The skinhead revival came in with a darker shadow. 'Paki bashing', though not confined to skinheads, was prevalent, a gang mentality fuelled by unemployment and deprivation. And there was a fatal link with the Oi! movement, a fiercely working-class, predominantly East End collection of bands including the Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts, Skrewdriver, the Last Resort and the 4-Skins. These were not media-friendly groups, and their confused disaffection swiftly transformed them - in the public eye at least - into a musical version of Alf Garnett: nationalistic, defensive, bunkered in with a victim mentality. Racist clashes marred several shows, a skinhead with a swastika appeared on the cover of a compilation album, and it became difficult to think of Oi! as anything beyond the soundtrack to the National Front. Many of the bands swung completely the other way - anti-racist, pro-Communist - but skinheads have always struggled with public relations. So Top Shop never embraced their wardrobe the way it did punk and the new romantics; the bigger bands skinheads followed, including Madness and Sham 69, were swift to disown them as soon as they became successful. In many ways, this was ideal; no one liked them and they didn't care, or at least they didn't care until they couldn't move without police searches and accusations that they were all Nazis.
Shane Meadows' film shares its title with an astute essay by the cultural critic Dick Hebdige. Its full title, This Is England And They Don't Live Here, comes from a comment made by an East London skin called Mickey, a quote that began with the classic line, 'Don't get me wrong - I've got a lot of coloured friends. And they're decent people. But they've got their own culture. The Pakistanis have a culture, it's thousands of years old. But where's our culture? Where's the British culture?'
Hebdige confirms that the stripped-down skinhead style was as self-conscious and studied as anything that had preceded it. 'Just watch the way a skinhead moves. There is a lot of lapel twitching. The head twists out as if the skin is wearing an old-fashioned collar that's too tight for comfort.' He observed the cigarette tip turned inwards in the palm, brought down from the mouth in an exaggerated arc. He saw them always 'jumping out of the frame', alert to provocation and eager to defend what little they had (and what they perceived was being taken from them by Asians and other immigrants.)
These days Hebdige is a professor in the art and film studies departments at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and now he equates the stance adopted by skinheads in the late Seventies with a more recent phenomenon. 'In the end,' he tells me by email, 'I think it's about humiliation, to be frank: the matrix of humiliation is an obvious but all too often neglected condition that's driving many of the more violent/extreme contemporary cultural and political phenomena in our era. I don't think you can understand what motivates a Palestinian suicide bomber any more than you can a blood and honour Asian-stomping skin without taking humiliation into account as a major motivating factor.'
Hebdige supports a theory put forward by the East End youth worker Phil Cohen: the original skinheads from the Sixties hankered for a traditionalist prewar Britain and the working-class lifestyle of their fathers, distantly wary of the new European alliances that threatened a magnificent isolation. In the second wave, nostalgia for a golden age was replaced by a desire to shock and bully, and to drink and laugh.
Hebdige says that these days 'the style tends to look more like part of an international white power movement, though I may be wrong. It may well be a lot more complicated than that, but it's certainly more difficult in 2007 than it was a few decades ago to adopt the skinhead style "innocently", that is, without invoking the equation most everybody nowadays - white and non-white people alike - makes between skins and right-wing racist activism. Spectacular youth subcultures are all about bending signs this way or that, but my sense is you'd have to be really determined, really smart and really perverse nowadays to set out to appropriate skin style for something other than a xeno-homo-non-white-phobic ideology.
Simon Garfield on skinheads in photography and film | Review | The Observer: "Getting under their skins"
Shane Meadows' film shares its title with an astute essay by the cultural critic Dick Hebdige. Its full title, This Is England And They Don't Live Here, comes from a comment made by an East London skin called Mickey, a quote that began with the classic line, 'Don't get me wrong - I've got a lot of coloured friends. And they're decent people. But they've got their own culture. The Pakistanis have a culture, it's thousands of years old. But where's our culture? Where's the British culture?'
Hebdige confirms that the stripped-down skinhead style was as self-conscious and studied as anything that had preceded it. 'Just watch the way a skinhead moves. There is a lot of lapel twitching. The head twists out as if the skin is wearing an old-fashioned collar that's too tight for comfort.' He observed the cigarette tip turned inwards in the palm, brought down from the mouth in an exaggerated arc. He saw them always 'jumping out of the frame', alert to provocation and eager to defend what little they had (and what they perceived was being taken from them by Asians and other immigrants.)
These days Hebdige is a professor in the art and film studies departments at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and now he equates the stance adopted by skinheads in the late Seventies with a more recent phenomenon. 'In the end,' he tells me by email, 'I think it's about humiliation, to be frank: the matrix of humiliation is an obvious but all too often neglected condition that's driving many of the more violent/extreme contemporary cultural and political phenomena in our era. I don't think you can understand what motivates a Palestinian suicide bomber any more than you can a blood and honour Asian-stomping skin without taking humiliation into account as a major motivating factor.'
Hebdige supports a theory put forward by the East End youth worker Phil Cohen: the original skinheads from the Sixties hankered for a traditionalist prewar Britain and the working-class lifestyle of their fathers, distantly wary of the new European alliances that threatened a magnificent isolation. In the second wave, nostalgia for a golden age was replaced by a desire to shock and bully, and to drink and laugh.
Hebdige says that these days 'the style tends to look more like part of an international white power movement, though I may be wrong. It may well be a lot more complicated than that, but it's certainly more difficult in 2007 than it was a few decades ago to adopt the skinhead style "innocently", that is, without invoking the equation most everybody nowadays - white and non-white people alike - makes between skins and right-wing racist activism. Spectacular youth subcultures are all about bending signs this way or that, but my sense is you'd have to be really determined, really smart and really perverse nowadays to set out to appropriate skin style for something other than a xeno-homo-non-white-phobic ideology.
Simon Garfield on skinheads in photography and film | Review | The Observer: "Getting under their skins"
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