Well this was a surprise. UKers are probably aware of this from back in the day when it was released, but I’d not seen it on Oz TV. The only reason I watched it was because it was Don Letts and I had enjoyed his ‘Punk’ doco so much. I have to admit, my knowledge of skinhead history was down around the Daily Mail/Express front-page level of ignorance and mis-informed garbage.
It doesn’t help that ‘skinhead’ is now synonymous with ‘fascist’, ‘racist’ and ‘thug’, particularly in other countries.
I think I’ll show it to my kids, mainly because the period footage from the early 70s is absolutely how I remember the UK as it was before I left in the 80s (pre-Cool Britannia), and it was why I left. Things might have been better elsewhere around the country at that time, and certainly things have improved since then (but not everywhere), but jeez it was bad.
And it was amazing to find out Gary Bushell wasn’t quite as big a tool as I had thought (he’s still a fairly substantial tool though).
Link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nns95Psr-iA
Yes I watched it. For all the careful triangulation I can only think of skinheads as nasty vicious bastards. True about the 70s footage though, but it did tend to the noir version of the 70s as these things do. I had a great 70s! Other than being chased by skinheads for having long hair, that is.
Oh, a suedehead were yer?
First generation neo hippy, maaan.
My youthful interactions with Skinheads, back around the turn of the ’60s into the ’70s, were seldom good. Got duffed up a couple of times. A few of the local ones were relatively friendly, but only because they were using some of the same drugs as us Freaks (we didn’t like to be called Hippies and be associated with all that bells, beads & bongos shit).
My racial tolerance credentials were not particularly good in those ignorant early days, but even so I was disgusted by their Paki-bashing exploits.
Also, I had my entire album collection (probably about a dozen prized LPs) nicked by a local skinhead, who probably sold them all to buy speed.
Post-punk revisionism, IMHO. Back in the day skins were Proud (of what?) ignorant racist thugs too thick to realise liking ska and reggae rather undermined the principled prejudice thing. They made Brighton seafront miserable to hairies, ruined football matches and punk gigs, and made a two-tone gig I saw almost turn into a riot. I like that gay men adopted the look and rather undermined it. But the image still presents a memory of a genuine threat to older Asians. And it’s not just an ‘image’ in Eastern Europe.
The Nazi skinhead is arguably our most successful cultural export of all time. It exists anywhere where white people live. It’s almost bigger than Jesus.
Gets yer there, dunnit?
Yeabutt some of them woz proper heroes. “Wipes tear from eye.”
To @Twang and @Vincent, you are completely right, savage psychos and vicious anti-asian bastards (selectively racist?)… I couldn’t agree more, and I avoided them as widely as everyone else. But still slightly more complicated than I expected.
Thanks for the recommend, really enjoyed that. Yeah, you can’t help but feel sympathy for the original skinheads who saw their look co-opted by the far right, but it happened, and to be fighting against it now seems a bit Canute-like to me.
Cnuts vs C888s?
I could never like Madness and the Two Tone lot because of the skinhead thing. Not a good look. I don’t care that they all liked Ska etc.
I saw this a while ago.
I took away a couple of things from it. DL rightly felt that some historical context was needed & so understandably emphasised the Spirit Of ’69 aspect ( as it tends to be referred to in some circles) – essentially a UK take on a ‘rude boy’ style. An easy look to attain ( although skinheads have always been obsessed with minor details & scornful of those who fall short of a very codified look), hyper-masculine, almost cartoonishly so, & therefore inevitably having a tendency towards football & fighting & the epitome of being able to ‘belong’ by subsuming into a group. Not to mention excellent music., it being Jamaican in origin. That’s all good as there are those who only know of boneheads & need to be enlightened.
Having said that, Don Letts & Pauline Black let the odious Garry Bushell off FAR too lightly when asking him about Oi & the late 70s skinhead revival, which mutated into the full on fascist goon thong much of the world knows today. Bushell fancied himself as a Svengali of a ‘movement’ , a more geezerish McClaren figure if you like, & wasn’t fussy about associating with some very unsavoury people & flirting with very unsavoury images & phrases – ‘Strength Through Oi’ being an obvious pun on the Nazi slogan ‘Strength Through Joy’ as an example. This wasn’t just posturing as Oi events such as in Southall led to riots & arson. Bushell was allowed to inanely grin & take a ‘ yeah, well’ angle when he should have been properly held to account for being the toe rag he is.
Not that I dislike him or anything, obviously.
At 15 in 1970, some of my friends were already skinheads. They were defined almost as much by what they were not; they were not poncy posh kids, they were not hairy kids, they were not grebos. They didn’t buy Genesis albums or hard rock albums. They didn’t have long hair and they didn’t wear patched loons or denim. They did listen to soul, ska and bluebeat, and they did have black kids amongst them. I liked their music, alongside the prog and the folk I’d already discovered. I still have my original copy of Skinhead Moonstomp on Trojan. But it didn’t take long for things to start to change, as the BM and NF moved in quickly on the back of working class pissed-offness and everything gradually went slightly swastika shaped. But for a while there, it was just another working-class cultural movement thing, a style, a vibe, like many others before it, with no affiliation to anything politically distasteful.
Amongst the very early skinheads in our town there were a couple of West Indian kids. Within a year or so they were no longer welcome in that gang.