![]() In 78-79 there were also quite a few punks with skinhead-style crops, so there was a lot of overlapping and ambiguity. As I write in the book, I can’t recall ever seeing a skinhead in the flesh before 1978, save for intriguing pictures of Skrewdriver in the music press. Teddy boys, definitely - they were all over the place. There was indeed already a smattering of skinheads in their midst, but it was so small they had no real visibility at the time. Sham 69 started getting a strong following at the fag-end of the summer of 1977 - they were on the cover of the August-September issue of Sniffin’ Glue following the release of their first single. In a chapter devoted to the Roxy club circa 77, Viv mentions night buses being ‘full of skinheads and drunks’, which is highly unlikely. Either the date is wrong or he was listening to another record. I’ve just spotted an anecdote that supposedly took place in 1976 although Johnny Rotten is said to be listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot - an album that only came out the following year. Besides, it’s a personal memoir not a history book. The dates, however, are not always totally accurate, which, to be fair, is hardly surprising given the breakneck speed of change in those days. Well, I was thinking specifically of Viv Albertine’s memoir - possibly the best punk memoir ever published and a truly excellent book in its own right. You begin by taking issue with claims in “certain punk memoirs, the streets of London, in 1977, were thronging with skinheads”? Stevo had a few less hang-ups about meeting a fully-fledged Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris to go over his new book Punk Is Dead (Zero Books), which in part deals with aspects of skinhead’s troubled history among punk.īut then Andrew Gallix, who also edits the eclectic and punked-up webzine 3:AM, was a little more gracious and even-handed than some of the book’s other contributors when it came to recounting his own experiences. It was no less than Garry Bushell himself who wrote of ‘dreading well-meaning graduates with crops and tailor-made crombies’ in Sounds when he met with the teenaged members of ‘Skins Against the Nazis’ in 1978. Punk Bashing Time: An Interview with Andrew Gallix Andrew Stevens interviewed me for Creases Like Knives, 16 September 2017:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |