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Jimmy Pursey – is he value for money?

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Jimmy Pursey seems to spend most of time on stage these days (with one of the versions of Sham 69) inviting fans to sing his songs. When he does occasionally sing, it doesn’t seem to be very good. Do we finally have to face the truth – that Jimmy’s not that great?

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  3. I never thought he was that great tbh and never considered him amongst the great punk singers. I always though it was downhill from Tell Us The Truth for the band and boy, that video is very damning of him taking the money without the effort.

  5. Mate, most of us faced the truth in 1978 – this guy’s a chancer and always has been. The English Kim Fowley, he appears on a couple of great records but completely by accident.

    Colin – your defence of terrible 2nd-wave punk artists who continue to ply their always-dubious trade well past state pension age is admirable in human terms but… if these people were 10 years younger they would be Candy Flip or, in Jimmy’s case, Jive Bunny.

      • I was 8, but I do know that Questions And Answers was a much sung song in my school playground at the time, so it was all about the kids.
        (OK, that was 1979 and it was only me and 2 friends singing 4 lines of the chorus)

        • Colin was probably a toddler. Don’t forget that, behind his professorial air and mortar board, there is a mop of boyish hair. “We” are Pursey’s vintage, whilst Colin is more Gary Barlowe.

          • Ha! Not a chance! 😀 I was 10 in 1978… so, admittedly, maybe two or three years below Jimmy’s fan base. But Gazza Barlow?!? That said, I can’t deny that Gazza has more vocal talent than Jimmy and a hell of a lot less yobbishness.

  7. I think the audience got what they wanted. They shout along with the shout along choruses. They’re getting what they would have got in the 70s, with hopefully considerably less violence. It’s not for me, but I came to terms with Jimmy not being that great about 45 years ago.

  8. I’ve seen both Sham69 variants doing the rounds, but the Jimmy fronted one was the better of the 2.
    He is a somewhat limited vocalist, and may never make the list of greats, but one can never deny JPs passion.
    He’s 68 now, so getting the audience to sing is saving his vocal chords

  10. I remember films on TV about bands of that time. He was always trying to get through a gig without the audience bringing it to a halt with fighting. He thought the kids were all right but they were out to prove him wrong.

  12. Jimmy Pursey was very much a local hero when I was 15 & at school in Sunbury.
    On a wall in Staines, someone had graffitied the band’s name. Unfortunately, they’d written over someone else’s mark, so it appeared to read “Spam 69”

    Several of my year would go to the Walton Hop (“it’s down to the Hop for the local girls”) & see him there in 1978. I saw him make a speech & join the Clash at the Victoria Park Rock against Racism gig – he belted out White Riot, it didn’t require too much in the way of a tune, but then he was always more about “attitude” & “doing it for the kids’. At the Hop, they used to hold “Mime competitions” (a precursor of “lip sync challenge”) Maybe he should rely on the skills learnt then.

    • Sunbury man eh @Timbar ? Me too, I went to Sunbury County, which became Sunbury Manor. I went to Walton Hop a few times as well, although I’m guessing I might be a little bit younger than you…

      • I went to Bishop Wand from 1974-79. – I’ve just turned 61. One of my classmates Matthew Parker is now the Bishop of Stafford – the first Bishop from our C of E school.
        I’m a Hampton man rather than Sunbury & public transport across the “county line” always used to be a bit irregular, so I never went there.
        My mum taught at Ambleside Middle School in Walton, picked up the gypsy slang “chawed, cushty” from her pupils & learnt that Jimmy Pursey was expelled from Rydens.

        I’ve still not been to the Hampton Hub, although Hampton & Richmond FC fan Simon Rivers is playing there on Saturday

    • This brings back some memories. I remember the Walton Hop as I lived not very far away and it was a local landmark. I was too young to go there but the older boys at school did. I was altar boy and for about 4 years and served at a closed order convent at Easter. This was actually quite a good gig. The terrifyingly long Easter period masses and services were serious affairs and I liked the atmosphere and the way it was done at the convent. About 100 nuns – all very friendly. Some had never left the place in their adult life.

      I mention this because a young lad of about 16 appeared one year. Quite old for an altar boy and I had no idea where he came from. He was very much how I imagine Gazza was in terms of behaviour. Constantly chattering, enormously funny and creative when it came to pranks, even when we are on “stage”. The direct opposite of how an altar boy should be. Anyway, he was always, always going on about the Walton Hop. Obsessed, he was. It was pretty much his only topic of conversation when he wasn’t being a prankster.

