3,010 words

I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet.
Put your braces together and your boots on your feet.
And give me some of that old moon-stomping.
— Symarip, “Skinhead Moonstomp”

People look at you in the street. Makes you feel proud. — a skinhead

Tribalism and Western youth go together, and from the 1960s to the 1980s in Britain the most feared tribe were skinheads. Possibly the last real English white working-class street movement, skinheads showed that the tribe doesn’t suddenly feel a sense of belonging once it becomes a tribe, rather the need to belong creates the tribe.

Skinheads began in the 1960s, and a strange hybrid of Caribbean music and tailored English garb saw these menacing clones evolve from a white version of the Jamaican “rude boy” then stepping off the boats and out onto the streets of the United Kingdom, through the clipped, preppy look of the English mods, to form their own look, style, and in some cases combative and extreme Right-wing politics. The original skinheads were disaffected, white, urban working-class men, just as neglected now as they were then.

When I see the word “disaffected,” I think what I imagine a lot of us think: that it refers to those too idle or stupid to invest their lives with meaning. But if all there is of meaning is dismal, vandalized, decaying, camp-like council estates, jobless parents quite possibly addicted to drugs or alcohol, no chance in the education system, and the company of a peer group of criminals, it is easy to see how disaffectedness is something some choose and others have thrust upon them.

For this was the time of Margaret Thatcher, named as she always will be by the media as the Iron Lady (and much worse) — not in the positive sense that iron is useful and vital, but owing to her government’s supposedly relentless rounds of cuts, austerity measures, and new taxes. Britain was certainly a bleak place before the relative affluence of the 1980s, and this is well shown by the films considered below.

I’ll look at three cultural artefacts which archive the rise and fall of the skinhead. Made in Britain, the story of a skinhead passing through the prison system, was made in 1982, while This Is England is a movie from 2006 and shows skinheads as a collective rather than as the lone wolf of the former film. Finally, Skinhead is a 2016 documentary by Don Letts, and I’ll start there.

Don Letts is a very good documentary-maker and archivist of the last century’s youth culture, not least because the tall, well-spoken rasta invites the viewer into the period portrayed. He also highlights the role fashion and music played for skinheads, as they do in every youth movement. Skinheads were modified mods, still adhering to the clipped sartorial style of these often amphetamine-raddled, music-obsessed teenagers with their Ivy League look and famous scooters. But skinheads adapted the uniform: the razor-cut, militaristic haircuts which gave them their name; button-down shirts; braces; and loafers or brogue shoes later gave way to army boots or the reliable Dr. Martens (the company produced ever-higher boots, producing a pair which laced up to the knees in the 1980s), Crombie coats, and the famous Harrington jacket, named after a soap-opera character who wore the item in a TV series. Letts interviews the man whose shop created the skinhead look.

The Ivy opened in 1964 in London’s affluent and leafy suburb of Richmond, peacefully nestled on the River Thames and an unlikely inception point for what would become Britain’s most violent youth cult. The idea was to sell English youth a preppy, clean-cut, all-American student vibe, and while the skinheads took to the clean-cut bit, they were hardly preppy. They wouldn’t have known what it meant, but you still wouldn’t have called a skinhead “preppy.”

Just as they were conceived in the Caribbean and born through the mod movement, skinheads were born again with the advent of punk. After all the catwalk posing of glam, the streets were edgy again, and that suited this essentially warlike breed. Skinheads liked to fight; punks did not, although often had to. For punks, skinheads were the enemy, and one to be feared. I was sucker-punched by one in Camden Town tube station in 1978, and in my desperation to escape I ran straight up the down escalator, on which I met my friends on the way to the platform and tried to warn them of the impending doom. They thought I was mad, for which I could forgive them given that I continued my ascent — eventually successful after much toil, don’t try it — of the descending escalator.

Skinheads fought psychotically at gigs, which sometimes had to be abandoned. Sham 69 were a punk band to whom skinheads gravitated, and I saw skins stop their show at the Reading festival. It was a long way from the original skinheads two-stepping to ska records. Eventually, the fighting at Sham 69’s gig at London’s famous Rainbow Theater was the end for the band, who never played live again. They had alienated some skinhead fans by playing at one of the Rock Against Racism gigs to disassociate themselves from their rising racist associations. The coarsely-named band The Four Skins likewise caused a race riot at one of their shows. Skinheads seemed quite happy to be labelled by the press as public enemy number one, and there was another reason for the media to cast them as such.

The National Front (NF), then Britain’s largest and best-organized Right-wing group, were astute when it came to recruiting, and sold their newspaper, The Bulldog, outside football grounds. Many skinheads approved, and increasing numbers of them were filmed and photographed at NF marches, the camera occasionally catching them “sieg-heiling,” as a new verb came to be known. With their British Bulldog and Union Flag tattoos, their army reject look, and their propensity for ultraviolence now wedded to a new and very direct political activism, the press took little time in stereotyping (a word we are still allowed to use because it happens to us) skinheads as the extremist wing of the far Right. This association of skinheads, who began as a loose collective who liked black music, with virulent racism has never gone away, although skinheads largely have.

