Ahead of punk leaders Sham 69’s first Hong Kong gig, guitarist and founder Dave Parsons speaks about the band’s acrimonious split with frontman Jimmy Pursey, and how the days of right-wing violence are behind them. By Hamish McKenzie

What have the responses been like to your recent shows?

Very good. Because you know we’ve got a new singer in the band now. Trying to replace a singer is always the hardest point in any band – it can be a make or break thing. To me, at the point when we did that, I wasn’t sure how much confidence I had that we’d be able to find a new singer for Sham, but we’ve been very lucky, and the guy we’ve got is called Tim V and he’s probably got more in common with our fans than the old singer has had for the last 15 years, and they’ve really taken to him. It’s been great, and they love him.

What do you mean when you say he’s got more in common with your fans than Jimmy Pursey?

Yeah, that’s the thing. Over the years, he just became apart from our basic fans. I mean, the new singer lives in a tower block in the east end of London, and so he’s on the street with the sort of kids that make up our fan base. He lives among those people and he’s part of them, and he knows their sort of issues, and I think the people who come to see us can feel that. Whereas, Jimmy started to take a very hierarchical stance, if you like, about world affairs – which is all very good – but to be honest, I don’t think he knew that much about it. It’s all very well preaching, you know on your website and stuff to people about places from your own front room.

Do you think if Jimmy was still with the band you would have been able to tour China?

No, no, no way. That was one of the reasons in the end why we had to part from him, because he wouldn’t play. We were playing five or six gigs a year, and every year [it was like], ‘Oh next year we’ll play some gigs, we’ll play more,’ and every year came by and we didn’t, and the band was so frustrated. I mean, we live in England, the two places closest to us were France and Spain. In the whole of our career, we only ever played one gig in France and we never played Spain at all.

Is there much violence going on at your gigs these days?

No. Thank God. That was one of the reasons why we gave it a break in 1981. Again, the violence really was blown up – it was caused by a very small minority of people, but it made all the headlines in the papers the next day and it just got out of hand and we had to stop. We haven’t had any violence at our shows for 15 years.

What do you think of the fact that Sham 69 attracted these people?

I’m still pretty miffed about it, to be honest. What really happened as far as I can work out, you organisations in England, like the BNP and National Front, who had all these thugs that were on the football terraces and they brought them off and put them into – they were using them – put them into our gigs and stuff, and they started to get huge amounts of publicity for themselves. I don’t think really, at that point, that they were even fans. They were just there on a mission to cause lots of trouble and get publicity for themselves.

What do you think when you see the likes of Johnny Rotten doing commercials for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter?

[Laughs] In a funny sort of way, I’m not that surprised, to be honest. I think it’s a shame for the kids, because I think some kids feel misled by it, but I think without putting the Sex Pistols down – because let’s face it, they were the catalyst that started the thing off – but when it comes down to it, the Sex Pistols were a manufactured band. You know, they were put together by Malcolm Mclaren and they were selling these clothes down on Kings Road, and kids were paying 60-70 pounds – which was a lot of money in those days – for a pair of zip-up bondage trousers.

It’s always been about having a go, trying to install the confidence in people, that you can get off your backside, you can actually have a go. And for us, maybe it’s evolved from The Kids Are United, about bringing people together. When we think back about all those different little clans – you had the mods, the rockers – all those different people who were fighting amongst themselves, if the kids had really been united in those days, think what a voice there could have been from the younger generation for positive change, whatever change that may have been.

What was it like having a top ten single a quarter of a decade after your last one?

Ah, very strange. There’s a whole another story there. That song was going to be number one – and this is another reason in the end we had to part ways with Jimmy. We had EMI behind us, backing the song, we had a lot of major radio stations in London playing the track 8 to 10 times a day, and they were organising promotional events and stuff, and right at the last minute, Jimmy would refuse to go. And the first week of sales, the track sold out in shops, went straight to number ten.

We were offered a slot at Top of the Pops, and Jimmy refused to do it – “I’m not doing Top of the Pops until we’re number one”. Well, the whole point is you do it when it’s number ten to make it number one, and it was just some self-destructive nature in Jimmy. I don’t even know if he could help himself, really. You’d get these great offers which came our way with Sham, and then he’d destroy them at the last minute, and what happened was that EMI refused to restock the shops because he’d let them down so badly, and had he done that, the chances are it may well have been our first number one.

How do you feel about that opportunity going past?

Disappointed and let down, really, because Sham had a lot of great opportunities offered to us on a plate, we’ve been very lucky, and Jimmy just seemed to destroy them all at the last minute. That really for me was the last straw – you don’t get opportunities like that every day, and just to blindly throw it away, it was just too much for me to take.

After so long working with him and working with a band with him – you must have been quite close after all that time – how does it feel that it has kind of slipped away?

Sad, very sad. As you say, I spent nearly all my working life working with the guy, but it’s a funny thing in a way. It’s very hard to ever understand really why he did some of the things he did, and in a certain way I came to the conclusion that he couldn’t help himself and in his point of view they weren’t malicious acts – although they were very selfish and there almost seemed like a complete lack of empathy to other people around him, even his fans in the end – I had this feeling that it basically wasn’t malicious from him. I’ve emailed the guy a few times, haven’t had a reply from him, but I’d like to think that at some point in the future we could speak again, maybe sit down and have a beer, because we’ve been through a lot together – some of the best times of my life I’ve been through with him. You can’t deny that.

What about when he says things like you shouldn’t go round calling yourselves Sham 69 without him in the mix?

Well this is another point, was his ego. All lead singers need to have a big ego – they have to, otherwise they can’t get up on stage and do what they do, but his ego just got so big it was kind of like he almost thought he was God. I co-wrote all those songs with him, and as far as I’m concerned, I have as much right to take Sham 69 songs out to play to our fans as anybody.

Sham 69 play Backstage on Saturday May 15 with No Name and Defiant Scum.