Under Their Skins

Skinheads created one of the most striking youth movements  in Britain, and it was primarily defined by terror and racism. But beneath the shaved heads and steel-capped boots lay a more complex reality.

The Observer, April 2007

For a while in the late Sixties and early Eighties, Britain fostered a youth cult so iconic in its imagery, and so threatening in its pose, that we remain ashamed of it decades later. Steel-capped boots and jeans with back pockets shaped by sharpened metal combs: that was the look, all aggravation and bristle, the terror at station platforms and football terraces and corner shops. Fashion is about many things – money, humiliation, fitting in and sticking out – but until skinheads showed up it was rarely about menace.

And now the menace is back, as unfashionable as ever and ripe for rehabilitation. There aren’t so many skinheads on British streets any more, and, like punk, the cult has been exported, occasionally with comic results, to Europe, the United States and the Far East. But new interest is emerging – an exhibition, the reissue of classic books, and a striking film called This Is England, the latest work from director Shane Meadows. The movie, a classic rites-of-passage saga, is most memorable for its performances and its look, and for the near-perfect recreation of the oddest of cults. It is the first truly empathetic skinhead film that neither glorifies nor condemns the tribe, and places its conflicts of comradeship, masculinity, music, hormones and extreme-right politics in a fully realised setting, the summer of 1983, with Britain searching for identity in the shadow of the Falklands and Margaret Thatcher’s tireless dismantling of community. If you lived through it, you will recognise it.

You may not, however, recognise the humanity of its subjects. These days, the word skinhead can conjure images only of hatred and racism, but that is our problem. How it came to be a problem is instructive, and tells us something about the power of imagery, and the nature of our prejudices.

‘Skinhead’s a way of life, a culture I live by,’ says a present-day skinhead called Pan on the website skinheadnation.com (‘A true family of brothers and sisters that spans the globe’). ‘It’s about having pride in the way I look, it’s about working for my living, earning everything I get. It’s about the second family I have with my mates on the street, about being true to the values that I learnt, the honour code. It’s the truest culture because you’re talking about the real people, the working people, the poor people. To outsiders, we represent the scum of the earth, but we know better. We know that we are the part of the greatest youth cult of all time, and nobody can ever take that away from us. It really is us against the world, and as we know all too well the world doesn’t stand a chance.’

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