The post-punk movement known as “Two-Tone” in the 1980s was the next port of call for skinhead culture, violently political as it was becoming. Bands such as Madness, The Specials, and The Selecter attracted a skinhead following, apparently reinforcing the movement’s origins in black music. But violence and more “sieg heiling” at gigs prompted The Selecter’s singer, Pauline Black, to tell Letts that she couldn’t understand how skinheads could hold the contradictory views they did, loving black music and yet hating blacks. But it doesn’t work like that. Cognitive dissonance comes easily to the genuinely stupid.

After Two-Tone, skinheads would have one last rallying cry: Oi! This brand of violent, ragged punk was aimed exclusively at skinheads and their aggressive ilk. Bands such as The Angelic Upstarts and The Cockney Rejects eventually faded as the scene turned nastier, but their space was filled by bands such as Skrewdriver, overtly Nazi in imagery and lyrics. The movement was championed by music journalist Garry Bushell, who came up with the name after first labelling it “new punk” and called a compilation album “Strength Through Oi!”, claiming that he had no knowledge of the allusion. By this time, skinheads were wholly associated with vicious, racist, Nazi-obsessed politics, and this would go on to badly wound those on the political Right not given to “Paki-bashing” or making ape noises at black football players. The type of creature which evolved out of this snarling jungle was bleakly portrayed in one of the two best fictional accounts of the skinhead of the time.

Made in Britain is not a moral homily, more an exercise in nihilism. Terry is a skinhead minor in a detention center, institutions commonly known as “borstals.” There is no mention of skinheads in the film outside of the semiotic one of Terry’s shaved hair, braces, and Nazi swastika. This is not the brazen chest-emblem of American History X, but a pathetic, self-inked swastika between Terry’s dead eyes. The film is as bleak as Terry’s mental landscape, and as the surely prison-bound skinhead taunts the detention officer who goes out of his way to help him and then befriends (insofar as he can “befriend” anyone) a black boy who he soon ruins by betrayal, we see him as a vessel filled only with its own emptiness.

The officer tries everything he can, professionally, to bond with Terry and save his certain passage to prison. He even takes him out stock-car racing (I believe Americans refer to this as a “demolition derby”) on condition that Terry gets to drive one of the cars. He does, but even this gesture leads to another temper-tantrum in a life which is one long temper-tantrum.

Finally, Terry steals keys and absconds with his black “friend” (as though Terry could befriend anyone), going on a crime spree during which the pair heave rocks through the windows of sleeping Pakistanis. Terry drives the van they have stolen, complete with the sleeping black boy, to a police station, leaving his accomplice to be arrested and destroy any chances of the boy’s imminent release.

Terry then gives himself up at another police station, and the interviewing officer calmly explains the nightmare that lies ahead for him in jail. Terry is not unintelligent, and has a rat-like cunning he employs goading and provoking anyone with whom he is in “conversation.” He smiles at the end of the tale and says, “Sounds great.” The police officer cracks him savagely across the knee with a truncheon and Terry grimaces to avoid showing what is obviously intense pain. The policeman has crossed the moral line, but the viewer silently applauds. If anyone deserves a beating, it’s Terry, less than human and yet all-too-human. This is the skinhead mentality shown incarcerated and alone.

This Is England is a very different outing and far more filmic than Made in Britain. Whereas the latter mostly takes place in cells and grey stone corridors — analogues to Terry’s mental architecture — This is England is paced and choreographed, with a lot of exteriors, bleak as they are in a 1980s British city already well into the great decline English urban centers have seen accelerate ever since. The token trees dotted among the concrete walkways in English town centers are somehow ugly and hard to look at.

The cast were almost all unknowns, and the budget is obviously low (which I prefer, as the writers then have to work harder), but the film is well-crafted and surprisingly moving. An opening montage shows clips of football violence, exercise classes, Right-wing marches, crumbling council estates, factory robots, and Indian men measuring a smashed window for repairs. This, says the opening, is England.

The central character is Shaun, a lad of 12 who is sick of being teased and bullied at school. Taken under the wing of an older skinhead, he has his head shaved and his new friends kit him out with regulation Fred Perry button-down shirt, red braces, and rolled-up jeans and boots. The centrality of skinhead culture to the movie is exemplified by its first major plot point (which usually occurs after 23 minutes of a feature film), when Shaun sees a beautiful pair of oxblood Dr. Marten boots in a shop window. These iconic boots, or others very much like them, would make their way onto the feet of Alex DeLarge and his droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. The film was later banned for its overt violence at the request of the director himself.

