Wearing of swastikas proliferated as people made aware of Punk rock by the Grundy incident became punks adopting and adapting emblems and dress from the first wave of fans including swastikas. We can’t vouch for the political beliefs of these people but as people came to view the emerging far right National Front as a threat and more publicity was given to it in the rock weeklies, the swastikas disappeared.It was a very small part of Punk, and for a very short time. They were just kids. When you are at school what’s the most rebellious thing you could draw on your book? Exactly. A swastika. Don Letts Punk 77 Interview 2005
Sounds 25.3.78
Only punk could wear the swastika and detach its meaning from Nazism while attempting to shock. “That’s what I thought, if punks could wear it ,and we were trying to look decadent and imperfect that should piss every body off, including Nazis. I always thought that if gays had adopted the pink swastika instead of the pink triangle that would have said it all. We just wore swastikas coz we thought they looked cool. We weren’t Nazis nor did we have any political views at all. We had no problem with Jews, Pakistanis, gays or any one else we just hated every one who wore lived in the straight world. None of us fitted in anywhere and that’s the way I liked it. Sorry to go on about this but people loved to misunderstand it, even now especially skinheads who were just naff straights anyway, keeping England white. Who cares? Let the fucking shithole sink into the sea I thought at the time. I still do.” Marco Pirroni Punk 77 Interview 2002
However as punk proclaimed itself working class and ever more populist the more distinctly right wing skinheads became attracted to punks superficial violence and far right symbols. They latched onto bands like Sham 69 and the Lurkers often disrupting punk gigs sieg heiling and causing fights. Here the swastikas and far right symbolism was for real and they thought punk rock could be an ideal recruiting ground. However they thought wrong as the astutely mobilised anti fascist forces of Rock Against Racism and the Anti Nazi League outmanoeuvred the far right in the quest for converts.What happened In the late seventies/ eighties as punk fractured into a myriad of forms such as anarcho and oi the latter became associated with more nationalistic but not necessarily racist tendencies is not the concern of this site.So for UK punk rock 1976-79 we can conclude that. misguided, stupid whatever. “No one wore the swastika as a political statement. It was an attempt to shock, just like the gay t shirts. Shock was the order of the day, and wrong as it may seem, it did just that”. Nils Stevenson. Punk the Book. Colgrave & ColemanI’ll finish off with a quote from Hebdiger’s Subculture : The meaning of Style ” We must resort, then, to the most obvious of explanations – that the swastika was worn because it was guaranteed to shock…The signifier (swastika) had been willfully detached from the concept (Nazism) it conventionally signified and placed in an alternative context ( ie punk music)…it was exploited for an empty effect.”
Clockwise – Captain Sensible, Poly Styrene and friends, National Front at Sham 69 gig.
Fans at The Gaylads’ Echoplex showPHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN
Around 9 on a recent Friday night, the Echoplex is filling up quickly with skinheads. Men sport closely cropped hair — sometimes with a parting cut — while the women wear either shaved patches up top or mod hairstyles. Button-down Ben Sherman shirts, rolled-up Levi’s 501s or permanent-press trousers known as Sta-Prest are popular on both sexes. A sizable minority, meanwhile, are in their nattiest: well-tailored, slim-cut suits or mod dresses with boots or loafers. On the smoking patio, old friends reunite over cigarettes and beer, showing off new tattoos, talking about jobs they hate or maybe sharing war stories about old shows, old bands and old fights.
They’re here to see Jamaican reggae legends The Gaylads and Brenda Holloway, the first Los Angeles Motown artist. As Holloway takes the stage, small groups skank in circles, with some couples paired off and dancing close, face to face.
L.A.’s skinhead scene has been around for decades but has gotten particularly popular during this latest revival in the past few years. Unlike the skinheads you’ve seen on TV, the L.A. scene is not only anti-racist, it’s overwhelmingly Latino. Though scenesters are into punk and Oi!, early reggae and obscure soul records dominate their collections. At least once a month, several hundred people turn out for old Jamaican stars or mostly forgotten Motown singers. DJ nights at Fais Do-Do in Mid-City offer superdeep cuts of early reggae and “Northern soul,” a neologism for American soul tracks first popular in Northern English dance clubs in the early ’70s. The Rocksteady Lounge at Silver Lake’s Akbar, a gay pub, offers a more intimate monthly affair with no less drinking and revelry.
Skinheads range from teenagers to middle-aged scene veterans. Their boots get an extra coat of polish for a night out, but otherwise they leave for work in the morning looking the same as they do for the club. Unlike the East L.A. punk scene, skinheads aren’t preoccupied with rebelling against The Man, and the police aren’t always busting them up. Instead, they’re focused on the simple pleasures of beer, music, friends, dancing and fashion. Women are as much a part of it all as men, and there’s always a good chance for romance.
This working-class subculture grew out of the British mods of the late 1960s. Ten years later during a punk-oriented revival, the neo-fascist National Front targeted English skins for recruitment. This cleaved the scene into two groups: racists, known as “boneheads” (or “glue sniffers”), and “traditional skinheads,” also known as “sussed skins.” While the former degenerated into fascist street gangs, the latter remained true to the skinheads’ original ethos of beer, boots and monster beats.
Boneheads look like old-school racist rednecks in wifebeaters and combat fatigues. Traditional skinheads, however, look more cultured, with a preference for Italian scooters (rather than cars) and high-priced polos — a basic Fred Perry costs around $80. A suited and booted traditional skin easily could be mistaken for an extra on Mad Men, if his hair were longer. Strip off the tattoos and sideburns and they’re positively clean cut.
Los Angeles might have the biggest skinhead scene in the country, though cities like San Jose, Portland and Boston have sizable contingents. There’s no distinction here between Latinos and whites, though the latter are a distinct minority. Skinheads live all over L.A. County, but their hot spots are in Mid-City, Echo Park and Silver Lake.
One particularly devoted enthusiast is Mark Morales, a 35-year-old psychology researcher at USC, who promotes soul and reggae events. He’s at the Echoplex tonight but doesn’t have much time to party, as he’s working not only as DJ but also stage manager and liaison for a video crew taping the event. Having grown up in East L.A., he became obsessed with the ska-revival label Two Tone as an adolescent, before falling in love with early Jamaican classics.
A stocky, easygoing guy who’s quick with a smile, Morales hasn’t donned skinhead gear in years, but he’s an influential scenester, bringing top Jamaican acts of yesteryear and obscure soul players to spots like this one and downtown’s Alexandria Hotel. Being a skinhead “is not just a look, like rockabilly or mod or whatever,” he says. “There’s a working-class mentality to it that other scenes don’t have.”
Indeed, you’ll find folks with occupations like line cook, warehouse clerk and assembly-line worker in the crowd. Step into a skinhead’s home and you’re likely to see memorabilia from years past, such as vintage housewares, posters from original 1960s releases and records too scratched to play. Further, skins tend to marry and reproduce within the cult: Melrose shop Posers Hollywood even sells Fred Perry and Ben Sherman baby clothes.
And though this retro-obsessed crowd voraciously consumes tunes that originated in Jamaican shantytowns and American tenements, it’s not protest music per se.
Instead, it’s a document of downtrodden people keeping their collective heads up through hard times. Lyrical themes include colonial oppression (“Israelites” by Desmond Dekker), romance (“The Tide Is High” by the Paragons), sex (the list of dirty reggae tracks runs a mile long) or nothing at all (nonsensical songs like “Skinhead Moonstomp” by Symarip).
This complicated musical evolution began with American R&B singers like Fats Domino and Huey “Piano” Smith, who inspired early Jamaican ska, which evolved into rocksteady, then reggae. The first British skinheads embraced these sounds during tough economic times in late-’60s Britain; more than 40 years on, traditional skinhead tastes haven’t changed much.
But don’t listen for “Redemption Song” at these parties. Though Marley is beloved, skins prefer him with the classic Wailers lineup that includes Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. In fact, skinhead parties feature beats and bass that bear more resemblance to a good hip-hop break than what most people think of as reggae.
Unlike many other musical subcultures (punk, for example), skinheads don’t usually “grow out of it.” Some have been around since the early 1980s and are pushing 60. Their preferred look — sharp, smart and clean — certainly helps them to age gracefully, but Morales believes something else keeps people in the fold. “It’s that attitude: the idea that I work for all my shit. Nothing has been given to you, so you’re proud of the stuff you have.” It’s not just about wearing the right clothes or having the right records in your collection; it’s about representing your working-class way of life.
Morales gets a bit of downtime when Holloway takes the stage, though he’s still on the job, so there’s no time to grab a drink at the bar. His eyes darting about the room, he looks over the scene that has shaped him since he was an adolescent. He’s living proof that what makes a skinhead is not what you wear — or even how your hair’s shorn — but what you’ve got in your heart.
Check out the skinhead scene June 9, when reggae legends The Pioneers perform at Los Globos.1
Eagles of Death Metal Were Playing Paris Club When Gunmen Attacked
by JON SCHUPPE and SHANSHAN DONGParis Terror Attacks: As Many as 60 Dead as Violence Erupts Around City 2:28
The California rock band Eagles of Death Metal was on stage at a packed Paris nightclub Friday when gunmen stormed in, cut down dozens of fans with automatic weapon fire and held hundreds hostage for hours.
Family members said the band, including singer and guitarist Jesse Hughes, were able to escape the attack at Le Bataclan, one of several that unfolded simultaneously across Paris. But some members of the crew were unaccounted for.
More than 100 people were counted dead at the central Paris club, which holds about 1,500 people and was sold out. Many others were reported wounded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTXDfgXheU8Watch French Police Evacuate People From Concert Hall 2:42
The wife of drummer Julian Dorio told NBC News that he’d told her everyone on stage managed to get out and that he and other band members made it to a police station. Emily Hall Dorio said she believed that the whereabouts of some members of the band’s crew were unknown.
“I’m grateful and heartbroken at the same time,” Emily Hall Dorio said. “I’m grateful he’s alive.”
Hughes’ brother reported on Facebook that he was safe.
And Hughes’ mother said later that the rest of the band was also okay.
One of the band’s front men, Joshua Homme, was not on tour with the band. He declined to comment when NBC News reached him by phone in Palm Desert, California.
Eagles of Death Metal in concert in Britain on Oct. 31. Danny Payne / Rex via AP
Homme, also a founding member of Queens of the Stone Age, formed the band in 1998 with childhood friend Hughes. They have used a string of temporary members in the past, including Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and actor Jack Black.
The touring band’s bassist posted a photo of the show just before the band was to go on.
Eagles of Death Metal — not actually a death metal band; the name is an inside joke — last month released their fourth album, Zipper Down, and were in the middle of a European tour.
The road crew. hours of back ache, sore neck, sweaty armpits, 20 hours, an average day, drive. drive and drive all day, to get to a grubby venue and set up for 3pm soundcheck, a quick shower and a bit of food if you’re lucky, a 30 min kip in some backroom on a 2 seater sofa, a bowl of crisps and a sausage roll, doors at 7 and the excited people arrive,
The pre nerves of the band, our job some story telling, and plenty of laughs. On they go to great applause, while we stand behind the curtain, keeping an eye on the guitarists leads. More in the monitor, take the light from the face. the rooms filling up, thats all that matters.
The set you’ve heard a thousand times, even your favourite is beginning to burn the ear drums. but the band play, as if its their first ever gig. the crowd pissed up and jumping about, 45 mins and off for a break, the crowd cheer for their favourite song, another 15 mins and its time for work to begin again.
Rip off the the set list, stuck to the floor, and chuck to some smiling fans, to make their day,Unplug the leads, the amps and the lights, load them in and roll them out, into the van quick as you can, lets try and get at least one beer for the night. off to a fine art, we pack it all away, then into the back stage to see who’s still there. the fridge is empty, just a couple of apples and a half eaten loaf of bread. no one else there, the parties all gone. 3am, we need to be up at 6, to do it all again
It was tuesday, 21st of july 2015. My bell rings at 3 o’clock in the morning. This time I wanted to go to Hamburg to see the Angelic Upstarts from South Shields in England. Support band at that show were The Headlines from Malmö/Sweden.
I wasn’t in the city of Hamburg for a long time, so I started at about 4 o’clock in the morning to have the posibility of spending much time in Hamburg. But my first destination wasn’t Hamburg, it was the city of Oldenburg in Holstein. Frank, a good friend of mine lives there. First time we met was in Lübeck at an Oi! Punk show where he and his band „Drunken Swallows“ played as support act. Frank invited me to stay the night at the flat of him and his nice girlfriend. Otherwise I had to drive 4 hours to get home after the Angelic Upstarts show. He really takes care of me, hahaha.
At about midday we drive together with Henning, a mate of Frank to the harbour of Hamburg. The sun was shining and it was warm so we decided to go on a ship to do a sight-seeing-tour of the harbour and have a few beers in the sun. After that we to the store of Remedy Records to meet our friends of Skinheads Hamburg. We had a little meal at the greek rstaurant next to Remedy Records and went to the concert at Monkey Music Club. When we arrived The Headlines were already on stage. The location was mostly full of people, so a lot of people saw this great show of the four swedes. Some songs were sung by Jake, the male singer and guitar player and some songs were sung by Kerry, the female singer and bass player. I think that hot Kerry ist he reason why especially some male persons in the audience will like this band. They played their own songs and covered Sham 69’s If The Kids Are United and Rose Tattoo’s Nice Boys Don’t Play Rock’n’Roll.
Now it was time for me to see Angelic Upstarts. They entered the stage very confident. The audience enjoyed the show as much as I. It was a wonderfull evening and I was glad to see some classics like 2.000.000 Voices, Teenage Warning, England or Solidarity live. Sham 69’s If The Kids Are United was covered by Angelic Upstarts too. After the concert we went back home to the city of Oldenburg in Holstein.
I slept very well and long at Frank’s sofa. At 12 o’clock I was on my way back to my north hessian home. The rest of the day I spend in my flat because of the 11th Back On The Streets Festival in a village called Rheinböllen one day later.
It was thursday july 23rd 2015. After loading my car I startet to Rheinböllen. I was very happy because I knew I will see a lot of friends and bands I like at the festival.
At the early afternoon I arrived in Rheinböllen. I occupied my hotel and decided to do a little siesta because I knew that the evening would be very hard, haha. My first Stop at the festival was Diana and the pavilion of Randale Records. We hadn’t seen for a long while so we had to tell us a lot and had to have a few beer. Thank’s Diana for the records you brought to me. It was a wonderfull first evening of that festival with lots of friends from Kassel, Frankfurt, Hamburg, the „Ruhrpott“ and Passau. We told stories from the past, had a laugh and made new friends. My musical highlight of that evening were the guys from Rude Pride (Madrid/Spain). They do traditional Oi! with some influences of ska and reggae. They did a great job!
It was friday morning and I woke up with a big headache. Maybe we had a few beer too much at the evening before. When we went back to the festival our first stopp was again the pavilion of Randale Records. On this day The Business played at the festival and we wanted to have a look if they took some new merchandise to Diana. The first band playing was called Extrem Unangenehm (in english: extreme unpleasant). Butt he show of them wasn’t as bad as their name promised. It was a pity that there were just a small quantity of people in the audience. Then a Band called Foiernacht entered the stage. These four young guys from South Tyrol played a mixture of Oi!, Punk and Psychobilly. They did a very good job and there were more and more people in the audience.
my personal highlight was The Business as you maybe expected. From the beginning their show was powerfull and the sound was great. mostly the whole audience were in front of the stage so many people enjoyed The Business as much as we did. The weather got worse and worse. Now another band from South Tyrol wanted to play their instruments. They had one of the best slots at the festival but the heavy rain caused there were just a few fans watching their show. The completely tattooed singer of the bandwas able to encourage the audience although the weather was as bad as possible. While Unantastbar played their Song „Das Stadion brennt“ (in english: The football stadium burns), a song about football fans burning pyrotechnics, many people in the audience burned pyrotechnics too. Maybe a little bit dangerous but it looked very impressive. The last act of the night was Roy Ellis aka Mr. Symarip. The rain stopped so the audience got bigger again and the people dancd heavily to his reggae beats and ska tunes. As his concert ended, we got back to our hotel.
Saturday, July 25th 2015. It was the last day of eleventh Back On The Streets Festival. Because of the bad weather the local authority forbade to start the music before 5pm. So all the bands had to abridge their set. It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon and the first band of the day called EgOi!sten played their show very experienced and the audience liked it. Either I didn’t see the drummer of the band Paris violence or they used a drum computer, but I think it was the second one. The band Martens Army got strengthening by Ferdy Dörnberg while they were playing. Ferdy, the half Englishman is a real virtuoso at many instruments and this time he played the slide guitar. Then my personal highlight entered the stage: Superyob. Franky Flame and his band really knew how they got the attention of the audience. Many young bands could learn a lot from this Oi! Punk veteran. After KrawallBrüder played their set Franky entered the stage again. It was just him, his Piano and Ferdy Dörnberg for a few songs. I couldn’t imagine a better end of the festival as these two great musicians.
At the next morning I bade farewell of my friends and drove to my north hessian home.
Thilo (written in august 2015)
Eine Woche voller Subkultur
21.07.2015 – 26.07.2015
Es war Dienstag, der 21. Juli 2015, 03:00 Uhr, der Wecker klingelte. Mein Weg sollte mich dieses Mal in den Norden der Republik führen. In Hamburg spielten an diesem Tage die Punkrock-Urgesteine Angelic Upstarts aus South Shields in England. Vorband an diesem Abend waren The Headlines aus Malmö in Schweden.
Ich war schon länger nicht mehr in Hamburg, deswegen fuhr ich schon um 04:00 Uhr in der frühe los, um noch möglichst viel vom Tag zu haben. Das Auto war gepackt und so ging es in Bad Hersfeld auf die A7 und immer Richtung Norden. Das erste Ziel meiner Reise hieß aber nicht Hamburg, sondern Oldenburg in Holstein. Dort wohnt Frank, ein mittlerweile sehr guter Freund von mir. Ich lernte ihn vor Jahren in Lübeck auf einem Oi!-Punk Konzert kennen, an dem auch seine Punkrock-Band Drunken Swallows spielte. Er lud mich ein die Nacht in der Wohnung von ihm und seiner Freundin zu schlafen, damit ich nachts nach dem Upstarts-Konzert die Strecke von Hamburg nicht mehr zurückfahren muss, sondern erst ausgeschlafen am nächsten Tag. Sehr führsorglich von ihm, hehehe.
Gegen Mittag fuhren wir dann zusammen mit Henning, einem guten Freund von Frank in die Hansestadt. Da das Wetter absolut auf unserer Seite war, fuhren wir nach St. Pauli an die Landungsbrücken. Da jeder von uns überraschenderweise eine Hafenrundfahrt machen wollte, taten wir genau dies und gönnten uns währenddessen auf der Elbe ein paar Bier. Inzwischen war es später Nachmittag und wir trafen uns bei Remedy Records mit unseren Freunden von den Skinheads Hamburg, gingen nebenan griechisch essen und fuhren weiter auf das Konzert in den Monkey Music Club. Als wir ankamen, hatten The Headlines bereits die Bühne betraten und begannen zu spielen. Der Club war bereits sehr gut gefüllt, sodass die Schweden nicht vor einer halb leeren Location spielen mussten. Das war auch gut so, denn die vier Punkrocker legten die Messlatte zu beginn an gleich sehr hoch. Ihre Musik war kraftvoll und der Wechsel zwischen Frauen- und Männergesang passte perfekt dazu. Kerry, die Bassspielerin und Sängerin sorgte zusätzlich für Kurzweiligkeit, insbesondere beim männlichen Publikum. Neben ihren eigenen Liedern coverten sie Sham 69’s If The Kids Are United und Rose Tattoo’s Nice Boys Don’t Play Rock’n’Roll. Danach betraten endlich Angelic Upstarts die Bühne und begannen vor einem nahezu überfüllten Club zu spielen. Endlich konnte ich Angelic Upstarts das erste Mal live sehen. Ihr Programm war sehr solide und auch die Song-Auswahl war gut überlegt. Bei den Klassikern wie 2.000.000 Voices, Teenage Warning, England oder auch Solidarity gab es im Publikum kein halten mehr. Auch Angelic Upstarts coverten Sham 69’s If The Kids Are United. Nach dem Konzert fuhren wir wieder zu dritt zurück nach Oldenburg in Holstein.
Nachdem wir am nächsten Morgen ausschliefen und danach gemeinsam frühstückten, war es auch schon wieder Zeit sich zu verabschieden. Gegen Mittag startete ich wieder in meine nordhessische Heimat. Den Rest des Tages verbrachte ich nur zuhause auf dem Sofa, denn am nächsten Tag ging es schon wieder weiter. Das Ziel hieß Rheinböllen. Dort fand das 11. Back On The Streets Festival statt.
Donnerstag, der 23. Juli 2015. Gegen Mittag stieg ich voller Freude ins Auto, denn ich sollte an diesem langen Wochenende viele Freunde und Bekannte wieder treffen und auch die ein oder andere gute Band zu Gesicht bekommen.
Am frühen Nachmittag kam ich in Rheinböllen an. Da ich noch etwas Zeit hatte, nachdem ich im Hotel eingecheckt habe, beschloss ich ein kleines Mittagsschläfchen zu halten. Der Abend sollte ja noch lang genug werden, hehehe. Mein erster Halt am Festivalgelände galt dem Stand von Diana und Randale Records. Lange hatten wir uns nicht mehr gesehen und hatten uns daher viel zu erzählen und hatten auch das ein oder andere Bierchen zusammen zu trinken. Danke an der Stelle noch einmal an Diana für die Platten, die sie mir mitgebracht hatte. Es dauerte auch nicht allzu lange bis meine Freunde und bekannte aus Kassel, Frankfurt, Hamburg, dem Ruhrpott und Passau ankamen. Mein musikalischen Highlight an diesem Festivaltag waren Rude Pride aus Madrid/Spanien. Ihre traditionellen Oi!-Klänge, bei manchen Liedern mit leichtem Ska- und Reggae-Einschlag trafen voll meinen Geschmack. Die Jungs können was!
Es war Freitag Vormittag und ich wachte mit einem ordentlichen Kater im Hotelzimmer auf. Ich ging vom Hotel zum Rastplatz um zu frühstücken und erstmal einen Kaffee zu trinken. Inzwischen war es Nachmittag geworden und ich pilgerte mit ein paar Freunden zurück aufs Festival Gelände. Da an diesem Abend The Business spielten, gingen wir zuerst wieder zum Stand von Randale Records um zu sehen, ob The Business Diana noch neues Merch zum Verkaufen vorbei brachte. Die erste Band des Tages hieß Extrem Unangenehm, wurde aber ihrem Namen überhaupt nicht gerecht. Ganz im Gegenteil, Ihr Konzert war sehr kurzweilig. Schade nur, dass noch nicht allzu viele Leute vor der Bühne standen. Ähnliches Schauspiel bei der Band Foiernacht aus Südtirol. Ihre Mischung aus Oi!, Punk und Psychobilly kam beim anwesenden Publikum sehr gut an. Auch sehr gut waren die 5 Jungs von Restrisiko. Das Publikum wurde inzwischen auch immer größer und das Festivalgelände füllte sich zunehmends.
Mein persönliches Highlight an diesem Tag des Festivals waren – wie vielleicht schon zu erwarten – The Business. Ihre Show war von Anfang an energiegeladen. Und da mittlerweile das Festivalgelände fast voll war, konnten dies auch noch viele andere so sehen. Das Wetter wurde zwar zunehmend schlechter, aber die Jungs konnten noch trockenen Hauptes Ihr Konzert beenden. Danach spielten die Punkrocker von Unantastbar aus Südtirol. Diese hatten mit dem starken Regen allerdings so dermaßen Pech, dass bis auf einige Fans nahezu alle Gäste das Festivalgelände verließen, oder sich bei den Zelten der Merchstände unterstellten. Bei ihrem Lied „Das Stadion brennt“, ein Lied über Pyrotechnik in Fußballstadien, zündeten jede menge Fans passenderweise Bengalos. Ein herrlicher Anblick.
Zu guter letzt an diesem Abend lud Roy Ellis alias Mr. Symarip zum Tanz ein. Da sich das Wetter wieder einigermaßen beruhigt hatte, folgen dieser Einladung viele Festivalbesucher. Als sein Konzert vorüber war gingen wir auch wieder ins Hotel zurück.
Samstag, der 25. Juli 2015. Es war der letzte Tag des diesjährigen Back On The Streets Festival. Aufgrund einer Unwetterwarnung des Deutschen Wetterdienstes konnte das Programm erst um 17 Uhr beginnen und nahezu alle Bands des heutigen Tages durften nur ein verkürztes Set spielen. Da das Festival so spät los ging, hatte auch die erste Band EgOi!sten Glück und konnte vor einem großen Publikum spielen. Selbstsicher spielten sie Ihr Programm und wurden vom Publikum auch gut angenommen. Ein gelungener Auftritt dieser noch jungen Band. Bei der Band Paris Violence vermisste ich den Schlagzeuger. Entweder ich habe ihn tatsächlich übersehen, oder sie verwendeten einen Drum Computer. Die Band Martens Army holte sich für ihren Auftritt auf dem Festival Verstärkung in Form von Ferdy Dörnberg. Der halbe Engländer ist ein echter Allrounder, was Instrumente angeht und unterstützte Martens Army an der Slide Gitarre. Danach sollte mein persönliches Highlight an diesem Abend folgen: Superyob. Franky Flame schafft es auch im hohen Alter noch, das Publikum ganz auf seine Seite zu ziehen. Viele jüngere bands können sich von ihm noch eine gewaltige Scheibe abschneiden. Nachdem dann die KrawallBrüder einen zum Besten gegeben haben, betrat Franky erneut die Bühne. Dieses Mal haute er allerdings Solo am Piano. Auch Franky bat Ferdy Dörnberg für das ein oder andere Stück auf die Bühne. Diese beiden Virtuosen bildeten wirklich einen würdigen Abschluss für dieses Festival.
Am nächsten Morgen trat ich den Weg in meine hessische Heimat an.
Former MOTÖRHEAD Drummer PHIL ‘PHILTHY ANIMAL’ TAYLOR Dies At 61
November 12, 2015
Another Legend goes to the Great Gig in the Sky
Ex-MOTÖRHEAD drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor died on Wednesday, November 11 at the age of 61.
Taylor‘s former MOTÖRHEAD bandmate “Fast” Eddie Clarke posted the following tribute to his colleague: “My dear friend and brother passed away last night. He had been ill for sometime but that does not make it any easier when the time finally comes.
“I have known Phil since he was 21 and he was one hell of a character. Fortunately, we made some fantastic music together and I have many many fond memories of our time together.
“Rest in peace, Phil!”
Taylor played in MOTÖRHEAD from 1975 to 1984 and again from 1987 to 1992.
In a 1983 interview with Artist magazine, Taylor stated about his drumming approach in MOTÖRHEAD: “Well, once [MOTÖRHEAD bassist/vocalist] Lemmy starts playing, he’s sort of out there on his own, in a way. It’s something that came naturally; but when Robbo [Brian Robertson, guitar] joined the band, we started working it out a bit more. When Eddie was with the band, I played more with the guitar than I did with Lemmy, because he’s not really a bass player. Lemmy always plays so fast that it’s always been down to the guitarist and me to keep the rhythm and melody going. Lemmy is just non-stop playing all the time, so for the highs and lows of the numbers, the ups and downs, light and shade — whatever you want to call it — it’s basically down to Robbo and myself. I’d never played much before, so it’s probably a lot more difficult for Robbo than for me. He’d always played in bands that had a proper bass player, so to speak.”
Pictured in his early days as a 1960’s Skinhead
Clarke and Taylor rejoined their former bandmate Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister on stage on November 6, 2014 at National Indoor Arena in Birmingham, England before Clarke, Lemmy and current MOTÖRHEAD drummer Mikkey Dee ripped through a blazing rendition of the MOTÖRHEAD classic “Ace Of Spades”.
Asked in a 2011 interview with Guitar International if he had any plans to ever reunite with Taylor and Clarke, Lemmy said: “No, because these two guys with me now have been with me longer than the original two. They played ‘Ace Of Spades’ more often than those two. They played ‘Overkill’ more often than those two. Why should I put Phil [Campbell] and Mikkey on hold to go off with guys who probably can’t play them as well? They’ve been out of practice. It’s ridiculous to think of it. Then I would be a nostalgia act. I’m all for the now and the future.”
Regarding whether he still talks with Phil and Fast Eddie, Lemmy told Guitar International: “Now and then. I like Phil, he was my best mate. Eddie was kind of a friend except he was always complaining about something. It got kinda tedious. Last time he left, we laid low. Before, one of us would go off and bring him back. It was a shame he shouldn’t have done that, we had a lot going for us back then. He should have stuck though it. It was the Wendy O. Williams thing and I couldn’t understand that (reference: recording ‘Stand By Your Man’, a cover version of the Tammy Wynette with Wendy O. Williams). He just gave up on it because Wendy wasn’t immediately perfect on it, she just needed to go through it a few times and he left the band over it. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I think he was expecting to be talked back in. Phil came in the room and said, ‘Eddie‘s left again.’ I said, ‘Whose turn is it to go talk to him?’ [Laughing]. I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not doing it.’ That’s the way it went. Wrong decision on his part.”
Tony Van Frater, the guitarist with Sunderland punk band Red Alert, has died, reportedly of a heart attack. He was 51.
