All language subtitles for TheStoryofSkinheadwithDonLetts

What do you think when you hear the word "skinhead"?

Violence? Intolerance?

Hatred? This image was born in the 1970s,

when this youth driven subculture earned a reputation for trouble on

the streets and terraces and a toxic association with racism.

But that's not how it started,

and it's certainly not what it meant to me.

This programme contains strong language

There was a time we were united on the dance floor, dressed to kill

and, if only for a moment, it felt like colour didn't matter.

'Skinhead was always, always a multicultural thing,

'skinhead was born of a mixed marriage between Jamaican culture

'and white working-class London culture, Cockney culture.

'That's what it always was.'

So, for any of these idiots to come along later and say, "No, it's a racist thing,"

how can it be racist? How can you be so ignorant of the roots of the thing you're trying to be?

'Subcultures are interesting.

'Skinheads are one of the most enduring, one of the most striking,'

and, for me, interesting,

because they contain that contradiction of

liking one thing but sometimes having differing views.

This is a story of kids trying to find a voice and a place in society.

It's a very British tale that reflects our national culture, good and bad,

and it seems that, throughout its troubled life,

there's been an ongoing struggle for the soul of skinhead.

I was born in 1956 and reached my teens on this

very estate in Stockwell,

south London. Back then, like most working class kids,

I used the only two things at my disposal to create my identity,

music and clothes.

And in those days, round these parts, it was all about skinhead.

'I moved to London, '64.

'Ten, 11. All the suburban kids, they all had short hair,

'so I used to just watch them and stare at them, see what they were wearing.

'Fascinated, loved it.'

And after a day or two, I realised it was subversive,

the whole thing was just fucking wild, like really short hair,

and these great big, awkward looking shoes, and, you know,

this is the swinging 60s!

'We weren't behaving or speaking or dancing

'or dressing like the hippies'

wanted us to do or our parents wanted us to do or the police or our

teachers or anybody else, or the media.

We were doing our thing.

- Number two.
- Number two?
- Yeah. And cut partly in as well.
- Certainly.

- INTERVIEWER:
- Can you remember when you first decided to be a skinhead?

I'd say about nine months ago.

I put on some jeans and stuff.

See what it's all about.

You walk down the street, people turn to look at you.

I sort of feel proud, really.

'I knew that it was like the mods had theirs, five or six years earlier,

'the teddy boys had theirs ten years ago. This is it, this is our thing.

'There wasn't a name for it except peanuts, some people used to say...

'"You know that peanut from...?" It would be like that.

'But no-one said "skinhead".'

One guy I heard saying, "Oi, skinhead!", but jokey.

'For quite a long time, the term skinhead was rather a casual name.'

I can remember in 1968, we weren't really calling ourselves anything.

To an extent, skinhead was what other people called you.

And gradually, the name just stuck.

And I don't know if the others recognised it,

because they didn't speak about it, but I was thinking,

"Wow, look what's going on here."

To many people, raised on a certain idea of skinhead,

the real roots of the movement are surprising.

As although the basic ingredients of these subcultures had already been

established by teddy boys, rockers and mods,

it was the arrival of my parents,

with the Windrush Generation after the Second World War,

that would play a crucial part in this particular story.

Because along with their hopes and dreams,

they also brought style and some brand-new sounds.

Both found favour with these white working class kids,

and seemed to contradict the emerging racism of the times.

I guess, like previous youth generations,

it's about people trying to find an identity,

but these white working class kids seemed to be taking tips from distant lands.

That was the first wave of Jamaican immigration

that had come in

and was then starting working alongside white workers,

and particularly on the docks.

And kids, I think, who were starting on their working life,

trying to look more manly and doing all this kind of business adopted those

kinds of styles. And that was the same for black youth and white youth.

'It probably started out like that, which was sort of working-class.

I even used to wear a donkey jacket with Dr Martens and turned up Levis.

But then you start looking around and you want to smarten up, and

other people actually started wearing that sort of thing.

And you just want to move on from there.

'We loved our clothes, we loved our music,

'we wasn't looking for the innovative thing, the guy who had the next thing that came along.'

We discovered this Ivy Shop in Richmond, it was like a treasure.

They had all the stuff we liked and wanted to access, but quality,

quality items. They had the button-down shirts, they had

the brogues and the smooth loafers that you wanted.

The really slick cut Crombie coats and so on.

I'd heard about the legendary Ivy Shop in my early teens,

but funds and its location in Richmond,

a distant land for this south London kid,

meant I never actually got there. Luckily for me,

its creator was still in business.

- John, how you doing, man?
- Nice to see you.

- Very nice to see you.
- So, Mr Simons, you've got to tell me,

how did The Ivy Shop become the Holy Grail for skinheads?

We opened The Ivy Shop in the summer of '64.

The initial idea was we were crazy about American Ivy League clothes,

this sort of collegiate kind of look.

And that's what inspired us to open the shop.

What did you make of this new clientele you were getting?

We gradually began to develop a clientele

that wore a clean cut look,

that did inform, I think, the skinhead situation later on.

I've noticed over your shoulder,

there's something that looks like a Harrington jacket...

I've heard that you were the one that named the jacket the Harrington jacket.

- I did indeed.
- Can I have a look at this, is that all right?
- You can have a look at that.

This is a casual jacket of ours, which is similar to a Baracuta Harrington,

which is the jacket that really got this whole thing started.

We visited Baracuta, I think,

just a couple of months after we started.

And then, one was watching the TV and you saw the series Peyton Place.

Black and white, I remember that.

