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Crombies, Braces and Boots
More on International Times (and a little on its first editor, Tom McGrath) in a Guardian article today marking the launch of ITs' full issue archive. It's the covers on the later issues and the illustrations that have lasted best and evoke the period. The one above is from a 1969 issue and signals the fast approaching demise of the hippy, even before the end of the sixties, and the rise of the skinhead.
By 1970 Richard Allen was publishing Skinhead, the start of a successful run through other titles such as Suedehead and, of course, Knuckle Girls.
Somehow, IT saw it coming and though its roots may have been in psychedelia, it recognised that the strange hybridity of British popular culture was its' true subject. A later editor of IT, Mick Farren, went on to write for the NME and penned a landmark article entitled 'The Titanic Sails at Dawn' which laid waste the turgid and pompous rock stars of the 70s and cleared the ground for punk. The article seems locked in an online subscriber-only archive and, anyway, it's probably more appropriate to direct to Farren's current blog.
To drive this tangent to its conclusion only needs the revelation that Richard Allen was a pseudonym for James Moffat, a Canadian born writer who worked under a series of aliases. Stewart Home, who has paid homage to the Allen books, analyses them in an online article, 'Gender, Sexuality and Control' where he conludes the readers of these texts were 'searching for an authority they could believe in, rather than attempting to overthrow all forms of hierarchy.' For more on all of this, there's a 1996 documentary on YouTube here.
1. At 9:46 am on August 10th, 2009 Dexter St. Clair wrote:
The skinhead was one of the descendants of mod.The bleached Levis, the braces and button down shirt were all port of the late sixties mod uniform Added to that was the Glasgow crew cut hair style and Dr. Marten boots rather than the cleg studded brogues favoured by Glasgow gang members.