Browse content similar to The Story of Skinhead with Don Letts. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
What do you think when you hear the word "skinhead"? | 0:00:04 | 0:00:06 | |
Violence? Intolerance? | 0:00:06 | 0:00:08 | |
Hatred? This image was born in the 1970s, | 0:00:08 | 0:00:12 | |
when this youth driven subculture earned a reputation for trouble on | 0:00:12 | 0:00:15 | |
the streets and terraces and a toxic association with racism. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:20 | |
But that's not how it started, | 0:00:20 | 0:00:22 | |
and it's certainly not what it meant to me. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:24 | |
This programme contains strong language | 0:00:26 | 0:00:34 | |
There was a time we were united on the dance floor, dressed to kill | 0:00:36 | 0:00:40 | |
and, if only for a moment, it felt like colour didn't matter. | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
'Skinhead was always, always a multicultural thing, | 0:00:51 | 0:00:54 | |
'skinhead was born of a mixed marriage between Jamaican culture | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
'and white working-class London culture, Cockney culture. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
'That's what it always was.' | 0:01:02 | 0:01:04 | |
So, for any of these idiots to come along later and say, "No, it's a racist thing," | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
how can it be racist? How can you be so ignorant of the roots of the thing you're trying to be? | 0:01:07 | 0:01:12 | |
'Subcultures are interesting. | 0:01:15 | 0:01:16 | |
'Skinheads are one of the most enduring, one of the most striking,' | 0:01:16 | 0:01:21 | |
and, for me, interesting, | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
because they contain that contradiction of | 0:01:25 | 0:01:29 | |
liking one thing but sometimes having differing views. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:35 | |
This is a story of kids trying to find a voice and a place in society. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:40 | |
It's a very British tale that reflects our national culture, good and bad, | 0:01:40 | 0:01:44 | |
and it seems that, throughout its troubled life, | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
there's been an ongoing struggle for the soul of skinhead. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
I was born in 1956 and reached my teens on this | 0:02:03 | 0:02:06 | |
very estate in Stockwell, | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
south London. Back then, like most working class kids, | 0:02:08 | 0:02:11 | |
I used the only two things at my disposal to create my identity, | 0:02:11 | 0:02:15 | |
music and clothes. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:16 | |
And in those days, round these parts, it was all about skinhead. | 0:02:16 | 0:02:21 | |
'I moved to London, '64. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:29 | |
'Ten, 11. All the suburban kids, they all had short hair, | 0:02:29 | 0:02:33 | |
'so I used to just watch them and stare at them, see what they were wearing. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:36 | |
'Fascinated, loved it.' | 0:02:36 | 0:02:38 | |
And after a day or two, I realised it was subversive, | 0:02:38 | 0:02:41 | |
the whole thing was just fucking wild, like really short hair, | 0:02:41 | 0:02:46 | |
and these great big, awkward looking shoes, and, you know, | 0:02:46 | 0:02:50 | |
this is the swinging 60s! | 0:02:50 | 0:02:52 | |
'We weren't behaving or speaking or dancing | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
'or dressing like the hippies' | 0:02:58 | 0:03:00 | |
wanted us to do or our parents wanted us to do or the police or our | 0:03:00 | 0:03:05 | |
teachers or anybody else, or the media. | 0:03:05 | 0:03:08 | |
We were doing our thing. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
-Number two. -Number two? -Yeah. And cut partly in as well. -Certainly. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:14 | |
-INTERVIEWER: -Can you remember when you first decided to be a skinhead? | 0:03:14 | 0:03:17 | |
I'd say about nine months ago. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:20 | |
I put on some jeans and stuff. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:22 | |
See what it's all about. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
You walk down the street, people turn to look at you. | 0:03:25 | 0:03:28 | |
I sort of feel proud, really. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:31 | |
'I knew that it was like the mods had theirs, five or six years earlier, | 0:03:33 | 0:03:36 | |
'the teddy boys had theirs ten years ago. This is it, this is our thing. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
'There wasn't a name for it except peanuts, some people used to say... | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
'"You know that peanut from...?" It would be like that. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:46 | |
'But no-one said "skinhead".' | 0:03:46 | 0:03:47 | |
One guy I heard saying, "Oi, skinhead!", but jokey. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:51 | |
'For quite a long time, the term skinhead was rather a casual name.' | 0:03:53 | 0:03:59 | |
I can remember in 1968, we weren't really calling ourselves anything. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:04 | |
To an extent, skinhead was what other people called you. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
And gradually, the name just stuck. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
And I don't know if the others recognised it, | 0:04:12 | 0:04:15 | |
because they didn't speak about it, but I was thinking, | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
"Wow, look what's going on here." | 0:04:18 | 0:04:21 | |
To many people, raised on a certain idea of skinhead, | 0:04:24 | 0:04:28 | |
the real roots of the movement are surprising. | 0:04:28 | 0:04:31 | |
As although the basic ingredients of these subcultures had already been | 0:04:31 | 0:04:35 | |
established by teddy boys, rockers and mods, | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
it was the arrival of my parents, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:40 | |
with the Windrush Generation after the Second World War, | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
that would play a crucial part in this particular story. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:47 | |
Because along with their hopes and dreams, | 0:04:48 | 0:04:50 | |
they also brought style and some brand-new sounds. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:54 | |
Both found favour with these white working class kids, | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
and seemed to contradict the emerging racism of the times. | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
I guess, like previous youth generations, | 0:05:02 | 0:05:04 | |
it's about people trying to find an identity, | 0:05:04 | 0:05:06 | |
but these white working class kids seemed to be taking tips from distant lands. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:11 | |
That was the first wave of Jamaican immigration | 0:05:11 | 0:05:15 | |
that had come in | 0:05:15 | 0:05:16 | |
and was then starting working alongside white workers, | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
and particularly on the docks. | 0:05:19 | 0:05:21 | |
And kids, I think, who were starting on their working life, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:24 | |
trying to look more manly and doing all this kind of business adopted those | 0:05:24 | 0:05:28 | |
kinds of styles. And that was the same for black youth and white youth. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:32 | |
'It probably started out like that, which was sort of working-class. | 0:05:34 | 0:05:38 | |
I even used to wear a donkey jacket with Dr Martens and turned up Levis. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:43 | |
But then you start looking around and you want to smarten up, and | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
other people actually started wearing that sort of thing. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
And you just want to move on from there. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
'We loved our clothes, we loved our music, | 0:05:52 | 0:05:53 | |
'we wasn't looking for the innovative thing, the guy who had the next thing that came along.' | 0:05:53 | 0:05:57 | |
We discovered this Ivy Shop in Richmond, it was like a treasure. | 0:05:57 | 0:06:01 | |
They had all the stuff we liked and wanted to access, but quality, | 0:06:01 | 0:06:05 | |
quality items. They had the button-down shirts, they had | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
the brogues and the smooth loafers that you wanted. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
The really slick cut Crombie coats and so on. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
I'd heard about the legendary Ivy Shop in my early teens, | 0:06:17 | 0:06:20 | |
but funds and its location in Richmond, | 0:06:20 | 0:06:23 | |
a distant land for this south London kid, | 0:06:23 | 0:06:25 | |
meant I never actually got there. Luckily for me, | 0:06:25 | 0:06:28 | |
its creator was still in business. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:31 | |
-John, how you doing, man? -Nice to see you. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
-Very nice to see you. -So, Mr Simons, you've got to tell me, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
how did The Ivy Shop become the Holy Grail for skinheads? | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
We opened The Ivy Shop in the summer of '64. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
The initial idea was we were crazy about American Ivy League clothes, | 0:06:45 | 0:06:50 | |
this sort of collegiate kind of look. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:54 | |
And that's what inspired us to open the shop. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
What did you make of this new clientele you were getting? | 0:06:57 | 0:06:59 | |
We gradually began to develop a clientele | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
that wore a clean cut look, | 0:07:03 | 0:07:05 | |
that did inform, I think, the skinhead situation later on. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:09 | |
I've noticed over your shoulder, | 0:07:09 | 0:07:11 | |
there's something that looks like a Harrington jacket... | 0:07:11 | 0:07:14 | |
I've heard that you were the one that named the jacket the Harrington jacket. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:17 | |
-I did indeed. -Can I have a look at this, is that all right? -You can have a look at that. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
This is a casual jacket of ours, which is similar to a Baracuta Harrington, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:26 | |
which is the jacket that really got this whole thing started. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
We visited Baracuta, I think, | 0:07:29 | 0:07:32 | |
just a couple of months after we started. | 0:07:32 | 0:07:35 | |
And then, one was watching the TV and you saw the series Peyton Place. | 0:07:35 | 0:07:41 | |
Black and white, I remember that. | 0:07:41 | 0:07:42 | |
