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How Britain killed off its musical tribes Where are the punks or Teddy Boys of today?

'Simple things — straight jeans rather than flares, skinny ties, short, spiky hair, combined with a scattering of badges — were enough to mark you out as some kind of a punk' (Erica Echenberg/Redferns)

'Simple things — straight jeans rather than flares, skinny ties, short, spiky hair, combined with a scattering of badges — were enough to mark you out as some kind of a punk' (Erica Echenberg/Redferns)


February 7, 2024   6 mins

When the Teddy boys burst onto the scene at the start of the drab Fifties, they established the template for all subcultures to follow. There have always been ultra-loyal music fans of individual artists, but this was something else: a look, and a lifestyle. The pattern usually went something like this: establish a uniform, adopt a musical preference, stir up the media to a predictable frenzy (wittingly or unwittingly), be denounced in Parliament, endure hand-wringing editorials declaring that civilisation is about to collapse, and then gradually become yesterday’s news as the hysteria blows over. Oh and, most discreditably of all, be written off as old farts by a younger subculture who have stepped up to take your place in the firing line.

The original Teds were the pioneers, denounced from pulpits and by politicians as little more than a hooligan mob. Originating in Blitz-damaged working-class districts of London such as Elephant & Castle and the East End, they began dressing in the Edwardian-style: long, velvet-collared jackets, narrow trousers, flashy waistcoats and crepe-soled shoes. The loss of countless young men in the war meant that jobs were now plentiful even for 15-year-old school-leavers, who had spare cash to go dancing, to the cinema and to order custom-made Ted suits from local tailors. And when authentic US rock’n’roll first broke into the British charts in late 1954, the Teds embraced it wholeheartedly. But it was only a few years before they grew up, and the mods and rockers came in to take their place as the moral panic of the day.

From the Fifties through to the end of the Eighties, this informal system of creative destruction roughly held. But then something went wrong. Though certain styles have a vague Noughties aura, there is little to fundamentally distinguish the way a teenager of today might dress from in 2004, or even earlier. And music is now consumed and sought out in a radically different way. A friend of mine who has been a well-known goth DJ for some years, told me that he was recently spinning records at Slimelight in London, a fixture since 1987, the “world’s oldest dark scene club playing ebm, electro, goth, futurepop, dark techno & trance, industrial”. The description itself is a measure of how much music scenes have fragmented into micro-categories. A young person came up to the booth and requested some “rock” music: when he asked her to be more specific, it turned out that she couldn’t name a single group or even a song she might prefer. She even seemed unclear as to what exactly rock might be in the first place.

It’s the sort of thing to give an old NME rockist an aneurysm. But it also marks a fundamental cultural change from the 20th century, when the category of “genre” was a fierce battlefield. Even “fame” has become compartmentalised. In their day, the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols were catapulted onto the front pages of newspapers and broadcast into millions of homes. A pensioner in the Sixties would have heard of (and probably loathed) Mick Jagger. But in our own time, acts can rack up colossal download figures while remaining almost completely unknown to anyone outside their own particular fan base.

Someone my age knows exactly what it feels like to be swept up by the new wind of a subculture. In 1976, punk rock hit Britain with the first Ramones LP, followed a few months later by the debut singles by the Damned and the Sex Pistols. The music and the clothing seemed the logical heirs to the stripped-down Fifties rock’n’roll I already loved. In our part of the country, you couldn’t yet walk into a shop and buy a punk t-shirt — such things were still the preserve of McLaren and Westwood’s wildly overpriced Seditionaries shop. But simple things — straight jeans rather than flares, skinny ties, short, spiky hair, combined with a scattering of badges — were enough to mark you out as some kind of a punk. And these standards were strictly policed. One of the best bands of the era, The Only Ones, were heckled at early gigs by their own crowd, who yelled “flared trousers, flared trousers” at them in protest at their failure to toe the sartorial line.

