Greatest

It would be trite but not inaccurate to call Charlie Harper the Energizer Bunny of British Punk — he formed the U.K. Subs (short for "Subversives") in 1976, and while the band wouldn't break through until the dawn of the second wave of Brit punk in 1979, the man stubbornly refuses to go away, playing whenever and wherever a venue will have the latest edition of his band and continuing to write and record his own brand of sturdy, straightforward, road-tested punk rock well into the new millennium. Like such contemporaries as the Exploited, G.B.H., and the Anti-Nowhere League, the U.K. Subs were always most popular at home and in Europe, while the vast majority of their catalog has never been released in the United States. This makes Great American Music's release of the U.K. Subs' Greatest Hits both welcome and a little puzzling — not only were none of the 18 songs on this disc hits in America, the vast majority never even had a proper release on this side of the pond during the group's heyday. But most of the band's best and best-known songs are right here, including "C.I.D.," "Stranglehold," "I Live in a Car," "Tomorrow's Girls," and "Crash Course," along with a few live tracks that document Harper's tireless live work and one amusing novelty, a French-language version of "Party in Paris" (which does not suggest Harper is especially fluent in the Gallic tongue). The U.K. Subs were never one of the great bands of British punk, but compared to the vast majority of the groups that rose up after the Sex Pistols crashed and burned, they wrote tough and energetic straight-ahead tunes, Harper was a passionate singer who knew how to work the crowd, and the countless musicians who've wandered in and out of the band over the years have followed the template well. Time has been far kinder to their music than anyone might have expected when Another Kind of Blues came out, and if you're in need of a reasonably priced summary of the U.K. Subs' glory days, this will do the job quite well (not to mention charging through its 18 tunes in less than 40 minutes).