Quite rightly cast as the original slob rock band London-based Third World War took the call to arms literally in 1970, long before The Clash (who they undoubtedly influenced) kicked against the pricks.
Defiantly working-class and proud to wear the agitprop badge on their boiler suits, Terry Stamp and Jim Avery pretty much invented the lexicon of social unrest on the let’s-get-tooled-up Ascension Day and delighted in the indecent, the drunk and disorderly on Shepherd’s Bush Cowboy, a song so graphic you could make it into a skin flick.
The aptly named Stamp didn’t bother hiding his anger issues, and took them out on his guitar while singing like the bastard son of Randy Newman at his most acerbic. Teddy Teeth Goes Sailing is a Socialist Workers Party manifesto and a right old blast at PM Edward Heath. Get Out Of Bed You Dirty Red and Preaching Violence are hopeless case studies of poverty and dead-end jobs. Trigger warning: if this all sounds like an anachronism then check your pulse.
Oddly, TWW managed to enlist American horn men Bobby Keyes and Jim Price on the lam from the Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Here’s a little bit of urban rock for your ass.
