The danger that the latent racism of the skinheads could be worked upon to the point where it became the cult's raison d'etre had been spotted by Black Dwarf, which headlined its 1969 article ‘THE SKINHEADS - A YOUTH GROUP FOR THE NATIONAL FRONT?' It was a while, however, before the NF made significant progress in that direction. Skinheads had more important things to do than attend meetings and listen to speeches. They were fellow-travellers of the far right but they were seldom card-carrying members.
It surprised some people, but the attempt to create a latter-day brownshirt movement was a failure, and the Front began to concentrate on reincarnating the Hitler Jugend instead. They began to spread their propaganda in schools, forming their own student association for the purpose. Matters were to come to a head later in the decade, but for most early-seventies skinheads, 'ideology' was altogether too long a word.
From their mod forebears, skinheads inherited their drug of choice, amphetamine, which had a lot to do with their edgy, aggressive stance; a skinhead on speed was a thick ear waiting to happen.
You'd stand there, you had your chewing-gum, you'd be chewing away and talking to your mates and you'd say 'Who's he looking at?' and you'd pump yourself up and you'd start getting paranoid about 'Is he looking at me? Is he looking at me?' and the guy, who was probably innocently watching a bird or whatever, when you'd say 'Who you looking at?' he'd say the wrong answer and you'd just biff him, you know what I mean? And then it would all go off. He'd have a couple of mates and it'd all go off. And once it all goes and the glasses are smashing and you hear them smashing you just run in there. There's no thought about the glass coming in your face or the punch in the earhole or somebody jabbing you in the back with a knife.
Skinheads were frightening in groups, but on their own they were a bit pathetic really, because they needed to be in a pack. But you never knew at the time whether any of them were carrying knives or not. I used to carry a blooming great Norton chain just for self-protection. But you used to wonder how these things ever got used in the first place. Obviously someone draws a weapon first and you wonder if it's worthwhile.
People came at us with chains and lumps of wood and lumps of metal. And you either stand your ground or you back off a bit and see if you can pick up a bit of debris or something and steam back and see whose bottle goes then. And I mean you can get hurt. I've seen people get stabbed, I've seen glasses put in people's faces, I've seen terrible things. Touch wood I haven't had it happen to me. I'm not saying I wasn't involved in doing it the other way round.
No mod would have been seen dead in a football stadium, but the terraces became the skinheads' public stage and their recruiting ground. They followed soccer in the first place because it was part of a working-class tradition and they were class conservatives. It also offered them a community with which to identify, a territory to defend and the opportunity, without the inconvenience of having to make arrangements as to time and place, to hit people.
Soccer's steady decline in importance as a spectator sport had been briefly arrested in the late sixties; England had won the World Cup in 1966, and the lifting of restrictions on players' wages had made the professional footballer a much more glamorous figure, with the likes of George Best and Charlie George acquiring virtual pop star status.
At certain grounds - in Glasgow and Liverpool for example - it had long been the custom for the younger and more vocal supporters to mass at one end of the stadium and form a 'kop choir'. Now they developed more elaborate rituals, such as the massed, swaying rendition by Liverpool fans of the Mersey classic 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. The visiting supporters took these conventions back with them to their home grounds; the Arsenal 'North Bank', the first to become overtly skin-head, was established during the 1966-7 season and within a couple of years every major club acquired an ‘end’. Within its tribal structure there were specialised roles, from the strategists and tacticians to the 'hard men' and 'nutters'. There was also the ‘brains crew' who had the job of supplying witty remarks and appropriate songs at particular points in the game.
So far so jolly, but before the end could begin to sway and harmonise together it had first to be occupied. It became the aim of the visiting supporters to seize and hold the home fans' end, and thus, from the moment the turnstiles were unlocked, did hostilities commence.
To say it was electrifying would be underestimating it. I mean you can talk about taking speed and smoking pot, but the actual buzz of being there and the noise generating round you and your team comes out and you scream... It's like a really high buzz. Your hair stands up on end. It's like - did you see that film, 'Zulu'? The thin red line and these thousands of black men all steaming down on them? I should imagine that could make you feel something like it, that battle, that chant, you know, it's electrifying. Your hair stands up and you go all cold. It's untrue. And all of a sudden, literally ten thousand Norwich supporters ran right across the pitch at Watford and the police just couldn't control us. They started throwing us back where they could, but we'd get in somewhere else, and the Watford supporters just made a mass exodus out of the ground and we just completely took over the other stand. Nowadays that would be regarded as hooliganism, but that never even made the papers.
We went to Coventry, I don't know how many of us, I suppose about 1,500. We walked through the streets of Coventry. We went in Woolworths through one door, we came out the other door and they was still walking in Woolworths, it was like a big snake going through the chain store. And there was things picked up, aerosol paint sprays and all that. There was a couple of birds in front of us and we sprayed their legs blue and red, the colours of our team, and there was a man's motorbike - we sprayed that an entirely different colour. Anyway, we got to the match and for some reason they let us get in first, so we've got the centre of their stand, and we all started chanting. And then all of a sudden we could hear 'Cov-en-tree, Cove-en-tree...' It was like stereo, and they came steaming in from both sides and we was stuck in the middle. They slaughtered us!
Deviancy amplification did the rest: the supporters who didn't care for 'aggro' stayed at home, so the 'tiny hooligan minority' to whom club chairmen were so fond of referring became a rather larger minority and eventually (swelled by recruits forwhom aggro was the main attraction) on some terraces became the majority.
The skinhead cult was the first post-war youth movement to which music was not of central importance. Football was, to them, what rock'n'roll had been to the Teddy boys. The soccer obsession was exploited by some pop performers such as Rod Stewart and Slade who achieved a sort of Cup Final atmosphere at theirconcerts, all swaying scarves and singalong choruses. But even out of season the skinhead's idea of a good time had little to do with concerts, discos or juke-boxes and far more to do with spending time in the pub or drinking on the move, endlessly discussing and occasionally committing acts of mindless violence.
We used to go out to the pub on a Friday night, then go clubbing it, then go out for a ride, generally just getting stoned, crash out somewhere in a forest or a lay-by somewhere, get up in the morning, drive back to London, have our breakfast, go home, get changed, meet again in the afternoon and be out drinking again then until Sunday night.
As with any extreme youth style, the skinheads attracted an outer fringe (or stubble) who went some but not all of the way. These tended to be younger and to include a higher proportion of girls. Someone coined the term 'suede-heads' for them, but they were more usually known as 'crombies' after their favourite coats. There were a few skinhead girls who attached themselves to the male gangs, where they were tolerated but largely ignored. Most girls who affected the style were at the pubescent stage of going round in little gangs of their own.
My first thing was a very half-hearted, ill-informed attempt to try and become a skinhead. I didn't know there was anything else to be. You wore a checked shirt and sort of broguey shoes, and there were also Crombie coats. I think they would have quite suited me, but it was not to be - I wore a Marks and Spencers school anorak. In middle-class, suburban Merseyside we were all trying to be skinheads, which was really pathetic. We just weren't that hard, you know. And we used to go round in little Harrington jackets and boys' brogue shoes and have our hair cut really short except for those wisps at the side and the back. But I was very ill during that whole winter because I would insist on going round with this stupid jacket on.
The skinhead style was too simple and too well-rooted in ancient working-class traditions to do anything so final as dying out. It mutated, each mutation calling itself by a different name ('smooth-heads', 'casuals', 'oi') and re-emerged in a slightly different form (the post-punk 'skins') at the end of the seventies. Meanwhile the original skinheads were heading rapidly for middle age, the first teenage generation to mark the transition to adult respectability by growing their hair.
