'It did go rapidly downhill. I mean, it went beyond the worst it had ever been before punk happened. The very elitist club scene, very expensive clothing ... It's just gone back again.
The only sociological essay ever to change the course of teenage history was written by Nik Cohn. Discussing the American youth scene in the mid-seventies, he made the simple point that what everyone thought was youth culture, i.e. being 'alternative', growing your hair and smoking dope, was actually marginal, whereas what everyone thought was marginal, i.e. the commercialised, 'shallow' disco scene, was actually the important bit. Cohn's article, propounding his Perception Of The Importance Of Disco, was taken up by a film producer who made it into a movie starring John Travolta, and the soundtrack of the film, 'Saturday Night Fever', became the best-selling record of the decade.
Yeah, about 1978 or whatever, there was this great big disco surge. It was John Travolta and 'Saturday Night Fever' and it was really abysmal. We started up the Anti-Disco League and got chucked out of all the cinemas for disrupting the films. But even now I hate discos.
But it really caught on. I mean, after the film, everybody was going out to dancing lessons and trying this, and there was people who'd never been interested in disco dancing before. So as soon as you heard a Bee Gees record it sparked it off, and there was Macho Man, came onto the dance floor and started dancing.
The men would try and base their image on John Travolta, which was the slightly flared trousers, the three-piece suit with the shirt collar out and a medallion round the neck, or they'd have these shirts with the buttons undone to the waist. They'd be putting their hands in their waistcoat pockets and trying to spin and turn and strutting about and the girls just stood by and watched. They were just posing. It was a real turn-off.
The scene then was just to look cool. You spent most of your time in the toilet, changing clothes. You used to go to the disco with a massive big bag and you had about seven changes of clothes in it and you'd have your towel and your body deodorant to get rid of the smell of sweat, because you'd end up sweating and you'd walk past someone and they'd say ' Oh no, please!' and then you'd have to go into the toilet and change. So you'd throw off what you'd just had on and put something fresh on, and you' d go on the floor and come back about half an hour later and change again.
The narcissistic escapism of disco represented the opposite approach from punk, but it was a response to the same set of problems. If punk was a primal scream, disco, with its warmth, its heartbeat throb, its darkness, security and freedom from responsibility, was a return to the womb. Black youth felt the same impulse and was drawn to the dance-music culture of 'jazz-funk' which, unlike Rasta, coped with the outside world by ignoring its existence.
Every disco had its bouncers, and their job was to keep out scruffs and troublemakers. Whereas punks, out for the evening, would feel that if there weren't a few troublemakers present they'd come to the wrong place, disco left the lumpen element out in the cold where it grew nastier. The flotsam of punk was caught by a new wave of skinhead aggro and was thrown up again as 'Oi'.
What remained of punk became known as Oi, Oi music, which I couldn't stick at all. I remembered when the National Front had called punks the 'white niggers' and punks were getting smacked about by skinheads, but Oi seemed to unite punks and skinheads. I'm sure there were pockets of philanthropy in the Oi movement, but predominantly it came over as a racist thing, and I couldn't stomach Oi at all.
The punk groups either disbanded or modulated, under the influence of marketing-conscious record company executives, into 'new wave'. This 'acceptable face of punk' wore short hair and an unsmiling face and its records arrived in trendily designed album sleeves. Its statement to the world amounted to an assertion of its newness. The bands that predated the summer of ‘76 were dismissed as clapped-out fogies; the newcomers sought to be clean, sharp, relevant, staccato and pure. By the end of the decade, the more talented new wave luminaries, such as the Jam, the Police and Elvis Costello. having lost both their novelty and their 'alternative' status, were fully integrated into the pop establishment. Meanwhile, the Oi bands took punk music in its original guitar-thrashing, four-letter-lyric style and used it to express an inchoate, half-fascist, half-anarchist view of the world. They were against the establishment, but they were against it because it was too soft on 'commies' and blacks, too hard on young unemployed whites like them. The adoption of some of the outward elements of punk, such as bullet-belts and parrot-head hair-cuts, did not disguise the adherents of Oi. Some were ex-punks, some not, but first and foremost they were skinheads.