In which Rodney Harrington wore the Baracuta Harrington. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:48 | |
So we were selling it in the shop, and he was wearing it on the TV, | 0:07:48 | 0:07:53 | |
so we used to put tickets on saying, "The Rodney Harrington jacket." | 0:07:53 | 0:07:59 | |
And after a while, say a few months, we got a bit lazy and | 0:07:59 | 0:08:03 | |
then we dropped the Rodney Harrington jacket, | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
and we just called it the Harrington jacket. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
And the rest is history, really. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
The skinhead staple was born! | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
'This was stuff which would have been recognised | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
'in the USA as being, well, rather preppy.' | 0:08:21 | 0:08:24 | |
We got it, somehow, second-hand, third-hand, | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
and we put sort of a cocky, street edge on it. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
A tie for me was always quite slick. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:35 | |
They took a lot of time and detail into making sure that their appearances | 0:08:35 | 0:08:39 | |
were spot on. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:41 | |
One of the jokes around Harrow was, | 0:08:41 | 0:08:44 | |
"I like your suit." "Thank you." | 0:08:44 | 0:08:46 | |
"Was it made-to-measure?" "Yeah." | 0:08:46 | 0:08:48 | |
"Who for?(!)" | 0:08:48 | 0:08:50 | |
'The girls were gorgeous, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:53 | |
'most of them were very, very chic and very, very smart. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:56 | |
'The hairstyle, it was really stylish, very sexy. | 0:08:56 | 0:09:00 | |
'Yes, it was very short on top and yes,' | 0:09:00 | 0:09:02 | |
there were long side pieces and pieces at the back, | 0:09:02 | 0:09:05 | |
but it was layered beautifully. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:08 | |
# I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet | 0:09:08 | 0:09:11 | |
# Put your braces together and your boots on your feet... # | 0:09:11 | 0:09:15 | |
Although we were tapped into American culture, | 0:09:15 | 0:09:17 | |
it was a little island with a big bassline that really captured the | 0:09:17 | 0:09:21 | |
imagination of the emerging skinhead scene. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
What was it about Jamaican culture that attracted you white guys? | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
It was unique and it was a bond we had with our black friends, | 0:09:27 | 0:09:31 | |
it was something we could all share in, even what we were wearing, | 0:09:31 | 0:09:35 | |
the trousers up high, things like that, that all came from Jamaica, | 0:09:35 | 0:09:40 | |
I would say, rather than the States. | 0:09:40 | 0:09:42 | |
'Black people just seemed cool in those days. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:46 | |
'There is no other word to use, really, they seemed cool.' | 0:09:46 | 0:09:50 | |
It's like Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. These places that you went | 0:09:50 | 0:09:54 | |
to if you wanted this kind of slab of otherworldliness. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:59 | |
'They came with a style, they came with a fashion, they came with a' | 0:10:01 | 0:10:04 | |
look, which again was embraced, along with the music, | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
and skinheads embraced that as well. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:10 | |
'We listened to reggae exclusively. I can remember, the summer of '69,' | 0:10:12 | 0:10:17 | |
I would only buy reggae. I remember being really quite pleased about that. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:21 | |
"I'm only buying reggae!" | 0:10:21 | 0:10:22 | |
Jamaican recording artists were also pleased by this new-found interest. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:30 | |
So much so, a whole new genre was born out of ska - skinhead reggae, | 0:10:30 | 0:10:35 | |
created specifically for the UK market. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:37 | |
'All of a sudden, they acknowledge us. I just found it was an acceptance on both sides.' | 0:10:39 | 0:10:44 | |
Those records created great atmosphere in the dance halls. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:48 | |
'We went to see all these artists, we saw The Pioneers,' | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
we saw Desmond Dekker, and we loved them. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
So it was completely multiracial. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:01 | |
It's pretty amazing that this movement blossomed here in the late '60s, | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
because, let's face it, in Britain back then, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
racism was a fact of life. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
'People forget at that time, | 0:11:14 | 0:11:16 | |
'the National Front were poling quite high, | 0:11:16 | 0:11:18 | |
'I think Enoch Powell made that speech in '68. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
'And also, I'm guessing that some of the white kids' parents were a' | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
little racist, because they were scared... | 0:11:24 | 0:11:26 | |
Oh, sure. The one thing you've got to remember is that Britain overall | 0:11:26 | 0:11:29 | |
was a much more racist society back in those days. | 0:11:29 | 0:11:32 | |
You could get away with Pakistani jokes on the radio. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
'I went to school around the corner, in Willesden, | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
'and the teachers were openly racist to the black kids.' | 0:11:39 | 0:11:44 | |
I mean, that's how England was. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
My black mates, I would take home, and my dad would raise his eyebrows, | 0:11:49 | 0:11:53 | |
it wasn't done in those days. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
It's like, "Oh." | 0:11:55 | 0:11:57 | |
As we entered the '70s, the ugly intolerance, common in these years, | 0:11:59 | 0:12:03 | |
entered the bloodstream of skinhead. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:05 | |
-INTERVIEWER: -Who's your natural enemy? -Pakis ain't so much your enemy, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
-they're just a pastime, ain't they. -Pakis? | 0:12:12 | 0:12:15 | |
-What do you mean by Pakis? -Pakistanis. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:18 | |
-You don't like Pakistanis? -No. -It's not their colour, | 0:12:18 | 0:12:21 | |
cos the Jamaicans are all right, we mix with the Jamaicans. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
We get on with a lot of Jamaicans. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:27 | |
You like Jamaicans but you don't like Pakistanis? | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
We mix in with a load of Jamaicans, got a lot of Jamaican mates. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:34 | |
I mean, they don't like Pakistanis, either. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
'A slightly younger generation started to come in, | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
'and they did get the idea that | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
'they had to buy a package of ideas, | 0:12:44 | 0:12:46 | |
'they had to buy the Paki-bashing idea. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:49 | |
-'Play up to the headlines. -Yeah. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:51 | |
What you've got to remember is that by late '69 and early 1970, | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
those of us who'd been there at the beginning were starting to get old. | 0:12:55 | 0:12:58 | |
'I remember one time wandering off the estate and bumping into some' | 0:12:58 | 0:13:02 | |
skinheads that definitely weren't on-side. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:04 | |
I made a hasty retreat back to my block, and my mother, | 0:13:04 | 0:13:07 | |
hearing the altercation outside, ran down, trusty kitchen knife in hand, | 0:13:07 | 0:13:12 | |
and proceeded to tell them about their mothers. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:14 | |
Lucky for those skinheads, they did the right thing! | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
When skinheads turned up, it was like, they'd had a precedent. | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
You weren't surprised by that, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:23 | |
you weren't surprised that there were elements of white youth that | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
thought that kind of thing. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:28 | |
From its beginnings on London council estates, | 0:13:29 | 0:13:31 | |
skinhead was now entering the dangerous waters of the mainstream, | 0:13:31 | 0:13:35 | |
and all the media attention that came with it. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:38 | |
'The media love a good moral panic. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:42 | |
'In 1969, they were looking for this year's mods and rockers,' | 0:13:42 | 0:13:46 | |
and suddenly, there we were, this ready-made youth cult. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:51 | |
'When the media articles did first come out, me included, | 0:13:55 | 0:14:00 | |
'and some other people, thought, "Oh, wow,' | 0:14:00 | 0:14:02 | |
"we're getting a bit of recognition." | 0:14:02 | 0:14:04 | |
And then, those kids, the same ones who were right up the front, | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
they started growing their hair long, | 0:14:07 | 0:14:10 | |
and first of all it was just the hair, then it was the clothes, | 0:14:10 | 0:14:15 | |
and by the end of 1970, | 0:14:15 | 0:14:19 | |
dare I say it, flares! | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
This might well have been the last call for the originators, but skinhead | 0:14:24 | 0:14:28 | |
didn't die. Instead, it found a new form and a new legion of followers. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
The boots, the genes, the Harrington jackets and things like that, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:40 | |
the football supporters adopted those. | 0:14:40 | 0:14:42 | |
'Teams that were coming down to London were seeing this attire' | 0:14:45 | 0:14:49 | |
seeing the way we were dressing. You know, "We're taking this back." It started to spread, | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
so it went out into the counties. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:55 | |
The inherent working-class appeal of skinhead found | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
a natural home up north. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:03 | |
London might well have been swinging, | 0:15:03 | 0:15:05 | |
but the rest of the country was less prosperous. | 0:15:05 | 0:15:07 | |
It's only later that I found out that a skinhead thing persisted | 0:15:09 | 0:15:13 | |
quite some time up there. And that makes sense. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
