Monocled Alchemist

A few right hooks and jibes

Vice Squad | Stand Strong Stand Proud | (EMI) 1982 | Stand Strong Stand Proud (EMI) MANY THINGS Vice Squad are not. Most positively they’re not often wrong and though being right isn’t always enough it does help.

Being right, a shade to the left of indignantly claiming to be in the right, is something very dear to Vice Squad. The accuracy of their earlier records — dating back to the daft debut ‘Avon Calling’ and ‘Last Rockers’ EP from ’79 —has strengthened their resolve and broadened their range.

They are no longer content with living out their lives using the excuses doled out to them, as did the Oi! boys, and if they’re not above celebrating pyhrric victories in random assaults on an oblivious establishment, they know how to hurt where it counts.

Vice Squad’s tentative jabs at “important” targets are nothing compared to the knockout blows they deliver to the petty ones. This is both sensible and fair, as it is those niggling little things, the personal jibes, that have scarred them the most, namely, from their potential audience, and gamely, us!

Their funniest song, ‘No Right Of Reply’, is the savage kick back against the critics the title implies, delivered by Beki with a wonderful mixture of cynical disdain and self-righteousness: “Always quick to criticise/Not so quick to think!” she prods, before dropping her opponents with: Now they see fit to glamourise/Prostitute beliefs before our eyes/Those could have everything but make out otherwise/Are made into heroes by a pack of dirty lies!”

Cheap

We stand chastised! Chastised enough to listen on, anyway. In ‘Out Of Reach’ and ‘Deathwish’ — the latter more ‘Quadrophenia’ actually — I hear Beki’s concern for punk casualties simultaneously expressed in tones of dismay tempered by scorn for the frailties that lead to such depressed states. And in ‘Cheap’ she belittles sexual braggarts with a few telling observations about potency. Or otherwise.

Pitched somewhere between epigram and slogan, the words — by Beki or guitarist Dave — are often smart and memorable. They have the cutting edge lacking in the more mundane post-punk splutter of the group.

However, there’s something endearing about the group’s dour drabness and singular sense of purpose that hooks Beki’s over-brimming vitality in the grim reality they’ve chosen to represent. The balance comes out about right. That is, what could have been great ends up being not bad. Not bad at all. (NME, 15th May 1982)

Vice Squad | Stand Strong Stand Proud | (EMI) 1982

VICE SQUAD: ‘Stand Strong Stand Proud’ (EMI ZEM 104) PUNK’S NOT dead, it’s just dull. The new punk’s same as the old punk, but lacks the early sense of discovery, release and malice. It feeds on the corpse of early Damned, early Banshees, the one and only Pistols. The new punk has turned the original spite into a collection of cliches, a jigsaw of studs.

Vice Squad‘s particular punk diagram relies on the presence of Beki Bondage. And Beki does have a presence, even it she’s only the last gasp of a line that begins with Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene. Punk has stuck to Beki like glue. She has all the enthusiasm but none of the necessary contempt. She sings her words as if they have no meaning, following the bouncing ball of protest, straining to make some connection between the words and the music.

Gutterchild

Vice Squad have two emotions in their music, resentment and depression. Baki specialises in tales of depression, of those who fall by the wayside. There’s the animals in ‘Humane’, the stoned victim of ‘Gutterchild’, the sixties-scarred apathetic, of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Massacre’ and ‘Out of Reach’. For all Beki’s enthusiasm, she sounds as if she spends most of her time holding a ‘Deathwish’ at bay.

This deathwish is best represented by the band with whom she performs and the production they’ve received on this record. The best a ‘new’ punk band can hope for is to sound almost as lively as an earlier and more original punk thrash. Vice Squad don’t roar or rage or exult — they go through the (now) tidy motions of punk, clipped drumming, leading bass, wall-to-wall guitar.

Vice Squad are the letter and not the spirit of punk. Beki is their best card but she’s too young to be playing such old music. Punk used to have a sense of humour. Now it’s a full-stop. + + (Record Mirror, 29th May 1982)