Nick Bentley, Beth Johnson, Andrzej Zieleniec

ntley,
Edited by Nick Be
iec
Jo hn so n an d Andrzej Zielen
Beth
Youth
Sub c u l
Fictio tures
PALGRAVE ST n, F i l in
UD
HISTORY OF SU IES IN THE
BCUL Other m and
AND POPULA TURES
R MUSIC Medi a
Tee nage D
reams
Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music
Series Editors
Keith Gildart
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton, UK
Anna Gough-Yates
University of Roehampton, London, UK
Sian Lincoln
Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
Bill Osgerby
London Metropolitan University, London, UK
Lucy Robinson
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
John Street
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Peter Webb
University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
Matthew Worley
University of Reading, Reading, UK
From 1940s zoot-suiters and hepcats through 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers, beat-
niks and Teddy boys; 1960s surfers, rude boys, mods, hippies and bikers;
1970s skinheads, soul boys, rastas, glam rockers, funksters and punks; on
to the heavy metal, hip-hop, casual, goth, rave and clubber styles of the
1980s, 90s, noughties and beyond, distinctive blends of fashion and music
have become a defining feature of the cultural landscape. The Subcultures
Network series is international in scope and designed to explore the social
and political implications of subcultural forms. Youth and subcultures will
be located in their historical, socio-economic and cultural context; the
motivations and meanings applied to the aesthetics, actions and manifesta-
tions of youth and subculture will be assessed. The objective is to facilitate
a genuinely cross-disciplinary and transnational outlet for a burgeoning
area of academic study.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14579
Nick Bentley • Beth Johnson
Andrzej Zieleniec
Editors
Youth Subcultures in
Fiction, Film and
Other Media
Teenage Dreams
Editors
Nick Bentley Beth Johnson
Keele University University of Leeds
Keele, UK Leeds, UK
Andrzej Zieleniec
Keele University
Keele, UK
Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music

ISBN 978-3-319-73188-9 ISBN 978-3-319-73189-6 (eBook)
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To all our friends, family and colleagues—you know who you are.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks go to a number of people who have assisted and helped us in

various ways. First, Bill Osgerby, who provided support and encourage-
ment both in organising the conference at Keele, was crucial in providing
advice and support for our proposal to have this collection included within
the Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music book
series. Secondly, this is a collective endeavour and is much more than the
sum of its parts. It would not exist without the dedication, support and
expertise that the contributors brought to this volume. Thirdly, Carmel
Kennedy and Emily Russell at Palgrave Macmillan provided advice, sup-
port and patience as we worked through various stages and hurdles to
bring this book to fruition. Fourthly, thanks to Matt Worley for reading
our submitted manuscript. Fifthly, thanks to Keele Research Institute for
the Social Sciences and Humanities, who sponsored and supported the
Teenage Dreams conference held in July 2013; to the Subcultures Network
who were also very supportive in organising the conference; and to
Courttia Newland, Tina Townshend and Don Letts who added their
expertise and insights but who did not make it into this volume, for vari-
ous (good) reasons. Finally, to all our families who provide encourage-
ment, support and the space and time to work on projects such as these
when we should perhaps offer more love and attention to them.
vii
Contents
Part I ‘Subcultural Fictions’ 1
irls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America 3

G
Bill Osgerby
ueering the Grammar School Boy: Class, Sexuality

Q
and Authenticity in the Works of Colin MacInnes and
Ray Gosling 23
Lucy Robinson and Ben Jones
unk Fiction; Punk in Fiction 41

P
Nick Bentley
‘Styles, ‘Codes and Violence’: Subcultural Identities

in Contemporary Black Writing of Britain’ 59
Dave Ellis
Part II Subcultural Representations on Screen 73
ix
x Contents
od at the Movies: ‘Face’ and ‘Ticket’ Representations

M
of a British Subculture 75
Stephen Glynn
he Narrative Nightclub 91
T
Matthew Cheeseman and David Forrest
ou’re All Partied Out, Dude!: The Mainstreaming of Heavy

Y
Metal Subcultural Tropes, from Bill & Ted to Wayne’s World 109
Andy R. Brown
on’t Look Back in Anger: Manchester, Supersonic and Made

D
of Stone 127
Beth Johnson
Part III Critical Theory and Subcultural Representations in

Other Media 145
igures in Black: Heavy Metal and the Mourning

F
of the Working Class 147
Scott Wilson
hock Rock Horror! The Representation and Reception

S
of Heavy Metal Horror Films in the 1980s 163
Nedim Hassan
outh, Hysteria and Control in Peter Watkins’s Privilege 179

Y
Rehan Hyder
epresenting Subcultural Identity: A Photoessay of Spanish

R
Graffiti and Street Art 197
Andrzej Zieleniec
Contents
xi
rom Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer: Between

F
the Bedroom and the Street 219
Jo Croft
rom Exaltation to Abjection: Depictions of Subculture

F
in Quadrophenia and Ill Manors 237
Keely Hughes
Index 255
Notes on Contributors
Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. He is author

of Contemporary British Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism
(Palgrave, 2018), Martin Amis (2015), Contemporary British Fiction (2008), and
Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007). He is editor of British
Fiction of the 1990s (2005) and co-editor of The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary
British Fiction (2015). He has also published journal articles and book chapters on
Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Ian
McEwan, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, the city in postmodern fiction, fictional repre-
sentations of youth subcultures, and working-class writing. He is currently work-
ing on a monograph: Making a Scene: Youth Subcultures in Postwar and
Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave, 2018).
Andy R. Brown DPhil (London) is Senior Lecturer in Media Communications

at Bath Spa University. He was part of a nucleus of scholars that got together to
imagine the idea of ‘metal studies’ and out of which arose the International Society
for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS). His recent publications include (with C. Griffin)
‘A Cockroach Preserved in Amber’, The Sociological Review (2014); ‘Explaining
the Naming of Heavy Metal from Rock’s “Back Pages”’, Metal Music Studies
(2015); ‘“Everything Louder than Everyone Else”’ in The SAGE Handbook of
Popular Music (2015); ‘The Ballad of Heavy Metal’ in Heavy Metal Studies and
Popular Culture (2016); ‘“Girls like Metal, too”’ in Heavy Metal, Gender and
Sexuality (2016); and Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in
Metal Studies (co-editor, 2016).
Matthew Cheeseman is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of

Derby. He works with fiction, non-fiction and art writing, drawing on English
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
literature, film and cultural studies. He runs Spirit Duplicator, a small press (spir-
itduplicator.org). @eine on Twitter.
Jo Croft is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores

University, specialising in psychoanalysis, spatial theory, and eco-criticism. She
completed her PhD, ‘Adolescence and Writing: Locating the Borderline’, at Sussex
University, and borderline subjectivity continues to be axiomatic in her research.
Since publishing Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern
Culture in 2006 (edited, with Gerry Smyth) Croft’s research has centred on forms
of mobility associated with ‘stuff’ (especially those suggested by ‘hoarding’ and
‘gleaning’), and she is currently writing a monograph entitled Dreaming on Car
Park Beach: The Eco-poetics of Matter and Movement. Croft has also recently been
developing her research using audio-visual formats, including two short films
about ‘swimming and dreaming’.
Dave Ellis is Associate Dean for Student Experience at Oxford Brookes University.

He continues to write and teach on contemporary fiction and theory and on the
growth of black British writing from the 1950s to the present day. He is also con-
cerned with issues of widening participation and inclusive curriculum design. He
published Writing Home: Black British Writing since the War in 2007.
David Forrest is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield.

His work explores representations of class and region in British film, television and
literature. His recent books include Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond (co-
written with Sue Vice), and he is currently at work on a monograph entitled New
Realisms: Contemporary British Cinema.
Stephen Glynn is an Associate Research Fellow at De Montfort University and

an assiduous follower of the Mod movement. His studies of academic life include
The British School Film: From Tom Brown to Harry Potter (Palgrave, 2016), while
his investigations of youth subcultures range from the general, The British Pop
Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond (Palgrave, 2013), to the particular, the
Beatlemania of A Hard Day’s Night (2005) and the acme of Mod movies,
Quadrophenia (2014). He is currently completing a ‘hat trick’ of Palgrave mono-
graphs with a study of the representations of association football in British
cinema.
Nedim Hassan is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool

John Moores University. His research interests include the roles of music in every-
day domestic life, 1980s’ rock and metal music culture, as well as contemporary
metal music cultures. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research that has
examined domestic musical practice, community music-making and metal music
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xv
culture. Previous published work focuses upon domestic and public musical per-
forming as a resource for social interaction and the articulation of self-identity, the
politics of leisure for adults with learning disabilities and the representation of hard
rock and metal music of the 1980s. He is currently engaged in an ethnographic
project that examines rock and metal music scenes in Merseyside, UK.
Keely Hughes is a Teaching Fellow in Education Studies at Keele University,

Staffordshire. She is currently completing her PhD in Sociology at Keele. Her PhD
research focuses on the constructions of subjectivity within the relationship
between capitalism and education in the city of Stoke-on-Trent.
Rehan Hyder is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University

of the West of England and author of Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the
UK Music Scene (2004). He is co-founder of BLIMA (Bristol Live Independent
Music Archive), which documents the everyday experiences of nightlife and musi-
cal culture in Bristol. Recent publications have focused on black music in Bristol
and also explored the notion of the so-called ‘Bristol Sound’. He has also a con-
tributor to Goethe Institute’s Ten Cities project (http://blog.goethe.de/ten-cit-
ies/), and he is currently working as content developer on the Bristol Music
exhibition to be hosted by the MShed in Bristol during the summer of 2018.
Beth Johnson is Associate Professor of Media and Film at the University of

Leeds. Her research interests include class, place, gender and sex as represented
on-screen. Beth is the author of Paul Abbott (2013), and is co-editor of Television,
Sex and Society: Analyzing Contemporary Representations (2012), and Social Class
and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain (2017, Palgrave) with David
Forrest (University of Sheffield). She has published in Screen, Critical Studies in
Television, the Journal of Popular Television and the Journal of British Cinema and
Television.
Ben Jones is a lecturer in modern British history at University of East Anglia with

particular interests in class formation, political economy, urban change and the
politics of ‘race’, migration and collective memory. He has published on the work-
ing class, housing policy, the British Left, and the community publishing move-
ment. He is currently working on two projects: on race, community development
& New Left activism in Notting Hill in the 1960s and on deindustrialisation in
England after 1945.
Bill Osgerby is Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at London

Metropolitan University. He has published widely on twentieth-century British
and American cultural history. His books include Youth in Britain Since 1945;
Playboys in Paradise: Youth, Masculinity and Leisure-Style in Modern America; and
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Youth Media and Biker: Style and Subculture on Hell’s Highway. He has also co-
edited numerous anthologies, including Action TV: ‘Tough Guys, Smooth Operators
and Foxy Chicks’ and Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change.
Lucy Robinson is Professor of Collaborative History at the University of Sussex.

She writes on popular music, politics and identity, feminism and punk pedagogy.
Including Gay Men and the Left in Post-war Britain: how the personal became politi-
cal. Since then she has worked on the Falklands War, charity singles, music videos,
zine cultures, digital memory, protest and the politics of popular culture. As well
as co-ordinating the Subcultures Network, and the open access digital project
Observing the 1980s, she has recently advised on an exhibition on Jersey in the
1980s and on a new documentary project funded by the BFI, Queerama.
Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Communication at Kingston University,

London. He is the co-editor with Michael Dillon of The Journal for Cultural
Research and co-editor with Eleni Ikoniadou of the series ‘Media Philosophy’. He
is the editor of Melancology: Black Metal and Ecology. 2014. His most recent book
was Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real (2015). He is cur-
rently writing a book on Scott Walker and existentialism.
Andzrej Zieleniec is an interdisciplinary lecturer at Keele University. His back-

ground is primarily in sociology, but he also makes contributions in research and
teaching in media, communication and culture, geography, education studies and
criminology.
His research and teaching interests focus on the interface between space, soci-
ety and culture, particularly in the way in which our lived environment is moulded
and shaped by social practices, either those imposed by power or those challenged
or colonised by the everyday practices of a range of social groups. He has used
aspects of spatial theory in research on urban greenspace, leisure spaces, landscape
and tourism, youth and space, graffiti and street art, popular music, planning and
urban regeneration. He has published two monographs Space and Social Theory
(2007) and Park Spaces: Leisure Culture and Modernity (2013). He is currently
Programme Director for the new degree programmes of Liberal Arts.
List of Figures
Chapter 12
Fig. 1 Tags on unoccupied shops—Madrid 204
Fig. 2 Tagged doorway—Barcelona 204
Fig. 3 Tagged abandoned shop—Madrid 204
Fig. 4 Crew/gang tag—Madrid 205
Fig. 5 Squatted abandoned office buildings ‘claimed’ by graffiti—
Madrid206
Fig. 6 SM172—Barcelona 207
Fig. 7 SM172—Madrid 208
Fig. 8 YCN2—Madrid 208
Fig. 9 Wheat paste—Noche Crew, Valencia 208
Fig. 10 ‘Stick-Up Kids’—Valencia 209
Fig. 11 Zone—Barcelona 209
Fig. 12 ‘Hello sorrow’—Fromthetree, Valencia 210
Fig. 13 Yippi Yippi Yeah, Madrid 211
Fig. 14 Julietta xlf—street art advertising graffiti festival, Valencia 212
Fig. 15 Escif: another wall is possible’—Valencia 213
xvii
Introduction
The origins and inspiration for this edited collection was the staging of a
conference held at Keele University in July 2013. The aim of the confer-
ence was to provide an interdisciplinary open forum to present, discuss
and analyse a broad range of texts, contexts, perspectives and approaches
extant in the field of contemporary subcultural studies. The conference
was an attempt to bring together a variety of perspectives and approaches
to readdress both contemporary and historical examples, representations,
realities, constructions and case studies of subcultures. It included contri-
butions from researchers and academics working on subcultures from cul-
tural studies, criminology, geography, literary studies, screen studies and
sociology, as well as film-makers, novelists and visual artists. The chapters
in this collection stem both from papers given at the conference itself and
others specially commissioned. The process underlying both the confer-
ence and this edition was based on a collective and collegiate endeavour.
The aims were to allow and encourage not only a snapshot of current
research but an example of social and critical solidarity in which, we hope,
the sum is greater than the parts, and the many voices reflect the non-
hierarchical and progressive sprit of supportive scholarship in the field.
While there has been a long tradition of analysing youth subcultures in
various disciplines, there has been no book-length study of how youth
subcultures have been portrayed in fiction, on screen and other media.
This edited collection provides a critical discussion and analysis of the rep-
resentation, articulation and construction of youth subcultures that con-
tributes to filling a gap in the current research into their literary, filmic and
visual depictions. The collection brings together scholars working in
xix
xx INTRODUCTION
literary studies, film studies, social and cultural studies whose research
interests lie in the aesthetics and cultural politics of youth cultures. The
book also contributes to, and enhances, theoretical perspectives and
approaches on the ways in which subcultures are (and have been histori-
cally) understood in the public consciousness as well as in academic dis-
course. It addresses examples that perhaps have been less widely covered
in research and literature and, where they have, offers new insights and
approaches. One of the intentions of the book is to stress that the power-
ful narrative construction of individual subcultures, and subcultural affili-
ation more broadly, is in part an imaginative and fictive construction. The
study of how fiction, film, TV and other cultural media have contributed
to this construction is therefore an important and timely intervention in
subcultural studies.
In bringing together these different and sometimes disparate critical
voices we have not attempted to impose a universal narrative or suppress
diverse voices and perspectives. Our text deliberately aims to bring out the
contemporary multiplicity of research in youth subcultures in fiction, film
and other media. Subcultures is an amorphous term and notoriously dif-
ficult to define, and the contributors to this collection draw on a range of
theoretical perspectives that reflect the ways that subcultural analysis has
evolved since its inception in the Chicago School and the CCCS
(Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies) at Birmingham, to current
manifestations that include post-subcultural theory. However, there is a
clear sense in this collection of the continuing importance of identity for-
mation, representation and affirmation. Therefore the changing landscape
of subcultural analysis and theoretical approaches in this collection is
reflected in the individual chapters that convey and cover a range not only
of subjects and fields from a multiplicity of perspectives and analyses of
various genres and narrative texts, but also critically address the contribu-
tions of seminal subcultural scholars and theorists. The collection identi-
fies developments and differences in the ways in which subcultural studies
has evolved and expanded the range of topics, groups, scenes, genres and
media. One area for future exploration is perhaps the role of digital and
virtual-world experiences. The use and misuse of online existence can be a
means to foster and promulgate (un)healthy subcultural allegiances and
identities. This seems clear in the worlds of contemporary political pro-
cesses. However, this is beyond the scope of this collection but is some-
thing that could and should be explored and analysed in future research.
INTRODUCTION
xxi
The book is divided into three parts with sections on fiction, film and
finally new theoretical ideas and perspectives through reference to ‘other
media’—creative representations, fictional and/or filmic examples and the
creative representation of identity. However, whilst the sections are organ-
ised as discreet delineations, a clear crossover and connection between
chapters is to be found in each section. We anticipate that the reader will
find the individual chapters of interest in and of themselves but will enjoy
the discovery of similarities and differences in approaches, genres, exam-
ples and illustrations between contributions as well as across sections. We
hope this contribution to the field explores and expands the work already
published in the series Palgrave’s Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music.
Section 1: Subcultural Fictions

The first section of the book examines the ways in which youth subcul-
tures have been represented, constructed and articulated in literary fiction.
It follows a broadly chronological approach and begins with Bill Osgerby’s
analysis of the subgenre of ‘bad girl’ fiction in 1950s America. Osgerby
discusses the way in which these texts contributed to popular anxieties
about youth delinquency, crime and gang violence, and identifies how this
moral panic was exploited by writers and publishers. The chapter goes on
to identify the way in which the success of bad girl fiction can be attributed
to wider shifts in the fields of production, demand, reception and
regulation.
In the second chapter, Lucy Robinson and Ben Jones also take us back
to the 1950s by identifying Colin MacInnes as a key player in the develop-
ment of subcultural fiction. They begin by identifying MacInnes’s 1959
novel Absolute Beginners as crucial in establishing the iconic figure of the
teenager as slick, cool and creative. They argue that ‘the Boy’ identity he
establishes in that novel is far more than simply a desire for perpetual
youth and becomes an autonomous, queer political agent that reoccurs
across MacInnes’s fiction and non-fiction. The chapter also identifies the
inspiration for ‘the Boy’ as the real life Ray Gosling, and the chapter goes
on to discuss Gosling’s negotiation of class differences and changing dis-
courses of sexuality in post-war Britain. By analysing Gosling’s journalism
and unpublished work, Robinson and Jones show how class and sexuality
intersected to shape Gosling’s activism and his historical construction of
selfhood as the political optimism of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the
xxii INTRODUCTION
gloom of AIDS in the 1980s. The chapter argues that the figure of the
teenager has always been inflected through queer masculinity and that, in
turn, experiences and stories of post-war social mobility impacted the gay
activism that followed.
The third chapter in this section moves to the 1970s as Nick Bentley
discusses the representation and construction of punk in literary fiction.
This chapter pursues two main themes: firstly, it analyses how literary tech-
niques are used in fiction and writing about punk to reflect similar styles,
approaches and practices in other cultural manifestations such as in music
and fashion. Secondly, it examines the way in which the emergence of
punk has been used in selected fiction to indicate a transition or rupture in
social, political and cultural discourses in Britain in the 1970s, especially
the move in politics from consensus to confrontation. It discusses novels
by several writers, including Richard Allen’s Punk Rock (1977), Jonathan
Coe’s The Rotters’ Club (2002), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
(1991) and Gideon Sams’s The Punk (1977).
In the final chapter in this section Dave Ellis analyses fiction by Courttia
Newland and Alex Wheatley in order to explore the links between identity
and postcode boundaries in the depiction of black British youth subcul-
tures. Ellis develops Homi Bhabha’s concept of New Cosmopolitanism
identifying what he posits as a ‘new parochialism’ being represented in
Newland and Wheatle’s fiction. This way of looking at these works sug-
gests that established codes of affiliation based on cultural styles and
formal and family histories are supplemented (rather than replaced) by
new, local histories. Ellis makes the point that if social identities are being
reconfigured in this new parochialism then social signifiers of style and
affiliation remain strong and can potentially result in violence. Several
novels are discussed including Newland’s A Book of Blues (2011), and
Wheatle’s Brixton Rock (1999), East of Acre Lane (2006), The Dirty South
(2008) and Brenton Brown (2011).
Section 2: Subcultural Representations on Screen

Our second section is concerned with subcultural representations on
screen, more specifically, on film. Stephen Glynn’s chapter opens with an
investigation of the representation of the Mod subculture on film, provid-
ing a contextual summary of the development of this essentially British
youth movement. His analysis focuses largely on a case study of the ‘ace
face’ of ‘Mod at the Movies’, Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia (1979).
INTRODUCTION
xxiii
Noting how subcultural leaders are inevitably challenged, a comparative

reading is made with Rowan Joffe’s younger rival Brighton Rock (2010), a
bold relocation to 1964 of Graham Greene’s catholic noir. Matthew
Cheeseman and David Forrest’s chapter uses the 1960s as a starting point
to analyse representations of nightclub dance floors in British cinema.
Focusing on club culture films, including Human Traffic (Justin Kerrigan,
1999), Sorted (Alexander Jovy, 2000), Soul Boy (Shimmy Marcus, 2010),
Everywhere and Nowhere (Menhaj Huda, 2011), Northern Soul (Elaine
Constantaine, 2014), and a contrasting French example, Eden (Mia
Hansen-Løve, 2015), Cheeseman and Forrest propose that British film
tends to use the dance floor as a narrative device that occludes or disturbs
notions of youth culture, turning it into a problem to be solved. The
notion of the problem of/in subculture and its mediation also occupies
the work of Adam R. Brown whose chapter on heavy metal subcultural
tropes, from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) to Wayne’s World
(1992), explores the contradiction that a youth subculture at the centre of
a mass-mediated moral panic was also the inspiration for a string of
Hollywood movies. Noting the significance of the male-teen-buddy ‘met-
alhead’ experience at the centre of the narrative, Brown looks to issues of
genre, in particular the comedy labelling of these texts, to consider the
ways in which they both soften heavy metal tropes and, simultaneously,
articulate a form of ‘protest masculinity’ that subverts both plot and nar-
rative. Authored by Beth Johnson, the last chapter in this section provides
an analysis of two recent rockumentary texts—The Stone Roses: Made of
Stone (2013), directed by Shane Meadows, and Oasis: Supersonic (2016),
directed by Mat Whitecross. Thinking through both the form and struc-
ture of their visual and sonic compositions, as well as the content, Johnson’s
chapter considers the ways in which both texts use the revival culture of
the present to look back at the past (1980s and 1990s), and situate the
bands at their heart as authentic, Mancunian creatives. Addressing issues
of subcultural and generic labelling, Johnson also considers the female-
centred stories, the socio-cultural alignments between the bands and the
directors, and the significance of place—Manchester—in order to more
accurately key out the cultural and identity work of these documentary
texts, and consider their contemporary relevance.
xxiv INTRODUCTION
Section 3: Critical Theory and Subcultural

Representations in Other Media
The chapters in this final section provide an exploration and analysis of a
variety of critical offerings that reflect the interconnection between iden-
tity and their representation in a variety of other media, as symbol and
artefact as well as practice. The scope of these essays demonstrates a vibrant
engagement with a range of material, examples and genres. The approaches
and perspectives applied in this section reflect the diversity of contempo-
rary subcultural research and analysis. They include a philosophical and
historical exegesis of a musical genre underrepresented in subcultural
studies, followed by a comparative analysis of how it is represented in film.
The following chapter considers the role and significance of film in the
depiction of the pop music industry. A photoessay on graffiti and street art
argues for and illustrates the use of the urban landscape as a canvas for the
self-representation and practices of an activity that is increasingly universal
in the urban landscape. The link between public and private space is dis-
cussed and addressed in the subsequent essay linking youthful practices in
the street with dreams, desires and hopes manifest in the private experi-
ence of the home and bedroom. The final chapter seeks to address the
similarities and differences in two film representations of youth, bringing
a contemporary and critical analysis of the social and cultural context of
their production and reception.
In the first chapter of this section, ‘Figures in black: Metal and the void
of working-class culture’, Scott Wilson looks at the subculture of heavy
metal. It notes metal’s longstanding lack of academic attention, particu-
larly from cultural studies. This is ironic given cultural studies’ association
with Birmingham, UK, the birthplace of metal in the late 1960s. The
chapter argues that Black Sabbath’s initial template for heavy metal offers
the form and structure for a work of mourning for the deindustrialisation
and destruction of traditional working-class culture in the UK. Looking
initially at Sabbath, then at Bolt Thrower, the essay suggests that metal’s
work of mourning introduces a process of subcultural identification, sup-
planted through states of sonic ecstasy, that allows something to be made
out of ‘an inferred experience of loss’, to create ‘out of chaos and
destruction.’
Nedim Hassan in the chapter ‘Shock Rock Horror! The representation
and reception of heavy metal horror films in the 1980s’ argues that though
existing academic work has examined moral panics surrounding heavy
INTRODUCTION
xxv
metal music in the USA during the mid-to-late 1980s, previous studies
have not assessed the impact they have had on popular film. Hassan’s
chapter focuses upon horror films released in this period that directly
engage with and satirise debates about metal music’s alleged corrupting
influence. Drawing upon genre analysis and assessing the audience recep-
tion of Trick or Treat (1986) in particular, the chapter contends that these
films articulated anxieties about the social control of youth during this
crucial period. Hassan argues that the films addressed youth audiences in
ways that fostered potential opportunities to reflect upon their experiences
of metal music culture and to counteract wider media discourses that con-
structed such culture as deviant.
Rehan Hyder in his chapter ‘Youth, hysteria and control in Peter
Watkins’ Privilege’ explores how the ideas of standardisation and confor-
mity are reflected in the near-future narrative of Peter Watkins’ 1967 fea-
ture film Privilege, and considers how such concepts have informed the
post-war tradition of British cinema focusing on the machinations of the
music industry. Watkins’ explicit linking of the popular music industry
with the dominant ideologies of the state (including politics, consumer
culture and religion) draws on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, particu-
larly Adorno’s work on popular music and conformity. The chapter will
consider how this critique of the music industry focused around the
manipulation of the pop superstar is informed by more recent debates
about cultural agency and fandom.
In ‘Representing subcultural identity: A photoessay of Spanish graffiti
and street art’, Andrzej Zieleniec presents graffiti as a universal and ubiq-
uitous feature of the modern urban experience, both signifier and material
object of a creative street culture. The chapter, using the author’s own
photographs from visual ethnographic research, explores and analyses the
ways in which graffiti writers and street artists represent themselves and
their identities, the methods and practices they use, the meanings and
values associated with their sense of belonging to a subcultural community
of shared interests and experiences. These are both individual and collec-
tive responses to and engagement with the urban as a lived experience and
practice that reflects a commitment to know, colonise, decorate and adorn
the public arena of cities’ streets, places and spaces with an alternative
urban aesthetic.
Jo Croft’s chapter, ‘“Destruction after all is a form of creation”: Donnie
Darko, and the spatial dynamics of the teenage dreamer’, explores the
teenage dreamer’s liminal terrain, focusing upon states of borderline
xxvi INTRODUCTION
c onsciousness rather than upon more familiar aspects of subcultural iden-

tity. Beginning with the premise that ‘youth’, ‘teenage’ and ‘adolescence’
have distinct but overlapping discursive resonances, Croft argues that
teenage dreamers occupy a uniquely borderline position: caught between
bedroom and street, they straddle the divide between (threatening) public
space and (introspective) private space. The chapter traces continuities
between different inscriptions of liminal subcultural identity, from August
Aichhorn’s ‘wayward youths’ and ‘juvenile delinquents’, to Frederick
Thrasher’s ‘susceptible gang-boys’ and Ian Hacking’s ‘fugueurs’. High-
lighting the relationship between borderline spatiality and ambivalent
mobility, Croft concludes with an intertextual reading of Graham Greene’s
The Destructors and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, foregrounding the
teenage dreamer’s ambiguous creative potential.
The final chapter by Keely Hughes, ‘From exaltation to abjection:
Positive and negative subcultures in Quadrophenia and Ill Manors’,
explores the veracity and accuracy of defining and describing subculture in
contemporary society. Using an analysis of the films Quadrophenia (1979)
by Franc Roddam and Ill Manors (2012) by Ben Drew, the chapter pro-
vides a critical discussion of the constructions of subcultural affiliations in
light of the role and representation of class relations and ‘symbolic styles’
(Hebdige 1979). She argues that there has been a shift in the construction
of subcultural movements and affiliations from a form of self-othering in
Quadrophenia to external-othering in Ill Manors which is largely con-
nected to changes within the capitalist system and the increasing despera-
tion of the working classes to survive as an entity under contemporary
neoliberal policies.
PART I
‘Subcultural Fictions’
Girls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction
in 1950s America
Bill Osgerby
‘Bad Girl’ Fiction and the ‘Circuit of Culture’

Billed on its front cover as ‘a shocking novel of teen-age gang life in the
slums of Manhattan’, Tomboy was a hit in 1950 for American author Hal
Ellson. The previous year Ellson had scooped success with Duke, a hard-
hitting bestseller depicting the lifestyle of New York’s violent, teenage
gangs. And in Tomboy Ellson’s attention switched to the female of the spe-
cies; with a narrative that focused on a teenage girl’s life in a street gang
and her journey into a world of ruthless turf wars, audacious heists and
torrid sleaze. The novel was another Ellson winner, earning plaudits from
critics and quickly running to a succession of paperback editions. Other
authors soon followed his lead, contributing to a prolific genre of ‘bad
girl’ popular fiction that graced American bookstands throughout the
1950s. Albert Quandt’s Zip-Gun Angels (1952), for example, profiled the
‘leader of a new kind of street gang … a gang of tough and beautiful girls’,
while Wenzell Brown’s Gang Girl (1954) recounted the exploits of Rita,
a fifteen-year-old hellion from New York’s Lower East Side who ‘knew
B. Osgerby (*)
London Metropolitan University, London, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 3

N. Bentley et al. (eds.), Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and
Other Media, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and
Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73189-6_1
4 B. OSGERBY
how to fight with her knees, her elbows, her teeth, how to hold a black-
jack, how to spot a cop, how to roll marijuana, how to lure a man into a
dark hallway’.1 And, in the same vein, Joseph Hilton’s Angels In The
Gutter (1955), Harry Whittington’s Halfway to Hell (1959), Leo
Margulies’ short story collection Bad Girls (1958) and Wenzell Brown’s
‘gang girl’ reprise, Girls on the Rampage (1961), all offered gritty tales of
young vixens prowling the backstreets of 1950s America.
This ‘bad girl’ fiction was a subgenre in a broader flood of cheap and
lurid ‘juvenile delinquency’ novels that traded on contemporary anxieties
about youth crime and gang violence.2 For the most part, 1950s teen
crime was characterised as a male problem—the stock delinquent por-
trayed as a swaggering, leather-jacketed hoodlum with a duck-tail haircut
and a bad attitude. But the belief that girls were becoming ‘tougher’,
‘harder’ and ‘more vicious’ was also widespread; and novels such as
Tomboy, Zip-Gun Angels and Gang Girl rode the wave of these concerns.
Successfully exploiting contemporary angst surrounding girls, morality
and crime, ‘bad girl’ fiction took the febrile newspaper headlines and con-
densed them into potboilers of sensational sex and violence.
The rise of ‘bad girl’ literature, however, was not solely indebted to con-
temporary anxieties about miscreant femininity. Like any media configura-
tion of youth subculture, ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s was the product of
a confluence of mutually constitutive processes—a ‘circuit of culture’—in
which social and cultural influences were important; but also decisive was
the way these factors interacted with developments in other realms, espe-
cially the fields of production, demand, reception and regulation.
The concept of a ‘circuit of culture’ was originally developed in the
mid-1980s by Richard Johnson. According to Johnson, to understand the
way media forms develop, circulate and generate meaning, attention must
be given to the way they move through a ‘circuit’ consisting of three main
stages—production, textuality and reception. Each stage, he argued, was
distinct and involved ‘characteristic changes of form’, but were linked
together in processes of interdependence and interaction so that ‘[e]ach
moment or aspect depends upon the others and is indispensable to the
whole’ (Johnson 1997, 83). Analytic perspectives that failed to acknowl-
edge each stage of the circuit and its relation to the others, Johnson con-
tended, could not adequately account for the form and meaning of media
texts. In these terms, then, approaches that dwelt exclusively on issues of
(for example) authorial intent or textual character were insufficient.
Instead, other aspects of the cultural circuit—for instance, the organisation
GIRLS ON THE RAMPAGE: ‘BAD GIRL’ FICTION IN 1950S AMERICA 5
of production and the readings generated by audiences—also demanded

attention, along with the dimensions of influence and interplay that invari-
ably existed between the various points of the circuit.
Since Johnson’s original model, various configurations of the cultural
circuit have featured in a diversity of studies. Versions of the cultural cir-
cuit have, for example, underpinned analyses of product design (Julier
2000) and the development of technologies such as the Sony Walkman
(Du Gay et al. 1997) and mobile phones (Goggin 2006), as well as in case
studies of textual forms such as the British ‘lads’ magazines of the 1990s
(Jackson et al. 2001). And ideas of a cultural circuit can also be usefully
applied to media forms associated with youth cultures and subcultures.
American ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s is exemplary. The rise of the genre
can be seen as the outcome of an interlinked circuit of culture in which the
social and cultural controversies of the period undoubtedly played an
important role, but crucial was the way these influences interacted with
other contemporary developments—most obviously the shifts in business
organisation, markets and censorship that transformed US publishing after
the Second World War.
The Paperback Boom and a Market for the ‘Three Ss’

Issues of production always play a key role in a circuit of culture, and they
were fundamental to the rise of ‘bad girl’ fiction. The success of the 1950s
‘bad girl’ novels was indebted to the wider boom in paperback books. Of
course, paperbound books were hardly new. The commercial possibilities
of paperbacks had already been demonstrated in Germany during the
1930s, where Albatross Books had successfully produced a range of mass-
market paperbacks whose innovations in size, typography and layout
became the industry standard. And in Britain the Albatross format was
imitated by Allen Lane’s launch of Penguin Books in 1935, which revolu-
tionised British publishing through the introduction of high quality, inex-
pensive paperbacks. But American talent was also quick to appreciate the
paperback’s potential.3
Leading the way, entrepreneur Robert de Graff joined forces with pub-
lishers Richard Simon and Max Schuster in 1939 to found Pocket Books,
which soon became a market leader with its paperback reprints of classics,
light novels and popular non-fiction. The company’s success was partly
indebted to its books’ low price (25 cents) and attractive presentation, but
it was also indebted to the firm’s innovative distribution. Whereas hardback
6 B. OSGERBY
sales traditionally relied on bookshops, de Graff (a seasoned pressman) saw

how a much broader market could be reached via the distribution systems
used for newspapers and magazines. Hence Pocket Books were racked-up
on newsstands and in drugstores, a strategic masterstroke that, within a
year, had clocked up sales of more than 1.5 million.
Following Pocket Books’ success, rivals soon appeared. For instance,
Avon Books (publisher of Gang Girl and Halfway to Hell) had started out
as a magazine publisher—J.S. Ogilvie Publications—but was bought up by
the newspaper distributor American News Company (ANC) and
relaunched in 1941 as Avon, a paperback imprint that closely imitated
Pocket Books. And more competition quickly followed. Dell was launched
in 1942, then Popular Library in 1943; in 1945 Ian Ballantine (formerly
director of Penguin’s American operations) set up Bantam Books (pub-
lisher of the paperback edition of Tomboy), followed by Ballantine Books,
launched in 1952. And in 1948 Kurt Enoch (who had fled Nazi Germany
after launching Albatross Books) established New American Library, ini-
tially publishing paperback reprints of classics, then a few original myster-
ies, romances and adventure stories.
But the key pioneer in the production of paperback originals was
Fawcett, a major magazine publisher and leading newsstand distributor.
Handling the distribution of New American Library’s Mentor and Signet
imprints, Fawcett soon saw the potential of paperback sales, and in 1950
the firm launched the industry’s first major line of original paperback nov-
els—Gold Medal Books (publisher of Angels in the Gutter and Girls on the
Rampage). Specialising in westerns, mysteries and thrillers, Gold Medal
had churned out over nine million books by the end of 1951, with many
novels quickly going to three or four editions. By 1953, then, the paper-
back trade was burgeoning and the business magazine Fortune could
trumpet ‘The Boom in Paper Bound Books’, estimating that the previous
year had seen national paperback sales of 243 million in a market worth
over $69 million (Fortune, September, 1953, 122).
The paperback bonanza, however, was itself indebted to another link in
the ‘cultural circuit’—the shifts in markets and consumer demand engen-
dered by America’s economic upturn. After the Second World War dispos-
able incomes and living standards rose across the board, and publishers
rode the tide of consumer affluence. But one market was especially attrac-
tive—teenagers and young adults. The post-war ‘baby boom’ ensured a
‘bulge’ in the US teenage population throughout the 1950s and 1960s;
and this, combined with buoyant levels of youth employment and a growth
in parental allowances, ensured a sustained growth in young people’s

spending power.4 In 1956, for example, Time magazine estimated that
‘allowances and earnings give the teenage boy an average weekly income
of $8.96, compared to only $2.41 a dozen years ago’ (Time, 13 August,
1956, 72); and by 1959 an awestruck Life magazine was observing that
American youth had ‘emerged as a big-time consumer in the US econ-
omy’, with teen wallets reckoned to be worth around $10 billion per year
(Life, 31 August, 1959, 78). Industries scrambled to stake a claim in the
teenage goldmine, with everything from rock ‘n’ roll records to ‘brothel-
creeper’ shoes pitched to young consumers. And publishers, too, were
keen to cash-in.
While paperbacks enjoyed a diverse readership, teenagers and young
adults were squarely in the book trade’s sights. In 1946, for example,
Pocket Books launched the Teen-Age Book Show, a touring exhibition
that pitched paperbacks to young readers, while throughout the 1950s
New American Library had an educational sales department geared to
penetrating the classroom market. Largely based on paperback reprints of
classic titles, such initiatives were promoted as offering young readers easy
access to literature deemed worthy and educational. But, alongside this
earnest fare, there also lurked a legion of paperback books with less high-
minded sensibilities.
During the early 1950s the flourishing paperback trade was regularly
decried by critics who argued the market was dominated by what they
dubbed ‘the three Ss’—’sex, sadism and the smoking gun’ (Schick 1958,
96). The point was not without foundation. Many paperbacks were noir-
esque tales of hard-boiled tough guys and hot-blooded dames; their
scorching narratives matched by covers that bristled with sneering hood-
lums and their improbably buxom molls. The formula had its roots in the
traditions of pulp magazine publishers, many of whom had become major
players in the new paperback business.
The ‘pulps’—so-called because of the low-cost, wood pulp paper they
were originally printed on—were cheap fiction magazines renowned for
their gripping themes and racy cover art. The genre’s heyday was during
the 1920s and 1930s when US newsstands were thronged with cheap,
visually striking pulp titles such as Argosy, Amazing Stories and Dime
Detective, all proffering thrilling tales of mystery, crime and adventure.
Paper shortages during the Second World War brought a steady rise in
costs and a decline in the pulps’ circulation and, in peacetime, the pulps’
sales were hit further by competition from television, comics and the
8 B. OSGERBY
boom in paperbacks. But, like mainstream magazine publishers, many

pulp publishers survived by, themselves, shifting into the paperback trade.
Pulp magazine specialists Leo Margulies (editor of Bad Girls) and Ned
Pines were quick off the mark, launching their paperback imprint, Popular
Library, in 1942. Others soon followed. Founded in 1949, Pyramid Books
was an offshoot of the pulp firm Almat Magazines, while Ace Books was
established in 1952 by A.A. Wyn, owner of the pulp publishing house Ace
Magazines. Like Pocket Books and Fawcett, the pulp publishers exploited
their established systems of magazine distribution and sales, and their new
paperbacks did a brisk trade in newsstands and drugstores. And, as the
companies’ writers, artists and editors shifted from producing magazines
to paperbacks, the pulps’ sensational themes, styles and subject matter
were reincarnated.
Like the original pulp magazines, their paperback progeny traded in the
thrilling and the taboo. They were home to ruthless gangsters, hard-bitten
detectives and shameless hussies. And, like the earlier pulps, the 1950s
paperbacks were adept at exploiting contemporary controversies, appro-
priating their concerns and motifs for narratives calculated to shock and
sensationalise. It was a strategy to which the theme of teenage rebellion
was ideally suited. Stories of violent street gangs and lawless ‘bad girls’
offered a high octane mix of sex and violence; but they also offered a sharp
bite of topicality at a time when America was seized by popular alarm
about an apparent explosion of delinquency.
The ‘Fifth Horseman of Doom’: The ‘Juvenile Crime