When you consider that to a great extent in Britain, | 0:15:17 | 0:15:21 | |
fashions seemed to start in London and spread out from London. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:26 | |
Now, truth be told, I've never been to a football match in my life! | 0:15:26 | 0:15:30 | |
And I was curious as to how the skinhead style has spread through the terraces. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:35 | |
So I figured I'd better speak to those that were there. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:38 | |
First stop, Yorkshire, to meet the Shipley Skins. | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
Jack, Austin, when and how did skinhead reach the North? | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
A guy moved up here from London. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:51 | |
He came up with his Sta-Prest and his boots and his shaved head. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:56 | |
And we were all football crazy, | 0:15:56 | 0:15:58 | |
so it weren't skinheads who started watching football, | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
it were football fans round here who started dressing as skinheads. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:06 | |
The first Harringtons that everybody was wearing was black, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:13 | |
but the uniform was red boots, white Sta-Prest, and the white | 0:16:13 | 0:16:16 | |
Fred Perry, I remember more than anything. | 0:16:16 | 0:16:18 | |
And looking after the boots was really important, in my view, | 0:16:18 | 0:16:21 | |
because the boots looked after you. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:23 | |
They did. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:24 | |
'It was 1969, I was a little 12-year-old going to football. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:31 | |
'And I seen this gang of skinheads. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:32 | |
'To me they were men, 16, 17, 18 years old.' | 0:16:32 | 0:16:36 | |
And they were like an army, and they just had this impression on me. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:39 | |
Do you know what I mean? | 0:16:39 | 0:16:40 | |
That was it, I went home, got my hair cut, stole my brother's work boots, | 0:16:40 | 0:16:44 | |
nicked my father's braces, and I become a skinhead! | 0:16:44 | 0:16:47 | |
MUSIC: Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival | 0:16:47 | 0:16:50 | |
'When they used to play things like Bad Moon Rising | 0:16:52 | 0:16:55 | |
'at football grounds, that used to whip the crowd up. | 0:16:55 | 0:16:57 | |
'I remember a semifinal against Manchester United, | 0:16:57 | 0:17:00 | |
'they played that at half-time, and that has stayed with me for ever,' | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
because Bad Moon Rising was trouble on the terraces. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:06 | |
'If you went to football, you would go there to support your team | 0:17:08 | 0:17:12 | |
'and to defend your end. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:14 | |
'Football was the only bastion where you could go there on a Saturday or' | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
a Sunday, scream and shout obscenities, | 0:17:17 | 0:17:19 | |
threaten people and not get arrested. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:21 | |
'We were fucking horrible, we wanted to fight with everyone, like, you know? | 0:17:24 | 0:17:28 | |
And, it's not nice, but kids are kids, that's what they do, do you know what I mean? | 0:17:28 | 0:17:32 | |
It's almost like a rites of passage thing. | 0:17:32 | 0:17:34 | |
It used to be, they'd sign 'em up and send 'em off to fight wars, like. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:37 | |
But after the Second World War there wasn't any more wars to send the kids off. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:41 | |
-So they had to release their... -Testosterone! | 0:17:41 | 0:17:43 | |
-Exactly. -Yeah, get it out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. -Like lions, they fight each other | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
to establish who's the best. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:49 | |
We're just the same, you know, we're animals. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:51 | |
# There's a bad moon on the rise... # | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
'Aggro, words came in, we'd never heard of "aggro" before until we heard,' | 0:17:55 | 0:17:58 | |
"We are the Chelsea Aggro!" | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
And all that sort of thing. We heard all of these songs, and we became Shipley Aggro Boys. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:04 | |
I remember one particular match where we disguised ourselves as Manchester United fans. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
Then we saw this small group of ten or 12 Manchester United fans, | 0:18:08 | 0:18:12 | |
and we started chanting, "Manchester, lah, lah, lah." So they all came jumping out. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:16 | |
We said, "We're fucking Leeds fans!" | 0:18:16 | 0:18:19 | |
And kicked the seven bells of shit out of them! | 0:18:19 | 0:18:21 | |
-We did! -Yeah. -Not proud of that, by the way, and I have to say that, | 0:18:21 | 0:18:24 | |
but that's how it was. And you were part of a military operation. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
In London, there's a lot of interaction with the Afro-Caribbeans. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
What was going on here? | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
There was a good number of black skinheads in Bradford. We didn't consider them black. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:37 | |
They were skinheads. They were our mates. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:39 | |
They weren't West Indians with same clothes on. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
They were skinheads who liked our music, our football. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
Not even all the same football team. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:48 | |
There were many dark faces, there were many black faces going to football. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
I never got once confronted by that, but I was totally aware of it. | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
I heard stories and I knew about stuff, but there was a dark side to it, | 0:18:59 | 0:19:03 | |
there was this dark side in football. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
This dark side obviously made for great headlines. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:12 | |
It was further intensified by the publication of Richard Allen's book, Skinhead, | 0:19:12 | 0:19:16 | |
in 1970. It became the Bible for these new skinhead converts. | 0:19:16 | 0:19:20 | |
Trouble was, its hero, Joe Hawkins, was an out-and-out racist. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:25 | |
Consequently, it had a lot to answer for. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:28 | |
'The book was passed around and it was my turn,' | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
I got hold of the book and read it and I read it again, and... | 0:19:32 | 0:19:36 | |
I'm not... I sort of admired Joe Hawkins, because he was the skinhead I wanted to be. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
I liked the way he looked. The front cover was very sort of, you know, big sideburns. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:44 | |
-Yeah, it was. -Big 'burns. -And then the fact that he didn't like policemen. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:49 | |
Now, I realise how juvenile my thought was, but he influenced me, | 0:19:49 | 0:19:52 | |
there's no doubt about that. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:54 | |
So, for a while, it's about style, music and football. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:59 | |
And then politics seems to come into the mix. | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
Definitely down in London. Was that the same up here? | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
It did for a short while, we had one guy, he was... | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
You know Barnadale's cousin? | 0:20:08 | 0:20:10 | |
-Yeah. -He came in, he was a young socialist. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:13 | |
Behind-the-scenes was the National Front. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:15 | |
They actually took us to, I remember going to Scarborough for a weekend, | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
all free. You can imagine young folk with nowt else to do jumping on a | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
coach. And the conference was held at the Spa in Scarborough, and they | 0:20:21 | 0:20:25 | |
wouldn't fucking let us out. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:26 | |
They'd got us in there and they locked the doors. We wanted out. We went to Scarborough for a good time, | 0:20:26 | 0:20:30 | |
we didn't go to listen to all this bollocks about politics. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
Seriously, that happened. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:35 | |
And they still kept on. And a few guys got hooked into it. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:38 | |
'Football was a massive movement. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:46 | |
'And I think certain people thought, "If we can influence football on a political level' | 0:20:46 | 0:20:51 | |
"and give them the start that we want, you know, | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
"it could get, it could go off the wrong way." | 0:20:54 | 0:20:57 | |
Now, I'd heard about the National Front's attempts to infiltrate the | 0:21:00 | 0:21:03 | |
terraces, so I dug deeper, via the net, to speak to a repentant, | 0:21:03 | 0:21:07 | |
ex-high ranking NF member. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:09 | |
What's the truth behind the NF targeting football fans, | 0:21:09 | 0:21:12 | |
many of whom were skinheads? | 0:21:12 | 0:21:13 | |
At the time, I was chairman of the Young National Front, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
which was the youth movement of the NF. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:18 | |
And we were aware of the sympathy that many of the skinheads | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
had for what we were doing. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:24 | |
And we used to sell Bulldog, | 0:21:24 | 0:21:25 | |
the newspaper of the Young National Front, | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
of which I was the editor, outside many football grounds. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
And at Chelsea, Chelsea were a bad team with home crowds of only about | 0:21:30 | 0:21:35 | |
seven or 8,000. | 0:21:35 | 0:21:36 | |
We were selling 700 copies of Bulldog at every game. | 0:21:36 | 0:21:39 | |
So that's 10% of the crowd were actually buying copies of the magazine. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
