Skinhead Reggae 

Originally featured in Small Axe 9 in 1980 ‘Skinhead Reggae’ was the first piece of writing that I ever had published and would, eventually, lead to my writing a number of articles, reviews, sleeve notes and books. A big thank you to Ray Hurford for giving me that all important start. 

Thankfully, in recent years ‘skinhead’ and ‘skinhead reggae’ are no longer inevitably seen as pejorative terms but it has taken over half a century to reach this understanding. I have (slightly) revised my original article in places but, like the renowned Peter Guralnick, I do not intend to “disown anything that I wrote” either. I have to say that, on re-reading this, it occurred to me that I wish I was as confident now although, perhaps not quite so opinionated, as I was back then…

“I wouldn’t altogether disown anything that I wrote, though in retrospect I might correct a good deal of its perspective...”                                                                                            Peter Guralnick

                                 Author’s Note Last Train To Memphis The Rise Of Elvis Presley Abacus 1995

Harry Hawke 2023

There was originally no name for the youth group now known as ‘skinheads’… a name which I use with the greatest reluctance to describe what I was thirteen or fourteen years ago. It's only use then was as a term of derision… and a particularly insulting one at that. We never saw ourselves as anything different from mods… we were just the younger brothers of the original mods that's all. The mods were among the first people to actually use their leisure time to the full spending all their money on clothes and music… in short looking good and the past masters of this were the black kids. It's ironic that something that took its style from the West Indian youths in this country became associated with mindless racism.

The twentieth century black hipster has always been the model for white youth to base their rebellion on and each music expressing that rebellion has always been eventually transmuted into a white musical form… jazz, rhythm and blues, soul and ska and reggae with the 2-Tone bands. The mods always held that fascination for black music… it's the best music to dance to after all… firstly rhythm and blues (early soul) and then ska known as Blue Beat after the record label. The majority of the white groups playing their English rhythm & blues eventually headed off into the psychedelic sunset in 1967 taking many of the mods with them, growing their hair, wearing bells and, instead of dancing, sitting on the floor shaking their heads to music that you now needed to "understand". Soul and Tamla Motown had been fairly well covered by many of the mod groups who'd started off playing variations of the rhythm & blues/Memphis/Detroit sound but Jamaican music was touched upon only by Georgie Fame (relatively successfully) and a handful of others. Very few white musicians had involved themselves in this music and this helped its exclusivity and popularity as it had been left untainted by what were now the hated hippies.

Crayford Town Hall

It has been argued (by Pete Fowler in particular) that music was less than essential to the skinheads and, to be fair, as the kids allowed themselves to be called skinheads so the music and its attendant style became more and more peripheral to be used as background noise to meet your mates and pull birds to. I'll accept that but argue that music was crucial to the formation of the movement. Just because no-one actually wanted to perform or to form bands to play the music we loved doesn't necessarily mean that music wasn’t important. I can't think of anyone I knew, black or white, back in late 1967/early 1968 who didn’t profess to be starting up a sound system. Most people already had record boxes and were building up a collection of speaker boxes as well. Let's face it reggae and rock steady comes from Jamaica and soul comes from America…English music just doesn’t enter into this… and a man's a fool if he thinks that he can sing as well as Otis Redding or play saxophone like Tommy McCook.

So the point of interest shifted from being the performer to being the man who presented the performer on record to the audience and to be top man in that sphere: to have the latest sounds before any of your rivals and to have the best collection of old ‘classic’ records to play as the night wore on. This isn't to say that I spent the whole of my youth hanging around Brixton shebeens until the dawn broke. The places these sounds played were, for the most part, dance halls at the back of ‘respectable’ pubs in south east. London and North West Kent such as the Daylight Inn, The Three Tuns and the Lord Palmerston while older enthusiasts told tales of five white sounds battling it out in Crayford Town Hall. In those days a sound didn’t have to mean a truck load of speaker boxes and exclusive dub plates but something between that and a "Road Show Disco - Weddings and Twenty Firsts A Speciality". You didn’t have to be black to run a sound and rock steady wasn’t the only type of music played as occasional soul and Tamla tunes were played to either slow down or speed up the proceedings… whatever was felt to be necessary by the man at the controls… slow deep soul records for close dancing and faster numbers for more sprightly moves. It was only in the seventies with the increasing fragmentation of styles and tastes that local sound systems began to play exclusively for the black reggae audience and, to be honest, it was when you couldn't go to a dance without hearing pop records like Norman Greenbaum's 'Spirit In The,Sky' being played that the whole thing just about collapsed for me. The parallels should be obvious. Who's more important now? Chris Hill or jazz funk? Jah Shaka or dubwise reggae? John Peel or any of the records he plays?

