The acres of hysterical newsprint that ensued drowned out any chance of Oi! music getting a fair hearing, ever. When The 4-Skins, The Last Resort and The Business played a gig at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall in 1981, the gig was surrounded by rioting Asian youths. The band that brought Oi! and street punk to prominence in 1978-79 was Sham 69, and they, in turn, gave career pushes to Oi! stalwarts like the Angelic Upstarts and the Cockney Rejects. Most bands – and many skinheads – took pains to distance themselves from this unsavoury element, especially after a number of violent incidents at live gigs, but a few genuine white-supremacist bands (most notoriously Skrewdriver) were enough to give Oi! a stigma which it never completely shed. Unfortunately, Oi! acquired a bad reputation when it was adopted by racist skinheads aligned with the neo-fascist National Front organisation and followers of the genre were universally labelled as an unruly contingent of violent, right-wing hooligans. The Oi! movement was marked by strenuously collectivist politics and chanted football-cheer choruses. In essence, it was punk rock that was most at home in a rowdy pub (similar to hardcore but not quite as extreme). When Garry Bushell, then features editor at Sounds, coined the term “Oi!” he gave us a punk subgenre that was loud, brutal, and extremely simple.

Oi! music was an attempt to keep punk a populist, street-level phenomenon, and most of it came from the working class of South London and the cockney East End. By the end of the 1970s, punk in Britain was splintering into several distinct strains, most of them quite “arty”.

Cockney rejects oi oi oi rar