We became punks because we wanted to associate ourselves with something. We wanted to forget about being bossed about at work all week and just look forward to meeting up with your mates on a Saturday. But when we found out all the punks were middle-class kids from Knightsbridge paying £40 for a pair of bondage strides, we jacked it in and became skinheads.
On 2 July 1981, a Pakistani woman and her three children were killed when their house in Walthamstow was set on fire. The following evening, a concert at the Hambrough Tavern in Southall, featuring the Four Skins, the Last Resort and The Business, was the scene of bitter fighting between skinheads and Asian youths. The Tavern was burned to the ground. This was an extreme example, but there were many more such incidents: where Asians in the early seventies had gone in fear of being beaten up and kicked by skinheads, they now felt justifiably afraid for their lives. In London, in Coventry and elsewhere, Pakistani youths were attacked for no reason and stabbed to death.
I goes into this Chinese chippy. I've got me National Front badge on, and I've got me England badge, and they all look at it and they start jabbering away in Chinese, you know, and I can tell they're calling me, saying 'Oh, look who we've got in', like that. And if you take the piss out of them, they won't serve you and they chuck you out!
I've got 'A.C.A.B.' on my fingers. All Coppers Are Bastards. That's the only tattoo I've got. I can't afford them, they're too dear. I got a bollocking off me Mam for it. She says ' Well, I hope the coppers don't see it when they get you, 'cos they'll give you a good hiding.'
When I was about fourteen I seen it on the television about skinheads and I thought 'Bloody Hell, it must be great to be one of them.' Then when I turned fifteen, I got my first pair of Doc Martens; got the money off my dad and went and had my hair cut. It just kicked off from there. Then I met Swazzy and he got me into the National Front and they told me what it's all about and I agree with it. There's too many blacks coming in, and they're complaining about jobs, right? Five million blacks, right? Three million unemployed. That's like twice the number of whities - that's us, right? - out of work. And we're not rioting. You're black, right? You belong in your own country.
(In 1981, the number of non-white people in Britain was estimated at 2.5 million. 88% of young people, when asked to guess, thought the number was higher than that. 41% of the unskilled working class guessed at a figure of over 10 million.)
The Anti-Nazi League and its musical offshoot 'Rock Against Racism' took up the challenge of the National Front's drive to recruit working-class youth to the racialist cause. Among the bands who performed free at Rock Against Racism concerts and festivals were those who had suffered at the hands of the skinheads, like the Clash and the British reggae bands, as well as others who were embarrassed by the skinhead element among their own following, like the Specials and Sham 69. It was a paradox of the time that skinheads liked reggae. A sizeable contingent of them joined the 100,000-strong Anti-Nazi League march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park in the summer of 1977 because they wanted to hear the black group Steel Pulse. The skinheads who followed the Specials referred to the band, which contained two black musicians, as The Specials Plus Two'.
My involvement with Rock Against Racism? I wore the badge. But then everybody wore the badges.
We used to chat with the Rastamen. We got on well with them. Yeah, I went to Hyde Park when they had the 'Rock Against Racism' gig. It was the Clash, Steel Pulse, Sham 69, and when we got there the first fifteen or so rows in front of the main stage were packed solid with National Front skinheads daring anyone to enjoy themselves and speak against racism. They just sort of broke the whole gig up.
In Liverpool we had a club called 'Eric's', and there black people and white people came together, because you' d have a punk group supporting a big reggae band from Jamaica. There was a crossover, you know, between the punk and the reggae thing.
The musical links between black and white, forged in the heat of the punk explosion, remained after punk and Rasta went their separate ways. The new meeting point was the mod revival of 1978-9, largely inspired by the film of the Who album 'Quadrophenia', which in turn revived interest in the ska and bluebeat music favoured by the first-generation mods. In London and, significantly, in the 'ghost town' of Coventry (one of the areas hardest hit by unemployment and a town which had seen more than its share of racial violence) new bands appeared wearing 'rude boy' suits and porkpie hats and performing Prince Buster tunes with much wagging of the right index finger. The collective name for Madness, the Specials, Selecter and similar outfits, taken partly from the record label, partly from their anti-racialist stance and partly from their trousers, was Two-Tone.
The appearance of black and white musicians in the same group, which was a novelty in 1979, became unremarkable in the eighties. The reggae influence on mainstream pop, from Paul Simon through to the Police and Culture Club, was even more pervasive.
