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."

No Eastern Promises: Bronco Bullfrog (1969)

This diamond-amid-the-bombsites was lost in cinematic limbo for decades until its re-release in 2010. Now it's back again, currently showing at London's Barbican. Here's my take on it, originally published in SNIPE magazine.

If you’re given to the act of thinking, there’s forever a sense of doubt attached to ‘established’ social history – a nagging feeling that the more interesting aspects of an era may be buried beneath a ton of cultural dogma. Bronco Bullfrog, shot on location in the East End in 1969 by Barney Platt-Mills, is a smashing, monochromatic example of such marginalia – the surly, underage sibling of Blow-Up and Performance, as insouciant and attitudinal as the latter two are self-conscious.

The actors were a bunch of Stratford and West Ham kids coaxed off the streets by Joan Littlewood’s theatre company and the film’s plot is as Spartan as the largely improvised dialogue: 17-year-old half-hearted hooligan Del meets 15-year-old Irene. His dad and her mum disapprove (her dad’s in the clink) and so the pair take to their relationship to the streets with all the ennui and frustration of a million teen couples before and since. Society at large offers them no space, merely insists they sit their frustration out. They do this in Wimpy Bars, derelict prefabs and late night strip-lit cafés over tea-spattered Formica table tops. Then they hook up with the titular character, who’s fresh out of Borstal. Ironically, the no-hoper status this should immediately consign him to is initially scotched by the fact he’s the only kid in E15 who’s captain of his own ship.

And yet, the film’s sense of social realism is such that Bronco, Del and Irene gradually appear to have no hope of escaping the gravitational pull of their background. When asked why he bothered coming back to the two-decade-old bombsites of Stratford when he could have gone up "the other end”, Bronco replies that he “don’t know anyone there”. The King’s Road, that attention-seeking poseur’s promenade that holds every phoney sixties memory in its strangulating grip, was a mere Circle Line ride away, but might as well have been one of Saturn’s moons. The characters’ lack of zeal in all their acts – sex, thieving, scrapping, boozing - suggest a bleak sense of fatalism: that all that might happen to them has already done so.

Bronco Bullfrog is sharper than any frenetic, kinetic contemporary yoof flick owing to what it leaves out. The minimalist dialogue would likely make a modern young audience uncomfortable (and would freak an American one out). Ten minutes of film which would now be filled with street babble here features 30 seconds of awkward, parsimonious teen dialogue (“Wanna go out wiv me tomorrow night?” “OK” “Alright, see ya”), which briefly make it a comedy of embarrassment.

I’ve heard this film described as a monument to Mod more than a few times. Not quite. While there’s no conscious sense of subcultural identity or tribalism evident among the kids of Bronco Bullfrog, this lot are actually the end product of Hard Mods, i.e. suedeheads: those whose means were as slender as their silhouettes and for who petrol-blue Italian mohair suits were out, but Sta-prest, button-down shirts and steel-capped leather boots were in. Unlike the loon-panted, cravat-sporting scions of SW3, they do not look in any way ridiculous to modern eyes (the doe-eyed, loose-locked Irene looks unnervingly contemporary). It’s thus a shame that the original soundtrack doesn’t reflect the subculture in question. Surely skanking bluebeat and ska would have trumped the longhair, bass-heavy sounds of The Audience, given the proto-Skin nature of the protagonists.

The unbilled character here is London. Bronco Bullfrog is a pin-sharp hymn of authenticity to a vanished section of the capital now host more to the ubiquitous than the unique. There are glimpses of Hackney Speedway (now buried beneath the Olympic stadium), an unpedestrianised Leicester Square in a trip Up West, freshly-set concrete flyovers over which Del drives Irene, pillion-style and even a working dock, probably the last of its kind. In the distance, Balfron Tower is visible, a symbol, along with the high-rise Irene lives in with her mother, of an anticipated future that never arrived.