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One dead, six others injured in south Minneapolis shooting at Punk show USA

One dead, six others injured in south Minneapolis shooting

MINNEAPOLIS — One person was killed and six others were injured in a shooting in south Minneapolis Friday evening.The victim, who was in their 30s, died at the scene of the 2200 block of 16th Avenue South, Minneapolis Police say. Five others with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds were taken to the hospital, and one other person who was shot took themselves to the hospital.Police say they were all the backyard of the house when the shooting happened around 10:15 p.m. Two suspects walked up the alley and at least one of them started shooting into the backyard, police say. The suspects then ran away through the alley. In all, police say they recovered 10 casings from the scene.MORE: Minneapolis music community mourning after mass shooting that killed 1, injured 6Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he believed at least one person was targeted.

This video of  previous show. DIY punk at the Nudieland club

Five of the people who were injured had graze wounds, O’Hara said at a press conference Saturday afternoon. One person required surgery.No one is in custody, and the investigation is ongoing.Victim identified

Man shot at Minneapolis punk show was talented songwriter, dedicated friend

A friend and bandmate said August Golden died in a shooting Friday at the punk venue Nudieland in south Minneapolis.

A Friday night house party in south Minneapolis was double cause for a big celebration. A band was playing numbers from its new recording. Another person was having a birthday.

But the good times at the punk venue Nudieland abruptly ended about 10:15 p.m. when gunmen fired into a crowd of people assembled in the backyard of the house on the 2200 block of 16th Avenue S.

Multiple people were injured, police said. One man died. Two suspects seen running away on foot were still at large on Sunday afternoon, police said.

Authorities have not released the name of the man who died in the shooting. But on Sunday, Bryan May said he is still coming to terms that his best friend and bandmate August Golden, 35, was killed.

“He was one of my favorite songwriters,” said May, who played with Golden in the Minneapolis punk band Scrounger. “Talented.”

May met Golden over a decade ago when they both lived in Santa Cruz, Calif. May moved into a house where Golden and 30 other people were living. The two hit it off immediately, May said.

“He was one of the most inviting people,” May said.

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The Jam 1982

‘The Jam 1982,’ Co-Written By Drummer Rick Buckler, Due From Omnibus Press

The book, by Buckler and Zoë Howe, is the eye-witness account of the band’s epic last year together.

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The Jam in 1982. Photo: FG/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images
The Jam in 1982. Photo: FG/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images

Rick Buckler, former drummer with The Jam, will have a new history of the band’s final year published by Omnibus Press on November 17.

Shop the best of The Jam’s discography on vinyl.

The Jam 1982 is written by Buckler and Zoë Howe and, in full color, glossy format, tells the eye-witness account of the band’s epic last year together, featuring previously unseen images from Buckler’s own collection. A strictly limited edition, signed hardback of the volume, including an exclusive print, will be available on the same day, and can be pre-ordered here.

The book also includes contributions from key members of those in and around the ever-influential band at the time, including DJ Gary Crowley, producer Peter Wilson, A&R manager Dennis Munday, photographer Neil “Twink” Tinning, Jennie Matthias (the member of chart group the Belle Stars who sang on “The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow”), and touring musicians Jamie Telford and Steve Nichol. Other friends and acolytes sharing their tales of 1982 include Eddie Piller, Paolo Hewitt, and Mat Osman.

Beat Surrender

 

“From the moment I teamed up with Paul [Weller] at school to start a band, everything else became secondary,” says Buckler. “We started out as a three piece with Steve Brookes on lead guitar and vocals, Paul on his prized Hofner violin bass and backing vocals, and myself on drums. We also had a name – not a very good name we thought – but it would do until we thought of a better one: The Jam. Dave Waller joined on rhythm guitar, learning to play on the way.

“Rehearsing in Paul’s bedroom,” he continues, “we got together a set of sixties covers and put on an hour of music as we worked towards our first gigs in Sheerwater Youth Club, county fairs, and anywhere around the Woking area we could secure a booking. Dave soon dropped out and in the meantime we continued to go out as a three piece, improving our set and adding in some rather dodgy self-penned love songs along the way.”

Bucker concludes: “Forty years after the split of The Jam, the real inside story hasn’t been fully told. The Jam still means a great deal to me and to so many others. I have always thought it was a great shame that we did not take it as far as we should.”

There’s been quite a few books written about The Jam, who still hold a huge fanbase world wide. Most mod and scooter events will have covers bands and memorabilia, why not get this book to add to your collection.

Available at various outlets
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Fred Perry 70 years old

The first Fred Perry Shirt was worn in 1952 – an all-white shirt with a Laurel Wreath on the left side. A simple shirt with a lot of meaning. In a matter of years, the shirt had become a uniform for British youth and a highly treasured piece of clothing. “A heritage British style. Smart, but functional. If someone is wearing one you know they’ve spent a bit of money on themselves.” (Peyvand Sadeghian).

For many, getting their first shirt was a moment to remember. Some had to wait and save weekend after weekend of pocket money for a shirt that would become a closet staple, “It wasn’t until I was about 21 I think. I got bought one for my birthday and we made a thing of it by going to the Covent Garden shop to pick one out. To be honest it was the first and only one I had for a long time!” (Peyvand Sadeghian).

The pilgrimage to a central London shop or market with the freshest stock is as memorable for many as trying on the shirt for the first time. “I bought my first Fred Perry polo shirt in 1978, from a sports clothing store in Oxford street. At the time relatively exclusive and difficult to obtain, and a treasured item of clothing.” (Ed Silvester).

That first shirt would be worn over and over, an effortless cool ready to take on anything and look good while doing it. “I wore my Fred Perry’s until they were so worn that I pulled the entire collar off while taking it off the last time I wore it. It was only then that I really understood how much it had meant and what it had done for me. What adventures we had been on.” (Barrymore George)

Over a decade on from the original white shirt Fred Perry introduced ‘Twin Tipping’ around the collar along with new colourways. These additions allowed for more self-expression across scenes and ages. “During the mod revival years we religiously wore different coloured Fred Perry polo shirts and V-neck jumpers. I still love wearing Fred Perry polo shirts to this day, updating them every few years.” (Ed Silvester)

“Wearing my Fred Perry lifted me everytime I put them on. Like a cloth coat of armour they gave me security and a sense of belonging. They felt close and snug and warm and safe.” (Barrymore George)

Mods, Skinheads, Rude Boys and Ravers had their differences, but all were connected by being made up of working-class youths. Fashion has always been a presentation of our class place in society and the kids of the later 20th century were ready to rebel against classical ideas of clothing through subverting classic shirts like the smart polo to their own more rough and ready styles. “It’s a uniform that unites the working class and music scenes of these periods. It’s sharp and comfortable at the same time. It’s also the opposite of fast fashion and fads. It embodies strong and traditional values that are here to stay. It’s legendary.” (Catherine Laz)

Youth culture fashion has become synonymous with ripping clothes up, bleach splatters and patches, matching all of this with a crisp and clean shirt makes a statement about how deliberate your choices are, that you know you can be smart or scruffy and you know how to demand attention either way. “We used to wear them with Sta-press trousers and thin braces and DMs. Bleached jeans were fashionable at one point with skinheads, where you bleached patches on your jeans yourself. We would also wear them with pencil skirts and a jacket, with fishnet tights and brogues.” (Catherine Laz)

A Fred Perry Shirt is an iconic piece of British clothing and heritage. It has a cultural significance that young people have found fitting to represent their own journeys for status and respect, while finding unionship in those that wear it. “Fred Perry represents a long standing British and much-loved subculture clothing brand, being a constant thread winding its way through my sporting and cultural life.” (Ed Silvester).

Barrymore George

I got my first Fred Perry in 1980. In fact, I got two that day along with my first set of nice Sta Press trousers in navy blue and a red Harington jacket. One shirt was black with a yellow trim and the other was burgundy with blue trim – both had three buttons.

I got home and immediately changed into everything and the 12-year-old me set off and glided proudly up my estate road to see my mates all kicking ball in a dusty grassless field.

The game stopped for a tiny second while they gazed open mouthed and said ‘wow.’ It was just for a second but that was enough, it truly was, because my boys never ever interrupted a game of football but for me that day they did. I never looked or felt the same again.

Catherine Laz

It was the summer of 1982 on the balcony of our bedsit in Swiss Cottage. My sister is on the left and I am on the right, wearing a blue Fred Perry shirt with sky blue stripes. I had the classic bleached blond crop hair and feathers skinhead girls used to have.

We spent our days hanging around Carnaby Street and Leicester Square, the King’s Road on Saturdays, shopping at The Last Resort on Sundays (where the polo was from), and our nights going to punk/mod/skinhead gigs all over London.

We had a great time because we believed we were the centre of the world. And that is what wearing a Fred Perry shirt meant, people instantly knew you were an important part of youth culture.

Peyvand Sadeghian

This was taken in Archway, North London, at I think a Punk/Oi all dayer upstairs at the Boston Arms in the early 2000s. I can’t remember what bands were playing that day.

The photo was snapped on a lil digital camera by Chris Low who I didn’t actually know at the time although we crossed paths again years later and became mates. In trying to figure out if we’d met before he realised he had this photo!

Ed Silvester

This photo was taken in the summer of 1979, in my friend Alan Smith’s bedroom in Epping. We used to hang out there, to catch up, listen to music and talk about the next bands to see.

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Ron Watts Wycombe Punk Rock promoter legend remembered

Ron Watts – 1942 to 2016
(Obituary researched and written by Paul Lewis – First published 16th July 2016)
Ron Watts in the green room at The Nags Head High WycombeLegendary music promoter Ron Watts passed away on 20th June 2016, aged 73, following a long illness. Watt’s spent much of his life living and working in High Wycombe and brought world wide fame to The Nag’s Head, a former HQ of the Wanderers.

Watts is best known for his involvement in the rise of the punk scene in 1976 and 1977, promoting gigs at the famous Nag’s Head venue in High Wycombe, in addition to the legendary 100 Club venue in Oxford Street, London. However, it be an would be an insult to his legacy to leave unmentioned his part in bringing top Blues acts to venues in the UK during the late 1960’s and beyond, plus his front man role in legendary Cajun Blues band, Brewer’s Droop.

Watts, born in wartime Slough in 1942, schooled at Langley Grammar School but had moved to High Wycombe with his family by his later teenage years. His love for music came from an early age – his initial taste was jazz but he soon got into the Blues, buying his first single in 1957 when he picked up a 78 rpm version of Chuck Berry’s School Days.

After passing his A Levels he worked at Midland Bank, High Wycombe and used some of his wages to attend R&B gigs in London – taking in early performances from Alexis Korner and Charlie Watts and mixing with the likes of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, well before they had become household names.

In his 2006 autobiography, ‘100 Watts, A Life in Music’ he recalled that High Wycombe at the time was ‘terminally uncool’, although he attended gigs at the Town Hall, plus jazz evenings at Court Gardens, Marlow. Watts also got the bug for live performing following an impromptu singalong during an R&B gig in West Wycombe featuring John Mayall.

He married for the first time in 1962 – tying the knot at Terriers Church before moving into a flat in Farnham Road, Slough with his wife Pauline. The couple had a daughter Terri shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, his work life took him to the Mars factory in Slough. It was in his early 20’s that he saw The Beatles take the stage in Slough, while his love for live music saw him help out at The Star and Garter pub in Windsor.

Having split from his wife in early 1966, Watts first ventured into music promoting in the summer of 1967 when he put on a show at Farnham Village Hall. Another gig in January 1968 at High Wycombe Town Hall would prove another significant step in his musical career. Watts would take to the stage again to sing with Wind of Change but the news got back to his employees at Mars and he was given the ultimatum on whether to quit his job or quit his on stage antics. To his employees surprise he chose the former and his serious promoting days were about to begin.

Within weeks of handing in his notice at Mars he had arranged his first concert promotion – an R&B night in the upstairs room at The White Hart pub in White Hart Street, High Wycombe. He would dub the venue ‘The Blues Loft’ – a title that would travel with Watts over the years ahead. Shakey Vick would be one of the first acts he would promote at The White Hart, along with Jack Dupree.

The impending demolition of The White Hart forced a brief spell of gigs at Ye Exchange, also in High Wycombe, but it was when he found The Nag’s Head on the London Road that he knew he had the venue he craved for – a relatively small (300 ish capacity) upstairs venue with its own bar.

His first gig there came in March 1968 and his Blues nights quickly gained in popularity. He would bring in the legendary John Lee Hooker to the Nag’s Head at a cost of £125. With tickets set at just 7/6 (37 ½ p), it was a risk that paid off. Other names that followed, included Howlin’ Wolf, plus in May 1968, an early live appearance for Jethro Tull – six months before their debut album had hit the top ten of the charts.

Status Quo and Thin Lizzy also performed for Watts at the Nag’s Head as the 1960’s drew to a close, while Marc Bolan, playing in the then folky Tyrannosaurus Rex, was another name that would become household during the 1970’s and as they became Glam Rock monsters T.Rex.

Despite moving to London in September 1968, the following years saw Watts continue his association with the Nag’s Head, although his attention was now the formation of the National Blues Federation (NBF), along with Chris Trimming. The pair also took on the ‘quiet’ Tuesday night slot at The 100 Club, quickly gaining high regard in the Blues world and seeing BB King take the stage one evening for a jam session.

Then in 1969, another impromptu singing performance, this time during a Blues Festival on Wycombe Rye, proved the catalyst for Watts to make the decision to form a band of his own.

Ron Watts - the early days - including time with Brewers Droop

Brewer’s Droop were formed and played a mixture of Blues R&B and Cajun (swinging jazz). Watts took on the role of lead vocalist, while other band members included Steve Darrington (pianist), John McKay (guitar), Malcom Barrett (bass) and Bob Walker (drums). Brewer’s Droop played almost 300 gigs in 1970 and close to 1,000 in the following four years the band were on the road – sometimes playing three shows in a day. Record company interest grew and an album ‘Opening Time’ was released on RCA in the summer of 1972. The album cover featured a picture of the band standing outside The Antelope pub in High Wycombe town centre – a regular drinking and performing haunt for the band. A single followed called ‘Sweet Thing’ and just failed to make the top 50.

With Brewer’s Droop regularly on tour and Trimming offered other opportunities in the music industry, the NBF folded. However, despite his busy schedule, in April 1970, Watts promoted an early Mott The Hoople gig at The Nag’s Head, while he kept connections with the London Road venue by using the ‘Blues Loft’ for rehearsals with ‘The Droop’.

An eager Watts also started promoting gigs at High Wycombe Town Hall, initially assisting the Broom & Wade apprentice association with a Savoy Brown and Wild Angels gig. Elsewhere, he would keep in touch with the local scene by helping to promote gigs at the newly opened Twylight Club – described by Watts as a ‘concrete bunker’ – under a new flyover built in High Wycombe around 1969.

Meanwhile, back at the 100 Club, a highlight for Watts was putting on Muddy Waters in May 1972. A visitor to ‘in crowd’ at the time also included a young American student called Bill Clinton. Watts recalled in his autobiography: “He swore to me he was going to be President of America one day. He had the biggest beard you have ever seen. He was a good kid, bucket loads of charisma.” Colonel Gaddafi, as a younger man, was another regular at the ‘Blues Loft’ and the 100 Club. Watts said: “We had a couple of drinks and he seemed like a good bloke. He said he was planning to ‘go into politics’ when he returned to Libya.”

Watts married again in February 1973, wedding Maureen at Priory Road Methodist Chapel in High Wycombe. The couple had first met around late 1968 when she had interviewed Watts for a Bucks Free Press article.

A second Brewer’s Droop album was recorded in late 1973 that included the relatively unknown guitarist Mark Knopfler (later of Dire Straits) on some of the tracks. Produced by Dave Edmunds, it remained unreleased until 1989 when RCA released they had a potential seller on their hands and released it under the title of The Booze Brothers. Watts made no income after the rights had been sold off years earlier.

Brewers Droop split in 1974, leaving the way open for Watts to concentrate again on the promoting side. Now living in Lane End, he kept open his local connections with a short stint of gigs at The Crown, in Marlow. Meanwhile, he was now promoting 2 or 3 nights a week at The 100 Club as the mid 1970’s ‘pub rock’ scene began to break with the likes of Ian Dury’s Kilburn & The Highroads, Dr Feelgood, Eddie & The Hotrods and the 101 ers – the latter led by a youthful Joe Strummer.

However, with Watts starting to become bored of the live music scene, he took on a job with G.D. Searle in High Wycombe and dabbled again briefly with playing live again with the short lived Jive Bombers. Towards the end of 1975 Watts recalls that he saw an article in Rolling Stone magazine about the US ‘punk’ movement. It sparked an interest that would come to a head in the following months.

It was a chance viewing of a Sex Pistols gig on Friday 20th February 1976, at what was when then known as High Wycombe College of Higher Education, that changed his life dramatically. A 33 year old Watts was apparently at the Screaming Lord Sutch gig to see the college social secretary about a stripper he was booking for them. He popped his head into the gig to witness The Pistols creating chaos but was interested enough to think it would be worth putting on what he described as a ‘bunch of scruffs’.

Pistols Manager Malcolm McClaren would later seek out Watts at The 100 Club. McClaren said he wanted his band to play the Oxford Street venue. Watts, recalling his memories of the High Wycombe gig a few days before, agreed. The Pistols would appear for the first time at The 100 Club on Tuesday 30th March 1976. The eventful period in Watts’ life also saw the birth of his first son Stuart. The toddler would spend some of his early life being bounced on the knee of the punk rock bands.

The Pistols would appear a further 10 times at the 100 Club in 1976, including the famous Punk Festival held on 20 and 21 September 1976. Before then, on Thursday 2nd September 1976, Watts would bring the Pistols back to High Wycombe for an appearance at The Nags Head – a venue Watts was now back promoting gigs at.

Violence at the punk gigs at The 100 Club bought a ‘punk’ ban at the Oxford Street venue – the infamous Sid Vicious bottle throwing incident at the September 1976 ‘Punk Festival’ being the final straw. But London’s loss was High Wycombe’s gain as Watts brought the up and coming ‘punk’ bands to The Nag’s Head. Following the summer heatwave of 1976, Watts promoted gigs from the likes of the Stranglers, The Damned and The Clash – all before they had signed deal with major record labels.

Watts’ gigs at The Nags Head would play a significant part in the rise of ‘punk rock’ and also helped wake up the ‘terminally uncool’ High Wycombe to develop a punk movemenet of its own, putting on many local bands as support acts to the wave of artists that exploded onto the national music scene at the time. However, a brief foray into band management in 1976 with The Damned ended on a sour note when he objected to the band swearing at the paying punters, shouting from the back of the loft venue at The Nag’s Head, “Keep it up and I’ll fetch my shotgun. We’ll see how much of a punk you are then.”

Ron Watts - the punk days - including time with Brewers Droop

In 1977, UK ‘punk’ went viral. Watts continued to put bands on at the Nags, showcasing acts like The Jam, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Generation X, The Police, Tom Robinson Band, Elvis Costello and XTC – again, in many cases, before they had signed record deals. When some of the acts out grew the London Road venue, he complimented the Nags with the more central High Wycombe Town Hall. The Stiff Tour of 1977 played the opening night at The Town Hall in October 1977 featuring one of the first ever performances by Ian Dury and The Blockheads. That same month, Watt’s second child with Maureen, Marie Watts was born. However, the marriage would not last and they split up in 1979.

Regular gig promotions continued at The Town Hall through the late 1970’s until the cloud of violence (at a non-Watts promoted gig) resulted in a draconian council ban on ‘rock concerts’ in the summer of 1980. But gigs at The Nags carried on, with the regular Thursday rock nights including a performance from ‘Top Irish Rock Act’ U2 midway through 1980.

However, a culmination of the Council restrictions and a landlord unenthusiastic for live music, saw limited opportunities at The Nag’s Head leading to Watt’s adding the Alexander’s Disco at Cippenham to his CV of music venues. It would host an early outing for new romantics Spandau Ballet but it was not Watts’ scene to see bands more interested in their hair do’s than the music.

Now back living with his parents in Slough, Watt’s tried to save the flagging fortunes of the Nag’s Head by arranging music sessions in the downstairs bar. It was around this time that a 29 year old Tony Blair would visit the venue – the then Labour MP for the ‘safe’ Conservative seat of Beaconsfield.

Never one to shy from work, Watts started working as a Quality Engineer for British Plastics in Slough in order to boost his income from the now even more risky promoting business. Some gigs at The Nag’s would be packed while others would see just a handful in the audience. A residency by local favourite John Otway proved particularly popular. Elsewhere, Watt’s gave some of their first gigs to local uprising stars Howard Jones and Marillion. Southend Blues rock act The Hamsters, also played some of the debut gigs at The Nag’s and continued to return to the Wycombe area until their retirement in 2012.

Watts’ association with promoting gigs at The Town Hall eventually came to an end in the early to mid 1980’s after the local Council decided to seek out a sole promoter for the ageing venue. The aspirations of the Council never came to fruition and the venue was effectively lost from the live music circuit.

By this time Watts had returned to High Wycombe to work as a Quality Technician at Broom and Wades. He also lived on a house boat on the Thames, near Bourne End before the leaving the area completely, residing briefly in Ffestiniog, North Wales before a move to Tamworth, Staffordshire.

Some of his final gigs at The Nag’s Head saw performances by former Cream bassist Jack Bruce, cult early 1970’s psychedelic band, The Pink Fairies, plus several more reunion night’s with Brewer’s Droop. A 20th anniversary of his time at The Nag’s came in 1988 when Shakey Vick returned with his Blues Band for an evening that Watt’s described as a ‘great night’.

After being made redundant by Broom & Wade in May 1991, Watt’s finally severed all promoting ties with High Wycombe and moved on to team up with Jim Simpson with the running of the Birmingham International Jazz Festival. Watt’s continued to confirm his love of the Blues by promoting gigs at The Bear in Bearwood (three miles from the centre of Birmingham). Within two years it had built up a membership of 5,000. He was also heavily connected with the organisation of the Birmingham Blues Festival during August Bank Holiday 1992. Gigs continued at The Bear until the summer of 1994.

Realising that the live music scene was not going to make him a living, Watt’s finally settled in Tamworth working for TNT before fulfilling one of his dreams of retiring to the South Coast by moving to a village close to Weymouth, Dorset in 2008.

During the intervening years, Watt’s was occasionally asked of his musical history and turned back the clock to be a guest of honour at a Sex Pistols reunion gig in Brixton in 2007. A year earlier he published his autobiography, Hundred Watts – a life in music, revealing much of the detail of his musical history that would have otherwise been lost. His comments at the time still rang true at the time of his passing in 2016: “Technology has taken a lot of the fun out of gigs. Too many bands today think that they can sit in their bedrooms and do it all from there. They need to get out there like we did and shake their arse.”

For those who went to any of Ron’s gigs, you will remember that he never tucked himself away from the spotlight. At The Nag’s Head he would regularly sit at the top of the stairs, taking your small change for entrance and checking your membership card. At the Town Hall he would sometimes come out onto the front steps before letting in the punters, with a warning that he didn’t want any trouble at that evening’s gig.

And the final word goes to Ron, again from a 2006 interview where he reflected: “I have had a blessed life. I didn’t have any special talent, I was just in the right place at the right time. Things just kept landing at my doorstep. Every day was Christmas.”

Also see:
 Wanderers into the record books and the night Ron Watts first saw The S*x Pistols
 The Nags Head – former Wanderers HQ and legendary venue lost to developers
 Hundred Watts – a life in music – at Amazon.co.uk

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Mod Revival 1978

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Summer 1978 – England: Two years on, punk has exploded from its roots in grubby Sex Pistols gigs to shock exposés, hit singles, high street fashion and cartoon punks like Sham 69. It has lost its bite.

The Jam, part of punk’s first wave, also appeared to have lost their edge, but as the year wears on, they emerge with an album that is swiftly proclaimed as one of the decades finest.

Ska Beat Rudies T Shirt

 

The LP launches The Jam on a journey which makes them the UK’s most adored pop group.

The album was of course, All Mod Cons, which was smothered in the iconography of the 60’s cult which had so impacted on the young Paul Weller (pictured below right) three years earlier.

All Mod Cons is the third studio album by the British band The Jam, released in 1978 by Polydor Records. The title, a British idiom one might find in housing advertisements, is short for “all modern conveniences” and is a pun on the band’s association with the mod revival. The album reached No. 6 in the UK Albums Chart.

 

Soon a clutch of The Jam’s most loyal fans took to copying the band’s Mod dress sense; suits, button-down collared shirts, Fred Perry’s and short, neat hairstyles (such as the French Crew).

jam_010

By coincidence, probably the most influential Mod band from the original 60’s scene were in the process of making a film about the original teenage experience – based in their West London haunt of Shepherds Bush – through the eyes of a Mod.

The Who‘s Quadrophenia accurately re-enacted the spirit of Mod London and Brighton for a generation too young to remember.

News filters out, nostalgic epitaphs to Mod are published and by the time the film is launched a year later, that army of Jam fans grows into what will soon be labelled the Mod Revival . . .

Summer 1979 : The Sounds music paper has led the way in documenting a fresh clutch of bands dressing as Mods. Most of them are based around London/Essex with a sound that mixes The Jam’s new wave energy with 60’s melodies and choice Motown/Who/Small Faces cover versions.

One of their main haunts is a rough and ready pub in Canning Town, East London, called the Bridge House, which funds a live album taped on May 1st – Mods Mayday ’79. The album includes tracks by Secret AffairSquireSmall Hours, The Mods and Beggar. It is the first gathering of the tribes outside a Jam gig.

Meanwhile, Paul Weller stumbles across another regular haunt, the Duke Of Wellington at London Bridge, where he spots The Chords from South London – and invites them – and a leading Mod band from Essex, Romford’s  Purple Hearts – to support The Jam on tour.

By August, most of the revival’s leading players have been signed up. Ian Page is seen on BBC1’s Nationwide as the scene’s self-proclaimed spokesman while his band, Secret Affair are given their own label (along with Squire) called I-Spy, by Arista Records. Both had already supported The Jam.

The Jam’s former producer, Chris Parry, adds The Purple Hearts and Back To Zero to his Fiction roster of The Chords and the R&B fuelled Long Tall Shorty. The Chords link up with Polydor and Long Tall Shorty to Warners. By Autumn the Mod revival is in full swing.

lambrettas_782

The Merton Parkas break into the mainstream Top 40 (just) with You Need Wheels, followed by Secret Affair with the ultimate Mod revival anthem, Time For Action (followed by the Motown-styled Let Your Heart Dance, and the more serious My World).

The Purple Hearts and The Chords enjoy a string of minor hits while The Lambrettas (pictured at left), from Lewes, West Sussex, debut with the excellent Go Steady, before cracking the Top 10 with an old R&B favourite, The Coasters‘ Poison Ivy.

Fuelled by this and Quadrophenia – and running parallel to the Midlands’ 2 Tone Ska Revival – Mod filtered out of London right across the South and the Midlands, and, to a lesser extent, the North.

The revival would ultimately spread to include much of Europe, Australia and even (albeit to a lesser degree) to parts of the USA.

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The Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton Lineup June 6-7-8 June 2024

BUY TICKETS HERE

 

The Great Skinhead Reunion is a 4 day Festival. Including Pre Party beach BBQ on Brighton Beach England Celebrating British Subculture

Line up for 2024. Once again we have a fantastic line up of acts

 

 

 

Established in 2011 The Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton was designed to bring Skinhead back home to where it was born in the 1960´s When the Mods and Rockers came to Brighton and hit the headlines, establishing their own youth culture. From those early Mods came the Skinheads, who embraced the new music coming in from Jamaica known as Ska. The Jamaican immigrants to the UK mixing with British working class kids with style and attitude, to form a new youth culture.

The Great Skinhead Reunion poster

The second wave of Skinhead began to build in the mid 70´s with the birth of Punk Rock in 76, this time musically the Skinheads adopting the Punk rock sound and aggro of the football terraces, Working class bands forming and putting out their own angry antisocial messages in music, frightening the media into a frenzy of misinformation, who promoted the image of hyper violent bootboys and girls on the loose. This was a time of major political unrest in the UK and extremist groups tried to recruit within working class culture, often targeting Skinheads and football supporters, in the hope of win one, win them all pack mentality.

