Feature Song: Take The Skinheads Bowling by Camper Van Beethoven (February, 1985/IRS Records/Davis, CA)

[Disclaimer: This entry features no links to music, as the bands I’m talking about are hateful. Also, you do not, under any circumstances, have to take any skinheads bowling]

Before Hardcore Havens can cross the Atlantic, I need to address some stuff I glossed over earlier.

The first wave of Skinhead culture sprung up in the UK toward the end of the 60’s, when Jamaican Rude Boys met English Mods. Rude Boys and Mods got on famously, sharing a flare for sharp suits, danceable upbeat music, and cannabis. However, being a Mod was prohibitively expensive. After all, you had to be able to pay for those sharp suits and scooters and stimulants. Plus, Mods tended to have shaggy, long-ish hair, which would have been a safety hazard if you worked an industrial job. So what was a working class Mod to do? Well, they opted for a more practical look, wearing straight cut jeans and work boots but with a nice button-down or polo shirt. If you could afford a sharp suit, you only had one, and you mostly wore it to the dance hall, where you danced to Ska, Soul, and R&B. As for a hairstyle, the Rude Boys often sported a shaven head, which required far less maintenance than the standard Mod haircuts. Working class Mods adopted that look, along with the trilbys and pork pie hats that were common among Rude Boys. The schism between these working class “Hard” Mods and the largely middle-class “Smooth” Mods became apparent in 1966 and by 1968 “Hard” Mods were largely known as Skinheads. The look wasn’t associated with racism (not yet, at least) but they did get lumped in with the alleged violence going on between Mods and Rockers earlier in the 60s. However, as the ages rolled forward into the 70s, Mods and Rockers faded into memory as Psychedelic, Glam, Progressive rock, and other forms and genres came to the forefront. The Skinhead look, however, was incredibly practical, and so it stuck around, migrating to the North. And then it got racist.

Football was among the many vectors that brought the Skinhead subculture out of London and into the North. Skinheads from the South would go see their favorite teams play against teams from the North, where they would encounter non-Skin rival fans. Due to the rowdy nature of English football fans, this often lead to brawls. This was happening around the same time as Enoch Powell gave the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, railing against immigration and emboldening white supremacists up and down the nation. White supremacists mobs formed for the purposes of “[Slur] Bashing,” wherein they go about harassing or assaulting minorities, mainly South Asian ones. They also weren’t as fond of their former Caribbean allies, as Ska had evolved into Reggae, with its Rastafarian and Pan-African themes making it less accessible for white westerners. Tabloid papers ran many stories about white supremacist violence against immigrant communities, always referring to the white aggressors as “Skinheads.”

This inspired hack pulp writer James Moffat to cobble together a Clockwork Orange knockoff about a young man who does similar things to Alex, except it took place in then-contemporary England. The protagonist of the novel, 16-year old Joe Hawkins, is fond of beer, football, sex, and violence, especially violence directed towards racial minorities. Far from the white dress clothes and black bowler hats sported by Alex and his Droogs, Joe Hawkins et al sport a then-modern Skinhead look. To that end, Moffat titled the novel “Skinhead” and published it under the alias Richard Allen. The book’s lurid plot led to much tabloid coverage, as moral guardians railed against the depictions of sex and violence. However, this did more to move copies than Moffat ever could. Just like American white supremacists took after the fictionalized version of the KKK presented in Birth of A Nation, British white supremacists took after the (arguably) fictionalized version of Skinheads presented in Skinhead. In fact, Skinhead sold so well that Moffat wound up writing at least 5 sequels with titles like “Suedehead” and “Bootboys” and “Knuckle Girls,” all of them the same kind of sleazy, foul-mouthed, racist garbage as the first.

Remember the Bromley Contingent and how they took to wearing swastikas? Well these new Skinheads got excited about this new angry aggressive beer-drinking music, and when they saw the swastikas, they took it as an invitation. Punk also had a surprisingly robust network of underground publications in the form of ‘zine culture, which the Neo-Fascist Skinheads used to spread their filth. When Punk “died” in 1977 and began splintering into the myriad styles and sounds we call ‘New Wave,’ the Nazi Skinheads were among the most resistant to the change. They were there for the violence, not for dancing. To that end, they started bands like The Ventz and The Dentists, and peppered right-wing ideology into their songs. The arrival of White Supremacist Skinheads in the Punk scene eventually came to the attention of UK’s National Front, who attempted to capitalize by starting a youth outreach group called The Punk Front in 1978. When they shut down the program, less than a year later, Nazi Skinheads responded by launching Rock Against Communism. This new contingent would continue trying to recruit new members at Punk shows, where they ran into Anti-Racist Skinheads. Clashes between these two groups often turned into small riots, which threatened to tear the Punk and 2-Tone Ska scenes apart.

The Battle for British Hardcore had begun. But what did our side look like?