The following is reproduced from the Decade 77-87 – a grown up disco: new wave, punk, postpunk, goth & indie with thanks to the OP for such an in depth review.

On 13th March 1978, MENACE released the single G.L.C.

If ever there was a London punk single that sounded like it had been dragged straight out of a row outside a civic building and turned into a chant before tempers had cooled, it was G.L.C. MENACE did not deal in polish, delicacy or clever little ironies for the benefit of the weekly music press. They were a far more physical proposition than that. G.L.C. hits with the force of a terrace chorus and the economy of a threat barked across the street. Part of its staying power lies in that refusal to dress itself up. It is not a record that asks to be decoded. It tells you what it thinks, then gets out.

By the time G.L.C. appeared, MENACE had already made enough noise around London to build a serious local name. The classic line-up was Morgan Webster on vocals, Steve Tannett on guitar, Charlie Casey on bass and Noel Martin on drums. Their own history places their formation in 1976 at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, from where they quickly became part of the Roxy-era London circuit. The band’s official account describes them as “London’s first generation no-nonsense boot boys”, which is partisan wording but not wildly off the mark if what is meant is their particular mix of directness, aggression and crowd appeal. Their audience brought punks and skinheads into the same room at a point when plenty of other bands either could not or would not.

That social mix matters when you hear G.L.C., because the record is built less like a private song than a public outburst. Before it, MENACE had released Screwed Up on Illegal in November 1977, and that debut helped establish them as more than just another name on a Roxy bill. Punk77’s band history preserves Charlie Casey’s memory of the song’s creation and makes clear how central Morgan Webster’s words already were to the band’s identity. Even then, MENACE were not really part of the witty, self-conscious or art-school wing of punk. Their strength lay in compression: hard rhythm playing, a singer who could turn blunt lines into a rallying cry, and songs that knew not to waste a second.

For G.L.C. they moved from Illegal to Small Wonder, the influential Walthamstow shop and label run by Pete and Mari Stennett. That change was not trivial. Small Wonder was one of the key independent operations of the late 1970s, the sort of place that could put out records too abrasive, too rude or too obviously non-radio to interest more conventional players. Pete Stennett later said that the original label could not really handle G.L.C. because of its lyrics and the simple fact that it was not likely to receive much airplay. Small Wonder, naturally, took the opposite view. The single came out as SMALL 5, with I’m Civilised on the flip.

The title points to the Greater London Council, but the song is not a position paper. It is much more instinctive than that. Charlie Casey later described it as “like a football song”, rabble-rousing and serious but not “political with a capital P”. That is one of the clearest things ever said about MENACE. The band were politically aware in the way many people in late-1970s London were politically aware: through irritation, restriction, class feeling, official interference and the sense that institutions were run by people who either despised you or did not care whether you existed. G.L.C. turns that mood into a chant designed for immediate use.

The musical construction is almost laughably simple, which is part of why it works so well. Steve Tannett recalled the song being built around A and E, and wondered whether it may once have been played slower in rehearsal before taking its final shape. On paper that sounds like nothing. On record it sounds exactly right. MENACE understood something that a lot of bands with more chops never quite grasped: if the rhythm section hits hard enough and the vocal phrase is sharp enough, simplicity stops being a limitation and starts becoming a weapon. G.L.C. does not hang around admiring its own roughness. It drives itself in a straight line and trusts the chorus to do the damage.

That chorus, of course, was never going to make life easy for broadcasters. Contemporary and retrospective accounts agree that the lyric made widespread airplay unlikely, and Pete Stennett’s comments confirm that concern was part of the reason the single ended up with Small Wonder in the first place. Yet records like G.L.C. did not depend on the approval of official channels. In 1978, punk still had a strong parallel infrastructure of independent shops, fanzines, mail order, gig networks and word-of-mouth circulation. A record could thrive precisely because it sounded banned, difficult or offensive. MENACE were not being frozen out of a mainstream they had once courted. They were operating in a world where exclusion could almost function as a recommendation.

What is striking, looking back through period coverage, is that the single split opinion in ways that now seem revealing. Lindsey Boyd in Sounds, writing on 11 March 1978, liked it. Her review praised the amount of energy the band put into telling the G.L.C. what it was full of and called it “a bloody good single”, even while placing it in the “high rise/dole queue genre”. That is a fair enough description of the lyrical terrain, but the more important point is that Sounds heard the song’s charge and gave it credit. The paper understood that bands like MENACE still had a useful role in a scene already being nibbled away by trendier strains of pop and new wave.

