have We Got? The Turbulent Story Of Oi! by Simon Spence (Omnibus Press 2023)

This is the heartwarming story of a journalist who, having written extensively about britpop, discovers and falls in love with Oi. Now Simon Spence is spreading the good news about skinhead rock to a whole new audience – and so, his book is very much pitched towards those who have discovered the genre even more recently than he did. Spence’s opening sentences are: “A definitive history of Oi!? Yes and no”. Serious historians don’t do definitive, not even a hedged definitive.^[1]

There is a foreword by Cock Sparrer founder Gary Lammin, and the book concludes with a chapter on Lammin’s old band, among other things. This sets Cock Sparrer up as the founding fathers of Oi. However, Spence begins with a chapter entitled ‘The New Breed: Crown Court’. Lots of people like Crown Court, but for me the band’s name was almost enough to put me off ever listening to them. The name is shared with a really boring and thankfully now defunct TV show. That isn’t why the band took the name, but anyone my age who grew up in the UK is likely to make the association. What next? Oi bands called things like Strictly Come Dancing and Good Morning Britain? Incidentally, ‘the new breed’ is a phrase I first came across in Richard Allen skinhead novels when I was reading them in the 1970s, but there’s no mention of that here.

Moving on, there is a delve into Oi precursors, including Sham 69, Menace and Angelic Upstarts. Spence opts for a very conventional view of the bands that inspired Oi, despite the fact that genres evolve and their boundaries change. He very much works with a pre-existing template on the origins of Oi and seems uninterested in broadening this out. Nonetheless, what some early Oi musicians enjoyed musically went way beyond this narrow range of influences.

Spence doesn’t mention west London band Neat Change, who had members geared up as skinheads back in 1967!^[2] Or, indeed, any of the far-out bootboy glam outfits who paved the way for punk – and with this, you could go all the way back to tunes like ‘Factory Grime’ by Crushed Butler. There are some lines in the book about the influence of dystopian tales such as 1984, Brave New World and Clockwork Orange on Oi culture. From this, it could be argued that some minor league London punk bands such as The Unwanted – whose simplistic vinyl releases included ‘Freedom’ (on the first Live At The Roxy LP), ‘Secret Police’ and ‘1984’ – were also precursors to Oi.