In which Rodney Harrington wore the Baracuta Harrington.

So we were selling it in the shop, and he was wearing it on the TV,

so we used to put tickets on saying, "The Rodney Harrington jacket."

And after a while, say a few months, we got a bit lazy and

then we dropped the Rodney Harrington jacket,

and we just called it the Harrington jacket.

And the rest is history, really.

The skinhead staple was born!

'This was stuff which would have been recognised

'in the USA as being, well, rather preppy.'

We got it, somehow, second-hand, third-hand,

and we put sort of a cocky, street edge on it.

A tie for me was always quite slick.

They took a lot of time and detail into making sure that their appearances

were spot on.

One of the jokes around Harrow was,

"I like your suit." "Thank you."

"Was it made-to-measure?" "Yeah."

"Who for?(!)"

'The girls were gorgeous,

'most of them were very, very chic and very, very smart.

'The hairstyle, it was really stylish, very sexy.

'Yes, it was very short on top and yes,'

there were long side pieces and pieces at the back,

but it was layered beautifully.

# I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet

# Put your braces together and your boots on your feet... #

Although we were tapped into American culture,

it was a little island with a big bassline that really captured the

imagination of the emerging skinhead scene.

What was it about Jamaican culture that attracted you white guys?

It was unique and it was a bond we had with our black friends,

it was something we could all share in, even what we were wearing,

the trousers up high, things like that, that all came from Jamaica,

I would say, rather than the States.

'Black people just seemed cool in those days.

'There is no other word to use, really, they seemed cool.'

It's like Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. These places that you went

to if you wanted this kind of slab of otherworldliness.

'They came with a style, they came with a fashion, they came with a'

look, which again was embraced, along with the music,

and skinheads embraced that as well.

'We listened to reggae exclusively. I can remember, the summer of '69,'

I would only buy reggae. I remember being really quite pleased about that.

"I'm only buying reggae!"

Jamaican recording artists were also pleased by this new-found interest.

So much so, a whole new genre was born out of ska - skinhead reggae,

created specifically for the UK market.

'All of a sudden, they acknowledge us. I just found it was an acceptance on both sides.'

Those records created great atmosphere in the dance halls.

'We went to see all these artists, we saw The Pioneers,'

we saw Desmond Dekker, and we loved them.

So it was completely multiracial.

It's pretty amazing that this movement blossomed here in the late '60s,

because, let's face it, in Britain back then,

racism was a fact of life.

'People forget at that time,

'the National Front were poling quite high,

'I think Enoch Powell made that speech in '68.

'And also, I'm guessing that some of the white kids' parents were a'

little racist, because they were scared...

Oh, sure. The one thing you've got to remember is that Britain overall

was a much more racist society back in those days.

You could get away with Pakistani jokes on the radio.

'I went to school around the corner, in Willesden,

'and the teachers were openly racist to the black kids.'

I mean, that's how England was.

My black mates, I would take home, and my dad would raise his eyebrows,

it wasn't done in those days.

It's like, "Oh."

As we entered the '70s, the ugly intolerance, common in these years,

entered the bloodstream of skinhead.

- INTERVIEWER:
- Who's your natural enemy?
- Pakis ain't so much your enemy,

- they're just a pastime, ain't they.
- Pakis?

- What do you mean by Pakis?
- Pakistanis.

- You don't like Pakistanis?
- No.
- It's not their colour,

cos the Jamaicans are all right, we mix with the Jamaicans.

We get on with a lot of Jamaicans.

You like Jamaicans but you don't like Pakistanis?

We mix in with a load of Jamaicans, got a lot of Jamaican mates.

I mean, they don't like Pakistanis, either.

'A slightly younger generation started to come in,

'and they did get the idea that

'they had to buy a package of ideas,

'they had to buy the Paki-bashing idea.

- 'Play up to the headlines.
- Yeah.

What you've got to remember is that by late '69 and early 1970,

those of us who'd been there at the beginning were starting to get old.

'I remember one time wandering off the estate and bumping into some'

skinheads that definitely weren't on-side.

I made a hasty retreat back to my block, and my mother,

hearing the altercation outside, ran down, trusty kitchen knife in hand,

and proceeded to tell them about their mothers.

Lucky for those skinheads, they did the right thing!

When skinheads turned up, it was like, they'd had a precedent.

You weren't surprised by that,

you weren't surprised that there were elements of white youth that

thought that kind of thing.

From its beginnings on London council estates,

skinhead was now entering the dangerous waters of the mainstream,

and all the media attention that came with it.

'The media love a good moral panic.

'In 1969, they were looking for this year's mods and rockers,'

and suddenly, there we were, this ready-made youth cult.

'When the media articles did first come out, me included,

'and some other people, thought, "Oh, wow,'

"we're getting a bit of recognition."

And then, those kids, the same ones who were right up the front,

they started growing their hair long,

and first of all it was just the hair, then it was the clothes,

and by the end of 1970,

dare I say it, flares!

This might well have been the last call for the originators, but skinhead

didn't die. Instead, it found a new form and a new legion of followers.

The boots, the genes, the Harrington jackets and things like that,

the football supporters adopted those.

'Teams that were coming down to London were seeing this attire'

seeing the way we were dressing. You know, "We're taking this back." It started to spread,

so it went out into the counties.

The inherent working-class appeal of skinhead found

a natural home up north.

London might well have been swinging,

but the rest of the country was less prosperous.

It's only later that I found out that a skinhead thing persisted

quite some time up there. And that makes sense.

When you consider that to a great extent in Britain,

fashions seemed to start in London and spread out from London.

