Punks from the past

Influential UK punk band Sham 69, will launch their first China tour tonight at Starlive in Beijing.

Widely considered the pioneers of street punk and its working-class offshoot Oi!, they showed on their 2008 tour of Australia that their legendary live performances, once labeled "incendiary", still have plenty of heat.

Sham 69 derived their name from a fading piece of graffiti that founder Jimmy Pursey saw on a wall near his home in Hersham, Surrey, in 1976 and rose to become a popular, if controversial, presence in the first wave of British punk.