So, it was a fruitful place for us to be plying our ware, shall we say. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:47 | |
So it's not surprising you're going to go where your support base is. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:50 | |
Did you know guys with right-wing tendencies? | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
Well, I were a member of National Front, simply because... | 0:21:55 | 0:21:59 | |
they used to have a disco and they wouldn't let you in if you weren't a | 0:22:01 | 0:22:05 | |
member. So I used to go to a regular meeting on Thursday nights, | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
at Belfry, it was called, Belfry, | 0:22:09 | 0:22:12 | |
just for the music and stuff. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:14 | |
Why do you think the skinheads found the National Front attractive? | 0:22:17 | 0:22:21 | |
I think the skinheads found the Nation Front attractive probably for the | 0:22:21 | 0:22:24 | |
same reason I did, they were white, | 0:22:24 | 0:22:25 | |
working-class at a time of major demographic change, of economic hardship, | 0:22:25 | 0:22:31 | |
of class identity, | 0:22:31 | 0:22:32 | |
of racial identity, and I think all of those things came together. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
The tribal cohesiveness. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
And of course, once you have a crucial number of skinheads, | 0:22:38 | 0:22:43 | |
the rest of the skinheads want to be part of the same scene. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
In order to be a true skinhead, you have to be a member of the Nation Front and it becomes a | 0:22:45 | 0:22:49 | |
self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:50 | |
When I joined... | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
as far as I can remember, I was the only young member, under 25. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:58 | |
And now, there's so many, I don't know how many. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
'There was an element that tried to hijack the terraces, | 0:23:03 | 0:23:06 | |
'of course there was. There was an element that tried to infiltrate the' | 0:23:06 | 0:23:09 | |
terraces, even on a political way. | 0:23:09 | 0:23:11 | |
But fortunately, they never got to the masses. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
The country slipped into a period of social decline during the mid-70s. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:21 | |
And as skinheads took hold on the terraces, | 0:23:21 | 0:23:23 | |
it seemed to disappear as a fashion from the streets. | 0:23:23 | 0:23:27 | |
But the arrival of punk rock, a new soundtrack fuelled by the times, | 0:23:27 | 0:23:30 | |
would kick-start the skinhead revival. | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
# And I am an anarchist... # | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
In 1977, as DJ at the legendary Roxy Club, | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
the UK's first punk rock venue, | 0:23:39 | 0:23:41 | |
I was perfectly placed to see this forgotten army emerge from the shadows. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:46 | |
# ..want to be | 0:23:46 | 0:23:49 | |
# Anarchy... # | 0:23:49 | 0:23:53 | |
Skinheads were in a funny place when they came back. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:55 | |
They started coming back from '76 onwards, | 0:23:55 | 0:23:58 | |
but they were very small at the time. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:01 | |
And at that time, the only places these kids could go were to punk clubs. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
And they didn't really like punk, because to them, | 0:24:04 | 0:24:07 | |
a lot of the punks were middle-class, a lot of the punks were posers. | 0:24:07 | 0:24:10 | |
They didn't like the scruffiness. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:12 | |
'I remember being 12 and seeing the Sex Pistols,' | 0:24:15 | 0:24:19 | |
listening to them. I was scared. I was scared. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:23 | |
That's a bit much. Like, "I'm an antichrist!" | 0:24:23 | 0:24:26 | |
'Me, as a kid, I would see all these punks walking round town with | 0:24:29 | 0:24:33 | |
'multicoloured hair and spikes and that sort of stuff and thought it was so exciting. | 0:24:33 | 0:24:36 | |
But punk itself was a little bit to art school for me, | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
I was a council estate kid living in, you know... | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
I think Sham 69 is what really got me. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
Sham had an upsurge in working-class people | 0:24:50 | 0:24:54 | |
so much wanting something else | 0:24:54 | 0:24:56 | |
and something new and something that they could feel was a punk band. | 0:24:56 | 0:24:59 | |
'When Sham came along, they were like the champions, in our own eyes,' | 0:25:03 | 0:25:06 | |
of the underdogs. So a lot of kids gravitated towards them. | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
I gave them our way into punk that they did not have outside of that. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:19 | |
Their whole thing is not about being experimental, it is a structure. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:24 | |
'And I think what Sham did, | 0:25:27 | 0:25:28 | |
'they took that whole terrace chant thing and they tried to reinvent' | 0:25:28 | 0:25:32 | |
themselves. And I think they'd have done it and been much more successful | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
if they hadn't been destroyed by the politics. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
'By the late '70s, the right-wing politicians, they realised there was' | 0:25:40 | 0:25:46 | |
an army who'd fight for them, do you know what I mean? | 0:25:46 | 0:25:49 | |
'They saw a way of, say, recruitment at our gigs. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:54 | |
'The lost souls of whoever they were, in the weakness of whoever they were, | 0:25:54 | 0:25:58 | |
'could far more easily be contained and brought about into their party' | 0:25:58 | 0:26:03 | |
through a Sham 69 gig than probably any of the gig they could possibly | 0:26:03 | 0:26:07 | |
go to. I was very, very quick to recognise this. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
So therefore that's why I quickly wanted to play the Rock Against Racism gig. Any of them, | 0:26:10 | 0:26:16 | |
to show straightaway I was an ally to the theme of rock against racism | 0:26:16 | 0:26:21 | |
than I ever was, do you understand, to the other event? | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
-Hold-up! -Hang on! -Oi! | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
Oi! | 0:26:28 | 0:26:29 | |
'Sham 69 concerts were disrupted by National Front and British movements, | 0:26:29 | 0:26:34 | |
'skinheads after Jimmy Pursey came out on the anti-racist side. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:40 | |
'It became, if you like,' | 0:26:40 | 0:26:41 | |
a catalyst for the skinheads to show their disapproval of what they saw | 0:26:41 | 0:26:46 | |
as Jimmy Pursey's sell-out of what they saw as being the true skinhead thing. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:51 | |
'When Sham 69 had their last stand, a terrible gig at The Rainbow, | 0:26:52 | 0:26:57 | |
'it was that lot, all of them who caused it.' | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
And even though there was only 40 of them, | 0:27:00 | 0:27:01 | |
they got a bigger mob around them and that's what caused that chaos, | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
so that was a terrible time for Jimmy Pursey. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:06 | |
What can I do? I mean, | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
I do it for you. If you trust me, I would have trusted you. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
This 40 managed to get about | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
200 of the audience running round in packs terrorising people, and then | 0:27:19 | 0:27:23 | |
they invaded the stage and there's Sieg Heiling and all this old crap. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:27 | |
It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:29 | |
The worst gig, up to that point, I had ever seen. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
'When people bring themselves out into the daylight, | 0:27:38 | 0:27:41 | |
'it's a completely different way of looking at things, isn't it? So that's what it did for me.' | 0:27:41 | 0:27:46 | |
It put a total value to their stupidity, do you understand, of saying, | 0:27:46 | 0:27:50 | |
"Thank God you've done that," because now I can also go, "Look, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
"do you really think I want to play to that?" That's why it was the last. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
"Do you really think I've got anything to do with this trash?" | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
In 1979, | 0:28:03 | 0:28:04 | |
Jimmy walked away from a scene that was becoming increasingly toxic. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
And from where I'm standing, the Sham 69 story is a real tragedy. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:12 | |
Because whether I liked the music or not, | 0:28:12 | 0:28:14 | |
he definitely made a connection to youth that felt ignored and rejected. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:19 | |
Something I could certainly relate to. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
And they wouldn't be the last band to feel the pressure of having a skinhead following. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:25 | |
# One step beyond... # | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
MUSIC: One Step Beyond by Madness | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
There was another movement waiting in the wings to pick up the skinhead | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
slack, good and bad. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:38 | |
Fuelled by the energy of punk and a love of reggae, | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
it focused on kids living on multicultural estates that had grown-up with, | 0:28:40 | 0:28:44 | |
well, kids like me. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:46 | |
And it put style and music centre stage. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:49 | |
Because this was 2 Tone. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:51 | |
'We lived in a town called High Wycombe, which was west of London, | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
'it was an overspill town. So, it was full of immigrants.' | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
Calypso was played all the time, reggae was played all the time. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:02 | |
But our music, the white kids, you know, council estate kids, | 0:29:02 | 0:29:04 | |
was punk rock. When 2 Tone came along, to us, | 0:29:04 | 0:29:08 | |
that was the kids of our council estate playing in a band together. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:12 | |