Wave’ and the Rise of ‘Youth-sploitation’
The rise of ‘bad girl’ fiction during the 1950s was indebted to wider devel-
opments in consumer markets and general shifts in American publishing.
But the specific subject matter of ‘bad girl’ novels stemmed from another
vital link in the books’ cultural circuit—their social context and, specifi-
cally, the widespread perception that juvenile crime was spiralling out of
control. As historian James Gilbert shows, Gallup surveys suggest a brief
peak of public concern in 1945, followed by a more sustained period of
alarm between 1953 and 1958 (Gilbert 1986, 63). The mood was cap-
tured in 1953 by Clymer Hendrickson, a New Jersey Senator, who con-
tended that delinquent youth represented the ‘fifth horseman of doom’.
‘Juvenile delinquency’, Hendrickson averred, was ‘at its highest peak since
World War II, and the crimes being committed by the young of our Nation
are harder, fiercer, more shocking than ever before in our Nation’s history’
(Washington Post, 12 April, 1953). In response, that year saw the appoint-
ment of a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to investigate
the problem’s cause. Headed by Estes Kefauver (Senator for Tennessee),
the enquiry continued until the early 1960s, and its very existence helped
confirm views that juvenile delinquency—or the ‘J.D.’ problem as it was
often dubbed—was a major social issue.
Such perceptions, however, were vastly overblown. Notions of a quan-
tum leap in delinquency seemed borne out by a relentless rise in crime
statistics, but Gilbert shows how this ‘juvenile crime wave’ was largely a
statistical phenomenon produced by new strategies of law enforcement
and changes in the collation of crime data (Gilbert 1986, 66–70). As
Gilbert argues, rather than being a response to a genuine eruption of
adolescent vice, the post-war fears surrounding delinquency functioned
as ‘a symbolic focus for wider anxieties in a period of rapid and disorient-
ing change’; the concerns about youth crime serving to articulate ‘a
vaguely formulated but gnawing sense of social disintegration’ (Gilbert
1986, 77).5
Nevertheless, the newsworthiness of juvenile delinquency ensured it was
a recurring theme in the popular media of the day. At the cinema, for
instance, dysfunctional adolescence loomed large in a spate of ‘J.D.’ mov-
ies.6 In 1955, for example, Warner’s Rebel Without A Cause (dir. Nicholas
Ray) catapulted James Dean to stardom as the prototypical teen rebel,
while the same year saw MGM’s Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks)
paint a sobering portrait of teenage violence in an inner-city high school.
But not all J.D. films were homilies on the dangers of wayward youth.
Whereas the pictures released by major Hollywood studios usually saw
straitlaced adults moralizing to errant youngsters, the movies produced by
independent studios were often more libertine. Dubbed ‘exploitation’ pic-
tures in the film business, such films were largely geared to the youth mar-
ket and shunned dominant notions of artistic merit and narrative finesse in
favour of cheap, quickly made product that cashed-in on contemporary
fads, luring audiences with the promise of spectacle and thrills. Hence many
exploitation studios quickly seized on the theme of delinquency. American
International Pictures (AIP, founded in 1954) led the way with a series of
‘wild youth’ films that included Motorcycle Gang (dir. Edward Cahn, 1957),
Dragstrip Riot (dir. David Bradley, 1958) and The Cool and the Crazy (dir.
William Witney, 1958). Superficially, these ‘youth-sploitation’ pictures pur-
ported to preach against the ‘evils’ of reckless adolescence but, beneath this
10 B. OSGERBY
veneer, the films gloried in their tableaux of the daring and the sensational;
and much of their box-office pull lay in the way they offered young audi-
ences the vicarious thrills of delinquent revolt.
Youth-sploitation sensibilities also surfaced in the book trade. ‘Pulp’
firms such as Ace, Pyramid and Popular Library predominated, but most
paperback publishers (including Avon, Ballantine, Gold Medal and Signet)
contributed to the hundreds of novels that, throughout the 1950s,
paraded the misdeeds of American teens. With lurid covers and e ye-catching
titles, the J.D. paperbacks offered a breathtaking world of switchblades,
zip-guns and gang rumbles. Author Hal Ellson was especially prolific.
Duke, his tale of a black, fifteen-year-old gang leader in Harlem, was first
published in hardback by Scribner’s in 1949, but it became a bestseller in
1950 when Popular Library issued it in paperback, and by 1955 the book
had clocked up sales of over 1.5 million. Tomboy came next in 1950, fol-
lowed in 1952 by The Golden Spike, a novel that began a sustained rela-
tionship between Ellson and the publisher Ballantine, the company
publishing many of the author’s long run of J.D. novels, including Summer
Street (1953a), Rock (1953b) and Tell Them Nothing (1956).
Other authors also stood out as meisters of J.D. fiction. Harlan Ellison,
for instance, produced Rumble for the publisher Pyramid in 1958, and
followed up its success with two short-story collections for Ace—The
Deadly Streets (1958b) and The Juvies (1961). Wenzell Brown also carved
out an impressive J.D. niche, producing Run, Chico, Run (1953b),
Teenage Terror (1958), Cry Kill (1959a) and Teen-age Mafia (1959b) for
Gold Medal, Monkey on My Back (1953a) and The Big Rumble (1955) for
Popular Library, and Gang Girl (1954) for Avon. Edward De Roo was
another genre recidivist, penning a succession of J.D. novels for Ace—Go,
Man, Go (1959a), The Young Wolves (1959b), Rumble at the Housing
Project (1960) and The Little Caesars (1961). There was also a multitude
of J.D. one-hit-wonders. Jay de Bekker, for instance, proffered Gutter
Gang (1954) for the publisher Beacon, Bud Clifton delivered D for
Delinquent (1958) for Ace, Edward Ronn furnished Gang Rumble (1958)
for Avon, William Cox supplied Hell to Pay (1958) for Signet and Morton
Cooper dashed off Delinquent! (1958) for Avon. All were bold, brash and
brimming with J.D. brutality.
The line-up of J.D. paperbacks also included some distinctive sub-
genres. Dope peddling was a regular ingredient in J.D. fiction, and in
some novels ‘reefers’ and ‘goofballs’ edged out switchblades and gang
rumbles as the chief preoccupation. Probably the best known ‘druggie
pulp’ of the 1950s was beat icon William Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical

portrait of heroin addiction, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug
Addict, published (initially under the pseudonym ‘William Lee’) by Ace in
1953. But this was just one among a slew of paperbacks that depicted ill-
fated youngsters gripped by a desperate drug habit. Alongside Ellson’s The
Golden Spike and Brown’s Monkey On My Back, there also appeared several
first-person confessionals—for instance, Pyramid released Leroy Street’s I
Was a Drug Addict (1953) and Monarch published Valerie Jordan’s I am
a Teen-Age Dope Addict (1962)—while lurid exposés also emerged in the
form of Joachim Joesten’s Dope, Inc. (1953), written for Avon, and Sloane
Britain’s The Needle (1959), for Beacon. Ostensibly they sermonised
against the perils of teenage drug addiction but, in the true tradition of
‘exploitation’ fare, the real appeal lay in their promise of a candid glimpse
into a world of the forbidden. And ‘bad girl’ fiction, too, was another J.D.
subgenre that capitalised on contemporary headlines and beguiled readers
with a taste for the wild and the wanton.
‘Girls Gone Wrong’: Delinquency, Gender

and ‘Domestic Containment’
While the 1950s ‘juvenile crime wave’ was mainly understood as a male
problem, the issue of female delinquency also prompted alarm. Popularised
in newspaper articles and magazine features, the image of the delinquent
‘bad girl’ also gained (supposedly) authoritative weight from professional
pronouncements. Katherine Sullivan, for instance, drew on her experi-
ences working on the Massachusetts Parole Board to author Girls on
Parole (1956), a sobering account of ‘why girls go wrong’, while Rebels in
the Streets (1964) saw journalist Kitty Hanson scour the files of the
New York City Youth Board to deliver a portrait of femininity run amok:
These are girls, of too much experience and too little knowledge, of violence
and hatred, of impulse and recklessness. They know despair, but not pity.
They often curse, but they seldom weep. These are girls who mug and steal,
who maim and sometimes kill. (Hanson 1964, 3)
Concerns about female delinquency had already surfaced during war-

time, when unease had a cohered around ‘Victory-girls’ or ‘V-girls’—
young women whose ‘free and easy’ liaisons with servicemen were
interpreted by the media as evidence of a breakdown in national morality.7
12 B. OSGERBY
But during the 1950s anxieties intensified amid the broader fears engen-
dered by the apparent upsurge of juvenile crime. Indeed, as historian
Rachel Devlin argues, the stories of ‘girls gone wrong’ seemed to under-
score the seriousness of the delinquency ‘problem’, since the extent of the
social disruption was ‘made palpable by the fact that girls in particular had
somehow slipped beyond the bounds of control, their “wildness” signifying
the breakdown of the boundaries of gender as much as of civil behavior’
(Deviln 1998, 89).
As Devlin suggests, the image of the female delinquent provoked par-
ticular unease because it resonated with wider tensions surrounding issues
of gender and sexuality. Popular perceptions of 1950s America as a land of
confidence and cohesion obscure the way US society was actually shot
through with conflict and distrust. Historians such as Alan Nadel have
drawn attention to the way Cold War America was characterised by a deep
suspicion of dissension and stern pressures to conform; US foreign policies
geared to the ‘containment’ of communist influence abroad finding their
parallel at home in a cultural agenda infused by paradigms of ‘contain-
ment’, with literature, cinema and the spectrum of popular culture deploy-
ing narratives that ‘functioned to foreclose dissent, pre-empt dialogue and
preclude contradiction’ (Nadel 1995, 14). Central to these strategies of
‘containment’ was a strict regime of gender and sexuality. As Elaine Tyler
May (1988) shows, the 1950s saw intensified pressures for social and sex-
ual stability, with ideologies of ‘domestic containment’ promoting mar-
riage and homemaking as fundamental to the strength and vitality of the
nation; a battery of media texts and academic discourse combining in an
attempt to convince women that the role of housewife and mother was
natural and fulfilling, and that to step beyond these normative roles was
abnormal, even subversive. In this context, then, the so-called ‘deviant
femininity’ of the girl delinquent seemed especially troublesome and pro-
voked profound concern.
It was, however, exactly these fears that made the girl delinquent so
attractive to the youth-sploitation industries. Her aura of deviance and
trouble were, for example, grist to the mill for exploitation filmmakers, and
throughout the 1950s a welter of cheap and quickly made pictures eagerly
capitalised on the concerns. AIP, for instance, released a steady stream of
‘bad girl’ pictures, including Hot Rod Girl (1956, dir. Leslie Martinson),
Reform School Girl (1957, dir. Edward Bernds) and High School Hellcats
(1958, dir. Edward Bernds). But publishers also eagerly took advantage of
the furore, hence the 1950s flurry of ‘bad girl’ paperbacks.
Across popular culture, images of the ‘bad girl’ were invariably charac-
terised by a brazen sexuality. And, as Elizabeth McCarthy observes, the
‘bad girls’’ ‘predatory, indiscriminate and rapacious sexual appetite’ had a
marked edge of sedition given how far it was ‘at odds with the concept of
female sexuality as geared towards marriage, homemaking and family’
(McCarthy 2011, 141). But ‘bad girl’ texts could also pander to pruri-
ence. The covers of ‘bad girl’ books, for instance, featured pouting lips,
bulging cleavage and tantalising tag-lines as a titillating lure; while sex
scenes that presented girls as boy-hungry hussies provided drooling read-
ers with a rich seam of fantasy fodder. The output of firms on the fringes
of the publishing industry—for example, Beacon, Midwood and
Monarch—was especially salacious. With low production values (the
cheapest paper stock and shoddy bindings), their selling point was content
more explicit than mainstream rivals and they were sold under the counter
or in cigar shops rather than on newsstands. These firms’ novels ran the
gamut of soft-core sleaze, but a staple were ‘bad girl’ tales such as Orrie
Hitt’s The Torrid Teens (1960—’She came from a nice home […] Yet at
seventeen she succumbed to vileness and twisted desire. Why?’), Leo
Rifkin and Tony Norman’s Gutter Girl (1960—’The whole story of the
wild and wanton girls who run with the street packs and throng the cellar
clubs’) and Julie Ellis’s Gang Girl. (credited to ‘Joan Ellis’ 1960—’She
had her first sordid lessons in love on the dusty rooftops of rundown
tenements’).
But other entries in the ‘bad girl’ genre were more reflective. In Hal
Ellson’s J.D. novels, for example, the author’s social conscience was never
far away. Ellson’s ‘day job’ was working as a recreational therapist at
New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where he became familiar with some of the
city’s most troubled youngsters. The experience informed his novels, and
his tales of Manhattan’s lawless delinquents often included elements of
liberal social critique. In his Preface to Duke, for example, Ellson argued
that the roots of delinquency lay not in intrinsic criminality but in depriva-
tion and social exclusion. ‘Where the gang exists as the “biggest” thing
there is’, Ellson explained, ‘it is only natural for a boy to join for he is
merely reacting logically to his own environment. He also finds acceptance
in a world that otherwise rejects him’ (Ellson 1949, 4).8 Ellson’s liberalism
also emerged in Tomboy. The novel’s fifteen-year-old protagonist—referred
to simply as ‘Tomboy’—runs with an Irish street gang (The Harps), and
Ellson gives a hard-hitting account of her proclivity for violence as she
beats female gang initiates with a leather belt, burns a cigarette into the
14 B. OSGERBY
breast of a traitor and pushes a rival gang’s spy from a rooftop. But Ellson
also presents Tomboy’s delinquency as the outcome of her inner conflicts
and dysfunctional home. Struggling with her sexual identity and seeking
escape from her drunken father, Tomboy is presented as finding haven in
the sense of belonging offered by the gang. Meanwhile, Ellson’s liberal
account of the ‘environmental’ causes of delinquency surfaces as Tomboy’s
gang reflect on a recent foray to the bright lights of Times Square:
They forgot where they were and what they really belonged to, that dark,
bleak world outside, a world of crowded tenements and dirty cheerless
streets where drunks brawled in bars and lay in hallways, a world of bicker-
ing harassed women who carried the fear of poverty always with them, an
area, which in spite of its desolation, knew the threatening pressure and
growing pains of another on its border where a darker people lived and
brawled yearning to break down the walls of its ghetto. (Ellson 1951, 94)
Similarly, the central character in Wenzell Brown’s Gang Girl is more

damaged than depraved. Like Tomboy, fifteen-year-old Rita is a feisty hell-
cat, and the novel follows her rise as a leader in a tough street gang.
Dodging the cops, she smokes dope, deals drugs and pitches into fist
fights. But, again like Tomboy, Rita is also the vulnerable victim of her
circumstances. Living among the slum neighbourhoods of New York’s
Lower East Side, Rita’s mother is an alcoholic (‘fat and sloppy with the
odor of gin constantly around her’ [Brown 1954, 44]), while Rita is tor-
tured by the loss of her father, a career criminal languishing on Death
Row. Rita, then, is presented as a product of ‘fear, bewilderment and a
desperate need for love and security’, always searching for ‘somewhere to
go, some place where she wouldn’t be alone with the sickening dread that
never seemed to leave her’ (Brown 1954, 47).
‘Bad Girls’ Contained?

Issues of textuality and representation are always an important component
in a cultural circuit, and the characteristic features of 1950s ‘bad girl’ fic-
tion were clearly informed by the concerns and controversies of the day. In
particular, the depiction of characters like Tomboy and Rita as the trauma-
tised products of dysfunctional family backgrounds reflected the way girls’
delinquency was often understood at the time. It became common, after
the Second World War, for psychoanalytic perspectives to be applied to the
study of juvenile crime as a whole, but Devlin shows how such ideas
‘proved to be particularly useful for describing and coming to terms with
female delinquency’ (Devlin 1998, 84). Psychoanalytic approaches were
so popular in the analysis of female deviance, Devlin argues, because they
‘managed simultaneously to express anxieties about the social meaning of
female delinquency yet contain the meaning of that behaviour safely within
the matrix of the family’, so that ‘female rebellion’ could be interpreted as
‘less an autonomous form of expression than a reaction to her familial
circumstances’ (Devlin 1998, 84–5). In these terms, then, the ideals of
‘domestic containment’ were effectively reinforced because delinquent
girls could be viewed as psychologically disturbed, rather than as wilfully
transgressive (or, more colloquially, as ‘mad’ rather than ‘bad’).
For some critics, ‘bad girl’ books like Tomboy and Gang Girl, were com-
plicit in this ‘containment’ of challenging femininities. Ramona Caponegro,
for example, argues that Tomboy reproduced the conservatism of psycho-
analytic interpretations of female delinquency because
as dangerous and as powerful as Tomboy appears on the streets, her actions

can be read as mere extensions of her failed relationship with her father, not
to mention her stepmother; consequently, according to the prevailing psy-
choanalytic theory of her era, her actions are robbed of self-determinacy,
changing her from tough hood into the victim of a dysfunctional family—
that is, a cause of juvenile delinquency that the public can understand.
(Caponegro 2009, 320)
Indeed, suggestive of Tomboy’s implicit conservatism was the glowing

endorsement it received from Frederic Wertham. The crusading psychia-
trist sprang to fame with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent in
1954, a bestseller in which Wertham decried the mass media—and comics
in particular—as a key cause of juvenile crime. The early 1950s saw
Wertham deliver extensive testimony before Kefauver’s Senate
Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, and his arguments were a key
influence on the introduction of the notorious Comics Code in 1954,
which effectively proscribed the ‘horror’ and ‘crime’ comics then popular
with young readers.9 But Wertham had nothing but praise for Tomboy.
And, in his introduction to the book’s paperback edition, Wertham
championed the novel’s ‘psychological truth’ and its presentation of delin-
quency as a problem whose roots lay in an adolescent’s troubled upbring-
ing (Wertham 1951, i–v).
16 B. OSGERBY
Popular texts, however, are often replete with contradictions that can
open them up to a variety of different readings. This was especially true of
1950s paperbacks, where representations of ‘rogue’ femininities had an
ambivalence that left them open to a range of interpretations by different
audiences. Many critics, for instance, point to the way lesbian-themed pulp
novels of the 1950s were ‘appropriated’ by a gay readership.10 Such books,
Yvonne Keller argues, were ‘intended for heterosexual voyeuristic male read-
ers’, but they had ‘unintended productive, exactly nonrepressive, effects’
(Keller 2005, 406). As Keller explains, at a time when lesbianism was virtually
invisible in popular culture, for many gay readers the ‘lesbian pulps’ became
an important vehicle for the formation of sexual identity since they ‘put the
word and idea of “lesbianism” into popular discourse, creating a category of
people that had not—to most—existed before’ (Keller 2005, 406–7).
Contradictions also characterised the ‘bad girl’ novels. They certainly
had dimensions of conservatism. Written almost exclusively by men, their
female characters were often constructed as sexual objects, while the con-
figuration of girls’ delinquency as a psychological disorder rather than an
expression of social defiance worked towards a ‘containment’ of female
agency. And yet ‘bad girl’ fiction also offered a walk on the wild side that
went against the conservative grain. Throughout the 1950s the American
media relentlessly promoted images of docile femininity, with women con-
figured as ‘happy housewives’ rooted in a life of subservient and ‘con-
tained’ domesticity. But the ‘bad girl’ books offered a beguiling alternative.
They proffered a vision of outlaw girlhood that refused to toe the con-
formist line, and much of their appeal lay in the way they flipped an inso-
lent middle finger to the straitlaced mainstream. Indeed, suggestive of the
books’ seditious aura were the efforts made by outraged moralists to
ensure their suppression.
During the early 1950s, moral crusaders cast a puritanical chill over
American publishing. First came localised, uncoordinated censorship drives
by parental groups and religious bodies such as the National Organization
for Decent Literature (NODL, formed by Catholic priests), together with
state-sponsored lawsuits against specific books deemed ‘obscene’.11 Then,
in 1952, the campaign was given focus by the appointment of a govern-
ment inquiry—The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic
Materials—tasked with investigating the publishing business and the influ-
ence of popular literature on young readers. Headed by Ezekiel C. Gathings
(Democratic Representative for Arkansas), the committee gunned deter-
minedly for the paperback market, announcing at the outset:
The so-called pocket-size books which originally started out as cheap

reprints of standard works, have largely degenerated into media for the dis-
semination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and
degeneracy. The exaltation of passion above principle and the identification
of lust with love are so prevalent that the casual reader of such ‘literature’
might easily conclude that all married persons are habitually adulterous and
all teenagers completely devoid of any sex inhibitions. (United States House
of Representatives 1952, 3)
From the start, the Gathings hearings were stacked against the paper-
backs. Few witnesses were called from the publishing industry. Instead, a
parade of religious leaders, police officials, teachers and judges testified to
the pernicious influence of an array of popular titles. Hundreds of books
were cited as reprehensible, but novels featuring wayward femininity
seemed to attract particular ire, Gathings reserving special contempt for
books like Treska Torres’ ‘lesbian pulp’ Women’s Barracks (1950), and
‘bad girl’ books such as N.R. DeMexico’s Marijuana Girl (1951) and Hal
Ellson’s Tomboy. Published in 1952, the Committee’s report pulled no
punches, arguing for much tougher obscenity laws and stricter regulation
of the publishing industry. The calls, however, had little impact. In con-
trast to the comic trade, the book industry carried political and cultural
weight and, citing First Amendment freedoms, publishers successfully lob-
bied against strengthened controls. Gathings, meanwhile, became a figure
of press ridicule as his report was left to gather dust.
The paperbacks, then, prevailed over puritanical attempts to clip their
wings. And, during the 1950s and early 1960s, court victories further
rolled back the legal checks on literature.12 The changes in censorship
were the final ingredient in the ‘bad girl’ books’ circuit of culture. With
the relaxation of legal constraints on novels’ content and covers, publish-
ers could milk J.D. themes for all their worth and, throughout the 1950s,
the stream of ‘bad girl’ fiction was free to offer page-turning slices of
‘youth-run-wild’ melodrama.
The End of the Line for ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction

The history of ‘bad girl’ fiction in 1950s America stands as a useful exam-
ple of the way the concept of a ‘cultural circuit’ can be used to under-
stand the development of media forms associated with youth cultures and
subcultures. The rise of the ‘bad girl’ genre was clearly indebted to
18 B. OSGERBY
the broader historical context of mounting social concern around issues

of both youth and gender. But other points in the cultural circuit were
also important—in particular, the wider shifts in American publishing,
the transformation of post-war markets and a textual ambivalence that
opened up the ‘bad girl’ narratives to a variety of possible audience read-
ings. And, with the relaxation of censorship controls, the genre steadily
flourished.
‘Bad girl’ fiction—along with the wider J.D. genre, of which it was a
part—hit its high-water mark around 1958, as publishers cashed-in on the
crest of the juvenile crime furore. After this, however, the cultural circuit
that had underpinned the rise of ‘bad girl’ books steadily unravelled. By
the beginning of the 1960s tough street gangs were old news and, as the
delinquency panic steadily dissipated, readers’ appetites for ‘bad girl’ thrills
also faded. Industry shifts were another nail in the genre’s coffin. Increasing
competition and a spate of business takeovers saw many smaller paperback
firms either fall by the economic wayside or merge with larger publishing
houses whose aesthetic inclinations were less outré.
Nevertheless, while 1950s delinquents became a thing of wistful nostal-
gia, the attitude and approach of the ‘bad girl’ books could sometimes
resurface. Indeed, throughout the 1960s and 1970s media-fuelled fears of
new subcultural bogeymen brought a spate of youth-sploitation paper-
backs chronicling the menace of feral biker gangs, LSD-fuelled freak-outs
and Charles Manson-esque hippie cults. And, within the line-up, there
were a smattering of titles such as Dexter Knapp’s Girl Gangs (1968) that
harked back to the ‘bad girl’ glory days, with their tales of (as Knapp’s
front cover blurb put it) ‘Gangs of girls banded together in their mutual
thirst for sex and violence!’ The ‘bad girl’ theme, then, may have waned,
but it did not disappear entirely.13
Notes
1. The two histrionic quotations are taken from the back-cover promotional
blurbs for, respectively, Quandt (1952) and Brown (1954).
2. See Osgerby (2017) for a discussion of the whole genre of 1950s ‘delin-
quency’ fiction.
3. For accounts of the rise of the American paperback industry, see Davis
(1984), Schreuders (1981) and Walters (1985).
4. A more detailed analysis of the development of the American teenage mar-
ket can be found in Osgerby (2008).
5. Gilbert does not use the term ‘moral panic’, but it can be aptly applied to
American responses to delinquency during the 1950s. Popularised in
Stanley Cohen’s (1972) analysis of the ‘battles’ between mods and rockers
at British seaside resorts during 1964, the concept of moral panic denotes
episodes of overblown social alarm in which exaggerated and sensation-
alised media reports fan the sparks of an initially trivial phenomenon, creat-
ing a self-perpetuating ‘amplification spiral’ that steadily heightens the
phenomenon’s social significance.
6. A full survey of 1950s ‘J.D.’ movies is provided in McGee and Roberston
(1982).
7. See Heggarty (2008).
8. In this respect Ellson’s attitudes echo perspectives elaborated by liberal
sociologists and criminologists of the day. For example, Albert Cohen
(1955) and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960) argued that the
poverty and privations of ghetto neighbourhoods excluded youngsters
from mainstream routes to success and so, looking for an alternative source
of status and security, they gravitated to street gangs. Given his position at
Bellevue Hospital, it is likely that Ellson was familiar with such views.
9. For a history of America’s horror comic panic during the 1950s see Hajdu
(2008).
10. Analyses of ‘lesbian’ pulp fiction of the 1950s exist in Foote (2005),
Rabinowitz (2014, 184–208), Walters (1989) and Zimet (1999).
11. An overview of the campaign is provided in Speer (2001).
12. See Davis (1984, 216–247) and Rabinowitz (2014, 244–280).
13. See Osgerby (2018, forthcoming) for a discussion of ‘bad girl’ fiction in
Britain and the US during the late 1960s and 1970s.
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Queering the Grammar School Boy: Class,
Sexuality and Authenticity in the Works
of Colin MacInnes and Ray Gosling
Lucy Robinson and Ben Jones
Introduction
In their writings on ‘the Teenager’ (often described as ‘the Boy’) between
1959 and 1961, Colin MacInnes and Ray Gosling translated teenage
experiences and constructed memorable teenage subjects for both
contemporary and later audiences. In this chapter, we will suggest that
taken as a whole MacInnes’s work constructs a complex understanding of
‘the Boy’s’ political possibilities. By integrating an analysis of his novelistic
work with his journalistic and activist writing, we will demonstrate the
complexity of MacInnes’s ‘Boy’ as an autonomous, queer political agent,
embodied in the ultimate Boy: Ray Gosling. The two writers were close
We would like to thank Amelia Fletcher, Rob Pursey and Nick Bentley.
L. Robinson (*)
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
B. Jones
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

24 L. ROBINSON AND B. JONES
friends, with MacInnes acting as a mentor to the younger Gosling, who in

turn functioned as something of a confidant to the older man. We use the
term ‘queer’ to mean both ‘mode of analysis and deconstruction relating
to identity politics and resistance to the norm, and as a mode of descrip-
tion relating to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgen-
der’ (Powell 2010, 283). For us, the significance of MacInnes’s and
Gosling’s sexuality lies not in providing us with clues to their psycho-
sexual motivation. Nor are we arguing that the Teenager was externally
queered by gay Svengalis of the pop and fashion worlds. For our purposes,
the Teenager is in itself a queered subject.
We will show how MacInnes’s one time flat mate, Ray Gosling,
described as the ‘Professional Teenager’ constructed and occupied a dis-
ruptive space between dependent child and productive adult. He showed
how the Teenager was at once a cynical marketing ploy and a multiple
shifting experience, queering the lines between the two. The Boy was a
sexual as well as generational identity. It was at once impossible and
obtainable. The Teenager was the inhabitant of a Dreamland always ‘like
a win on the pools, just around the corner’ (Gosling 1960, 31). In both
Gosling’s and MacInnes’s narratives of teenage life, the Teenager pro-
vided an identity that was ‘progress’ driven within a liberal narrative of the
modern, and resonant of authenticity, resistance and transgression. The
Boy Gosling therefore embodied the spectrum of queer-identified poli-
tics: multiple, and fragmented, whilst at the same time appealing to a set
of collective, generational experiences. He was the template for the
Teenager, providing inspiration for MacInnes’s literary creation: an iconic
character which sought to embody a generational identity. At the same
time Gosling offered a process for unpicking the template. In the second
half of the chapter we will explore how Gosling’s Teenager was put
together after his brief alienating experience of university life. Gosling ‘the
scholarship boy’ found salvation in asserting the vibrant authenticity of
working-class experience against the deadening norms of middle-class stu-
dent life. We conclude the chapter by tracing Gosling’s trajectory from
the early sixties, analysing his activism on behalf of queer and working-
class communities and his controversial confession to a mercy killing,
shortly before his own death in 2013. We begin however by exploring
how Absolute Beginners was interpreted and understood in the mid-1980s,
as a prelude to a discussion of an alternative reading of the novel and
MacInnes’s queer politics.
QUEERING THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL BOY: CLASS, SEXUALITY… 25
Colin MacInnes
In 1959, Colin MacInnes published the second of his London novels,
Absolute Beginners. In it, the unnamed protagonist is constructed as the
iconic teenager, slick, cool, creative, with his ex-lover Crepe Suzette as the
object of his art, and his Achilles heel. The novel is episodically framed
over one summer, against a backdrop of racial tension, and has become a
standard option for reading lists on youth culture and masculinity in the
1950s. Often treated as social documentary rather than a work of fiction,
it also stands as an infamous reminder of what 1980s retro could do to a
novel when translated into film form. Julien Temple’s 1986 musical adap-
tation starred Patsy Kensit as Crepe Suzette and featured David Bowie,
Sade and Steven Berkoff. In the film the unnamed narrator, the Boy, is
given MacInnes’ name Colin, suggesting an identification with the author
as protagonist, rather than as observer (Temple 1986). The film signalled
the emergence of a particularly English soul jazz scene in the eighties,
around The Wag Club and artists like Sade, Carmel, Working Week and
Paul Weller’s Style Council. Production had not run smoothly, and the
film was not received well. Similarly the scene it articulated was written off
by Simon Reynolds in 1988 as a ‘Hipster London elite’ (Reynolds 1988).
Unlike Temple’s punk films, Absolute Beginners has since become a marker
of overblown, over-styled pop films. Over a decade after its release, Stephen
Dalton described it as ‘that nadir of vacuous Eighties style-whore cinema’
(Dalton 1998).
By returning to MacInnes’s original texts, rather than this later adapta-
tion, both Paul Weller and Billy Bragg have used MacInnes’s words to
attempt to draw clear lines of inheritance back to an imagined ‘authentic’
teenage culture. In so doing they have called up ‘the Boy’ to stand along-
side them in solidarity: a classed identity in a multicultural context with
implications for a reimagined ‘Englishness’. Weller described Absolute
Beginners as ‘the ultimate mod book’ and wrote the preface to its new edi-
tion in the wake of the film’s release. Bragg named two of his albums after
MacInnes’s books—England, Half English and Mr Love and Justice. In
fact Bragg thought that it might have been Weller who gave him the copy
of England, Half English that inspired him to connect with MacInnes. For
Bragg, MacInnes’s Englishness was a ‘cultural notion’ which encompassed
ethnic diversity and celebrated multiculturalism and cultural hybridity
(Staunton 2007).
Putting the Queer Back—Subject and Process

This diversity however had its own boundaries and borders. MacInnes’s
homosexuality and his acerbic personality provided his detractors with
ample ammunition. His personal life has been used to wipe out his public
political statements. When picked up by later writers and critics, the politi-
cal potential of MacInnes’s queer identity is either muted as in Bragg and
Weller’s recovery of ‘The Boy’ or erased entirely by the harshest critics of
MacInnes’s personal politics (see for example Howe, quoted in Vulliamy
2007).1 Queer—whether conceived of as an approach or as an identity—
gets lost in these more contemporary formulations. Despite the appropria-
tion of MacInnes as the founding father of a classed and ethnically diverse
Englishness, these identities, we argue, are inflected through a destabilis-
ing queerness. This is not a matter of reading MacInnes as either classed
or as queered, but as we suggest class and queer identity can be read
together, as inside/out, and as both subject and analysis.
MacInnes’s Politics
Although MacInnes was not always public about his homosexuality, he made
political connections between the position of homosexuals and that of other
marginalised groups. In his later life he became increasingly explicit about his
queer politics. Prior to this he had spoken out against injustice and imperial-
ism, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland and the situation of black
Britons. Although himself a son of the imperial establishment, MacInnes was
a friend to Michael X and defended the black community in Notting Hill
from police harassment (Gould 1983, 193; Humphry and Tindall 1977, 51).2
He was involved in and wrote about debates over immigration, the Elgin
marbles,3 Ireland (1962b), racism and discrimination,4 censorship (1962a,
1971a), drug use (1965c), prostitution5 and black liberation (1965b, 1967),
and was part of the process that opened up public debate on these issues. A
regular on the Radio 4 programme ‘The Critics’, he was also involved with
‘the underground’ and liberationist movements. He supported the defence of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Oz, also contributing to the latter publication
(1962a, 1971b). Yet throughout it all, MacInnes was clearly the product of
a privileged and literary background.6 In short, MacInnes was a genera-
tional and cultural translator. Using his ‘half in, half out’ position he pro-
duced guides to hidden worlds; for example, his ‘guide to jumbles’ explains
to the white community what MacInnes thinks various black communities
think of them. His essays ‘pop songs and teenagers’ and ‘Sharp Schmutter’
were both guides to teenage life and style aimed at a much older readership.
Although originally published in magazines, these essays were later included
in his collection England Half English complete with annotated reflections
and afterthoughts from 1961. In the process, of course, this work constructs
the hidden worlds not just as unseen, but as other. He cannot step outside his
own context however. His readers should, he wrote, appreciate ‘pop discs’ in
the same way that they would ‘the native masks and ivories’ that he assumes
they’ve collected.7 Perhaps it is these seeming contradictions and crossovers,
rather than his sexuality, that lead so many to describe MacInnes as ‘perverse’
(Calcutt and Shephard 1998, 180).
Work on MacInnes’s Resistance

Beyond biography, academics have noted the layers of resistance in
MacInnes’ life and work and the ways in which he queered the fifties. As
Nick Bentley (2003) has shown, MacInnes’s ‘radical experiment with nar-
rative forms’ reproduced the ‘submerged worlds of London’s 1950s’
(2003). The episodic structure of MacInnes’s writing, as attested by
Bentley and Connor, indicated the fragmentary nature of subcultural lives.
For Bentley, Absolute Beginners ‘offers a diverse representation of identify-
ing multiple subcultures within the term youth’ (2003, n.p.). This diver-
sity undermines the over-determinist coherence found in much of the
early work on youth (for example, by Phil Cohen and Richard Hoggart)
(Bentley 2010). Alan Sinfield’s work on cultural materialism situates sexu-
ality at the heart of post-war cultural change. Sinfield (1997, 178) uses
both MacInnes and Gosling to demonstrate the blurring of British and
American cultural codes. We want to build on these readings to trace a
similarly disruptive element of his work across and between forms. Part
journalism, part social commentary, part fiction, MacInnes’s queered form
and genre reproduced a queered subject. Matt Cook and Richard Hornsey
have identified the ‘bricolage’ of fragmented narratives in the 1950s and
early 1960s as ways of ‘form[ing] provisional queer’ positions ‘against the
heteronormative prescriptions of post-war British Culture’ (Hornsey
2009; Cook 2011). Indeed, the queer bricolage of MacInnes’s writing
and life history was recognised by his peers. George Melly (1976), for
example, saw MacInnes as an advocate of the ‘portmanteau permissiveness
of the sixties’. As Richard Hornsey has noted, MacInnes’s fiction was ‘far
from explicitly queer’ (2009, 2). Indeed it is this lack of explicitly queer
content that has allowed us to situate MacInnes and his work as queer in a
dual sense: both in terms of his subjectivity and his mode of analysis.
Queer Content
If MacInnes was implicitly queer in his fiction, his non-fiction writing
explicitly addressed queer themes. MacInnes used his journalistic writing
to extend the debates around homosexuality, and indeed personal politics
more generally. In the 1950s MacInnes wrote articles condemning the
homosexual subculture he saw around him. He described English
Queerdom as ‘one of the most unpleasant groups on the earth’s crust’
(MacInnes 1965a, 7). MacInnes rejected the reformism of the Wolfenden
Report from its inception as a way of changing homosexual men’s lives.8
He challenged both the prurient interest in Oscar Wilde’s trials and
Wilde’s status as ‘the homosexual martyr’ at a time when films such as
Oscar Wilde (1959) and The Trial of Oscar Wilde (1960), were being used
to ventriloquize the struggle from Wolfenden to what would become the
Sexual Offences Act (1966, 159–60).9 He was also critical of the reformist
groups fronted by professional, heterosexual do-gooders (1965a). Much
of his later journalism was written from a queer subject position. He wrote
for Gay Left, Gay News and published his exploration of bisexuality, Loving
Them Both, in 1973 (1965a, 1972b, 1973). These positions layered queer
narratives in his work and queer identities in his biography.
Queered Teenager
This helps to understand how the queered Teenager has been constructed
within the context of MacInnes’s wider published work, particularly his
journalism and his biographical context. As Bentley (2003) has argued,
the lines between fact and fiction are disturbed in MacInnes’s work, which
makes it ‘problematic for traditional literary criticism.’ Sometimes his
work is treated as documentary, particularly as MacInnes himself acknowl-
edged in his writing about teenagers (MacInnes 1986, 148).10 Stuart Hall,
for example, found Absolute Beginners more ‘authentic’ in its understand-
ing of both the social context and the collective strategies developed by
teenagers than either memoirs or social surveys. Hall reviewed the novel
alongside E. R. Braithwaite’s memoir of his time teaching in an East End
Secondary Modern, To Sir, With Love, and two social surveys for Universities
and Left Review in 1959. Most notable, for Hall, was the way in which
MacInnes’s Boy, ‘comes straight at us’ with his own moral compass. This,
for Hall was what gave the book its status as ‘social documentary’ and
took it beyond ‘inspired journalism’ (Hall 1959, 23). Yet to MacInnes the
use of his work as social document could also undermine his craft, as he
regarded his fiction as less documentary, and more poetic evocations of
the human situation (MacInnes, ‘Sharp Schmutter’, 148).11 This sense of
MacInnes and his texts as inside/outside (both positionally and in terms
of literary modes) is picked up by most commentators. In the queered
sense, he was also both inside and outside in terms of his construction of
his own sexual identity and of The Boy. The participant observer in fiction,
life history and journalistic writing has helped construct a version of the
period that privileges subjectivities whilst maintaining the possibility of
detached and impartial social investigation, and the pull of authenticity,
‘or of being there’. MacInnes did not, he wrote, ‘document’ an existing
teenage culture and language; he made it up (149). He was both a partici-
pant observer and a creative writer. This has allowed the fifties as seen
through MacInnes’s works of cultural production to have their queer cake
and eat it, to engage with queer as a mode of disruption of coherent iden-
tities, and as a way of articulating the same identities.
Queering the Boy
Amongst the teenagers, MacInnes saw an international army for a new
Children’s Crusade.12 It was, however, a distinctly masculine army.
MacInnes and the Boy had their own limits when it came to girls. Where
girls are acknowledged, they are, like Crepe Suzette, some ‘sharp cat’s bird
or chick’ (MacInnes, ‘Sharp Schmutter’, 153). The parents’ generation
may have accommodated women’s rights, he wrote, but the youth culture
was more tribal (instinctive perhaps) and therefore masculine. On the
streets ‘[t]he boys walked ahead, their expressionless faces, surmounted by
Tony Curtis hair-dos, bent in exclusive masculine communion’ (MacInnes,
‘Pop Songs and Teenagers’, 55). Their scavenger style picked up from
images of American and European dress and fed out to the streets via high
street retailers like Marks and Spencer. The teenager was the product of
their international and local economic base and their parade dress took
advantage of the wonder of modern manufacturing; it was precise, light-
weight and drip dry (MacInnes, ‘Sharp Schmutter’, 153).13 MacInnes
noted that rather than signalling an unmanly turn to the ‘effete’, this
brought with it a welcome concern with hygiene and cleanliness (157).
The cleanliness market did, however, help to queer the Boy. It directed
‘him’ to window shopping, consumption, unisex hair salons and what
MacInnes described as ‘bisexual remedies for body odour’ (157).
The Boy was not just transgressive of the boundaries between work and
leisure, adulthood and adolescence, communities and classes, he was a pro-
foundly sexualised, and sexually disruptive subject. If, as we have sug-
gested, The Boy can be read as queer, furthermore, the Boy in Absolute
Beginners queered the line between fact and fiction, representing for many
a more ‘authentic’ teenager than those depicted in the contemporary jour-
nalism of MacInnes and others. In the next section we argue that this
simultaneous pull of authenticity and disruption extends beyond the text,
across the genres of MacInnes’s writing and into the intertwined life histo-
ries of both MacInnes and Gosling. We analyse Gosling’s self-composure
as The Boy, in his own words, to demonstrate the queerness of the teen-
ager, as both a subject and as a way of examining the world. Here we show
that teenagers could be analysts of their own conditions in their own terms,
and were not simply subject to MacInnes’s constructions, despite the
inherent messiness of Gosling and MacInnes’s relationship. Gosling’s class
and youth were central to his appeal as both the embodiment of the work-
ing-class teenager, and as an ‘authentic’ guide to teenage culture. However,
his educational experiences, metropolitan connections (including his rela-
tionship with MacInnes) and sexuality meant that he was, like MacInnes,
simultaneously inside and outside the subcultures he was describing.
Ray Gosling: From Scholarship Boy to Dream Boy

As a teenager Gosling was both a Ted ‘follower’ (‘part of the wave, but a
believer’) and, as he recalls, ‘in a group of working class grammar school-
boys christened the “grubbies” or “arty-farties”. We were interested in
things of the mind. It was rather an elite set’ (Gosling 2010, 49). Despite
being from a working-class background, his identification as a worker
began at 15 when he started a summer job as a signalman:
I used to go back after working on the railway with an absolute contempt

for everyone else in the school because they hadn’t, or so I thought, the
faintest idea of life […] Mine was quite a big school—900 pupils—and I
don’t suppose there’d be more than a dozen boys who had any conception
of what work was life for the mass of people. Your father can do it but you
have to do it yourself to understand. (56)
At this stage of his life this feeling of being defiantly working class put
Gosling in a rather different category from the ‘uprooted and the anxious’
scholarship boy depicted by Richard Hoggart in the Uses of Literacy
(Hoggart 1958). Worker, Ted, “Grubbie” intellectual—Gosling moved
across these roles with ease. It was only on leaving school to read English
at Leicester University that Gosling began to feel distinctly out of place
amongst his middle-class peers: ‘Anything like the lively interest in life I’d
found in the pubs, caffs and on the railway didn’t exist. They’d no style
[…] I liked the staff and made friends. I liked the library, but hated the
students and there was nothing wrong with them’ (61–2). Gosling made
his escape—both to London, where he met MacInnes—and to the bur-
geoning music scene in Leicester where he began managing bands and set
up the ‘Chez Ray Rock’ night at the Co-op hall (64).
By 1960 Gosling was ‘The Boy’. He was however not simply a muse or
protégé, he was the agent of his own construction. Like MacInnes, in
blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own writing Gosling acted
as a spokesman for his generation. He used the label ‘absolute beginner’
to describe his generations’ year-zero role in the history of youth (Gosling
1961, 5). For Gosling ‘The Great Big Us’ of absolute beginners had taken
over from the Teddy Boy. At the conclusion to Absolute Beginners,
MacInnes’s Boy greets a group of Africans, newly arrived at the airport:
‘They all looked so damned pleased to be in England, at the end of their
long journey, that I was heartbroken at all the disappointments that were
in store for them. And I ran up to them, through the water, and shouted
out above the engines, “Welcome to London! Greetings from England!
Meet your first teenager! We’re all going up to Napoli to have a ball!”’
(MacInnes 2011, 285).
Like MacInnes’ hero, Gosling’s role was to act as guide to the subcul-
tural codes and spaces he inhabited, to present evidence and insights to
the outside world (Bentley 2003). Gosling introduced the ‘Dream Boy’
and its multiplicities, performativities and queered rebellion in an article
for New Left Review in 1960. Although introduced as a young signalman
and youth club organiser, Gosling makes it clear that identities are far
more complicated than job labels or bureaucratic roles: ‘The Boy stands
up in his sexual and phallic dress, a rebel against a sexless world of fear,
and from his own he has made gods. In his dress, his walk, in his whole
way of life he makes a private drama for the world that failed him to take
note of’ (Gosling 1960, 30). He goes on to note: ‘[The Boy] st[ood] in
an age of frustration as a dreamlover’, attracting both ‘the society moll
and the homosexual’ (Robinson 2007, 57). Youthful masculinity and

homosexual undercurrents were inseparable for Gosling. He spoke for
those who were simultaneously ‘[d]reaming of being a Boy-God, [and]
dreaming of being in love with a Boy-God’ (Gosling 1961, 5). In his
simultaneous position as agent and observer Gosling, and his self-made
Boy-God, confounded categories. The Boy is not a mere object of study
in the growing body of work on delinquency, nor is he the passive con-
sumer of mass marketing—Gosling’s Boy-God combines agent, analyst
and organiser.
The article (described as a ‘manifesto’) was based on his experiences of
helping to run a ‘self-programming’ youth club in Leicester. The Daily
Mirror described it as the ‘Toughest Youth Club in England’, and it was
run by young people, for young people. There was no table tennis table or
‘“administering angel” wanting to take [the young people] off the street’.
It was potentially, ‘the most daring and fruitful youth experiment of the
century’ according to the Mirror journalist who visited (Stonely 1961).
Gosling wanted to use the lessons of this experiment to fill-in the consid-
erable gaps in understanding evident in the ‘Albermarle Report’ on The
Youth Service in England and Wales (1960). Whilst the report ‘knew
nothing about teenagers in 1960’ Gosling’s writing performed the
Teenager from the inside out. Gosling wrote up the experience in Lady
Albermarle’s Boys the first Young Fabian Pamphlet in 1961. Like
MacInnes’s journalistic work, Gosling’s report was designed to speak of
his own experience, and to his own identified community, but also to act
as a guide for the general public who had ‘struck’ him as being ‘grossly ill
formed’ about the ‘Service of Youth, [and] the habits and behaviour of the
young generation’ (Gosling 1961, 1). He provided a benchmark for the
period in the construction of a number of categories: Boys, Dream Boys,
Ordinary Boys, Lady Albermarle’s Boys, Boy-Gods, as attested by Stan
Cohen’s use of Gosling’s writing in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which
was reviewed by MacInnes (MacInnes 1972a).
We have long understood the need to talk about identities through the
complex processes of their mutual production and intersections—not
understanding masculinity without looking at femininity, understanding
race as constructed simultaneously along lines of blackness and whiteness.
However, our construction of teenage culture has largely focussed on the
emergence of youth identity along its own lines of distinction between
childhood, adolescence, youth and adulthood. When MacInnes con-
structed the Boy, and when Gosling composed himself as the Boy, we are
able to see the ways in which ageing and youth are constructed together,
at the time, and of course, over time through their autobiographical writ-
ings. MacInnes built the Boy in response to his own sense of ageing, and
with hope for The Boy’s imagined future. In 1961 he wrote ‘I cannot
deny I regret that youth is gone: not so much because I am no longer
young, as because, when I was young, I didn’t really know it: and thus
missed many opportunities of using youth as now I wish I had.’ He con-
tinues, ‘one sad joy of being middle-aged is that most of us can love youth
as we never could when we were part of it’ (MacInnes 1962c). Unable to
have experienced it himself, MacInnes framed, identified and disrupted
the Teenager instead. Meanwhile Gosling was growing up. In so doing he
became the commentator and composer, this time of MacInnes as much
as of himself.
The Boy Grows Up

For Ray Gosling, Colin MacInnes was ‘the man I looked up to, who was
my mentor more than anyone else’ (Gosling 2010, 79). He has been
described by others as both a ‘disciple’ and ‘protégé’ of MacInnes’
(Nehring 1993, 238; Fowler 2007, 75.), but we want to suggest that he
was more than that, an embodiment of the Teenager, but also a site of
disruption. MacInnes, the writer and The Man, was also reconstructed in
relationship to Gosling, The Boy. Later in established adulthood Gosling
gets relabelled as MacInnes’ ‘friend and memoirist’, a reciprocal relation-
ship. Having grown out of being MacInnes’ Boy, after MacInnes’s death
in 1976, it becomes Gosling’s turn to compose a self for MacInnes through
his own biographical narratives. Each, therefore, composed the other. As
well as a chapter dedicated to their relationship in Personal Copy, which is
identical to the introduction dated 1978 that Gosling wrote to MacInnes’s
posthumous collection of essays Out of the Way, Gosling presented Radio
4’s Prophets, Charlatans and Little Gurus, about MacInnes in October
1982 (Gosling 2010, 79; MacInnes 1979, 9–14). Gosling grew up to
make up his mentor on his own terms as MacInnes had constructed his
ageing process around the discursive centrality of The Boy.
Gosling’s political activism from the mid-1960s and beyond encom-
passed both gay politics and advocacy on behalf of working-class commu-
nities. The bulk of the latter centred on the campaign against the wholesale
redevelopment of the St Ann’s district in Nottingham, to which Gosling
dedicated the second half of Personal Copy to describing. A nineteenth-
century neighbourhood of 10,000 houses with a population of over

