![\"Symarip-](\"https:\/\/cdn1.faroutmagazine.co.uk\/uploads\/1\/2025\/10\/Symarip-The-reggae-outfit-that-adopted-the-skinhead-culture-Far-Out-Magazine-01-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/div>One of the very first reggae bands to be formed in the perpetual drizzle of the United Kingdom, rather than the blazing sun of the Caribbean, Symarip established themselves at roughly the same time as skinhead culture started to take root, and they immediately saw the potential in tailor-made music for young skinheads.<\/p>\n
So, rather than peddling the usual ska and reggae rhythms to Trojan, they created anthems like \u2018Skinhead Moonstomp\u2019, \u2018Skinhead Girl\u2019, and \u2018These Boots Are Made For Stomping\u2019 \u2013 their skinhead-tinged take on the Nancy Sinatra classic.<\/p>\n
Inevitably, all of those tracks found a cult audience among the skinheads; they were the first records written specifically for this new breed of youth culture, during a time in which the press and authority figures were already denouncing skinheads as brainless troublemakers and making a litany of unsubstantiated comparisons to the running battles between mods and rockers a few years prior.<\/p>\n
With the band\u2019s Trojan-released debut album,\u00a0Skinhead Moonstomp<\/em>, in 1970, the subculture saw its represented wholeheartedly both on the cover and throughout the tracklisting. Not only did that record help to make Symarip the definitive sound of the skinhead subculture, but it also afforded them a taste of mainstream success, too. By that point, Trojan was a powerhouse of a label, and when \u2018Skinhead Moonstomp\u2019 was reissued in 1980, during the ska revival of the 2 Tone age, it even entered the UK singles charts.<\/p>\n Symarip\u2019s success \u2013 much like the \u2018Spirit of \u201969\u2019 skinheads \u2013 was fairly short-lived, and the band relocated to Germany to record as an Afro-rock band during the early 1970s, but their impact on the skinhead subculture still resonates to this day.<\/p>\n Particularly after the skinhead image became hijacked by the National Front and a plethora of other far-right charlatans, tracks like \u2018Moonstomp\u2019 act as an essential reminder of the real roots of the subculture: a unifying celebration of Jamaican rhythm and British working-class culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A subcultural shift emerged towards the end of the 1960s, as the sharp suits and smooth jazz of the mods slowly morphed into Dr Martens … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"yoast_head":"\n