In the 1970s, British soccer had a bad reputation. It had a rap sheet full of gang fights, stabbings, riots, and murder. Football fans were labeled hooligans. Thugs who, according to some newspaper editors, were on the verge of taking over the streets and destroying society. No one was safe.

Most weeks the tabloids churned out tales of some aggro outside a stadium. The red tops were peddling fear. The public bought it. Once the news starts reporting on something, it becomes real.

These gang fights between rival soccer fans were mixed in with tales of skinheads, bovver boys, razor gangs, and thugs who dressed like Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange out for a little bit of ye old ultra-violence. There was truth in the stories, but soccer violence wasn’t as widespread as often reported. Certain clubs attracted gangs who were more interested in a punch-up on a Saturday afternoon than watching the “beautiful game.”

To put it context, these were kids who had missed the mythical nirvana of sixties excess. The sex, drugs and so-called revolution of the swinging sixties only applied to about a few dozen people who were rich and famous and living in London. For everybody else, the sixties were dire, poverty-ridden, and filmed in black-and-white. Only American TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman, and Lost in Space gave any hint there might be a better, more colorful world out there.

When the seventies arrived, for most of the public it was like suffering the biggest hangover after a party to which you had never been invited. Unemployment was on the up. Strikes were almost every week. Power blackouts meant kids lived by candlelight on whatever their mothers could spoon out of a tin. Under the new Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath, a pompous condescending charlatan, politics was being removed from the grubby hands of the working class. Politicians despised the populace. Heath signed up to Europe and the world of white middle class technocrats and academics who would attempt to disenfranchise the working class and their so-called ignorant opinions over the coming decades.

The press were happy to go along with this. They tarred youngsters as ne’er-do-wells, thugs, hooligans, filthy little fuckers who should be sent into the army. Pop fans were deluded. Soccer fans were thugs waiting to kick your fucking head in.

Most of the people who thought this—politicians, journalists, religious leaders—wanted to crush the young. These people were mainly middle-aged ex-soldiers who had fought in the Second World War and returned to a country impoverished, in ruin, and held captive by rationing. The seventies soccer fan represented everything they feared—thuggish mobs ready for violence who if they were ever smart enough to get together might one day topple the establishment. Fat chance.

This was one way of looking at it. The other was how the fans saw it. Soccer was a release. A pleasure to be shared with passion. Something that made youngsters feel part of a community. Fans created their own fashions. Decked their clothes with players’ names, managers, and their club crests. They had their own beliefs. And their politics changed from xenophobic and racist to becoming supportive and champions of multi-ethnicity. White working class football fans had more friends from different ethnicities than any white male government or media broadcaster or board of directors.
 

 
Between 1976-1977, Edinburgh-born photographer Iain S. P. Reid documented fans of Manchester United and Manchester City. Reid had graduated in Fine Arts from Sunderland University. He then moved to Manchester where he was studying for his Masters in Fine Art when he picked up his Leica camera and started photographing the two sets of rival fans.

In 1978, an exhibition of his work was held at the Frontline Books, Piccadilly, Manchester. In his introduction to this exhibition, Reid wrote:

I worked on a series of portraits of football supporters. I was given a grant by the Arts Council to facilitate this project. As can be imagined, this caused a minor furore in the local Manchester press. I was infamous for a while. Most of the work was exhibited in 1978 in the Frontline bookshop, 1 Newton Street, Piccadilly.

The chief interest in the whole body of work was the way in which the football supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City used to dress and treat the whole match as if it were a carnival. Despite all press reports, there was very little violence, and the fans I found most helpful in assisting with the project. They were always aware of the angle I was taking with the work. I carried around copies of the photos I was going to be using to show them I was not exploiting them by misrepresenting them in any way.

In the late seventies, Reid moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, where he worked on an oil platform. He then became a social worker. He had a passion for helping others and spent his time working with drug addicts and the homeless.

Reid died in November 2000 from cancer. After his death, boxes of his photographs were discovered. These are now shared via a Facebook page, are available as art prints, and will be published in a book with 15% of profits going to a cancer charity. Reid’s photographs capture more of the joy and camaraderie of seventies’ football fans than all the tales of violence peddled by the media. See more of Reid’s work here.
 

 

 
See more of Iain S. P. Reid’s work, after the jump…
 

Hitler the Hells Angel.
 
A gang of British Hells Angels ride into town. They gather at their favored bar in Birmingham, England, the aptly named Oddfellows’ Arms. The bar is the last remnant of a once-thriving working class area. Inside, the Angels drink, chat, and carouse. At one of the crowded tables a young biker has “Mum + Dad” tattooed on his soft white arm.