  13. I recall watching Sham 69 on OGWT. My mother, 60 and shabby genteel, knitting, observed, “why is that butcher’s boy so CROSS?”. One must wonder, given Walton and Hersham never looked so bad to me. I also saw him at the RAR events, one with The Clash, and once at the Elvis Costello gig in September 1978 where I think Sham withdrew from the programme due to their bonehead fans. This is his finest moment (other than the interpretive dance era), which I preserved for posterity:

  15. I remember my cousin (who was importantly a 4 years older than me) lending me That’s Life. I taped it and thoroughly enjoyed it at the time. Haven’t given it a thought since but will give it a whirl.

    JP was always the excitable kid who let ideas out before fully thinking them through. When he ran out things to be indignant about, he ran out of things to be interesting about. But for a couple of years he was exciting and pretty relevant.

    Sham 69 also knocked out several great punk singles.

    But that video reminded me of working in a pub and JP being the difficult one to get to sup and leave. And it was shit pub.

    • He was interviewed on Radio Luxembourg when that album came out, and they played tracks from it. He explained what the songs were about. Hurry Up Harry is the story of him visiting his friend Harry’s house on the way to the pub. Harry was taking a long time to get ready. Similar pearls of wisdom were revealed about the other songs. It must have been enlightening for his fans to have the hidden depths of his lyrics spelt out.

  16. If Jimmy displayed passion it might balance out the limited quality of his musical contribution – but the thing is, it doesn’t seem from many of the live clips in recent years that he can be bothered. Of course, I may be wrong – it may be that the gormless chimp-like stage presence is his schtick and the kids love it. I’m not convinced, though…

  17. On a tangent… there doesn’t appear to be any clips of the Tim V version of Sham 69 (the, er, ‘sham Sham 69’?) on YouTube dating from after March 2018. Could it be that they blinked first? That the market for Sham 69 really could only accommodate one version?

    Here are Tim and the (Ulster) boys (whoever they are/were) in March 2018:

    • According to wikipedia (which is actually true for a change, as Jimmy has related this story before):
      ‘Sham 69’ is said to have derived from a piece of graffiti that co-founder Jimmy Pursey saw on a wall. It originally said Walton and Hersham ’69 but had partly faded away, and made reference to when Walton & Hersham F.C. secured the Athenian League title in 1969.

  21. I saw Sham a couple of times, including at Reading 78 which was essentially a barely container riot by the ‘Sham Army’, & Pursey with The Clash at Victoria Park – the footage from the stage is truly unmatched in catching what The Clash were about & why old punks still get misty eyed about them
    – as for Sham, the gigs really were mental & the scary violence can’t be overstated – it’s still the only time I’ve bottled out of going into a gig, genuinely terrified by the goons hanging around outside.
    I think Pursey really was a good egg but was not the greatest musically & could never hope to prevent the band’s deranged audience from wrecking everything.
    Even their farewell gig ‘Sham’s Last Stand’ was pandemonium, I knew 2 kids who were hospitalised after it
    If anyone wants to fork out dosh to see Jimmy give it a go after all these years, good luck to them & to him.

  22. I had some similar experiences to @junglejim – I’d add that Pursey was courted far too much by Gary Bushell at Sounds, and would be encouraged to hang out at the offices and mouth off every week. I seem to recall that The Cockney Rejects and Angelic Upstarts ended up having run-ins with him after initially being allies.
    Blimey, though, gigs could be scary back then. Being a couple of years too young to buy a ticket in ’77/’78, my entree to the live world was the likes of Sham, the Upstarts, the Rejects et al, and there’d always be a ruckus. The change that occurred is usually credited to the advent of Two Tone and ska, but those early Specials gigs were often unpleasant. Worst was probably Bad Manners in 1979, with the St Johns Ambulance lot stretchering folks out from the support band onwards.
    Gradually, though, things got better. On the whole….
    When I was working in telly, late 80s, early 90s, a cameraman mate used to earn money on the side (hustle) by filming bands and making promo videos. He was phoned by someone from something like ‘World Music Limited’ and asked if he’d shoot a gig they were putting on in North London. Various acts from around the globe, world music sort of thing, he was told. Sure, he said. He arrived, with a couple of crew, at the pub, only to find a note on the door saying they’d had to switch to a venue in Essex. Off they drive, arriving an hour or so later at the new location, also a pub. A pub adorned with St George’s flags, and full of boneheads. They get escorted in, and fearing for their lives, set up for filming what turns out to be a Blood & Honour event. Luckily it all kicks off between various factions (White Supremacists of England vs England White Supremacists, possibly) a few minutes into the first band, the plugs are pulled and they leg it.
    As Jim says above, Pursey truly didn’t intend any of the consequences; I think of him as a misguided social worker (‘I’m gonna build a place for the kids!’) whose naivety and narcissism resulted in things getting out of control.

    • Idealistic talk about “the kids” sometimes leads to “the kids” biting the speaker on the arse. Yesterday, I spent 4 hours reading papers from a social services department regarding a “misunderstood youth” who ran rings around their purblind evasions, having a right laugh while doing so. THEN came substantial violence that couldn’t be ignored. I say this as a classic “George Weber” liberal down to the moustache, green woolie, and Saturday’s “Guardian Review” on the stripped-pine kitchen table.

