Skinhead

By Nick Knight

A handbook of the most prevalent post-war youth cult. Over 20,000 copies sold.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: May 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857125910

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book is my photographic vision of London’s East End skinheads. All the photos were taken between 1980 and 1981 and nearly all were shot in the vicinity of Petticoat Lane. When I started the book in the summer of 1980, I knew none of the East End skins. By this time all London’s pubs and clubs had firmly shut their doors to skinheads. The one remaining club, Squires, over the water in Catford, shut almost exactly as I started the book. The only place where large numbers of skins regularly met was an aptly named shop off Petticoat Lane, called The Last Resort.

The skins who patronised this shop, every Sunday and most of the rest of the week, were part of the skinhead revival. The style originally formed in 1966 from a number of different elements which merged to give one strong and definite style by 1967. This continued, although developing and maturing, until 1972, when it became lost in the emergence of new youth cults and fashions.

For most people who grew up before the sixties, skinheads are seen as yet another unpleasant and ugly aspect of modern youth. The real origins and reasons for the emergence of the cult get lost in outrage at the behaviour of those who possess the style. These pages are intended as a guide to how the movement came about and to describe the archetypal skinhead of the 1967-72 period. The people I have talked to, who were skinheads during this period, show such a pride and passion for their style, that it is to do them justice that these pages are written.

BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY 1980, SOUTHEND

ORIGINS

The date of the first appearance of a distinct youth style or culture in post-war Britain was in the early fifties. At that time, some working class youths in London adopted as their uniform the long Edwardian coats and tight trousers which had previously been worn by young men-about-town at the time of the New Look. (1) They were known as teddy boys or teds. They were devoted to rock and roll, they wore curious hairstyles with quiffs and DAs painstakingly greased into place. They behaved as a group separate from conventional life. In the early sixties, the teddy boys were succeeded by the mods, and their counterparts the rockers.

Skinheads could be identified as a separate group in 1968 because of their distinctive dress and appearance, the type of music which they liked and the tough, aggressive behaviour which they displayed. The fact that a new youth style had emerged was not surprising. What was new was that skinheads appeared not to be a continuation of a trend, but a change of emphasis or even a reversal in the development of style. The sixties had seen a glamorisation of youth, with all its attendant absurdities, and the emergence of the skinhead style represented a counter-revolution. The revolution took place amongst the working class youth of London and other cities. This movement appeared more or less spontaneously and its emergence shows how this section of society still possessed its own individualism and independence.

The teds of the fifties had been replaced by the mods, who at first had been a very exclusive, almost secret, underground working class movement. They wore immaculate clothes, regarded themselves as an élite and behaved like gods. They bought the finest Italian suits and rode on Vespas and Lambrettas. They decorated the scooters with artificial fur fabric and as many accessories as possible. Contrasting with, and in opposition to, the mods, were the rockers or greasers, who with their leather jackets and heavy motor bikes were a diluted version of the American Hell’s Angels.

EARLY SKIN WITH MODS. APRIL 1967

Separate from these groups was the large mass of youth whose clothes were chain store versions of traditional styles. Attention on fashion for most of the public was concentrated on women’s clothes, with mini-skirts and boots emphasising the rapid change in attitudes. While the mini-skirts and The Beatles made the news, the mods, who were only newsworthy when they rioted at seaside towns, developed their own independent styles of dress relatively uninfluenced by popular fashion.

Each successive age group wishes to establish itself as being different from its predecessors. You share your identity with your mates at work or with your own age group at school, not with your elder brother. In establishing their own style, the younger brothers of the mods adopted