The books heartily stoked early 1970s Britain’s poisonous atmosphere of random violence (see Stanley Kubrick’s voluntary withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange from UK cinemas) and established the skinhead as a contemporary working class archetype. Pulp press the New English Library celebrated the skins with a wildly popular series of trash paperbacks that glorified the cult’s venal, brutish aggression. In Kingston, they were churning out skin-specific 45s like Symarip’s ” Skinhead Moonstomp ,” with it’s opening recitation of “I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet/Put your braces together and your boots on your feet/ And give me some of that old moonstomping. Psychedelic Carnaby streeters they definitely were not, and the sect burgeoned to the point that outsiders quickly realized it was a highly exploitable marketplace. A mutant sub-culture that emerged in the late 1960s from the fast evaporating Mod scene, the skins were a rowdy, easily identifiable crew who sported a distinct uniform and adopted contemporary Jamaican ska and rocksteady as their preferred soundtrack, anointing the genre’s top singer Prince Buster as their musical hero. In order to understand the street level circumstances which produced Madness, one must grasp the historic context of the skinhead movement. While Madness is universally seen as a family friendly, jolly good posse of cockney payasos, it’s high time to address another side of the Madness phenomena, one for which they have far too long enjoyed “a layer of protection”-the ugly reality of the group’s skinhead origins, a stain from which they have successfully skated past for decades. ![]() The single was great, but the three nattering squares hosting the show spun dozens of appalling discs, chief among them this dreadful 1983 Madness pop bomb, which led to one of them oozing on about “our friend, Suggs.” When I was working on the Melanie Vammen substack piece awhile back, the fabulous former Pandoras-Muffs-Coolies rock goddess was a guest on Laguna’s KXFM radio to debut the Coolies latest song, and I naturally tuned in.
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