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It was a military uniform: you had your jeans, your braces, your steel-capped boots on. I mean, the Army wear boots, don't they? As a military unit you wear boots. They was a weapon. If someone was having a go at you, you could put the boot in.
Skinheads? Well, there's always a status quo of prats around. They just go under different names really. |
| Among the long-haired thousands who gathered in Grosvenor Square at the end of October 1968 to chant ‘Victory to the NLF' and 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh', there were 200 shaven-headed supporters of Millwall Football Club who were chanting 'Enoch, Enoch' and 'Students, students, ha ha ha'. Nobody yet called them skinheads, but they had not gone unnoticed; only the previous month the new style had achieved mention in the Daily Telegraph: |
Hundreds of youths in hobnailed boots left Margate last night after a weekend of fights and scuffles with police. The boot brigade, successors to the mods and rockers, met police in several clashes on the seafront yesterday and on Sunday. One boy, sixteen, dressed in hill-billy fashion in heavy brown boots, and jeans held up by braces, said: 'The boots are just part of the uniform. They make us look hard.’
Skinhead style was not so much an innovation as a standardisation of the 'hard mod' image, which could trace its ancestry all the way back to Clacton 1964, but while undeniably neat, the look was about as unstylish as it was possible to get: shaved head, big boots (Doc Martens, also known as 'cherry reds'), wide jeans rolled up to mid calf and worn with braces which went over the sleeveless pullover that was worn as a vest, and, for very cold weather, the Harrington jacket, a short, black denim 'bomber' jacket with a checked lining. For evening wear, to go 'clubbing it', the skinhead dressed more formally in two-tone Tonik trousers, a Ben Sherman button-down shirt and Brut aftershave. |
| We'd just gone through the mod era, which we'd all appreciated. I mean, we sat round with our scooters in the early days. We all went down to Brighton and Southend, Bank Holidays, and we all had a fight with the greasers like the mods did. But then we went to the extreme: I mean, we took our hair right down to the limit, you know, half an inch or whatever. I had it done at a barbers' called Grey's down East India Dock Road. It wasn't much of a haircut; he just gets those old trimmers out and goes zing, zing, zing and that's it, your hair's gone! |
| By this time, the notion that no youth cult was complete without its own philosophy had taken such a hold on the nation in general and the Press in particular that reporters were put out to discover that skinheads didn't seem to believe in anything very much. The Daily Mail quoted a sixteen-year-old 'peanut' as saying: 'What are we for? Nothing really. We are just a group of blokes. We're not for anything.' Asked what he was against, however, the peanut waxed verbose: Long hair, pop, hippie sit-ins, live-ins and the long-haired cult of non-violence.' The term 'peanut', the Mail added helpfully, was 'a sneering description of the cult, directed more at their rattling motor-scooters ("peanuts in a tin") than at their shaven heads'. This analysis of the minutiae of youth culture was typical of the period. It seemed as though every gang of skinheads had its own non-judgemental sociologist in tow. |
| By the summer of 1969, the young nihilists were proving a serious nuisance to the alternative society. In June Oz reported: |
| The Spikeys, or Brushcuts, are summer's new dumb terrorists in jeans, braces and thick leather boots. With sharpened aluminium combs and hair to match (sic) they have already wrecked one major free concert. They maraud in large groups, and last month beat up a few long-hairs in Hyde Park, to the baying accompaniment of vastly outnumbering hippies: 'Wow, what a bad scene, man.' One compensation: only the masculine variety have been spotted, so at least they won't breed. |
| (Oz spoke too soon). |
The Black Dwarf, in August, fed the whole puzzle into the sausage-machine of Marxist dialectical analysis and cranked out the theory that skinheads...
...represent an assertion of working-class identity against the hippies and lefties - groups that they very reasonably consider middle-class and irrelevant to their life-situation... The skinheads are the real drop-outs, as opposed to the fancy drop-outs who take a few months off work to do very nicely living by their wits. These latter people aren't really drop-outs at all, they are people whose dissatisfaction with society had led them to take a long holiday from it. The skinhead is rejected by society. He is dropped out - because he is thick, because he can't cope with responsibility, because he's disorganised. He lands up in the lowest-paid job where he has to work long, boring, unrewarding, unrecognised hours before going back to a home that has blatantly missed out on the glitter of the affluent society.
What was to be done about it? Black Dwarf proposed to 'mobilise' the 'many thousands of working-class boys and girls in this country who were deeply impressed by the May Events in France, for whom the word "revolution" is an exciting word. These young people see the skinheads as the nasty, thick little louts they really are.' |
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| The class-based explanation understates one important point about skinheads: they were reacting not only against the upwardly-mobile grammar-grubs, but also against what they saw as the effeminacy of the hippie image. Their own style was a parody of butch-ness, and they saw 'queer-bashing', by which they meant taunting and assaulting the frillier varieties of male hippie, as a moral crusade. |
| They were mostly from the secondary modern schools and they mostly left school as fifteen and went either on the dole or stacking shelves in supermarkets, that sort of thing. They weren't what you call the cream of the intelligentsia. |
| Against the lumpen-prole stereotype one should set the 1968 report on soccer hooliganism which analysed 497 convictions; it found that 10% of the offenders were skilled workers, a further 4% clerks and salesmen, and there were even a couple of managerial-grade yobbos in the sample. Less than half were unskilled or unemployed. |
I went to college. I'm an electrician by trade, and touch wood I've never been unemployed. You know, several others who were in our gang are in business now. One of them is an architect surveyor with a half-million-pound turnover and two villas in Spain. He got done for having a row at Coventry, I remember. He got three months' D.C. (Detention Centre) for steaming into the Old Bill with a hammer.
