Never Surrender!

It's a very small world in the middle of a crowd
The room gets dark when the music gets loud
Treble cuts through' when the rhythm takes the bite
But there's no room to move 'cause the floor is packed tight

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Two LPs here by one of the best bands ever to come out of the maelstrom of British punk, hell, one of the best bands ever to come out of Britain. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a debut album and sadly a posthumous compilation, released 13 months later: The Ruts The Crack (1979) and Grin And Bear It (1980).

The skins in the corner are staring at the bar
The rude boys are dancing to some heavy, heavy ska
It's getting so hot people are dripping with sweat
The punks in the corner are speeding like a jet

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I was introduced to the Ruts as a student by my mate Faz who gave me a taped copy of the band’s Peel Sessions LP, telling me I couldn’t call myself a punk until I’d heard them; he was right. I played the hell out of that sucker, one memorable January night when I was too cold in my room to sleep*, playing it three times on my Walkman – the track ‘It Was Cold’ chilling me more than normal.

I have never managed to run into a copy of The Peel Sessions in the flesh but about a decade later I found these two LPs within about a week of each other in Liverpool. They’re two of the best LPs ever to come out of the British punk scene, but somehow not quite as great as that old tape I had back in ’91**.

A voice shouts loud
"We'll never surrender"
A voice in the crowd
"Never surrender"

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The Ruts were a London-area-ish punk band formed back in ’77 but only putting out their first single in ’78 – which in the hyper speed vortex of those scorched-nostril times was wayyy too slow, daddio; they were done and dusted by 1980. The Ruts didn’t so much do reggae, in the manner of the Clash, it was packed deep into their sound every bit as much as punk was and as much as they borrowed some niftily polished rock hooks too.

The Crack opens with, that most thrilling of all sounds to hear on a record, a police siren – the Ruts take it as a metronome and careen off down the tracks, delivering their verdict on ‘Babylon’s Burning’. That they do this with total control, seething with restraint and disdain just makes it reign supreme o’er me. Right from the word go the rhythm section of Dave Ruffy and Segs sound like no other, well no other until folks started to copy them^.

There’s no let up with ‘Dope For Guns’, Malcolm Owen’s vocals bite hard on this one as the rhythm skanks fast in the background. The street hassle of ‘SUS’ (named after the UK’s stop and search laws^^) takes a menacing slower turn and adds some rock power along the fringes.

When we reach ‘It Was Cold’ the previous couple of light punk rock tracks melt away, the atmosphere is set from Owen’s first syllable and Paul Fox’s evocatively chilly guitar tones. Cold, running, hiding, pursuit, fear … it takes me back to that night of shivers. Not many punks at the time could have played what the Ruts did then.

Pausing to invent the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the up-tempo funking/biting/dancing/punking ‘Savage Circle’, we get to more real fabulousness on ‘Jah War’. As befits associates of, the mighty, Misty In Roots^* this is a wired, brass-assisted, reggaefied bulletin from the frontlines of the Southall riots. What impresses so much is just how polished and at home the band sound here, this is their music, never mind the dilettantes.

The rest of The Crack is spirited, punky and very much of its’ time – the live ‘Human Punk’ is particularly ferocious, great, but not as remarkable as what went before. Rabble rousing was a big part of it all, but the Ruts clever and imaginative musicianship and writing showed they could do so much more.

The lights come alive in a blinding flash
Dance floor clears as the mutants clash
Everyone leaves when the heavy's arrive
Someone hits the floor, someone takes a dive

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Malcolm Owen was fired by the Ruts because of his heroin habit and the band split, convincing them he had changed his ways he persuaded them to reform and to celebrate this he took something that inadvertently killed him. So by July 1980 the original band, trailblazers who could have led who-knows where, were no more.

The record company put out a compilation a whole 5 months later, maybe they were more sentimental back then – Grin And Bear It; which is a brilliant title in the circumstances. It’s a mix of a couple of singles, A’s and B’s, two cuts recorded for John Peel’s radio show, three tracks recorded live in France and the just finished, post-humous single ‘West One (Shine On Me)’.

The latter is an ominous track, painfully self-aware and a real plea for, not quite help, understanding maybe? Garry Barnacles sax swoops and soars across a half-punk, half-dub soundscape and the melodies are big and bold. It sounds like nothing else I can think of.

Glasses smash full of champagne
It trickles down the drain
A treat for sewer rats
You're like a rat when you get high
People falling on the floor
Or running out the door

This is immediately followed by one of the best songs ever, ‘Staring At The Rude Boys’; not hyperbole, fact. Everything is perfect in this claustrophobic, dark tale of nightclub violence, clashing tribes and ideologies. Again that taut everything-about-to-snap bass and drum sound, Owen’s rough delivery and the hard poetry of the lyrics … it makes me weak at the knees. Always a favourite to get me pumped up before a night out.

The paranoid pogoing and bopping of the two Peel tracks aside, Grin And Bear It scores big with 1978 B-side ‘H-Eyes’. A hard-nosed diatribe against heroin, delivered with perfect (hypocritical? prescient?) venom by Owen the sound is stripped back and appropriately harsh.

The A-side of the same single ‘In A Rut’ is equally brilliant, a song I have found myself singing to myself at various points in my career. The delivery is meant and the band even at that early stage find time to insert a couple of idiosyncratic rhythmic experiments into.

The three live tracks smoulder with extra aggro and tension compared to the studio versions on The Crack. The band’s sound is perfect, taken straight dow to a 2-track with no overdubs at all, none of the intricacy sacrificed for bombast and speed as is so often the case with live recordings.

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That’s all they wrote and did. The band worked on as Ruts DC and none of it was bad, they were three great musicians but that sense of tension and star quality was not there for me.

So charge your glasses one and all and drink to the briefest and best, the Ruts.

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The picture on The Crack features the band, John Peel*^, Jimi Hendrix, Patrick Moore (his only LP cover appearance?!), various members of the Damned and Jimmy Pursey. Über Ruts fan Henry Rollins owns the original now, apparently; the big show-off!

The sleeve of Grin And Bear It is a lesser thing, my copy is missing the inner sleeve that I only learned today, it was supposed to have. Good job I’m not an obsessive kind of guy …

1044 Down.

PS: Excellent article on Malcolm Owen by John Robb in the Quietus, here.

*despite wearing a jumper and an extra pair of socks in bed.

**I am not sure I want to find a copy of The Peel Sessions now in case it doesn’t live up to memory – I felt music more back then, I had the time to live it a little more, fewer life distractions away from it.

^no Ruts, no Fugazi, none of that post-punk choppiness that came back into vogue again a few years ago.

^^much abused for very arbitrary and racist policing at the time.

^*big time favourites of my dad, Live At The Counter was one of the sacred texts I was raised on.

*^with a schoolgirl on his knee, it would appear.