Skrewdriver - All Skrewed Up (1977)

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to break the hiatus of posts on the English Chemical Theatre with a brief and nasty review of a Skinhead classic – Skrewdriver’s seminal All Skrewed Up.   I’ll be honest that the last six months have been a little on the pants side: the economic downturn which has raged with varying intensity since 2008 has finally begun to bite me on the bum.  Business is down and stress levels are high.  What better prescription than 40 minutes of no nonsense punk angst?

Despite the band’s later infamy, All Skrewed Up received decent reviews in the music press of the time and shows a good level of musicianship sometimes missing from contemporary punk outfits.  The lyrics are pure therapy as well – with all the clichéd rants about tax codes, angry youth, 9-5 drudgery and restrictive social norms.  The album is surprisingly coy when it comes to bad language and there are none of the Neo-Nazi/White Power references which were later to turn Skrewdriver into the house band of the National Front.

All Skrewed Up and the wider punk movement were a strong and vivacious reaction to a decadent, tired and irrelevant society.  What was true of the mediocrities in the late seventies is no less so of today’s society.  I smile at the thought of what Skrewdriver’s wordsmiths would have made of the beastly business rhetoric of “Human Resources” or the painful sham which is the X-Factor.

All in all a perfect panacea for a disenchanted English chemist, stranded somewhere between youth and wisdom.  Stand out tracks for me are the blues driven Where’s It Gonna End  and the classic punk workout An-ti-so-cial.