By 79 The skinheads were on the fightback and in London with bands like Madness and Badmanners, linked with British Midlands such as Coventry bands The Specials. The Selector and The Beat and created the 2tone label, which firmly mixed black and white youth together against this media onslaught.

In 1981 came the next wave. Oi! music was unleashed by Sounds magazine, bringing back the angry streetpunk energy and protest into the Skinhead subculture, once again giving the media and movie makers something to chew on.

Over the years the pendulum swung back and forth, but against all the odds Skinhead in its genuine form found its way across the world, connecting the Working class of Britain with mainland Europe, during the cold war even into communist Eastern block, then across to USA, South America, and in modern times, Indonesia to pretty much every westernised nation.

At the Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton you will find the most genuine, real and very friendly welcoming event in Skinhead history. Real people who have lived the life, mixing with new faces just coming in. We actively search for new acts to showcase and tour. We reunite old bands and give them a stage to play, we encourage scene DJ´s from across the worldwide scene, to play and network. Together all of us taking the scene forward, learning from previous mistakes, without selling out our principals of a true Working class subculture. The reunion invites everyone to attend, be you a skinhead or just someone wanting to be part of the event, interested and wanting a great fun weekend. We also actively support charities every year.

United We Stand!

TICKETS

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.

WRISTBANDS GIVE YOU FULL ACCESS TO ALL THE EVENT, THREE FULL DAYS AND NIGHTS OF ENTERTAINMENT, 12 BANDS, 10 DJ’S PLUS A  SPECIAL PRE PARTY  BEACH BBQ ON THURSDAY PRE PARTY

The line-up maybe subject to change, as so many band members and dj’s are involved, 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, We Strongly advise NOT to fly to Stansted or Luton as this is a long way and expensive UK public transport, but if you have no choice then use National Express buses from those airports, which you need to book in advance to get cheaper rates, 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. Wilson Avenue is about the nearest free street parking to the venue, jump on a local bus back into town.

All Event Enquiries email Symond at subcultz@gmail.com. phone (uk) 07733096571

The Facebook community group Facebook group

Facebook page

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.

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SKABOOZER UKRAINIAN FUNDRAISER, for Refugee women musicians escaping war

This event is to raise money for some of our girls trapped in Ukraine as the city came under attack. A few of the girls have escaped with just a bag of clothing, kids and a baby. Now homeless in mainland Europe, with an ever changing situation, we will be taking a van out to Europe directly after the event with much needed aid, size 8 girls clothes and meduim plus children and other essentials, please come to this event, have fun and do something, £10 tickets plus any donations you can do. This is very genuine i spoke to the girls as they were making their way to Romania with children and babies, they abandoned anything they couldnt carry and went by foot over the border to escape war. , bring along any donations of clothes, she asked for size 8 and medium, but all sizes will be donated to other girls. medical stuff, womens sanitary and animal supplies, everything is needed

Tickets available here

when i spoke to Samira last week she was being bombed as she was trying to escape Kyiv with some other girls, children and babies. for four days the girls struggled to make their way to the Romainian border. Some of the girls are still missing. We have arranged accomodation in Germany for the girls temporarily and hope to get them to UK. We at Subcultz were asked to be the agent for the previous Ska band the girls had formed, but had broken up prior to the war outbreak, we now plan to work with Samira to persue her singing career with UK musicians

IF YOU WISH TO DONATE MONEY YOU CAN USE FRIENDS AND FAMILY OPTION ON PAYPAL TO SUBCULTZ@GMAIL.COM (PLEASE PUT A NOTE -(UKRAINIAN CRISIS FUND). BANK TRANSFER PLEASE EMAIL US FOR DETAILS. IF YOU WISH TO DONATE CLOTHING MEDICAL, WOMENS AND BABIES PRODUCTS, ANIMAL FOOD PLEASE EMAIL SUBCULTZ@GMAIL.COM AND WE WILL LET YOU KNOW A COLLECTION DELIVERY POINT. ONCE THE VAN IS FULL WE LEAVE. PLEASE DROP PARCELS TO 131 VALLEY ROAD , PORTSLADE BN412TN IF YOU ARE IN UK. EUROPEAN PICK UP POINTS TO BE CONFIRMED

The girls and children sheltering under a road bridge from Russian bombers during the invasion of Kyiv
Some of the girls are still missing in Ukraine

This is the items badly needed, having spoken the Red Cross

Canned food – Pot noodles – Powder soup – Baby food – Nappies – Sanitary Products – Soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste – Power Banks and batteries – Small compact sleeping bags – PPE (overall, goggles, gloves, etc) – First Aid Kits. Women and childrens clothing, small toys, sweets, pushchairs, shampoos.

Please bring any of these items to our fundraising event or post/deliver to

Angie Larter 131 Valley Road, Portslade, Brighton, BN41 2TN

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Symarip Pyramid Jamaican Ska Legends

Symarip Pyramid are back, with original legends of Jamaican Ska. Monty Neysmith. Frank Pitter and Mick Thomas. Signed to Subcultz management the band set out for a few shows in 2019 , UK,  Spain, Belgium and Germany to sold out events after appearing at The Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton in 2018, which was meant to be a one off reunion for the band

Symarip Pyramid Mick Thomas, Monty Neysmith, Photo Symond Lawes 2019

Symarip (also known at various stages of their career as The BeesThe PyramidsSeven Letters and Zubaba) were a British ska and reggae band, 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. Consisting of members from  West Indies  , Home of the legends of Jamaican Reggae 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 based on the Derrick Morgan song, “Moon Hop“.[2]

Symarip Pyramid Ltd edition 7″ Vinyl released on Subcultz Records

Landing as young immigrants into London from Jamaica in 1962 joining into the growing South London Reggae culture, spearheading the blending of black migrant and white London youth. Mods being the subculture of the time who followed RnB American Modern Jazz before the Skinheads replaced them towards the late 60’s, the band formed as the Bees to back leading singers Prince Buster and Laural Aitkin

Releasing the first and only pure Skinhead Reggae concept album Skinhead Moonstomp in 1970 with Trojan records

Symarip: Skinhead Moonstomp | Hi-Fi News
Skinhead Moonstomp Released on Trojan Records 1970.

They moved to Germany in 1971, performing reggae and Afro-rock under the name Zubaba. In 1980, the single “Skinhead Moonstomp” was re-issued in the wake of the 2 Tone craze, hitting No. 54 on the UK Singles Chart. 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 moved back to England, where Ellis continued performing as a solo artist, sometimes using the stage name ‘Mr. Symarip’. Mike Thomas met a Finnish woman while living in Switzerland and relocated to Finland 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 including 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 in Lincolnshire 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’.

To book the band and any further information subcultz@gmail.com

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The Crombie overcoat

The Winter Hero: From The Chesterfield to The Crombie

The hero of Winter dressing will always be the overcoat. Warm, luxurious and thoroughly practical, a beautifully tailored overcoat gives any wearer an air of stature and style.

What is an overcoat? Not to be confused with a topcoat, an overcoat is a tailored coat which is traditionally knee-length or longer. Made from a warm, heavyweight cloth, such as wool or a wool/cashmere blend, they can be either single or double-breasted. They usually feature a single rear vent.

The overcoat has been a key part of a gentleman’s wardrobe since it was invented in the late 18th century. They were often worn as formalwear to represent the wearer’s social status or as part of their uniform, both professional and military. The style of the overcoat hasn’t changed much since then, apart from some very subtle changes made according to whatever the trends are at the time.

18th century crombie 1

It was, for instance, very fashionable during the Regency period to wear form-fitting clothes, subsequently, the overcoats of the time were worn closely fitted to the body; usually double-breasted in style, with waist seams and a flared skirt. As the popularity of the overcoat grew and it became available to the working classes, the silhouette became looser, so as to accommodate their lifestyle.

There are several styles of overcoat, all variations similar but subtlety different.

The first I draw attention to is the Chesterfield. It became fashionable in the 19th century. It is said that the Earl of Chesterfield had this style of coat made by his tailor. But, whether he is actually the creator of the Chesterfield is debatable, purely because the similarity of it to other coats. The coat is available both in single-breasted and double-breasted. Quite often made in a woollen cloth with a herringbone pattern. It usually has a fly front and is knee-length or slightly longer. Some will have slanted flap pockets like a hacking jacket, including possibly a ticket pocket, and a welt pocket on the chest.

2 chesterfield.crombie 2

Another style is one that is not mentioned a great deal these days and owes it’s look and use to the Military. Called the British Warm, this coat is made of thick Melton wool like the Pea Coat. It has epaulettes and is double-breasted. Usually two flap pockets, and no ticket pocket. There is also a variant of this coat that usually comes in Cashmere. This one is usually longer and is similar in style to the Trench Coats that officers wore in WW1.

Next, we come to another variant, and that is one called The Covert. This coat is quite similar in style to The Chesterfield. It is slim-fitting, sits above the knee, and although has features in common with the Chesterfield, such as a fly front, the same pockets, such as the three flap pockets, and a chest welt pocket, and the inclusion of a velvet collar. It is the twill fabric, and the fact it can be worn all year round makes it popular. Originally it was a hunting or riding coat. On the inside of it, there is usually another large pocket level with the thigh, which was usually used for provisions or ammunition. So quite possibly that’s the reason why so many old-style “Gangsters” used to like wearing them.

Lastly, we come to the one style that has become well known especially in the UK, and that is The Crombie. Although in regards of style it has been around since the end of the 18th century. The brand Crombie didn’t produce coats of it own until as recently 1985. Crombie was essentially a fabric manufacturer, and their woollen mill was established in 1805 by John Crombie in Aberdeen, where it was able to produce a high-quality woollen fabric. John saw that it was good business to sell these fabrics they made directly to tailors, as well as other merchants.

TICKETS HERE 

By the mid 19th century its fabrics had become not only fashionable on Savile Row, but we’re being exported on a global scale. During the American Civil War, for example, Crombie’s booming business was able to provide the grey cloth used to uniform the Confederate Army, all while markets in Canada, Japan and Russia were getting well established, and all by the turn of the 20th century.

Crombie produced hundreds of miles of cloth for blankets and uniforms during both world wars. Between them, the Crombie family sold the business to Salts – a company named in honour of the entrepreneurial Yorkshireman Titus Salt, who built Saltaire and popularised alpaca. In 1958 Salts was subsumed into the Illingworth Morris empire, and later inherited by Pamela Mason, the ex-wife of James Mason. During the 1980s the group was acquired by Alan Lewis, the Conservative Party’s vice-chairman for business.

Skinheads at Piccadilly Circus London 1980. photo by Gavin Watson

Under Lewis, Crombie’s emphasis shifted: in 1985 the first Crombie-branded collection of coats and other wares were produced, and in the early 1990s production moved to Yorkshire. The collection of Crombie branded clothes is still going strong – garments include plenty of City and skinhead-friendly covert style coats, and what we would term The English Town overcoat. Which is tailored from thick woollen cloth.

There are different variations of this coat, and many other brands often do their own versions. Next for instance do a Crombie style coat called an Epsom. But, where it differs from the Crombie, is that it doesn’t have the welt pocket on the left chest. Any well dressed Mod, Skinhead or Suedehead, would be frustrated by this missing detail, I am sure. But for the chap who wants a coat to go to the races, or work in the city. It isn’t a bad coat. All of these coats do their job. They serve their purpose and keep their wearer clean and dry. So whether you are a Russian Spy, a Gangster, a Banker or a racing enthusiast, or just an average Joe. There is always an overcoat worth getting, and they always look smart and are perfect for when things get a bit chilly.

Top Image from Sunday Times Magazine (1971)

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Northern Irish Punk Rocker attacked in Berlin

Lead singer and Bass player of Mister Lizard. My very good friend and best friend of my sons was bashed by 5 guys with knuckle dusters last night in Berlin in Friedrichshain area. Completely Unprovoked attack other than him being a punk, and them casuals. He is a Northern Irish Punk, who cant speak German, and one of the nicest people I know

Adam was out with a few friends, when he was approached by an aggressive German who seemed to have a problem with Adams appearance, but not understanding the verbal confrontation Adam tried to communicate, but was then set upon by another four attackers armed with Knuckledusters

We believe the attackers could have been in Berlin in connection to a huge demonstration the following day 1st August 2020

“We left a bar and walked around the corner and a guy started shouting at us but we ignored them, then he ran up to us and I turned around and that’s when his friend hit me with the knuckleduster, screaming Antifa scum. His associates then joined in fully armed in an unprovoked ferocious attack, leaving Adam unconscious with severe head wounds.

Adam is the singer and bass player with his band Mister Lizard and has only recently moved to Berlin to play in the active Punk music scene of the city. Also a lighting tech for bands that include Slipknot. He has no political ties, but was wearing a small crossed out swastika badge on his hat, very commonly worn by punks ever since the 1970’s.

Mister Lizard singer Adam McConville attacked with Knuckledusters in Berlin

Berlin Police were called but were not interested in persuing any form of investigation. However we are appealing to anyone with information to contact us. This is an attack once again on our subculture. Most young people that get involved in subculture will at some point come up against bigotry and abuse, sometimes turning violent like the tragic case of Sophie Lancaster killed for being a Goth.

Mister Lizard Live in Leeds
https://www.facebook.com/misterlizardnoise/
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Life for the ‘feral thugs’ who killed a girl Goth Sophie Lancaster

A JUDGE attacked the “feral thuggery” blighting Britain yesterday as he jailed two yobs for life for the murder of a student.

SOPHIE Kicked to death in a park after being picked on by a gang because of her Goth clothing

SOPHIE: Kicked to death in a park after being picked on by a gang because of her Goth clothing

Sophie Lancaster, 20, was kicked to death by two drunken 15-year-olds as she tried to stop a “merciless” gang battering her boyfriend unconscious in a park.

Three other youths were jailed for assaulting him.

Judge Anthony Russell QC said tough sentences were necessary to curb increasing attacks by youths roaming the streets.

Fuelled by cheap alcohol, a gang of yobs set upon Sophie and 21-year-old Robert Maltby just because they wore distinctive Goth clothing.

Judge Russell said: “This was feral thuggery of a kind that is quite unacceptable. It raises serious questions about the state of society which exists in this country at the beginning of a new millennium which was heralded with such optimism.”

He added: “At least wild animals when they hunt as a pack have a legitimate reason for doing so – to obtain food. You had none and your behaviour on this night degrades humanity itself.

“Regrettably, cases where gangs of youths attack others viciously, sometimes using weapons, sometimes using their own brute force through their feet, are becoming more prevalent.

“Where such crimes are proved, severe punishment will follow.

“I want the message to go out loud and clear that cowardly thugs who resort to kicking others senseless are sentencing themselves to lengthy custodial terms.”

Preston Crown Court heard how Sophie and Robert were attacked last August as they walked home through Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancs.

Brendan Harris, 15, felled Robert with a punch before the others set upon him “like a pack of wild animals”.

Harris told how – as Sophie cradled Robert on the ground and urged them to stop – Ryan Herbert, also 15 at the time, kicked Sophie’s head “as though he was volleying a football in full flight”.

The pair continued to stamp on her head before leaving the couple for dead.

Their injuries were so severe that paramedics could not tell them apart.

After the attack the gang bumped into a witness, who said they were behaving in a “giddy way, hyperactive and bouncing around doing silly things”.

He added: “It was as though they were boasting about what they had done.”

Herbert told him: “You wanna see them, they are a right mess.”

Sophie, a gap-year English degree student who enjoyed writing poetry, slipped into a coma and died two weeks later.

Robert, a Manchester University art student, survived horrific head injuries. But he has been left psychologically scarred and is afraid to leave his house.

In a statement he told the court: “I have regressed to a child-like state and I am finding the world a terrifying place.”

Sophie’s mother Sylvia, 52, told the court: “Their actions are so heinous I can’t bring myself to think about it.

“My daughter’s last moments on Earth must have been a living hell. Not only did she witness Robert being kicked and stamped upon, but she died not knowing whether Robert lived or died after the vicious attack on him.”

Harris, who was found guilty of murder, was jailed for life and must serve 18 years before he can be considered for parole.

Herbert, now 16, who admitted murder, was given life with a minimum of 16 years, three months. Neither showed any emotion as they were led away.

Joseph Hulme, 17, his brother Danny Hulme, 16, and Daniel Mallet, 17, were handed indeterminate sentences after admitting causing grievous bodily harm with intent by attacking Robert.

The Hulmes must serve a minimum five years and ten months each. Mallet must serve at least four years and four months.

Outside court, Mrs Lancaster, who works with problem children, said: “No sentence could ever be enough.

“I feel I have a life sentence. They will be out before the end of their 30s.”

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The White Negro (Fall 1957)

Norman Mailer’s inflammatory 1957 essay on the original “hipsters.”Norman Mailer June 20, 2007

Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin conceding defeat after Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign. Photo © Mitchell Cohen (all rights reserved).
Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin conceding defeat after Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign. Photo © Mitchell Cohen (all rights reserved).

Norman Mailer ran in the Democratic primaries for mayor of New York City in 1969 with journalist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate (Breslin sought the nomination for President of the City Council). Their program called for New York City to secede from the state of New York. Political power was to devolve to the city’s neighborhoods. The Mailer-Breslin slogan was “The Other Guys are the Joke.” Dissent published many of Mailer’s controversial articles, including “The White Negro” (Fall 1957), which is reprinted below, and Mailer served on Dissent’s editorial board for more than three decades. The photograph above was taken by a seventeen-year-old campaign worker who had then never heard of Dissent, Mitchell Cohen, who now co-edits the magazine. Mailer died November 10th at the age of 84.

The White Negro

Superficial Reflections on the Hipster

Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying low. . . . You can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with “squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) . . . it is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times, he does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.—“Born 1930: The Unlost Generation” by Caroline Bird, Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957

american Hipsters 1950’s

Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it wits nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A. man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people.

II
It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry) , if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong signs autographs in the Blue Note nightclub in Chicago in 1948.

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good.

So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-à-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro had stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could. Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, “I feel this, and now you do too.”

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.

To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself—one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the “purpose”—whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound conviction. Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious could welcome an existential philosophy without ever feeling it at all; indeed only a Frenchman by declaring that the unconscious did not exist could then proceed to explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the microscopically sensuous and all but ineffable frissons of mental becoming, in order finally to create the theology of atheism and so submit that in a world of absurdities the existential absurdity is most coherent.

Beatnik Bongos

In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side of life, rational life, undialectical life—since he conceives of death as emptiness, he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration.

Yet this masculine argument can mean very little for the mystic. The mystic can accept the atheist’s description of his weakness, he can agree that his mysticism was a response to despair. And yet . . . and yet his argument is that he, the mystic, is the one finally who has chosen to live with death, and so death is his experience and not the atheist’s, and the atheist by eschewing the limitless dimensions of profound despair has rendered himself incapable to judge the experience. The real argument which the mystic must always advance is the very intensity of his private vision—his argument depends from the vision precisely because what was felt in the vision is so extraordinary that no rational argument, no hypotheses of ‘oceanic feelings” and certainly no skeptical reductions can explain away what has become for him the reality more real than the reality of closely reasoned logic. His inner experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the existentialist. And the psychopath. And the saint and the bullfighter and the lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning consciousness of the present, exactly that incandescent consciousness which the possibilities within death has opened for them. There is a depth of desperation to the condition which enables one to remain in life only by engaging death, but the reward is their knowledge that what is happening at each instant of the electric present is good or bad for them, good or bad for their cause, their love, their action, their need.

It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death.

III
It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed. By this premise the hipster is a psychopath, and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath for he possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that absorption in the recessive nuances of one’s own motive which is so alien to the unreasoning drive of the psychopath. In this country where new millions of psychopaths are developed each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory popular culture (where sex is sin and yet sex is paradise), it is as if there has been room already for the development of the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own condition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath. Having converted his unconscious experience into much conscious knowledge, the hipster has shifted the focus of his desire from immediate gratification toward that wider passion for future power which is the mark of civilized man. Yet with an irreducible difference. For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man. If there are ten million Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and the figure is most modest) there are probably not more than one hundred thousand men and women who consciously see themselves as hipsters, but their importance is that they are an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.

Before one can say more about the hipster, there is obviously much to be said about the psychic state of the psychopath—or, clinically, the psychopathic personality. Now, for reasons which may be more curious than the similarity of the words, even many people with a psychoanalytical orientation often confuse the psychopath with the psychotic. Yet the terms are polar. The psychotic is legally insane, the psychopath is not; the psychotic is almost always incapable of discharging in physical acts the rage of his frustration, while the psychopath at his extreme is virtually as incapable of restraining his violence. The psychotic lives in so misty a world that what is happening at each moment of his life is not very real to him whereas the psychopath seldom knows any reality greater than the face, the voice, the being of the particular people among whom he may find himself at any moment. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck describe him as follows:

The psychopath . . . can be distinguished from the person sliding into or clambering out of a true psychotic state by the long tough persistence of his anti-social attitude and behaviour and the absence of hallucinations, delusions, manic flight of ideas, confusion, disorientation, and other dramatic signs of psychosis.

The late Robert Lindner, one of the few experts on the subject, in his book Rebel Without A Cause—The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath presented part of his definition in this way:

. . . the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; lie is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires
. . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and tins trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts.

Yet even Lindner who was the most imaginative and most sympathetic of the psychoanalysts who have studied the psychopathic personality was not ready to project himself into the essential sympathy— which is that the psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over. For the psychopath is better adapted to dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us, and if it be remembered that not every psychopath is an extreme case, and that the condition of psychopathy is present in a host of people including many politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, call-girls, promiscuous homosexuals and half the executives of Hollywood, television, and advertising, it can be seen that there are aspects of psychopathy which already exert considerable cultural influence.

What characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves. Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu. Therefore, we are obliged, most of us, to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and rhythms which come from the past. It is not only the “dead weight of the institutions of the past” but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities which might be exciting for our individual growth.

Through most of modern history, “sublimation” was possible: at the expense of expressing only a small portion of oneself, that small portion could be expressed intensely. But sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo to history. If the collective life of a generation has moved too quickly, the “past” by which particular men and women of that generation may function is not, let us say, thirty years old, but relatively a hundred or two hundred years old. And so the nervous system is overstressed beyond the possibility of such compromises as sublimation, especially since the stable middle-class values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. In such a crisis of accelerated historical tempo and deteriorated values, neurosis tends to be replaced by psychopathy, and the success of psychoanalysis (which even ten years ago gave promise of becoming a direct major force) diminishes because of its inbuilt and characteristic incapacity to handle patients more complex, more experienced, or more adventurous than the analyst himself. In practice, psychoanalysis has by now become all too often no more than a psychic blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analyst’s non-responsive reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution, a “tranquilizing” of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out—less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative. He is thus able to conform to that contradictory and unbearable society which first created his neurosis. He can conform to what he loathes because he no longer has the passion to feel loathing so intensely.

The psychopath is notoriously difficult to analyze because the fundamental decision of his nature is to try to live the infantile fantasy, and in this decision (given the dreary alternative of psychoanalysis) there may be a certain instinctive wisdom. For there is a dialectic to changing one’s nature, the dialectic which underlies all psychoanalytic method: it is the knowledge that if one is to change one’s habits, one must go back to the source of their creation, and so the psychopath exploring backward along the road of the homosexual, the orgiast, the drug-addict, the rapist, the robber and the murderer seeks to find those violent parallels to the violent and often hopeless contradictions he knew as an infant and as a child. For if he has the courage to meet the parallel situation at the moment when he is ready, then he has a chance to act as he has never acted before, and in satisfying the frustration—if he can succeed—he may then pass by symbolic substitute through the locks of incest. In thus giving expression to the buried infant in himself, he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires and so free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system. Like the neurotic he is looking for the opportunity to grow up a second time, but the psychopath knows
instinctively that to express a forbidden impulse actively is far more beneficial to him than merely to confess the desire in the safety of a doctor’s room. The psychopath is ordinately ambitious, too ambitious ever to trade his warped brilliant conception of his possible victories in life for the grim if peaceful attrition of the analyst’s couch. So his associational journey into the past is lived out in the theatre of the present, and he exists for those charged situations where his senses are so alive that he can be aware actively (as the analysand is aware passively) of what his habits are, and how he can change them. The strength of the psychopath is that he knows (where most of us can only guess) what is good for him and what is bad for him at exactly those instants when an old crippling habit has become so attacked by experience that the potentiality exists to change it, to replace a negative and empty fear with an outward action, even if—and here I obey the logic of the extreme psychopath—even if the fear is of himself, and the action is to murder. The psychopath murders—if he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love, his being is frozen with implacable self-hatred for his cowardice. (It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act—even by the logic of the psychopath—is not likely to prove very therapeutic for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act it is not altogether cowardly)

At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy— he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him. But in this search, the psychopath becomes an embodiment of the extreme contradictions of the society which formed his character, and the apocalyptic orgasm often remains as remote as the Holy Grail, for there are clusters and nests and ambushes of violence in his own necessities and in the imperatives and retaliations of the men and women among whom he lives his life, so that even as he drains his hatred in one act or another, so the conditions of his life create it anew in him until the drama of his movements bears a sardonic resemblance to the frog who climbed a few feet in the well only to drop back again.

Yet there is this to be said for the search after the good orgasm: when one lives in a civilized world, and still can enjoy none of the cultural nectar of such a world because the paradoxes on which civilization is built demands that there remain a cultureless and alienated bottom of exploitable human material, then the logic of becoming a sexual outlaw (if one’s psychological roots are bedded in the bottom)
is that one has at least a running competitive chance to be physically healthy so long as one stays alive. It is therefore no accident that psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro. Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt. (Actually the terms have equal weight. Depending on the telescope of the cultural clique from which the Square surveys the universe, “evil” or “immature” are equally strong terms of condemnation.) But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute. Add to this, the cunning of their language, the abstract ambiguous alternatives in which from the danger of their oppression they learned to speak (“Well. now, man, like I’m looking for a cat to turn me on ..“), add even more the profound sensitivity of the Negro jazzman who was the cultural mentor of a people, and it is not too difficult to believe that the language of Hip which evolved was an artful language, tested and shaped by an intense experience and therefore different in kind from white slang, as different as the special obscenity of the soldier which in its emphasis upon “ass” as the soul and “shit” as circumstance, was able to express the existential states of the enlisted man. What makes Hip a special language is that it cannot really be taught—if one shares none of the experiences of elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems merely arch or vulgar or irritating. It is a pictorial language, but pictorial like non-objective art, imbued with the dialectic of small but intense change, a language for the microcosm, in this case, man, for it takes the immediate experiences of any passing man and magnifies the dynamic of his movements, not specifically but abstractly so that he is seen more as a vector in a network of forces than as a static character in a crystallized field. (Which, latter, is the practical view of the snob.) For example, there is real difficulty in trying to find a Hip substitute for “stubborn.” The best possibility I can come up with is: “That cat will never come off his groove, dad.” But groove implies movement, narrow movement but motion nonetheless. There is really no way to describe someone who does not move at all. Even a creep does move—if at a pace exasperatingly more slow than the pace of the cool cats.

IV
Like children, hipsters are fighting for the sweet, and their language is a set of subtle indications of their success or failure in the competition for pleasure. Unstated but obvious is the social sense that there is not nearly enough sweet for everyone. And so the sweet goes only to the victor, the best, the most, the man who knows the most about how to find his energy and how not to lose it. The emphasis is on energy because the psychopath and the hipster are nothing without it since they do not have the protection of a position or a class to rely on when they have overextended themselves. So the language of Hip is a language of energy, how it is found, how it is lost.

But let us see. I have jotted down perhaps a dozen words, the Hip perhaps most in use and most likely to last with the minimum of variation. The words are man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square. They serve a variety of purposes, and the nuance of the voice uses the nuance of the situation to convey the subtle contextual difference. If the hipster moves through his night and through his life on a constant search with glimpses of Mecca in many a turn of his experience (Mecca being the apocalyptic orgasm) and if everyone in the civilized world is at least in some small degree a sexual cripple the hipster lives with the knowledge of how lie is sexually crippled and where he is sexually alive, and the faces of experience which life presents to him each day are engaged, dismissed or avoided as his need directs and his lifemanship makes possible. For life is a contest between people in which the victor generally recuperates quickly and the loser takes long to mend, a perpetual competition of colliding explorers in which one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same, (pay in sickness, or depression, or anguish for the lost opportunity) but pay or grow.

Therefore one finds words like go, and make it, and with it, and swing: “Go” with its sense that after hours or days or months. or years of monotony, boredom, and depression one has finally had one’s chance, one has amassed enough energy to meet an exciting opportunity with all one’s present talents for the flip (up or down) and so one is ready to go, ready to gamble. Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether of love or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can release a little more energy for himself since he hates himself a little less, he can make a little better nervous systern, make it a little more possible to go again, to go faster next time and so make more and thus find more people with whom he can swing. For to swing is to communicate, is to convey the rhythms of one’s own being to a lover, a friend, or an audience, and—equally necessary— be able to feel the rhythms of their response. To swing with the rhythms of another is to enrich oneself— the conception of the learning process as dug by Hip is that one cannot really learn until one contains within oneself the implicit rhythm of the subject or the person. As an example, I remember once hearing a Negro friend have an intellectual discussion at a party for half an hour with a white girl who was a few years out of college. The Negro literally could not read or write, but he had an extraordinary ear and a fine sense of mimicry. So as the girl spoke, he would detect the particular formal uncertainties in her argument, and in a pleasant (if slightly Southern) English accent, he would respond to one or another facet of her doubts. When she would finish what she felt was a particularly well-articulated idea, he would smile privately and say, “other-direction . . . do you really believe in that?”

“Well . . . No,” the girl would stammer, “now that you get down to it, there is something disgusting about it to me,” and she would be off again for five more minutes.

Of course the Negro was not learning anything about the merits and demerits of the argument, hut he was learning a great deal about a type of girl he had never met before, and that was what he wanted. Being unable to read or write, he could hardly be interested in ideas nearly as much as in lifemanship, and so he eschewed any attempt to obey the precision or lack of precision in the girl’s language, and instead sensed her character (and the values of her social type) by swinging with the nuances of her voice.

So to swing is to be able to learn, and by learning take a step toward making it, toward creating. What is to be created is not nearly so important as the hipster’s belief that when he really makes it, he will be able to turn his hand to anything, even to self-discipline. What he must do before that is find his courage at the moment of violence, or equally make it in the act of love, find a little more of himself, create a little more between his woman and himself, or indeed between his mate and himself (since many hipsters are bisexual), but paramount, imperative, is the necessity to make it because in making it, one is making the new habit, unearthing the new talent which the old frustration denied.

Whereas if you goof (the ugliest word in Hip), if you lapse back into being a frightened stupid child, or if you flip, if you lose your control, reveal the buried weaker more feminine part of your nature, then it is more difficult to swing the next time, your ear is less alive, your bad and energy-wasting habits are further confirmed, you are farther away from being with it. But to be with it is to have grace, is to be closer to the secrets of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for you are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his body, that trapped, mutilated and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It, who is energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s prana, the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s “blood,” Hemingway’s “good,” the Shavian life-force; “It”; God; not the God of the churches hut the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm.

To which a cool cat might reply, “Crazy, man!”

Because, after all, what I have offered above is an hypothesis, no more, and there is not the hipster alive who is not absorbed in his own tumultuous hypotheses. Mine is interesting, mine is way out (on the avenue of the mystery along the road to “It”) but still I am just one cat in a world of cool cats, and everything interesting is crazy, or at least so the Squares who do not know how to swing would say.

(And yet crazy is also the self-protective irony of the hipster. Living with questions and not with answers, he is so different in his isolation and in the far reach of his imagination from almost everyone with whom he deals in the outer world of the Square, and meets generally so much enmity, competition, and hatred in the world of Hip, that his isolation is always in danger of turning upon itself, and leaving him indeed just that, crazy.)

If, however, yon agree with my hypothesis, if you as a cat are way out too, and we are in the same groove (the universe now being glimpsed as a series of ever-extending radii from the center) why then you say simply, “I dig,” because neither knowledge nor imagination comes easily, it is buried in the pain of one’s forgotten experience, and so one must work to find it, one must occasionally exhaust oneself by digging into the self in order to perceive the outside. And indeed it is essential to dig the most, for if you do not dig you lose your superiority over the Square, and so you are less likely to be cool (to be in control of a situation because you have swung where the Square has not, or because you have allowed to come to consciousness a pain, a guilt, a shame or a desire which the other has not had the courage to face) . To be cool is to be equipped, and if you are equipped it is more difficult for the next cat who comes along to put you down. And of course one can hardly afford to be put down too often, or one is beat, one has lost one’s confidence, one has lost one’s will, one is impotent in the world of action and so closer to the demeaning flip of becoming a queer, or indeed closer to dying, and therefore it is even more difficult to recover enough energy to try to make it again, because once a cat is beat he has nothing to give, and no one is interested any longer in making it with him. This is the terror of the hipster—to be beat— because once the sweet of sex has deserted him, he still cannot give up the search. It is not granted to the hipster to grow old gracefully—he has been captured too early by the oldest dream of power, the gold fountain of Ponce de Leon, the fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm.

To be beat is therefore a flip, it is a situation beyond one’s experience, impossible to anticipate—which indeed in the circular vocabulary of Hip is still another meaning for flip, but then I have given just a few of the connotations of these words. Like most primitive vocabularies each word is a prime symbol and serves a dozen or a hundred functions of communication in the instinctive dialectic through which the hipster perceives his experience, that dialectic of the instantaneous differentials of existence in which one is forever moving forward into more or retreating into less.

V
It is impossible to conceive a new philosophy until one creates a new language, but a new popular language (while it must implicitly contain a new philosophy) does not necessarily present its philosophy overtly. It can be asked then what really is unique in the life-view of Hip which raises its argot above the passing verbal whimsies of the bohemian or the lumpenproletariat.

The answer would be in the psychopathic element of Hip which has almost no interest in viewing human nature, or better, in judging human nature from a set of standards conceived a priori to the experience, standards inherited from the past. Since Hip sees every answer as posing immediately a new alternative, a new question, its emphasis is on complexity rather than simplicity (such complexity that its language without the illumination of the voice and the articulation of the face and body remains hopelessly incommunicative). Given its emphasis on complexity, Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the result of out actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad, we cannot even know (in the Joycean sense of the good and the bad) whether unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad, we cannot be certain that we have given them energy, and indeed if we could, there would still be no idea of what ultimately they would do with it.

Therefore, men are not seen as good or bad (that they are good-and-bad is taken for granted) but rather each man is glimpsed as a collection of possibilities, some more possible than others (the view of character implicit in Hip) and some humans are considered more capable than others of reaching more possibilities within themselves in less time, provided, and this is the dynamic, provided the particular character can swing at the right time. And here arises the sense of context which differentiates Hip from a Square view of character. Hip sees the context as generally dominating the man, dominating him because his character is less significant than the context in which he must function. Since it is arbitrarily five times more demanding of one’s energy to accomplish even an inconsequential action in an unfavorable context than a favorable one, man is then not only his character but his context, since the success or failure of an action in a given context reacts upon the character and therefore affects what the character will be in the next context. What dominates both character and context is the energy available at the moment of intense context.

Character being thus seen as perpetually ambivalent and dynamic enters then into an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his existence. To take a perhaps unjustified metaphysical extrapolation, it is as if the universe which has usually existed conceptually as a Fact (even if the Fact were Berkeley’s God) but a ract which it was the aim of all science and philosophy to reveal, becomes instead a changing reality whose laws are remade at each instant by everything living, but most particularly man, man raised to a neo-medieval summit where the truth is not what one has felt yesterday or what one expects to feel tomorrow but rather truth is no more nor less than what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the present.

What is consequent therefore is the divorce of man from his values, the liberation of the self from the Super-Ego of society. The only Hip morality (but of course it is an ever-present morality) is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and—this is how the war of the Hip and the Square begins—to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone because that is one’s need. Yet in widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man’s desire contains its antithesis of human cooperation.

If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience of the past, is that the Hip ethic is immoderation, child-like in its adoration of the present (and indeed to respect the past means that one must also respect such ugly consequences of the past as the collective murders of the State) . It is this adoration of the present which contains the affirmation of Hip, because its ultimate logic surpasses even the unforgettable solution of the Marquis de Sade to sex, private property, and the family, that all men and women have absolute but temporary rights over the bodies of all other men and women—the nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself. Which is exactly what separates Hip from the authoritarian philosophies which now appeal to the conservative and liberal temper—what haunts the middle of the Twentieth Century is that faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes literal faith in the creative possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares growth.

Whether the hipster’s desire for absolute sexual freedom contains any genuinely radical conception of a different world is of course another matter, and it is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an elite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions. But given the desperation of his condition as a psychic outlaw, the hipster is equally a candidate for the most reactionary and most radical of movements, and so it is just as possible that many hipsters will come—if the crisis deepens—to a radical comprehension of the horror of society, for even as the radical has had his incommunicable dissent confirmed in his experience by precisely the frustration, the denied opportunities, and the bitter years which his ideas have cost him, so the sexual adventurer deflected from his goal by the implacable animosity of a society constructed to deny the sexual radical as well, may yet come to an equally bitter comprehension of the slow relentless inhumanity of the conservative power which controls him from without and from within. And in being so controlled, denied, and starved into the attrition of conformity, indeed the hipster may come to see that his condition is no more than an exaggeration of the human condition, and if he would be free, then everyone must be free. Yes, this is possible too, for the heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis, and it is pleasant to think that courage contains within itself (as the explanation of its existence) some glimpse of the necessity of life to become more than it has been.

It is obviously not very possible to speculate with sharp focus on the future of the hipster. Certain possibilities must be evident, however, and the most central is that the organic growth of Hip depends on whether the Negro emerges as a dominating force in American life. Since the Negro knows more about the ugliness and danger of life than the White, it is probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential superiority, a superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground drama of domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of unforeseeable consequences, for the Negro’s equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every White alive.

With this possible emergence of the Negro, Hip may erupt as a psychically armed rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound against the anti-sexual foundation of every organized power in America, and bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, and new conflicts of interest that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work. A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time of conformity. At that time, if the liberal should prove realistic in his belief that there is peaceful room for every tendency in American life, then Hip would end by being absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry. But if this is not the reality, and the economic, the social, the psychological, and finally the moral crises accompanying the rise of the Negro should prove insupportable, then a time is coming when every political guide post will be gone, and millions of liberals will be faced with political dilemmas they have so far succeeded in evading, and with a view of human nature they do not wish to accept. To take the desegregation of the schools in the South as an example, it is quite likely that the reactionary sees the reality more closely than the liberal when he argues that the deeper issue is not desegregation but miscegenation. (As a radical I am of course facing in the opposite direction from the White Citizen’s Councils—obviously I believe it is the absolute human right of the Negro to mate with the White, and matings there will undoubtedly be, for there will be Negro high school boys brave enough to chance their lives.) But for the average liberal whose mind has been dulled by the committee-ish cant of the professional liberal, miscegenation is not an issue because he has been told that the Negro does not desire it. So, when it comes, miscegenation will be a terror, comparable perhaps to the derangement of the American Communists when the icons to Stalin came tumbling down. The average American Communist held to the myth of Stalin for reasons which had little to do with the political evidence and everything to do with their psychic necessities. In this sense it is equally a psychic necessity for the liberal to believe that the Negro and even the reactionary Southern White eventually and fundamentally people like himself, capable of becoming good liberals too if only they can be reached by good liberal reason. What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people is perhaps incapable of being contained, and therefore if one wants a better world one does well to hold one’s breath, for a worse world is bound to come first, and the dilemma may well be this:
given such hatred, it must either vent itself nihilistically or become turned into the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.

VI
No matter what its horrors the Twentieth Century is a vastly exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators. Which of course is carrying speculation beyond the point where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and bleakness of the future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of abdicating from all imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort, and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct about the meaning of life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people, come out of the most intense conditions of exploitation, cruelty, violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded as an instinct in keeping this tortured people alive, then it is perhaps possible that the Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if this is so, the radical humanist could do worse than to and brood upon the phenomenon. For if a revolutionary time should come again, there would be a crucial difference if someone had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending every circuit and process of society from ukase to kiss as the communications of human energy—a calculus capable of translating the economic relations of man into his psychological relations and then back again, his productive relations thereby embracing his sexual relations as well, until the
crises of capitalism in the Twentieth Century would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its economic imbalance at the expense of a new mass psychological imbalance. It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital (that first of the major psychologies to approach the mystery of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted, displaced, and procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another)—where particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital would find its place in an even more Godlike view of human justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those intimate and institutional processes which lead to our creations and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our rebellion.


Norman Mailer is a longtime contributer and former board member of Dissent.

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Trouble with Skinheads at UB40 Gig

Skinheads: the cult of trouble

Skinheads streaming out of Camden Town underground tonight look hard and they know it. The crop is the style, but it can also be the weapon: it’ll nut you if you look too long or you don’t step out of the way, if you’re wearing the wrong uniform or follow the wrong team. Outside the Electric Ballroom four Special Patrol Group men stand staring at the line of skinheads waiting to pay £3.00 to see UB40, staring at the anti-fashion parade.

The smart look is sta-press trousers, Ben Sherman shirts and polished Dr Martens. The tougher look is a short-sleeved shirt displaying the tattoos, bleached Levis with the braces hanging loose round the legs. The real hard cases have tattoos on their faces. One has a small cross on each cheek. Most of the girl skins look really young, about 13, and are dressed like the boys in shirts, jeans and boots. But some wear short skirts, like one black skinhead girl who’s got brown monkey boots over black fishnet tights.

The police point and giggle at all the girls in mini-skirts. Now and again they try to show who the real tough guys are by frogmarching the odd skinhead to the back of the queue.

Skins: the image is white convict, the music is black. (Remember Norman Mailer’s article on the cult of hip, ‘The white Negro’?) Groups like UB40 – the name comes from the DHSS code for the unemployed – are now called two-tone because they put black and white musicians together to play ska, an early form of reggae coming out of Jamaica, and popular with the first wave of British skinheads in the 1960s.

It is not just skinheads who are into two-tone. Punks, Rastas, rude boys (skins in mohair suits), and a few long-hairs, are here too. But inside the Electric Ballroom, this huge and airless hall, it’s the skinheads who make the atmosphere charged . . . . There’s a loud crack and heads turn. But it’s just a skin who’s finished his can of Coke and smashed it on the floor.

A skinhead tries to make an art form out of machismo. He walks chin out military style, with a duck-splayed swagger. He sucks hard on his cigarette, chews his gum with a vengeance. He doesn’t smile too much, unless he’s with his mates at the bar. The only time a skin looks somehow vulnerable is when he’s dancing – never with a girl, always either alone or with other skins – with his eyes half-closed, dipping his shoulders rhythmically. Skinheads are great dancers.

‘It’s just fashion, innit?’ says a 16-year-old from South London, watching his mate zap the Space Invaders in the bar, rocking gently to the reggae of Reality, the warm-up band. Two girls – one has MINI-SKIN N4 DODGER painted on the back of her army-green jacket – run full-tilt through the bar; scant regard for drink or bodies. Skin girls aim to be as street-tough as the boys. They strut to the front of the queue at the women’s toilets. No one complains.

Although skin boys don’t hang out with the skin girls, every now and again a boy will just waltz up to a girl, kiss her violently for a couple of minutes, before moving off wordlessly. Girls are okay for kissing and fucking, but you don’t talk to them, not in public anyhow. These boys, with their POW haircuts and markings, their enamel Union Jack badges, their polished boots – these boys don’t get too upset if they’re taken for fascists. Fascism is a laugh.

A boy in a red Fred Perry tennis shirt greets his friend with a Nazi salute, grinning. Another skinhead wandering round the bar has WHITE POWER written in blue on his T-shirt. A black roadie for UB40 stops and scowls at him, but the white supremacist ignores the challenge, walks on by.

At 10.30, UB40 come on stage and there’s a rush from the bars as the skins make for the front of the hall. Two Rastafarians and six whites in this band. ‘This is one of our Rock Against Thatcher numbers,’ says the frontman. A few half-hearted cheers. ‘Are there only 50 people here into Rock Against Thatcher?’ He gets a bigger cheer. A drunk skinhead staggers through the packed dance floor, trying to kick the guy running away from him, before giving up the chase and collapsing on the floor. Everyone ignores him. Be cool.

The final encore over, the lights come on, and the plastic pint pots are ceremoniously crunched. West Ham skins sing ‘Wembley’ (pronounced Wemballee) on their way out, throwing down the gauntlet to the Arsenal.

It’s not picked up. It’s been a quiet night, after all. Police are back on duty outside as the dancers spill out, dripping with sweat this warm night, and traipse down the street for the underground train home. Home to their parents, most of them, though there is one last pleasure to be squeezed out the night: to chant and sing and look tough on the tube. Scaring the straights is half the fun.

It always has been. Seat-slashing Teds, mass-rioting mods and rockers, football thugs, skinheads, drug-taking hippies, foul-mouthed punks . . . Sub-editors write headlines, politicians fire moralism from the hip, youth movements come and go.

Skinhead first arrived in the late 1960s. It was a sort of male working-class backlash against mods grown too narcissistic, effeminate and arty. Football fans discovered a style. I remember 4,000 Manchester United skinheads on the terraces at Elland Road, Leeds, in 1968. They all wore bleached Levis, Dr Martens, a short scarf tied cravat-style, cropped hair. They looked like an army and, after the game, went into action like one.

Skinheads never really disappeared from the football terraces. But the clothes, like skinhead music (soul, ska, home-grown rabble-rousers like Slade), went out of fashion, until the punk movement turned style inside out, starting in late 1976. A new generation of skins started following the band called Sham ’69. ‘If punks are about anarchy, then skinheads are the most anarchist going,’ Jimmy Pursey, the band’s frontman, once told me in his Hersham flat, above a bookie’s. ‘They fight, run riot, don’t give a fuck about anything.’ Pursey withdrew from the Rock Against Racism carnival in Brixton later that year because he feared that his supporters might smash the whole thing up. Sham ’69 folded the next year.

Mark Dumsday never liked Sham ’69 anyway. He has been a skinhead for two years, he is 18, and moved to London a years ago after working on a fairground in Southend, his home town. He now lives in a short-life ex-council flat in King’s Cross. He gets £23 a week from social security.

It’s five in the afternoon. We’re sitting in front of a black and white portable TV, here in the living room of this fourth-floor flat in Midhope House. Mark says he usually gets up around two, watches television, then goes out for a drink, or to a gig, or whatever. His father is a welder. His mother works for Avon cosmetics.

‘When I was at home,’ he says, ‘I didn’t get on very well with them. Now it’s sweet. All right now. They don’t mind me being a skin. They quite like it, like the haircut, think it’s tidy.’ He’s looking at the TV. Shots of bikini-clad women on Caribbean beaches. The Eversun commercial.

Why did Mark first get his crop? ‘I dunno. I used to hang around with bikers, the Southend Hell’s Angels. In August ’78, when I came off the fair, I had a crop. It was something different at the time. At Southend there was only about ten of us. Now there’s loads of ’em.’

The tattoo on his right arm is a caricature of a skinhead. ‘Most skins have got this one,’ he says, pointing to it. ‘Or a lot of the BM [British Movement] skins have got the phoenix bird.’ Pictures of Debbie Harry and Olivia Newton-John on one wall, and of the West Indian reggae artist, Peter Tosh, smoking a joint on another. ‘Yeah, I like a blow. I don’t know any skinheads who don’t.’

He left school at 16 without taking any exams. ‘I was hardly ever there. Used to bunk off all the time.’ He’s thought about getting a job as a despatch rider, but he’s happy enough on the dole. He has no girl friend. ‘I don’t bother going out with them,’ he grins. I ask him why it is that skinheads always hang out in all-male groups. Is it that they don’t know how to talk to girls? ‘That’s rubbish,’ he says. ‘Anyone can pick up a bird. Anybody.’ But Mark has never picked up a skin girl. ‘I think a girl with a crop looks silly.’

Skinhead isn’t fashion, he says; but he’s not sure what it is at all. What does he get out of it? ‘Not a lot.’
Two young Glaswegian women, both with dyed blonde hair and one of them tattooed, arrive with shopping bags. ‘They’re just staying here,’ says Mark. ‘Ain’t got nowhere else to go . . . ‘ No, the only thing that’s kept skinheads going is it’s not commercial, like punk was and mods are. I want to stay one till I’m 21.’ Why? ‘Dunno. Stuck it out two years. Might as well make it five. If I quit, I’ll probably turn biker.’

A lot of the skins who used to live on this estate are now inside, but Mark has stayed pretty clean. ‘I only have one offence against me. For possession.’ Of drugs, that is – ‘speed’, amphetamines. ‘I’ll have it occasionally, not very often. A lot of skins are into glue, but I’ve never done that. If you can’t afford the right stuff, don’t do that.’ The television picture distorts. Mark gets up, fiddles around with the aerial, which is stuck in the grille of a gas fire. One of the Glaswegians notices a mark on the back of his head. She asks him what it is. ‘Scar,’ he says. A woman on the box, now in focus, reckons the boa constrictors are very popular pets now. Mark sits down again.

Life here, the way he tells it, is one long struggle against the law. ‘The Old Bill were up here the other night. Took me curtains away to analyse them. Went right through the place. They went downstairs and asked this geezer, “Is that bloke upstairs a nutter?”

A prostitute who lived on this estate was murdered. Most of her body was found in Epping Forest; police expected to find the rest here, in Midhope House. ‘The cop was saying, “You did it, didn’t you? I think you done it.” I just laughed.’ Mark says he did know the prostitute. ‘Didn’t like her either.’ A sudden strong smell of varnish as the two women start painting their nails.

‘Yeah,’ Mark continues. ‘You do get a lot of aggravation from the Old Bill. In Southend I’ve been nicked twice for things I never done. My mate kicked in a rockabilly and I got put in a cell for 24 hours for that . . . and here they just stop you on the street, RO you. Give it all out on the radio. See if they’ve got warrants out for your arrest.

‘I’ve been beaten up the Old Bill. There was me and another guy, me mate, he ran away. They took me home, found a starting pistol. Then they got me in the back of the car. Twisting my neck and punching my mouth. Bastards they are . . . and you get a lot of DS [drug squad] at gigs. Round here the DS are easy to spot, just old geezers. But at gigs some of ’em are really young. I was at Dingwalls [also in Camden Town] the other night and suddenly the DS was all around us.’

Mark, the letters of his name tattooed on his four fingers, flicks a hand over his crop, asks me if I want a cup of tea? Skinhead crops come in four categories, from grade one to grade four. Mark’s is grade one, the shortest. He has to get it cut every three weeks.

Over the tea Mark says he has no time for mods (‘just a load of wimps’), Teds, rockabillies or Asians. Why Asians? ‘I don’t like Pakis and I don’t know any skinheads who do. Pakis just don’t mix. You’ll see one of them,’ he points to the Peter Tosh poster, ‘with a white man. Never see a Paki with one. Paki-bashing is all part of the cult anyway.’

There is an Asian band in south London called Alien Kulture who take gangs of Asian youth with them wherever they play. Mark had said he thought ‘niggers are okay, I like the music.’ But he just shakes his head about Alien Kulture: ‘I don’t think they’ll last. I don’t think they’ll last five minutes. A Paki band? I never heard of such a thing.’

Tonight Mark is going to see Madness, the all-white ska band, at the Lyceum. Madness are darlings of the British Movement and National Front skins: somebody’s going to get hurt tonight. Mark himself says he isn’t into fascism, and he isn’t into violence. ‘I don’t fight unless someone provokes me.’ But what is it then that provokes skins to punch, kick, nut and razor? ‘It’s just the cult. Skins are trouble, aggro, Paki-bashing, the lot. The cult is trouble.’

Choose your own cult and live inside it. Skinhead is trouble. The cult is big in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester. In Glasgow and Belfast, punk is still the biggest youth movement. In the country as a whole, the ‘heavy metal’ revival is in the ascendant (loud rock from the likes of Saxon, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard). No one is really too sure what is happening in the youth culture. Fascist skins, left-wing skins, and yet more skins who just like the clothes and the music? A psychedelia revivial, a rhythm-and-blues revival? Black skins and white rude boys? Asian rock bands?

I take a train up to Bradford. Bad Manners are playing at the university. Bad Manners are from Stoke Newington. All white apart from the drummer, they say they got to know ska sounds hanging out in the local black clubs. The lead singer, Doug, has been a skinhead since the first time round, in 1968. ‘I’m the leader,’ he says, elongating the vowels to fake dumbness. ‘I’m the one who encourages all the violence at the gigs. I think you haven’t had a good gig unless you’ve had a good punch-up’. He smacks his ample fist into his palm and laughs.

The accent, like the clothing, is constructed from the cartoon worker, the Jak navvie. Skinhead style takes the bourgeois caricature of its class (dumb and violent) and makes it yet more extreme. Shave off the hair to emphasise brainlessness and criminality, make the head ugly and lumpen. Wear boots to emphasise drudgery and violence. A donkey jacket, like the one that Doug wear on stage, completes the look.

Active in a housing co-op in Stoke Newington, Doug is smart all right, he knows all about the parody and he has no time for racist gig-wreckers, but what can he do except make jokes about it? Trapped by his chosen style, the farthest he can go is to say, ‘Well, anyone who votes NF, they’re not too clever.’

The band are changing and tuning up in a lecture room. The tables are littered with empty bottles of Stella Artois, the remains of pasties. ‘I’m tough, I’m rough’, shouts out one of the band, sub-Clint Eastwood. ‘I’m mean, I’m clean’, screams someone else.

The boys from Stoke Newington, living on £25 a week and touring the country, are having a good time. After an American football-style huddle they rush out to play. No violence, of course, at a college gig. Bradford seems a lot further than 200 miles from London where, the next day, I have an appointment with the National Front.

I ring the bell and the front door is opened cagily by a fat man with greased back hair and an army-surplus jumper. Joe Pearce, the organiser for the Young National Front, and editor of their magazine, Bulldog, shows up. He looks every inch like a college boy, which he was till he was forced to abandon his course on polymer technology at the South Bank poly. His medium-length brown hair is well groomed. He wears a green car-coat and beige flares. He says he’s told the NF skins to meet us down at the pub. We live Excalibur House, the National Front’s Shoreditch headquarters.

Proud of the Front’s impact in the youth culture, Joe Pearce boasts of widespread support among heavy metal fans and mods, as well as skins. ‘Like the mod movement in the East End is NF. There’s a link between the glory boys and the NF, the gang that used to follow Secret Affair and now follows the Cockney Rejects. They’re the ones that have mod tattooed in the inside if their lip.’

The first skin to arrive is Gary Munford from Ealing YNF. He was first a skinhead in 1970, when he was twelve. Since then, he’s been a suedehead and a soul-boy. ‘I used to go down the discos, wear pegs and American bowling shirts. It was such a posy scene. I was spending about £30 a week on clothes. And then there was all the niggers at the discos and white slags hanging about with them.’

The few black people in this bar start finishing off their drinks. Another crophead sits down at the table. He’s wearing an army-camouflage flying jacket. I ask him what he does for a living? ‘Demolition,’ he says, with a mechanical chuckle. His name is Alex Barbour.

The recent National Front march in Lewisham was 80 per cent skinhead. What’s happened to the older support? ‘More important you have the young support. Look at the police running away, like they did at Bristol. Older people aren’t prepared to take that violence. Young people have got the bottle to go out there and . . . ‘ Gary Munford clenches his fist, adorned with punching rings.

‘If there’s going to be a ruck, skins’ll be the first ones in, they’ll steam in. Except I do disagree with them going down to Brighton and Southend and beating the shit out of each other, when they could be beating shit out of more constructive people, mentioning no names.’ His friends laugh.

Tony Duck and Rita Hope, from Haringey YNF branch, finally turns up. He is an unemployed electrician, and she works at Swan and Edgar on Piccadilly. He thinks a lot of recent skin converts are ‘just a bunch of wallies who’ve learnt how to chant Sieg Geil at gigs. They’re the sort of people who’ll grow their hair and start going round with blacks again.’ Tony says that, in his branch, there are two full paid-up black members. ‘It’s because they really want to go home.’

Gary Munford says his girl friend is in the Front. ‘She;s been on marches with me. But a lot of the time the blokes tell the birds not to come. There’s gonna be a riot.’

‘Half of us can look after ourselves just as good as you lot anyway,’ says Rita Hope. Even here, in the backwoods of the NF, some cracked reflection of a women’s movement: a woman’s right to ruck.

Jeering at this notion of physical equality, Gary Munford recalls a time he arrived at a march with 14 skins, to find 200 Anti-Nazis blocking their path: ‘We got all the girls behind us, said keep walking, then just ran at them shouting, “White youth unite.” They all just turned and ran. Whatever anyone says, our blokes have got more bottle.’

‘The birds of the reds are worst,’ says Rita Hope.

There is a vicious feel to those East End streets, where all the white boys are skins, which is absent in Somers Town: the small triangle between St Pancras, Euston and Camden. There is no reason to go through Somers Town, unless you happen to live in one of those blocks of council flats that comprise the neighbourhood. At around a quarter to four, boys are pouring out of the local school, Sir William Collins, an all-boy comprehensive. The blacks walk home with the blacks, the whites with the whites.
Two white skins, Andy Sophocleous and Steve Rawlinson, both 13, say that out of 165 boys in their year, about 70 are skins. They reckon the school is all right: ‘Same as all schools really. Some parts you like, and some you don’t.’ What is it they don’t? ‘Some of the teachers. Some of ’em are grumpy. Don’t let you have any fun in class. Kids work best if you can have a laugh, too.’

The Great Skinhead Reunion annual event in Brighton

Andy is carrying a school-supplied acoustic guitar. ‘I want to be in a band when I’m a bit older.’ I ask him what his parents said about him becoming a skin? ‘Well,’ he pauses. ‘I walked in after my first crop. and my Dad goes, “Oh, what? You think you’re a trouble-maker now?” And our teacher, Mr Malinson, he sort of goes to me and him,’ pointing to Steve, “‘If I saw you two on the street, if I was a cop, I’d pick you up before two normal kids.” For sus, like. People can get the wrong idea because of the hair.’

‘My mum don’t like it,’ Steve says. ‘Thinks you’re going out just for trouble . . . Best ti be normal if you think about it. Then you don’t get beaten up by no one.’ Steve and Andy aim to keep out of trouble. That’s why they don’t go to gigs. ‘There’s trouble on the train. They won’t let you on ‘cos they think you’ll vandalise everything. On buses they can make you sit downstairs.’

Moved on, stopped, questioned, denied entrance – skinheads these boys reckon, have a lot to put up with. ‘Yeah, they get a hard time, especially from the police, and quite a few teachers. One teacher suspended a skin. He had a swastika shaved into his head. I think that’s bad as well,’ Andy says. ‘I think he should have gone home. He would have got into a lot of trouble with the coloured kids, anyway. He would’ve got beaten up. The school’s roughly half and half, a few more whites . . . ‘

They’re getting a bit fidgety. It’s 4.20 and the football is on, live from Rome, at 4.30.

Down through Somers Town, over the Euston Road (a territorial divide for the gangs round here), and again on into King’s Cross. Just down the road from the Midhope House, where Mark Dumsday lives, is a youth club called the Tonbridge Club. Open 6 to 10, six days a week, it’s the hang-out for local kids too young or too poor to go drinking and dancing. They come here to play table tennis, snooker and pinball, listen to records. Most of the boys here, too, are skinheads. One of them, Michael, tells me he’s up in court next week for not going to school. He’s 15. Why did he get a crop? ‘Dunno. Just like the music, reggae and ska. And I’m into me own band, play bass. Get the name of the band down. It’s called Youth Cult.’

Another skin, Eric McQueen, takes Bob Marley off the turntable and puts on the Sex Pistols single, Anarchy in the UK. Eric is living in a hostel for juvenile delinquents in Westbourne Grove. ‘Well, it started at primary school, see,’ he says. ‘I used to fight all the time. I went to a hostel in Chapel Market and then they put me in Stratford House, a remand home, for six months. From there I went to a community house. Spent a year there, and then I got a job. I’ve had seven jobs since I left school, in shops, factories, decorating, everything.’

And what’s the idea of this place he’s in now? ‘Sort your life out,’ he smiles. ‘It’s all right. Ain’t got many rules, except you got to be in by 12 on Saturdays.’ Eric is 18. He has only had his crop, which is dyed blond, for two months.

Eric tells a couple of young girls who’ve sidled up that he gets about £8 a day from his social worker. They look impressed. I ask him how he got the scar on his left ear? ‘Some nutter.’

Hugh Byrne, who’s also 18, has a crop which is starting to grow out. He’s out of work. ‘He’s a good artist,’ says one of the girls standing by a bar which sells Kit-Kats and Coke. ‘Skinhead is just the thing round this area,’ High says, with the air of someone bored with the whole idea. ‘Used to be a lot of mods round here too, ‘cos the star of Quadrophenia, Philip Daniels, used to live round here. Half the skins round here used to be punks or mods.’

One local skin gang, about 40 strong, have recently given it all up, Hugh says.’They’ve all changed to normal ‘cos they were always getting picked on and that. I used to get picked up by the Old Bill a lot.’ Is that why he’s letting his hair grow? ‘No. Not really. It’s only been two months. I can’t be bothered to get it cut.’

Post-skins. like Hugh, and his friend, Tony French, all describe themselves as having gone ‘normal’ once they’ve let their grow out. Tony French, who now looks like a King’s Road smoothie, used to be involved in all the gang feuds round here. ‘No reason,’ he says. ‘Something to do.’

Reasons? Anyone interested in reasons (for skins, for punks, for Rastas) should take a walk through the meaner city streets, then turn on the TV. ‘We want a riot.’ You must have heard the skinhead chants. ‘We are evil.’ The straight world, the Rastas call it Babylon, is threatened with style: a sneer, a strut, a beat that has soul . . .

The teenagers at the Tonbridge Club start drifting off home at around nine. Youth Cult are playing London Calling down in the basement.

article from 26 June, 1980 by Ian Walker.

Ian Walker

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Shane Meadows wants to make This Is England ’00

10/5/2020

Film still of This Is England in 2006
Film still of This Is England in 2006. Picture: Moviestore Collection/Shutterstock

The director has revealed he’d like to to make another instalment of the series, which is set at the turn of the millennium.

Shane Meadows wants to do another series of This Is England.

Every year we celebrate the Skinhead subculture on Brighton Beach with The Great skinhead Reunion Event

The 47-year-old director – who previously helmed the 2006 film and its TV spin-offs – has revealed he’s eager to return to the series with a new instalment, set around the turn of the millennium.

Speaking to Andrew Shim – who played Milky in the series – in his Shimmy’s Corona Diaries YouTube series, Meadows shared: “I don’t know when but I’ve got This Is England ’00 in my head, the millennium one, because I sort of thought it would be nice, because when did we shoot the last one? Was it 2015, 2016?

“So, you’re obviously five years away and I don’t massively want to copy the film ideas, but if I went back I’d love to do a millennium one.”

READ MORE: This Is England Set For Final Film?

Shane Meadows at the 2016 Bafta Awards
Shane Meadows at the 2016 Bafta Awards. Picture: Mike Marsland/Mike Marsland/WireImage

Meanwhile, Stephen Graham – who famously played the fearsome Combo in the franchise – has turned his hand to comedy in new Sky One sitcom Code 404, but admitted he wasn’t sure if he could pull it off.

Speaking during a special junket from lockdown he revealed: “At first, I was quite nervous, actually.

“I said to Danny [Mays], ‘I can’t do this mate, I don’t really know what to do here’. And he was great with me because he’s such a generous actor anyway and a lovely fella. He was like, just do what you do, play it normally… just find the truth in it. I was like, ‘Okay’. And then that’s when I kind of found my place in it.”

Stephen Graham also recently took part in an interview with The Chris Moyles Show and let Pippa show off her best Scouse accent:Pippa shows Stephen Graham her questionable scouse accent!Watch Pippa in action here.Share

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Millie Small dies in London

“To all friends of Jaelee, Jaelee has asked me to write this and I do so with the heaviest of hearts. Earlier this afternoon Jaelee’s mum, the beautiful and vivacious spirit that was Millie Small passed away. Millie suffered a stroke over the weekend after a suffering a serious haemorrhage in her brain and was taken to Charing Cross Hospital in London on Saturday. Unfortunately the haemorrhage was such that team at the hospital was unable to remove the liquid around her brain and her condition has unfortunately been in decline since Saturday. Earlier today her doctors took the decision to take her off life support as there was no chance of a recovery and she passed away this afternoon. The team at the hospital did a fantastic job to make sure she was comfortable and peaceful in her last few days and Jaelee was at her side until the very last moments. I saw Millie briefly at the start of lockdown from a safe distance when I dropped off some supplies for her; she was her usual effervescent self, full of warmth, smiles and life so this has come as a real shock. I’m sure Jaelee will want some time and space to come to terms with everything so if you have a message for her let me know and I will pass it on.”

Milie Small with husband and child
Millie Small a legend of Jamaican Ska and Reggae

My Boy Lollypop was a favourite for many Skinheads in the UK a song many thought dedicated to them and sung by girls to their Skinhead Boyfriend for decades

The star was most famous for her hit single My Boy Lollipop, which reached number two in both the US and the UK in 1964.

It remains one of the biggest-selling ska songs of all time, with more than seven million sales.

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell announced her death and remembered her as “a sweet person… really special”.

It was Blackwell who brought Small to London in 1963 and produced her version of My Boy Lollipop, showcasing her childlike, high-pitched vocals.

“I would say she’s the person who took ska international because it was her first hit record,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

“It became a hit pretty much everywhere in the world. I went with her around the world because each of the territories wanted her to turn up and do TV shows and such, and it was just incredible how she handled it.

“She was such a sweet person, really a sweet person. Very funny, great sense of humour. She was really special,” said Blackwell.Skip Youtube post by El enano trapecista

Born Millicent Small in Clarendon, south Jamaica, she was one of seven brothers and five sisters, raised on the sugar plantation where her father was an overseer.

At the age of 12, she won a talent contest at the Palladium Theatre in Montego Bay; and by her teens, she was recording for Sir Coxone Dodd’s Studio One label in Kingston.

There, she teamed up with reggae singer Roy Panton, and they became one of the island’s most prolific duos, scoring a major hit with We’ll Meet.

Blackwell took an interest in the singer after releasing some of those records in the UK on his fledgling record label, Island, and brought her to London in 1963.

Small was enrolled at the Italia Conti Stage School for speech training and dancing lessons; and she toured the UK before cutting My Boy Lollipop with a group of London session musicians (Small claimed Rod Stewart played the harmonica solo, but he has denied being present at the recording).

Released in February 1964, it made her an international star, and helped popularise ska music around the world.

“It is the ska equivalent of Elvis’ Heartbreak Hotel or the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen – the disc that popularised a sound previously considered to be on the margins of mainstream consciousness,” wrote music historian Laurence Cane-Honeysett in Record Collector magazine.

Millie Small
Millie Small was given a hero’s welcome when she returned to Jamaica after the success of My Boy Lollipop

However, Small was unable to replicate the success of My Boy Lollipop, scoring only one further hit, a soundalike called Sweet William, later the same year.

But she continued to tour and record, and appeared frequently on 1960s pop shows like Juke Box Jury and Ready Steady Go.

“My life seemed very normal to me – even though I was only 17, I took fame in its stride,” she told the Express in 2016.

After leaving Island in 1970, she recorded for legendary reggae label Trojan Records, where her first single was a cover of Nick Drake’s Mayfair.

However, it was the b-side that attracted greater attention. Called Enoch Power, it was a defiant response to Enoch Powell’s inflammatory, anti-immigration “Rivers of Blood” speech that captured the mood of the UK’s Caribbean population.Skip Youtube post by lanman31337

Soon after that single, and the accompanying album Time Will Tell, Small stepped away from music, saying “it was the end of the dream and it felt like the right time”.

In later years, she lived in Singapore and New Zealand before returning to London, where she concentrated on writing, painting and raising her daughter.

When My Boy Lollipop was re-released in 1987 to mark Island Records’ 25th anniversary, the singer gave a rare interview to Thames TV, where she revealed she had, at one point, been penniless and sleeping rough in London.

However, she took the hard times in good grace, explaining: “That’s all experience. It was great. I didn’t worry because I knew what I was doing.

“I saw how the other half live. It’s something I chose to do.”

In 2011, Jamaica’s Governor-General made Small a Commander in the Order of Distinction for her contribution to the Jamaican music industry.

The singer is survived by her daughter, Joan, who is also a musician based in London.

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Harrington Jacket an icon of British Fashion design

Harrington decades of cool

The Harrington Jacket, and The Roll Call Of The Cool

When, it comes to the Harrington Jacket, I feel a sense of pride. I am from the North West of England. I was born in Salford and was brought up in Greater Manchester. For those that don’t know – the versatile and simply smart casual jacket originated in the form as we know it, in Manchester, the metropolis that was at the centre of England’s textile industry and had been, since the industrial revolution.

I mean, if you look at the Twentieth century, and if you had to pick out one British-designed garment that has transcended numerous decades, and had earned its right as a favourite amongst sportsmen and Hollywood greats alike, and infiltrated its way into the wardrobe of fringe subcultures, the Harrington jacket, simply stands taller than any other.

harrington jacket a222

It is impossible not to talk about the Harrington jacket and not begin by paying homage to its originators of the style of this classic and extremely wearable garment, Baracuta.

Baracuta was founded in 1937 by James and Isaac Miller in Manchester, they “designed the G9 (The G stands for Golf) when they set out to create a functional rainproof jacket for the English modern working man,”

The company is inextricably linked to the Harrington jacket. In the same year, it was founded, the brand released the iconic G9, which then only became known as the ‘Harrington’ after the rise of US TV soap opera Peyton Place, in which a character – Rodney Harrington played by Ryan O’Neal – would often wear the style.

peyton place mia farrow ryan oneal

John Simons, the purveyor of American classic styles is considered to be the most influential man in Britain with regards to Ivy Style, and quality garments plays a part in this tale of the Harrington jacket. As aforementioned, there was a character in Peyton Place played by Ryan O’Neal called Rodney Harrington. Legend has it, that Simons would handwrite cards to go in the window next to the garments on show. He would write for example “The Rodney Harrington Jacket” when displaying a Baracuta G9 in his shop window. After doing this a few times the writing of the name was shortened simply to “The Harrington”

My first Harrington i got in 1979 whilst collecting for a Scouts charity sale, it had a hole in the arm so i sewed a ska patch over it, i was the proudest skinhead on Earth”. Symond Lawes
Picture by Gavin Watson

The Harrington jacket’s original purpose was to be worn in the great outdoors. Traditionally, its shell is a water-repellent poly-cotton blend with an umbrella-inspired vent on the back to aid the run-off of rainwater so one’s trousers don’t get wet. There are also two slanted flap pockets with concealed buttons and an elasticated waistband and cuffs to keep you dry. The collar is a double-button, stand-up, Mandarin-esque collar which can be snapped shut to stop the incoming rain. There is also a central fastening zip. Overall, it’s incredibly lightweight, yet its signature element is the tartan lining of Lord Lovat, a British commando and chief of the Fraser Clan, who gave Baracuta’s founding brothers permission to use his family’s colours in 1938. Since then, this has remained an unchanged feature on Baracuta Harringtons. Why? Because according to Paul Harvey, a designer at Baracuta, “firstly it must be simple and not follow fashion. Secondly, proportions and balance are vital to such a simple design. Thirdly, it has to feel right. The simplicity of the jacket asks nothing of you and that means you feel totally comfortable wearing it.”

harrington jacket advert

It’s a simple design and the look has been worn by many that have become style icons. Movie and music legends alike have been known to wear Harrington jackets. It’s no surprise that stylists from many different backgrounds have gravitated towards wearing a G9, or more recently Harrington jackets that have been manufactured by other manufacturers. For it is a testament to this garment that it has been copied widely, as its influence is such that it is the epitome of cool. When you see James Dean, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the King of Cool Steve McQueen wearing a Baracuta, it makes you want to buy into that coolness. When you see the Mods, Skinheads, Britpoppers and indie artists looking cool in Harrington’s you acknowledge that sense of style for an easy to wear, sharp and understated look.

From cheaper ones to ones that are much more expensive. They are in various different fabrics. I have three Baracuta’s. One is in the traditional water repellent fabric, one that is in Chambray cotton, and another is a rare lightweight summer one, that is in red polyester and has a mesh Fraser tartan lining. I also have a Harrington style jacket by Two Stoned, that has the legend “The Two Stoned Rodney Harrington Style Jacket” on the label, and had been purposefully aged to look vintage and has several “Northern Soul” patches on it. I have a vintage US college version of a Harrington made by Haband of Patterson, New Jersey which is more like the Baracuta G4, and a black Leather G9 style Harrington I wear in the autumn and winter that is made by Charles Caine.

Rebel Without a Cause natalie wood james dean harrington g9 coat

Harrington’s are functional, comfortable, and timeless. The functionality is what appeals to most men, and the knowledge that when you slip one on, you instantly join that roll call of the cool. Of course – Harrington’s look great on women also. As when the fairer sex chooses to wear masculine clothing to subvert style norms, so they choose items that men have looked up to and admired. In affect reaffirming that they too can join that roll call, and show that they also like the functionality, comfort, and design that has a history that is broad, long and full of cultural identity.

Harrington’s are here to stay for it is the jacket that is made for both work and play.

harrington jacket female
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Mods v Rockers! The beach battles that rocked Britain in 1964 – and terrified bank holiday tourists

50 years ago the nation was shocked by violence which accompanied our first true youth culture. One man at the notorious Brighton brawl looks back on the chaos

The bank holiday began with tourists flocking to the coast but ended with them fleeing for their lives as Mods and Rockers turned beaches into battlefields.

Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1964, simmering rivalry between the groups reached a flashpoint as they clashed repeatedly on seaside piers and promenades across the country.

But the worst of the violence was seen in Brighton, as families were trapped in a shocking showdown which sparked moral panic about the state of British youth.

Tony Edwards was 18 and one of the first band of Mods to arrive on the Sussex coast that day. He says: “The Rockers had outnumbered us for years but leading up to 1964 we’d grown in numbers – now it was payback time.

“When we arrived on the beach there were just a few Mods and a big group of Rockers in the middle. Within about 90 minutes the beach filled up with hundreds of Mods.

“Then someone on our side threw a pebble at them and within a few seconds they were just being blitzed. I saw one guy who’d been cut on the head with blood running down his face.

“In the end the police had to charge on to the beach and escort this group of Rockers off the seafront, which must have been humiliating. They were tough men and we were just little kids poncing around in fancy clothes.

“But we weren’t going to take their c**p any more. It was the holidaymakers I felt sorry for. They looked terrified.”

You’re coming with me, son: Police arrest youths on Brighton beach (Image: PA)

Tensions had been rising for some time. The Rockers were usually in their 20s or 30s; Elvis-loving bikers rooted in 1950s Teddy Boy culture.

The teenage Mods’ culture, which flourished in the early 60s, was based on continental clothes, Italian Vespa and Lambretta scooters and the music of soul and jazz musicians.

They first clashed that spring on the March bank holiday in Clacton. At the Essex resort 97 people were arrested and the battle lines were drawn.

After that, trouble flared from Bournemouth to Margate, up to the bank holiday of August 1964. But Brighton’s Whitsun clash was the most notorious, thanks to sensational headlines and its immortalisation in Mod flick Quadrophenia.

Battles ran well into the night but although there were weapons – knives, chains and makeshift knuckle dusters – most scuffles involved fists and boots.

Tony, once branded King of the Mods in hometown Reading, says: “There were quite a few scuffles. I got into a few myself and nearly got arrested.

“I kept out of it most of the time but we would rush over and watch if something did kick off. We saw the action on top of the aquarium, a scene which is famous.

“In the middle were these Mods with deck chairs bringing them down on the heads of Rockers.

“But a lot of injuries came from the sense of panic and all these crowds running around. It was bedlam.

“A Mod got pushed through a window and got so badly cut he was pouring with blood. It was really nasty and there was this copper holding this lad and he was quite emotional: ‘For Christ’s sake, just look at this!’ he said.

“It was an accident, the crowds pushed him through, but word spread that a Rocker did it – and that fired us up more.”

The Mods got much of the blame for the violence but 68-year-old Tony, now a dad of three and a grandad of two living in Cornwall, blames the Rockers and police.

He says: “The police were very heavy-handed. There was panic about Mods but it was misplaced. All we wanted was to have a good time. Music and clothes were our passion.

“There was probably a hardcore of violent people, Mods and Rockers, who just used it as an opportunity for a fight.

“But it was the Rockers who went to Brighton knowing there was going to be trouble. They went there looking for it – and they certainly found it.”

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Punk Rock Promoter Ron Watts

RON 

RON WATTS PUNK PROMOTER  
Friday 17th November 2006, 30 years since Punk detonated, and I had the pleasure of sharing a few drinks with Ron Watts in my home. Ron promoted many of the early bands, and organised the now legendary Punk Festival at the 100 Club on the 20th and 21st September, 1976. Ron’s just published a great book which documents those heady and (for those lucky enough to have been there) exciting times. I switched on the tape recorder, put some wine on the table and off we went, talking about our mutually favourite subject. Music! I hope people will find this interview as interesting as I did, he’s a top bloke with some great memories.
Rob Maddison, Tamworth, 19th November 2006. 100 Watts, a life in Music. Written by Ron Watts and forward by Glen Matlock. ISBN 0-9543884-4-5. Available from Heroes Publishing, the Internet (it’s on Amazon) or even a bookshop!
 

RM) Ron, firstly, why did you write the book?
Ron) I was approached by the publishers, who said “would you be interested in writing your life story”. I thought about it, for about two days, and then thought yeah. Yes, I’d do that, you know what I mean.RM) How on earth did you remember everything?
Ron) Most of it was in the house, still. I just had to find all the old diaries and booking sheets and things, and it jogged my memory, you know. RM) You kept all that stuff, then Ron?
Ron) Well, yes, I suppose you would, really, wouldn’t you. To be honest, I sold some stuff off at auction, about 10 years ago, when I was skint. One thing was the Sex Pistols contract from the Punk Festival, which was handwritten by Malcolm McClaren.RM) Who bought it?
Ron) I think it was the Hard Rock Café in Central London, to put up on the wall.RM) When’s your next promotion Ron?
Ron) Well, I haven’t been promoting for a while, but it’s in my blood, and people are expressing an interest in me doing something. I’ve got 2 venues lined up for the new year, look here for news, come February. We’ve venues in Oxford Street and High Wycombe, but can’t say too much at this point!! These gigs are to be known as Ron’s part 1 and 2…RM) Who are you promoting?
Ron) What I did in 1977. RM) What, new “Punk” bands, such as The View etc?
Ron) No. Same bands I did in ’77. Same bands in the same place. Some of them are reforming, I’ve been on the bone mate!!RM) Who are you still in touch with from those days, Ron?
Ron) Virtually everybody. People from the Sex Pistols, met some of the Clash quite recently, Damned I’m still in touch with, no end of people. RM) Glen Matlock wrote the forward to the book and is obviously a decent bloke.
Ron) Glen is a nice bloke, and definitely part of the Pistols, but is his own man.RM) Did you ban Punk?
Ron) No. Punk was banned around me, and while it was banned at one venue, I still considered doing it at another, the Nags Head in High Wycombe. At the first opportunity for it to go back into the 100 Club it went back in. It’s a false supposition to suggest I banned it. It was banned because the police and Oxford Street traders association objected to Punks standing in queues outside their shops waiting to get into the club. At this time Oxford Street was the premier shopping street in Europe. I’d be getting complaints, so would go out into the street and try and get people to move out of shop doorways etc, but as soon as I went back in the club they’d be back in there. And of course there’d been some real bad violence. When a girl loses her eye that’s a pretty serious thing. You have to remember that I didn’t own the club, I just promoted there. Simple as.
RM) Did Sid Vicious throw the glass that injured the girl’s eye?
Ron) Well, I presume so, the barman saw him do it. He didn’t know Sid from Adam, but he pointed him (Sid) out and told me it was him that threw it. I don’t think Sid meant to hurt anybody, except the Damned! If it had caught Captain Sensible on the head he’d have liked that! Funnily enough I was down at the 100 Club a couple of weeks ago, and Michelle Brigandage, who took some of the photos in the book, was telling me that she was actually sat with the girl who lost her eye. Apparently she was an art student from South London, never wanted any publicity and was broken hearted, as anyone would be who lost an eye, especially at that age. She was only 19 at the time. Michelle was sat with her when it happened, she was her mate, and it’s the first time I’ve had a real chat about it. She said herself that though she accepts that it was Sid who threw the glass, he hadn’t intended to do that. But at the same time, he had thrown the glass with malice, and might’ve done even worse damage to someone else, you never know. So in one sense, he’s exonerated to a degree, and in another sense he’s still a malicious Pratt.

Ron Watts manager signs The Damned. with Stiff Records


RM) Was there any collusion to get Sid off by discrediting the barman’s story?
Ron) No, but so many people went down with him, to the police station, and said he didn’t do it that the CPS probably thought 250 against 1 and dropped it.RM) Were you surprised by Sid’s eventual demise?
Ron) No. You know, his mother, Ann Beverley moved up to Swadlincote, near here. She got some money from Sid’s estate, and the Pistols gave her some money. She got a cheap house and a few bob in the bank, and when she’d run through that she topped herself. As for Nancy, the police weren’t looking for anybody else, but we don’t know, do we.RM) Ron, how proud are you of your role in Punk, and could it have happened without the 100 Club?
Ron) Yeah, it would’ve happened anyway. It might have happened in a different way, but I suppose the traumatic birth it got, and the big hand it got via the Punk festival etc helped, otherwise it might have taken a bit longer. RM) Could it have started in any other city other than London?
Ron) I think it needed London. It gave it the credibility. It might have happened somewhere else, and it might have been more interesting if it had happened, say, in Liverpool or Newcastle or somewhere, but it would have taken longer to be accepted, and London would have taken longer to accept it.RM) I suppose the Pistols, who catalyzed the movement were a London band, and people like Paul Weller, Pete Shelley etc always say the seeing that band is what galvanised them.
Ron) Yes. They were the catalyst. We needed to have them in the Capital, playing in the middle of the Capital. It was always going to be a shortcut for them, you know. So yes, it would have still happened elsewhere, but in a different way.
RM) Whose idea was the 1976 Punk Festival at the 100 Club?
Ron) Mine. My idea, yeah. I approached Mclaren, as I knew that I needed the Pistols to headline it. And the Damned, they said that they wanted to do it, and The Clash agreed immediately, then we had to cast around to find some more. The Manchester bands were got down by Malcolm (Mclaren). Siouxsie approached me direct, although it wasn’t much of a band. Then, the Stinky Toys were volunteered by Mclaren, although I’d never heard of ‘em, and hardly anyone’s heard of ‘em since! Never mind, they got on eventually on the second night!RM) I read in the book that the Grande Piano on the stage got used like a climbing frame. Were you actually liable for damages if things got broken?
Ron) The piano wasn’t going to get moved off the stage. It always stays there. Thing is, you’ve got to remember that it was a running, 7 nights a week club, for Jazz and Blues mainly, and the piano was a part of all that. The owners of the club left me to it for my nights, very seldom that they were there, even. If the place had been wrecked, it would’ve been down to me, I’d have had to pay for all the damage, you know.RM) Punk 77’s owner wondered if you thought the Banshees sounded as bad as he thought they did?!
Ron) Well, in ’76 they weren’t really a band, you can’t comment. What they were doing was performance art, just getting up onto the stage and doing something off the top of their heads. They didn’t know any songs, and it sounded like it. It was weak, it was weedy. Sid just about tapped the drums. Siouxsie was doing the Lords Prayer and stuff like that. You couldn’t say it was a gig, or a rehearsed act, it was just people, getting up and trying to do something. I let them do it, you know, I might have done something like that at their age. I don’t think Siouxsie really lived up to her reputation, if you like. Well, not initially. RM) I didn’t like them, but the Banshees went on to become very skilled, musically.
Ron) Yes. By then she’d recruited some good blokes. She’s been living in France for a long time now, I don’t see her.

 
RM) Were the early Punks, like Siouxsie, middle class students? If so, how did they feel when Punk was taken up by the masses?
Ron) No. The early Punks were solidly working class. There was the art college mob, they weren’t numerically very strong, but they were the most vivid people, because of their appearance. They set the standard, the tone, you know? But immediately behind that, by the time of the punk festival of ‘76, the bulk of the audience was being formed by young, working class people and they took it to their hearts at once. RM) Were the movements roots biased towards the fashion element or more towards the music side, or was it one package?Ron) The fashion and art side, you know, was where Siouxsie was coming from. They took it very seriously, it was a new movement and they only had the one band to start with. It was very arty, but it was an art movement that worked. If you’d been there the first night I put the Pistols on, I think it was March 30th 1976, and you saw the Bromley Contingent coming in! They didn’t all come at once, they come in dribs and drabs. Each time, it was breathtaking and jaw dropping just to see them walk through that door.RM) Were contemporary Londoners shocked by the appearance of the early Punks?
Ron) Initially, yeah. They’d got used to it by the end of that year. But initially, like in the early months, absolutely.RM) The summer of ’76 is famous for its heat wave. I bet you’ve great memories of it?
RW) In that summer, and remember that it was the hottest, the best summer in living memory, it was the summer, people still talking about it now, and nothing was happening, everybody was asleep, you know. Anyway, this New Zealand film crew turned up to capture London. They’d been dispatched from Auckland to film London, in the summer. They were bright enough to cotton on to the movement, and they were haunting me! I mean, they got so many yards, so many miles of film, some of it’s not even been seen yet. All the main punk films, like the Rock ‘n Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury, were relying on their footage. They were amazed when they got their first, full on, Bromley Punk. They could not believe it. They said “You guys are 200 years ahead of New Zealand!” RM) Were you interested about the politics in Punk?
Ron) I tried to keep it at arms length. I wasn’t interested in sub-divisions.RM) What about The Clash?
Ron) Didn’t know that they were! (political). I think they were just trying to make it, I mean, they latched on to it. The Pistols had got a lot of the market wrapped up with their attitudes, so The Clash had to find some attitude, and they probably cooked it up with their manager, I reckon. What attitude can we have? Well, the Pistols have got this, that and the other and they found the one that they could go for. RM) I’ve read that the purists hated them, but I loved The Jam. They flirted with politics early on, and then really got involved, with Paul Weller joining Red Wedge later.
Ron) The Jam were some of the biggest winners out of Punk. There was such a lot of talent in that band. That band was so tight.RM) Did you get more involved with them once they’d started to get bigger?
Ron) They wanted me to help them with their American tour, by going ahead from city to city publicising it. But this was ’77, and I was amazed that their manager John Weller had asked me, and I would’ve loved to have done it. But, I was at the height of my promoting career, and I realised that. So I said “No, I’ve got to stick with this.”
RM) The Jam always felt like a band that, as a fan, you had a stake in.
Ron) I tell you what, they did a show for me at the 100 Club, when they’d been doing really huge venues like the Hammersmith Odeon. They’d always said, when we get there, we’ll come back and do one. They ended up doing three for me. One at Wycombe Town Hall, one at the Nags Head, which is a pub, you know! And, the 100 Club. They were really good like that, and I appreciate what they did for me and I love ‘em to bits.RM) It’s weird that there was all that acrimony between those people, and even stranger that Rick, and now Bruce, are playing in a Jam tribute band. (The Gift).Ron) Good drummer. I think, and this is my opinion, as I’ve no proof of it, that the girls all used to go for Bruce Foxton. The band was great, and they knew the band was great and they loved Paul Weller. But, in their hearts they all fancied that they’d get off with Bruce Foxton. When I did the box office at the 100 Club, there’d be all these girls turning up in school uniforms. I’d be saying “How old are you?” and the answer was always “19!” Am I really going to sell these girls tickets?!RM) I read somewhere, years ago, that Sid Vicious and Paul Weller had a fight after arguing about the Holidays in the Sun/ In the City riff. Did you hear that one?
Ron) No. I can’t see that. Paul Weller was from a tough, working class background. A fight between him and Sid Vicious would have lasted about 8 seconds. He would have dealt with Sid in no time at all. It didn’t happen. Sid would need to have been tooled up, and I’ve had to fight him 3 times when he was. And I’m still here. Sid came at me with a chain, once. I confiscated it, and wish I still had all these weapons, as I could put them up for sale at Christies, couldn’t I?! And I saw Sid with a knife, threatening Elle, the singer out the Stinky Toys with it. I took that off him and gave it to Malcolm Mclaren. Wish I’d kept it. RM) Ron, did you have much to do with Rock Against Racism (R.A.R)?
Ron) Only in as much as I endorsed it. And, I wouldn’t have any racist behaviour, as it says in the book, in any of my venues. I just wouldn’t. No way, I mean my bouncers were black, a lot of my acts were black, and I wasn’t going to have it. There were a few occasions when it surfaced, and I did the natural thing and let the black guys sort it themselves.RM) Empowerment?
Ron) Yeah. At Wycombe Town Hall, the British movement guys were having a go at my bouncer, Gerry. One black guy against twenty or thirty of them, so I said to him “I’ll take your position, don’t be long, go down the pubs and get your mates.” And he come back in with a dozen big black lads. I said to them, “Look, you’re here to look after Gerry, not to kill these white guys.” So, Gerry stood in front of them, and there wasn’t a word out of them again! They moved out of the way, and went down the other side of the hall, these bullies. They saw the odds evening up a bit, and given the other 8 or 9 bouncers I had stood in the hall, we would’ve murdered them.
RM) Jimmy Pursey went on-stage with The Clash at R.A.R in Victoria Park. Was this damage limitation on Pursey’s behalf? He seemed to get his fingers burned when the Skins affiliated to Sham 69.
Ron) Exactly. And I don’t think he liked that one little bit. See, now, Jimmy Pursey is another guy, like Paul Weller and Joe Strummer, probably all of them at that time. Underneath he was a much nicer person than the media, and the world, would realise and portray. He was an alright geezer and he caught the wrong end of the backlash. People were believing what he was portraying and singing about, and that wasn’t necessarily him!RM) Did Sham 69 dance a bit to close the flame? They could be perceived as “rabble rousing”, if you like.
Ron) They were looking for something to hang their stick on, if you like. The Pistols found it in one. Joe Strummer looked around with The Clash and thought about it and did it, you know. The Jam done it through their potent mix of soul and punk, and I think Jimmy Pursey thought he’d go with the hard boys in the East End. The skinheads, and the mobsters and the ruffians, you know. RM) Musically, Sham 69 were similar to the Pistols…
Ron) Yeah, closer than some. I liked Sham 69, they were alright. I think Pursey is another guy who hung his hat somewhere, and that hat got on the wrong peg.
RM) How fast did Punk spread throughout 1977?
Ron) Well, it got going in ’76. The Wycombe Punks, because they had me to promote at the Nags Head, got their first Sex Pistols gig there on September 3rd, which was actually 3 weeks before the 100 Club Festival. They were on the case really early. In ’76, Wycombe and the surrounding towns were full of Punks. By the end of that year, they even had a black Punk in Wycombe, a guy called Marmite. He had black hair, with a silver zigzag stripe in it. By ’77, it was all up and running everywhere. By January or February 1977 almost everyone under the age of 18 or 19 was a Punk.RM) When did the press really get hold of it?
Ron) Then. But they were on to it before the Bill Grundy Show, the Punk Festival was before that show and from then it was just….you know. I used to get phone calls, from NBC and CBS in America asking if anything’s going on, or coming off, could you let us know.
RM) That’s odd, being as the Americans claim to have invented Punk!
Ron) They were a year or two ahead. It’s like most things. It’s like the Blues. We had to take the Blues back to America for White America to know about it. Cream, Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, those sort of people. RM) America’s too big and too diverse. It couldn’t host youth movements like Punk and 2-Tone.Ron) No. It had to come from somewhere else. I mean, in New York it was a club scene, in Britain it was a national scene. RM) What did you think of those American bands?Ron) Some of them were really good. I didn’t think New York Dolls were as good as bands like Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. They were probably the best Punk band I ever saw, actually.
RM) And Blondie?
Ron) Well, Blondie. The bass player, Nigel was a guy from the Nags Head. Tigger, we used to call him. That was his name round Wycombe. He played at the Nags Head before he was in Blondie. I’ve got to say that Tigger and Blondie didn’t get on. Maybe she fancied him, and he didn’t fancy her!

RM) He would’ve been the only British male in the late ‘70’s who didn’t, then?!
Ron) Perhaps he knew something we didn’t!RM) Back to the serious stuff, Ron. The Clash flew to Belfast, had some nice photos taken near some barricades and murals. Then they flew home. No gigs played. What do you think about all that?
Ron) Well, it’s up to them. Sometimes, promotional events can take over. You can be wise after the event, it might have sounded like a good thing at the time. Who knows, I mean, it might have been sincere. I didn’t see them as a band who had very political motives outside of the publicity. I’m not saying they didn’t have a heart, but sometimes publicity sows a life of its own, you know.RM) If they’d played, this would never have been an issue with people over the years.
Ron) No, but they would do benefits and things, R.A.R, and one just before Joe died, for a fireman’s benefit. RM) It’s ironic. The Pistols and Strummer/Jones last gigs in England were both strike fund benefits. And the Pistols, apparently, never cashed their cheque from that Christmas Day one.
Ron) I wasn’t a party to any of that, but yeah, that was a good gesture. A lesson. A guy came down to interview me, and he lived near Joe Strummer. Lived in the same village and he was a long time journalist. He said that he thought that Joe Strummer had a lot of heart, and it was very typical of him that he’d go out and do a benefit as The Clash, but commercially would only do The Mescalero’s.

RM) Back to the Pistols, now Ron. What was their early live sound like?
Ron) I’ll tell you something now that I’ve never told anybody before. Musically, when the Pistols started, I thought that they were, or sounded like, a youth club heavy metal band. Not the songs, or the vocals, or even the presentation but the actual sound of the band. It wasn’t a weak sound, but it wasn’t particularly pokey. Within three months, they’d perked it up a lot.
RM) How big an influence was Dave Goodman to their sound?
Ron) He brought a lot of stuff to them. He gave them a lot of advice. He’d make them sound a lot more pokey, he’d get them to do things. I spent a lot of time with Dave Goodman, as when you’re a promoter, you’re there to open it up. And Dave used to arrive early, you know, he’d arrive at four in the afternoon. I’d give him a hand in with some of the gear, and we’d spend some time together as we’d be the only ones there for a couple of hours. I’d be answering the phone and stuff, doing other things like that, but I got to know that guy. He never actually spoke to me about Punk. He mentioned the Pistols, but he never actually spoke about the Punk movement. I wish I’d recorded all those conversations!RM) Did you always fill the 100 Club?
Ron) Well, after the first couple of months, it filled out, yeah. I mean, the Pistols didn’t pull a crowd for about their first six gigs. We’re talking about 50 – 80 people, the Bromley Contingent and a few interested parties!

RM) Some people must’ve come in to watch the Pistols out of curiosity? Maybe just walking by the club, then deciding to see what was going on in there, and finding their lives would never be quite the same again?
Ron) Yeah, I think that younger people who come down to see it would change. They’d come down the first night with long hair and flares, and by the third night they’d seen them they’d come down in drainpipes and Punk haircut, you know?

RM) What about the other clubs, Ron, like the Roxy?
Ron) Went to the Roxy, yes, many times. It was a bit of a pokey hole actually. The Roxy didn’t last long. The Vortex I went to. The stories I used to hear about that place! It was more of a disco crowd, actually. Rent-a-Punk, you know? It wasn’t for the faint hearted, not very savoury! RM) Did you get to read many of the fanzines?
Ron) Yeah, I did. I used to see them all. We had one out in the Home Counties called the Buckshee Press, which is a piss take of the Bucks Free Press, of course there was Sniffin’ Glue, we used to see that at the 100 Club all the time. There were others, too, I came across them all over the place, actually, some of them were just one issue, you know, and just a couple of pages.RM) Did you know Mark Perry and the music hacks the time?
Ron) Yeah, I knew Mark. Caroline Coon, too. Caroline has been very kind to me in her books, and things, you know. In fact she blamed me, or congratulated me for the whole of Punk in one of them, special thanks to Ron Watts, and that’s nice! Caroline was the first dedicated journalist who wanted to see Punk happen. And, I’m glad in a way that it happened for her, too, because she put her money on the table, you know? Same as I did. She ran that Release thing, which got all the hippies out of jail for cannabis. She was ahead of her time, I mean seriously, you can’t lock someone up for 6 months for smoking cannabis! RM) Changing tack again, Ron. What did you think of Malcolm Mclaren?
Ron) I like Malcolm personally. No doubt, you know, I’m not just saying that. On first impressions he looked like an Edwardian gentleman. He’d got that off to a tee, I’d never seen anyone look like him, actually. I never had any bad dealings with him, and he was always very straightforward.RM) People either loved or loathed Mclaren. John Lydon isn’t a fan.
Ron) Yeah, I think it was more of a financial thing, but I mean, John Lydon should also remember that without Mclaren he probably wouldn’t have been in them. Mclaren set the scene going, I was the first to pick it up, from that, before recording deals, but he never stuffed me like he stuffed the record companies. They made a lot of money, initially.RM) Did the record companies drop the band so willingly because it was Jubilee year?
Ron) Well, the Pistols were full on and did it. I mean, “God Save The Queen” become one of the biggest selling British hit singles, didn’t it? It’s still selling now! And they wouldn’t let it on the shelves, would they. Bless ‘em! RM) You were on the legendary ’77 boat trip up the Thames, when the Pistols played and Mclaren got arrested. What was that like?
Ron) It was lovely! You should’ve been there, honestly. The band were ok, they just did their normal gig. I enjoyed seeing people that you wouldn’t expect, talking to each other. When you’ve got the boss of Virgin, that business empire, talking to Sid Vicious, can you imagine what sort of conversation they had?! I’d loved to have taken a tape recorder in there! RM) Do you think the police raid on the boat was planned?
Ron) I tell you what, I was amazed at that. I was actually on deck, and the boat was going downstream, back towards Westminster Pier. The Pistols were playing, and it got a bit jostley. You know, a bit of charging about in a small space ‘cause it wasn’t very big, the boat, really. So, I went out on to the deck by the railings, and a couple of other people come and joined me. There was plenty of food and drink, and I had a beer and a chicken leg or something, you know. And I’m looking and I can see these two police boats, and they were a way off. Downstream, I could see two more police boats, and they were a way off, too. I carried on eating the chicken and drinking the beer, looked round, and they were all there, together, at the same time! I mean, the degree of professionalism was just amazing! And then they were on that boat, in force, like about twelve or fifteen coppers, in moments. The boat was quite high sided, but they were up there. And you know what they were doing, they were up there and on that boat and we were escorted into the Westminster Pier basin.RM) Then Mclaren was nicked. Do you reckon he did just enough to get the publicity of an arrest without being charged with anything serious?
Ron) I saw that. He got a lot of press out of it, yeah. He knew. Everybody turned to me, to try and sort it all out. One of them was a Countess!
RM) Ron, you mentioned that no other bands were on the boat. Was there a real rivalry between these new bands at the time?
Ron) The Jam were the young upstarts according to the Pistols, you know. The Clash were their biggest rivals at the time. The Damned, they had no time for.RM) Why don’t The Damned get their due credit? In my opinion, they should.
Ron) I don’t know. A lot of people say they’re just a Punk cocktail act. You don’t see a lot about them, and yet they were the first to get a single out and they could play. Scabies could play. Brian James come up brilliant, but then he’d have done anything, if they’d have asked him to join Led Zeppelin he’d have done that, and Captain (Sensible), well I like Captain.RM) Buzzcocks were, from what I’ve heard on bootlegs, a bit rough to start with. They really hit a rich seam once they got up and running.
Ron) If the Buzzcocks could make it, anybody could. I wasn’t impressed, really. But what’s in the future’s in the future, you never know what is at the time. They blossomed.

RM) And Magazine? Did you rate them?
Ron) Yeah, I did. Brilliant guitarist, John McGeoch. And Penetration, they were a good band, and X-Ray Spex.

RM) Which bands are you the most pleased to have seen play?
Ron) Well, I mean, it’s all of them. But where do you start?! Alright, the Pistols and The Clash, definitely, yeah. The Jam – pleased to see them anywhere, anytime. I did enjoy the Damned at an early stage, but they’re not in the top 5. And Sham 69, and The Heartbreakers.RM) I heard “Pretty Vacant” on the radio in my car earlier today, and I got the old goose bumps. Does any of the music from that time affect you the same?
Ron) All the early Pistols stuff, yeah!RM) What’s your view on Punk and Reggae getting married?
Ron) Yeah, if people want to get together and cross pollinate ideas, then that’s alright. It was the underbelly, twice. You had the white working class and the black working class responding to each other at last! RM) Some Punk bands who had a go at playing Reggae were better than others. Ruts, SLF and of course The Clash all cracked it in their own styles…
Ron) The worst Reggae act I ever saw, were The Slits. Actually, probably just the worst act! RM) Do you think that Punk and Reggae blending in ’77 was the root of Two Tone?
Ron) Yes. I’m sure it came out of that. I used to have a lot of Reggae acts on in that club, aside from Punk and the Blues and everything. I’d put on Steele Pulse, or an American Blues artist like Muddy Waters, as long as it was what I liked.
 RM) Your best front men and women?
Ron) I’m thinking about this one…The best oddball front man was Wayne County. Best front woman, from what I saw, Faye Fife.RM) You rate Faye Fife over Poly Styrene?Ron) You’re putting me on the spot there! I’d put them equal for different reasons. Faye used to put on a great act. They were perennially at the club and at the Nags Head. Because I had so many venues, when they were coming down again, I needed to know, because that’s three bookings to give them. It was always like, “get your diary out, mate, when you coming down?” If I gave them three bookings, they’d come down, and they could fill it out with other stuff, do the rounds. X-Ray Spex were good, too. Really good band. The Rezillos are still going, actually.   RM) I watched a documentary on TV the other night about that Stiff Records tour. The one where they hired a train from BR.
Ron) They did the first night for me, at High Wycombe, yeah. There were some funny people there! Wreckless Eric was at the Punk thing I did in Blackpool this year. It took me about an hour to recognise him. I kept looking and looking and vaguely remembered him. Not a nice bloke. RM) Here’s the last one, Ron. Punk lit a fuse for many people. I’m one (albeit two years late), the other people who contributed questions to this interview are others and there’s millions more. As Ed Armchair puts it, his fuse is still burning to this day, and has affected virtually every aspect of his life since it was lit. Do you have the same feelings about Punk as we do?
Ron) Yes. I got going through that and it still survives. My first love in music was, and is, Blues. I see a lot of similarities between Punk and Blues. They both come from the underbelly of a society, and they’ve both triumphed against all the odds. They both spoke for their people of that time and place. They’ll reverberate forever. Punk freshened up a stale music scene and the Blues were the bedrock for twentieth and twenty-first century music.RM) Ron, thanks for your time and best of luck with your new projects.END
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Punk To Save The Planet

Chris Packham: “Punk is coming back to save the planet”

The naturalist sees punk pioneers getting excited again – and it’s down to Extinction Rebellion and youth climate strikers. He recalls his youth pogoing to God Save the Queen and draws parallels to today in Forever Punk

It’s April, it’s sunny, and I’m humming…

‘We’ve heard it all before / We’re learning to ignore / You must confess this awful mess /Isn’t just a bore’

I’m unnaturally jovial…

‘It’s more than we could bear / But you don’t really care / Kiss of life to save our life /All you do is stare’

It’s one of my favourite songs from way back in 1978…

‘I’m back in full attack / Never give in until they crack / Emergency’

It’s Emergency by 999, perhaps the most underrated punk band, and I joyously recall vocalist Nick Cash reeling around the stage spitting out this song. So, so good! I’ve always liked the ‘never give in until they crack’ sentiment, and it’s particularly relevant today – because today is all about the biggest emergency ever.

When I reach Extinction Rebellion’s pink boat, moored on Oxford Street [in April], there’s a festival atmosphere and thousands of people are clearly delighted by the DJ’s choice of London Calling by The Clash. The bass is thumping through the colourful crowd, many of whom are singing along. I’m tempted, but I’m no Joe Strummer, so I keep my voice to myself. Well, my singing voice anyway.

When I address the fabulous party and salute their energies and endeavours to put the climate and environment emergency on the map and in everyone’s mind, I finish by asking them to continue to “shout above the noise”, to embrace the musical mantra that has informed, fuelled, directed and given integrity to my life for the last 40 years.

 

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m tiptoeing on tenterhooks into the basement of a North London pub to meet the maker of that essential and integral part of me, Pauline Murray – the vocalist from Penetration who penned that awesome anthem to independence, defiance, self-determination and rebellion.

They say you should never meet your heroes. They are wrong. She is wonderful and nurtures me through my starstruck interview and ends by handing me a handwritten copy of the lyrics. It’s framed now. It hangs prominently in my home and would be grabbed if fleeing from a fire. It will be in the casket with me for the terminal fire. It defines me and what I’ve done and what I do.

You see, for me the attitude and ethos of punk still pumps through my veins. Not just the music, the politics, the fashion, the art, but the method and the ferocious desire to change things – to never take ‘no’ for an answer, to make this a better place, to rail against injustice and always, always challenge authority. And maybe tear it down…

But am I just a sad old geezer trapped in the past, nurturing the nostalgic ideals of a youth, no longer of any contemporary relevance? Worse, am I, Chris Packham CBE, a sell-out, a hypocrite? Have I become the bastard I would have hated when I was pogoing to God Save the Queen?

Is it just me or are there a generation of other spiky old gits out there still angry, still fighting, still fired up by that social maelstrom that ravaged the UK in the mid-1970s? Well, that was my summer’s quest for BBC Four – to find them, quiz them, get the measure of them and then to see if their philosophies have been reborn and empower today’s activists, protesters and game-changers.

Spoiler alert. When I asked my stellar cast of punk’s original playmakers whether their ideology was alive and well, to a man and woman they cited “Extinction Rebellion” and the “youth climate strikers”. They smiled, got excited, shifted in their seats, punched the air – their eyes sparkled.

The consensus was that punk had finally woken from hibernation and was re-emerging to excite a new wave of very angry young people. They might be short of studs and safety pins, but they are not mincing their words and they are not afraid of the establishment.

They are breaking down doors, put ethics before the law, and, critically, these “stupid idiots” are not going to “shut up and go back to school” (that’s what Jeremy Clarkson said about Greta Thunberg). No these “truants” and “uncooperative crusties”(the last insult courtesy of our PM) will suck up such antipathy and use it like kryptonite to detonate essential creative and positive change. They might not know or even like it, but they are punks. I’ll leave Pauline with the last enduring and pertinent words…

‘Silence is no virtue in a crowded world / Where no-onehears / Feast your eyes upon the fools / Who follow theleaders without thought / Don’t let them win / Don’tthem drag you in / Shout above the noise.’

Chris Packham’s Forever Punk is on BBC Four on January 10

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Camden Skinhead

rollingstone Somers Town Skinheads London

Hello. I want to share with you my recollections and memories of the skinhead scene that I have always been a part of. At the moment I am recovering from falling off some scaffolding, so this has given me time to get to grips with modern technology and given me a chance to reflect for the first time on the subject of Skinhead culture and share with you some of the stories and memories of the past from like minded people which has been prompted by hearing the interview with Symond Lawes on the Brighton skinhead reunion recorded some time ago.
I will start by telling you about myself. I’m a 50 year old skinhead and bricklayer now living in Wendover, Bucks. I grew up around the Camden Town/Somers Town area of London.
When I was a kid, kicking a ball around at night, my mum always said: ‘Be home before the Mods come out!’

This was around 1969, she was referring to the lads, who would have been Mods, who had inherited the same patches outside the local pubs that their elder brothers hung around some years earlier.My parents still called them Mods, and I always thought of Mods as being the the elder statement of skinheads. These were previously the 7/6d’s, that have now come of age. We knew which families they came from, and who they were, and our families knew their families and so on. There were some real tough families in the area at that time. By this time the groups that my parents remembered were growing up, getting married, they were joining the Army and working for Her majesty ( GPO) or staying at one of her Hostels. (HMP Pentonville was near my home)The GPO tower was looming over us, like a calling card, it was a respectable career to aspire to and a lot of us did end up going to Mount Pleasant GPO, after being kicked out of school.
But a further aspiration, was to join the local gang. I was way to young for this at the time but I would look out of my bedroom window, with envy watching this group, evolve from 1968 onwards. I will never forget the sound of the the light buzzing of scooters as the gang rode their inheritance from their older brothers. They were a group of lads who had this tough but smart look about them, They wore mostly denim jackets, with Crombies ¾ length coats, boots and braces. The gals didn’t have the skinhead feathered hair cuts, like they did later. Some of them looked a bit like the Toyah Wilcox character in Quadrophenia. Most of the girls had Crombies but looked feminine but they still looked like Sixties Mod girls, with kilt type minis, they wore their hair in a shoulder length style that hinted at skinhead look. It was a bit like a flat mullet, with a fringe, that looked like it had been cut around a saucer template.
You always looked out for “Names” on the skinhead scene. “Names” who were hard enough to have been kicked out of the local boxing gyms. The word got out amongst the scene. They were always tough Jamaican offspring kids, and they were ALWAYS part of the group. These kids where always in the mix, as some of the top boys, but in many ways smarter. “wiv the threads” a right proper mixed bunch who always fought and hung around together, Skinheads or mods, peanuts, however they were, they were the was the only group you would ever see with blacks kids.

In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Somers Town like this:

SOMERS-TOWN, a chapelry and a sub-district in St. Pancras parish and district, Middlesex. The chapelry is a compact portion of the metropolis; lies between New Road, the Regent’s canal, and the Great Western railway, 2 miles NW of St. Paul’s; occupies ground which was mainly unedificed so late as 1780; and has a post-office‡ under London NW, and an S.-Police station. Pop., about 14,500. The living is a p. curacy in the diocese of London. Value, £300. Patron, the Vicar of St. Pancras. The church was built after designs by Inwood, at a cost of £14,291.—The sub-district extends beyond the chapelry, and comprises 184 acres. Pop. in 1851, 35,641; in 1861, 39,099. Houses, 3,907.

Some of the lads dressed smarter then the others, the way they dressed reminded me of the slick character in the 70’s TV show “Please Sir” some of the black lads had the Tennis Fred Perry shirts, and braces with “Peyton Place jackets. My mum wanted to see me dress like that, as she fancied the film actor Ryan O’ Neil.
She seem eager to see me in one of those outfits, more then any other form of attire. Later on most of the Jamaican kids were smartly dressed in tonics and loafers especially on music nights and at that time they had the same inner London accents as most of them had come over in the 1950’s when they was babies and a few of the younger lads was born in the UCH the same as me.
On youth club nights I would hear the sound of the club in the Cumberland Market down in NW1. This was mixed with the turn out of the dads and older lads coming out of the Kings Head opposite my house. At the time I didn’t know what the stuff they were playing was, but it had such a infectious bounce to it, and it echoed all around my room at night. I used to tuck my head under my eiderdown. I felt so spellbound by the rhythms and beats. So much so, that I would wake up with it almost resonating like an exact recording in my head the next morning.

This would stay with me for life. Later on I discovered exactly what it was and that it was the ska/rocksteady music. The ska would be played at the early part of the night just as it was getting dark, and the sound would be taken down a level later in the evening with the Rocksteady beat. At the time I was too young to get involved and my nearest encounter of rubbing shoulders with this crowd, was seeing these older kids break away from the group and go on the march to Highbury, on Saturdays. The older lot headed for the boozers and then the North Bank, while we went to the West Stand with my dad,and my mates who all had older brothers in the ranks so with that and the fact that there parents knew mine and who’s boy I was!
As I got older, I would go around me mates gaffs, a lot of their elders had left home to start families. It was almost the unwritten law at that time, that the elder brothers room should remain untouched, and that included record collections. For me, at the time that was heaven. I understood that ska was the main stay amongst Skinhead record collections, although a lot of skinheads at the time, did listen to other stuff apart from reggae there was a popular local band called “The Action” that locals still followed also nearly everyone of them had “Who” and “Small Faces” poster or disc, and also would you believe: “A Kind Of Blue” by Miles Davis. which his brother always called his “Shagging music.”

Madness have become the most successful band to have come out of the Skinhead Subculture, From Camden Town, inspiring a Ska movement worldwide

 

I thought it was a kind of dance at the time and I remember being glad to see those records and posters as it kind of blessed what I thought was a guilty secret of mine, my love of “The Who.” In a way it wasn’t that strange, as we all gravitate to a kind of group or music that attracts us and that was the whole Mod ancestry! It wasn’t quite the mainstream but it was heavy enough to be called Geezers music but it never crossed over to hippiedom which I always thought of as being “THEM” the group you never want to be with. I inherited a hatred of them, not so much the music coz there was a lot of “Blues” which I always loved, and that’s when I started to get more knowledgeable about this kind of music, as I knew that it was the root of ska, a Jamaican take on the blues that they had heard from the Southern states. So this also gave it a blessing to like “The Blues” as well.

My dislike for hippies came from the fact that they all seem to talk posh and they always seemed to be moaning in middle class accents and I despised those military wing greasers.The music consisted of “geezer rock” or white English men who played “Soul” and “Blues” that came out of “Rock” getting it slightly wrong. This was a style that developed by mistake. This clashing together of styles seem to repeat itself later on with Punk which I embraced quickly as soon as I was old enough to welcome it all but I had always being a Skinhead or Suede head since the time I tried to dress like guys from 1968 and 1969.

I have never been anything else as my age stopped me being a Mod. Then Punk came along and there was no way I was going to wear flares and attend concerts with the hairy ones on ice at Wembley!!! I’m pleased to say, that I have lived my life as a skinhead, and never succumbed to wearing flares no matter how out of step I was with the early to mid 70s.
I would also like to touch on something that Skinhead/Suede head discussions seem to overlook, This is when I started to hang around music venues the remainder of Skinheads from early days to the early mid 70s suede heads, were influenced by “Glam Rock” although it was from the less feminine side such as Mott the Hoople and Steve Harley. There seem to be the pre- punk, side which was full of the skinhead types, and that was “Pub Rock”. There were so many of us in our group, we would make our way up to Tally Ho boozer in the north end Kentish town, to see the bands that played there, that included all of us and those who were old enough to get in “legit”.

We were all part of the old gang of would be skins. This time more of them were wearing DMs, and crombies, with either a No2 or slightly grown out suede head haircuts. This was still the family “Skin” very much so, and this was the heavier aggressive sound that was for working class inner Londoners, or any other cities youth. We could relate to it.. it was our Generations “The Who.” I sounded out all of these bands, pre-punk even trying to get down to that London in Essex hotspot which was Southend. I thought Dr Feelgood were fucking magic. My mates started to hunt through those record collections to find stuff like it and in hindsight we enjoyed Kersal Flyers Brinsly Shultz etc….. I loved all that stuff. By then of course we’d turn up trying to get in to gigs (I was still too young by the way) to any gigs that we thought was of that ilk, but once we got to them and heard them there was something more unhinged about some of those bands: “London SS” and the “101ers” need I say more that was my introduction into punk and then for a year or two I indulged my self into it.
I met up with mates all over London, that I knew from Boxing Gyms by way of boxing, regular trips down to the Bridgehouse, when it was in Barking Road also it was only a short walk down to the “Roxy” it was close to us and we used to just to hang out there. We Heard that “Dee Generate” out of “Eater”, was our age so we thought: “Let’s ave some of that.!” Some of the punks were a bit creepy, and a bit too arty, for my liking, but I went with it. There was some crumpet, but the girls were all weird wiv suspenders and stuff, and their knockers were sticking out of bin liners!
This was great for a kid my age, especially the at the “Roxy” the mighty Menace at “The grope and wank her” (Hope and Anchor yes we used to think it was funny!!!!!!) We would chat to Charlie Harper at the George Roby,there was this lesbian down the west end. We used to go and hang around with her with an added idea I was gonna cop an eyeful, but that turned out to be the only place a lot of bands were able to play, thanks to the then Tory run GLC so although I did do a lot of growing up in experiencing ways of female flesh. It wasn’t the lesbo orgy I was expecting.
I will like to add, that at times we could feel a change happening, felt a ruck coming on, there were more swastikas, appearing with some of the punks. My jeans were scruffier but I still wore my black “Peyton Place” jacket and me Fred Perry tennis shirt we used to call em, not polos, they was well cheap then down Petticoat lane or Roman road. I always wore me DMs, and my hair was a bit above No2, I was a punk, but I always stayed a skinhead,too so the Swastika was a symbol that we despised. We grew up with parents and grandparents that had experienced it.

Half the streets were still corrugated fenced up, from Bomb sites, back in the days of me observing original skins I used to read read battle picture library and War picture library, those booklets, you know the kind of thing I mean. I used to have dreams of single handedly wiping out Nazis. I used to go to bed thinking that there was an army of rapist, Nazis hippies and coppers, and Narkie Grasses. and how I can dispose if them.It also was a symbol of The Grease, another reason why we hated them, because of their treachery of wearing what Nazis wore. although we hated “The Filth” and any establishment figure,, we were still working class British people and we was not that rebellious. So I resisted wearing that stuff but we was always up for a ruck people tend to think or want to believe it was the far left that was bovver boys when it was the opposite. I hate politics in music or subcults ,that’s why I don’t hold wiv no S H A R P stuff, but I will say this, we never saw a Tory never mind supported them.

Everyone came from Labour voting working class families,, so we knew what we wasn’t, but never dwelt on what we were or what we were going to be. I hated politics and what’s great about being a skinhead then and at now my age is that it’s like being in stir “You don’t ask questions.” The nonces will be found out and dealt with at some point, and a skinhead gathering is the same for anyone on both sides. Both far extremes will feel marginalised eventually and this it started out as a youth sub culture, and we have taken it with us. It’s what you feel, being a skinhead is all about, and it is what brings us together. As it’s the furthest thing away from being a 14 to 15 year old Mod. Skinhead, Rude Boy in the 1960s, suede head 1970s is politics. Thats what your mum and dad talk about, and as I still haven’t grown up nor do I want to I am a old but proud pathetic old git, and I won’t never change!
Going back to attitude. Well, We did speak in a way that isn’t talked now, but even your hard line trade union lefty activist would be slaughtered by the speak Gestapo now!!! it was another time, there was paki – bashing by gangs of mixed black and white youths especially after the arrival of Ugandan Asians not because of colour but because they were new and strange and our ignorance wasnt enlightened by the lack of integration and not willing to embrace, the culture,, unlike the Irish around our way which was a massive wave of families and for young people the West Indians shared there fashion and music it was ignorance and for us, the it was an overwhelmingly important pastime of fighting. This could be amongst any inner city youth Asians were just another group to ruck with, nothing more or less, as far we were concerned! As a group, privately who knows or cares what your views was away from the the lads was,, there was and there wasnt, least among us anyway and especially skinheads who were the hardest lot of the roughest manors, but I am sure Teds, Rockers, fuck even some working class hippies that went along for the trip as it were spoke like that,or picked on someone or something they didn’t understand that they felt weary of amongst not just kids but everyone at that time.

Most skinheads got a bashing from other skinheads most people amongst us was working class, and most of them were skinheads, or related to skinheads. I recall skinhead battles tales amongst the groups , and later on, about area gangs, they didn’t think in terms of London boroughs, just London areas and it was all very Territorial, for example there was Somers town, were I was, Kentish town, Upper Holloway Archway,Clarkenwell ,Shorditch/Hoxton/ Dalton, Queens Crescent, Camden town, then going eastwards there was Stoke Newington, Clapton and then the East End, Bethnal Green, Mile end , Wapping, Stepney, go further east and you get Canning Town, or West Hammersmith, Chelsea Fulham and Shepherds Bush.

Or you might know guys from these areas from work in the centre or boxing club circuit, or gigs, and you would talk and have a laugh but if you were meeting for a ruck then you be knocking shit out of each other if they were representing the area, and further to that, you might have a West Ham or Chelsea supporter in your local gang who would fight with you if you were called out by another manors lot but as they were mostly Arsenal around our way any friendship went at for that fixture. same goes for an Arsenal supporter from Fulham he’d be rucking his mates at football and come Saturday you looked at the scarf not the person that’s what how mad it was I have been told about it from older skinheads that I used to admire when I was looking at them from my bedroom window, fuck some of these guys are in there 70s now.

It was slightly different when I turned the age to shag and ruck but not that far off, but you get me gist !!! so I think Asians at the time got more of ribbing then a hiding it was other groups but most people would unite if they saw greasers setting on a skinhead or what you deemed as one of your ownAs for the Hambourgh tavern I’ve got my own views on that I was there although not for long we couldn’t get to it, but I remember feeling so fucking angry, to see skins that look like they were on the side of the the filth again it was whipped up by both right and left, press and lay politicians and more so the music press who hated the thought of working class council kids being a force, I don’t blame the Asians, they were young fuel filled lads protecting their area or what was force fed to them,they were young like us and was up for a ruck, like any group of whipped up teenage lads, we wanted to go down here or there and make some working class noise and have a few pints. I’m not a conspiracy weirdo, but there was so many reasons why the fucked up middle class left, the fucked up Nazi right wing plus the broadcast media and music press caused that, as the latter didn’t like something that was based around youth led pastime angst and they didn’t like something that they didn’t make or break because it was real and not manufactured, it was something that we could enjoy and dictate what happened with it. It served our purpose, it gave birth to the boneheads that have soiled a working class culture and ruined the fledgling stages of young rock n roll bands,And took away a good deal of their income at a time when they should of been making it good. We could enjoy a good few years of live working class punk rock, seeing as it was taken away from its own manufacturers and given to people who could enjoy it it started going down hill after the Clash signed to CBS it was salvaged and put to good use but the press wanted it dead. These days we can relax with it as our first love and enjoy the Ska and rocksteady that we adopted, and still love, through our own choice as Middle Aged skinheads, that the music press didn’t intend us to love and there’s fuck all they can do about it!!! I’ve got through a whole pack of 20 smokes, in the time it’s taken to do this, didn’t realise the time, that’s more then i get through in three days, but I have enjoyed sharing this with you all…. as you can tell I can go on for ever about this…

Those days were right proper heady,, faces were on stage,in bands that you knew from  seeing them around the chippy/ newsagent in tobert street,,or the youth club, and you know faces from school ,, punk , Arsenal ,especially (Arsenal/Highbury grove ) school , most of the locals around our way went to William Collins ,, I was expelled from secondary schools,, St George’s in St. John’s wood, Highbury grove, ect , only two weeks at William Collins,
I was used to seeing loads of local faces being on telly,, in bands, you took it for granted,(Pauline’s people then Grange Hill)  70s corona drink ads,ect ,, i stopped noticing,,
people from Anna Scher and all that!!! and so on,,but I know who your talking about now ,Low Numbers, they were in the Dublin castle,,i recall ,seen em with Madness,( or invaders, cant remember what stage they were at, the time) loads of us started bands, we loosely played,,,,but nothing proper,,, some bands went further then others,,we were called THE St Pancres Chronical   after the local Rag, but we were shit,,, I played guitar but every time I picked i it up , I just ended up playing Blues,,,bending notes,,,and sounding to much like Heavy Rock?,, I was fine with it, but it pissed the rest off,,,so we decided to stick to being in the crowd watching/ listening,
,,coz I knew people from other  schools in other manors , we kind of broke away from Cumberland market faces , except for four mates in  Robert st,,,and The Crown Flats,local people became  just another face  ,,you recognised ,and the families they came from,,, and who your dad and grandad drank with,
,There was a local crooner  type who  went of to the Army,,, geezer called Gary Driscoll,, he was the first local I knew off, that was dragged up there!! To get noted,,
,my ole man used to be mates with the landlord,of the Dublin castle ,then a Irish fella called Barney Finley,,I was. Mates with his boy Raymond,, they passed it on to the present family,,in the late 60s ,we used to run about in there  after lock up,  two o clock on Sunday afternoons, coz we’d often go to  av sunday dinner with them!!so it was only right I would later make that me local,, so  i witnessed the start of all that too,,was lucky Spose living between West End and Camden Town,
,,I was able to get into clubs in soho,,in the late 70s coz me dad knew all the faces and names ,Jimmy  and Rusty Humphreys  ect,, that’s why I was able to hang about  the latest clubs, being younger,me dad ran an electrical repair /retail shop ,,in Berwick street,called Friel and Francis ,with me uncle Bob (pic,on the front of oasis album), would you believe,, the first parking metre in Westminster was unveiled outside the shop,and  a young spiv that hung about in and out was Alan Suger came down  parked his van with hilivery   A .M .S .TRADING,,marked on the side,coz he knew the press would be snapping, me dad used to sell his car Ariels,(cute ,, got to love that)  anyway they  used to rig up the sound in Ronnie Scott’s,
I used to bunk of whatever school I was in ,to work on Berwick street market,,,
,we used  wheel the sack barras to pick up the veg  and stuff from around what was to become the Roxy before the fruit and veg moved across the river,, John Holt used to have something to do with it ,  I remember , it was converted  from that,,,so that’s why I familiar  to it to hang around there,,later,,, coz I was a cocky little shit, and coz Eaters drummer was from the sticks and was our age , we dint want him to out do us ,to be part of it all.. ,  i knew Id be looked after,,by someone that would be to hand,,if it got to heavy we could UP any older punk that snarled at our presence,,when they did, we was quick to take of our young punk head , and say “we ain’t fucking punks were skinheads”,,,you tossers,,, although we were at the time,,, lot of the older punks were from the sticks,, so when we got snarled at ,, we’d give it  our “( we’re from here,you ain’t  and you don’t know what’s around the corner on the way out ,)
,,the other local connection was my grandads drinking buddy ,who liked drinking with riff raff,was Constance Lambert, he used to live up Park Village East and come down to The Victory ,in Albany St ,he used to drink like a gooden apparently , corse he pegged it before I or the The Who was born,so he dint see his sons  success ,!

 

‘Skinheads & Cherry Reds’, Gerry Stimson, Rolling Stone, July 26 1969, pp. 22-23

This is from the UK edition of Rolling Stone, the American music paper. There are plenty of misspellings and typos, these are from the original. There’s also some racism expressed.

They are the people you may see on the fringe of things, at free concerts shouting out for their favourite football team when everyone else wants to listen to the music, hanging around outside of the Roundhouse trying to annoy people with long hair, or you may see them just hanging around on the street. They are the kids who have short cropped hair, wear boots and levis with braces. They don’t really have a name as such, outsiders call them crop-heads, prickle heads, bullet-heads, spike-heads, thin-heads, bother boys, or agro boys.
The lack of a name is strange, for most groups of people with an image of their own eventually get a name, Mods, Rockers, Hippies, Heads. ‘We are not mods really. Some people call us Mohair Men because we wear suits at the weekend, mohair men waiting for the agro. We’re just sort of stylists really because we keep in with the styles.’
The thing that they are known by is the gang and the area they come from. Like Mile-end, the Highbury, the Angel. The gang will have a hardcore of members with the rest of the bullet heads in that area supporting this gang against gangs from other areas. ‘There’s about 30 of us here from the Town (Summerstown), you know, King’s Cross and all of them areas. If we ever got into trouble, the geezer’s down there’d back us up; like there was 120 over the Hampstead Fair, geezer’s we knew, and everyone would back us up if we was in trouble.’
Trouble is the key activity of the gangs. Known as a ‘bit of agro’ – a bit of aggravation. Trouble can start at some event such as a football match, a free concert ‘like up Parly Hill’ or at just about any other time. At the Hampstead Fair ‘all the rival gangs, they all meet up there. Holloway, Highbury, and all them mob, like, and they all stick together, they’re all one mob and we’re the other mob.’
Trouble starts in several ways. It may be planned days ahead over some rivalry between two gangs, or it may just break out over some small incident. ‘You just see a face you don’t like. You know, I mean we get a bit of aggravation with the guys up there. All you hear all the time is the Holloway’s looking for you, the Highbury’s looking for you: and everytime we go there and pull someone about it and say ‘what’s all this trouble with the Town?’, no-one knows nothing about it. So every now and again, like, when people say ‘we hear the little Holloway turned you over’ we can’t have that like, so we have to go up there and turn them over.’
Each gang seems perpetually on the alert for some trouble. Sometimes months will go by without a fight, then suddenly there’ll be a fight every night. ‘We are friends with no-one, no joke. There was a time when we couldn’t go out of our area like unless we were thirty handed. We fucking hit every crew from right round here, up that way St. John’s Wood, The Edgeware Road, Tufnell Park, Archway, Burnt Oak, Mile-end, Kilburn, Holloway, Highbury, just sort of everywhere. We just sort of, about eighteen months ago, went made didn’t we, for about three weeks, getting into fights and whacking crews. We whacked someone from nearly everyone of them areas and they was all after us. There was a lot of agro then.’ That was the time when someone in a car came after the Town with a shotgun. There was some uncertainty as to whether it was a shotgun or an airgun, and if it was a shotgun, whether it had real or blank cartridges. ‘The guy with the gun thought we’d all run like and hide but he came a bit unstuck ‘cos we didn’t. We stood there and fucking waited for it. We he can only shoot two of you can’t he.’ The outcome was that they threw dustbins under the car making it skid up the pavement into a brick wall, then threw bottles. ‘The geezer with the gun, got knocked out, and they says they’d never come down no more, cause they’re all made down that Town.’
Some of the action is centred around football, for most of the gangs support some team. But little of the fighting is with other supporters of London teams; instead it is with supporters of teams from the North and Midlands. The Shed boys are those who support Chelsea (see the slogan ‘Shed’ painted on the walls) who watch the match from the Shed, one of the stands on the ground. Any who is not a Shed boy goes into the Shed is liable to get a kicking. Some of the fighting with other supporters takes part after the match, like at Euston when after a match you can see the crowds of bullet heads roaming in the streets nearby. Other things may follow the match, like kicking in shop windows and taking the cigarettes, or the time a crowd went up to Parliament Hill after a match and threw bottles at the Fleetwood Mac.
The clothes and the walk all fit in with the hard image. The usual gear is levis worn short with braces, tee-shirts, v-necked sweaters or cardigans in blue, khaki, brown, mustard or green. An innovation is the v-necked short sleeved sweater that doesn’t quite reach the waist so there is a hint of braces. Sometimes there are tattoos and sometimes gold signet rings worn two or three at a time. The cropped hair started coming in about three years ago and is probably copied from the spade haircut. And then there are the boots, the most important part of the gear. There are different types of boots and the styles change just as they do with shoes. Members of one gang tend to buy the same kind of boots. The boots probably arrived because a lot of bullet heads were wearing them for work, along with levis, and they’d come home from work in these clothes and what’s the point of changing if you are only going to stand round on the street corner. Then a style developed. ‘Like me, I didn’t start wearing them, we not really, because I thought, well I couldn’t half land a good kick with them, I bought them because everyone else did.’
The boots are one of the symbols of the hard image, and of course are very useful for fighting with. If you go out in your boots you are wearing a very handy weapon that is not so obviously a weapon like a knife. Even when the gang gets dressed up in their mohair suits on a Saturday night the boots are still worn, but then they will be highly polished. The trousers of the suits are worn short like the levis in order to leave room for the boots.
The boots are different colours and the favourite ones change over time. When it first started everyone was wearing tuf boots, Big T with the rubber sole, ‘then these boots came out, they call them Cherry Boots, Cherry Reds, with a toe cap like and sort of yellow trimmings. Then the black ones of these, then Monkey Boots which lace all the way up, and then Doctor Martins came out. Now there’s some new ones, with high backs, they’re just called Stompers, big steel toecap and everthing.
The walk too expresses the toughness. Its a sort of bouncy swagger with the shoulders spread broad. Its a ‘here I come stand out of the way’ walk. When there’s a group going somewhere walking is done in a long crocodile in single file, all hunching along behind the guy in front.
Most of the time seems to be spent waiting for something to happen, a bit of aggravation or a ‘caper’. During the week there is little else to do but hang about on the street, in cafes or Youth Clubs (if they haven’t been barred). Usually its the case that a few members of the gang have been barred from a club and so the rest don’t go because they don’t want to split up. The weekend is when it all happens. Those that are working have money and so maybe there is drinking or dancing at clubs. Clubs are not so popular as they used to be a year or so back. Then it was the Tiles and the Scene and other clubs round Wardour Street. A few now may make it down to Birdland. The weekend may also be the time for a caper down to the coast, Southend, Clacton or Brighton. Sundays it may be the Lido for swimming and a film in the evening if there is something on that they fancy, like a cowboy. Clint Eastwood goes down big. Strangely so did The Graduate. Tough films are liked best. Sometimes there are parties when peoples parents are away. Drinking mainly and the occasional smoke or pills.
The thing is that most do not have money to do much, especially during the week. If you’ve got a job and you’re not drawing just your £2 10s. 0d., from the Youth Employment the wage is likely to be around £10 or £15 a week, in labouring, apprenticeships and unskilled jobs. It is like they are in between everything. Not long out of school with a bit of money but not enough to go drinking in the pub every night, and in any case there is the age problem in pubs for most are between 15 and 17. To young and not enough money to buy cars or scooters. Sometimes someone will have a firm’s van which will be used to bomb off to the coast at the week-end. Too old to get much out of youth clubs. The girls they grew up with are now going out with older guys and only a few of the gang have girls. In some gangs girls are important. Squabbles over another gang’s girls may be a source of aggravation. But with other gangs girls are conspicuously absent and if some gets a girl he spends more time away from gang activities.
So the excitement comes from the action. But even that is avoided by some who can’t afford any more nickings. ‘Like that’s why we don’t go down the coast at the holidays no more. We’ve got too many up against us as it is. If you’ve got a lot of previous you’re doomed you are. If a copper gets hold of you and he recognises that you come from the Town you’re doomed to a fucking good hiding before you ever get near that nick.’ Like other groups there is the feeling that you get caught for the wrong things. That the bust is always the phoney one when you are not guilty. ‘We used to be really fighting all the time and they could never get any of us. Then they really started coming down, nicking you for just being there. Then a lot of it died down cause we gave a couple of them a good hiding. These two blokes came at us so we went at them, then one starts shouting that he was a police officer. It was too late then.’ The arrests are for insulting behaviour or assault. ‘I got one for using an offensive weapon. I got a good hiding off all these students and I got a nickering for it. I threw a bottle at them when they run. One of the geezer’s got his nose cut off.’

The Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton


As well as the gang fights there are fights between just two people. In a team fight between gangs anything goes but if two people fight and it looks fair they are left to it. ‘You get one geezer fighting another geezer, it’s a straightener like, he might be looking for so and so and he might go up and say ‘right you, a straightener, then we leave ‘em alone.’
Some of the gangs like the Highbury and the Angel have leaders but many of the smaller gangs have different leaders for different activities. Some people are listened to more if an event is planned. Someone will organise something ‘like going to Southend for the weekend or a crew going out and whacking someone.’ Then of course there are those that are the best fighters. ‘There are fighters and then there are cranks, madmen. Like Tony. Everytime we have a fight some cunt he just wants to stomp them into the ground. He goes mad and starts shouting ‘Stomp Stomp’. You know that cunt what was on the floor at Ally Pally. Tony had this huge broom pole and was stomping him for five minutes.
‘We had a bit of agro up there like.’ There are other targets as well as rival gangs. The targets are other easily identifiable groups such as students, Pakistanis and Greeks. Weirdos and students they cannot understand. ‘What I hate about weirdos is that the majority of them is students. We’re paying for them to go to their colleges to get educated so they can help us run the country, it may not be my taxes but everyone contributes like, if it weren’t for them your tax would go down even if it was just a penny. Then those fucking peace demonstrations. The’re all shouting about fucking love and peace and that then they go down Grosvenor Square smashing windows and we get a bill from the Americans; we fucking owe them enough dough as it is.’ The feeling is that if weirdos want to dress strangely and be dirty ‘they’re right states they are, right two and eights’ then they are entitled to get done over. One way to get a weirdo is to jump him if he does not move off the pavement out of the way of the gang, or to wait in the entrance tunnels of the tube and to rush at him and jostle him. Sometimes landing a few kicks. ‘Weirdos is no fun to jump though because they don’t fight back, they just curl up while you kick them.’
Weirdos are also hated because they are friends with foreigners – Bubbles (Bubble and squeaks – Greeks) and ‘them Black Irishmen from the north – Pakkis.’ ‘We can’t stand the Pakki’s – we all went down Drummond Street one night, down the road that is, like its all infested with Pakkis. About fifty of us went down fucking putting bottles through their restaurants and that was a good laugh that was. It got in all the papers, how the Pakkis were asking the police if they could arm themselves and form vigilante groups.’ And of course the Irish. ‘I don’t know why we don’t fucking give them back Ireland if they give us back Camden Town.’
Strangely they don’t dislike West Indians. It might be because they dig the West Indian Music and dance their dances. Double D – Desmond Decker, Arthur Connely, Roland Owl, Otis Redding, The Ethiopians, The Skatallites, Buster, The Untouchables, and Max Romeo. Sometimes a bit of bubble gum creeps in but mostly its Blue Beat, Ska, Rock-Steady and Reggae music. The Blacks are admired by the gangs. ‘Like they were the first with the short hair. They’re alright the Rude boys. Rudies hang out with Rudies mostly, and with white girls, and Black fight Blacks and Whites fight Whites and that’s it.’

 
 
 

 

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Rebel Dykes London Punk Rock

Lesbian Punk Girls

Brixton in the ’80s was home to a group of radical lesbians who mixed sexual politics with squat culture. Meet the group calling themselves the ‘Rebel Dykes’

In the early 1980s, young gay women, many still teenagers, gravitated to London, attracted by its diversity and experimentation. A lesbian subculture grew up around the squats of Brixton and Hackney. ‘You could tell which houses were squats by the painted doors and blankets in the windows,’ Siobhan Fahey remembers. ‘I wanted to live in Brixton, so all I did was walk around the streets asking if I could move in.’

Fahey had come to London from Liverpool as a teenager. At the time being gay could be dangerous. It had only just become legal for gay men to have sex, and in 1988 Margaret Thatcher brought in Section 28, legislation which outlawed the promotion of homosexuality as ‘a pretend family relationship’. The capital’s empty buildings offered safe spaces for sexual openness, creativity and activism, and so the Rebel Dykes – as Fahey later christened them – were born. Dressed in biker jackets and chains, their hair sculpted, shaved and rainbow-coloured, the Rebel Dykes were the antithesis of ’80s conservatism. They helped establish women-only squats across the city and opened London’s first lesbian fetish club.

  ‘There have been no books or articles. It’s like it never happened’ – Siobhan Fahey

Now, though, these pioneering women feel like they’ve been written out of history. ‘There have been no books or articles. It’s like it never happened,’ Fahey says, explaining that their ‘punky intersectional feminism’ was attributed to ’90s movements like Riot Grrrl, while stories about 1980s squat culture often focused on men. Eventually, she set up a Facebook group to find former Rebel Dykes and nearly 200 people joined. Now she’s producing a documentary to tell their story.

The roots of the Rebel Dykes can be chased back to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the female-only protest which campaigned against US nuclear weapons being sited at an RAF base in Berkshire. It was a feminist hub and, according to many of the women I spoke to, a hot spot for coming out and hooking up.

Lesbian Fetish Punk London

‘ I was young, I was cute – why not?’ – Karen Fischer

Rebel Dyke Karen Fischer, known as Fisch, explains that, for many lesbian women, heading to Greenham was liberating. ‘It was like being alone on a desert island, then suddenly there were loads of you,’ she says. ‘It was like being a kid in a candy store. I was young, I was cute – why not?’

There was more at stake, though. ‘If people found out you were gay, you could lose your job, you could get your kids taken away,’ says Fisch. ‘Our lives were made political by the lifestyles we had.’ One Rebel Dyke told me how a Lesbian Strength March was followed by neo-fascists.

Lesbian Punk girls kissing London

Pink Paper

 Two women kiss at Pride (from Pink Paper) 

A major component of the Rebel Dykes’ ‘political lives’ was London’s squat culture. Squatting became a criminal offence in 2012, but in the ’80s it was a basic lifestyle option for
struggling young people. More than 30,000 people were reported to be living in squats in London at the start of the decade. With 3 million Brits out of work, a scene of artists, activists and musicians grew in our city’s squats. As women from Greenham drifted to London, a radical group formed among them.

Fahey ended up living – ironically – in a disused housing benefits office as well as sharing a room at a well-known house on Brailsford Road. ‘We lived in one street that was full of squats where we all took turns cooking at each other’s houses,’ she says, describing how there was a band practice room downstairs .‘There were lots of people in open relationships,’ says Fahey. ‘We had parties that would go on for days.’ It wasn’t all fun, though: drugs, Aids and homelessness affected the community.

The back page of ’80s squatters’ zine Crowbar

The Rebel Dykes were known for their liberal attitude towards sex . They launched London’s first lesbian fetish club, Chain Reactions, which caused uproar among other lesbian groups who were more conservative. Fahey says that the complaints only fuelled the night’s success. It was always packed out, with a different ‘sex cabaret’ each week. ‘Groups of women would come together to put it on and fall in and out of love while making it,’ she laughs. ‘We had pickets outside from other lesbians who thought that lesbians shouldn’t be doing this thing as it “wasn’t quite right”.’

Another popular night was Systematic at Brixton’s Women’s Centre, run by promoter Yvonne Taylor. ‘It was different to other club nights at the time,’ she says. ‘Because it brought in a whole range of different types of women: black, white, young, old, butch and femme.’ Taylor still hosts a monthly night – Supersonic – and says she’s enjoyed watching London’s nightlife become more inclusive in recent years. She’s not the only Rebel Dyke still involved with London’s LGBT+ nightlife, Fisch still performs as drag king Frankie Sinatra.

  ‘I would climb into first-storey windows, take parts of security doors off and change locks’ – Atalanta Kernick

Beyond clubbing the Rebel Dykes’ lives were centred on punk bands and protests. They took part in anti-apartheid, Stop the Bomb and Support the Miners demos as well as early Pride marches. ‘I’ve got a photo of me carrying a banner that reads: “Brixton Dykes Demand Wages for Bashing Bailiffs”,’ says Rebel Dyke Atalanta Kernick. ‘It’s a play on a campaign for women demanding wages for housework. Another was made out of pink mesh and had cats embroidered on it. It said: “Brixton Dykes Make Pussies Purr”.’

Lesbians are fucking everywhere. London Punks

T-shirt made to promote fetish night Chain Reactions

As a teenager with an acid-green mohican, Kernick moved into her first squat in 1985 with a woman she met at Greenham Common. ‘I would climb into first-storey windows, take parts of security doors off and change locks,’ she says. ‘I did a building maintenance course, then carpentry, electrics and plumbing.’ She was one of a number of women who used the skills they learned squatting to take cash-in-hand trade jobs.

Rebel Dykes now: Kernick, Fisch (left), Fahey, Taylor (right) 

Eventually Kernick left London, but the era remains a key part of who she is. After living up north for 15 years, she returned to the city after reconnecting with another Rebel Dyke. ‘We used to flirt in the squats when we were 18,’ Kernick smiles. ‘We’ve been together five years now.’

For Fahey, the Rebel Dyke years are still relevant. She sees her film as a way to connect with today’s queer activists. ‘Sometimes young people look at us like: “You’re so brave”,’ she says. ‘But we had the dole, squats and no CCTV. I look at them in awe.’

Help the Rebel Dykes make their film at www.rebeldykes1980s.com/donate-to-us.

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Todd Youth,Agnostic Front, Warzone, Murphys Law Dies

Todd Youth (Warzone, Murphy’s Law, etc) reportedly passed away

by Andrew Sacher October 27, 2018 2:25 PM

Todd Youth passes away, a huge loss to the Punk Rock community worldwide

NYHC legend Todd Youth, who played in Agnostic Front, Warzone, Murphy’s Law, D Generation, Danzig, and more, and most recently Fireburn, has reportedly passed away. Todd’s Fireburn bandmate Ras Israel Joseph I (also formerly of Bad Brains) posted on Facebook:

On the passing of my friend, and my Brother Todd Youth
There are no words to express how sad I am at the passing of my brother Todd Youth. The music he made will forever be remembered, and I’m so thankful that I was able to work with him and that we created Fireburn together. Todd and I were living separate lives doing hardcore and reggae music. We met each other in 1992 and then never spoke again until 2017. We created Fireburn within two weeks of knowing each other and finished writing two of my favorite hardcore records that I ever worked on: “Don’t stop the youth”, and “Shine”. Closed casket records signed the band and we were on our way. We had great shows and lots of people showed up to them. We toured with gbh from England, hung out with the guys from Negative Approach, and got our blessings about our music and our records from the Bad Brains. I know that Todd is now resting in peace and I know that Krishna is taking his soul to a better place. He was a devout Hari Krishna and The Devout human being. Todd wherever you are I hope that we will make music again one day. Life is a circle and I know I’ll meet you again in that circle brother. We will meet again. Rest In Peace, Rest In Power, rest my brother. I am saddened that we cannot make music again together, but I am happy that you are finally going home to be with Krishna that Haile Selassie has finally giving you peace and comfort my brother. one day, I too will lay down and die. This body that I ware is temporary. I will probably be alone. They’re probably be no one around me. However I know that I will join you and all of our other friends in that good place and we’ll all see each other again. I’m sorry you died Todd. I’m sorry I can’t see you again. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help you. You are my friend and my brother and I love you. Rest in peace my brother. May your visit to our Heavenly Home be full of peace, and comfort, and closeness to Krishna. Haribo. Haile Selassie I. FIREBURN.

Todd Youth live on stage

NYHC show promoters BlacknBlue Productions also posted, “I can’t ….. A very sad day for NYHC FAMILY . 😞😞😞🙏🏼🙏🏼 Todd Youth . We love you . Condolences to all friends & family . Tell the people you love that you love them any chance you get.”

Todd was always such a positive character and passionate about his music. The scene has lost a great character. On behalf of The British Skinhead and Punk scene I send my most sincere thoughts and love to all his family and friends across the pond

Symond ( subcultz ) England

Hatebreed also posted a tribute:

Rest in peace, Todd. You’ll be missed and your crucial contributions to NYHC and beyond will live on.

Watch the full set video of Todd playing with Warzone for the Raybeez tribute in 2017, stream the latest Fireburn single, and listen to one of the Murphy’s Law classics he recorded with them:

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My mum, The Punk Rock pioneer of X-Ray Spex : Poly Styrene’s daughter Celeste Bell

My mum, the punk pioneer: Poly Styrene’s daughter remembers the X-Ray Spex leader

Six years since her death, the punk singer remains hugely influential. Her daughter reflects on learning ‘the family business’, how fame nearly broke her mother – and why she’s making a film of her life

Celeste Bell

Poly Styrene in her early days.
Poly Styrene Punk girl icon

 Poly Styrene in her early days.
Photograph: Anorak London

Even when I was really young, I knew what my mum did for a living. She was always working on something: writing music, recording, doing interviews. As I got older, she’d tell me about the punk movement, about the musicians she knew and what it was all about.

We lived with my grandmother on and off through that period, and she saw punk very differently. For my grandmother being a punk meant things like wearing odd-coloured socks, which she didn’t approve of. Even Mum didn’t like a lot about punk, too. There was loads she found exciting, of course, but she’d tell me plenty of the negative stuff: the aggressiveness of the crowds, the spitting on stage, how very few women were present at many of these gigs – and how that made her terribly anxious about performing. I realised later she was trying to warn me off becoming any kind of performer, in case I got any ideas.

Poly Styrene with her X-Ray Spex bandmates in 1978.
 Poly Styrene with her X-Ray Spex bandmates in 1978. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

My mum was really a girl when she started playing music: she was 15 when she began performing, younger than most of the other female artists on the scene. Even though she was more talented and had more important things to say than a lot of her contemporaries, she felt she wasn’t taken seriously – not only because she was a young girl, but also because she was working class and didn’t finish school. All of this made it a massive challenge to get any respect from people in the music industry.

Poly Styrene: The Spex factor

When I was a young kid, in the late 80s, she was involved in the Hare Krishna movement. Through that she became friends with people such as Boy George and Chrissie Hynde. I assumed all this spiritual stuff and having well-known people coming and going was the norm. At some points, we were pretty much living in a temple, and everything revolved around Hare Krishna, including her music. I used to tell her: “Nobody’s interested in hearing songs about Krishna, Mum.” But she didn’t care.

Then, when I was 10 or 11, she reconnected with X-Ray Spex and started work on what would become the Conscious Consumer album. Soon after, she had her first website and she started being more in touch with fans. I began to realise just how many fans she had, and how worldwide her support was.

When I turned 15 she gave me a copy of Germfree Adolescents, and I started to understand what a great writer she was. I’d grown up listening to hip-hop and music like that of Rage Against the Machine – which, in the way of all parents, she didn’t approve of, as she told me it would encourage bad behaviour!

X-Ray Spex did a comeback gig at the Roundhouse in London in 2008, playing Germfree Adolescents in full, and my band opened the show. I’d already seen them play Brixton Academy but being up on stage brought home the size of the audience. I was also able to meet a lot of people in the audience at that gig – people would come up to me, say how much they loved X-Ray Spex and what my mum meant to them, which brought home how deep an impact she’d had.

Poly Styrene in 1991.
 Poly Styrene in 1991. Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns

When Mum passed away in 2011, lots of people came to the funeral who I wasn’t necessarily aware she’d known. There was so much genuine love, and genuine sadness – I was moved to see that depth of feeling for her.

My mum was quite a businesswoman in how she approached her music and legacy, and she always got me involved in “the family business”, such as writing for her website. And she even suggested I take over as leader of X-Ray Spex. She still hated performing, it brought back all those old anxieties, and I guess I could have done it – I do sound a lot like her, and in a certain way it could’ve been fun. But it would have been way, way too weird for me.

She was contradictory, though, and she remained apprehensive about me being a performer, because she said music remained a toxic environment for women. I wonder if my mum might have had a happier life if she hadn’t had that level of fame. She was always wondering what might have happened if she hadn’t dropped out of school, and although the music brought her excitement and opportunities that most people never have, it also robbed her of her mind in a sense. I think the experiences she had probably triggered latent mental health problems.

Poly Styrene performing

When I saw the documentary about Amy Winehouse, with her getting trapped by her success so young, I did notice a lot of parallels: fame, even on a small scale, really does break some people. But Mum didn’t let it get her completely – that’s why she never did what was expected of her musically. She might not have been able to recapture the unique thing she created with Germfree Adolescents, but she never let anyone tell her what to be. She was true to herself, always.

For these reasons, I wanted to make a film about her – I’m currently raising money to create Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche. Whenever I talk about her, I think what I really want people to realise is just what a great writer my mum was. Not just a symbol of something, or another part of the punk story, but an amazing talent. With Germfree Adolescents she built this whole world that touched on sci-fi, dystopias, social criticism, the role of women, all these things. I honestly think it’s one of the greatest records of the late 20th century. She was 15 or 16 when she started composing those songs, she hadn’t done her O-levels, she’d got into all sorts of trouble – but she could write this incredibly prophetic stuff and understand the world in a way I don’t think most of her contemporaries could. I am truly proud of her work, and my long-term goal is to get more people to understand this.

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Neville Staple with Dakka Skanks Live in Brighton, . Concorde 2, Sept 7th

Anti-Trump Band NOFX Tells Vegas Audience ‘At Least It Was Country Fans’ Killed in Oct. Shooting

Laura Loomer

ByLaura LoomerPosted on May 30, 2018 

     COMMENTS

In a shockingly distasteful comment made on stage, the lead singer of punk band NOFX said he was happy country music fans died in the Las Vegas shooting.

Michael John Burkett, who calls himself “Fat Mike,”made the comment while preforming with his band at the Punk Rock Bowling Music Festival in downtown Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend.

In between songs, Burkett said to the audience, “We played a song and didn’t get shot. There’s no getting shot in Vegas unless you’re in a country band. That sucks, but at least it was country fans and not punk rock fans” who died in Las Vegas shooting.

Watch below 

https://youtu.be/up7w3anxLho

Eight months has passed since the Las Vegas shooting in which 58 people were murdered and over 800 injured at the Route 91 County Music Festival. Police say alleged gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire from his 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino onto thousands of people attending the concert.

Las Vegas continues to grieve over the attack that shocked the world but that didn’t seem to bother the aging punk band, which has been around since 1983. NOFX continued to make jokes throughout their performance about the shooting.

NOFX and Burkett, 51, are no strangers to controversy and making distasteful remarks during performances. Last year at the same music festival in Las Vegas, “Fat Mike” decapitated a naked statue of Donald Trump on stage and proceeded to beat it with a baseball bat. Before decapitating the statue, he said, “If you’re a Trump supporter, fuck you, and get the fuck out of our scene.”

Several people who attended the punk rock festival over the weekend took to social media to express outrage and disgust over the comments.

Andrea@drea1439  

Dear #NOFX you’re not funny and until you’ve had to run for your life while being shot at for ten minutes, you have no right to utter a single word about that night! Please don’t return to Vegas.

Unreal. Enjoy the rest of your time in obscurity #NOFX. I looked for a photo in our image bank for this story and the most recent one was taken in 2009.https://995qyk.com/2018/05/30/band-jokes-las-vegas-shootings-saying-least-country-fans/ …5:28 PM – May 30, 2018 · Tampa, FL

Band Jokes About Las Vegas Shootings Saying “At Least They Were Country Fans”

NOFX thought it would be “hilarious” to joke about the October 1 shootings while on stage in Las Vegas. They said “at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans”. This is disgusting and…

‘We crossed the line of civility’ – NOFX issue apology after joking about Las Vegas shooting

image: http://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/55/2018/05/2018_nofxgetty_1000x635-920×584.jpg

Fat Mike of NOFX

Fat Mike of NOFX By Damian Jones Jun 4, 2018 2:55 pm

Band also spark a backlash on social media

NOFX have apologised after the punk icons were slammed for joking about last year’s Las Vegas shooting.

During a recent set at the Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival in the city, the band spoke out about the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting last October that left 58 people dead.

“I guess you only get shot in Vegas if you’re in a country band,” guitarist Eric Melvin joked before frontman Fat Mike interjected: “At least they were country fans and not punk rock fans.”

The joke provoked a huge backlash and prompted Stone Brewing Co. – the San Diego Brewery behind NOFX’s beer and music festival both called Punk In Drublic – to sever ties with the band.

“We at Stone Brewing are aware of NOFX’s insensitive and indefensible statements this past weekend. As a result, we are severing all our ties with NOFX, including festival sponsorship and the production of our collaboration beer,” a representative for the company said in a statement.

Now, the band have issued a full apology for their comments, describing the episode as “shameful”.

“There’s no place here to backpedal. What NOFX said in Vegas was shameful. We crossed the line of civility. We can’t write songs about how people in this world need to be more decent, when we were clearly being indecent. Las Vegas has always been a welcoming city to our band, and to make light of the tragedy that occurred there was egregious”, NOFX wrote in a Facebook post.

“All members of the band would like to sincerely apologize to anyone who experienced loss from the Vegas shooting 8 months ago, and to anyone who was at our show who lost a loved one or a friend, or who had to witness the incredibly senseless violence that night.

“We were asked why we didn’t release an immediate apology. Well, we didn’t feel that we could write a sincere apology without reflecting on the actual damage we had done. No press agent was gonna write this for us. That’s why we have struggled with this for the past few days.”

The group added: “We didn’t plan or intend on saying anything so insensitive. It was off the cuff, but just as hurtful. We won’t blame it on drugs or alcohol or Ambien. That’s too easy. NOFX said it, and we own it. We made a tasteless joke. But to be clear, NOFX does not condone violence against ANY group of people, period!

“As sincere as we’ve ever been.”

Founders of the Punk Rock Bowling Festival also apologised for NOFX’s comments.

They said in a statement: “In light of NOFX’s comments during their performance at the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival, we would like to offer a formal apology to those in attendance, the City of Las Vegas, the victims and their families of 10/1.

“Las Vegas is home to the Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival, and we do not condone statements made from our stage on Sunday night. We take the safety of our festival goers seriously and want to relay that, there is nothing funny about people being shot and murdered, ever.”

NOFX’s joke sparked a backlash on Twitter with one user writing: “NOFX thought it would be ‘hilarious’ to joke about the October 1 shootings while on stage in Las Vegas. They said ‘at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans’. This is disgusting and callous. We will never support anything involving this band ever again.”

Another added: “I’ve been a fan of @FatMike_of_NOFX and his band since I was a kid. His comment about the Vegas shooting makes me sick. Fuck you. You just lost tons of fans.”

  •  

As NOFX once said, “It’s up to you to stand up to the bullshit that’s happening in this country.”

Surely NOFX won’t mind if Americans and the music industry stand up to someone who thinks country music fans deserve to die over other groups of people.

As of press time, NOFX did not respond to requests for comment.

feature image via Loudwire

Laura Loomer is a conservative investigative journalist and activist. She is the author of What Happens In Vegas, forthcoming from Dangerous Books. Follow her on Twitter @LauraLoomer

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How Fred Perry became a target of New York tabloids

Wimbledon tennis champion Fred Perry

Mod lad London

At far-right rallies across the U.S., an English tennis champion named Fred Perry hovers, invisible to the men unwittingly representing him. For the last two years, members of the Proud Boys cult of masculinity have worn Perry-branded striped-collar polo shirts with a Wimbledon-inspired laurel insignia as they shout at anti-fascist protesters and take rocks to the head. In blog posts and tweets dating back to 2014, their patriarch Gavin McInnes has instructed them that this — a Fred Perry cotton pique tennis shirt, always in black and yellow — is the proper armor for battling multiculturalism.

The Proud Boys at most have a few hundred active members, but they are a fixture at fascist “free speech” events like this month’s anti-Muslim marches, where they mingle with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. McInnes is eager to point out that the Proud Boys accept people of colour, Muslims, and Jewish people — so long as those members also “accept that the West is the best” and reject non-Western immigrants to America (McInnes is Canadian). But McInnes insists his followers are not themselves white supremacists, a clarification he has to make partially because Fred Perry polos have a history of popping up at any fashion orientated event across Europe and the Americas. The shirts have been a fixture in some form or another, in all their two-dozen-plus colorways, in modern and youth style for fifty years, here in the States but especially in England, where both the brand and the skinhead subculture that co-opted it are from.

    Skinheads High Wycombe 1986

In the mid-1960s, a movement emerged, which was to become a god send for very cheap headlines, to sell newspapers and movies. when first-generation ‘Black’ Jamaican and Barbadian Brits, whose parents had been recruited by the tens of thousands to help rebuild England after WWII, introduced their white working-class friends to ska, rocksteady, and rude boy style at clubs around London’s council estates. “You could see the music was bringing these different cultures together, and it was suggesting a possible way forward through understanding our differences,” Don Letts, a filmmaker, DJ, and BBC Radio host, who was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents, told The Outline. In 2016 he produced the BBC documentary The Story of Skinhead, mostly to correct the record on skinhead culture’s non-racist origins. “Politics wasn’t really something that we talked about. That was on our parents’ level. We just wanted to bond over music, clothes, and girls.”Amid England’s entrenched class consciousness, taking pride in looking nice as a working-class person inspired the white English kids to spin together their own heritage with their West Indian neighbors’ sleek suits, dress shoes, and generally smart style. “They went for things that were associated with the English upper class and looked clean and sharp but were more affordable, and Fred Perry was definitely one of those things,” Letts said. Paired with work boots and tight jeans, Perry’s designs for the tennis court became a subversive dig at English elitism. The look, which according to Letts appeared mostly on white kids but a few black ones, too, was also a response to flamboyant, middle and upper-class mod culture;
before the term “skinhead” finally began appearing in the late ‘60s, the young white kids with short-cropped hair and crisp workwear were called hard mods.

As young people were working out this visual identity, white English adults had become convinced that black and South Asian immigrants were taking their jobs and ruining the economy. In 1968, conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a now-infamous, vitriolic speech in which he warned white Brits that they would soon be an oppressed minority in their own country, punished by a politically correct government for daring to reject multiculturalism. “After that speech, I felt the atmosphere change immediately,” Letts said. “Race really came into the picture and the scene became more hostile.” a perfect subject matter could be stired up and encouraged, the press were onto something. a big group of young uneducated, poor working class kids, that could become the modern devil in the midst, The modern antichrist

The more ostracized and feared they were, the stronger their identity became.Skinhead culture began migrating north, to predominantly white communities, which at that time was 95% of the Britain, where football matches were the main source of distraction from a deteriorating economy on a Saturday afternoon. Fred Perry’s wide color range gave fans plenty of options to show which team they supported, and the look emanated a tough edge well suited to the violence simmering underneath football culture. Ensconced in white suburban bubbles, these boys became a natural target for the U.K. National Front, (just as much as they were by fleet street), a rapidly growing white nationalist party founded in 1967 that often recruited outside football stadiums. Every fresh college grad journalist had easy meat for the first published piece The party also opened social clubs across northern England that hosted live music, giving working-class kids — many of whom, proud of their class status, by then identified and dressed as skinheads — a place to congregate and commiserate about their dimming futures. “But you could only get in if you signed up to be a member of the National Front, and up north it was probably the only club, and so of course they wanted to go there and hear music,” Letts explained. “A lot of it came down to ignorance and just following the herd. These kids didn’t have any formulated political views.”

Gavin McInnes Proud boys USA

We discussed this story, and Gavin McInnes, on our daily podcast, The Outline World Dispatch. As the ’70s progressed, mainstream media became fascinated with this young, fashionable, seemingly new strain of the far right. The skinheads loved it; the more ostracized and feared they were, the stronger their identity became. Like today’s Pepe trolls, any attention was a godsend. Even when framed as reprehensible, ignorant ideology aired in public forums exposed more people to the journalist’ views and legitimized them as being worthy of discussion. After Margaret Thatcher brought the Tories’ isolationist, neoliberal policies to power in 1979, gutter journalism boomed across England, and there were always badly dressed college grads in the ranks twitching to bitch and lie for a quick buck down Fleet Street

Skinhead Girls at the Reunion Brighton England

Women wear Fred Perry at the annual Skinhead Reunion event in Brighton in 2014.

A picture taken by a passer by and sold to a photo library, by a passing member of the public, looking for a quick earner, with no permission or knowledge of the girls personal lives or history

With Reagan’s inauguration signaling a similar shift in the U.S., lazy journalism, and blatant blackening of characters of the lower wealth bracket became the norm, badly dressed press reporters uniform, boomed, to the levels of the padded shoulder suits, found a welcome home stateside when it landed in the early 1980s, according to Heidi Bierich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “poor, white people ideas already had a toehold in the US, and this culture spread very quickly across the country,” said Bierich. In conservative strongholds like Orange County, California and in parts of northern Florida, angry white youth who were politically unwelcome amongst punk and hardcore’s overwhelming anti-Republicanism became a perfect victim of cheap lazy journalism, these uneducated, low paid mass were never going to make the media have to answer charges of malicious slander, character degredation, or incitement to abuse.

Skinheads in Bogota Colombia wearing Fred Perry
Zoe Beery , fashion expert and journalist

Since the SPLC began tracking these journalists in the late 1990s, bad fashion sense has been a consistent enough presence that it’s one of only two things that really identifies these people. Number two, being their complete lack of factual evidence whilst concocting stories for the gaps between adverts in throwaway magazines clothing brands the SPLC includes in its lower class trash glossary is a fred perry t shirt (the other is Dr. Martens). “What makes youth fashion cultures distinct is music and clothing, not necessarily their ideology,” Bierich said. “They’re very mobile and fluid. You’ll find them in white black and hispanic groups in the USA,

A member of the Proud Boys stands behind Gavin McInnes in a black and yellow Fred Perry polo, at a rally in Berkeley, California.

london Hipster
Proud boy Hawaii

When I emailed McInnes to ask him why he tells his followers to wear the black and yellow polos as they trawl for anti-fascists in downtown hicksville, he warned me that “if you associate us with rich middle class pop stars, Hipsters, British sportsmen or any implication like that I will take you to court” but went on to explain that he wants to align his group with the working-class toughness of the late ’60s hard mods. (A youth culture that never actually existed ) “It plays into the idea of this being a rebellious, edgy movement against the status quo,” said Alice Marwick, an unnamed Fordham University researcher who has extensively studied social media (wasted months reading false facebook profiles) claiming to be far right. “When you say ‘white supremacy’ you think of something with a long history, like the KKK. When you say ‘alt-right’ it sounds like something new and alternative, very similar to alt delete, when you write something completely senseless. In that newness, people feel that they’re part of sticking it to the man, nothing like ending a debate, by pressing the block button, to silence any questions someone may want to ask the journalist.”

Amy Winehouse expression when asked if she was a Proud Boy

A few days later, he released a ten-minute video excoriating media that criticizes the Proud Boys for their uncanny similarities to Amy Winehouse dress sense. I asked him why, if he doesn’t want to be associated with Jewish singers and Hipsters, he tells the Proud Boys to dress like them. He replied, “I’m not going to let the media’s obsession with pop stars dictate what shirt we wear.” The more hated they are, the stronger their identity becomes.

This article has been written with slightly more knowledge than the original printed on new york toilet roll

if you want a laugh read here

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Jeff Turner and Gary Bushell on Oi!

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”.

cockney-rejects-greatest-cockney-ripoff

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.”

strength-thru-oi-poster-gavin-watson

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.”

gary-bushell

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.”

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Skinhead Girls, Derek Ridgers 1980

Who are the subjects in the iconic “Skinhead girls, Bank Holiday, Brighton 1980” photo by Derek Ridgers used in Morrissey’s 1992 “Your Arsenal” tour as a backdrop and merchandise (t-shirt, program cover)? Finally we know – Caroline and Debbie. Both were together recently and surprisingly, both learned just last weekend (Aug. 2016) about the use of the photo on Morrissey’s tour 24 years ago.

Debbie writes through emails:

I am one of the skinhead girls in the photo as I have just found out my picture was used… Caroline on the left, I’m on the right (in both 1980 and 2016 photos, below). She moved to Australia and was over last weekend. That’s when we found out via Google about the photo, such a shock but a nice one. Eyes nearly popped out when we saw the huge backdrop of us.

I have been in touch with Derek, he is sending us a photo as we never got one. Sent him a photo of what we look like now and he thinks we haven’t changed (well, longer hair and older). Does anyone have any tour mementos?

Caroline lives in Perth, Australia, is married with 3 children and also a granny.

I live in Surrey, married, with 1 son and work in community nursing.

We was both wild when young, me being the worst as my mum tells me.

Skinhead Girls London 1980. derek Ridgers
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Skinheads BBC, Don Letts

Skinheads. Don Letts documentary. BBC

When I first received an email from the BBC asking would I like to be involved in a documentary that BBC4 were putting together with Don Letts, my first thought was one of caution, I have done a few documentaries over the years, starting with George Marshall in 1994, Then Skinhead attitude of 2002. The first documentary I remember being made was the 40 minutes, focussing on the band Combat 84 and chubby Chris, which was a complete stitch up, and ruined the bands career, making them being excluded from the forthcoming Oi! Albums and finding their records banned.

