Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
movement. Many of them were bad lads who enjoyed nothing better than a ruck and whose only rationale for kicking the living shit out of someone they didn’t like was just that – they didn’t like them. But, like me and my mates who I hung around with a few years after the Never boys were causing mayhem, these lads thought, rightly or wrongly, that a lot of their escapades were just ‘high spirits’ that often would get out of hand, inevitably leading to violence and, at times, serious injury and incarceration.
This violence is not something that can be denied; it was a violent time and something that should be remembered by today’s tub-thumpers who regularly berate modern youth on how ‘it was safer to walk the streets 40 years ago’. The plain truth is: it wasn’t. The papers from those days are full of reports of stabbings, robberies and vicious assaults; there were even reports of ‘a gang of knife-wielding coloured youths’ or ‘the shadow gang’ as the local press dubbed them, who were based in Stokes Croft and who would jump out from shop doorways and demand money with menaces from passing pedestrians. The word ‘mugging’ had not entered the language of the day.
This little island of ours has long been a violent place. Today’s much-maligned youth are no better or no worse than their parents, grandparents and, in some cases, great-grandparents. ‘Victorian values’ is a figment of Tory politicians’ imagination. Where do they think the original ‘hooligans’ came from? If you want a real eye-opener, read Hooligan – A History of Respectable Fears by Geoffrey Pearson for an amazing insight into the history of the British hooligan. What must be remembered, however, is that becoming a skinhead is not about making a fashion statement. If you were prepared to wear the boot, then you were prepared to use – and receive it – as General George ‘old blood and guts’ Patton once said, ‘A soldier in shoes is only a soldier, but in boots he becomes a warrior.’
The Bar Celona reunion brought a lot of the old ‘warriors’ out from the comfort of their armchairs and their slippers. I was a tad disappointed that few, if any, wore any of their old clothing from back in the day, although judging by the waistlines on show even if they did still own any it was unlikely it would still fit. At least Angelo Pascoe made an effort – his brogues looked as polished and pristine as the day he must have first bought them. Of course, at the time, although you were aware that you were part of a ‘scene’, you didn’t really appreciate just how significant it all was. Your threads were just that – threads – that would be updated and replaced as quickly as the ‘scene’ itself was updated.
One of the lads who turned up that night and who was an original Never boy was Chris, still looking as fit and trim as he was nearly 40 years previously. In fact, he had more hair now than he did then and a moustache to rival those of his old enemies, the greasers. After several phone calls, I arranged to meet him in the centre of Bristol.
‘Where do you fancy meeting?’ I asked.
‘How about the Way Inn?’ replied Chris.
‘Sorry, mate, been shut about 30 years,’ I replied.
Fortunately, when we did meet, in the aforementioned Horse and Groom, Chris’s memory had been restored and we spent an enjoyable evening reliving those distant days, only this time he didn’t have to keep on eye on the door for the law who regularly visited the hostelry searching for under-age drinkers.
Chris, like Lloyd, who also joined us for the evening, was born in 1950 and started frequenting the Never at the age of 16. At the time, he lived in Knowle West and recalled buying his first boots at an army surplus store in Bedminster. Like Eugene, he remembered being skint most of the time so couldn’t afford a scooter. ‘Couldn’t even afford to buy any records,’ he recalled. He brought along one of the younger members of the ‘crew’, Pat ‘Paddy’ Walsh, who, along with his brother Martin, were up there with the Pascoes, the Stones (Andy and Paul) and the legendary Roy and Mike Thorne as ‘top boys’ on the town circuit.
Chris and Paddy both remembered the fracas at The Star pub where, allegedly, ‘that axe’ was used, but again the memory became selective. They both admitted to being involved in the clashes in and around the city centre with the greasers, recalling how a mob of them would go to the greasers’ café but how they would only send four or five to gather outside to goad the greasers into coming out, where they would then face the full force of the gathered Never boys. Again, the devilment inside them was the main cause of the mayhem. Paddy recalled his brother Martin ‘taking a pair of scissors out with him, not as a weapon but to go around the Locarno cutting the ties in half of other lads’. You can only guess at the reaction from the ‘victims’ – the consequences likewise can only be imagined.
Fights in the dancehalls were a common occurrence. I read of one in the Locarno in the Evening Post from late 1969 that resulted in one poor lad receiving 200 stitches in a face wound after being attacked with a glass. The boots may have been outlawed on the dancefloors but the result of a ‘glassing’ were just as serious, if not more so. The fighting in the Locarno or the Top Rank, whether over a girl, a spilled drink or, more often than not, just a look (‘You dogging I up?’ would often be the precursor to a smack in the mouth) led to police being stationed in the clubs themselves. The Bali Hai became a battleground, the pint mug became a weapon of mass destruction and the acrid smell of Brut filled your nostrils – all to a blistering backing track featuring Jamaica’s finest. Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and The Maytals sung of freedom, wonderful worlds and pomp and pride while blood flowed and stained the polished maple sprung dancefloor.
Chris recalled another weapon being used with devastating effect one Christmas when the BBC’s Radio One Club visited the Top Rank for a live broadcast – as it turns out, the only one in history that was ever cancelled live on air due to the disorder. ‘We heard that the Radio One Club was in the Top Rank that night so one of the boys paid to get in then let the rest of us in by opening the side door. The bouncers (who truly lived up to their name in those days) knew we had done this so they were looking for us.
‘Once we got in, we mingled with the crowd. We saw a handbell on stage so we nicked it and would ring it to annoy the bouncers, because they could not see who had it. Later, we went upstairs where I bumped into one bouncer who I had frequent encounters with. I had the bell and he asked me for it so I said, “Are you sure you want it?” He said yes, so I gave it to him right on the head.’
In a way, the bouncer got off lightly; the weapon could have been a lot worse. On a trip to London, a group of the Never lads visited the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth where one of the boys tried to purloin a World War II machine-gun from a display – thankfully, he didn’t succeed.
It was inevitable that Barney’s trusty fruit and veg wagon would come up again. Paddy remembered how his brother Martin would ‘hold on to bars on the back as Barney drove around the Pithay, then lift his legs off as he careered around the corners… thought he was Superman!’ It seemed many of the lads thought at some stage they were super heroes, from moonwalking around the Top Rank in homage to Neil Armstrong, to their choice of stylised, sometimes even uniform clothing. The language, the swagger, but mostly the attitude set them apart from the rest of the proletariat.
At the time, Chris was a kitchen porter, Pat was still at school and Lloyd, like Eugene, was an apprentice engineer. But, unlike their predecessors, the aspirational and elitist mods who proclaimed ‘mods didn’t do sweat’, the skinheads ‘did do sweat’ and were fiercely proud of their working-class roots, even their ‘Britishness’, despite coming from backgrounds as diverse as Ireland, Jamaica and, as with the Pascoe brothers, Italy.
True mods with their narcissistic splendour strove to leave their working-class backgrounds behind them – it could be argued they were the first yuppies. They looked to French art-house films, Italian Soho coffee bars and American jazz musicians for their inspiration. Skinheads looked to the military, American astronauts and Jamaican rude boys for theirs. Mod was a way of life; skinheads, on their own admission, were more one-dimensional and lived for the weekends and the immediate satisfaction that went with it. They set their sights slightly lower.
Paolo Hewitt, the mod historian and author of such books as The Soul Stylists – 40 Years of Modernism and My Favourite Shirt: A History