Post by soulhalshall on Jun 15, 2020 19:57:28 GMT
We didn’t have no skinneads in my street. Roy at the end was Welsh but he wasn’t a skinnead. You’d have been kicked out of school for a skinnead. In the early 90s there were still bowls, you’d see bowls, but I heard one teacher once, when I was six, telling Rory that he ought to go to a real barber not his mum with a bit of Tupperware. She didn’t work but his dad was a solicitor in Meldreth, who should have known better. The first skinnead I remember was Sinead O’Connor, not in the flesh like. My dad taped Nothing Compares 2 U and put it on in the mornings before school, then Desmond Dekker then Eternal Flame (Bangles, there wasn’t Atomic Kitten then) then the Elements Song by Tom Lehrer. He had an eclectic taste or no taste at all. We still thought skinneads meant racists and that wasn’t popular because we didn’t have Brexit then. We’d just had the Maastricht Treaty actually.
Then it became subversive, which is to say I started noticing it more, so not necessarily subversive at all, but still, subversive in the way that appropriating anything associatively tarnished by a previous social group could be said to be, like liking Abba or squatting (property). The skinnead appealed to me as I got older because I hated getting my hair cut and as an assault on my middle-class Cambridge upbringing of mackintoshes with itchy polymer labels, United Colours of Benetton hand-me-downs (cousins) and house arrest in Kettle’s Yard. Hair, if it was going to be any good, Top of the Pops said, had literally to rise or fall, as exemplarily exemplified by pop five-piece 5ive – Ritchie: up, Scott: up, Sean: down, Abz: varied, plus hats, J: up. The Loaded generation couldn’t have a short back and sides; if you wanted a Gail Porter (pre-skinnead) poster on your wall you’d need gel and highlights going up or skinnead going down.
My mum told the hairdresser, Tracey on Hills Road, to advise me against bleaching, so I couldn’t go up – something that has blighted my adult life if you know what I mean – but I had the last laugh in some ways, nicking some hair lightener from the bathroom, doing my eyebrows blonde and going Addenbrooke’s hairdresser for a skinnead. I felt like Ben Kingsley’s character in Sexy Beast (which I haven’t seen), and incidentally most people who saw me tapped into his character’s vocabulary to describe my grade 1 all over. My first grade 1 since a distinction in descant recorder in 1998; you can take the boy out of Kettle’s Yard.
I wanted to look hard. And other than an unsuccessful spell, I say unsuccessful but no-one beat me up, of chewing imaginary gum, this was the only idea I had. We don’t talk so much about looking hard these days but I wasn’t to know. Now, a study by a university in America says skinneads appear more dominant, influential, powerful and authoritative, which may as well mean hard. I looked like a teenager who needed more hair to shelter my features’ abandonment of perspective and subtlety. I wanted to look like an insider in the hard club, fight club, sorry mate, they’d say at the door of Kettle’s Yard, you ain’t coming to examine Alfred Wallis’ childlike depictions of Cornish coastlines with a head like that, and I’d be cock-a-hoop, I’ve got different lines in mind mate, I’d say, cryptically but obviously meaning cocaine (which I have of course never gone near). I didn’t look like an insider, as I said, I looked like a tuber, an outsider, though that may be as much a failing of my friends to follow suit as anything to do with me. My mum shouldn’t have told Tracey about the highlights, she (my mum) ended up shaving my head in the garden, or the conservatory in winter.
I didn’t know how I had wanted to look until I saw the picture of Danny Brown on a Jimmy Quinn pre-season boot camp in 2007. By this time I had acquired a misspelt tattoo: ‘United in Endeaueur’. I wanted to look like Danny Brown, dominant, powerful, influential, authoritative, die hard, die harder, sexy beast, nothing compares 2u, and masculine, virile, blokey, lad. First skinnead, a girl at school asked me was I a bad boy (no italics on either word) but I didn’t know what to say, presumably giving her the impression either that I was so bad I wouldn’t even answer or more probably that I was an effete chancer desperately seeking but missing masculinity.
Greater potential as leaders, studies say skinneads are. I didn’t have no leadership skills, no authority, dominance, just an image of Danny Brown in my shaved head. It didn’t foist masculinity on me at school but maybe it did at matches, artificial masculinity of an unknown skinnead in a crowd, shouting stuff like them around me who didn’t ask me was I bad boy. I don’t know, is it about class, was I trying to strip off independent school upbringing with clumsy societal appropriation or hiding from something in myself. I used to see a therapist but she was Greek American and didn’t know who Danny Brown was, which I felt was important to the story, so I didn’t elaborate. There’s a study for everything, one which proves anything, I knew a bloke once whose wife co-authored a paper on cucumber reproduction in Avignon, but there’s another study which claims that if you’re working class you’re more likely to be street smart so maybe I was trying to channel the acquired nous of a Danny Brown which I imagined he possessed based on skinnead to a very large extent.
