In 2017 I unexpectedly fell on hard times and had to take on a second job fast. It was a shit job, frankly, but one that had me walking all over London for long hours. By the end, I knew London’s streets, alleys, and corners, its whole geography, better than ever.
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From early on in his solo career, Morrissey has held a strong fascination with skinheads, skinhead girls, suedeheads, and East London, defiantly championing a world on the brink of being bulldozed by neoliberal power. At Layers of London, Andrew Stevens has created a map of Morrissey’s East London locations, which you can explore HERE. This is his introduction.
Can anyone speak of an “East London demi-monde” for Morrissey? I thought as much a decade or so ago, penning this in the foreword for a new edition of Richard Allen’s Suedehead (Dean Street Press), as across much of his career the once avowedly Mancunian singer has returned consciously and decisively to East London – not as a heritage object but as a living myth. This distinction matters. Raised in Stretford, not Stratford, East London becomes in Morrissey’s imagination less a bounded geography than a portable identity: a code that can be adopted and inhabited. The bombsites and bath houses, spit-and-sawdust pubs and boxing clubs of Bethnal Green, Wapping, Dagenham and Plaistow form a counter-map to the depicted metropolitan glamour of Piccadilly and cabaret queens of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. They are the stages on which he has repeatedly located a defiant, wounded, theatrical working-class masculinity – part elegy, part provocation.
The following interview, originally published in Italian in the current (third) issue of the magazine Garageland, was conducted during the preparational stages for new edition of Gavin Watson’s classic photo book Skins, which has since come out on ACC Art Books. The original 1994 edition was printed by ST Publishing, which was run by George Marshall, author of the seminal Spirit of ‘69 – A Skinhead Bible (1991).
Although Skins remains his best-known publication, Watson is also the author of other volumes, such as the recent highly successful Oh What Fun We Had! (2019), which focuses on his group of friends from High Wycombe, an ethnically and subculturally inclusive crew.
Watson’s work is important for a number of reasons: firstly, it’s an insider’s view of the scene and therefore of great documentary interest. Secondly, looking at his pictures we can follow the evolution of the crew and their changing preoccupations and interests from the punk and skinhead era all the way to the rave years. Another significant trait of Watson’s work is the proximity of his hometown of Wycombe to London. As those who live in suburban areas know, being close to a big city can be an advantage – you can see a lot of gigs if you travel a relatively short distance, for example. But the suburbs are still the suburbs, and as such they’re inevitably cut off from many positive features that the big city has to offer.
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Yesterday on the unofficial Chelsea FC forum, The Shed End, a photographer named David Nicolson posted a couple of rare Chelsea Shed Boys pictures, including of their notorious leader, Danny ‘Eccles’ Harkins. Continue reading
Let’s kick off with a 16 July 1969 article about a bunch of Somers Town skinhead kids, originally published in Rolling Stone magazine and transcribed by persons unknown. Here, the usual tales of bovver, aggro, and tribal warfare are interspersed with obscure stylistic references to “spade haircuts”, “Cherry Boots with steel toe caps and a yellow trimming” – supposedly not Dr Martens – and “Stomper boots” with “high backs, big steel toe cap, and everything”. Note also that the article claims boots were “still worn” with mohair suits on the weekends, albeit highly polished – a combination whose existence many 1969 veterans steadfastly deny. Continue reading