When The Specials done that music, Neville Staples and Terry Hall, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
that was us, that was me and Barry. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:17 | |
These guys, they were us. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:23 | |
And I'd never seen us jumping around on Top Of The Pops. | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
When I heard that, just the call of "one step beyond", I thought, | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
"I'm having some of that." I didn't really look at it as being skinhead, | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
it wasn't about that, it was just about, "This music, I like. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:40 | |
"What they're wearing, I like." | 0:29:40 | 0:29:43 | |
End of. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:44 | |
'There was a whole new bunch of kids coming up and Specials and | 0:29:46 | 0:29:50 | |
'the multicultural stuff are talking to that, and they were talking to the kids' | 0:29:50 | 0:29:54 | |
that were seeing stuff, the new world out of our eyes, | 0:29:54 | 0:29:57 | |
not our parents' eyes, when the whole world was white. | 0:29:57 | 0:30:00 | |
'My dad was extremely racist. | 0:30:04 | 0:30:06 | |
'I mean extremely. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:08 | |
'He was a National Front member, he hated anybody that wasn't white,' | 0:30:08 | 0:30:11 | |
Anglo-Saxon. So my dad was saying one thing, I was saying something else. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
But it wasn't about making a big statement, it wasn't like, | 0:30:15 | 0:30:19 | |
"Oh, we shouldn't be doing it." It was just normal. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
'It was full of black people like Neville Staples and Pauline Black on' | 0:30:24 | 0:30:27 | |
the television telling us it was us, as well. | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
Do you know what I mean? So it was like, "This is ours." | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
We didn't think we were skinheads, or we were this, or we were that, | 0:30:40 | 0:30:43 | |
we were just... I had as many black mates that were wearing their stuff | 0:30:43 | 0:30:47 | |
as anybody else, until... | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
the evilness of it all started happening and they all chipped. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:53 | |
They just went, "Obviously we can't do that no more." | 0:30:53 | 0:30:56 | |
You know, if you're playing, you had maybe the first four or five rows | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
all Sieg Heiling at the stage, at some stage during your set. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
And you had to deal with that. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:10 | |
And the only way you could deal with it would be to stop the gig. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
So we used to go offstage and wait for it all to calm down and then a | 0:31:16 | 0:31:21 | |
skinhead ambassador would come upstairs and sort of tap on the door | 0:31:21 | 0:31:26 | |
and say, "Are you coming back on?" | 0:31:26 | 0:31:28 | |
"And you go, "No, we're not! | 0:31:28 | 0:31:30 | |
"All your mates are all Sieg Heiling at us." | 0:31:30 | 0:31:32 | |
He was like, "Well, they don't represent what we think. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:36 | |
"There's a whole group of us down there and we only came along because we | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
"love the music," and all this kind of thing. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:41 | |
I mean, what I used to say was, "Go down and talk to them, | 0:31:41 | 0:31:45 | |
"convince your other mates, who look exactly the same as you do, | 0:31:45 | 0:31:48 | |
"that this is, they're at the wrong gig." | 0:31:48 | 0:31:52 | |
Even though I was very ideologically | 0:31:56 | 0:32:00 | |
involved with the National Front's | 0:32:00 | 0:32:03 | |
credo, I was quite happy to listen to black music. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:07 | |
I loved soul music, I loved reggae music, I loved ska music. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:11 | |
So, there was a paradox, you can call it a contradiction, | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
it was certainly an oddity that we wanted an all-white culture and all-white | 0:32:13 | 0:32:18 | |
society, yet we were quite happy to imbibe this non-white culture. | 0:32:18 | 0:32:24 | |
I still don't understand how any skinhead can keep that contradiction | 0:32:31 | 0:32:36 | |
within themselves of loving the music and feeling it is perfectly | 0:32:36 | 0:32:40 | |
acceptable to practise racism. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:43 | |
-# Stop your messing around -Ah-ah-ah | 0:32:43 | 0:32:46 | |
# Better think of your future... # | 0:32:46 | 0:32:48 | |
'Skinhead was always, always a multicultural theme.' | 0:32:48 | 0:32:51 | |
Skinhead was born of a mixed marriage between Jamaican culture and white | 0:32:51 | 0:32:56 | |
working class London culture, Cockney culture. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:58 | |
And that's what it always was. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:00 | |
So, for any of these idiots to come along later and say, "No, | 0:33:00 | 0:33:02 | |
"it's a racist thing." How can it be racist? | 0:33:02 | 0:33:04 | |
How can you be so ignorant of the roots of the thing you're trying to be? | 0:33:04 | 0:33:08 | |
'It never made sense to me, you know what I mean?' | 0:33:14 | 0:33:16 | |
Why the fuck would a racist want to go and watch 2 Tone bands? | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
Because the whole idea of 2 Tone was multiculturalism. | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
But the same thing, I think they went along just for the fucking trouble. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:26 | |
So all people would see is skinheads in trouble, you know what I mean? | 0:33:26 | 0:33:29 | |
They'd see some of them would have fucking "white power" T-shirts and | 0:33:29 | 0:33:32 | |
they'd assume all the skinheads that were there were white power. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:36 | |
# A message to you, Rudy... # | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
'The media, they seem to think we were the instigators of that.' | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
And in some ways, that 2 Tone completely missed the point, | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
was some right wing movement that attracted skinheads | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
and we were a threat to society in some way or another, | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
without ever thinking past that or even thinking, "Well, | 0:33:55 | 0:33:57 | |
"there's black people who were in these bands," | 0:33:57 | 0:33:59 | |
or even investigating what we were talking about. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:02 | |
'They tried to brand all skinheads as being right-wing thugs and idiots,' | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
'which was never, ever true.' | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
To the extent that I think they actually transformed the way skinheads | 0:34:10 | 0:34:14 | |
were seen. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:15 | |
A lot of middle-class people were scared of the skinheads, | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
because they were largely working class, they took this line they were all right-wing thugs. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:26 | |
And they weren't, they never were. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:28 | |
-MUSIC: -Ghost Town by The Specials | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
'When I was a little kid in school, the teacher asked us, | 0:34:33 | 0:34:37 | |
'"What do we think we are? Working-class, middle-class or upper class?" | 0:34:37 | 0:34:41 | |
And nearly every kid said middle-class. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:43 | |
We were all from a fucking council estate. | 0:34:43 | 0:34:45 | |
But we were ashamed to say fucking working-class, do you know what I mean? | 0:34:45 | 0:34:49 | |
There was a stigma on it. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:50 | |
So when we reached 12, 13 and become skinheads, we thought, "Fuck him, | 0:34:50 | 0:34:54 | |
"why should we be fucking ashamed?" | 0:34:54 | 0:34:55 | |
We become proud to be working-class, not so much proud, but unashamed. | 0:34:55 | 0:35:00 | |
# All the clubs are being closed down... # | 0:35:00 | 0:35:05 | |
'We were the ones no-one wants talk to. | 0:35:05 | 0:35:07 | |
'We were the scruffs, we lived on council estates, | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
'there was nothing cool about us. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:12 | |
'And the more we were hated by the media, the more we were called the Nazi, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:17 | |
'hooligan thugs, scumbag, lowlife, drug sniffing, mugging old lady lowlife, | 0:35:17 | 0:35:22 | |
'the more it put us together. The more it made us outlaws, | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
the more we were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:27 | |
That's what we felt we were. And that kept us together throughout the '80s. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:32 | |
The coming decade would see yet another incarnation of skinhead, | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
and one that confused the hell out of me. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:40 | |
It was harder, it was tougher and I couldn't see or hear any connection to | 0:35:40 | 0:35:44 | |
Jamaica. Trust me, there was no black in Oi!. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
This generation of skinheads were disillusioned and felt despised. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
So they needed a new soundtrack. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
'It was 1981. | 0:35:57 | 0:36:00 | |
'By then, skinheads had come back on the back of Sham 69 and 2 Tone, | 0:36:00 | 0:36:05 | |
'they were already back, like. So the older ones like me,' | 0:36:05 | 0:36:07 | |
we already knew what it was all about. | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
The younger kids, they didn't remember the first time round. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:13 | |
For them, it was like a punk inspired skinhead thing, | 0:36:13 | 0:36:17 | |
hence the different clothes. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:19 | |
They were more like military with the flight jackets and stuff like that. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:22 | |
# Running down the backstreets Oi, oi, oi | 0:36:22 | 0:36:24 | |
# And we're running and we're free Oi, oi, oi... # | 0:36:24 | 0:36:28 | |
'What you noticed were bands coming through who were the reality of that | 0:36:28 | 0:36:32 | |
'punk myth, who were the dead-end kids, they were from council estates, | 0:36:32 | 0:36:36 | |
'they were from high rises, tower blocks, | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