30,000, the clearance of St Ann’s, which took place over a period of about
ten years from the mid-1960s, was one of the largest redevelopment pro-
grammes in Europe. It also proved to be one of the most controversial.
1966 saw the establishment of SATRA, the St Ann’s Tenant’s and
Resident’s Association—chaired by Gosling. SATRA strongly criticised
the complete lack of public consultation regarding clearance and cam-
paigned for selective renewal. In a report for Nottingham’s Civic Society
Gosling stated: ‘We intend to show […] that it is economically possible
and humanly desirable to take the very bad out now, patch for the present
the not so bad, improve the reasonable, preserve the good’ (Gosling 1967,
2). Ultimately, despite the petitions, public meetings, challenges and small
victories for democratic involvement and accountability, it was a battle
which Gosling and his colleagues lost. As he reflected: ‘Change came like
a torrent, sweeping all before it: houses, streets, chapels, shops, pubs, the
whole old life […] A history was wiped away’ (Gosling 2010, 221). Yet
Gosling’s nostalgia was inflected with a sense of standing both inside and
outside the community he had chosen to represent:
I wasn’t born there, bred or raised. I’m not a native of what I call my dis-
trict. I’m a latter day immigrant who freely chose to foist myself on “poor”
people, like a Robin Hood, to fire slings and arrows at Aunt Sallies for the
gratification of my own principles and for my own amusement as much as
anybody’s good. (251)
This privileged inside/outsider status was deployed to rather greater

effect in his approach to the politics of gay rights.
Like MacInnes, Gosling engaged with queer politics as both a subject
position and a mode of analysis. Throughout his activism Gosling’s poli-
tics were queered and classed. He was critical of the elite reformism ‘by
stealth’ of the earlier law reform campaigns and he became vice president
of Campaign for Homosexual Equality in 1975.14 Alongside his long-time
comrade, Alan Horsfall, he ran the Gay Monitor website until his death.
Like Horsfall, his focus lay beyond the relatively privileged metropolitan
gay centres, to the provincial North and Midlands. In fact, no longer likely
to be seen as a ‘professional Teenager’, he was instead represented (erro-
neously, given his East Midlands heritage) as a ‘professional Northerner’,
whose documentaries recorded and to some extent romanticised working-
class lives (Binnie 2000, 176).
Gosling’s class, location and sexual identity made him an important

critical commentator during the Bolton 7 case in 1998. The case saw the
prosecution of seven men for consensual sexual acts in the ‘privacy’ of one
of their homes in Bolton. All the men were known to each other, and the
party had been videoed using a home camera. The video was used as the
evidence in the trial in which all seven men were charged with a series of
potentially imprisonable offences including buggery, and the rather catch-
all charge of ‘gross indecency’. All the defendants were convicted, three
lost their jobs and the trial cost £500,000. The case made clear the bound-
aries between public and private left over from the 1967 Sexual Offences
Act and further constructed two queer constituencies and ascribed each a
value according to class. On the one hand the sophisticated, affluent
Canal Street, on the other the ‘unsophisticated’, rough, working-class
house parties (Binnie 2000, 166–78). The case also drew sharp lines
according to age. The judge’s sentencing pointed out the ‘immature and
unsophisticated’ nature of the younger defendants. Their queerness
denied them adulthood or agency; to the judge their same-sex activity was
‘little more than […] smutty-minded schoolboys tipsily experimenting
with sex’ (Binnie 2000, 176). Whilst the five younger men (between the
ages of 18 and 25) were given community service, the two older men
(aged 33 and 55) received (suspended) custodial sentences (Moran 1999,
39–55). Video footage had been at the heart of the case. Gosling
responded in kind. He made a documentary about the case for Channel
4, Sex, Lies and Video Tapes. In the documentary he wielded his inside/
outsider status to document working-class queer lives in northern
England, in itself an usual thing.
Like MacInnes before him, Gosling continued to blur the lines between
experience and memory, fact and fiction. The grown man Gosling was
built up of the paper traces of his pasts. Gosling’s Sum Total was a ‘sort of
autobiography’, and his later Personal Copy: A Memoir of the Sixties, was a
‘fairly true story’. Although presented and marketed as one of the ever-
growing number of sixties memoirs, it was actually largely a collection of
previously published journalism, topped and tailed to shift a chronology
and compose a life narrative. In 2005 Gosling’s ageing process became the
subject of a documentary Ray Gosling OAP for BBC 4. A £5000 tax bill,
left unpaid had spiralled into a massive debt. Gosling was bankrupt and
about to lose his home. His impending move into sheltered accommoda-
tion meant he had to clear out the piles of paper notes and files that filled
‘almost every square inch’ of his home. He fought to remain in his own
home and be allowed to keep and curate the mountains of ‘documents’ of

his own past (Arnot 2005). As the Bolton 7 case had shown, sharp lines
can be drawn across the more blurred lines of disruption. The slippery
lines across fact and fiction, experience and documentary evidence came to
a head for Gosling in 2010 at the age of 70. In a documentary he disclosed
that he had ‘smothered’ to death a lover who was dying of AIDS. The
documentary, for BBC East Midlands on the subject of death, was appro-
priately named Inside Out. He went on to repeat his confession on break-
fast television. The story spoke of the contemporary debates on euthanasia,
and of the tragedy of a generation of gay men lost or left grieving by
AIDS. He told the filmmakers:
I killed someone once. He was a young chap, he had been my lover and he
had got Aids. In hospital, the doctor said, “There’s nothing we can do.” He
was in terrible pain. I said to the doctor, “Leave me just a bit.” I picked up
the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. The doctor came back and
I said, “He’s gone.” Nothing more was said. (Chalmers 2012)
It was a powerful story but it did not hold its own power for long.
Gosling insisted that he would not identify the man, the hospital or town
where the death occurred. But journalists offered cash incentives for any-
one who would come forward to identify the dead man, or Gosling’s pre-
vious lovers. The police investigated the ‘mercy killing’ as suspected
murder and three days after the interview was broadcast Gosling was
interviewed for over 30 hours before being bailed (Chaytor 2010a).
During the interview Gosling conceded and named his lover: Tony Judson.
Newspaper reports of the events unravelled the story’s emotional
authenticity. As Gosling’s life and writing had already shown there were
‘laws in books and there is a law in your heart’ (Chaytor 2010b). These
were not the same thing. The fallout from the revelation also suggested
that there are truths, or social documents, in books, and rather different
truths in your heart. According to the Mirror, Gosling’s younger lover
had died in a British hospital in the late 1970s, ‘in the early days of AIDS’.
The first documented case of a gay man dying of AIDS, in New York, is
generally recognised to have been in 1981. Gosling accepted that the
story was fiction, not fact, and the usefulness of that fiction was lost. He
was eventually charged not with murder but with wasting police time, and
received a 90-day suspended sentence.
In one interview Gosling explained his confession as the product of
slipped tenses, ‘between the past and conditional’ (Chalmers 2012).
Having written himself through boyhood and into the man he became, it
was left to Gosling’s obituary writers to make sense of the fictitious truth
behind the story. Gosling had explained the layers of investment in his
story, beyond its authenticity. He told his friend, Tony Roe, that ‘[a]t his
friend’s funeral […] he was harangued for not ending the suffering sooner.
So for the next 30 years he told himself and believed himself that he had.
He had wanted to do the right thing and to have been seen to do the right
thing’ (Gosling 2013b). He had been moved to disclose the story as some
sort of recompense for all the stories that he had collected over time;
‘everyone else had revealed themselves to me’, he said, ‘and I felt I had to
reveal myself to them’ (Gosling 2013a).
Notes
1. See the critical remarks of Darcus Howe in Vulliamy, 2007.
2. See MacInnes, “Letter to the Editor”; MacInnes 1967, 14; Gould 1983,
193; Humphry 1977, 51.
3. “Greeks and Vandals,” in MacInnes 1966, 62–6.
4. “A Short Guide for Jumbles,” in MacInnes 1966, 23–33.
5. MacInnes, “The Other Man,” in MacInnes 1966, 141–7; MacInnes 1979,
338–9.
6. MacInnes was the son of Angela Thirkwell and was also Rudyard Kipling’s
cousin.
7. MacInnes, “Pop songs and Teenagers”, in MacInnes 1966, 49.
8. MacInnes, “English Queerdom,” 7.
9. “The Heart of a Legend: The Writings of Ada Leverson,” in MacInnes
1966, 159–60.
10. Colin MacInnes, “Sharp Schmutter,” in MacInnes 1966, 148.
11. “Sharp Schmutter,” in MacInnes 1966, 148–57.
12. Colin MacInnes, “Pop songs and Teenagers”, in MacInnes 1966, 50.
13. MacInnes, “Sharp Schmutter,” 153.
14. See C.H.E., Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee Held on
16th November 1975; C.H.E., Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive
Committee Held on 16th 17th July 1975; and Grey 2011, 267.
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in 1950s British Fiction,” Literature & History 19, 1 (2010).
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30, 2012.
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18, 2010.
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February 17, 2010.
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1975.
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1975.
Cook, Matt. 2011. “Homes Fit for Homos: Joe Orton and the Domesticated
Queer,” in eds. Brady Sean, and Arnold, John. What is Masculinity? Historical
Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
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November, 1998.
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and the study of British youth culture,” International Journal of Cultural
Studies 10, 1 (2007).
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Gosling, Ray. 2013b. The Glasgow Herald, November 22.
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London: Chatto & Windus.
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(1959).
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cial reference to publications and entertainments. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Urban Environment of Late 1950s London,” (Paper presented at QUEER
50s, Birkbeck, University of London, 6–7 May 2009), 2, https://core.ac.uk/
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London: Hart Davis.
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Magazine, August, 1962, 53–61.
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February, 1965.
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1967.
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October 31, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/apr/15/brit-
ishidentity.fiction
Punk Fiction; Punk in Fiction
Nick Bentley
Introduction: All the Young Punks

Punk is by its very nature irreverent. Punks are most often represented in
motion, as an active force, challenging the cultures, mores and behaviours
of mainstream society. They are not normally associated with the sedentary
and thoughtful practice of reading. However, punk has been addressed in
a number of novels and experiments with fiction over the years since it
developed in the mid-1970s. This chapter will discuss the representation of
punk and punks in literary fiction and has two main aims. Firstly, it dis-
cusses the way in which formal and literary techniques are used in fiction
and writing about punk (or by members of the punk subculture) to reflect
similar aesthetic practices in other artistic and cultural fields such as music
and fashion. It examines narrative techniques in selected fiction as well as
referencing a number of other literary manifestations of punk, including
the new music journalism that appears in the 1970s (by writers such as
Caroline Coon); the aesthetic characteristics seen in the rise of DIY punk
Some of the ideas in this chapter are a developed from another book chapter:
Bentley (2018).
N. Bentley (*)
Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK

42 N. BENTLEY
fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue; some of the stories collected in Punk Fiction:

An Anthology of Short Stories Inspired by Punk, edited by Janine Bullman;
and various other pieces of writing by participants in the subculture. In
these stories and writing, in particular, the use of cut up narratives, typo-
graphical experiment, the shifting of register and perspective, and manipu-
lation of language represent an attempt to offer a literary rendering of the
anarchic expression of punk in music, fashion and attitude. However, it will
also be shown that writing about punk at times draws on more established
modes of literary realism in the attempt to convey authentic experiences.
Secondly, it will examine the way in which punk has been used in fiction to
indicate a transition or rupture in significant social, political and cultural
discourses in Britain in the 1970s, especially with respect to the move from
the consensus politics of the earlier part of the decade to a politics of con-
frontation marked by the appointment of Margaret Thatcher as leader of
the Conservatives in 1975. The chapter analyses a number of novels includ-
ing Gideon Sams’s The Punk (2004 [1977]), Richard Allen’s Punk Rock
(1977), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Jonathan
Coe’s The Rotters’ Club (2001).
There are, of course, a number of definitions of punk and indeed a
number of specific cultural and geographic locations that claim its origins:
from New York’s underground and post-glam culture to Brisbane’s garage
punk to London’s King’s Road; from The Roxy in Covent Garden and
the 100 Club in Oxford Road, Soho to CBGB in Manhattan’s East
Village. There have, indeed, been several American novels that have
engaged with, and been discussed with reference to, punk and post-punk
such as Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985), Jonathan Franzen’s
Freedom (2010) and more recently, Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire
(2015) (see Luter 2015; Bresnan 2015). This chapter, however, will
concentrate on the British context. Punk appears, of course, in a whole
range of novels from the 1970s to the present, and what follows can only
be a snapshot of the coverage.
Dick Hebdige, following Paul Willis (2014), has identified a homology
behind the apparent anarchic and diverse set of spectacular signifiers: ‘The
[punk] subculture was nothing if not consistent. There was a homological
relation between the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and
amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format for the fanzines, the
insurrectionary poses and the “soulless,” frantically driven music’ (Hebdige
1988, 114). This has become one of the dominant critical readings of
punk, based on Hebdige’s semiotic approach to reading the cultural
PUNK FICTION; PUNK IN FICTION 43
meanings generated by the subculture’s spectacular elements. However,

what becomes apparent when looking at the ways in which punk has been
articulated in narrative fiction is the diversity of responses it has a gener-
ated and the variety of styles and forms that in part reflects the anarchic
nature of punk, but also often recourse to more established and conven-
tional forms of literary realism. In this sense the homology model, which
tends to reduce punk to a set of fixed attitudinal characteristics, is mislead-
ing. Punk fiction, indeed, as we shall see, reveals a pluralistic set of diverg-
ing representations, articulations and styles that reflect a diverse set of
individual responses by novelists and writers.
Punk Fiction
One of the trickier elements of articulating punk in prose narrative is try-
ing to capture the affective experience of being part of the punk subcul-
ture. Several writers have tried to achieve this through direct description.
Joolz Denby, for example, writes of attending a gig by The Ruts:
It was like being in the eye of a hurricane, in a cauldron boiling with energy
and a kind infectious epiphany. Outside the world could have vanished into
Hell and nothingness, but in that shitty, murder-haunted, perfect box we
were all warriors, shield-maidens, purified. None of us left unmarked by that
experience and some of us were changed forever; some of us saw what we
could aim for, what we could be, what we could break our hearts tryin for.
What we still try for. (2009, 17)
The language in this section is interesting in that it uses clichés such as

‘eye of the hurricane’ and a ‘cauldron boiling with energy’ and mixes them
with new formations such as the juxtaposition of ‘shitty’ and ‘perfect’ as
adjectives to describe the venue. This is a prose striving for the tools to
convey the experience adequately. The mixing of metaphors and registers
is indeed indicative of the destructive energy that thrusts experiences
together to form something new. What is also striking about this passage
is the collective and ritualized feelings it produces. To express this, Denby
reaches for very old formations: warriors and shield maidens; the term
‘purified’ appearing as wonderfully out of place in the description.
This is an attempt to describe a real physical location in a mode of social
realism, but the prose extends beyond the documentary to convey the
imagined feel of the experience itself. This combination of authenticity
44 N. BENTLEY
with an imagined and wrought style reveals something of the very nature
of punk, which extends to the ways in which the participants consider
themselves as occupying a space that is in some sense real and imaginary.
Take for example, this description, excerpted from the band’s website, of
the history of the late-1970s punk band The Skeptix, by Ush, one of their
original members:
Let me take you back to them dim, distant and far off days of vinyl. In the
beginning was THE PUSH, the best band to play in the singers garage, who
did gig infrequently the length and breadth of STOKE! A rag-tag bunch of
misfits who formed the band in 1978(ish) but did pass away soon after.
Upon the demise of said band, a voice spoke unto me, and said, ‘OI,
PRETTY BOY!! (he had good taste in them days!) D’YA WANNA BE IN MY
BAND?’ And lo, twas the voice of FISH! Local guitar hero! (thats what he
told me!) Verily I said onto him, (in a local dialect) ‘O’RATE! A WILL,
AHH!!’ So then The Skeptix were born. Pulled from the four corners of the
town to conquer the evil and depraved world of ‘pap pop’ and other
deranged forms of music that molested the ears of the youth and to bring
light and meaning once more unto mankind!!!!!!!????? (Ush 2002, n.p.)
In this example of writing from within the subculture, the self-conscious

myth-making is simultaneously undercut by the mocking side commen-
tary, while the use of the mock-historic language, fluctuating registers, the
typographical diversity and exuberant use of punctuation convey the
energy and irreverence of punk.
The two examples quoted above can both lay claim to an authentic
response to involvement in the subculture, but they convey two distinctly
different approaches to the representation and articulation of punk in
prose writing. The Denby extract attempts to offer a realistic and authen-
tic description of the affective response of punk and tends towards a docu-
mentary testimony of what it felt like to be part of the punk movement.
Its attitude to language, however, is relatively traditional in that it uses
conventional prose writing as a linguistic claim to its authenticity. The Ush
piece is more experimental in its rejection of conventional syntax and
grammar, its movement between registers, and its deployment of parody.
These two approaches also reflect some of the internal fractures within
punk itself. The documentary aspect tends to focus on punk as an expres-
sion of broader social, cultural and political concerns of which it is read as
an aesthetic and cultural expression. This approach can be seen, for exam-
ple, in Julian Temple’s film The Filth and the Fury (2001). Although it
includes some appropriate stylistic elements such as the use of cut-up bri-
colage effects, the documentary style focuses on the emergence of the Sex
Pistols and punk as a response to social and political contexts in 1970s
Britain. In the film, interviews with the band are framed against Richard
III’s ‘winter of discontent’ speech, referring to the famous description by
political commentators at the time of the wave of strikes and social unrest
in Britain in the winter of 1978–1979. The film also associates various
issues of working-class disillusionment with the political system, and in
particular the Labour Party as the political vehicle that had failed to repre-
sent their concerns sufficiently. Punk is thus read as an inevitable cultural
manifestation of political discontent. In contrast, the aesthetic form repre-
sented by Ush is more irreverent towards conventional methods of articu-
lation. It represents a carnivalesque disruption of the semiotics of power.
There are of course aspects of this in Temple’s film, but the Ush piece is
more socially ambivalent in its irreverent playfulness. In filmic terms, Ush’s
approach is closer to Derek Jarman’s evocation of punk in his 1978 film
Jubilee with its avant garde and experimental evocation of punk
rebelliousness.
It is perhaps in the combination of these approaches that a specific
genre of ‘punk fiction’ can be identified, one that combines both an
authentic account of the experience of punk with an anarchic response to
the accepted and official forms of language and convention modes. This
combination of form and content can be seen, for example, in Mark
Perry’s short story ‘A Punk Life’
what are we here for?/the same old questions/buzzing around in my head

like some fucking stale Marquee gig/up there it all came back/standing—
swaying/nervous up there but full of it/living on nervous punk energy/
blasted out on speed/hating the music/hating the crowd […] punk was
about being out of control/acting on impulse/setting things up/smashing
them down/being better than the lot before but also being worse. (1996, 5)
In this passage, there is a clear sense of an authentic account of a real

experience, however, the use of the disjointed and accumulated sentences
represents a disruption of conventional modes of realism. Perry initially
gained fame in the punk movement as the editor of the fanzine Sniffin’
Glue, and this publication itself features elements of the anarchic and irrev-
erent disrespect of conventional forms of writing with authentic and val-
ued information about the punk scene.1
46 N. BENTLEY
It can be shown that the influence of punk as a literary aesthetic extends

beyond those texts that are directly connected with the subculture. For
example, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, which although it includes
aspects of punk in its narrative, embeds punk in a series of other concerns.
In terms of literary form, The Rotters’ Club borrows from punk’s bricolage
technique in its stylistic and typographical diversity. Coe’s novel includes a
series of narrators and points of view, and in driving forward its narrative
the novel includes letters, diary entries, theatre reviews, political leaflets,
sections from a character’s journal, song lyrics and magazine articles.
Elsewhere Coe has stressed the way in which ‘the British novel has rein-
vigorated itself’ by ‘tapping into the energies of popular film, music and
television’, and this applies to his own work (Coe 2005, 6). Punk is one of
the energies influencing Coe’s writing, as can be seen in The Rotters’ Club
as well as in a number of his other works, including his most well-known
novel, What a Carve Up! (1994).
Irvine Welsh’s fiction could also be identified as drawing on the aes-
thetic of a punk sensibility. His ground-breaking first novel Trainspotting
(1993), detailing the experiences of a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh
in the 1980s, also uses a bricolage technique of deploying diverse styles and
points of view that mirrors punk’s stylistic features in music fashion and
pop imagery. Indeed, it could be argued that punk fiction as a genre can be
identified not just in the sense of those novels that offer characters and nar-
ratives that are part of the subculture, but in a more subtle and profound
influence on the stylistic direction of the British novel in the latter quarter
of the twentieth century. British novelists such as Martin Amis, Julie
Burchill, Angela Carter, Stewart Home, John King, China Mieville, Tony
Parsons and Alex Wheatle, amongst others, can be identified as being influ-
enced by a punk aesthetic, not to mention the more obviously direct links
of literary genres such as cyberpunk and steampunk (see Elhefnawy 2015).
Indeed, what is often identified as postmodern fiction includes work that
borrows greatly from a punk aesthetic. In the next section of this chapter
the formal aspects of punk fiction will be discussed with respect to a series
of novels that have attempted to embed the subculture in broader narra-
tives about the social, cultural and political contexts of Britain in the 1970s.
Punk in Fiction
Alongside stylistic aspects, punk has also been a rich source for novelists
who are interested in commenting on the relationship between the sub-
culture and the socioeconomic and political contexts from which it
emerged. The contrast of approaches between the social realist and the
experimental can also be found in the fiction that has tried to capture these
contexts, ranging from works that came out at the time, such as Gideon
Sams’s The Punk (2004 [1977]) and Richard Allen’s Punk Rock (1977),
to novels that look back to the punk moment and use it in order to trace
social and political changes, such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990) and Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club (2001). Another
distinction between Sams and Allen and Kureishi and Coe is that the for-
mer pair are working in a publishing context of pulp fiction/underground
fiction, while the latter two have achieved critical as well as popular suc-
cess.2 Having said that, the removal of established distinctions between
high and popular culture, of course, is a prominent feature of postmoder-
nity, and punk had a central role to play in this blurring of boundaries.
What seems to compare across all the novels is that punk is embedded in a
broader view of the 1970s and used as a cultural manifestation of the pro-
found set of political and social changes that were a feature of the decade.
Even in Sams’s novel, written by a 14-year-old member of the subculture
(initially as part of a school English project), there is awareness that punk
is a manifestation of deeper cultural changes afoot in society. As Adolph,
the provocatively self-monickered hero of The Punk explains to an old man
he encounters: ‘Look mister, I am today’s youth, and you’re going to be
hearing a lot more of us if you don’t sit up and take notice. There’s gonna
be some changes in this country pretty soon, an’ you better be prepared
for it’ (27). Although what these changes might be is left vague, it is clear
that Sams’s hero recognizes the place punk has in a broader set of socio-
cultural and generational changes.
This sense of change is often individual as well as social and several of
the novels include moments (usually generated by attending a punk gig,
party or event) where a main character experiences a profound change in
identity. This can be seen in both The Buddha of Suburbia and The Rotters’
Club where there is an attempt to convey the life-changing experience of
attending a punk gig, notably for characters who are discontented with the
direction youth culture was seen to be taking in the middle decades of the
1970s. Indeed, both novels deploy what are seen to be outmoded alterna-
tive subcultures as a contrast to the emergence of punk: in Kureishi’s novel
this is a combination of hippiedom and its post-hippy equivalent of art
rock/space rock, and for Coe it is the British progressive rock of the late
1960s and early 70s.
Both The Rotters’ Club and The Buddha of Suburbia contain scenes that
attempt to describe the experience of attending a punk gig. In Coe’s
48 N. BENTLEY
novel, one of the main characters, Doug Anderton, has ambitions to

become a rock journalist and visits the NME offices in London on the
basis of an informal invitation to ‘drop in’ after sending them an example
of his writing. Although no one at NME is expecting him when he arrives,
he is eventually asked to go to a gig to report on a Rock Against Racism
gig in Forest Gate. Not knowing London he mistakenly goes to Forest
Hill but, rather fortunately, ends up going to see The Clash playing at the
Fulham Old Town Hall. The date is 29 October 1976 and this is a refer-
ence to an actual Clash gig marking Coe’s attention to historical detail and
revealing a level of authenticity in his representation of the lived experi-
ence of punk. The experience of attending the gig has a marked effect on
Doug:
He was transfixed by the sight and sound of Joe Strummer shouting, scream-
ing, singing, howling into the microphone: the hair lank with sweat, the
veins on his neck tautened and pulsing with blood. Doug surrendered to the
noise and for an hour he pogoed like a madman in the dense, heaving heart
of a crowd two hundred more or strong. (2001, 162)
This experience, combined with a one-night stand he later has with the
‘preposterously named Ffion ffoulkes’, an upper-class woman he had met
earlier at the NME offices, represent a change in Doug’s provincial out-
look: ‘Doug lost something important that night […] It had to do with
his sense of self, his belonging, his loyalty to the place and the family he
came from’ (164). In subcultural terms, Doug had, before this experience,
been associated with his friend Philip Chase’s love of prog rock, but his
discovery of punk is couched in terms of a set of expanded cultural hori-
zons that the introspection of prog had denied.
This transition from the so-called bloated, boring and outmodedness of
the prog scene to the exuberance and rebelliousness of punk is, of course,
a common trope in the cultural histories of the period. As Caroline Coon
wrote in a Melody Maker review of a Sex Pistols gig in August 1976, ‘The
Pistols are the personification of the emerging British punk rock scene, a
positive reaction to the complex equipment, technological sophistication
and jaded alienation which formed a barrier between fans and stars’ (1995,
491). This idea of punk representing a fresh and organic reaction to mid-
70s rock extravagance is also registered in Sams’s The Punk, for example,
when the central character, the self-named Adolph, explains that he
‘despised the rock stars and groups, such as The Who and Led Zeppelin.
They talked about fighting the system and capitalism but always ended up
as rich as millionaires’ (2004, 5).
That this transition from the hippy and prog to punk registered as a
moment of both personal and societal change is perhaps most clearly
expressed in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. The novel covers
the span of the 1970s and when it begins, the main protagonist, Karim, is
nineteen and affiliates with a late-hippie rock scene that is dominant in his
school and appears to appeal to his mixed-race identity. However, Karim
recognises that disillusionment is developing with the idealism suggested
by the hippie generation. As he notes, ‘the kid’s crusade was curdling now,
everyone had overdosed’ (1990, 71). One of Karim’s close friends is
Charlie, the son of a white middle-class woman with whom Karim’s father
has an affair. It is Charlie who is presented as having his finger on the pulse
in the various transitions in rock music culture the novel records as it
moves through the 1970s. Initially Charlie forms a band based on the
emerging space rock/art rock scene as epitomised in the figure of David
Bowie, a scene that is presented as extending the hippie principles to a new
focus on individual self-fashioning.
It is, however, Charlie’s sudden attraction to punk that marks the main
transition in the novel in terms of subcultural identity. Again this is pre-
sented as a visceral and emotive response to the experiencing of a live punk
gig. On initially entering the venue with Karim, Charlie is sceptical of the
band’s anarchic approach: ‘He’s an idiot […] I bet they can’t play […]
Unprofessional’ (130). But by the end of the gig it is the very abjection of
the punk performance that Charlie lights upon as an indication of the
power of this new subculture. ‘The sixties have been given notice tonight.
These kids we saw have assassinated all hope. They’re the fucking future’
(1990, 131). The event has a profound effect on Charlie, a character who
is able to quickly jettison one subcultural identity and take up another: he
changes his name to Charlie Hero and the name of his band to The
Condemned (from the previously hippie-influenced ‘Mustn’t Grumble’).
Charlie represents the power of punk to effect change in the individual as
he opens himself to the anarchic power of the movement. Karim, how-
ever, is more sceptical and the representation of punk in the novel as a
whole is ambivalent. The ability to latch on to the performative aspects of
subcultural identity marks Charlie as engaged in an inauthentic response
to punk subculture as a whole. As Karim points out, they cannot become
punks because: ‘We’re not like them. We don’t hate the way they do.
We’ve got no reason to. We’re not from the estates. We haven’t been
50 N. BENTLEY
through what they have’ (1990, 132) However, the question of authen-
ticity and inauthenticity is always complicated in punk as much of it thrives
on parodic performativity and self-reflexive mockery. As Dylan Clarke
notes, punk offered a way of ‘being subcultural while addressing the dis-
cursive problem of subcultures’ (2003, 232). Clarke identifies punk as the
‘last subculture’ in the classical sense, but it can be equally argued that it
ushers in the notion of the post-subcultural in its combined attention to
demarcating a set of distinctive youth cultural behaviours and attitudes
while at the same time promoting an attitude of self-loathing. When the
abject becomes celebrated, the very notion of the subculture’s success is
itself always couched in ironic and postmodern terms. In this sense,
Charlie’s direct response to his first experience of punk exceeds evaluative
judgments of the authentic/inauthentic, and in Kureishi’s novel the arrival
of punk’s individualism is framed alongside the imminent appearance of
Thatcherism on the political scene. In many ways, despite its claims of
anarchism, punk and Thatcherism are parallel responses to the apparent
failure of a centrist Labour Party that had claimed to represent working-
class interests, but had resulted in widespread industrial unrest and politi-
cal divisions within the Party by the late 1970s. As John Lydon states in
The Filth and the Fury, with respect to the period that saw the emergence
of the Sex Pistols, ‘England was in a state of social upheaval. […] Total
social chaos […] People were fed up with the old way, the old way was
clearly not working’ (Temple 2001, 00:02:15–00:02:46).
Punk as a response to sociopolitical conditions is also registered in
Richard Allen’s Punk Rock. In this novel, Danny Boy, the front man in a
punk band who, like Charlie in Kureishi’s text, has to a large extent self-
fashioned his rebellious public persona, explains to the journalist narrator
Kerr: ‘We’ve reached the end of tolerance with bowler-hats telling us, in
Queen’s English, what to do and where to do it and when to do it. These
kids are the nucleus of an army. A people’s army. Not commies. Not any
political, string-pulled puppets. But free kids wanting their music first,
their country next’ (Allen 1977, 79). Despite this claim of political non-
partisanship, the particular articulation Allen places on punk emphasises a
right-wing, racist element that is clearly different from Johnny Lydon’s
left-leaning anarchism. It should be noted, however, that Allen’s claim to
offer an authentic depiction of punk is dubious. Richard Allen is the pen-
name of James Moffat, who had produced a series of lucrative subcultural
pulp novels in the 1970s including Skinhead (1970) and Suedehead
(1971). His 1977 Punk Rock was a continuation of this trend. Allen’s style
across all his works was to emphasise the violent aspects of subcultural
practice and his novels tended to be lurid, soft porn entertainment that fed
into moral panics about youth behaviours. Punk Rock, for example,
includes an outdoor punk festival in which a skinhead is beaten up and
trampled by the crowd while Kerr himself is punched and kicked. Allen’s
novel identifies the ‘New Wave scene’, as it describes it, as a commodified
enterprise that combines insincere musicians, impresarios and music jour-
nalists whose main aim is to exploit a youth cultural movement. However,
behind the commercial apparatus, Kerr begins to empathise with the
authentic members of the subculture; after witnessing the violence at the
festival he notes: ‘I’m beginning to identify with the punk rockers […] I
can see the frustrations building inside them. Imagine ten quid for a
ticket!’ (1977, 52).
Violence also plays a prominent role in Gideon Sams’s The Punk, which
includes a scene in which a fight between punks breaks out at a gig result-
ing in one of the crowd fainting when his safety pin earring is ripped out.
At another gig, featuring The Damned, The Clash and the Sex Pistols at
the famous punk venue The Roxy, in Covent Garden, a fight breaks out
between the punks when the headlining act are late in coming to the
stage. The novel is loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, and the sectarian
violence of Montagues and Capulets is transferred to violent encounters
between punks and Teds with the inevitable tragic consequences for
Adolph and his girlfriend Thelma who converts from Ted to punk.
Violence is also an inherent part of the subculture in Stewart Home’s
Tainted Love (2005), a novel that is predominantly about the 1960s coun-
terculture, but in its later stages includes description of a fight that breaks
out at a Rock Against Racism gig between a politically engaged white
punk band and its followers and a local skinhead group. As with Richard
Allen, Home’s narrative is more ambivalent towards punk than the more
celebratory aspects of Sams’s novel; in Tainted Love this particular punk
scene has been infiltrated by Socialist Worker elements. The complexities
of the subcultural conflicts are brought to the fore and are registered by
Home in the fact that one of the members of the Reggae band headlining
the Rock Against Racism gig defends the skinheads: ‘Them Ladbroke
Grove skinheads ain’t racists […] they’re redskins and like old school reg-
gae music’ (2005, 222). Earlier, this ambiguous image of punk is regis-
tered by the narrator: ‘when I returned to London in 1977 there were
punks everywhere. Most of them seemed kind of cute to me but […] they
can turn savage (218).’
52 N. BENTLEY
Alongside these descriptions of subcultural violence, the political com-

plexities of punk are registered in the descriptions of fashion and appear-
ance. In Sams’s The Punk¸ Adolph wears a safety pin through his nose and
an earring that comprised of ‘a gold swastika surrounded by the star of
David, painted in sky blue’ (2004 [1977, 13]). Similarly, after Charlie
converts to punk in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia:
He wore, inside out, a slashed T-shirt with a red swastika hand-painted on

it. His black trousers were held together by safety-pins, paperclips and nee-
dles. Over this he had a black mackintosh; there were five belts strapped
around his waist and a sort of grey linen nappy attached to the back of his
trousers. (1990, 152)
As noted earlier, Hebdige has identified punk as a bricolage form with

each object (and the combined juxtaposition of the objects) forming a
homology of cultural signifiers that connotes chaos and rebellion. In the
two extracts above, the fascist iconography is placed alongside the subver-
sion of consumerism through the use of safety pins; this combines to pres-
ent a performance, played out on the abjected body of the punk subject,
of a total rejection of the dominant culture’s ideas of taste. The sartorial
statement is thus designed to shock not only the political centrist, but also
evade conventional (1970s) demarcations of left- or right-wing politics.
This is not to say that it evades hierarchies of taste, and indeed as Sarah
Thornton has noted, following Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural
capital (1984), the subcultural use of cultural knowledge and objects
offers an alternative framework of subcultural capital (Thornton 1995).
Indeed, for punk the more outrageous and offensive the dress and behav-
iour the higher the subcultural capital the subject accumulates. And in
doing so, the aim is often to hollow out the political significance of objects
such as swastikas.
The complexity of the political meaning of punk has been noted by a
number of critics who themselves are divided over the effects of punk’s
desire to shock. Elizabeth Wilson, for example, has argued that ‘Punk
spoke the anger of youth in a crumbling economy administered by out-of-
touch politicians, and, insofar as nihilism is political, it was political; it was
anti-establishment, it was about outrage, shock, violence, pornography,
anarchy and self-destruction’ [emphasis in original] (2000, 135).
Alternatively, punk can be seen to have attracted members from a broad
political spectrum. As Roger Sabin points out, punk’s ‘political ambiguity
left ample space for right-wing interpretation’ (1999, 199) and as Dylan
Clarke notes ‘Some punks went so far as to valorize anything mainstream
society disliked, including rape and death camps, some punks slid into fas-
cism’ (226).
These political ambiguities make punk a fertile subject for fiction, and
both Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, in
particular, deploy references to the subculture as a way of examining the
political shifts in Britain in the 1970s. Both these novels, indeed, identify
punk as coinciding with the shift from consensus politics of the immediate
post-war to the culture wars of the Thatcherite period. For Kureishi, atten-
tion to pop-cultural contexts and histories has always been a way to exam-
ine broader social and political concerns; as Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests:
‘For Kureishi pop epitomises the liberating energies of the “cultural revo-
lution” which began in the 1960s’ (2001, 115). We have already discussed
Charlie, but the main character in The Buddha of Suburbia is Karim, who
is described early in the novel as a ‘new breed’ of Englishman due to his
mixed ethnic background and who is looking for ‘trouble, any kind of
movement, action and sexual interest’ (1990, 3). Although he does not
embrace punk in the same way as Charlie, his individualism and desire to
succeed despite the racial prejudice he receives in 1970s Britain mirrors
punk’s desire to stand up for the marginalised and abjected of society.
Karim is an engaging narrator; however, as the text moves forward into
the later 1970s, his individualism is often self-serving and unthinking.
Indeed, Karim and Charlie become emblematic of a new breed of selfish
individualism, described by his friend Changez as representative of a new
kind of identity: ‘Here, in this capitalism of the feelings no one cares for
another person’ (1990, 215). The novel ends in 1979 with the election of
Thatcher, and the implication is made clear that Karim and Charlie are
themselves representative of a new culture that places individual ambition
above the development of meaningful human relationships.
Coe’s The Rotters’ Club presents a similar deployment of punk as a cul-
tural signifier of sociopolitical change. The novel details the relationships
of a group of Birmingham school friends set against key political contexts
of the 1970s: namely, Trade Union unrest, the Birmingham pub bomb-
ings, and the rise of racist political movements and attitudes. The school
becomes the arena in which these concerns in the parent culture are played
out, and subcultural affiliation thus becomes representative of broader
political concerns. In this way, the novel follows one of the key ideas devel-
oped by the subcultural theorist Phil Cohen in its identification of the
54 N. BENTLEY
transference between youth subcultures and the parent cultures from

which they emerge. As Cohen argues, ‘mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies,
are a succession of subcultures which all correspond to the same parent
culture and which attempt to work out, through a system of transforma-
tions, the basic problematic or contradiction which is inserted in the sub-
culture by the parent culture’ (2004, 90).
In Coe’s novel, punk represents an expression of rebellious individual-
ism that is placed in contrast with the novel’s other main subcultural refer-
ence—progressive rock. Richard Bradford, for example, notes that one of
the main characters attracted to the subculture, Doug Anderton, is ‘fasci-
nated by punk, not because it is art but because it seems to him to distil a
selfish disregard for collective or personal responsibility’ (2007, 44). Doug
is friends with Philip Chase and Benjamin Trotter, fans of prog rog bands
like Hatfield and the North, who produced the album (1975) from which
Coe takes the title of his novel. One key incident dramatises the arrival of
punk on 1970s youth culture. The incident is recounted in one of the
novel’s shifts in temporal perspective that moves us to a written memory
produced by Doug in 1999. Doug explains that Philip had been planning
for a number of months to put together a prog rock band and had been
writing material when the band met for its first rehearsal. The band is
called Gandalf’s Pikestaff and Philip’s composition is a 32-minute prog
rock masterpiece called ‘Apotheosis of the Necromancer’ which, in typical
prog ambition, attempts to cover ‘the entire history of the universe from
the moment of creation up until roughly, as far as I could see, the
resignation of Harold Wilson in 1976’ (2001, 179). However, a chant—
‘the maws of doom’, a phrase taken from a National Front leaflet intro-
duced the previous day by one of the novel’s other anarchic characters, is
taken up by Stubbs, the band’s singer. The drummer and guitarist in the
band get bored with Philip’s ambitious progressive rock and move into a
‘ferocious back beat in 4/4’, and Stubbs starts to scream ‘The maws, The
maws, the very maws of doom’ repeatedly. This aggressive verbal interrup-
tion is indicative of the critic David Laing’s argument that vocalists in punk
bands tend to emphasise ‘speech, recitative, chanting or wordless cries and
mutterings’ as a way of disrupting the ‘musicality of singing’ and thus
avoiding the ‘contamination of the lyric message by the aesthetic pleasures
offered by melody, harmony, pitch and so on’ (2015, 70). The anarchic
overturning of Philip’s ambitions at this point is thus emblematic of a par-
ticular rupture in rock history, and as Doug explains, ‘Philip had chosen
the wrong moment, historically, to make his personal bid for prog rock
stardom’ (2001, 179–80), and Philip himself later reflects that ‘These were
desperate times for someone like him, whose heroes—specialists, to a man,
in fifteen-minute instrument […]—had until recently commanded two-
page features in the music press but could nowadays barely get themselves
a recording contract’ (2001, 250).
Behind the personal contexts and schoolyard antagonisms of this comic
episode, however, is a deeper indication of underlying anxieties over politi-
cal shifts in Britain. In subcultural terms, the rehearsal records some of the
apolitical and escapist aspects of prog rock against the engaged (though
often politically ambiguous) nature of punk. It is interpreted by Doug, as
he reflects back on the period, as bound up with a shift in the political
climate in Britain from the continuation of a broad consensus politics to
the ideological stand-off between left and right as manifest in the emer-
gence of Thatcherism. On the evening following the ill-fated rehearsal of
Gandalf’s Pikestaff, Doug recalls overhearing his father, a prominent trade
unionist, enter into an edgy conversation with Benjamin’s conservative
father after the result of a by-election which the Tories had won a landslide
victory. Doug later reflects: ‘Meanwhile waiting in the wings was a new
breed of Tory and these people meant business’ (2001, 181). Philip’s
ambitions of producing a prog masterpiece are connected with ‘the death
of the socialist dream’, as Doug comments:
This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into

half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes seemed no more
Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working
towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed
it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity.
Beautiful ideas dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of some-
thing beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to
happen. (182)
Doug associates progressive rock with a left-wing utopian sentiment

that is no match in the 1970s and 1980s for the harsher ideologies of a
Thatcherite politics of individualism, represented here by punk.
Coe’s novel, then, is just one of a number of literary works in which
punk is deployed as a cultural indication of broader social and political
transitions in Britain and reveals the diversity of cultural associations with
which it has been imbued. The subculture’s anarchic rebelliousness is
often used in fiction as emblematic of the shift in British culture from a
56 N. BENTLEY
politics of consensus to one of opposition. Taken as a whole, however, the

fictional narratives discussed in this chapter reveal a complex set of political
and ideological affiliations associated with punk that both registers the
desire for a rude and often carnivalesque disruption of dominant ideolo-
gies and power relations, but one that evades traditional left-right markers.
The anarchism of punk can thus be seen in a corresponding overturning
of the prevailing modes and styles of the British novel as much as it can
reflect profound changes in British society in the 1970s.
Notes
1. For a history of the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue see Perry 2000.
2. For a detailed survey of the importance of the context of publishing for
punk fiction see Rivett 1999.
References
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Novel in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club.’ In Jonathan Coe: Contemporary
British Satire, edited by Philip Tew. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Bradford, Richard. 2007. The Novel Now. Malden, MA. and Oxford: Blackwell.
Bresnan, Mark. 2015. ‘“Consistently Original, Perennially Unheard Of”: Punk,
Margin, and Mainstream in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.’ In Write in Tune:
Contemporary Music in Fiction, edited by Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner,
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223–38. Oxford: Berg.
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Coe, Jonathan. 2005. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. London:
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‘Styles, ‘Codes and Violence’: Subcultural
Identities in Contemporary Black Writing
of Britain’
Dave Ellis
In an apparently unmotivated scene in Mike Phillips’ Blood Rights (1990),

the black private eye, Sam Dean, takes time out of his ongoing investiga-
tion to tutor his son on the visual details with which he can learn to map
London streets and chart a safe course through the potential dangers
therein. Dean is a voice of authority here not simply because he is a detec-
tive professionally attuned to, and experienced in, drawing significance
from outwardly meaningless phenomena, but also because he is a veteran
of London street life. He has grown up as a first-generation black Briton
in the 1960s and ‘70s, and he is accustomed to, and has learned to antici-
pate, unprovoked acts of racial hostility from different social groups and
from representatives of the white Establishment. The cognitive map he
conveys to his son is based upon ethnic differences providing visual clues
to the levels of threat they pose to a young black boy. The lesson is success-
ful and his son learns that certain groups of people and certain situations
D. Ellis (*)
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

60 D. ELLIS
are dangerous and to be avoided: he has been given the means to read the
streets. However, this intergenerational wisdom is somewhat destabilised
as his son asks Dean why he always says hello to other black people on the
street, whether he knows them or not. Dean replies, ‘In the old days …
we’d speak because it would be kind of reassuring to be in contact with
another black person’ (Phillips 1990, 166). What has always struck me as
interesting about this exchange is that Dean’s son is offered tuition on
what differentiates groups of people but must ask what binds them
together. Perhaps Dean senior’s sense of a communal identity based upon
a shared history of migration is less evident to his son than it is to him:
what does this suggest, I wonder, about the discursive construction of
identity in black British literature that deals with characters two or more
generations removed from the experience of migration?
In an analogous scene, Dennis Huggins, Alex Wheatle’s central pro-
tagonist in The Dirty South (2008), performs his own cognitive mapping
of South London: ‘Tulse Hill estate where a trailer load of eastern
European people and white trash families live […] Myatts Fields estate
where all the crack houses used to be … Angel Town where every second
brother seems to be packed with a gun. Stockwell, where the rude boys
show off their guns in the local youth club and Vauxhall where the
Portuguese shottas sell the best hash in London …’ (Wheatle 2008, 2).
Dennis, like Dean’s son, is a second-generation black Briton, albeit ten
years his senior. It would be widely inaccurate to suggest Dennis has lost a
colour consciousness or that he perceives white Britain to be any less
harmful to his and his peers’ life chances than Dean does. However,
Dennis has learnt to map London differently to Dean, and the semiotic
maps he employs owe less to colour codes than to postcodes: it is not so
much whom you encounter, as where you encounter them that demar-
cates Dennis’s London. This intensified parochialism drives the narrative
of The Dirty South as it is Dennis’s failure to observe the boundaries set
out in his own mapping that leads to the tragic resolution of the novel.
In this chapter I will seek to explore the ways in which youth identity
and affiliation are portrayed in works by two key figures in contemporary
black British writing: Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland. It takes a spe-
cific focus upon teenage culture and style as a means of picking out inter-
generational differences not simply to suggest that youth culture defines
itself in opposition to the generation that precedes it, since this is a well-
established principle. Instead, it is to suggest that these books illustrate
what I want to call the ‘new parochialism’ in which youth identity in
STYLES, ‘CODES AND VIOLENCE: SUBCULTURAL IDENTITIES… 61
working-class London draws upon an intensified sense of affiliation to a

local area, estate or postcode. One consequence of this new parochialism
is an alteration in the former codes of affiliation based upon a Caribbean
heritage expressed through formal and family history and musical style
which is supplemented (rather than replaced) by local histories, often held
at the level of orality and myth. Central to the ‘new’ histories in each of
the texts are myths of violence and reputation. In this respect, Sam Dean’s
colour coding of London becomes more complex, since the postcodes of
the new parochialism blur the boundaries of ‘race’ and introduce new
affiliations and disaffiliations that pertain more to new local histories than
to the histories of migration.
The concept of a new parochialism is drawn from Homi Bhabha’s
intervention in 1999 when his ‘Manifesto’ stimulated a series of discus-
sions and events leading to the Reinventing Britain Conference hosted by
the British Council to debate British identities. In ‘The Manifesto’, Bhabha
describes a contemporary reality in which ‘the new cosmopolitanism has
fundamentally changed our sense of the relationship between national tra-
dition or territory, and the attribution of cultural values and social norms’.
In the ‘new cosmopolitanism’, ‘culture is less about expressing a pre-given
identity (whether the source is national culture or “ethnic” culture) and
more about the activity of negotiating, regulating and authorising com-
peting, often conflicting demands for collective self-representation’
(Bhabha 1999, 39). In these propositions Bhabha is seeking to progress
beyond the multiculturalist debates of the 1980s wherein the notion of
core and marginal cultures were challenged by decentring a dominant cul-
tural tradition—in this instance, Englishness—in preference for a model of
competing ethnicities within which no ethnicity could claim a prior value
or innate or historical privilege. Instead Bhabha proposes a hybrid culture
within which the essentialising tendencies of ‘equal but different’ are ren-
dered ‘increasingly sterile’. Central to Bhabha’s vision of a new social land-
scape is the impact of a loosening of nationalist identities through the
cultural borderlessness of transnationalism captured in the ‘hybrid cosmo-
politanism of contemporary metropolitan life’ (Bhabha 1999, 39). One
way in which this new, or hybrid, cosmopolitanism might be illustrated is
through reference to ‘Fresh for ‘88’, a short story by Courttia Newland
from his collection, A Book of Blues (2011).
In the story, a pair of London youths prepare for an MC contest being
held in Wormwood Scrubs park. Here, 1988 is significant because it is
‘the year young London went hip-hop crazy’ (Newland 2011, 40). The
62 D. ELLIS
enthusiasm for American style is evident in the street fashion of baseball

caps, baggy jeans and unlaced Nike Air Max trainers and the eagerness of
the narrator, Stone, to compare Harrow Road flats with Brooklyn brown-
stones from The Cosby Show (Newland 2011, 39). However, this is not an
unmediated adoption of American style: 1988 was also the year that
British hip-hop established itself through the Demon Boyz and their
Recognition album. Hip-hop, with its basis in sampling and borrowing,
translating and transforming, ties closely to Bhabha’s notion that there is
‘no ideal norm of perfect translation or appropriation possible’ when
hybrid works contest origin or ownership. In this story, hip-hop is ‘an all-
encompassing culture’ (Newland 2011, 40) not a narrow tradition, and,
for Stone, the MC performance is not premised upon the reverential rep-
lication of original performance but on the spontaneous interactivity of
DJ, MC and audience: ‘nothing supersedes that split-second moment of
finding my flow and placing the words exactly on the beat …’ (Newland
2011, 45).
Stone’s bid to win the MC battle ends in failure as a fight breaks out in
the audience during his act and disrupts his performance. Dispirited, he
wonders whether his opinion of the power of London hip-hop was exag-
gerated and would itself always remain parochial compared to the US acts.
However, the transformative power of hip-hop to establish new configura-
tions is reaffirmed in the denouement of the story: reflecting on what
seems to be his perennial bad luck and persecution, Stone finally asks his
friend, Reka, ‘You think all dis shit happens to me—to us—because I’m
white?’ (Newland 2011, 60). Throughout the story Stone’s character,
voice, dress style and musical tastes have been indistinguishable from his
(presumably) black associates, and Newland’s intention is clearly to draw
attention to the implied reader’s assumptions about ‘racial’ markers. In
addition, Reka’s reply to Stone’s query, ‘Nah, blud’, suggests that such
markers are no longer relevant to a hip-hop generation who find a com-
mon identity in musical subcultures that transcend national identities and
cultural heritage: ‘blud’, here, is invested with additional meaning.
I do not want to overburden this short story with too much social sig-
nificance, although some of what I have said here in terms of a shared
street style that crosses ethnic boundaries can also be observed in Noel
Clarke’s screenplay for the film, Kidulthood (2006). The revelation of
Stone’s ethnicity, also, is not an uncommon narrative ploy, and parallels
could be drawn with Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2007), for example
(it remains interesting, however, that a writer of Newland’s experience and
stature knows he can still exploit this authorial technique effectively).

