Oi Polloi are a great band. We played with them down in London couple of weeks back at the IWCA benefit and just had time to say hello, but I last had a proper talk with Deek in Paris in June when Oi Polloi and The Oppressed were playing at the RASH PARIS festival (Red and Anarchist Skinheads) - the Glasgow contingent ended up sitting backstage most of the night cos we dont speak french! Had a good discussion with him about the Scottish and Edinburgh skinhead 'scene', some interesting stories there...
Incidentally the Paris scene is very divided with a pretty major split between SHARP and RASH skins - the RASH skinheads often fight with the SHARPs because they are not left-wing enough, even though they are both anti-racist. And then of course on the other side you have other non-political ones, patriotic ones, then nazi ones. It all gets very violent from what they were saying, in the 80s it was basically heavy gang warfare every weekend. But apparantly Paris including the suburbs has about 6million people - fucking big place so not suprised theres all these factions! Me and my mate were accused of being '
nationalistes' by one of the RASH skins for wearing a scotland flag badge and me a 'V for VE day' charity badge! we were like... erm.. no... we're just from Scotland
I would say that Oi Polloi have anarchopunk politics but musically they are closer to Oi!/streetpunk - If metallideth means they are a merger of american hardcore then I dont see it - if you mean hardcore UK bands like discharge and varukers then I don't see that either..! They were on Roddy Moreno's Oi! Records label and appeared on the label sampler 'This is Oi! - A Streetpunk Compilation' in '86 alongside The Oppressed, Vicious Rumours, Society's Rejects, Condemned 84, Section 5, etc etc... Definitely a good example of the 80s Oi sound if you ask me.
They are a great band though, when I first saw them I expected them to be crust type noise but was very pleasantly suprised.
They could still use a bath and a haircut though
