Skinheads: a Hard Case

Skinheads have long been misunderstood. This subculture’s perceived links to far-right politics have somewhat soured their contribution to subcultural style. To make claims for it is to hit a cultural nerve and be laid open to accusations of filtering out noxious ideologies to concentrate on aesthetics alone.

However, things are rarely as black and white as they seem, if you’ll pardon the expression, and while there were undoubtedly factions of racist and violent Skins or 'boneheads' – those who were afraid of everything and worked overtime pretending they were afraid of nothing – there were legions of other Skins whose way of life was a celebration not of whiteness, but of roots: they were working-class with class.

Dress to the left c.1972

The original sixties Skins morphed out of the Mod scene. For Mods whose means were as slender as their silhouettes, petrol-blue Italian mohair suits were out - but Sta-prest, button-down Brutus shirts and steel-capped leather boots (shiny enough for a modette to stare into and make up her Ace Face) were in. The template for this approximated look was the dockyard worker’s uniform: with a few tweaks and some painstaking attention to detail, it was sharp, clean and tough enough to be seen in during an amphetamine-fuelled evening of skanking to blue beat, ska and soul in the racially mixed and harmonious dancehalls of south-west London.

Suedeheads c.1971

By and by, like ice floes in the spring, these Mods (‘Hard Mods’) split from their peacock-like brethren (‘Smooth Mods’). By now, the latter wore their aspiration tonsorially by adopting hairstyles that spoke of leisured grooming while the former went to the other extreme with a clipped head that spoke of practicality, manual work and self-assurance. This style, the original Skinhead crop, was inspired by the young West Indian men they danced beside. These Rude Boys kept their wiry, unruly & coarse locks under strict control by keeping one step ahead of the razor. From this cut Skinheads would receive their new name come the fag-end of that most mythologized decade.

Best foot forward, c.1971

In 1969, many male Skins had partings shaved into their crops, running from crown to forehead, though this was mostly hidden beneath a pork-pie trilby, worn on the back, not the top of the head. Over the check shirt (Brutus, Ben Sherman or Jaytex) an original Skin would wear a Wrangler or Levi’s denim or corduroy jacket, or perhaps an RAF great coat or donkey jacket. Anything, infact, as long as it wasn’t fashion, that most bourgeois of concerns; this was about style. However, all coats and jackets faded in the grand shadow of the sheepskin coat, the Skin Symbol par excellence.

'ard Modettes c.1968

The distaff members of the Skin and Suedehead cult distained the buttock-hugging acrylic strides favoured by their mainstream sisters of the ’69-72 period (though the Skinbird’s affection for the mini-and-fishnets combo came later), but their faces owed much to the Modette style:  lips painted cardiac-arrest pale, Cleopatra eyes, and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Their hairstyle was also modernist at this point – a tufty, micro-fringed crop with feathered sides. Beneath their flat-fronted slacks or bell-bottoms, they’d more than likely be wearing monkey boots or clumpy flare-heeled brogues. Their brothers and boyfriends would be shod in a bewildering array of reflective leather: loafers, Italian brogues, leather-uppers, 8-eyelet DMs, or Norwegians.

Jackie-friendly suedehead couple c.1973

Come the very early seventies, Skinheads began to evolve into Suedeheads - some of who took their terrace stomp all the way to Top of the Pops in the form of Glam (Slade, after all, started out as faithful Suedeheads). 

Nobody's Fools: Slade in 1969

With a softer, smoother surface up top, the silhouette broadened at the shoulders with the arrival of the Crombie (more often than not a Chesterfield masquerading as Crombie, but let’s not split stubble) in all its midnight black or natty navy sleekness. A pocket square was often pinned in the breast with a diamond-studded pin. Amazingly, a brolly and bowler was sometimes added to this get-up, thereby creating a bizarre caricature of a City Slicker.

Skins and Suedeheads were increasingly less easy to spot in the mid-seventies period, largely because their style had evolved so far from its origins that they were virtually unrecognisable, walking the mean streets of the East End in knitwear, polo-necks, cords and, surreally, long fringes. 

But in the wake of the punk explosion, a new generation of Skins emerged alongsidethe countless other youth cults of the 1979-83 period, and this was when racial politics really entered the equation along with the emergence of Two Tone. The East End of London was the principal territory of the new Skin, but in the New Towns - those concrete citadels of the Home Counties - Skinhead was huge.

Sorts

Skins now wrapped up against the chill wind of Thatcherism in Harrington jackets (burgundy or black cutting the sharpest dash), accompanied by orange-tab Levis with three-inch turn ups, all the better to expose the inky-black DMs rising up their calves. Added to this were form-fitting Fred Perry shirts, V-neck sweaters and whip-slender braces. Hair ranged from the near-bald ‘shadow’ of the number one crop to smoothies and suedes. Skinhead girls (or ‘Skinbirds’) now sported the classic feather (or ‘Chelsea’) cut – short on the crown, with fringes at the sides and front; the crown might even be shaved, with feathery bangs flopping over the forehead. Many Skinbirds had a tendency to bleach their remaining follicles to within an inch of their lives - and they never let their roots grow out. Ever. Denim minis were worn with itchy black fishnet tights and spotless cherry red DMs (or white socks with shoes). Snug Fred Perry t-shirts and Ben Sherman check shirts were often a real boon for those Skinbirds blessed in the mammary department.

Skinbirds, Brighton 1980

Overall, the look became more extreme (tattoos were widespread), but it was no less sharp, although suits were never seen on Skin revivalists. But the rot had set in, and Skinheads began to splinter spectacularly: into Trojans (originals), Neo-Nazis, SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), casuals and ‘plastic’ Skins (i.e. High Street pretenders), Two-Tone and Oi! fans and later, gay fetishists. For a subculture that had originally stressed roots, pride and respect, the fact that some Skins could now be seen Mod-bashing on Margate seafront or in Bethnal Green underpasses showed how withered those roots had become.

Neo

Like all the subcultures of the post-punk era, true Skins still exist, albeit in diminished numbers. Many 21st-century Skins are often a combination of the best elements of the subculture; their politics, if they have any, do not interfere with their love of ska, Fred Perry or feather cuts. But then as now, there are those who sully the name: a head case is a hard case to crack.

Reggae-pop! 1970

Potential Piccadilly Palaver 1970

Sharp

Blur busy appropriating, 1993

Allen's Oeuvre

El Tel and the Boys: The Specials in 1979

Skinbirds c.1982

Kids are United

"Don't care for you or your camera, mate."

Nowt to Lose But Your Mind! Asylum (Roy Ward Baker 1972)

I first saw Asylum in 1994 on late-night TV. I were watching with my dad, who about ten minutes into the film went “Aaah! Saw this at the pictures when it came out. Total rubbish!” Still, he saw it through with me, even putting up with my turning the air of that tiny living room foul with noxious fag smoke; that’s how good Asylum is, you see.

It set off my love of 1960s and ’70s anthology horrors (or ‘portmanteau horrors’ as the more pretentious insist – insist! – on calling them). Most of them were produced by Amicus - ‘the studio that dripped blood’. They were less famous, less Gothic, and less claret-and-bosoms obsessed than Hammer yet more famous than the very odd Tigon studios, which were formed in 1966 by exploitation king Tony Tenser - surely the Paul Raymond of British cinema – and featured medieval witchcraft, beasts in the cellar, and much-terrorised dolly birds and mods. 

Anyway, Asylum is forever a flick of joyous and gory glory. In four trim little tales of malfeasance written by Robert Bloch of Pyscho fame, we encounter voodoo, Formica mini-bars, restless mummified limbs, vengeful dummies, axe-scarred mistresses, anachronistic tailors, and minuscule  mind-controlled, metal-bodied agents of evil. Welcome to the Happy House.

Young Doctor Martin (Robert Powell) arrives for an interview at a remote commuter-belt asylum. He’s greeted by Patrick Magee’s lugubrious Dr Rutherford, who is wheelchair-bound. “An accident,” he murmurs in rich, fruity tones, adding menacingly, “Never turn your back on a patient.”

Powell’s ‘test’ to secure employment is to speak with a number of hopelessly insane patients and hear their stories in order to discern which one is (or was) Doctor B. Starr, Rutherford’s former associate and now an inmate who has taken on a new, psychopathic persona. Drawing himself up with all the arrogance of relative youth, Martin chuffs that he most certainly will recognise him. With one eyebrow raised, Dr Rutherford responds to this monumentally sexist assumption by purring ‘“Him”? How d’you know the doctor’s a man?’

Robert Powell as Dr Martin: heated Carmen rollers not pictured

And so Martin ascends the stairs which are hung with framed Hogarth prints depicting the various stages of insanity, (a sick comic touch – somewhat akin to displaying foetuses in jars in an abortion clinic waiting room). At the secure ward door, he is greeted by his guide Reynolds (a cheerful yet taciturn Geoffrey Bayldon). Meeting his subjects one by one, each of their stories are told in flashback.

Frozen Fear: being the adventures of Bonnie (Barbara Parkins), once a gorgeous, raven-haired gal about town, now thoroughly out to lunch after a fight with the vengeful body parts of her lover’s murdered wife . . .

Barbara Parkins as Bonnie: fond of matching her outfits to her decor

As we can expect from an Amicus anthology, more than one grim little tale takes place in a fraught domestic setting, each dysfunctional in its own unique way. Here, Richard Todd’s porky, be-cravatted Walter makes himself a brandy at his awesome leather-padded, Formica-topped bar just as his wife Ruth (a haughty Sylvia Syms) arrives home in high dudgeon. They’re clearly a miserable couple, sniping sarcastically at each other. Ruth has just attended a “spiritual lesson” (how very seventies of her) and is sporting a tooth-and-claw bracelet she airily claims will protect her from forces stronger than life, death or evil . . . like Bonnie. Dishonest to the core, Walter tells her that’s all over. Ruth smirks and sneers that she’s glad, as she has no intention of letting him go, ever, and sinks her manicured talons into his shoulders to show him she damn well means it.

Walter and Ruth: runners up in the 1972 Homes & Gardens Lounge of the Year Awards (points lost for sticking a pot-plant in the ashtray)

But Walter has other plans, and soon, Ruth’s been slaughtered and quartered. However, it turns out she was not the biggest obstacle to Walter and Bonnie’s happiness: her voodoo bracelet is. Initially, there’s no sign of said talisman’s potency as an axe-wielding Walter separates Ruth into six easy pieces, wraps her neatly in brown paper packages tied up with string (certainly something to give Sister Maria pause) and places her in the deep freeze. 

Ruth realises . . .

Ruth chills out

But then he spies the trinket lying poignantly on the floor. Unmoved, he tosses it in with her (“Rest in pieces!”), which turns out to be a huge mistake. For in a few hours, the charm has worked its black magic: Ruth’s paper-trussed arm returns to life, escapes its frozen hell and squeezes the life out of her widower’s windpipe.

Ruth's revenge!

Later, when Bonnie turns up, Ruth’s assorted body parts are out in force and the guilty girl finds herself assaulted on all sides by an aggressive, busty torso and angry athletic limbs. Finally, the arm bearing the ‘anouwanga’ bracelet – that which Ruth claimed would protect her from forces “stronger than life or death” – breaks free of its paper and cravenly, deliciously descends upon a frantic Bonnie from above. 

Not one of Bonnie's Favourite Things

Cornered

Bonnie und the Blade

As it grabs at her face, she swings the axe on herself, and we’re treated to a classic POV shot of the gleaming blade bashing repeatedly away. Back at the asylum, Bonnie giggles and hums to herself with innocent menace before parting her ratted mane to reveal the livid, cleaved-meat scars she hides beneath it. “Now do you believe me?” she says in sugary tones. “Now?”

Never has a woman been so in need of Dermablend and a deep-conditioning treatment

The Weird Tailor: being the adventures of Bruno, a former tailor of unspecified mittel-European descent whose mannequin turns on him after years of being pricked, prodded and fingered (lucky bugger)

In a confusingly anachronistic corner of seventies London, Bruno and his wife Anna toil wearily in their failing, threadbare tailor’s shop. There’s a touch of pathos in their insistence on living in what appears to be 1947, as Bruno laments the loss of his once-fine customers of long ago to the unsympathetic, bulldog-faced landlord, who’ll be leaving empty handed once again.