Similarly, UK hip-hop is not the first example of white youth adopting
black cultural styles, although I would argue that this is a considerably
more thoroughgoing adoption of black style than might be found amongst
the white adherents of jazz, blues and reggae in earlier decades. However,
I do want to return to Stone’s question: if Reka responds negatively to
racial difference being the source of their woes, one might ask why does all
this happen to them?
Among Stone and Reka’s associates are two older youths, P. Nutt and
Sy, who bully Stone and, through the threat of physical violence, dominate
the basement where the youths practice on borrowed record decks.
Newland leaves it unclear whether Stone attracts particular attention from
them due to his small stature rather than his ethnicity, not least because all
the youths are equally intimidated by them. However, Nutt and Sy’s repu-
tation for violence is not wholly negative for Stone. Whilst window shop-
ping away from their home neighbourhood, Stone is approached by a
group of boys at a bus stop who try to rob him. The stand-off is only
ended when one of the group recognises Reka and Stone as being associ-
ated with Nutt and Sy. Now assumed to be under the protection of the
duo, and with the unspoken expectation of reprisals should they go
through with the robbery, the group withdraw: reputation and the
assumption of local loyalties is enough to give them pause for thought.
This correlation of locality, loyalty and violence is evident elsewhere in the
story. Reka and Stone end relationships with girls mostly due, as Stone
reflects, to the ‘potential danger of visiting an area where he didn’t live’
(Newland 2011, 46). Similarly, Wormwood Scrubs Park is not just a site
for competing music, it is also a ground for battling postcodes: ‘Everyone
from every manor in London came [to it], which made it a mad, bad and
dangerous place to be’ (Newland 2011, 46). Taken together, the ‘shit’
that happens to Stone emanates less from what he looks like, so much as
where he comes from in the form of a heightened parochialism. Sy and
Nutt must maintain their reputation for violence; that reputation must be
recognised as an attribute of a highly localised area of London; and respect
for it must be maintained irrespective of ethnicity.
This scenario is some distance from the positive potential of Bhabha’s
project to encapsulate a reinvented Britain within which a hybrid cosmopoli-
tanism transforms the relationship between identity and a national t radition
or territory. Instead, this new cosmopolitanism has been supplanted by a
new parochialism in which the meanings of place are being reinvented
64 D. ELLIS
by emerging urban histories that secure highly localised attributes of iden-

tity, communality and belonging. So, where Sam Dean was once able to
point to the reassurance of a shared black history held together by oral links
back to the Caribbean, arguably this oral history is not shared by his son,
hence the confusion that sits behind his question. New social histories and
identities are being forged that help to redefine the association of identity to
place on much more restrictive historical and geographical bounds. To see if
this can be illustrated elsewhere, it may be helpful to look at the longer
chronological range afforded by Alex Wheatle’s novels.
Brixton Rock (1999) is Wheatle’s first novel and introduces the central
character, Brenton Brown. Brenton has been placed into care at a young
age and Brixton Rock recounts his reunion with his Jamaican mother and
intense affair with his half-sister, Juliet. In the sequel set sixteen years later,
Brenton Brown (2011), Brenton’s unresolved feelings for Juliet, compli-
cated by the growing demands of their child Breanna to know the truth of
her parentage, eventually leads Brenton to migrate abroad. In both novels,
Brenton’s life in care is related through dreams and flashbacks and tells the
tale of a black identity that must be learned through adopted styles and
codes of behaviour and allegiance. In this respect, Brenton is severed from
the pre-given identity of a national culture (as described by Bhabha) and
so is his pick-and-mix invention of an identity, drawing upon diverse cul-
tural sources that makes him a hybrid character, perhaps more so than the
biology of his dual heritage.
Brenton is put into care because his mother, Cynthia, has an affair with
a white man while her husband is in Jamaica. Pregnant when her husband
returns, Cynthia is forced to give Brenton to his father who is unable to
provide for him when his own family refuse to support a dual heritage rela-
tion. Brenton is brought up in Pinewood Hills, a care home in the coun-
tryside well to the south of London, and the novel itself is set in the hostel
in Brixton Brenton is placed in when he turns eighteen. As might be
apparent from this short summary, Brenton lacks a clear cultural heritage,
having been brought up largely amongst white people, and his two princi-
pal sources of comfort are constructed ones: first a scarecrow called Mr
Brown that he became fixated on as a child at Pinewood; and secondly, a
poster of James Dean in which he continues to confide whilst at the hostel.
The extent to which he must learn to be black is finally recounted by his
hostel mate, Floyd, as an anecdote in Brenton Brown: ‘His accent! There
was some kind of BBC, Surrey fuckery going on with his accent … I had
to teach him to walk like a Brixtonian […] He had no riddim, man. No
bounce … And then I tried to teach him how to crub with a girl’ (Wheatle
2011, 240–1). It is while Brenton is still learning to be Brixtonian that he
encounters his ‘nemesis’, Terry Flynn. Brenton initiates a longstanding
feud with Flynn in Brixton Rock after he punches Flynn for calling him a
‘liccle half-breed’ at a blues party (Wheatle 2010, 19). Subsequently
Brenton hospitalises Flynn by hitting him with a beer glass in a pool hall
fight. From this point, Brenton is embroiled in a battle over reputations,
since the ghetto press now has Brenton dubbed as ‘the guy who crucially
dealt with Terry Flynn’ (Wheatle 2010, 21). This feud will lead eventually
to both Flynn’s death when he falls under a tube train during a fight with
Brenton and to Brenton’s enduring Brixton fame as the ‘Steppin’ Volcano’:
a nickname that companies him through most of Wheatle’s novels. As
Floyd puts it, ‘Mashing up Terry Flynn has turned you into a celebrity’
(Wheatle 2010, 249).
As the ‘Steppin’ Volcano’, Brenton acquires a place in local mythology
akin to Sy and Nutt in Newland’s story and this reputation brings with it
the expectation of behavioural patterns and other identity markers that
Brenton learns alongside his education in being Brixtonian. For example,
in the opening scenes to Brixton Rock, he deliberately adopts (and regrets)
a ‘bad bwai’ pose’ for the benefit of the police officers (2010, 3). In this
respect, the cultural markers that Brenton also adopts, including the con-
fusing combination of Jamaican reggae tapes and the James Dean poster
that populate his hostel room, are themselves cut adrift from any authen-
ticating point of origin: Brenton is not adopting a roots culture in terms
of tracing back to his Caribbean roots. This becomes most evident in
Brenton Brown when Brenton decides that his undimmed feelings for
Juliet mean he must leave England altogether to achieve a fresh start.
Whilst considering likely places to settle, Jamaica is quickly dismissed: ‘I
wanna go somewhere with decent weather. A place where I can hear reg-
gae music. Forget Jamaica, I don’t wanna spend my days there living
behind some serious metal grille at the front of my yard and see a goat
shitting on my gates and chickens walking around like they want to mug
you … Maybe the US?’ (Wheatle 2011, 173). This is not the only point at
which Brenton has dismissed a link back to the islands. Comparing the
decoration of his mother’s house with that of his friend Floyd’s mother he
notes, ‘Mrs Francis’s front room is similar to the way Mum had hers. The
same black-and-white photos on their mantelpiece, Jamaican scroll souve-
nirs hanging from the walls […] What a load of fuckery! […] Did Jamaican
women who came over here in the fifties and sixties all agree to have the
66 D. ELLIS
same shit in their front rooms?’ (Wheatle 2011, 134). Crucially, though,
this is not as simple as saying that Brenton lacks the traditional family
upbringing to provide old country ties to the Caribbean through memory
and extended transnational family networks. For Brenton, this severance
with the Caribbean is also true of his contemporaries for whom the notion
of roots begins in Brixton. As he compares his sense of belonging to his
friends, Floyd and Biscuit, Brenton states, ‘My roots are not in south
London. Not like it is with them. They belong here. This place has defined
the way they walk, talk and carry themselves’ (Wheatle 2011, 246).
The definition or construction of identity in this instance is as tempo-
rally and geographically specific for Brenton’s friends as it is for Brenton
himself. This ultimately begs the question of how Brixton has defined its
black inhabitants, or perhaps more correctly, how they define it through
their own cognitive mapping and history making. Linton Kwesi Johnson,
a pioneer of black British culture from the 1970s, chronicled the same
cultural terrain as Wheatle from the position of a first-generation migrant.
His first volume of poetry, Voices of the Living and the Dead was hailed by
Farrukh Dhondy as having ‘contributed the first collective myth of English
poetry for centuries’. Johnson’s poetry, he continues, brings the ‘experi-
ence of locality for his own audience—Brixton, Railton Road, Shepherds,
the telegraph, Sofrano B, Neville King […] what are these? Ask any young
black in London’ (Dhondy 1974, 133–4). In an interview Wheatle affirms
his own belief in the continued significance he assigns to the importance
of locality in the creation of identity through storytelling and the owner-
ship of a parochial history: ‘I feel the need to write those stories [of the
black experience] because they’re being neglected […] we as a people
have to write our own stories, otherwise, as what happened in the past,
they’ll be told for us. And, so, I feel this obligation sometimes to tell our
stories’ (Immonen 2007, 125). It is therefore interesting to see in
Wheatle’s novels the way in which this communal history of resistance gets
diminished in the new parochialism of styles, codes and violence.
As noted above, the Brixton Riots in 1981 mark a crucial juncture in
both the history of black Britain and the generational shifts represented in
Wheatle’s novels. Wheatle’s views on the riots are made clear in an inter-
view with Linton Kwesi Johnson where he states,
people sometimes forget that these were the biggest upheavals on the main-
land for 100 years, and that important moment in black history has not been
properly recorded on film or drama or anything else, only in literature by
you [i.e., Johnson]. That is worrying. I’m thinking that this part of our his-
tory will just be wiped away and forgotten unless someone else makes up
their mind to address it. I think it needs to be addressed because our chil-
dren need to know where they come from and of the struggles we have
waged thus far. (Wheatle 2009, 37)
Here again, the point of origin for the purposes of identity is assumed
to be British. In addition, the riots mark a significant place in recent black
history, not least because the Scarman enquiry that ensued brought an
official account of the daily experiences of black Britain into the political
and public domain. Specific reference is made in the Scarman Report to
the work of the Special Patrol Group and the operation of the ‘sus’ laws
that permitted almost random stop-and-search activities that were widely
perceived to be used to target black youths. East of Acre Lane is set against
the local events leading to these riots, and Wheatle acknowledges the
Scarman Report as a source for his novel alongside the anecdotal memo-
ries of his friends, joining together the official and unofficial accounts.
Wheatle’s novel is significant because it dramatizes both an important his-
torical event and a parallel parochial history. At the start of the novel
Brenton’s place in the ‘annals of Brixtonian folklore’ as the ‘Steppin
Volcano’ is reaffirmed with Biscuit’s nine-year-old brother, Royston,
already in awe of being in the presence of a ‘real life Brixtonian bad man’
(Wheatle 2006, 24). By the end of the novel, this reputation would be
enhanced as Biscuit, Brenton and others kill local drug lord and pimp,
Nunchaks, in an endeavour to free Biscuit’s sister, Denise, from prostitu-
tion. This reputation again falls into local legend and reappears in The
Dirty South where Dennis boasts about his father’s (Biscuit’s) fame as a
‘shotta’ involved in the death of a local ‘Bricky crime lord’ (Wheatle 2008,
3). It is in the intergenerational transition from Biscuit in East of Acre
Lane to his son, Dennis, in The Dirty South that one can observe the loss
of a Caribbean communal history in favour of the new myths of
parochialism.
East of Acre Lane features another recurrent character in Wheatle’s fic-
tion, the Rastafarian, Jah Nelson. Everton Pryce has described the link
between Rastafarianism and reggae music in a manner that accords with
Wheatle’s sense of owning and linking together style, history and culture:
‘Reggae music […] played the role of linking the style and form of Afro-
Jamaican street-culture to the style and form of young Afro-Caribbean
blacks in Britain, and, with the rastafarian movement, gave these same
68 D. ELLIS
youths an orientation …’ (Pryce 1985, 37). Nelson attempts to bind

Biscuit into this orientation so he so can ‘try fe do somet’ing better, and
nah get ‘imself moulded by the environment where ‘im live’ (Wheatle
2006, 43). He does so by trying to provide Biscuit with a grounding in
African history to help him see beyond the daily exigencies of being the
breadwinner for his family (in the absence of his father) through dealing
drugs and petty crime. Nelson is not wholly successful as Biscuit is swept
along by the events that will lead to the fatal encounter with Nunchaks.
However, at the close of the novel Biscuit sends Denise to Nelson to help
her recover from the trauma of her abuse and witnessing Nunchak’s death
(Wheatle 2006, 306). Nelson’s insistence that ‘Education is de key’
(Wheatle 2006, 308) will be picked up again in The Dirty South where it
is dismissed by Dennis as being his father’s ‘mantra’ (Wheatle 2008, 4). It
is here that the cognitive map of London that Dennis described in my
introduction can be placed into a longer history of youth subcultures into
the (a)history of the new parochialism.
The Dirty South follows Dennis Huggins’ entry into the world of drug-
dealing in Brixton at the age of fourteen, until his eventual incarceration
six years later. As noted above, Dennis’s father, Biscuit, is the key character
in East of Acre Lane who also appears in both Brixton Rock and Brenton
Brown as a friend of the eponymous Brown during their youth in the ear-
lier novel, and as adults in the latter one. Taken together, these loosely
connected novels extend the range of Wheatle’s novels from Brown’s
birth in 1963 to Brown’s death and Dennis’s release from prison in 2006.
At the centre of this forty-year period sits the 1981 Brixton Riots around
which the events of East of Acre Lane turn. Reading these novels as an
account of the attitudes, codes and relationships of two successive genera-
tions of black Britons that come after Sam Dean (whose experience
stretches back to the 1958 Notting Hill riots) allows us to think of Biscuit
and Brenton as second generation and Dennis and his peers as third gen-
eration black Britons. In doing so, one can detect a social process within
which the new affiliations, styles, codes and disaffiliations of the new paro-
chialism get established.
Pivotal to understanding Dennis Huggins’ character is recognising his
highly parochial sense of place and the codes of behaviour that accompany
such localised awareness. It is with a deliberate irony that Wheatle has
Dennis dismiss his father’s continued preoccupation with the ‘numbers of
young black employed in 19 fucking 80, long forgotten riots […] and how
Margaret Thatcher messed up the country’ (Wheatle 2008, 4). Neither is
Dennis attracted by his African-Caribbean heritage. He has been taught

black history by Jah Nelson when he was young, but he only uses this to
impress Akeisha, his long-term love interest, and he only does so because
another of his father’s contemporaries, Yardman Irie, makes an appearance
at a poetry jam in Brixton. Here, Dennis is utterly dismissive of the appeal
to African roots by the host ‘Queen Manashmanek from the golden and
prosperous lands of Nubia’ (Wheatle 2008, 110) and the consciousness-
raising acts that precede Irie’s performance. At the end of the evening,
Dennis makes a clumsy attempted pass at Akeisha and she sees through his
pretence: ‘You’ve just spent the last half hour giving me a lesson in
Jamaican history. And now this! I thought you was different from the rest,
Dennis. But you’re just like the other brothers in Angel Town and Bricky,
just looking for a wok and you don’t care how you get it …’ (Wheatle
2008, 119). This rejection of a cultural heritage and history is matched by
Dennis’s rejection of anything more recent. Even as he sits in his cell await-
ing release, Dennis rejects new myths of belonging: ‘burn the mayor’s
theory of multicultural society. It ain’t real’ (Wheatle 2008, 5).
What is real for Dennis is reputation. Without knowing the truth of
events, he boasts about his father’s past as a ‘shotta’, his association with
the ‘Steppin’ Volcano’ and their part in the murder of Nunchaks. In very
much the same way as Stone, in Newland’s short story, is attuned to the
association of postcodes, codes and violence, Dennis tries to locate himself
onto the cognitive map of London. Like Stone, he is aware of the dangers
of the new parochialism, but unlike him, Dennis ignores his own advice
and finds himself the object of an ambush in Peckham. Dennis is robbed,
stripped and hospitalized but the core issue is less about money than a
failure to observe the ‘rules of the ghetto’ (Wheatle 2008, 36). Having
completed their assault, the leader of Dennis’s assailants crows, ‘Who’s he
think he is? A Brixton shotta coming down our ends and he wasn’t even
packed’ (Wheatle 2008, 36). When his partner-in-crime, Noel, visits
Dennis in hospital, he is unsympathetic: ‘People been chatting […] How
you got honey-trapped by some bitch from Peckham ends. It’s not good
for our rep, bruv. Some brothers been laughing about it, saying that you
and me are pussies. I ain’t tolerating that’ (Wheatle 2008, 43). Dennis and
Noel plan a revenge attack wherein Brixtonian honour is satisfied and their
parochial reputation restored as a more severe beating using iron bars and
bricks is carried out on the original culprits.
In taking this action, Dennis and Noel are sustaining a parochial map of
London in which the physical reality of violence and the discursive reality
70 D. ELLIS
of reputation collide with the effect of strengthening their sense of collec-

tive identity: being a Brixtonian triumphs over any other form of possible
allegiance. If such loyalties are highly parochial, they are also a-historical
insofar as enmities are formed (as they are in Newland’s story) from places
of current residence rather than a longer history of migration. Consequently,
Dennis’s mapping of London is a radically synchronic arrangement that is
dismembered from history. His tragedy is thus a failure to engage with
history over both the short and the long term. For example, the cognitive
map of Brixton Dennis provides in the introduction to the first chapter of
the novel finally describes the ‘Camberwell end of Coldharbour Lane
where so-called Muslim gangs cruise and jack any shottas and run protec-
tion rackets’ (Wheatle 2008, 2). It is precisely here and under these cir-
cumstances that he and Noel are ambushed once again, this time leading
to Noel’s death and Dennis’s subsequent revenge killing of Courtney
Thompson.
This potentially explains the complex interaction between reputation
and reality in the new parochialism and particularly in its dynamic nature.
If Brenton learns to adopt and adapt style to become a Bricky celebrity,
the same is arguably true of Dennis who is suspected of pretence even by
Noel: ‘You’re a pretend badman, Dennis. Everyone knows it. A mother-
fucking wannabe. You ain’t too different from those white and Asian
people who try to talk black. You’re a motherfucking pimp! Pimping
from street culture’ (Wheatle 2008, 45). Similarly, Thompson is one of
a group of young Blacks who have recently converted to Islam in the
novel and who are bringing a new edge of violence to the area. For
Dennis, these are merely ‘so-called’ Muslims and he suggests that their
religious conversion is nothing more than the adoption of a new dissi-
dent street style that will not last (Wheatle 2008, 116). It is certainly
true that Thompson fails to lead a recognisable life of Islamic convictions
and that he is refused entry to a mosque by Muslim elders. In addition,
Thompson and his gang demand that Noel ‘converts’ to being a Muslim
as they beat him to death. But this is no religious crime and its motiva-
tion sits somewhere between parochial drug warfare and reputation since
Dennis and Noel have ‘disrespected’ Thompson in front of his crew over
a girl. In all three of Wheatle’s novels, then, the death of a character
serves not only to remove a violent threat, it also serves to place the sur-
viving characters into a parochial history of London through which they
and others can locate themselves. It is the new parochialism that Dennis
uses to define his life—ironically since the legend of the killing of
Nunchak conceals the fact that the trigger was pulled by Biscuit’s white
neighbour, Frank. Thus Dennis’s own mantra, ‘only in Bricky’, that also
punctuates The Dirty South starts to feel as much of a historical as a social
confinement.
Throughout The Dirty South, Dennis constructs a parochial London
that continually reinvents codes of difference from which identity can
emerge. For Bhabha, this emphasis upon the constructedness of identity
characterises the multiculturalist thinking of the 1980s that missed the
transformation of the public sphere occasioned by the new cosmopolitan-
ism. However, this transformation is rejected by Dennis as itself being a
myth, and his sense of localised identity based upon a parochial map of
London is abandoned as he plans a new life in Leicester upon his release.
This instability of character bears considerable resemblance to Stone in
Newland’s ‘Fresh for ’88’, who adopts a language and a culture whole-
heartedly but never feels fully as though it is his own. This is a theme that
runs through Wheatle’s novels, most notably in the character of Brenton
Brown and thus confirms the role of the new parochialism in constructing
identity through style in a process of affiliation and disaffiliation.
What this chapter has tried to show is a reversal of the positive trends
gestured towards by Bhabha’s proclamation of a transformed social space
brought about by a new cosmopolitanism within a transnational, metro-
politan Britain. Bhabha was working in response to the multiculturalist
thinking of the 1980s in which multiple ethnic identities were envisioned
as evidence of a plural society. For Bhabha, emphasising ‘different but
equal’ policies operates within old paradigms of identities authenticated
by myths of origin that were unsustainable in contemporary Britain. In
these novels and short stories depicting black, teenage life in London
within the same period, I think illustrations of new identities and loyalties
being formed can be found. These loyalties are not based upon pre-
migratory origin, as Bhabha suggests, but neither do they provide a
transformed social space. Instead, a new parochialism based upon post-
codes and local mythologies of reputation and social competition and
rivalry occupy the space previously filled by social Rastafarianism in the
1970s. If social identities are being reconfigured in this new parochial-
ism, they are not being weakened and the social signifiers of style and
affiliation remain strong. So much so that, as Dennis watches his friend
Noel being beaten to death in The Dirty South over a wholly predicted
matter of reputation, one assumes these are not the ‘teenage kicks’ that
The Undertones sang about.
72 D. ELLIS
References
Bhabha, Homi K. 1999. ‘The Manifesto,’ in Wasafiri 14:29 (1999): 38–39.
Dhondy, Farrukh. 1974. ‘Review of Voices of the Living and the Dead,’ Race Today
6.3 (March 1974): 92.
Immonen, Johanna. 2007. ‘Interview with Alex Wheatle, 11 March 2007,
Clapham Library, London,’ Critical Engagements: A Journal of Criticism and
Theory 1.2 (2007): 117–138.
Kidulthood. 2006. Dir. Menhaj Huda. UK: Revolver Entertainment.
Malkani, Gautum. 2007. Londonstani, London: Harper Perennial.
Newland, Courttia. 2011. A Book of Blues, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Flambard Press.
Phillips, Mike. 1990. Blood Rights. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Pryce, Everton. 1985. ‘The Notting Hill Carnival: Black Politics, Resistance and
Leadership 1976–1978,’ Caribbean Quarterly 32.2 (June 1985): 35–52.
Wheatle, Alex. 2009. ‘A Conversation with Linton Kwesi Johnson,’ Wasafiri 24.3
(2009): 35–41.
Wheatle, Alex. 2010. Brixton Rock. London: BlackAmber Books (first published,
1999).
Wheatle, Alex. 2006. East of Acre Lane. London: Harper Perennial (first published
Fourth Estate, 2001).
Wheatle, Alex. 2008. The Dirty South. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Wheatle, Alex. 2011. Brenton Brown. London: BlackAmber Books.
PART II
Subcultural Representations on Screen

Mod at the Movies: ‘Face’ and ‘Ticket’
Representations of a British Subculture
Stephen Glynn
The distinctly British nature of the Mod subculture is evident from the
unending debate over the extent of its ‘cross-class membership’ (Muggleton
2000, 160), with its development and demographic, up to and beyond the
acme of its media attention in the 1964 seaside riots against motorbike-
riding Rockers, repeatedly documented and theorised (inter alia Melly
1972; Rawlings 2000; Weight 2013). In essence, beginning in the musical
wilderness of late 1959, when groups of young men in and around London
reacted to raucous Teddy Boys, pretentious beatniks and trad jazz fogies by
fashioning themselves as well-dressed ‘Modernists’, by 1964 a nationwide
but still selective ‘gang Mod’ escalation had developed its own codes, con-
ventions and hierarchical structures. At the top were the ‘Faces’ (or ‘Aces’),
setting the pace and wearing the classiest combinations; in their wake came
their epigones, the largely maligned ‘Tickets’ (or ‘Numbers’), their out/
look more working-class in flavour, their dance halls outings more often
than not ending in a fight. The boys would arrive on the regulation Italian
scooter, personalised with peacock fans of wing mirrors, headlights and
S. Glynn (*)
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

76 S. GLYNN
whip aerials, and wearing a US army surplus parka, practical for keeping
warm while weaving through traffic and for protecting the expensive tight-
fitting three-button mohair suit. The girls dressed androgynously, their
hair cropped or bobbed, with trousers and shirts to match (and mostly
borrowed from) the boys, flat shoes, bobby socks and minimal make up.
Amphetamines kept the mind and body alert, maximising the weekend’s
fun potential, emphasising dancing before dating, being ‘in’ before ‘put-
ting out’.
Mod at the Movies is an equally select—and seemingly secretive—band.
The BBC4 series Oh You Pretty Things (20 September 2014), exploring the
cut and thrust between British fashion and music subcultures, cites as the
starting point of this interplay a ‘long forgotten’ Mod movie: Dateline
Diamonds, directed by Jeremy Summers, a 1966-released ‘B’ film that sup-
ported Leslie Phillips in the superannuated Doctor in Clover. Dateline
Diamonds principally concerns diamond smuggling to Amsterdam via
Kenny Everett’s pirate radio ship—in reality Radio London—but it also
features pop performers such as the Chantelles and Kiki Dee, and signifi-
cantly captures the original line-up of Mod favourites the Small Faces,
before Ian McLagan replaced Jimmy Langwith aka Winston. The group are
hardly the film’s ‘star turn’—they play one song, filmed during a genuine
Radio London night at the Rank Ballroom, Watford. It is an engaging,
competently edited scene, but overall Dateline Diamonds’ ‘pop and cop’
format was critically derided for falling between two stools: ‘neither ele-
ment is in anyway distinguished, and the intervals for music merely slow
down the detection’ noted the Monthly Film Bulletin (33, 385, February
1966, 22). Still, this had long been the standard procedure for pop per-
formers: appear in a low-budget fiction film, boost box-office sales by
bringing in a teenage audience, and boost record sales from the associated
film publicity. This mutually beneficial commercial strategy had been under-
taken by Britain’s pop acts from its first indigenous stars Tommy Steele and
Cliff Richard, through to the world-conquering Beatles and beyond (Glynn
2013). However, as a blatantly commercial venture, good timing was key,
and the release of Dateline Diamonds was fatefully delayed, meaning that
‘I’ve Got Mine’, the Small Faces’ follow-up single to ‘Whatcha Gonna Do
About It’, came and went without the necessary publicity, and conse-
quently failed to chart. Add in poor receipts and, in every aspect, Dateline
Diamonds was also a commercial failure. Finally, Summers’ film singularly
fails to signify as ‘the starting point’ of Mod movies: indeed, there is much
to contest with the pop-fashion Mod genealogy adumbrated in Oh You
MOD AT THE MOVIES: ‘FACE’ AND ‘TICKET’ REPRESENTATIONS… 77
Pretty Things. It was Ready Steady Go! (AR-TV, 1963–1966) with its pre-
senter Cathy McGowan’s clarion call that ‘the weekend starts here’ and
mainstay group the Who that nationalised Mod fashion, while several prior
and concurrent films, though largely maligned support features accompa-
nying the principal programmed film, placed the subculture more centrally.
Mods are sticklers for accuracy and this essay offers a corrective and com-
prehensive ‘A to B’ of Mod Movies.
Amsterdam was not the place to be seen: especially since teenagers and
their spending power came to the fore in the mid-1950s, it was the liber-
tarian reputation of Brighton that proved to be an irresistible attraction
both to hormonal teenagers looking for lust and hard-nosed producers
seeking a lucrative exploitation movie, and several cinematic outriders can
now be located. Prophetic of Mod tropes to come, Linda (Don Sharp
1960) tells the story of gang member and scooter boy Phil (Alan Rothwell)
taking his girlfriend Linda (Carol White) on a day-trip down to Brighton,
hoping for something more than sightseeing and a stick of seaside rock:
his advances are unceremoniously spurned. Though it was the support
film to Tony Richardson’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and with
Joe Meek producing its theme song, Linda was scantily reviewed: ‘an
unpretentious but amusing little film which combines action with humour
and even some charm’, noted the supportive Cinema Exhibitors Association
Report (18 November 1960): so unpretentious it is currently listed as one
of the BFI’s 75 most-wanted ‘lost’ movies. Jim O’Connolly’s Smokescreen,
a Butcher’s Film Services ‘B’ film from the apposite 1964, cannot be con-
strued as a Mod movie—it even supported Elvis Presley’s (enemy) biker
musical Roustabout (John Rich) on the UK circuit—but it contains a
memorable pre-credit sequence where a blazing Hillman Minx Convertible
hurtles over the cliff at Beachy Head, we later learn, unoccupied: it is a
film launch that, alongside its extensive location footage, rehearses the
later definitive Mod foray down to Brighton. Optimistic on burgeoning
musical ‘scenes’, Lance Comfort’s Be My Guest (1965) sees David
Hemmings’ Dave Martin and his pop group prevent a devious promoter
from stealing their hit song and subsequently set up the (Beach Boys-lite)
‘Brighton Beat’ movement. With a paucity of pantheon pop stars, the
film’s Mod credentials were enhanced by the casting, in an acting role, of
Steve Marriott of the aforementioned Small Faces. ‘A simple little tale,
embellished with uncomplicated humour and music in the modern idiom.
Good stuff for youngsters’, patronised the trade press (Kinematograph
Weekly, 25 March 1965). A support booking for Morecombe and Wise’s
78 S. GLYNN
spy spoof The Intelligence Men (Robert Asher), the film also featured a
performance from Slash Wildly and the Cut Throats, in reality the Zephyrs,
a London bluesy beat group then working with the Who producer Shel
Talmy. The Zephyrs also feature in a scene, shot at the Scene, in Primitive
London (Arnold Miller 1965), a minimal-budget Mondo-style documen-
tary filmed by future Adventures of director Stanley Long. A portrait of the
capital manoeuvring uncertainly between post-war austerity and ‘Swinging’
Sixties liberalism, it offers an eclectic set of Soho-based images ranging
from a chiropodist session to chicken slaughtering and, whenever David
Gell’s transatlantic moralising voiceover begins to pall, cuts to a scene
featuring a stripper. It mixes in brief interviews with ‘freaky beatniks’,
Rockers at the Ace Café, London, and scenes with young Mods, overlaid
with over-simple cod psychology on their ‘peacock displays’ necessitated
by the post-war female majority and the concomitant ‘trendsetter’ male
boutiques. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, another 1965 sup-
port film expressed, over 28 minutes, differences in scooter boys and ton-
up boys through the medium of dance. Mods and Rockers, produced by
pop Svengali Larry Parnes and directed by Kenneth Hume, employs the
Western Theatre Ballet company, showcases Parnes’ peroxide protégé
Heinz, and uses a medley of Beatles’ songs covered by the Cheynes
(including 18-year-old Mick Fleetwood on drums). The original promo-
tional synopsis extols the film’s exposition thus: ‘A symbolic ultra-modern
coffee bar sets the scene for a girl in gold lamé jeans, bolero and bootees,
to start moving to the pulsating rhythms beating out from a glittering juke
box. A boy starts to dance with this red-headed dynamo of a girl, but is
repelled when she accepts the advances of a second boy. The two men vie
for her attentions.’ ‘Pulsating’ and ‘dynamo’ strike as excessive: in truth,
the warring Mods and Rockers offer up a series of stilted dance moves not
far in advance of Sting’s later efforts, though the trendy youth club-
running vicar rings true to the spirit of the times. Further evidencing the
pitfalls of misleading publicity, the film was folded into two Frank Gilpin
shorts, Swinging UK and UK Swings Again and retitled Go-Go Big Beat!
for a full-length US release: however, poster headlines implying a Beatles
appearance led to Brian Epstein instigating litigation, and the removal of
every Cheynes’ cover number.
Mod then moves on, transforming itself either into a ‘soft’ hippy strain,
as evidenced in the Howard Barker-scripted Made (John Mackenzie 1972)
which brings Carol White, now as single mother Valerie Marshall, back to
Brighton on a youth club outing: on the beach she meets and falls for
insecure singer Mike Preston (Roy Harper), though he soon dumps her
and writes a song about the experience. Or else Mod takes the harder
route into the skinhead subculture, or its ‘suedehead’ variant, definitively
portrayed in Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platts-Mills 1970), a film which,
with its shots of the Blackwall tunnel, terraced housing, kitchen and café
interiors, undoubtedly influenced the booklet photographs in the Who’s
1973 Quadrophenia album. A fast shimmy forward brings us to the late-
1970s where, post-punk and largely due to Paul Weller and the Jam, Mod
was once more part of the subcultural zeitgeist. Steppin’ Out (Lyndall
Hobbs 1979), a 25-minute support feature to Ridley Scott’s first Alien
movie, investigates London nightlife and, alongside punks and Blitz kids
(precursors to the New Romantics), features ‘Mod Night’ at Legends with
Mod revivalists Secret Affair and the Merton Parkas, and follows a coach
party to a roller disco in Dunstable. Seemingly incompatible, that link of
Mod and disco had also been central to John Badham’s 1977 international
success, Saturday Night Fever. A Mod movie in disco clothing, John
Travolta and his Bay Ridge cohorts enduring their mundane jobs and liv-
ing for their weekend high are, in fact, a cultural transposition of British
‘Faces’ and their ‘Ticket’ followers. Northern Irish rock writer Nik Cohn’s
7 June 1976 New Journalism piece for New York Magazine, ‘Tribal Rites
of the New Saturday Night’, had been immediately optioned by Robert
Stigwood, the producer of Tommy (Ken Russell 1975), for his next epic
venture—and overlaid with the inevitable upbeat Hollywood ending.
While set in Brooklyn, recent arrival Cohn later admitted to compensating
for his ignorance of American subcultures by borrowing characters and
attitudes from what he knew best—the mid-1960s Mod scene in London’s
Shepherd’s Bush: ‘Tony and the Faces are actually Mods in everything—
except the dances’, he told Melody Maker, without fooling, on 1 April
1978. The obsession with appearance certainly strikes as a Mod influence,
while Cohn even stole the Italian-American gang name, not straight from
the Who’s 1964 rebranding but from the fans their first manager, Peter
Meaden, organised to swell their early gigs, the Hundred Faces.
If Travolta was a Mod manqué, the ‘Face’ of Mod movies soon arrived
as the Who realised a feature film treatment of their musical Modyssey
Quadrophenia, Pete Townshend’s band-rebooting recreation of the ‘short
time’ when they ‘felt like Mods’ (Townshend 2012, 245). In 1978
Townshend entrusted the £1 million cinematic version to a film debutant,
30-year-old television director, Franc Roddam, fresh from his award-
winning docudrama Dummy (ATV, 9 November 1977). Roddam was
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given the brief that the double album’s music should contribute to and
support the narrative, but not, as they felt had regrettably occurred with
Tommy, take over. It was a shrewd appointment, as Roddam, a Mod
observer rather than obsessive, was central to the creation of a critical dis-
tance, taking the ideas Townshend had invested in the album and expand-
ing them in line with his own social realist background. The film follows
teenage Mod Jimmy Cooper (Phil Daniels) who lives at home, works as a
junior clerk, and spends his evenings with friends in the Mod clubs of
London. He is preoccupied both by scene regular Steph (Leslie Ash) and
the upcoming weekend trip down to Brighton to fight the Rockers. He
succeeds on both fronts but back home becomes increasingly disillusioned
and leaves it all behind, returning to Brighton in the (vain) hope of reliv-
ing former glories. Roddam’s addition of a backstory, a layer of London
social context, was enriching, as was the writing in of additional characters
since the young and largely unknown cast this necessitated introduced a
fresh, punk-inflected sensibility to their portrayals of teenage dreams.
These varied agencies all permitted Quadrophenia to accommodate com-
peting modes of understanding, and the film’s enduring appeal can be
seen to reside largely in prising open a hermetic subculture to its social
realist context: it is a cult film that dares to explore the dangers that reside
in being part of a cult; it is a Mod film that exposes the potential mindless-
ness of Mod.
I have written extensively on Quadrophenia elsewhere, including a ded-
icated monograph (Glynn 2014) analysing the film’s cult components
such as its intertextual frames and its failings, notably myriad anachronisms
and continuity errors. These components are doubly important for
Quadrophenia since the ‘private sectarian world’ which Umberto Eco
accords to cult movies (1986, 198) is true of Mod itself: as soon as the
media and their misconceptions move in, the hard core move on. Indeed,
Paulo Hewitt has questioned whether any ‘real’ Mods turned up at
Brighton beach, arguing that the genuine Mod movement was finished by
1963, its cover blown by Ready Steady Go! (a media moment recognised
in Quadrophenia when Jimmy devotedly watches the programme, to de
rigueur parental disgust); thereafter, Hewitt asserts, it ‘was taken up by
idiots really, just beer boys and thugs—no self-respecting Mod would have
been down at Brighton’ (Catterall and Wells 2001, 161). It is a conten-
tious claim, but for this particular subculture attention to detail undoubt-
edly mattered far more than attention-seeking: to 1960s Mod purists, not
only was Quadrophenia’s portrayal hopelessly inaccurate, but it also
encouraged gangs of raucous wannabes. Furthermore, ‘original’ Mod

revivalists (such as myself) felt that they too were now losing their secrecy
and exclusivity to a nationwide release. Quadrophenia, by its very popular-
ity, was letting down its core audience, exemplifying the invariable conclu-
sion: ‘the simultaneous diffusion and defusion of the subcultural style’
(Hebdige 1979, 93).
The portrayal of the Mod subculture, its identity construction through
the ironic appropriation of mainstream signifiers, is treated elsewhere in
this volume. Here I shall highlight the film’s stylistic successes, its ‘Ace’
accomplishments in differing contextual cadres. The most spectacular—
and most admired—’epic’ scenes recreate the Brighton beach riots during
the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend of 17–18 May 1964. The source
events can now be seen as a media-fuelled self-fulfilling prophecy, a media-
tion registered in Quadrophenia with the press photographer’s snapping
in front of Jimmy and Co. on the seafront providing the catalyst for their
tribal chant of ‘We are the Mods! We are the Mods!’ Thereafter, with
2000 extras available to Roddam, down the slope and onto the beach to
the west of the Palace Pier charged the Mods of 1978, while from the
opposite direction came a set of (less authentic) leather boys, and caught
in the middle police on horseback jostling and jumping over them.
Cinematographer Brian Tufano, with his instincts as a documentary cam-
eraman to the fore, placed himself amidst the flying stones and flying fists,
filming mostly from a height of three to six feet and capturing the aggro
‘on the hoof’. With its broad moves skilfully choreographed, the scene
successfully pulls the audience in—it frequently draws applause at screen-
ings—only then to push them away. On the film’s release, Roddam stated
that ‘If there’s any contemporary relevance in the film, it’s in the way it
tells young kids to be individuals and not to get carried away by group
behaviour […] Think for yourself, and don’t follow group ideas’ (Screen
International, 191, 26 May 1979, 10). This call to self-reliance is consid-
ered a strong component of the film’s enduring cult appeal: mirroring my
‘placing’ of the film in a Brighton lineage and providing a taxonomy for
the ‘tacky herbert’ Jimmy, Quadrophenia is a film about the search for defi-
nition, the strong attraction—and insidious danger—of ‘belonging’.
Jimmy’s teenage struggle for identity has, over time, become the film’s
predominant interpretation, but I would emphasise its equal exploration
of the quest for intensity, for proving life on the pulses, be it through sex,
drugs, rock’n’roll—or a good old punch up. When, after the seafront fra-
cas, Jimmy screams ‘On my life, I was there! I was there!’ it is the intensity
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of performance that invites the spectator to recall their personal ‘Brighton