'that was the people forming bands.' | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
And it became a harder guitar sound, it became more of an all lads together, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:46 | |
big mob chorus. That's what distinguished it. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:48 | |
I give it the name, I think, new punk, real punk, | 0:36:53 | 0:36:55 | |
we're searching for a name for it because it was different. | 0:36:55 | 0:36:58 | |
And I hit on Oi! in 1980. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:00 | |
But you also, you put together a record of Oi! music that had as its title, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:05 | |
Strength Thru Oi!, which is a parody of a Nazi slogan. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:09 | |
-You must have known it was a Nazi slogan? -Did you know that before? I didn't. | 0:37:09 | 0:37:12 | |
You mean you were sold a title for your album without realising? | 0:37:12 | 0:37:15 | |
I was looking for a play on words. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:17 | |
I thought of The Oi! Of Sex from Joy Of Sex, | 0:37:17 | 0:37:19 | |
I thought of Oi! Division from Joy Division. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:21 | |
I thought Strength Thru Oi! was, it was the definitive, street level, | 0:37:21 | 0:37:26 | |
hooligan album. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:27 | |
You mean to say you didn't realise it was a Nazi slogan? | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
The first time I saw that slogan, it was on a Skids album. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
The Oi! music per se is not racialist, it's never been racialist. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:36 | |
All it is, is pro working-class people. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
We happened to show up there and we sing about football violence and | 0:37:41 | 0:37:44 | |
fighting with the police and shit like that. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:46 | |
So Oi! is just a name that got coined to make it different from the | 0:37:46 | 0:37:51 | |
original punk. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:52 | |
'When the Oi! came in, I was 15, 16 and I thought, "Yeah,' | 0:37:56 | 0:38:00 | |
"they are expressing how I fucking feel and how angry I am. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:04 | |
So you had the Madness stuff you could dance to and the "fuck you" stuff | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
with the Oi! | 0:38:07 | 0:38:08 | |
You said earlier you were running round smashing things up anyway, right. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:18 | |
-Tell me about that? -We had our moments. | 0:38:18 | 0:38:21 | |
But, yeah, we went down to see Angelic Upstarts and just fucking tore the | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
place to pieces. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:26 | |
I liked Angelic Upstarts. There was no reason why we done that, we did it. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:31 | |
When you hear the music, you feel aggressive. Then after, you feel like punching someone's head in. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:41 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:38:41 | 0:38:42 | |
Kicking their teeth in, whatever. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
All you want to do is go in a pub, get yourself pissed, | 0:38:44 | 0:38:46 | |
kick somebody's brains in and then go out and smash a few windows or | 0:38:46 | 0:38:50 | |
something. Something like that. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:51 | |
There's nothing to do, when you think about it, | 0:38:51 | 0:38:53 | |
that's the only reason why people do that sort of stuff. | 0:38:53 | 0:38:56 | |
'They were singing that violent, aggressive white, skinhead music.' | 0:39:00 | 0:39:05 | |
And we, "Wow, man, this is us." | 0:39:05 | 0:39:08 | |
The days of dancing down the disco to 2 Tone and having a great time | 0:39:08 | 0:39:12 | |
had now turned into this, we are now street fighting gangs. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
'Now, I can't pretend I was one of Oi's biggest fans, | 0:39:19 | 0:39:23 | |
'but one of the things that did catch my eye were the tattoos. | 0:39:23 | 0:39:26 | |
'These new street gangs had lots of them in strange places. | 0:39:26 | 0:39:30 | |
'And they'd become a defining part of Oi.' | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
'In the 1980s, there were a lot of skinheads within the Oi movement | 0:39:36 | 0:39:40 | |
'that did opt to have tattoos, tattoos had started' | 0:39:40 | 0:39:42 | |
to become popular with all subcultures at the time. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:46 | |
# I just can't take much more of this oppression | 0:39:46 | 0:39:49 | |
# I'm going out my head... # | 0:39:49 | 0:39:51 | |
Many skinheads wanted to make a big statement in those days | 0:39:51 | 0:39:55 | |
and, um, the face became very popular. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:59 | |
# Have you ever seen grown men cry? | 0:39:59 | 0:40:01 | |
# Police! Police! Police oppression! | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
# Police! Police! Police oppression! # | 0:40:04 | 0:40:07 | |
One of the problems with people getting their faces tattooed | 0:40:07 | 0:40:11 | |
is that, in some ways, you're behind an ink prison. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:13 | |
I guess you can move on from fashion, | 0:40:13 | 0:40:15 | |
but you can't really move on from a face tattoo. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:17 | |
Some tattoos, you know, you could regret, | 0:40:17 | 0:40:21 | |
because of your life choices and how they change. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
In London, in Leicester Square especially, | 0:40:26 | 0:40:30 | |
you had all the runaways living on the streets, right. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:32 | |
These are the ones who had the tattoos on their faces | 0:40:32 | 0:40:35 | |
and were glue sniffing, and we, as kids... | 0:40:35 | 0:40:37 | |
Again, we were their age, we were looking at them and hero worshipped | 0:40:37 | 0:40:40 | |
them a bit, cos they were the toughest, they were the hardest. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:42 | |
This very white and violent incarnation of skinhead | 0:40:45 | 0:40:48 | |
seemed always to be always looking for a fight and, once again, | 0:40:48 | 0:40:51 | |
the National Front were there to give them a reason. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:54 | |
How did the politics coming into the mix affect your attitude? | 0:40:54 | 0:40:57 | |
Oh, mate, I was hanging out, everyone was cool. | 0:40:57 | 0:41:02 | |
And, er, then, suddenly, | 0:41:02 | 0:41:04 | |
they started to listen to some of this other music, which... | 0:41:04 | 0:41:09 | |
I'm a lover of music, so, within the music they were listening to, | 0:41:09 | 0:41:12 | |
there were some tunes I thought, "That's a good tune. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:14 | |
"That's a nice tune, an all right tune." | 0:41:14 | 0:41:16 | |
But what fucked me off is I couldn't go to the gigs. | 0:41:16 | 0:41:18 | |
-Yeah. -There was no chance that I could now travel with my friends. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
There was no chance that I could now continue socialising. | 0:41:21 | 0:41:26 | |
Er... I was out of the game, basically. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:29 | |
For a black kid then, | 0:41:31 | 0:41:32 | |
there was not much reason for them to get involved in the Oi! scene, | 0:41:32 | 0:41:36 | |
especially when all they seen in the newspapers and the telly was Oi was | 0:41:36 | 0:41:39 | |
full of skinheads, Oi! was full of fucking racism and shit like this, | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
you know what I mean? | 0:41:42 | 0:41:43 | |
Although I couldn't relate to Oi!, | 0:41:44 | 0:41:46 | |
as a black man, I could definitely relate to the growing discontent | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
across the land - something I experienced personally | 0:41:49 | 0:41:52 | |
during the Brixton riots of the early '80s. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:55 | |
You've gotta look at what was going on at the time. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:05 | |
There was a lot of anger going on and so it was very easy, it was like | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
get this fucking anger music up there and people went for it, | 0:42:09 | 0:42:11 | |
because, you know, they could relate to it. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
Unemployment was high, you had a lot of people with fuck all to do, | 0:42:17 | 0:42:21 | |
they had no future, they genuinely had no future. | 0:42:21 | 0:42:23 | |
And so, if someone comes along and has got a message for them saying, | 0:42:23 | 0:42:26 | |
"We can help you guys," whether it be the far left, or the far right, | 0:42:26 | 0:42:29 | |
they've got an audience, and, even if only one in ten of them listens, | 0:42:29 | 0:42:33 | |
they can recruit. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:34 | |
Skinhead was becoming even more polarised, | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
leading to confusion on all sides. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
And in a year that was full of anger, | 0:42:40 | 0:42:42 | |
the situation came to a head in the summer of 1981, at a gig featuring | 0:42:42 | 0:42:47 | |
several Oi! bands that attracted a right-wing following, | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
regardless of where they stood. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
-NEWSREADER: -200 skinheads travelled to the large Asian community | 0:42:52 | 0:42:56 | |
of Southall in London to attend a concert at the Hambrough Tavern. | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
As they reached the centre of Southall, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:01 | |
several skinheads ran down the Broadway breaking shop windows. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:05 | |
Here you had large groups of people, | 0:43:05 | 0:43:07 | |
fascist people, er, who were doing Nazi-type salutes, | 0:43:07 | 0:43:12 | |
writing NF on the condensation of the windows | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
and abusing all the Asians here. | 0:43:15 | 0:43:18 | |
You know, police still didn't do anything. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:21 | |
The idea that these bands went to Southall... | 0:43:21 | 0:43:24 | |
-An Asian community! -..with the intention of starting a race riot is | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
-just nonsense. I mean... -That's still a little naive! | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
If you go in there in a mob! | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
What happened at Southall was the locals, | 0:43:34 | 0:43:37 | |
who obviously had been wound up by someone about the fact | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
that skinheads, as well as other kids, were coming to this gig. | 0:43:40 | 0:43:44 | |
And they took it as an affront and | 0:43:44 | 0:43:45 | |
