Category: Music

Stompin’ in Bologna: Rude’s Ghetto 84 Chronicles

The Italian town of Bologna has a population of less than 400,000, but the density of local Oi and punk combos has always been incredibly high. Nabat (arguably continental Europe’s most influential Oi band) hails from the San Donato quarter, while the nearby Bolognina neighbourhood is the historical breeding ground for groups such as Ghetto 84 and Zona Popolare. Ghetto 84 were fronted by Rude, a second-generation Bologna skinhead. He was part of the wave that ruled the latter half of the 80s and established a strong connection between skins and Bologna FC 1909 ultras.

During their initial period, Ghetto 84 recorded the 7-Song tape La Rumba!, released on Nabat’s C.A.S. Records in 1987, and a couple of tracks for the excellent 1991 compilation Oi! Siamo ancora qui!, which was curated by Klasse Kriminale’s Marco Balestrino. An album, A denti stretti, followed in 1996. After that, Ghetto 84 fans had to exercise patience – it took over 20 years for the comeback album, Ultras Rock ‘n’ Roll, to be released.

One joyous afternoon in May 2023, we met with Rude at Hellnation Records in the Bolognina quarter of Bologna. The shop is located on the very street where Rude grew up in the 70s and 80s (and right next to Black Panda Tattoo, where Bologna skins get inked). Today, Rude lives in Dresden, Germany, and he was in town for a visit. We took the opportunity to sit him down in a nearby bar and find out about skins, ultras, punks and mods in 80s Bologna, Rude’s old band Ghetto 84, his subsequent career as a musician and DJ, and his present stint with Zona Popolare.

Interview: Matt Crombieboy
Photos of Rude at Hellnation shop: Francesca Chiari

CLICK PICTURE FOR STOMPING IN BOLOGNA PART 1

CLICK PICTURE FOR STOMPING IN BOLOGNA PART 2

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United Skins: My (non-) interview with Tony of Control Zone

Control Zone’s ‘Bloody Bouncers’ is certainly one of the best tracks off the Last Resort shop’s notorious United Skins compliation of 1982. The band hailed from Omagh, a northern Irish town of some 20,000 souls, and had originally mailed a four-song demo to the Last Resort shop’s Micky French. French sent the band an advance payment to cut a few tracks for United Skins.

But then, things didn’t quite go as expected: ‘Left-Right March’, which Control Zone had written about the H-Block campaign of Irish Republican prisoners, was left off the album, and they weren’t too happy with the artwork either. Next up, French offered them to tour the UK alongside other featured artists such as Skrewdriver, who in the same month as United Skins was released played their infamous ‘coming out’ gig at the 100 Club. Control Zone declined the offer… Although they marched on with a different vocalist and in a new musical direction (a kind of pop/rock with keyboards and a brass section) for another year, the vinyl world never heard from Control Zone again.

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Squelette, Lenders, Ultra Razzia and others: Record Reviews

Italy, where half of us are now based, is a country where everything closes down for August. The cities are deserted as sub-tropical temperatures take their toll and everyone’s off to the beaches: the most popular holiday destination for Italians is Italy. We indulged as well, spending a fair few afernoons sizzling in the sand and cooling down in the waves. Apart from gaining new insights into crab migration – we encountered king-sized ‘blue crabs’ from Asia that have recently hit our shores – we delighted fellow beach bums with our portable record player and a selection of Oi vinyl. Finally we had a bit of time to review a bunch of records passed on to us! So here’s some thoughts on fairly recent (and some not-so-recent) releases, handed to us largely by the good people from Hellnation and Primator Crew.

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Meet the Miners: drilling into Italy’s Oi scene

Confront your average ‘progressive’ with the term “traditional values” and they’ll shudder. But in truth, “traditional values” mean different things depending where in the world you are and who you ask. For Miners, an Oi band from the town of Bergamo in north Italy’s Lombardy region, these values are “sharing, solidarity, a sense of belonging, dignity, fun and a sense of humour” – the traditional values of the Italian working class back when it was among the strongest in Europe. Today, after three decades of Italy’s complete political liberalisation, these values have all but evaporated, they say, replaced by self-seeking individualism and resentment.

Miners were formed about a decade ago and are a powerful live proposition, but they only have two releases under their belt. Valentina Infrangibile asked them why that was, also probing on topics such as Italian vs English lyrics, clobber and being an outsider. Miners are: Albe (vocals), Fil (guitar), Tiziano (bass), Beppe (drums).

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Dalton, proletarian subculture and rock & roll

I was tempted to let Papillon by Dalton enter our Classic Albums series, but it isn’t what you’d call a classic like Red Alert’s We’ve Got the Power or Voice of a Generation by Blitz just yet. For one, it only came out three years ago – and few people outside of Italy will have heard it.