He was a mainstay of the group, who were formed in Sunderland back in 1979 and went on to tour nationally and internationally.
He also played with the Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects, and was one of the most respected figures in the North East punk scene.
Tony – real name Anthony Frater – was a founder member of Red Alert, who made three studio albums and released several singles which reached the UK Indie Charts Top 30.
Red Alert broke up in 1985, reformed four years later and continued touring and occasionally recording.
Meanwhile, Tony, who was known as ‘Tut’, played with South Shields band Angelic Upstarts, and, since 1999, with the reformed Cockney Rejects.
Away from music, he used to have an ice cream van, and it is believed he had recently been working as a taxi driver.
Tributes started flooding in today on social media sites.
Dear friends and supporters worldwide, most of you are probably aware of the tragic circumstances of this past week in which we lost our beloved brother and friend Tony Van Frater. Due to this catastrophic event we have no option other than to cancel the forthcoming UK tour forthwith as a mark of respect for the man and his family. none of us knows what the future holds at present, we wish to enter a period of mourning and reflection on the massive contribution and impact that Tony made on all our lives. All tickets will be refunded and we apologise for this, and we hope that we have your understanding and co operation in these difficult times.
Thank you one and all. The Cockney Rejects.
Tony played for us at Concrete Jungle Festival for us in 2007, and has been a big part of the Cockney Rejects band since he joined
“The founding member of Red Alert and Cockney Rejects bass player was one of the scene’s true gentlemen.
“His talent and friendship will be missed by many. RIP big man – our thoughts are with your family and friends.”
Red Alert singer Steve ‘Castiron’ Smith wrote on his Facebook page: “Best mate, brother, legend, thanks for the memories son, see u up there.”
I was actually to be seeing Tony tomorrow, as i am DJ’ing a festival in Bavaria. we are all deeply shocked by this, and our thoughts go out the the Rejects and all Tony’s friends and family, it makes you realise once again, how short this life is, and we have to keep on keeping on. Stop the negative infighting, and enjoy the life we have. We are all brothers and sisters in our old punk and skinhead subcultures. Symond
The show will go on, and a pint of two will be drank in Tony’s name. Big respect will go out to Tony ifrom Bavaria, and across the Punk and Oi! world
Symarip (also known at various stages of their career as The Bees, The Pyramids, Seven Letters and Zubaba) were a ska and reggaeband from the United Kingdom, originating in the late 1960s, when Frank Pitter and Michael Thomas founded the band as The Bees. The band’s name was originally spelled Simaryp, which is an approximate reversal of the word pyramids.[1] Consisting of members of West Indian descent, Simaryp is widely marked as one of the first skinhead reggae bands, being one of the first to target skinheads as an audience. Their hits included “Skinhead Girl”, “Skinhead Jamboree” and “Skinhead Moonstomp“, the latter of which was based on the Derrick Morgansong, “Moon Hop“.
They moved to Germany in 1971, performing reggae and Afro-rock in Germany under the name Zubaba. In 1980, the single “Skinhead Moonstomp” was re-issued in the wake of the 2 Tone craze, hitting #54 on the UK Singles Chart.[2][3] The band officially split in 1985 after releasing the album Drunk & Disorderly as The Pyramids. The album was released by Ariola Records and was produced by Stevie B.
Pitter and Ellis eventually moved back to England, where Ellis continued performing as a solo artist, sometimes using the stage name Mr. Symarip. Mike Thomas, who had moved to Switzerland and met a Finnish girl there, moved to Finland where he worked as a musician, doing the groundwork for the Finnish reggae culture through his band Mike T. Saganor. Monty Neysmith moved to the United States, where he toured as a solo artist.
In 2004, Trojan Records released a best of album that included a new single by Neysmith and Ellis, “Back From the Moon”. In 2005, Neysmith and Ellis performed together at Club Ska in England, and a recording of the concert was released on Moon Ska Records as Symarip – Live at Club Ska. In April 2008, they headlined the Ska Splash Festival inLincolnshire as Symarip, and later performed at the Endorse-It and Fordham Festivals. Pitter and Thomas now perform in a different band as Symarip Pyramid. Their Back From The Moon Tour 2008-2009 was with The Pioneers. In 2009, to celebrate the rebirth of the band and the reunion of the two original members, Trojan Records released a compilation album, Ultimate Collection. Pitter holds all copyright and trademark rights for the name Symarip Pyramid.
Monty Montgomery was born In Port Antonio, Jamaica. This talented and charismatic singer started to write and create music in his early years. While studying in London, England, Monty met with fellow Jamaican musicians on the weekends.
This led to the creation of the worldwide known
SYMARIP / PYRAMIDS
With hits like: Skinhead Moonstomp, Traintour To Rainbow City, Skinhead Girl, Mexican Moonlight,
All Change On The Bakerloo Line, Must Catch A Train to Night, etc.
This band reached the British Charts and toured all over Europe. Monty collaborated with the legendary “Godfather of SKA” Laurel Aitken and Eddie Grant.
Monty holds numerous awards and is listed in the Guiness Book Of British Hit Singles. Voted as one of Top Reggae Artists of all times by Billboard magazine. Monty’s versatile songwriting genius is his biggest asset. His many years of performing all over Europe, USA, Africa and the Caribbean, including the annual Sun -Splash in Jamaica, has given him the experience and skills that makes him the ultimate professional that he is today. Several of his songs have become staples on the list of many young SKA bands around the world. Sharon Woodward’s “Thank you, Skinhead Girl”, a documentary film made in the UK, includes Monty’s penned “Skinhead Girl”. Monty Montgomery’s albums: Seeds, Massive Are You Ready , Crucial Vibes andBack To Jump Street established him as a solo artist in the reggae world.
Miss Goosy (Audio and Video) is an ideal party mix and the video is very funny. It is now available @ CDBaby.com
Monty also was a finalist in 2008 Jamaica’s Festival with the song “My Jamaica”.
Now his latest work “Yah Mon” ranges from SKA to Reggae, and will with no doubt stand out. Songs like “Yah Mon”, Sweet Suzie”, “It’s time again” and “Kingston City”, just to name a few.
Monty’s latest single “The Freak In Me” was produced and arranged by Grub Cooper, from the number one band in Jamaica, known as FAB 5.
Monty and Jump up Records teamed up to release four new titles on vinyl. “Spirit Of 69 ” is a must to listen and dance to.
Monty’s live shows are engaging and energetic, and he always leaves his audiences feeling positive and happily skanking, begging for more.
FORTIS FOREVER
Monty is now a stand alone artist playing both the Symarip classics and his own work written over his years as a reggae legend
for bookings please contact Symond at subcultz@gmail.com
The Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton Every Year, the first weekend of June, Skinheads come from across the globe to Brighton seafront. for full event details go to www.subcultz.com
FULL 3 DAYS EVENT, YOUR WRISTBAND IS VALID THROUGH OUT, YOU CAN USE IT FOR AS LITTLE, OR AS MUCH AS YOU WANT. THE EVENT WILL SELL OUT, AND THERE WILL BE NO ADVANCE DAY TICKETS AT A REDUCED DAILY RATE , IN ADVANCE.
The line-up maybe subject to change, as so many band members and dj’s are involved. Babies coming along, alcohol, world wars and famine can be unforeseen, but the Great Skinhead Reunion, is more about coming to Brighton to see all your friends and making some more, for 3 full days of mayhem.
SKINHEAD ONLY HOTELS .
Add to your experience, by getting a room in our Skinhead only hotels. Conveniently located, with a short walk to the venue, and no moaning neighbours to worry about. The rooms vary in size and cost, to fit your needs. all within an easy walk to the skinhead reunion venue. We have hotels exclusive to the Great Skinhead Reunion guests and bands. Party party !! please email subcultz@gmail.com with your requirements, to be booked into the Skinhead Hotels
For those on a low budget, its worth checking Hostels and campsites, but my advice, is to get in the reserved hotels, for a nice stress free, clean and comfortable holiday in Brighton.
TRAVEL INFORMATION
Brighton is situated on the south coast of England, approximately one hour from London. London Gatwick is the nearest airport. There are regular direct trains and National Express buses. The next nearest is Heathrow, There are also direct trains from Luton Airport . Its advised not to fly to Stansted, as this is a long way, and you risk losing valuable drinking time
The nearest ferry port serving mainland Europe is Newhaven -Dieppe . Newhaven is about 20 min drive to Brighton. Dover is about 2 hours to Brighton
PARKING ZONES – one of the worst aspects of Brighton, is a lack of affordable parking. my advice is to use street parking on the suburbs of Brighton, its a reasonably safe place. a good bus service will take you into brighton centre (churchill square) and a short walk from there to the sea front. worth allowing the extra hours work, to save yourself serious parking charges
All Event Enquiries email Symond at subcultz@gmail.com. phone (uk) 07733096571
Last week, anti-gentrification protesters took to the streets of London’s East End as part of a series of parades organised by the anarchist group Class War.
One of their targets, the Cereal Killer Cafe, was bombed with paint and scrawled with graffiti that read “scum”. While businesses such as this one are a symptom of the city’s extreme gentrification, rather than its cause, they have – in the eyes of some – become symbolic of this rampant and unwelcome redevelopment.
The subsequent media coverage, whether earnest or cheeky, drew attention to the establishment’s hirsute and tattooed proprietors, Gary and Alan Keery. Why were the bearded brothers subjected to such ire? Apparently because they’re hipsters.
It has become fashionable to hate the hipster. They are blamed not only for big issues such as gentrification, but also for the style crime of donning distinctly unhip fashions (at least in the eyes of other current or former subculturalists).
Following this story, I could not help but think what future cultural historians might make of the early twenty-first-century hipster.
Is the introduction of the long beard into mens fashion a deliberate attempt to normalise the religious muslim man into Europe
Historicising youth subcultures
Over the last decade, in both popular media and scholarly work, there has been a surge of interest in the historicising of post-war youth subcultures. TV documentaries celebrating these narratives, such as the recent Street, Sound & Style (2015) and films like This is England (2006) and Northern Soul (2014), exemplify this growing trend.
On the academic front, the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subculture, Popular Music and Social Change (currently based at the University of Reading) is made up of scholars from around the world who work on projects highlighting young people’s contributions to history. Many of these academics are interested in constructing narratives that attempt to make sense of why youth subcultures or lifestyles arose when they did.
Youth cultures characteristically embody the various sensibilities of an era. For instance, my own work on Mod culture depicts the original British subculture of the early 1960s as one that firmly wanted to put the trauma of war behind it by adopting all that was ultra-contemporary and up-to-the-minute. Instead of necessarily trying to reinvent neighbourhoods (though, to be fair, some Mods were also ambitious entrepreneurs), Mods focused on reconceptualising themselves.
The first iteration of the subculture saw male Mods cut dashing figures across London’s grey East End in their European-style suits and atop sleek, Italian scooters. For them, reaching for the “now,” the “new” meant looking beyond Britain’s shores.
The more commercialised, mid-sixties “Swinging London” version of the culture embraced pop art and space-age motifs. Female Mods wearing paper dresses or white and silver miniskirts jauntily reflected this forward-thinking.
While it’s important to recognise nuance and variation within all youth subcultures or trends – and not paint any of them with one, totalising brush – it is also an intriguing exercise to consider how young people’s interests, sensibilities, and actions are symbolic of their times.
The hipster as a reaction to neoliberal values
Since reading about the London protests, I have thought about what future historians might make of the hipster. Attention has already been paid to the hipster as a possible manifestation of and/or reaction to the neoliberal values that have come to dominate contemporary life in the developed world. While some academics and cultural commentatorshave critiqued the hipster more generally, others also have discussed the group’s neoliberal sensibilities more specifically.
While some might see hipsters as “progressive”, this tag may be limited to their appearance alone. They are far from radical. Hipsters, as purveyors of pricey artisanal goods, are not trying to buck the system or advocate for social change. They are not “angry youth”.
If anything, their ardent embrace of entrepreneurialism and D-I-Y craftiness suggests that they have wholeheartedly accepted the fact that “the market” rules one’s lot in life. If living and thriving in hyper-expensive cities like London or New York requires opening a business that charges A$11 for a bowl of cereal, so be it.
Seemingly inherent to the hipster’s philosophy is the pragmatic acceptance that one’s possibilities are determined by the economic and political systems in place.
The fact that the hipster’s mode of operation has inspired such disdain – often among those who identify with more traditional youth subcultures such as punk – is likely because hipsters are seen as selling out (or buying in) rather than trying to resist or subvert mainstream realities.
The recent flowerbeard trend. Kiselev Andrey Valerevich/www.shutterstock.com
While a full sleeve of tattoos may suggest more historically familiar notions of “rebellion”, the much-ridiculed Amish-style beard alludes instead to an austere, old-world sensibility. It is more than likely that many of those youths involved in the London protest would perceive hipster identity as the antithesis of their own.
In thinking through the existence of the hipster – and why he (see footnote) has become the target of such ire – it is important to ask ourselves this: Why is there still an underlying expectation that any seemingly “non-mainstream” group of young people are rebellious or want to “question the system”?
In a more pessimistic response to such a question, those who dislike the hipster may say that we have entered into an age where many young people are just happy to accept what is; that hipsters see themselves as living in a world that is both post-subculture and post-rebellion.
It is certainly easy to see how precarious employment, inflated costs of living, and heightened levels of surveillance would prompt capitulation on all fronts – making even the supposedly “hip” not quite what they seem.
A less damning and more supportive reading of the hipster would argue that young people do not have to “fight the power” or “system” because they are the system (and are reinventing it). The agency and empowerment offered to the millennials through their mastery of digital media has not only provided the world with Silicon Valley Wunderkinds, but hipster entrepreneurs, too. They are two functions of the same app.
While I am not the first to speculate on why the hipster has come to be a part of our contemporary world, I will certainly not be the last. What will the hipster come to symbolise about life in the early twenty-first century when historians of the future reflect on this era?
Note: Yes, “he”. The hipster is most always perceived as male, though there are certainly many millennial women who take part in this subculture or lifestyle (minus the Amish-style beards).
Is the Hipster a naturally organic manifestation of fashion, or was it a planned style to normalize the beard, not seen in mens fashion since the pre-punk days of the early 1970’s ?
More than 10 years later, the consequences of the September 11 attacks are still being felt by Muslims all over the world. There are still stories about Muslim Americans having to hide their religion, by changing their names or appearance, or by practising their faith discreetly. A cloud of distrust still hangs over many ordinary Muslims, not only in the United States, but around the globe.
In one terrible moment, the disgraceful attacks of 2001 tarnished the name of Islam. What was once known as a peaceful, loving religion is now mistakenly identified by some as a backward faith that promotes aggression and oppression.
Friends returning from studies in the US describe their experiences as filled with caution. The change in attitudes towards Muslims was almost simultaneous with the attacks. For the prejudiced, Muslim identity is no longer a statement of faith but an insult or an accusation.
One of the most identifying feature of the Muslim man, in the west is the facial beard
Hipster Beard, a coincidence?
Undoubtedly, media have played a major role in the misrepresentation of Muslims in the subsequent 10 years. Video, print and online content disseminates images such as those of Muslims pumping their rifles in the air in Afghanistan. This has little to do with faith. Images depict Muslim men as being uneducated, dangerous extremists while Muslim women are shown as oppressed.
September 11 was a sad day for all faiths, but Muslims in particular continue to feel the repercussions.
For Hollywood, we have become the bad guys. Movies, TV series and even comedy shows write “the Muslim terrorist” stock character into the script as the main villain. News reports play up the images of Islamist training camps and suicide bombers, enforcing the stereotype that Muslims are extremists by nature.
Having a long beard, wearing a hijab or headscarf, or praying in a mosque is now grounds to be harassed, and in some cases attacked, by ignorant groups or individuals. Many Muslims, including American citizens who had spent years building their lives in the US, have begun practising their faith more discretely or have even returned to their countries of origin out of fear for their safety.
In the UAE, we have the advantages of a rich, multicultural society that allows religious and cultural tolerance in our daily lives, at work, in schools and in public. Yet that is not to say that we don’t have our own fair share of stereotypes. It is only natural to draw conclusions about a faith, nationality or group characteristic, sometimes based on superficial traits.
Whether we like it or not, everyone’s subconscious automatically makes assumptions and builds them into stereotypes, regardless of how open-minded we believe we are.
And while we can fairly condemn discrimination against Muslims in the United States and Europe it cannot be denied that we have inherited our own stereotypes, in the UAE and in many other Arab and Muslim countries, directed towards people based on how they practice their faiths.
By 2015 beards have become a very normal part of Hipster Europe
An easily visible manifestation of this relates to men who choose to grow out their beards. Many times, I have overheard sniggering comments made about long-bearded men. Behind closed doors, accusations of extremism are made, perhaps in jest, but these ideas take root and can become damaging innuendo and rumour.
I saw this firsthand when a colleague of mine decided to grow out his beard. He was on the front line of our organisation and dealing with customers, and so his beard – bizarrely – became an issue of concern for colleagues and management. At first, it was a few harmful jokes about its length; later, a “friendly” suggestion to shave was passed down from management; and, in the end, an indirect threat was made.
My colleague, being one of the most peaceful and patient men I know, decided to stay the course. And his efforts paid off. After exhaustive efforts, he was able to convince management of his ability to do his job, and even outperformed most of his colleagues to prove that he was an asset. Even with a beard.
This is what many fail to understand about men who choose to demonstrate their faith by growing out their beards. Just as with other faiths, piety in Islam does not imply extremism, but rather a commitment to peaceful existence with everything and everyone around you. In the UAE, a Muslim country and also a tolerant one, we must not allow ourselves to fall into the trap of stereotyping religious men and women.
Quite the opposite in fact, we must continue to promote the truth about Islam as a peaceful religion and its powerful benefits for a person’s life at work, at home and as a part of a community. In that way, we can persuade the rest of the world that the harmful stereotypes that followed September 11 have nothing to do with Islam.
Taryam Al Subaihi is an Abu Dhabi-based political and social commentator who specialises in corporate communications
Stomper 98 are confirmed for the great skinhead reunion in Brighton England june 3-4-5th 2016. Brighton is seen as a birthplace of the skinhead subculture, with mods and rockers fighting on the beaches in 1964, by 1967 the skinhead had spread across the uk, a solid British working class subculture. Saturday afternoon saw mobs of skinheads fighting for their territory and team on the football terraces, by night, Stomping to Jamaican reggae, wearing the cutting new clothing of quality British design and cloth, handmade leather shoes and boots. After a dip came the rebirth, with the aggro Boot Boys and explosion of Punk Rock from 76, the Sham Army. 79 saw the 2tone revolution, bringing the Punk and Reggae sounds together. By 1980, the largest number of skinheads in history were on the streets of Britain. Then came a backlash against the middle class system, which had controlled the people for centuries, this music was known as Oi! Music. Direct action through music. As riots spread across the UK skinheads scared the government, an army of angry disenfranchised street kids, ready to Ruck. Margaret thatcher put a ban on oi music, clubs and pubs refused skinheads entry, record shops took the vinyl from the shelves. The SPG ( police) Attacked Skinheads across the country . But we refused to die. We went underground, created our own scene, our own clubs, promoted by fanzines and word of mouth. ‘skinheads, a way of life’ like martyrs through the centuries. a faith, which is stronger than any latest fashion. So by the mid 80’s Skinheads were popping up across the planet, fed by the media scare stories, of the anti Christ. By photographic images and books. But also by skinhead bands playing around the globe, for a few beers and a hot dog. Gone are the days of territorial violence and racial conflict. The political infighting designed to divide and destroy, thrown aside. What’s now, is a world wide community, living A skinhead way of life. Every year we celebrate the skinhead subculture, in all its positive eras. From 60’s ska to 21st century oi! And with that, We invite Selective bands each year to come represent their country and scene. We are very pleased to announce Stomper 98 from Germany will be performing at the Great Skinhead Reunion, Brighton, England for 2016. tickets are already 1/3 sold out for 2016, so dont miss out, on what is set to be a sell out event www.subcultz.com
Stomper 98 sind für die Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton/England bestätigt, die vom 3.-5. Juni 2016 stattfindet.
Brighton gilt als eine der Geburtsstätte der Skinhead-Subkultur, denn im Jahr 1964 war es eben genau in Brighton, wo sich Mods und Rocker ihre ersten Schlachten an den Stränden und in den Straßen ablieferten. 1967 hatte sich die Skinhead-Bewegung bereits über das gesamte Vereinigte Königreich ausgebreitet und war fester Bestandteil der Subkultur der britischen Arbeiterklasse. Samstag nachmittags sah man Skinhead-Banden im Umfeld von Fußballspielen für ihre Städte und Vereine auf den Straßen kämpfen und nachts konnte man die Skinheads dann zu jamaikanischem Reggae tanzen sehen. Bei all dem achteten sie darauf stets smart gekleidet zu sein. So trugen sie qualitativ hochwertige Stoffe im typisch britischen Design, sowie handverarbeitete Lederschuhe und Stiefel.
Die Zeit verging und durch die Boot Boys und und den nicht mehr aufzuhaltenden Punk Rock erlebte dieser Kult eine Wiedergeburt im Jahr 1976. Drei Jahre später braucht der 2Tone zusammen, was zusammen gehört und kombinierte die Klänge von Punk und Reggae.
Es war in 1980, als man so viele Skinheads wie nie zuvor in den Straßen von Großbritannien finden konnte und als eine bestimmte Musikrichtung die Leute aus ihrem Mittelschicht-Winterschlaf reisen sollte. Diese Musik war bekannt unter folgendem Namen: Oi! Mit dieser Musik gingen viele Unruhen und Krawalle einher, sodass die Skinheads bei Staat und Polizei ein Gefühl der Angst verbreiteten. Margaret Thatcher verbot Oi! in Clubs und Kneipen, veranlasste gar ein Hausverbot für Skinheads und sorgte dafür, dass keine Oi!-Platten mehr in den Plattenläden zu finden waren. Die Polizei griff uns Skinheads scharf an, aber wir ließen unseren Kult nicht sterben! Die Bewegung verschwand zunehmend in den Untergrund. Wir betrieben unsere eigenen Clubs, veranstalteten eigene Konzerte, brachten eigene Fanzines heraus und lebten unseren “Way Of Life” abseits der Masse. Wir waren wie Märtyrer. Der Stolz auf diesen unseren Kult war und ist stärker als jeder Trend und wird überleben!
In den Medien verteufelt verbreitete sich der Skinhead-Kult über den ganzen Globus. Doch nicht nur den Medien gelang es Diesen Kult zu verbreiten, sondern auch Bands, die die wahren Werte dieser Subkultur in die Welt hinaus trugen.
Fernab von territorialen Auseinandersetzungen, jeglichem Rassismus und unzähligen Versuchen der Politik die Bewegung zu Spalten oder gar zu zerstören, lebt der Skinhead-Kult unbekümmert weiter wie eine weltweite Gemeinde am Rande der Gesellschaft.
Und genau deshalb feiern wir jedes Jahr unsere Subkultur in all ihren positiven Epochen. Vom Ska der 60er Jahre bis hin zum Oi! der heutigen Tage.
Jedes Jahr laden wir wohl ausgesuchte Bands ein, uns die Szene in ihrem jeweiligen Land zu präsentieren und wir freuen uns ganz besonders im Jahr 2016 die Band Stomper 98 https://www.facebook.com/Stomper98?fref=ts aus Göttingen/Deutschland in Brighton begrüßen zu dürfen.
Ein Drittel der Karten ist bereits verkauft und wir rechnen auch in 2016 wieder mit einer ausverkauften Great Skinhead Reunion.
Enoch Powell stood in British Parliament, and made one of the most famous speeches in history. This speech has been debated ever since. Was is a genuine warning, or did it actually make immigration a ‘Race’ issue. To date its estimated there are around 10 million immigrants and their descendants now living in the UK, with hundreds of thousands joining every year. No longer from just ex British colonies. making up around 15% of the UK population as a whole, but a much higher percentage of younger generation.
This is the full text of Enoch Powell’s so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.
One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.
Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”
Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.
At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.
A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.
After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?
The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.
I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.
In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office.
There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.
The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: “How can its dimensions be reduced?” Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.
The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.
It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.
Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.
I stress the words “for settlement.” This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.
I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.
Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party’s policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.
Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.
Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.
The third element of the Conservative Party’s policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no “first-class citizens” and “second-class citizens.” This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.
The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.
This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.
Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.
Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another’s.
But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.
In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.
I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:
“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.
“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her ‘phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, “Racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country.” So she went home.
“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist,” they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word “integration.” To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.
Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.
But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.
We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.
Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:
‘The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’
All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.
For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.
Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.
The Cockney Rejects’ 1980 performance at Birmingham’s Cedar Club remains unnoted in the annals of rock history. It warrants no mention when music journalists compile the 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock, nor the 100 Craziest Gigs Ever, which seems like a terrible oversight. In fairness, no one is ever going to rank the show by the East End quartet – then enjoying chart success with a punk take on the West Ham terrace anthem I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles – alongside Jimi Hendrix at Monterey in terms of musical brilliance. Still, it has its own claim to historical import: by all accounts, it was the most violent gig in British history.
“I’d seen quite a bit on the terraces or outside football grounds, but this was carnage,” says Jeff Turner, today an immensely amiable decorator, then “Stinky” Turner, the Cockney Rejects’ teenage frontman, cursed with what his former manager Garry Bushell tactfully describes as “a bit of a temper”. Turner continues: “There was a lot of people cut and hurt, I got cut, my brother [Rejects’ guitarist Micky Geggus] really got done bad, with an ashtray, the gear was decimated, there was people lying around on the floor. Carnage.”
The problem was football-related. “Most of the punk bands at the time, they had their ideals – the Clash, Career Opportunities, political stuff, fair play,” says Turner. “When I was a kid, my thought for punk rock was that it could put West Ham on the front pages.” To this end, the band – affiliated to the club’s hooligans in the Inter City Firm – had appeared on Top of the Pops in West Ham shirts. “After that, everybody wanted to fight us, but you couldn’t back down,” says Turner. “Once you were defeated, it would have opened the floodgates for everybody.”
So the Rejects and their party fought: “Twenty Cockneys against … well, not all 300 Brummies were trying to attack us, but I’d say we were trying to fight off 50 to 100 people.” In the aftermath, Micky Geggus was charged with GBH and affray, and the Cockney Rejects’ career as a live band was, in effect, over. An attempt to play Liverpool later that year ended after six songs “because there was 150 Scousers trying to kill us”, while a subsequent gig in Birmingham was aborted by the police: “The old bill got wind of it and escorted us on to the M6,” says Turner. “At the time, I was gutted, but now, I think, thank God for that. Someone could have died.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising the gig has been swept under the carpet of musical history: after all, so has the genre the Cockney Rejects inadvertently inspired. Thirty years after Bushell – then a writer for the music paper Sounds, as well as the Rejects’ manager – coined the term “Oi!” to describe a third generation of punk-inspired working-class bands playing “harder music on every level, guitar driven, terrace choruses”, it remains largely reviled or ignored in Britain.
In the eyes of its remaining fans, Oi! is the “real thing”, the genuine sound of Britain’s streets in the late 70s, populated by artists Bushell championed when the rest of the music press concentrated on “bands who dropped literary references you wouldn’t have got if you didn’t have a masters’ degree and wrote pretentious lyrics”. Bands such as the Cockney Rejects, the Angelic Upstarts – Marxists from South Shields managed by a man Bushell colourfully describes as “a psychopath – his house had bars over all the windows because people had thrown firebombs through it” – Red Alert, Peter and the Test Tube Babies. It briefly stormed the charts. The Angelic Upstarts followed the Cockney Rejects onto Top of the Pops, while Splodgenessabounds made the Top 10 with the deathless Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please. But today, if the general public have heard of it at all, they tend to agree with the assessment once offered by journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie: “Punk’s stunted idiot half-brother, musically primitive and politically unsavoury, with its close links to far-right groups.” It is, asserts Bushell, “without a doubt, the most misunderstood genre in history”.
The problem isn’t really to do with the music, although protracted exposure to the oeuvre of Peter and the Test Tube Babies – home to Student Wankers, Up Yer Bum and Pick Your Nose (and Eat It) – could leave all but the hardiest soul pleading tearfully for a few literary references and pretentious lyrics. The problem is Oi!’s adoption by the far-right as its soundtrack of choice. It wasn’t the only part of street culture to attract the attentions of the National Front and the British Movement in the late 70s and early 80s. Losing out at the polling stations thanks to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the NF had instigated a programme of “direct action”: it would attempt to kick its way into the headlines at football matches and gigs. Chart bands such as Sham 69, Madness and the Specials had concerts disrupted.In 1978, seig-heiling skinheads caused £7,500 worth of damage at a Sham 69 gig in London.
But it was to Oi! that the far-right was most attracted, not least because it attracted both football hooligans and the re-emergent skinhead movement – two groups the NF’s direct-action programme targeted for recruitment. “We played a gig in Camden, we saw these Nazi skinheads beating the shit out of these two punks,” remembers Turner. “They’d managed to wreck Sham 69’s career, but us with our following” – the ICF was then headed by Cass Pennant, whose parents were Jamaican – “we weren’t going to have it. We just went down and absolutely slaughtered them. We declared to them that if they ever set foot where we were again, we’d decimate them.” And so it proved. “Neo-nazis confronted the Rejects again at Barking station,” remembers Bushell. “They basically told them, ‘We’re going to come to your gigs, we’re going to do this and do that.’ The Rejects crew battered them all over the station. They didn’t come to the gigs after that.”
