Deep Cuts #09: Gallows – 'Grey Britain'
Rage and ruin in the fallen wasteland of Rule Britannia.
Artist: Gallows
Title: Grey Britain
Release: May 2nd, 2009
Label: Warner Bros.
Listen here: Spotify | Youtube
I’m a little late with this one already. So, in the interest of time, here’s the preemptive TL;DR:
Grey Britain, the second full-length album from UK hardcore outfit Gallows, is one of my favourite records of all time and one of the most underrated albums of the millennium. I’m hard-pressed to think of a punk rock album from the last two decades that has as much bite, thematic weight, and pure, unadulterated rage on display as this thirteen-track behemoth. It’s a truly staggering record that continues to floor me in new ways twelve years on from its release.
Before things get carried away here, let’s add some historical context.
A decade ago, England was on fire. The unrest began in Tottenham Hale, London on August 4, 2011, when a man named Mark Duggan was shot dead by police. In scenes that echo the global protests surrounding the death of George Floyd in 2020, the “London riots” as they came to be known quickly grew to include clashes between protestors and police, widespread looting and the destruction of numerous vehicles, homes and shop fronts.
Between August 6-11, 2011, thousands of civilians rioted all across the country, in Woolwich, Brixton, Peckham, Hackney, Enfield, Battersea, Walthamstow, Croydon, Ealing, Barking, Lewisham and East Ham, through to Birmingham, West Bromwich, Bristol, Coventry, Derby, Liverpool, Manchester, Leicester, Nottingham, and Wolverhampton before the inflamed violence was finally snuffed out. There were thousands of arrests, multiple people admitted with severe injuries and five deaths. I could link to relevant sources, but honestly, this Architects track is probably better suited for getting the point across:
The London riots are largely viewed as the product of growing discontent and malaise while the UK struggled to come out of the global recession that marked much of the late 2000s. Social factors included rising unemployment, bitter class divides, racial tensions, and economic stagnation.
It’s this context, I feel, that makes Grey Britain burn that much brighter as a historical document. Not only through the incendiary hardcore punk on offer or the record’s ambitious thematic scope, but in its dire and unwavering presentation of things to come. A bold prophecy of provocation and pain, of ceaseless class war, of a Britain violently bleed dry of all its pomp and prestige.
In the mid-2000s, Gallows were the piss-and-vinegar vanguard of the UK hardcore punk scene. Through enigmatic ginger frontman Frank Carter and his pitbull stage presence, the band embodied a return to the hallowed ideals of punk rebellion that thrived on real danger and genuine excitement.
Fans fought for the privilege of their raucous and bloody live shows. Critics praised Carter’s biting social commentary, which often cast an unflattering light on the ills and anxieties of urban existence. On “Come Friendly Bombs,” taken from the group’s breakneck debut, Orchestra of Wolves (2006), Carter’s apathetic snarl sums up the feeling of a dead-end England in a single bar:
“Black knuckles and broken teeth/
Grey days and grey streets/
The same faces, the same release/
If this town had a name it would be defeat.”
This notion of a world drained of all its colour and vibrancy is a theme the band would eagerly return to in the years to come. Epitaph’s Brett Gurewitz declared Orchestra of Wolves to be the best hardcore album since Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come (1998), adding: “This is the band we’ve all been waiting for.”
Gallows had broken through and captivated audiences with a sound that was urgent, vital and uncompromising. They were the name on everyone’s lips and they were just getting started.
Naturally then, the suits came knocking. The band raised the eyebrows of punk purists by signing a deal with major label Warner Bros. and reportedly received a £1 million advance for their sophomore follow-up album. In 2008, Gallows decamped across the pond to Vancouver, BC, to record with Canadian producer and engineer Garth “GGGarth” Richardson (Atreyu, Biffy Clyro, Rise Against).
In February of 2009, Carter explained to Kerrang that the band’s new record, Grey Britain, was “about what’s going on socially, politically and economically in the UK and how it affects us,” and added with a hint of grim resignation that “Britain is fucked.”
The quintet then teased the album’s material in the following April with the pre-release single, “The Vulture (Acts I & II)”: a sprawling six-minute ballad that included string theatrics and the unexpected addition of Carter’s clean singing.
