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Crime 84 - Stolen (2024)

Self Release Album Of Crime 84, punk from jakarta, Indonesia.

FFO: Ultra Violent/Crucifix/The Partisans/UK82

#crimen 84 #jakarta #indonesia #punk #uk 82 #hardcore punk #punk hardcore #street punk

The Insane - “Dead and Gone” 100% Hardcore Punk Song released in 1981. Compilation released in 1998. Punk Rock / Hardcore Punk

Back in the early 80s, the large town of Wigan in Greater Manchester, England was known for having two energetic and ferocious punk bands: The System and The Insane. Actually, scratch that. It was actually more like two and a half punk bands. See, The Insane split themselves into two at one point and both bands ended up calling themselves by the same name. I mean, that's both highly confusing and utterly insane, right? I get the idea of there being multiple bands with the same name and all of them hailing from completely different parts of a country, but two bands with the same name from the same town? Patently absurd! Although, now that I think about it, my not-that-large of a college town had two Chinese restaurants called Ling Ling and neither one had anything to do with the other. So fuck me, I guess, right?

Anyhoo, before their silly split, The Insane were pretty good practitioners of the UK82 sound; that second wave stuff that cranked up the fuzz-distortion and quickened the pace and sang about the fascist, Thatcher-run hellscape of a predicament that they found themselves in during a time of Cold War uncertainty. It was music that sounded like it was made post-nuclear holocaust. And it was wild.

The Insane formed in '79, but their debut record, a three-song 7-inch called Politics, wouldn't come out until 1981. And Politics managed to make it to #18 on the UK indie charts and stayed on those charts for five weeks. But the funny thing about Politics was that the band's frontman, Barry Taberner, was unable to attend the recording session, which left Simon "Psycho" Middlehurst, the guitarist, to unexpectedly take up lead vocal duties, too. The mixing of the record sucked, but Middlehurst did a bang-up enough job to get that record to chart, which is a sort of remarkable thing, all things considered.

Contained on Politics is its middle track, "Dead and Gone," which is a song that pretty much exemplifies the whole UK82 ethos. Middlehurst's chords of highly fuzzy distortion come in short, little, thrashy waves, sounding something like a more inebriated and rawer version of Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" while Dave "Bambi" Ellesmere's drums shuffle and gallop beneath. Middlehurst sings about the futility of war and gang life, as he tells the brief and bleak tale of a nihilistic 18-year old boy who "joined the army just for fun," but is now dead. Middlehurst could also be cleverly equivocating the army with a street gang, which in that case, cool, but it's hard to say definitively. Songs tend to be up to the listener's interpretation, after all.

Good song that this popular punk band in Wigan made before their dumb split.