By 1977, I was regularly walking the night-time streets of my home city, Portsmouth, in DIY ripped-up and stencilled clothing. You quickly became used to running the gauntlet of other youth tribes who felt duty-bound to criticise your tastes by the application of fists or boots. But I cared enough about the music that it seemed worth the risk. And the music itself was a liberation, the sounds that I heard on John Peel’s evening Radio One show, and read about in the NME, inspiring me to form a band with some friends and start playing live, frequenting some of the city’s less salubrious pubs. Yet the tabloid newspapers of the day did everything in their power to promote the idea that punk musicians were little more than violent oafs: Bernard Brook-Partridge, chairman of the Greater London Council, famously declared that “most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death”.

It was certainly an identity that many were willing to scrap for. I was one of around 50 Portsmouth teenagers who showed up in October 1977 to see X-Ray Spex. One particularly brazen punk had scrawled “I’m Glad Elvis Died” across his torn white t-shirt: this was a provocation too far, given that Presley had been gone less than a month. A sizeable contingent of local Teds were waiting outside the venue when the gig finished, looking for an excuse to give some punks a hiding. (I was never much good at sport, but I ran off pretty swiftly before things spilled over into violence.) The media delighted in these scenes, deliberately pitting one group of young people against another. At the height of the Queen’s official Jubilee celebrations that year, Ian Glover-James from the London Evening Standard, accompanied by a photographer, rounded up a group of second-generation Teds and followed them as they set off down the King’s Road looking for punks to attack:

“It has been going on for a month or more. Gangs of Teds, teenage imitators of the 1950s originals, on search and destroy missions looking for the enemy, driven by a bond of brotherhood and intolerance for anything more bizarre than themselves. Their motive? Over to the leader of the pack, 19-year-old Rockin’ Mick from Brockley: ‘We hate punks,’ he stated simply. ‘By Christmas they’ll be wiped out.’”

The streets are far from safe for young people now, with parts of big cities governed by the anonymous threat of random knife crime. But this sort of passionate, identitarian — almost sectarian — violence between subcultures has largely disappeared.

In 1979, hot on the heels of punk, young people looking for a scene could choose between three separate revivals that year: ska, rockabilly and mod. The turn of the decade brought the New Romantic movement, the psychobillies who combined rockabilly and punk, and the Goths, whose major bands were often products of the original Seventies punk scene. Yet by the early Nineties, despite the fondness of the music press for hanging labels like grunge, shoegazing or Britpop on certain bands, it had become ever more difficult to tell an individual’s taste in music simply from the way they looked. A sea of shapeless t-shirts with band logos ruled the day. Scenes blended into each other, and people who attended a Pulp gig one evening might go to a Cramps gig the following night, all wearing the same clothes.

Today, in the age of the big flat now, the era of the animal-print onesie, fashions may fluctuate but are no longer a signifier of cultural identity. And, if you do feel the need to walk around dressed up as a leather-and-studs punk rocker or Vlad the Impaler, it will probably just be assumed that you’re on a stag or hen night. So much of youth fashion in particular has stood still. One of the most common streetwear styles today dates from 1986, when the pioneering New York hip-hop outfit Run-DMC sang about “My Adidas”, leading to a lucrative sponsorship deal with that corporation. The group’s essential look of clothing, headgear and trainers would not seem out of place worn by later hip-hop performers or fans over the succeeding decades.

Musical taste itself has mutated, becoming more all-encompassing and less partisan as the internet gave access to a far greater array of recordings from all periods and cultures than ever before. In the Seventies, Britain could support five national music papers selling hundreds of thousands of copies each week. Now, even their names — Record Mirror, Disc — sound like anachronisms. Such cohesion and shared experiences slowly became a thing of the past with the great proliferation of terrestrial and satellite channels over the following decades, and with it, that sense of belonging which is essential to nurturing a subculture. Common ground has given way to individual choice, and no-one seems to think that you can bring down the monarchy by singing a song anymore.