Grey Britain was released on May 2nd and followed by two singles: the upbeat punk ‘n’ roll revelry of “London Is The Reason” and the bludgeoning sonic beatdown of “Misery.” In December of that same year, less than twelve months after the record’s arrival, Gallows announced that they had “mutually” parted ways with Warner Bros.
At the time of release, critical reception to Grey Britain was largely mixed. Writing for The Quietus, Stephen Burkett described the record as “a slightly missed opportunity” and “enough of a blast to remind people why Gallows are important to so many, but not quite the focused wrench it could have been.” This was a sentiment shared by NME’s Dan Martin, who argued that “if the world that Gallows depict is even half-accurate, it’s not one you’d want to live in. And it’s doubtful you’d want to listen to its soundtrack many times either.”
Others were slightly more receptive. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis enjoyed the “livid vigour” of ruthless cuts like “Black Eyes” and album closer “Crucifucks,” along with Carter’s “ability to articulate disgust and despair with such visceral force,” but struggled to engage with the album’s “relentlessly horrible” thematic portent. Not so for his colleague, Jon Savage, who praised the band’s spirit and prescience, “and their willingness to engage with a recognisable social reality.”
Grey Britain, in this humanist view, attempted to “inject into British rock music the sense of standing for or against something, the feeling that there is something more at stake than money, fame and self, the belief that human beings are important.”
Still, twelve years on, the record has found love and recognition in retrospect. Approaching the album’s tenth anniversary in 2018, NME named the album as one of the best hardcore albums of all time, one that took the genre to “places most could only dream of—a truly epic documentation of modern British malaise, that’s as vital now as the day it was released.” Similarly, Metal Hammer declared the album to be “a sprawling, ugly, bleak, punk rock masterpiece” that “horrified the mainstream [and] inspired a whole generation of heavy UK hardcore bands.”
Legacy, however, is a curious thing. Taking a cursory look at lists for Best-Of punk albums—Paste’s “25 Best Punk Albums of the 2000s”; Rolling Stone’s “40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time”; SPIN’s “Top 50 Essential Punk Albums”; Treble Zine’s “100 Best Punk Albums”—and one finds that Grey Britain is nowhere to be found.
If anything, for me at least, Grey Britain stands as a testament to sticking by your principles. “We are the British music industry’s biggest mistake,” quipped Carter in the aftermath of the album and their subsequent label shelving, with guitarist Laurent “Lags” Barnard adding: “We see other bands being told what to do by their paymasters, but we’re not one of them.”
For Gallows, punk was an art form, deserving a level of reverence that the corporatists dare not price in. Ultimately, it’s The Guardian’s Ben Myers who sums up Gallows “great rock ‘n’ roll swindle” the best:
For a group that recalled second-wave UK punk bands like Discharge, it was the most brilliantly ridiculous major-label signing of recent times... But on the surface what looked like an underachievement is actually the opposite: with their uncompromising sound and brawling live shows Gallows have gone further than any British hardcore band ever has.
Spiritual forefathers such as Black Flag, Crass and Concrete Sox might have rightly railed against the establishment, but major-record deals were never an option for them. Gallows did the right thing. Knowing they could never be Green Day they took the money, toured the world and recorded an album so brutal no one could ever accuse them of selling out.
The dangerous thing about prophecy, of course, is the potential for it to come true. The explosive tumult of the London riots and its aftermath certainly vindicated Grey Britain’s nihilistic portrait of Rule Britannia as a fallen wasteland sinking into a self-made morass of corruption, rage and ruin. If like me, you’re happy to entertain a mostly cynical worldview, there’s a clear narrative throughline to be drawn here from the London riots to Brexit in 2016 and the state of the UK today.
Carter, who went on to leave Gallows in 2011 and pivot to the slightly more cheerful sounds of Pure Love and The Rattlesnakes, confessed to VICE in 2019:
Financially, we [the UK] never recovered, and then morally and governmentally we’re in fucking bits. We’re in pieces, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. All that’s done is nurtured a widespread hatred, and fear, and grand disillusionment—which is all in that record!
It was there as a precursor ten fuckin’ years ago... The xenophobia, and the agoraphobia, and the hatred that I was singing about then, that was my fear. We were writing about a post-apocalyptic future in London. And, unfortunately, now… I’m living in it.