it was a massive attack on the gig with kids throwing petrol bombs. | 0:43:45 | 0:43:48 | |
It kicked all off, the pub got burned down. | 0:43:51 | 0:43:53 | |
This made major news across the country. | 0:43:53 | 0:43:56 | |
Margaret Thatcher, in her wisdom, said, "Ban that, let's ban Oi!" | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
Right? So that got pulled off the shelf and then, after Southall, | 0:43:59 | 0:44:03 | |
most of the good Oi! bands all folded up, The Rejects, all them were gone. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:07 | |
And in their place were small little Oi! bands | 0:44:07 | 0:44:09 | |
and they were being funded by the right wing groups | 0:44:09 | 0:44:12 | |
and it just fed this whole monster, really. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:14 | |
So, of course, the media picked up on it | 0:44:19 | 0:44:21 | |
and every time you then saw somebody with the high boots on | 0:44:21 | 0:44:24 | |
and the bleached jeans - racist skinhead. | 0:44:24 | 0:44:26 | |
I think the trouble really started up in London, | 0:44:29 | 0:44:33 | |
with bands like fucking Screwdriver. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:35 | |
The out and out, Nazi, fucking bonehead bands. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:40 | |
They got into it in a big way, the right wing thing. I think they could | 0:44:40 | 0:44:44 | |
see they could make money, they could play gigs, sell records. | 0:44:44 | 0:44:47 | |
Being part of being a skinhead is to be a nationalist, | 0:44:47 | 0:44:50 | |
to be patriotic and proud of your country and proud of your race. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
There's a lot said about skinheads being started from blacks | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
in the East End, but personally, I don't think that's right at all. | 0:44:55 | 0:44:59 | |
I've heard these rude boys, whatever they are called, | 0:44:59 | 0:45:01 | |
but I don't consider them to be skinheads anyway. I think | 0:45:01 | 0:45:04 | |
skinhead is a white, working-class movement thing, really. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:07 | |
# Boots and braces Fighting cos you're bored... # | 0:45:07 | 0:45:12 | |
For Screwdriver, they started "blood and honour". | 0:45:12 | 0:45:14 | |
What was blood and honour about? | 0:45:14 | 0:45:15 | |
Blood and honour was the sort of prodigy of Screwdriver, really. | 0:45:15 | 0:45:21 | |
It was a proper neo-Nazi thing. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:23 | |
We were trying to bring about race warfare, | 0:45:25 | 0:45:27 | |
so our job was to basically disrupt the multicultural society, | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
the multiracial society, and make it unworkable and make the various | 0:45:31 | 0:45:34 | |
different groups hate each other to such a degree they couldn't live | 0:45:34 | 0:45:38 | |
together and, when they couldn't live together, you end up with that | 0:45:38 | 0:45:41 | |
ghettoised, radicalised society from which we hoped to rise, | 0:45:41 | 0:45:44 | |
like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes. | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
The rise of these right-wing bands led to the formation of SHARP - | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice - | 0:45:53 | 0:45:56 | |
spearheaded in the UK by Roddy Moreno. | 0:45:56 | 0:45:59 | |
We were reactionary, so we become like an antifascist band. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:03 | |
Nothing to do with the country, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:05 | |
it was simply because there was fucking boneheads out there | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
-making us fucking look bad. -You had to do something, I guess? | 0:46:08 | 0:46:10 | |
Look, if skinhead was about anything, | 0:46:10 | 0:46:12 | |
it was about don't let people take the piss out of you, | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
you know what I mean? Be a man, man up like, you know what I mean? | 0:46:15 | 0:46:18 | |
So, when we seen these fucking dickheads dressing up like us and | 0:46:18 | 0:46:22 | |
come in with all this Nazi nonsense, we had to stand up and say, | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
"No, we're not having none of that." | 0:46:25 | 0:46:27 | |
The Daily Mail tried to paint the whole thing | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
as being this neo-Nazi movement, which it never, ever was. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
And I think that media version was | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
taken up by, um... the media all round the world. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
MUSIC: Beethoven's Symphony No 9 from A Clockwork Orange | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
If you put in the internet "skinhead", you'll get, like, | 0:46:47 | 0:46:50 | |
a whole list of Polish casuals running around at football matches. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:54 | |
You'll get American, white supremacist groups. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:57 | |
You know, where's the skinhead amongst that? | 0:46:57 | 0:46:59 | |
You know, there is none. It's got nothing really to do with us. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
-No. -It's been hijacked by the media, it's been sold. | 0:47:02 | 0:47:05 | |
And that is a shame, that, after 40 years, it's that same thing. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:10 | |
The demonisation helped, if you like, to ghettoise skinheads | 0:47:18 | 0:47:22 | |
and they became this very sort of angry, bitter, resentful, paranoid | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
subculture, because of the way they were being depicted by the media, | 0:47:26 | 0:47:30 | |
so, um, in one sense, they became the monster the media had created. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:33 | |
You look at most racist rallies, | 0:47:36 | 0:47:38 | |
say in America, and they're dressed all in black, military fatigues, | 0:47:38 | 0:47:42 | |
the boots and that. They don't look anything like skinheads, | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
but it's the military look. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:47 | |
They just wanted to look hard, so they dressed up like skinheads. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:51 | |
Particularly in Europe, | 0:47:51 | 0:47:52 | |
and especially perhaps now in Germany and Eastern Europe, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:55 | |
the skinhead movement has emerged as part of the new what you might call | 0:47:55 | 0:48:00 | |
neo-fascist response to the challenges of migration, | 0:48:00 | 0:48:04 | |
and European union meltdown and whatever other political phenomenon | 0:48:04 | 0:48:08 | |
you want to bring into the equation. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:10 | |
As this idea of skinheads as fascists, | 0:48:12 | 0:48:14 | |
with misguided ideas about national identity, spread around the world, | 0:48:14 | 0:48:18 | |
it would even find a home where there were no white people. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:22 | |
There's this gang of fucking dickheads called the KL Troopers | 0:48:22 | 0:48:26 | |
and they're Malaysia Nazis. I know, it don't make sense. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:31 | |
The Nazis would've fucking shot them all, do you know what I mean? | 0:48:31 | 0:48:34 | |
And their thing is Malay Power. Brown Power they call it. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:38 | |
And they want fucking Malaysia for Malaysians, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:40 | |
so they want all the Chinese to fuck off | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
and they want all the fucking Vietnamese to fuck off. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:45 | |
Wherever the right reared its ugly head, there was a left response. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:51 | |
And then, there were those that wanted nothing to do with either side. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:54 | |
The global appeal towards the skinheads is because | 0:48:56 | 0:48:59 | |
they stand up for themselves, and I think we all need that sometimes - | 0:48:59 | 0:49:03 | |
to stand up and say, "I want to be heard." | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
You know, I want to be heard, and I think other countries, they have | 0:49:06 | 0:49:09 | |
their downfalls and have got their upset with their societies and they | 0:49:09 | 0:49:13 | |
just go, "We're going to stand up for ourselves and say who we are." | 0:49:13 | 0:49:16 | |
MUSIC: Morning Sun by Al Barry & The Cimarons | 0:49:16 | 0:49:19 | |
If you ever find a very proud working-class nation, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:24 | |
you will find skinheads and reggae music and Oi music there, | 0:49:24 | 0:49:28 | |
because it speaks to somewhere else, it isn't just surface. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
And I have spent three decades trying to suss out | 0:49:31 | 0:49:33 | |
what that fucking is, I think it's a bit of a mystery. | 0:49:33 | 0:49:36 | |
Something organic, something that goes deep | 0:49:37 | 0:49:39 | |
when you're within a tribe. | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
# She was waiting so impatiently... # | 0:49:41 | 0:49:46 | |
I mean, I still have people come up to me today and say, | 0:49:46 | 0:49:49 | |
"Are you a skinhead?" and you go, "Yeah." | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
and they go, "So you're a racist?" | 0:49:51 | 0:49:53 | |
And I go, "What makes you say that I'm a racist?" | 0:49:53 | 0:49:55 | |
Even though, after fucking 35 years fighting against it, | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
Joe Public still assumes skinheads are fucking racists. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:06 | |
Where we have one, everyone knows the fucking truth, | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
you know what I mean? | 0:50:09 | 0:50:10 | |
Everyone knows there's skinheads and there's boneheads. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
You have skinheads within skinheads. So there are, if you like, | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
retro skins that just want to go back to that '60s purity, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:26 | |
as they would see it, or those that are blood and honour | 0:50:26 | 0:50:29 | |
keeping on that tradition that goes back to the late '70s. | 0:50:29 | 0:50:33 | |
But I mean, except for the fact they call themselves skinheads, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:35 | |
and they might look superficially similar, a white supremacist, | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
neo-Nazi skin is not going to look very much like someone | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
who's trying to look like a 1969 skinhead who loves ska music. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:45 | |
Subcultures are interesting. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:51 | |
Skinheads are one of the most enduring, one of the most striking | 0:50:51 | 0:50:56 | |
and, for me, interesting, | 0:50:56 | 0:51:00 | |