A film crew documents these activities. When asked, the Hells Angels talk of their rejection of society’s values, their independence, their freedom. They relish their dirty appearance, long hair, and their uniformity of dress. One biker has a jacket covered with the Nazi insignia. He says his parents’ generation fought the Nazis—“The only good German was a dead German,” they said—but he’s never met a bad German. He wears the badges and pins to shock, to disgust, to rebel—to show his “outlaw” status.

Though these Hells Angels consider themselves free of society’s rules, they do have their own codes and rituals by which they live their lives. Outside the bar, a young couple named Sylvia and Hitler get married. They want their relationship to be recognized by the other Angels. The marriage is a genuine ritual. To the rest of society Hitler and Sylvia are “living in sin.” Like any other newlyweds, the couple will have to get a job, some “bread” and somewhere to live.

When Hitler is asked about his name, he explains he was called “Hitler” by the other Angels because he has “proved himself.”

Interviewer: How do you prove yourself?

Hitler: There’s quite a few ways you can prove like. I mean, beat a skinhead up—that’s great. That’s class. I mean, if it was legal we’d go around hanging skinheads.

 

Four skins…
 
The kids were out of control. Or so it seemed. The rise in births after the Second World War saw a massive number of youngsters reach their teens and twenties during the 1960s. There was a fear the country was being swamped by gangs of youths. There was no longer any National Service to dissipate their energy on military maneuvers or war. There was more money. More leisure time. More entertainment. Pop music and television were the new gods. For an older generation, the hysteria of Beatlemania—with its “out of control” mobs of teen girls—was as much a portent to the breakdown in British society as the gangs terrorizing the inner cities. Teddy Boys. Razor gangs. Rockers. Mods. Tribes defined as much by their violence as by their tastes in music, their clothes, their modes of transport, or their goddamn hairstyles.

In the 1950s, poet Thom Gunn wrote a highly preceptive poem called “On the Move” about the rise of rebelious youth and their chaotic, unfocussed energy. The poem describes a biker gang roaming across America “reaching no absolute, in which to rest” always moving “toward, toward.” Gunn was inspired by The Wild One, the Marlon Brando movie, where his character Johnny was asked “What you rebeling against, Johnny?” To which Brando’s character replies, “Whatcha got?” Though Gunn’s admiration for the bikers’ rebellious attitude is obvious, he sees their actions as wasted and inadequate to provoke any real change.

By the late 1960s, skinheads were considered a bigger threat to the British public than bikers. Hell’s Angels kept their business amongst themselves. Skinheads attacked anyone—though primarily anyones of a different ethnicity to their own “pure blood” white skin. Skinheads were thuggishly unrepentant “bovver boys” who’d give you a kicking as much a look at you.
 

Skinhead Steve with his parents.
 
The documentary shifts to a group of young skinheads from London. They brag about “Paki bashing.” They crow about their racism and violence. The film focuses on one young skinhead called Steve. The camera follows him home where he watches TV with his mom and dad. His father had been a Teddy Boy. He understands the appeal of being in a gang. Steve tells him about the thrill of marching through South End a thousand strong. The feeling of being part of something says Steve, would bring “tears to your eyes.”

Steve: It makes you feel proud. It will last for a little while. Then something new will come along. But till then you’ve got us. It’s just the way it goes.

More after the jump…

 
Check out artist Renato Garza Cervera‘s super-disturbing series “Of Genuine Contemporary Beast.” Cervera created sculptures depicting L.A. gang members as rugs, complete with the hokey feral faces a taxidermist would give a tiger or bearskin. If you’re revolted by such a racist and inhumane depiction of dead young men, congratulations—that’s the intended effect; Cervera’s work is supposed to produce discomfort with blatant dehumanization.

Societies always invent new beasts in order to make others responsible for their problems, to express their fears and to invent them a new cover. Mass media play a very important role on this world-wide scapegoating process, by presenting some minorities as uncapable of thinking or feeling, delayed and dispensable people.

The startling detail in the tattoos and skin of each sculpture—right down to their anuses—contrasts so intensely with the uniformity of their faces; the effect is the kind of uncanny creepiness that inspires nightmares.
 

 

 
More of these creepy and provocative artworks after the jump…...
 

Members of the Savage Skulls circa late 60’s, early 70’s
 
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, gangs not unlike the ones featured in Walter Hill’s The Warriors owned the streets of New York City. The 1993 documentary film Flyin’ Cut Sleeves takes a look back at the volatile years that eventually culminated in a truce and subsequent “peace meeting” held at the Hoe Avenue Boys Club in 1971 by the gangs themselves. The real-life events are strikingly similar to the storyline from Hill’s 1979 film.
 

