‘Punk skins’ in Hoxton, 1978īut there’ s plenty of accounts which claim that skinhead ‘ came back’ at the Roxy in 1977? Yesterday, on Soho Radio, someone was talking about seeing mohicaned punks on the King’s Road in 1977 - another common anachronism which annoys me no end. Maybe it’s because it’s also my own past we’re dealing with here. Once more, however, I suspect the date is wrong.Īll this is very anal, of course, but I can’t help thinking historical accuracy is important that the devil is in the (lack of) detail. I’ve just flicked through the book to check, but alas couldn’t find it. I believe there’s another passage in Viv Albertine’s book where she talks about Mick Jones and herself being attacked by a gang of skinheads after a gig on the White Riot tour. Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Simonon and Weller had all been little skinheads or suedeheads. The radicalisation of the movement that led to the skinhead revival is, in my opinion, part of this quest for authenticity. Being born again is just that: being born again.
If I may quote myself quoting the Cockney Rejects, “Punk’s year-zero mentality (like all other attempts to start again from scratch) was haunted by a yearning to return to some original, prelapsarian state - back in the garage, when the cult still had no name, before they killed the fucking thing. One of the ideas I develop in Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night is that punk was haunted by its lost beginning. Hoxton Tom McCourt, later of 4-Skins, in small green circle.
Punk herberts out to fight teds in Kings Road, 1977. Paul Simonon himself sported braces and a proper skinhead crop, complete with a shaved parting, at some point in 78. He’s a good example of this hybrid style that reflected a radicalisation of punk in the face of commercialisation and due to an influx of working-class punters on the scene. The guttersnipe hanging out of the open platform at the back of a double-decker in the ads for ‘Clash City Rockers’ (1978) is clearly meant to be a punky urchin, with ‘CLASH’ stencilled on his trousers, but he also has a very short haircut that makes him look a bit like a skinhead. In 78-79 there were also quite a few punks with skinhead-style crops, so there was a lot of overlapping and ambiguity. As I write in the book, I can’t recall ever seeing a skinhead in the flesh before 1978, save for intriguing pictures of Skrewdriver in the music press. Teddy boys, definitely - they were all over the place. There was indeed already a smattering of skinheads in their midst, but it was so small they had no real visibility at the time. Sham 69 started getting a strong following at the fag-end of the summer of 1977 – they were on the cover of the August-September issue of Sniffin’ Glue following the release of their first single. In a chapter devoted to the Roxy club circa 77, Viv mentions night buses being ‘full of skinheads and drunks’, which is highly unlikely. Either the date is wrong or he was listening to another record. I’ve just spotted an anecdote that supposedly took place in 1976 although Johnny Rotten is said to be listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot - an album that only came out the following year. Besides, it’s a personal memoir not a history book. The dates, however, are not always totally accurate, which, to be fair, is hardly surprising given the breakneck speed of change in those days. Well, I was thinking specifically of Viv Albertine’s memoir - possibly the best punk memoir ever published and a truly excellent book in its own right. You begin by taking issue with claims in “ certain punk memoirs, the streets of London, in 1977, were thronging with skinheads”? ‘Punk Is Dead’ editors Andrew Gallix (right) and Richard Cabut Stevo had a few less hang-ups about meeting a fully-fledged Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris to go over his new book Punk Is Dead (Zer0 Books), which in part deals with aspects of skinhead’s troubled history among punk.īut then Andrew Gallix, who also edits the eclectic and punked-up webzine 3:AM, was a little more gracious and even-handed than some of the book’s other contributors when it came to recounting his own experiences. It was no less than Garry Bushell himself who wrote of “dreading well-meaning graduates with crops and tailor-made crombies” in Sounds when he met with the teenaged members of ‘Skins Against the Nazis’ in 1978.