Bushell points out that there was “a Nazi subculture all the way through punk. Malcolm McLaren started it all with the swastikas, which thick people saw and thought, ‘Oh, they must be Nazis.’” There were white power punk bands, too – such as the Dentists and the Ventz, which were formed by the “Punk Front” division of the National Front, in lieu of real punk bands showing any interest in promoting white supremacy. It was a trick the NF would be forced to pull again when Oi! bands resisted their overtures – the party recruited a failed punk band from Blackpool called Skrewdriver and repositioned them as the musical voice of the neo-Nazi movement. “It was totally distinct from us,” says Bushell. “We had no overlap other than a mutual dislike for each other.”
Bushell’s latterday career as a gleeful provoker of the liberal left, writing for the Sun and the Daily Star, probably hasn’t done much to help public perceptions regarding Oi!’s political affiliations. When Oi! was at its height, however, he says he was a Trotskyist who did his best to infuse the movement with socialist principles. He organised Oi! conferences and debates, “trying to shape the movement, trying to stop the culture of violence, talking about doing unemployment benefits, working with the Right to Work campaign, prisoners’ rights gigs – I thought we could unite punk and social progress.” Not everyone was receptive: “Stinky Turner was at one debate, and he didn’t contribute much, apart from the classic line, ‘Oi! is working class, and if you’re not working class you’ll get a kick in the bollocks.’” He laughs. “Perfect! That was what the Rejects were all about.”
Trotskyist or not, Bushell also managed to exacerbate the problem, not least by masterminding the unfortunately titled 1981 compilation Strength Thru Oi!. “I didn’t know!” he protests. “I’d been active in politics for years and had never come across the phrase ‘strength through joy’ as a Nazi slogan.It was the title of a Skids EP.”
To compound matters, its cover featured a photograph of a skinhead who turned out to be the delectable-sounding Nicky Crane, who – nothing if not a multi-tasker – managed to combine life as a neo-Nazi activist with a secret career as a gay porn star. “I had a Christmas card on the wall, it had that image that was on the cover of Strength Thru Oi!, but washed out. I honestly, hand on my heart, thought it was a still from The Wanderers,” Bushell says. “It was only when the album came through for me to approve the artwork that I saw his tattoos. Of course, if I hadn’t been impatient, I would have said, right, fucking scrap this, let’s shoot something else entirely. Instead, we airbrushed the tattoos out. There were two mistakes there, both mine. Hands up.”
Much worse was to follow. A July 1981 Oi! gig featuring the 4-Skins and the Business in Southall – the scene of a racist murder in 1976 and the race riot that ended in the death of Blair Peach in 1979 – erupted into violent chaos: 110 people were hospitalised, and the venue, the Hambrough Tavern, was burned down after being petrol bombed. Depending on whose version of events you believe, it was either sparked by skinheads attacking Asians or Asian youths attacking gig-goers: either way, the Southall riot stopped Oi!’s commercial progress dead. The Cockney Rejects found that shops refused to stock their new album, The Power and the Glory: “I’d sung a song called Oi Oi Oi and all of a sudden there’s an Oi! movement and I didn’t really want anything to do with it,” says Turner. “This awful, awful shit happened in Southall, we were never there, and we got the rug pulled out from under our feet. I went from the TV screen to the labour exchange in 18 months.”
An inflammatory article in the Daily Mail exacerbated the situation further: “We never had an problems with Nazi activists at our gigs until after the Mail’s piece,” says Bushell. “Only then did we have people coming down, thinking it was going to be this rightwing thing, When they discovered it wasn’t, that’s when the trouble started. I was attacked at an Upstarts gig at the 100 Club by about 20 of them. I had a knife pulled on me at Charing Cross station.”
That should have been that, had it not been for Oi!’s curious afterlife in America. Steve Whale – who joined the Business after Southall and struggled on through the 80s, repositioning the band as “street punk” – unexpectedly found himself in possession of a US recording contract with Bad Religion’s label Epitaph, lauded by bands including Boston’s Irish-punk stars the Dropkick Murphys and the extraordinarily influential California band Rancid. Jeff Turner has just returned from a tour of Japan: “Osaka, Tokyo, Nagoya. I haven’t got fortunes but I’m able to do that. That’s all I can ask for, it makes me happy.”
“I had Lars Freidricksen of Rancid come in and sit in the pub round the corner from my house, welling up, telling me if it wasn’t for Oi! he might have killed himself as a teenager,” says Garry Bushell. “I thought, ‘Fuck me, it’s really had an effect on these people.’ I’m not proud of the way Oi! was misunderstood, but I’m proud of the music, proud of what it started, proud of what it gave punk.”
In Britain, he concedes, the genre’s name is still blackened in most people’s eyes. “There were people in 1976 saying punk had to be a Nazi thing because of the swastikas. The difference is, those bands had rock journalists on their side. The Oi! bands only had me.” He laughs, a little ruefully. “I did me best.”
As annoying as it is, the one question almost everybody, who is not a skinhead wants to know, is about the racism connection to skinheads, which has become almost a synonym of the word Skinhead
I will try to explain the reasons behind it. Without denying or justifying. I can only talk from my own real life experience, having grown up in a multi racial environment, from a very young pre school age child. On a council estate on the outskirts of London, in a town called High Wycombe.
Britain had an empire for almost 400 years, which covered 1/3rd of the world, encompassing many cultures and races. Every British person was bred to work for it, as a military serviceman, Industrial worker, or tradesman. The Second World War put an end to Britain’s power base. Germany surrendered, but the UK lost more than most nations.
Skinhead appeared towards the end of the 1960’s a boom time, with high employment, as the Empire was being closed and sold off, a boom needed cheap labour, to fill the shortage, created by the war losses. The government of the day decided to award all ex colonies British citizenship, and actively went out to places like The Caribbean and India to recruit a workforce. Those early immigrants arrived in the UK and were immediately awarded social housing. The British working class communities were forced to accept these new cultures into their communities, with no real education or understanding.
A deep fear of change arose. This together with the economic bust of the 1970’s, huge industrial turmoil, with strikes, 3 day working week, and a poverty wide spread across the country, a collapse of Britain as a national power and world influence. Racism was an immediate reaction. Immigrants taking jobs from the countries indigenous working class population. Three million unemployed – three million immigrants, easy mathematics. But it wasn’t only the unemployment, there was a huge shift in culture. The single parent family, shop hours changing. Foreign languages and street gangs on the estates. Fear and ignorance of the unknown.
The average skinheads age was around 14 years old, he would be very influenced by his parents, the media around him. Political groups set up, and actively recruited these kids into the fold, to act as street fighters. The organisations, The British Movement and National Front became a fashionable rebellion, very popular in the white working class areas, organizing highly visual street marches, adopting symbols of previous fascist groups of the 1930’s.
Here we see photographer Nick Knight photographing a young Skinhead lad. Nick later produced a book of images, which became mainstream reference for the Skinhead Subculture. Nick is now one of the UK most highly successful and wealthy fashion photographers
Although skinhead had originally come from Mods, the music of Jamaican Reggae and Ska popular. The skinheads of the mid to late 70’s and 80’s were much more of an aggressive hooligan element, wrapped up in political instability. The cold war made it popular to be anti Communist. The Racial tension and conflicts created by mass immigration, made it real life on the streets and school yards to associate with your own, fight for your territory. But most of it was just a fashion, rather than a violent reality, often just a rebellion to left wing leaning school teachers.
In 1981 riots spread across the UK, as a reaction to police oppression, political instability and anger at the governments, who had destroyed industry and communities. Most of the riots came from the Black areas , like Brixton in London, St Pauls in Bristol, Toxteth in Liverpool, The Moss side in Manchester. But there was one which happened in Southall, west London, which was a Bengali Sikh area. This went off between Skinheads and the local population. A pub venue called the Hanborough Tavern, which had skinhead bands playing was burned to the ground, the skinhead kids in attendance almost being burned to death. But Margaret Thatcher, notorious for knee jerk reaction banned skinhead Oi! Music overnight. Records pulled from the shelves, blacklisting, no radio play. The fact 2tone, which was also a very popular music of the same time, was reggae based, with multi racial members, was ignored. Those bands distanced themselves from Skinheads or stopped playing.
Many of the mainstream Skinhead/Punk bands, known as OI! bands folded up, labels dropping them. But it didn’t kill skinheads. It just pushed it underground, and made an already violent subculture, more violent, and radicalised some, deeper into political extreme groups. In reality the actual racial violence was quite small, it was often nothing more than a few skinheads fighting a few left wing students, but it grabbed huge media attention, which actually fuelled it. Kids became skinheads, and thought it was a rule, to be racist, even though a big number of skinheads came from all white areas, and had probably never met a non white person. This rumbled on throughout the 1980’s, creating a small industry for some. Racialist motivated skinhead music was made and exported, which, not unlike Irish rebel music, got a fan base and fantasy wrapped around it. But also raised reasonably large amounts of money for those involved, and their political groups.
Industrial Strikes ravaged the 1970’s, ultimately culminating in a mass cull of industry right across the UK, making millions unemployed and destroyed working class communities
Skinheads never really recovered the huge numbers of 2tone 1979-1982.
The media constantly wrote that any violence or racism reported must therefore involve Skinheads, who would always be portrayed as the instigators, which drove huge divides and enhanced the public persona, but also exported the skinhead image, as one of a racist thug. White supremacist groups in USA, Hollywood and parts of Europe picked up the image and uniform, a monster was fed. Even today, and although Indonesia has one of the biggest Skinhead scenes on the planet, California has a big Hispanic Skinhead scene, whenever the word Skinhead is mentioned in the press, any random Racist white person, is often what they are talking about.
Yea good….a few things I would say is that there was racism with the skinheads in the 60’s ” Enoch Powell Rivers of blood speech” Paki bashing and the likes….. Also the racism of the 70’s was a trend of going against the status quo such as lefty teachers and a lot of kids attracted to being a skinhead were so because it was unpopular with the masses as with the NF…a lot went along with it as they did with the uniform…it was part and parcel…those days if you became a skin you became a racist and a lot loved to revel in there 5 minutes of TV glory seig Heiling for the cameras even though a lot couldn’t care…it was all about being anti social and what better way than pretend you agreed with what the country had fought against not 40 years previous….if we weren’t the outsider then we would make ourselves the outsider by any means possible…..I would also say that before becoming skinheads we were no bodies, part of a massive crowd then when we became skinheads we become something and infamous which as a kid we all yearned for. Jim
Skinheads were a violent youth culture, and a big part of that was street fighting with other young men, These days, would be seen as very politically incorrect. Squaddies, Pakistanis and even Gays were reported in the press, as being targets for skinhead aggression. But much of that was just media exaggeration, The mass majority of fighting was with any other group of young, mainly white men.
The Cockney Rejects’ 1980 performance at Birmingham’s Cedar Club remains unnoticed in the annals of rock history. It warrants no mention when music journalists compile the 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock, nor the 100 Craziest Gigs Ever, which seems like a terrible oversight. In fairness, no one is ever going to rank the show by the East End quartet – then enjoying chart success with a punk take on the West Ham terrace anthem I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles – alongside Jimi Hendrix at Monterey in terms of musical brilliance. Still, it has its own claim to historical import: by all accounts, it was the most violent gig in British history.
“I’d seen quite a bit on the terraces or outside football grounds, but this was carnage,” says Jeff Turner, today an immensely amiable decorator, then “Stinky” Turner, the Cockney Rejects’ teenage front man, cursed with what his former manager Garry Bushell tactfully describes as “a bit of a temper”. Turner continues: “There was a lot of people cut and hurt, I got cut, my brother [Rejects’ guitarist Micky Geggus] really got done bad, with an ashtray, the gear was decimated, there was people lying around on the floor. Carnage.”
The problem was football-related. “Most of the punk bands at the time, they had their ideals – the Clash, Career Opportunities, political stuff, fair play,” says Turner. “When I was a kid, my thought for punk rock was that it could put West Ham on the front pages.” To this end, the band – affiliated to the club’s hooligans in the Inter City Firm – had appeared on Top of the Pops in West Ham shirts. “After that, everybody wanted to fight us, but you couldn’t back down,” says Turner. “Once you were defeated, it would have opened the floodgates for everybody.”
So the Rejects and their party fought: “Twenty Cockneys against … well, not all 300 Brummies were trying to attack us, but I’d say we were trying to fight off 50 to 100 people.” In the aftermath, Micky Geggus was charged with GBH and affray, and the Cockney Rejects’ career as a live band was, in effect, over. An attempt to play Liverpool later that year ended after six songs “because there was 150 Scousers trying to kill us”, while a subsequent gig in Birmingham was aborted by the police: “The old bill got wind of it and escorted us on to the M6,” says Turner. “At the time, I was gutted, but now, I think, thank God for that. Someone could have died.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising the gig has been swept under the carpet of musical history: after all, so has the genre the Cockney Rejects inadvertently inspired. Thirty years after Bushell – then a writer for the music paper Sounds, as well as the Rejects’ manager – coined the term “Oi!” to describe a third generation of punk-inspired working-class bands playing “harder music on every level, guitar driven, terrace choruses”, it remains largely reviled or ignored in Britain.
In the eyes of its remaining fans, Oi! is the “real thing”, the genuine sound of Britain’s streets in the late 70s, populated by artists Bushell championed when the rest of the music press concentrated on “bands who dropped literary references you wouldn’t have got if you didn’t have a masters’ degree and wrote pretentious lyrics”. Bands such as the Cockney Rejects, the Angelic Upstarts – Marxists from South Shields managed by a man Bushell colourfully describes as “a psychopath – his house had bars over all the windows because people had thrown firebombs through it” – Red Alert, Peter and the Test Tube Babies. It briefly stormed the charts. The Angelic Upstarts followed the Cockney Rejects onto Top of the Pops, while Splodgenessabounds made the Top 10 with the deathless Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please. But today, if the general public have heard of it at all, they tend to agree with the assessment once offered by journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie: “Punk’s stunted idiot half-brother, musically primitive and politically unsavoury, with its close links to far-right groups.” It is, asserts Bushell, “without a doubt, the most misunderstood genre in history”.
The problem isn’t really to do with the music, although protracted exposure to the oeuvre of Peter and the Test Tube Babies – home to Student Wankers, Up Yer Bum and Pick Your Nose (and Eat It) – could leave all but the hardiest soul pleading tearfully for a few literary references and pretentious lyrics. The problem is Oi!’s adoption by the far-right as its soundtrack of choice. It wasn’t the only part of street culture to attract the attentions of the National Front and the British Movement in the late 70s and early 80s. Losing out at the polling stations thanks to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the NF had instigated a programme of “direct action”: it would attempt to kick its way into the headlines at football matches and gigs. Chart bands such as Sham 69, Madness and the Specials had concerts disrupted.In 1978, seig-heiling skinheads caused £7,500 worth of damage at a Sham 69 gig in London.
But it was to Oi! that the far-right was most attracted, not least because it attracted both football hooligans and the re-emergent skinhead movement – two groups the NF’s direct-action programme targeted for recruitment. “We played a gig in Camden, we saw these Nazi skinheads beating the shit out of these two punks,” remembers Turner. “They’d managed to wreck Sham 69’s career, but us with our following” – the ICF was then headed by Cass Pennant, whose parents were Jamaican – “we weren’t going to have it. We just went down and absolutely slaughtered them. We declared to them that if they ever set foot where we were again, we’d decimate them.” And so it proved. “Neo-nazis confronted the Rejects again at Barking station,” remembers Bushell. “They basically told them, ‘We’re going to come to your gigs, we’re going to do this and do that.’ The Rejects crew battered them all over the station. They didn’t come to the gigs after that.”
Bushell points out that there was “a Nazi subculture all the way through punk. Malcolm McLaren started it all with the swastikas, which thick people saw and thought, ‘Oh, they must be Nazis.’” There were white power punk bands, too – such as the Dentists and the Ventz, which were formed by the “Punk Front” division of the National Front, in lieu of real punk bands showing any interest in promoting white supremacy. It was a trick the NF would be forced to pull again when Oi! bands resisted their overtures – the party recruited a failed punk band from Blackpool called Skrewdriver and repositioned them as the musical voice of the neo-Nazi movement. “It was totally distinct from us,” says Bushell. “We had no overlap other than a mutual dislike for each other.”
Bushell’s latterday career as a gleeful provoker of the liberal left, writing for the Sun and the Daily Star, probably hasn’t done much to help public perceptions regarding Oi!’s political affiliations. When Oi! was at its height, however, he says he was a Trotskyist who did his best to infuse the movement with socialist principles. He organised Oi! conferences and debates, “trying to shape the movement, trying to stop the culture of violence, talking about doing unemployment benefits, working with the Right to Work campaign, prisoners’ rights gigs – I thought we could unite punk and social progress.” Not everyone was receptive: “Stinky Turner was at one debate, and he didn’t contribute much, apart from the classic line, ‘Oi! is working class, and if you’re not working class you’ll get a kick in the bollocks.’” He laughs. “Perfect! That was what the Rejects were all about.”
Trotskyist or not, Bushell also managed to exacerbate the problem, not least by masterminding the unfortunately titled 1981 compilation Strength Thru Oi!. “I didn’t know!” he protests. “I’d been active in politics for years and had never come across the phrase ‘strength through joy’ as a Nazi slogan.It was the title of a Skids EP.”
To compound matters, its cover featured a photograph of a skinhead who turned out to be the delectable-sounding Nicky Crane, who – nothing if not a multi-tasker – managed to combine life as a neo-Nazi activist with a secret career as a gay porn star. “I had a Christmas card on the wall, it had that image that was on the cover of Strength Thru Oi!, but washed out. I honestly, hand on my heart, thought it was a still from The Wanderers,” Bushell says. “It was only when the album came through for me to approve the artwork that I saw his tattoos. Of course, if I hadn’t been impatient, I would have said, right, fucking scrap this, let’s shoot something else entirely. Instead, we airbrushed the tattoos out. There were two mistakes there, both mine. Hands up.”
Much worse was to follow. A July 1981 Oi! gig featuring the 4-Skins and the Business in Southall – the scene of a racist murder in 1976 and the race riot that ended in the death of Blair Peach in 1979 – erupted into violent chaos: 110 people were hospitalised, and the venue, the Hambrough Tavern, was burned down after being petrol bombed. Depending on whose version of events you believe, it was either sparked by skinheads attacking Asians or Asian youths attacking gig-goers: either way, the Southall riot stopped Oi!’s commercial progress dead. The Cockney Rejects found that shops refused to stock their new album, The Power and the Glory: “I’d sung a song called Oi Oi Oi and all of a sudden there’s an Oi! movement and I didn’t really want anything to do with it,” says Turner. “This awful, awful shit happened in Southall, we were never there, and we got the rug pulled out from under our feet. I went from the TV screen to the labor exchange in 18 months.”
An inflammatory article in the Daily Mail exacerbated the situation further: “We never had an problems with Nazi activists at our gigs until after the Mail’s piece,” says Bushell. “Only then did we have people coming down, thinking it was going to be this rightwing thing, When they discovered it wasn’t, that’s when the trouble started. I was attacked at an Upstarts gig at the 100 Club by about 20 of them. I had a knife pulled on me at Charing Cross station.”
That should have been that, had it not been for Oi!’s curious afterlife in America. Steve Whale – who joined the Business after Southall and struggled on through the 80s, re positioning the band as “street punk” – unexpectedly found himself in possession of a US recording contract with Bad Religion’s label Epitaph, lauded by bands including Boston’s Irish-punk stars the Dropkick Murphys and the extraordinarily influential California band Rancid. Jeff Turner has just returned from a tour of Japan: “Osaka, Tokyo, Nagoya. I haven’t got fortunes but I’m able to do that. That’s all I can ask for, it makes me happy.”
“I had Lars Freidricksen of Rancid come in and sit in the pub round the corner from my house, welling up, telling me if it wasn’t for Oi! he might have killed himself as a teenager,” says Garry Bushell. “I thought, ‘Fuck me, it’s really had an effect on these people.’ I’m not proud of the way Oi! was misunderstood, but I’m proud of the music, proud of what it started, proud of what it gave punk.”
In Britain, he concedes, the genre’s name is still blackened in most people’s eyes. “There were people in 1976 saying punk had to be a Nazi thing because of the swastikas. The difference is, those bands had rock journalists on their side. The Oi! bands only had me.” He laughs, a little ruefully. “I did me best.”
Immigration and the National Health Service: putting history to the forefront
Stephanie Snow , Emma Jones | 08 March 2011
Executive Summary
The Coalition Government’s plans to restrict immigration to the UK through capping non-EU immigrants and to introduce more stringent controls for highly skilled migrants are contradictory given the long history of recruitment of overseas health workers.
Since the 1930s, successive governments have recruited doctors, nurses and other health workers from overseas to work in UK health services with the first mass recruitment waves of nurses from the African Caribbean in the 1950s and doctors from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s.
The need for health workers was significantly increased by the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 and the expansion of specialists and technologies.
Immigration controls were tightened during the 1960s and 1970s but the increasing demand for overseas health workers continued.
Discrimination around training and career opportunities of first generation overseas health workers has had negative consequences for recruitment from the second generation.
The lack of any system of accurate data to monitor the migration, immigration, recruitment and retention of health workers has exacerbated the difficulties of manpower planning.
Shortfalls in certain fields of nursing and medicine continue and are predicted to intensify because of an international shortage of health workers.
Putting history to the forefront would help policymakers realize the significance of the NHS’s continuous dependence on overseas health workers and the need therefore both to improve equity and opportunity for such health workers and to integrate this fact of health manpower planning into national immigration policy.
Introduction
The current recruitment of junior doctors from India appears incongruous given the Coalition Government’s plans to cap non-EU immigrants, apply transitional controls for all new EU members in future, and introduce more stringent controls for highly skilled migrants. Yet present preoccupations about immigration take no account of the impact of such measures on public services such as the National Health Service (NHS) which has a long history of reliance on overseas health workers. Since the 1930s, successive governments have resolved staffing crises through recruiting workers from overseas. The NHS currently employs around 30 per cent of nurses and doctors from black and minority ethnic (BME*) groups with approximately 30 per cent of doctors and 40 per cent of nurses born outside the UK. The low awareness of the historical importance of overseas recruitment to the NHS has artificially constrained immigration debates. It has also contributed to the failure to tackle the discrimination experienced by these workers in training and career opportunities. BME clinicians are over-represented in the lower grades of the professions, under-represented in senior managerial positions, and work in the less popular areas; fewer than 10 per cent of NHS senior managers and only 1 per cent of NHS chief executives have a minority ethnic background.
Putting history to the forefront requires addressing deep-seated and difficult questions around immigration and the NHS that have never been tackled by policy makers. Health worker shortages have been a perennial problem for a number of interrelated reasons including difficulties around nurse recruitment and retention, the reluctance of UK-trained doctors to take up posts in unpopular locations and specialties, and the challenges of balancing the production of doctors and nurses with NHS staffing needs against the unpredictable forces of immigration and emigration. The difficulties look set to continue given the international shortages of health workers which are anticipated to reach 53,000 in the UK, 40,000 in Australia, and 275,000 in the US over the coming year.
Recruitment of overseas nurses
Staffing crises in British hospitals had been identified long before the establishment of the NHS in 1948 and concern over nurse shortages had been the subject of numerous government inquiries which blamed low recruitment on inadequate training, poor pay, and the marriage bar. During the Second World War, hospital domestic and nursing work was regarded as vital to the war effort and attracted a large number of women into national service. But staffing the new NHS was compromised by the national post-war labour shortage. The unprecedented increases in the medical and nursing workforce over the first decade of the NHS exacerbated the problem. Between 1949 and 1958 the medical workforce increased by 30 per cent in England and 50 per cent in Scotland; the nursing and midwifery workforce increased by 26 per cent across Britain. The most severe shortages were in unpopular areas of nursing such as hospitals for the chronically sick, mental hospitals and in geriatric nursing.
As early as 1949 the Ministries of Health and Labour, in conjunction with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council and the Royal College of Nursing launched campaigns to recruit hospital staff directly from the Caribbean. Recruitment was aimed at three main categories of worker: hospital auxiliary staff, nurses or trainee nurses, and domestic workers. Senior NHS staff from Britain travelled to the Caribbean to recruit, and vacancies were often published in local papers. In 1949, the Barbados Beacon advertised for nursing auxiliaries to work in hospitals across Britain; applicants were to be aged between 18 and 30, literate, and willing to commit to a three-year contract. By 1955 there were official nursing recruitment programmes across 16 British colonies and former colonies. Over the next two decades, the British colonies and former colonies provided a constant supply of cheap labour to meet staffing shortages in the NHS, and the number of women from the African Caribbean entering Britain to work in the NHS grew steadily until the early 1970s. By the end of 1965, there were 3,000-5,000 Jamaican nurses working in British hospitals, many of them concentrated in London and the Midlands. It has been estimated that by 1972, 10,566 students had been recruited from abroad, and that by 1977 overseas recruits represented 12 per cent of the student nurse and midwife population in Britain, of which 66 per cent came from the Caribbean.
By the late 1980s, the NHS again faced serious problems in the retention and recruitment of nursing staff, much as it had done in 1948. The problem now involved chronic shortages of both trainees and qualified nurses. Nursing’s popularity as a career choice among school leavers had declined markedly. Changing social expectations and financial constraints meant that young people were now seeking better-paid job opportunities in other sectors of the economy. The abolition of work permits for overseas nurses in 1983 added to the difficulties. Meanwhile, an estimated 30,000 nurses were leaving the NHS every year; their departure blamed on long-standing problems associated with low salary levels and the pressures of the job. By 1998, there were reports that the shortages in newly qualified nurses were approximating 8,000 a year. Problems intensified with the expansion of the NHS in 2000 which created additional demand for nurses that were met by recruiting workers from India.
Recruitment of overseas doctors
The shortage of doctors in the UK was well-established by the 1960s especially in unpopular locations such as single-handed general practices in deprived urban areas and remote rural locations, and in hospital specialties like mental health and care of the elderly. In 1944, the Goodenough Committee had recommended expanding medical schools to relieve shortages but the 1957 Willink Committee decided that student numbers should be cut because of the risk of overproduction. Taking into account the minimum five year period of training, the Committee concluded that reducing medical student intake by 10 per cent between 1961 and 1975 would keep numbers in balance. Since 1939 student numbers had increased by more than a third and even before the Committee’s recommendations were made public some medical schools had begun to reduce their student intakes. Yet, within months of the report’s publication, it became evident that in fact a shortage of medical personnel was imminent.
In retrospect it is clear that the Willink Committee’s estimates failed to anticipate the need for extra doctors to improve future health services and to meet the requirements of a growing population. These underestimates drove the first mass wave of medical recruitment from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and by 1960, between 30 and 40 per cent of all junior doctors in the NHS were from these countries. In 1961, Lord Cohen of Birkenhead told the House of Lords: ‘The Health Service would have collapsed if it had not been for the enormous influx from junior doctors from such countries as India and Pakistan’. The emigration of these doctors built on Britain’s historical links with its ex-colonial territories, especially India. As a direct result of colonial rule, by the time of Indian Independence in 1947 Indian medical schools and hospital administration ran along the lines of the British model. Medical education and training were delivered in English, and geared towards meeting the requirements of the General Medical Council. This ensured that Indian-trained doctors would be able to work in Britain, and encouraged overseas medical graduates to come and gain further training and experience that they would then take home. Emigration of large numbers of UK-trained doctors to work mainly in the United States and Canada, because of the relatively poor pay and conditions of the NHS, compounded the shortages. By the late 1960s, Henry Miller, Professor of Neurology at Newcastle University and chairman of the British Medical Association’s Committee for Planning, estimated that the annual emigration of British trained doctors amounted to between 30 and 50 per cent of the annual number of medical graduates.
In 1963 the Conservative Health Minister, Enoch Powell, who later led the call for stricter controls on immigration, launched a campaign to recruit trained doctors from overseas to fill the manpower shortages caused by NHS expansion. Some 18,000 of them were recruited from India and Pakistan. Powell praised these doctors, who he said, ‘provide a useful and substantial reinforcement of the staffing of our hospitals and who are an advertisement to the world of British medicine and British hospitals.’ Many of those recruited had several years of experience in their home countries and arrived to gain further medical experience, training, or qualification. In 1968, the recruitment of overseas doctors was fuelled again by the predictions of further medical shortages by the Todd Committee, which recommended expanding medical schools. By 1971, 31 per cent of all doctors working in the NHS in England were born and qualified overseas. Overseas doctors remained central to NHS staffing throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, filling vacancies in locations and specialties that were unpopular with UK trained doctors. In 1997, 44 per cent of 7,229 newly registered doctors (under full registration) had received their initial medical education overseas.
Brixton riots 1981.
