From 2 Tone to grime, our youth cults showcase a vibrant history of Britain

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/17/youth-culture-teddy-boys-ravers

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There are two histories of modern Britain, running concurrently and only occasionally touching. The first is the one of parliaments, politicians, royal babies, military interventions, prosperity, austerity and all the rest of it. The other is surely the history of the streets, sounds and styles that inform not only our culture, but how we are seen across the world.

Most of our great cultural exports stem from one place: our youth tribes, the young style cults that reject the culture that is given to them, start something of their own and sometimes find their looks and sounds taking over the world.

Something about this country – the divisions, the class system, the general sense of distrust and dissatisfaction – seems to breed youth subcultures like no other place on Earth. The strange, stylish clans that this island incubates have been exported across the world, influencing everything from high street fashion to high art. From teddy boys to 2 Tone rudeboys, soulboys to Slipknot fans, grunge bands to grime crews, mods to mod revivalists, the history of these groups shows us a version of modern Britain that goes way beyond Diana and Blair.

For the Channel 4 series Street, Style and Sound (in conjunction with i-D magazine), which I’ve been co-writing with acclaimed photographer and film-maker Ewen Spencer, who has written, directed and narrated it, we’re trying to tell the story of how these ordinary kids from Berkshire, Brixton and Birmingham created their own worlds and how these worlds reacted against each other.

The series is essentially a journey, one that most of us don’t fully understand, of how kids who were wearing jelly shoes and listening to jazz funk found themselves wearing Vicks-soaked gas masks and listening to acid house within a few years; of why teenagers now grow out their fringes, wear their trousers around their thighs and steal their parents’ old clothes.

Our story starts in 1980, the year that i-D magazine was launched, initially as a reaction against the refusal by Vogue to cover punk. It was a divided time for youth culture, with numerous sartorial factions forming all over the country, but perhaps the most prominent look on the streets was that of the mod revivalists: young working-class kids who found a kind of solace and acceptance not in the looks of their own time, but in those of the late 60s, a more aspirational era in thrall to Italian suits and foppish hairdos.

Splintering off from that scene came the 2 Tone rudeboys, who fused the mod look with the harder-edged aesthetic of the skinheads into a new, multiracial, politicised, but playful hybrid of 60s subcultures. With their tonic suits and tight haircuts, looking sharp was the order of the day. There were no beards or beads here. This ideal of “clean living under difficult circumstances” (as rock publicist Peter Meaden once called the mod aesthetic) was anathema in the grim days of the Callaghan/Thatcher crossover period and a spit in the eye of this increasingly suburbanised Britain.

Eventually the 2 Tone kids and the nu-mods fell under the same umbrella as the scooter boys, who revelled in mob-handedly gathering in coastal towns for almighty pissups (one newspaper accused them of “turning the Isle of Wight into the Isle of Fright”), but eventually that scene became predictable and middle-aged, and the cool kids, searching for something more considered, a bit more louche than flight jackets and Doc Martens, fell under the spell of the soulboy lifestyle, with its wedge haircuts, Hawaiian shirts and notorious jelly shoe obsession.

Youth culture had become aspirational once more, and the influence of the continent started to be felt on the streets of Britain. The soulboys, many of whom were regular football-goers, began to take notice of the luxury sportswear being worn by the teenagers of Milan and Marseille on their away days.

Soon the terraces of Villa Park, Stamford Bridge and Anfield were awash with Lacoste jumpers, Fila tracksuits, Sergio Tacchini polo shirts and Nike tennis shoes. Boutiques selling this kind of gear popped up all round the country, and a universal, materialistic style scene was born, in which you can see the seeds of today’s label culture.

At the same time, and in quite similar clothing, the early British breakdance crews were covering small patches of their cities in linoleum and elbow-spinning into a brand-new youth cult. They soon ditched the tracksuits, found Goose jackets and customised belt-buckles, ushering in the streetwear scene that survives to this day.

But not everybody can do a handstand, and for some the growing house music scene, imported from the rusting cities of the US midwest, seemed the way forward. House was hard but soulful, rigid but expressive. Much like the B-Boy scene it spawned its own dance crews, including Manchester’s Foot Patrol who could be seen shuffling and sliding across early raves in Moss Side.

But when Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold took a fateful trip to Ibiza and imported the eclectic, euphoric scenes they saw at DJ Alfredo’s Amnesia residency back to Bermondsey, south London, rave culture as we know it was born.

It has become a cliche but it was ecstasy that got the Millwall and West Ham fans at the other ends of the dancefloor to join together in this strange new acid house future. Men began to grow their hair out, girls started wearing dungarees, and simple baggy T-shirts became the look of the day, way before the smiley faces and whistles that became the sartorial stereotype for the rave generation.

Not that guitars were finished for everyone: when the droning, uncompromising sounds later known as grunge started to come over from Seattle and Washington State, the style obsessives also soon appropriated the plaid and denim of the cold American north-west and the style magazines took notice. Soon, Corinne Day’s shots of Kate Moss captured a new kind of freedom in British youth, Sleazenation and Dazed & Confused started, while i-D began commissioning the likes of photographers Jürgen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans. The fashion world had finally caught up with the street-style world.

But grunge was an overwhelmingly white, middle-class scene, very much influenced by America; it was never going to be uniquely British. It took jungle – a bastard, urbanised child of the rave scene, taking elements from hip-hop and reggae – to enter the arena before things toughened up once more. Iceberg jeans, Slammin’ Vinyl bomber jackets and beanie hats were the essentials.

Jungle led into UK garage, for which the pendulum of influence once again swung to a more luxurious style: Moschino trousers, Gucci loafers and belly tops. Garage led into grime, which took a looser silhouette: Air Force One sneakers, powder-blue tracksuits and fitted caps.

The cycle seems to go on like this: there seems to be an opposite and equal reaction to every youth movement, shown once more in the mid-00s when the Ray Davies-meets-Johnny-Thunders aesthetic of the London indie scene, led by Pete Doherty, Johnny Borrell et al, was countered by the hyper-American emo aesthetic.

As we move towards the current day, there is a temptation to say that youth cults don’t exist, that we’ve all fallen into high street, Hollister homogeneity, the kids included.

But you’ve only got to see the teenage streetwear obsessives, led by the Wavey Garms secondhand designer marketplace and Swedish rapper Yung Lean and his Sad Boys crew, to see that the tradition of clean living is still there, even if their circumstances might not be as difficult as their stylistic forefathers. And more than that, many of the cultures we have seen still have their followers, young people who choose to be skinheads, or mod stylists, clothing themselves in the looks of old in the face of all that’s offered by the style-industrial complex.

The beauty of youth cults is that nobody knows where they’ll go next, that they’re always one step ahead of trend forecasters and brand ambassadors. We could make this series again in 10 years’ time and have a wealth of new material. Those of us who are fascinated by this kind of thing live in hope that somewhere in this country a look, a sound, a way of being is quietly brewing, and that it might take over the world. Why? Because it’s different.

Catch up with Street, Style and Sound episode 1 on channel4.com. The series continues on Thursday 21 May at 12am