Attending Oi and punk gigs in Italy, it’s impossible not to encounter skinhead girl Dalila as she seems to be at all of them. A native of the Varese province in Lombardy, north Italy, she is also fronting her own band Ostile, who have been active since 2017 and have released the album Cresciuti In Fretta on the Milan label Rockout Fascism, known for releases by bands such as Zeman, Feccia Rossa and Les Trois Huit. Valentina Infrangibile spoke to her.
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French Oi has always had a special quality, hasn’t it? I first learned this when visiting family in my birth town Warsaw many moons ago and randomly buying a bootleg tape titled Son de la rue from a street market stall outside the Palace of Culture. It was the days of a flourishing black market, and on every street corner you’d find 4-Skins and Blitz pirate tapes democratically displayed alongside Metallica and Madonna ones. Son de la rue compiled some of the best cuts from the Chaos en France series – Komintern Sect, Snix, Camera Silens, you name it – and I’ve remained a fan of frog Oi ever since.
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Comrade – a band name that will ring familiar to historians of European Oi, especially those of a left-wing persuasion, but to few others. Formed in 1986 in the Belgian town of Antwerp, they went on to perform music based on classic British Oi, but with socialist sloganeering and ‘red’ imagery, across European stages until 1990. Last year, Mad Butcher Records released a retrospective compilation – but, although their former vocalist Klaas Vantomme remains a skinhead at heart, he has apparently mellowed out a lot politically, and reunion gigs seem to be off the cards. Girth spoke to him, and Matt Crombieboy sent him a couple of follow-up questions.
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Looking up the definition of ‘turbo’, a word that first emerged in the early twentieth century, we find multiple meanings, although it usually denotes something that is connected to turbines – e.g. a turbocharger, an aeronautic turboprop, etc. In the 80s, the term entered the lexicon of heavy metal to describe things that are unbelievably powerful – so powerful they may as well be driven by turbines. And so, a thrash band from the Polish People’s Republic simply christened itself TURBO. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Judas Priest issued their 1986 album Turbo Lover.
The 90s gave us Turbonegro of course, and more recently, a subgenre dubbed ‘Turbo Oi’ has emerged in Italy. One of the leading lights of the movement are Stiglitz from Genoa – a young group stepping into the illustrious footsteps of Gangland and many other local legends. Genoa, you must know, is one of the most important cities not only for the historical development of the world market, but also for the Italian skinhead scene.
Stiglitz were founded two years ago by Gianluca (vocals), Beppe (vocals), Alberto (guitar), Francesco (bass) and Martino (drums). Following up on their self-titled debut mini-album of 2020, they’ve just published a single called Tempi grammi on Flamingo Records. I’ve no idea if they’ll like hearing this, but the vibe reminds me somewhat of the first Skinkorps single, Une force, un hymne – or a more melodic version of it. Or maybe it’s just a more melodic version of the first Stiglitz album. Whatever the case, Valentina Infrangibile spoke one of their two vocalists, Gianluca.
By the way, 16 December will see the release of their new EP, Deja Vù.
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One thing I don’t like is when the small-scale music industry imitates the big music industry. It’s not the fact that people try to make some money to cover their expenses or pay their bills – that’s ok, we all need to live. The problem starts when everything becomes subordinated to ulterior ends. Oi bands from the continent that should be writing lyrics straight from the heart start to sing in bad English, hoping it will improve their chances of playing the festival circuit. Instead of expressing truthfully how they see the world in which they live, they rehash the most banal cliches they can think of: after all, if you leave it at commonplaces about ‘believing in yourself’ and ‘standing where others fall’ – basically the stuff that Mariah Carey songs are made of, but with gang vocals –, you won’t offend anybody.
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Someone posted this video on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, but since I can’t be sure that it will stay there, I added it to our own channel too. This is rough but, from my point of view, incredible footage that I’ve never seen before: Daily Terror live in Bingerbrück near Frankfurt in 1984 – so, about a year after Pedder Teumer’s transformation from punk to skinhead, and a few months before this line-up of the band split. As you can read in our Daily Terror band story, Pedder would go through a period of depression after the breakup, only to re-emerge with a new Daily Terror line-up the following year.
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How’s that for a bizarre band name? The nice folks of Maximum Labour Records who sent me this slab of vinyl are certainly Oi historians: they have unearthed and remastered the demo tapes of a band from Brussels that had donned a skinhead image years before it occurred to any other Belgian punk band to do likewise. As early as 1980, Buzz Buzz and the Common Oi were seen on Belgian stages with closely cropped hair and – customary among first-generation Oi bands from the continent – more or less improvised skinhead gear. That’s early if you consider that it took the Germans and the French another year or two to get there – ‘Oi! The Album’ had only just hit the shelves.
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It was 1980 in the centre of Cologne. The sign on the shop spelt ‘Rock-O-Rama: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rhythm & Blues, Punk’. Inside, small handfuls of teds and punks were swapping suspicious glances while trying to avoid each other – not easy in a room that couldn’t hold more than 10 people. The burly man behind the counter, well into his 30s and sporting a quiff, a tache with friendly mutton chops and white ankle boots, put a record on: the first production of his very own Rock-O-Rama label, Punks Are the Old Farts of Today by Vomit Visions. For once, the bewildered teds and punks were in agreement: this racket was completely unlistenable.
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Jeff Schoep was once described as ‘the most famous nazi in America’. From 1994-2019, he was the director of the National Socialist Movement, which – as names go – was one up from its forerunner organisation, the American Nazi Party (imagine a far-left organisation calling itself the ‘Commie Party of America’…). Schoep was a dedicated white supremacist for twenty-seven years.
Our writer Gareth Postans first became aware of Jeff in Deeyah Khan’s documentary ‘White Right: Meeting The Enemy‘. He saw a man who didn’t look completely convinced and came across as lost, but intelligent. It was his friendship with Khan that made him question his beliefs.
Jeff now runs Beyond Barriers, which is a non-profit organisation dedicated to a world devoid of ‘extremism’. Gareth asked him some questions via email, and he kindly replied very promptly. And because I have my issues with the catch-all term ‘extremism’ (which is why I’ve wrapped it in the most disdainful quote marks I could find), I sent him two follow-up questions to boot. Enjoy!
Matt Crombieboy
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Arguably, some chapters of skinhead history are best left forgotten but, conscientious historians that we are, we talk about them anyway. Today we want to find out: what is ‘möh’? The expression was often seen in German skinzines from the 80s, usually accompanied by drawings of bulldogs or super-skins.
If you listen to live recordings of German skinhead bands from about ‘84 or ‘85 onward, you’ll often come across this crowd chant:
That’s Daily Terror live in Schöppenstedt ’87, an event we have described at length elsewhere – and the chant you hear is spelled “möh, möh, möh” [phonetically: mø: mø: mø:]. It follows this simple melody:
Creases Like Knives 