The advantage of having parents who were born in the early 60's is that they were kids in the 70's with all the political reforms and feminism, teenagers in the 80's with the metamorphosis of fashion and Thatcherism and full adults at the turn of the century. They have been very useful in the fact they grew up and were actually friends with a lot of skinhead during the movement and as black-British people they had a great non-subjective view of the racial front of events I have asked for small little questions and there responses were very interesting and will moreover help me to fine tune my understanding of skinhead culture so I have a stronger background knowledge! I'm going to use my mother's information because it is primary so I'm getting it straight from the source.
I asked her a something vague about the fashion of the skinheads. Originating from Birmingham up in the Midlands the skinhead movement wasn't as extreme as it was down in London but like in all major cities of Great Britain there were youth who wished to express themselves in away they can especially in fashion. My mother said she very much enjoyed the fashion of the time and even died her hair orange to show some individuality! Through her eyes being a skinhead was just a bold fashion statement to start off with. There were no terrible connotations behind that word like we get now. There were different social sub-cultures that other people were apart of like mods and rude boys and Greebos and it wasn't an odd thing to see them all hanging out together because after all the were just mates. They had all grown up in the same areas and probably went to the same schools they just decided to go down a a different route. One of the most interesting things she said was "during the weeks you would pals with your skin head mates and you would you know joke around with them and you were just friends but come the weekend if you saw them hanging out with their other skinhead pals you wouldn't try be all friendly with them you would just give a chin-jut of recognition and walk on... it was the social norm" I find this amazing! That skinheads on their own where just normal people but once they got into groups you knew not to messed with them.
Some of the reason you should not mess with a group of skinheads is because together they were actually quite violent. They may have been perfectly nice people but when they all came together and you introduced alcohol and a chance to have some "fun" then they could turn into quite dangerous people. A few of the past times I was told about was p*** bashing where they would target local corner shops or establishments owned by Asiatic people. This actually tied in with what we saw in This is England so we see that's another way that skinhead culture started to turn violent. In other research into skinhead music is that originally they were very mellowed and liked to listened to Reggae music which is of course closely linked to black culture (especially Jamaican people which had a connection to marijuana) so we see that whole sub-culture start off as non-racist! Another violent past time that help to attribute to the skinhead stereotype of brutality was actually a lot to do with football hooliganism! My mother said it wasn't uncommon for skinheads to get drunk at football matches and cause trouble nor was it uncommon for them to have parties before or after football matches and get really hammered and cause trouble! Drugs and Alcohol didn't help with the fierce nature of a skinhead.
The last thing I asked her about was Masculinity within the skinhead community. She said that there was a huge following of being masculine especially again with fashion choices and the way they expressed themselves. Something that really stuck out to me was when she said she was jealous of the hairstyle that female skinheads wore. She said she would have loved to feel that cool and that it was a really popular way for girls to express themselves. I guess the whole masculine emphasis came from the feelings of wanting to be powerful. I can relate this to blackout by the way in which James once to be powerful to protect himself from bullying so he shaves his head to become more masculine thus more powerful!
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