If there are any British dopers out there who were skinheads/punks/mods or whatever else back in the late 70s and early 80s I would like to know what happened to you. After that period of your life how easy or hard was it for you guys to move on and get a job, house and just generally grow up?
I know that most of the reasons for the skinhead revival and existence of punks was because of the dissilutionment felt by the youth of yesterday, with the economy the way it was and youth unemployment so high. It seems like after all this time many things have changed but some have stayed the same.
I assume mods were from the early '60s, skinheads from the early '70s, punks from the early '80s. All +/- a few years. I’ve met none unless they became retired whatevers.
However I deeply despise the imperative that people — even those people whose lifestyles I find repellent — are under any obligation to end their choices and, still worse, to conform, and ‘generally grow up’. They owe you, and society in toto, nothing.
The first thing I think of it the orange & blue haired ‘Mohawks’ with black leather jackets & combat boots that I saw in 1985 in almost every walk through tunnel in England.
I could not help staring.
The English accent when they talked just made it more surreal …
Not really what you were asking, but … I’ve met a couple of FOAFs from Scotland and Northern Ireland (older than me) who used to identify as punks in the 1980s. Thing is, they still looked to be solidly middle class the entire time (they seemed to have no trouble living a normal life by day) so there was nothing to “grow up” from. Last I heard they’re comfortably settled into the soccer fan culture - not really hooligans but still a bit wild when they feel like it.
I get the feeling that is very common in Britain and elsewhere in Europe - middle class kids joining scary looking scenes purely for kicks.
Based on my experience in Australia we were a sub set of skins called Sharpies, we were just bored suburban kids trying to be tough. Most of us grew up and shake our heads at how dumb we were.
There was a 70s mod revival (see: The Jam) that was considered part of punk (which starts in '76, not the '80s, so skinheads [technically, revival-skinheads] and punks are contemporaneous) and had a lot of crossover with 2Tone Ska. And then it all leads to the Blue-Eyed Soul revival of the 80s a la The Style Council and that ilk.
It’s not an imperative, either from us, or from society. It’s just that, eventually, your parents quit supporting you, and your friends quit letting you sleep on their couch, and you either get a job, or you go hungry.
It’s easy to be a rebel when you are single and childless. Once you have a family, you have other responsibilities. It would be rather hypocritical to expect the hand of “society” to feed the mouth that bites it.
There is no reason why a mod, or hippie, or anything else should not do those things, and yet still remain true to themselves and those core beliefs and urges that define them and differentiate them from mainstream society.
And from what little I’ve read of hippies, they were not supported by their parents.
What makes you think a guy with a funny haircut can’t get a job?
I guess you might have a tough time getting a job as a receptionist at a dentist’s office with a funny haircut. But lots of places like construction, computers, entertainment, and so on don’t care.
It may be true that the funny haircut is a strike against you with some hiring managers. So you might miss out on a few opportunities. But you usually only need one job at a time, so you just have to keep trying.
I’m not a British punk; I live in California. And I never had a mohawk – I used to be of the Siouxsie Sioux/ teased black hair variety, and eventually I settled into pink hair cos I really like it.
This is a topic I think about a lot, because I wonder where the hell everybody went myself. I guess they mostly did wind up with families and jobs. A few, of course, died young. A few are living unconventional lives somewhere, bloody but unbowed. But when you go to a punk show nowadays what you see is the “new” punks, who are substantially different from the first-gen punks.
These young ones are much more conformist than we were. Because punk was not yet commercialized back then, if you wanted a tshirt with a band’s name on it, you often had to make it yourself. If you wanted to dress up in, say, a trashy tutu and ripped fishnets, you went down to Salvation Army and hunted that crap down yourself, because no one had it ready-made. And the fishnets were ripped because you tore them playing in the playground in Golden Gate Park at midnight – NOT because you bought them that way on ebay.
It seems to me that they are, on the whole, a lot more insular too. I can’t recall someone who I don’t know EVER just coming up to me and starting a conversation at a current punk show. It seems like it was very different in the 80s; we had a sense of being together because we all had chosen to opt out of the same thing. (mainstream society at the time.) These days, the sense is more that they are all choosing to opt IN to something – because, pretty much, they just aren’t the objects of actual scorn, like we were back then. I remember people being scared to sit next to me on BART trains because I was wearing a leather jacket.
I don’t know – it’s frustrating, and it makes me feel lonely. I sure wish I could find like a hotbed of OG punks around here to hang out with.
Not a classic punk, I’m too young, but in about 2001 I went to a classic punk festival in England. I was 18, but the vast majority of the audience were original 80s punks, and a bunch of their kids.
From what I saw and heard, about 80% of them had transitioned into ‘normal’ jobs, just with long sleeves to cover the tats and either short office style hair that could be spiked a little bit, or shaved heads. I’m sure a lot more had just quit the scene altogether, but you wouldn’t have picked a lot of the attendees out as punk on the street.
It was interesting watching people arrive wearing smart office wear then disappear into the toilets to reappear in punk getup. There’s still a hardcore of them that are ‘full timers’, that maybe work in tattoo parlours or other jobs where the look is accepted, you often see them hanging around some pubs, but most have pushed it back to just a holiday or weekend thing, especially the ones with kids. The rest of the time, according to an overheard punk/accounts manager they’re ‘bringing down the system from the inside now. There’s a really good pension scheme too.’
Of course, this was still 12 or 13 years back, and a lot of them will have kids leaving home and some may even be pushing retirement age by now, so I don’t know how that will be changing things. The festival was only in my old home town that once.