beach memoir’. For Danny Peary this is the universal, or at least American,
entrée to the film: ‘Who doesn’t remember such a moment—the moment
in your life when both the top dog in your crowd and your ideal lover saw
you at your best, when you revealed your “true self”’ (Peary 1984, 134).
Jimmy’s sense of belonging and self-worth is tied not so much to his iden-
tity with a movement but to the intensity of a moment.
Jimmy thereafter screws it up: Quadrophenia remains in people’s affec-
tions finally because it is about ineptness, about human (rather than cine-
matic) failure. This ‘quality’ is embodied in the film’s casting which Alan
Fletcher, film consultant and author of the tie-in novelisation, thought
‘inspired’: ‘Peer pressure drove the Mod machine and Daniels didn’t look
quite Mod, just missing it’ (Catterall and Wells 2001, 149–50). The ful-
crum of Quadrophenia is an analysis of someone trying to keep up with his
subcultural peers and not succeeding. Jimmy fails in and is failed by the
four key relationships in his life: his family, his job, the girl and the group—
in short, a quadrophonic failing. For me, more than through its visceral
realisation of the violent group dynamic, it is Quadrophenia’s focus on the
uncertain individual that attains the apex of Mod movie achievement.
Andy Medhurst has attributed to Dirk Bogarde’s delivery of the ‘confes-
sion’ scene of Victim (Basil Dearden 1960) ‘the rare power of genuine
subversion in popular cinema’ (1996, 128): Daniels’ different perfor-
mance mode during the return to Brighton can stand up close for affective
comparison. Perfectly embodying the ‘he-man drag’ so ‘greyly outra-
geous’, announced by Roger Daltrey on the soundtrack, it is hard to locate
a misjudged stress as, with eyes wide open but opaque, inflections both
distant yet defiant, Jimmy (literally) attains a first-class ticket status. I have
always found an awkward grace in this emotional stasis, sandwiched
between two moments of vituperation, first when meeting his love Steph
walking along the street and then espying his hero Ace Face (Sting) work-
ing at the hotel. Indeed, from the demise of his own scooter through to
the cliff-face casting off of Ace Face’s now vacuous Vespa, Daniels’ Mod
method unerringly conveys the internal conflict in its myriad evasions and
betrayals, from agonised inarticulacy through to foul-mouthed releases of
tension, from ‘You slag! You cunt!’ to the nadir of ‘Bell-boy! Bell-boy!’
This bleak breakdown is not a common cinematic conclusion, yet Jimmy’s
unresolved internal struggle undoubtedly contributes to Quadrophenia’s
attraction for those in thrall to or recalling teenage turmoil. Not finding
one’s place, not quite being part of the pack, is a key aspect of the film’s
emotional honesty, and ultimately Quadrophenia endures because, as
Roddam later noted, ‘it lets young people off the hook. They don’t have
to be great. You’re allowed to fail’ (Cast & Crew: Quadrophenia, BBC4,
22 March 2005). An acceptance of failure: this message, cutting through
any cinematic or subcultural provenance, is arguably what makes
Quadrophenia, in the final analysis, so British a subcultural investigation.
Mise-en-scène and music skilfully support this consummate collapse.
Sitting in the seafront café, drugged up, depressed yet still striving to recap-
ture happier days, the city and its iconic pier are visible in front of him on
the window panes. The composition here adroitly illustrates Jimmy’s dimin-
ished sense of reality and how the ‘solid’ Brighton, when the gang were
united, has long departed. It is, in both visual and mental senses of the term,
a reflection. Throughout Quadrophenia music’s importance to the identity
of young working-class people is explored, but, unlike tie-in fare such as
Dateline Diamonds or Be My Guest, there are no ‘star’-performed musical
numbers. Fulfilling Townshend’s brief, the Who’s quasi-contemporary
music, notably ‘My Generation’, features only in diegetic snatches at various
parties, coffee bars, dancehalls and bedrooms, but still successfully offers an
evocation of the period and an index of the depth of fan allegiance. The later
rock-inflected album music also functions, especially in the film’s last third,
as a non-diegetic discourse, its ‘melodramatic’ employment ‘siphoning off’
Jimmy’s increasingly fragile emotional states. For instance, when ejected
from the Brighton dancehall, Jimmy spends the night on the beach, staring
out at the pounding waves: with a long-shot dwarfing him against both pier
and shoreline, visually the scene all but erases the insignificant human pres-
ence; instead the music, the instrumental section from ‘Love Reign O’er
Me’ with lead guitar and synthesiser, foregrounds Jimmy’s brooding psyche.
Such a combination of terrifying cosmic indifference and teenage
experiential angst has made Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray 1955)
the obvious, even obligatory point of comparison for Quadrophenia.
But the tensions of social class were absent for Jim Stark and his bour-
geois college colleagues, whilst in Quadrophenia ‘the British working-
class patois was so extreme it was almost the point of a lot of the dialogue’
(Robert Sandall 2006). It also points to a more indigenous and inform-
ing genealogy as, alongside Linda et al.—and especially Bronco Bullfrog
whose New Wave aesthetic, numerous plot turns, images such as the
girlfriend riding pillion, and even snippets of dialogue (‘bit flash,
innee?’) all echo Roddam’s later treatment—Jimmy’s return to Brighton,
cinematically accomplished in its own right, has an extra enhancing reso-
nance with the 1964 of Richard Lester’s seminal A Hard Day’s Night.
Firstly, throwing his possessions out of the train corridor window wins
84 S. GLYNN
Jimmy the admiring glances of two schoolgirls, much as the Beatles’ play-
acting had drawn the attention of Patty Boyd and classmates. Then, as well
as referencing a photo from the Quadrophenia album’s artwork, Jimmy’s
attitude as he sits on the 5.15 between two bowler-hatted commuters
silently encapsulates the class warfare previously articulated between the
obstreperous plum-voiced commuter—’I fought the war for your sort’—
and Ringo Starr, who sarcastically retorts: ‘bet you’re sorry you won!’
This key generational divide was repeated in the film’s critical recep-
tion. The younger generation were thrilled: for Richard Barkley ‘the film
is a magnificent achievement in current British cinema, shatteringly honest
in intent and stunningly photographed’ (Sunday Express, 19 August
1979), while Nigel Andrews praised ‘one of the most exultantly offbeat
British films I can remember’ with its Beachy Head finale ‘as mad, memo-
rable and modernistic as any sequence in recent British film history’
(Financial Times, 17 August 1979). This positivity was not shared by
Felix Barker, who fifteen years earlier had been swept up by the ‘teenage
enthusiasm’, ‘charm’ and ‘innocence’ of the Beatles’ first feature (Evening
News, 9 July 1964): now, deeply disturbed by Roddam’s brutal depiction
of the Fab Four’s supposed contemporaries, he wrote that ‘Just about
everything I dislike is to be found in Quadrophenia. The music is so loud
and raucous that there should be a free issue of ear-plugs with every ticket.
The film reeks with mindless violence’ (Evening News, 16 August 1979).
Similarly, Films and Filming’s end of year honours list (best film Terrence
Malick’s Days of Heaven) awarded Quadrophenia the accolade of ‘most
distasteful film of the year’ (January 1980, 29). Nonetheless Quadrophenia
was a commercial successful at the UK box office. It swiftly established
itself as the definitive cinematic treatment of the Mod subculture, reigning
supreme as its cult film reputation grew; its Mod revival re-release in 1997
earned favourable comparisons with the recent Trainspotting (Danny
Boyle 1996) and critical encomia typified by Charlotte O’Sullivan for
whom ‘this is one of the best portraits we have of this frustrated little
island. Too honest to be upbeat, too exciting to be bleak, even second
time round it’s unmissable’ (Time Out, 29 January 1997).
At the time of writing, rumours of an unauthorised present-day-set
sequel, to be directed by Ray Burdis with Daniels and Toyah Willcox on
board, are prompting pre-emptive press outrage—’Like Jimmy’s scooter,
the original film’s legacy risks being pushed off a clifftop’ bemoaned James
Hall (Telegraph, 10 June 2016). Still, however long it takes, subcultural
leaders are inevitably challenged: the dynamic is discernible in Quadrophenia
itself as young pretender Dave (Mark Wingett) locks horns with ‘Face’
elder Pete (Garry Cooper), shooting menacing looks and getting up too
close for comfort before finally, down at Brighton, moving in on ‘Pete’s
girl’, Steph. Quadrophenia held unopposed dominion for 22 years before
a south coast cinematic challenger emerged, via another Mod updating.1
Brighton Rock (4 February 2011) is the only British first feature, after
Quadrophenia, to portray the Mod subculture. Here, though, from the
outset lay a greater anxiety of influence. Graham Greene’s 1938 source
noir novel of fear and sin is considered, even by Greene, as the work that
marked his emergence as a ‘catholic writer’ (Greene 1980, 74). Exploring
the subculture of interwar racecourse gangs and their protection racke-
teering, its first film realisation, directed in 1947 by John Boulting and
with 24-year-old Richard Attenborough giving a coruscating performance
as the chilling teenage hoodlum Pinkie Brown, has become sufficiently
revered to be voted number 15 in the BFI’s 1999 poll for the ‘Greatest
British Film of the Century’ and has drawn plentiful academic exegesis,
including a dedicated monograph (Chibnall 2005). Several attempts to
re-film the novel came and went—interested parties reputedly included
Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick and the Hughes Brothers—until Studio
Canal, determined to maximise its back catalogue, eventually entrusted
the £8 million reworking to feature film debutant, 36-year-old television
director Rowan Joffe, fresh from his award-winning docudrama The
Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (Channel 4, 13 October 2008). Writer-
director Joffe, briefed not to do a straight remake of either the book or
the Boulting version, but conscious that a contemporary version would
reduce character credibility, decided to update the story to the seaside
battles of Mods and Rockers in 1964, arguing that Britain ‘still had some
of the same kind of innocence it had in the 40s and 50s, but was by then
forward- looking enough—with stuff like mods and the music of the
time—to suggest that, in a film investor’s mind, the current audience
would see something modern about it’ (‘Mod Man Out’, Sight and
Sound, 20, 12, December 2010, 42). Significantly for the film’s plot moti-
vations, 1964 was also the last year where the death penalty was still in use
for murder, while Joffe, who wrote a foreword to the 2011 tie-in rerelease
of the novel, also saw a wider resonance in the warring subcultures as
symbolic of Britain’s new fear and hatred of the young who ‘raise a chal-
lenging flick knife to the old pre-war order’. Largely shot in neighbouring
Eastbourne since Brighton was now too gentrified to serve, and with a
cast of A-list British acting talent, Joffe’s reworking sees Pinkie vengefully
murder Fred Hale (Sean Harris), the killer of his gang boss, and thus suc-
ceed to the position of leader. However, an incriminating snap by a seaside
86 S. GLYNN
photographer leads Pinkie first to seduce timid waitress Rose Wilson

(Andrea Riseborough) in order to secure and destroy the offending
photo, and then to propose marriage so that Rose, like Pinkie a ‘Roman’,
will be unable to give evidence in any prospective murder trial.
Brighton Rock invites a double comparison for its source and setting.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, Joffe’s plot changes work to tighten up on
Greene’s originals, adding a greater plausibility to events and pulling the
various relationships into a closer orbit. Having Pinkie track down the
photograph that shows his accomplice Spicer harassing Hale, rather than
seek a circumstantial time-coded press card, adds a more acute urgency to
his pursuit of Rose, while making Hale a rival gangster boss, rather than
the prize-dispensing newspaperman ‘Kolley Kibber’, provides Pinkie with
an accelerated rites-of-passage from ‘runner’ to mob leader. The avenging
Ida Arnold (Helen Mirren) is not here a chance pub encounter but Hale’s
former lover and owner of the silver-service tea-room where Rose works, a
transformation readable less as excessive coincidence than a credible depic-
tion of Brighton’s claustrophobic demi-monde where all actions have swift
and localised repercussions. The plot’s final third shifts clumsily, however,
increasingly over-powered by Martin Phipps’ intrusive score until all col-
lapses at the denouement. Despite Joffe’s protestations to the contrary, his
film draws less on Greene’s novel than the 1947 screenplay, rewritten by
Greene after he rejected the version presented by Terence Rattigan: this
cinematic influence is exposed in replicating the infamous finale where the
screenplay softened the novel and spared Rose ‘the worst horror of all’ by
having Pinkie’s pier-booth recording (‘You want me to say I love you—but
I hate you!’) stick on the record player and repeat ‘I love you—I love you’.
Joffe repeats Boulting’s every move in a mawkishly melodramatic, indeed
‘miraculous’ conclusion, including the tilt up to a crucifix and the swelling
angelic choir on the soundtrack. It is a cinematic (if not human) failing.
The deficiencies of this Brighton Rock become clearer, however, when
Joffe stands up too close to Roddam. There is certainly a firmer attention
to period detail, the squalid tenement blocks and Pinkie’s stygian basement-
lodgings authentically redolent of enduring post-war austerity, but while
Mods, Rockers and the Brighton riots were central to Jimmy and
Quadrophenia, subcultures are here contingent. This is narratively evident
in a scene of (successfully realised) humour when Pinkie, having stolen a
scooter as a getaway vehicle, finds himself inadvertently leading a Mod
procession across the seafront. His pillion passenger, Spicer, is played by
Phil Davis, whose previous casting as Jimmy’s associate Chalky adds a minor
Mod movie intertextuality, while Andy Serkis provides a mood-lightening
cameo as gangland bigwig Colleoni, stirring his coffee with effete ennui as
he pronounces on ‘restless youth: the ravaged and disrupted territory
between two eternities!’. The principal Mod casting, however, crucially
lacks Daniels’ intensity of performance, unwittingly missing not just the
look—Sam Riley may offer a more brooding Pinkie than Attenborough,
but at 30 years of age he cannot begin to pass for a 17-year-old psycho-
path—but also the sound, Andrew Lowry decrying ‘a stage-school “fug”
accent, breathy like the Italia Conti types trying to sound tough on
EastEnders’ (Total Film, February 2011). The characterisation of Rose
rings equally false. Subcultural accounts of youth have long been accused
of displaying an imbalance in gender divisions: by focusing on mainly work-
ing-class but overwhelmingly male subjects, ‘women and the whole ques-
tion of sexual division have been marginalized’ (McRobbie 1980, 37). This
is evidenced in the paucity of recognition of distinct female subcultures,
but also in the failure fully to acknowledge female participation in a given
subculture. This is not entirely true of Quadrophenia. When the boys all
dash off from the Goldhawk Club to avenge a Rocker attack on one of their
own, the girls are more than happy to stay behind and dance together to
the Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’: it is a brief scene but one foregrounding
female Mod fashion and fun. Extrapolating from this, Steph and fellow
Mod Monkey (Willcox) may not (yet) be strongly autonomous ‘new’
women, but the film portrays them very much in charge of their sexual
activity. Steph in particular exercises agency over her desire: sexually liber-
ated, she moves from man to man, uninterested in developing a stable
relationship: Jimmy, by contrast, seems the pining romantic. Brighton Rock
offers no such shifting sexual landscape: a woman as unworldly as Rose
could, perhaps, have been found on the south coast in 1938, but the updat-
ing leaves her a socio-sexual anachronism—even her purchase of a mini
dress to impress Pinkie is painfully subservient—while the couple’s one-
way romance remains stubbornly unconvincing, especially Rose’s soul-
damning devotion to a Pinkie so lacking in either menace or charisma.
And then there is the Brighton beach fight. Joffe’s version serves as a plau-
sible spectacle of disorder that Pinkie and his enemies can use as a cover for
their own violence, notably the attack on ‘milky’ want-out Spicer. Principally,
though, the riots provide at best a hinterland to the film’s wider theme of the
futility of violence, and at worst another hard-nosed commercial exploitation
of Mod mores. And despite a promising prequel with pounding elemental
waves, cinematographer John Mathieson’s muted palette and Phipps’ incon-
gruous scoring exacerbate the fight scenes’ stilted, dislocated character, sorely
lacking the visceral, vital energy provided by Quadrophenia which entered
88 S. GLYNN
the fray and pulled the audience in with it. Ultimately, though, the very
presence of the warring Mod and Rocker subcultures problematises the film,
blurring its narrative focus: if the racecourse gangs cede the spotlight to these
later youth movements, it creates a confusing anti-climax that Pinkie et Co.
remain discrete members of their own secondary collectives; indeed, down-
playing the turf wars for a beach riot setting removes much of their intrinsic
and internecine dramatic effect—here they play away, and lose.
Brighton Rock also failed to win large audience figures or critical plaudits.
Simon Heffer fulminated without even seeing the film—the online trailer
was enough for him to label it ‘a farrago’ and ‘a masterpiece refashioned as
a turkey’ (Telegraph, 23 January 2011). Curmudgeonly perhaps, but all gen-
erations and journals felt a false move. Riley’s performance was panned
(often for not being Attenborough) while the repeat ending (in all senses)
was pilloried: for Philip Kemp ‘It’s a major miscalculation’ that ‘finally sinks
Joffe’s movie’ (Sight and Sound, 21, 2, February 2011, 51). The Mod-
ernisation, though, was most roundly condemned: for Tim Robey ‘Sadly,
the justifications for this, beyond indulging tacked-on Quadrophenia
sequences of mods on mopeds, prove as shallow as puddles under the pier’
(Telegraph, 3 February 2011), David Noh found the update ‘needless’ and
‘emblematic of the entire enterprise’s wrongheaded bloat’ (Film Journal
International, August 2011), while David Thomson thought the rioting ‘a
foolish moment, and it has nothing at all to do with the new film—but this
film is too full of things that have too little point or impact’ (New Republic,
30 August 2011).
Such a critique could never be applied to Quadrophenia, which, fight-
ing off all ‘Ticket’ pretenders, remains the ‘Face’ of Mod movies, the
definitive cinematic treatment of an enduring British subculture and its
defining moral panic-inducing moment. To quote Jimmy: I mean, that’s
something, innit?
Notes
1. The Mod revival and release of Quadrophenia occasioned gentler and sporadic
Mod movements overseas, notably amongst art students in Southern
California as evidenced by the US independent features We Are the Mods
(E.E. Cassidy 2009) and Young Birds Fly (Leonardo Flores 2011), neither of
which has (yet) exhibited beyond the festival circuit. For the sake of complete-
ness, mention honourable or otherwise must be made of Exhumed (Brian
Clement 2003) which transposes the Mods vs. Rockers battle to a post-apoc-
alyptic world where Vampires ride Vespas and werewolves are leathered-up
bikers, and DreamWorks’ Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (Eric Darnell,

Tom McGrath and Conrad Vernon 2012) where the (villainous) animal con-
trol gang drive Mod-style scooters around the streets of Monaco.
References
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Filmography
A Hard Day’s Night (Dir. Richard Lester, 1964).
Be My Guest (Dir. Lance Comfort, 1965).
Brighton Rock (Dir. John Boulting, 1947).
Brighton Rock (Dir. Rowan Joffe, 2011).
Bronco Bullfrog (Dir. Barney Platts-Mills, 1970).
Dateline Diamonds (Dir. Jeremy Summers, 1966).
Doctor in Clover (Dir. Ralph Thomas, 1966).
Dummy (Dir. Franc Roddam, 1977).
Exhumed (Dir. Brian Clement, 2003).
Linda (Dir. Don Sharp, 1960).
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (Dir. Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath and
Conrad Vernon, 2012).
Made (Dir. John Mackenzie, 1972).
Mods and Rockers (Dir. Kenneth Hume, 1965).
Oh You Pretty Things: The Story of British Music and Fashion (Dir: Matt Hill, 2014).
Primitive London (Dir. Arnold Miller, 1965).
Quadrophenia (Dir. Franc Roddam, 1979).
Rebel Without A Cause (Dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955).
Roustabout (Dir. John Rich, 1964).
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Dir. Tony Richardson, 1960).
Saturday Night Fever (Dir. John Badham, 1977).
Smokescreen (Dir. Jim O’Connolly).
Steppin’ Out (Dir. Lyndall Hobbs, 1979).
Swinging UK (Dir. Frank Gilpin, 1964).
The Intelligence Men (Dir. Robert Asher, 1965).
The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (Dir. Rowan Joffe 2008).
Tommy (Dir. Ken Russell, 1975).
Trainspotting (Dir. Danny Boyle, 1996).
UK Swings Again (Dir. Frank Gilpin, 1964).
Victim (Dir. Basil Dearden, 1960).
We Are the Mods (Dir. E.E. Cassidy, 2009).
Young Birds Fly (Dir. Leonardo Flores, 2011).
The Narrative Nightclub
Matthew Cheeseman and David Forrest
Introduction
This chapter brings together expertise in film and cultural studies to anal-
yse representations of nightclub dancefloors in British films from the
1990s onwards: Human Traffic (Justin Kerrigan, 1999), Sorted (Alexander
Jovy, 2000), Soul Boy (Shimmy Marcus, 2010), Everywhere and Nowhere
(Menhaj Huda, 2011) and Northern Soul (Elaine Constantine, 2014). We
use these films to identify persistent visual iconographies and accompany-
ing ideological underpinnings within the British dancefloor film. To
understand what these films do not do, we also look by way of contrast to
a film from France, Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014). Our approach links
academic writing on dance music and nightclub cultures with analysis of
filmic texts, and in doing so the chapter captures a sense of the wider
discourse surrounding nightclubs and especially the dancefloors that often
form their focus, on- and off-screen.
M. Cheeseman (*)
University of Derby, Derby, UK
D. Forrest
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

92 M. CHEESEMAN AND D. FORREST
We propose that British film tends to use the dancefloor as a narrative

device that occludes or disturbs notions of youth culture, turning it into a
problem to be solved. For example, Sorted can be read as an attempt to
purify club culture and strip it of deviancy whilst Everywhere and Nowhere
is a search for a sublime state of identity work where the DJ as artist unifies
a dissonant post-subcultural identity. In their positioning of the dance-
floor as a problem to be solved, these films have much in common with
the British social problem film in that they perpetuate conservative repre-
sentations of youth cultures. In this post-war cycle (running between
1947 and 1963) youth culture was repeatedly equated with the notion of
threat to an established social (and by extension) narrative order, with an
underpinning ‘concern with regulation’ uniting the films (Hill 1986,
124). Race, sexuality, music and emerging subcultures were developed as
themes that injected a veneer of radicalism, realism and relevance into an
apparently staid and conservative film industry. The films of Basil Dearden,
J. Lee Thompson and others have much to tell us about how British cin-
ema continues to represent and indeed use youth and culture to enable
narrowly focused narratives which support rather than destabilise domi-
nant ideological positions. We turn here to John Hill’s (1986, 125) semi-
nal analysis of the social problem film:
these films, for all their raising of problems, ended up confirming, rather
than querying, a consensual view of the world. This was the result not only
of what they did, or rather didn’t, show, but of how such problems were
then used to reconfirm a particular set of attitudes and assumptions. Images
of teenage sex and violence, for example, not only functioned as indices of
the ‘problem’ but also helped clarify the ‘correct’ standards of behaviour by
which they were to be understood and judged.
This group of films, with their attendant dancefloors, all relate to early
twentieth-century, pre-Chicago-school theories of deviancy, specifically
ones that view deviant behaviour as resulting from deviant psychology.
These films are often unsympathetic to the idea of subculture—
uncomprehending that young people are engaged in a social group with
its own norms and networks in opposition to mainstream society. While
we are not suggesting that the representation of sex, violence or the con-
sumption of drugs in the club culture films of the 1990s and 2000s is
explicitly connected to a conservative moral order, it is, we propose that
deviant lifestyles and tendencies are similarly housed within narrative sys-
tems which emphasise order and restoration.
THE NARRATIVE NIGHTCLUB 93
While this remains a common narrative device, further readings from

the scholarship on youth culture and subculture are also apparent and
relevant. We will briefly describe their scope here, beginning with the writ-
ers associated with the Birmingham CCCS (Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies), who largely viewed subculture as emerging from
working-class youth who focused on style to develop resistant and antago-
nistic cultures positioned against a mainstream culture. In the face of
weakened class consciousness, such subcultures posited style as proxies for
resistance against the system (see Cohen 1997; Hebdige 1979). One
might expect such a dynamic to feature in club culture films. In our analy-
sis, however, it typically manifests as a surface reading, in that the dance-
floor is initially depicted as a communal, resistant space before being
revealed as a deviant space. This trope turns the dancefloor into a narrative
problem to be solved by the film’s protagonist.
While we maintain that dancefloors are always presented as problems in
British film, they are not always resistant or deviant to a wider society. They
are sometimes problems in and of themselves: a stage on which the pro-
tagonist solves conflicting and opposing forces. We relate this to post-
subcultural theory, which is understood as the mobilisation of Bourdieu’s
(1984) framing of distinction in relation to subculture in conditions of
postmodernity. Subcultures are no longer seen as resistant but as a smorgas-
bord of styles and identities that can be fluidly borrowed from at will. Sarah
Thornton (1995) writes in such a fashion about club culture, following
Redhead (1993) in suggesting that subcultures are not necessarily resistant
but elastic and porous. The individual’s role in choosing, selecting and
constructing their own style is thus emphasized (Muggleton 2000). This
befits an age where consumer lifestyles have (allegedly) greater importance
in establishing youth identity than subcultural affirmation (Miles 2000).
We recognise, then, that the debates in studies of subculture—between
class and the individual, between ordinary life and spectacular style, wors-
ened economic conditions and choice—are ongoing (Shildrick and
MacDonald 2007) and note that there has been a recent (and persuasive)
attempt at synthesis (Hodkinson 2016, 636) which argues for
pursuing, drawing together and integrating two angles of study, one focused
on how individuals negotiate with, draw from and position themselves in
relation to different groups and the other centred on how particular groups
work and the ways their operation provides structure and direction to the
lives, orientations and identities of participants.
It is further noted, for our purposes, that many of the writers involved
in this debate are British. Similarly, these debates are present in the British
films we examine, although they may arrive at different solutions. As the
nightclub plots of the protagonist frequently deal with familial obligation
and social deprivation, issues of transition and social class (and its denial)
are often present. As we shall also demonstrate, the individual mastering
the dancefloor is often used to highlight post-subcultural issues of choice
and stylistic performance. Sometimes, however, these do take into account
negotiation between different groups, as per Hodkinson’s call. We thus
use the narrative space of the nightclub to poke at perennial questions
concerning youth culture, seeking to depict and interrogate the position
of British cinema’s own exploration of youth culture.
While there has been much academic work on club culture, there has
been relatively little written on the films depicting it. There is one mono-
graph, by Stan Beeler (2007), Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in
Literature, Film and Television Since the Late 1980s. This depicts club cul-
ture as following a passage from subcultural to popular culture, which sees
it ‘become more apparent to the public eye’ and in so doing ‘develop[ing]
an academic and literary superstructure’ (11), that includes films. Some of
these ‘club fictions’ are aimed at preserving the subcultural ‘origins of the
movement’ whilst others present the club and the dancefloor as non-
oppositional, part of ‘the established cultural industry’ (13). Beeler claims
there are several elements essential to club fiction: dance music and venues,
drugs and an attempt to ‘escape to a better world’ (in a combination of
hedonism and futurism) (13). In terms of culture, club fictions function to
‘describe the subculture to the mainstream’ and ‘to allow the members of
the subculture to celebrate their participation in ways other than clubbing’
(25). One might note that such a description positions these films as inter-
mediaries, attempting to satisfy a range of viewers. There is thus a high
degree of intertextuality between the dancefloor and the texts that inform,
circulate and comment on it, all of which are part of a larger discourse
about youth, style and identity (Morrison 2014). Our discussion of film is
intended to explore this intertextual territory, sketching out its p ossible
extent, in a manner approaching Nathaniel Weiner’s (2015) comparable
discussion of 1970s social realist films and their relation to subcultural
thinking from Birmingham’s CCCS. Weiner concludes that these films do
‘reflect discourses at work among British radicals and filmmakers during
the 1970s and 1980s … who saw youth subcultures as a radical response
to an experience of oppression shaped by age, class and race’ (17).
In club culture films, the dancefloor has a communal and to some

extent utopian iconography. Despite this, it is nearly always evoked as
backdrop to facilitate the development of goal-oriented, classically config-
ured narratives that emphasise personal agency and suppress the open-
ended, non-restrictive possibilities of youth culture as a resistant collective.
This move towards order is predicated on the privileging of the individual
protagonist’s narrative at the expense of a possible exploration of the
dancefloor as enabling a more progressive sense of narrative dispersal. The
dancefloor then, while appearing as a space for the flowering of communal
identity, represents both a spatial and structural entity to be mastered or
overcome in pursuit of conservative structures of goal completion. We
would like to suggest that this is a convention for British film. That is not
to say that film does not entertain notions of youth culture, but rather that
the use of the dancefloor as a narrative device occludes or disturbs these
notions, turning, in each film, the notion of subculture (post- or other-
wise) into a problem to be solved. So, the area we explore in our case
studies is the peculiar tension between the dancefloor as a space that con-
sistently individuates various films, despite those films holding variegated
attitudes and beliefs towards subculture.
Our analysis suggests that the cinematic dancefloor remains an inher-
ently conservative space due to its construction within rigid and inexpres-
sive narrative and ideological parameters. Other critics have, however,
adopted more complimentary perspectives. Like us, Simon Morrison,
acknowledges the well-trodden ‘discursive traits’ of what he terms the
Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) film, with its ‘parabolic story-
line arc’ that ‘maps the genesis, zenith and the nadir of the narrative: the
anticipation […] the actuality […] the aftermath that orientates us through
the story of the film’ (2011, 54). For Morrison, despite its formulaic
nature, this structure does appropriately reflect the ‘journey of a night-
out: going out […] coming up […] coming down. Indeed, it is the story
of club culture itself’ (54). Morrison is right that the dancefloor film has
the capacity to evoke the visceral ambience of the club space, and that such
experiences, do indeed, resemble something of a narrative journey with
distinct phases and points of conclusion. There is not necessarily a mutual
exclusivity between linear storytelling and the evocation of the narrative
nightclub.
Andrea Rinke is similarly positive in her approach to such texts,
specifically Justin Kerrigan’s 1999 film Human Traffic. She praises the
apparent absence of a moralising structure, the film’s refusal to discipline
its protagonists’ transgression and its ‘carnivalesque celebration of youth-

ful deviance’ (2015, 38). Rinke’s argument also centres on the disruptive
self-aware narration as further evidence for the strength of the film’s
‘polemic against the condemnatory master discourse about recreational
drugs’ (40). Certainly, Kerrigan’s approach to his subjects—a group of
twenty-somethings who the film follows over a weekend of clubbing—is
sympathetic, and Rinke is right that the ‘film does not problematize the
taking of dance drugs by young clubbers’ (43). In this sense, Human
Traffic is not a ‘social problem film’ and as Rinke would argue, its dispersal
of narrative focus across its ensemble, resists reductive, instrumental con-
clusions. However, as ever we must look to the ending to better under-
stand the film’s ideological enterprise. An alternative reading of Human
Traffic might suggest that despite its non-judgemental evocation of a uto-
pian dancefloor community, these elements are ultimately superficial
authenticators of the deeply conservative and goal-oriented emphasis on
the protagonist’s Jip’s (John Simm) battle to overcome his impotence and
consummate his relationship with the object of his desire, Lulu (Lorraine
Pilkington). The film finishes with a crane shot as the two kiss and embrace.
Although the deployment of such a cliché could well be seen as part of the
film’s ironic, self-aware register, the apparent need for Human Traffic to
be anchored by the journey towards heterosexual romantic union reveals
once more the limited project of the dancefloor film.
The relationship between genre and subcultural theme is central to our
understanding of the ways in which the cinema might seek to represent
the individual and the dancefloor. As mentioned, Nathaniel Weiner’s work
on British cinema’s relationship with subcultural representation is particu-
larly useful here. Weiner’s argument, that films such as Pressure (Horace
Ové, 1975), Bloody Kids (Stephen Frears, 1980), Babylon (Franco Rosso,
1980) and Made in Britain (Alan Clarke, 1983) reflect the approaches,
concerns and sensitivities of the research undertaken by the CCCS,
identifies a more resistant and progressive subcultural impulse within
British film history. In his discussion of Babylon, a film about soundsystem
culture in South London, Weiner indicates how the film ‘celebrates the
independence and vitality of the London reggae scene, echoing the
CCCS’ interest in the politics of style and its analysis of reggae as “cultural
resistance”’ (2015, 11). His case studies all have in common looser, more
non-prescriptive narrative structures than the nightclub films we discuss.
For example, Babylon concludes with ‘Blue’ (Brinsley Forde) defiantly
MCing at a party as the police break down the doors, and the viewer’s
need for closure is overwhelmed by the vitality of the performance; and

Ové’s Pressure oscillates between a vivid documentary realist style and a
more poetic and expressionistic examination of the dream state of its trou-
bled protagonist as he confronts institutional racism and moves towards a
position of political radicalism at the film’s conclusion. The films are capa-
ble of such nuance because they are unencumbered by the narrative doc-
trine of social problem that would define the dancefloor film of the 1990s
and 2000s.
In Alexander Jov’s Sorted, made in 2000, Matthew Rhys plays Carl, a
provincial lawyer who comes down to London to investigate his brother’s
death. Carl’s brother, it is soon revealed, was an active member of a com-
munity of clubbers. The film tracks Carl’s flirtation with the subcultural
pleasures of the dance and drug scene; it subjectifies (and to some extent
celebrates) his first experience of the drug ecstasy; it celebrates the kinship
of the dancefloor and the intensity of the group friendships it accommo-
dates; and it attempts to posit the alternative lifestyle of the clubber against
normative narratives of everyday life. The film is thus very sympathetic to
a classic view of club culture, as a contingent, consistent group united by
strong group bonds and a regular consumption of club styles and music.
It follows the classic initiation of a neophyte, descending into a clubworld
that is depicted as subterranean, existing in a transcultural London under-
world, where, nevertheless, the dancefloor provides glimpses of redemp-
tion. A group of clubbers offer friendship and support to the neophyte,
literally styling him in the clothes and footwear of the underground.
These elements are, however, marginalised in favour of the central
emphasis on Carl’s journey: that of the naïve but virtuous northerner,
dispatched to the exotic and dangerous capital in his search for truth,
revenge and the restoration of moral order. His subcultural exploration is
necessary to reveal the antagonist, the evil figure to his good, the spatial
overlord of the dancefloor, Tim Curry’s devilish Damian, a fantastical
drug dealer. Carl orchestrates a clubbers’ uprising against the drug lord
who owns and oversees the very nightclubs they dance in. Thus evil is
purged from the dancefloor by the outsider. The film concludes with Carl
overseeing Damian’s death, avenging his brother and happily consolidat-
ing his relationship with Sunny (Sienna Guillory), his brother’s ex-
girlfriend, and tellingly the only one of his brother’s associates who exists
outside of the narrow confines of the dancefloor narrative—the clubbers
are seen in the end titles, as afterthoughts.
The protagonist kills the drug lord poisoning the subculture, thus
achieving not only narrative cohesion and completion in terms of aveng-
ing his brother, but also purging the drug dealer from the nightclub: a
strange plot for a film that also extols the mind-bending, group-enhancing
joys of ecstasy. Thus Sorted represents an updated social problem film in a
way that is typical for the club culture films: (1) drugs, hedonism and uto-
pian possibilities do not exist without the criminal; (2) the dancefloor itself
is indeed a criminal space; (3) pleasure cannot exist without the presence
of evil; (4) the club or the party is a narrative obstacle that must be over-
come by the virtuous outsider; (5) the dancefloor becomes an authenticat-
ing device to veil an inherently simplistic binary. In subcultural terms
Sorted is concerned with deviancy, in a fashion reminiscent of the post-war
social problem films, but with a different goal: an attempt to purify club
culture itself. It is thus sympathetic to the idea of subculture (and sympa-
thetic to the idea of subculture as resistance) but cannot help but also
frame subculture as a problem to be solved, largely due to the way the
dancefloor is positioned as an obstacle.
Menhaj Huda’s Everywhere and Nowhere, made in 2011, is a more
acute representation of the dancefloor to perpetuate and promote indi-
vidual agency. Here, rather than overcome the dancefloor, the protago-
nist, wannabe DJ Ash (James Floyd), must master and control it in order
to succeed in completing his linear coming-of-age narrative. He is torn
between his love for DJing (and apparently production, although like
many dancefloor films no distinction is made between the two), and his
conservative first-generation Pakistani father’s desire to see him take on
the family business. Of course, the DJing wins out, but this narrative com-
pletion does not endorse subcultural creative endeavour. Indeed, the odd
(and inauthentic) fusion of drum’n’bass and mass-market electro house
played by the senior DJ, Ronnie (Simon Webbe), emphasises that the pas-
sage to the DJ booth is not about music as much as it as about status—
musical authenticity and its inherent para-textual potential cannot be
allowed to distract from the protagonist’s quest.
Ash’s own productions are put forward as evidence of his uniqueness as
a creative force. They are fusions of Bollywood musical soundtracks, dub-
step, and amen breaks commonly associated with drum’n’bass, yet the
music merely serves as a narrative device to assert—in a heavy-handed
manner—Ash’s conflicted cultural identity, the film’s apparently utopian
conclusion confirms this: Ash’s triumphant appearance in a DJ booth sees
him return to the populist sanitised drum’n’bass of earlier scenes. Ash’s
central position within the narrative and his pursuit of the star status of DJ
is supported by a persistent emphasis on his difference in contrast to other,
less developed agents within the film. His character is predicated on a per-
vasive resistance towards communal possibilities. He is too intelligent and
too sexually attractive to find affinity with his cousin, who is enchanted by
radical Islam (seemingly because he cannot get a girlfriend); he is too seri-
ous to enjoy the pleasures of drug consumption and the pursuit of sex that
his other friends enjoy, and he is too moral to prescribe to the flawed and
hypocritical version of Islam represented by his father, who preaches fam-
ily values while maintaining a sexual relationship with a family friend.
These factors symbolically converge through the dancefloor that Ash must
master—a figurative distillation of the narrative obstacles that he must
overcome, spatially represented in the journey towards the booth to
become an artist.
Despite the similarity in individuating narrative, the film’s treatment of
club culture is completely different from Sorted. Much of this is due to the
eleven years that separate the films. By 2011, when Everywhere and
Nowhere was made, club culture is presented as synonymous with being
young. There is no underground journey here: whatever your ethnicity,
sexuality, religion, you must engage with the dancefloor. It is ubiquitous
and ordinary, the floor that youth friendship is necessarily enacted on.
Such ubiquity certainly reflects the structural and social changes that saw
club culture municipally reframed as the night-time economy, which regu-
lated and legitimated the idea of rave with that of the creative municipality
(Chatterton and Hollands 2003). Indeed, many of these changes were
already underway by the time Sorted was made in 2000, yet that film cer-
tainly depicts a club culture that was distinct and underground, capable of
being learnt and not already ambient, non-negotiable by youth.
Following Stan Beeler’s typology of club fiction, Sorted, thus, takes the
dual role of both explaining club culture to outsiders but celebrating it to
insiders. The distinction is lost by Everywhere and Nowhere, where there
are only distinctions in style, no initiations or discovery. The outsiders are
Ash’s immigrant parents and radical Islam. This is clearly expressed in the
dialogue:
‘Everyone is living a big fuck off lie’

