Author of a history on Rock Against Racism and all that came after, followed up by the co-written autobiography with The Beat’s Ranking Roger, Daniel Rachel has made a name for himself as a devoted chronicler and authority on the 2 Tone era. His latest, Too Much Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story is out now. It may well be the same old show, but Stevo just had to tune in to hear more about punks, teds, National Front, natty dreads, mods, rockers, hippies and… skin-heads!
When we last spoke you’d just covered the tricky gamut of music and politics from Rock Against Racism through 2 Tone to Red Wedge. Is this a book you’d always wanted to write before then and the Beat book or a natural progression from them? I can only think of George Marshall’s and Garry Bushell’s collected writings from the time which came out not long back.
There has never been a comprehensive book on the 2 Tone label beyond George Marshall’s one in the early 90s. That was great, but thin. So yes, I’ve always wanted to write the 2 Tone Records Story, but the timing was as much to do with getting Jerry Dammers on side.
What Have We Got? The Turbulent Story Of Oi! by Simon Spence (Omnibus Press 2023)
This is the heartwarming story of a journalist who, having written extensively about britpop, discovers and falls in love with Oi. Now Simon Spence is spreading the good news about skinhead rock to a whole new audience – and so, his book is very much pitched towards those who have discovered the genre even more recently than he did. Spence’s opening sentences are: “A definitive history of Oi!? Yes and no”. Serious historians don’t do definitive, not even a hedged definitive.[1]
Important progenitor: Gary Lammin
There is a foreword by Cock Sparrer founder Gary Lammin, and the book concludes with a chapter on Lammin’s old band, among other things. This sets Cock Sparrer up as the founding fathers of Oi. However, Spence begins with a chapter entitled ‘The New Breed: Crown Court’. Lots of people like Crown Court, but for me the band’s name was almost enough to put me off ever listening to them. The name is shared with a really boring and thankfully now defunct TV show. That isn’t why the band took the name, but anyone my age who grew up in the UK is likely to make the association. What next? Oi bands called things like Strictly Come Dancing and Good Morning Britain? Incidentally, ‘the new breed’ is a phrase I first came across in Richard Allen skinhead novels when I was reading them in the 1970s, but there’s no mention of that here.
Moving on, there is a delve into Oi precursors, including Sham 69, Menace and Angelic Upstarts. Spence opts for a very conventional view of the bands that inspired Oi, despite the fact that genres evolve and their boundaries change. He very much works with a pre-existing template on the origins of Oi and seems uninterested in broadening this out. Nonetheless, what some early Oi musicians enjoyed musically went way beyond this narrow range of influences.
Spence doesn’t mention west London band Neat Change, who had members geared up as skinheads back in 1967![2] Or, indeed, any of the far-out bootboy glam outfits who paved the way for punk – and with this, you could go all the way back to tunes like ‘Factory Grime’ by Crushed Butler. There are some lines in the book about the influence of dystopian tales such as 1984, Brave New World and Clockwork Orange on Oi culture. From this, it could be argued that some minor league London punk bands such as The Unwanted – whose simplistic vinyl releases included ‘Freedom’ (on the first Live At The Roxy LP), ‘Secret Police’ and ‘1984’ – were also precursors to Oi.
Menace: Prog, Punk, Skinheads & Serendipity by Paul Marko (Punk 77 Books)
Menace were a classic four man late-seventies punk group. That said, the fact they had an Islington-based Canadian singer was slightly unusual for a London band of the time. Vocalist Morgan Webster was not only a great frontman, with his eye makeup and flamboyant dress he looked way more punk than the rest of Menace. That said, I preferred the real and ordinary dressed-down look sported by the majority of the band, although I can also understand why Paul Marko has opted to use a picture of the band’s singer on the cover of his book. The group created a great racket that was one of the earliest manifestations of what became known as street punk.
A new three-novella collection of uncensored, unapologetic tales for our conservative conformist times, The View From Poacher’s Hill is the second instalment in an ongoing collaboration between the authors Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King. Following The Seal Club, published at the end of 2020, Poacher’s Hill features Warner’s ‘Migration’, Welsh’s ‘In Real Life’ and King’s ‘Grand Union’. And kicking off the last of these stories is Skinheads’ own Nutty Ray English, fresh from King’s new novel London Country. Set in the autumn of 2021, Grand Union finds Ray at peace with the world. But trouble is on its way…
And to some, it was – but to many, myself included, choosing your own haircut was a rite of passage. I was around 11 years old when I begged my mum to let me go to the barbers and get a crop. Up until then she had cut my hair herself, most certainly through necessity rather than any penny-pinching. She was a single mum bringing up two kids in a flat above a row of shops. My clothes came from jumble sales. It took a lot of pleading and whining, but she eventually relented and off I went to the barbers expecting to be transformed in to Suggs’s lovechild, but that’s a whole other story.
It is easy to forget that in the late 1970s, early 80s, you could still be sent home from school for daring to turn up with hair shorn too short. A mohican or dyed hair would almost certainly have got you suspended until you agreed to comply with school dress code. Yet in some weird way, it is exactly because these boundaries and rules were in place and enforced that this period of time is so memorable. I have been asked why my novels, Too Much Too Young and Feathers, are set in the period that they are. It’s really simple. It’s a time I am familiar with and one that, rightly or wrongly, I am very fond of. For myself and many, this period was our first dipping of our wicks in to the exciting world of music, fashion, social freedoms and autonomy.