Trouble brewing

But lo – here is Peter Cushing’s Mr Smith to save the day! Splendidly angular, Cushing’s curious customer sports an aura of cash and mystery, and he’s Bruno and Anna’s first client in an age. With him, he brings some fabulous reflective, white-hot material that Tony Romano will one day make famous. He states that he wants a suit made from this and his written instructions must be followed to the letter and worked on only after midnight and before dawn. He’ll be waiting for it, with a handsome payment, on Friday night.

But it transpires Smith is Bruno’s equal in poverty. He inhabits barren rooms, having sold everything. The reason for this, he reveals to a crestfallen Bruno come Friday night, was to purchase a particular book – a weighty, almost comically ancient-looking tome which he hefts into view. This curious volume is full of calibrations, formulas and illustrations of a suit – the suit.

Voodoo Vogue

Smith also harbours a green-faced cadaver in the next room – his son, he says, dead from natural causes. And it’s the suit with its properties beyond human imaginings that’ll soon reverse that. But Bruno refuses to hand it over, and Smith pulls a gun on him (in a benign, ‘This I must do!’ way). In the ensuing scuffle, Smith is shot and Bruno flees.

Father & Son

Once home, he tells Anna to burn the sinister suit, but instead she puts it on the rather odd-looking shop dummy (a facsimile of Oliver Reed in The Devils). Anna looks proudly at the dummy and says “I call him Otto. I sometimes talk to him when you’re away.” Panicked, Bruno says she must burn the suit. Anna says they must confess to the police. As they wrestle over the receiver, the besuited Otto jerks his head sideways and stretching his waxen limbs, lumbers toward the warring couple. 

The Wax Man Cometh

We can see by now that the dummy Otto is being played by an actor with bits of quivering, badly-attached latex stuck to his visage. This only adds to the humour, not horror, of him going straight for Bruno and throttling him. This dénouement is eye-rollingly daft, but perhaps fitting for the conclusion of what’s the weakest segment of the film. Bruno’s adamant that Otto is “Ay-liiiive!” on the streets of London somewhere, but he’s clearly deluded: he’s obviously shacked up with Anna.

Lucy Comes to Stay: being the adventures of Barbara, a murderous schizophrenic who’s one part classy, cerebral brunette, one part platinum-haired troublemaker.

Babs: a slave to the side-parting

With this story, it seems like Bloch temporarily ran out of inspiration and decided to rehash Pyscho set in bourgeois Brit suburbia. Still, I’m not complaining – where else do you get to see a class act like Charlotte Rampling running around stabbing folk with shears and cackling fit to burst, all while inexplicably wearing what looks like a Dutch air hostess’s uniform?

Barbara (Rampling) has been collected from the loony bin by her frightfully priggish brother George (James Villiers, eternal avatar of the languid English toff). She’s happy and relaxed, but her expression switches starkly when George alludes to the problems that got her sectioned in the first place. “That’s all over with,” she murmurs ominously. It isn’t of course, and we’re left in no doubt that trouble’s brewing when Babs’s alter-ego appears in the form of the sinister, minxy Lucy (Britt Ekland), who wears a blouse with lapels like spearheads and flares so extreme that no wardrobe on earth could be wide enough to accommodate them. Lucy is soon gallivanting evilly around the house, cutting phone wires and slipping powered sedatives in to George’s tea and generally confusing Barbara further and feeding the seed of paranoia in her already fragile mind. 

"Barbara. It appears that . . .

. . . we are all out of Elnett."

Whispering huskily into Barbara’s ear, Lucy says of the jolly, apple-cheeked dame George has hired to look after her: “She’s not your nurse you know. She’s your guard. Your keeper!” Babs happens to have inherited all her parents’ wealth, which, as Lucy points out, gives George more than enough reason to join forces with Nurse Higgins and have her slung back in the snake pit.

George: one nil to Babs

To this end, Barbara/Lucy decides to rid herself of her detractors and so gleaming shears are plunged straight into the hearts of her calculating brother and poor old Nurse Higgins. Lucy, the gleeful side of this bad penny, responds to such bloodied ends with an expression of queenly triumph. Barbara, however, on seeing her handiwork, bears the weight of guilt with an expression of slack-jawed disbelief.

Barbara - or Lucy?

Lucy - or Barbara?

Manikins of Horror: being the adventures of Dr Byron - a formidable perma-tanned academic with more than a touch of the mad scientist.

The Lomster and his metal minions

In the final segment, Dr Martin is introduced to Dr Byron (a smooth, bass-voiced Herbert Lom) who inhabits a room that resembles a GP’s surgery with a phalanx of glass bottles on display and a skeleton grinning in the corner. However, there’s no altruism in his work – merely ego. For Dr Byron has a cabinet containing tiny, metal-bodied figures of all his fellow inmates and asylum staff – each identifiable by a lifelike head. They are, he claims, alive, powered by psychokinesis. 

"Soon you'll be a man, my son!"

None too amused by such flagrant disregard for his intelligence, Dr Martin states that Byron is clearly Dr Starr and makes his way back to Rutherford’s office, little knowing that Byron’s sent his mini-me on ahead, despatching Rutherford with a scalpel to the brain. It’s a squirmworthy moment when Martin stamps on the thing in fear, only to discover that it is indeed real: teeny-tiny innards marinated in blood spill unctuously from the manikin’s mangled body.

Ready for action . . .

 . . . in for the kill.

Rushing back upstairs past the Hogarth prints, Martin discovers that Byron too, bears the marks of his crushed manikin. And so it’s left to the rodent-faced Reynolds to provide the twist ending. Dr Martin, it seems, hasn’t been at all successful in identifying the newly insane Dr Starr after all . . .

"Getting to know yooouuuu . . ."

Stare at this picture and you will hear Dr Starr's maniacal laugh: clear as a bell and nasty as a snake slithering into your BED!

While Asylum is rollicking nasty fun, it doesn't bear analysis unless you want to be immediately marked out as a contender for the Horror Buff's Pseud's Corner. For me, it stands up proudly in the 21st century - chills, spice, wit and all. (But then, I've always felt like an exile in the present.) Also, as a kitsch hound its period charms are like bonio to me, so perhaps it's more of an acquired taste than I'm willing to concede. 

Ultimately, the minimal dialogue saves Asylum from ridiculousness. If you think this is a film that takes its responsibilities in any way seriously, then maybe you too, are a candidate for the Laughing Academy, my friend. Because if camp is the definition of failed seriousness, then Asylum escapes being damned to that overcrowded realm, unlike so many of its contemporaries.

The film is available on YouTube. Like Ruth in Frozen Fear, it is in several parts (*cackles* etc).

Rockers: Folk Devilry in Leather

Rockers have been suffering from a mistaken subcultural identity for over fifty years. Teds, those frothily-quiffed dandy thugs in Technicolor facsimiles of Granddad’s 1911 Sunday Best, were not Rockers. And though the Greaser tag eventually became interchangeable with Rocker, flowing alongside Rockabilly and later Psychobilly, into one big, grease-slicked reservoir, Rockers were at first out there on their own, a very pre-Swinging Sixties phenomenon.

Their roots were in the immediate post-war era: an historical incubating period for nearly every youth cult, big or small for the next 25 years. Between 1945 and 1950, the average wage of teens in Britain increased at twice the average rate of the adult wage. This new prosperity collided with the explosion of American Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hollywood’s take on insubordinate youth in The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel without a Cause, and, oddly, the construction of arterial roads around major British cities – veritable racetracks with the circumference of a metropolis. British motorcycle building hit a peak in these years too, and the youths who roared up and down the freshly set concrete on these gleaming monsters became known as ‘Ton-Up Boys’ (Ton-Up being slang for driving at 100mph), whizzing by in a phalanx of smoky leather, smoggy exhaust smoke & inky blue denim.