The majority of the legendary Jamaican record producers started off as sound men and a number of singers were associated with sounds before they ever began recording commercially. I suppose the real point is that the sort of music I'm talking about was essentially a studio product made specifically for people to dance to. It was really only with Island's big push of Bob Marley in the mid-seventies that Jamaican music was taken seriously as a live spectacle. The ska, rock steady and reggae musicians were, for the most part, accomplished jazz and big band musicians playing whatever the producers paid them to play and the music was essentially studio crafted. So what chance did we have thousands of miles away from Kingston, Detroit or Memphis studios? However, funnily enough, a lot of records we thought at the time came straight from the other side of the Atlantic were recorded here in London by expatriate Americans and Jamaicans… but that's another story.

During the rock steady era Duke Reid and Coxsone were, naturally enough, the men who provided the top sounds but as reggae rhythms gradually established themselves Beverley’s with Leslie Kong came to the fore with newer producers such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee, Joe Gibbs, Clancy Eccles. Derrick Harriott and Sir JJ with the Ethiopians coming on strong. What's important is that at the time no-one really knew or cared whose name was on the label (most pre-releases had nothing on the labels anyway and it was a point of pride to have only white labels or blanks in your record box) as long as the music was good. People got to know that you could usually rely on The Maytals or an Upsetter production but these were fairly safe bets and just because a certain artist had one good record out it didn’t necessarily mean that their next one was going to be any good. There wasn’t that radio deejay mentality of automatically playing a follow up to a big hit… it was the sound itself that was important. I remember seeing a photo of the Tony Tribe (Tony Mossop) in the Jamaican Weekly Gleaner wearing braces and stating that he was known as ‘The King Of The Skinheads’. This really was tripe. He'd admittedly had one extremely popular record with ‘Red Red Wine' but nothing more. There were no heroes as such. 

During the summer of 1969 things began to change. I realise just how subjective this is and I'm sure that to people a year or two older than me I'd previously looked like just another young kid trying to get in on the act but the age seemed to be dropping all the time. What really hastened the end for me was the sudden interest of the newspapers and television in yet another "menacing youth cult" and this one was ultra-violent, wore boots specifically for kicking people, shaved their heads and danced to monotonous jungle rhythms… all very newsworthy. What the media failed to realise about true sub-cultures is that they're only any good when no-one outside of the coterie knows what's going on. No one actually wants to look like a hooligan. You have to be fairly brain-less to wear a uniform that says I am a mindless thug yet this is what now happened. 

The desire to outrage your parents and elders is usually a middle class phenomenon… most working class kids just want to be left alone and the original skinhead thing was no exception to this. It was a reaction against the whole hippy bit admittedly but not in the deliberately ugly way that was later to caricature the original look. Paying forty odd pounds for a suit, eight guineas for shoes and three guineas for a shirt wasn't anything to do with looking ugly. It definitely wasn't cheap and it certainly wasn't lacking in style. Hair wasn't even that ludicrously short. As articles about this new brand of thuggery started to appear one observer commented "you could almost hear the hair grow" while really young kids who wanted a reputation rushed out to buy a copy of ‘Wet Dream’, a pair of boots and get their hair cropped.

As unfortunate as this was for all the people who'd been into the look for the previous two or three years it meant big business for the clothing manufacturers and record producers who are never slow to see a good thing. And, in the same way, that in every high street chain you could buy cheap copies of Ben Sherman shirts so you could also buy cut price compilation LP’s of ‘Skinhead Reggae’. A few of the currently popular records at the time of the first media interest actually became pop chart hits. Records were made specifically for the skinhead market and releases like ‘Skinhead A Message To You‘, ‘Skinheads A Bash Them’ or ‘Skinhead Train‘ didn’t sound good at the time while the passage of time has done little to improve them. As well as these records mentioning skinheads what mostly sold were cover versions of pop and soul hits, ribald releases and countless organ instrumentals usually preceded by a spoken or shouted introduction.

King Stitt

That's not to say no good records were made at the time (1969 to 1971… see below)) as plenty of all time classics came through. King Stitt’s best records appeared during this period and, perhaps more importantly, U Roy came into his own as a recording deejay. But the insistence on rude records, skinhead records and cheap records killed off any real interest in reggae as a serious music. Many artists and producers fell over themselves to try and produce a more commercial sound adding strings, choirs and anything else they felt would make the sound more acceptable but it was all in vain. Mention reggae and you'd get a twang of imaginary braces and "want some bovver?”. 

