I was chatting with an old(er) English punk rocker a few weeks ago about the time before my time. His band split up in 1986 and he said they all pretty much felt that punk in general was finished - not that they were finished with punk, but that punk itself was just....done. A few of them dabbled in other bands for a while (some embarrassing funk rock experiments that I'll keep in their collective closets). In retrospect, this seems wild to me, especially considering the flood of punk and hardcore exploding on the British Isles in the mid-1980s, but I wasn't there and I didn't have his experience so there's no judgement. Maybe this MARTIAL LAW demo would have made a bigger splash had been recorded a few years earlier, maybe the anarcho sounds (and...politics?) were just passé by 1985, or maybe that old head I was chatting with had temporarily reached maximum punk capacity after a few years of constant gigs. Regardless, Angry Songs clearly demonstrates what we already know: punk did not die in the '80s.
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