Racial integration has caused issues in British society for many years, with street riots in areas like Brixton in London
Immigration controls
Since the nineteenth century and before, Britain has had a long history of immigration and racial tensions have arisen from groups such as the Irish and East European Jews settling in the country. However, post-war mass migration changed the UK’s ethnic landscape in an unprecedented way and successive governments sought to allay public anxiety by introducing tighter controls around immigration. By the 1960s, the 1948 Nationality Act, which had granted British citizenship to citizens of British colonies and former British colonies, was under attack. In 1962, the then Conservative Government introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, restricting the admission of Commonwealth settlers to those who had been issued with employment vouchers. In the eighteen-months before the Act was passed, many new arrivals came to Britain. This large influx stoked popular fears of uncontrolled immigration, which sustained calls for increased controls. In 1968, a new Labour Government introduced a second Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which distinguished between British passport holders, with the right to live in Britain, and those without. The law was rushed through with the primary purpose of restricting the entry into Britain of Kenyan Asians, driven out by the ‘Africanisation’ policies of the Kenyan government. As British passport holders, Kenyan Asians had had, up to this point, unconditional right of entry. While this new piece of legislation applied to all Commonwealth countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, it was more unlikely that people from the New Commonwealth would qualify as patrials, thereby creating a division between white and black Commonwealth citizens.
Exceptions to immigration controls were made for essential and well-qualified staff, hence both nurses and doctors were exempt from the immigration controls imposed in the 1960s. In general, the men and women who came to work in the NHS were welcomed throughout this period of political agitation. Their professional status distinguished them from the mass of migrants, most of whom were classified as unskilled. In spite of his later vocal opposition to black and Asian immigration in general, Health Minister Enoch Powell championed the recruitment of overseas nurses in the early 1960s. As historian of the NHS, Charles Webster suggests, this apparent anomaly was perhaps because the immigration of nurses not only ‘provided a plentiful supply of cheap labour, reduced wastage, and undermined the shortage argument’ but also ‘strengthened his hand in pressing for a strong line against the nurses’ pay claim, which itself was his chief weapon in his wider campaign to induce colleagues to adopt a more aggressive approach to the control of public sector pay.’ Immigrant nurses were therefore an expedient means of providing political leverage.
The situation had altered by the 1970s. Immigration laws undermined the employment rights of overseas nurses. The automatic right of entry to prospective nurses from the Commonwealth was withdrawn with the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act. Later, in 1983, work permits for nurses were also abolished prohibiting further entry of overseas nurses to train in Britain. A report for the Commission of Racial Equality, published that same year, found a higher proportion of trained overseas-born nurses, than overseas-born nurses in training. It also stated that less than 9 per cent of nurses employed by the NHS were born in developing countries. Despite attempts to improve recruitment within the UK, the shortage of qualified nursing staff continued, and was approximating 8,000 a year by 1998. The subsequent expansion of the NHS under New Labour created a need to rapidly increase the nursing workforce but while the number of British training places was increased, this did not solve the immediate demand for workforce growth. International recruitment became one of the government’s key strategies in tackling the chronic shortage of qualified nurses, this time with a focus on recruiting already trained nurses and midwives from overseas, rather than training them in the UK. In 2002-03 more than half of the nurses newly registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council had trained outside Britain. Unlike for overseas nurses, the tightening of immigration controls in the 1970s and 1980s had not significantly reduced the numbers of overseas doctors coming to Britain, while the output of UK medical schools continued to fall short of the NHS’ manpower needs. The flow of overseas doctors into and out of the UK is not monitored, but estimates from the early 1980s suggest that around a third of the yearly influx of overseas doctors returned to their home country. In 1985 the work permit scheme was eventually extended to include doctors. An official ‘loophole’ was created however which meant that overseas doctors could continue to seek postgraduate training in Britain for a four year permit-free period, extendable for a further year after approval from the postgraduate dean. In 1997, this permit-free period of postgraduate training was extended to six years.
The output from UK medical schools was increased in 2000 and this brought a change in attitude towards overseas doctors. By 2005 the government feared that the recruitment of overseas doctors would deny employment to a large number of home-grown medical graduates, especially as International Medical Graduates (IMGs), who were often highly skilled, and with several years’ experience in their chosen field, remained an attractive prospect for the NHS. In a bid to keep junior posts open for graduates who were British or EEA nationals, in April 2006 the Department of Health retrospectively sought to debar IMGs from applying for training posts in the NHS. Under new rules, hospitals were told they must prove they could not recruit a junior doctor from the UK or the EU before shortlisting candidates from other countries. The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) challenged the Government in the High Court, which ruled that the Department of Health’s guideline was illegal. The judgement was upheld by the House of Lords in April 2008, but not before thousands of overseas doctors had had their opportunity of permit-free training abruptly withdrawn at great personal and financial costs to themselves and their careers. The long-term implications of this action however were not anticipated so the UK is now once again looking to recruit Indian-trained doctors to fill vacancies in specialties unpopular with UK-trained graduates.
Discrimination, qualifications and training
Migrants arriving in the first wave of mass migration endured verbal and physical abuse both within and outside the workplace. White trade unionists resisted the employment of migrants and imposed a quota system. Within the NHS, concern that importing overseas workers was likely to create tensions was recognised in a 1949 Home Office memo:
‘it has been found that the susceptibilities of patients tended to set an upper limit on the proportion of coloured workers who could be employed either as nurses or domiciliaries.’
Racism and discrimination have been universal experiences of health workers migrating to the UK especially around training and career progression. Many of the nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s expected to achieve the internationally-recognised State Registered Nurse qualification (SRN) which would allow them to return home and gain employment. But nursing authorities at that time argued that their racial characteristics limited their intellectual capacities and motivation to achieve that level of training. Thus many overseas nurses were forced or even duped into State Enrolled Nurse (SEN) training rather than the more prestigious and more highly valued SRN qualification. The longer term consequences of this were significant as the SEN was not an internationally-recognised qualification and limited overseas nurses’ options for returning home.
The move towards recruiting overseas-trained nurses has not prevented discrimination and exploitation. Overseas-trained nurses are required to complete a programme of supervised practice placement and adaptation, but as the Researching Equal Opportunities for Overseas-trained nurses and other Healthcare Professionals (REOH) Study found, the skills and experiences of these highly trained individuals are not given adequate recognition within the inflexible formal assessment and accreditation system in the UK, leading to under-grading, deskilling, and skills waste. Like nurses, BME doctors have been disadvantaged by the medical profession’s internal hierarchies which left them working on the geographical and institutional margins of medicine. As migrants, they experienced difficulties in getting shortlisted for jobs and were more likely to gain posts away from prestigious teaching hospitals and medical schools. Some even had to accept lower remuneration in order to support themselves and their families. Nor were BME doctors trained in the UK exempt from barriers, particularly around selection processes where those responsible for shortlisting candidates frequently excluded individuals on the basis of a foreign surname.
The legacy of discrimination against first generation overseas health workers has had consequences for the recruitment from the second generation. Nurses, especially, do not see nursing or other health service work as a career they would wish for their daughters. And although some of the barriers have been removed since the 1990s with new legislation and workplace regulations, institutional discrimination within the NHS continues to impede many working lives. This has direct implications for the future of the NHS and its status as a world-leading provider of healthcare as it is likely to continue to need to recruit manpower from overseas
Manpower planning
Since the 1930s, unplanned shifts in population growths, upturns and downturns in economic conditions, and changing political motivations have created and continue to create contingencies in NHS staffing for which successive governments were and are unprepared. It is clear that any government would find it very difficult to manage health manpower requirements by achieving equilibrium between migration and immigration flows. Shortages of health workers, especially doctors, are difficult to handle because of the lag time between the creation of training places and qualification.
Nevertheless, a lack of longitudinal data to track the migration, immigration, recruitment and retention of health workers has contributed to the difficulties. As has the fact that workforce planning for medicine and for nursing has been treated as two separate enterprises, despite evidence from economic analysts since the 1960s of the inherent problems in this approach. In May 2006, Josie Irwin, Head of Employment Relations for the Royal College of Nursing, summarised the difficulties in oral evidence to the House of Commons’ Health Committee. Numbers of nurses, she said, had increased by 85,000 since 1997. However: ‘the quality of workforce planning in the UK means that we do not know where all those nurses have gone; we do not know how many of them have stayed in the UK; we do not know how many of them have stayed in the NHS … we do not know very much about the retirement behaviour of these nurses … the success of importing new numbers of nurses in the UK is challenged by not knowing enough about them once they have entered the workforce.’
Manpower challenges persist. A 2008 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Looming Crisis in the Health Workforce, suggests that the overall pool of potential workers will diminish internationally on account of contractions in younger age cohorts. UK medical and nursing school places have increased significantly over the last 10 years with the aim of developing a sustainable UK-trained workforce. Yet history suggests that the UK’s dependence on overseas health workers will continue and may even be exacerbated by the international shortage of health workers.
Conclusions
The Coalition Government’s resolve to introduce further curbs on immigration as a response to public concern about the drain of migrants on local resources simply repeats the contradictory patterns of earlier administrations. Putting history to the forefront would help policymakers construct historically-evidenced agendas that could aid health manpower planning and improve equity and opportunity for significant numbers of health workers.
Current debates need to reflect on the impact of tightening immigration controls – including those for highly skilled migrants – on public services, especially the NHS. The forces of migration and emigration are unlikely to weaken given the global nature of the healthcare market, and the NHS will continue to need to recruit staff from overseas. Acknowledging the UK’s long reliance on overseas health workers and establishing a system for the collection of longitudinal data to monitor the migration, immigration, recruitment and retention of health workers are achievable short-term policy goals which would help manpower planning enormously. Measures could be put in place to ensure the qualifications and training of highly skilled migrants are recognised within UK systems; and institutional discrimination around training and career opportunities in the NHS needs continuing redress. Addressing the deep-seated problems around nurse recruitment and retention, and the unpopularity of certain medical specialties and locations are much more challenging issues and will require a longer timeframe. History shows that it is in the UK’s long-term interests to ensure that future generations of overseas health workers operating in a global market will choose to work in the NHS.
*Technical Note: BME: the predominant term employed throughout this article is ‘black and minority ethnic’, or BME, to describe all members of minority racial groups. Other terms such as ‘black’, ‘West Indian’, ‘Caribbean’, ‘Afro-Caribbean’, and ‘South Asian’ and ‘Asian’ have been used where appropriate to distinguish between ethnic minority groups. We recognise that the persons to whom the terms are applied do not necessarily define themselves by such terms.
Further Reading
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2008) The Looming Crisis in the Health Workforce.
Panayi, Panikos (2010) An Immigration History of Britain. Pearson Education. Julian M Simpson, Aneez Esmail, Virinder S Kalra, Stephanie J Snow (2010) ‘Writing migrants back into NHS history: addressing a ‘collective amnesia’ and its policy implications’,Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 103(10): 392-6.
Smith Pam A., Helen Allan, Leroi W Henry, John A Larsen, and Maureen M. Mackintosh (2006) ‘Valuing and Recognising the Talents of a Diverse Healthcare Workforce’, Report from the REOH Study: Researching Equal Opportunities for Overseas-trained Nurses and Other Healthcare Professionals. European Institute of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, the Open University and the Royal College of Nursing.
Stephanie Snow and Emma Jones are Wellcome Research Associates in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine, University of Manchester. stephanie.snow@manchester.ac.uk; emma.l.jones@manchester.ac.uk. This paper is based on their new book, Against the Odds: Black, Minority and Ethnic Clinicians and Manchester, 1948-2009, published by Carnegie Press, 2010 on behalf of Manchester Primary Care Trust who funded the research.
Football, or as Americans call it ‘Soccer’ may be one of the fastest growing sports in America – with the English Premier League watched by millions each week – but it appears some of its worst excesses may have crossed the Atlantic.
Two gangs of rival supporters were seen brawling in the streets of New Jersey Sunday afternoon ahead of a heated clash between the New York Red Bulls and newly-formed New York City Football Club.
In scenes reminiscent of the blood-soaked battles between British hooligan gangs, shirtless men bellowed ‘who are ya?’ at one another and lashed out with full trash bags and sandwich boards outside a supporters’ bar.
The unedifying confrontation raised the prospect of a violent soccer culture having migrated west, along with many of its best-known players, who have accepted big-money deals to devote themselves to U.S teams.
Scuffles break out outside New Jersey bar ahead of soccer derby
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Attack: Street brawlers were pictured in Newark, New Jersey, attacking one another with sandwich boards and shouting ahead of a New York City FC vs New York Red Bulls soccer match
‘Who are ya?’: The fighters were shouting at one another in faux-British accents, appearing to mimic the hooligan cultures which plagues UK soccer
The clash took place not far from Penn Station in Newark, and under a mile from the Red Bull Stadium, where the Red Bulls eventually beat NYCFC two goals to nil.
The fans fought – reportedly only for a few minutes – outside Bello’s Pub and Grill, a New York Red Bulls supporters’ bar.
A member of staff told DailyMail.com the clash did not involve patrons drinking inside and it is the first known instance of soccer-related violence around the stadium
Violence and gang culture related to soccer fans has been a serious problem in Great Britain and other European countries, where riot police and mounted officers often attend the most emotional games in an attempt to keep the peace.
One passing witness said ‘Some of the guys had tattoos and were making hand gestures, whilst bouncing on the spot, a bit like a child desperate for an ice cream’
Soccer authorities have been promoting a sanitized version of the game in the United States, garnering many fans in the process.
The elevated profile of the sport – as well as big-money contracts – have seen famous European players moved to American teams.
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Shirtless: The appalling site of fat guts put local residents off of their hot dogs. Some of the fans wore little clothing as they clashed not far from Newark’s busy Penn Station
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Intervention: An NJ Transit Police squad car was seen headed for the fans towards the end of the clip
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Quite the welcome: Fans at the game displayed this banner – satirizing the way many European players towards the end of their careers have signed deals with U.S. clubs. Big names include David Beckham, Thierry Henri and Chelsea’s Frank Lampard – who played Sunday for NYC FC.
Hollywood producer Albert Goldstein has immediately called for a script to be written, and is desperately looking for an English sounding American actor to play firm boss ‘Road-sign Randy’
The violence tonight raises the question of whether individual soccer fans may be attempting to transfer the so-called hooligan culture across the Atlantic.
The video shows an New Jersey Transit Police squad car responded to the violence. DailyMail.com has contacted NJ Transit and the Newark Police Department for comment.
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Reminiscent: The men seemed to be imitating the football violence which is common overseas – pictured above are fans in Germany being held back by riot police
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Transplant: Former Chelsea player Frank Lampard, pictured above with his fiancee Christine Bleakley in Times Square, is one of several European stars to transfer to the US
The height of the British hooligan culture, was the 1970’s and 80’s until Maggie Thatcher clamped down on it, with heavy fines and jail terms. The New Yorkers have some distance to go, than a few cafe signs and ‘Oo Are ya’s’
SOCCER HOOLIGANISM VIDEO ECHOES ELIJAH WOOD ‘GREEN STREET’ FILM
Soccer fans brawling in the streets may be new in reality, but the fascination of hooligan-style violence to Americans has been given the silver screen treatment in the past.
2005’s Green Street Hooligans, which stars Elijah Wood, demonstrated told the story of a Harvard drop-out who was enticed into the violent world of British sporting violence.
Wood’s character left college in disgrace after taking the fall for his roommate’s cocaine use, then moved to London and got caught up in the Green Street Elite, a group with links to London’s West Ham football club.
The young American gets caught up in the brutality and camaraderie of the so-called GSE, which organizes huge, bloody brawls with fans of rival clubs.
However, he is scared away from hooligan culture for good after a family friend is beaten to death when a fight gets out of hand. Elijah Wood joins British football hooligans in Greet Street
SHARE PICTURE
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Visceral: Elijah Wood, right, starred in Green Street, which saw him take on British football hooligans on their own turf
Actor George Cole, best known for playing Arthur Daley in TV’s Minder, has died aged 90.
Cole played the Cockney wheeler dealer Daley for 16 years, between 1979 and 1994.
He also starred in a number of St Trinian’s films as shady businessman Flash Harry.
Agent Derek Webster said Cole had died at the Royal Berkshire hospital following a short illness, surrounded by his family.
“It is with deep regret that I have to announce the sad death of one of our most loved and respected actors,”
George was a much loved actor, and great inspiration for working class people. playing the lovable rogue, Wheeler Dealer anti authority character. He became the name used for the dodgy second hand card dealer, that you cant trust as far as you can throw him.
God love ya sunshine, see you at the Winchester Club in the sky, So long as ‘Er indoors aint there’
Sharpies, or sharps, are the darlings of Australian gang fashion. They started out in the 1960s when groups of working-class teenagers in Melbourne, and to a lesser extent, Sydney, came together over cars, tattoos, fights, and “dressing sharp.” While US-style motorcycle clubs evolved around leather jackets, Australian sharpies defined themselves by Conny tops, Staggers jeans, and chiseled shoes. But like bikers, sharpies placed a similar value on loyalty asserted with violence.
Nick Tolewski was in his early teens in the late 1970s when he and his friends started taking photos of the Thomastown Sharps, one of Melbourne’s largest sharpie groups in the city’s north. A few years ago Tolewski self-published some photos of the period in a book titled Once Were Sharps. Now, with a second book on the way, we sat down for a chat.
VICE: Hi, Nick. Tell me about growing up with these guys. Nick Tolewski: A lot of them lived on the same street. As a young kid I would see them at Andy’s Pinball Parlour, the roller disco on Settlement Road, the swimming pool, the youth center on a Friday night, or at the Main Street Recreation Reserve. Then I got to know some of them through my love of pigeons. I used to breed pigeons when I was five and so did a bunch of the Thomastown Sharps. So we used to go to each other’s houses and check out what we each had. But see, I was eight years younger than a lot of them. I used to run around like a little mascot to them. When I was 13 I started boxing with Squirt, who was similar in age and part of the sharpies because his brother was Thomastown’s main guy.
Apparently sharpies were like Australian skinheads. Were they racists? Nah, they weren’t. The Thomastown Sharps were all different nationalities. They had all religions, races… it was all mixed. A lot of the ethnics had been in Thomastown for 20 years. The rest of the city was still getting used to the influx of migrants that arrived in the 50s and 60s, but Thomastown had racial harmony.
But they were definitely violent? Oh, sure. The Thomastown Sharps had five big names: Big Louie, Blacky, Mitcho, Big Ears, and Wayne. They were all the big blokes and got in a lot of brawls, but Big Louie was definitely the toughest. He didn’t fear anyone. He knew Chopper Read the best out of Thomo boys and they spent some time together in Pentridge Prison.
There are a lot of tattoos in these photos. Tell me about what tattoos meant? To get inked back then made a statement. Some of the boys got the names of the core members tattooed on them. It was like a badge of honor and a distinctive statement that showed you didn’t care what others thought. The boys couldn’t always afford to get them done properly, so they’d jerry-rig a tattoo gun with pen ink, wire, and a small motor. Snatch tattooed “fuck off” on Pee Wee’s lip. The Pink Panther and a bluebird were also iconic tattoos among the sharps.
That takes me to my next observation: There’s not a lot of girls in these photos. Did anyone ever have a girlfriend? Yeah, there weren’t too many girls in Thomastown, but there were a few scattered across different sharpie gangs. They were tough and held their own. No one did them any favors because they could do it for themselves. But a lot of the guys had girlfriends. Snatch had a fair few. He was seen as the ladies man among the Thomo sharps. He used to pull in the sheilas.
What happened to the Thomastown Sharps? In the early 80s, they started using guns. Places started getting shot up and the whole gang thing was taken to another level. Also drugs got in the way. Blokes were getting on heroin. They were ten years older and everything changed.
So what are these guys doing now? One of them works for the local council of Whittlesea. One is a schoolteacher in Daylesford. Another is a builder in Bundoora. A lot of them became panel beaters. But the majority of them don’t work these days. And a lot of them have passed away from overdoses or car accidents.
What do you think of modern gangs? No good, mate. Too much violence with knives and guns, which leads to killings. The Lebanese Tigers and Black Dragons used to do their karate, but most of the fights back in the day were fists and feet. Also, gangs now take all types of drugs that make them go mad. It’s not good.
So what do you still find appealing about the sharpies? The look of them. With their hair, tattoos, clothes, and how they hung out as a gang. They were tough, you know. And as a little kid, coming from a working class family, you looked up to those guys. They gave me a sense of belonging and purpose.
PUNK was far less important than ex-punk Tom Logan likes to think, it has emerged.
Historians have taken issue with claims made in the autobiography of former Septic Nipples drummer Logan, which include the assertion that punk “changed everything”.
History professor Mary Fisher said: “Clearly many areas of life were not affected by punk. The car industry, for example, did not start making Allegros covered in spit with an anarchy symbol Tippexed on the side.
“Mr Logan – or Johnny Piss, as he was known then – believes punk had some political significance. But it was followed by Thatcherism, which was all about buying your own house and making it look nice, which isn’t very punk.
“It’s also possible that if punk had not existed, grunge would have been invented sooner and we could have just listened to Nirvana and not pretended to like the Slits.”
However Logan defended the importance of punk, saying that without it he would not have a vast stock of underwhelming anecdotes.
Logan said: “I was at a party with Johnny Thunders and the Pistols at Siouxie Sioux’s house, and the Damned turned up without any booze, so Siouxie told them to fuck off and get some from the off licence, and some crisps.
“All that craziness was a long time ago though. Today I’m an IT consultant with a wife and two kids living in a semi in Leeds.
“But there’s no way that could have happened if it hadn’t been for punk.”
PRINCE BUSTER – DISCOGRAPHY: (Ska/Rocksteady Singer)
Biography: Cecil Bustamente Campbell OD (born 24 May 1938, Kingston, Jamaica), better known by the stage name Prince Buster, is a Jamaican singer-songwriter and producer. Prince Buster, one of the founders and leaders of the ska music scene that originated from jamaica. Reggaediscography presents the most complete discography on internet dedicated to Prince Buster’s music.
PRINCE BUSTER – OFFICIAL DISCOGRAPHY:
1) Albums: .1963 – I Feel The Spirit .1964 – Fly Flying Ska .1964 – National Ska: Pain In My Belly .1965 – It’s Burke’s Law (Jamaica Ska Explosion) .1965 – Ska-Lip-Soul (Prince Buster And His All Stars) .1967 – What A Hard Man Fe Dead (The Prince Buster All Stars) – [Aka: “Live By My Ten Commandments” 1967] .1967 – Prince Buster On Tour – [Reissue: “King Of Blue Beat” 2001] .1967 – Sings His Hit Song Ten Commandments .1967 – Jamaica’s Pride: Rock Steady (Judge Dread feat. Prince Buster) .1968 – She Was A Rough Rider .1968 – Wreck A Pum Pum (Prince Buster & The All Stars) .1969 – The Outlaw .1972 – The Message Dubwise (Featuring Prince Buster All Star) .1972 – Big Five .1972 – Sister Big Stuff .1972 – Dance Cleopatra Dance – [Includes some previously unreleased + Compilation] .1987 – Prince Buster Sing Showcase .2003 – Prince Of Peace: Live In Japan (Prince Buster With Determinations)
2) EPs: .1980 – Behind Bars [Judge Dread (Aka: Prince Buster)] – [Blue Beat] .2013 – Blue Beat Original EP (JJ Sparks & Prince Buster) – [An Altara Production]
3) Compilation/ Best of: .1967 – Prince Buster Record Shack Presents The Original Golden Oldies Vol. 1 – [Prince Buster] [Compilation of Hits] .1967 – Prince Buster Record Shack Presents The Original Golden Oldies Vol. 2 – [Prince Buster] [Compilation of songs produced by Prince Buster. It includes various artists] .1968 – FABulous Greatest Hits – [(FAB, 1968) & (Sequel Records, 1993)] [Compilation/Greatest Hits] .1968 – Tutti Frutti – [FAB] [Compilation/Greatest Hits] .1968 – 15 Oldies But Goodies (Prince Buster & Other Stars) – [FAB] [Compilation of songs produced by Prince Buster. It includes various artists] .1994 – The Prophet – [Lagoon] [Compilation/Greatest Hits (1963-67)] .2000 – King Of Ska – [Prince Buster/Jet Star] [Compilation/Greatest Hits] .2003 – Rock A Shacka Vol. 5 – Dance Cleopatra – [Drum & Bass Records/Japan] [Compilation/Greatest Hits] .2013 – The Blue Beat Explosion! The Birth Of Ska – [Sunrise Records] [Classic collection of early Prince Buster related material] .2013 – Buster’s Shack (Prince Buster & Friends) – (Digital Release) [Greatest Hits of early Prince Buster material]
4) Appearances: Albums .1972 – Chi Chi Run [Big Youth, Prince Buster All Stars + Friends) – [FAB] .1972 – Jamaica’s Greatest (Prince Buster & Friends) – [Prince Buster]
5) Album Tribute: .1986 – “Prince Buster Memory Lane” by Owen Gray – [Phill Pratt] .2012 – “Prince Buster Shakedown” by The Dualers – [Cherry Red Records]
See Photos and Music Videos:
Prince Buster – Discography: ____________________________
1) Albums:
.1963 – I Feel The Spirit (Original Press): “I Feel The Spirit” 1963 – [Blue Beat]
“I Feel The Spirit” 1968 – [Fab]
Editions:
“I Feel The Spirit” 1963 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) I Feel The Spirit. 2) Madness. 3) Don’t Make Me Cry. 4) They Got To Come. 5) All Alone. 6) Soul Of Africa. 7) Wash Your Troubles Away. 8) Jealous. 9) Black Head Chinaman. 10) Beggars Are No Choosers. 11) Run Man Run. 12) Just You. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1963)]
Reissue: “I Feel The Spirit” 1968 – (Same Album) Tracks: 1) Wash Your Troubles Away. 2) Hold Them. 3) Shaking Up Orange St. 4) We Shall Overcome. 5) Last Train To London. 6) Time Longer Than Rope. 7) I Feel The Spirit. 8) Madness. 9) Closer Together. 10) They Got To Come. 11) All Alone. 12) Soul Of Africa. [Label: Fab (Lp: 1968)] ______________________________________________________________
.1964 – Fly Flying Ska (Original Press):
“Fly Flying Ska” 1964 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Prince Buster “Flying Ska (Wings Of A Dove)”. 2) Prince Buster “Lucky Seven”. 3) Prince Buster Feat. The Skatalites “Perhaps”. 4) Prince Buster Feat. Bobby Gaynair & Errol Dunkley “My Queen”. 5) Prince Buster Feat. Millie Small & Roy Panton “I Go”. 6) Prince Buster Feat. Roland Alphonso “Roland Plays The Prince”. 7) Prince Buster “Call Me”. 8) Prince Buster “Eye For An Eye”. 9) Prince Buster Feat. Owen Gray “River Jordan”. 10) Prince Buster “The Greatest”. 11) Prince Buster Feat. The Maytals “Ska War”. 12) Prince Buster Feat. Don Drummond “The Burial”. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1964), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1964)] ______________________________________________________________
.1964 – National Ska: Pain In My Belly (Original Press):
“National Ska: Pain In My Belly” 1964 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Prince Buster & The Maytals “I Got A Pain”. 2) The Maytals “He Is Real”. 3) T. McCook “Cast Your Faith To The Wind”. 4) Prince Buster “Faith”. 5) The Ska Busters “Georgia”. 6) Prince Buster “Have Mercy”. 7) The Maytals “I Love You So”. 8) Eric Morris “Those Teardrops”. 9) Prince Buster “Chinaman Ska”. 10) The Skatalites “Super Charge”. 11) Don Drummond “Ska Town”. 12) Prince Buster “Ska School”. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1964), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1964)] ______________________________________________________________
.1965 – It’s Burke’s Law (Jamaica Ska Explosion) (Original Press):
“It’s Burke’s Law (Jamaica Ska Explosion)” 1965 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Burke’s Law. 2) Al Capone. 3) Gun The Man Down. 4) Skahara. 5) Trip To Mars. 6) Rygin’. 7) Mighty As A Rose. 8) Indian Love Call. 9) Here Comes The Bride. 10) Almost Like Being In Love. 11) She Pon Top. 12) Feel Up. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1965), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1965)] ______________________________________________________________
.1965 – Ska-Lip-Soul (Prince Buster And His All Stars) (Original Press):
“Ska-Lip-Soul” (Prince Buster And His All Stars) 1965 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Wings Of A Dove. 2) Respect. 3) Cat Munno. 4) Mek It Tan Deh Goosie. 5) Sammy Dead Medley. 6) Dance Jamaica. 7) Mr. Wonderful. 8) How Can I Tell Them. 9) Dayo. 10) And I Love Her. 11) Matilda. 12) Rum And Cocoacola. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1965), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1965)] ______________________________________________________________
.1967 – What A Hard Man Fe Dead (The Prince Buster All Stars) – [Aka: “Live By My Ten Commandments” 1967] (Original Press):
Editions:
“What A Hard Man Fe Dead” (The Prince Buster All Stars) 1967 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Hard Man Fe Dead. 2) That’s Saying A Lot. 3) Words Of Wisdom. 4) Sit And Wonder. 5) Sad Song. 6) Thanksgiving. 7) Ten Commandments. 8) Moving Spirit. 9) The Prophet. 10) My Girl. 11) I Won’t Let You Cry. 12) Answer Your Name. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1967), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1967)]
Aka: “Live By My Ten Commandments” 1967 – (Same Album with some different title tracks) Tracks: 1) Ten Commandments. 2) Moving In My Soul. 3) The Prophet. 4) My Girl. 5) I Won’t Let You Cry. 6) Girl Answer Your Name. 7) Hard Man Fe Dead. 8) Ain’t That Saying A Lot. 9) Words Of Wisdom. 10) Is Life Worth Living (Sit And Wondtr). 11) Sad Song (Your turn). 12) Thanksgiving. [Label: Prince Buster (Lp: 1967)] ______________________________________________________________
.1967 – Prince Buster On Tour – [Reissue: “King Of Blue Beat” 2001] (Original Press): “Prince Buster On Tour” 1967 – [Blue Beat]
Reissue: “Prince Buster On Tour” 1988 – [Skank Records]
Reissue: “King Of Blue Beat” 2001 – [Wah-Wah Records Sound]
Editions:
“Prince Buster On Tour” 1967 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Intro. 2) Madness. 3) Take It Easy. 4) Oh Love. 5) Seven Times To Rise. 6) 007 (Shanty Town). 7) Come To Jamaica. 8) Cincinnati Kid. 9) Move Over. 10) Sound And Pressure. 11) On The Beach. 12) Al Capone. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1967), Skank Records (Lp: 1988)]
Reissue: “King Of Blue Beat” 2001 – (Same album) Tracks: 1) Intro. 2) Madness. 3) Take It Easy. 4) Oh Love. 5) Seven Times To Rise. 6) 007 (Shanty Town). 7) Come To Jamaica. 8) Cincinnati Kid. 9) Move Over. 10) Sound And Pressure. 11) On The Beach. 12) Al Capone. [Label: Wah-Wah Records Sound (Lp/Cd: 2001), Tam-Tam Media (Digital Release: 2007)]
!!! Album Recorded live at UK tour, on May 28, 1967 ______________________________________________________________
.1967 – Sings His Hit Song Ten Commandments [It includes 5 songs taken from the album “What A Hard Man Fe Dead” 1967 + New Tracks] (Original Press): “Sings His Hit Song Ten Commandments” 1967 – [RCA Victor]
Reissue: “Sings His Hit Song Ten Commandments” 2009 – [Reel Music/Sony]
Editions:
“Sings His Hit Song Ten Commandments” 1967 – (Original Version) [It includes 5 songs taken from the album* “What A Hard Man Fe Dead” 1967 + New Tracks] Tracks: 1) Ten Commandments*. 2) I Won’t Let You Cry*. 3) Is Life Worth Living*. 4) Ain’t That Saying A Lot*. 5) Girl, Answer To Your Name*. 6) Ten Commandments From Woman To Man. 7) Wings Of A Dove. 8) Smart Countryman. 9) Tongue Will Tell. 10) They Got To Come. [Label: RCA Victor (Lp: 1967)]
Reissue: “Sings His Hit Song Ten Commandments” 2009 – (Includes 1 bonus track**) Tracks: 1) Ten Commandments. 2) I Won’t Let You Cry. 3) Is Life Worth Living. 4) Ain’t That Saying A Lot. 5) Here Comes The Bride**. 6) Girl, Answer To Your Name. 7) Ten Commandments From Woman To Man. 8) Wings Of A Dove. 9) Smart Countryman. 10) Tongue Will Tell. 11) They Got To Come. [Label: Reel Music/Sony (Cd: 2009)] ______________________________________________________________
Reissue: “Jamaica’s Pride: Rock Steady” 1988 – [Skank Records]
Reissue: “Jamaica’s Pride: Rock Steady” 1998 – [Diamond Line/Jet Star (Lp: 1998)(Cd: 2000)]
Reissue: “Judge Dread Rock Steady/She Was A Rough Rider” 1993 – [Dojo Limited] [It includes two original album on one cd]
Editions:
“Jamaica’s Pride: Rock Steady” (Judge Dread feat. Prince Buster) 1967 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Judge Dread. 2) Shearing You. 3) Nothing Takes The Place Of You. 4) Ghost Dance. 5) Rock With A Feeling. 6) Sweet Beat. 7) The Appeal. 8) Dark Street. 9) Judge Dread Dance. 10) Show It Now. 11) Raise Your Hands. 12) A Change Is Going To Come. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1967), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1967), Skank Records (Lp: 1988), Westmoor Music (Cd: 1993), Diamond Line/Jet Star (Lp: 1998)(Cd: 2000)]
Reissue: “Judge Dread Rock Steady/She Was A Rough Rider” 1993 [It includes two original album on one cd] Tracks: 1) Judge Dread. 2) Shearing You. 3) Nothing Takes The Place Of You. 4) Ghost Dance. 5) Rock With A Feeling. 6) Sweet Beat. 7) The Appeal. 8) Dark Street. 9) Judge Dread Dance. 10) Show It Now. 11) Raise Your Hands. 12) A Change Is Going To Come. 13) Rough Rider. 14) Dreams To Remember. 15) Scorcher. 16) Hypocrites. 17) Walk With Love. 18) Taxation. 19) Bye Bye Baby. 20) Tenderness. 21) Wine Or Grind. 22) Can’t Keep On Running. 23) Closer Together. 24) Going To The River. [Label: Dojo Limited (Cd: 1993)] ______________________________________________________________
.1968 – She Was A Rough Rider (Original Press): “She Was A Rough Rider” – [(Blue Beat, Lp: 1968) – (Blue Beat/Prince Buster, Lp: 1968) – (Westmooor Music, Cd: 1990?)]