Shaun is initiated into what is a fairly mild-mannered skinhead gang, smoking weed and even flirting with one of the girls, a frightening Goth creature. This changes when Combo turns up, an older, old-school skinhead fresh out of jail. He changes the tone of the movie, particularly as one of Shaun’s adoptive gang members is black. This is the point at which skinhead culture, according to a narrative there is no reason to disbelieve, becomes overtly political, as gormless and blunt as those politics may be.

Combo takes the gang to a National Front meeting. The NF, as noted, were the major Right-wing party of the 1980s, and recruiting outside football grounds gained them a large skinhead following. The meeting’s speaker, Lenny, is a perfectly-cast, fat, bullish Englishman of the type that typified the NF, yeasty and egg-bound as he whips his small skinhead audience into a racist frenzy. He says at one point, “We’re not racists. We’re realists.” That statement coming from that figure is the reason the political far Right in Britain fails and will fail every time it raises its head. The only people touting race realism then were buffoons, political cosplayers, and fatsoes with big mouths — and, in their garbled way, skinheads. That is the company we keep, according to the British mythos. And because the British are as susceptible to unconscious association as anyone else — that’s how branding works — the far Right became implicitly bracketed with skinheads and fat, mouthy bastards. There is not currently a credible Right-wing brains trust.

Things begin to fall apart, with Shaun stuck between two warring factions among his newfound friends. Combo goes increasingly berserk, threatening an Indian shopkeeper with a machete before he and Shaun loot the man’s store and, when Combo confesses to one of the girls that the night he spent with her prior to his incarceration was the best of his life, she says it was her worst. She was 16, she says, and “pissed out of me head.” Combo shows just how much of an emotional infant he is, and after crying briefly changes into his usual persona, only more so. A violent dénouement is on the cards.

After a weed-smoking session, Combo makes up with Milky, the black kid in the gang he had previously offended, and who tells Combo all about his big, happy West Indian family. Combo snaps and kicks Milky half to death, as well as bottling an elder gang member in the face. The film cuts to Shaun in bed, looking at a photograph of his dead father, who was killed in the Falklands conflict. The Falklands War accompanies the narrative throughout, and there is a long sequence at the end of troops embarking for the islands disputed between Britain and Argentina. The question the sequence asks, given what we have just seen, is what are they going for, exactly? In a final scene which is blatantly symbolic, yet not crassly so, Shaun throws his England flag — a gift from Combo — into the sea. This is England, indeed.

It is a very good movie, and again shows the essential vacuum at the heart of skinhead culture. Combo is Terry on some very horrible steroids, and the skinhead image has been associated with the far Right in Britain ever since the 1970s. Skinheads are a synecdoche, a partial emblem which has come to represent the whole, like a crown represents royalty, or vine leaves on a Medieval tavern meant drink could be had there.

Defenders of skinhead culture endlessly make the point that the skins themselves couldn’t be racist, as their whole inspiration had come from Jamaican culture. But that is not quite how it works. The shaven-headed new skinhead army had had, by the 1970s, more than enough time to work out for themselves that the passengers on the HMT Empire Windrush brought more than just new music and some natty styles. Anti-black attitudes are born from empiricism as well as the jerk of the knee.

Whether or not skinheads were racist is a meaningless question. Our tragedy is that skinheads exemplify the Right wing, and will always be the picture that pops particularly into the British mind when the National Front are mentioned. They are still going, incidentally, and their current head honcho was one of only two (from a total of ten contacted) “far Right” British political organizations to reply to an e-mail I sent when researching the British far-Right today (or lack of it).

The biggest obstacle faced by the political Right — the genuine Right, not those socialists who occasionally make a risqué suggestion concerning immigration or gender and who are currently running Britain — is its associations. These are largely media created, and they supply a ready-made, stereotypical image of the far Right as bone-headed, violent, hyper-racist nutters, exemplified as that class is by the British skinhead. In the end, skinheads were dopes who were roped by slightly more powerful dopes, and skinheads and the National Front are inseparably linked in the British mindset.

After such a bleak tour of one sector of Britain’s cultural wasteland, I will attempt to leave you with a story which, while it may not exactly warm the heart, may thaw it out a little. In the winter of 2011, I was drinking not far from Queens Park Rangers’ (QPR) football ground, and there was a game on. I went outside for a cigarette and was confronted by half-a-dozen skinheads: proper, dressed-to-the letter-boneheads. A measure of trepidation may best describe my immediate mood, but they smilingly beckoned me to join them at their table. This I did.

They had travelled to the game from Wales — QPR were playing Cardiff City — and I ventured that you didn’t see many authentic skinheads nowadays in London. They explained that, although they weren’t themselves of the persuasion, their mate had been a proper skin, and he had died five years previously. Now, on the closest football Saturday to the anniversary of their friend’s death, they all dressed up like he used to dress, got their heads shaved, and went to the game, wherever it was. Extended family, I guess. Later, I wondered what the gate staff at QPR thought when they saw this mob approaching. Actually, I know what they thought. Here come the fascists.