Now, truth be told, I've never been to a football match in my life!

And I was curious as to how the skinhead style has spread through the terraces.

So I figured I'd better speak to those that were there.

First stop, Yorkshire, to meet the Shipley Skins.

Jack, Austin, when and how did skinhead reach the North?

A guy moved up here from London.

He came up with his Sta-Prest and his boots and his shaved head.

And we were all football crazy,

so it weren't skinheads who started watching football,

it were football fans round here who started dressing as skinheads.

The first Harringtons that everybody was wearing was black,

but the uniform was red boots, white Sta-Prest, and the white

Fred Perry, I remember more than anything.

And looking after the boots was really important, in my view,

because the boots looked after you.

They did.

'It was 1969, I was a little 12-year-old going to football.

'And I seen this gang of skinheads.

'To me they were men, 16, 17, 18 years old.'

And they were like an army, and they just had this impression on me.

Do you know what I mean?

That was it, I went home, got my hair cut, stole my brother's work boots,

nicked my father's braces, and I become a skinhead!

MUSIC: Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival

'When they used to play things like Bad Moon Rising

'at football grounds, that used to whip the crowd up.

'I remember a semifinal against Manchester United,

'they played that at half-time, and that has stayed with me for ever,'

because Bad Moon Rising was trouble on the terraces.

'If you went to football, you would go there to support your team

'and to defend your end.

'Football was the only bastion where you could go there on a Saturday or'

a Sunday, scream and shout obscenities,

threaten people and not get arrested.

'We were fucking horrible, we wanted to fight with everyone, like, you know?

And, it's not nice, but kids are kids, that's what they do, do you know what I mean?

It's almost like a rites of passage thing.

It used to be, they'd sign 'em up and send 'em off to fight wars, like.

But after the Second World War there wasn't any more wars to send the kids off.

- So they had to release their...
- Testosterone!

- Exactly.
- Yeah, get it out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Like lions, they fight each other

to establish who's the best.

We're just the same, you know, we're animals.

# There's a bad moon on the rise... #

'Aggro, words came in, we'd never heard of "aggro" before until we heard,'

"We are the Chelsea Aggro!"

And all that sort of thing. We heard all of these songs, and we became Shipley Aggro Boys.

I remember one particular match where we disguised ourselves as Manchester United fans.

Then we saw this small group of ten or 12 Manchester United fans,

and we started chanting, "Manchester, lah, lah, lah." So they all came jumping out.

We said, "We're fucking Leeds fans!"

And kicked the seven bells of shit out of them!

- We did!
- Yeah.
- Not proud of that, by the way, and I have to say that,

but that's how it was. And you were part of a military operation.

In London, there's a lot of interaction with the Afro-Caribbeans.

What was going on here?

There was a good number of black skinheads in Bradford. We didn't consider them black.

They were skinheads. They were our mates.

They weren't West Indians with same clothes on.

They were skinheads who liked our music, our football.

Not even all the same football team.

There were many dark faces, there were many black faces going to football.

I never got once confronted by that, but I was totally aware of it.

I heard stories and I knew about stuff, but there was a dark side to it,

there was this dark side in football.

This dark side obviously made for great headlines.

It was further intensified by the publication of Richard Allen's book, Skinhead,

in 1970. It became the Bible for these new skinhead converts.

Trouble was, its hero, Joe Hawkins, was an out-and-out racist.

Consequently, it had a lot to answer for.

'The book was passed around and it was my turn,'

I got hold of the book and read it and I read it again, and...

I'm not... I sort of admired Joe Hawkins, because he was the skinhead I wanted to be.

I liked the way he looked. The front cover was very sort of, you know, big sideburns.

- Yeah, it was.
- Big 'burns.
- And then the fact that he didn't like policemen.

Now, I realise how juvenile my thought was, but he influenced me,

there's no doubt about that.

So, for a while, it's about style, music and football.

And then politics seems to come into the mix.

Definitely down in London. Was that the same up here?

It did for a short while, we had one guy, he was...

You know Barnadale's cousin?

- Yeah.
- He came in, he was a young socialist.

Behind-the-scenes was the National Front.

They actually took us to, I remember going to Scarborough for a weekend,

all free. You can imagine young folk with nowt else to do jumping on a

coach. And the conference was held at the Spa in Scarborough, and they

wouldn't fucking let us out.

They'd got us in there and they locked the doors. We wanted out. We went to Scarborough for a good time,

we didn't go to listen to all this bollocks about politics.

Seriously, that happened.

And they still kept on. And a few guys got hooked into it.

'Football was a massive movement.

'And I think certain people thought, "If we can influence football on a political level'

"and give them the start that we want, you know,

"it could get, it could go off the wrong way."

Now, I'd heard about the National Front's attempts to infiltrate the

terraces, so I dug deeper, via the net, to speak to a repentant,

ex-high ranking NF member.

What's the truth behind the NF targeting football fans,

many of whom were skinheads?

At the time, I was chairman of the Young National Front,

which was the youth movement of the NF.

And we were aware of the sympathy that many of the skinheads

had for what we were doing.

And we used to sell Bulldog,

the newspaper of the Young National Front,

of which I was the editor, outside many football grounds.

And at Chelsea, Chelsea were a bad team with home crowds of only about

seven or 8,000.

We were selling 700 copies of Bulldog at every game.

So that's 10% of the crowd were actually buying copies of the magazine.

So, it was a fruitful place for us to be plying our ware, shall we say.

So it's not surprising you're going to go where your support base is.

Did you know guys with right-wing tendencies?

