The Burial

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The Burial were a ska-, northern soul- and folk-influenced Oi! band from Yorkshire, England that formed in 1981. They released one album, A Day on the Town, and have worked with Nick Toczek on various projects under the name Britanarchists.

They had three songs on the Oi! of Sex compilation album; two as The Burial and one as Britanarchists. They had two songs on the Oi! the Demos compilation, and songs on The Sound of Oi! and Oi! Glorious Oi! compilations. In the liner notes of Oi! The Demos, Mark Brennan of Captain Oi! Records describes The Burial as "the prototype Skacore band", and on his website he described them as "vastly underrated".^{[citation needed]} In his article Oi! The Truth, Garry Bushell writes, "Scarborough’s Burial cited Oi and 2-Tone as forebears and mixed the sounds of ska and rowdy bootboy punk in their set."^[1] The Gonads' song "Joys of Oi!" includes the lyric "The Burial at number one".^{[citation needed]}

Eric 'Barney' Barnes, named after Eric Blair (pen name George Orwell) was the chief ideological leftist influence on the band. He was an active member of Militant tendency and he vigorously supported the National Union of Miners in its year long strike action; working class revolutionary socialist groups such as Red Action; and activist-performers such as Bradford's anarchist rant-poet Nick Tozcek.^{[citation needed]} Their political views, musical style and skinhead identity meant that they sometimes shared the the same concert bill as the Trotskyite band The Redskins.^{[citation needed]} Barnes eventually left Militant, retrained as a nurse and became a shop steward at Scarborough Hospital.^{[citation needed]}

In the early days of the band, the members worked at the Malton Bacon Factory abattoir in Norton-on-Derwent, North Yorkshire.^{[citation needed]} The imagery of workplace alienation and escapist hedonism featured heavily in their song "Friday Night", which has been covered by American hardcore band Hardsell.^{[citation needed]}