Young members of the Savage Skulls
 
According to the statements made in Flyin’ Cut Sleeves, in 1969 the NYPD put the number of organized gangs at 100, with membership as high as 11,000. Many gang members were just kids, barely in high school. Some of the most compelling footage in the film comes from interviews that were shot by Rita Fecher, a schoolteacher working at that time in the South Bronx. From her interviews with her students, Fecher was able to glean that the vast majority of her pupils were also active gang members. It is a gritty and dark exploration of a desperate time in New York City—Fecher notes at one point in the film that she received an absence note from a family that could not send their child to school because he had no shoes.

Flyin’ Cut Sleeves was released on DVD in 2010, and you can score a copy here. I’ve included a slew of vintage images of many of the gangs featured in the film as well as Flyin’ Cut Sleeves in its entirety. There’s also a brief NSFW video that was shot at the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting for you to check out.
 

 

 
After the jump, more remarkable images of the Flyin’ Cut Sleeves gangs as well as the full movie (and a bonus video too).....
 

 
These business cards come from Chicago during the 1970s and early 1980s—a charmingly distinguished touch for what was after all in most cases just a bunch of buddies who would get into rumbles every so often.

As the proprietor of We Are Supervision, the blog where most of these cards came from, says, these cards come from the days when “a gang was more of a neighborhood crew then what it is today.” These were the days of “fists, bats, and bottles” rather than AK-47s. “Most of the gangs were just about the neighborhood and hanging out together.”

If you wanted to make some cards like this for yourself, the first thing you’d have to do is make up a name for your crew—something like “Almighty Insane Freaks” will do. Then generate a little doodle of a unicorn or a skull, list the names of your members and voilà! you are instantly eligible to enter the fishbowl raffle at your local chain restaurant…...
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
More of these great cards after the jump…....

 
Though Ken Russell wanted to be a ballet dancer, his father wouldn’t hear of it—no son of his would ever be seen in tights—so the young Russell turned his attention to photography, a craft he thought he could make his name with. He attended Walthamstow Technical College in London, where he was taught all about lighting and composition. Russell would later claim that everything he did as a trainee photographer broke the rules—a trend he continued throughout his career as a film director when producing such acclaimed movies as Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, Tommy, Altered States and Crimes of Passion.

Russell became a photographer for Picture Post and the Illustrated Magazine, and during his time with these publications took some of the most evocative photos of post-war London during the 1950s. He spent his days photographing street scenes and his nights printing his pictures on the kitchen table of his rented one-bed apartment in Notting Hill.
 

 

 
For fifty years, it was believed Russell’s photos had been lost, but in 2005 a box marked “Ken Russell” was discovered in the archives of a photo library. Inside was over 3,000 of Ken’s negatives.

Among his most famous work from this period is “The Last of the Teddy Girls”—a series of photos documenting London’s girl gang subculture and their male counterparts. Russell was attracted to these young women for their sense of independence and style—dressing in suits, land army clothes—while rejecting society’s expectations of more traditional, feminine roles. (Teddy kids of either sex were known for fights breaking out wherever they congregated.) The images show Russell’s innate talent for composition and offer a fascinating look into a rarely documented female subculture.
 

 

 
More of Unkle Ken’s beautiful photos, after the jump…
 

 
In 1964 gangs of Mods and Rockers fought battles on the very British beaches Winston Churchill had once sworn to defend.

It all kicked-off over the Easter weekend of 30th March in the holiday town of Clacton-on-Sea, south-east England. Famed for its cockles and winkles, “Kiss Me Quick” hats, amusement arcades, its eleven-hundred foot pier and golden sands on West Beach, Clacton provided the backdrop for the first major battle between the twenty-something Rockers and their teenage rivals the Mods. Clacton was reportedly “beat-up” by “scooter gangs” and 97 youth were arrested.
 

 
This was but a small rehearsal for what was to come later that year. Over the May and August bank holidays “skirmishes” involving over “thousands” of youngsters “erupted” at the seaside resorts of Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton.

In Margate there were “running battles between up to 400 teens and police on the beach as bottles were thrown amid general chaos.” But it was the fighting in Brighton that scooped the headlines, with tales of two days of “violence” and some “battles” moving further along the coast to Hastings.
 