Well, I were a member of National Front, simply because...

they used to have a disco and they wouldn't let you in if you weren't a

member. So I used to go to a regular meeting on Thursday nights,

at Belfry, it was called, Belfry,

just for the music and stuff.

Why do you think the skinheads found the National Front attractive?

I think the skinheads found the Nation Front attractive probably for the

same reason I did, they were white,

working-class at a time of major demographic change, of economic hardship,

of class identity,

of racial identity, and I think all of those things came together.

The tribal cohesiveness.

And of course, once you have a crucial number of skinheads,

the rest of the skinheads want to be part of the same scene.

In order to be a true skinhead, you have to be a member of the Nation Front and it becomes a

self-fulfilling prophecy at that point.

When I joined...

as far as I can remember, I was the only young member, under 25.

And now, there's so many, I don't know how many.

'There was an element that tried to hijack the terraces,

'of course there was. There was an element that tried to infiltrate the'

terraces, even on a political way.

But fortunately, they never got to the masses.

The country slipped into a period of social decline during the mid-70s.

And as skinheads took hold on the terraces,

it seemed to disappear as a fashion from the streets.

But the arrival of punk rock, a new soundtrack fuelled by the times,

would kick-start the skinhead revival.

# And I am an anarchist... #

In 1977, as DJ at the legendary Roxy Club,

the UK's first punk rock venue,

I was perfectly placed to see this forgotten army emerge from the shadows.

# ..want to be

# Anarchy... #

Skinheads were in a funny place when they came back.

They started coming back from '76 onwards,

but they were very small at the time.

And at that time, the only places these kids could go were to punk clubs.

And they didn't really like punk, because to them,

a lot of the punks were middle-class, a lot of the punks were posers.

They didn't like the scruffiness.

'I remember being 12 and seeing the Sex Pistols,'

listening to them. I was scared. I was scared.

That's a bit much. Like, "I'm an antichrist!"

'Me, as a kid, I would see all these punks walking round town with

'multicoloured hair and spikes and that sort of stuff and thought it was so exciting.

But punk itself was a little bit to art school for me,

I was a council estate kid living in, you know...

I think Sham 69 is what really got me.

Sham had an upsurge in working-class people

so much wanting something else

and something new and something that they could feel was a punk band.

'When Sham came along, they were like the champions, in our own eyes,'

of the underdogs. So a lot of kids gravitated towards them.

I gave them our way into punk that they did not have outside of that.

Their whole thing is not about being experimental, it is a structure.

'And I think what Sham did,

'they took that whole terrace chant thing and they tried to reinvent'

themselves. And I think they'd have done it and been much more successful

if they hadn't been destroyed by the politics.

'By the late '70s, the right-wing politicians, they realised there was'

an army who'd fight for them, do you know what I mean?

'They saw a way of, say, recruitment at our gigs.

'The lost souls of whoever they were, in the weakness of whoever they were,

'could far more easily be contained and brought about into their party'

through a Sham 69 gig than probably any of the gig they could possibly

go to. I was very, very quick to recognise this.

So therefore that's why I quickly wanted to play the Rock Against Racism gig. Any of them,

to show straightaway I was an ally to the theme of rock against racism

than I ever was, do you understand, to the other event?

- Hold-up!
- Hang on!
- Oi!

Oi!

'Sham 69 concerts were disrupted by National Front and British movements,

'skinheads after Jimmy Pursey came out on the anti-racist side.

'It became, if you like,'

a catalyst for the skinheads to show their disapproval of what they saw

as Jimmy Pursey's sell-out of what they saw as being the true skinhead thing.

'When Sham 69 had their last stand, a terrible gig at The Rainbow,

'it was that lot, all of them who caused it.'

And even though there was only 40 of them,

they got a bigger mob around them and that's what caused that chaos,

so that was a terrible time for Jimmy Pursey.

What can I do? I mean,

I do it for you. If you trust me, I would have trusted you.

This 40 managed to get about

200 of the audience running round in packs terrorising people, and then

they invaded the stage and there's Sieg Heiling and all this old crap.

It was horrible. Absolutely horrible.

The worst gig, up to that point, I had ever seen.

'When people bring themselves out into the daylight,

'it's a completely different way of looking at things, isn't it? So that's what it did for me.'

It put a total value to their stupidity, do you understand, of saying,

"Thank God you've done that," because now I can also go, "Look,

"do you really think I want to play to that?" That's why it was the last.

"Do you really think I've got anything to do with this trash?"

In 1979,

Jimmy walked away from a scene that was becoming increasingly toxic.

And from where I'm standing, the Sham 69 story is a real tragedy.

Because whether I liked the music or not,

he definitely made a connection to youth that felt ignored and rejected.

Something I could certainly relate to.

And they wouldn't be the last band to feel the pressure of having a skinhead following.

# One step beyond... #

MUSIC: One Step Beyond by Madness

There was another movement waiting in the wings to pick up the skinhead

slack, good and bad.

Fuelled by the energy of punk and a love of reggae,

it focused on kids living on multicultural estates that had grown-up with,

well, kids like me.

And it put style and music centre stage.

Because this was 2 Tone.

'We lived in a town called High Wycombe, which was west of London,

'it was an overspill town. So, it was full of immigrants.'

Calypso was played all the time, reggae was played all the time.

But our music, the white kids, you know, council estate kids,

was punk rock. When 2 Tone came along, to us,

that was the kids of our council estate playing in a band together.

When The Specials done that music, Neville Staples and Terry Hall,

that was us, that was me and Barry.

These guys, they were us.

And I'd never seen us jumping around on Top Of The Pops.