My uncle was a teenage Teddy boy in the mid-Fifties, growing up in a council house in Slough. He had the clothes, the haircut and the textbook James Dean-Presley moody expression which he could put on for the cameras, even in my parents’ wedding photos. During my punk days, I once asked him whether he and his friends had run into difficulties from differently-dressed groups, and he said no, it was just the Teds, the vanguard of youth rebellion, against the straight society.

Today, instead of that binary division, there are a multitude of available identities to try on and discard at will, while social media and the need for “likes” and approval reward those who fit in rather than kick out at the system. Of course, the system itself has also long since mutated, and the spectacle of former would-be rock singer and guitarist Tony Blair inviting Noel Gallagher to Downing Street in 1997 only showed how far the old battlelines had been erased. The title of one of Noel’s songs famously referenced Angry Young Man John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the 1956 play that declared that “there aren’t any good brave causes left”. In our time, plenty of young people march in the streets and protest about everything from wars to climate change, but the flags they fly are social and political, and what unites them is the individual cause they are fighting for, rather than any subculture.


Max Décharné is an authority on the counterculture of the Fifties and Sixties. Teddy Boys – Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution is his tenth book.


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Paul T
Paul T
7 months ago

It’s music streaming that did that. A few years ago all my music was deleted when I joined a streaming app. I had no idea why. On the app, if I set up a playlist within a few months most of the songs are unavailable and I cant remember the tens of thousands of individual pieces and albums I used to enjoy. I have them all on an old iPod for which I have a plug and cable locked away along with a wired speaker. I really hope the music streamers eventually go out of business once people realise what a Private Equity scam they are.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
7 months ago

I was a teenager in the 70’s but not heavily into music. I got my tribal kicks (literally and figuratively) on the football terraces.

I think the disappearance of tribes has more to do with masculinity, particularly of the testosterone fuelled adolescent variety, having become toxic.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
7 months ago

These cultural “tribes” were a boomer phenomenon; a blip. Great while they lasted but never to be repeated in the age of fragmentation.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
7 months ago

The author misses the elephant in the room of the clubbing scene that grew up from the late 80s onwards, with vast warehouses full of young (and not so young) people moving individually within the crowd. Therein endeth the identitarian music scene, and also much of the violence that accompanied the preceding decades.

Scott Coltrane
Scott Coltrane
7 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

That also struck me as a glaring omission. As someone who was part of the rave/club scene in the early-mid 90s (the late 80s was a little too early for me!), one of the great things was that it allowed for individuality to be expressed, unlike the ‘regimented’ nature and strict dress codes of the scenes that came before that the author reminisces so wistfully over. While I have time for some of the punk music (I stress “some” – like all music scenes, there was a handful of quality bands and bucket-loads of dross), the culture that went with it is not something to be particularly celebrated – narcissism mixed with nihilism was never going to achieve much.
We all have a tendency to think the youth-culture of our particular era was the best (I’d always argue for the nineties – the variety of music genres, movies, fashions that all broke through to the mainstream was unprecedented until then, while the backlash against political correctness is something I fondly look back on in this current era of wokeness!), but I think perhaps the author doesn’t have much contact with the youth of today. Yes, we can all romanticise about how great it was to discover a new band/album in a record shop, but kids today have the ability to explore all sorts of styles (mainstream or alternative) through streaming. My 13 year old has a far greater appreciation of the wealth of good music out there than I ever did at that age! And I value the individuality that I see kids expressing today, which is much braver than simply conforming to what a particular tribe prescribes (be it mainstream or not). But then I’m not on social media, so perhaps what I observe in the ‘real world’ isn’t the zeitgeist at all!

Alphonse Pfarti
Alphonse Pfarti
7 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

I waited for that to appear in the article and was surprised by the omission also. One notable thing from my own recollections was the intense snobbery around different sub-genres of rave/club music. Those who held US artists from Chicago and Detroit in high regard wouldn’t be seen dead at a Goa trance night in the company of dreadlocked, tie-dye clad hippies. Central Scotland had it’s own home-grown scene combining Rotterdam gabbba and squeaky mallet happy hardcore, with the clientele almost exclusively from the housing estates of provincial towns rather than the cities. While you never had pitched battles between these tribes, they certainly all looked very different and almost never ventured into each other’s territory. I suppose the author merely emphasises his point that people grow up, move on and don’t know what the next generation is up to.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
7 months ago

A different world back then; almost another planet…

D M
D M
7 months ago
Reply to  Jonathan Nash

Deliberate misquote ?

