This Is England - TV Series

[Bazza]

The following info was taken from The Blaggers ITA MySpace page - www.myspace.com/blaggersita about a TV series for 'This Is England'.



The four part series of one hour episodes will be called 'We Were Faces' and will be screened on Channel 4. The series will revisit many of the key characters from the film 4 years later in 1986.

Two episodes have been written so far, with the other two underway. Writing duties are being undertaken by Shane Meadows and Jack Thorne (Skins, The Scouting Book For Boys).

Filming is scheduled to start next spring.

Articles mention that Shaun, Lol and Woody will be amongst those that return.

[Bazza]

Talking of 'This Is England' here is an article that originally appeared in Little White Lies magazine's special issue on Shane Meadows' This Is England which I thought that one or two might find interesting.



"I don't wanna be a punk no more. I'm gonna be a rude boy - like me dad."
Clive, from Sid and Nancy


It's a warm spring evening at Reading University in 1985. A strange scene begins to unfold as Trotskyite-Motown skinheads, The Redskins, are joined on stage by Billy Bragg and former Specials mainstay Jerry Dammers. As the muckle-mouthed Dammers pounds out The Harry J Allstars' Liquidator, a group of skinheads break away from the skanking crowd and, linking arms, start to pogo. "Skinheads are back! Sieg Heil!" they chant, offering the Roman salute for the roots classic. They are tolerated for a moment before a group of eight or ten skinheads sweep them from the floor in a shower of lager and plastic pint pots. The band doesn't miss a beat but outside there are muffled shouts, breaking glass and the unmistakable thump of air-soled footwear swung in anger.

It wasn't unexpected. These boys weren't 'sharp' like a lot of the audience that night, preferring t-shirts to Fred Perry or Ben Sherman, 14 rather than 8 hole Dr Martens and knocking back Special Brew when there was Red Stripe or rum and coke at the bar. They were 'boneheads', unrecognisable from the original skinheads whose style had grown out of Mod and whose musical heroes were people like Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker and Jackie Mittoo - sharp looking Jamaicans all. But unlike their forbears, the skinheads of the early 80s emerged into a fractured country short on optimism. Unemployment had doubled in less than two years, taxes were up, inflation was 18% and England's major cities were ablaze with rioting in the summer months. Jimmy Cliff's Wonderful World, Beautiful People was never going to be a natural soundtrack.

While rude boy bands like The Specials and The Beat distilled the original ska sound into something uniquely British, others faded, or like Bad Manners became cartoonish grotesques churning out grandma-friendly novelty pap. Increasingly, the music associated with the boots 'n' braces culture was divesting itself of it's Jamaican roots and the sound drawing skinhead audiences was an aggressive, defiantly working class back-to-basics punk. At Sounds, always the most unreconstructed of the rock weeklies, equally unreconstructed music journalist Garry Bushell would christen the noise from the streets 'Oi!'. As well as embracing yobbism, Oi! was also an overwhelmingly white scene, which didn't help its increasing reputation for links to the National Front.

Today, Bushell is adamant though that Oi! was a more complex beast and that it was tabloid sensationalism that made it a youth culture bogeyman . "The idea that Oi! was racist or Nazi stems mostly from the Daily Mail and the Southall Riot," he says."Oi! bands responded with a tour called, ludicrously, 'Oi! Against Racism and Political Extremism but Still Against the System'. The idea that all British second generation Skins were Nazis or even racist is just mad."

In fairness, this zippily-titled riposte to the Mail wasn't an exception: early London Oi! bands like the Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects were deeply involved in campaigns against unemployment and support for strikers. But it was The Redskins, a skinhead band from York with a very different style, that would finally confound the popular image of skinheads.

