Radio One: Live In Concert

SHAM 69: “Radio One: Live In Concert” (Windsong)

WAS IT ‘Sham’ from the Hersham Boys and 69 as in phoney mutual oral sex? Or perhaps sham as in shambles? On this evidence it seems to be all of them, by varying degrees.

Jimmy Pursey – Punk’s Noddy Holder – rabble-rouses with the worst, his sharp, shallow slogan-heavy anthems to Jack the Laddish Yobbish solidarity always something of a non-starter. ‘If The Kids Are United’ is an agitational chant ripped from every SWP picket-line, spiky with crashing sham-Steve Jones guitar and even though its “you are he, and he is you” sentiment never stood a well-aimed gob’s chance with their pilled-up speed-pogo safety-pinned Barmy Army, it’s still worth a wide grin for its ludicrous opportunistic cheek. And even now, in a parallel universe, it’s getting the Techno Dance treatment from ATR, which is immortality of a kind.

Pursey – unlike, say, Chelsea’s Gene October – charted several times. But unlike, say, Billy Idol, he failed to survive Punk’s battered anti-celebrity beyond the revival circuit.

These nine tracks, recorded at the Paris Theatre in February 1979, catch Sham 69 at their sleazoid high-point, with ‘hits’ ‘Borstal Breakout’, ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’ (dedicated to the Angelic Upstarts) and 4:35 minutes of their pathetically pseudo-profound ‘Questions And Answers’. The energy levels are enjoyably brattish and, as Sham’s ‘real’ gigs got notoriously trashed by what insert-scribe and fully paid-up fan Mark Brennan describes as the ‘over-enthusiasm’ of the Sham Army, Pursey dives into the slightly more controlled BBC facsimile with a voracious hunger. He teasingly sends up the radio producer’s supposed warning over bad language, mis-announces the band as the Shadows, and contrives further naughtiness by re-writing ‘Day Tripper’ in ways that Lennon and McCartney would not approve, ie: he slips in the occasional ‘shit’.

It all seems like an inter-dimensional gate opening up into an alternative time-world where all this good-natured venom is still taken seriously, but nevertheless, an album not without its moments of endearingly thuggish fun.

• Andrew Darlington