The fact that the music was created by blacks in Kingston and London was ignored in favour of its skinhead connotations. The reaction of the music press was incredibly hostile. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch was the worst offender in his singles column where he regularly mentioned throwing his reggae review copies into the office dustbin. They just weren't worth writing about. The only serious radio play was on Mike Raven's Sunday night R&B show on Radio One There were very few interviews with the artists or producers and no-one really cared. People still continued to dance to soul and Tamla (as they always had done) but the popularity of reggae didn’t really last that long. Its differentness and shockability soon began to wear thin and the latecomers who'd previously professed life-long allegiance were easily swayed by the influence of the glitter bands such as Slade and T Rex. Many of the younger Jamaican producers and artists began to delve deeper (lyrically and musically) into the realms of Jamaican, African and, above all Rastafarian, consciousness that the white mainstream audience ironically found acceptable.

Harry Hawke 1980

For the purposes of this discography I've ignored the most obvious 'skinhead' hits and chosen, with the help of some friends, what I hope is a fairly objective selection, in no particular order, of the best and most popular records from 1968 to 1971.

1968

54 46 That's My Number – The Maytals – Beverleys

El Casino Royale - Lynn Tait & The Jets with Uzziah ’Cool Stick’/‘Sticky’ Thompson (uncredited) - Amalgamated

No More Heartaches — The Beltones - Harry J

Catch The Beat – The Pioneers — Amalgamated

Moonlight Lover - Joya Landis - Treasure Isle

Scorcia (Scorcher) – The Sound Dimension - Coxsone

More Scorchia (Scorcher) – The Sound Dimension - Coxsone

Place In The Sun - David Isaacs - Upsetter

Feel The Rhythm - Clancy Eccles – New Beat

People Funny Boy — Lee (King) Perry — Upset

1969

Clint Eastwood – The Upsetters - Upsetter

Mama Look Deh – The Pioneers - Amalgamated

Fire Corner - King Stitt – New Beat

Pop A Top - Andy Capp - Tiger

The Night Doctor – The Upsetters - Upsetter

How Long (Will It Take) - Pat Kelly — Pama

What A Fire – The Ethiopians - Sir JJ

Jesse James — Laurel Aitken - Nubeat (UK) 

Fatty Fatty/Tribute To Drumbago - Clancy Eccles/The Dynamites – New Beat

Hong Kong Flu – The Ethiopians - Sir JJ 

1970

Herb Man - King Stitt, Andy Capp & The Dynamites - Clandisc

Lock Jaw - The Upsetters, Tommy McCook & The Supersonics with Dave Barker (uncredited) 

- Treasure Isle

Monkey Man – The Maytals — Beverleys _

Dry Acid - The Upsetters with Uzziah ’Cool Stick’/‘Sticky’ Thompson (uncredited) - Upsetter

Vampire/Check Him Out – The Upsetters/The Bleechers - Upsetter

A Love I Can Feel - John Holt - Coxsone

Rule The Nation – U Roy with The Tommy McCook Quintet- Treasure Isle

The Law – Byron Lee & The Dragonaires (Andy Capp) - Tiger

Remember That Sunday - Alton Ellis & Phyllis Dillon - Treasure Isle

Duppy Conqueror - Bob Marley & The Wailers – Upsetter

1971

Cherry Oh Baby - Eric Donaldson – Jaguar

Blood And Fire - Niney & The Observers - Observers

Wear You To The Ball – U Roy & John Holt with Tommy McCook & The Supersonics

- Treasure Isle

Trench Town Rock - Bob Marley & The Wailers - Tuff Gong

Back To Africa — Alton Ellis - Syndicate 

Rivers Of Babylon – The Melodians - Beverleys

Ripe Cherry - Dennis Alcapone - Jaguar

Cool Operator - Delroy Wilson - Jackpot

Let The Power Fall For I - Max Romeo - Hop

Better Must Come - Delroy Wilson - Jackpot

Recommended Further Listening:

Tighten Up Volume Two – Various Artists Trojan TJCCD 017 2002

Reggae Pressure – Various Artists – Trojan TJCCD 366 2007

Rude Boy The Story Of Trojan Records – Various Artists Trojan TJDLP573 2018

Who Wants Some? - Various Artists - VP VPCD/LP 4244 2023

Recommended Further Viewing:

Reggae - Directed by Horace Ové 1971

Rude Boy The Story Of Trojan Records - Directed by Nicolas Jack Davies 2018