Anything But United behind Jimmy

YOU know the score: you're in a punk band, you have a number of hits, you're supposed to be a "spokesperson" for the 1977 generation, you make some waves, then disappear. As punk recedes, so does your hairline and you become just another fondly remembered gobby singer from yesteryear.

Twenty years down the line, cognisant of how punk nostalgia has got a grip on the media and how lesser bands have reformed and toured successfully, you put the show back on the road. People turn up, you make noises about a new album with (oh no) "a whole new direction" and everyone nods their head but really just wants to hear the two or three hit singles again.

So many of the class of '77 have taken this route. Some are welcome, others are an excruciating embarrassment. Somewhere in the middle lie Sham 69.

It was all going to plan: the reunion tour was going well, there was talk of the dreaded comeback album, and the interest was still there. That was how it should have remained. What wasn't factored in was how and why Sham 69 ended up playing If the Kids Are United on BBC's Newsnight last year.

A few days previously, Tony Blair had used the Sham 69 song as his choice of walk-on music for his party conference speech. A nation went into shock. New Labour had always previously used bland rubbish at the party conferences.

The tone was set when D:Ream's poxy dance-lite Things Can Only Get Better was used as new Labour's official campaign anthem back in 1997. More recently, Labour party conferences used music by The Lighthouse Family. A case of soft, meaningless rubbish meeting its political counterpart.

And then, out of nowhere, Sham 69. Poor Jimmy Pursey didn't know what hit him. During their heyday, Sham 69 were plagued by National Front members using their gigs as a recruiting ground for their imbecilic party. Sham 69 retired from the live stage in 1978, specifically because a concert had been broken up by battling National Front skinheads.

Now Labour was hijacking If the Kids Are United. "Usually you see Blair with Geldof and Bono, the jet-set political messiahs," said Pursey of his song's use at the conference. "I see my band as more of an SAS unit. We're outlaws. I hope he's not using that song as a sort of backing innuendo to say Gordon and Tony are united. That song was written as a spiritual thing, as an anthem for the people of this country."

Significantly, when Pursey was asked to revisit the song for his Newsnight appearance, he changed the lyrics to make it an anti-Iraq war anthem.

Next month Pursey and Sham 69 are poised to have their biggest ever hit with a reworked version of their song Hurry Up Harry (a minor classic if ever there was one). Because the official English World Cup anthem songs are so bloody awful, listeners to Virgin Radio were polled to select a band and a song they would prefer as "the alternative anthem". Hundreds were mooted, but Sham 69 won out. (The official song, incidentally, is Embrace's World at Your Feet.)

Sham 69 have retitled the song Hurry Up England. This may not be a wise decision. Pursey always unequivocally expressed his absolute disgust with the policies of the National Front and received death threats from extreme right groups for his work with the Anti-Nazi League fighting racism.

By now you should see what is wrong with this picture: combining England football fans and Sham 69. This is nothing to do with Pursey, who is a fantastic person, but everything to do with the repellent Oi movement, which attaches itself like a malignant virus to certain forms of music. Has nobody thought this through?