Pursey worked up some “poetic” lyrics for Hersham Boys this, plus the increased use of keyboards (played by Pursey’s co-producer, Peter Wilson) meant that Sham was nearing the stage of early Boomtown Rats, complete with a surprising cover of the Yardbirds’ classic “You’re a Better Man Than I.” A break with the punk scene, but no less aggressive than usual. All told, a funny punk LP which features “Hurry Up Harry” and the anthemic “Angels with Dirty Faces,” both hit singles. parents, boy and girl, boy and girl’s boyfriend, etc.) between songs. That’s Life offers more of the same, while enlarging on an idea heard briefly on Tell Us the Truth: inserting narrative slice-of-life dialogues (kid vs. (It’s hard to judge how much of that is by design and how much is due to sheer incompetence.) More than any of those, Pursey’s Cockney yelling tabbed him as the Anykid who could, but it’s also true that almost any kid could have written the LP in his sleep. The sound, oddly enough, isn’t so much derived from the Clash and Pistols as it is from the Dolls, Heartbreakers and Ramones. The first LP sidesteps the issue of decent production by having one side with none at all and the other recorded live.
Arguably their best single, “Hurry Up Harry” is about the importance of “going down ‘a pub.” Lead singer/lyricist Jimmy Pursey was earnest enough, and the band simple and basic: although their records are of no lasting import, Sham became the most popular UK punk band of their time, scoring five Top 20 singles. Their populist slogans were ultimately chanted like football cheers and taken seriously only by the enormous British Sham army. The archetypal working class ramalama dole-queue band, deliverers of socio-political bromides over blazing guitars, Sham 69 (the name, and the band, came from Hersham, a town on London’s southern fringes) had a bad case of arrested development.
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