I made up a song about Danny Brown; Danny Brown is made of steel, it began (and was also titled), he’s fucking hard and he’s mental, Danny Brown is made of steel. There are, I admit, some issues with the song, it hasn’t aged well, but it gives an indication of what I was trying to imitate, where I was with my thinking and also where I wasn’t. On the terrace I wanted to shear away my background and I wanted to be something else inside, it’s terrible what youth does to you. I was 47. That’s a joke, the only one. I also wore a cubic zirconia earring from Argos around this time, you should know. You should also, although I don’t know why you should, that none of this, the doctoring of class, the hair, the tattoo, the earring, made any difference to my masculinity, dominance, leadership qualities, height, aggression, authority or influence. I now have a short back and sides but it is a wonderful picture of Danny Brown.
Then it became subversive, which is to say I started noticing it more, so not necessarily subversive at all, but still, subversive in the way that appropriating anything associatively tarnished by a previous social group could be said to be, like liking Abba or squatting (property). The skinnead appealed to me as I got older because I hated getting my hair cut and as an assault on my middle-class Cambridge upbringing of mackintoshes with itchy polymer labels, United Colours of Benetton hand-me-downs (cousins) and house arrest in Kettle’s Yard. Hair, if it was going to be any good, Top of the Pops said, had literally to rise or fall, as exemplarily exemplified by pop five-piece 5ive – Ritchie: up, Scott: up, Sean: down, Abz: varied, plus hats, J: up. The Loaded generation couldn’t have a short back and sides; if you wanted a Gail Porter (pre-skinnead) poster on your wall you’d need gel and highlights going up or skinnead going down.
My mum told the hairdresser, Tracey on Hills Road, to advise me against bleaching, so I couldn’t go up – something that has blighted my adult life if you know what I mean – but I had the last laugh in some ways, nicking some hair lightener from the bathroom, doing my eyebrows blonde and going Addenbrooke’s hairdresser for a skinnead. I felt like Ben Kingsley’s character in Sexy Beast (which I haven’t seen), and incidentally most people who saw me tapped into his character’s vocabulary to describe my grade 1 all over. My first grade 1 since a distinction in descant recorder in 1998; you can take the boy out of Kettle’s Yard.
I wanted to look hard. And other than an unsuccessful spell, I say unsuccessful but no-one beat me up, of chewing imaginary gum, this was the only idea I had. We don’t talk so much about looking hard these days but I wasn’t to know. Now, a study by a university in America says skinneads appear more dominant, influential, powerful and authoritative, which may as well mean hard. I looked like a teenager who needed more hair to shelter my features’ abandonment of perspective and subtlety. I wanted to look like an insider in the hard club, fight club, sorry mate, they’d say at the door of Kettle’s Yard, you ain’t coming to examine Alfred Wallis’ childlike depictions of Cornish coastlines with a head like that, and I’d be cock-a-hoop, I’ve got different lines in mind mate, I’d say, cryptically but obviously meaning cocaine (which I have of course never gone near). I didn’t look like an insider, as I said, I looked like a tuber, an outsider, though that may be as much a failing of my friends to follow suit as anything to do with me. My mum shouldn’t have told Tracey about the highlights, she (my mum) ended up shaving my head in the garden, or the conservatory in winter.
I didn’t know how I had wanted to look until I saw the picture of Danny Brown on a Jimmy Quinn pre-season boot camp in 2007. By this time I had acquired a misspelt tattoo: ‘United in Endeaueur’. I wanted to look like Danny Brown, dominant, powerful, influential, authoritative, die hard, die harder, sexy beast, nothing compares 2u, and masculine, virile, blokey, lad. First skinnead, a girl at school asked me was I a bad boy (no italics on either word) but I didn’t know what to say, presumably giving her the impression either that I was so bad I wouldn’t even answer or more probably that I was an effete chancer desperately seeking but missing masculinity.
Greater potential as leaders, studies say skinneads are. I didn’t have no leadership skills, no authority, dominance, just an image of Danny Brown in my shaved head. It didn’t foist masculinity on me at school but maybe it did at matches, artificial masculinity of an unknown skinnead in a crowd, shouting stuff like them around me who didn’t ask me was I bad boy. I don’t know, is it about class, was I trying to strip off independent school upbringing with clumsy societal appropriation or hiding from something in myself. I used to see a therapist but she was Greek American and didn’t know who Danny Brown was, which I felt was important to the story, so I didn’t elaborate. There’s a study for everything, one which proves anything, I knew a bloke once whose wife co-authored a paper on cucumber reproduction in Avignon, but there’s another study which claims that if you’re working class you’re more likely to be street smart so maybe I was trying to channel the acquired nous of a Danny Brown which I imagined he possessed based on skinnead to a very large extent.
I made up a song about Danny Brown; Danny Brown is made of steel, it began (and was also titled), he’s fucking hard and he’s mental, Danny Brown is made of steel. There are, I admit, some issues with the song, it hasn’t aged well, but it gives an indication of what I was trying to imitate, where I was with my thinking and also where I wasn’t. On the terrace I wanted to shear away my background and I wanted to be something else inside, it’s terrible what youth does to you. I was 47. That’s a joke, the only one. I also wore a cubic zirconia earring from Argos around this time, you should know. You should also, although I don’t know why you should, that none of this, the doctoring of class, the hair, the tattoo, the earring, made any difference to my masculinity, dominance, leadership qualities, height, aggression, authority or influence. I now have a short back and sides but it is a wonderful picture of Danny Brown.
