Garbage Days Revisited #32: The Boys - "The Boys" (1977)

"Well I'm living in the city in the shadow of things to come/Everywhere I turn, neon lights like a midnight sun/Livin' in the city under traffic control, it's just enough to make you believe that there's a subway to heaven and an underground to kingdom come..." - The Boys - Livin' In The City

After a couple of forays elsewhere, this week's Garbage Days Revisited sees us return to the waters of punk and power pop with one of the great overlooked albums of 1977, the debut from The Boys. I've said it before in both Sounds From The Junkshop and here that in my early twenties I started seriously listening to punk and while I've always said I'd never doubt the joys of listening to the Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Ramones etc, it was always travelling down the lesser explored backroads that I found a lot of my favourite bands of the genre.

The Boys were one such case - formed by guitarist Matt Dangerfield who'd been in proto-punks the London SS with Brian James and Rat Scabies and keyboardist Casino Steel who'd been in legendary glam almost-weres the Hollywood Brats, they recruited guitarist Honest John Plain who had been at college with Dangerfield and was working as a factory foreman at the time. Plain brought two of his apprentices, bassist Duncan Reid and drummer Jack Black (no, not that one...) to complete the line-up. Largely written off at the time as too poppy and contrived, I still maintain their debut album is one of the best '77 punk albums with some properly killer tunes and arguably pointed the way forward to the power-pop movement that would come along a couple of years later.

Steel would bring a couple of old Brats songs with him to the Boys including the gleefully disgusting Alice Cooper soundalike Sick On You ("I ain't sadistic, masochistic, you and me are through/I'm sick to death of everything you do/And if I'm gonna have a puke, you bet I'm gonna puke on you!") and the revved up power pop ode to a cheeky quickie Tumble With Me while a speeded-up cover of the Beatles' I Call Your Name, while it might not exactly have endeared them to the Clash influenced "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones!" crowd showed their influences.

Lyrically, The Boys is very much '77 with songs about dodging the police (Cop Cars, Keep Running), sex (Box Number), posers down the Roxy (Soda Pressing) urban boredom (Living In The City) and juvenile delinquency (Tonight). But it's packed to the gills with top drawer hooks and choruses that really marked the Boys out as a different breed to a lot of the "no future" brigade, almost like the missing link between the Pistols and the spikier pub rockers like Eddie & The Hot Rods from a year or so before.

The group were picking up a fair bit of momentum by the summer of '77 and the album breached the Top 50. Unfortunately the week after it was released, Elvis died and the pressing plant who were producing it instantly diverted all their attention to repressing the King's back catalogue meaning it dropped straight out of the charts after one week. Arguably the group's career never really recovered commercially - their second album Alternative Chartbusters was similar quality to their debut with lead-off single Brickfield Nights, written about Dangerfield's time growing up in Leeds, being a power-pop classic and there being plenty of other hook-laden standouts like Taking On The World, Do The Contract Hustle, Cast Of Thousands, USI and the surprisingly well executed ballad Heroine (by punk standards another serious no-no though which can't have helped their credibility - then again, as Generation X showed sometimes the best power pop stuff comes out of not giving a stuff what the trendies think of you). Although it did well on the continent, sales were negligible in dear old Blighty and the group would soon find themselves dropped by their label NEMS (who would later have both the UK Subs and the Damned on board briefly).

The group would move on to indie label Safari and return to 1980's To Hell With The Boys (which was recorded in a town called Hell in Steel's native Norway hence the name) which was another solid collection of songs and yielded them a couple of indie chart hits in Kamikaze and Terminal Love. By the time of their final effort, 1981's Boys Only, Steel had left after being deported back to Norway (he would later record with the late Gary Holton former frontman of the Heavy Metal Kids and star of Auf Wiedersehn Pet) but the album was another good collection of songs with Weekend being another hit that should've been and other tracks like Let It Rain and Little White Lifeline being good indicators that the band had very much still got it but again, sales were negligible and after being dropped by Safari, the band would split in 1982.

As with a lot of punk bands, the Boys would reform in the '90s (Plain in the interim joining with ex-UK Subs and future Dogs D'Amour guitarist Darrell Bath to form the very underrated Crybabys who may just be making a GDR appearance very very soon) and Dangerfield, Plain and Steel are still out there recording to this day with a new album due soon apparently. Reid meanwhile, having left the band a decade or so ago, now fronts the Big Heads who have done at least two certified classic albums in recent years in the form of 2017's Bombs Away and last year's Don't Blame Yourself (Nite Songs review here). They may have largely got lost in the shuffle in their heyday but in recent years, the Boys have deservedly become a very influential band on a lot of power pop groups and all four of their albums are well worth a checkout but for me, their debut really is one of the great lost classics of 1977. Track it down, give it a spin and see for yourself.