UK SUBS
THE GENERATION that time forgot. Music confronting hardships at root level. The continuation of Working Class Protest
through the ages. This is the real world. So they tell me. Let me tell you, they are feeding you with horse shit. The kids are, once again, being hyped. The heritage of punk - musical and ethical - has swollen like a scab of rancid pus into a new patriotism. It is a thoughtless creed, regaled and stoically preserved by numbskulls
Diminished Responsibility (Gem)
Any form of patriosm is, of course, the last refuge of the scoundrel and that's a fair enough (too fair) way of describing the mentors of bands like The Sex Pistols, The Outcasts and The UK Subs, all led by grown men, at least ten years older than the groups' average fans.
The significance of this album's sleeve should not go amiss - a Visage type graphic of two Marvel Comic guitar warriors/marauders - it's a thoroughly modern exploitation angle, designed to attract the common vicarious thrill-seeker. The UK Subs are the missing link in an existence which helplessly and needlessly goes from torturing animals and bullying younger kids, to beery wifebeating evenings by the fireside.
There's a nightmare darkly outlined in this record. It depicts a hooligan falling into a Hawkwind-type sci-fi conspiracy theory. A kind of hell. If I thought that's the way things were going, I'd gladly fill up with 100 tuinol, shave the veins on my wrist and dive onto the tubeline on the way home tonight. Things are bad, a lot of people have no future: jobless and purposeless, some of them are my friends. But the Subs would have you believe on a song like 'Confrontation' that we're in the throes of guerilla warfare.
Perhaps it's about Northern Ireland, in which case - AAARRGH - why don't you just go back to cutting barnets, Charlie? It makes me fairly sick when people recklessly plunder the frightening imagery of terrorism without having, say, spent at least a year under its threat while living in a rat-infested building without plumbing. A package holiday in Divis for these boys, I think.
Perhaps the Subs and their followers feel they confront realities more responsibly and honestly than other rock bands. PISSWATER! The punk scene is an extension of rock's backslapping, wet-towel-flicking social mores, of its dullard-placating musical sloth and non-invention.
The UK Subs are a reactionary cess-pit. Take 'Fatal' on side one - a more wretchedly sexist song it is hard to envisage. Like all wretched sexism, the thing I hate most about it is that it shows the male to be a snivilling, slack-jawed imbecile. An original, useful angle for a song like this - about syphillis - would have been to advertise at least one of the clinics provided for such mishaps in London town. But that would be unthinkable, the Subs only like to moan, rather than try to solve problems.
The people who buy this record probably think it signifies the big burdensome equation with which we all struggle: POWER X MONEY = MISERY AND DESPAIR. But the problems thay talk about, the problems they create, exist in a vacuum. How can you talk about 'class', 'politics' or 'protest' in regard to a record that fails to acknowledge the importance of, for example, Lenin or Orwell, Benn or Foot?
When I become Prime Minister all schoolchildren are going to have to work out to James Brown's 'Superbad' for two hours each day. Then they'll grow up with strength and pride and never become slovenly, wasteful or selfish. I won't have to ban groups like the UK Subs, they'll die due to lack of interest.
Gavin Martin