Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
‘Flange’, Mary, Jo, the twins – Mary and Sue – were all remembered with affection by some of the guys I interviewed. Some, like the unfortunately monikered ‘Line-up Liz’, more so than others. One of the interviewees recalled how often a couple would disappear out the back door of the café to appear a ‘few minutes later with the knees on the lad’s jeans all white’ – you can only guess that they weren’t out there to discuss the merits of Motown Chartbusters Volume 3, the first compilation album to get to number 1 in the charts in February 1970.
Of course, the fairer sex have always calmed the savage brow and the girls of the Never were no exception – not that the boys changed their behaviour overnight. The violence on Bristol’s streets continued but the Never café itself lost its appeal. There’s a rather obvious reason for this – most of the lads from the Never were just teenagers. The very reason for them using the café in the first place was because they couldn’t get into pubs and, once they could, alcohol and the company of the fairer sex exerted a far stronger pull than a bottle of Coke, a pinball machine or one of Jim’s Viennese steaks.
From the café, they moved on to the previously mentioned pubs and clubs, often meeting up with their newly acquired ‘birds’, by the map, the favoured meeting place for young Bristolians in the city centre outside the Victorian toilets. Of course, if you weren’t so ‘flushed’, the lads would arrange to meet the girls inside a club. ‘That way, you didn’t have to pay to get them in,’ chuckled Lloyd on remembering the days when he first started ‘courting’.
As stated previously, the café closed down for good in 1974. Jim Jr moved to London where, among other things, he got into the clothing business. He lived there for a number of years but returned to his home town to work back in cafés and eventually to open up the Roma restaurant and Bar Celona club where the old Never boys held their reunion.
The boys themselves, in the main, have changed their ways. Most of them are happily married, many to girls they met in the Never; many are fathers; some are grandfathers; quite a few are successful businessmen and entrepreneurs; several run their own companies. One I interviewed drives a Rolls-Royce, and at least one is a millionaire. Very few, if any, turned out to be career criminals.
Not surprisingly, few of them have real regrets of those days. They hold their heads up; to them, there’s no stigma about being labelled an original skinhead, far from it. ‘The best days of their lives,’ many of them stated.
Even before the reunion at Jim’s club, many of them kept in touch; the camaraderie has continued over the years and they regularly meet up with their wives for meals, even taking family holidays together.
A café of sorts still stands in Fairfax Street, a tired, sad little establishment called the Soup and Sandwich. No longer do the top boys of Bristol frequent it; no longer are Trojan and Motown classics blasted out from the jukebox; and no longer are Lambrettas and Vespas lined up outside earning admiring looks. Like the Top Rank, the Locarno and the adrenalin-filled trips to the coast in Barney’s fruit wagon, the Never on Sunday café has gone but, as one of those proud boys said, ‘The Never café – never beaten, never bettered, never forgotten’.
As the lads who frequented the Never moved on, skinny little suedeheads like me moved in. Personally, I never frequented the café – I was too young, too small and, truth be told, too scared. The football terrace was to be my stomping ground, for the next decade or so anyway.
It was now my time… and my story.
The Seventies – A Decade of Disturbance
People who say they have no regrets generally mean the complete opposite. I would be lying if I said I had no such regrets. I now regret many of my actions from my formative years, but at the time the word ‘regret’ was not even in my vocabulary, neither was remorse. It seems that a book of this sort has to be justified, rationalised and, for whatever reason, vindicated. I have no intention of justifying the actions of myself or my peers and certainly not those of people I barely knew. This book is merely an observation and record of actual events which, at the time, seemed nothing out of the ordinary; indeed, this book could be penned by hundreds, if not thousands, of others just like me. It’s not a novel or a collection of dubious anecdotes collated by an ill-informed ‘keyboard warrior’ – it’s a true story, or as true as my memory allows it, of true people. Make of it what you will, draw your own conclusions.
Hidden deep amongst the pages of The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, gathering dust and tucked away somewhere between the Moody Blues and Mott the Hoople lies a solitary and somewhat pathetic entry: ‘Derrick Morgan; Jamaica, male vocalist; entered chart 17 January 1970; title: ‘Moon Hop’; Crab record label, 1 week at number 49’. The ultimate insult, one week at number 49.
To the uninitiated and ignorant devotees of all things seventies, busily thumbing their way through to ‘Ride a White Swan’, ‘Waterloo’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ ad nauseum, the so-say ‘classic’ records of that decade, it would barely warrant a second glance. To those who were cut from an altogether different cloth, however, it may strike a chord, maybe raise a smile in appreciation and even evoke a warm memory of the plastic palm trees and light splits of the Bali Hai bar and of the music of the Locarno ballroom.
‘Moon Hop’ entered the record charts in the first month of that momentous decade and was as much an ‘underground’ record as any of those by the likes of King Crimson and Yes who are more readily tagged with that same irksome label. What’s more, ‘Moon Hop’ does not stand alone; ‘Movin” by Brass Construction, ‘Shadow’ by the Lurkers, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ by the Only Ones all only had a nodding acquaintance with the charts but, nevertheless, their impact and influence remains immeasurable. Scratch away the veneer, scrape off the dross and dismiss the detritus and you will find the music and the fashion from an altogether different world – my world, a world of Tonik suits, terraces and The Maytals, of race riots, safety pins and The Clash by way of P.Funk, platform shoes and discos. The true story of the most maligned decade in British youth history, through my eyes – my fashion, my music, my violence. Welcome to the real 1970s – it ain’t no Boogie Wonderland.
I must have been ten, maybe eleven. Either way my physique wasn’t up to much. I came running in with a face full of hate and anger, demanding pity. Through the snot and the tears, I blubbed to my old man, ‘That… that older kiddy just hit me!’
‘Well, go and ’it ’im back,’ my father replied matter-of-factly. I detected a wink and a grin and did as I was told. The scene had been set.
As the dreamy, idealistic, liberal 1960s drew to an end, dear old Britannia, who had hitched up her skirt, kicked off her sandals and danced barefoot in the park with the rest of Timothy Leary’s peace-loving hippies suddenly received an abrupt dose of reality, and a reminder that she was not quite ready to lose her head and her customs to a bunch of junkies from across the pond.
The ‘hard mods’ or ‘peanuts’ had arrived as younger, more dysfunctional, hippy-hating cousins of the mods in early 1968 and by mid-summer the following year, the newly named ‘skinheads’ – after a short flirtation with the ‘cropheads’ moniker – had quickly taken over as the cult for the disenchanted, white working-class youths of Britain. It had been a long hot summer of mounting violence and thumping reggae. Desmond Dekker topped the charts and bovver boots stomped across the nation. The new decade was bracing itself.
January 1970. That Derrick Morgan record drifted unnoticed in the nether regions of the pop charts while