Cock Sparrer Are U.K. Punk Legends. Are They Saying Goodbye?

I
t’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Lower Manhattan, and the 1970s British punk band Cock Sparrer are trying to find where CBGB used to be.

Singer Colin McFaull, guitarist Daryl Smith, drummer Steve Bruce, bassist/songwriter Steve Burgess, and guitarist Mick Beaufoy are in the back of a black Sprinter van, which is taking them from soundcheck at Brooklyn Paramount — where they’re set to play their second sold-out headlining show in as many nights — to Generation Records, where they’re scheduled for a fan meet-and-greet. Though they don’t know it yet, more than 100 people with Doc Martens polished and heads freshly shaved are lined up down Thompson St. Some of them will break into tears when the group of 70-something British fathers and grandfathers finally get there. 

In the meantime, as they make their way through traffic on the Bowery, straining their eyes for the John Varvatos awning where the legendary punk club used to be, they remember what it was like to play their first New York show there in 2000. There was a sign outside that said “No Skinheads Allowed,” Bruce remembers, which meant there was a line of people in hats — “wooly hats, bowler hats” — angling to get in. During the set itself, the room was so hot that “sweat was raining from the ceiling,” says McFaull. “There’s a great clip where someone throws a beer mug from the back of the room,” recalls Smith. “It smashes on the beams above our heads and covers everybody in glass. And it was just, carry on, not a problem. CBGBs!”

When Cock Sparrer got together in 1972, they were just another set of teenagers from East London who thought playing some covers at high school auditoriums might get the attention of local girls. “It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the gigs weren’t that well-attended in the early days,” Smith says. But they started writing songs that combined the audacity of their glam and rock idols (T. Rex, Slade, Small Faces) with the energetic football chants at local West Ham games. There wasn’t a name for it yet, but when punk took off, record companies decided they were part of the new genre. Though Malcom McClaren passed, Decca Records, looking for a token punk band, signed them, along with Adam and the Ants and Slaughter and the Dogs. 

Things didn’t go well. They dressed like working-class kids — boots, jeans, camouflage — and when executives told them to try on some of those new bondage pants and safety pins, they told them to fuck off. (Their song “Take ‘Em All,” with a chorus that goes, “Take ‘em all/Put ‘em up against the wall and shoot ‘em,” is about their experience with label execs.) 

Decca put out Cock Sparrer’s self-titled album, then dropped them. They recorded one more studio record, Shock Troops, released on Razor Records in 1983, but the scene was growing violent, and when fights started breaking out at their shows, they opted to stop gigging for a while. Now well into their twenties, they started careers and families. They met up when they could, joked about the old days, had barbecues and family dinners, and largely moved on. They were a group of friends that had once been in a band.

Meanwhile, they began to achieve a mythical status in the punk scene they’d left behind. Little was known about Cock Sparrer — only a handful of photos of those days were known to exist — but Shock Troops had grown into a cult hit. Songs like “Where Are They Now?,” “We’re Coming Back,” and “Droogs Don’t Run” combined earworm singalongs with nostalgia for a fleeting moment in British music. As punk grew into a worldwide culture, Shock Troops was always there. Tim Armstrong picked up a copy before going on to start Rancid; Ken Casey credited it for inspiring the Dropkick Murphys. All the while, Cock Sparrer never even considered themselves punk. 

In 1992, McFaull got a call. How would his band like to headline a 2,000-person show? He thought it was “absolutely crazy,” but consulted the members of the band anyway. They would need a new guitarist, and found that Smith, 20 years their junior, had grown up on their music and eagerly joined on. It turned out Smith’s dad had been one of the original execs who’d signed Cock Sparrer back in the early 1970s. It was all meant to be. 

From there, the rooms only grew. They put out a dozen more albums — the most recent of which, 2024’s Hand on Heart, even charted in the U.K.  — and continued to headline shows across the world. For two decades, their shows have been chosen-family reunions, with friends meeting, couples getting together, and even, increasingly, kids showing up to the gigs. But late last year, they announced that two shows in Los Angeles, two in New York, and one in Boston would mark their final dates in those cities. What will that mean for the generations of Cock Sparrer fans who grew up on their music? Rolling Stone caught up with McFaull and Smith during their last stint in NYC to discuss where they came from, and what happens next. 

You’ve got a huge following, but some Rolling Stone readers might not know who you are. Who are Cock Sparrer? 

Smith: I don’t know who coined the phrase, but we’re a band that’s had our career in reverse. Rewind to ‘76, ‘77 — the guys were from the wrong side of London. Punk was happening in the West End, very art-school. And Cock Sparrer came from the East End. It was very working-class, and didn’t quite fit in with this dressing up with safety pins element. 

McFaull: We played the Roxy the same week as X-Ray Spex and Siouxsie and the Banshees. We always thought punk was, you just get up and do it — you know, have a go. But when it became all about fashion and how you looked, we just wouldn’t comply with it. So all the way through, we’ve made some really great decisions about things. [Laughs.] Got us to where we are today, but we wouldn’t change it for the world. 

What kind of music were you playing when the band first started? 

McFaull: We were pretty much doing the stuff that was on TV. Slade, Bowie, Alice Cooper, Sweet, T. Rex — the glam-rock stuff. We would watch that, learn the songs, then play them at a youth club that evening. All covers, all done very badly. I’m sure, at the time, we thought we were brilliant. And from that came this fantastic friendship which we developed. That’s the basis for all of it. That’s why we’re here today, and that’s why we started as we did. When the punk thing came up, there were lots of bands being manufactured, put together by various managers, like the Pistols, like the Clash, who went on bigger and better things, of course. But we’ve always had that friendship thing that comes before everything.

