by 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 boots, jeans, and an unending adoration for Jamaican ska and reggae music: the birth of the skinhead subculture.
One of the most divisive, misunderstood subcultures to ever walk the streets of England’s capital, the first wave of skinheads emerged as a product of immigration and integration; a blending of white working-class culture and the culture being brought over to the UK from the Caribbean in the suitcases of the Windrush Generation. Black and white skinheads danced together, united under a common love of heavy bass and homemade sound systems.
Once the subculture had infected the tower blocks and housing estates of London, it quickly spread to every town and provincial city on this sceptred isle, helped along by football away days. By 1969, the skinheads had well and truly arrived, and try as it might, the musical mainstream soon found a need to cater for these short-haired boot-boys. Hence, labels like Trojan Records began to spring up, catering almost exclusively to a skinhead market and flooding UK record stores with the infectious rhythms of Jamaican ska, reggae, and rocksteady goodness.
Although Trojan quickly leaned into the skinhead subculture with its marketing, the label still dealt almost exclusively with presenting Jamaican artists to a UK market, and those artists sitting in the sunshine of Kingston were largely unaware of the fact that they were beloved by legions of Doc Marten-wearing football hooligans.
Even though there were artists who relocated to London around that same time – Dandy Livingstone being perhaps the greatest example – nobody seemed overly keen to cater their music specifically towards this blossoming subculture. That was, of course, until Symarip came along.
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.
So, rather than peddling the usual ska and reggae rhythms to Trojan, they created anthems like ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’, ‘Skinhead Girl’, and ‘These Boots Are Made For Stomping’ – their skinhead-tinged take on the Nancy Sinatra classic.
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.
With the band’s Trojan-released debut album, Skinhead Moonstomp, 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 ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’ was reissued in 1980, during the ska revival of the 2 Tone age, it even entered the UK singles charts.
Symarip’s success – much like the ‘Spirit of ’69’ skinheads – 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.
Particularly after the skinhead image became hijacked by the National Front and a plethora of other far-right charlatans, tracks like ‘Moonstomp’ act as an essential reminder of the real roots of the subculture: a unifying celebration of Jamaican rhythm and British working-class culture.
