Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
with a penchant for acidic wit, one-liners and a rather annoying habit of pronouncing ‘Avon’ as if he’s flogging overpriced women’s cosmetics on the doorstep. As well as myself and other corpulent, middle-aged members of the Avon (rhymes with ‘raven’, Mr Quantick) Soul Army, the documentary featured such luminaries from the Bristol music scene as Mark Stewart, Nellee Hooper and Grant Marshall from the Wild Bunch, and an enthusiastic and educated Brislington (Briz) kiddie by the name of Tim Williams. Tim shone through with his vast knowledge of not just the provincial Bristol music scene, but the national scene as well. Back in the late Seventies/early Eighties, he produced Bristol’s equivalent of the infamous Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, Loaded; his other claim to fame was that his brother Leigh was mentioned in Briz’s very own born-and-bred harpie Julie Burchill’s autobiography I Knew I Was Right, so that’s two famous people to come out of the south Bristol suburb. I knew of Tim; he was a mate of Neil Emery who I knew back in the Seventies and who helped me write the first edition of this book. Listening to the finished Way Out West which went out in the July of 2004, it became evident that Tim was a ‘top kiddie’ – I needed to speak to him.
I caught up with Tim in the Wellington pub on Gloucester Road in north Bristol, a regular watering-hole for Rovers’ fans and which, as is very much the style these days, features stripped floorboards as well as stuffed olives and bruschetta on the menu, not to mention, bizarrely, morris dancers performing in the garden. It was all a bit surreal. We were debating whether ‘Change’ by Donald Byrd or ‘Commando’ by The Ramones best represented Seventies music, while, in the background, all we could hear was a fucking accordion and Noddy bells. Tim regaled me with tales of visits to the Wigan Casino where he learned precisely when to clap during ‘Cochise’ by Paul Humphrey like the locals, and how walking in front of the speakers was an alternative, and painful, way to get your ears syringed.
If that’s not enough, his recollections of the early punk scene and how, of all places, Newport in South Wales had a fair shout in rivalling the King’s Road as a main player in the world of spit and bondage are revealing to say the least. But there’s much more to Tim than an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Seventies music scene and a predilection for Vivienne Westwood shirts (yes, an original still adorns his wardrobe), so I’ve handed a couple of chapters over to Tim for his recollections in his own words. You’ll really think you were there – you can almost smell the Hai Karate in your nostrils and taste the Billy buzzing in the back of your throat.
I’m not trying to rewrite history. There is no specific aim or agenda about this book, but I am trying to correct a few misconceptions of not only the late Sixties and the Seventies but also the present day. If nothing else, I hope after reading Booted and Suited some people may have a less prejudiced view of certain things.
One of the biggest misconceptions of those days revolves around the much maligned aforementioned skinhead. Their propensity for violence can’t be denied, but their perceived racist views and supposed links to extreme political groups certainly can be. To a certain extent, this may have been true for many of the second generation of skinheads from the late Seventies and early Eighties who found themselves hijacked by various right-wing movements, but the original summer of ’69 boot boys cannot be tarred with that same brush. Their beginnings were apolitical, humble and basic – a basic need to belong and a basic need to look smart and tough. Perhaps many of them didn’t realise it at the time but they had more links with the Fifties and Sixties immigrants to Britain than they did with their own peers and parents.
The second misconception is linked but much more contemporary – if the original bad boys of Britain were having a hard time with the media, it was nothing compared with today’s chavved-up hoodies. Again, it would be foolish to deny their misdeeds – those Daily Mail headlines can’t all be wrong, can they? No, they can’t, there are some real bad lads out there who wear their ASBOs as a badge of honour, but to suggest that they are ‘feral’ and to think that many of today’s youth are members of knife-toting gangs is not only delusional but also insulting.
Having said that, this fear in adults of youngsters – this ‘pedophobia’ – is very real and a sad reflection of today’s troubled times but, if I’ve learned anything through my research, it’s that many of today’s youth are no better, or no worse, than their predecessors of 40 years back. Indeed, the incidents, both recorded and anecdotal, of youths carrying (or wearing) offensive weapons were as high then as they are now and, in some cities, I would suggest it was even higher back then. As Barbara Ellen wrote in the Observer in response to the UNICEF report on our troubled youth, ‘However frightening as it sometimes gets, maybe we should accept British adolescence for what it is, has always been – a whirling out-of-control carousel. You can only watch and hope that your particular (stroppy, nihilistic, establishment-hating, maddening, indispensable) Brit teenager manages to cling on for the ride.’
The third and final wrong that I want to put right is perhaps the most far-fetched and the most controversial, but in part it’s my raison d’être behind the book – I know it may sound like sacrilege now but not everyone back then thought music started and finished with Abba. Hopefully, this book will prove an antidote to I Love the Seventies, the TV series where the decade has been sanitised, repackaged and rewritten to fit in with cosy Saturday-evening viewing.
There’s been a whole industry built around the Abba myth; of course they were big, they sold shedloads of records, but so has Jive Bunny over the years – did anyone who was really into their music in the Seventies buy their records? No. Did your mum and your little sister buy their records? Yes. In the words of Public Enemy, ‘Don’t believe the hype.’
‘Mamma Mia… my my… how can I resist you?’ Well, in my case and for many thousands of others back then, quite easily, as it happens.
Can you remember those illustrated kids’ books from a few years back called Where’s Wally? where you had to find a gormless, bespectacled bloke in a red striped jumper among a myriad of similarly dressed characters? Trying to find when the first skinhead appeared in Bristol, let alone Britain, is a bit like that. It goes without saying the first sightings would have been in London. ’Course it was, me old china – you wouldn’t expect anything else, would you? Those Cockney geezers have always been one step ahead of the rest of the country, haven’t they?
Dick Hebdige, the British media theorist and sociologist, claims that some mods were spotted with boots and braces during the notorious riots with rockers at Margate and Brighton as early as 1964 – which also ties in with Micky Smith’s observations in his book Want Some Aggro? – whereas the spring of 1968 seems to be the more commonly accepted date for their historic debut. As for the exact location of where he first saw the light of day, Bermondsey, Willesden and Plaistow can all lay claim to be the birthplace of the forerunner of the modern-day hoodie. One of the first recorded instances of this new teenage phenomenon appearing in public came during the Great Vietnam Solidarity March in London on 17 March 1968 – 30,000 anti-war demonstrators were heckled and abused by 200 ‘closely cropped local youths dressed in Millwall Football Club’s team colours’. Not that these lads were making a political statement; their venom was aimed at the massed-ranked hippies as opposed to the USA’s involvement in south-east Asia – political animals they were not.
John Waters, an original Sixties mod from Upper Holloway, London, remembers vividly two very different sorts of mods: the easy-on-the-eye West End dandies and those with a tougher outlook, the so-called ‘hard mods’ who were just a step away from being bona fide East End boot boys. Writing on the Modculture website, he recalls, ‘There were two distinct types of mod