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Today is one of those days when it feels like there isn’t much gas in the tank for my staff pick. As I mentioned in my Record of the Week description, I haven’t been able to get the Salvaje Punk record off my turntable, and I’ve had an exhausting week in which I’ve driven to Richmond twice. Both gigs I saw were excellent, and it was energizing to connect with so many people and see so many stellar bands, but it has left little time for sitting around with records. As we were driving back from Richmond last night, Jeff asked me what I planned to write about for my staff pick. I told him I had no plan, but I spitballed a few ideas that have been floating around in my head. Which brings us to my pick for this week, the Oppressed’s first single, 1983’s Never Say Die.
I think the Oppressed came on my radar via Captain Oi!’s CD collection Oi! The Singles Collection Vol 1, which I picked up in the early 00s and played to death. Bringing together the A and B-sides from 10 essential early oi! 7” singles and EPs, this CD did much to spark my interest and shape my taste in oi!, and to this day the records on that compilation form a big part of my list of favorite oi! records. When I spent a few months in London in 2008, I listened to this comp incessantly and set about acquiring the originals. I got them all except, oddly enough, the Oppressed’s Work Together (though I picked up a 90s Spanish reissue at some point). I’ll get an original of that one day, but it’s my least favorite single on that collection, so I’m not sweating it too much.
A few months ago, though, I picked up a copy of the Oppressed first EP, Never Say Die, in a small collection. I don’t think I’d heard the record before, but it won me over with some of the rawest, most primitive punk music I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing. Weirdly enough, what sound like the band’s weaknesses on “Work Together” are their strengths on Never Say Die. Within the context of the oi! compilation I mentioned above, which is filled with anthems like the Business’s “National Insurance Blacklist,” Cock Sparrer’s “England Belongs to Me,” and Major Accident’s “Mr. Nobody” alongside rippers like 4 Skins’ “One Law for Them,” the Partisans’ “Police Story,” and Blitz’s “Never Surrender,” the slow place and leaden rhythms of “Work Together” are difficult to sit through. However, the primitive delivery on Never Say Die is charming as hell.
Jeff uses this word “dunderheaded” that I think captures why I love this record so much. The A-side, “Urban Soldiers,” is about as dead simple as a song can get, with a straightforward 4-chord progression, a basic rock beat, and vocal cadences one step removed from nursery rhymes. Oddly, the song has two choruses, one built around the phrase “Urban Soldiers” and the other just featuring the singer yelling “we’re skinheads!” four times in a row. The lyrical dunderheadedness continues on the two B-side tracks, “Ultra Violence” (“blood! on the! streets!”) and “Run from You” (as in “I won’t run from you”). The Oppressed sounds like a caricature of a skinhead band, from their lyrical focus on violence and their identity as skinheads to the giant boot on the front cover to their record label name, Firm Records. I would find this kind of thing stupid, but the Oppressed is so defiantly one-dimensional that I can’t help but love them. They are so committed to their thing that they leave me no option but to suspend disbelief and submerse myself in their world.
I should note that while Never Say Die appears to be the work of committed dunderheads, the Oppressed later had a political awakening and devoted themselves to combating fascism within the skinhead scene. The Oppressed’s singer Robby Moreno traveled to New York and discovered the S.H.A.R.P. (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) movement and tried to import those ideals back to England. The Oppressed also got back together in the 90s, and their 1994 Anti Fascist Oi! E.P. repurposed a short set of classic oi! covers, changing the songs’ lyrics to critique the right wing politics that still haunted the UK and European skinhead scenes. These 90s releases aren’t as exciting to me, lacking the wide-eyed sense of discovery I hear on Never Say Die. I’m glad for that later era of the Oppressed, though, because the band’s outspoken political stance allows me to enjoy their earlier stuff free of any suspicions about dodgy politics.