It’s fair to say you’ve made it in your writing career when your books are as anticipated as those of John King (The Football Factory), who as the saying goes needs no introduction to any sussed reader (though this is a good start). London Country (London Books, 2023) is a familiar canter through King’s authorly hinterland of West London (“Herbert Manor”), not only spliced and infused with more punk references than you could shake a mic stand at but revisiting three of his most popular and successful ‘cycle’ novels, Human Punk, White Trash and Skinheads.
London Country centres on familiar characters from those earlier novels, their personal crises and brushes with the judicial system, collapsing healthcare and occasionally boss sounds on tape and vinyl. Readers will be pleased to know that skinhead cabbie Hawkins makes an appearance amid the ruminations on the state of the nation, as Brexit hurtles from pinstriped gentlemen’s clubs and electoral fringe politics into daily life (King was once a leading light in the ‘Lexit’ No2EU coalition of trade unionists). Working class history writer and original skinhead Martin Knight was on hand to hear more.
The British comic strip Skin – conceived and drawn by Brendan McCarthy, written by Peter Milligan and coloured by Carol Swain – was commissioned by Fleetway Publications, who intended to publish it in Crisis magazine in 1990. The story revolved around Martin Atchet, a young skinhead whose arms are malformed from birth. Like so many real-life children in the 50s and 60s, the Martin character is born deformed because his pregnant mother is prescribed thalidomide, an anti-nausea drug whose effects on pregnant women are not properly tested.
Due to the raw and potentially controversial subject matter, the publishers soon changed their minds and withdrew their offer, however, and Milligan and McCarthy’s splendid work remained in limbo until 1992, when Kevin Eastman – co-creator of the Ninja Turtles alongside Peter Laird – finally made it available to the public via Tundra Publishing.
In Italy, Skin was published in three parts in Tank Girl magazine, namely from November ‘95 to February ‘96, and this original Italian edition is quite difficult to find. However, Hellnation Libri are now issuing a new Italian edition, edited and translated by Flavio Frezza (of Garageland magazine). For this interview, Flavio and the skinhead artist Alessandro Aloe (of Moriarty Graphics) had a chat with Brendan McCarthy, who like his co-author Peter Milligan was a skinhead in the very early 70s.
This interview was originally published in Italian on the Crombie Media blog.
Scorcha! Skins, Suedes and Style From The Streets 1967-1973by Paul ‘Smiler’ Anderson and Mark Baxter (Omnibus Press, 2021)
With words and images, Scorcha! sets out to document one strand of UK working class youth culture in the pre-punk era. The pictures provide a far more accurate depiction of late-sixties and early-seventies street style than slick fashion photos using models, stylists, make-up artists and professional photographers ever could. There are a slew of previously unpublished photos of ordinary kids all pilled up and with only a handful of places to go. Some of those in the pictures have also been interviewed – alongside a few pop personalities ranging from former BBC Radio One DJ Emperor Rosko to mod revivalist Paul Weller. Alongside this, there is record art and other promotional schlock I’ve seen before, but it provides needed context.
Packing a Punch is that rare thing: a documentation of 80s British skinzines completely without celtic crosses or crude drawings of glue-addled ‘super skins’. And it isn’t a coffee-table book either. Instead, it’s brogues, Jaytex and razor partings all over – the focus is on what the author considered the rightful heir of the original skinhead, namely the ‘sussed skin’ of the 1980s. This scene, from which George Marshall also emerged, was based around zines such as Spy Kids, The Bovver Boot, Tighten Up and The Suedehead Times. And the little book at hand that guides us through their evolution is a kind of zine too, written by someone who was part of it all. He’s still around today and as committed as ever.
The history kicks off with Skins, the original croptop zine edited by a Chelsea FC and Sham Army skin named John Smith from late ‘79 or early ‘80 – the exact date is hard to establish – and printed by the Last Resort shop in the East End. While reporting on contemporary stuff such as the Southall ‘81 riot, Skins also had an acute sense of tradition: there was always room for Motown, reggae and original skinhead history in its pages. Skins ran for five issues, the contents of which are all listed individually – a treatment awarded to all zines discussed in Packing a Punch.
No Jeans! No Greens! No Casuals! London Scooter Clubs 1979-1985 Roger Allen, Old Dog Publishing 2020
Driving a scooter through London wearing a parka in 1980/81 was seen by other youth cults as a provocative gesture. It was seen as an invitation to violence by skinheads, casuals and bikers that roamed the same streets. Soon these scooter-riding mods banded together in clubs united by a shared interest in scooters, as well as fashion and music, to present a united front against their enemies.
After visits up North, on scooter runs to Scarborough, a lot of these clubs started to drop the mod fashion and picked up on the scooter boy look of the Northern clubs. Many London mods didn’t get it and banned scooter boys from their venues with signs proclaiming ‘No Jeans!, No Greens!, No Casuals!’ in other words no scooter boys.
Roger Allen spent two years interviewing over 60 members of the clubs that existed within the London area between 1979 and 1985. The A23 Crusaders and The Paddington, The Wasps and The Viceroys, The Nomads and the Virgin Soldiers and all the 80 scooter clubs that made up this scene. Andrew Stevens spoke to him about the 337-pages strong result.
Creases Like Knives 