And we're running down the backstreets
Oi! Oi! Oi!
And we're running unafraid
Oi! Oi! Oi!
Cause we all know that's the sound of the streets²Cockney Rejects, ‘Oi Oi Oi’ (1980)

Punk appeared to provide an ideal conduit for the English protest song. Titles drawn from 1976–7 – ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘White Riot’, ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours!’, ‘Great British Mistake’, ‘No More Heroes’, ‘Right to Work’ – reveal a disaffection that found creative outlet in youthful upsurges of noise, art, style and performance. Certainly, the modus operandi of a music made simply, without recourse to technical ability, allowed for those with something to say to say it. And many did, ushering in a (new) wave of gob, vomit, filth and fury that splattered across an aesthetic defined by rips, tears, slogans and provocative signifiers.

Not for nothing did early interpretations align punk with the climate of ‘crisis’ enveloping the UK in the mid-1970s. In the music press and newspapers, punk was explained as a splenetic response to rising unemployment and crumbling inner-cities. For politicos, academics and cultural commentators, punk served as a reflection of socio-economic tensions, a creative protest that went beyond the dire state of Top of the Pops or the diminishing returns delivered by rock’s ageing pioneers.⁴Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

As always, things were more complicated. Simon Frith, among others, was swift to dispel any easy correlation between punk and the ‘dole queue’.⁷Simon Frith, ‘Beyond the Dole Queue: The Politics of Voice’, Village Voice (24 October 1977): 77–9. The cultural and political concerns manifest through punk bore bohemian, art school and radical influences that dispelled interpretations focused solely on ‘songs from the street’ (to quote Sham 69). Punk’s praxis bore a mix of critique and social commentary, but often it was fuelled by a vaguer sense of adolescent angst or anxiety. Many bands rejected the political readings projected onto them, preferring – as in The Damned’s case – to explain their sped-up rock ‘n’ roll as expressions of youthful exuberance: kids being kids.

Indeed, much that came packaged as punk was affected and facile. More to the point, an evident fascination with abjection and mental breakdowns, with violence and alienation, might suggest an implicit protest; but it could also indicate deeper existential musings or just morbid obsessions (a ‘new musick’, Jon Savage riffed on what later became known as post-punk).⁸Jon Savage, ‘New Musick’, Sounds (26 November 1977): 23. If punk, taken generally, was a protest, then it was inchoate and fraught with contradictions.

They’ve taken everything
There’ll soon be nothing left
Soon we’ll be walking the streets
With nothing on our feet¹¹Sham 69, ‘Song of the Streets’ (1978).

Inevitably, perhaps, such contradictions saw punk disassemble into a range of sounds and styles into the 1980s. Oi! was one such strand, initially conceived by Garry Bushell as ‘a loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’.¹²Garry Bushell, ‘Oi! -The Column’, Sounds (17 January 1981): 11.

Bushell, a Sounds journalist who compiled Oi! The Album in 1980, located Oi! in a punk lineage that ran through the blunt social realism of Sham 69 onto the Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects and, by 1980–81, the likes of the 4-Skins, Infa Riot and The Business. The term itself referred to an exclamation designed to attract someone’s attention and was much favoured by the Cockney Rejects. Nevertheless, a range of punk groups – many signed to the No Future record label (catalogue numbers running Oi 1 to Oi 24) – lent support, providing Oi! with outposts across the UK.

These were bands who held fast to the idea of punk as a street-level protest; the voice of the young and disaffected working class. ‘Dead end yobs’, Oi!’s resident poet Garry Johnson called them:

bash street kinds like me and you […]
at war with the chosen few
the middle class and the boys in blue.

Oi! was thereby presented as a ‘reaffirmation of punk values’ distinct from the ‘soulless droning of gormless Doors revivalists’ (i.e. Joy Division et al.), the ‘posey peacock brigade’ (i.e. new romantics) and ‘hippy’ anarchists (i.e. Crass).¹⁵Ibid. By contrast, Oi! comprised ‘human hand grenades primed by this middle class and middle age controlled society which has guaranteed them NO FUTURE and left them to fester in their frustrations’.¹⁶Garry Bushell, ‘The New Breed’, Sounds (1 November 1980): 32–3.

Feel the rage, building up
Feel the rage, breaking out¹⁹Infa Riot, ’Feel the Rage’ (1982).

The controversies surrounding Oi! are well-known. The parameters of Oi! were vague and led to much intra-punk musing on what – if anything – distinguished a punk band from an Oi! band. Bushell’s coining of the term raised accusations of Oi! being a media construct, its class-focus rendering an unintended parody of lumpen youth. More seriously, Oi!’s embrace of skinhead culture led to charges of glorifying violence and worse. At a time when the National Front (NF) and British Movement (BM) were recruiting among just the same milieu Oi! appealed to and emerged from, associations with the far right gained currency once a pub hosting a gig in Southall was burnt to the ground by Asian youths resistant to a contingent of skinheads gathering in an area with a history of racist antagonism. A ‘race riot’, the press called it in July 1981, helping ferment a summer of inner-city violence that spread across the country.

More was to follow. That the second Oi! compilation, Strength Thru Oi! (1981), appeared to take its name from a Nazi slogan and featured a Neo-Nazi skinhead on the cover (Nicky Crane), only added to the furore. Thereafter, Oi! was condemned as a platform for ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes to feed their way into popular music.²⁰Simon Kinnersley, ‘The Skinhead Bible of Hate from an Establishment Stable’, Daily Mail (9 July 1981): 18–19; Paul Donovan and Pat Evans, ‘Exposed: The Racist Thug on the Cover of this Evil Record’, Daily Mail (10 July 1981): 3; Lucy Hodges, ‘Racists Recruit Youth Through Rock Music’, The Times (3 August 1981): 3; Mick Duffy, ‘Playing with Fire – And Other Skin Problems’ and Neil Spencer ‘Oi! – The Disgrace’, NME (11 July 1981): 4–5; Joanna Rollo, ‘Sounds Familiar’, Socialist Worker (18 July 1981): 4.

Again, things were more complicated. Those gathered beneath the Oi! banner encompassed a range of politics that extended from the left to the right. Despite the controversies around Southall and Strength Thru Oi!, Oi! garnered critical support from writers associated with the Socialist Workers Party (Attila the Stockbroker, Seething Wells, X Moore) and an endorsement from Red Action’s Micky O’Farrell.²³X Moore was Chris Dean, the lead singer in the SWP-aligned Redskins. For O’Farrell, see sleevenotes to Various Artists, Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot (Secret Records, 1982). Naively, perhaps, Oi! appeared set up to answer Sham 69’s ‘If The Kids Are United’ with a class-based culture that eschewed political binaries, seeking to work out intra-class tensions without input from outside.

As it was, far-right antagonism to Oi! bands for not aligning to their cause led to repercussions, just as it had done for Sham 69 in the 1970s. Bushell, an erstwhile contributor to Rock Against Racism’s Temporary Hoarding and an on-going champion of 2-Tone (with which Oi! shared part of its audience), was physically attacked by the far-right and had his address published in their news sheets.

Oi! was undoubtedly male-centric and tended to the avowedly patriotic, but the culture’s politics were more complicated than the caricature presented by the NME and Daily Mail. Notably, too, Oi! provided a relatively rich seam of punk protest.²⁴Matthew Worley, Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality and British Punk’, Twentieth-Century British History, 24:4 (2013): 606–36.

’Cos Oi! ain’t about having a fight
Oi! ain’t about black v white
The voice of Oi! is unity
No them and us, just you and me
[...] United against society²⁶Garry Johnson, ‘United’ (1981).

To listen to a selection of Oi! songs is to hear tales of youthful misdemeanours, random violence, petty crime and local characters. ‘Jack the Lads’ and ‘Plastic Gangsters’ look on as youths in boots and harringtons run down the back streets or catch the bus to Canning Town. Bushell’s sleevenotes to the Oi! compilation albums framed the music in the context of working-class low culture: bank holiday beanos and saucy seaside postcards; Richard Allen’s pulp novels and Carry On humour; pubs and clubs; football, boxing and rock ‘n’ roll.

But there was a ferocity too. In songs, poems and prose, class injustice was derided and aim taken at figures of authority: teachers, social workers, the police, politicians, middle-class ‘suburban rebels’ pertaining to speak for the working class. In the early 1980s, as the effects of Margaret Thatcher’s economic shock therapy were felt in rising unemployment and accelerated deindustrialisation, so punk’s earlier moniker of ‘dole queue rock’ became ever more apposite, something Oi! actively embraced. Broadsides against the government repeated, calling for jobs and a future or detailing the aggravations of life on the proverbial scrapheap.

Chosen to represent (proto-) Oi! on our list of 250 songs, ‘Liddle Towers’ protested the 1976 murder in police custody of a boxing coach from Chester-Le-Street. Verdicts of ‘justifiable homicide’ and ‘death by misadventure’ were later recorded, despite evidence that Towers was beaten on arrest and later in the cells. The song itself is unequivocal. ‘Who killed Liddle?’, Mensi – the lead singer – asks. ‘Police killed Liddle Towers’, he replies. The story is told: how Towers was arrested for being drunk and disorderly; how he was beaten; how the verdict was ‘a lie’. The song closes with a coda: ‘murder, unpaid murder, murder’.

Questions are unanswered
Policeman scared to talk
Perhaps they are hiding something
Will my message get across
Please tell me why,
Why did he die?
Please tell me now, and tell me how²⁸Angelic Upstarts, ‘The Murder of Liddle Towers’ (1978).

Angelic Upstarts initially specialised in songs of police oppression and tales of being ‘nicked’. But the structures that confine working-class life were also railed against; explosions of anger and frustration were chartered. By the 1980s, unemployment (‘Two Million Voices’) and inner-city strife informed the band’s lyrics, with 1982’s ‘Woman in Disguise’ offering a withering critique of Margaret Thatcher. The band’s anti-racist credentials were made clear on ‘I Understand’ (1981) and ‘Kids on the Street’ (1981), presaging Mensi’s later endorsement of Anti-Fascist Action. Support for Solidarity and the ‘Afghan Rebels’ registered their opposition to Soviet Communism. Interestingly, too, their north-east roots and experience of working in the mines and on the shipyards fed into songs such as ‘King Coal’ (1980) and the anti-scab poem ‘Heath’s Lament’ (1981).

Workplace politics recurred through Oi!, brooding on the processes of deindustrialisation that undermined both the prospect of stable employment and the collective identity of trade unionism. Protest-wise, The Business’ ‘National Insurance Blacklist’ (1981) was notable for its focus on the unofficial debarring of militant trade unionists.

Job chances seem very thin
It's a losing battle we must all win
The C.B.I. are winning, keep down the pay
Mysterious people calling early in the day
The ‘X’ has appeared, another lost life
No tears are shed for the children and wife
The dailies ignore it or treat it with tact
Still when have they been known to report fact?

‘Work or Riot’, they threatened elsewhere, though Business songs also took in sabotaging hunts and the dangers of nuclear power.

As for unemployment, Infa Riot’s ‘Each Dawn I Die’ (1981) documented what it felt like to be an early 1980s ‘number in Maggie’s little book’: trapped in a social prison with no future, ‘I’ve completely given up’. Crime was one way out, though songs such as ‘Catch 22’ and ‘Kids of the Eighties’ recognised the endgame was rarely one of wealth and fortune. The circular score to ‘Catch 22’, with trouble in the street leading to trouble in the home, and trouble in the home leading to nowhere to go, neatly captured Oi!’s pent-up vexations. Yet, like other Oi! bands, Infa Riot’s music was boisterous, celebratory even. In the culture – in the pubs and the music and the camaraderie – there appeared at least temporary salvation.

Britain’s in trouble, country’s bled dry
Handicapped and elderly have all gotta die
No one fights the system, fight with each other
The combine is laughing, scared of big brother³²4-Skins, ‘1984’ (1981).

Those looking for signs of racism in Oi!’s songs and lyrics will find sparse pickings, certainly in the early 1980s.³³Matthew Worley, ‘“Hey Little Rich Boy, Take a Good Look at Me”: Punk, Class and British Oi!’, Punk & Post-Punk, 3:1 (2014): 5–20. Class was the thread that bound Oi!, even as it battled with territorial rivalries and subcultural style wars. The ‘real enemy’, as The Business put it, were those in power. The ‘white working class’, Garry Johnson insisted, ‘[have] got more in common with [the] black working class than they have with [the] rich white middle class’.³⁴Garry Johnson, The Story of Oi! A View from the Dead End of the Street (Manchester: Babylon Books, 1981).

There were glimpses of a darker side. The 4-Skins’ reference to ‘rivers of blood’ in ‘One Law for Them’, a song presented as class war that nevertheless read as a complaint about black working-class violence being excused while white working class disorder was condemned, sheds some light on lyricist Gary Hodges’ far-right history. Combat 84, whose singer Chris Henderson was a far-right activist, are notably absent from the Oi! albums compiled at the time, even as they did form part of London’s Oi! milieu. In the event, the far-right set up its own white power scene in 1982–3, gathered primarily around the reformed punk band Skrewdriver. This later found international reach via the Blood & Honour franchise.³⁶Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, ‘White Youth: The Far Right, Punk and British Youth Culture’, in Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds), Tomorrow Belongs to Us: The British Far Right since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2018).

13, 14: It's a teenage warning.
15, 16: But nobody's listening.
17, 18: Who takes the blame?
19, 20: The twentieth century.³⁸Angelic Upstarts, ‘Teenage Warning’ (1979).

Oi!, then, was crude and sometimes rude. It was defensive and often appeared conservative with a small ‘c’, responding to the political and socio-economic changes of the 1970–80s. As a result, Oi! songs sound defiant but backed-up against a wall, threatening retribution while herding together. The relative gains and relative certainties of working-class life made over the post-war period were seen to be receding, giving way to a perilous future. On ‘Generation Landslide’ (1983), Prole bemoaned how ‘old men stifle dreams’, comparing the opportunities of the 1950–60s to the insecurities of the 1980s.

You had Cathy McGowan, now we’ve got Lady Di
You had a golden future, and we’re left high and dry […]
You had jukebox jury, now we’ve got teenage fury.

Or, for another evocation of history, the 4-Skins’ ‘Bread or Blood’ (1982) looked back to the East Anglian agrarian riots of 1816 to forewarn a return to the stark poverty and social inequalities of the early nineteenth century.

Often dismissed for its unabashed masculinity and revelling in violence, Oi! nevertheless contributed to England’s oeuvre of protest songs. If these really were ‘people you don’t wanna know […] from places you don’t wanna go’, as Sham 69 sung in ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’ (1978), then Oi! still gave space to young working-class voices. Hopefully, history will listen to their teenage warnings.