because they contain that contradiction of liking one thing, | 0:51:00 | 0:51:05 | |
but sometimes having differing views from what that might suggest. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:12 | |
The fight for the soul of skinhead has always been a one-sided battle, | 0:51:15 | 0:51:19 | |
as these opposing views have been poorly represented. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:23 | |
But there have been attempts to redress the balance. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
What do you think Shane Meadows was trying to do with This Is England? | 0:51:26 | 0:51:29 | |
I think Shane was trying to put a truth across. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
Um, an honest truth about how it actually was for his generation | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
and that time growing up. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:38 | |
There's a kid in it, he's dressed up with his bleached jeans, | 0:51:41 | 0:51:43 | |
he's got a shaved head, he's a full-on skinhead. | 0:51:43 | 0:51:46 | |
And they're driving back from a Nation Front meeting | 0:51:46 | 0:51:48 | |
and he's sat in the back and he goes, "Er... | 0:51:48 | 0:51:52 | |
"Wasn't that all a bit of a load of old bollocks? | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
and he stops and throws him out the car and leaves him | 0:51:55 | 0:51:57 | |
in the countryside, and I thought, "That's me, that is me all over." | 0:51:57 | 0:52:00 | |
The Tim Roth film, it's like, "Whoa!" | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
You know, anything that gave a little nod towards who we were, | 0:52:07 | 0:52:11 | |
you jumped on. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:12 | |
He was a confused kid, he had a Swastika on his forehead. | 0:52:12 | 0:52:15 | |
He was a confused kid, thank you. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:16 | |
But he spent most of the film hanging out with the black guy. | 0:52:16 | 0:52:19 | |
Thank you. See, that's what I mean! | 0:52:19 | 0:52:21 | |
That's why he got it, so that director got it so spot fucking on. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:25 | |
Against a tidal wave of negativity, | 0:52:30 | 0:52:32 | |
there's always been those that know the real story. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
And it's left to them to keep the original flame alive | 0:52:36 | 0:52:39 | |
in the form of skinhead revivals. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:41 | |
I'm 61 years of age, I was brought up in this culture. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:49 | |
And I love the music, I love the clothes I wear, | 0:52:49 | 0:52:52 | |
People give me dirty looks and everything else, but I don't care. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
Cos, at the end of the day, I wear what I want. As I says, I'm 61! | 0:52:55 | 0:52:59 | |
I'm happy what I'm doing, I have friends, I have everything. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:03 | |
But the odd occasion, you have people come up to you saying | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
you're a Nazi and NF and all this. I'm not NF! | 0:53:06 | 0:53:09 | |
What's NF got to do with dressing like this, you know? It's stupidity. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:13 | |
It's a way of life for me. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:17 | |
It's the music, it's the clothing, it's the culture, | 0:53:17 | 0:53:21 | |
from when I was young. That's what I grew up with. That's what I love. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:24 | |
We do what we do and we'll do what we do till we die, you know. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
It's important for the younger generation to understand | 0:53:30 | 0:53:32 | |
-where it came from, to understand the music. -It wasn't about racism. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:36 | |
There is no racist element in what we do | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
and that's very important to get over to people. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:43 | |
This is a very, very interesting phenomenon for me. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:46 | |
I've been in touch, lately, | 0:53:46 | 0:53:49 | |
with people like that, because it's heartening they want to do that. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
Cos what really united us, when all said and done, as I keep saying, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:56 | |
was the music and the clothes. | 0:53:56 | 0:53:58 | |
For a youngster now, to actually choose to become a skinhead... | 0:54:00 | 0:54:04 | |
-HE LAUGHS: -..I mean...I mean... | 0:54:04 | 0:54:06 | |
why would you want to do that, unless you are really into it? | 0:54:06 | 0:54:10 | |
It's probably the hardest youth culture to choose to be in. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:14 | |
We didn't do that when we... We just went for whatever was cool! | 0:54:14 | 0:54:17 | |
And we didn't have all that stigma - that's all come after. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
But to choose to do that now as a youngster, | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
I've got nothing but respect for them. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:24 | |
On my feet, I wear Doctor Marten boots, they're cherry red, | 0:54:27 | 0:54:31 | |
they've got yellow stitching and yellow laces. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:33 | |
Levi jeans, they're 501s with a half-inch turn up | 0:54:33 | 0:54:37 | |
and I also wear a Brutus trim fit shirt, nice button-down collar | 0:54:37 | 0:54:42 | |
and I wear half-inch braces, | 0:54:42 | 0:54:44 | |
so they match everything else. | 0:54:44 | 0:54:46 | |
And I wear a Harrington jacket that completes the whole skinhead look. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:50 | |
So, skinheads started in the '60s, there was a revival in the late '70s | 0:54:50 | 0:54:54 | |
-and there's reunions in the 21st century. -Yeah. | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
Why are young people so into it? | 0:54:57 | 0:54:59 | |
It's...it's something different, it's the music, the style | 0:54:59 | 0:55:04 | |
and just to be someone else and be part of a family. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:08 | |
I think the clothes is a big part of it, cos it's... | 0:55:10 | 0:55:14 | |
what separates you from everyone else, isn't it? So... | 0:55:14 | 0:55:17 | |
the clothes is a big part of it, | 0:55:17 | 0:55:19 | |
I think you either go into collecting the records | 0:55:19 | 0:55:21 | |
or you collect the clothes and I started off collecting the clothes, | 0:55:21 | 0:55:25 | |
getting everything, so I looked pukka! | 0:55:25 | 0:55:28 | |
Why are you skinheads in the 21st-century? | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
Because it's a way of life. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:37 | |
It's just one of them things that doesn't leave you. | 0:55:37 | 0:55:39 | |
It's there, the music, the fashion, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:41 | |
even through the times when you're growing up, getting married, | 0:55:41 | 0:55:44 | |
you're having kids, where you think, "I have to put it | 0:55:44 | 0:55:47 | |
"on the back burner," it's always there, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:48 | |
so, when you get the opportunity... I think you're always a skinhead. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
The younger generation, | 0:55:53 | 0:55:55 | |
as long as they look at the good aspects of being a skinhead, | 0:55:55 | 0:55:58 | |
the traditional skinhead, and the Trojan music, the clothes | 0:55:58 | 0:56:02 | |
and whatever and don't go for the bad side of the skinheads, | 0:56:02 | 0:56:06 | |
that, um, sort of a merged in the late '70s, early to mid 80s, | 0:56:06 | 0:56:11 | |
um, then that's a good thing, and it keeps the culture alive. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:15 | |
# This is the law! | 0:56:15 | 0:56:17 | |
# Chapter one | 0:56:17 | 0:56:18 | |
# The law | 0:56:18 | 0:56:21 | |
# The law for the good | 0:56:21 | 0:56:23 | |
# The law for the ugly | 0:56:24 | 0:56:26 | |
# For the bad! BAD! | 0:56:29 | 0:56:31 | |
# The law... # | 0:56:33 | 0:56:35 | |
When I'm listening to the news and they say, | 0:56:35 | 0:56:38 | |
"Gangs of skinheads attacking refugees" or, this, that | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
and the other, I think, "Hang on, taking my name in vain, | 0:56:41 | 0:56:45 | |
"taking the name of my mates in vain." | 0:56:45 | 0:56:48 | |
I would like to reclaim their name. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:50 | |
Either throw it away, because it's become associated | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
with something else, or actually reclaim it. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
Do you think it's possible to | 0:56:58 | 0:57:00 | |
reclaim the name skinhead from the fascists? | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
-No. -Really? -No, I don't think so at all. | 0:57:02 | 0:57:05 | |
For the simple reason that, again, | 0:57:05 | 0:57:08 | |
those ideologies have been so sold to people, | 0:57:08 | 0:57:11 | |
in that skinhead is associated with... | 0:57:11 | 0:57:15 | |
that it's like a branding. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:17 | |
I get asked a lot by people about, | 0:57:19 | 0:57:20 | |
like, well, "You seem to know a bit about skinheads. What's it about? | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
"I thought they were all racist, I thought they were all this." | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
It depends on where you start reading your story. | 0:57:27 | 0:57:29 | |
If you go back and start reading your story back to the beginning | 0:57:29 | 0:57:33 | |
and get yourself a good foundation | 0:57:33 | 0:57:35 | |
of your knowledge of the skinhead culture, and where it was born from, | 0:57:35 | 0:57:39 | |
I think, if you can just get that foundation sorted out right | 0:57:39 | 0:57:43 | |
in your head, then everything you read and come from after that, | 0:57:43 | 0:57:46 | |
at least you've got that, you know what it was about. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:49 | |
Then you can understand and you can see where it's been distorted, | 0:57:49 | 0:57:53 | |
do you know what I mean? Because it did start off as one thing. | 0:57:53 | 0:57:57 | |
Now it has branched off to mean untold different things. | 0:57:57 | 0:58:00 | |
I thought I knew what skinhead was when I started this journey. | 0:58:02 | 0:58:05 | |
Even though the world's telling me it's changed into something else, | 0:58:05 | 0:58:09 | |
I still believe in the original idea - the one | 0:58:09 | 0:58:11 | |
that brought us together through a mutual love of music and style. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:15 | |
In my world, a tool for social change, albeit at street level. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:20 | |
But where I'm from, that's where it starts. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:22 | |
Where it ends up, well, as we've just seen, that's something else. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:26 |