Skinheads

Originating in 1960’s Britain and proudly working class Skinheads devolved from the Mods which was the term used to first describe fans of modern, as opposed to traditional jazz. This original Mod scene began to fracture under commercial and media pressures and internal contradictions such as those overtly interested in fashion and the 60’s look and the ‘hard Mods’. The former were beginning to merge into the more middle-class, hippie, permissive, long-hair culture currently coming into vogue. The latter were evolving their own utilitarian working-class clothes style of steel-toe capped boots, straight-leg jeans raised to mid-calf or Sta-Prest trousers, button-up shirts, and braces and for going out, suits.

Above Skinhead couple Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes October (left) 1969 wearing classical button down shirts such as Ben Sherman. Skinhead women (left) in Leicester Square, London, 1981. Great Daily Mail Article and photos on original and eighties skins.

Add to this the drug amphetamine making them edgy, jumpy, and paranoid and their music of choice soul, ska, bluebeat, early reggae and rocksteady music as opposed to the marijuana and acid-laden trippy rock of the hippies. Like the Teds and Mods, your hairstyle said who you were and what group you belonged to. No more so than the Skinheads named after their haircut where the length of the cut is determined by the guard on the barber’s electric razor. One being the shortest and four the longest.

By 1969 however, the Skinhead look was so popular that even the rock band Slade shaved their heads and adopted the look, and trash novels like ‘Skinhead’ and ‘Skinhead Escapes’ by Richard Allen, full of violence and sex, sensationalised the youth subculture. The back cover of ‘Skinhead’ gives you a taste!

By the 1970s, Skinheads had started to fade from popular culture. However as they mutated from their original styles, Skinheads began to gain popularity again in the mid-seventies as they absorbed rising football hooliganism into their aggression. Fiercely conservative, patriotic and distrustful of middle-class intellectuals Skinheads added to their reputation for aggression with their response to a changing society that involved picking on the Asian community (Paki bashing), homosexuals (queer bashing) and student bashing. This kind of behaviour meant the group became a recruiting ground for the nationalistic British National Party with the net result of stereotyping Skinheads as racist, homophobic and violent.

Punk Rock, now moving to a harder street style of sound and look with its combination of terrace style choruses, implied aggression and working class identity arguably struck a chord with some Skinheads. Examples of this were bands like Cocksparrer who actively proclaimed themselves a Skinhead band, Slaughter & the Dogs, with their stage favourite ‘Where Have All The Boot Boys Gone,’ Sham 69 who had a small group of original Skins as some of their first fans and Menace. All of these had skinhead followings.

Sham 69’s involvement with Skins came with the infamous ‘skinheads are back shout’ at one of their gigs at the Roxy.

Jimmy Pursey (Sham 69) Let’s really get to the truth of this other business of skinheads. What happened there was this, somebody in the audience shouted out at one of the gigs at the Roxy ‘Skinheads are back’, to which me, being a little skinhead from 1967 where it lasted for about six months, and if you didn’t go to fuckin’ school with a shaven head you would get the crap kicked out of you and which 90% of kids at that particular time in 1967 had, you would then understand that someone shouting that out in 1977 would bring a sarcastic reaction from me, as normally things like that do. As ‘yeah mate, yeah your O.K. sure they are…blah, blah, blah’, to which someone took it upon them to say that I was saying ‘Yeah, they are back aren’t they.’

Dave Parsons (Sham 69) What actually happened was, at an early gig when we were drawing a crowd of about five, an old friend of Jimmys who had been an original Skinhead the first time around was in the crowd – Jimmy spotted him and said (tongue in cheek) “Skinheads are back.” The next time we played, the place was packed with people queuing to get in, all with freshly cropped heads.

Now these new Skinheads had their own style of music as Skin John Butler explained in a Sounds article ‘A Day In The Life Of A Skinhead’ to journalist Garry Bushell.

When it first started we just wanted to be different. We didn’t want to be fashion, we wanted to be anti-fashion but we didn’t want to be Punk, and that’s ‘ow skin came about. Punk was middle class, the price of the gear, £35 for a pair of bondage strides, it’s out of order, innit.

To me a skin’ead is a geezer who wears the proper clothes and who’s got the right beliefs. He’s got to follow Punk. Before it ‘ad no chance, following reggae bands. How could they follow ’em? They were over the other side of the Atlantic or wherever it is. We couldn’t associate with them. But now there’s Punk and skins can associate themselves with Punk. Sounds, 21.10.78

Swelling the ranks were Punks turning Skinhead both to protect themselves and to project a harder image to avoid being a target for the general public and Teddy Boys. Punk fashion also began to change. As Punk broadened and appealed more to the working class, some of its fans adopted more practical and urban clothing. Boots, jeans, leather jackets and shorter-cropped hair meant a Punk was now more mobile. Hard to run from a gang of Skins, Teds or football hooligans when your legs are tied together in bondage trousers!

Mervyn Jones (Roxygoer) Skinheads started appearing in the summer of 77. To begin with they wasn’t really a problem. I think it was Punks adopting a harder look fed up with all the hassle and being more able to blend in.

Indeed, this was the motivation behind Skrewdriver’s doing a Slade and turning into a Skinhead band. Having been previously involved in Teddy Boy violence themselves, they became Skinheads and actively courted them as fans after witnessing an incident at a gig.