When I heard that, just the call of "one step beyond", I thought,

"I'm having some of that." I didn't really look at it as being skinhead,

it wasn't about that, it was just about, "This music, I like.

"What they're wearing, I like."

End of.

'There was a whole new bunch of kids coming up and Specials and

'the multicultural stuff are talking to that, and they were talking to the kids'

that were seeing stuff, the new world out of our eyes,

not our parents' eyes, when the whole world was white.

'My dad was extremely racist.

'I mean extremely.

'He was a National Front member, he hated anybody that wasn't white,'

Anglo-Saxon. So my dad was saying one thing, I was saying something else.

But it wasn't about making a big statement, it wasn't like,

"Oh, we shouldn't be doing it." It was just normal.

'It was full of black people like Neville Staples and Pauline Black on'

the television telling us it was us, as well.

Do you know what I mean? So it was like, "This is ours."

We didn't think we were skinheads, or we were this, or we were that,

we were just... I had as many black mates that were wearing their stuff

as anybody else, until...

the evilness of it all started happening and they all chipped.

They just went, "Obviously we can't do that no more."

You know, if you're playing, you had maybe the first four or five rows

all Sieg Heiling at the stage, at some stage during your set.

And you had to deal with that.

And the only way you could deal with it would be to stop the gig.

So we used to go offstage and wait for it all to calm down and then a

skinhead ambassador would come upstairs and sort of tap on the door

and say, "Are you coming back on?"

"And you go, "No, we're not!

"All your mates are all Sieg Heiling at us."

He was like, "Well, they don't represent what we think.

"There's a whole group of us down there and we only came along because we

"love the music," and all this kind of thing.

I mean, what I used to say was, "Go down and talk to them,

"convince your other mates, who look exactly the same as you do,

"that this is, they're at the wrong gig."

Even though I was very ideologically

involved with the National Front's

credo, I was quite happy to listen to black music.

I loved soul music, I loved reggae music, I loved ska music.

So, there was a paradox, you can call it a contradiction,

it was certainly an oddity that we wanted an all-white culture and all-white

society, yet we were quite happy to imbibe this non-white culture.

I still don't understand how any skinhead can keep that contradiction

within themselves of loving the music and feeling it is perfectly

acceptable to practise racism.

- # Stop your messing around
- Ah-ah-ah

# Better think of your future... #

'Skinhead was always, always a multicultural theme.'

Skinhead was born of a mixed marriage between Jamaican culture and white

working class London culture, Cockney culture.

And that's what it always was.

So, for any of these idiots to come along later and say, "No,

"it's a racist thing." How can it be racist?

How can you be so ignorant of the roots of the thing you're trying to be?

'It never made sense to me, you know what I mean?'

Why the fuck would a racist want to go and watch 2 Tone bands?

Because the whole idea of 2 Tone was multiculturalism.

But the same thing, I think they went along just for the fucking trouble.

So all people would see is skinheads in trouble, you know what I mean?

They'd see some of them would have fucking "white power" T-shirts and

they'd assume all the skinheads that were there were white power.

# A message to you, Rudy... #

'The media, they seem to think we were the instigators of that.'

And in some ways, that 2 Tone completely missed the point,

was some right wing movement that attracted skinheads

and we were a threat to society in some way or another,

without ever thinking past that or even thinking, "Well,

"there's black people who were in these bands,"

or even investigating what we were talking about.

'They tried to brand all skinheads as being right-wing thugs and idiots,'

'which was never, ever true.'

To the extent that I think they actually transformed the way skinheads

were seen.

A lot of middle-class people were scared of the skinheads,

because they were largely working class, they took this line they were all right-wing thugs.

And they weren't, they never were.

- MUSIC:
- Ghost Town by The Specials

'When I was a little kid in school, the teacher asked us,

'"What do we think we are? Working-class, middle-class or upper class?"

And nearly every kid said middle-class.

We were all from a fucking council estate.

But we were ashamed to say fucking working-class, do you know what I mean?

There was a stigma on it.

So when we reached 12, 13 and become skinheads, we thought, "Fuck him,

"why should we be fucking ashamed?"

We become proud to be working-class, not so much proud, but unashamed.

# All the clubs are being closed down... #

'We were the ones no-one wants talk to.

'We were the scruffs, we lived on council estates,

'there was nothing cool about us.

'And the more we were hated by the media, the more we were called the Nazi,

'hooligan thugs, scumbag, lowlife, drug sniffing, mugging old lady lowlife,

'the more it put us together. The more it made us outlaws,

the more we were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

That's what we felt we were. And that kept us together throughout the '80s.

The coming decade would see yet another incarnation of skinhead,

and one that confused the hell out of me.

It was harder, it was tougher and I couldn't see or hear any connection to

Jamaica. Trust me, there was no black in Oi!.

This generation of skinheads were disillusioned and felt despised.

So they needed a new soundtrack.

'It was 1981.

'By then, skinheads had come back on the back of Sham 69 and 2 Tone,

'they were already back, like. So the older ones like me,'

we already knew what it was all about.

The younger kids, they didn't remember the first time round.

For them, it was like a punk inspired skinhead thing,

hence the different clothes.

They were more like military with the flight jackets and stuff like that.

# Running down the backstreets Oi, oi, oi

# And we're running and we're free Oi, oi, oi... #

'What you noticed were bands coming through who were the reality of that

'punk myth, who were the dead-end kids, they were from council estates,

'they were from high rises, tower blocks,

'that was the people forming bands.'

And it became a harder guitar sound, it became more of an all lads together,

big mob chorus. That's what distinguished it.