Reissue: “She Was A Rough Rider” 1988 – [Skank Records]
Reissue: “Judge Dread Rock Steady/She Was A Rough Rider” 1993 – [Dojo Limited] [It includes two original album on one Cd]
Editions:
“She Was A Rough Rider” 1968 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Rough Rider. 2) Dreams To Remember. 3) Scorcher. 4) Hypocrites. 5) Walk With Love. 6) Taxation. 7) Bye Bye Baby. 8) Tenderness. 9) Wine Or Grind. 10) Can’t Keep On Running. 11) Closer Together. 12) Going To The River. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1968), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1968), Fab (Lp: 1969), Skank Records (Lp: 1988), Westmooor Music (Cd: 1993)]
Reissue: “Judge Dread Rock Steady/She Was A Rough Rider” 1993 [It includes two original album on one cd] Tracks: 1) Judge Dread. 2) Shearing You. 3) Nothing Takes The Place Of You. 4) Ghost Dance. 5) Rock With A Feeling. 6) Sweet Beat. 7) The Appeal. 8) Dark Street. 9) Judge Dread Dance. 10) Show It Now. 11) Raise Your Hands. 12) A Change Is Going To Come. 13) Rough Rider. 14) Dreams To Remember. 15) Scorcher. 16) Hypocrites. 17) Walk With Love. 18) Taxation. 19) Bye Bye Baby. 20) Tenderness. 21) Wine Or Grind. 22) Can’t Keep On Running. 23) Closer Together. 24) Going To The River. [Label: Dojo Limited (Cd: 1993)] ______________________________________________________________
.1968 – Wreck A Pum Pum (Prince Buster & The All Stars) (Original Press): “Wreck A Pum Pum” – [(Blue Beat, Lp: 1968), (Blue Beat/Prince Buster, Lp: 1968) & (FAB, Lp: 1969)]
Reissue: “Wreck A Pum Pum” 2000 – [Prince Buster/Jet Star]
“Wreck A Pum Pum” (Prince Buster & The All Stars) 1968 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Wreck A Pum Pum. 2) Wreck A Buddy [Feat. The Sexy Girls]. 3) Rough Rider. 4) Pum Pum A Go Will You. 5) Whine And Grine. 6) Ten Commandments. 7) Beg You Little More. 8) Pussy Cat Bite Me. 9) Pharaoh House Crash. 10) The Abeng. 11) Train To Girls’ Town. 12) Stir The Pot. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1968), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1968), FAB (Lp: 1969), Prince Buster/Jet Star (Cd: 2000)] ______________________________________________________________
.1969 – The Outlaw (Original Press):
“The Outlaw” 1969 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Gun The Man Down. 2) The Baddest. 3) Cincinnati Kid. 4) The Sermon Of A Preacher Man. 5) Al Capone. 6) Any More. 7) Happy Reggae. 8) Hold Them. 9) Outlaw. 10) Burke’s Law. 11) Fever. 12) Phoenix City. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1969), Blue Beat/Prince Buster (Lp: 1969)] ______________________________________________________________
.1972 – The Message Dubwise (Featuring Prince Buster All Star) (Original Press):
“The Message Dubwise (Featuring Prince Buster All Star)” 1972 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Swing Low. 2) Sata A Masa Gana. 3) Java Plus. 4) The Message. 5) Mississippi. 6) Saladin. 7) Why Am I Treated So Bad. 8) Jet Black. 9) Black Harlem. 10) Big Youth. [Label: Prince Buster (Lp: 1972), FAB (Lp: 1972)] ______________________________________________________________
.1972 – Big Five (Original Press): “Big Five” – [(Prince Buster/Melodisc, 1972), (Westmoor Music, 1993)]
Unofficial Album:”Big Five” – [Unknown label]
Reissue:”Big Five” 1988 – [Skank Records]
Editions:
“Big Five” 1972 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Big Five. 2) Kinky Griner. 3) Leave Your Man. 4) Give Her. 5) Bald Head Pum Pum. 6) At The Cross. 7) Fishey Fishey. 8) The Virgin. 9) Black Pum Pum. 10) Every Man Pum Pum. 11) Tonight. 12) Wash The Pum Pum. [Label: Prince Buster/Melodisc (Lp: 1972), Skank Records (Lp: 1988), Westmoor Music (Lp/Cd: 1993)]
Reissue: “Big Five Party Album” 197? [Same Album with different title tracks. Album released without cover art] Tracks: 1) Big Five. 2) Kinky Griner. 3) Tonight. 4) Give Her. 5) Bald Head Pum Pum. 6) At The Cross. 7) Holly Fishey. 8) It Big. 9) Fat Girl. 10) It Too Long. 11) Mrs. Tail. 12) Wet Dream. [Label: Prince Buster/Melodisc (Lp: 197?)] ______________________________________________________________
.1972 – Sister Big Stuff (Original Press):
“Sister Big Stuff ” 1972 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) South Of The Border. 2) Still. 3) Protection. 4) Why Not Tonight. 5) Wish Your Picture. 6) Sata A Masa Gana. 7) Sister Big Stuff. 8) Stand Accused. 9) Bridge Over Troubled Waters. 10) Stick By Me. 11) Young Gifted And Black. 12) Cool Operator. Bonus Tracks*: 13) Police Trim Rasta. 14) My Happiness. 15) My Heart Is Gone. [Label: Melodisc (Lp: 1972), Sunspot (Lp: 2011)(Cd*: 2011)(Digital Release*: 2011)] ______________________________________________________________
.1972 – Dance Cleopatra Dance [It includes some previously unreleased + Compilation] (Original Press):
“Dance Cleopatra Dance” 1972 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Dance Cleopatra. 2) Madness. 3) Take It Easy. 4) Oh Love. 5) Times To Risc. 6) 007. 7) Come To Jamaica. 8) Cincinatti Kid. 9) More Over. 10) Sounds And Pressure. 11) On The Beach. 12) Al Capone. 12) Waiting For My Rude Girl. [Label: Blue Elephant (Lp: 1972)] ______________________________________________________________
.1987 – Prince Buster Sing Showcase (Original Press):
“Sing Showcase” 1987 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Rain From The Sky. 2) Version. 3) Breaking Up. 4) Bugging. 5) Fatty Fatty. 6) Version. 7) Blowing In The Wind. 8) Version. 9) Hypocrites. 10) Version. [Label Tesfa Records (Lp: 1987)] ______________________________________________________________
.2003 – Prince Of Peace: Live In Japan (Prince Buster with Determinations) (Original Press):
“Prince Of Peace: Live In Japan” (Prince Buster with Determinations) 2003 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Gaz Mayall “Introduction”. 2) Determinations “Mt. Gem”. 3) Determinations “Mango Rock (Shock Steady)”. 4) Determinations “Crazy”. 5) Prince Buster & Determinations “Introduction”. 6) Prince Buster & Determinations “Al Capone”. 7) Prince Buster & Determinations “Orange Street”. 8) Prince Buster & Determinations “They Got To Come”. 9) Prince Buster & Determinations “Burke’s Law”. 10) Prince Buster & Determinations “Dance Cleopatra”. 11) Prince Buster & Determinations “Hard Man Fe Dead”. 12) Prince Buster & Determinations “Big Five”. 13) Prince Buster & Determinations “Blackhead Chinaman”. 14) Prince Buster & Determinations “30 Pieces Of Silver”. 15) Prince Buster & Determinations “One Step Beyond”. 16) Prince Buster & Determinations “Prince Of Peace”. [Label: Island/Universal/Japan (Cd: 2003)]
!!! Recorded live at Bayside Jenny, Osaka and at Liquid Room, Tokyo in 2003.
“Behind Bars” [Judge Dread (Aka: Prince Buster)] 1980 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Prince Buster “Judge Dread”. 2) Prince Buster & Allstars “City Riot”. 3) Jamaicas Greatest “It’s Burkes Law”. 4) Prince Buster “Barrister Pardon”. [Label: Blue Beat (Lp: 1980)] ______________________________________________________________
.2013 – Blue Beat Original EP (JJ Sparks & Prince Buster) (Original Press):
“Blue Beat Original EP” (JJ Sparks & Prince Buster) 2013 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) You Did’nt Love Me. 2) Tra La La. 3) Mama Kiss Him Goodnight. 4) Feeling Blue. 5) 3 Nights in Lovers Town. 6) I Love You so Much [Label: An Altara Production (Cd: 2013)(Digital Release: 2013]
!!! Songs by JJ Sparks & Prince Buster released early 60’s
.1972 – Chi Chi Run (Big Youth, Prince Buster All Stars + Friends) (Original Press): “Chi Chi Run” (Big Youth, Prince Buster All Stars + Friends) 1972 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) John Holt & Big Youth – “Chi Chi Run”. 2) Prince Buster All Stars – “Haft”. 3) Prince Buster & Big Youth – “Revolution Rock”. 4) Prince Buster & Big Youth – “Revolution Come”. 5) John Holt & Big Youth – “Leave Your Skeng”. 6) Prince Buster All Stars – “Miami Beach”. 7) John Holt & Big Youth – “Leggo Beast”. 8) Little Youth – “Youth Rock”. 9) Dennis Brown – “One Day Soon”. 10) Dennis Brown – “If I Had The World”. 11) Prince Buster All Stars – “Boop”. 12) Alton Ellis – “Since I Fell For You”. [Labels: Fab (Lp: 1972), Melodisc/Prince Buster (Lp: 1973)] ______________________________________________________________
“Jamaica’s Greatest” (Prince Buster & Friends) 1972 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Dennis Brown “One Day Soon”. 2) The Heptones “One Day Will Come”. 3) John Holt “If I Had The World”. 4) John Holt “News”. 5) Alton Ellis “Since I Feel For You”. 6) Prince Buster “Still”. 7) John Holt “Mona Lisa”. 8) The Heptones “God Bless The Children”. 9) Dennis Brown “If I Ruled The World”. 10) Alton Ellis “Good Loving”. 11) Prince Buster & Ethiopians “My Happiness”. 12) Prince Buster “Protection”. [Label: Prince Buster (Lp: 1972)]
Owen Gray “Prince Buster Memory Lane” 1986 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Enjoy Yourself. 2) Run Man Run. 3) They Got To Go. 4) Bad Minded People. 5) Madness. 6) Time Longer Dan Rope. 7) Beware. 8) Black Head Chine. 9) Wash Wash. [Label: Phill Pratt (Lp: 1986)] ______________________________________________________________
.2012 – “Prince Buster Shakedown” by The Dualers (Original Press):
The Dualers “Prince Buster Shakedown” 2012 – (Original Version) Tracks: 1) Chinaman Ska. 2) King Of Kings. 3) Nothing Takes The Place Of You. 4) Take It Easy. 5) Firestick. 6) Orange Street. 7) Sister Big Stuff. 8) Enjoy Yourself. [Label: Phoenix City Records (Cd: 2012), Cherry Red Records (Cd: 2012)(Diogital Release: 2012)]
Ben Sherman sold to Marquee Brands Fashion brand, a staple for mods and worn by the Who, the Jam and the Specials, sold to US company backed by US private equity firm
Suggs (Graham McPherson) of Madness wears a Ben Sherman shirt in this early 1980s photograph also featuring bandmate Mike Barson (left).
Ben Sherman, the struggling British clothing brand sported by successive generations of rock stars from the Who and the Jam to Oasis, is hoping to make a comeback after being snapped up by a private equity-backed firm.
Marquee Brands, controlled by the US investment group Neuberger Berman, is buying the loss-making business for £41m from its current owner, Oxford Industries, also based in the US.
Analysis Ben Sherman now a safe choice but history could help its relaunch Clothing brand’s mod pedigree, with the right spin, could appeal to a new generation hungry for the latest retro look
It is the latest change in ownership for Ben Sherman, a company whose shirts were a staple of the golden age of UK youth cults, worn by mods in the 60s and later adopted by that movement’s various offshoots including skinheads, suedeheads and rude boys.
So, as I spend way to long on the internet, checking out bands, thinking about what to programme for my next event, I go through lots of bands. Some I avoid like the plague, some have just overplayed the curcuit and burned out. But some have a bit of mystery over them. Sometimes you hear the rumours and the slagging off, before you actually get to see them. Being the Twat I am, the more the bitching, the more I like to take a look.
When Citizen Keyne got in touch with me, my first thought was OI underdogs, is up my street, so I’ll give them a whirl. And what a pleasant surprise I found on putting on the first album, Ungreat Britain. I was expecting the same regurgitated Oi!, with loads of repetitive OI Guitar licks and a singer being ‘Very Hard’.
What I actually heard is a flashback to 1977 Punk Rock, but with a modern twist. Chavs , Boot sale Tales, is straight into 21st Century United Kingdom of Methodone
I have to admit, too many years working in music, too many years of being a skinhead, has numbed my brain to so much. A song has to grab you by the bollocks and get those butterflies tickling your chest, that buzz in your neck that makes you want to pogo round the front room.
Most modern Oi bands will perhaps manage one strong track,or follow the same old done subject matter, of boots braces, tattoo’s and working class delusions. Now onto Floyds arse, this album is such an eclectic mix. With a definite punk rock sound, taking me right back to Micklefield estate in the summer of 78. But don’t write this band off as yet another copycat. Citizen Keyne have really brought in a modern sound, with lyrics dealing with todays issues. The love of lager down our necks. With reminders of early Sparrer, Sham, Buzzcocks, with a touch of Macc Lads thrown in for good measure. This really is a stand alone band, and a great first listen. Cant wait to unpack the next selection.
Featuring Live bands Citizen Keyne, Skapones, Adverse society, Tear Up. Toxic. Anti Social
Full DJ line up for a second room, playing SKA, And all Skinhead related music
The Great Skinhead Northern Gathering 9th + 10th October In Sunderland. Our second year of our Autumn Gathering, as a celebration of the skinhead culture A full day of Dj’s in one room, and Live bands in another. A full line up to follow, watch this space. Ony £15 for the whole event. Cheap beer and rooms nearby. Friday will be wristbanded 7pm -3am bands and DJ’s. Saturday 10th noon -5pm free entry meet and greet. After 5pm it will be wristband only, Live bands and DJ’s The weekend wristband £15 is valid for both nights
This is a family friendly event. Children are welcome until 9_9:30pm, but must be off the premises by then, by law so all are welcome, the venue is The Corner Flag. Central to the city center in a good location for local transport connections, trains, metro etc it’s the corner flag located at high street west, with plenty of fast food outlets and restaurants nearby, there will be something for everyone a good mix of Oi,ska,two tone a little bit of everything, a good size venue capable of holding this event, any bands wishing to play, Oi,Ska,Two Tone also any dj’s wishing to spin a few disks, should contact subcultz@gmail.com. www.subcultz.com If you missed last years then you have to come to this one, good music,good beer,with very good people
Proud Chelsea’sSex, Drugstores and Rock & Roll: a History of the King’s Road is a new exhibition of photographs of King’s Road, Chelsea from the early days of the swinging 60s, right up to the end of the 80s. This picture shows a group of punks in the 1970s, when the road became a centre of punk culture.
Recording artist and fashion designer Malcolm McLaren came to fame as manager of the Sex Pistols. Later, he recorded several albums of his own material.
Synopsis
Born in 1946 in London, England, Malcolm McLaren was one of the creative forces behind the sound and attitude of the Sex Pistols. With a passion for style and social friction, the daring McLaren went on to manage several other bands following the Pistols’ demise in 1978, as well as record several albums of his own material. He died in Switzerland from complications related to cancer on April 8, 2010.
Early Life
Artist, musician, band manager. One of the creative forces behind English punk rock and the Sex Pistols in particular, Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was born January 22, 1946, in London, England. The son of a Scottish engineer, he was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, whom he later credited with fostering his well-regarded subversive spirit.
As such, school was not a perfect fit for the creative McLaren. He attended more than half a dozen different art schools, including Harrow Art School, where he befriended Jamie Reid, who would later serve as the brains behind the Sex Pistols’ provocative graphics. His struggles in school led one institution to expel him and another, Croydon College of Art, to try to have him committed to a mental institution.
In 1971 McLaren dropped out of school for good and opened a boutique shop in Chelsea. Initially called Let It Rock and later renamed Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, the store specialized in 1950s “Teddy boy” fashions.
Life in Music
McLaren’s world changed when the New York Dolls, a glam-rock band that performed in high heels, visited his shop one day. McLaren and the musicians quickly hit it off and eventually he followed the band back to the United States, where he worked as its manager. McLaren brought an unusual approach to his job, pushing the band to shock its American audiences as much as possible. In one instance he had the Dolls perform in Maoist Red Guard uniforms and play in front of a hammer-and-sickle flag.
But the Dolls’ run was short-lived, and after the group broke up, McLaren returned to London intent on trying to ramp up what he’d tried to do in the States.
He found his new cause in a group of musicians headed up by lead singer John Lydon, later renamed Johnny Rotten due to the condition of his teeth. In every shape and form, the Sex Pistols was the product of McLaren’s imagination. He put the band together and orchestrated the outrage that made them the toast of the English punk rock scene. Rotten called McLaren “the most evil person on earth.”
With singles like “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen,” the Pistols climbed the charts in Britain. The group’s short run consisted of just one album, the 1977 release Never Mind the Bollocks: Here’s the Sex Pistols. In 1978 the group embarked on its first and only American tour. It quickly concluded when Rotten walked off the stage at a performance in San Francisco, leaving the band behind and marking the end of the Pistols as a group.
Even with the band’s demise, McLaren continued to stay heavily involved in the music scene. He went on to manage several other acts, and in 1983 issued an album of his own, Duck Rock, which featured a combination of world music and hip-hop. Several other albums followed, including Fans(1984), Waltz Darling (1989), and Paris (1994).
URGENT NEWSFLASH!!!! IT LOOKS LIKE THE ‘WORKERS’ OF OUR RETARDED RAILWAYS ARE THINKING OF STRIKING ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE GREAT SKINHEAD REUNION, I UNDERSTAND THEY WANT TO JOIN US FOR A PISSUP, BUT THIS DOESN’T HELP OUR SKINHEADS GETTING TO BRIGHTON. SO MY BEST ADVICE IS TO USE NATIONAL EXPRESS BUSES, THESE RUN FROM ALL LONDON AIRPORTS AND LONDON VICTORIA, GET OFF AT POOL VALLEY, BRIGHTON, WHICH IS ABOUT 2 MINUTES FROM THE VENUE ON BRIGHTON SEAFRONT BOOK HERE http://www.nationalexpress.com/home.aspx
KEEP AN EYE ON THE NEWS REPORTS, HOPEFULLY, THE LAZY TWATS WILL AT LEAST SAVE THEIR HOLIDAYS UNTIL AFTER THE REUNION http://www.nationalrail.co.uk
In late 1975 a massive shake up within the music industry was emerging and with this came a teenage driven musical revolution, soon to be known as PUNK ROCK.
If the ‘Kings Road London’ was the birthplace of punk then its younger brother the ‘London Road, High Wycombe’ was equally as important. The ‘Nags Head’ High Wycombe as a venue was every bit as important as the legendary ‘100 Club’ in Denmark Street, both were linked by one person and that was rock promoter Ron Watts. At the height of this revolution as Ron booked the likes of the ‘Sex Pistols’, ‘The Damned’, ‘The Clash’ and the ‘The Stranglers’ at both venues, teenagers in Buckinghamshire were being introduced to a major shift in youth culture many months before Punk erupted nationwide.
Mimicking its older London brother in every way in High Wycombe it seemed everybody under the age of 25 was becoming a punk rocker. Hippies had almost been eradicated and with turf wars between punks and teddy boys subsiding further combined with a revival of mod’s, rockers and skinheads the town’s local population was slowly having to accept this new ‘melting pot of anti- establishment’ youth culture.
Shortly after the now infamous Punk Festival of 1976 and the riotous Jubilee boat fiasco Ron Watts continued to book well known punk bands at Wycombe’s Town hall, it was always his policy to give local talent a chance to shine through. There was a vibrant local music scene emerging but with so much focus on London bands I believe there was one band that unfortunately went unnoticed.
………..this is the story of THE XTR@VERTS…………
As early as 1976, a good six months before ‘The Sex Pistols’ played the Nags Head, a group of mid-teens including Kris Jozajtis/guitar, Mark White/drums, Carlton Mounsher/bass, formed their own band ‘Deathwish’. Inspired by 60’s UK bands such as The Who, Small Faces and The Rolling Stones and later stateside offerings such as Iggy Pop and the Stooges, The Velvet Underground and The New York Dolls.
‘Deathwish’ were soon playing their own brand of Punk Rock well before the term ‘Punk’ was even coined.
Their first gig caused a stir when a confused audience who had been expecting the usual hippie drivel turned violent and threw lit fireworks at them. The band had to be escorted from the venue by the police.
At Deathwish’s second gig an A&R rep from CBS came to check out the band following Ron Watts recommendation. Every bit as confused as the audience from the first gig, unfortunately he lacked the vision to sign them, but at least he didn’t throw anything at them, lit or otherwise !!! As fate would have it during the show an enigmatic youth with brightly coloured hair joined in singing with the band on stage, soon becoming lead vocalist, a certain Nigel Martin.
Nigel, influenced by ‘Roxy Music’ and ‘Bowie’ was always outrageously dressed, so Punk was a natural transition for him. Unfortunately High Wycombe didn’t have alot to offer fashion wise in the mid 70’s, except flares and platforms. There was a great Teddy boy shop called ‘Goddards’ which in fairness sold some great gear but that wasn’t enough, so he used to hang out at ‘SEX’, Malcolm McClaren’s shop at the top of the Kings Road with his punk mate ‘Marmite’, probably the first black punk with peroxide hair. (One time Marmite wore a transparent rubber jacket with goldfish swimming inside it..!!)
Nigel was photographed in Malcolm’s shop by ‘Honey’ magazine, standing out because he would get free crazy colour hairstyles at ‘Vidal Sassoon’s’ courtesy of Vivienne Westwood. Malcolm took the fee for the photoshoot and deducted half of the payment, explaining to Nigel that would cover his loss on the t-shirts which Nigel had previously been seen stealing !! At the same time ‘Vivienne Westwood’ had a market stall nearby and Nigel used to go there and get his clothes made to order.
Meanwhile with ‘Deathwish’ floundering, Nigel together with Mark Reilly/guitar and Tim Brick/drums had formed a band called ‘The Xtraverts’ with Kris Jozajtis filling in on bass, a job he swiftly passed on to Carlton Mounsher. With the line up complete and with a set of original songs plus a few covers they played the University circuit and London venues such as ‘The Roxy’, ‘The Vortex,’ ‘Hope and Anchor’ ‘Fulham Greyhound’ and ‘Global Village’, supporting ‘Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ , ‘Gary Glitter and The Glitter Band’ and ‘Bernie Torme’. Further they were voted best new band in the Aylesbury ‘Friars’ poll.
Whilst at these gigs they rubbed shoulders with the up and coming soon to be punk icons, drinking with ‘Joe Strummer’, ‘Paul Weller’, wet toilet roll fights with ‘Billy Idol’, arguing with ‘Sid Vicious’ and pinching white label copies of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ from ‘Johnny Rotten’. Whilst at an Arsenal football game in early 1976 Nigel dressed up with brightly coloured spiky hair recalls seeing John Lydon later to become Johnny Rotten sporting long hippy hair and a black trenchcoat, one wonders who influenced who !!! These were remarkable times. Carlton also recalls being persuaded by Rat Scabies and Brian James of ‘The Damned’ to help them put just pressed copies of New Rose into their covers at Stiff Records. Although this meant he had one of the first copies of the UK’s first punk records , he still had to pay for it !!!
The band played around with new names and became ‘Nigel Martins Visage’ or ‘Mirage’, but with ‘Steve Strange’ having the same name finally agreed and settled on ‘THE XTR@VERTS’, a name which reflected their image and style. Soon they released their first vinyl single on Spike Records, ‘BLANK GENERATION’, b/w ‘A-LAD-INSANE’, there was a limited pressing of 500 and incidently these singles are now selling for over £175 on e-bay.
The band individually having strong creative drive, unfortunately disbanded the following year and moved in different directions with Carlton and Mark Reilly forming the ‘ Cathedrals’, later Reilly left to join ‘Blue rondo ala Turk’ and then formed and continues to have success with ‘Matt Bianco’. Carlton formed ‘The Ventilators’ later ‘The Vents’, and then ‘The Swamps’. Kris went on to join ‘The Folk Devils,’ whilst Tim did session work with ‘Japan’ and then moved into production.
