I don’t suppose many people remember The Users – their entire career consisted of two singles. But their debut Sick Of You, is a punk classic.
Released in May 1977, in many ways it’s the quintessential punk song – loud buzzsaw guitars, a rolling bass guitar run, machine-gun drums and a gruff vocal matched to a sneering lyric.
That was the Class of ’77 in a nutshell.
The fact they never went on to fame and fortune would, I imagine, have mattered to them far less than the knowledge that Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys once cited this as one of his favourite punk singles, singling out the production – so often the achilles heel of those early punk singles. Not here.
John Peel was another fan. And so am I.
I still have my 7-inch single on Raw Records, a label founded by a Cambridge record dealer called Lee Wood.