Sham 69: The Hersham Boys

Hersham’s most unlikely export is a punk band whose biggest hit is named after the village itself. Sham 69, formed here in 1975, went on to reach number 6 in the UK singles chart with “Hersham Boys”, and their story runs directly through the same building that once housed Walton’s pioneering film studio.

A band from the village

Before they were a punk band, the group that became Sham 69 performed as Jimmy & The Ferrets, a Bay City Rollers covers act fronted by a young Jimmy Pursey, with Billy Bostik on drums, Johnny Goodfornothing on guitar and Albie on bass. It was only after seeing the Sex Pistols play live in early 1976 that the band changed direction entirely, reforming as Sham 69 and becoming one of the defining groups of the UK punk scene’s second wave.

The name

The band’s name comes from a piece of local graffiti. It originally read “Walton and Hersham ’69”, marking the year Walton & Hersham Football Club won the Athenian League title, but by the time Pursey and his bandmates noticed it, part of the lettering had faded away, leaving something closer to “sham 69”. They kept it.

The hits

Sham 69 placed five singles in the UK top 20 between 1978 and 1979: “Angels with Dirty Faces” reached number 19 in May 1978, “If the Kids Are United” reached number 9 that July, “Hurry Up Harry” reached number 10 in October 1978, “Questions and Answers” reached number 18 in March 1979, and “Hersham Boys”, the band’s highest charting single and its most direct piece of local naming, reached number 6 in July 1979.

Jimmy Pursey and the Walton Hop

Before any of the chart success, Pursey was a regular at the Walton Hop, the disco held in the former power house of Walton’s old film studio. Miming contests were a regular fixture of the Hop’s programme, and Pursey performed there as a teenager, miming to Bay City Rollers and Rolling Stones records with Jimmy & The Ferrets before punk gave the band, and Pursey, a genuine voice of their own. It is a neat piece of local continuity: the venue that had once hosted one of Britain’s most important early film studios went on, decades later, to give a Hersham punk band its first stage.

The band since

Sham 69 continued, reformed and toured in various lineups long after their initial run of chart hits, and remain closely associated with the second wave of British punk. Their connection to Hersham has stayed a fixed part of the story: a band that took its name from a piece of fading local graffiti, and named its best-known song directly after the boys of the village it came from.