Album Review: Angelic Upstarts – We Gotta Get Out Of This Place / 2,000,000 Voices
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Captain Oi!’s mission to reissue classic punk albums continues apace and moves into the sphere of combining two records from each band, as begun with their treatment of the Cockney Rejects’ debut full lengths. It’s almost like it’s someone’s birthday with three (count ‘em) meaty collection all being released on the same day. Elsewhere you’ll find 999 and Discharge, but for this review, let’s see what’s going on with South Shields’ favourite street punk sons, the Angelic Upstarts.
Back in May, the Captain released the Upstarts’ debut album, Teenage Warning from 1979, and this new 2cd package takes the next couple of steps through the band’s recording history.
Released in April 1980, We Gotta Get Out of This Place found the line-up who’d put the debut together still going strong, The single, Never ‘ad Nothing gets things going with the raw sound of feral guitars and an agitated vocal performance from Mensi; the fist-pumping chorus and raging tempo set the scene for the bulk of this sophomore album, and is followed by the previously released B-side of Teenage Warning’s Murder of Liddle Tower, Police Oppression.
The indignant Oi! and Street Punk flow thick and fast throughout We Gotta Get Out of This Place, with raging tirade against inequality following raging tirade. Their Destiny is Coming showcases Steve Forsten’s muscular bass, other single, Out of Control is fast, fat and stacked around a massive chorus, as is Listen to the Steps and the driving Can’t Kill a Legend.
Yet it’s not just about the obnoxious sounds of the north-east streets; here you’ll also find the band stretching their collected Punk muscles and mixing it up with a more classic genre sound on the likes of Capital City and a chugging Shotgun Solution. King Coal has a fat riff to guide the traditional sound, while Lonely Man in Spandau – a reference to Rudolph Hess – finds the Upstarts in a lighter, almost The Clash or Stiff Little Fingers, mood.
The title-track and Animals’ cover, is as punked-up and irreverent as you would expect from these not-so Angelic Upstarts, which became the album’s third single, the edited version of which can be found among the bonus tracks of this disc.
The other two bonus tracks are Nowhere Left to Hide and Unsung Heroes II, both of which had been previously available as additional tracks on other versions of the album.
The most left-field track on the record must be the barroom feel of Ronnie is a Rocker, with its saloon piano and jaunty rhythms, making a break from the socially conscious stance of the band’s usual material.
Produced by Peter Wilson, who’d work with Sham 69, The Jam and Cockney Rejects, to name but a few, We Gotta Get Out of This Place sounds fat and full, without losing any of the cutting edge of the band; it would also go on to annoy just the right sort of people.
2,000,000 Voices was released in June 1981, meaning the Angelic Upstarts had knocked out three albums in less than two years, but the intensity of that meant Steve and Keith departed and the new rhythm section of Glynn Warren on bass (and washboard!) and drummer Derek Wade, who’d been with the band before Teenage Warning.
Again, the music was written by Mensi and guitarist, Mond, and manages to be even more a diverse range of tunes that the previous album. Beginning with 2,000,000 Voices, the Upstarts again tackles the notions of class and inequality with scant concern for political correctness. A song about the unemployment numbers of the time, from the very start the freer sounding guitars and constant refrain of the title, embeds itself on the brain.
The band were nothing if not savage critics of the sticky-end of the lollipop they saw – mostly – northern, industrial communities getting, so produced a series of Working Class anthems, aimed at the plight of the under appreciate engines of this great nation.
Ghost Town – not The Specials’ classic, but in the same thematic vein – comments on the urban blight caused by economic ruin and the disintegration of manufacturing, through a general punk tune and the addition of Simon Wilson’s saxophone.
Mr Politician, with its tickling guitars, casts a very dim view of the professional political class and, forty-some-odd years later has aged like fine wine. Sadly, the classic punk of Guns for the Afghan Rebels hasn’t, they being the freedom fighter opposing the Soviets in the Eighties, who would go on to become factions of the Taliban in the Nineties.
The pure punk of Jimmy, We’re Going to Take the World and number 57 single, Kids on the Street show the Angelic Upstarts had not strayed too far from the origins and time had not brought the band any closer to loving the police if You’re Nicked is anything to go by. While the consequences of police brutality raise their head again, with the reggae-beats and echoing guitar of I Understand telling the tragic tale of Richard Campbell who, like Liddle Towers, lost his life while in custody.
The jaunty beats of Last Night Another Soldier belie the seriousness of the subject matter when addressing the Troubles over the Irish Sea; the acoustic-led England makes the grave mistake of showing patriotic pride and received flack for it, while Heath’s Lament is Mensi’s spoken word caustic jibe at how the first miner’s strike generationally divided communities.
To break up the serious nature of this album, the Upstarts pop in a fiddle-led hoedown in the shape of Mensi’s Marauders and brings the record to a close with the piano and violin centred duet, I Wish.
2,000,000 Voices features five bonus tracks, including a single edit of I Understand, the B-side of the equally reggae infused Never Come Back. Other non-album B-sides on offer are the raucous The Man Who Came in from the Beano, from Last Night Another Soldier; England’s flipside, Stick’s Diary, and a driving The Sun Never Shine, featured on Kids on the Street.
Again produced by Peter Wilson, this time in association with the band and Ashley Goodall, 2,000,000 Voices reached number 32 in the UK album charts. Following this third record, the Upstarts would continue to experiment into their next albums, though the release schedules would slow down a little. But that’s for another day.
