THE EXPLOITED Band Description:
The Exploited came out of Edinburgh in the late 1970s, when punk still smelled like wet wool, cheap lager, and bad decisions you were weirdly proud of the next morning. The early lineup shifted fast, but once Wattie Buchan took the mic, the band stopped “forming” and started charging.
People love to file them under neat labels (street punk, oi!, hardcore), but the point was never neat. The point was direct. You could hear the working-class grind in the stomp of it, and you could feel the DIY mentality in how little they cared about polishing anything for polite company.
When Secret Records put them out properly in 1981, the noise suddenly had a receipt. "Punks Not Dead" landed like a boot through a flimsy door, then "Troops of Tomorrow" followed in 1982 and proved it was not a fluke. These records even shoved their way into the UK album charts, which is hilarious if you remember how allergic the whole thing was to “approval.”
The sound is simple to describe and hard to forget: guitars that slice instead of shimmer, drums that march and sprint at the same time, and Wattie’s voice doing that classic snarl that feels less like singing and more like spitting a truth you do not want to hear. Big John Duncan’s guitar work helped define that early punch - riffs that do not ask permission.
The “politics” question always circles them like flies. The lyrics are anti-authority, anti-comfort, anti-anyone telling you to sit down and behave, and that reads as political whether the band wants the label or not. Meanwhile, outsiders kept trying to turn the whole thing into a moral panic: violence, extremism, corrupting the youth, blah blah. Sometimes it was ugly in the crowd. Sometimes it was just loud people finally having a language for their frustration.
My one everyday anchor with them: I first heard The Exploited from a battered cassette deck that chewed tape like it had teeth, and it still sounded more alive than half the “serious” music on the shelf. That is the trick with this band. They are not subtle. They do not mature into something tasteful. They just keep showing up, like a bruise you earned and refuse to explain away.
