Oi! The Summer!

The music and associated subculture had the goal of promoting unity between punks, skinheads and other non-aligned working class youths (sometimes called herberts). The Oi! movement was partly a response to a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, “trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic...and losing touch”. The word Oi is an old Cockney expression, simply meaning hey or hello. General ideology of the original Oi! movement was a rough sort of quasi-socialist working class populism, and first Oi! bands were composed mostly of punk rockers and people who fit neither the skinhead nor punk label.