NME, by contrast, was less convinced. In a review reproduced from 11 March 1978, Monty Smith took a more sarcastic line, calling it “good ol’ headbanging-on-low-ceilings punk” and treating the whole business as either a joke or a successful parody. The tone is telling. By early 1978, parts of the music press were already getting impatient with punk that did not signal sophistication in approved ways. MENACE were precisely the sort of band likely to provoke that reaction: too lumpen for some, too plain-speaking for others, too tied to a street-level audience to be safely filed under the clever end of the movement. Seen now, the review says as much about the critic’s discomfort as it does about the record.

The recording itself seems to have captured the band at close range, with little interest in smoothing off the edges. Punk77’s oral history says G.L.C. and I’m Civilised were cut at Berry Street Studios, just off Clerkenwell Road, and that friends from the St John Street crowd were around. Patrik Fitzgerald also contributed backing vocals. Those details help explain why the single sounds less like four people trying to simulate a mob than an actual roomful of people leaning into the refrain. That communal heft is central to the record. You do not hear MENACE standing apart from the noise and describing it. You hear them inside it.

The B-side deserves more attention than it usually gets. I’m Civilised is not simply the dutiful extra track attached to the famous side. Steve Tannett later called it “one of our best bits of punk writing” and praised it for not being a standard “1234!” rush. He remembered it as “chunky, hard and well-constructed”, and that feels right. Where G.L.C. is all outward bark and gang response, I’m Civilised has a bit more shape and weight to it. It shows MENACE were not confined to a single trick, even if that trick was powerful enough to dominate how the band were remembered. A good punk single often reveals a group’s full range in compressed form. This one does.

What also comes through, especially in Charlie Casey and Steve Tannett’s recollections, is how much MENACE depended on Morgan Webster. The Punk77 feature is blunt on that point. Steve calls him “a brilliant lyricist”, and even in the band’s roughest work there is a real knack for phrases that are ugly in the right way: memorable without sounding polished, funny without becoming novelty, furious without collapsing into sludge. MENACE were never the sort of band who attracted attention for instrumental display, but they did have internal discipline. Charlie’s basslines gave the records shape, Steve understood how to keep the guitar lean and functional, and Noel Martin’s drumming kept everything moving with the kind of no-frills insistence punk needed.

After G.L.C., the band’s history became more ragged. Illegal exercised a second single option and issued I Need Nothing / Electrocutioner in February 1979 from an earlier recording, apparently without consulting the band. Punk77’s history is clear on that, and it helps explain why the next steps do not feel like a smooth campaign. MENACE were not being developed in the modern sense. They were moving through a half-chaotic independent world where contracts, friendships and impulse often pulled in different directions. Final Vinyl followed on Small Wonder in June 1979, containing Last Years Youth and Carry No Banners, but by then the first phase of the band was already winding down.

There is a tendency in punk history to reduce bands like MENACE to a handful of compilations, a few photos, and a simple tag such as “street punk pioneers”. There is some truth in the label, but it can flatten what they actually sounded like. MENACE were not merely thuggish, nor were they simply proto-Oi! in embryo. They were a late-1970s London punk band with a strong melodic instinct for chant-driven songs, a singer with a real feel for phrasing, and a following rooted in particular streets, pubs and venues. That is different from saying they were a template. G.L.C. is too vivid, and too specifically London in its irritation, to be treated as just an early example of some later category.

As for what happened afterwards, the postscript is more interesting than the standard tale of a band briefly flaring and vanishing. MENACE’s own history says Noel Martin, Steve Tannett and Charlie Casey moved on into Vermillion and then the Aces, with G.L.C. stubbornly surviving as a song strong enough to be brought back onstage and to help trigger the next band. Steve Tannett later built a substantial career in the music business, working at a high level with IRS and beyond. That trajectory does not cancel out the scrappy force of MENACE. If anything it shows that some of the people who made these supposedly primitive records were sharper operators than outsiders assumed.

Morgan Webster did not get that long second act. Multiple later sources record that he died in 1991. MENACE themselves eventually re-formed in later years, and current discography and band references show the name continuing well beyond the original run, with Noel Martin carrying it forward in a later line-up. That gives G.L.C. an afterlife without turning it into museum punk. It remains what it was in the first place: a hard, fast London single made by a band who understood that a chorus does not need finesse if it has enough venom, enough rhythm and enough local truth behind it.