Before leaving High Wycombe, Mark Reilly introduced Nigel to two young musicians ‘Mark Chapman’ and ‘Steve Westwood’, base and guitar players respectively, to continue with ‘The Xtr@verts’. Recruiting drummer ‘Andy Crawford’ they knuckled down and continued rehearsing and writing new material.
With a new line up, fresh and stronger than ever they hit the circuit running. Ron Watts gave the band many supports at the Town Hall where many well known acts were playing. First gig with the Jones Boys (aka Howard Jones) then support slots with ‘The Slits’ and ‘Creation Rebel’ and then headline gigs at the ‘White Swan’ Southall, the ‘Rainbow’ Finsbury Park and then ’Oranges and Lemons’ Oxford. Further concerts followed and a string of support gigs with the Damned’, ‘999’, ’Angelic Upstarts’, ‘The U.K. Subs, ‘The Vibrators’’ and ‘The Lurkers’.
The band went straight into the studio and during 1979 released two singles, the first was ‘POLICE STATE/DEMOLITION’ a double a) side, costs were shared with another local band ‘Plastic People’ with their song ‘Demolition’- released on Rising Sun records. The second release later in the year with the introduction of a new guitarist was ‘SPEED / 1984’.
The band with its new line up built up a very large following with in excess of 1000 people travelling to gigs far and wide, coaches filled with fans from all over the south of England would come and be a part of the Xtr@verts crew, especially when headlining their own gigs and with the support of ‘Rat Scabies’ drummer of the ‘Damned’ with a band he was managing ‘The Satellites’ played with the Xtr@verts on numerous occasions. Then there was the infamous ‘Oranges and Lemons’ gig in Oxford, The Clarenden, Fulham Greyhound, Hope’n’Anchor, plus many more memorable gigs in and around the home counties.
The Xtr@verts had a massive Punk and Skinhead following from as far as Birmingham to London and they would travel and support the band. The venues were packed with large chanting boisterous crowds and were more reminiscent of a Millwall -West Ham match than a concert.
At one gig in particular, 1980 at the Town Hall , High Wycombe, Rat Scabies even stood in and drummed for the band, and recently some 35 years later a recording of this electric gig has been discovered.
During late 1979, even after plays of both singles on ‘John Peel’s’ radio show, topping the N.M.E and SOUNDS charts, knocking ‘pretty vacant’ of the top of the independent charts also in the top 3 of the ‘Oi’ charts and a brief appearance on ‘20th Century Box’ a ‘Janet Street Porter’ production with an interview by ‘Danny Baker’ on the subject of independent record labels and unsigned bands releasing and distributing their own records. Unfortunately the writing was on the wall.
Coupled with musical differences, changing line up and dissallusion with the punk ethos and the arrival of a new breed of Punk more commonly known as ‘Oi’ which had started causing violent confrontations and injecting absolute ch@os between fans at latter gigs, on the 31st January
…………THE XTR@VERTS short life from 1976 to1980 was over……….
Reunions: album release and new line ups:
After the break up members went in different directions, Mark Chapman the totally flambouyant and outrageous base player became a top London DJ playing re mixes of 70’s disco classics in London Nightclubs becoming a promoter and entrepreneur, founder of ‘Car Wash’ and rubbing shoulders with new found friends ‘ Sigue Sigue Sputnik’.
Nigel played with a few local bands but moved into promoting rather than performing and opened the ‘Kat Klub’ under the flyover in the centre of town packing out the venue with bands like the U.K Subs, Crass, King Kurt, 999, the ‘Meteors’, ‘Angelic Upstarts’ and the ‘Vibrators’, keeping music live after the demise of the Town hall due to skinheads causing so much trouble at an ‘Adam Ant’ gig the venue was closed by the council.
During the next 10 years there was a handful of re union gigs, re hashing of old songs albeit very well received locally, during the mid eighties with the arrival of new guitarist Alistair Murray and drummer Steve McCormack ( who had been close friends with the band from day one) the Xtr@verts performed 3or 4 gigs with new image and style with a complete new set of songs.
After the release of a compilation Xtr@verts album, with songs and versions unheard of in the day, entitled ‘So Much Hate’ was released on ‘Detour’ records in the mid 90’s which has sold incredibly well worldwide, the Xtr@verts reformed once again and a launch gig was organised with the UK Subs….this was the last time the band were to play. A chapter in all the lives of the band members was finally put to sleep……….
Until now… 2014,
After the sad death of base player Mark Chapman and a chance meeting with long time friend and organiser of Brighton’s Skinhead Reunion Symond Lawes and with such a worldwide interest in past punk history and youth culture, the XTR@VERTS have reinvented themselves yet again and with a brand new and exciting line up are now in the process of recording a new album and rehearsing for a launch gig at the ‘100 Club’ (to be announced shortly).
The band’s new line up includes ;
NIGEL MARTIN Original ‘Xtr@verts’ and ‘Deathwish’ lead vocalist and front man.
CARLTON MOUNSHER Original Deathwish and Xtr@verts bassist now lead guitarist.
STEVE McCORMACK Later band member, having previously played with ‘Xtr@verts’ on many occasions, sang and recorded with his own band in the late 80’s early 90’s with his rocker outfit the ‘T-Birds’. Even supported ‘Screaming Lord Sutch !!’ Also appeared on Granada TV’s ‘Stars in their Eyes’ as ‘Billy Idol’ 1993/94 and has played drums with rockabilly bands home and abroad and is an accomplished Jazz singer.
NICK ‘BO’ CHAPMAN Also known as Joe Hope and brother of former base player Mark Chapman. Nick has played guitar for over 30 years, playing with local Folk Rock and Electronic bands throughout the 80’s to the present. ‘Were not the same were individuals’.
IAIN WOOSTER Iain has actively been playing in bands for the past 30 years, touring extensively through the 90’s UK and America, playing on albums for various artiste’s and an appearance with his band on the B.B.C’s ‘Eastenders’ during the 1990’s
The XTR@VERTS were a group that slipped through the media net and in their heyday were every bit as good as their contempories and although not up there with the flagship bands of the time they are credited and historically placed in the period that was punk rock. They appear in the top 100 punk bands of all time and have rubbed shoulders with many of the punk greats, perhaps now is the time to let people see what they missed or what might have been.
The Xtr@verts were one of Wycombe’s finest. So now let’s see what big brother’s little brother has to offer…….?????
‘Who Sent the Boys’. The story of the Xtraverts.
Biography written and researched by Steve McCormack. April 2014
Late additions to the Bill for The Great skinhead Reunion 2015 The Bermondsey Joy Riders
Claiming all the credentials of a bonafide ‘77 super group, The Bermondsey Joyriders is a band pooling the hard-won experience and history of three veteran punks. Founding membersGary Lammin (vocals / guitar) and Martin Stacey (bass) cut their teeth in the Joe Strummer-produced Little Roosters and Generation X precursors Chelsea respectively, whilst recent recruit Chris Musto (drums) is a sticksman of some credentials – having previously played with Johnny Thunders, Joe Strummer and Nico, to name but a few!
More than the sum of their impressive punk rock heritage however, The Bermondsey Joyriders have won praise for splicing those sounds from suburbs with raw blues and Lammin’s startling slide guitar – emerging with a sonic signature that is undeniably all their own. Given just 12 hours (!) in the studio to lay down their self-titled 2008 debut, they managed to produce a record which Classic Rock magazine’s Carol Clerk deemed to have “pulled off a really impudent mix of influences”, and which Guitarist magazine’s Charles Shaar Murray felt had achieved a “unique spin on punk-blues”.
Featuring Gary Lammin, writer of Runnin Riot and Chip on your shoulder, original member of Cock Sparrer. Check their website for full info on the band
At first I wanted to go to Rebellion Festival in Blackpool and the Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton this year. But then my car broke and it had to be repaired. That was too expensive to realize these two trips to good old England.
Just a few days later good friends of mine from South Tyrol asked me to join their trip to London at the first days of February. it should be their first trip to England, so they would be very happy if I would go with them. This trip would be cheaper than going to the two festivals in Blackpool and Brighton, so I said “yes”. It was the first time I could celebrate my birthday in London.
It was Friday, Jan 30th, 6 o’clock in the morning. My brother drove me to the train station of the city of Bad Hersfeld. I left this town by train to arrive at the snow-covered city of Sterzing/South Tyrol. At that weekend I enjoyed the delicious south tyrolean cuisine and maybe a few too many glasses of red wine and beer.
On Monday, Feb 2nd it was Florian, Sandra, Stefan and me (Thilo) going to the airport of Bergamo/Italy at 5 o’clock in the morning. At about midday we arrived at the airport London Stansted.
First we took a taxi to our hotel in London Leyton. The taxi driver was very friendlich and told us to be careful in street-traffic because of the traffic on the left side of the street. When we arrived at our hotel we checked in, ate a small snack and went out to explore the capital of Great Britain. We didn’t want to waste any time, so we started quickly to work off our list of destinations which was full of football, subculture and the typical tourism stuff.
Using the Oyster Card we go by tube to our first destination, the Boleyn Ground in the East End. It was a pity that we can’t have a look inside the stadium but at the shop I bought a new scarf of West Ham United FC.
In the evening we went to Camden Town to have Fish & Chips at The Oxford Arms and have a few pints of beer at The Elephant’s Head.
The next day we explored a lot of tourism stuff. First we used the tube to get to Tower Hill Station. From that station we did a huge walk through London. We went to the Tower Of London and the Tower Bridge. After that we walked along River Thames to the London Eye. We had a wonderful view over the city and we took lots of pictures, so we disclosed our identity as tourists, haha.
On Westminster Bridge near Big Ben we met a bagpiper in traditional Scottish clothing. I hoped he would play the song “Hingland Cathedral” because my father loves this song too and plays it very often when he plays the bagpipe. We stopped for a while to listen to the bagpiper and I was very surprised as one of his next songs was “Highland Cathedral”. London, I thank you for that little present.
Stefan insisted to go to Hard Rock Café so we decided to have a late lunch there. We had a burger and chips and of course a pint of beer. After we were shocked by the bill we had to pay and disappointed by the music they played in the Hard Rock Café (It was everything but Hard Rock!!!) we went to Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.
The darkness had set in, so we wanted to view the lights of Piccadilly Circus and Carnaby Street. The Day ended again in Camden Town. But this time we had a few pints in a pub called “The World’s End”.
It was Wednesday, Feb 4th. It was my 26th birthday. The same procedure as every day of this journey we met at the hotel lobby in the morning to have a breakfast in the hotel. I had to find out that I wasn’t the only person who bought something at the shop at Boleyn Ground two days before. Sandra gave a little Button to me on which you can find the coat of arms of West Ham United FC and the slogan “It’s my Birthday”. Sandra and the two other boys laughed and told me that I had to wear that button the whole day.
After the breakfast in the hotel we wanted to follow the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace, but all we found was a sign-post “No Guard Changing Ceremony Today”. So we had enough time to visit Madame Tussauds’ before lunch. We took some distracted pictures with some wax celebrities and left the cabinet. Our next destination was the train station King’s Cross/St. Pancras. Sandra wanted to have a look at Platform 9 ¾ from the books and movies of Harry Potter.
At the early afternoon we arrived in Camden Town and we decided to spend the rest of the day there. Florian and I wanted to go shopping at Camden Lock Market. That was the day of the trip we spent the most money. We read in the internet about a shop called Oi! Oi! The Shop. The old skin inside the shop was very pleasant character and ready to help. He really knew where we can find the things we want to have. I saw a ring of Trojan records but I hesitated and didn’t buy it. Finally I bought a tee shirt of The Business, a CD of The 4-Skins and a few patches and pins. The other three spent a lot of money in the Lock Market too.
We all enjoyed the time in the pub called “The World’s End” one day before, so we decided to celebrate my birthday in that pub an have some beers before we went back to our hotel in London Leyton.
Our last full day in London started later than the days before because the day before we came back to our hotel very lately. We used the tube to come back to Camden Town. Everyone of us felt in love with this part of London and everyone had seen a thing that wasn’t been bought. For example I wanted to come back to Oi! Oi! The Shop to buy the Trojan ring. But first we searched for a possibility to have a Full English Breakfast. It was a tasty breakfast but after that all of us agreed that nobody needed a lunch after that. We went back to the old skin of Oi! Oi! The Shop. I wanted to buy the Trojan ring and while I was trying to find one that fits me, the others gave me the money for the ring and told me that the ring is a present for me. The owner of the shop asked them, why they were paying the ring for me. Sandra answered that yesterday was my birthday and the ring should be my birthday present. When he heard that, he went for a Trojan Skins Pin and gave it to me. He said it’s a birthday present too. I thanked him a few times and we left the shop.
In the meantime it was evening and we spent that evening in the hotel and went to bed because at the next morning we had to get up very early.
Friday, Feb 6th. The day we flew home to the continent. Early in the morning we got up to take a taxi back to the airport London Stansted. At midday we landed at the airport of Bergamo/Italy and drove back to Sterzing/South Tyrol. One day later I went back to my hessian home.
I had great days in the english capital. Everyone of us was sure to return to that impressive city.
That trip to London was a wonderful, but calm alternative to the festivals during the summer but I have to admit that it would have been awesome to visit the Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton or the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool.
London, I spent a good time in you. THANK YOU.
Thilo (written in March 2015)
Ein Internationaler Trip nach London
02.02.2015 – 06.02.2015
Eigentlich wollte ich in diesem Jahr auf das Rebellion Festival nach Blackpool und auf die Great Skinhead Reunion nach Brighton. Da aber mein Auto repariert werden musste und die Reparatur leider sehr teuer war, musste ich mich von dem Gedanken dieses Jahr nach Blackpool und Brighton zu fahren wohl verabschieden.
Nur ein paar Tage später erreichte mich von Freunden aus Südtirol die Nachricht, dass sie Ende Januar bis Anfang Februar nach London wollten. Da es ihre erste Reise nach London werden sollte, fragten sie mich, ob ich nicht mitkommen wollte. Da dieser Kurzurlaub in London wesentlich günstiger sein würde, als ein Besuch am Rebellion Festival in Blackpool und auf der Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton, freute ich mich natürlich sehr über dieses Angebot und sagte sofort zu. Zumal ich damit auch das erste Mal meinen Geburtstag in London feiern konnte.
Es war Freitag, der 30. Januar. Mein Bruder fuhr mich morgens um halb 6 nach Bad Hersfeld an den Bahnhof. Von Dort aus ging es erstmal mit dem Zug ins verschneite Sterzing in Südtirol. Das Wochenende verbrachte ich dann bei Freunden in den Bergen und genoss die Südtiroler Küche und vielleicht auch das ein oder andere Glas Rotwein und Bier zuviel.
Am Montag, den 2. Februar starteten wir, Florian, Sandra, Stefan und ich (Thilo) um 05:00 Uhr morgens von Sterzing aus nach Bergamo an den Flughafen. Mittags landeten wir am Flughafen London Stansted. Es waren für die meine drei Mitstreiter die ersten Schritte auf englischem Boden.
Wir fuhren weiter mit dem Taxi in den Stadtteil Leyton zu unserem Hotel. Unser Taxifahrer war sehr freundlich und wies uns mehrmals darauf hin, dass wir im Straßenverkehr vorsichtig sein müssten, da der Linksverkehr eine große Umstellung für uns sein könnte. Der erste Eindruck von England war für die Erstbesucher durch den netten Taxifahrer also ein durchweg positiver. Am Hotel angekommen, checkten wir kurz ein, brachten unser Gepäck auf die Zimmer und aßen eine Kleinigkeit bevor wir uns gleich auf den Weg machten London zu unsicher zu machen. Wir wollten keine Zeit verlieren und füllten die wenigen Tage, die vor uns lagen optimal mit einer Mischung aus Fußball, Subkultur und dem typischen Touristen-Programm.
Mit der Oyster Card im Gepäck machten wir uns mit der U-Bahn auf zu unserem ersten Ziel, dem Stadion Boleyn Ground im Londoner East End. Es war schade, dass wir das Stadion nur von Außen besichtigt haben, aber ich habe mir im Stadion Shop noch einen neuen Schal von West Ham United kaufen können.
Am Abend hat es uns nach Camden Town verschlagen. Wir aßen im The Oxford Arms Fish & Chips und danach gingen wir nach Gegenüber ins The Elephant’s Head um den ersten Tag in London bei einigen Bieren zu beenden.
Am nächsten Tag sollte ein langer Fußmarsch vor uns liegen. Wir fuhren mit der U-Bahn zur Station Tower Hill. Nachdem wir dem Tower Of London einen kurzen Besuch abstatteten ging es per Pedes weiter zur Tower Bridge und an der Themse entlang zum London Eye. Ein herrlicher Ausblick bot sich uns von der Spitze dieses Riesenrades direkt am Ufer der Themse. Wir genossen den Blick über die Dächer von London und zückten auch das ein oder andere Mal die Kamera.
Weiter ging es über die Westminster Bridge zum Big Ben. Auf der Westminster Bridge stand ein Dudelsackspieler in typisch schottischer Tracht. Insgeheim wünschte ich mir, dass er das Lied „Highland Cathedral“ spielen würde, da mein Vater dieses Lied auch sehr liebt und oft spielt. Wir hielten einen Moment an und hörten ihm zu. Ich war sehr überrascht, als das nächste Lied, was er anstimmen sollte, dann tatsächlich „Highland Cathedral“ war. Ich danke London für dieses kleine Geschenk.
Da Stefan unbedingt ins örtliche Hardrock Café wollte, nutzten wir die Gelegenheit und nahmen dort gleich ein etwas verspätetes Mittagessen in Form von Burgern und Pommes ein. Dazu gab es natürlich wieder ein Bier. Wir staunten allerdings nicht schlecht, als wir die Rechnung bekamen. Die Musik hatte auch nur sehr wenig mit Hard Rock zu tun. So gingen wir dann auch etwas ärmer und auch vom Gesamteindruck leicht enttäuscht weiter unseres Weges. Auf dem Weg zur U-Bahn-Station lief uns noch der Buckingham Pallace und Westminster Abbey zufällig über den Weg.
inzwischen war es dunkel geworden, sodass wir den Piccadilly Circus in seiner ganzen Lichterpracht zu sehen bekamen. Die Carnaby Street sollte unser letztes Ziel sein, bevor wir den Abend wieder in Camden Town, diesmal aber im The World’s End Pub, ausklingen ließen.
Es war Mittwoch, der 4. Februar. Es war mein sechsundzwanzigster Geburtstag. Wir trafen uns wie jeden Morgen in der Hotellobby. Dort erhielt ich auch gleich ein kleines Geburtstagsgeschenk von Sandra. Ich war nicht der einzige, der am Montag im Stadion Shop im Boleyn Ground etwas gekauft hat. Sandra kaufte einen Button, mit der Aufschrift „It’s My Birthday“ und dem Vereinswappen von West Ham United in der Mitte. Diesen Button musste ich dann den ganzen Tag lang tragen.
Nach dem Frühstück fuhren wir mit der U-Bahn wieder zum Buckingham Pallace um uns die Wachablösung anzusehen. Dort angekommen fanden wir allerdings nur ein Schild vor, auf dem folgender Text zu lesen war: „No Guard Changing Ceremony Today“. So ging es dann eben etwas früher als eigentlich geplant in Madame Tussauds’ Wachsfigurenkabinett. Nachdem wir dort das ein oder andere verstörende Bild mit dem ein oder anderen Wachsprominenten machten ging unsere Reise weiter zum Bahnhof King’s Cross/St. Pancras. Sandra wollte sich dort unbedingt das Gleis 9 ¾ aus den Harry Potter Büchern und Filmen ansehen. Am späten Mittag sind wir dann in Camden Town angekommen. Hier verbrachten wir dann auch den Rest des Tages. Ich glaube dies war der Tag der Reise, an dem wir das meiste Geld ausgaben. Das meiste Geld davon sollten wir im Oi! Oi! The Shop lassen. Ich gönnte mir ein T-Shirt von The Business, eine CD von The 4-Skins, sowie einige Aufnäher und Pins. Ich sah auch einen Ring von Trojan Records, der es mir wirklich angetan hatte, den ich aber nicht mitnahm. Auch der Rest der Reisetruppe schlug ordentlich zu. Der ältere Skin im Laden war sehr hilfsbereit, er wusste genau wo die Dinge waren, nach denen wir suchten. Da uns der Pub „ The World’s End“ sehr gut gefallen hatte, beschlossen wir meinen Geburtstag dort noch etwas zu feiern, bevor wir wieder ins Hotel fuhren.
Unseren letzten kompletten Tag in London gingen wir langsam an. Nachdem wir am Vorabend ausgiebig gefeiert hatten, schliefen wir bis in den späten Vormittag hinein. Anschließend fuhren wir mit der U-Bahn in die Stadt um uns ein Englisches Frühstück zu gönnen. Das Frühstück war genau nach meinem Geschmack und es machte so satt, dass man bis zum Abend nichts mehr essen brauchte. Beim Frühstück berieten wir uns, wie wir den letzten Tag verbringen wollten. Schnell wurden wir uns einig, dass wir alle nochmal nach Camden Town wollten, da jeder von uns gestern beim Shopping im Camden Lock Market noch etwas zurückgelassen hatte, was er/sie noch unbedingt haben wollte. Wir hatten uns einfach in diesen Stadtteil verliebt. Wir besuchten auch Oi! Oi! The Shop wieder, da ich dort einen Ring mit dem Logo von Trojan Records gesehen habe, den ich mir unbedingt noch kaufen musste. Als ich einige Ringe anprobiert hatte und die richtige Größe gefunden hatte, teilten mir Sandra, Florian und Stefan mit, dass sie zusammen gelegt haben und mir diesen Ring zu meinem gestrigen Geburtstag schenken möchten. Sandra gab dem älteren Skin vom Shop das Geld und voller Dankbarkeit nahm ich den Ring entgegen und streifte ihn mir über den Ringfinger. Auf der anderen Seite der Ladentheke fragte der Skin in die Runde, warum sie mir den Ring schenken, schließlich sei er ja nicht günstig. Sandra antwortete ihm, dass ich gestern Geburtstag gehabt hatte und dass der Ring mein Geburtstagsgeschenk sei. Daraufhin schenkte er mir noch einen „Trojan Skins“- Pin. Voller Freude verließ ich mit den anderen den Shop.
Es war mittlerweile Abend geworden und da wir am nächsten Tag wieder sehr früh zum Flughafen mussten, beschlossen wir, an diesem Abend mal nur ein Bier zu trinken und dann gleich ins Hotel zurück zu fahren.
Es war Freitag, der 6. Februar und der Tag unserer Abreise. Schon sehr früh nahmen wir uns ein Taxi und fuhren zurück Richtung London Stansted.
Am Vormittag landeten wir wieder im norditalienischen Bergamo, bevor wir mit dem Auto weiter Nach Südtirol und Sterzing fuhren. Am nächsten Tag fuhr ich wieder mit dem Zug zurück in meine nordhessische Heimat.
Es waren sehr schöne Tage in der englischen Hauptstadt. Auch meine drei Freunde waren sich sicher, sie waren nicht das letzte Mal in London. Diese schöne Stadt würden wir wieder besuchen.
Dieser Urlaub war eine sehr schöne, wenn auch viel ruhigere Alternative zum ausfallenden Besuches am Rebellion Festival in Blackpool. London, Du hast mir viele kleine Freuden gemacht. Dafür danke ich Dir.
At first I wanted to go to Rebellion Festival in Blackpool and the Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton this year. But then my car broke and it had to be repaired. That was too expensive to realize these two trips to good old England.
Just a few days later good friends of mine from South Tyrol asked me to join their trip to London at the first days of February. it should be their first trip to England, so they would be very happy if I would go with them. This trip would be cheaper than going to the two festivals in Blackpool and Brighton, so I said “yes”. It was the first time I could celebrate my birthday in London.
It was Friday, Jan 30th, 6 o’clock in the morning. My brother drove me to the train station of the city of Bad Hersfeld. I left this town by train to arrive at the snow-covered city of Sterzing/South Tyrol. At that weekend I enjoyed the delicious south tyrolean cuisine and maybe a few too many glasses of red wine and beer.
On Monday, Feb 2nd it was Florian, Sandra, Stefan and me (Thilo) going to the airport of Bergamo/Italy at 5 o’clock in the morning. At about midday we arrived at the airport London Stansted.
First we took a taxi to our hotel in London Leyton. The taxi driver was very friendlich and told us to be careful in street-traffic because of the traffic on the left side of the street. When we arrived at our hotel we checked in, ate a small snack and went out to explore the capital of Great Britain. We didn’t want to waste any time, so we started quickly to work off our list of destinations which was full of football, subculture and the typical tourism stuff.
Using the Oyster Card we go by tube to our first destination, the Boleyn Ground in the East End. It was a pity that we can’t have a look inside the stadium but at the shop I bought a new scarf of West Ham United FC.
In the evening we went to Camden Town to have Fish & Chips at The Oxford Arms and have a few pints of beer at The Elephant’s Head.
The next day we explored a lot of tourism stuff. First we used the tube to get to Tower Hill Station. From that station we did a huge walk through London. We went to the Tower Of London and the Tower Bridge. After that we walked along River Thames to the London Eye. We had a wonderful view over the city and we took lots of pictures, so we disclosed our identity as tourists, haha.
On Westminster Bridge near Big Ben we met a bagpiper in traditional Scottish clothing. I hoped he would play the song “Hingland Cathedral” because my father loves this song too and plays it very often when he plays the bagpipe. We stopped for a while to listen to the bagpiper and I was very surprised as one of his next songs was “Highland Cathedral”. London, I thank you for that little present.
Stefan insisted to go to Hard Rock Café so we decided to have a late lunch there. We had a burger and chips and of course a pint of beer. After we were shocked by the bill we had to pay and disappointed by the music they played in the Hard Rock Café (It was everything but Hard Rock!!!) we went to Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.
The darkness had set in, so we wanted to view the lights of Piccadilly Circus and Carnaby Street. The Day ended again in Camden Town. But this time we had a few pints in a pub called “The World’s End”.
It was Wednesday, Feb 4th. It was my 26th birthday. The same procedure as every day of this journey we met at the hotel lobby in the morning to have a breakfast in the hotel. I had to find out that I wasn’t the only person who bought something at the shop at Boleyn Ground two days before. Sandra gave a little Button to me on which you can find the coat of arms of West Ham United FC and the slogan “It’s my Birthday”. Sandra and the two other boys laughed and told me that I had to wear that button the whole day.
After the breakfast in the hotel we wanted to follow the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace, but all we found was a sign-post “No Guard Changing Ceremony Today”. So we had enough time to visit Madame Tussauds’ before lunch. We took some distracted pictures with some wax celebrities and left the cabinet. Our next destination was the train station King’s Cross/St. Pancras. Sandra wanted to have a look at Platform 9 ¾ from the books and movies of Harry Potter.
At the early afternoon we arrived in Camden Town and we decided to spend the rest of the day there. Florian and I wanted to go shopping at Camden Lock Market. That was the day of the trip we spent the most money. We read in the internet about a shop called Oi! Oi! The Shop. The old skin inside the shop was very pleasant character and ready to help. He really knew where we can find the things we want to have. I saw a ring of Trojan records but I hesitated and didn’t buy it. Finally I bought a tee shirt of The Business, a CD of The 4-Skins and a few patches and pins. The other three spent a lot of money in the Lock Market too.
We all enjoyed the time in the pub called “The World’s End” one day before, so we decided to celebrate my birthday in that pub an have some beers before we went back to our hotel in London Leyton.
Our last full day in London started later than the days before because the day before we came back to our hotel very lately. We used the tube to come back to Camden Town. Everyone of us felt in love with this part of London and everyone had seen a thing that wasn’t been bought. For example I wanted to come back to Oi! Oi! The Shop to buy the Trojan ring. But first we searched for a possibility to have a Full English Breakfast. It was a tasty breakfast but after that all of us agreed that nobody needed a lunch after that. We went back to the old skin of Oi! Oi! The Shop. I wanted to buy the Trojan ring and while I was trying to find one that fits me, the others gave me the money for the ring and told me that the ring is a present for me. The owner of the shop asked them, why they were paying the ring for me. Sandra answered that yesterday was my birthday and the ring should be my birthday present. When he heard that, he went for a Trojan Skins Pin and gave it to me. He said it’s a birthday present too. I thanked him a few times and we left the shop.
In the meantime it was evening and we spent that evening in the hotel and went to bed because at the next morning we had to get up very early.
Friday, Feb 6th. The day we flew home to the continent. Early in the morning we got up to take a taxi back to the airport London Stansted. At midday we landed at the airport of Bergamo/Italy and drove back to Sterzing/South Tyrol. One day later I went back to my hessian home.
I had great days in the english capital. Everyone of us was sure to return to that impressive city.
That trip to London was a wonderful, but calm alternative to the festivals during the summer but I have to admit that it would have been awesome to visit the Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton or the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool.
London, I spent a good time in you. THANK YOU.
Thilo (written in March 2015)
Ein Internationaler Trip nach London
02.02.2015 – 06.02.2015
Eigentlich wollte ich in diesem Jahr auf das Rebellion Festival nach Blackpool und auf die Great Skinhead Reunion nach Brighton. Da aber mein Auto repariert werden musste und die Reparatur leider sehr teuer war, musste ich mich von dem Gedanken dieses Jahr nach Blackpool und Brighton zu fahren wohl verabschieden.
Nur ein paar Tage später erreichte mich von Freunden aus Südtirol die Nachricht, dass sie Ende Januar bis Anfang Februar nach London wollten. Da es ihre erste Reise nach London werden sollte, fragten sie mich, ob ich nicht mitkommen wollte. Da dieser Kurzurlaub in London wesentlich günstiger sein würde, als ein Besuch am Rebellion Festival in Blackpool und auf der Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton, freute ich mich natürlich sehr über dieses Angebot und sagte sofort zu. Zumal ich damit auch das erste Mal meinen Geburtstag in London feiern konnte.
Es war Freitag, der 30. Januar. Mein Bruder fuhr mich morgens um halb 6 nach Bad Hersfeld an den Bahnhof. Von Dort aus ging es erstmal mit dem Zug ins verschneite Sterzing in Südtirol. Das Wochenende verbrachte ich dann bei Freunden in den Bergen und genoss die Südtiroler Küche und vielleicht auch das ein oder andere Glas Rotwein und Bier zuviel.
Am Montag, den 2. Februar starteten wir, Florian, Sandra, Stefan und ich (Thilo) um 05:00 Uhr morgens von Sterzing aus nach Bergamo an den Flughafen. Mittags landeten wir am Flughafen London Stansted. Es waren für die meine drei Mitstreiter die ersten Schritte auf englischem Boden.
Wir fuhren weiter mit dem Taxi in den Stadtteil Leyton zu unserem Hotel. Unser Taxifahrer war sehr freundlich und wies uns mehrmals darauf hin, dass wir im Straßenverkehr vorsichtig sein müssten, da der Linksverkehr eine große Umstellung für uns sein könnte. Der erste Eindruck von England war für die Erstbesucher durch den netten Taxifahrer also ein durchweg positiver. Am Hotel angekommen, checkten wir kurz ein, brachten unser Gepäck auf die Zimmer und aßen eine Kleinigkeit bevor wir uns gleich auf den Weg machten London zu unsicher zu machen. Wir wollten keine Zeit verlieren und füllten die wenigen Tage, die vor uns lagen optimal mit einer Mischung aus Fußball, Subkultur und dem typischen Touristen-Programm.
Mit der Oyster Card im Gepäck machten wir uns mit der U-Bahn auf zu unserem ersten Ziel, dem Stadion Boleyn Ground im Londoner East End. Es war schade, dass wir das Stadion nur von Außen besichtigt haben, aber ich habe mir im Stadion Shop noch einen neuen Schal von West Ham United kaufen können.
Am Abend hat es uns nach Camden Town verschlagen. Wir aßen im The Oxford Arms Fish & Chips und danach gingen wir nach Gegenüber ins The Elephant’s Head um den ersten Tag in London bei einigen Bieren zu beenden.
Am nächsten Tag sollte ein langer Fußmarsch vor uns liegen. Wir fuhren mit der U-Bahn zur Station Tower Hill. Nachdem wir dem Tower Of London einen kurzen Besuch abstatteten ging es per Pedes weiter zur Tower Bridge und an der Themse entlang zum London Eye. Ein herrlicher Ausblick bot sich uns von der Spitze dieses Riesenrades direkt am Ufer der Themse. Wir genossen den Blick über die Dächer von London und zückten auch das ein oder andere Mal die Kamera.
Weiter ging es über die Westminster Bridge zum Big Ben. Auf der Westminster Bridge stand ein Dudelsackspieler in typisch schottischer Tracht. Insgeheim wünschte ich mir, dass er das Lied „Highland Cathedral“ spielen würde, da mein Vater dieses Lied auch sehr liebt und oft spielt. Wir hielten einen Moment an und hörten ihm zu. Ich war sehr überrascht, als das nächste Lied, was er anstimmen sollte, dann tatsächlich „Highland Cathedral“ war. Ich danke London für dieses kleine Geschenk.
Da Stefan unbedingt ins örtliche Hardrock Café wollte, nutzten wir die Gelegenheit und nahmen dort gleich ein etwas verspätetes Mittagessen in Form von Burgern und Pommes ein. Dazu gab es natürlich wieder ein Bier. Wir staunten allerdings nicht schlecht, als wir die Rechnung bekamen. Die Musik hatte auch nur sehr wenig mit Hard Rock zu tun. So gingen wir dann auch etwas ärmer und auch vom Gesamteindruck leicht enttäuscht weiter unseres Weges. Auf dem Weg zur U-Bahn-Station lief uns noch der Buckingham Pallace und Westminster Abbey zufällig über den Weg.
inzwischen war es dunkel geworden, sodass wir den Piccadilly Circus in seiner ganzen Lichterpracht zu sehen bekamen. Die Carnaby Street sollte unser letztes Ziel sein, bevor wir den Abend wieder in Camden Town, diesmal aber im The World’s End Pub, ausklingen ließen.
Es war Mittwoch, der 4. Februar. Es war mein sechsundzwanzigster Geburtstag. Wir trafen uns wie jeden Morgen in der Hotellobby. Dort erhielt ich auch gleich ein kleines Geburtstagsgeschenk von Sandra. Ich war nicht der einzige, der am Montag im Stadion Shop im Boleyn Ground etwas gekauft hat. Sandra kaufte einen Button, mit der Aufschrift „It’s My Birthday“ und dem Vereinswappen von West Ham United in der Mitte. Diesen Button musste ich dann den ganzen Tag lang tragen.
Nach dem Frühstück fuhren wir mit der U-Bahn wieder zum Buckingham Pallace um uns die Wachablösung anzusehen. Dort angekommen fanden wir allerdings nur ein Schild vor, auf dem folgender Text zu lesen war: „No Guard Changing Ceremony Today“. So ging es dann eben etwas früher als eigentlich geplant in Madame Tussauds’ Wachsfigurenkabinett. Nachdem wir dort das ein oder andere verstörende Bild mit dem ein oder anderen Wachsprominenten machten ging unsere Reise weiter zum Bahnhof King’s Cross/St. Pancras. Sandra wollte sich dort unbedingt das Gleis 9 ¾ aus den Harry Potter Büchern und Filmen ansehen. Am späten Mittag sind wir dann in Camden Town angekommen. Hier verbrachten wir dann auch den Rest des Tages. Ich glaube dies war der Tag der Reise, an dem wir das meiste Geld ausgaben. Das meiste Geld davon sollten wir im Oi! Oi! The Shop lassen. Ich gönnte mir ein T-Shirt von The Business, eine CD von The 4-Skins, sowie einige Aufnäher und Pins. Ich sah auch einen Ring von Trojan Records, der es mir wirklich angetan hatte, den ich aber nicht mitnahm. Auch der Rest der Reisetruppe schlug ordentlich zu. Der ältere Skin im Laden war sehr hilfsbereit, er wusste genau wo die Dinge waren, nach denen wir suchten. Da uns der Pub „ The World’s End“ sehr gut gefallen hatte, beschlossen wir meinen Geburtstag dort noch etwas zu feiern, bevor wir wieder ins Hotel fuhren.
Unseren letzten kompletten Tag in London gingen wir langsam an. Nachdem wir am Vorabend ausgiebig gefeiert hatten, schliefen wir bis in den späten Vormittag hinein. Anschließend fuhren wir mit der U-Bahn in die Stadt um uns ein Englisches Frühstück zu gönnen. Das Frühstück war genau nach meinem Geschmack und es machte so satt, dass man bis zum Abend nichts mehr essen brauchte. Beim Frühstück berieten wir uns, wie wir den letzten Tag verbringen wollten. Schnell wurden wir uns einig, dass wir alle nochmal nach Camden Town wollten, da jeder von uns gestern beim Shopping im Camden Lock Market noch etwas zurückgelassen hatte, was er/sie noch unbedingt haben wollte. Wir hatten uns einfach in diesen Stadtteil verliebt. Wir besuchten auch Oi! Oi! The Shop wieder, da ich dort einen Ring mit dem Logo von Trojan Records gesehen habe, den ich mir unbedingt noch kaufen musste. Als ich einige Ringe anprobiert hatte und die richtige Größe gefunden hatte, teilten mir Sandra, Florian und Stefan mit, dass sie zusammen gelegt haben und mir diesen Ring zu meinem gestrigen Geburtstag schenken möchten. Sandra gab dem älteren Skin vom Shop das Geld und voller Dankbarkeit nahm ich den Ring entgegen und streifte ihn mir über den Ringfinger. Auf der anderen Seite der Ladentheke fragte der Skin in die Runde, warum sie mir den Ring schenken, schließlich sei er ja nicht günstig. Sandra antwortete ihm, dass ich gestern Geburtstag gehabt hatte und dass der Ring mein Geburtstagsgeschenk sei. Daraufhin schenkte er mir noch einen „Trojan Skins“- Pin. Voller Freude verließ ich mit den anderen den Shop.
Es war mittlerweile Abend geworden und da wir am nächsten Tag wieder sehr früh zum Flughafen mussten, beschlossen wir, an diesem Abend mal nur ein Bier zu trinken und dann gleich ins Hotel zurück zu fahren.
Es war Freitag, der 6. Februar und der Tag unserer Abreise. Schon sehr früh nahmen wir uns ein Taxi und fuhren zurück Richtung London Stansted.
Am Vormittag landeten wir wieder im norditalienischen Bergamo, bevor wir mit dem Auto weiter Nach Südtirol und Sterzing fuhren. Am nächsten Tag fuhr ich wieder mit dem Zug zurück in meine nordhessische Heimat.
Es waren sehr schöne Tage in der englischen Hauptstadt. Auch meine drei Freunde waren sich sicher, sie waren nicht das letzte Mal in London. Diese schöne Stadt würden wir wieder besuchen.
Dieser Urlaub war eine sehr schöne, wenn auch viel ruhigere Alternative zum ausfallenden Besuches am Rebellion Festival in Blackpool. London, Du hast mir viele kleine Freuden gemacht. Dafür danke ich Dir.
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What was I thinking, the day I decided to get involved with punk rock. My youth was way behind me, long gone were the days when I thought we were going to change the world.
Great news, Subcultz have teamed up with our Swedish friends to create some regular nights.Our first offering is the Fantastic British Indie band ‘Mind of a Lion’ playing with Stockholm band, ‘Mankind’ This is a free gig. and we are expecting a full house. get there early
Subcultz proudly presents , live at PetSound bar, An evening full of energy with two great bands that will shake you up ;
They told us to stand upon the sand. There’s no-one there only the dead, The planes had all flown over head.
“Stand and be proud” said Mr Bush, This today our final push. We’ve been trained for this my highland boys, We played like soldiers with our toys. There’s no-one there, just sand and stone, But its me this time , that goes alone.
Horay we charged, on our way to Bagdad, The people they cheer, we will all be glad. There’s no-one there, only the dead, The planes had all flown over head.
So we ran, oh what a crack, On our backs, 200lb packs. There’s no-one there only the dead, The planes had all flown over head. I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake and cry,
You couldn’t sleep because I lied. Over the hole in no mans land, My rifle held within my hands. But who was that Mr Bush? The boy I met on the final push.
A frightened child, with a wide eyed stare. No prisoners they said, til we make the line, No prisoners they said, there is no time. There’s no-one there, only the dead, The planes had all flown over head.
That day I killed a mother’s child, My darling mothers Bastard child.
Symond Lawes
2005
Please Support my good friend Jennie Matthias in her charity project, helping those that are not as fortunate as you
Taken from The Guardian newspaper We’re racist, we’re racist. And that’s the way we like it.” Just in case there was any possibility that the group of Chelsea hooligans were preventing a man from boarding a train on the Paris Métro for a reason more obscure than the colour of his skin, they helpfully illustrated their actions with a chant. They are racist.
They like being racist. What further justification than their liking of racism could they possibly need? It’s quite menacing, I think, the counterpoint in that chant, with the understated use of the word “like” confirming that half the fun is in embracing a powerfully destructive and hateful identity in a casual way, as if it’s merely a mild preference. These guys don’t feel passionately racist. It’s just something they “like”. No big deal. What’s all the fuss about?
Chelsea and the U.N condemn fans who pushed black man off Paris Métro Read more Are these men still finding their self-identification as racists enjoyable, now that a fellow passenger has filmed them in their petty aggression and taken it to the media? These men will be identified, banned from attending Chelsea matches at the very least, and perhaps face with criminal charges.
In the meantime, we can be assured of further why-oh-why discussion as to why football should continue to attract racists, despite the game’s years of concerted effort to disassociate itself from racism. Maybe I’m missing something here, but it always seems to me that football support is all about feeling that you’re part of one group and are opposed to another group.
In that way it surely shares at least some of the mentality of the racist. Then there’s the even more tiresome question of why these racist men support Chelsea even though it has so many black players. Yes. Why would a racist enjoy cynically exploiting the skills of black people? Such a baffling mystery. When, in human history, has that ever happened? No doubt these men are now feeling that they are the victims – victims of the political correctness that they think it so clever to defy.
It’s a shame, in a way, that the term “political correctness” even exists, that being against ignorant prejudice and vicious hatred can be characterised not as civilised but as “political”, not as right but as “correct”. The phrase implies heavily that a set of rules that should be followed has been brought into being in some arbitrary, faceless, undemocratic power-grab. The saddest thing is that men such as these men, who “like” hating strangers of whom they know nothing, really do feel that they are the ones being oppressed by a sinister ideology, when all that’s oppressing them is their own nasty, small-minded resentment. By Deborah Orr
Not undermining, the fact a gang of drunks abusing a rail passenger is a pathetic act, its probably worth looking at the root of where the British football hooligan comes from. The rough end of the council estate. Brought up on a gang mentality. Has much changed in 30 years? Perhaps only the colour of skin
But in the scheme of things, should it really warrant such a high level of BBC media coverage Does anyone remember this being broadcast so loudly?
It seems once again the corporate dictatorship, which is Facebook, has deleted our community group page, for no apparent reason. We at subcultz , have been building the Reunion event over the last 5 years, with no problems at all. We have successfully mixed all non political skinhead music genres together, and are seeing a mass of skinheads, and ex skinheads, young and old, from across the globe coming the Brighton every year. The most frustrating thing, is there seems no right of appeal, or even contact ability, with whoever it was, that pressed the delete button. We have lost our event page and hundreds of photos, held on the page. Its completely against democracy, to take peoples right of free speech and communication away.
The Skinhead Reunion itself is doing really well. We have the best reggae DJ’s on the planet booked up again, We have around 9 bands, and presales tickets are up over 150, on 2014. If anyone out there knows of a way to communicate with facebook please let me know. But otherwise we have to just grit our teeth and keep moving forward. We have no interest at all in Bullshit skinhead politics of left or right. We are here to party and have fun. Everyone is welcome, from whatever background you come, To meet and have a good time, drink some beer and listen to great music. Keep the Faith
However much i hate to have to keep relying on facebook, this is our subcultz page
Whatever Facebooks motivation was to delete us, the most ironic thing, is that Their big Brother HQ is in Dublin. And we have a young band booked to play from there, called the Dodgy Few. we have Skinheads who lived through the troubles in Northern Ireland, from both sides of the sectarian divide, drinking together, with Ex British soldiers. We have created something undreamed of 25 years ago. When the powers that be, had the working classes killing eachother, in a civil war.
What happens when you ‘report abuse’? The secretive Facebook censors who decide what is – and what isn’t abuse
A report from the Independant newspaper UK
The first thing that catches the eye of a visitor entering the lobby of Facebook’s European headquarters is the array of motivational posters stapled to the far wall. “Proceed And Be Bold”, orders one. “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?” asks another. “Done is Better Than Perfect”.
Stepping inside the gleaming, jagged glass building in Dublin’s docklands is like passing through a portal to San Francisco. Staff wearing hoodies and jeans and clutching Apple laptops negotiate their way through an obstacle course of low-hanging Frank Gehry lights, orange beanbags and ping pong tables.
But appearances can be deceptive. The joyful pop soundtrack in the canteen and the urban art adorning the walls belies the fact that some of the hundreds of people employed here are carrying out some very serious – and very sensitive – work.
To mark Safer Internet Day on Tuesday, The Independent became the first newspaper to be given access to Facebook’s Community Operations team: the men and women tasked with responding to reports of abuse by the site’s users. They are trained to cover everything from low-level spam all the way up to serious cyberbullying, hate speech, terrorist threats and suicidal cries for help.
Dublin is Facebook’s most important headquarters outside California. The Community Operations team based here does not just cover Europe, but also examines reports sent in by millions of users across the Middle East, Africa and large parts of Latin America. In the words of Sonia Flynn, the managing director of Facebook Ireland, they are “the front line between Facebook and the people who use Facebook”.
She adds that while the “vast majority” of reports received require no further action, when a serious concern is raised the team needs to act quickly and decisively. For this reason, a Community Operations person covering Spain cannot simply get away with speaking fluent Spanish – they must also have a good cultural knowledge of the country. Forty-four different nationalities are represented in the Dublin team alone.
“We put emphasis on hiring people from the different countries with the right language expertise and cultural understanding,” says Flynn. “When someone creates a piece of content – whether it’s a photo or a comment – there’s what’s said and what’s meant. That’s why it’s really important for us to have people who understand not just the language, but the culture of the country that they’re supporting.”
The offices of Facebook in Dublin, where the community operations teams is based In the past, Facebook has been criticised for lacking the human touch in its interactions with its ever-growing army of users (at last count, there were 1.39 billion of them across the world). A notable example occurred at the end of last year, when American web designer Eric Meyer highlighted what he described as the site’s “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty”.
Mr Meyer had been invited to try out the site’s Year in Review feature – an automatically generated list of his Facebook “highlights” from 2014 – only to be confronted by a picture of his daughter Rebecca, who died earlier in the year. The product manager responsible for the feature later emailed him to personally apologise.
Content policy manager Ciara Lyden, who used to work on the Community Operations team, says she often saw first-hand how the public perceive Facebook. “Every so often I’d help someone out with a query that they had, and then they’d be like: ‘Thanks – if you’re a person or a robot, I don’t know’. I’d have to write back to tell them that I really am a person,” she says.
While she admits that Facebook could “do more” to show its human side, she points out that the site has to be built around the fact that it has more than a billion users who are online 24 hours a day. The company has put a lot of effort into what it calls “compassion research”, taking advice from academics at Yale’s Centre for Emotional Intelligence on how to help users interact with each other so they can resolve their differences without Facebook taking any action at all.
Previously, if one user said something that another found offensive, Facebook would simply look at whether the content broke any rules and if it did, take it down. Now it can act as a sort of digital counsellor, giving the offended person the chance to explain to the other why they were hurt.
Facebook could “do more” to show its human side (Getty Images) Instead of just typing into a blank box, the offended user is given a set of possible phrases to describe how they feel. The choice depends on their age: a teenager will see words more likely to be in their vocabulary (“mean”), whereas an adult will see more sophisticated options (“inappropriate”, “harassing”).
The approach seems to be working, as in the vast majority of cases, the person responsible for the post deletes it of their own accord. “In the real world, if you upset me I’d likely go and tell you that you’ve upset me, and we’re trying to make that mirror what happens through our reporting flows,” explains Flynn.
However, the company is keen to stress that every single report of abuse is read and acted upon by a human being, not a computer – a fact that might surprise most users. The system is constantly monitored by staff based across four time zones in California, Texas, Dublin and Hyderabad in India, so there is never a “night shift” with fewer staff on hand.
When a user clicks “report”, it is graded for its severity and guided to the right team. “If there’s a risk of real-world harm – someone who is clearly cutting themselves, or bullying, anything touching child safety in general, any credible threat would be prioritised above everything else,” says Julie de Bailliencourt, Facebook’s safety policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Although she says the company does have a set of response times by which it aims to help people, it will not make them public – or divulge how many abuse reports it receives overall. Security around the Community Operations team is also strict: to protect users’ privacy, a sign near where they sit reads “No Visitors Beyond This Point”.
Most reports are relatively benign. In Turkey, for example, every time the football team Galatasaray plays one of its big rivals, Facebook notices a spike in reports from supporters of both teams complaining about each other. The same is true of derby-day football matches in the UK.
Most Facebook reports are relatively benign (Getty Images) “People tend to report things that they don’t like, not necessarily things that are abusive,” says de Bailliencourt, who has worked at Facebook for five years. “It’s not like we can pre-empt things, but we know that during big sporting events we’re going to have an increase.”
News events also cause spikes in abuse reports. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in France, a sudden surge in the number of controversial posts and heated debate resulted in more complaints. Or as de Bailliencourt puts it: “Anything that happens in the real world happens on Facebook at the same time.”
Very serious reports – such as someone threatening to kill themselves – are fast-tracked to the police or security services, she adds. “If we feel someone has taken some pills and they’ve posted on Facebook: ‘Goodbye world, that’s it, it’s the end’, we’re obviously not going to send them our usual supporting documentation – we need to go much faster.”
She adds that Facebook has “absolutely” saved people’s lives through swift intervention and has “equally as many good stories” as it does controversies, such as the row over its removal of breastfeeding pictures, which she describes as a “human mistake”. She says it is a myth that the more users that report something, the more likely it is to be removed. “One report is enough.”
Facebook has a clear code of conduct which users must respect, but there are always grey areas. Staff are also aware that a decision to remove something from the site – or leave it up – can be far-reaching, like a powerful court setting a global precedent. Under pressure, the multi-cultural team often has heated arguments.
“We don’t hire people to just press the same button X amount of times per hour,” says de Bailliencourt. “We hire people with very different backgrounds, and they sometimes disagree. It feels almost like the UN sometimes.”
Post deleted: Abuse reports on Facebook
Breastfeeding pictures
In 2011, Facebook deleted the page of a breastfeeding support group called The Leaky B@@b, informing its founder Jessica Martin-Weber that she had “violated our terms of use”. Facebook said later the deletion had been a “mistake” and the page was reinstated. The site says it generally tries to “respect people’s right to share content of personal importance”.
Inciting violence
A Facebook page calling for Palestinians to take to the streets in a violent uprising against Israel was removed in 2011. The page, entitled “Third Palestinian Intifada”, had already attracted the condemnation of the Israeli government, which said it was inciting violence against Jews. Facebook said while the page began as a call for “peaceful protest”, it had descended into “direct calls for violence or expressions of hate”.
Free speech
Facebook refused to remove a “fan” page dedicated to James Holmes, the man accused of shooting 12 people dead at a cinema in Colorado in 2012. Facebook said the page “while incredibly distasteful, doesn’t violate our terms” as it was within the boundaries of free speech.
Suicide prevention
In 2013, New York police intercepted a teenager who was on his way to jump off a bridge after he posted a message on Facebook. When officers were alerted to post, they sent him a message on the site and handed out his photo to nearby patrols. He called the police station and was taken to hospital.
Skinhead.. 2 Me, it began in 82-83 (for me ).. at age 14-15.. my mothers an alcoholic, father unknown.. we were kids on the street, who dident ave a chance against those, back in school, whom had everything, famillies… we formed our own… we were learnt by nature 2 stick together whatever the cost.. cause we knew, we were the ones to pay the price,, i started of as punk, but oi kicked in and i was hooked.. somehow, IM SO GLAD TO SEE ALL THESE YOUNGSTERS OF today, hookin up.. it is with great sense of pride, really.. im myself close to the 50s now… n i dont fuckin regret a minute of it, if i could re- lived my life.. I WOULD!!! At THAT time… in and out of trouble was the only thing we had, i can only speak for my self here, but i know, that trough time, back in that day.. a hell of a lot of us.. came from broken homes, broken families etc.. AND WE WERE ABOUT TO FORM OUR OWN PATH, so to speak.. our own little FIRM.. at that time, i wouldent give a fuck, weither the kids were swung to metal.. or weither they were swung to reggae.. we simply had our own, and we were ready, to fuckin swing YOU, by the neck… brotherhood, pride and loyalty. and u know, well what… were still havent got that kind of recognizion, that we deserve, but on the other hand.. we never wanted it or even asked for it… at this very writing moment.. proud of my bruvs and sis… SKINHEAD TILL THE DAY I DIE!! This … The Great Skinhead Reunion.. Channels all that… through all generations, and different age groups, politics, etc… SKINHEADS MADE THIS ONE CLEAR.. That we can cellebrate the LIFE OF SKINHEAD and take pride in the fact, that we were, we are.. And no one EVER will bring us down or take the history off from us.. EVER!!.. The lost generation!! and ere we are.. Cheers.oioi. // Eddy// Sweden… ps See u all in June -15. Cheers. and double and tripple and a half.. 🙂
In 1981, Decca Records released Strength Thru Oi!, a compilation album featuring 22 bands associated with the Oi! offshoot of UK punk rock. The title was reportedly a play on Strength Through Joy, an early LP by the Scottish group the Skids, though some charged curator Gary Bushell with co-opting a popular Nazi slogan. Bushell denied the accusations, but either way, the record was meant to introduce Oi! as a style of music capable of invigorating listeners—fortifying their bodies, minds, and souls.
The title may have been tongue-in-cheek, but music and exercise have long gone hand-in-hand, and with that in mind, we asked three New York City fitness enthusiasts to experiment with an all-Oi! soundtrack during their workouts and help us answer the question of whether one truly can gain strength through Oi!
Our methods, it must be pointed out, were quasi-scientific at best, as this music is—and this is no knock—some of the absolute dumbest shit imaginable.
BACKGROUND (Edited by Subcultz)
In its original incarnation, British punk rock was deceptively simplistic. Genre figureheads the Clash and Sex Pistols were intelligent, self-aware 20-somethings who’d been to art school and attained a set of skills—squatting, figure drawing, discussing politics while drinking and speeding—that left them with few viable career options. Thanks to svengali managers like Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, these and other unemployable dole collectors were able to form rock ‘n’ roll bands, and while the music was fast and loud—three-chord 50s rock played with all the anger and frustration you’d expect from underachieving young people—early punk anthems like “God Save the Queen” and “Career Opportunities” bristled with a covert idealism that belied the subculture’s nihilistic reputation.
As exciting and influential as it was, punk was artistically limiting, and by the late 70s, the music had run its course. The Sex Pistols broke up, the Clash branched out into classic styles like reggae and R&B, and other bands—the Damned, the Stranglers, etc.—plugged in synthesizers and joined the ranks of the emerging post-punk and new Wave groups. The music grew artsy and pretentious, and that led to the birth of Oi!—the only style of music whose name is always capitalized and followed with an exclamation point.
Influenced by groups like Sham 69. Angelic Upstarts and Cock Sparrer. 4Skins and Blitz made it real. Championed by members of the UK skinhead subculture—a movement emerged from the British council estates—Oi! is proudly working-class music. Its blunt, aggressive songs center on drinking, fighting, football , and, “Fuck Maggie thatcher, and her boys in Blue, A V’s up to the British class system. I’m not gonna waste my life working at your factory.” Musically, it was and is ’77-style punk stripped of all subtlety. Because the choruses sound like football chants, every song is an anthem, giving voice to the lives many young people were living in 1980’s Britain, Police harassment, and mass youth unemployment. Oi! gobs in the face of authority—the government, banks, the military, teachers, parents, people who don’t like Oi!—and that makes it adaptable and timeless. The music has permeated all corners of the globe, and “Oi! Oi! Oi!” sounds pretty much the same in any language.
In the USA Strength Thru Oi was used in experiments.
EXPERIMENTAL METHOD
For the purposes of this study, we enlisted three individuals from different age groups with unique workout habits:
Kristen, a 32-year-old Pilates instructor, graduate student, and punk fan who hopes to make the synthesis of music and exercise an integral part of her practice once she becomes a doctor of physical therapy.
Spencer, a 28-year-old proponent of CrossFit—a popular exercise philosophy based on high-intensity interval training, weightlifting, and other extremely demanding exercises.
Francis, a 40-year-old runner, computer programmer, and member of the South Brooklyn Running Club.
All three were given an eight-song Oi! soundtrack composed of the following songs:
Cockney Rejects, “Bad Man” Cock Sparrer, “Riot Squad” The Business, “Suburban Rebels” Red Alert, “We’ve Got the Power” Blitz, “Fight to Live” 4 Skins, “One Law for Them” Sham 69, “I Don’t Wanna” The Templars, “New York”
The Oi! mix leans heavily on UK genre favorites from the late 70s and early 80s, though the final selection, “New York,” is a 1994 cut by the Templars, an American band formed in Long Island. “New York” was selected for geographical reasons, as we were interested in finding out whether (a) US Oi! songs stand up to their British antecedents and (b) whether an NYC-centric song might have added emotional resonance with our participants. (Note: None of the selections—and indeed, no aspects of this study—have anything to do with racist strains of the Oi! or skinhead subcultures. We like our punk rock dumb, not ignorant.)
Each participant was asked to rate each song on a scale from 1 to 10, as well as offer a score capturing Oi!’s overall usefulness as a workout aid. Through a series of follow-up questions, we were able to further analyze the athletes’ attitudes toward the music and garner their expert opinions regarding its pros and cons. Again, because we’re dealing with music that’s defiantly lugheaded and generally resistant to evolution, our methodology is extremely suspect and bound to provoke anger in real scientists and medical practitioners. It’s only marginally smarter than what a gang of drunken skins might sketch out on a barroom napkin after their ninth round of Guinness.
