Skinheads Revisited: Fear and Posing in Backstreet Britain It Was the Era of Ska and Skins, Punk and Race Riots

Art Youth culture Skinheads revisited: fear and posing in backstreet Britain It was the era of ska and skins, punk and race riots. Gavin Watson lived it and documented it. But what did the photographer find when he went in search of his old gang? By David James Smith Gavin Watson The photographer (left) was born in 1965 and grew up in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. His photographs of his skinhead friends became an inspiration and reference point for Shane Meadows’s 2006 fi lm, This is England. Watson makes a living today shooting for style magazines such as Vice. Right: with his then girlfriend, Kelley, on London Road in High 56 Wycombe in 1983 stm22056.indd56 2-3 The Sunday Times Magazine March 22, 2009 March 22, 2009 The Sunday Times Magazine 5711/3/09 17:58:34 Art ven now, 26 years later, Kelley can a lot of anger in him and in others around him. performance of The Prince on Top of the Pops. still remember how she looked, They were a family of sorts — a family of The music triggered a distant echo of the sounds the night she met Gavin. Her hair skinheads — and it seems that for many of them of Barrymore’s earliest memories, the ska tunes was orange — a bleach gone that family was a substitute for the dysfunctional played by his father. The name Madness was wrong, it had got her suspended home lives they were trying to escape. taken from a popular song by the Jamaican ska from school; she would later try to repair the With good reason, skinheads have come to be performer Prince Buster. The Prince, their fi rst error and send it cabbage-green instead — a associated with neo-Nazis and virulent racism, hit, was their homage to him. black leather miniskirt, a pink-and-black but the world that Gavin Watson occupied and Barrymore mostly grew up in a children’s leopardskin top. Kelley — pronounced as Keely — recorded was not so straightforward. While he is home in Micklefi eld, separated from his was 14, and her parents, her mum and stepdad, well aware of the extremist bigotry expressed by Anguillan mother and Antiguan father. His had specifi cally asked her to tone down her dress many skinheads, he is a passionate advocate for carers were white and he was, as he puts it, for the family party. It would be a boring party the view that there were antiracist skinheads too, “f***ed up and institutionalised”, but he full of very ordinary-looking people, she knew. that it was not about being right-wing, but being instinctively knew the music was West Indian of Just the thought of it was hell on earth to her. working class. His was the second wave of origin and belonged to him — an argument he Kelley’s natural father was Pakistani, but he skinheads, the fashion revival heralded by the would often have later when black friends had left her white mother while she was still a advent of the two-tone British ska bands such as accused him of betraying his culture by toddler. Her mother’s new boyfriend was white too. They lived in a village outside Slough, and Kelley Jones With good reason, skinheads have come to be associated Kelley’s whole world was white, her mixed-race Now a 40-year-old origins never mentioned, except by outsiders grandmother, Kelley with neo-Nazis and virulent racism. who taunted her with racist abuse: Paki. Paki. (above) still has pictures But it was not about being right wing, but being working class Paki. It was, she says, from the relative safety of that her then boyfriend 26 years, an incredibly diffi cult time. Nobody Gavin Watson took of her Madness and the Specials in the late 1970s. He becoming a skinhead. It’s our music, he would ever stood up for her and she never stood up for in 1983, during the remembers having his fi rst crop in 1979. Gavin’s say, it came from slavery, and skinheads have herself. She felt she was carrying her mother’s skinhead era (left). Her micro-landscape was the Micklefi eld housing kept it alive since the fi rst wave in the late 1960s. shame. She would rub her skin with a scrubbing mixed-race origins — half estate of east High Wycombe and Hatters Lane Because he lived in a children’s home and brush, or try to disguise it with talcum powder. white, half Pakistani — School, where he and others mixed freely across didn’t really have anyone looking out for him, The party, in the nearby town of High made Kelley a target of racial barriers. Barrymore George, now a DJ Barrymore could not