The media will always have an agenda, usually one based on other media perceptions on Skinhead racialist politics. So I thought to myself, do I really want to go and tell this terminally boring story once again, but then I thought, well if I don’t, someone else will. Its been a curse for nearly 40 years, since the far right National Front in the UK actively set up a recruitment campaign, targeting disenfranchised white working class kids, provoking and promoting violence and faction. The Skinhead image perfect for the Sun Newspaper to run front page images of the modern devil in our midst. Like any young kid, wanting to be part of something, many jumped onto that image and the wheels have turned ever since, one feeding the other.

barry-bmore-george-don-letts-symond-lawes-bbc-skinhead-documentary

I decided to go meet up with Don and get his story, find out his motivation in his desire to make a documentary. Was it going to be the usual media left wing leaning clap trap. But very soon Don and I started having a laugh, we shared many life experiences and times. Although he is slightly older than me, we were both involved in riots in 1981, both loved punk rock. I had booked Don in 2007 to DJ our Xray Spex show at the Roundhouse, as he was the legendary Roxy club Dj and a friend of Poly Styrene.

Before we started talking Skinhead, Don produced some old tattered photos of himself in the late 60’s as a skinhead, stapress, loafers and button down shirt. Then told me his own story of growing up on a south London council estate, and the early pre punk skinhead days. And that his motivation was to put the record straight, and celebrate the strongest youth subculture to have ever been born in England. Its rich tapestry, that has weaved the threads of Skinhead from the mid 60’s to the mid 2010’s.

I agreed to take part, and roped my old mate from the Wycombe Skinheads, Barry ‘Bmore’ George along. I did put several names forward to the researchers, as people I told them held respect through action in the skinhead world. People like Gary Hodges, Milky, Roy Ellis. They told me they had been speaking to Roi Pearce and Suggs, so I thought it would be great to have some of these king pins of the scene involved, but sadly most people in our scene distrust the media more than rabid dogs, which after all these years, and stitch ups, is understandable. I even find it a struggle with some bands that are very happy to play large ‘Punk’ festivals to a skinhead audience, but don’t want to appear on a flyer for a ‘Skinhead Reunion’ So its a problem on all levels. Until everyone involved claims the Skinhead subculture, and puts their truth forward, the subculture will forever be that of the medias perception. As a kid of 13 I made a vow to become a skinhead, and through lifes journey, its a belief and core I have never felt any embarrassment over. Guilt through association.. well I know who I am, and who my skinhead friends are. So what the media and the middle class think of me, I wont be losing sleep over.

I found the documentary to be surprisingly good. It started with the roots of skinhead. The Reggae and Jamaican influences of its inception in the 60’s. The football hooligan gang fighting of the 70-80’s. The influence created by Joe Pearce and the Young national Fronts campaign. The musical icons like Jimmy Pursey. The 2tone explosion of 1979. Some old footage of Ian Stuart. Live interviews with Kevin Rowland and Pauline Black, to give quite a good balance, and explain the why’s and wherefores of the British Skinhead subculture.

Sure if I had been given the job of researcher and assistant director, I would have added more elements in. The music and what it meant to us, on a street level, the offshoots like the scooter and northern soul scene. Perhaps tried to get people involved in the far right skinhead scene to explain from their angle, why they felt the way they did, and how they feel its part of the skinhead culture they have lived. Don had voices of the far left, with Roddy Mareno. Might have even been nice to find a journalist that would admit to paying young kids for a seig heil for the newspapers.

But what the documentary really did for me, was to show I am not the only person with such a strong passion for our beloved Skinhead subculture. I saw many faces on the screen I consider friends, brothers and sisters. So many of them singing from the same hymn sheet. And that is, there is only one skinhead subculture and its called SKINHEAD

watch it here 

Symond Lawes.

23 Oct 2016

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MindofaLion

OFFICIAL WEBSITE CLICK HERE

‘they are heavy at the same time it is very melodic and well played shit so i think anyone who is not too one-way-minded would appreciate their songs’ … Adelina, Sweden

What the industry says

Updates for 2016, Mindofalion have been busy in the studio, releasing an EP to critical acclaim, they immediately secured a play listing for BBC introducing, and have been inundated with live shows. Smashing the Brighton scene wide open they are very pleased to announce a series of Major UK Festivals 

The wheel keeps rolling… After the success of our Sell out EP launch leading to Machina being played on BBC Sussex for BBC Introducing (link below) we are now very proud to announce we will be playingY Not Festival!! Editors, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, our friends at Madness, our favourite band The Hives are headlining and we are playing alongside our friends SAFE TO SWIM, Thyla, Atlas Wynd, Penelope Isles, MANC BOYS Duke Mercury,The Rocking Horse Club, SEATS… You get the picture. A lot of amazing talent.

Buy a ticket on the YNOT website. More news to come…

Listen to Machina 


Soundcloud link

mindofalion Ynot Festival
Mindofalion EP launch

Top night last night for the Mindofalion EP launch. Which should be on all platforms in a couple of days?!
To all the bro’s and sisters that made it. Love you all. @palmpleasures Atlas Wynd Penelope Isles — with Harry Sotnick, Jack Looker, Jack Sowton, Jack Brewis-Lawes, Lily Wolter, Sam Evans and Jack Wolter.

When’s it going to stop? So to remind ourselves… Sell out EP (THANKS EVERYONE!), BBC Sussexand BBC Introducing play Machina on national radio, Origin EP gets released on all major platforms – a first for Mindofalion, then we reveal we are performing Y Not Festival… Now we are pleased to announce we will be playing Truck Festival!!

Mindofalion Truck fest

2016 sees another band members shuffle, and in comes Sam on Bass guitar, to really lift the live shows, to another level of excitement, Think along the lines of Tim Commerford and you know what to expect from Sams stage performance

mindofalion Sam
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MindofaLion

2014 tour 

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 Autumn 2014.

M.O.A.L Hit the road for a UK tour. From Manchester in the North to the Deep south

music download 

 Into 2015 Together with the regular UK shows, M.O.A.L are proud to announce, they have been invited to perform in Stockholm, Sweden. Making this the first international performance. 

Event Details Pet Sounds Bar, Stockholm 17th April 

Maximum Volume music‘……… Brighton based three piece MindOfALion are a new name on the landscape. What you need to know for now is they do a nice line in alternative rock. Tracks like “Monopoly” have a big sound and they are evidently a little different to the usual. Single “Zia Ground” is an interesting song and the band, built around the Brewis-Lawes brothers, Archie and Jack, are clearly driven. Archie’s guitar playing is impressive and when they really let go they are at their best.

Into 2014 Great news Mind of a lion have teamed up with Gullwing USA, with a second video being shot with Mind of a Lion track ‘Conflict’ being overdubbed, lets hope to see this great British band entertaining out cousins in the sunshine

Self motivated musicians expressing their state of mind through a raw, organic and poetic sound. Energy and influence through drums, bass, guitar and vocals.

At a very young age the brothers traveled around India,  witnessing the poverty that we don’t experience in our world. People begging in front of their god’s temples, different mind sets, ancient beliefs & the segregation and conflict caused by religion. They use music to express their own thoughts and state of mind, influenced from these early experiences and blend the two to form Mindofalion, write songs to reflect their own life experience. Experimenting and developing, think of the verve, white stripes. but with a new 2014 energy

Check out the new music coming through, with a new direction, in the battle to achieve that stand alone sound

mind of a lion

 2013

what the press says 

Brighton,  music blog, Press party

henna

Mind of a lion have been busy writing new material, gigging and would like to announce a new member on bass. Henna

2012

Based in Brighton , England

This hard hitting band are very difficult to pigeon hole, although its clear to see a certain Rage Against the Machine influence. in their early tracks, the stuff coming through in 2014 is in a new direction, showing strong versatility, as the trio find their own individual sound . Mind of a Lion has a definite London working class feel, with an edge of Grime mixed in, but with elements of the verve and white stripes. The first thing that shocks, is the age of the lads when they turn out such a high level performance of well written songs, fully charged live performance. Most young bands tend to follow whatever is popular at the time, but Mind of a Lion seem to be more interested in the message in their music, than being the ‘rock star’.

“Music should have a message” Archie BL

archie studio

As young lads, brothers Archie and Jack had a children’s tree camp in nearby woods, one day the whole area was cordoned off by police and terrorist material was discovered, which lead to the banning of all bottles on Aeroplanes. Perhaps subconsciously this had a great influence on Archie’s song writing. The First Demo album is entitled ‘Peace through aggression’ which is a direct reference to the life of young people in the 21st century. Living a backdrop of the war on terrorism, with Governments theory of war will create peace.

Co Writers- Archie Brewis-Lawes

& Jack Brewis-Lawes

Storming the stage as the opening band to 2012 Rebellion Festival

Definitely destined for the big time, Mind of a lion are the future of the British underground.

jack on drums, mind of a lion

live in Brixton, London

Check out their songs: Monopoly, Obstacle, Zia Origin.

This is the new punk rock/indie/alternative. 

https://www.youtube.com/mindofalion/
http://www.soundcloud.com/mindofalion/
http://www.facebook.com/mindofalion/

previously known as the Monacles http://www.myspace.com/themonaclesmusic

Into 2014 Great news Mind of a lion have teamed up with Gullwing USA, with a second video being shot with Mind of a Lion track ‘Conflict’ being overdubbed, lets hope to see this great British band entertaining out cousins in the sunshine

Mind of a Lion are two brothers, Jack and Archie, with female band member Henna. Touring the UK in 2014, fighting the never ending battle for recognition. They started life as musicians at 12 years old, writing a full album of material. this is a video, made by them at that age

written in 2007, by the boys, then aged 12 years old ‘Reliegion’

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Staying Power – Gavin Watson

Staying Power – Gavin Watson

Victoria and Albert Museum, London 

Gavin Watson was born in London in 1965 and grew up on a council estate in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. He bought a Hanimex camera from Woolworths in his early teens and began to take photographs. Upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, Watson moved back to London and became a darkroom assistant at Camera Press. He continued to photograph his younger brother Neville and their group of skinhead friends in High Wycombe.

The ‘Wycombe Skins’ were part of the working-class skinhead subculture brought together by a love of ska music and fashion. Although skinhead style had become associated with the right-wing extremism of political groups like the National Front in the 1970s, Watson’s photographs document a time and place where the subculture was racially mixed and inclusive. His photographs were published in the books Skins (1994) and Skins and Punks  (2008), and the director Shane Meadows cited them as an inspiration for his film This is England (2006). In 2011 and 2012 Watson photographed campaigns for Dr Martens and began a project with the singer Plan B. 


Gavin Watson, 'Barry's Haircut', 1987. Museum no. E.361-2011. © Gavin Watson / Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Gavin Watson, ‘Barry’s Haircut’, 1987. Museum no. E.361-2011. © Gavin Watson / Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Gavin Watson, 'Micklefield', 1981. Museum no. E.362-2011. © Gavin Watson / Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Gavin Watson, ‘Micklefield’, 1981. Museum no. E.362-2011. © Gavin Watson / Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

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Great Skinhead Reunion revue, By David Webster

Skinhead Reunion, brighton, Dave Webster, Steve Aller,Linda Scarpallini, 2014

Arrived in Brighton around 1.30 with my mate Steve Aller holding high expectations of what the weekend had in store. I was not to be disappointed as this years reunion was even better than the 2013 event. After checking in at the Adelaide hotel, we made our way to the Volks where we met up with many old mates, Dave Ryan and his son Sid, Dave Nash, Lisa Sumner, Lynda Scarpellini, Jo Barnett, Steve Parish, and many more. The vibe was good as we all sat around chatting outside in the sun whilst the music blasted out. First band on were ”Grade 2” who performed well above anything I had anticipated. This band made up of 3 lads all still at school showed a confidence well above their years. Sid the vocalist showing no nerves at all. I was straight on the dancefloor throwing myself about like a spider on acid. Loved every second of their set. Then it was back to the fresh air of Brighton to cool myself down. Saw a old flame from the past, [11 years to be exact!] Ana, and straight away we connected. The relationship blossomed over the w/e. Back to the bands and next on were Swedish Oi band ”Agent Bulldog” who had brought with them a large Swedish contingent. Although I could not understand the lyrics to their songs, I still enjoyed their set very much and had a jump around. Last band of the night were ”The Downsetters” who I had seen earlier in the year at Skamouth. The masses obviously enjoyed these lads as the dance floor filled. Their set included a combination of covers and their own material, which was very good. They even did a ska version of the Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant, which I was not sure about! By around 10ish the bands had finished. But for many the night was just beginning as the crowds headed for the next venue [which I cannot remember the name of!] After a short walk we arrived to hear old Trojan sounds blasting out, and so the dancing continued into the early hours. By around 1 o clock this old boy was done in, my bed was calling.

SATURDAY.
Up early to hit the breakfast table, so after a shower and a squirt of Steves chanel deodorant, off we toddled.  We eventually hit the Volks around 1ish on another scorching day. Gutted that I had missed Ken and Bobbi’s wedding do.Already the place was heaving with skinheads slowly getting pissed. As a non drinker it was J20s all the way, kinda funny seeing most getting pissed whilst I remained sober. The music is my alcohol! The Dr Martens photo booth was in big demand as many queued for a free photo. First band on today were ”Lineside” who I must apologise to for missing. I took a break from reunion activities for a walk along Brighton pier with the Latina Ana, where we got more reacquainted, and indulged in a ice cream. Back to the Volks just in time to catch Linesides last number. They actually sounded very good indeed. Next band up were the 2-Tones, who I thoroughly enjoyed from last years reunion. Again, they blew the roof off with the dance floor packed as they belted out cover after cover of our favourite ska/Trojan sounds. A hour or so later it was time for Saturdays headlining band ”The Feckin Ejits” a band I had not seen since the 1980’s. Really enjoyed this set as the crowd went mental to ”You gotta kick a picket or two”. Top marks Mr Sterling! Then at 10-30 it was off to the ?????? for more dancing. My poor feet were done in, the dms are certainly better than brogues for jumping about in. Again by 1ish I was cream crackered and pestered Steve to go back to the hotel. [He had the solitary key!]. And so endeth day 2.

SUNDAY
Up early, due to my mate Steve singing Judge Dredd songs whilst I was trying to sleep. Down for brekky, then it was more sleep. Got to the Volks to find it still packed, regardless of many having headed home for work commitments. Only 2 bands tonight. ”Jack the Lad” with Gunk from Condemned 84 who did a complete set of Oi covers, and jolly good fun it was too! Once again I jumped about like a loony on day release. Finally it was the highlight of the w/e [not including meeting Ana again] the band I had really came to see ”The Last Resort”, having not seen them for a few years I was really psyched up. And what a energetic set it was. All the old favourites, mixed in with newer stuff like Never get a job, and the superb We are invincible. The floor was a mass of boots, muscle and sweat [with a couple of females amongst the nutters, well done Jo Barnett and Tash] . After 2 encores that was it, no more bands. But certainly not the end of the night as Ana and I strolled romantically along the beach with the lit up pier and big wheel in the background. Awww how nice. Still made it back to the volks for the last hour or so of music. The djs incidentally have been superb. Top marks to them all. Also the bar staff who were kept on their toes. Gotta say a massive thank you to everyone that made this w/e such a great event. It is what you make it to a point, but after all is said and done it would not be happening without Symond. Sod the haters. Roll on 2015s Reunion. Oi oi that’s yer lot Dave Webster. Could have wrote much more, but have left my personal details out. Ha ha.

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Los Angeles Skinhead Ska scene

SKINHEADS UNITED: ALL OVER L.A., NONRACIST, PRIMARILY LATINO SKINHEADS OBSESS ON CLASSIC REGGAE AND SOUL

  • First published in LA Times 2012

BY NICHOLAS PELL

la-weekly-skinheads
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

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Mass Murder in Paris. Terror attack!

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 duo White Miles was the opening act.

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MOTÖRHEAD Drummer PHIL ‘PHILTHY ANIMAL’ TAYLOR Dies At 61

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.”

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Tony Van Frater of The Cockney Rejects dies.

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.

Official announcement from the Cockney Rejects.

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

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Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton, Big 6. 2016

Tickets for 2016 are available HERE

CONFIRMED ACTS

INFA RIOT Punk – Oi! 1982 Legends   

ROUGH KUTZ

FECKIN EJITS

THE HACKLERS – SKA

GRADE 2

CROWN COURT

TEAR UP from Watford, A brand new young oi! act

Dekkertones a leading British Ska Tribute act, to get the party started

PISTONES  (Finland)

SPECIAL GUESTS WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT THE EVENT

Facebook Event page

Bands and DJ’s wishing to perform, all info and enquiries, contact Symond at subcultz@gmail.com

Video made in 2013

The Great Skinhead Reunion, Brighton, www.subcultz.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

Posted by Skinhead Reunion Brighton on Saturday, 2 April 2016

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

The Facebook community group Facebook group

Facebook page

Continue reading Great Skinhead Reunion Brighton, Big 6. 2016
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The Hipster

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).

Why hate the hipster? Scott Hart/flickr, CC BY

However, in this instance, many commentators rightly highlighted the fact that while hipsters and their quirky businesses – cafes that charge A$11 per bowl of cereal, for instance – are easy targets of scorn, they are only symptomatic of larger socio-economic realities and problems.

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.

The 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story depicted youth culture in New York City. Fred Fehl/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

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.

erick hrz aguirre/Flickr, CC BY

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.

Numerous authors have described the advent of punk in 1970s Britain, with its “no future” ethos, as a reaction to the economic crises of the decade. Recent ruminations on the 1980s New Romantics position them as make-up-laden yuppies – Thatcherites in disguise.

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”.

Cecilia Sánchez Sánchez/Flickr, CC BY-SA

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).

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The Beard, Jihad or Hipster

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

On Twitter: @TaryamAlSubaihi

added content ‘The Hipster’ by subcultz

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Stomper 98 Confirmed for The Great Skinhead Reunion, Brighton, England 2016

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.

www.subcultz.com

tickets here

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Seaside Rebels + Bishops Green

Seaside Rebels + Bishops Green + Support

23rd october 2015 – Hamburg Monkeys Music Club

Bishops Green Live

Bishops Green

Friday, 23rd October 2015. One more time I was on my way to an Oi! concert in

Monkeys Music Club in Hamburg. Last Time when I was there I saw The Headlines

from Sweden and Angelic Upstarts from northern England. This Time I saw Seaside

Rebels, a young London based Oi! band who released their first album and Bishops

Green from Vancouver, Canada who were on an Europe Tour.

It was early in the morning. After I had put my bag into my car I drove on the motor

highway up to north. My mate Frank invited me again to stay at his flat after the

show. When I arrived in Oldenburg in Holstein Frank, his girlfriend Diana and I had an

obligatory cup of tea. Then Henning and Frank’s band mates Pit and Phil came and

we went to Hamburg.

Remedy Records (the label of Frank’s punk band Drunken Swallows) told Frank a

few days before their new album arrived. So our first stop in Hamburg was the shop

of Remedy Records. The boys were very glad when they see their new album. With a

happy attitude we went to the location.

Seaside Rebels Live

SEASIDE REBELS

Rohbert and some of the Skinheads Hamburg were waiting for us to enter the club

together. The support band was a small punk band called Berlin Blackouts. As their

name implied they were from Berlin. Now it was time for Seaside Rebels.

I was really looking forward to see them live because I loved their first EP Changing

Times and I wanted to listen to them live. These nice blokes keep what they

promised on their vinyl. Of course Seaside Rebels played songs from their new

album When Their World Endet, Our Story Began… They did good covers of Blitz’

Warriors and Madball’s Pride. From the beginning till the end their show was full of

energy and this energy transferred to the audience. Nothing to say but good job!

After a short break it was the turn of Bishops Green. Their performance was very

powerful and mostly the whole audience singed the songs together with the band.

The Canadian street punks played songs of all of their three albums. After the show I

asked Greg (vocals of Bishops Green) how he is able to hold out to the end of a tour

without his voice gets worse from show to show.

The show was over and we drove back to Oldenburg. The next day we had a

wonderful day at the autumnal and rough shore of the Baltic sea. On Sunday I hit the

road to my north heaasian home right with a good new soundtrack. Frank made me a

present of the new album „Im Sturzflug durch die Republik“ of his Band Drunken

Swallows and at Monkeys Music Club I bought the new album of Seaside Rebels.

Thilo

(written in December 2015)

Seaside Rebels + Bishops Green + Support

23.10.2015 – Hamburg, Monkeys Music Club

Freitag, der 23. Oktober 2015 stand am Kalenderblatt. Ein weiteres Mal sollte es

mich dieses Jahr nach Hamburg verschlagen und auch wieder in den Monkeys Music

Club. Im Sommer sah ich dort die Punks von The Headlines aus Schweden, sowie

die nordenglischen Punkrock-Urgesteine Angelic Upstarts. Dieses Mal feierten

Seaside Rebels, eine junge Oi!-Punk Band aus London dort die Album-Release-

Party ihres ersten Albums und Bishops Green aus Kanada machte dort Halt auf ihrer

Europa Tour.

Das Auto war gepackt und es ging in aller Frühe wieder bei Bad Hersfeld auf die A7

in Richtung Norden. Mein guter Freund Frank gewährte mir wie beim letzten Mal

auch ein Unterschlupf für die Nacht nach dem Konzert, sodass ich wieder nicht direkt

nach Hamburg fuhr, sondern wieder zuerst an die Ostseeküste nach Oldenburg in

Holstein zu Frank und seiner Freundin Diana. Nach einer obligatorischen Tasse Tee

zur Begrüßung kamen auch schon Henning, sowie Franks Bandkollegen Pit und Phil

und wir starteten in Richtung Hansestadt.

Remedy Records, das Label von Frank’s Punkrock Band Drunken Swallows teilte

ihm ein paar Tage zuvor mit, dass ihre neue Platte eingetroffen sei. Aus diesem

Grund fuhren wir vorm Konzert noch schnell zu Remedy Records um das gute Stück

zu begutachten. Die Vorfreude auf der Hinfahrt war dementsprechend groß und

wurde beim Label auch nicht enttäuscht. Weiter ging es zum Monkeys Music Club

und zum Konzert.

Dort angekommen warteten vor dem Eingang schon Rohbert und ein paar der

Skinheads Hamburg auf uns und wir betraten gemeinsam die Location. Die Support

Band hieß Berlin Blackouts und kam wie der Name schon sagt aus Berlin. Dann

betraten endlich Seaside Rebels die Bühne.

Ich freute mich sehr auf diese Band, da ich ihre Changing Times EP im

Plattenschrank stehen habe und die schon eine richtige Hausnummer war. Ich wollte

die Songs darauf endlich auch mal live hören. Ich wurde nicht enttäuscht, die Jungs

halten, was sie auf Platte versprechen. Neben den Songs der EP spielten sie

natürlich auch die Songs der Platte, die sie an dem Abend veröffentlichten. Der

Name ihres neuen Albums: When Their World Ended, Our Story Began… Der Song

Warriors von Blitz, sowie Pride von Madball befanden sich auch in ihrem Repertoire.

Ihr auftritt war energiegeladen, was sich auch auf das Publikum übertrug.

Nach einer kurzen Umbaupause betraten Bishops Green die Bühne. Vom Anfang bis

zum Ende ihrer Performance zeigte nicht nur die Band, sondern auch das Publikum

vollen Einsatz. Ich bewundere immer wieder die Stimme von Sänger Greg und wie er

das beispielsweise auf einer Tour durchhält. Lieder aller drei Platten wurden zum

Besten gegeben. Die Songauswahl konnte sich, wie auch schon bei der letzten Tour

wirklich sehen lassen. Ein rundum gelungenes Konzert.

Nachdem Konzert fuhren wir wieder zurück nach Oldenburg. Nach einem herrlichen

Tag an der herbstlich rauen Ostsee fuhr ich Sonntagvormittag wieder nach Hause.

Den richtigen Soundtrack für die Heimfahrt hatte ich, da mir Frank ein Exemplar des

neuen Albums seiner Band mitgegeben hat und ich mir am Konzert das neue Album

der Seaside Rebels gekauft habe.

Thilo

(geschrieben im Dezember 2015)

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Enoch Powell, Rivers of blood speech

Enoch Powell

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.

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Jeff Turner and Gary Bushell on Oi!

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.”

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Racism within The Skinhead Subculture

Racism within The skinhead subculture

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.
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The Story of Oi!

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.”

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UK Immigration and the National Health Service

Immigration and the National Health Service: putting history to the forefront

Wedding-on-Somerleyton-Road-west indians in london
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.
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.

Migrant Health Workers in the NHS

About the author


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.

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Football hooliganism makes it to America

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 

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

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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

‘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.

Shirtless: Some of the fans wore little clothing as they clashed not far from Newark's busy Penn Station

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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

Intervention: An NJ Transit Police squad car was seen headed for the fans towards the end of the clip

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Intervention: An NJ Transit Police squad car was seen headed for the fans towards the end of the clip

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

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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. 

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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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

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 U.S.

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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 

Visceral: Elijah Wood, right, starred in Green Street, which saw him take on British football hooligans on their own turf
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Visceral: Elijah Wood, right, starred in Green Street, which saw him take on British football hooligans on their own turf

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3191764/Has-British-style-hooliganism-infiltrated-American-soccer-Fans-brawl-streets-ahead-New-York-derby-match.html#ixzz3iUjsJWAy
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George Cole Dies aged 90, A British Legend

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’

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Sharpies, Australian

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.

Interview by Dan Nulley. Follow him on Twitter

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Did Punk rock change the world

Punk not as important as former punk thinks

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.”

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PRINCE BUSTER – DISCOGRAPHY: (Ska/Rocksteady Singer)

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)]
______________________________________________________________

.1967 – Jamaica’s Pride: Rock Steady (Judge Dread feat. Prince Buster)
(Original Press):
“Jamaica’s Pride: Rock Steady” – [(Blue Beat, Lp: 1967), (Blue Beat/Prince Buster, Lp: 1967) & (Westmoor Music, 1993)]

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.

______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

EPs:

.1980 – Behind Bars [Judge Dread (Aka: Prince Buster)]
(Original Press):

“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

______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

Appearances:

.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)]
______________________________________________________________

.1972 – Jamaica’s Greatest (Prince Buster & Friends) – [Prince Buster]
(Original Press):

“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)]

______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

5) Album Tribute:

.1986 – “Prince Buster Memory Lane” by Owen Gray
(Original Press):

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)]

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Ben Sherman sold

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.

We Reported The death of Ben Sherman in 2012

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.

Continue reading Ben Sherman sold
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Citizen Keyne. Ungreat Britain

Citizen Keyne. Ungreat Britain

Get your Copy Here

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.

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Great Skinhead Northern Gathering, Sunderland. 9th – 10th Oct. Sunderland

BUY TICKETS 9-10th Oct 2015

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

DJ Coordinator is Sean Marshall

facebook event page, please share

Tickets Here 

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

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Kings Road. London Punk Rock

The glory days of King’s Road

This picture shows a group of punks in the 1970s Kings Road, London
London Punks and Skinheads 1970’s Kings Road.

Proud Chelsea’s Sex, 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.

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Punk Rock. Malcolm Mclaren Artist, Fashion Designer (1946–2010)

QUICK FACTS

NAMEMalcolm McLarenOCCUPATIONArtist, Fashion DesignerBIRTH DATEJanuary 22, 1946DEATH DATEApril 8, 2010EDUCATIONHarrow Art School,Croydon College of Art,Goldsmiths CollegePLACE OF BIRTHLondon, United KingdomPLACE OF DEATHSwitzerlandFULL NAMEMalcolm Robert Andrew McLaren

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).

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Rail Strikes in UK may affect skinheads getting to Brighton, please book national express buses as an option

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

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Punk Bands – Xtraverts

Xtr@verts biography; ‘Who sent the Boys’ ?

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

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Bermondsey Joy Riders to perform the Great Skinhead Reunion, Brighton

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