Irish punk provocateurs the Sussed reissue their 1981 EP Don't Swim On The East Coast

A blast from the rollicking punk past will hit in September with the reissue of a classic Irish punk EP by The Sussed.

The 'Don't Swim On The East Coast' / 'I Wanna Conform' EP has been completely remastered.

“I’m so chuffed with the mix,” frontman and main songwriter Rory Stokes told Hot Press, adding “it is so much crisper than the original single."

The band were one of the more provocative and interesting outfits to emerge from the Irish punk scene, with power-pop sprightliness and social commentary spicing up their three-chord thrash.

They also courted controversy, with their single 'Don't Swim...' being banned from appearing in chart listings by RTE for its condemnation of the nuclear waste plant Windscale, later renamed to Sellafield.

Among the band’s fans were Dave Fanning, Larry Gogan and the BBC's John Peel.

Support like this ensured that the RTE ban did little to harm their popularity, though the band never reached the heights attained by acts like the Boomtown Rats or Radiators From Space.

The band did a great line in mischevious PR, gaining widespread coverage for a gig poster boasting the Rolling Stones, Boomtown Rats, AC/DC and the Sex Pistols as support acts, with the Sussed as headliners – on June 31, 1982!

To compensate for a revolving-door situation on the bass-player department, the Sussed hit on the idea of The Masked Bassman, who sported a balaclava.

The mysterious character can be spotted in the band's clip for 'Don't Swim...', which was the test-card clip for Ireland's only pirate television station Channel D: