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."

"One-two-three and UP YOUR BUM!" Lost Girl Punk Band of the Day: The Gymslips

Comes with chips! The 'slips 1982

My coffers are empty, which means no new Cartier telephone dialling-pin for me this month, among other essentials. It also means no new records. So chanelling the idea that when you’re hungover you tend to discover amazing clothes you’d forgotten you owned, I went rooting through my vinyl hoping to come across some forgotten gem that hadn’t troubled my ears for a while. And I found the Gymslips’ first and only album. (I also found the soundtrack to early ’80s lesbian classic The Legend of Billie Jean, but I won’t be writing about that, no matter the merits of a Pat Benatar ditty or five).

For your safety (well, it def weren't for theirs . . .)

In the 1990s, those with a shaky grasp of history and sociology (i.e. the media) liked to blather on about The Ladette, as if never before in history had anyone with a vagina gone out, got drunk, chuffed a few fags and ogled men (or other women, for that matter). Oh, no. Never. Not until Cox and Ball did it. So it was talked up as a Zeitgeisty phenomenon. But The Gymslips were well at it over 30 years ago, creating cheeky, raucous, garagey glam-pop-punk while downing enough booze to dissolve an elephant’s body in.

The band, who rejoiced in the mellifluous 1970s proley princess names of Karen, Suzanne and Paula (later joined by a Kathy on the keys), came variously from the East End and Kent, formed the ’slips in 1980 and referred to themselves, Richard Allen style, as ‘Renees’ - this being a late ’60s Hard Mod term for girls of said subculture; the blokes were known as ‘Ronees’. In an NME interview, Karen said that a Renee was a girl who got as much shagging done as a bloke while also matching him for pint drinking, fag smoking, nose-picking, farting, and the wearing of skinhead-style double denim. Atta Girl! Whether they meant it or not, this was a form of working-class feminism, because being unladylike is joyously feminist behaviour. Indeed, the sleevenotes of their only album describe Renees thusly: ‘Diet: excessive alcohol, pie & mash. Clothing: jeans, monkey boots, denim jackets. Habits: most disgusting things.” It was as if Beryl the Peril, Minnie the Minx, Sweary Mary and Pansy Potter the Strongman’s Daughter and had met down the Roxy.

When The Gymslips are referred to, it’s often as the only female Oi! group, which they weren’t. A case for them as the female Sham 69 is just about plausible (Hurry Up Harriet?) but their boisterous, everyone-get-yer-stomp-on yobette sound crossed with wistful and tender-yet-tough love songs posits them more as some bastard hybrid of the Sex Pistols and the Shangri-Las. Still, being a geek authority on late-’70s and early ’80s female punk and post-punk groups (yeah, you bet I’m popular), I’m well aware of the lack of influence the ‘slips have when compared to their contemporaries such as The Slits (Best Punk Band Ever), Kleenex/LiLiPUT (Best Euro Female Punk Band Ever), The Raincoats (somewhat worthy, frumpy, inventive Godmothers of Grunge), the Mo-dettes (foul-mouthed, pop-punk dandettes out for a lark), Dolly Mixtures (hyper-melodic, Mod-ish, middle-class girls, quite good at harmonising), The Bodysnatchers (de Rude Gals of Two Tone) and Marine Girls (twee-as-fuck sixth-form-busking-society types and, amazingly, faves of Kurt Cobain and the genesis of the redoubtably talented Tracey Thorn’s musical career). And so they’re largely and unjustly forgotten. Mention their name and it’s chirruping crickets all the way. Their lineage, you could say, spanned We've Got a Fuzzbox . . . to Kenickie, where the family line appears to have ended. But what genes!

Bosoms, beer, binge, bed

Their only album Rocking with the Renees was released in 1983, and is a aural monument to sheer rollicking fun. Their forte was mainly pumping, jangly mid-60s-influenced pop-punk, which had served Blondie and the Buzzcocks so well (and no doubt helped secure their cross-generational appeal). If you believe men and women play their instruments differently (and I do – there’s generally a more rhythmic bent to the sound of an all-female band; listen to the Slits and the Pistols back to back and you’ll get some idea of what I mean) then the ’slips were refuseniks, as the driving riff that opens the first track, Renees  (“ See us walkin’ down the street – monkey boots upon our feet!”) sounds like something Steve Jones would have no trouble with. There’s no doubt they could play though - the drumming’s insistent, bombastic and fierce and the basslines are hefty and Glam. 

Still, there are a considerable amount of half-inched riffs and melodies on there, which doesn’t do much to dispel the stereotype of the East End tea-leaf. They’re forgiven though, as their joyous terrace-stomp vocals have all the ballooning, shallow fun of a night on a sticky dancefloor and the lyrics betray a what-the-hell hedonism that seems oddly antiquated (“Get drunk! Get smashed! Get pissed! Get fat! We’re the Renees ’ere we come! One, two, three and UP YOUR BUM!”) Probably one of the most fun "meet the band" intros recorded since 'Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees!' Today, those lyrics would probably garner a Parental Advisory sticker - or at least an NHS one. Still, the following track is called Drink Problem, as if they felt they hadn’t already definitively dealt with their reigning passion in the first one. This song is a shameless ode to Drinking Irresponsibly and Loving It (“Whisky makes you frisky, gin makes you sin, brandy makes you randy and rum makes you . . .”) OK, so it’s hardly Patti Smith’s lyrical league, but it does put a huge smile on my face - not least because I now can’t help but imagine Smith, fist in air, reciting those lines in that deadly serious, Shamanic way of hers in some East Village café, 40 years ago. 

They had their class politics and gender issues, riffing on the former on Barbara Cartland (“Poor old gal what a life she’s lead, with her stately home and her four-poster bed”) and the latter on Face Lifts, in which a sad, ageing housewife goes to see a surgeon with his eye on the main chance who tells her she’s an ugly old cow and to put her future in his hands. Agony aunts get short shrift in Dear Marje, as do pop stars who let you down by running to fat, drugs and LA (Wandering Stars). They also graced the world with a well ballsy cover of 48 Crash and Connie Francis’s taunting Robot Man (one in a long-line of songs from gals who won’t take second best, stretching from Sophie Tucker’s Horse Playin' Poppa to Missy Elliot’s One-Minute Man). 

They garnered many decent reviews and Gave Good Interview, too (“Nah. We’ve never had men yelling ‘Gerrem off!’ Probably because they’re terrified of what’s underneath...”) but they sold few records, perhaps because they didn’t seem to know their strengths, which really lay in ’60s-style shimmering pop tunes like Thinking of You and Yo-Yo, rather than their Rabelaisian if repetitive ladette anthems. The NME were surprisingly keen on them (“...refreshing antidote to the conventional belles of the ball . . . ladylike they ain’t – and that is their strength.”). I say ‘surprisingly’ because being bright, good-humoured girls who said things like “We’ve paid our dues, but we still don’t get any decent groupies – all wallies, no hunks!” set them decidedly apart from said organ’s favoured alumni at the time, i.e. pretentious post-punkers referencing Baudrillard in their lyrics or threatening to record concept albums about fascist coups in Equatorial Guinea or somesuch. Sounds (NME’s main rival in the ’70s and ’80s) supported them staunchly too - sadly, usually in the form of that feeble excuse for a troglodyte, Gary Bushell. John Peel loved them. 

However, they split in 1984 owing to contractual problems, and Paula, the guitarist, recruited a new line-up and began afresh. This new incarnation of the band produced a few Peel Sessions and the new members looked and sounded more like a bunch of backcombed Camden Palace acolytes – they were only the same group in name. After they spilt Karen went on to join Oi-botherers Serious Drinking (natch), and Paula went ska with the Deltones. These two even teamed up again as The Renees and released a single titled He Called Me a Fat Pig and Walked Out on Me.

Minus a few teeth, you can bet.

Wotta cheek