Punk Hardcore Oi! New Wave Post-Punk

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Formed: Denton, Greater Manchester, England, UK

Punk/Oi! combo.

The blurb here is adapted from an unidentified fanzine and the bulk of the text is used courtesy of Henk from UK82. I hope I've made sense of it!

"The band was formed in January 1981 as Protest by the guitarist and bassist from Red Alert (not the Geordie skinheads responsible for 'In Britain' but another band who contributed the track 'Who Needs Society' to Bullshit Detector. The drummer was found at a party and the singer was an old school mate who joined after leaving another dead end band called Kicked To Death' After two weeks' graft, the band had a repertoire consisting of "two new songs, three old Red Alert songs and hundreds of rip-offs", and played the Mayflower supporting The Exploited, where they promptly got barred ("for doing a certain song we try to keep a secret" - intriguing!).

That July, following a few local gigs, they recorded the Abrasive Youth demo. More gigs followed - including support slots to the Angelic Upstarts, The 4 Skins Blitz and Ack-Ack - and in 1982 a second demo was recorded. As the drummer told the unidentified fanzine, "During the Moss Side riots an unexpected telephone call came from the BBC conning us into a documentary or something about Oi!. But we told them to fuck off in the nicest possible way. For six months we were unable to play anywhere due to lack of transport, and the pathetic anti-punk attitude in Manchester. After things were sorted out, it was all up hill, and the record deal came with No Future. Then we got to business and wrote a set of songs, kicking out the worst and sticking in the better ones. Anyway, we're off to America for a megatour (all lies), and hope to play in Manchester again some day".

The No Future "deal" appears to be nothing more than an appearance on A Country Fit For Heroes with the song "Orders".

The following comes from the other UK82 website (here) which hasn't been updated for a while. It's a pretty amusing letter from Mick of Protest and was originally printed in Final Curtain #6, December 1982:

After our track 'Orders' on the No Future rip-off money-making project, we went back into the recording studios again, and made a five track tape. Unfortunately, we haven't got any tapes left, but we're going in the studios again on November 5th, so hopefully we will be 3rd time lucky and do a good one. We've tried Hologram in Stockport, which is O.K., Birch Lane in Ashton, which is wank, so now we're going to try for Cargo Studios in Rochdale. I hope they fill in the missing link. We've been pretty unlucky so far in playing gigs, etc. We're banned from most places, except for the Mayflower (but only after a bit of creeping), but now even that place is no use, as it was forced to close violence at gigs, etc... I sure miss the place.

Anyway, the songs we're practicing for our new tape are '3rd Generation', 'Oppressed', and 'Patriot'. We've just run into a few problems, which have held up both recording and gigging. Namely, at first, we hadn't got any money to hire vans and stuff, but then suddenly this geezer come knocking on the door, and filled us with lots of lies and high hopes. We thought he was great, and we wanted him to be our manager, so we did two gigs with his van, and a week later he moved and took 150 pound of our money with him. So, because we were skint (and still are), and because we're all on the dole, we decided to track him down to get our money back. I sussed him out to a flat in another part of Manchester, and we then sent the boys 'round to inflict some damage to him. He finally gave us our money back!

No Future have near enough promised us a single with this new tape coming out. The single could be out early next year. I really hope that this goes through, so as we can do some long-awaited gigging, and buy our van.

This little bit is my own observation:

The No Future deal did not happen. A three-song single called Vinyl Overload eventually did come out in 1983, but it was the only release under the band's own name. The remaining Protest vinyl outpourings were exclusively contained on compilation albums, and given the titles 'Third Generation' and 'Patriot' one would guess the songs were lifted directly from the demo Mick refers to.