Consumer Guide Album

Sham 69: Tell Us the Truth [Sire, 1978]
On the "studio side," where the marginal differentiations are nicely tricked up, Jimmy Pursey comes across as a thoughtful eccentric with his own ideas about punk dilemmas both musical and social. Turn the record over and he devolves into a passionate blur of the most faceless English punk sort. Anyone naive enough to structure a song around a repeated shout of "George Davis Is Innocent" can be charming for a while, but not for 11:31, which is how long it takes the "live side" to self-destruct. B