By the summer of 1982, The Adicts were already something of an anomaly. As parts of UK punk moved towards a harder, street-punk sound, four Ipswich-based musicians were walking into gigs dressed as the droogs from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, throwing confetti and playing cards into the crowd, with frontman Keith "Monkey" Warren grinning beneath joker make-up he'd sourced from a local magic shop. The Clockwork Orange-inspired look had been developing since around 1978/79, while Monkey later recalled that the face-paint element came into its own around 1981, when he first started painting his face — Halloween supplies initially, then professional clown products. "The 'Clockie' thing didn't really evolve until about '78/79," Monkey has said. "The image is an amalgam of many things. Clearly A Clockwork Orange is a major visual influence, but we plagiarised other things — mainly the Joker from Batman, comic strip characters, circus, mime." In a scene that was growing darker and more monochrome by the month, The Adicts were determined to stand out.
The band had begun life considerably more modestly. Pete "Pete Dee" Davison and his brother Michael "Kid Dee" Davison had moved to Ipswich from Sunderland and were already playing together — using pillows for drums in their front room — when they fell in with Mel "Spider" Ellis and Keith Warren. "Mel had just failed the audition for Nick Kershaw's band — too tall apparently," Monkey has recalled with characteristic deadpan, "and I was a punk without a cause." After stints under the names the Afterbirth and The Pinz — a name Kid Dee later dismissed as "such a shit name" — they settled on The Adicts in the late seventies. Their debut EP, Lunch with the Adicts, appeared in 1979 on the Dining Out label, reportedly selling around 10,000 copies and reaching the independent charts. The debut album, Songs of Praise, followed in 1981 on their own Dwed Wecords label, funded by then-manager Geordie Davison. Monkey has described the moment they pressed the first copies with something close to reverence: "I can still remember being in the back of the van just after we'd picked up the first pressing and the LP sleeves. I think we were all getting off on the fumes from the glue. I took the first record and put it in the first sleeve and we all cheered as I held it up."
When Fall Out Records reissued Songs of Praise in 1982 and agreed to release the band's debut single, the obvious choice was Viva la Revolution. The band's own website describes it, without much argument from anyone who has heard it, as "arguably the best song on the album, and certainly the most anthemic." One later retrospective on the Cherry Red label box set The Adicts: The Albums 1982-87 went further, calling it "possibly the band's magnum opus." That assessment carries weight. Viva la Revolution is one of the band's strongest matches of slogan, melody and momentum — a record that justifies its revolutionary rhetoric through sheer musical force rather than posturing.
The song itself, written by all four members — Warren, Pete Davison, Mel Ellis, and Michael Davison — is built around a driving, riff-forward structure that locks into place immediately. Lyrically, it plants its flag without ambiguity. The opening verse deposits us squarely in the thick of an uprising: "Into the dungeon with evil men / The people have risen, we're free again." From there, the song operates in a series of declarative rallying calls — "Rebels and fighters, a licence to kill / Unite with the bandits down from the hills / Open your windows, open your doors / Open your minds to a freedom of thought." The chorus, chanted rather than sung, doubles down: "Viva la revolution" repeated as both slogan and exhortation. A later verse broadens the canvas: "Raise our voices, raise our flag / Smash the symbols of the life we've had / Long live the future, long live the scheme / Long live our hopes, long live the dream." And then, with a very Adicts-style acknowledgement that revolution should have some fun in it: "Drink the wine from the rich man's cask / This revolution won't be the last." The imagery is specific, the rhetoric internally consistent, and Monkey's delivery gives it genuine conviction without tipping into self-parody.
The A-side was issued on Fall Out catalogue number FALL 002, backed by Steamroller — the full, superbly-titled (My Baby Got Run Over By a) Steamroller — and Numbers. Steamroller, a non-LP cut at this stage, is a lurching, almost cartoonish rocker that demonstrated the band's willingness to leaven their politics with pure absurdist humour; a superior studio version would later surface on Sound of Music. Numbers, which had appeared on Songs of Praise, is a tightly wound two-minute charge against bureaucratic dehumanisation — "I don't wanna be a number / Just like being a prisoner / I just wanna stay free" — whose subject matter sits neatly alongside the A-side's broader anti-establishment worldview. The signing-on-the-dot imagery — "Got my name on a form / Thought I had it made / They treat you just insane / You are just a number and I ain't got a name" — connects the lofty revolutionary language of the title track to the grim mundanities of early-eighties working-class life. Collectors have noted that the single versions differ in character from the album recordings, making the package something of a distinct historical artefact in its own right.
The single spent over three months on the indie chart, cementing the band's rapidly growing reputation at precisely the moment when the UK independent chart was an arena that mattered. John Peel was playing the band during this period — Peel logs record plays of Viva la Revolution in 1982, with (My Baby Got Run Over By a) Steamroller appearing on BFBS in July 1982. It is worth noting, in fact, that a BFBS log records a play of Viva la Revolution as early as 7 March 1982, which suggests the song was circulating ahead of its formal release date — one more reason to treat late June 1982 as the beginning of the single's commercial life rather than the definitive moment of its existence.
Viva la Revolution came to define The Adicts in a way that their subsequent catalogue, however varied and often impressive, never quite superseded. When Tony Hawk's Underground included the track in its 2003 video game soundtrack, it helped put the song in front of younger players and listeners who might otherwise never have encountered it. Live, it has been a regular staple of Adicts sets for over four decades, losing none of its crowd-command in the process.
The single's release came at a decisive moment in the band's trajectory. November 1982 brought both Chinese Takeaway and the second album Sound of Music on Razor Records. The album is commonly listed as reaching number two on the indie chart, also briefly appearing in the national Top 100 — number 99, for one week, on the Official Albums Chart in December 1982. The following year, Bad Boy gave them their highest-charting single and brought the major labels circling. A deal with Warner Bros.' Sire Records followed, though it turned out to be, in Monkey's own words, "a bit of a dodgy period." Monkey later recalled that the Adicts name was seen as carrying negative connotations for radio and television, and the Sire period produced the short-lived ADX name, under which they released only two singles — Tokyo and a punk reworking of the Marlene Dietrich-associated Falling in Love Again — before the relationship unravelled.
The Adicts spent the late eighties gradually losing momentum, releasing the adventurous Smart Alex in 1985 and then their fourth album Fifth Overture, first issued in Germany in 1986 with a UK release following in 1987 — a country where their fanbase remained robust even as British interest dipped. A long period of reduced activity followed, punctuated by the album Twenty-Seven, released in 1992 or 1993 depending on the territory, before the band properly reformed and released Rise and Shine on Captain Oi! Records in 2002. The subsequent years saw them move through SOS Records, People Like You, DC-Jam, and eventually Nuclear Blast, with their most recent studio album, And It Was So!, appearing in November 2017. Throughout all of it, Monkey, Pete Dee and Kid Dee have remained the public core of the band, with later lineups including John "Scruff" Ellis and, in more recent years, Kiki Kabel and Highko Strom. They played Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas as recently as May 2025, and Viva la Revolution was in the set — which should surprise nobody.
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