I give it the name, I think, new punk, real punk,

we're searching for a name for it because it was different.

And I hit on Oi! in 1980.

But you also, you put together a record of Oi! music that had as its title,

Strength Thru Oi!, which is a parody of a Nazi slogan.

- You must have known it was a Nazi slogan?
- Did you know that before? I didn't.

You mean you were sold a title for your album without realising?

I was looking for a play on words.

I thought of The Oi! Of Sex from Joy Of Sex,

I thought of Oi! Division from Joy Division.

I thought Strength Thru Oi! was, it was the definitive, street level,

hooligan album.

You mean to say you didn't realise it was a Nazi slogan?

The first time I saw that slogan, it was on a Skids album.

The Oi! music per se is not racialist, it's never been racialist.

All it is, is pro working-class people.

We happened to show up there and we sing about football violence and

fighting with the police and shit like that.

So Oi! is just a name that got coined to make it different from the

original punk.

'When the Oi! came in, I was 15, 16 and I thought, "Yeah,'

"they are expressing how I fucking feel and how angry I am.

So you had the Madness stuff you could dance to and the "fuck you" stuff

with the Oi!

You said earlier you were running round smashing things up anyway, right.

- Tell me about that?
- We had our moments.

But, yeah, we went down to see Angelic Upstarts and just fucking tore the

place to pieces.

I liked Angelic Upstarts. There was no reason why we done that, we did it.

When you hear the music, you feel aggressive. Then after, you feel like punching someone's head in.

THEY LAUGH

Kicking their teeth in, whatever.

All you want to do is go in a pub, get yourself pissed,

kick somebody's brains in and then go out and smash a few windows or

something. Something like that.

There's nothing to do, when you think about it,

that's the only reason why people do that sort of stuff.

'They were singing that violent, aggressive white, skinhead music.'

And we, "Wow, man, this is us."

The days of dancing down the disco to 2 Tone and having a great time

had now turned into this, we are now street fighting gangs.

'Now, I can't pretend I was one of Oi's biggest fans,

'but one of the things that did catch my eye were the tattoos.

'These new street gangs had lots of them in strange places.

'And they'd become a defining part of Oi.'

'In the 1980s, there were a lot of skinheads within the Oi movement

'that did opt to have tattoos, tattoos had started'

to become popular with all subcultures at the time.

# I just can't take much more of this oppression

# I'm going out my head... #

Many skinheads wanted to make a big statement in those days

and, um, the face became very popular.

# Have you ever seen grown men cry?

# Police! Police! Police oppression!

# Police! Police! Police oppression! #

One of the problems with people getting their faces tattooed

is that, in some ways, you're behind an ink prison.

I guess you can move on from fashion,

but you can't really move on from a face tattoo.

Some tattoos, you know, you could regret,

because of your life choices and how they change.

In London, in Leicester Square especially,

you had all the runaways living on the streets, right.

These are the ones who had the tattoos on their faces

and were glue sniffing, and we, as kids...

Again, we were their age, we were looking at them and hero worshipped

them a bit, cos they were the toughest, they were the hardest.

This very white and violent incarnation of skinhead

seemed always to be always looking for a fight and, once again,

the National Front were there to give them a reason.

How did the politics coming into the mix affect your attitude?

Oh, mate, I was hanging out, everyone was cool.

And, er, then, suddenly,

they started to listen to some of this other music, which...

I'm a lover of music, so, within the music they were listening to,

there were some tunes I thought, "That's a good tune.

"That's a nice tune, an all right tune."

But what fucked me off is I couldn't go to the gigs.

- Yeah.
- There was no chance that I could now travel with my friends.

There was no chance that I could now continue socialising.

Er... I was out of the game, basically.

For a black kid then,

there was not much reason for them to get involved in the Oi! scene,

especially when all they seen in the newspapers and the telly was Oi was

full of skinheads, Oi! was full of fucking racism and shit like this,

you know what I mean?

Although I couldn't relate to Oi!,

as a black man, I could definitely relate to the growing discontent

across the land - something I experienced personally

during the Brixton riots of the early '80s.

You've gotta look at what was going on at the time.

There was a lot of anger going on and so it was very easy, it was like

get this fucking anger music up there and people went for it,

because, you know, they could relate to it.

Unemployment was high, you had a lot of people with fuck all to do,

they had no future, they genuinely had no future.

And so, if someone comes along and has got a message for them saying,

"We can help you guys," whether it be the far left, or the far right,

they've got an audience, and, even if only one in ten of them listens,

they can recruit.

Skinhead was becoming even more polarised,

leading to confusion on all sides.

And in a year that was full of anger,

the situation came to a head in the summer of 1981, at a gig featuring

several Oi! bands that attracted a right-wing following,

regardless of where they stood.

- NEWSREADER:
- 200 skinheads travelled to the large Asian community

of Southall in London to attend a concert at the Hambrough Tavern.

As they reached the centre of Southall,

several skinheads ran down the Broadway breaking shop windows.

Here you had large groups of people,

fascist people, er, who were doing Nazi-type salutes,

writing NF on the condensation of the windows

and abusing all the Asians here.

You know, police still didn't do anything.

The idea that these bands went to Southall...

- An Asian community!
- ..with the intention of starting a race riot is

- just nonsense. I mean...
- That's still a little naive!

If you go in there in a mob!

What happened at Southall was the locals,

who obviously had been wound up by someone about the fact

that skinheads, as well as other kids, were coming to this gig.

And they took it as an affront and

it was a massive attack on the gig with kids throwing petrol bombs.