RESULTS
Assessing Oi!’s overall fitness benefits, our participants submitted scores of 8 (Kristen), 8 (Francis), and 4 (Spencer). That averages out to 6.3—a respectable number only Spencer would likely argue with.
“On the musical-taste front, I’ll caveat all of my below thoughts with the fact I acknowledge I have really eclectic (read: lame) taste in workout music,” Spencer says. “A random workout playlist is equally likely to contain Metallica, Eminem, Britney Spears, Beastie Boys, club music, classic rock anthems, 90s rock, and miscellaneous Top 40 from the last one to two years. It’s not inconceivable something from Les Mis sneaks in as well. Which is all to say (1) my girlfriend never lets me pick music, and (2) I seriously doubt I’m the general Oi! demographic.
“That said, I was excited to try working out to something new. And now that I have I can confidently say I do not enjoy working out to Oi! I seriously could not differentiate these songs while they were playing; it all sounded like a cat from the East End of London being beaten with a Stratocaster.”
Spencer cites the “cool accents” and fact that the music is “better than speed metal” as its major selling points. The cons, he says, are that it “does not provide the workout fuel of James Hetfield/Adam Levine.”
“Not liking it makes me feel like I’m yelling at kids to get off my lawn,” he says.
Relative to the other test subjects, Spencer’s preferred form of exercise involves arguably the most intense physical exertion, and his testimony would seem to refute the idea there is, in fact, strength to be derived through Oi! The music may, however, have benefits for people involved in activities like running, where a steady rhythmic pulse helps offset fatigue. Unfortunately, our findings suggest, the positive effects are negated when the music gets too fast, and any Oi! worth its salt is way the hell too fast.
“Overall, Oi! music has an aggressive upbeat beat that can give your mind something to stay focused on during an intense workout,” says Francis. “I found myself looking forward to the songs with more catchy hooks. The cons of Oi! music was that I found the tempo too fast for running, so it was hard to stay relatively in synch with the music. It felt like some of the songs were urging me to run faster than I could or wanted to during the workouts.”
Oi! might also be good for the core muscle groups, as Kristen has emerged from the experience “definitely inspired to create a Pilates punk playlist.”
“This genre has the ability to inspire energy and hard work which is great for a high abdominal endurance type of workout that is Pilates,” she says.
In terms of individual song scores, the Templars fared best, suggesting that hometown pride plays a role in enjoying Oi! This is not surprising, given the music’s association with packs of loutish London lads getting blitzed and head-butting one another at their local pubs and football stadiums. Oi! is tribalistic, and songs are pegged to specific cities and neighborhoods in a way that first-wave British punk wasn’t. All three athletes were asked to pick a favorite lyric, and Kristen’s comes via the Templars: “New York City is where we wanna be!”
“NYC is always a motivating factor,” she says.
Cockney Rejects and Cock Sparrer also proved popular among our participants, achieving average scores nearly as high as the Templars. Both “Bad Man” and “Riot Squad” have anthemic qualities that, while found in all eight selections, are arguably more pronounced, and that might explain the scoring.
The song-by-song ratings are below. The first number is the total score, followed by the average in parenthesis.
The Templars, “New York”: 24 (8) Cockney Rejects, “Bad Man”: 22 (7.3) Cock Sparrer, “Riot Squad”: 21 (7) The Business, “Suburban Rebels”: 19 (6.3) Red Alert, “We’ve Got the Power”: 16 (5.3) Blitz, “Fight to Live”: 16 (5.3) 4 Skins, “One Law for Them”: 14 (4.6) Sham 69, “I Don’t Wanna”: 13 (4.3)
“I liked Cock Sparrer’s ‘Riot Squad’ the best—I think because I found it had a catchy beat and interesting lyrics,” says Francis. “Also, the tempo wasn’t too out of synch with my running pace.”
CONCLUSIONS
Having crunched the numbers, taken a close look at the anecdotal responses, and consumed a six-pack Newcastle Brown Ale, we’re prepared to draw the following conclusions.
1. Oi! does not make you physically stronger—at least not in any way that might prove useful to hooligans looking to throw heavier objects through storefront windows or smash the jaws of street-fighting adversaries with fewer swings of their meaty fists. According to Spencer, “there wasn’t much of an energy boost for me from the music. My brain mostly seemed to tune it out after awhile. But, again acknowledging my terrible taste in music, I could easily see someone throwing down hard to this stuff. There’s clearly a ton of energy to the songs and some real anger and passion behind the lyrics, which I think could drive some solid gym time if a listener liked the sound of the music itself. And had any clue what the lyrics were.”
2. If you listen to Oi! while running or doing Pilates, you might slice your mile time or strengthen endurance in your legs, abs, hips, back, and arms. But after you take the lyrics to heart, go to the pub, and knock back a half-dozen pints of stout, you’ll likely undo whatever good you’ve done your body. That goes double if you get into a brawl on your way home, and if you’re really an Oi! fan, you will get into a brawl on your way home.
3. Oi! is far too boneheaded to warrant scientific study—even a half-assed one like this. This whole thing might have been a complete waste of time. Wanna fight?
Kenneth Partridge is not a scientist, but he plays one on the internet. Keep up with his research on Twitter – @kenpartridge
This event is now done, but we are back for 2016 on 3-4-5th June on Brighton beach again, for The Great Skinhead Reunion big 6. we will be putting things together as we go, finding the very best bands on the scene, organising DJ’s, sorting out peoples tickets and hotels. To make the big 6 even bigger. Massive thanks to everyone who has supported the skinhead subculture, and the reunion. see you all soon.
Bands and DJ’s wishing to perform, all info and enquiries, contact Symond at subcultz@gmail.com
Details below are the 2015, New bands will be performing for 2016.But i will leave this link up, to give you the idea, of what the reunion is all about
Video made in 2013
THE TICKETS ARE £40 EACH, WHICH IS FOR THE FULL 3 DAYS EVENT, YOUR WRISTBAND IS VALID THROUGH OUT, YOU CAN USE IT FOR AS LITTLE, OR AS MUCH AS YOU WANT. THE EVENT WILL SELL OUT, AND THERE WILL BE NO ADVANCE DAY TICKETS AT A REDUCED DAILY RATE , IN ADVANCE.
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The line-up maybe subject to change, as so many band members and dj’s are involved. Babies coming along, alcohol, world wars and famine can be unforeseen, but the great skinhead reunion, is more about coming to Brighton to see all your friends and making some more, for 3 full days of mayhem.
DISCOUNTED HOTEL RATES QUOTE REFERENCE SUB001 When making a booking Hotel rooms, of all sizes. 3 hotels available to fit your requirements email Ed at info@granvillehotel.co.uk or phone 0044 1273 326302. You must quote the reference SUB001 to get your rooms. The rooms vary in size and cost, to fit your needs. all within an easy walk to the skinhead reunion venue. These hotels are exclusive to the Great Skinhead Reunion guests and bands. So no public to worry about. party party !!
YOU CAN NOT BOOK THESE HOTEL ROOMS VIA THE HOTEL WEBSITE, YOU NEED TO CONTACT THEM DIRECTLY, AND GIVE THE CODE, AND SAY YOU ARE ATTENDING THE SKINHEAD REUNION
For those on a low budget, its worth checking Hostels and campsites, but my advice, is to get in the reserved hotels, for a nice stress free holiday in Brighton
PARKING ZONES – one of the worst aspects of Brighton, is a lack of affordable parking. my advice is to use street parking on the suburbs of brighton, its a reasonably safe place. a good bus service will take you into brighton centre (churchill square) and a short walk from there to the sea front. worth allowing the extra hours work, to save yourself serious parking charges
All Event Enquiries email Symond at subcultz@gmail.com. phone (uk) 07733096571
Brighton can lay claim to being a big part of the birth of Skinheads. During the Mods and Rockers battles of the 1960’s when London lads would descend on the South Coast for bank holidays to Peacock and cause ‘Bovver’ the term Skinhead was born, to describe the short haired Mods.
Becoming probably the biggest and longest standing of all the youth fashion subcultures, Skinhead has matured and now become a worldwide community. Distinctly recognized by almost military shaven head, boots and braces. The real skinhead is a working class product of the British council estate ‘salt of the earth character’ fiercely proud of his identity,with an obsession for clothing, style and music, equaled only with his love of beer.
On the first weekend of every June, since 2011, Brighton has seen an ever increasing number of Skinheads and their lovely Skinhead Girls invade Brighton. Boots, Braces, pristine clothing and a cheeky smile. Attracting scene members from right across the globe, to Madeira Drive, overlooking the beach. A full three days of Skinhead related entertainment is laid on. DJ’s playing hyper rare vinyl, from the early days of Jamaican Ska, through to modern day Street Punk and Oi. Live bands hit the stage of the Volks bar each night. With various aftershows happening until the early hours, to keep the party buzzing.
Acts appearing so far booked
Peter and The Test Tube Babies
Make no mistake! Peter And The Test Tube babies have written some of the best punk songs ever. In the early ’80s they stood out, above all other bands to emerge, with their tales of the hazards of being young punks in Brighton – “Banned From The Pubs”, “Intensive care”, “Run Like hell”, the list goes on…all had the Test Tubes hallmark, combining personal experiences, real cool tunes and, most important of all, maintaining a great sense of humour.
At the time, their gigs were fun filled events with electrifying tunes and plenty of entertainment. Harmless humour of those early gigs was captured on their debut album, “Pissed And Proud“. From those early gems, the Test Tubes just got better and better. The next crop of songs, “Jinx”, “Blown Out Again” and “September” all featured on “The Mating Sounds Of South American Frogs“, which stayed at number one for four months at the top of the independent charts. A US tour followed, climaxing with a 4,000 capacity sell out show at the Los Angeles Olympic Auditorium.
The mid ’90s saw the release of “Supermodels” and the departure from the band of Trapper and Ogs (bass and drums), excellent musicians. The band brought in fresh blood, the young and dynamic Rum and AD on bass and drums respectively. To promote the Supermodels album the band then went on a 25 date tour of Germany, Holland and Switzerland.
On their 20th anniversary in 1998 the band flew to Germany to record the “Alien Pubduction” album, their first with AD and Rum. The band also undertook a massive US and Canadian tour that lasted five weeks, lots of UK gigs and of course the annual German Christmas tour.
Rum quit in 1999 due to the punishing tour schedule. Paul ‘H’ Henrickson, known to the band and a Brighton stalwart, took over on bass. The band hit the road with renewed vigour touring repeatedly throughout the UK, Germany, Ireland, USA, France and making an impact on the summer festival circuits. Early in 2001, after years of taking punk to the masses, the pressure took its toll and A.D. left the band. Harp playing Christophe from Paris took over on the drums, beating other hopefuls to the job in hard fought auditions. The band were soon back on the road touring all over the world including a visit to The Shetland Islands!
Drums rolled again in 2003 as Christophe yielded the role to Dave ‘Caveman Dave’ O’Brien. Christophe joined Peter and Del in the studio to aid with their creation of vibrant Test Tube material for the twenty first century.
In 2005, after a seven year hiatus, the band released “A Foot Full of Bullets“, recorded at Ford Lane Studios, Ford, West Sussex. The album was definitely worth the long wait demonstrating a familiar core sound matched with smart self assurance gained from decades of experience. Storming on with characteristic vigour, the Test Tubes gained praise as “the best band of the weekend” (Lars Friedrickson) at the WASTED festival before closing the year with the annual German Xmas Tour 2005.
A remix of “A Foot Full of Bullets” was produced with contributions from Campino (Die Toten Hosen) and Olga (The Toy Dolls) at the start of 2006. “For a Few Bullets More” was released in August. Not long after, web master Dr Nigel announced he was bowing out of the band’s website after years of valued service. The band are all indebted to Nigel and wish him all the best. Creating a new web presence took the band through to the next big tour date…The band flew down under in September to play Australia and New Zealand for the first time.
The Test Tubes remain one of the best punk bands to come out of Europe. Appearing on the first Oi! albums in the early 80’s, The Test tubes have remained a favourite for many of us, ever since. See them live at the Great Skinhead Reunion
The Rough Kutz where formed by Hazza (Hammond organ), Brigga (vocals) and Rat (guitar) in 1994. The band changed the band line-up over the years, the current line-up consists of four other members; Mucka (vocals), Tony (bass), Sean (lead guitar) and yatesy(drums). The first studio album, A Bit O’ Rough was released in 1998 on Antwerp-based ska label Skanky ‘Lil Records. After this release the band began touring Europe. They released second album Welcome to our World in 2002 and, in 2006, followed with Another Week Another War. On this album Roddy Radiation from The Specials played guest lead guitar.[1] In 2006, they also performed a European tour with Radiation on guitar.in 2010 the Rough Kutz released their fourth album gangsters playground on Rk records.in 2012 the Rough Kutz recorded a version of the specials song Rude Boys Outa Jail, for the specialized charity album in aid of the teenage cancer trust.they performed live at the cd launch gig in the home of Two tone records, Coventry.
The Crack. Although they are best remembered as being members of the Oi! punk movement, the Crack were actually closer to the musical stylings of punk popsters 999 and mod rockers the Chords than any of their Oi! brethren (the Business, Cockney Rejects, etc.). On the musical scene since 1982, often compared to Slade, in their musical sound. They won a national televised battle of the bands, probably one of the only skinhead bands to have gained any positive recognition on British Televisions history. the Crack didn’t release this debut album until 1989. Like many bands of the era, as the main skinhead culture nose dived in the UK. The Crack, together with Argy Bargy and Cock Sparrer fought the hard times in Europe, to bridge the gap, and keep the flame burning, taking Skinhead and Oi music worldwide.
Franky Flame. A legend of the Skinhead culture. Franky will be there for his one man Cockney Joanna ‘Pie n Mash’ knees up
In the scene for many years,with his band superyob, Franky plays a traditional london dancehall version of oi tunes, making a great sing a long, beer filled malarkey
For a long time now Aarhus has been Denmarks Oi! capitol and Last Seen Laughing is another band in that tradition, which we are proud to belong to!
Last Seen Laughing is a 3 piece band, with members who all come from OI/Punk/Hardcore musical backgrounds. We’ve all played in various bands over the last approx. 20-30 years. We have played together about 4 years and had our debut in our hometown of Aarhus, Denmark in Dec. 2008.
The Line-up is:
Steen – Bass, Chorus : Frontman, leadsinger & guitarist in legendary Danish punk band The Zero Point still goin’ strong since 1979. Drummer in Hardcore outfit War of Destruction.
JP – Drums, Chorus : Drummer in Oi! band The Hoolies. Singer in Oi! Band The Outfit. Drummer in 80’s punk band Dayli Kaos and 90’s punk band deFuldeprofeter (The Drunken Prophets).
Kres – Guitar, leadvocal : Guitarplayer in 90’s Hardcore band Toe Tag, bassplayer in 90’s Hardcore band Tiny Toons. Guitar in 90’s punk band deFuldeprofeter and Guitar in The Hoolies and The Outfit.
After The Outfit decided to call it a day, Kres as being the main idea holder of the band, had tons of unused material, decided to start on his own along with brother JP on Bass. Back then we called ourselves The Jutland Muster. Jutland being the part of Denmark where we live. After about 8 months JP couldn’t find the extra time to play music, but Kres kept on with various bass players and drummers (very hard to find musicians that want to play or know oi music in Denmark). It was always kept as a 3 piece band to keep it minimalistic, aggressive and tight. After approx. 2 years of practicing and creating songs JP decided to join back in and took over the drums. 3 months later in late 2008 we hi-jacked Steen to play bass and Last Seen Laughing was born.
In late 2009 we went into the studio to record a demo with 3-4 songs, but ended up with recording 9 songs! We sent out the material to different labels and negotiated with especially one of them. Things dragged on and time went by and we played more and more shows both at home and abroad, and we kept on writing more material until we by the end of 2010 was ready to hit the studio again. This time we recorded 5 songs. 1 song was for a local comp which hasen’t been released yet and the 4 remaining songs was together with the 9 previously recorded songs was going to be our debut album. Suddenly we were contacted by Randale Records in Germany, who had received our 9 song cd earlier, and they wanted to do an album with us. We seized the opportunity and accepted their offer after a bit of negotiating with both them and the other label we had talked to earlier. That resulted in our debut album being released in June 2011. The vast majority of people who have heard it are very pleased with it and reviews of the album are all in all very positive.
Then later that year we landed ourselves a part of a christmas comp. That song brought about the idea of a split christmas Ep together with fellow hometown band The Guv’nors. It’s a picture Ep in the shape of a christmas tree. It has to be the ugliest record you’ve ever seen!!!
We recorded material for the next album & an EP in 2012. The EP containing a teaser from the new album and a song that’s solely on this release. It was available from Randale Records on dec. 20’th 2012. It sparked the interest for the new album to come and the response was really good. The plan was that the new album should be released a couple of months later but due to circumstances it was delayed untill October 2013. The titel of our second album is “As true as it gets” and it’s also released by Randale Records. The impact of this album has really lifted the band to a new level and made our name more well known.
Last Seen Laughing is inspirered by the second wave of Oi! from the 80’s as well as the Oi! Revival of the 90’s. We take bits and pieces from many different bands and mix it into our own sound. The style is aggressive, minimalistic and catchy! Last Seen Laughing has already made quite an impact on the scene in Denmark especially with the song ”Tæsk” (translates Beating or more precise ”to get your head kicked in”), which is somewhat of a hit or anthem in the underground. These last couple of years has also seen a very fast growing interest for Last Seen Laughing from abroad and we’ve already been to England, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands and Germany to play gigs. So far Last Seen Laughing has played a lot of concerts in Europe and we still have more to come. The future for Last Seen Laughing looks remarkably bright if you look upon the bands history so far!
A new young band from The heart of Ireland. The amazing vocal talents of female vocalist, Shannon Doyle, Playing their own original Reggae /Ska songs. already kicking up a storm, right across the ska scene in Ireland and the UK. We are very excited to see what they can pull off infront of a full house of skinhead veterans, at Brighton.
Gerry Lane (Guitar),
Ciaran White(Drums)
Alan Daly (Bass)
Robbie Collins: Trumpet
Andy Mullan: Saxophone.
Skinheads from across the pond, Minneapolis, USA
Degeneration is Oi! with a capital “O!” These boys have been having a laugh and having their say for 20 years. The band formed in 1994 in Minneapolis, where the music scene was not to favorable for a bunch of skins to be shining out. But they carried on, despite the negative press skinheads were having at the time. The band storms the stage and play unrelenting music, with scorching guitars, heavy bass, and growling vocals. They know what they what needs to be done and then proceed to get it done.
The boys released their first single “Blind.” in 96. They played hundreds of gigs and then put out “Oi! For the Kids”, where they had their first success. They quickly followed that up with a new drummer, who’s still here today, and 2 more 7”s. “Boots and Braces-Studs & Chains” and the “Young Life EP”. Going from strength to strength, they put out their first cd “Carry The Torch”.
Moving forward, always staying true to their Oi! roots the band, continued on. They recorded a few songs for compilations, and things slowed down. They stepped away from the stage and raised some families. Never forgetting the music they love, they knew it was time to let the world know that they were still standing tall!
Their new LP “Standing Tall” will be released on 11/11/15 and they will be coming to Europe for the first time to play both old and new songs. What a better place for a bunch of skinheads to hear them then at the Great Skinhead Reunion!
Degeneration is
Jason is Lead GuitarGreg on DrumsPhil “Ox” on BassMe VocalsChris “Joker” Rhythm GuitarOi OI Music
SKAbretta, is a 6 piece band that takes you through the years of SKA and Reggae from the early Blue Beat sounds of Prince Buster to the 80’s revival, covering everything in between. Created in mid 2012 they have quickly become a local favourite as there blend of old and new styles caters for every taste whether your in to 2-tone or the more traditional Trojan groove you are in for a night to remember.
In less then a year Skabretta have gone from playing local boozers and clubs to playing venues such as the 12 bar Club in Denmark Street, Folkstone SKAfest and the iconic 100 Club on Oxford Street. With a packed diary and gigs coming in up and down the country, they will be coming to a town near you soon.
Our DJ’s are selected like a fine wine, from around the world of skinheads. Each DJ has a strong history. They all come and play the best music you are ever likely to hear, and most run their own nights elsewhere. so please support these guys and girls, who are the backbone, of the Skinhead Reunion and the scene overall
Gary Olas, The Upsetter
Olas has been hosting our Friday nights since the first Reunion.Old school vinyl sound system playing the best in all types of reggae with gigs all over the world. This is also runs the OLAS BOSS REGGAE RADIO SHOW. Twice a week OLAS BOSS does two internet radio shows, Wednesday at 7pm until 9pm playing the very best in roots and dub reggae across all time dates. The later Wednesday, from 9pm till midnight, show is boss reggae/rocksteady/ska – two tone at ten for fifteen minutes – then at 11pm, the world famous Dabble Under the Duvet. An hour of the finest old school lovers rock. All genres of reggae are covered over the two shows. You can also listen again at any time. the radio site iswww.channelradio.co.uk. OLAS BOSS REGGAE RADIO SHOW.
Barry ‘Bmore Mcvowty’
From the Wycombe skinheads, been active in the skinhead scene since 1979. One of the very best DJ’s, with a wide knowledge of eclectic music. Dont miss Bmore performing as he spins. And dont be surprised with what hits the decks, Bmore plays from the soul!
Skavoovie
SkavooVie! .. Infectious SKA Beats and Killer Diller Rocksteady rhythms. WHERE? Currently enjoying a monthly residency at Upstairs at the Mez, 4th Saturday of the month. Serious SKA choons on original 45’s from the vinyl vaults of Blue Beat, Studio One, Dr. Bird, Top Deck, Treasure Isle and many more…Scorchers!!!
A regular and key player in Brighton, with a record collection, most DJ’s would die for.
Weekend tickets are available at www.subcultz.com
Lee Evans. Has been around the London scene, longer than red buses. From the Wycombe Skinheads, Lee was a well known face DJ’ing around London in the 80’s with bands like the Riffs and Hotknives, Desmond Dekker and Laural Aitkin shows, to his credit. Now running regular DRC nights
Martin Long..I’d like to welcome Martin Long from Portsmouth, to our list of guest DJ’s at the Great Skinhead Reunion 5. Martin has been a long term skinhead and very active in the skinhead and scooter scene for many years, and its a pleasure to have him play for us in 2015
Rob ‘Double Barrell’ Powell. Is active on the London circuit and Carnaby Street skins, and Elephants head meet ups of the modern day. And his only fools and scooters events. Playing a cross section of skinhead related tunes
Fuxy AKA The Hungarian’s Boss Sounds
Active on the Dublin scene, Live and direct from Hungary.
Playing, punk, Oi! and Boss sounds
Skashack Toast, will be back in residence for 2015, playing his saturday setS
Feckin Ejits Album. The first 100 people to order,and pay for their copy, can send their photo and have your image, a friends, old or new, put onto the sleeve. to be forever enshrined with the Feckin Ejits. Probably the greatest band of the 1980’s, that never made it to vinyl. (the pub got in the way of the giro) place your order now. Due for release by Subcultz in the Spring 2015, with a world tour in the offing. OTFH
A Malaysian fan gesturing at a live band performance during a skinhead meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Hundreds of people turn up to watch skinhead bands from Japan and Thailand performing live at the two-day event. – AFP pic, January 18, 2015.Asian “skinheads” converged in Kuala Lumpur over the weekend for two days of full on Oi music
shaven headed, tattoo-covered torsos, boots and braces, the roughly 200 skinheads from Japan, Thailand and Malaysia gathered to spread their anti-racism, anti-drugs credo.
The event was organised by the Malaysian chapter of SHARP – Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice – a group that first emerged in the United States in the 1980’s, as a reaction to the overkill media version of Skinhead equals Ku Klux klan, White Supremacist.
Bob Panjang, one of the SHARP organisers, said it was the first time such a gathering had been held in Muslim-majority Malaysia. “We are not the Nazi skinhead groups that are racists. We don’t promote Malay power in Malaysia,” he said, referring to the country’s ethnic majority group.
“We promote the spirit of brotherhood. We oppose racism and we have Chinese and Indians in our group.”
Religious authorities today condemned the event, saying the skinheads’ tight, torn jeans and leather jackets project a bad image for youths, despite SHARP’s “good message”.
However, authorities have so far done nothing to stop the festival, held at a converted shophouse venue called “Fire House”, which was plastered with slogans denouncing racism and drug use.
The skinhead movement first emerged among working class youths in Britain in the 1960s, an offshoot of the Mods. But in the 1970’s picked up a political edge, as Britain fell from power, Huge unemployment, and civil unrest. To some a fashion, but to others, a way to project anti-establishment, anti-hippy sentiment,
However, the movement’s spread overseas was accompanied by a splintering in core values, with neo-Nazi elements becoming notorious for their violence against racial minorities in Europe, sparking a push-back by anti-racist skinhead groups.
Malaysia has tiny communities of relatively tame skinheads, rockers and other Western-inspired subcultures, which are frowned upon by Islamic authorities.
Panjang said SHARP has about 2,000 adherents in Malaysia, including “skinhead girls”. The group also opposes sexual violence.
“I joined the skinheads because I am attracted by its brotherhood and the fashionable outfits we wear,” he said.
Pictured here, is an image of the opposing side. Malay power, too some, might seem quite a contradiction, when the media version of racist’s are pictured as white skinned. Could be just ‘Punk Rock Fashion’, But disenfranchised people, from whatever race they belong, will react, rebel and possibly blame another race of people, for their situation.
The concerts featured live bands from Japan, Thailand and Malaysia playing music by late Jamaican star Desmond Dekker, an earlier pioneer of reggae and ska, as well as music from the “Oi!” skinhead subculture, and the Skatalites, – AFP, January 18, 2015.
Here at subcultz. We think it just shows the reach the skinhead culture has, across the planet. Who would have thought, when the British media and authorities were crushing us, branding and slandering the British working class kids, that it would be alive and kicking in Malaysia 30 years later. That is a surely a two fingered salute to the middle class media, if anything is.
Erin Donnachie: Erin’s interest in Music started at a young age learning piano and later singing in choirs and jazz bands. It was when she was approached by Gianluca and Gavin to join their band that she adapted to becoming a strong rock vocalist.
Gavin Williams: Gavin picked up a guitar at 17 years old after idolizing legends such as Slash and Black Sabbath since he was quite young and formed a band with his best friend Gianluca before forming Life on Standby.
Gianluca Demelas: Gianluca asked for a drum kit for his Christmas after seeing a friend learn drums and dreamt of being like John Bonham. Through school Gianluca jammed with Gavin and the two soon formed a band which became Life on Standby.
Liam Walker: Liam (originally a guitarist) has an interest in blues and John Mayer. Liam joined Life on Standby as the band’s bassist while he was still in school.
Biography of Life on Standby:
Life on Standby is an Alternative Electronic Rock band who formed in Greenock, Scotland in 2011. Since their formation, the four piece have released two EP’s ‘Set the Sail’ and ‘Masquerade’ as well as 3 singles. However since the release of ‘Masquerade’ the band have climbed up the ranks of the Scottish live music circuit from playing the Glasgow O2 Academy and Garage Main Stages to Headlining King Tuts Wah Wah Hut and sold out Oran Mor. 2014 has been a big year for the band, being invited to perform with bands such as Marmozets and The Hype Theory, Life on Standby were invited down to the Red Bull Studios in London to record a live track and video while observed by Alternative break through band Don Broco, which ultimately led to their first ever performance on English soil at Download Festival followed by a very successful first UK tour. Life on Standby are now looking forward to releasing their debut album in March 2015.
Live Shows and Tours:
Past Venues: (2011-2012)
Garage Attic (Glasgow, Scotland) Garage G2 (Glasgow, Scotland) Word Up (Greenock, Scotland)
Oran Mor – Sold out Headline show (Glasgow, Scotland)
PJ Malloy’s (Dunfermline, Scotland) Download Festival 2014 (Donnington, England)
Recent UK Tour: (Oct 2014)
Green Room (Perth, Scotland) Eagle (Inverness, Scotland)
Nice N Sleazy (Glasgow, Scotland)
Lomax (Liverpool, England) Lounge 41 (Workington, England) the Victoria Inn (Derby, England)
Future Live Events: (2015)
Audio – Glasgow, Scotland: Fri 30th January
Lounge 41 – Workington, England: Sat 7th March
The Swan – Stranraer, Scotland: Fri 13th March
The Green Room – Perth: Sat 14th March
Fanny by Gaslight – Kilmarnock: Sun 15th March
Reviews:
“Incorporating snatches of electronica affords them an eclectic variation on their hard-chugging, contemporary sound, with front woman Erin Donnachie’s spirited performance lending them a streak of punk edge” – Jay Richardson, The Scotsman.
“One of the best unsigned Alternative Electronic bands in Scotland” – Daily Mail.
“Definitely a band to look out for” – Duncan Gray, Triple G Music.
“Life on Standby were the standout act of the night, such a mass of raw energy and emotion” – Underground Uncovered.
“One could perhaps argue that Greenock’s Life on Standby don’t fit the usual mould of a Download Festival band, but don’t be fooled by their electronic leanings. Behind the synths and front woman Erin’s soothing vocals lays a body of eclectic, crunching riffs that will shake off any Sunday hangover.” – Daily Dischord
“SINCE forming in 2011, Life on Standby has emerged as one of Scotland’s best unsigned alternative electronic bands.” – Evening Times.
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