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
7 months ago

Grime? Drill?

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
7 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Arguably dominant culture now, rather than subculture. All trendy teens I work with are into it. The guys dress like road men and the girls wear primark leggings with zavetti jacket and they all think they’re gangsters.

Scott Coltrane
Scott Coltrane
7 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Indeed. There are countless genres of music and scenes out there if one’s willing to look beyond what pops up on an Instagram feed. The reason Teddy Boys (50s) and Punk (70s) gained so much attention was because there was nothing else youth-driven for the kids to get behind!

Icabod Crane
Icabod Crane
7 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Indeed. Perhaps the sign of getting old, post 20th Century, is being blissfully unaware of the yoof subculture of the day. I’m sure that applies to me, too. My knowledge fades out post the dubstep era – perhaps I know of drill, grime and enjoy a spot of vapourwave and electronic quasi-classical like Kiasmos and , but that dates me at around 2010, I think…
In terms of a tribe, I used to be a raver and was sworn to enmity with Britpop and the dreary tail end of the rockist era that this author identifies with, a choice I defend to this day. The guitar was dead, long live the synthesizer. And there is something vindicating in that 90s rave music videos on YouTube remain a delightfully rare sanctuary from vitriolic comment sections, I must say. I guess we did something right!
This obliviousness of things 21st century definitely applies to many of my contemporaries too, however, whose cultural awareness seems to have stopped around the year 2000. Perhaps it’s better to grow old gracefully but I suffered FOMO for longer, I guess.
The Internet has definitely fragmented and diminished the live music scene, and therefore the visibility of identifiable subcultures for people to bond over, which is something I lament. The cost of living crisis has compounded this, not least diminishing opportunities for the proles to take a risk on a career or side-gig in the arts. Though it’s still relatively healthy in big cities like Manchester.

Icabod Crane
Icabod Crane
7 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

.

Archibald Tennyson
Archibald Tennyson
7 months ago

Isn’t it clear? This has all been subsumed into a new subculture of dyed hair, nose piercings, smartphone addiction, and despising Western civilisation.

Ian_S
Ian_S
7 months ago

I was 15 and rock had reached the nadir of the Bee Gees with their blow waves and tight white disco flares. It completely failed to resonate in any way at all. Then suddenly there’s God Save the Queen, Anarchy in the UK, Pretty Vacant. Like Blitzkrieg, and suddenly we had our music. Can you just f***ing imagine the effect. Sex Pistols were class warfare, anti establishment to the core.

And now, when the little identity nonces from the Daddy’s in Corporate suburbs whinge on about how white boys are racists unless they’re obsequious trans-allies or some other equally self-emasculating ideological saps of the self- obsessed better classes, that power of hitting your stride in life just when Sex Pistols cranked up, and knowing exactly what it meant about class relations, is like the glowing nucleus of strength when politely suggesting to woke fash narcissists where to shove it real hard.

Glynis Roache
Glynis Roache
7 months ago
Reply to  Ian_S

It would appear that ‘the glowing nucleus’ of strength has burnt itself out. I’m old enough to remember the fifties and the drainpipes and the beetle crushers. And the knuckle dusters, the bicycle chains and the fights. Somewhere, and it may have been in a recent controversial Telegraph opinion piece, I read that if there is a Muslim uprising in the UK we will certainly lose. Why for God’s sake, why? Is it because everybody listens to Taylor Swift instead of Black Sabbath? Could be. Military bands were initially about signalling orders and position but it was recognised that music inspired the soldiers. The bloodcurdling sound and swirl of the pipes, for instance, boosted morale amongst the troops and intimidated the enemy. During WW1, pipers led the men ‘over the top’ and into battle. Many died, including my great uncle who was in the Black Watch – otherwise known as Die Damen aus der Hölle (The Ladies from Hell).
    With politicians who are too flaccid to deport even the worst of those who are pouring into the UK, I would welcome any evidence, musically inspired or otherwise, that we still have some people who don’t need safe spaces and know where and how to ‘shove it real hard’ should the necessity arise.

Harry Phillips
Harry Phillips
7 months ago
Reply to  Ian_S

It was brilliant, wasn’t it?

Jaden Johnson
Jaden Johnson
7 months ago
Reply to  Ian_S

So you’re 61/62 and still asserting the merits of punk vs disco? I expect you’ll tell us that Abba were crap too….

Warren Francisco
Warren Francisco
7 months ago
Reply to  Jaden Johnson

Your name suggests that you are relatively young. This means that you should shut up and respect your elders when they speak about great cultural shifts that came to pass before your time. My tribe would sit in a large group and teach each other how to properly peg trousers to get that perfect punk look and then discuss how many eyelets one wanted in steel toed Doc’s (and what color laces would get one branded a racist skin even though dressed as a punk). The greatest trick to play on a close friend was to put a Grateful Dead sticker on their car next to their Damned and Sisters of Mercy decals and revel in their shame and laugh at how long it took them to notice. You can imagine that we wouldn’t have been caught dead even acknowledging the existence of ABBA.

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
7 months ago
Reply to  Jaden Johnson

I’m 70 and I thought – and still think – Abba were great. But I also liked disco, punk music and New Wave along with classical music, opera and trad jazz. Since then I’ve added techno and trance to my list of musical interests.

Fredrich Nicecar
Fredrich Nicecar
7 months ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

I’m 71 and love Techno and Trance. In fact it is very good running music. There is only good music or bad music.

Bryan Dale
Bryan Dale
7 months ago
Reply to  Ian_S

I’m 62 and that sounds very much like my experience. Sure I like other music but nothing get my blood flowing like cranking up the volume on some classic punk.

Perry de Havilland
Perry de Havilland
7 months ago

I’m a dinosaur, i.e. a child of the 1980s, totally a ‘New Romantic’ back in the day with a dab of Goth… yet these days hardly anyone I know personally listens to the modern stuff I listen to (& visa versa). My tastes now runs to Witch House, Martial, Electronic etc. from Ukraine, Sweden, Belarus or Poland or obscure UK acts like ALLICØRN.
And that’s all fine by me.

Warren Francisco
Warren Francisco
7 months ago

I remember the night (in the late 90s!!) when I went to the new goth club and saw the younger kids doing their thing to the new goth sounds and thought to myself, “Not for me anymore, this just doesn’t have the incandescence of Siouxie or the neurotic joy of Alien Sex Fiend. It’s over.” And I never went back. Johnny Cash epitomizes goth for me now.

John Galt Was Correct
John Galt Was Correct
7 months ago

The internet changed everything. People that grew up with the internet are different to us. They don’t need to be part of a sub-culture to find identity or belong. They are used to just viewing any and everything that they want in a non-immersive voyeuristic way. We also ended up at pubs and clubs to meet friends and got into ‘scenes’ through that, but the internet generations don’t, they are always in contact whereover they are. They also don’t drink much, that removes a lot of everything that we did.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
7 months ago

They also always have phones in hand to record everything today, gone are the halcyon days of plausible deniability.

John Galt Was Correct
John Galt Was Correct
7 months ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

That’s a good point.

R Wright
R Wright
7 months ago

It was Bootleg Babies being released that made me realise things had changed.

Drew Gibson
Drew Gibson
7 months ago

So, is the loss of musical tribes a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’???

Warren Francisco
Warren Francisco
7 months ago
Reply to  Drew Gibson

It’s very much a bad thing. The tribal identity exists within a larger (nation sized) context. It allows young people to express a wild and unedited lifestyle, a kind of experimental abandon. Having altercations with other tribes is actually quite fun and brings one to a natural perception of one’s limits (physical and mental). My friends used to actually have fist fights with skinheads, it was always punks vs skins, because they were truly a**holes and deserved a beating, even if they often won. You can see how this builds a kind of character, even for the silly n*zis, which is unavailable online.

william langdale
william langdale
7 months ago

They are all playing video games instead.