‘That’s what we do, that’s what we have to do.’
In one way this could be interpreted as presenting a view of youth as a

generation, with only non-whites identifying with any concept of subcul-
ture, which in this case is fundamental Islam, positioned as an intensifica-

tion of his father’s patriarchal, restrictive attitudes. The dancefloor is the
true reality that must be mastered, that cannot be ignored. When Ash’s
father is revealed to be corrupt, the world of family, ethnicity and wealth
can be shunned, and Ash can finally be open about the fundamental ubiq-
uity of the dancefloor. He has conquered an overbearing father and can
journey to the DJ booth as its master.
Ash has journeyed from being a club culture participant with multiple
and conflicting identities, to a master, in charge of a coherent identity at
the centre of youth culture. He has been true to his self and true to the DJ
booth, which represents his perfect individuality amongst a crowd of indi-
viduals, fluid only in the styles of music they consume. Thus, the dance-
floor posits a purification that solves a problem: post-subculturalism
stripped of interfering family, ethnic and religious obligations (turning
away from the position Hodkinson argues for and towards the classic post-
subcultural analysis of Muggleton 2000). Ash is free to immerse himself in
the post-production art of the DJ, mixing styles without consequence,
and has thus achieved mastery of a generation of individuals united by the
consumption of club culture.
In recent years the generic concerns of ‘club fiction’ have been enacted
in British films interested in other dance subcultures, namely Northern
Soul. 2010s Soul Boy, directed by Shimmy Marcus, feels strikingly familiar.
A young, naïve protagonist enters the dancefloor space and his life is trans-
formed by an immersion into the ‘scene’; drugs and crime threaten to
derail the euphoria, but the resolution of a ‘love triangle’ and, in the case
of Soul Boy, success for the protagonist in a climactic ‘dance off’ offer
redemption and closure. The film’s eye for period detail, with its authentic
soundtrack and recreation of the iconic Wigan Casino, is mere decoration
for the delivery of a tried and tested structural formula.
Elaine Constantine’s Northern Soul released some four years after Soul
Boy, however, promised something more. Constantine was and still is an
avid attendee at Northern Soul all-nighters; as a photographer she had
documented the scene in its heyday; and she drew on her own experiences
to ensure authentic locations: ‘I knew to do it justice I had to shoot up
north’ (Scullard 2014). A radical social media and online strategy also
helped build the sense of ‘authenticity’ around the film. The long process
of Northern Soul’s production (it took years to raise finance) had the effect
of generating publicity and the film’s Facebook page swelled to 50,000
followers before it was even released. The page was used to recruit extras
for the dance scenes and to solicit photo submissions and stories for
Constantine’s accompanying book Northern Soul: An Illustrated History
(with Gareth Sweeney). The page was also critical in enabling distribution
as fans lobbied their local cinemas to show the film via initiatives such as
‘Ourscreen’ which ‘empowers film fans and local communities to create
and attend screenings at their local cinema’, and screenings were hosted in
club settings alongside DJ sets and exhibitions across the country
(Anonymous 2016). The participatory nature of Northern Soul’s audience
development, and its mining of collective (sub)cultural capital, appeared
to enable a penetration of the diegetic boundary between the passive audi-
ence and the imagined narrative dancefloor. We remember watching the
film at The Showroom cinema in Sheffield on the day it was released. The
theatre was packed full of Northern Soul fans. They sang at the screen, a
few even danced. This was certainly, in Beeler’s terms, a film made (and
marketed) to celebrate the scene to insiders.
This sense of euphoria, however, was curtailed by the collective realisa-
tion of the film’s fundamental limitations. Constantine’s background in
photography is evident in the claustrophobic compositions, the interplays
between light and dark and the granular evocation of the 1970s. The film
is thus more stylistically impressive than Soul Boy, yet its style cannot
excuse its rigid storytelling. In a fictional Northern town, John (Elliot
James Langridge), a frustrated, socially awkward school-leaver, meets a
kindred spirit, Matt (Josh Whitehouse), and discovers Northern Soul. The
two become DJs and plan to accumulate enough money to travel to
America to buy records. Drugs and crime pollute the dream, when Sean
(Jack Gordon), a shadowy (Southern) outsider, botches a drug deal and
the euphoria of the dancefloor gives way to a hellish comedown. John and
Matt fall out, and then, at the film’s conclusion, rekindle their friendship,
but not before Matt has affirmed his heterosexuality by having sex with
the angelic Angela (Antonia Thomas), offering him a path of redemption
outside of the dancefloor with its homoerotic undertones. There are
momentary spaces in the film for what Constantine calls the:
pleading, yearning, largely adult, black American voices […] initially very
alien to our ears [that] seemed to speak to us so directly […] with a degree
of intimacy that we rarely got from our own friends and family. (Anonymous
2015)
While these communal impulses were bound up in the fostering of

engaged participative audiences, the film still falls back on tried and tested
narrative strategies which seem, in their subordination towards individual
resolution, to directly contradict Constantine’s evocation of a utopian
subcultural moment. The dancefloor here acts as a magnet around which
the plot assembles in a predictably orderly fashion, forming straight lines
and refusing to disperse and evoke the transformative potential of the
subculture.
If the narrative nightclub’s conservatism is defined by the relationship
of causality to narrative space, we must look to representations of dance-
floors that reject the instrumental nature of such structures. From the
period we focus on (post-1990s), we have turned to a French film as an
example. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden (2014) is co-written by and based on
the experiences of Hansen-Løve’s brother, Sven. The film follows 20 years
in the life of Paul (Félix de Givry), a Garage DJ in Paris, from the begin-
nings of his love affair with dance music, to his rise to prominence, before
the second half of the film deals with the melancholy of his descent into
debt and drug addiction. Although the trajectory might seem familiar for
the dancefloor film, its expansion across a dispersed, twenty-year timeline,
with its loose episodic structure closing and opening points of narrative
interest at seemingly arbitrary junctures, imbues the film with an opaque
ambience that offers no easy solutions.
Eden was originally billed as a film about the so-called French touch
scene that produced Daft Punk. Although Thomas Bangalter and Guy-
Manuel de Homem-Christo are characters in the film, their roles are
minor, their lack of prominence making conspicuous Eden’s more univer-
sal, quotidian concerns. The duo is, however, central to a critical moment
within the film. At a house party early on in the film they play, for the first
time, their classic, breakthrough track ‘Da Funk’. For Hansen-Løve the
scene anticipates their elevation to stardom:
In the profile shot, Bangalter and Homem-Christo still belong to the group
[…] Then, from the far shot, we see them face on but suddenly they are
somewhere else. We have lost them. They are here, but you don’t hear what
they say any more because they are stars. I love how we captured that
moment. (MacInnes 2015)
As the track progresses and its seminality becomes evident, Hansen-Løve

cuts to a two-shot of another hopeful production duo, Paul and his partner
Stan (Hugo Conzelmann). Our expectations of the nightclub film suggest

that this should be a critical point: perhaps they will respond negatively,
because they know they will never be able to match ‘Da Funk’s’ quality, or
this moment will signal the setting of a narrative goal, inspiring them on
their own path towards stardom. Instead, Paul merely comments to Stan:
‘They finished their track.’ Hansen- Løve cuts back to the animated dance-
floor, Daft Punk just visible behind their decks, and Paul continues: ‘It
fucking rocks.’
Like Constantine, Hansen-Løve struggled to finance her dancefloor
film, with potential backers put off precisely by the film’s rejection of the
principles of the narrative nightclub: ‘[a]ll the comments I’ve had about
the script were that nothing was happening and that there wasn’t enough
conflict’ (Ehrlich 2015). In another interview she again seems to invoke
the rigid generic expectations of the dancefloor film:
Some people think when you have characters that are doing something ille-
gal or wrong, they should be punished in a way. They were punished but in
a different way than people expected, a much quieter way. (Mertens 2015)
For Eden, then, the staples and structuring devices of the dance music
genre are secondary to a more ambiguous and poetic examination of
music and dancing as a way of dramatizing everyday life, as Sven Hansen-
Løve’s notes:
[Paul] has one big thing in his life, he is driven by music like [most people]
are for a woman or a guy, he falls in love deeply and passionately [with that],
and it’s difficult to find room for both. (Montgomery 2015)
The multiple romantic relationships that Paul has across the film are of
course interwoven within its aforementioned elliptical narrative structure,
as Jonathan Romney argues in his review: ‘when you focus on one
character’s intense, sealed-in experience, it makes sense that other people’s
lives happen offstage, in an abrupt, fragmentary fashion’ (Romney 2015).
Thus the pursuit of romance, the beginning and ending of affairs, other-
wise so central to the narrative nightclub, are secondary to the film’s cen-
tral organising structure: Paul’s experience of and immersion in the
subcultural space.
As such, the nightclub scenes are critical to Eden’s poetic energy.
Hansen-Løve shot on digital rather than film, which, as she recalls ‘means
we didn’t have to have extra lights in the nightclub scenes. We were using
the lights of the nightclub’ (Vishnevetsky 2015). As such, the camera’s
subtle presence is reflected in its position often amongst the crowd and
alongside the playing of the music diegetically, generating another layer
of sensory realism. The crowd often sing along with the soulful lyrics of
the tracks that Paul and Stan play, adding an experiential, interactive qual-
ity to the representation of the club. Again, Hansen-Løve is keen to
emphasise her wilful rejection of the iconographic clichés of the narrative
nightclub:
I wanted to make it so much more real life and much less like cinema. I
didn’t want to embrace that vulgarity that is so common now, [that] MTV
language, I wanted to get rid of that and find my own. (Montgomery 2015)
The film’s realism, both subjective in its focus on Paul’s nostalgic,

dream-like reflections, and objective in its visceral, almost participatory
evocation of the feeling of dancing to and playing of house and garage
music means that the conventional narrative cues of the dancefloor are
absent. Eden is instead organised along more associative and rhythmic pat-
terns, in line with its themes. When Stan and Paul are interviewed on a
radio show, Paul introduces a track as being ‘exactly what we like, between
euphoria and melancholy’ in a moment which seems to condense the
film’s underlying tone. Indeed for Lindsay Jensen this tension represents
‘the theme of Paul’s life over the years explored by the film. Between is a
constant state.’ Eden ends with a solitary Paul on his bed reading a poem,
‘The Rhythm’ by Robert Creeley:
It is all a rhythm,
from the shutting
door, to the window
opening,
The poem’s cyclical quality, both in form and content, reminds us that
Paul’s melancholy is a condition of his euphoria and vice versa. Eden suc-
ceeds where Northern Soul does not, in embedding the nightclub in a
narrative structure that can tackle and encompass its shifting position
across and along a person’s life. In doing so it explores the scope of youth
and style and takes a long view of subculture, society and commitment. It
comes closest to representing the synthesis between subcultural and post-
subcultural which Hodkinson discusses.
Eden is, in our survey, an exception. As a French film with an ostensible

focus on a historically specific French dance music subculture, Eden is
unmoored from the trappings of the British cinema’s colonisation of the
nightclub as a cinematic space. Much of its success comes from Hansen-
Løve’s nuanced approach, unburdened as it is from the expectation of
narrative order and focussed instead on evoking a feeling of the experience
of dancing and listening to music. Eden shows that the narrative nightclub
need not be constrained by a linear treatment of the dancefloor, yet it is
hard to find a space within British cinema for a similarly imaginative treat-
ment of the subculture(s). Indeed, one has to look to the world of con-
temporary art, and Mark Leckie’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) for
a visual text which seeks to realise rather than curtail the possibilities of the
British dancefloor. In the British films that we have discussed here, the
trace of the social problem genre lingers: that is a way of dealing with
youth and subculture which demands order, and which denies the possi-
bilities and potentials of transgression, both within and beyond the narra-
tive. British films concerned with the dancefloor, despite showing the
potential of communality, tend to force an individuating narrative, whereby
the space becomes an obstacle to be overcome and mastered, in the course
of which it is frequently turned into a tool by the protagonist. This is a
narrative function that also relates to these films’ instrumental approach to
subculture, where the dancefloor uncomplicates, makes linear, purges and
purifies.
References
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about-ourscreen/ [Last accessed: 13/12/16].
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story,” available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2jrXD9
q1bpKVP19TwdcCBFt/keep-the-faith-elaine-constantine-on-filming-the-
northern-soul-story [Last accessed: 13/12/16].
Beeler, Stan. 2007. Dance, Drugs and Escape: The Club Scene in Literature, Film
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subcultures and beyond’ in Journal of Youth Studies 19 (5), pp. 629–645.
MacInnes, Paul. 2015. “Eden: ‘There was no film that took club culture seriously,”
Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/21/mia-
hansen-love-eden [Last accessed: 13/12/16].
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interview [Last accessed: 13/12/16].
Miles, Stephen. 2000. Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
Montgomery, Hugh. 2015. “Why the Daft Punk-featuring EDEN is the dance
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[Last accessed: 13/12/16].
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You’re All Partied Out, Dude!:
The Mainstreaming of Heavy Metal
Subcultural Tropes, from Bill & Ted
to Wayne’s World
Andy R. Brown
In this chapter I explore the apparent contradiction that a youth subcul-

ture at the centre of a mass-mediated, high-profile moral panic was also
the inspiration for a string of successful Hollywood movies, which placed
the male-teen-buddy ‘metalhead’ experience at the centre of the narrative,
in the form of characters like Bill and Ted (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves),
and Wayne and Garth (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey). While previous
studies (Hunter 1996; Best and Kellner 1998) have been concerned to
locate such films and characters within a recognisable landscape of youth-
oriented consumer capitalism, they have been unsuccessful in identifying
the centrality of heavy metal culture tropes, including argot, electric-guitar
virtuosity and music and album references, to the ways in which such char-
acters negotiate their relationships to such an environment. While such
A. R. Brown (*)
Bath Spa University, Bath, UK

110 A. R. BROWN
films are clearly comedies and depend upon a postmodernist pastiche of

conventions common to the late 1980s teen film, this satirical style is also
one that is constantly in ‘dialogue’ with heavy metal culture. Without this
aspect, such films would lack authenticity and their characters would not
be credible, let alone liked by a cross section of teenagers and adults, many
of whom are nonetheless not heavy metal fans. The question I want to
pursue is how such films translate heavy metal subcultural tropes into
credible mass cultural forms, examining what is inevitably lost in such a
process as well as what is gained, suggesting overall that satire and humour
are central to such strategies and to their success.
Heavy Metal and Moral Panic

We have certain rules. Removal of heavy metal albums or tapes, not allowing
the child to dress in any style of heavy metal, which would mean taking these
kinds of things away from him. Not allowing him to wear the heavy metal
t-shirts that depict the band members or pictures of monsters, skeletons,
graves or whatever.
Darlyne Pettinicchio, co-founder and Director of The Back In Control

Training Center, Orange County, CA.1
In the period from 1984 to 1991, the genre of heavy metal and the
youth culture identified with it were subject to a sustained campaign of
elite condemnation and mass-mediated ‘moral panic’, to an extent unprec-
edented even within the troubled history of the reception of popular
music in North America (Chastagner 1999; Weinstein 2000, 265–70;
Walser 2014, 137–51). The initiators of this campaign were an o
rganisation
that called itself the Parent’s Music Resource Centre (PMRC), largely
‘composed of Washington D.C. wives and mothers’ (Martin and Segrave
1993, 292), such as Susan Baker and Tipper Gore. The PMRC charged
that rock music had become sexually explicit, morally depraved and por-
nographic. They produced a list of offending songs (‘the Filthy Fifteen’),
the majority of which were by heavy metal bands, and called for a ratings
system that would control access to such music by minors. The campaign,
which typically focused on quoting ‘explicit’ lyrics and ‘objectionable’
album covers from the PMRC’s ‘bad list’ (Martin and Segrave 1993,
293–4), received widespread coverage in national media, such as Newsweek,
the Washington Post, The Donahue Show, CBS Morning News, and Today.
YOU’RE ALL PARTIED OUT, DUDE!: THE MAINSTREAMING OF HEAVY… 111
Following a presentation on the ‘evils of rock music’ by the PMRC to

the Justice Department’s Commission on Pornography, the Senate
Committee initiated proceedings into ‘porn rock’ and record labelling,
held in September 1985. There, a number of ‘expert’ witnesses claimed a
causal connection between ‘epidemic’ rates of male suicides and heavy
metal songs, citing Ozzy Osbourne’s Suicide Solution, Blue Oyster Cult’s
Don’t Fear the Reaper and AC/DC’s Shoot to Thrill. In October 1985,
Osbourne was sued by a nineteen-year-old youth’s parents, who claimed
that the young man was listening to the artist’s record the night he took
his own life. In the summer of 1990, the band Judas Priest were taken to
court by the parents of two boys who acted out a suicide pact, allegedly at
the behest of ‘subliminal (or backward) messages’ placed on the album,
Stained Class (1978). Such claims reflected widespread fears among reli-
gious organisations, such as Parents Against Subliminal Seduction (PASS),
over the impact of Satanism and satanic symbols on impressionable youth
(for example, Raschke 1990, 171). The outcome of the campaign was a
‘voluntary agreement’ between the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) and the PMRC that the industry would label potentially
‘offensive’ records with a ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics’ warning.
This practice came into effect in 1986 and is now the industry standard,
occurring most frequently on heavy metal and hip-hop/rap releases
(Christenson 1992).
Despite the unprecedented and excessive nature of this elite-orchestrated
and media-sustained ‘demonisation’ of heavy metal youth and their music
of choice, during this same period fictional or filmic representations of the
‘metalhead’ teenage archetype actually increased, finding their way into a
number of popular films. These include the conflicted character(s) who
were able to go Back To The Future (1985) or, to complete a post-modernist
history assignment, as in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1992), Airheads (1994) and the low-budget
Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and
Fubar (2004). Also, during this period (1989–1995) the growing popu-
larity of the ‘kidult’ characters Wayne and Garth, of Saturday Night Live’s
comedy-skit Wayne’s World, led to the release of the very successful
Wayne’s World (1992) and the sequel, Wayne’s World II (1993). The
period 1993–1997 also saw the development, by the animator Mike
Judge, of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head show, which although initially con-
troversial, gained widespread success. How are we to explain this?
112 A. R. BROWN
Idiot Dancing: Subcultural Theory and Heavy

Metal Youth Cultural Style
It is tempting to place this account of heavy metal youth culture within
the classic CCCS model of resistance and incorporation, in particular the
moral panic and industry commodification phase described by Hebdige
(1979, 92–9). Here we witness both the societal ‘folk devil’ subject to
symbolic and institutional censure and the industry-commercial phase
where a once-threatening teen subculture is rendered safe and manage-
able, in this case, within recognisable ‘youth’ comedic conventions.
However, it is important to note that the majority of subcultural theo-
rists failed to recognise the existence of a heavy metal subculture at all or,
if they did, rejected any claim it might have to be a youth culture of
‘resistance’ (Cashmore 1984); ironically, in the case of Hebdige, because
its style was viewed as ‘idiotic’ (Brown 2003, 211). The object of this
idiocy is heavy metal’s ‘dance-style’, which he fails to identify as
‘head-banging’.
For Cashmore, reports of this ‘head-banging’ (The Times, 5th April
1982), provided the ‘only genuine moment of panic about heavy metal’
when a youth died from brain damage caused by ‘continually jerking his
head at a concert’ in 1982 (1984, 37). Despite this coverage, ‘heavy
metal generally failed to arouse the kind of hysteria or panic associated
with most youth subcultures’ (Cashmore 1984, 37). Rather it ‘gave the
appearance of being threatening without actually being threatening’.
Heavy metal fans, according to Cashmore ‘didn’t want to change soci-
ety… They just wanted a little corner of it where they could introvert to
their own sphere, escaping to a fantasy world in which they played imagi-
nary guitars and shook their heads into states of concussion’ (1984, 37).
And yet, as we have seen, within a year of this judgment heavy metal was
at the centre of the largest and most sustained panic of any post-war
subculture.
In retrospect, it seems plausible to argue that the campaign by state and
local institutional apparatuses of repression, focused on the music of heavy
metal and its fans, announces a neoliberal New Right attack on a perceived
area of youth resistance to Regan (and Thatcherite) policies within youth
and civil society in this key period (Brown 2013, 24–5). Despite the claims
made that heavy metal music was a darkly sinister fringe music that encour-
aged its fans to ‘oppose the traditional values of those in authority and
encourage rebellious and aggressive attitudes and behavior towards par-

ents, educators, law enforcement and religious leaders’, and to promote
‘behaviors that are violent, immoral, illegal [such as] drug and alcohol
abuse’ (Pettinichio 1986), heavy metal music during the PMRC campaign
was far from a fringe music. As Walser notes, in this period heavy metal was
transformed from a subculture-identified music into the ‘dominant genre
of American music’ (2014, 11), with Rolling Stone magazine pronouncing
it the new ‘mainstream of rock and roll’ (2014, 3). But, as a marketing
survey conducted during this same period found, while ‘ten million peo-
ple in the United States “like or strongly like” heavy metal’—a further
19 million strongly disliked it (cited in Walser 2014). Perhaps one of the
reasons for this negative perception is that, unlike many other youth sub-
cultures, the relationship between the music of heavy metal and its fandom
has been central to its coherence as a youth formation, meaning that when
it experienced a period of commercial success it still retained a subversive
edge, despite its popularity.
Central to this subversive edge was a performative expression of hyper-
masculinity, one that attempted to cohere a narrative of ‘heroic’ masculine
virtuosity and control but which was subject to challenges within its own
logic from glam, romance and androgynous styles, that signalled in their
different ways, an instability to any masculinist narrative of certainty. For
Walser (2014), the appeal of heavy metal in this period, was in how metal
‘musicians and fans […] developed tactics [and strategies] for modeling
male power and control within the context of patriarchal culture’ via
‘enactions of masculinity’, including ‘varieties of misogyny as well as
“exscription” of the feminine […] supported by male, sometimes homo-
erotic, bonding’ (p. 110). Walser’s (2014) exploration of these modes
identifies: the misogyny of the ‘male victim’ ensnared by the dangerous
sexuality of the ‘femme fatale’ in such songs as In the Still of the Night by
Whitesnake; the Nothing But A Good Time androgyny and to-be-looked-
at-sexual-display of glam-metal bands like Poison; and the ‘romantic sin-
cerity’ projected by hard-rock/metal bands, like Bon Jovi, who began to
soften their sound with ballads ‘where the only mystical element was bour-
geois love’ (p. 120).
Previous work, such as Plantinga (2014) on the mockumentary This is
Spinal Tap (1984), read this hyper-masculine display as an over-conformity
to hegemonic masculinity, and identified the comedic aspects of such films
as centring on the pathos of the central characters inability to recognise
114 A. R. BROWN
the impossibility, and indeed absurdity, of achieving the ‘phallic mastery’

required of the heavy metal performer. However, I argue that not only is
a ‘self-referential’ humour central to the subcultural identity of heavy
metal culture (Konecny 2014) and thereby a key factor in the affectivity of
its filmic appeal to wider audiences, the over-investment of fans and musi-
cians in the absurd and overblown narratives of mythological monsters,
horror, the satanic, war and apocalyptic nemesis reflects a wider project of
resistance that, drawing on a neglected aspect of Connell’s (2005) hege-
monic masculinity thesis, I want to describe as ‘protest masculinity’.
The term ‘protest masculinity’ is variously employed to explain the
aberrant behaviour towards the social compact that supports hegemonic
masculinity, exhibited by males in habitual situations of unemployment or
insecure work, males lacking a father figure in deprived households and
those resisting the authority of other men in work situations or appren-
ticeships. Poynting defines it as ‘compensatory claims to imagined power-
fulness on the part of marginalised young men experiencing social injury
at their lack of real power, expressed through a hypermasculine style’
(2007, 511), while Gregory Wayne Walker argues: ‘Protest masculinity is
a gendered identity oriented to a protest of the relations of production
and the ideal type of hegemonic masculinity’ (2006, 5). Connell explores
how various ‘marginalised’ masculinities, such as white Australian bikers,
embrace a compensatory ‘outlaw’ masculinity and thereby make ‘a claim
to power where there are no real resources for power’ (2005, 111).
Connell’s point is that these marginal men receive little benefit from the
patriarchal dividend, while their attempts to resist the gender order bring
them back into conflict with authority. Their choices are therefore limited:
accept marginality and subordination, adopt a mode of conflict or seek to
reject hegemonic masculinity.
From a macro socio-cultural, and indeed psychoanalytic perspective,
heavy metal’s ‘protest masculinity’ is rooted in a deeply sublimated resis-
tance to regional and global deindustrialisation and the consequent
cultural marginalisation of working class identities, particularly those
identified with skilled manual work, which is not only ‘magically’ recov-
ered (as the CCCS subcultural theorists would have it), but subject to
multiple reinvestments over the years. Heavy metal’s protest masculinity
has become a complex cultural phenomenon that invites multiple read-
ings, from the humorous to the profound, the subcultural to the
‘universal’.
Oedipus Most Complex: Time-Travelling with Marty

McFly and Bill & Ted
In the realm of popular culture this ‘magical recovery’ is most often dra-
matised as a teen-male Oedipus complex, where the central characters are
consciously aware that they must challenge the male authority of their
tyrannical and/or inept ‘fathers’ while trying to resist the (real or imag-
ined) attentions of their mothers: ‘She’s your step mum, dude!’, Ted
repeatedly reminds Bill. This Oedipus complex is played out, often liter-
ally, through the role that heavy metal guitar culture plays in the lives of
these teens. It is the key to shaping the future, as in Bill and Ted, or to
reshaping the past so that it can become the future, as in Back to the Future.
Of course, what is also recovered is a ‘good’ kind of patriarchal ‘father’
figure. For example, the central character of the breakthrough teen fran-
chise Back to the Future (1985) is a conflicted male-teen who lives in sub-
urbia, in a lower-middle-class family, and who is described by his school
principal as a ‘slacker’ ‘just like your father’. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox)
skateboards around his hometown and plays guitar in his band, the
Pinheads. In the opening sequence of the film Marty plugs his guitar into
Doc Brown’s 1950s sci-fi console, turns the volume and distortion dials
up to ‘maximum’ and then blows the main speaker cone and his own body
across the room, with one touch of his magic pick. Looking back over his
aviator shades at the broken speaker at the centre of the giant amp, Marty
is heard to softly exclaim: ‘Rock n roll!’. But he fails the school prom audi-
tion because the head of the assessment panel (played by Huey Lewis)2
halts the band’s performance, commenting: ‘I’m afraid you’re just too
darn loud’.
In a key sequence towards the climax of the film, Marty—having played
lead-guitar on the ballad that allows his Mom and Dad to kiss for the first
time and thereby ensure his future existence—is then invited by the band
leader and fictitious cousin of Chuck Berry (Marlon) to play another num-
ber. Reluctant at first, Marty then launches into Berry’s Johnny B. Goode
(1958), thereby introducing the all-black R&B band (who were booked
to play an all-white fifties college prom night) to the ‘new’ genre of rock
‘n’ roll. But after the bridge, Marty unleashes a guitar solo ‘from the
future’, which leads to the premature end of the song (as the band can no
longer keep up) in a haze of feedback and wailing lead guitar: “I guess you
guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it,” he says to
the stunned audience. During the performance of this solo, Marty makes
116 A. R. BROWN
reference to many of the styles that define the guitar-centric culture of

heavy metal (and its uneasy relationship to black music), including Berry’s
string bends, the speed-surfing guitar runs of Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix’s
stage-craft and virtuosity, the aggressive power-chords of The Who and
the neo-classical “tapping” of Eddie van Halen.3 Much of this guitar rep-
ertoire can be found in the instrumental solo piece, ‘Eruption’, performed
by one of the most celebrated metal guitarists, Eddie van Halen, which
combines pentatonic blues ‘licks’, Chuck Berry-esque string bends and
‘quotations’ from well-known classical-violin primers, combined with ‘fast
picking and hammering’, precise string-harmonics and ‘dive bombs’.4
It is surely not a coincidence that in the opening sequence of Bill &
Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) the boy’s dilemma is that their failure to
make a promotional video for their band, the Wyld Stallyns, is because they
can’t play well enough; yet the purpose of the video is to enlist the help of
‘guitar god’, Eddie Van Halen to help them to achieve this aim. Not only
does Ted ‘steal’ his father’s keys, but Bill, in order to rescue his friend,
phones the house pretending to be ‘Officer Van Halen’, saying the lost
keys have been handed in to the local police station. At various points in
the film, we are told by the ‘good’ father-figure, Rufus (George Carlin)
(who has travelled back from the future to assist them), that the boy’s
guitar playing will ‘get better’, since without their ‘future’ music the new
world order cannot come into being. Like Back to the Future, the key to
achieving their mission is a time-travel machine.5 However, first they must
pass their history exam, or Ted will be packed off to the military as punish-
ment for being a high school ‘slacker’.
What follows are their adventures back in time to transport a number
of ‘historical’ figures, including Billy the Kid, Napoleon, Genghis Kahn,
Plato, Joan of Arc, Beethoven, Freud, Abraham Lincoln and some ‘medi-
eval babes’ from the court of King John, to the Californian suburb of San
Dimas, where they are introduced to the delights of the local shopping
mall before appearing as guest speakers in their ‘rock concert’ themed,
end-of-term presentation. During this postmodernist journey, the film
takes every opportunity to reference heavy metal tropes, sometimes quite
literally. For example, when hiding in knight’s armour, attempting to res-
cue the medieval teen ‘babes’ who have been promised in marriage, the
boys find it difficult to walk:
Ted: ‘Bill’
Bill: ‘What?’
Ted: ‘These are heavy’

Bill: ‘Yea, heavy metal!’
When attempting to woo the young women, Ted quotes lyrics from the
power-ballad ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ by Poison. When their rescue
plan is exposed, the King’s henchmen order that they be placed in an ‘Iron
Maiden’, to which they boys reply: ‘Excellent!’ (accompanied by air-
guitar). When introducing the philosopher Socrates to the San Dimas
high school graduates, Ted declares: ‘He was the teacher of Plato, who
was in turn the teacher of Aristotle and like Ozzy Osbourne, was repeat-
edly accused of corruption of the young’.6
For I.Q. Hunter (1996), Bill and Ted are part of a ‘mini-genre’ of
American cinema: the Dumb White Guy Movie. Owing something to
anarchic gross-out comedies like Porky’s (1981) and National Lampoon’s
Animal House (1978), ‘films such as Wayne’s World, Forrest Gump,
Dumb and Dumber, Airheads and the TV show Beavis and Butthead
glorify the Dumb White Guy as an all-American cultural hero’ (p. 111).
But rather than viewing them as ‘lurid symptoms of anomie and cultural
degeneration’ or as ‘boorish manifestations of a white male backlash’,
for Hunter, they represent the ‘simultaneous triumph of consumer capi-
talism and American popular culture’, as predicted by Fukuyama in his
‘end of history’ thesis (1996, 111). Despite this somewhat sweeping
claim, for Hunter the ‘key joke’ of the film is that the ‘salvational music’
of the Wyld Stallyns, that will put ‘an end to war and poverty’, align the
planets and lead to ‘communication with aliens’ from the future, ‘is
white heavy metal, the most despised and unhip (and monocultural) of
genres’ (p. 123). What Hunter fails to note however is the overriding
‘dialogic’ conversation that the film has with heavy metal youth culture,
transforming an outsider subculture into a satirical but ultimately like-
able set of characterisations, that are then able to comment on contem-
porary youth experience more generally. Relevant here is that the
scriptwriters originally envisaged Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted
Theodore Logan as ‘14-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bellbot-
toms and heavy metal T-shirts’ (Quoted in Freeman 2014). In fact, it
appears that an early scene was scripted of Bill and Ted walking past a
group of popular kids who ‘hated them’. However, once Alex Winter
and Keanu Reeves were recruited into the project, this scenario was
dropped (Freeman 2014).
118 A. R. BROWN
Bangers, Thrashers and Burnouts:

The Mainstreaming of Heavy Metal Character Tropes
In many key respects, heavy metal is paradigmatic of post-subcultural
youth styles that followed in the wake of punk, such as goth, grunge,
industrial/dance, rap and hip-hop, styles that have a more complex rela-
tionship to the commodity form than simply appropriation (Brown 2007).
What this means is that the integrity and identity of the subculture and the
kind of youth identities that it allows is a function of its passionate but
conflicted relationship to the authenticity of its commodity forms, to the
extent that they are seen to truly ‘represent’ metal’s subterranean values.
At the same time, like the working-class subcultures of teds, mods and
skins celebrated by the CCCS school, heavy metal culture is grounded in
a classed cultural experience, one that defines the biographies of its origi-
nator bands (Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Budgie, Deep Purple, Uriah
Heep), as well as providing the mythological canvas upon which the genre
is able to transform the overwhelming loudness of its industrial origin
environment into a metrically ‘heavy’ expressive musical form. But it is
one that has the requisite sonic weight to carry other-worldly narratives
and flights of musical fantasy that darkly embrace human corruption, the
devil, evil and hell on earth. It is not surprising then that histories of the
remarkable longevity of the genre demonstrate that heavy metal culture is
articulated in the space between industry and ‘underground’, between the
authentic and ‘sell out’, where the authentic forms of heavy metal music
are often paradoxically the most theatrical, overblown and ridiculous,
either in their borrowings from classical music and literature, pursuit of
overwhelming musical loudness and dramatic ‘OTT’ (‘over the top’) per-
formances (Brown 2015).
In this respect, it is important to recognise that the ‘comedic’ conven-
tions and representations of heavy metal on film cannot simply be inter-
preted as an industry/hegemonic attempt to render the genre ‘ridiculous’,
but rather, they are reflective of these long-standing tensions and contra-
dictions. While the genre of the teen film is certainly a relevant framework
for understanding the production cycle that I examine here, and the his-
tory of exploitation and distortion that often accompanies such produc-
tions (Shary 2005), by the mid-eighties the Hollywood producers of this
popular genre were increasingly aware of the need to address particular
youth identities in ways that were seen to be credible, often because the
success or failure of such films depended on a perception of ‘authenticity’
among the increasingly cynical and segmented youth consumer audiences

such productions were marketed at. So, despite the fact that many of the
films are comedic, such comedy is informed by a satirical intelligence,
which both laughs at but also celebrates its object of mirth.
The significance then of the emergence of a number of documentaries,
feature films and mockumentaries, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s,
is in how such productions make reference to and articulate the character
of the teen (or kidult) ‘metalhead’ and the ways in which they are defined
by a heavy metal culture that inform their collective ‘values’ and shared
‘norms’ of behaviour. Thus, whether they are aspiring bands (actual or
fictional) or male-buddies, such as Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth or Jay
and Silent Bob, they consistently display and embrace a set of values that
‘mark’ them out as a generational cohort, as bangers, thrashers, slackers or
burnouts. This is so for argot (‘this sucks’, ‘party on’, ‘excellent’), ges-
tures, (air-guitar, headbanging, the horns), shared musical references
(AC/DC, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Megadeth, Scorpions, Van Halen),
mode of dress (long hair, denims, patches, t-shirts, trainers), socioeco-
nomic circumstance (lower middle-class, skilled or semi-skilled working
class), urban locations (suburbia), and social and ‘political’ demeanour
(school-slacker, college-dropout, dead-end-job employee). Central to this
also are modes of consumption, particularly styles and their typical ‘youth’
locations (the shopping mall, the fast-food takeaway, the chain store, col-
lege campus), but also the search for identity and authenticity where it
seems to be most absent, in the midst of youth consumer capitalism.
“We’re Not Worthy”: The Satirical Relationship

of Wayne’s World to Heavy Metal Culture
‘Let me bring you up to speed. My name is Wayne Campbell. I live in

Aurora, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago—excellent. I’ve had plenty
of joe-jobs; nothing I’d call a career. Let me put it this way: I have an
extensive collection of nametags and hairnets. Ok, so I still live with my
parents, which I admit is bogus and sad. However, I do have a cable access
show, and I still know how to party. But what I’d really like is to do
Wayne’s World for a living. It might happen. Yeah, and monkeys might fly
out of my butt’ (Wayne’s World, 1992).
Drawing on the character of Wayne, the fast-talking, wise-cracking,
heavy metal kidult, who with his ‘excellent’ friend, Garth, hosts his own
120 A. R. BROWN
‘open access’ cable television show from his mum’s basement, this hugely
successful mainstream film, and it sequel, offers an insight into heavy metal
fandom and its subcultural tropes, which is both celebratory of the guitar-
gods and bands that define the genre, while poking fun at big business and
‘lame’ male figures of authority who fail to respect its integrity or seek to
exploit it. So strikingly original was this characterisation of North
American, male-teen suburban culture in the mid-1980s that it has found
its way into rock iconography and You Tube fandom, particularly the syn-
chronised head-banging that accompanies that riff from Queen’s
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, when Wayne, Garth and partied-out friends,
‘head-bang’ in unison, from the seats of their car, in the famous opening
sequence of the movie.
Mike Myers, who created the comedy skit for Saturday Night Live and
co-wrote and starred in the film, observes: ‘Wayne’s world is the subur-
ban, adolescent, North American, heavy metal experience as I knew it in
the mid-70s, growing up in Scarborough, Ontario, which is a suburb of
Toronto, Canada’.7 Rob Lowe, who plays the ‘sleazy TV exec’ (Benjamin
Kane), who wants to transform Wayne and Garth’s public-access cable
show into a commercially sponsored TV show in order to steal Wayne’s
musician girlfriend, has observed:
Wayne’s World takes place in Aurora, Illinois, and I grew up in Dayton,

Ohio. So, it’s basically the same place. I grew up in downstairs, naugahyde-
panelled basements with bean bag chairs and really bad shag carpeting with
a TV that had four legs, and that gold mesh over the speaker […] so I
related to Wayne’s World. Wayne’s World was real to me’.8
Although the plot involves the teen-film conventions of boy-meets-girl,

loses her to the suave but cynical baddie, falls out with his best friend, but
then in the last reel the buddies unite in a mission to save the heroine and
expose the duplicity of the baddies, the film spoofs these conventions along
the way, and especially in the finale, where different postmodernist endings
are enacted, including references to Scooby Doo and other TV shows.
However, from the opening scenes, the film spends time establishing the
characters, Wayne and Garth and their friends, as ‘kidults’ who are defined
by their teen allegiance to heavy metal music culture and their patterns of
symbolic consumption amongst the fast-food takeaways, shopping malls
and drive-ins of middle-America suburbia. The satirical intent of the film
and the source of its inclusionary humour are established from the outset as
Wayne speaks direct-to-the-camera, introducing himself and then his

bespectacled ‘best friend’ Garth, who pulls up outside his house in the
‘Mirthmobile’ (a 1976 AMC Pacer, with flame body work). Once in the
front seat, the eponymous hero slots a cassette tape into the dashboard
player and announces to his metal dudes: ‘I think we’ll go with a little
Bohemian Rhapsody, gentlemen’. ‘Good, call’ replies Garth. This classic
hard rock soundtrack then accompanies the characters as they drive into the
heart of teen suburban uptown, singing along to Wayne’s lead, as the cam-
era frames the neon logos and signs of shops, bars and take-out venues.
This soundtrack is interrupted twice: first when Wayne and Garth stop
to rescue a fellow metalhead (wearing a Deep Purple t-shirt): ‘Phil, what
are you doing here. You’re all partied out, man—again’. Once Wayne has
given Garth a ‘no puke guarantee’, their friend is taken on board where
the Queen song momentarily revives him. After the headbanging sequence,
the Pacer pauses so that Wayne can gaze into the window of the local gui-
tar store, where a white 1964 Stratocaster is on display. Garth, speaks
direct to camera: ‘He does this every Friday night’. And then to his friend:
‘Stop torturing yourself, man. You’ll never afford it. Live in the now.’ But
Wayne, lost in a mystical reverie (accompanied by ethereal music), turns to
camera and says: ‘It will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine’. Later, after a
visit to their favourite donut ‘munch-bar’ (where the waitress says: ‘Don’t
you guys ever get tired of ordering the same thing’ and they all reply:
‘No’), we move on to the Gasworks (where Meatloaf is a bouncer). ‘An
excellent heavy metal bar and always a babe-fest’, declares Wayne. It is
here that Wayne falls instantly in love with Cassandra, the lead singer and
bassist of the band: ‘She’s a babe. Schwing. Yady-yady-yah. Hugh’. And
the plot set-up of the film is complete, as Wayne speaks to camera: ‘She
will be mine. O yes, she will be mine.
The ‘protest masculinity’ that informs the humor of the film, centrally
involves deflating the pretensions of male authority figures, employing
‘toilet jokes’ and ‘juvenile’ sexual innuendo. For example, when the arcade
owner and sponsor, Noah Vanderhoff (Brian Doyle-Murray), tries to take
over a Wayne’s World slot, Wayne holds up a card to camera, that points
in his direction, declaring: ‘This man sucks goats. I have proof’, before
hitting him with his favorite put-down:
Wayne: ‘All I have to say about that is: ass-sphincter-says-what.’

Noah: ‘What?’
Wayne: ‘Exactly!’
122 A. R. BROWN
Like Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth share a modified ‘surfer’ or ‘valley’
speak idiolect, which includes the ubiquitous: ‘Excellent. Party on’, ‘No
way. Yes, way’, ‘Bogus’ and the double-negative qualifier, ‘Not’; as well as
a ‘babe’ lexicon: Robo-babe, Babe-licious, Fox, Babe-raham Lincoln, and
so on. However, the phrase ‘we’re not worthy’ is key to the alternative
value structure of their heavy metal fandom. This phrase, accompanied by
much bowing and scraping, is reserved for ‘name’ hard rock and heavy
metal musicians. It is also notable that whenever Wayne interviews such
musicians he always throws in a ‘serious’ question that the musicians are
(surprisingly) able to answer in great detail. As for example,
Wayne: ‘So, do you come to Milwaukee often?’

Alice Cooper: ‘Well, I’m a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee
has certainly had its share of visitors. The French
missionaries and explorers were coming here as
early as the late 1600s to trade with the Native
Americans.’
Pete (band member): ‘In fact, isn’t “Milwaukee” an Indian name?’
Alice Cooper: ‘Yes, Pete, it is. Actually, it’s pronounced “mill-e-
wah-que” which is Algonquin for “the good
land.”’
Wayne: ‘I was not aware of that. Say, does this guy know
how to party or what?’
The satirical intelligence then that informs Wayne’s World offers the
audience an insight into a youth subculture that has a set of values that
are rooted in notions of authenticity, drawn from the music and style-
culture of heavy metal fandom. While we are able to laugh at how Wayne
and Garth reflect the sexual fantasies and insecurities of male-teens who
are not quite adults, as in the subplots of Garth’s late puberty and
Wayne’s ‘psycho’ ex-girlfriend, it is ultimately their naïve commitment
to their subcultural world that gives them the strength to contest the
pomposity and power of male authority figures who seek to exploit it
and them. While it could be argued that the subculture it portrays is one
that is easily accessible to youth (and adult) audiences who ‘recognise’
the bands, and the style and argot the film exaggerates for comic effect
what the film ultimately celebrates is the authenticity of the youth cul-
tural experience itself.
Conclusion
As Best and Kellner (1998) note ‘the popularity of heavy metal for over
two decades […] requires sociological scrutiny in an era of quick turn-
over of musical fads’ (p. 98). However, except for a passing reference to
Donna Gaine’s book, Teenage Wasteland (1991), they fail to offer such
a scrutiny. As I have argued here, the demonisation of heavy metal youth
culture in the 1984–1991 period in North America not only coincides
with the period of its most sustained chart success, it is also a period in
which the image of the male metalhead conveyed in moral panic media
is paradoxically transformed into a series of teen-buddy characters, most
notably Bill and Ted, and Wayne and Garth, that are central to the suc-
cess of a string of Hollywood teen-comedy films and their sequels. While
classic models of subcultural theory argue that periods of youth moral
panic are accompanied by a process of mainstreaming that effectively
make ‘safe’ the threat such youth cultures are seen to pose to dominant
culture, in the case of heavy metal it could be argued that it is the main-
streaming of heavy metal music in this period that provokes the panic in
the first place. Whatever is the case, it is surely the popularity of heavy
metal music culture among a large section of North American youth that
is the motive for scriptwriters and film producers in this period to develop
these teen-comedy projects. The fact that such films are comedies, where
the object of mirth is the central characters and their relationship to
heavy metal culture, might suggest that the role of satire here is to ‘make
safe’ a troubling youth culture by simplifying and distorting it using
established comedic conventions. But, as we have seen, although the
films do simplify the musical references of heavy metal culture, a form of
‘protest masculinity’ is central to the plot and narratives of such films,
allowing the central male-metalhead ‘loser’ characters to triumph against
hegemonic forms of male authority that are depicted as pompous,
oppressive and corrupt. However, the answer as to why such films were
popular with a cross section of teen and adult audiences is unquestion-
ably the way(s) in which heavy metal music and culture provides Bill and
Ted, and Wayne and Garth, with a unique vocabulary, shared sense of
humour, core values and group identity that informs their world view
and consumer lifestyle, so that in a teen world of fads and fashions they
communicate a taste-culture that has a strong sense of continuity and
authenticity.
124 A. R. BROWN
Notes
1. Interview from the documentary film The Decline of Western Civilization,
Part II: The Metal Years (1988).
2. Of Huey Lewis and the News, whose 1985 hit ‘The Power of Love’, fea-
tures in the film. Ironically, the number the band are performing is a ‘heavy
metal version’ of this song.
3. Michael J. Fox confirms (2002 DVD Feature) that the choreography for
this sequence was conceived as a homage to these ‘guitar heroes’.
4. The band Van Halen are also named on a cassette tape of ‘future music’ that
Marty plays to George McFly (Crispin Glover), while pretending to be an
alien visitor to earth, to command him to take his future mother, Lorraine
(Lea Thompson) to the Prom in order to break the oedipal-complex he
finds himself trapped within.
5. The time machine originally scripted was a 1969 Chevrolet van, not a Phone
Booth. But the director (Stephen Hereck) felt this was too Scooby Do and
also Back to the Future had just come out, featuring the DeLorean car.
6. In the sequel, Bogus Journey (1991), the ‘dead’ Bill & Ted have a great deal
of fun with their guide Death (the Grim Reaper, a pastiche of the Bergman
character): ‘Ted, don’t fear the reaper.’ Death: ‘I heard that.’
7. Interview included with 2001 DVD of the film.
8. Interview (as above).
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Don’t Look Back in Anger: Manchester,
Supersonic and Made of Stone
Beth Johnson
The last five years has seen the release of two ‘rockumentary films’—The
Stone Roses: Made of Stone (Dir. Shane Meadows, 2013) and Oasis: Supersonic
(Dir. Mat Whitecross, 2016)—which will be the central focus of this chapter.
Both documentaries function to bring their respective Mancunian British
bands (who originally found popularity in the 1980s and 1990s) back into
contemporary cultural focus via their positioning of the pre-digital 80s and
90s as authentic subcultural music eras. Whilst this framing provides a signifi-
cant degree of similarity, there are clear d
ifferences between the texts. While
Made of Stone ultimately traces the revival and tour of The Stone Roses since
their 2011 reformation, Supersonic uses the present and, I will argue, draws
on a recent trend for nostalgia as a springboard to look back at the past.
The release dates of these rockumentaries coincide more broadly with a
recent indie ‘revival’ trend in the cultural public sphere evidenced through
reformations of bands such as James, Republica, Pulp, Cast and Blur. Critical
responses from the national, web and music press toward revival and retro
culture, coupled with what Paul Long and Jez Collins (2018) have referred
to as the ‘mythologizing of certain cities and bands as musically exceptional’
have been largely unfavourable and even antagonistic. Drawing on the
B. Johnson (*)
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

128 B. JOHNSON
legacy of FAC51 (Manchester’s original ‘Factory Records’) and in response

to the building’s 2010 reinvention as a three-floor nightclub, FAC251, run
by Peter Hook and club operators Tokyo Industries, an anonymous website
branded ‘FUC51: Manchester Deniers’ carried the following introduction:
Manchester will have you believe it is a forward-thinking city. A Northern

Republic standing up against the tide of Londoncentric nonsense. However,
what Manchester fails to realise is that it cannot ever move forward because
it is so determined to rest on recent history. While slating Liverpool for
being a Beatle-museum, Mancs are pretending it’s 1988. Look around the
city and you’re given constant reminders of Factory Records, The Haçienda,
The Stone Roses, The Smiths, Acid House, New Order, Joy Division and…
you get the idea. Our aim is to act as snipers to this relentless wave of bor-
rowed nostalgia that continues to make stars of Madchester hangers-on and
people steeped in yesteryear. We’ll tear the memories to pieces, we’ll show
you where Manchester is getting it right, we’ll harangue all that wallow in
yellow and black hatchings and those that rifle the pocket of Wilson’s corpse.
(Anon, 2010)
While the content of the introduction is crafted with some humour, the
tone is distinctly serious, drawing out debates around heritage, nostalgia,
cultural value and ‘bad’ commerce. History, is seemingly, having an iden-
tity crisis. In this sense, we can see that retro-tours and reformations
alongside music city myths—have been, at least by some, looked back on
in anger, accused of either ‘cashing in’ or ‘blocking’ new creatives. In
addition, in the sphere of academia, the music revival trend as well as a
more general leaning toward the retro in the fields of fashion, art and
design has culminated in the production of various studies such as Svetlana
Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Elizabeth Guffey’s Retro: The
Culture of Revival (2006), Simon Reynolds’ recent Retromania: Pop
Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011) and Owen Hatherley’s The
Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity (2017). While these texts dis-
cuss and theorize ideas around retro and nostalgia in a variety of ways and
from a variety of different viewpoints, they have, alongside public
responses, worked toward producing a critical mass of information about
the intertwining of the recent past, the present and the future, determin-
ing more than ever that history is constantly ‘in the making’.
Drawing on the work of Rupa Huq (2006), Keith Beattie (2008), Paul
Long and Jez Collins (2018), this chapter engages with broad questions of
representation and identity, particularly in relation to place, youth-culture,
DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER: MANCHESTER, SUPERSONIC… 129
gender and class. It also aims to consider specific issues in relation to the
two documentary texts at its heart, thinking through questions such as:
how does the medium of film work to position The Stone Roses and Oasis
as ‘authentic’ Mancunian creatives? What cultural and social impulses align
the directors of the documentaries and the bands that they chronicle? In
what ways do the documentaries position the bands as relevant in and to
the regional and national music scene of the present? How and via what
aesthetic methods and modes do the films attempt to mythologise the
recent past?
Situating the Bands and Setting the ‘Scene’: A Brief

History
UK, and more specifically Manchester-based band The Stone Roses
formed as a five-piece in 1983/1984 and released a number of singles
prior to being signed in 1988/1989 to Zomba subsidiary, Silvertone
Records on a famously exploitative eight-album deal. The release of their
first self-titled album in 1989 was a success and their single, Fools Gold,
reached number eight in the UK music charts. The same year the band
won four accolades at the NME Awards, including Band of the Year and
Single of the Year. 1990 saw The Stone Roses play at Spike Island and
their status as authentic stars—articulate young Northern men who had
something alternative to say or sing and who refused to ‘know their place’
in class terms—was seemingly cemented. Shortly afterwards, the band
tried to withdraw from their contract and sign with Geffen Records. This
action marked the start of a protracted legal battle with Zomba which
blocked The Stone Roses from working on a second album for three years.
Their next album, entitled Second Coming, was released in 1994 to a rather
more muted reception. In 1995, Reni (the band’s drummer) left the band.
In 1996 the band finally broke up when John Squire (lead guitarist and
songwriter alongside lead singer Ian Brown) left the band following a row
with Brown. Sixteen years later The Stone Roses announced their resur-
rection—a second or indeed third coming. Two years later in 2013, the
documentary The Stone Roses: Made of Stone was released, chronicling their
reformation.
Established in 1991 and citing The Stone Roses and The Beatles
amongst their musical influences, Oasis—a five-piece Mancunian guitar
band—were signed to the independent label Creation Records in 1993.
130 B. JOHNSON
Made up (initially) of Noel Gallagher (lead guitarist), Liam Gallagher

(lead singer), Paul McGuigan (bass guitar), Paul Arthurs (rhythm and lead
guitar) and Tony McCarroll (drums and percussion), Oasis worked inces-
santly, and 1994 and 1995 saw the release of two key albums, the first
Definitely Maybe and the second, What’s the Story Morning Glory. Both
albums attained critical acclaim, and like The Stone Roses, Oasis’s music
spoke of British culture, difference, youth and class. Reaching the height
of their fame in 1996 with two sell-out gigs at Knebworth attended by
over 250,000 fans, the BBC recently described the concerts as ‘era defin-
ing’.1 Continuing to make music for a further 13 years, the band finally
broke up in 2009 after a much-publicized spat between brothers—song-
writer and front man respectively—Noel and Liam Gallagher. While Oasis
have not reformed, both brothers have fuelled press speculation about the
possibility, particularly amidst the reformation trend, and substantiating
this, 2016 saw the release of Oasis: Supersonic, a documentary charting the
band’s rise to international stardom.
Narrative Openings
Despite their different temporal points of focus, both documentaries open
with sensuous and visceral stylistic sequences. Made of Stone begins with a
heady, slow-motion, black-and-white close-up of Ian Brown waving to
fans, backed by an audio recording of Alfred Hitchcock defining happi-
ness. Brown’s face is clearly that of the present and thus the opening
situates the time as ‘now’, documenting and dramatizing the emotional
response of fans to Brown and his to them. In contrast, Supersonic opens
with a question heard in voiceover: ‘What’s happened to the band in the
last three years?’ to which Liam Gallagher replies: ‘It’s a big question, and
it deserves a big answer.’ While indeed the question is still relevant in the
present day (particularly in light of the revival trend), the crackle of the
audio designates the interview as one from the past. This moment is then
followed up with the distinctive voice of British radio DJ Jo Whiley desig-
nating Knebworth as the ‘live gig of the decade’, after which a male com-
mentator notes that ‘In three years Oasis have gone from being a new
signing to being rock’s true giants’. The visuals cut to helicopter footage
of Knebworth, then to Oasis taking to the stage, then Liam singing/snarl-
ing the first lines of Columbia: ‘There we were, now here we are. All this
confusion, nothing’s the same to me.’ The lyrics here work to underscore
the reflective nature of the rockumentary, playing with and vocalising the
temporal shifts between the then and the now of Oasis. This schismatic
opening operates both as an introduction to the contemporary confusion
around Oasis’s identity (provoking a ‘What’s the story?’ now, question)
and figuratively making a space in the present for past experiences and feel-
ings to resurface. While the troubled contemporary status of the band
implies a point of tension, the next cut—to an ecstatic Knebworth audi-
ence—serves to reinscribe the intense visualisation of fandom.
The highlighting of the visual attraction of bands is not unusual for
rockumentary texts. Such spectacular openings are, particularly in the case
of Made of Stone, further intensified by stylised slow motion, evoking a
fantastical and hallucinatory visual quality for the viewer. What both texts
make clear from the outset however is not only the importance of fandom
to the evolving histories of the bands, but the importance of the experience
of fandom as a cultural and dramatic high—a defining and intense moment
in the making of identity. In both texts the openings (which function
through foregrounding aesthetic tensions to highlight both the past as a
moment in time and as a contemporary experience), underscore the
capacities of visual images and sounds to compose identities in ways that
not only perform, but also critique the processes of representation. It is in
the same vein that I offer this chapter and the analysis that follows.
Genre Identity: What’s in a Name?