Mervyn Jones (Roxygoer) They reckoned they had changed because of a gig at Battersea. The Teds had attacked and all the Punks had run away except for the Skins who had stayed to fight back. So they decided they were going to become Skinhead.

Gary Hitchcock, later manager of the 4 Skins, appeared in Sounds in 1980, talking about the Skinhead revival describing Skrewdriver as the first real Skinhead band.

We met Ian Stuart at a Sham gig at the Roxy in ‘77. He told us about Skrewdriver, said they weren’t like Sham, that they were skins, so we spread the word about, and there was a massive turn-out. Down at the Vortex it was. We never knew there were so many skinheads around and they were all geezers. No one looked under twenty five, and they played all the skinhead reggae stuff that we hadn’t heard in years.

Skrewdriver then started to attract other Skins.

Kevin McKay (Skrewdriver) We attracted Skinheads from Chelsea, West Ham and Arsenal and they all came to see us. Ian would go out fighting with them afterwards because he loved all that type of crap and all the fans loved him. So when we did a double headline gig at the Roxy with Sham 69 we played first. When they played, our Skinhead fans were running on stage and booing them because Sham didn’t go out fighting with them. It was a bit sad really because it wasn’t about the music it was just the fighting. Punk77 Interview

These Punks turned Skinheads were treated with the same disdain, regarding their styles and music that the original and second wave of Punks had for each other.

The influence of Punk and the scarcity of traditional skinhead wear meant that the new breed of skin rarely came up to the standards of dress set just seven or eight years before. Even the music of bands like Sham and Menace was a world away from the original skinhead sounds of soul and reggae. “The music was just like rock music,” says Brian Kelson, who saw Punks as a variation of hippies and bikers, “and the clothes were just so scruffy and ill-fitting. The jeans would be skin tight and too short with great big boots, and the hair was shaven right off. They’d be taking drugs and sniffing glue, and you wouldn’t have caught an original skinhead doing that – it was degrading. You were a working class bloke, proud of this great nation, and you wouldn’t be seen dossing like a hippy. The public saw them as dirty, scruffy, bald-headed drug takers – short haired hippies really. To be brought up with such strong ideals about the movement and to see it taken over like that was worse than anything. http://www.skinheadnation.co.uk

As a result of their involvement with aggro on the terraces and their patriotic pride, they were targeted by the National Front and actively recruited. Their tactic like at football matches was to rush the stage and take control of it, start fights and intimidate. Gigs became a bloodbath on either side. The Lurkers gig at Woolwich was famously a carnage as right-wing Skinheads ran amok and Crass’s gig at Acklam Hall reversed the hate as violent anti-nazis attacked and beat anyone looking remotely like a skinhead.

G.B. ENGLAND. Racists give Nazi salute in London. 1980 – Chris Steele-Perkins

Sean Powers (Menace Roadie) My opinion is it was a skinhead thing and they have always been associated with having a fight. I don’t care what anyone says. People used to be at football in the seventies and if you were a skinhead there you would be regarded as one of the people who fought. You wouldn’t be a skinhead otherwise. It was an identification thing. The skinhead uniform was to intimidate. I’m not saying everyone was like that, but the majority were. When you get ten of then tanked up and on blues (you’re wired for the night but wake up still chewing your jaw off four days later aching) so all fired up with this rush. The music was powerful so when the chords start off I’m off pogoing, bouncing into people arms by the side with shoulders and then you get a fucking idiot who punches you, then you throw a punch back and then bang! There you go. There’s your reaction and that’s how it all kicks off. Punk77 Interview

 Skinheads and Punks Crystal Palace vs Chelsea 1980 – Photo Ian Berry

These new Skinheads with less emphasis on traditional styles grew in numbers and grabbed media attention and forever sealed the stereotype of skinheads the world over. For Jimmy Pursey and Sham 69, all Skinheads were welcome in his audience be they Punks turned Skinheads or even NF Skinheads as he explained to Sounds music paper.

A Skinhead is not acceptable, but a Punk became acceptable because Punk to the parents was a joke. Half these fucking posers would walk around saying ‘Anarchy’-if they saw the law running down the street with a fucking riot going on they’d be the first to run down the road.

These Skinheads who came from the Punks were the actual Punks. They were the ones who believed in everything that was going on, so when they saw everything was going wrong they thought ‘F~ this, let’s do something that’s not acceptable.’

Skinheads aren’t acceptable because they represent violence. But you can channel that violence, that energy and excitement into something good, showing you can be a rebel with a cause. That’s what I’m trying to do.

“It’s just not true that all Skinheads are Nazis, but I’d rather have an NF skinhead come to my gigs so I can turn round and say ‘I’m an Anti-Nazi, what do you fucking think of that’ than a robot. Garry Bushell, Sounds, 5.8.78

For Sham 69 their final farewell gig at the Rainbow was wrecked by Skinheads. Eventually, a third wave of even harder more street punk music evolved into what became known as OI and even more associations with nationalism and violence but that’s another story.

The album cover above didn’t help featuring notorious British Movement member Nick Crane with nazi tattoos airbrushed out and a title with a play on ‘Strength Through Joy’ a German leisure organisation in Nazi Germany

For Skinheads, their fate was forever sealed with the easy negative violent racist stereotype of them that had evolved from their multicultural roots but to be fair it was partly of their own making.