Been a while since you heard from us, hasn’t it? Last December, we celebrated what had been an exceptionally productive year for Creases Like Knives. Then, as if to undermine any hopes we’d become a ‘proper’, ‘professional’, or regular publication, we only gave you one article in the whole first four months of 2024. The truth is precisely this: we aren’t professionals, nobody’s paying us, and we just happened to have lots on our plate lately. One thing’s for sure: Creases Like Knives isn’t ceasing operations – I think in some form we’ll always be around. But our levels of activity will vary, depending on what else life throws at us. In this sense, apologies to the good folks from Common People, Primator Crew, Une Vie Pour Rien, Hellnation and Ballroom Blitz Records who sent us most of the albums reviewed here – we made some of them wait for ages. All reviews by me this time.
Matt Crombieboy
Tag: bootboy glam
Dalton, proletarian subculture and rock & roll
I was tempted to let Papillon by Dalton enter our Classic Albums series, but it isn’t what you’d call a classic like Red Alert’s We’ve Got the Power or Voice of a Generation by Blitz just yet. For one, it only came out three years ago – and few people outside of Italy will have heard it.
For the Italian skinhead and ultras scene, though, the album was a game-changer and a towering achievement. Dalton, a Roman group formed by former members of Oi bands Pinta Facile and Duap, debuted in 2015 with Come stai?, an album with packed with melodic but robust bovver rock hits. As I have written here before, they’re “very Italian, musically too … their music is pub-rock and glam-rock based, but it has the atmosphere of Italian working-class bars. They sound authentically like where they’re from, mixed with what they’re into”.
Continue readingWhere Have All the Boot Boys Gone? Stewart Home reviews a Cherry Red compilation

It’s not unusual to see someone described as an original skin, but for now original bootboy seems less of a thing. Although I caught the end of the skinhead reggae boom via the tunes that made the UK charts off the back of that scene in the early seventies, I was too young to embrace its fashions. When I started secondary school in 1973 bootboy gear was all the rage but the look was more associated with football than music. What did we listen to? Some of the bands on Mark Brennan’s Where Have All The Boot Boys Gone? (Cherry Red) compilation – like Mott The Hoople, Sweet and Slade.[1] But there’s also stuff here I didn’t hear at the time and other tracks that belong to a later era.
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