Skinheads
- Thread starter fay spook
- Start date
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
I have to say I got bored with the programme and switched it off.
irons1965
pfm Member
So Tony you really think a decent bloke like Pursey would produce and affiliate himself with a band like the Cockney Rejects if they were racists?
Myself I never cared much for the hooliganism slant of the Rejects but they weren't racists in my book....Some great tunes as well.
Ditto Mensi and the Angelic Upstarts...Defiantly anti fascist and supporters of the working classes.
The Skinhead series? Yes. I remember my brother reading them on holiday in the early/mid 70s. I picked them up in the 90s. A bit childish but they are what the are and the main character lived at the end of my real road in Acton.
gary1064
pfm Member
I read these back in the day, a bit surreptitiously as they were my older brothers. I fancied myself to be towards the suedehead end of the spectrum, LOL. Was probably about 10 at the time!
Tony L
Administrator
This is far from my area of expertise I must admit. I never liked the music (I'm a middle class twunt and I'd have been a pretentious artshool punk if I was old enough to be a punk, and to my mind by '79 things had got way better and more interesting with new-wave, DIY, synth pop etc anyway so punk was dead by then!). I just remember the reputation of skinheads/Oi! was pretty terrible/terrifying in my time, they were folk to be avoided and Gary Bushell has always been Gary Bushell. Every single day. I found the film interesting as I didn't really know the early history, and that is way more to my taste.
irons1965
pfm Member
Making a comment such as you did about Oi! (a Bushell term that I was never personally comfortable with anyway) about it being racist to the core was a disappointing generalization....As I've already mentioned there were quite a few bands who did their level best to distance themselves from the nasty unsavoury and outright ugly racist hijacking that some parts of the media positively revelled in.
To me it was all about the energy and tunes, a subgenre of the best stuff from the first generation a few years earlier.
By the way, not a fan of Bushell myself but as mentioned he did a lot of championing of punk writing for Sounds and he did introduce me to The Blood (now there's a band that'll upset the liberal media and no, not a racist lyric to be found anywhere), so not all bad.
Tony L
Administrator
I'll make another generalisation; that punk was only interesting while people were figuring out what it was, e.g. bands like The Ramones, Pistols, Damned, Wire, Banshees, Slits, Clash etc. Once it had settled down and become formulaic it was remarkably tedious to my mind, especially against the backdrop of the amazing new-wave and DIY innovation that was emerging in the aftermath. The next interesting thing for noisy rock music came from America with The Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Husker Dü etc etc.
irons1965
pfm Member
That's fine, your call....All about musical preference re: formulaic.
I'm not talking about musical taste I'm talking about your initial statement about Oi being racist to the core....Then in your next statement you admit to that genre of music as not being your area of expertise - I can reiterate that that era had bands that did their level best to distance themselves from the ugliness already mentioned....It wasn't all right wing that all I'm saying, more working class disillusionment from the better bands.
-alan-
pfm Member
I still have most of them.
Yes, always fancied the idea of being a 'suedehead'. Perhaps it was the idea of the slightly less extreme haircut - you could at least be one in your own head, without ever having to demonstrate your hardness (or lack thereof) in public
blossomchris
I feel better than James Brown
Back to the original skinheads, I can remember our distaste for loafers with tassles, Our lot all went for plain loafers. We were double tasty.
Bloss
Bloss
Snufkin
pfm Member
Growing up in a seaside town in the late 60's gave me an inside track on various youth cults. By 1969 we seemed to have at least three distinct groups of what later became known as Skinheads (a term coined by the red tops IIRC).
The most serious, and the ones best to avoid, were known as the Bowler Boys whose hair was almost non existent. They wore rough looking cut off jeans that had seriously disagreed with their boots which were usually heavy working boots. Their lower half was topped off with shirts or T shirts and the all important tatty, grey/green raincoat. They usually looked gruby which was not the norm for the breed. Everyone gave them a wide berth.
