Читать книгу Booted and Suited - Chris Brown - Страница 17
ОглавлениеMany of those who managed to avoid getting their heads kicked in no doubt moved on to become the hard mods, the cropheads and the skinheads as the years progressed. As the Sixties ended and the Seventies began, the skinhead style, once firmly identified, tagged and analysed by the British media as Adge had recalled, lost its harshness somewhat and, in the absence of style guides and fashion bibles (The Face was a decade away), the young doe-eyed wannabe skinheads had to rely on the good old Daily and Sunday Mirror for updates on what the bad boys of London were wearing. Under headlines such as AGGRO: THE CULT OF THE BOVVER BOYS, BOOT-IN DOWNWATER LANE and the insightful ‘DOWN AMONG THE BOVVER BOYS’ the tabloids ranted, raved but finally admitted that ‘away from trouble, they are so normal’.
Harry ‘the Spider’ Carrock, an 18-year-old ex-Hells Angel and carpet-layer who claimed his nickname was given to him because when he put the boot in it looked like he had eight legs, got a full-page exposé complete with moody photo, while a grim-looking skinhead complete with sheepskin coat, braces and Sta-Prest got the artist’s impression look alongside the meaningless subhead ‘LEVI’S, CLIP-ON BRACES AND BOOTS’. The military hardware of the previous years was disappearing rapidly – this newer, more stylish look was seized upon by the fashion industry with high-street stores up and down the country rushing to fill their shelves and racks with ever more colourful Sta-Prests, Fair Isle sweaters and gingham button-down check shirts. The aforementioned Brutus Gold in particular, successfully competed with the more expensive Ben Shermans in bringing out ever more colourful patterns and designs. The cult was now becoming a fashion, reaching back to its mod origins to cherry-pick its favourite stock. Crombie overcoats as favoured by the rude boys, Loake loafers, Baracutta ‘Harrington’ golfing jackets and the cool constant of street style, the Fred Perry polo shirt, were to become compulsory wear over the next year or so. But, while the look was changing, the attitude was not. While the rest of the world knew nothing of this ever-so-secret British street club with its penchant for city-gent attire and American college-boy class, its membership grew by the week to become the epitome of working-class pride and fury. Short hair, short tempers and a love of one’s country – it was to become a deadly combination.
As the Seventies progressed, Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. Unemployment and class, as well as race-conflict, came to the fore. The dregs of the skinhead movement descended into a bitter pit of bigotry and hatred, forever to be remembered, rather harshly, as the ‘Oi’-loving tattooed racists of a decade later. As George Marshall, the skinhead historian, put it in the excellent Spirit of ’69 – A Skinhead Bible, ‘In the national horror league, skinheads weigh in somewhere between serial killers and devil dogs. It’s as if shaving your head and lacing up a pair of DMs turns you into some sort of dangerous alien life form.’
These Never boys may have been tough but ‘alien life forms’ they weren’t. These were the lads who skanked and sang along to ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, the lads who raised Desmond Dekker to number 1 in the charts and the same lads who lined up alongside the West Indian youths to fight the swastika-clad Hells Angels on the streets of Bristol during that red-hot summer of 1969.
So what brought about the demise of the Never? Not surprisingly, the Never’s decline mirrored that of the skinheads themselves – any street cult worth its salt has a life-span of just three to four years and so, by the end of 1971, the cult of the skinhead was on the wane. The skinhead movement was no different to that of the mod and, in later years, the punk. By the time the cult went mainstream and the media and the schoolkids had discovered it, the instigators of it all were hanging up their boots, growing their hair and the cult was dying an ignominious death, only to be resurrected a few years later as a crude parody of its former glorious life.
On top of that, the law were at last getting organised and managing to keep a lid on the trouble, at the seaside resorts at any rate. When the bovver boys invaded Weston yet again on the Easter Monday of 1971, the law were waiting and ‘Operation Skinhead’ went into operation. The plan was simple: stop and search every youth on their arrival at the station, relieve them of their weaponry – boots, knives, studded belts, plastic hoses filled with lead, steel combs and knuckle-dusters – and break them up into small manageable groups and move them on their way. Throughout the day, only ten arrests were made.
The operation was deemed a great success as many of the skinheads left early and headed back to Bristol minus their weapons. ‘The police made things very tough for us,’ one 18-year-old beltless, combless skinhead from Bristol claimed.
He got off lightly. Seventy or so miles away, as the seagull flies, across the Bristol Channel I was getting my head stoved in by Swansea skinheads. Perhaps I should have gone to Weston and strolled along the prom, prom, prom with my mates, with or without my boots.
One of the other reasons that the Easter weekend was relatively quiet in Weston, if not Swansea, may have been because the skinheads’ old enemy, the Hells Angels, made a detour and headed for the small Somerset town of Axbridge where 70 of them, mainly from London, gatecrashed a dance at the village hall where they terrorised the locals, forcing them to flee as both male and female members of the gang began to strip naked. They obviously weren’t used to that Somerset scrumpy and those Adge Cutler songs.