 
The press latched onto the story of youth out of control like a terrier and squeezed every damning adjective out of it, hyping the events into a small war. Yet, these so-called “running battles” between the two rival factions were no worse than the fights between soccer fans or street gangs on a Saturday night. Still,  the press and parts of the “establishment” (the police, the judges, the bishops, the local councillors and politicians…etc.) saw an opportunity to slap down the youth, and the press created a “moral panic” outraged over the falling standards of “this scepter’d isle.”
 

 
The Rockers were proto-biker gangs—they kept themselves separate from society, were bound by their own rules and rituals, and usually only fought with rival Rockers. Though considered dangerous—often referred to by the press as the “Wild Ones” after the American B-movie starring Marlon Brando—there was a sneaking admiration for the Rockers as they epitomised a macho fantasy of freedom and recklessness that most nine-to-five workers could only dream about. The Rockers also had the added appeal of being working class and fans of rock ‘n’ roll—which was more acceptable to middle England in the mid-sixties once the God-fearing Elvis had set youngsters a good example of being dutiful to one’s country by joining the US Army.
 

 
Mods on the other hand were an unknown quantity—ambitious, aspirant working class kids, politically astute, unwilling to take “no” for an answer. They were feared for their drug taking—speed was their tipple of choice—and their interest in looking good and wearing the right clothes. Dressing sharp was considered “suspect” and if not exactly effeminate, being fashion-conscious was not an attribute traditionally thought of as a masculine one. For an older generation, the Mods were the face of the future looming—the red brick universities, the council estate, the supermarkets, the motorways and self-service restaurants—these entitled brats were the very children for whom they had fought a war.
 

 

 

 

 

 
The events of that heady summer inspired The Who’s Pete Townshend to write his rock opera Quadrophenia. Anthony Burgess, who was never shy about making a headline, said his book A Clockwork Orange had been inspired by these “loutish” and “hoodlum” youth—even though his book had been published in 1962. Fifty years after the infamous “fighting on the beaches,” the BBC made a documentary revisiting the Mods, Rockers and Bank Holiday Mayhem that interviewed some of the youngsters who were there.
 

 
The intention of the filmmakers in this short extract from the “exploitation” documentary Primitive London is to take a pop at tribal youth culture and its fashions. The four youth cultures briefly examined are Mods, Rockers, Beatniks and those who fall outside of society.

The Mods are dismissed as “peacocks;” the Rockers are seen as lumpen and shall we say knuckle-dragging; the Beatniks don’t really know what they believe in as they are against everything, man; and finally there are the ones who are not part of any group as they consider themselves to be outside of society—apparently these guys “dissipate their identity in complete passivity”—now that sounds like a group I’d join.

Mostly it’s all about the Beatniks, who are filmed hanging out in their local bar getting drunk, answering questions on fashion, work, marriage and all the other concerns middle-aged producers thought were important in 1965. As a footnote, the bar seen in this clip is the one where Rod Stewart (aka Rod the Mod) hung out. The featured musicians are Ray Sone, harp (later of The Downliners Sect) and Emmett Hennessy, vocals, guitar.
 

The Dirty Ones, because Williamsburg has always been chic.
 
1979’s The Warriors became a cult classic by creating a fantastically dystopian world of lawlessness roamed by stylized gangs of the Romantic variety, but the reality of 1970’s NYC gangs was… well, actually… not that much different from their epic, fictionalized versions onscreen. In fact, the fear of gang violence at the time was so fevered, the film was actually blamed for crimes committed against people who were coincidentally coming from or going to the movie. This map from The New York Times is dated August 1, 1974, and the names of the gangs are so dramatic, it’s easy to see how fact and fiction could blur in the eyes of a terrified populace. 

The folks over at The Bowery Boys blog even dug up a few details on the “activities” of some of the gangs listed, including The Young Barons (an altercation that ended in one death and the slicing off of someone’s nose, 1972), a battle between the Devils Rebels and the Screaming Phantoms (two rebels were killed, 1973), and the 1974 extortion dealings of the Outlaws, the Tomahawks, the Jolly Stompers and B’Nai Zaken. If that last one threw you for a loop, B’Nai Zaken is a phrase largely associated with Ethiopian Jews, and not (as I had hoped), a bunch of Hassidim with nunchucks.

There was a even a 1973 report that a few local gangs had been cast in an autobiographical gang film,The Education of Sonny Carson, perhaps paving the way for Walter Hill to later do the same thing with The Warriors
 

 
Via The Bowery Boys

 
Bobby is a biker with the Outcasts—a motorcycle club based in Norfolk, England. Bobby has three kids, and his daughter thinks he’s a Hell’s Angel. But the Outcasts are a small club, an average of 33 members—small enough for the members to know each other, to help each other out. Bobby thinks it’s a good club. “We do our own thing,” he’ll tell you.