It kicked all off, the pub got burned down.

This made major news across the country.

Margaret Thatcher, in her wisdom, said, "Ban that, let's ban Oi!"

Right? So that got pulled off the shelf and then, after Southall,

most of the good Oi! bands all folded up, The Rejects, all them were gone.

And in their place were small little Oi! bands

and they were being funded by the right wing groups

and it just fed this whole monster, really.

So, of course, the media picked up on it

and every time you then saw somebody with the high boots on

and the bleached jeans - racist skinhead.

I think the trouble really started up in London,

with bands like fucking Screwdriver.

The out and out, Nazi, fucking bonehead bands.

They got into it in a big way, the right wing thing. I think they could

see they could make money, they could play gigs, sell records.

Being part of being a skinhead is to be a nationalist,

to be patriotic and proud of your country and proud of your race.

There's a lot said about skinheads being started from blacks

in the East End, but personally, I don't think that's right at all.

I've heard these rude boys, whatever they are called,

but I don't consider them to be skinheads anyway. I think

skinhead is a white, working-class movement thing, really.

# Boots and braces Fighting cos you're bored... #

For Screwdriver, they started "blood and honour".

What was blood and honour about?

Blood and honour was the sort of prodigy of Screwdriver, really.

It was a proper neo-Nazi thing.

We were trying to bring about race warfare,

so our job was to basically disrupt the multicultural society,

the multiracial society, and make it unworkable and make the various

different groups hate each other to such a degree they couldn't live

together and, when they couldn't live together, you end up with that

ghettoised, radicalised society from which we hoped to rise,

like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes.

The rise of these right-wing bands led to the formation of SHARP -

Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice -

spearheaded in the UK by Roddy Moreno.

We were reactionary, so we become like an antifascist band.

Nothing to do with the country,

it was simply because there was fucking boneheads out there

- making us fucking look bad.
- You had to do something, I guess?

Look, if skinhead was about anything,

it was about don't let people take the piss out of you,

you know what I mean? Be a man, man up like, you know what I mean?

So, when we seen these fucking dickheads dressing up like us and

come in with all this Nazi nonsense, we had to stand up and say,

"No, we're not having none of that."

The Daily Mail tried to paint the whole thing

as being this neo-Nazi movement, which it never, ever was.

And I think that media version was

taken up by, um... the media all round the world.

MUSIC: Beethoven's Symphony No 9 from A Clockwork Orange

If you put in the internet "skinhead", you'll get, like,

a whole list of Polish casuals running around at football matches.

You'll get American, white supremacist groups.

You know, where's the skinhead amongst that?

You know, there is none. It's got nothing really to do with us.

- No.
- It's been hijacked by the media, it's been sold.

And that is a shame, that, after 40 years, it's that same thing.

The demonisation helped, if you like, to ghettoise skinheads

and they became this very sort of angry, bitter, resentful, paranoid

subculture, because of the way they were being depicted by the media,

so, um, in one sense, they became the monster the media had created.

You look at most racist rallies,

say in America, and they're dressed all in black, military fatigues,

the boots and that. They don't look anything like skinheads,

but it's the military look.

They just wanted to look hard, so they dressed up like skinheads.

Particularly in Europe,

and especially perhaps now in Germany and Eastern Europe,

the skinhead movement has emerged as part of the new what you might call

neo-fascist response to the challenges of migration,

and European union meltdown and whatever other political phenomenon

you want to bring into the equation.

As this idea of skinheads as fascists,

with misguided ideas about national identity, spread around the world,

it would even find a home where there were no white people.

There's this gang of fucking dickheads called the KL Troopers

and they're Malaysia Nazis. I know, it don't make sense.

The Nazis would've fucking shot them all, do you know what I mean?

And their thing is Malay Power. Brown Power they call it.

And they want fucking Malaysia for Malaysians,

so they want all the Chinese to fuck off

and they want all the fucking Vietnamese to fuck off.

Wherever the right reared its ugly head, there was a left response.

And then, there were those that wanted nothing to do with either side.

The global appeal towards the skinheads is because

they stand up for themselves, and I think we all need that sometimes -

to stand up and say, "I want to be heard."

You know, I want to be heard, and I think other countries, they have

their downfalls and have got their upset with their societies and they

just go, "We're going to stand up for ourselves and say who we are."

MUSIC: Morning Sun by Al Barry & The Cimarons

If you ever find a very proud working-class nation,

you will find skinheads and reggae music and Oi music there,

because it speaks to somewhere else, it isn't just surface.

And I have spent three decades trying to suss out

what that fucking is, I think it's a bit of a mystery.

Something organic, something that goes deep

when you're within a tribe.

# She was waiting so impatiently... #

I mean, I still have people come up to me today and say,

"Are you a skinhead?" and you go, "Yeah."

and they go, "So you're a racist?"

And I go, "What makes you say that I'm a racist?"

Even though, after fucking 35 years fighting against it,

Joe Public still assumes skinheads are fucking racists.

Where we have one, everyone knows the fucking truth,

you know what I mean?

Everyone knows there's skinheads and there's boneheads.

You have skinheads within skinheads. So there are, if you like,

retro skins that just want to go back to that '60s purity,

as they would see it, or those that are blood and honour

keeping on that tradition that goes back to the late '70s.

But I mean, except for the fact they call themselves skinheads,

and they might look superficially similar, a white supremacist,

neo-Nazi skin is not going to look very much like someone

who's trying to look like a 1969 skinhead who loves ska music.

Subcultures are interesting.

