I was around ten years old when my dad first played me the Cockney Rejects. He’d already raised me on the Pistols and The Damned, but when I’m Not a Fool came blasting through, it hit different. Alongside Sham 69, the Upstarts and the 4Skins, the Rejects felt more dangerous – less art school, more back street. For a agressive kid like me, they weren’t just another punk band. They were mine.
It took some guts to call your debut album Greatest Hits Volume 1, but the joke was on no one – because it was. Kicking off with I’m Not a Fool and containing the stone-cold classic Bad Man, it was packed with songs that still stand tall today. Fighting in the Street, East End, Join the Rejects – almost every track could have been a single.
This 2024 reissue from Captain Oi! makes Volume 1 even better by adding all three tracks from the Flares ’N’ Slippers EP – the raw single that put them on the map.
Greatest Hits Volume 2, released just months later in 1980, sometimes sits in the shadow of its big brother, but it’s far from filler. It opens with the thunderous War on the Terraces, includes the scene-defining Oi! Oi! Oi! and the tongue-in-cheek Greatest Cockney Rip Off, which dragged them onto Top of the Pops and into the UK Top 30. There’s also the terrace anthem Bubbles, forever tied to West Ham, plus underrated cuts like Hate of the City and Urban Guerilla.
The bonus material on this new edition is the real icing on the cake: B-sides, single versions, and their contributions to Oi! The Album. For fans like me, it’s like finding lost snapshots from your youth. For newcomers, it’s a crash course in why the Rejects mattered.
Listening again in 2024, what strikes me most is how alive these records still sound. You can hear flashes of the heavier direction they’d later take (Headbanger, The Rocker), but here it’s still pure, rowdy punk. Music written by working-class kids for working-class kids, shouting about football, fighting, pride and defiance – and doing it with a grin.
At 10 years old, I felt like the Rejects were singing directly to me, about my world. And listening now, 44 years later, they still are.
Greatest Hits Volume 1 & 2 (Expanded Edition) is out now on Captain Oi!/Cherry Red Records. 38 tracks, a digipack with full booklet, and two albums that still sound fucking brilliant.
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