in the early days of the genre included Angelic Upstarts, the 4-Skins, the Business, Anti-Establishment, Blitz, the Blood and Combat 84.
Lyrical topics included unemployment, workers' rights, harassment by police and other authorities, and oppression by the government.
bands―such as Sam McCrory and Johnny Adair's Offensive Weapon[10]―and fans were involved in white nationalist organisations such as the National Front (NF) and the British Movement (BM), leading some critics to dismiss the Oi!
bands, such as Angelic Upstarts, The Business, The Burial and The Oppressed, were associated with left-wing politics and anti-racism, and others were non-political.
[11][12][13] Rock Against Communism (RAC) was a partial development from white power/white supremacist movements, which had musical and aesthetic similarities to Oi!
Although due to Cold War fears the genre had appeal to some punk rock bands distinct from original Oi!
[16][9][17][18] Before the concert, some audience members had written NF slogans around the area and bullied Asian residents of the neighbourhood.
[6][16] In response, local Asian youths threw Molotov cocktails and other objects at the tavern, mistakenly believing that the concert—featuring the Business, the 4-Skins and the Last Resort—was a neo-Nazi event.
Although some of the concert-goers were National Front or British Movement supporters, none of the performers were white power music bands, and the audience of approximately 500 people included skinheads, black skinheads, punk rockers, rockabillies, and non-affiliated youths.
Not only was its title a play on a Nazi slogan "Strength Through Joy", but the cover featured Nicky Crane, a skinhead BM activist who was serving a four-year sentence for racist violence (Crane later disavowed his alignment with the far right after revealing he was gay).
[11] He also denied knowing the identity of the skinhead on the album's cover until it was exposed by the Daily Mail two months after the release.
[11] Bushell, a socialist at the time, noted the irony of being branded a far-right activist by a newspaper that "had once supported Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, and appeasement with Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War Two.
phenomenon mirrored the hardcore punk scene of the late 1970s, with American Oi!-originating bands such as the Radicals, U.S.