Skinheads are one of the most enduring, one of the most striking

and, for me, interesting,

because they contain that contradiction of liking one thing,

but sometimes having differing views from what that might suggest.

The fight for the soul of skinhead has always been a one-sided battle,

as these opposing views have been poorly represented.

But there have been attempts to redress the balance.

What do you think Shane Meadows was trying to do with This Is England?

I think Shane was trying to put a truth across.

Um, an honest truth about how it actually was for his generation

and that time growing up.

There's a kid in it, he's dressed up with his bleached jeans,

he's got a shaved head, he's a full-on skinhead.

And they're driving back from a Nation Front meeting

and he's sat in the back and he goes, "Er...

"Wasn't that all a bit of a load of old bollocks?

and he stops and throws him out the car and leaves him

in the countryside, and I thought, "That's me, that is me all over."

The Tim Roth film, it's like, "Whoa!"

You know, anything that gave a little nod towards who we were,

you jumped on.

He was a confused kid, he had a Swastika on his forehead.

He was a confused kid, thank you.

But he spent most of the film hanging out with the black guy.

Thank you. See, that's what I mean!

That's why he got it, so that director got it so spot fucking on.

Against a tidal wave of negativity,

there's always been those that know the real story.

And it's left to them to keep the original flame alive

in the form of skinhead revivals.

I'm 61 years of age, I was brought up in this culture.

And I love the music, I love the clothes I wear,

People give me dirty looks and everything else, but I don't care.

Cos, at the end of the day, I wear what I want. As I says, I'm 61!

I'm happy what I'm doing, I have friends, I have everything.

But the odd occasion, you have people come up to you saying

you're a Nazi and NF and all this. I'm not NF!

What's NF got to do with dressing like this, you know? It's stupidity.

It's a way of life for me.

It's the music, it's the clothing, it's the culture,

from when I was young. That's what I grew up with. That's what I love.

We do what we do and we'll do what we do till we die, you know.

It's important for the younger generation to understand

- where it came from, to understand the music.
- It wasn't about racism.

There is no racist element in what we do

and that's very important to get over to people.

This is a very, very interesting phenomenon for me.

I've been in touch, lately,

with people like that, because it's heartening they want to do that.

Cos what really united us, when all said and done, as I keep saying,

was the music and the clothes.

For a youngster now, to actually choose to become a skinhead...

- HE LAUGHS:
- ..I mean...I mean...

why would you want to do that, unless you are really into it?

It's probably the hardest youth culture to choose to be in.

We didn't do that when we... We just went for whatever was cool!

And we didn't have all that stigma - that's all come after.

But to choose to do that now as a youngster,

I've got nothing but respect for them.

On my feet, I wear Doctor Marten boots, they're cherry red,

they've got yellow stitching and yellow laces.

Levi jeans, they're 501s with a half-inch turn up

and I also wear a Brutus trim fit shirt, nice button-down collar

and I wear half-inch braces,

so they match everything else.

And I wear a Harrington jacket that completes the whole skinhead look.

So, skinheads started in the '60s, there was a revival in the late '70s

- and there's reunions in the 21st century.
- Yeah.

Why are young people so into it?

It's...it's something different, it's the music, the style

and just to be someone else and be part of a family.

I think the clothes is a big part of it, cos it's...

what separates you from everyone else, isn't it? So...

the clothes is a big part of it,

I think you either go into collecting the records

or you collect the clothes and I started off collecting the clothes,

getting everything, so I looked pukka!

Why are you skinheads in the 21st-century?

Because it's a way of life.

It's just one of them things that doesn't leave you.

It's there, the music, the fashion,

even through the times when you're growing up, getting married,

you're having kids, where you think, "I have to put it

"on the back burner," it's always there,

so, when you get the opportunity... I think you're always a skinhead.

The younger generation,

as long as they look at the good aspects of being a skinhead,

the traditional skinhead, and the Trojan music, the clothes

and whatever and don't go for the bad side of the skinheads,

that, um, sort of a merged in the late '70s, early to mid 80s,

um, then that's a good thing, and it keeps the culture alive.

# This is the law!

# Chapter one

# The law

# The law for the good

# The law for the ugly

# For the bad! BAD!

# The law... #

When I'm listening to the news and they say,

"Gangs of skinheads attacking refugees" or, this, that

and the other, I think, "Hang on, taking my name in vain,

"taking the name of my mates in vain."

I would like to reclaim their name.

Either throw it away, because it's become associated

with something else, or actually reclaim it.

Do you think it's possible to

reclaim the name skinhead from the fascists?

- No.
- Really?
- No, I don't think so at all.

For the simple reason that, again,

those ideologies have been so sold to people,

in that skinhead is associated with...

that it's like a branding.

I get asked a lot by people about,

like, well, "You seem to know a bit about skinheads. What's it about?

"I thought they were all racist, I thought they were all this."

It depends on where you start reading your story.

If you go back and start reading your story back to the beginning

and get yourself a good foundation

of your knowledge of the skinhead culture, and where it was born from,

I think, if you can just get that foundation sorted out right

in your head, then everything you read and come from after that,

at least you've got that, you know what it was about.

Then you can understand and you can see where it's been distorted,

do you know what I mean? Because it did start off as one thing.

Now it has branched off to mean untold different things.

I thought I knew what skinhead was when I started this journey.

Even though the world's telling me it's changed into something else,

I still believe in the original idea - the one

that brought us together through a mutual love of music and style.

In my world, a tool for social change, albeit at street level.

But where I'm from, that's where it starts.

Where it ends up, well, as we've just seen, that's something else.