Third World War

I’ve got just the thing for you,
A real cop beater,
A sawn-off twelve-gauge
Five-shot repeater,
Get your ass long down to Hammersmith town,
Join the urban guerrillas,
Take up arms against the crown.
(‘Hammersmith Guerillas – from the Third World War album ‘Third World War II’)

Forming in 1970 Third World War weren’t the first commie proto-punk band.  That honour (perhaps) goes to the MC5. But whereas the MC5 were very much part of the America of peace & love 1960s – their music speaking of a joyous new dawn where we as brothers and sisters would “come together” – TWW were a manifestation of the disillusionment and nihilism of 1970s England that would create Punk ‘proper’ just a few days later.  TWW’s lyrics, though more overt in their politics than the MC5’s ever were, don’t concern themselves with hopeful paeans to a new socialist future, but with pub brawls, frustrations with trade union officials looking for arrears on union dues, and the quality of the cuisine in factory canteens  (the tea is “piss”).  The one song that does provide a look towards revolution (‘Ascension Day’) is more concerned with the camaraderie engendered in the guerrilla battle of a Guervarian coup (“load your magazine clip/ I’ll load mine”), than the hopeful flowering of proletarian democracy and a new egalitarian society.

 

Third World War was conceived by the band’s manager, Jon Fenton, as a reaction to the hollow, yet fulsome hippy optimism that permeated rock and pop music at the time. Prefiguring Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols (appropriately, John Lydon was a fan of TWW), Fenton assembled the band on this impetus, “manufacturing” the group to provide a voice for the realities of working class life in Britain. Fenton found and brought together the team of Jim Avery (bass) and Terry Stamp (rhythm guitar & vocals) - both certifiably young proletariat and aspiring songwriters - along with a rolling assortment of studio musicians.   This admixture would spew forth two albums worth of music that, although probably having too much of a swing and downright groove for most punk bands (even if sputtered with ultra-fuzzed guitars and some fantastically obnoxious musicianship), nevertheless had the requisite authenticity, directness of expression and anger of punk rock.  In fact, the two album cover designs used by the band for their records seem anachronistic entities, in that they could easily have been put out by Crass Records:

If the group’s creation was in anyway regarded by Fenton as a commercial concern, the ugliness and violence of the music created by Avery and Stamp would have quickly put paid to the illusion.  A salutary example of the band’s intransigently uncommercial nature is provided in the case of the song ‘Urban Rock’, which was chosen to be a single, lifted from the band’s second album (the excellently named ‘Third World War II’).  The album version’s lyric were clearly unviable for radio play, due to the narrator at one point extolling having “screwed a bottle in [a “fat thug’s”] face”, so a new version was recorded.  The group obliged with a single version that, if lyrically is more neutered, is if anything more violent due to the aggression of the band’s performance

If in ’77 much of the youth UK was ready to glut itself on anarchy and destruction, clearly, in the years TWW was active – ’70 to ’72 – the hippy dream still had a hold on people, and the band made little impression, quickly petering out due to not making any money.  They were seemingly much derided in the press – with one reviewer averring that they were the worst band in existence – and to this day they are largely forlorn and left out the story of rock music. Appropriately, one of the band’s songs ‘Stardom Road Part I & II’ is a self-aware lament for the impossibility of TWW ever reaching success:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDcHrt72DDk

That said, today they have a few famous vocal admirers, such as Paul Weller and Steve Albini, and can stake some claim to being, along with contemporaneous groups such as Crushed Butler and the Pink Fairies, sonically and spiritually kindred with the movement which was to come a few years later and change rock music forever.  More important than all this though, is TWW’s available recorded output which does not need to be contextualised in this matter for its greatness to become immediately apparent to anyone who loves soulful, strange and fucked-up music. 

For more information on Third World War visit the band’s official webpage:  http://www.stardomroad.com/Stardom_Road/Home.html

Terry Stamp, although forced to return to his previous job as a truck driver, continued to intermittently make music, which he does to this day.  Visit his website here:  http://www.gslmusic.com/

https://www.facebook.com/DarkandDirtySounds

By Mark Foley