Police Oppression<\/a><\/p>\nDebut 7″ single by Angelic Upstarts re-released\u00a0by London based Small Wonder and Rough Trade Records (working in partnership) a few months\u00a0after the original North East based\u00a0Dead Records\u00a0release\u00a0had sold out and\u00a0several months\u00a0before the band\u00a0were riding high in the Top\u00a040 with the second 7″ single ‘I’m\u00a0An Upstart’\u00a0.<\/p>\n
This track was mentioned in the comments of another post recently so for the folk that mentioned this classic track, here you are…<\/p>\n
Text courtesy of Tony Puppy’s fellow muso journo\u00a0at ‘Sounds’ weekly music paper, Gary Bushell.<\/p>\n
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Singer Tommy \u2018Mensi\u2019 Mensforth and guitarist Ray Cowie, known as Mond, formed the Upstarts in the summer of \u201977 after getting blown away by the Clash\u2019s White Riot tour. Childhood mates, they had grown up together on the Brockley Whinns council estate in South Shields and later attended Stanhope Road Secondary Modern school (Mensi got expelled from the local grammar school at thirteen for delinquency.)<\/p>\n
Mensi worked as an apprentice miner after leaving school. Forming the band at 19 was his escape route from the pits. Mond worked as a shipyard electrician right up until their first hit. The Upstarts\u2019 original drummer and bassist quit after violent crowd reactions to their first gig in nearby Jarrow, to be replaced by bakery worker Stix and bricklayer Steve Forsten respectively. The band were also soon to recruit the services of Keith Bell, a self-confessed former gangster and one-time North Eastern Countries light-middleweight boxing champ, who as manager, bouncer and bodyguard was able to maintain order at early gigs on the basis of his reputation alone.<\/p>\n
The Upstarts soon attracted the attention of the Northumbria Police Force, who haunted the band\u2019s early career like a malignant poltergeist. Police interest stemmed from the Upstarts\u2019 championing of the cause of Birtley amateur boxer Liddle Towers who died from injuries received after a night in the police cells. The inquest called it \u2018justifiable homicide\u2019. The Upstarts called it murder, and \u2018The Murder of Liddle Towers\u2019 (b\/w \u2018Police Oppression\u2019) was their debut single on their own Dead Records. Later re-pressed by Rough Trade, the song\u2019s brutal passion was well received even by music press pseuds, although not by the Old Bill who infiltrated gigs in plain clothes. Charges of incitement to violence were considered. Only the Upstarts\u2019 mounting press coverage dissuaded them. For their part the band were uncompromising. They appeared on the front cover of the Socialist Workers Party\u2019s youth magazine Rebel soon after and accused their area police of being largely National Front sympathisers.<\/p>\n
Official police action might have been dropped but unofficial harassment continued unabated. Mensi claimed he was constantly followed and frequently stopped, searched and abused by individual officers. The band blamed unofficial police pressure for getting them banned from virtually every gig in the North East of England \u2013 via the promise of raids, prosecution for petty rule breaking, opposing licence renewals and so on. The Upstarts got the last laugh though when in April \u201979 they conned a Prison Chaplain into inviting them to play a gig at Northumbria\u2019s Acklington Prison (where ironically Keith Bell had finished his last sentence). 150 cons turned up to see a union jack embellished with the words \u2018Upstarts Army\u2019, a clenched fist, the motto \u2018Smash Law And Order\u2019 and a pig in a helmet entitled \u2018PC Fuck Pig\u2019. The band hadn\u2019t managed to smuggle in a \u2018real\u2019 pig\u2019s head (they usually smashed one up on stage) but the cons revelled merrily in the wham-bam wallop of rebel anthems like \u2018Police Oppression\u2019, \u2018We Are The People\u2019 (about police corruption), and a specially amended version of \u2018Borstal Breakout\u2019 retitled \u2018Acklington Breakout\u2019.<\/p>\n
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The Daily Mirror splashed with \u2018Punks Rock A Jailhouse\u2019 (wrongly identifying me as the band\u2019s spokesman.) The Prison Governor and local Tories did their nuts, with Tynemouth MP, the appropriately named Neville Trotter, condemning the gig as \u2018an incredibly stupid thing to allow\u2019. Only Socialist Worker printed a true record of the gig, quoting Mensi telling prisoners they\u2019d be better off in nick if Thatcher got elected that summer, and urging punks to vote Labour as \u2018Thatcher\u2019s government will destroy the trade union movement\u2019. (In reality Mensi\u2019s brand sub-Scargill patriotic socialism was far removed from the SWP\u2019s revised Trotsky-lite posturing).<\/p>\n
The band\u2019s salty populism and savage post-Sham punk attracted a massive following of working class kids in the North East, the self-styled Upstarts Army, while the power of their debut single convinced Jimmy Pursey to form his JP label with Polydor. The Upstarts were the label\u2019s first signing and also their first sacking after a jumped-up Polydor security guard tried to push the band about. He took on Mensi in a one against one fight and went down like the Belgrano. Polydor dropped the band. They never bothered to ask for Mensi\u2019s side of the story. Soon after the Upstarts signed with Warner Brothers. Their second single, the Pursey produced \u2018I\u2019m An Upstart\u2019, was released in April \u201979, charted, and was chased hard by the \u2018Teenage Warning\u2019 single and album<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Murder Of Liddle Towers Police Oppression Debut 7″ single by Angelic Upstarts re-released\u00a0by London based Small Wonder and Rough Trade Records (working in partnership) a few months\u00a0after the original North East based\u00a0Dead Records\u00a0release\u00a0had sold out and\u00a0several months\u00a0before the band\u00a0were riding high in the Top\u00a040 with the second 7″ single ‘I’m\u00a0An Upstart’\u00a0. This track was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-downloads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2315"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2323,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions\/2323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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