The Ten Best British Punk Songs

[johnfoyle]

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/musi ... ory=525561

The Ten Best British Punk Songs
By the Cowboy Junkies
28 May 2004


1 ANARCHY IN THE UK The Sex Pistols (1976)

An obvious choice, but this song is the groundbreaker, the summation of an ethos, delivered with so much anger that there is no doubt about the message, nor any question of the messengers' commitment. With Steely Dan on the radio, nobody realised then what the impact of British punk would be, but a year later it was enormous.

2 DOWN IN THE SEWER The Stranglers (from 'Rattus Norvegicus', 1977)

Jean-Jacques Burnel's crafted basslines drive all of The Stranglers' songs, especially this one. Hugh Cornwell's guitar-work and equally nasty vocals take us to a place where nothing's nice, everything's sleazy and he's quite proud of it. They make rockin' in the gutter feel good.

3 I FOUND THAT ESSENCE RARE Gang of Four (from 'Entertainment!', 1979)

These guys had a great sense of space and rhythm, which they dirtied up with Andy Gill's harsh guitar tones and Jon King's dry vocals. Their take on capitalist degradation had us dancing to lines like: "See the girl on the TV, dressed in a bikini/ She doesn't know it but she's dressed for the H-bomb." Das Kapital meets James Brown - equal amounts of cynicism and funk.

4 ALBATROSS Public Image Limited (from 'Metal Box', 1979)

The ultimate high-concept rock music: Jah Wobble's bass is so low you can hardly hear it, Keith Levine's guitar so piercing it's painful, while Johnny Rotten Lydon wails like an impaled banshee.

5 NO XMAS FOR JOHN QUAYS The Fall (from 'Live at the Witch Trials', 1979)

These guys took the smarty-pants level up several notches - you had to have a college degree to get all of the lyrical references. Musically, it's not too far from Lou Reed via Captain Beefheart, but jaggedly updated with screeching guitars. Intellectual punk at its finest.

6 SEVENTEEN SECONDS The Cure (from 'Seventeen Seconds', 1980)

Simple, subtle and so effective, this is plaintive in the purest sense. Skirting the edges of punkdom, The Cure appealed to the angry melancholic in all of us.

7 NEW DAWN FADES Joy Division (from 'Unknown Pleasures', 1979)

What I said about "Seventeen Seconds", to the power of 10. Every element of this song was a revelation: the slowed-down guitar melody, the cavernous drum sounds, the dirty heartbeat of a bassline and Ian Curtis's graveyard vocals. A suicide note set in a beautiful wasteland.

8 CROCODILES Echo & the Bunnymen (from 'Crocodiles', 1980)

Looking like the Beatles, sounding like Jim Morrison and staying at the Hotel Velvet Underground, these boys were unafraid of the pop song, and had an intensity to match Joy Division's. This song was one of their best live; these bunnymen could rock.

9 REQUIEM Killing Joke (from 'Killing Joke', 1980)

This song would be a great soundtrack to the outbreak of nuclear war. The first heavy-metal punk band, to whom everyone from Metallica to Nirvana owes a debt. Metal was one of punk's "dinosaur rock" targets, but instead of destroying it, Killing Joke made metal nasty, darkly humorous and powerful.

10 SONNY'S BURNING The Birthday Party (from 'The Bad Seed EP', 1982)

The end of rock'n'roll. If you could set off an explosive device inside an Elvis Presley song, this is what it would sound like. The opening screamed vocal, "Hands up who wants to die", followed by pulverising guitars, drums and more screaming is a numbing experience. But this blend of pain and poetry keeps you listening - no matter how ugly it gets - for the flashes of post-rock brilliance embedded throughout. It's fitting that, when Nick Cave climbed out of this wreckage, he became something of an Elvis crooner himself.


The Cowboy Junkies are playing the Shepherd's Bush Empire, London W12 on Wednesday June 2 .

[Pov]

Nothing by The Clash????

[clairequilty]

Nothing by The Clash????

Never heard it. How does it go?

Was it on Cut The Crap?

[Otis Westinghouse]

That's a pretty feeble idea of 'punk'. Sorry, but Gang of Four and Joy Division (and yes, that is an awesome track) are post-punk, maybe, but just not punk per se. Absurd to ignore The Clash, it's true.

[clairequilty]

And by the way, I actually like Cut The Crap.

[clairequilty]

Out of curiosity, was this list published by "Cowboy Junkies", the band... or "Cowboy Junkies", the candy bar?

[Jackson Monk]

.....and what about 'Babylon's Burning' and 'Sound of the Suburbs' ?

[Tim(e)]

No London's Burning???

The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, PIL etc are now "punk" bands???

The Birthday Party are now a British band???

Why do I have to read stuff like this first thing on a Monday morning

[tokyo vogue]

Huh? No Clash? No Buzzcocks? No 4skins? No, well, any good punk song?

[Boy With A Problem]

For what it's worth
Here's My list (without repeating any artists)

Sex Pistols - God Save The Queen
The Clash - White Riot
The Buzzcocks - Boredom
The Jam - In The City (I thought the first lp was pretty punk)
X-Ray Spex - Oh Bondage! Up Yours
Wire - 12XU
Stiff Little Fingers - Suspect Device
Undertones - Teenage Kicks (perhaps a stretch calling this punk, but the Ramones like simplicity of the first lp is punk genious to me).
The Members - Solitary Confinement
The Damned - Stab Your Back

[Otis Westinghouse]

That's infinitely more like it. Don't know the Damned, Members nor Wire songs, but they're the sort of bands to have in there (though I guess that's early Wire, a band I have never heard much by, sadly). Jam In The City is definitely a song in the punk idiom, even if their punk peers rejected them as punks blah, blah. Undertones is slightly stretching it, but it's still legit.

I'd put Damned New Rose in, or maybe Neat, Neat, Neat, partly as EC homage. And I'd side with Doof for the more obvioud Sound of the Suburbs for the Members. And I'd want to add an early Siouxsie song, probably Love In A Void.

[Gillibeanz]

Peaches by the Stranglers, and Hurry Up Harry or Hirsham boys by Sham 69 must be in there somewhere surely?.........