    • Things were indeed weird (& very scary) notably peaking between late 77 & 1980.
      The skinhead revival can be attributed almost entirely to Sham initially as they mutated from a Punk band to the Skins favourite & the start of Oi, other bands were similarly affected.
      A friend & I had seen the Angelic Upstarts a couple of times, had a great frenzied time & at the next gig were shocked to see that the audience had become 90% skinheads in the course of around a month – if you didn’t feel like jumping on the bandwagon it suddenly got pretty frosty.
      My recollection of that entire era is essentially one of violence & fear of violence right across London, notably on the tube system ( I think somebody wrote a song about it) to the extent that we’d check whether Madness or Bad Manners were playing before deciding whether to go & see a band, in order to avoid the goons travelling to or from their gigs. This was after a few notable run ins that made the movie ‘The Warriors’ look quite relaxing!
      My memories of the only time I saw Joy Division (in Kilburn) are tainted by crapping myself en route to the venue, on the way back to S London from the venue & fretting about the homeward journey throughout the entire gig. Not the ideal way to enjoy music!

  23. Speaking of the Rejects, Jeff Turner (once Stinky, now nice and clean and bourgeois) has just circulated this announcement to clarify that their ‘No more touring’ talk from last year means, well, ‘No more touring’. It’s a bit like Jimmy clarifying that ‘Hurry Up Harry’ was about hurrying Harry up… 🙂

  24. Amazing though it may be to say it, there seems to be a higher degree of musical quality and ‘professionality’ in the Cockney Rejects vis a vis Sham 69. How about that?

  25. Is there a punk group who released at least 26 albums, each with starting with a successive letter of the alphabet? I have a feeling I saw something to that effect, but cannot remember who it is.

  28. It’s a shame there isn’t (at least, I assume there isn’t) any market for a Jimmy Pursey tribute act – if there were, ‘Not Jimmy, Per Se’ would be a delightful band name. 🙂 Obviously, ‘Sham Sham 69’ is the barndoor name awaiting any such tribute artistes.

      • My memory, like Bob Mortimer/Tubby Brewster’s balance, often seems shot to shit, but you mentioning Pursey and crime caused some hippocampal activity and I remember that when I was working on the Jonathan Ross telly show, I booked Siouxsie and Paul Morley for a heated debate about youth culture. Also present was Tony Colston-Hayter, an utter prick who, nominally arguing for the right to go to raves, handcuffed himself to Jonathan and threw a glass of water at Morley.
        The next day (a Monday), I get a call from Jimmy Pursey, who said ‘There was only one thing wrong with that show, me ol’ cock sparrer’ (which I thought was odd, seeing as they were a photo-Oi combo). And what’s that one thing, Jim, me ol’ china plate?
        ‘I wasn’t on it! I’d have given that herbert what-for!’
        I then asked him about the place for the kids he’d promised to build, and the line went dead.
        Anyway, I just checked, and TCH ended up in jail for scamming bank customers.

        • “Grow up, sit down and stop talking a lot of bollocks”… it’s not often JR comes off best. I was 16 watching this and thought the handcuff man was a prize bell-end.

          The other main thing I remember about that was that JR said The Stone Roses were going to be on next week – this was late 1989 and they were the kings of the world pretty much. Morley congratulated Ross for this, whereupon Ross said he hadn’t booked them himself and didn’t even like them.

          The Roses were never on and later said they’d got more pride than to go on that show and have fish thrown all over them (oddly specific….)

          • I think that Messrs Brown, Squire et al will find, once they calm themselves down, that they were cancelled because we’d been promised an exclusive and they only went and appeared on The Late Show on the Tuesday after our Handcuffs show. The one where there was a power cut.
            I’d had to really push for the rest of the production team to agree to them performing in the first place; I believe part of my convincer-presentation involved photocopying various over-excited music press reviews, all under the heading ‘Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
            do you, Mr. Jones?’

            • One of the many golden opportunities that they didn’t take.

              See also: releasing your comeback album in December.

              PS. Your comment rather puts the kybosh on the standard rock critics’ narrative that in 1989 the world fell on their knees before the Stone Roses – a year during which they were outsold about thirty to one by, er, Johnny Hates Jazz.

  30. Do we know if this contemporaneous smash by the ‘Tones was a tribute to Jimmy P? ‘No one ever listened to a word he said…’

    As an aside, I’ve always been impressed by the chutzpah of the hookline: ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…’

    It says literally nothing.

  31. Back to the OP: is Jimmy Pursey value for money?

    Of course he is – just not for the reason that he might wish…
    I mean, just look at the length of this thread – that’s entertainment VFM right there, innit?

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