By the time Oi! was making headlines in the music press, The Redskins' bassist Martin Hewes had abandoned his brief flirtation with prog noodling and heavy rock for the energy of punk, ska and their obligatory political adjuncts, Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. It was a time when everything had a political connotation, from the colour of your boot laces to the music you listened to, and it was Oi!'s failure to grasp that fact, says Hewes, that left it open to exploitation. "The Oi! brigade were never particularly complex but at the same time they were not Nazis," he recalls. "Oi! was about drinking beer, going to football and getting shagged - in no particular order. It endeavoured to be apolitical. Unfortunately it existed in an environment that was not apolitical and rightwing skinheads took advantage of that and ultimately gave Oi! a bad name that it probably didn't deserve."

The Redskins' debut, the riff-driven lovesong to Leon Trotsky Lev Bronstein, picked up on Oi!'s rawness but their sound quickly developed a more soulful edge. They added a brass section and singer Chris Dean's voice lost its snarl in favour of a wounded, Otis Redding-inflected yelp as the band moved beyond the range of their crop-headed contemporaries. They were bypassing ska and roots altogether and building on the foot-stomping rhythms that had filled Northern Soul all nighters in the previous decade. Only these songs were about the power of collective action in a late industrial economy, not being done wrong by your woman.

"Our sound was influenced by all the music that we were hearing around us at the time", says Hewes. "We never wanted to be labeled as 'a skinhead band' because we always wanted to appeal to a wider audience, specifically because our main motivation was to put socialist ideas back on the agenda".

To the band, musical style was governed at least as much by propaganda considerations as personal taste: "We felt that our music had to encompass a wider range of styles to include as many different sub-cultures as possible. So our gigs were attended by a very wide cross-section of individuals who ultimately were united by an interest in socialist ideas. In general our hardcore fans were a real mixed bag of skins, mods, rockerbillys, punks, fanzine editors, ranting poets, chefs and hardcore lefties."

The Chefs - a group of scooterists who were, well, chefs - were indeed a fixture of Redskins gigs, but rarely made their presence felt to the extent of those "hardcore lefties" known as Red Action. Skinheads of the old school, they were also committed socialists who never let politics stand in the way of their love of beer and a good ruck. Despite acknowledging the relative sophistication of the group's ideology, Garry Bushell is characteristically skeptical of the rank-and-file's motivation: "At heart, they were thugs," he remembers. "They enjoyed violent confrontation with their ideological opposites, the 'Fash', seeking it out for its own sake - and they usually came tooled up with coshes, hammers and pick-axe handles."

For those in the The Redskins' audience on the receiving end of the 'Fash', the presence of a bunch of leftwing hardnuts could be reassuring, but the band themselves took trouble in their stride, as Martin Hewes remembers: "After being attacked at the Jobs For Change festival in London's Jubilee Gardens, we did keep baseball bats on stage just in case some rightwing nutters decided to try and attack us. To be honest, Britain is quite mild in comparison to continental Europe - Germany in particular - where it wasn't uncommon to be told that people had had guns and knives taken off them before the gig. That's somewhat more scary than some pathetic Nazi shouting obscenities at you." And besides, Hewes had seen it all before at gigs in the late '70s, albeit from the audience rather than the stage. It baffled him then too: "It seemed ludicrous to us that, at a Two Tone gig, nazi skinheads would happily dance to The Specials for half the gig and then try and the start a fight. Why listen to music that had its roots in Jamaican culture and then try and beat the crap out of people who didn't agree with your nasty racist ideas?"


Despite a few left-leaning leaders, musical and otherwise, it's a question that has long dogged Skinhead. Perhaps it's the uncompromising nature of the culture and the passion it inspires in its most devoted adherents that makes it such fertile ground for the politics of passion, whether of love or of hate. Whatever the truth, even as The Redskins were confounding the popular image of skinheads, many were already growing out their crops, slipping into Pringle and Tacchini and embracing a new generation of black music; within a few years, a new youth cult would make fighting on the dancefloor seem like ancient history.

Today, Martin Hewes retains his political convictions, but has he remained true to the skinhead ethos? "Not really", he says, "although I do still get a grade two every month". Avanti!