By the end of the '70s, British punk was splintering into several distinct strains, most of them arty or ambitious in their own ways.
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music was an attempt to keep punk a populist, street-level phenomenon; most of it came from the Cockney working class of London's East End. Likely taking its name from the Cockney Rejects' 1980 song
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(before which it was simply known as street-punk),
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was loud, brutal, and extremely simple, with loads of shout-along, almost football-chant choruses. In essence, it was punk rock that was most at home in a rowdy pub. It was somewhat similar to hardcore, but not quite as extreme;
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stuck much more closely to the original punk blueprint laid out by the Sex Pistols and early Clash. In fact, critics frequently disdained the style for its punk-purist lack of adventurousness, and the way its political statements often replaced the Pistols' wit and intelligence with angry rabble-rousing. The latter wasn't universally true, but all the same,
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acquired a bad reputation when it was adopted by racist skinheads aligned with the neo-fascist National Front organization. Most bands (and skinheads) took pains to distance themselves from this unsavory element, especially after a number of violent incidents at live gigs; however, a few genuine white-supremacist bands (most notoriously Skrewdriver) were enough to give
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a stigma which it never completely shed. The band that brought
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/street-punk to prominence in 1978-79 was Sham 69, and they in turn gave career pushes to
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stalwarts like the Angelic Upstarts and the Cockney Rejects. The mid-'90s punk revival led to a renewal of interest in
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; many favorite early albums were reissued, and a number of new bands popped up both in the U.K. and overseas.