The notion of identity is crucial to this chapter, and it is identity-work that
I want to pick up on here to explicate and think through the geographical,
generic and cultural labels assigned to the music of The Stone Roses and
Oasis. As bands who emerged on the British music scene in the 1980s and
1990s, their music has been variously categorized as ‘indie’, ‘baggy’,
‘Britpop’ and ‘Madchester’. In opposition to mainstream music, that
which is ‘indie’, as Wendy Fonarow (2006, 66) notes, can be understood
as ‘intimate, personal, and modest, on a small scale and about specificity;
it is authentic, lean and local.’ While such a nuanced description befits
much indie music, it is, arguably, ‘out of place’ when applied to the 1980s
and 1990s bands that are central to this chapter—The Stone Roses and
Oasis. Though, as Rupa Huq notes in Beyond Subculture, it is important
to recognise the industry shift of the 1990s in which many indie bands
were “poached’ away from their earlier contractual homes’ (2006, 155),
another reason for the lack of fit between Fonarow’s definition of ‘indie’
and the bands central to this chapter relates to the fact that while the style
132 B. JOHNSON
and ethos of The Stone Roses and Oasis may have started out as ‘indie’,
their success on the indie scene worked to situate them as ‘large-scale
cool’, providing them with subcultural capital that had significant com-
mercial value. This coolness and the bands’ success for the record labels
Zomba and Creation gave them a new and precarious identity, somewhere
between the indie/major label polarity, resulting in the situation that ‘by
the time Oasis became the UK’s biggest band around 1996, the under-
ground had become the overground’ (Huq 2006, 155).
The ‘baggy’ label was one associated with the place of Manchester in
the late 1980s and referred to both a sound and an oversized style of
clothing. In general terms, the ‘baggy’ sound was made up of a combina-
tion of funk, psychedelia, house music and guitar rock.2 The clothing style
was more literal, encompassing a retro 1960s type of ‘hippie’ look, with
baggy or bellbottomed jeans, oversized and brightly coloured t-shirts or
casual style tops (frequently football shirts). Indeed, clothing and this
‘look’ or fashion style can be understood as an outward sign/symbol of
association with the Mancunian music scene—and one through which
working-class, masculinist identity is brought to the fore. Furthermore,
the look can also be linked to the retro and nostalgic resurgence of both
bands aided, for example, by the launch of the fashion chain Pretty Green,
founded in 2009 by Liam Gallagher. As a brand, Pretty Green specialises
in menswear, particular 1960s psychedelic shirts and ‘casual style’ tops—
representing a look and feel associated with the band. This look is repro-
duced in the décor of the stores, which all feature neon ‘stage’ lighting
signs and use guitars and vinyl LPs to adorn the walls. In terms of market-
ing, music identity heritage is pushed front and centre. The Pretty Green
website states: ‘Since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1950s, British
street culture has been influencing fashion and music worldwide. Pretty
Green has an authenticity borne of a deep understanding of that culture
and the things that make it relevant today.’3
Both the working-class identity and pluralism that can be understood
as central to the ‘baggy’ label can also be extended to the political aims of
The Stone Roses and Oasis. As Dave Haslam (2000, 180) notes: ‘Ian
Brown put a positive political spin on the spirit of the musical times. He
was all for breaking down barriers and opening minds […] In May 1988
The Stone Roses played […] at an anti-Clause 28 benefit [and] two days
later he went on the affiliated march and rally in Albert Square.’ The
baggy label was and still is particularly interesting in relation to both
speaking of and to the pluralism of the music scene in Manchester.
Problematically, the music of The Stone Roses and Oasis has often been
considered in identity terms as male, straight, white and aggressively
British (more specifically English)—and therefore as limited, purposefully
disengaged from both differing gender and sexual identities and what
David Hesmondhalgh (2001, 278) refers to as ‘a cosmopolitan interac-
tion with other cultures’. Ian Brown, John Squire and the Gallagher
brothers have been critical of such misunderstandings. In Made of Stone,
Brown carefully explains that his decision to be a singer in a band was
influenced by African-American R&B and rock singer Geno Washington,
who, at a party in Brown’s run-down flat in Hulme in 1983, told him
“You’re a star, you’re a star. You should be a singer.” Speaking to Rolling
Stone in 1990 Brown, noting the importance of non-white and non-Brit-
ish music lamented: ‘I think pop music was saved by the advent of acid
house and rap because whites have done nothing for ten years.’4 This clear
engagement with non-white music, and Brown’s refusal to be situated as
a single type of musician influenced by a narrow array of white British
heritage, speaks to an attitude of plurality.
The faux nationalist (and more specifically English) locating of The
Stone Roses and their music can also be (albeit wrongly) extended to
Oasis, whose music is commonly defined as ‘Britpop’. In 2014 the BBC
celebrated ’20 years of Britpop’ with a week of shows across UK television
and radio including archived interviews, contemporary reflections, an
online image gallery and a specially designated webpage featuring a new
photography exhibition on Oasis announcing ‘Britpop is Back’.5 The tag-
line ‘Britpop is Back’ was of course specific to the BBC’s timeline of
‘Britpop’, a genre to which they accorded a starting date of 1994 with
Suede’s Brett Anderson’s appearance on the cover of VOX. What was not
mentioned by the BBC in relation to this issue of VOX (Issue 42, 3rd
March, 1994), which they pictured, was the other image that takes up
space on the front cover—that of The Stone Roses, covered in grey, pol-
lock style paint with the adjacent tag ‘Return to MADCHESTER’. Indeed,
this talk or title of return and of ‘Madchester’ seems particularly apt not
only as a headline in 1994 (The Stone Roses second coming), but as a
headline of the present. Arguably, the ‘mad’ in Madchester not only oper-
ates as an indicator of the hedonism associated with the Mancunian music
scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but as a present form of protest,
making visible the limitations and problematic appropriations of ‘new lad-
dism’ in defining the Manchester scene. In addition, at the height of their
Britpop fame in 1995, Oasis rejected claims that they would record a song
134 B. JOHNSON
for the England football team who were due to compete in Euro’96 with
Noel robustly asserting, ‘Over my dead body, we’re Irish.’6 Madchester is
not Manchester. It is, rather, a jumping off point, a place from which
music can start to look beyond its immediate locale and value a new type
of identity formation that embraces and acknowledges both its own roots
and the place of others in creating new sounds, new vibes, new genres and
new identities.
The problematisation of the term ‘Britpop’ has also been discussed by
other cultural commentators. In his chapter on ‘British Popular Music and
National Identity’, Hesmondhalgh notes that:
Britpop has caused some confusion. The term was generated within one
particular genre—indie/alternative rock—to describe a tradition of
Britishness in popular music […] Britpop was never, in any sense, a move-
ment with common artistic aims. Nor can Britpop usefully be thought of as
a musical genre […] Britpop is best understood, instead, as a discourse: a
group of utterances and statements that have a significant role in organizing
understanding in the social realm. And what Britpop discourse did was to
construct a tradition of quintessentially British and/or English music that
distorted and simplified British musical culture. (2001, 276)
This British musical culture was however, as Huq (2006) suggests,

already nostalgic for a past moment of glory even if it was enlisted to ‘Cool
Britannia’. Akin to Hesmondhalgh however, my aim here is to point to
the politics and problems of labelling and think through the ways in which
Made of Stone and Supersonic explore the nationalist discourses that have,
at times, been associated with the bands that they represent. This sort of
identity work seems particularly apt in the present moment as the 2016
British vote for Brexit and the rise of right-wing politics in Europe and
beyond could make easy work out of suggesting that the revival of 1980s
and 1990s music could be interpreted as part of a British, and more spe-
cifically English, resurgence of colonialist, euro-sceptic and/or hard-right
attitudes. Though certain political commentators such as Conservative
MP John Redwood sought in his 1996 article ‘There’s Always England’
to affiliate Britpop music with right-wing values, I want to suggest that as
in 1996, when this notion was popularly derided, the recent revival trend
is part of a distinctly different cultural and political tack. The contempo-
rary indie revival is not a return to white noise, but is rather an attempt to
make visible a more authentic era in and idea of music and identity forma-
tion, prior to the digital music revolution.
That is not to say that the bands central to this chapter did not perform
problematic rock/indie personas, but that these were primarily concerned
with gender rather than race. While proclaiming their difference from UK
Tory-led middle-class culture (Noel Gallagher, for example, caused con-
troversy by noting that taking class A drugs was as common for young
people as drinking a cup of tea), both bands exhibited behaviours that
almost perfectly fit the traditional mould of the ‘rock-star’. Both Ian
Brown and Noel and Liam Gallagher cockily stated in various interviews
that The Stone Roses and Oasis were ‘the best bands in the world’ and
performed identities which, akin to the male-only makeup of their bands,
pushed forward a type of aggressive masculinity. Again, this strand of
hyper-masculine identity is not unusual within the scene of rock music. As
Sara Cohen has noted, rock music is associated with ‘a male history, […]
canon and legacy full of male bravado, male comradeship and collectivity’
(1997, 30); it is, in short, premised on men ‘making a scene’. Interestingly,
while this is most dominantly the mode of masculinity associated with The
Stone Roses’s and Oasis’s reputation formations, both documentaries
work in interesting ways to simultaneously reinstate this performance of
retrogressive masculinity, and revolt against it.
Putting Women in the Picture

Supersonic begins by not only making female commentators on and in
music heard (specifically Jo Whiley), but also reinscribes the male legacy of
the band with two female-centred stories. The first relates to Noel and
Liam’s mother, Peggy Gallagher—an Irish immigrant who moved from
Ireland to Manchester in 1962 before meeting Tommy Gallagher, getting
married and going on to have three sons over the next eight years. The
second retells the Oasis origins story focusing on the all-female indie band
Sister Lovers, whose insistence that Oasis played at a gig in Glasgow (tak-
ing half of the Sister Lovers own designated set), led to the band getting
signed.
In the first instance, the rockumentary screen makes visible family pho-
tographs of Peggy Gallagher and her young sons, starting with an image of
Peggy and Liam, before making way for a montage of 1970s photos show-
ing various pre-school and school-aged shots of Noel and Liam. Besides
the soft Irish voice of Peggy talking about her sons and the difficult rela-
tionship between them, even as children, a second soundscape also serves
to sonically situate the social background of the brothers: that of the
136 B. JOHNSON
unmistakable introductory guitar riff of The Stone Roses track ‘This Is the
One’. Soon afterwards, Noel begins narrating the story of Oasis getting
signed:
We were sharing a rehearsal room with an all-girl band called Sister Lovers.
Unbeknownst to us, one of the girls in the band, Debbie Turner, God bless
Debbie, was an ex-girlfriend of Alan McGee’s, the head of the coolest record
label in England. We were asking her what they were up to and they were
saying “We’re going up [to Glasgow] to do this gig […] She said “Why
don’t you come with us?” […] We all put £25 each in to hire a splitter van.
We get there and we say “We’re Oasis from Manchester.” And the guy says
“There’s no band down here.” I said “Yeah, yeah, it’s all right, we’re with
Debbie.” And he’s like “No, no, no, no fucking way.”
Debbie is then heard in voiceover, as the animated story plays out on-
screen: ‘I think we said “Well, if they’re not playing, we’re not going to
play. We’ll do a really short set.” Then Oasis were allowed to play.’ The
rockumentary then prints the date and location on-screen ‘GLASGOW,
31st MAY, 1993’ before showing grainy footage of Oasis performing. The
musical performance then gives way orally to the voice of Alan McGee
noting how impressed he was with the punkish lyrics, style and raw sound
of Oasis’s tracks, noting in particular the lyrics ‘You’re the outcast. You’re
the underclass. But you don’t care. Because you’re living fast.’ After the
set, McGee notes he went straight up to Noel and asked him if the band
wanted a contract with Creation Records.
The punkish spirit of the band is important to briefly consider here. As
Haslam notes, ‘Punk made Manchester a credible pop city, bred noncon-
formist attitudes, nurtured indie labels and gave us a DIY tradition’ (2000,
133). These aspects of identity are not only applicable to the city of
Manchester, but to the attitudes of both the Sisters Lovers and Oasis as
narrated in the story above. While McGee’s words, particularly in relation
to punk, serve to highlight the masculine heritage of punk rock power in
the music industry, the clear recognition given to Debbie Turner by Noel
as the facilitator of this opportunity—her willingness to lay herself on the
line to ensure that Oasis’s music was heard—is resounding. Indeed, the
importance of women is further mined in the documentary with a longer
section on Peggy Gallagher who notes how her husband beat her and
Noel mercilessly before she found the courage to leave him. In response,
Noel and Liam both note their anger at their father for his behaviour and
praise their mother, with Liam saying: ‘Mum was an angel, still is. I wanted
to get her to stop doing like three fucking jobs and put her feet up […]
and have nice things.’ Noel goes on to note: ‘When I think of those times,
she sort of brought us up on her own, really. And three lads, particularly
one of them being Liam, it was very tricky. I mean, she gave it all up for us
[…] I wanted to make her proud.’ While other stories narrated in the
documentary point to and serve to highlight the rock behaviour of the
band (an animated VFX sequence produced by The Brewery retelling the
story of the band’s arrest on a ferry to Amsterdam, for example), the ten-
der moments in which Noel and Liam acknowledge the importance of key
women in their lives are represented in a continuum with their authentic-
ity in which the family/softness is a balance to the hedonism/laddishness
made visible elsewhere. These narrative fragments are not animated
(indeed, they need no extra-textual elements to be brought to life), but
instead are presented minimally, with Noel and Liam simply talking to the
camera.
Peggy’s Irish background—her status as an immigrant to England—is
also highlighted in the documentary and is coupled with Noel and Liam’s
acknowledgement of their Irish heritage. As Paolo Hewitt notes in the
rockumentary discussing a large gig that Oasis performed in Ireland: ‘It’s
that immigrant thing, isn’t it? It’s that sense of identity. Ireland saw them
as one of their own.’ As a band whose music is often described as belong-
ing to ‘Britpop’, this explicit recognition of the difference between English
and Irish identity and the Gallagher brothers’ acknowledgement of their
Irish heritage serves to eschew the frequent elision between British and
English identity that, as Hesmondhalgh notes, is a frequent problem of
Britpop labelling and discourse, causing a ‘constant slippage […] and the
presentation of a notion of Englishness that marginalized regional varia-
tion’ (2001, 278). What we see in the Gallagher brothers’ identity recog-
nition and hear in their music, is an intercultural ethos with transformative
potential for representing and understanding rich and multicultural
identity.
Authentic Moments
In terms of Made of Stone, the Roses rockumentary also brings to the fore
authentic moments. However, it does so by concentrating on and making
visible in the body of the film the experience of fandom rather than focus-
ing on the talk or performances of the band themselves. In a sequence
138 B. JOHNSON
filmed outside Parr Hall in Warrington, Meadows positions his hand-held

cameras in the street in order to capture the public response to The Stone
Roses last-minute radio announcement of a reformation gig that evening
at the intimate venue for people who could prove their historic fandom by
bringing original merchandise—1980s and 1990s cassette tapes and LPs,
gig tickets and other memorabilia. Capturing a single man running down
the road in a formal suit with his mobile phone in his hand saying ‘I’ve
been fucking everywhere mate, there’s nothing’, then a trickle people in
work clothes heading purposefully toward Parr Hall, then a swelling mul-
titude of fans, young and old, a man’s face fills the screen as he confesses:
‘I’ve had to lie to my boss and tell him my father-in-law’s had a heart-
attack.’ This dedication to seeing The Stone Roses play is further explored
by Meadows in other grainy interviews. With the camera pointing at
another male waiting in line in the Parr Hall queue, an interviewer asks
him if he’s meant to be working. The man, dressed in high visibility vest
and with remnants of plasterboard on his hands and face says: ‘Yeah, I’ve
actually left. I’ve knocked through into the house and not even boarded
up. So, if you’re watching, Richard, sorry mate—I’ll sort it out tomor-
row.’ Various interview crew then ask individual fans why they have come
and what it is about The Stone Roses and their music that is so special.
The fan responses are, for the most part, captured in low grade and at
times with poor sound, yet this serves to make the replies and the moments
themselves more affective. One fan notes:
I was doing some work at home about half an hour ago. It came up on
Facebook. Kecks on, van, here. You know and I know [why they’re so spe-
cial], but you can’t write it down, can you? […] There’s a reason why I’ve
still got my hair like this twenty years later, you know what I mean? There’s
a reason why I’ve never worn a tie. There’s a reason why I still listen to that
album once a week. And it still makes me tingle. There’s a reason why I’m
here and my childminder’s looking after my baby somewhere.
These moments work to establish the depth of feeling of fans for the
band, but more than that, they establish the importance of being there and
experiencing the first reformation gig alongside The Stone Roses. In
speaking of the band in these interviews, fans don’t talk of music alone but
of the way in which the Roses music has influenced and shaped their iden-
tities and lives. Indeed, these oral testimonies fulfil the typical oral history
function of documentary and underline the authenticity of having been
there and wanting to be there again.
The notion of being there that is stressed in the interviews can be under-
stood as an indicator of the importance of presence in relation to music
and identity formation in the pre-digital age. This nostalgic acknowledge-
ment of the past is also mined in Supersonic. In the penultimate scene of
the rockumentary, Noel, somewhat self-consciously, reflects on Oasis’s
1990s success:
It was the pre-digital age, it was the pre-talent show, reality TV age. Things
meant more. It was just a great time to be alive, never mind a great time to
be in Oasis. We were about to enter in to a celebrity-driven culture and I’ve
always thought that [the 1990s] was the last, great gathering of the people
before the birth of the internet. It’s no coincidence that things like that
don’t happen anymore. Twenty years ago, the biggest musical phenomenon
was a band that came from a council estate. I just think in the times in which
we live, it would be unrepeatable.
The Directors: Aligning Social Impulses

A further source of authenticity in the rockumentary case studies is an
alignment between the bands and the directors of their documentary
texts. I want to suggest here a set of shared cultural and social sympathies
between The Stone Roses and director Shane Meadows and between
Oasis and director Mat Whitecross. Shane Meadows, the acclaimed British
film director of A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)
and This Is England (2006), is widely known for his powerful, British,
working-class, youth-orientated narratives. Writing of him in 2015, jour-
nalist Mark Lawson noted that Meadows was ‘a chronicler of England’s
public and personal stories’, comparing him to Ken Loach and Mike Leigh
in terms of his ability and desire to interrogate the political through the
personal. Like much of Loach and Leigh’s work, Meadows films have
hitherto been dominated by teen characters, growing up and struggling to
come of age. In his films, adult identity and its emergence is a difficult
process, yet is often helped by finding alignment with subcultural clans.
This Is England (2006), Meadows’ most successful film to date, is notably
engaged with and explicitly rejects notions of white nationalism, looking
instead (perhaps nostalgically) to subcultural clans such as skinheads and
music such as ska to embrace and recognise new, more divergent and rich
British identities. Via the narrative strand of mixed-race character Milky’s
(Andrew Shim) identity amidst a skin group, This Is England exposes the
140 B. JOHNSON
true horror of nationalist racism, situating Nazi-influenced character

Combo (Stephen Graham), as a weak individual, who is so jealous of
Milky’s family and dual-heritage that he fails to contain his pathetic rage,
beating Milky to the point of near-death. This clear engagement of
Meadows with nationalist politics and indeed their deplorable conse-
quences is, I suggest, a concern that is both authentic and clearly shared
by The Stone Roses. In addition, having spoken on various occasions
about the semi-autobiographical nature of his work and his love of music—
particularly the music of his formative years including The Stone Roses—
Meadows, a working-class male who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s
and whose work has an explicit focus on class and subculture, shares a
social impulse with The Stone Roses whose music speaks of many of the
same issues. Both believe that their stories—stories of ordinary working-
class people—matter, and both tell their stories through their art. Both are
often and problematically characterised as ‘rough’ and uncultured, and
neither had professional grounding in their respective areas of music or
filmmaking. Yet, both acknowledge the often-harsh realities of working-
class life but are not confined to merely documenting and reproducing
them—instead, they share a commitment to a delicate and poetic transfor-
mation of the mundane and the familiar.
Interestingly, the director of Supersonic, Mat Whitecross, first came to
public attention with the docudrama The Road to Guantanamo (2006),
co-directed by Michael Winterbottom. The film tells the story of three
British Muslims who travelled to Pakistan for a wedding and were taken to
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where they are held without charge, terrorised
and tortured for two-and-half years. Deeply political, the film was fol-
lowed by another collaboration with Winterbottom, The Shock Doctrine
(2009)—chronicling what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’. Next,
Whitecross embarked on a singularly directed project Moving to Mars
(2009)—a story that traced the journey of two Burmese families from a
refugee camp on the Thai/Burmese border to the UK. It was at this point
and after significant critical acclaim that Whitecross decided to take his
work back to where it had first originated—the music video. Directing a
video short for the Mancunian band Take That (who were embarking on
a revival tour) and then another for Coldplay, 2010 also saw the release of
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, a biopic of Ian Dury, a British singer-
songwriter and actor who, in the 1970s, became one of the founders of
the domestic punk-rock scene. In 2012 this was followed by Spike Island,
a comedy film following the journey of four youths determined to attend
The Stone Roses Spike Island gig—a narrative that ironically resonates
closely to the real-life experience and desires of Meadows. Whitecross’s
documentary Supersonic came out four years later in 2016. This combina-
tion of the intensely political, the biographic, the musical and the
personal—and moreover the complexities of exploring identity—are in
clear congruence over Whitecross’s oeuvre. As Oasis noted The Stone
Roses amongst their key influences, Whitecross, in an interview with
IndieWire in 2006, noted the importance of Meadows as a creative inspira-
tion, as he ‘always maintained that anyone could be a filmmaker, that
everyone had stories to tell.’ The social impulses that Whitecross and Oasis
share are, I suggest, in part down to their social similarities. Both Whitecross
and the Gallagher brothers were born of immigrant parents. Neither had
formal musical or film training, and in both cases their work tends to focus
on issues of displacement being overcome by collective effort. In the cases
of The Stone Roses and Meadows and Oasis and Whitecross, the directors
of these rockumentaries can be understood as more than collaborators—
they are fans, critics and co-conspirators. While this makes for clear creative
calibrations, such pairings also run the risk of lacking critical distance.
Conclusion
Keith Beattie, writing in the book Documentary Display notes that:
Rockumentary maintains a commitment to the traditional documentary

project within a focus on youth subcultures and music subformations—and
attendant perspectives on personal identity—which constitute the informa-
tional core of the form. However, rockumentary motivates knowledge in
ways different to nonfiction works […] In the rockumentary the provision
of information (‘telling’) operates within and through a mode which empha-
sises and exploits the representational capacities of the visual register (‘show-
ing’). The form of knowledge produced within this model is subjective,
affective, visceral and sensuous. (2008, 60)
The subjective, affective, model of which Beattie speaks is in clear evi-

dence in both Made of Stone and Supersonic. Indeed, both texts self-
consciously acknowledge this, pushing front and centre via their directors
and the dynamic visual and aural spirit of the work, their own fandom.
This is most evident in Made of Stone in which Meadows notes that The
Store Roses are his heroes and the film project is the fulfilment of a life-
142 B. JOHNSON
long dream. In an interview for The Observer newspaper, Meadows

described Made of Stone as ‘the closest thing to a love letter that I’ve ever
made.’7 Whitecross shared a similar story in relation to Oasis, noting in an
interview with Tom Stroud that: ‘There’s no way you could grow up in
the ‘90s and be the age I was and not have Oasis as part of your DNA.’
This notion of the directors’ own identities being so bound up with the
bands and music that they sought to represent, makes visible and seeks to
acknowledge a clear and conscious lack of objectivity in their record of the
past and present. Rather than being understood as a failing however, both
directors embrace the intimate intertwining of their emergent stories and
transformed relationships with the bands, music and scenes at their heart,
keying out and pushing forward their own place in the creation of new
and renewed fan identities.
Whether viewed with optimism or as retrogressive, revival culture has
encouraged a reconsideration of the power, point and cultural capital of
the music, bands and fans under its lens. In relation to Made of Stone and
Supersonic, while the former can be understood as a revival of the ‘real
thing’, the latter operates as a mediated stand-in for a desired reunion.
Both rockumentaries are clear responses to a particular, past cultural con-
text—a pre-internet age when music was about being there, and above all
it is this notion that links the texts to the past rather than any nationalistic
resurgence.
Both texts do represent the past somewhat nostalgically at times, how-
ever, nostalgia here is not represented as a failure to imagine the future,
but a recognition that the past, the present and the future are not separate
spheres but are enmeshed through experience, feeling and memory, both
visual and vocal. In short, the main message of the rockumentaries is that
we should not look back in anger. The Stone Roses and Oasis are not
‘bloated corpses’, but, like the films that depict them, are very much alive:
a living history, still in the making.
Notes
1. As noted on ‘Britpop at the BBC’ (online): http://www.bbc.co.uk/
programmes/profiles/1mpyWmdshwT3gGzhPwZ3JbR/britpop-
at-the-bbc-whats-on.
2. See, for example, John Robb’s description of ‘baggy’ in The Stone Roses And
The Resurrection of British Pop: The Reunion Edition (2012).
3. Pretty Green. Accessed at: https://www.prettygreen.com/discover/
timeline/.
4. Ian Brown in interview with Rolling Stone, accessed online: http://louder-

thanwar.com/stone-roses-key-figures-talk-about-the-band/?relatedposts_
hit=1&relatedposts_origin=241426&relatedposts_position=0.
5. ‘Britpop at the BBC’ (online): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profil
es/1mpyWmdshwT3gGzhPwZ3JbR/britpop-at-the-bbc-whats-on.
6. Noel Gallagher cited in Eugene Masterson (1996) The Word on the Street:
The Unsanctioned Story of Oasis. Edinburgh: Mainstream, p. 56.
7. Shane Meadows speaking to Miranda Sawyer in The Observer, 26th May
2013.
References
Anon. 2010. FUC51: Manchester Deniers—Introduction (January 2010) Online
at: http://fuc51.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/fuc51-introduction-of-sorts.html
Accessed 03.04.17.
Beattie, Keith. 2008. Documentary Display: Re-viewing Nonfiction Film and Video.
London: Wallflower Press.
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Brown, Ian in Rolling Stone (1990) (online): http://louderthanwar.com/stone-
roses-key-figures-talk-about-the-band/?relatedposts_hit=1&relatedposts_
origin=241426&relatedposts_position=0 Accessed 17.12.16.
Cohen, Sara. 1997. “Men Making A Scene.” In Sheila Whitely (ed.) Sexing the
Groove: Popular Music and Gender. London & New York: Routledge,
pp. 17–36.
Fonarow, Wendy. 2006. Empire of Dirt: The aesthetics and rituals of British indie
music. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press.
Gallagher, Noel cited in Masterson, Eugene. 1996. The Word on the Street: The
Unsanctioned Story of Oasis. Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Guffey, Elizabeth. 2006. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books.
Haslam, Dave. 2000. Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City. London:
Fourth Estate.
Hatherley, Owen. 2017. The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity. London:
Verso.
Hesmondhalgh, David. 2001. “British Popular Music and National Identity.” In
David Morley and Kevin Robins (eds.) British Cultural Studies: Geography,
Nationality and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 273–286.
Huq, Rupa. 2006. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial
World. London and New York: Routledge.
Lawson, Mark. ‘Shane Meadows: Chronicler of England’s Public and Personal
Stories’ in The Guardian 7 August, 2015 (online): https://www.theguardian.
com/film/2015/aug/07/shane-meadows-chronicler-england-public-personal-
stories Accessed 02.06.16.
144 B. JOHNSON
Long, Paul and Collins, Jez. 2018. “Another Uniquely Mancunian Offering?’
Un-Convention and the Intermediation of Music Culture and Place.” In Ewa
Mazierska (ed.) Heading North: The North of England in Film, Television and
Popular Music. London: Equinox.
Meadows, Shane. 2013. “Made of Stone: Interview”, The Observer, May 26
(online): https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/may/26/shane-mead-
ows-interview-made-of-stone Accessed 12.12.16.
Redwood, John. 1996. “There’s Always England,” The Guardian, March 20.
Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.
London: Faber and Faber.
Robb, John. 2012. The Stone Roses and The Resurrection of British Pop: The
Reunion Edition. London: Ebury Press.
Whitecross, Mat. 2006. “In Interview”, IndieWire: http://www.indiewire.
com/2006/06/indiewire-interview-mat-whitecross-co-director-of-the-road-
to-guantanamo-76530/ Accessed 23.02.17.
Whitecross, Mat cited by Tom Stroud. 2016. “This is History: Mat Whitecross on
directing Supersonic” (online): http://www.oasis-recordinginfo.co.uk/?page_
id=1947 Accessed 12.12.16.
Filmography
A Room for Romeo Brass (Dir. Shane Meadows, 1999).
Dead Man’s Shoes (Dir. Shane Meadows, 2004).
Moving to Mars (Dir. Mat Whitecross, 2009).
Oasis: Supersonic (Dir. Mat Whitecross, 2016).
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (Dir. Mat Whitecross, 2010).
Spike Island (Dir. Mat Whitecross, 2012).
The Road to Guantanamo (Dirs. Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross,
2006).
The Shock Doctrine (Dirs. Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, 2009).
The Stone Roses: Made of Stone (Dir. Shane Meadows, 2013).
This Is England (Dir. Shane Meadows, 2006).
PART III
Critical Theory and Subcultural

Representations in Other Media
Figures in Black: Heavy Metal
and the Mourning of the Working Class
Scott Wilson
Mental Cases
In 1965, fifty years after the height of the ‘carnage incomparable’ of World
War One (Wilfred Owen, ‘Mental Cases’, 1917), and just twenty years
after the even greater devastation of World War Two, anthropologist
Geoffrey Gorer (1965) published a remarkable survey, Death, Grief and
Mourning, which noted the profound decline in public mourning rituals
in contemporary Britain. Gorer and his colleagues attributed this decline
largely to the mass slaughter of these wars, their targeting of civilian popu-
lations and the teeming number of vanished, mutilated, unmarked and
unknown dead. The excess of the dead—particularly among the working-
class ‘cannon fodder’ at the front and the devastated cities at home—ren-
dered the traditional, public mourning of communities redundant, or
impossible. There were too many corpses, and too many communities
razed to the ground.
Consequently in contemporary Britain, as Gorer shows, mourning has
remained largely a matter of private grief constrained in discreet stoical
funerals. Unlike in other cultures, in Britain there are no professional
S. Wilson (*)
Kingston University, Kingston-upon-Thames, UK

148 S. WILSON
mourners, no public displays, set dress code (other than to wear a black
tie) or rituals, and certainly no outward manifestations of sorrow; no rag-
ing at the wickedness of the world and the ‘war pigs’, ‘the evil sorcerers of
death’s construction’. Oh Lord, no, not in 1965. There is of course one
day of national mourning for the war dead every year on 11th November
held at the Cenotaph in London. The Cenotaph, significantly, is the tomb
of the Unknown Soldier, and as such it is a monument to the impossibility
of mourning. Individual members of the community can have no personal
relation to the depersonalised and un-representable corpse that is hidden
within the stone edifice; other than in a highly abstract way, he or she is
nothing to them, nor were they anything to him or her.
It is well known that fans of heavy metal wear black, as do the vast
majority of the very many subgenres of metal that now proliferate around
the world: the darkest, blackest, doomiest, depressive, funereal, most
satanic black the better. While it may be framed and supplemented by
black leather, denim waistcoats and patches hinting at the style’s proletar-
ian roots in the bomber-jacketed garb of the biker gangs derived from
itinerant ex-aircraft crew after World War Two, or indeed the combat
pants and various other scraps of army surplus gear, the key garment is the
black T shirt commemorating the name of one’s favourite band. The
necessity of black relates directly to the title track of the album Black
Sabbath by Black Sabbath, the first heavy metal band. The enigmatic and
frightening ‘figure in black which points at me’ summons all listeners
through identification with the terror, doom and excitement of the singer,
Ozzy Osbourne. It is the supreme instance of metal interpellation. We are
‘hailed’, as listeners, at the altar of the Black Sabbath where we must sac-
rifice, in a Satanic inversion, all prior identity to ‘die’ and become born
again as a metalhead. Like Hamlet, confronted with the accusatory finger
of the ghost of his father demanding revenge, the ‘adolescent and fune-
real’, nascent heavy metal fan must in turn don black mourning weeds,
‘drawn to mirror and materialize the figure conjured in the music in
himself’(Masciandaro 2015, 40).
As strange and unlikely as it may seem, Black Sabbath’s lyrical and
musical modality, their mise-en-scene in the late 1960s precisely addresses
the problem of working class mourning in the most sensational way, in the
form of a spectacular ‘Electric Funeral’ (Paranoid). On the first album,
along with the central theme of death and sacrifice, references to doom
and sorrow abound, ‘bodies turning to corpses’, the impossibility of ‘peo-
ple counting their dead’ (Black Sabbath). Most famously, of course, in
FIGURES IN BLACK: HEAVY METAL AND THE MOURNING… 149
Paranoid’s ‘War Pigs’, perhaps Sabbath’s most famous song, Osbourne

rages explicitly against the ‘Generals’, the perpetrators of ‘mass destruc-
tion’, for whom Satan is waiting at Judgment Day. The title of the second
album also broaches, like Wilfred Owen, the question of sanity and its
relation to war, loss, mourning and psychotic forms of melancholia.
‘People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time’ (‘Paranoid’).
Indeed Wilfred Owen’s opening lines from ‘Mental Cases’ are pure metal:
‘Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?/Wherefore rock they, pur-
gatorial shadows,/Drooping tongues from jays that slob their relish/bar-
ing teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked?’ (1–4).
A retrospective review of Sabbath’s Paranoid succinctly sums up the
main elements or themes that became defined as heavy metal. The review
states that Paranoid is:
the album that defined metal, musically, sonically and thematically. Hate
mongers (‘War Pigs’), lunatic robots (‘Iron Man’) and schizos (‘Paranoid’)
dance a jig while Sabbath’s four horsemen of the Apocalypse play instru-
ments of mass destruction. The star of the show is Tony Iommi’s detuned
SG, which pukes the largest, loudest guitar sound known to man. Add
Geezer Butler’s sci-fi lyrics and Ozzy’s prophet-in-the-wilderness vocals and
you have the rock equivalent of the book of revelations. (Reviewer 1992 in
Rosen 2002, 61–2)
Here we have a definition of heavy metal as a schizoid war machine

wandering a divine wilderness divested of God but haunted by Satan or
the cries of his invocation in what Osbourne described as ‘an evil sound, a
heavy doom sound’ (Ozzy Osbourne in Rosen 2002, 46).
It is significant that this great panoply of war, destruction, religious
transgression and doom is framed by a title referencing mental health,
particularly ‘paranoid’ forms of mania and depression. Indeed, ‘Black
Sabbath’, the title track of the first album sets the ‘bi-polar’ template for
metal that alternates between the heaviness of gloomy atmospheres and
the rush of power chords. Subsequently, the various subgenres of metal
that have followed in Sabbath’s wake will gravitate towards one pole or
another: speed metal, thrash metal, power metal, battle metal and so on
are nuanced and set off by doom metal, death metal, black metal, sludge
metal, drone metal, funereal doom metal, depressive—and even suicidal—
funereal doom metal.
For the clinical psychoanalyst Darian Leader (2009), the exponential rise
in states of depression and depressive symptoms since the Second World
150 S. WILSON
War is in large part due to the reduction and interiorisation of mourning

noted by Gorer’s study in the 1960s, such that mourning has become a
problem increasingly posed to individuals distanced from the life of the
community. In his clinical practice Leader sees that many apparent states of
‘depression’ actually indicate an underlying yet unacknowledged state of
mourning or melancholia. The affect associated with some prior loss is trig-
gered by an event such as a redundancy, divorce or blow to self-esteem that
plunges a subject into a fathomless slough of despair and despondency. For
Leader, depression is a blanket term for a variety of different types of symp-
toms related to an instance of singular loss and a failure of mourning since
this original, defining loss is unacknowledged, disavowed or repressed.
In this chapter, I am going to suggest that Sabbath’s initial template for
heavy metal offers the form and structure for a work of mourning that, as
Kleinian analyst Hanna Segal (1986) argues of art generally, allows artists
and their fans, through processes of identification—in the case of metal
supplanted through states of sonic ecstasy—to make ‘something out of an
inferred experience of loss’, to create ‘out of chaos and destruction’
(Bataille et al. 1995, 86). I will look initially at Black Sabbath, but also at
how fellow Midlands metal band Bolt Thrower creatively externalise loss
so that it may be publicly registered, acknowledged and celebrated. In so
doing they—perhaps un-deliberately if not unconsciously—work through
various stages of mourning. According to Leader these are: first, the fram-
ing and representation of loss; second, the constitution and symbolic ‘kill-
ing’ of the lost object apprehended in all its ambivalence; third, the
isolation of the place that the object has vacated and left empty; and
fourth, the internalisation of that space as a conditioning absence, or void,
out of which the artistic works of mourning can be created and publicly
celebrated, as Hanna Segal suggests.
The representations of various lost objects that are brought to bear in
heavy metal’s characteristic tales of violence, destruction, doom, depres-
sion and death—representations that can be figured as popular cultural
works of spectacular mourning—are predicated, I suggest, on one funda-
mental prior loss that has been characterised as both an absence and an
impossibility. That is the notion of working-class culture itself.
The Factory and the Slaughterhouse

The first two albums of Black Sabbath are conventionally regarded as
genre defining, but as we have seen, in laying down what retrospectively
became known as heavy metal, Sabbath’s sound is indelibly conjoined with
doom in a sonic bi-polarity of mania and depression linked to an underly-

ing sense of mourning and psychotic melancholy. Certainly a pall of doom
did indeed hang over the Black Country, its metal industries and working
class inhabitants in the late 1960s. Industrial Birmingham and its bleak
environs, Aston in particular, home of the band’s members, provided the
background and milieu for the genre, adding an economic hue to the
depressive set of features characterising its early iconography.
This association is supported by the metonymy connecting the term
‘metal’ with industry, a connection that is riveted together by the anec-
dote of Sabbath’s lead guitarist Tony Iommi’s industrial injury, caused
when a piece of sheet metal that he was supposed to weld, sliced off the
ends of his fingers. It is as if Iommi’s doom-laden power chords are the
groaning expression of this loss, the wound of those severed fingertips
sacrificial victim of the clash between flesh and metal. With Sabbath’s sig-
nature sound, scars moving on guitar strings bind with a violent, external
force of sonic vibration. It is a sound born of a loss that is symbolic as well
as real.
The day job of the band’s singer, Ozzy Osbourne, also had an historical
connection with death. He worked in the local slaughterhouse. Historically,
slaughterhouses are institutions linked with religion; they were temples of
sacrifice, serving ‘a dual purpose of prayer and killing’, that resulted in ‘a
disturbing convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous gran-
deur typical of those places where blood flows’ (Bataille et al. 1995, 73).
For example in the feast of Yom Kippur, on the Day of the Great
Atonement, a bull is sacrificed at the bass mourning sound of the shofar,
an instrument shaped from a ram’s horn. Sacrifice makes the sacred, the
death of the totem animal summoning the absent God. The demand leads,
however, in the Judaic Christian tradition through a series of displace-
ments, to the death of the Golden Calf, the death of the Son and even to
the death of God himself, disclosing the void in which everything is con-
sumed in a process of self-destruction. The secularisation that accompa-
nies this displacement eventually eliminates the dimension of the sacred
altogether. Slaughterhouses become industrialised, ‘cursed and quaran-
tined like plague-ridden ships’ (Bataille et al. 1995, 73). Death is dis-
avowed, and indeed like life and existence generally is homogenised,
standardised and pre-packaged.
The deep groaning sound of Iommi’s chords and Osbourne’s wailing
vocals, hail from teenage dreams of the slaughterhouse and the decaying
factory. As if the sound echoed throughout the ages, through the debased
medium of pulp Hammer horror films and Dennis Wheatley novels popu-
152 S. WILSON
lar and prevalent at the time fuelling lyricist Geezer Butler’s imagination.
Metal resounds like the shofar not (or not just) in the absence disclosed by
the death of God, but in the void of working-class culture. Just as God had
to be summoned out of inexistence in order to be killed, so metal brings
British working-class culture into existence for the first time in the sound
of mourning for its ‘death’ that is predicated upon the impossibility of its
birth. Heavy metal is not the first form to have noted this. In the eigh-
teenth century, Thomas Gray’s proto-black metal ‘Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard’, observes the ‘mould’ring heap’ of an unmarked,
common grave and wonders if ‘some mute, inglorious Milton here may
rest’. In heavy metal the sound of mourning for the stillborn death of
working class culture is developed through a weird appropriation and
mutation of American blues that is completely reshaped and transformed
in the name and sound—‘metal’ and industry—that precluded that culture
in the drudgery of factory work. Heavy metal is not a form of the blues. It
is a new form of music initially forged in Britain, but which eventually took
on a global trajectory. Metal is no longer predominantly British: it is now
in very different ways Norwegian, Finnish, Brazilian, Japanese, Chinese,
Turkish, Lebanese and so on. Across numerous festivals and generic
extremes, metal exists as an essentially empty form like a shofar or Viking
drinking horn—the sign of the horns being of course the universal signifier
of metal affirmation and kinship—that can take any ethnic or national
content. Across Europe, old and new, national and regional varieties and
subgenres of metal have tracked the expansion of globalised capital and the
failures of nation states to sustain cultural differences, often providing the
medium for a trail of discontents related to the loss of ethnic identities that
are given voice in metal as a mourning sound through which sacrifice, loss
and desire are articulated. For a discussion of how metal provides the posi-
tive reverse of the absence of any European popular culture in which could
be located a political alternative to the ‘globalatinisation’ represented by
institutions like the EU, see Wilson (2012). It is in this somewhat para-
doxical way, as an empty vessel, that heavy metal can be described as a
genuine product of working-class ‘culture’. Heavy metal is a working-class
‘Thing’, in the terminology of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, the
‘Thing’s thingness’, its authenticity, does not so much lie in the material of
which it consists, but in ‘the void that holds’ (1975, 169). So while the
origin may be British, there is nevertheless nothing necessarily inauthentic
about Brazilian or Turkish metal, say, given the specificity of the active
‘void’ that shapes and resonates through it in the noise that it ‘holds’.
Cultural Studies and the ‘Juke Box Boys’