Smith: And we’ve always said that it’s friendship first, band second. There’s a lot of bands that thrive on not getting on, that’s what gets the creative spark. I’ve often said, I could think of nothing worse than spending my Saturday night with someone that I don’t like, creative spark or not.

McFaull: Well, you’ve been with us since 1992. And he’s still on probation, not an official member yet.

Smith: I’m still the new boy. I mean, only 35 years.

How has your approach to writing new music changed over the years?

McFaull: It’s developed because of the various points in our own personal lives. We’d write about football fighting, and then we write about going out, and then we write about meeting girls, then we’d write about having children. So the whole story is reflective of our lives. 

Smith: To me, it’s always got to be brutally honest. When I sit down and write a Cock Sparrer song, or when Burge sits down to write a Cock Sparrer song, we know the hooks, the anthemic bits. That’s Cock Sparrer. We’ve got a sound we would never deviate too much from. We want to give people what they want. But lyrically, we are really stripped of that. If I had to sum up Cock Sparrer, all we’ve ever wanted to do is give people a good night out. We’ve got people in our circle that were just fans, that have become lifelong friends. It really is an extended family. 

McFaull: With that comes a higher level of responsibility, because you want to make sure that your friends are going to be safe when they come to the shows. Last night, there were four groups of small kids, all about eight years old, with their parents, right down the front. And that was not a good place to be last night, a lot of crowd-surfing, a lot of size-10 boots coming over the top. I mean, we wouldn’t be very good friends if we didn’t want the best for our extended family. So, you know, if they’re going to come to support us, we should try to support them.

Smith: It’s testament to how the scene changed, as well. We had a festival in the U.K., it used to be called Holidays in the Sun, and it would pull together all the different genres. You never could have had anarcho-punk sharing the stage with an oi! band. It would have been a blood bath. But suddenly, all that was left was people that had a genuine passion for the music. That tribal thing had gone, and it was left with people that loved the music. It felt like it’s becoming like a safer space. It has become, it sounds cliché, but a real community. 

You guys said that these are going to be your last shows in New York. Why is that?

McFaull: Because the visa process for British brands to come and play in the U.S. is quite arduous and expensive. And we’re not getting any younger. There are still places that we’d like to come and play in the U.S. again, but to go through that visa process, to do all the work and play the same place again? We’ve never been to Seattle. We haven’t been to Portland. It’s not the last time for the U.S., but it’s the last time that we will play in these cities.

Smith: Our visas run out after Boston. So the honest truth, we can’t come back again, because we have no visas. We have to make a decision whether we go through that process again, cost-wise, time-wise, whatever. Because, in all honesty, if we do it again, it probably will be the last time we get the visas, because we’re not going to be coming out doing this when they’re 80 years of age, you know?

Daryl, your dad was one of the record executives who signed Cock Sparrer to Decca. Is “Take ‘Em All” actually about the record execs? And if so, does that mean the song is about your dad?

McFaull: [Laughs.] We love his dad. His dad is one of the funniest guys you’ll ever meet. Daryl tells great personal stories about their relationship and things that have happened in their lives. We didn’t realize that it was even the same person until… It’s just the biggest thing in the world that these two things should come together. But no, it’s not about anyone specifically.

Smith: I have to say, I read the lyrics. I think that’s got my dad written all over it. [Laughs.] But also, having now worked with the band on the business side of things, and having seen how hard it is to get them to make a decision to do anything, I absolutely would have treated the band like that. Cock Sparrer weren’t the easiest band to work with, and Decca weren’t a label that understood punk. It was almost like, we’ll sign a token punk band, because every other label is signing punk. They didn’t know what to do with them once they got them.

McFaull: I think we were a bit of a panic buy as well, because all the other companies had their roster of punk bands and Decca were trying to catch up. 

Smith: I wouldn’t be offended if it was about my dad. He always said he never cared about the music. His thing was spotting talent and selling as many records as possible. He signed the Smurfs. He went and signed them and paid a crazy advance, tens of thousands [of pounds]. Back in the day when a house in the U.K. was £5,000, he’d given like £75,000 to sign the Smurfs. So he was called into the office by his boss. “Why have you just pledged the entire year’s budget to these fictitious blue people?” And he said, “It’s gonna sell records.” He knew it was going to commercially just explode. Now, he’s got a gold disc with the Smurfs. 

Tell me about what happened with Malcolm McLaren. Why didn’t he take to Cock Sparrer? 

McFaull: We always say that we didn’t go with McLaren because he didn’t buy us a beer. And I mean, the element of that is true. But the bottom line is, being in the room with him for half a minute, we knew this was never going to be a good idea. We played him three of the most lame-ass, terrible songs you can imagine, and expected him to think they were brilliant, and clearly he didn’t. He came in with another guy and he had spurs and bondage trousers, and we were there in our usual workman’s gear. And we looked at each other. It was nice, because we met him a couple of times and told him about the band. We never expected for one minute for him to come from one side of London all the way to East London, to come and see us. But he did, to his credit.

Daryl: Yeah, you know, I did hear in subsequent years, his interest [in Cock Sparrer] was he liked the song “Running Riot.” He liked that as a title because he thought it would make a good T-shirt. So I respect him for that.