When the tempers burning
The opening chords of If The Kids Are United sound like a call from the rooftops, raw and unfiltered. The rhythm hits straight, like boots on concrete. Jimmy Pursey’s voice doesn’t ask for permission. It declares. With its chorus shouted like a street slogan, the track gave working-class youth something to hold onto in 1978. No ornaments, no metaphors. Just fists, sweat and voices raised in the same direction.
Sham 69 didn’t come from squats or art schools. They came from Hersham, a London suburb without glamour. Jimmy Pursey had worked in a screen-printing factory before forming the band. He’d seen football terraces from the inside. That gave their music its physicality. Songs weren’t ideas, they were movement. If The Kids Are United was written for real-life Saturday afternoons, for faces pressed against pub windows, for the loud energy of crowds needing something louder to answer back.
There’s no search for subtlety in this track. The riff repeats like a hammer hitting steel. The drums march forward without hesitation. At the time, punk was already flirting with art galleries and conceptual fringes. Sham 69 looked the other way. Their version of punk walked with the lads in bomber jackets, drank cheap beer, got bruised in the moshpit. They didn’t play characters on stage – they were themselves, a bit messy, sometimes unpredictable, always genuine.
I was in a band that wanted to get across to kids of today.
(Jimmy Pursey, 1979)
When the song came out, Britain was tense. The country felt split open along class and generation lines. Factory closures, unemployment, clashes in the streets. If The Kids Are United became an anthem on both sides of that crack – sung by skinheads and punks, played in youth centres and football stadiums. Pursey tried once to calm a riot from the stage by yelling the lyrics into the chaos. It didn’t work, but it showed what the song had become: more than a track, it was a shared signal.
Over time, the punk scene changed, and so did Sham 69. But this track still lives like a fresh scar – clear, deep, unforgettable. It doesn’t explain itself. It arrives like a punch and stays like a memory of shouting in unison under grey skies. The kind of song you don’t need to understand to feel. You only need to press play and turn it up until the walls shake.