For the Italian skinhead and ultras scene, though, the album was a game-changer and a towering achievement. Dalton, a Roman group formed by former members of Oi bands Pinta Facile and Duap, debuted in 2015 with Come stai?, an album with packed with melodic but robust bovver rock hits. As I have written here before, they’re “very Italian, musically too … their music is pub-rock and glam-rock based, but it has the atmosphere of Italian working-class bars. They sound authentically like where they’re from, mixed with what they’re into”.

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Let’s talk about war: Güerra album review and interview

Güerra: Quanta fame hai? LP
(Hellnation/Radio Punk)

Photo: Gabriele Nastro

The first time I heard about the band Güerra (the Italian word for war, but with an extra Motörhead umlaut) was when my tattooist was inking something that contained the word ‘war’ into my skin. This prompted him to tell me about a “great band from Romagna called Güerra that sounds like Blitz”. I downloaded their first, pre-pandemic album off Bandcamp, but was only partially convinced. While it contained a few catchy tunes, many songs were sung in English and the vocalist’s accent was so strong as to be grating. I also had the impression that perhaps the band had rushed into the studio too early, i.e. before it had enough songs from which to compile a truly strong and consistent album.

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Blank Generation: The Untold Story of a High Wycombe Oi band

Though not often brought up today, there was something of an Oi revival happening in the early 90s. In England, some of the foremost acts were Boisterous, Another Man’s Poison, Braindance and Argy Bargy, and the must-have compilations of the hour were Oi! The New Breed and British Oi! – Working Class Anthems. The latter album also comprised a band of youngsters from High Wycombe, a market town some 30 miles west of central London. Named Blank Generation – though not after the Richard Hell song, as we shall see – the group managed to record a demo, a single and the album Out Of My Head during its four-year existence.

The core of the band were the industrious brothers Benny and Chez on vocals and bass respectively (alongside Kneill on guitar and soon joined by Don on drums). Today they’re both based in London, and if you live north of the river you’re likely to bump particularly into Benny – for, no matter how much he insists that he’s through with the skinhead world, he’s magnetically drawn back to it time and again. Recently it struck me that the story of Blank Generation has never been told, but probably should be, as it offers a glimpse of the British Oi scene at a particular moment in time. So I decided it was time for a historical interview with Benny and Chez.

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Where Have All the Boot Boys Gone? Stewart Home reviews a Cherry Red compilation

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.

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Tchernobyl, Cran, Claimed Choice and others: Record Reviews

Abdul Bleach Boy, who used to do the bulk of our Record Roundups, has been incommunicado lately, i.e. off social media and doesn’t reply to messages. Maybe he’s going through some kind of spiritual crisis – hope not. Instead of a more comprehensive Record Roundup, then, here’s just a few reviews of vinyl that people have sent me, above all the continuously excellent Une Vie Pour Rien, once the best Oi zine and a big influence on Creases Like Knives, now the best Oi/punk label. Plus some random picks I came across over the past few months.

If you want to send us vinyl for review, contact us at creaseslikeknives [at] gmail.com. We don’t normally review digital files sent to us. Cheers!

Matt Crombieboy

Tchernobyl: Face au mur 7’’ EP
(Une Vie Pour Rien)

I wrote quite a bit about this Paris band’s previous releases, and although my reviews were thoroughly positive, I imagine a few things I said may have annoyed the band: persistent invocations of Brutal Combat, for instance – a key influence that Tchernobyl have long since transcended. It would probably be unfair at this point to liken their music to what I described as Brutal Combat’s “moronic, leaden Oi”. Yes, there’s a certain relentless uniformity to the basic structures, but within the rigid form there’s space for ideas and innovation. As time moves on, Tchernobyl immerse themselves deeper in what our guest writer Andrea Napoli has called the ‘Oi wave‘ and others have dubbed ‘cold Oi‘. Some of the sounds – e.g. the guitar lead in the chorus of ‘Unis‘ – even convey a Goblin-like vintage soundtrack feel, though Sisters of Mercy or Joy Division may be more obvious points of reference (unless you’re a French cold wave expert, which I’m not). Tchernobyl subtly expand the boundaries of the genre, losing perhaps some of the rawness of the 2019 demo in the process, but none of their hardness or severity. In a sense, they’re doing to French Oi what bands such as West Germany’s Razzia or Poland’s Armia were doing to hardcore punk when they infused it with bleakness in the second half of the 80s).

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Classic albums: ‘United Colors of Blaggers ITA’

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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