SIMON WOLF
SIMON WOLF
7 months ago

An interesting thing about the 1970’s is how thats era’s music that is still popular today was hated by the critics and as such by many of the sixth form/student readers of the music press of the day i.e Abba, Elton,Queen, etc whereas the critics favs Steely Dan ,Television, Little Feat etc have proved very generational.A great bio-pic helps in creating interest among later generations.

David Collier
David Collier
7 months ago

I like the intriguing idea of musical tribes. The Meistersingers of Finsbury Park.
But on a more intellectual note, these various genres, movements, whatever, were each a feature of their time and, in the UK at least, bubbling up from what could be called working-class origins, families who were not very well off. Needs to be put in the context now, not of reminiscence for the tribes, but the changing nature of the tribes. The author perhaps a little bit too focused on the manifestation rather than the cause.

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
7 months ago

With trends like these, who needs NMEs?
Disappointing, though sadly unsurprising that the author, “an old NME rockist”, manages somehow to ignore the dance music scene of late 80’s and early 90s that spawned countless sub-genres and changed youth culture for ever – not to mention ending football hooliganism for a generation.

Su Mac
Su Mac
7 months ago

Ther not many really independant thinking, self aware individuals in society and they don’t join tribes with dress codes. They might invent them and be followed I suppose.

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
7 months ago

The article doesn’t mention the Beatniks which were around long before I was old enough to be aware of them, but I thought they were a youth tribe of sorts.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
7 months ago

“Where are the punks or Teddy Boys of today?”
Wandering around on zimmer frames and mobility scooters in Stokes Croft, Bristol.

Katherine 0
Katherine 0
7 months ago

I can totally relate to this article, and often wonder about the lack of a musical/social movement that teens can feel part of nowadays. I find the ‘looks’ of the past 20-30 years really boring in comparison to the 80s, when I was a teen. I grew up in the US (Dallas) and had a different version of this tribal identity – we still had punks in the 80s! – it was mostly suburban kids who felt alientated from the dominant culture and there were 2 tribes: the punks and the preppies. Not many actual fights (these were suburban kids, after all) but a very strong animosity that I still feel echoes of today, when confronted with anyone who looks too preppy!
I think kids need a movement/group identity as a way to differentiate themselves from their family and the dominant culture that is forced upon them. I don’t know how kids today deal with it – without this identity to attach themselves too, but I wonder if the trans community is one such identity – as in some schools it’s cool to be part of this subgroup – and kids are looking for a way to be different but at the same time accepted by their peer group.

James Kirk
James Kirk
7 months ago

Without reading it again I think “The Man” saw there was money to be made and, typically, spoilt it. I got my first pair of Levis in Carnaby St in 1966 and paid silly money. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that jeans, i.e. workwear, can still be silly money. Except on street markets where a Pakistani ships them in from China or a Leicester sweatshop. Youth seems to have homogenised now into ubiquitous hoodies with trainers which cost more than jeans. Sociologically, those with the least income pay the most for trainers, like they have the biggest flat screen TVs. Musically a computer can make music at home emulating strings, piano and guitar. Behind the scenes all ages try an acoustic guitar, yearning to play Clapton, Hendrix and Mississipi blues. The Man has spoilt music too. Why else do we still spend so much on Glastonbury and concerts for old men like ACDC, the Stones or Paul McCartney? Dolly Parton is immortal, people flock to cover bands playing Queen and Abba. If you’re looking for rebellious youth there’s Rap, Death and Thrash metal and genres too many to mention. No revolution though, as likely played by Uni kids as from inner city comprehensives. As for the rest, Mark Knopfler sang “He’s got a daytime job, he’s doing alright”… “Saving it up for a Friday night”.