Too punk for punk in the late 70s, Oi! elder statesmen in the early 80s, living-legend role models in the early 90s, Cock Sparrer never got credit for what they started. Today, after all these years, they’re as strong as they’ve ever been.
Cock Sparrer, an East End London street-punk institution, with a core quartet of members who’ve been together since 1972, have never been more in demand than they are right now. According to their imposing, stentorian lead vocalist Colin McFaull, they have enjoyed a career in reverse. “Maybe bands in future will follow our model,” he says, “shun big record deals to follow their own path; leave big gaps every few years… Not make any money out of it.”
In 1977, Cock Sparrer’s faces (in the eyes of a music industry and press already blind-sided by a spike-topped, McLaren-marketed, hippie-averse new order) simply didn’t fit. They looked like they’d just walked off the terraces. They were actually working class. Their music a shade too brutal, their hair a couple of grades too cropped, Cock Sparrer were just too punk.
Maybe, because they’d already been hard at it for five years and had honed their brand of sonic aggravation closer to the bone than anyone else (until Sparrer-indebted Oi! arrived on the fringes of the mainstream in ’81), they were simply too far ahead of the game.
So while they couldn’t get arrested (actually, poor analogy, they very much could get arrested) in 1977, by 1982 they’d been embraced as underground elder statesmen by a never-morereceptive domestic punk scene. By the early 90s they were being held up as living-legend role models by such leading lights of the US crossover hardcore scene as The Dropkick Murphys and Rancid.
When Cock Sparrer (né Sparrow) started out – with a core line-up (then as now) of singer McFaull, guitarist Mickey Beaufoy, bassist and songwriter Steve Burgess and drummer Steve Bruce – their musical role models were local heroes and mod godheads the Small Faces, along with the glam stars of the day: Slade, T.Rex, Roxy Music, Bowie, Mott, Alice Cooper. Their ambitions were modest: “We’d copy songs that were in the charts to try and pull a few birds down the youth club, but it didn’t always work out, obviously.”
Four years on, it became apparent from reading music press reports that they were not alone in touting crop-haired, glam/mod-based, short, sharp and aggressive shocks. Something similar was rumbling up west. And in the summer of ’76 a visit was made to Chelsea’s King’s Road to deliver a demo cassette to Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.
“We said: ‘Have a listen to this, this is the real stuff’, and arranged for him and one of his guys to come and see us rehearsing over