All these things what we was to the older people — hooligans, louts, tearaways —you know, it's not true. I mean I like to think I'm a likeable person as such. Maybe I wasn't so much then, but even then I was polite and never disrespectful to elderly people. I had neighbours who'd say 'Oh, he's a lovely boy, helped me home with my shopping yesterday' and all that. I mean, just because I done things on a Saturday afternoon on the terraces and Friday night at the club, it doesn't make me a bad person. |
| Insofar as skinheads were recruited from among society's rejects (and as always, to articulate the thought was half-way to making it true), their constituency was on the increase as the swinging sixties gave way to the sour seventies. In August 1971, The People, under a headline that was not yet a cliche, 'FROM SCHOOL TO THE SCRAP-HEAP', expressed its concern: |
| It's going to take longer than ever this year for school-leavers to find their first jobs. Obviously and tragically. For a record 450,000 boys and girls left school last month to join the record queue of more than 800,000 unemployed. And, until Britain's sagging economy revives, job-hunting teenagers are in for the worst period of blighted prospects since the war. |
Meanwhile, the Evening Standard blamed not unemployment but the schools:
When they leave school they will still be so illiterate they will get lost on the Underground. Already they know that they are failures and they resent it. Knowing no other language, at twelve or thirteen they adopt the ways of the misfit: get convict haircuts and act violently. Their number grows each year, their behaviour becomes more extreme. They represent, without doubt, one of the major challenges to our education system. Education Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher described as 'the most shattering set of statistics I have ever had to give' the following: that 91% of children who leave school at fifteen (and nearly half the population still does leave at fifteen) had no exam passes of any kind.
If evidence is needed that skinheads, in the beginning, were not consciously racist, one need only point to their favourite music. |
| Music-wise it was reggae. Well, I call it reggae, I mean it was kind of bluebeat. It was Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker and the Upsetters and the Pioneers to name but a few. The first record I can remember buying — which everyone went mad over — was 'Red Red Wine' by Tony Tribe. That was the first single I bought. |
| To go with the Jamaican ska music, with its heavy off-beat, the skinheads evolved their own semi-military style of dancing, the skinhead stomp. |
| You'd go three steps one way and three steps the other and two forward and one back and kick your leg behind you. Everyone seemed to dance the same way. It wouldn't take you two minutes to pull a bird,you know. The birds would all be going like that up and down the floor and you'd just stand in front of them and just follow them and that's it - you'd clocked it with a bird, you know. |
| The Sunday Times, in September 1969, even theorised that the skinhead haircut as well as the music was borrowed from 'Negroes, whom they call Calebs or "Rudies" and whom they leave pretty much alone'. |
| This happy state of racial harmony was undermined and finally destroyed by the emergence in 1969 and the spread in 1970 of the ugly sport of 'Paki-bashing'. It started in the East End, reflecting the hostility of the wider working-class community to a large-scale influx of Asian immigrants at the time. One suspects, also, that skinheads picked on Asians, in the same way as they picked on hippies, 'queers' and students, because they were less likely than West Indians to attempt to defend themselves. 'Pakis', because of wider cultural differences from working-class whites, were despised. West Indians - although they might be fought against, much as Tottenham supporters would fight Arsenal fans - were regarded with respect, or at least with as much respect as one can actually feel while kicking somebody in the face. |
| Yes, we did have trouble with the blacks. I mean, there was a club that started up at Mile End that was called 'The A Train' and yeah, sure, every Friday night, every Saturday night, whenever we chose to go up there, we'd have a battle with the blacks. But we had black guys on our side as well, a few coloured guys who'd stand behind you and fight for you as a brother, no problem. |
| A black Liverpudlian remembers the fights in his city as having more to do with territory than with race. They certainly were not all one-sided. |
| Oh yeah, we used to fight against the skinheads, and it’d be like territorial. You'd have to stay within your territory, like you wouldn't get one man coming out of his territory, going into say Lodge Lane, because you'd just get attacked. So we used to meet them at certain times, and we'd throw bricks and people would have catapults, you know? And of a Saturday, people would go into town, the city centre, and they'd go in the precinct there, in a cafe called the Brass Rail. The black guys would meet in there and the skinheads would come in shouting all kinds of things, 'niggers' and 'wogs', and then you'd get the kind of situation where you'd have ten black guys and say fifty skinheads, and if the ten black guys made a dash for the skinheads, the fifty of them would run, you know, because they'd see plenty of black faces and they'd see ten as like fifty of them. |
And then people started getting into karate and ju-jitsu. There were the Bruce Lee films and they appealed to the black guys and they started learning kung-fu. Then after a while, the Bruce Lee thing died out and people started to leave it, and there wasn't this need to fight the skinheads. As people grew up they got more mature and got more sense, and that type of thing stopped. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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