Then we had the smoothies (sometimes known as Suedeheads). Much smoother and smarter looking with more hair but still extraordinarily short by my standards; a bit like a short crew cut. With hindsight its easy to see how they had spun off from Mods with their attention to detail and cleanliness/grooming. Smart looking tonic mohair suits with trousers a little on the short side. Another favorite item of leg wear was Levi stay Press trousers. Ben Sherman shirts and smart boots (DM's) or more commonly heavy brogues. In colder weather they would sport Crombie overcoats; I believe an expensive item and very different from army surplus coats sported by Bowler Boys.
Then we had a hybrid of the other two groups. They were usually younger and they probably had less money. You would have to have had an income to hack it as a Smoothie and you had to be really tough to be a Bowler Boy. The 'hybrid' or proto Skin was soon to be known as Skinheads. They tended to wear Levi Jeans, cut off but not as severe or as tatty as the Bowler Boys. Boots were DM's or Monkey Boots. Shirts were Ben Sherman. The jacket of choice was the Harrington Jacket. The better off ones would also sometimes aspire/wear a Crombie. They became the dominant group in terms of numbers because the rules governing the identity and therefore admittance to the other two groups was much stricter.
Some of the things that tied three different groups together could be summarised as follows:
These distinctions could of course been subdivided further. Our town had a heavy drug using sub sect known as The Heroin Skinheads. By about 1971 the other groups and identities had faded away and we were left with the skinheads we know and love. Of course it didn't stop there and the transition into what we know today as a 'Skinhead' continues; it could be seen as one of our more successful exports.
The most serious, and the ones best to avoid, were known as the Bowler Boys whose hair was almost non existent. They wore rough looking cut off jeans that had seriously disagreed with their boots which were usually heavy working boots. Their lower half was topped off with shirts or T shirts and the all important tatty, grey/green raincoat. They usually looked gruby which was not the norm for the breed. Everyone gave them a wide berth.
Then we had the smoothies (sometimes known as Suedeheads). Much smoother and smarter looking with more hair but still extraordinarily short by my standards; a bit like a short crew cut. With hindsight its easy to see how they had spun off from Mods with their attention to detail and cleanliness/grooming. Smart looking tonic mohair suits with trousers a little on the short side. Another favorite item of leg wear was Levi stay Press trousers. Ben Sherman shirts and smart boots (DM's) or more commonly heavy brogues. In colder weather they would sport Crombie overcoats; I believe an expensive item and very different from army surplus coats sported by Bowler Boys.
Then we had a hybrid of the other two groups. They were usually younger and they probably had less money. You would have to have had an income to hack it as a Smoothie and you had to be really tough to be a Bowler Boy. The 'hybrid' or proto Skin was soon to be known as Skinheads. They tended to wear Levi Jeans, cut off but not as severe or as tatty as the Bowler Boys. Boots were DM's or Monkey Boots. Shirts were Ben Sherman. The jacket of choice was the Harrington Jacket. The better off ones would also sometimes aspire/wear a Crombie. They became the dominant group in terms of numbers because the rules governing the identity and therefore admittance to the other two groups was much stricter.
Some of the things that tied three different groups together could be summarised as follows:
- Short hair
- Braces
- Trousers that hang above the shoes or boots
- Boots or heavy shoes
These distinctions could of course been subdivided further. Our town had a heavy drug using sub sect known as The Heroin Skinheads. By about 1971 the other groups and identities had faded away and we were left with the skinheads we know and love. Of course it didn't stop there and the transition into what we know today as a 'Skinhead' continues; it could be seen as one of our more successful exports.
jackbarron
Chelsea, London
No they didn't. I did a cover feature on the Redskins for Sounds. The main guy behind the band, singer Chris Dean, used to write for NME under the name X Moore. He and bassist Martin Hewes were members of the Socialist Workers Party.
The Redskins put out one album, Neither Washington Nor Moscow, and split up in 1986. Dean was a great writer. Somebody told me he went to live in Italy.
Jack
bor
queue jumper
That's a shame.
They performed at Coventry Poly for us as at an SWP fundraiser we put on(probably for the miners), IIRC. At the end of the show, I could see some of our local skinheads slip into the room, and I did wonder what they made of it all.
My over-riding memory was some sort of sense of euphoria, seeing a band who where as openly far left as we were, which wasn't necessarily that common at that time.