Where it all began: Brando as Johnny in The Wild One (1954)

By the early sixties, the Ton-Ups had become as well known – if not better known - for their devotion to Rockabilly and a singular style of dress, as for their motorcycles, and the Rockers were born (Teds, conversely, had by now passed into history – at least as a visible youth cult). Rockers now began to strip down and soup up their bog-standard factory motorcycles, which ended up closely resembling racer bikes: speed not comfort was the desired end.  Storming north and south of the river and around London’s  arterial roads was thirsty work, and while battered leather, reflective slicked hair and the tribal stomp of engineer boots quickly became unwelcome – if not banned – in dancehalls and ‘respectable’ pubs, The Ace Café, the Ace of Spades and the Chelsea Bridge Tea Stall quickly became Rocker haunts, not only for slurping endless mugs of sickly-sweet beige tea while chuffing unfiltered tabs, but as starting and finishing points for increasingly competitive & treacherous motorcycle races. Rockers were loathed by ‘motorcycle enthusiasts’ and the feeling was probably mutual.

As the subculture grew stronger, the outfit became tougher, largely born of practicality. The leather jackets became increasingly studded, patched and covered in enamel or metal pin badges. Levis were tough, midnight blue and wide-legged, with turn-ups of several inches plus. Under these, a Rocker would sport the classic Lewis Leather biker, or engineer boots. Hair was Brylcreemed into shimmering pomps, ramrod stiff quiffs, or slick, swept-back waves; certainly nothing the chill air could shift while roaring up the North Circular, were you forgoing your helmet or peaked leather cap (latterly a much-favoured fetish item). A fluttering white silk scarf and aviator goggles completed the look. Of an evening, the boots might be replaced by crepe-soled brothel creepers in a spectrum of rainbow colours and off came the leathers to reveal Daddy-O-style bowling shirts. 

Pomps 'n' Pepsi

Rocker girlfriends (for they were nearly always girlfriends – they didn’t have subcultural autonomy like their rival Mod sisters) wore a similar daytime get-up, but with a wild bouffant & more eyeliner than a silent movie star. When the sun went down, she’d shimmy into a circulation-hindering pencil skirt, a bullet bra and a pair of spike heels. Thus attired, the Rocker couple would dance to Elvis, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury, Johnny Burnette, Wanda Jackson and Link Wray. 

Gene und Eddie: rumble

Their drug of choice was beer, for Rockers where emphatically – almost puritanically – anti-drugs. The reason for this appears to be little other than Mods’ fondness for them: anything Mods liked, Rockers emphatically hated. A Rocker would have no more necked a Purple Heart than he or she would have donned a parka and jumped on a Vespa.

Circa 1960

By the late '60s, after a succession of well-publicised seaside clashes with Mods a few years earlier had helped create Folk Devils out of both cults, Rockers began to splinter as elements of their world became appropriated (as usual) by hippies who liked motorbikes, i.e. Hell’s Angels. Easy Rider, released in 1969, was anathema to Rockers, and it’s hardly surprising; it’s harder to think of a more wholesale hippie theft of Rock ‘n’ Roll than this beardy, weirdy, much-lauded film. From here on, the ‘Greaser’ tag took over.

In the early-mid ’70s, old Teds and Greasers became one on the cultural imagination: both were seen as vaguely tragic throwbacks. Teds undoubtedly helped this attitude along with their innate conservatism. The social and political changes of the sixties and seventies hadn’t touched them, and they liked it that way. Greasers were not cut from the same cloth, but they were united with Teds in their hatred of Punk, come ’76, casually beating several shades of Crazy Colour out of the King’s Rd crowd of a Saturday afternoon for what they were doing to ‘their’ Rock ‘n’ Roll. Fortunately, youth creates afresh, and those who loved their parents’ ’50s and ’60s Rockabilly as much as the new-fangled three-chord thrash combined the two and Psychobilly was born, alongside a passionate Rockabilly revival, with bands like The Cramps, The Polecats and The Meteors leading the way. Psychobilly and the new rockabilly were faster & harder than the originals, and former style took the original look to cartoon extremes – 10-inch quiffs, shaved temples, brightly coloured tattoos: and this was just the girls.

Hard Girls: the backbone of all badassery

The Rockabilly revival never truly died out and remains a solid subculture today; a colourful, hardcore, obsessive alternative to a world that seems to drift from the bland to the blander, day in, day out.

Your author's father on the speedway, 1958

Dude 'tude

Rita Tushingham and Colin Campbell in The Leather Boys (1964)

Chelsea Bridge

Dahn The Ace

Originally published on Queens of Vintage.com, August 2009