The Battle of Birmingham: The most violent rock show in history
Call this a hot take, but Americans have always done punk rock better than the Brits.
In Ol’ Blighty, punk basically boiled down to the freedom to gob on whatever and whoever you like. There were a few outliers who saw the value in combining it with political expression, like The Clash and The Slits.
However, the vast majority of British punks were angry kids who just wanted to lash out. Who wanted to piss people off at best and outright hurt people at worst. Just look at the Sex Pistols yukking it up on Bill Grundy’s TV show, decked out in swastikas if you need proof of that. No matter how much they sang about ‘Anarchy in the UK’, there was about as much political thought in it as an episode of Tiswas.
Perhaps no one put it better than Cockney Rejects frontman Jeff ‘Stinky’ Turner (or Jeff Geggus to his mum) in an interview with The Guardian conducted in 2010 when he commented: “Most of the punk bands at the time, they had their ideals – the Clash, ‘Career Opportunities’, political stuff, fair play, when I was a kid, my thought for punk rock was that it could put West Ham on the front pages.”
The truth is that there were a lot more kids like ‘Stinky’ than there were like Joe Strummer. The difference was that in 1980, Cockney Rejects had just taken their Hammers fandom into the mainstream.
The Rejects’ biggest hit was a cover of West Ham anthem ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. The thing to bear in mind, though, is that football fandom today is not what it was in the late 1970s and 1980s. The band going on Top of the Pops in Claret and Blue wasn’t just wearing their East End origins with pride; it was also a statement. You see, the band had a die-hard following in the form of West Ham hooligans, the Inter City Firm. In its day, it was essentially going on live TV and showing that your band was gang-affiliated, and I’m not exaggerating in the slightest.
How did Cockney Rejects start The Battle of Birmingham?
This wasn’t just for the cameras, either.
Mere weeks after that Top of the Pops performance, the band had a gig booked at the Ceder Club in Birmingham, home of another English football club with a notorious firm, Birmingham City. The Brums got the word that the ICF were coming to town to be at the Rejects’ gig and (if you believe the band’s recounting of events), around 200 of them came to politely inform them that they didn’t take too kindly to that sort of behaviour ’round here, thanks very much.
The Brummies spent the entire set of the opening act, Kidz Next Door, terrace chanting and waiting for the headline act to appear. Despite verbal exchanges between the sets of hooligans, nothing had broken out just yet; this all changed when the Cockney Rejects took the stage. Halfway through their first song, a pint glass was hurled on stage, smashing against the amps. Stinky Turner, ever the man to calm things down with empathy and kindness, responded by saying, “If anyone wants to chuck glasses, they can come outside and I’ll knock seven shades of s**t out of ya.” Oh dear.
The brawl that followed cost over two thousand pounds of damage. It also gave guitarist Mickey Greggus a head wound above his eye that needed nine stitches. Even when he was getting the procedure done, he did so with more brawling happening directly outside the hospital between the two firms. What’s more, the moment this story hit the papers, other football hooligan firms saw this as open season on the Rejects, due to their affiliation with the ICF.
After a similar altercation in Liverpool, no booking agent in the country would book The Cockney Rejects, and this put the kibosh on any hope they had of stardom. That said, though, Stinky did put West Ham in the papers, so he did what he set out to do. Can’t say fairer than that.