initially buy the proper Wycombe, was just as she had imagined it, until racial abuse. But Watson and performer living in Brighton, was close to clothes. He remembers having to make do with this tall, imposing skinhead walked in. He wasn’t racist, or even right Gavin’s younger brother Neville, and remembers cutting the fl aps out of cheap fl ares to make stuck out like a sore thumb and Kelley made a wing. ‘The most common how their lives were defi ned by music from an them into drainpipes to match the Levi denims beeline for him, her boldness perhaps intensifi ed political bind we had was early age. One minute they were little teddy and Sta-Prest worn by others, such as his friend by her appearance, which served as a kind of that we all hated Maggie boys listening to Showaddywaddy, and the next Neville who embraced the look quickly and with mask behind which she could hide her Thatcher,’ he says they were being blown away by Madness’s style, even outdoing his older brother, Gavin. unhappiness and disguise her true self: Barrymore eventually caught up and had his “You gonna buy me a drink?” own small wardrobe of Fred Perry tops, Ben The next day, Gavin Watson borrowed a Sherman shirts with the button-down collars, a moped and drove to the village to see her. They Harrington jacket, a Crombie overcoat, a trilby went for a walk and he took photos of her, the hat, the right trousers and Doc Marten footwear. fi rst of hundreds over the 16 months they were The older you got, says Barrymore, the more anal together, as Gavin was an obsessive chronicler of you became about your appearance, especially the people around him, in those tribal days of the once impressing “birds” started to matter. late 1970s and early ’80s. He was just He was never into fi ghting, unlike some of the photographing his mates, he insists, and had no others, had no interest in what he calls the idea if the pictures were any good, or would soldiering, the heroics and the war stories of eventually, and deservedly, make him famous. being a skinhead. There were nights when it Kelley, with her punk style and her mohican all kicked off, but somehow he just managed to hair — she loved Siouxie Sioux — was a beautiful miss it, just as he survived while others around muse. She is 40 now, a grandmother, and more him got messed up by drink and drugs. overweight than she’d like, the prints of Gavin’s He and Felix, another frequent fi gure in photographs on her kitchen wall a reminder of Gavin’s photographs, used to sniff glue and drink the girl she once was, and the slim fi gure she will Symond Laws together from their early teens and would get never regain. But at least she is no longer living a Now a music promoter, absolutely slaughtered. Felix had been abused lie. Kelley never actually told Gavin she was half- Symond, 43, (above) from an early age, so maybe he was escaping Pakistani — she never told anyone until she was stages Oi! concerts in something, like so many others, but he kept on past 30 and had counselling — but he guessed Britain and America. Right: drinking and, according to Barrymore, in the end anyway, and as he drew her into his world she Symond (left) and his his liver gave out and Felix died at 19. His funeral felt accepted for who she was and protected too friend Felix give the Nazi in High Wycombe was massive, like a skinhead- from the racism she’d been suffering back home. salute on the Micklefi eld and-punk convention. Gavin remembers someone coming up to him housing estate in 1980. There have been other subsequent deaths, once and saying: “I hear you’re going out with a ‘They were just mucking none of them pretty, and none uglier than that of Paki?” Bam. He decked them, as he puts it. “Did about,’ insists Watson. ‘We Stuart Horgan, remembered by some as sweet- 58 ya?” Gavin’s fuse was short back then. There was were uneducated then’ natured, but, by most accounts, a ferocious, a 59 stm22058.indd58 4-5 The Sunday Times Magazine March 22, March 22, 2009 The Sunday Times Magazine 5911/3/09 17:38:25 Art deeply disturbed young man who became Neville Watson punk spin-off for those who considered punk too increasingly out of control. He was one of a Gavin Watson’s younger art school, and was only later hijacked by bigots. select group of Gavin’s friends who shared the brother, 39 (below), runs Two young boys give a Sieg Heil salute in one small tattoo in the centre of the palm of their independent record labels picture of Gavin’s.

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