At first glance ‘Classic album’ may appear a little overblown or erratic for this series of classic Oi albums here at Creases Like Knives, but hear us out. The Blaggers ITA (originally sans the dub-styled ITA as just The Blaggers) emerged out of the band Complete Control, signed to Roddy Moreno’s Oi Records and frontman Matty Roberts (later Matty Blag) appeared in a 1980 BBC documentary about skinheads in the Shropshire new town of Telford.
Recorded and mixed over the space of a weekend in Wood Green’s Southern Studios, the album on Words of Warning celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and remains in print through Mad Butcher Records. When you consider what was actually happening in the early nineties – council estate riots across the country, shopping centres divested of sports and designer wear using stolen Cosworths, LA burning after Rodney King, cut-price privatisations of our energy and water, the British far right getting their first taste of electoral success in East London (and a kicking in South London) and the IRA casually shelling Downing Street with mortars from the back of a Ford Transit – then it’s all on here, a document, almost.
A subsequent major deal with Parlophone (then part of the arms-selling EMI conglomerate) saw them dubbed the Blaggers EMI, Blaggers Inc. or, even worse, a ‘student band’ among some quarters of punk merit arbitration. Though you at least could now source their records from the 99p bin at HMV rather than sending soapy stamps to some anarcho-crusty distro.
Andrew Stevens sat down with founder member and guitarist Steve, saxophonist Olaf, and hornsman Brendan to find out more. Together with vocalist Christy, who joined later, they talked him through the album track-by-track.
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As with Defiant Pose (1991), Red London (1994) and Tainted Love (2005) before it, Stewart Home raided his record collection for this novel’s title, epitomised by mean and moody rocker Kip Tyler’s smouldering classic single. ‘She’s My Witch’ has been covered by several artists since its 1959 release, most notably in a Cramps style by the Panther Burns (1987), woozy garage rockers the Fuzztones (1992) and most recently psychobillies The Radiacs (2010). I mention these only as Home’s own musical tastes and live forays, particularly to Dalston’s Garageland, get frequent mentions and largely fuel the online relationship which unfolds between the novel’s two protagonists, Vespa-riding personal trainer (and former skinhead) Martin Cooper and video editor Maria Remedios, a former dominatrix more likely to be found in bars with Hells Angels and skinheads than behind an editing suite in her native Spain (in one Facebook message she rues how the latter are now all “just fat middle-aged men”). This in itself opens up the time and place of the novel, East London in the post-financial crisis, pre-Brexit era (understandably as this is published on John King’s London Books imprint, the jacket text goes in heavy on this) where personal wellness and the creative industries meet, mutually reinforcing. As London riots then prepares to stage a few weeks of global sport, Martin and Maria get further acquainted on social media and commence the exchange of favoured YouTube clips of garage rock and proto-punk and the odd cult film trailer.
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