The last great invasion of Weston by the Bristol boot boys was the August Bank Holiday of 1971 when the same tactics were used as the previous Easter. For the first time in nearly three years, instead of reporting the violence, the Evening Post was able to smugly declare: PEACE AT SEASIDE AS YOUTHS ARE FRISKED. Only four youths were arrested and, as well as the usual array of weapons being confiscated, the first instance of ‘umbrellas with sharpened tips’ was reported. The skinheads were on their last legs. The smoothies were on the march, and waiting just around the corner were all those multicoloured tank tops and ludicrous platform shoes; the decade that fashion forgot was entering an even scarier stage.
Bob Feltham remembered the dying days of the skinhead movement. ‘Towards the end of these days, I went into my “new” era, grew my hair and I started to frequent Tiffany’s with some of my close friends and met new friends who were students and living in Clifton.’ This in itself shows just how far the lads had moved on – hanging round with students? How low could they go?
Bob continued, ‘Rick Markham became a close friend and Rick and I took over running the disco at the Fisherman’s Wharf on the Triangle, later to become Shades. It was after this time that many of the old crew moved away from town and started frequenting the Clifton clubs, culminating in the best club ever to exist in Bristol, Platform One, where I have also DJ’d on the odd occasion. It was here that I met my wife-to-be, Caroline, and the rest, as they say, is now history.’ Indeed, quite a history. As the song by the late Ernie K Doe goes, ‘Here come the girls’.
The vast majority of the clientele of the Never were lads – at times, it resembled a high-octane boys club, oozing with testosterone with more alpha males on display than your average gladiator movie. Not surprisingly, this attracted the girls like moths to a flame – some of them embraced the skinhead cult themselves, if not in the violent behaviour then certainly in the fashion stakes, with many of them wearing Ben Shermans, Levi jeans and, in some cases, boots. They may not have resorted to the males’ aggressive behaviour, but it was not unknown for the girls to conceal the lads’ weapons in their handbags on their visits to the seaside.
‘Flange’, Mary, Jo, the twins – Mary and Sue – were all remembered with affection by some of the guys I interviewed. Some, like the unfortunately monikered ‘Line-up Liz’, more so than others. One of the interviewees recalled how often a couple would disappear out the back door of the café to appear a ‘few minutes later with the knees on the lad’s jeans all white’ – you can only guess that they weren’t out there to discuss the merits of Motown Chartbusters Volume 3, the first compilation album to get to number 1 in the charts in February 1970.
Of course, the fairer sex have always calmed the savage brow and the girls of the Never were no exception – not that the boys changed their behaviour overnight. The violence on Bristol’s streets continued but the Never café itself lost its appeal. There’s a rather obvious reason for this – most of the lads from the Never were just teenagers. The very reason for them using the café in the first place was because they couldn’t get into pubs and, once they could, alcohol and the company of the fairer sex exerted a far stronger pull than a bottle of Coke, a pinball machine or one of Jim’s Viennese steaks.
From the café, they moved on to the previously mentioned pubs and clubs, often meeting up with their newly acquired ‘birds’, by the map, the favoured meeting place for young Bristolians in the city centre outside the Victorian toilets. Of course, if you weren’t so ‘flushed’, the lads would arrange to meet the girls inside a club. ‘That way, you didn’t have to pay to get them in,’ chuckled Lloyd on remembering the days when he first started ‘courting’.
As stated previously, the café closed down for good in 1974. Jim Jr moved to London where, among other things, he got into the clothing business. He lived there for a number of years but returned to his home town to work back in cafés and eventually to open up the Roma restaurant and Bar Celona club where the old Never boys held their reunion.
The boys themselves, in the main, have changed their ways. Most of them are happily married, many to girls they met in the Never; many are fathers; some are grandfathers; quite a few are successful businessmen and entrepreneurs; several run their own companies. One I interviewed drives a Rolls-Royce, and at least one is a millionaire. Very few, if any, turned out to be career criminals.
Not surprisingly, few of them have real regrets of those days. They hold their heads up; to them, there’s no stigma about being labelled an original skinhead, far from it. ‘The best days of their lives,’ many of them stated.
Even before the reunion at Jim’s club, many of them kept in touch; the camaraderie has continued over the years and they regularly meet up with their wives for meals, even taking family holidays together.
A café of sorts still stands in Fairfax Street, a tired, sad little establishment called the Soup and Sandwich. No longer do the top boys of Bristol frequent it; no longer are Trojan and Motown classics blasted out from the jukebox; and no longer are Lambrettas and Vespas lined up outside earning admiring looks. Like the Top Rank, the Locarno and the adrenalin-filled trips to the coast in Barney’s fruit wagon, the Never on Sunday café has gone but, as one of those proud boys said, ‘The Never café – never beaten, never bettered, never forgotten’.
As the lads who frequented the Never moved on, skinny little suedeheads like me moved in. Personally, I never frequented the café – I was too young, too small and, truth be told, too scared. The football terrace was to be my stomping ground, for the next decade or so anyway.
It was now my time… and my story.
