The Flys Are The Acceptable Face of ‘Pop Punk’

I don’t know a lot about pop punk music, but I do know that I’ve always found it quite embarrassing.

Wikipedia tells me that some relatively credible groups laid the foundations for this subgenre in the late 70s and early 80s, including Buzzcocks and Descendents. For most of us, though, the likes of Blink-182, Sum 41, Fall Out Boy, and The Offspring are more what ‘pop punk’ conjures up.

That means a very particular brand of vocals, a nasal yankee whine that would take a vice-like hold on both sides of the Atlantic (and probably further afield). It means big jeans, wallet chains, spiky hair; all oddly zeitgeisty among the TikTok teens of 2025, ‘what has been will be again’ and all that. It means big, powerful, singalong choruses that even a hater like me will find shamefully hard to resist.

There’s also a fundamental adolescence to the whole thing, more so than traditional punk music, with distinct notes of sadness and longing often underlying the emphatic vocals. Among the skateparks ‘n’ suburbia aesthetic, there’s a common struggle for identity and escape deep at the subgenre’s heart.

Somewhere in all this, stripping away all the nonsense, there’s the promise of something I could really get behind. But I wasn’t ready for my pop punk revelation to come in the form of a short-lived and largely-forgotten band from late-70s Coventry.

This band is The Flys – pushed into second place on Google by a later, American outfit of the same name – and they might just be the earliest example of a pop punk group. “The Flys were less interested in the fast and loud template that would soon be de rigeur among the new groups,” claims an AllMusic biography of the group. “Instead their music was moody but melodic.”

This paints a picture of the awkward spot they found themselves in amidst the punk and early post-punk music landscape, and goes some way to explaining why they never quite found commercial success before disbanding in 1980. It’s unclear who said it first, but ‘half-punk, half-pop’ is the phrase that’s used to describe The Flys’ sound in multiple online sources. This inelegant formation is particularly fitting in how it describes a sound that’s now familiar, but defied easy categorisation at the time.

So, what does pop punk music sound like when 90s Californian suburban sprawl is swapped for 70s industrial English midlands? Perhaps the most surprising aspect is that the common lyrical elements still feature heavily. ‘Why d’you wanna do a damn fool thing like living?’ is the repeated refrain of the remarkable ‘Civilization’, with its picture of a humdrum existence of TV, ‘gristle and beans’, and the looming threat of violence, broken only by beer and drugs. ‘Every day’s the same, and every day remains’.

‘I Don’t Know’ speaks to the misfits, those who consider themselves a little different or even superior to the place and people around them, in the same style that would help many later pop punk bands to build their delirious teenage followings.

‘It’s hard to live in a factory city’ is the song’s opener, and there’s something here that I think is at the core of why The Flys’ work strikes more of a chord than the better-known pop punk oeuvre of the 90s and 2000s. Coventry is not known for its glamour, having been bombed to shit in World War II and the subject of a phrase meaning ‘to ostracise someone’ for even longer, and it was experiencing a nadir even by these standards when The Flys were making music. It was in a major economic crisis, with the decline of local industries, principally car manufacture, leaving Coventry with one of the UK’s highest levels of unemployment.

Meanwhile, Pete Wentz, founding member of Fall Out Boy, has the full name Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III and grew up in an ‘affluent suburb’ with a lawyer for a dad. While I’m sure this isn’t a fair characterisation of the entire US pop punk scene, from afar it does suffer from a sense that its suburban rebellion is all a bit privileged; a bit ‘screw you, mom and dad!’

Of course, there is plenty of straight punk about which the same could be said. But generally speaking, at least with the good stuff, there is something to be angry about amidst snapshots of lives better connected with sociopolitical issues. Theirs is a less individualistic rage. 

Put out by Cherry Red in 2020, Today Belongs to Me: 1977-1980 is a lovingly packaged collection of The Flys’ entire recordings, along with a chunky booklet containing an essay by David Wells that warrants a proper read. The story it tells is of a band caught between genres and suffering for it, with befuddled labels lacking the vision to market a sound that wasn’t quite one thing or another. 

“While many of their contemporaries received critical and commercial acclaim, The Flys were swatted away like the disgusting, disease-ridden insects from which they took their name,” Wells writes. In a 2007 interview archived on his charmingly old-school website, the band’s founding member and “leading light” Neil O’Connor has little concern for genre classification. Asked whether he considers The Flys more ‘punk’ or ‘powerpop’, he replies: “Somewhere in between, but no – I don’t really care for labels and prefer, these days, to write without having to put one on any of my writings/recordings.”

Today Belongs to Me’s pack-in essay makes the clear case that while the band’s earlier work has its merits, the 1979 LP Own is The Flys’ masterwork. In fact, Wells is incredulous that the album was and is so utterly ignored: “Own was a 24-carat classic, an album that should have defined the dog-days of the decade as much as London Calling… Not too many people noticed, but Own was a masterpiece.”

And yes, there is some cracking stuff on Own: Night Creatures is The Flys at their pop best, powered by a deliriously catchy riff with an enjoyably un-punk solo thrown in for good measure. Cheap Days is one of The Flys’ very best, a return to the sharply-observed lyrical cynicism of Civilization and I Don’t Know: “These are cheap days, but it’s trash, it’s all trash.” Living in the Sticks is purest pop-punk yearning: “I’ll maybe leave the sticks when I come alive.”

To my ears, though, there is no night-and-day contrast between its tracks and the rest in this outstanding collection. Rather, it is in combination that its impact is most striking; a wholly impressive body of work, over a period of just three years, for little to no reward. 

On the bright side: how many artists, in any creative field, manage to blaze a trail for a genre and stand head and shoulders above almost anyone else who has tried it? That is perhaps the achievement of The Flys; they gave us the great promise of pop-punk that everything since has broken.