![]() Instead he seeks out a near illiterate skinhead called Harry. This doesn’t deter him from emphasising right wing elements and making no mention at all of oi!’s well established socialist/radical tradition. Even Dickhead is forced to admit that most skins, like most working class kids, are apolitical. But while other music is judged by tunes and lyrical content, oi! is judged by its unwanted minority element of fans. A kid got stabbed at a Black Uhuru gig a day later, yet somehow that wasn’t another one of our monsters, even though we cover more reggae than any other rock paper. Oi! was always for skins, punks and herberts – it was united by class not fashion.Īnd contrary to Dickheads hideously distorted history, the trouble that marred early oi! in London wasn’t political but rival football gangs! Undeterred by facts, he goes on to assert that Southall was our Frankenstein’s monster. The compilations were a showcase/platform for working class bands FULL STOP. Modesty prevents.īut modesty doesn’t prevent me making one thing clear – I compiled the oi! albums to give good punk bands a hearing. Especially when you also recall which paper gave the most coverage to this sensational street movement. In contrast, 2 Tone showed how anti racism really works, but 2 Tone isn’t mentioned because it would destroy Dickheads case. I attacked RAR because RAR failed, it threw away its working class base and became a middle class toy. Socialism used to (and should still) stand for working people and HONESTY – no wonder today’s feeble petite-bourgeois ‘commies’ fail to relate to working class kids. People like Militant are thoroughly machiavellian. He makes great play of my disgust at ‘machiavellian middle class communists’, failing to mention that this was written more than a year after he claims it was. Presumably we should have covered Stockhausen to lose sales. Sounds covered oi! to boost our circulation, he claims, thus demonstrating as much knowledge of market research as a Durex salesman in a nunnery. NME’s support for RAR is documented, Sounds historic Anti Nazi League issue isn’t mentioned. I used to buy them all because they all covered punk. What did the NME do for punk? Caroline Coon in Melody Maker and John Ingram in Sounds covered punk first Parsons and Burchill who covered it best came slightly later(and fighting the NME establishment all the way), but they were matched column inch for column inch by Savage and Suck in Sounds. Just as Columbus discovered what the Indians already knew about, so the kids and bands were already there! Do these cretins really believe the Sham armies, the UK Subs fans and the legions of hardcore punks and skins disappeared overnight because the NME declared punk dead? The various strands of new punk were there for anyone to see and we covered them alone (like we covered early Ruts/SLF/Skids etc alone) because we were there too! What was the Upstarts/Subs/Rejects/Ruts/Splodge on Top of the Pops? Scotch mist?ĭickhead claims Sounds tried to do for oi! what NME did for punk. How little does he know about ANYTHING!Īccording to this dork, oi! was ‘invented’, presumably the same way Columbus ‘invented’ America. Needless to say it’s superficially impressive garbage involving a distortion of history of Stalin/Goebbels proportions.įor starters, how could any consideration of skins dismiss Sham 69 and 2 Tone in a matter of lines? Answer: only if it wanted to write all skinheads off as thick idiots! And of course, because Dickhead doesn’t want to waste time before getting stuck into oi! and Sounds. No, what gets up my nose is an unpleasant slug called Dick Hebdige who purports to offer a sociological guide to skinheads. But its not him that bothers me, or the fashion notes, or Harry Hawkes fine discography of reggae of the ’69 kind. Knight, you may recall, was the creep who flogged the News of the World-shock horror pictures last year and there’s plenty of evidence of his sensationalist skills here (snapping pre-teen kids sieg heiling demonstrates the sort unflinching dedication to duty that’s bound to secure him future employment on scummy Fleet street). Don’t all yawn at once at the arrival of skinhead by Nick Knight, a self-styled ‘complete skin history’. ‘ANOTHER BOOK ON SKINHEADS hits the streets with all the impact of a punctured dunkie hurled at a sleeping rhino by a crippled pensioner. A passionate defence of skinhead culture by GARRY BUSHELL.
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