That’s what the Outcasts are about—it’s about biking. We just live how we want to live—regardless of government or police. We just do what we want to do.

Norfolk is now better known as Alan Partridge country—“A-ha!”, where Stephen Fry surfs the web and counts his millions. For Bobby and the other members of the Outcasts in the 1980s, Norfolk was their patch, their turf, that they ran and protected from other gangs.
 

 
Once, the Outcasts liked to ride into town and cause a bit of mayhem. Now they just live a quiet life and have a bit of fun. Other biker clubs want to wipe them out, but the Outcasts want to be left alone, and Bobby would prefer it if all the biker clubs partied with each other, instead of cutting each other up.
 

 
The Outcasts make their money from odd jobs or collecting social security checks. It’s 1985, the middle of Margaret Thatcher’s reign as Prime Minister and there’s not much work to be found.

Bobby’s mom might not like the way he lives, but she knows he will always be there for her, she says:

All young men like bikes, but they mostly grow out of it. It’s running around with knives and all these medals that I don’t like.

Bobby bought his first bike after his father died. He inherited some money, and his mom thought it better he buy a bike rather than steal one. But then Bobby just drifted into the Outcast life.
 

 
Made in 1985, this fascinating portrait of the Outcasts motorcycle club is a must-see documentary. Though at times it edges towards Spinal Tap territory, the film is a beautiful crafted and vivid portrait of a group of young men seeking purpose and fulfillment in their lives.
 

 
H/T Voices of East Anglia

 
Today’s youth culture seems quite tame when compared to the cheap thrills exhibited in this selection of outlaw biker movie posters from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Films like Twilight or (your favorite Marvel superhero here) can hardly compete with The Cycle Savages (starring Bruce Dern), Werewolves on Wheels (genius idea, though apparently the speeding lycanthropes howl and growl for a mere five minutes in this flick) or Angels: Hard As They Come, an early Jonathan Demme movie in which “Big men with throbbing machines” met their match in “the girls who can take them on.” Fnarr..Fnarr…

These films mixed Western outlaw narratives (sometimes directly lifted from other movies) with the heightened anxieties of suburban parental America and a dash of spice from some real Hell’s Angels to give it flavor. They also offered meaty roles for the likes of Bruce Dern, John Cassavetes, Alex Rocco, (the ubiquitous) Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Jane Russell and even Casey Kasem, and a chance for many a young director to learn their trade. Taking a look at these posters one can almost smell the grease and gas fumes from here.
 

 

 

 
More outlaw bikers after the jump…

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Street Gangs: Challenge for Law Enforcement is one of the many films produced by Charles Cahill (and Associates) for educational use during the late 1950s and early 1970s. Usually Cahill’s films had such uninspiring titles as Safety Through Seat Belts (1959), Safety Belt for Susie (1962), Highball Highway (1963) and Safety Rules for Schools (1967) and presented similarly uninspiring content.

Street Gangs, however, has considerable cultural and social interest mainly down to the interviews with young East Los Angeles gang members from sometime in the 1970s, who talk about their involvement in gangs, their codes, tattoos, and use of weaponry.  This documentary was found by GuildfordGhost, who purchased a 16mm reel of the film and uploaded it to YouTube.
 

 
Via Voices of East Anglia

Cholafied Jay-Z.
 
Cholafied comes from the mind of Michael Jason Enriques, an LA kid who grew up in the 1990s.

It’s a throwback to the Chola gangster style: “Sharpied” eyebrows, dark lipliner, and the fumes from a can of Aqua Net.

It’s a product of LA where subculture, celebrity obsession, street art, and stupidity are rolled up together like one of those bacon wraped hot dogs sold on Hollywood Blvd.

See more of Michael’s “Cholafied” celebrities here.
 

‘Do you feel lucky, Chola?’: Clint Eastwood.
 

The Royal Chola Queen Elizabeth dos.
 

Chola Wonder Woman
 

Chola Mark Zuckerberg
 
More after the jump…
 

 
And it’s directed by Drew Barrymore. It’s a beautiful looking four-minute recreation of West Side Story based in LA, featuring Chloe Moretnz (Kick Ass) and Tyler Posey (Teen Wolf) as star crossed lovers caught in the middle of a turf war, and it’s got a suckerpunch ending that is actually quite moving (a very rare feat for a pop promo). The song ain’t too shabby either:

Best Coast - “Our Deal”
 

 
To see the making of Best Coast’s “Our Deal” go here and you can find their album Crazy For You here.