Barmy Army: When industrial dub scored English football
One of the most innovative branches of UK post-punk was the pioneering On-U Sound Records.
Formed in 1979, producer Adrian Sherwood would sonically brew a strange weld of dub expanse and industrial abrasion that pulled reggae-obsessed punks like The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart and The Slits singer Ari Up into weirdly aggressive, mutoid outgrowths of reggae riddims saturated in alien effects and metallic scrape.
Later on, Sherwood would corral the likes of Jamaican artists Mikey Dread, Prince Far I, and Jah Woosh into the fold with the Singers & Players ensemble, even striking a fruitful creative partnership with original dub maverick Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.
Around the release of his electronic side-project Tackhead’s debut album in 1987, Sherwood sought to lift their sample-heavy caustic funk for the Barmy Army project, a swaggering machine dub that skulks with Tackhead’s belligerent bite yet smattered with audio snippets and field recordings of football commentators, terrace chants, crowd roars, and the occasional patriotic anthem fed through its subversive yet affectionate sonic maw. Roping in Tackhead’s bassist Doug Wimbish and guitarist Skip McDonald, 1989’s The English Disease dropped as a homage to “the beautiful game” while also lifting the lid on the political turmoil surrounding the day’s football culture.
The turbulent era that shaped Barmy Army’s football dub experiment
English football was navigating trying times. As Jack Langford details in 2019’s The 1980s – Football’s ‘Darkest Decade’ post, long before The Premier League had cemented the Football Association’s commercialisation in 1992, the era’s privatisation mania had reached the First Division clubs a decade earlier, Tottenham Hotspur the first to float themselves on the London Stock Exchange and setting a precedent where the country’s clubs began turning into public limited companies and ripe for shareholder carve-up. As dividends rose, by 1985, Spurs, Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal, and Man Utd all existed in a virtual league of their own, bolstered by a shift toward capital over their traditional support base.
Football found itself the target of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s agenda to “change the soul” while her cabinet economically tore up the country. Having successfully smashed the might of union power and fractured the council estate cohesion with the disastrous Right to Buy scheme, the neoliberal death grip looked to the communal experience club football brought to working-class identity with no less political disdain.
Exacerbated by the backdrop of mass unemployment and the deindustrialised bludgeon on masculine identity, the escalating violence meted out by hooliganism reached its zenith in the late 1980s. Eyeing an opportunity, the press keenly adopted a class lens to the climate of aggression, coding the firms as a ‘working-class’ issue despite their broad socioeconomic make-up. This classist bile was spewn all over the victims of the Hillsborough crush, The Sun keenly spreading lies from South Yorkshire Police, alleging drunken loutish behaviour causing the death of the 97 Liverpool fans.
Then Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke starkly crystalised how “Thatcher had grouped football supporters alongside militant trade unions and the IRA as ‘the enemy within'” in 2016’s And the Sun Shines Now: How Hillsborough and the Premier League Changed Britain.
The troubled energy emanating from English football had found its way into Tackhead’s work before Barmy Army, albeit with a greater, warped sense of humour. 1987’s ‘The Game (You’ll Never Walk Alone)’ industrial hip-hop single was laced with samples from ITV commentator Brian Moore—it’s B-side a ‘remix’ swapping Moore for Thatcher and Ronald Reagan speeches—and hiding the message “Where’s the Barmy West Ham Army?” in the vinyl press etching.
Football in music was nothing new, Chas & Dave penning three FA Cup Final songs for Spurs, Everton dropping 1985’s ‘Here We Go’ and Liverpool FC’s collaboration with Gaye Bikers on Acid three years later on ‘Anfield Rap’ ahead of their 1988 final against Wimbledon—The Reds losing one nil. Yet, football in the pop charts was still an infinitely more innocent and awkward presence on Top of the Pops, the stylish cool of New Order and John Barnes’ rap or Collapsed Lung’s ‘Eat My Goal’ yet to land in football’s rapidly shifting culture. It’s this elder spirit that Barmy Army inhabits, playfully posturing as a ‘footy fever’ novelty record belonging to the days of Roy of the Rovers and Scorcher and Score. It blends in, The English Disease‘s Subbuteo cover perfectly capturing football’s charm before it became too glossy for its good.
The English Disease is a confounding yet essential entry in the On-U Sounds back catalogue, tackling an endearing yet cautious examination of football culture on his moniker’s only LP. Involving everybody from Ministry‘s Al Jourgensen to former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, Barmy Army dribbles its dub football between leftfield funk and electro-collage ensconced with a captivating media layer of skewed game archive and match samples. Dropped when English football had lost serious confidence in itself, 1989’s The English Disease stands as a crucial musical time capsule of the national sport at a seismic pivot, soaking up the years of tumult while intuitively anticipating football’s new shining, glossy hinterland—for better or worse.
