I went to see Luton punk band UK Decay at a rare hometown gig at the Luton Hat Factory arts centre last Saturday (8/11/2025). As expected a peak of their set was their 1980 song 'For my country' with its chorus 'for the honour, I don't ask why, it's my pleasure, my honour to die, for my country.'
The song riffs on Wilfred Owen's First World War poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est' which contrasts the reality of soldiers 'guttering, choking, drowning' in a gas attack with 'The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country').
The poetry of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other First World War poets had a big impact on the first punk generation. Penny Rimbaud of Crass has credited Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), which set Owen's poems to music, as a key influence on his pacifism. But I think most of us probably encountered these poems in school and/or through Brian Gardner's anthology 'Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914–1918', first published in 1964 and reissued in a 1976 paperback edition. A lot of punk anti-war sentiments were expressed through an imagery from this time, and UK Decay's song is a good example from its lyrics to its sleeve.
This was largely an anti-heroic poetry, grounded in the lived experience of the First World War trenches and sceptical of the glories expounded by armchair generals and propagandists. How different from today when once again militarism is simply equated with heroism and few in the public eye are brave enough to question the uncritical celebration of the armed forces (see for instance the hounding of any TV presenter who doesn't wear a poppy in November). I have no doubt there have been soldiers who have performed heroic deeds - which I would define as going beyond the expected boundaries of your role and putting yourself at risk in order to save other people's lives. But nobody gets to be a hero just by virtue of their job title, and I certainly wouldn't classify shooting unarmed demonstrators in Derry in 1972 as heroic, or more recently executing unarmed captives in Afghanistan or sexually abusing women in Kenya. If it is an 'old lie' that dying for your country is an honour, it is even more of a lie that killing for your country is honorable too.
[the gig was great by the way, sometimes seeing a band many years after their heyday can be a bit sad, but in this case it felt like UK Decay managed to reconjure up a community with lots of people coming from different places to catch up with each other and perhaps with their younger, maybe more hopeful selves. I saw many people I haven't seen in the flesh for years including people from most of the Luton bands of that punk and post-punk/proto-goth period (let's say 1978-85) including Pneu Mania, Dominant Patri, Karma Sutra, Passchendale (another WW1 reference), Party Girls, Rattlesnakes etc. not to mention the legendary Switch Club]
