It was widely rumored that he had stabbed at least one squatter with a screwdriver, but this was never proven.įor punk rockers, usually perceived as relatively defenseless targets in London’s tribal jungle (stay clear of those Teddy boys!), the skins quickly became a rightfully perceived danger. smashing them up) along with whispered claims of not only threats, but violence, bottles and bicycle chains. “We were all prone to behaving badly.”Īmong the squatter set, his reputation was even worse, with many claiming Suggs enjoyed arbitrarily “doing” squats ( i.e. “Everybody from the estate I grew up on went to the football, and you ran around shouting at people and booting people up the arse,” Suggs said in 2016. His intimidating signature graffiti SUGGS SUPER SKIN could be seen from Kings Cross to Camden Town, Holloway Road to Hackney. Between his reliable mixture of laughter with lads and chatting up birds to his not infrequent flights of mad-dogging stink-eye glower, everyone in the place was acutely aware of Suggs’ presence.Īlthough still just 17, Suggsy’s dark reputation emphatically preceded him. It was glorious.Įnter Graham McPherson, AKA Suggs, who, with his crew, was a prominent weekend fixture at the jukebox adjacent far end of the Hope’s bar. Most Fridays, we’d trek to the century old Hope & Anchor pub in Islington (its tiny basement stage hosted shows by everyone from the Damned and Lurkers to Wayne Kramer, Joe Ely with the Clash), and, on the way, we’d pass by Dave Vanian and Bay City Roller Les McKeown’s residences. Concurrently, the bastard offspring of Oswald Mosely and Enoch Powell eagerly welcomed the skins into their neo-fascist National Front and British Movement parties, creating a viral alliance that buoyed these rogue political factions and elevated the skins reputation from dangerous football hooligans to a far more menacing and organized political threat.Īs resident of marvelous 2 story, 4 bedroom squat on the East End of London’s Balls Pond Road from early 1978 to late 1979, I was intimately familiar with that aforementioned poisonous atmosphere-which only steadily intensified. The books heartily stoked early 1970s Britain’s poisonous atmosphere of random violence (see Stanley Kubrick’s voluntary withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange from UK cinemas) and established the skinhead as a contemporary working class archetype. Pulp press the New English Library celebrated the skins with a wildly popular series of trash paperbacks that glorified the cult’s venal, brutish aggression. In Kingston, they were churning out skin-specific 45s like Symarip’s ” Skinhead Moonstomp ,” with it’s opening recitation of “I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet/Put your braces together and your boots on your feet/ And give me some of that old moonstomping. Psychedelic Carnaby streeters they definitely were not, and the sect burgeoned to the point that outsiders quickly realized it was a highly exploitable marketplace. A mutant sub-culture that emerged in the late 1960s from the fast evaporating Mod scene, the skins were a rowdy, easily identifiable crew who sported a distinct uniform and adopted contemporary Jamaican ska and rocksteady as their preferred soundtrack, anointing the genre’s top singer Prince Buster as their musical hero. In order to understand the street level circumstances which produced Madness, one must grasp the historic context of the skinhead movement. While Madness is universally seen as a family friendly, jolly good posse of cockney payasos, it’s high time to address another side of the Madness phenomena, one for which they have far too long enjoyed “a layer of protection”-the ugly reality of the group’s skinhead origins, a stain from which they have successfully skated past for decades. The single was great, but the three nattering squares hosting the show spun dozens of appalling discs, chief among them this dreadful 1983 Madness pop bomb, which led to one of them oozing on about “our friend, Suggs.” When I was working on the Melanie Vammen substack piece awhile back, the fabulous former Pandoras-Muffs-Coolies rock goddess was a guest on Laguna’s KXFM radio to debut the Coolies latest song, and I naturally tuned in.
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