Directly contemporaneous with the birth of heavy metal was the emer-
gence of the discipline of cultural studies that was developed from the late
1960s at The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS),
Birmingham University. In its own way, the impetus for CCCS was also an
effect of mourning for working-class culture. This movement grew from
the founding assumptions set out in Raymond Williams’s seminal text
Culture and Society (1971). The main theme of the book laments the great
severing of ‘culture’ from ‘society’ produced by the industrial revolution in
which the former became the exclusive preserve of a largely leisured, ruling
class. By contrast, the growing urban working class (or in Marx’s term the
proletariat) that was produced from the agrarian peasant workers who pro-
vided the labour for England’s economic growth and industrial power in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no time or inclination to pro-
duce any culture worthy of the name. Williams writes, ‘the traditional
popular culture of England was, if not annihilated, at least fragmented and
weakened by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution’ (1971, 320). It
is a view reiterated by cultural studies’ most commanding figure, Stuart
Hall, writing even in the 1980s that ‘there is no separate, autonomous,
“authentic” layer of working-class culture to be found’ (Hall 1981, 227).
Williams’s project in the book is to advocate the reintegration of culture
and society in an understanding of culture as ‘a whole way of life’. It was
not evident, however, that this more holistic notion of culture could be
produced in the context of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, the
culture actually enjoyed by the working classes of the twentieth century—
cinema, television and popular music for example—he regarded as essen-
tially a mode of alienation that reinforced the separation of culture and
society. Williams writes, ‘we cannot fairly or usefully describe the bulk of
the material produced by the new means of communication as “working-
class culture”. For neither is it by any means produced exclusively for this
class, nor, in any important degree, is it produced by them’ (1971,
319–20). Even The Beatles, a broadly working-class group from Liverpool
who would go on to write all their own songs and redefine American pop-
ular music for Britain and the world, were regarded with disdain by the
New Left. ‘Beatles culture’ wrote Terry Eagleton in 1966, ‘is created
largely by a complex of agents, composers and businessmen who are part
of a system which creates a culture from above’ (Eagleton 1966, 122). The
Beatles, of course, were originally ‘rock ‘n’ rollers’, teenagers who dreamt
154 S. WILSON
of Elvis Presley and America. In The Uses of Literacy, cultural studies

founder Richard Hoggart is disapproving of the ‘peculiarly thin and pallid
form of dissipation’ represented by teenage boys in ‘drape suits, picture
ties, and an American slouch’ listening to rock ‘n’ roll on juke boxes.
Living in ‘a myth world compounded of a few simple elements they take
to be American life’, they are suffering from ‘a sort of spiritual dry rot’
(1957, 248).
This kind of assessment judges cultural activities according to a notion
of authenticity that is informed by a national, essentially literary culture—
endowed no doubt with the English oak of spiritual sturdiness. A hugely
influential text, Hoggart’s book informed academic critiques of popular
culture subsequently. At the same time, Williams’s nostalgic desire for a
future in which culture can be understood as ‘a whole way of life’, and his
non-elitist understanding of culture as ‘ordinary’ in Keywords and else-
where, began to shape the understanding of subcultures as expressions of
ways of (working-class) life in a manner that was not quite so dismissive.
The subcultures that emerged from working-class cultural practices that
necessarily engaged with commercial, consumer culture were both
acknowledged and assessed politically, becoming valued according to the
degree of ‘resistance’ they offered to ‘dominant culture’. They might also
be valued evidentially if such subcultures, their products and activities
could be interpreted in a Marxist analysis to see what ‘contradictions’ they
either disclosed or concealed in the dominant culture and society (see for
example Hebdige 1981). What was important for the cultural studies
tradition ultimately was not popular culture itself and its specific forms and
qualities, but its potential as a political ‘site of struggle’ and a ‘sphere […]
where socialism might be constituted.’ As Stuart Hall emphasised: ‘that is
why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t
give a damn about it’ (Hall 1981, 239).
Heavy metal was supposed by sociologists and cultural studies academ-
ics not to provide congenial ground for socialist revolution or progressive
social movements, and its fans were not considered worthy of attention as
a subculture. While ‘mods’ are the cornerstone of British academic
accounts of subcultures, rockers are assumed to have disappeared. In fact
they became metalheads and subsequently, following the various forms of
metal subgenres, have along with rap and hip hop the largest fan base in
the world. It is true social scientists did not neglect metal entirely. As Andy
Brown (2011) documents, metal came to academic attention in the disci-
plines of psychology or sociology because it was assumed to be associated
with delinquency and deviance, or ‘non-normative behaviour’. Heavy

metal was placed on the same plane as drug taking and juvenile crime. It
would be much later in the history of cultural studies, in the 1990s and
early decades of the twenty-first century, before metal would be afforded
any kind of sympathetic academic attention. Yet even here, assumptions
regarding conservative or ‘hegemonic’ representations of masculinity, for
example, metal’s so-called ‘politics of gender’ (ignoring the innumerable
female metal bands), and the presumption of ‘whiteness’ (ignoring the
innumerable metal bands from South Asia, South East Asia, South
America, the Middle East and so on) informed even those academics who
were more favourably inclined—or who were even fans themselves—in
moments of awkward bad conscience. The voices of Hoggart and Williams
still speak powerfully in this discourse such that art is reduced to social
behaviour leading, in the case of metal criticism, to an imperative to con-
jure-up ever more monstrous instances of male or ‘paternal’ authority, or
fantasies of control, ‘mastery’, ‘masculinity based on a fear of feminine
weakness’, or in the case of black metal ‘misanthropic elitism’ (Harris
2006, 31–48). Metal continues to be subject to sociological show trials
that have no other purpose it seems to me than to justify the violence—
not of the art of metal—but of academic discourse itself, in its bio-political
pursuit of social inclusivity in the form of normalisation.
But perhaps none of this is very surprising. Metal emerges in part in
reaction to the progressivism of the late 1960s that informs academic dis-
course in the human sciences. No doubt, the sound of metal can provide
support to negative attitudes and emotions. At the time, certain frustra-
tions and suspicions informed a rejection of the perceived continuity
between the conventional sensibility of pop romance and the ‘peace and
love’ mantras of ‘hippie’ politics. As Sabbath drummer Bill Ward recalled,
‘we got sick and tired of all the bullshit—love your brother and flower-
power forever, meeting a little chick on the corner and you’re hung up on
her and all this’ (cited in Rosen 2002, 31).
Alongside the apparent bad attitude and alleged political incorrectness,
the other aspect of heavy metal that meets with scorn and disapproval is
the prevalence of occult and satanic symbolism, which is regarded as naïve
and irrational, if not infantile. For the progressive materialism of the
human sciences, to be divested of God is all well and good, but not when
it is replaced by the antithesis of the Good God, the bad Devil. This point
has been addressed elsewhere by myself and others. In ‘Introduction to
Melancology’ (2014), for example, I argue that black metal constitutes a
156 S. WILSON
radical if paradoxically divine atheism that loathes God and embraces

Satanism in order to open itself to a world of transcendent imagination
that secular atheism and scientific realism precludes. But to keep within
the context of this chapter, I would contend that the elaboration of a
supernatural domain—no matter how ‘pulpy’ and artificial—is a necessary
step in representing and mourning the dead. This is for two reasons: first,
because recourse to the domain of the supernatural is a means of acknowl-
edging that the dead do not die that easily. The dead haunt the living that
struggle to mourn, their presence registered in guilt and resentment at
being abandoned, in hatred, remorse and self-hatred, the elements of mel-
ancholy that so often accompany mourning: the afflictions of ‘the minds
that the Dead have ravished’ in the words of Wilfred Owen (‘Mental
Cases’). Second, the fictional life of the undead that haunt the present in
the pulp fictional forms of vampires, zombies, ghouls and all the occult
paraphernalia that populate the iconography of the metal subgenres testify
to the need to kill the dead for a second time, so that one might be finally
free of them. But in order to kill them, one must occupy their domain
symbolically. Thus, while the mourning ‘black of the metalhead is adoles-
cent and funereal’ it communicates ‘a problematic immersion in the
world’ of the dead rather than the ‘elite transcendence’ of it represented
by the critically distanced, mature gaze of the social scientist (Masciandaro
2015, 40).
Of course one is never entirely free of the dead, so the third and fourth
aspects of mourning concern constituting the lost object more precisely
and our relation to it. The lost object is not necessarily identical to whom
or what has died. Citing Freud from Mourning and Melancholia, Leader
writes, ‘there may be a difference between whom we have lost and what
we have lost in them’ (2009, 128). The nature of this object must be fur-
ther considered in relation to the uncertainty that we have concerning
what we ourselves might have meant to the person who has died. Or what
indeed the lost object, the dead ‘thing’, might expect from us. There is at
the core of the lost object a point of nonknowledge or ‘sense of alterity
and of a register beyond’ all forms of representation (Leader 2009, 163).
It is in relation to this sense of alterity that lies the possibility for creativity
and a new beginning. In the next section I shall reiterate the first two
aspects of mourning in order to progress to the third and fourth by turn-
ing to Bolt Thrower. Bolt Thrower articulate, similarly through the means
of ‘trash’ consumer culture, a quasi-medieval (a ‘bolt thrower’ is a medi-
eval weapon) pre-industrial, mytho-poetic barbarism with futurological,
dystopian visions of mass slaughter and sacrifice. Defining this vision,

however, is the twentieth-century history of the disenchantment of war in
the industrialised carnage of working-class soldiers and populations. The
band are from Coventry, a city devastated by carpet bombing that is domi-
nated by a huge Cenotaph, the title of one of their most powerful tracks.
Cenotaph
The word cenotaph derives from the Greek κενοτάφιον/kenotaphion
(kenos, one meaning being ‘empty’, and taphos, meaning ‘tomb’). The
word Cenotaph then literally means ‘empty tomb’, or a monument erected
in honour of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere. It
can also be the initial tomb for a person who has since been interred some-
where else. Or again, as in typically ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’,
it can be the tomb of remains that are unnamed and unrecognisable; the
mortal remains that mark the absence of identity. The essential thing is
that the Cenotaph contains a central absence or emptiness that is both
symbolic and real. As such, it is an object that has the dignity of the ‘Thing’
in Heidegger’s terms. In this instance, the central emptiness symbolises
death, and the suffering that led to it. The construction of an edifice built
symbolically around a monumental emptiness also provides a means of
acknowledging that such suffering and death is impossible to imagine or
represent.
Bolt Thrower’s ‘Cenotaph’ (War Master, 1991) seems to reiterate this
sense of the monument as a ‘Thing’ in Heidegger’s terms, but in an
ambiguous way. While the tomb stands alone, destined to silence in its
commemoration of mortality, it is also described as a ‘parody’. Is the
Cenotaph commemorating the unknown remains of a nameless victim, or
commemorating the death of death itself? Is this the final death, ‘man-
kind’s oblivion’, or the overcoming of death in a hyper-mechanised uni-
verse? ‘Cenotaph’ sits slightly uneasily as the centrepiece of War Master.
Not musically where it provides a point of continuity between War Master
and particularly ‘World Eater’ from Realm of Chaos (1989) that plunges
the band’s sound into something more like full-blown death metal.
Musically, ‘Cenotaph’ performs ‘World Eater’s’ vision of bomb-blasted
carnage with crushing riffs, pulsing bass and punishing drums like banks
of artillery and a hail of bullets. The pulsating sonic force of ‘World Eater’
is accompanied by growling lyrics declaiming on the wounded and the
dead, on carnage and the devastation of bodies melting in blasts of white
158 S. WILSON
hot metal, bodies screaming in agony. In ‘Cenotaph’, however, the verses

slow down into a doom mode appropriate to the idea of the monument.
It is well known that Bolt Thrower take their visual imagery and much of
the inspiration for their lyrics from the Games Workshop and the
Warhammer games, particularly Realms of Chaos and no doubt much of
War Master. However, as far as I am aware, players are not offered a
Cenotaph alongside the action figures to deploy in the game. ‘Cenotaph’
seems to be an attempt to provide a link between the fantasy wars in
Warhammer and Warhammer 40k and the reality of twentieth-century
war, most notably World War Two and the devastation of Bolt Thrower’s
hometown. Coventry possesses its own formidable Cenotaph in Memorial
Park. A magnificent, futuristic art deco construction designed by
T.F. Tickner, it was ultimately completed in 1927 but opened in 1921 in
order to honour the dead of the ‘Great War’ of 1914–1918. However
because Coventry remained home to many metal-working industries and
munitions factories, it was famously subjected to an intense Blitz from July
to August 1940, culminating in an attack, on 14 November, from 515
German bombers that devastated the city in firestorms affecting every
building in the city centre. The lyrics from ‘World Eater’ that evoke melt-
ing flesh in the face of white-hot bomb blasts could easily have been writ-
ten about that event.
In War Master then, Bolt Thrower adopt with their Warhammer imag-
ery something highly artificial, such that their ‘Cenotaph’ becomes the
representation of the representation of the monument in Coventry, in
order for it to commemorate the death of death. The sense of ‘parody’
that is mentioned in the first line suggests that it is neither an Unknown
Soldier nor a particular pile of corpses that is commemorated: it is the
corpse of war itself. Bolt Thrower’s ‘Cenotaph’ is a memorial to mortality
and memory, to mankind’s oblivion and ultimately ‘war’s terminal con-
clusion’. And this is catastrophic—more catastrophic than war is the death
of war since it involves the sacrifice of the sacrifice that establishes the
social bond. ‘Cenotaph’s’ place in the context of Bolt Thrower’s oeuvre
evokes the worst possible dystopian outcome that is inextricably linked to
the overcoming and obliteration of mankind: that war itself would come
to a terminal conclusion at the hands of a war ‘master’. Does this have a
contemporary reference to something outside the Warhammer-esque
mythology?
World War One was not the only war that threatened to end all wars, or
at least the sacrifice necessarily inherently to war. Bolt Thrower’s War
Master was released in 1991, the year of the first Gulf War, which began in
January, the war that, notoriously, Jean Baudrillard declared ‘did not take
place’ (1995, 2). America, he writes, Saddam Hussein and the Gulf Powers
are fighting over the corpse of war. ‘Since this war was won in advance’
between a Western cyborg army run by an inhuman machine intelligence
and an Iraqi human army that were obliterated in the sand, it did not take
place. Not even the 10,000 tonnes of bombs that were dropped on the
Iraqis per day could make this a war. It is possible that War Master con-
tains an implicit Baudrillardian critique. Certainly it anticipates the present
and future of drone warfare driven by artificial intelligence that threatens
humanity according to Steven Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates
(Sainato 2015).
Warhammer 40k is set in a universe in which humanity is enslaved by an
alien intelligence bedecked in the semi-generic accoutrements of futurist
medieval techno-barbarism. The cinematic reference is to some of Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s movies from the 1980s such as Conan the Barbarian
inflected with the Terminator franchise. This conjunction is symptomatic
of a particular concern of the early 1990s that is clearly thematised by The
Terminator movies. On the one hand, the explosion of new technological
innovations and the exponential rise of the machines render war, on a
human scale, redundant. It is post-industrial war involving third-generation
machines, a question of machines against machines in which humanity is
surpassed. This is the theme of ‘Profane Creation’, of course, of War
Master, the album in which ‘technology’s progression’ results in the
enslavement of mankind. Human life is rendered worthless in an ‘auto-
mated living hell’. War is dead because humanity just does not have the
capacity to compete with the machine’s new revolution in military affairs.
The Conan-the-Barbarian-style Medievalism, then, is a phantasmatic
attempt to imagine the re-enchantment of war on something like a human
scale, or on the scale at least of techno-sapiens, or cyborgs. This is the
cyborg fashioned on the idea of a pre-modern warrior rather than the
cyborg ‘consoldier’: the soldier or pilot fighting war in the comfort of a
sealed cockpit with an onboard simulator, or the operator in a console in
Nevada at the heart of a nexus of networked computers commanding
drones.
The ‘war master’ of the Gulf War was the consoldier pilot or drone
operator, remote from the consequence of his or her actions. The sound
of Bolt Thrower is forged in the furnace that burns the corpse of war,
simultaneously simulating war and mourning it in their characteristic com-
160 S. WILSON
bination of death and doom metal. Of course it is ironic but also signifi-
cant that death metal became the music of choice ten years later as US
soldiers sought to supplement the lack of war’s reality in the second war
on Iraq, with pilots flying missions with Hatebreed in their helmets (see
Pieslak 2009).
The ‘lost object’ for Bolt Thrower is evoked by war. Bolt Thrower actu-
ally mourn war. But what is it in war that ‘points’ to them, like Sabbath’s
enigmatic ‘figure in black’? What are they to war? War Master represents a
culmination of a number of themes marking their writing from the begin-
ning. ‘Concessions of Law’, for example, is concerned with the lawlessness
of war, but as a figure for something else. War is not lawless, as the very
notion of a ‘war crime’ suggests. It is not just that there are always rules of
engagement that one may bend or twist or transgress. War may be a locus
of transgression, but the ecstasy of transgression depends upon and sus-
tains the law as its condition. For Bolt Thrower, however, the invocation
of the lawless chaos of war is to suggest the idea of a force hostile to
humanity that is located outside all human law, rule, norm. It is a force
that can only be imagined in terms of all too human atavistic crimes and
cruelties, killer instincts, sadism, but which is entirely other and alien. For
Bolt Thrower, war is the name of cosmic trauma, war as the force of the
Outside; war as means towards a figure for some Other Thing. In this
sense Bolt Thrower’s death metal is a practice that is oriented entirely
towards contact with the unknown that requires engagement with an
alternative, transcendental medium heterogeneous to language. This het-
erogeneous medium is of course music, or rather metal, in this instance
death metal whose sonic pulverisation of the brain and solar plexus seeks
to hollow out the body of its organs in intense reveries reminiscent of the
experience of schizophrenia—a recurrent theme and affect of metal going
back, as we have seen, to Sabbath’s Paranoid.
One of the problems with deploying forms of analysis that reference
lyrics and themes drawn from them is that it implies that the music is just
there to support and enhance these lyrics and themes, as if they were some
kind of movie soundtrack, nuancing lyrical feeling and emotion. But this
is not the case. On the contrary, it is completely the other way around.
More often than not, the function of lyrics is simply to enhance the music
in an untenable commentary on its sonic force that is inaccessible to any
system of linguistic meaning. For the most part inaudible in the case of
death metal, sung or rather growled lyrics provide an improper, catachres-
tic, objective correlative to an in-human sonic system designed to impact
the sensorium with the unsettling force of cenaesthetic schizophrenic

symptoms, the symptoms of ‘mental cases’ in the words of Wilfred Owen:
weird voices in the cerebellum, growling, indistinct yet threatening
beneath sonic explosions of violent percussion and blood-curdling bass.
These sounds ultimately evoke the shattering of normal existence in cos-
mic trauma caused by ‘unknown powers’, ‘Unleashed (Upon Mankind)’;
or ‘An unseen force’ that tears through body and soul, (‘What Dwells
Within’); or a ‘force’ that strives to gain control of ‘your mind’ that ‘burns
you deep inside’ (‘Shreds of Sanity’). With the latter, ‘Shreds of Sanity’,
schizophrenia is used as a trope to evoke bodily events and the sonic reor-
ganisation of the sensorium and a reordering of psychic cathexes in rela-
tion to an extraterritorial vastness yet to be discovered.
In Bolt Thrower’s death metal, schizophrenia is not a specifiable defect
of human central nervous system functioning. It is not a medical condition
but a schizosonic, transhuman vector of exteriority heading towards ‘regions
of the unknown’ (‘After Life’), cutting across and opening out the effects
of the (de)tonalities that mark the singular life of sonic beings. With Bolt
Thrower, death metal is not about war, rather, war is about death metal
(an inversion they share with the Italian Futurists for whom the cacophony
of war was an art of noise). In the work of Bolt Thrower, working-class
mourning takes the form of the creative deployment of the sound and fury
of war and madness, ‘snatching after’ those ‘that smote them, brother’
(Owen, ‘Mental Cases’). Black Sabbath, Bolt Thrower, and metal at its
best, shapes out of chaos and destruction a sonic war machine that courses
through the void of Culture as its scourge.
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Shock Rock Horror! The Representation
and Reception of Heavy Metal Horror Films
in the 1980s
Nedim Hassan
In histories of the development of the heavy metal music genre in the

United States, the 1980s has been considered a hugely significant period.
Not only did heavy metal become a ‘dominant genre of American music’,
it became the locus of a moral panic and accordingly, as Walser puts it, ‘a
site of explicit social contestation’ (Walser 1993, 24). This moral panic has
been discussed at length by various scholars who have identified how dur-
ing the mid-1980s the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), a
powerful pressure group with links to US politicians, pursued a highly
visible media campaign that effectively served to demonise heavy metal as
a genre that allegedly promoted violence, suicide, Satanism, involvement
with the occult and other deviant activities to America’s youth (Brown
2011; Wright 2000; Chastagner 1999).
As Wright (2000) and Brown (2011) suggest, major factors in amplify-
ing the moral panic during this period were the accessibility and authority
of the groups making claims about the destructive influence of heavy
N. Hassan (*)

164 N. HASSAN
metal. Politicians, religious organisations, police, probation and mental

health services were all articulating concerns about the negative influence
of metal on youth to parents and families via mass media. This construc-
tion of metal culture as deviant had implications for fans’ notions of self-
identity, with some feeling that they were treated differently by authorities
and that they had to defend their musical tastes (Weinstein 2000; Friesen
1990). Furthermore, in the light of debates about metal’s influence on
youth, mental health facilities in Southern California were willing to hos-
pitalise adolescents on the basis of parental concerns about their children’s
preference for the music (Rosenbaum and Prinsky 1991). Therefore, it is
apparent that the moral panic had an impact upon the regulation of young
peoples’ behaviour in the 1980s.
The prominence of these claims within the mass media ensured that
even though articles that challenged such ideas did appear within aca-
demic research and niche media such as heavy metal magazines, they
were largely ignored in broader media debates. Consequently, Brown
(2011) concludes that fans in the 1980s had limited means to counteract
the development of the moral panic. However, while much has been
written about the above moral panic and its impact, hitherto there has
been relatively little attention paid to how it influenced popular film in
this period. Taking as a starting point Andrew Tudor’s emphasis on the
importance of scrutinising the sociocultural moment when attempting to
understand the potential appeal of genre texts at a particular place and
time, this chapter examines a relatively short-lived cycle of films that may
be termed ‘heavy metal horror movies’ (Tudor 2002). Films like Trick or
Treat (1986), The Gate (1987) and Black Roses (1988) explicitly por-
trayed aspects of heavy metal culture and were released at a point when
debates about metal’s influence on youth were at their most acute. This
chapter contends that consideration of these films as products released
during a climate of moral panic is crucial. It illustrates that the broader
media debates mentioned above, which were motivated by the purpose of
controlling America’s youth, influenced both discourses about heavy
metal music and discourses relating to the heavy metal horror films.
However, through analysis of these films and an assessment of audiences’
interpretations of them, this chapter demonstrates that these texts are
ambivalent and had the potential during this vital historical moment to
constitute resources of resistance for youth audiences and metal fans in
particular.
SHOCK ROCK HORROR! THE REPRESENTATION AND RECEPTION… 165
Heavy Metal Horror Films as Exploitation Movies

Shary depicts the heavy metal horror films as a ‘short-lived phenomenon’
(2002, 147) that constituted a generic subcategory in its own right and
existed alongside other more established horror subgenres such as the
slasher film. However, as Deighan (2016) points out, the heavy metal hor-
ror film has a longer history that complicates definitions of it as a distinc-
tive subgenre. This is because earlier films like Terror on Tour (1980) and
Rocktober Blood (1984) were essentially drawing upon motifs from the
slasher horror subgenre but featured protagonists who were associated
with metal and hard rock bands (either as victims or killers). Deighan goes
on to point out that the heavy metal horror trend stretches into the 1990s
with low-budget films such as Shock ‘Em Dead (1991) and Dead Girls
(1990). This chapter will focus upon the films that were released in the
immediate wake of the PMRC media campaign and the congressional
hearings of 1985 when the moral panic relating to metal music culture was
at its most acute. Consequently, analysis will be confined to a consider-
ation of Trick or Treat (1986), The Gate (1987), Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare
(1987) and Black Roses (1988).
In a sense, then, these films can also be defined as exploitation movies
in that they were produced in order to capitalise on both the success of the
heavy metal musical genre and to exploit the controversy surrounding it.
Commenting on the development of the exploitation movie in the 1950s,
Doherty notes that such movies were ‘triply exploitative, simultaneously
exploiting sensational happenings (for story value), their notoriety (for
publicity value), and their teenage participants (for box office value)’
(1988, 8). The heavy metal horror films, as will be illustrated below, all
match this description to a large extent.
As Cherry asserts, horror films are adept at being able to ‘tap into the
cultural moment by encoding the anxieties of the moment into their
depictions of monstrosity’ (2009, 11). It will be demonstrated below that
these heavy metal horror films achieved this by primarily connecting
iconography and events associated with metal culture to notions of mon-
strosity, Satanic ritual, possession, deviance and violence. Crucially, they all
accomplish this articulation through narratives that centre on the experi-
ences of young people. Thus, in one sense they can also be seen as part of
a broader trend which saw the growth of teen-centred horror films, par-
ticularly after 1985, a year in which teen horror film releases had doubled
compared to the previous one (Shary 2002). Shary argues that the teen
166 N. HASSAN
horror of this period, exemplified in slasher films such as the popular

Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, worked as what Feuer
terms a kind of ‘cultural problem-solving’ device in that it served to
‘Other’ youth characters in specific ways, featuring monsters that punished
adolescent transgression (Feuer 1987, 144; Shary 2002).
This ritual approach to the study of the horror genre is valuable because
it enables us to explicate how horror film texts can become part of a ‘cul-
tural forum […] involving the negotiation of shared beliefs and values,
and helping to maintain and rejuvenate the social order as well as assisting
it in adapting to change’ (Feuer 1987, 144). Consequently, horror films in
this period that depicted the activities of youths had the potential to
become part of the negotiation of shared cultural values, contributing to
understandings of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ youth behaviour by directly
confronting anxieties about ‘Otherness’ (Wood 2002).
However, Neale (2000) and Tudor (2002) point out that this approach
needs to be adopted with care because there is a tendency for analysts
using it to be somewhat selective when choosing films that are exemplars
of cultural problem-solving, ignoring texts that may contradict their theo-
ries. Moreover, scholars employing the ritual approach have sometimes
tended to lack an appreciation of the potential complexity of film audi-
ences. Consequently, it is vital to consider the ‘appeal of a genre in a par-
ticular socio-temporal context’ and to appreciate that audiences ‘conceive
genres variably, taking divergent pleasures from them’ (Tudor 2002, 49).
Thus, the analysis that follows attempts to maintain a consideration of
Tudor’s key question: ‘why do these people like this horror in this place at
this particular time’ (2002, 54). Consequently, the sections that follow,
whilst analysing the generic conventions of heavy metal horror, will also
connect these with issues emerging from the aforementioned moral panic
and will consider the reception of these films by audiences.
Conventions of Heavy Metal Horror

In terms of their use of generic conventions, the heavy metal horror films
of the mid-to-late 1980s utilised elements that featured in wider youth-
oriented films of the period. Sharing similarities with texts like 976-EVIL
(1988) and The Lost Boys (1987), as well as with earlier texts like Carrie
(1976), several of the films depict alienated teen characters who are strug-
gling to deal with a dysfunctional family life, the loss of a parent or the
pressures of high school. Black Roses and The Gate in particular establish
problematic relationships between key characters and their parents from

early scenes onwards. For instance, both John (Black Roses) and Terry (The
Gate) live in single-parent households with their fathers, who are por-
trayed as either distant (John’s father hardly looks at him and is mainly
depicted staring at his newspaper) or absent (we never see Terry’s father,
but we see a note left on the refrigerator door that he is away ‘on business’
and Terry is left to eat cold pizza). While Eddie, the central character in
Trick or Treat, has a caring single mother, he spends the majority of his
time in his bedroom and, moreover, his status as an alienated teen is estab-
lished from the outset of the film when we learn that he is being bullied by
jocks at his high school.
In a highly effective opening sequence, not only does Trick or Treat
establish Eddie as a victim of bullying, it alludes to the notion that this has
led him to contemplate suicide. We see Eddie in his bedroom writing a
letter to his rock star idol, Sammi Curr, and we hear the content of this in
the form of a monologue that continues to unfold whilst we witness high-
school- based incidents of harassment that provide visual testimony to
some of his words. In this sequence we learn that Eddie has had ‘radical’
thoughts of ending ‘it all’ but that ‘the one thing that kept me going’ was
his rock idol.
Trick or Treat’s broaching of the issue of teenage suicide is distinctive.
It is the only heavy metal horror film to allude to the connections between
metal and suicide that were being made during some of the debates in this
period. Weinstein (2000) and Brown (2011) make clear that this was a
connection that was articulated during testimony given at the Senate hear-
ing organised by the PMRC in 1985, as well as during subsequent media
reports. However, Trick or Treat’s immediate refutation of Eddie’s sui-
cidal thoughts through the affirmation of his fandom—‘the one thing that
kept me going was you’—provides a striking contrast to the wider media
discourse of the period. Rather than suggest that metal music fandom can
cause or promote youth suicide, which was an allegation that became cen-
tral to discourses denouncing metal, Trick or Treat implies that metal fan-
dom can offer salvation from suicidal thoughts. Indeed, to an extent, both
this film and The Gate construct metal music as a positive communicative
force that can become a medium for the empowerment of young people.
Ironically when Eddie first listens to backwards messages on a Sammi Curr
record, (an act associated with controversy because Christian groups were
alleging that backward masking on records often promoted pro-suicide or
Satanic messages), he is given instructions on how to stand up to his high
168 N. HASSAN
school tormentors (Ladouceur 2016). In The Gate it is the album sleeve

notes and lyrics of the fictional band Sacrifyx that provide Terry and Glenn
with the specialist knowledge they need to understand and eventually
close the gateway to the Hell-like world that they have inadvertently
opened, saving Glenn’s sister and his family home.
What complicates the construction of music culture as a potential source
of youth empowerment in the heavy metal horror films is the way that metal
music and musicians are to varying degrees located within the realm of the
occult and the Satanic. In The Gate Sacrifyx possess knowledge of the ‘Old
Gods’ and have performed occult rituals that their album sleeve implies
enabled them to open the gate and led to their destruction. Rock star
Sammi Curr in Trick or Treat ritually sacrifices himself in flames in order to
be eventually reincarnated as a demon by the devoted Eddie. The Satanic
Black Roses of John Fasano’s 1988 film are masquerading as a metal band
in order to convert the youth of Mill Basin into murderous demons. While
in Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, although the band Tritonz and their followers
are ultimately revealed as ‘mere shadows’ designed to enable the Archangel
Triton to entice and do battle with Satan, it is still telling that it is a metal
band that is depicted as being suitable to lure ‘old Scratch’ himself.
In Trick or Treat and Black Roses the articulation of metal with Satan
and the occult is compounded by a narrative device employed in earlier
films such as Children of the Corn (1984), namely the inclusion of a false
God or prophet who brainwashes youths, attempting to turn them against
adults and carry out murderous deeds. This is manifested most explicitly
in Black Roses when the band plays a series of concerts in Mill Basin. After
each show the town’s youth become enchanted by the band’s power,
becoming increasingly alienated from school and their families. This then
leads them to carry out acts of delinquency before eventually murdering
their parents. In this instance, the metal band Black Roses are a malign,
corrupting influence, who, like Isaac, the deranged child preacher in
Children of the Corn, indoctrinate the town’s youth into committing mur-
derous acts on adults in order to serve an evil deity. In Trick or Treat
despite the warnings of his DJ friend Nuke (played by hard rock band
Kiss’s Gene Simmons) that Sammi Curr ‘wasn’t a God’, Eddie’s idolising
of Sammi is ultimately revealed as dangerous when his continued playing
of backwards record messages helps to reincarnate Curr as a powerful
demon capable of controlling electricity. Once the source of a more
empowered and assertive sense of identity for Eddie, idolatry of a metal
star is revealed as misguided once Eddie realises that Curr is a ‘false God’.
All of the films discussed above feature, to varying degrees, iconogra-

phy associated with metal music culture. This includes: album sleeves and
artwork; clothing such as denim and leather jackets, bandanas, patches and
rock T-shirts; other markers of subcultural style and affiliation such as long
hair styles and dance styles such as head banging and air guitar; electric
guitars and amplifiers. Furthermore, each of the films features metal music
that is often deployed for both diegetic and extra-diegetic purposes during
the soundtracks. Yet it is the portrayal of music technology in these texts
that is another significant factor to examine in order to further explicate
how they work as horror texts and resonate with wider social anxieties.
Each film posits the notion that musical artefacts such as recording studios
(Rock ‘n’ roll Nightmare), speakers (Trick or Treat and Black Roses), per-
sonal stereos and hi-fi systems (Trick or Treat), or else vinyl records them-
selves (Trick or Treat, The Gate and Black Roses) can act as conduits for
evil.
This notion is most prevalent in Trick or Treat when playing an album
backwards facilitates the eventual reincarnation of the demonic Sammi
Curr. Although even prior to Curr’s full appearance, one of the most strik-
ing scenes in the film is when, following instructions from Curr’s back-
wards messages, Eddie plants a tape recording with Tim, the jock who
leads the bullying against him. Tim’s girlfriend, Jeannie, then listens to the
cassette on her personal stereo in Tim’s car after he momentarily leaves her
alone whilst they are ‘making out’ by a lake. A ghostly green essence slowly
emanates from Jeannie’s headphones and proceeds to sexually arouse her
by stimulating her breasts and vagina, before a monstrous salivating appa-
rition is manifested, causing her to scream and faint. When Tim arrives
back at the car Jeannie’s headphones are smoking and appear to have
melted the flesh of her ear lobes.
This scene and later ones, such as when Sammi Curr emerges from
Eddie’s bedroom speakers or attacks people at the high school concert by
firing bolts of electricity from his guitar, blends fears concerning the threat
of the occult with technophobia. In his essay on technology and the
Satanic film, Ferguson argues that films like 976-EVIL (1988) and
Evilspeak (1981) foreground anxieties in 1980s USA over ‘controversial
communication technologies’ such as 976 and 900 premium rate phone
lines that parents were concerned about their children accessing from the
home because they ‘posed threats to traditional family structures’ through
the way that they potentially made pornography available (Ferguson 2016,
97). In the heavy metal horror films such anxieties about the control of
170 N. HASSAN
communication technologies are (at times literally!) amplified. Not only is

metal music a source of fear, this genre is portrayed as ubiquitous and
mobile in that it can attack from hardware within the home and outside of
it. Indeed, towards the end of Trick or Treat Eddie’s car stereo possesses
his car through the broadcast of Sammi Curr’s music.
Given that radio had by the 1930s become a domesticated medium for
music that as Moores (2000, 48) puts it ‘was passing from the miraculous
to the taken-for-granted’, these representations of music technologies that
had by the 1980s become naturalised within everyday American life are
striking. Although there were some concerns about personal stereo usage
and its potential to be socially disruptive or cause hearing damage, it had
become a central leisure activity for many Americans by the mid-1980s
(Du Gay et al. 2013). The transistor radio had enabled music to be heard
‘on the move’ since the mid-1950s (Peterson 1990). Yet in these texts
such everyday media technologies were implicated in the potential destruc-
tion of youth and the family.
While the domestication of music technologies within the family home
is a process that historically involved contestation and negotiation between
men and women (Keightley 1996; Moores 2000), in the heavy metal hor-
ror films the construction of this domestication as uncanny can be linked
with parental anxieties over their children’s use of such technologies. In
Freud’s (2003 [1919]) influential work on the uncanny he examines the
relationship between the German terms heimlich (which roughly translates
as meaning something familiar and home-like) and unheimlich (which
translates as the opposite—something unfamiliar) in order to discuss how
certain fictional depictions or real situations can foreground uncanny
thoughts or feelings that human subjects have repressed. Drawing on this
concept, it is apparent that films like Trick or Treat and Black Roses
articulate the notion that familiar, domesticated, everyday heimlich music
technologies located in living rooms, bedrooms and cars have become
unheimlich: de-familiarised and uncanny. Freud makes clear that the
uncanny is ‘something familiar […] that has been repressed and then reap-
pears’ (2003 [1919], 152); in these films, an older sense of the ‘miracu-
lous’ (Moores 2000, 48) and undomesticated, rather than the everyday
aspect of music technologies, is being foregrounded.
Moreover, this foregrounding takes place in order to emphasise a loss
of parental control over their children and over musical commodities that
have been appropriated by youth. Nowhere is this anxiety over the loss of
control more effectively summed up than in a scene in Black Roses where
efforts by a paternal figure to control loud metal music are met with a
deadly attack by music technology. Tony’s father chastises him in the liv-
ing room, telling him to ‘turn this [metal] music off!’ before switching off
the record. Sending Tony out of the room to help his mother with the
dishes, his father sits down on the sofa only for the stereo system to switch
itself back on and continue blasting out metal. When he inspects the
record turntable he finds that the spinning vinyl disc has distorted into a
monstrous form with bulging black flesh. Glancing up he realises that the
speaker has undergone a similar transformation and he is powerless to
prevent a spider-like alien monster from attacking him, wrapping its jaws
around his head and devouring him through the speaker.
The generic conventions of these heavy metal horror films, therefore,
need to be understood not only in relation to broader horror texts of the
period, they need to be situated in relation to broader sociocultural anxiet-
ies about the control of youth cultural activities. As the above examples
illustrate, these were ambivalent texts that exploited moral panics about
metal culture in order to suggest that this was something firmly linked
with the occult and uncanny, yet they also suggested that this culture
could offer salvation as well as damnation. For the remainder of this chap-
ter issues with the reception of these texts will be considered by paying
particular attention to more contemporary audience evaluations of Trick
or Treat. This will then enable an exploration of the impact of the afore-
mentioned discourses and representations.
‘Most of Us Metalheads Thought She Was Full

of B.S.’: The Reception of Trick or Treat
The production notes of Trick or Treat are revealing in that they clearly
portray the film as having been produced with the satirical intention of
‘poking fun at the forces and individuals on all sides of the controversy’
surrounding metal music (Trick or Treat: production notes 1986, 5). As
the main scriptwriter Rhet Topham (who was also a metal fan) explained
in an online interview with a fan website, the debates led by the PMRC
were: ‘definately [sic] the seed for the film. At that time Tipper Gore […]
was running around screaming about something called ‘Rock-Porn.’ Most
of us metalheads thought she was full of B.S.’ (cited at SammiCurr.com,
online 2016b). Indeed, Trick or Treat features a scene near the beginning
of the film that parodies the congressional hearings into music lyrics that
172 N. HASSAN
were instigated by the PMRC, with fictional rock star Sammi Curr raging
against what he sees as attacks on free speech in much the same way that
rock musicians Dee Snider and Frank Zappa had attacked the PMRC at
the actual hearings. That the film was satirising the controversy being gen-
erated is also suggested by its ironic casting of heavy metal icon Ozzy
Osbourne. Osbourne plays an evangelical preacher, the Rev. Aaron
Gilstrom, who is featured on television ranting against ‘sick’ and depraved
metal music.
This satirising of the moral panic about metal could be seen as a kind of
folk devil reaction (Griffiths 2010) that was disseminated in a popular
media form. Griffiths defines a public folk devil reaction as one that would
be understood by members of a subculture but is designed to ‘to be seen
or heard by people who are not already involved or familiar with the
group, community, or subculture that has triggered the moral panic in
question’ (2010, 410). Such reactions are designed to defend the subcul-
ture that is being demonised. Although not all of the producers of the
above films may have set out to achieve this, it is interesting that some
comments of fans of Trick or Treat interpret it in this manner.
For instance, a prevalent position articulated in the Internet Movie
Database (IMDb) reviews of the film is a recognition that the film engages
with the controversies surrounding heavy metal in the 1980s, with 35 out
of the 65 reviews indicating some acknowledgement of the debates
referred to earlier. Some of these comments demonstrate an awareness of
the impact of the film’s parodying of the moral panic. This is made evident
in comments such as: ‘What is also great about TT is how funny it is when
[it] mocks and pokes fun at the controversy and criticism Heavy Metal
went through at the time especially with Tipper Gore, the PMRC, playing
Metal records backwards and probably hearing subliminal messages. It
takes all those things that are mentioned above and makes laughs out of
them’ (jcbutthead86, Internet Movie Database 2016).
The significance of these aspects of Trick or Treat is augmented when
we consider its dissemination to a mass market. It was the thirteenth most
popular horror film watched in the US during 1986, a year that saw big
blockbuster horror franchises like Aliens, Poltergeist II and Friday the 13
Part VI, doing good business at the box office. The film grossed
$6,797,218, and it was likely that it was watched by a healthy audience on
home video given that the film was released during the boom in video
recorders and movie rentals (Box Office Mojo 2016 [online]). The
soundtrack to the film, which was performed by Fastway, stayed on the US
album charts for 11 months (Larkin 1995, 131). Trick or Treat was, there-
fore, watched and listened to (and potentially discussed and reflected
upon) by a substantial number of people in the US.
If we accept James Twitchell’s argument that the primary audience for
horror in this period was adolescents, then consideration of the reception
of this film becomes even more pertinent (Twitchell 1985, 68). In a period
when it is apparent that some heavy metal audiences found it difficult to
defend their cultural practices in the face of a sustained mass-media cam-
paign by the PMRC, a different popular media form watched in the cin-
ema and at home may have helped them to legitimate their self-identities
in spite of marginalisation elsewhere. Indeed, as was discussed above,
Trick or Treat in particular articulates anxieties about teenage marginalisa-
tion in that its central character, Eddie Weinbauer, is a heavy metal fan
who is struggling to cope with high school life. The significance of this
representation of Eddie and its potential impact on audiences within this
specific historical context will now be considered further.
Eddie’s victimisation by characters that are portrayed as jocks positions
him as a ‘burnout’, which as Eckert (1989) has made clear in her ethno-
graphic study of high school social roles was a prominent social category
during the 1980s. Whereas jocks embody an attitude of conformity to the
US high school’s corporate hierarchical structure, burnouts represent the
opposite end of the spectrum and are more alienated from this structure
(Eckert 1989, 4). In a telling scene from early in the film, Jeanie, the girl-
friend of the main jock character who bullies Eddie, confronts him and asks
him why he is so ‘creepy’ and why he is not interested in who is ‘running
for school council’. Hence, from the outset Trick or Treat suggests to us
that Eddie is connected with the burnout category in that he rejects the
corporate hegemony of the high school. Yet, burnouts were not usually
considered as targets for bullying; indeed as Eckert pointed out in personal
communication, they were often considered ‘tougher’ than jocks and they
usually had strong friendship networks (personal communication, 20th
June 2014). By portraying Eddie as marginalised from any strong friend-
ship networks, especially at the start of the film, but foregrounding the
notion that he is (like burnouts) alienated from the high school system,
Trick or Treat emphasises that this character is vulnerable. Furthermore, by
largely isolating Eddie but maintaining a ‘jocks versus burnouts’ dialectic
that would have been highly familiar to high school students, the film
might have provided some in the audience with an opportunity to reflect
upon personal anxieties about their position within school hierarchies.
174 N. HASSAN
The potential for this is demonstrated in online responses to the film on

both IMDb and also fan websites devoted to Trick or Treat. Eleven out of
the 65 IMDb reviews discuss identifying with Eddie, and some of these
feature revealing reflections upon personal experience. One reviewer in
particular elaborates on the significance of the fact that Eddie is portrayed
as a victim of bullying and notes that ‘The way Eddie is being bullied in
the film is timeless and real and it will always be relevant because it hap-
pens all the time’ (jcbutthead86, Internet Movie Database 2016). Another
reviewer directly relates to Eddie’s experiences, writing that ‘I am a lot like
the Eddie character as I was constantly bullied in school for loving heavy
metal music and being different. So much so I now have post-traumatic
stress disorder because of it and to see a movie where the lead character
refuses to put up with the bullies anymore is inspiring’ (cradleoffilth-
fan777, Internet Movie Database 2016).
The theme of identification with Eddie is also suggested in contribu-
tions to the fan-created guestbook of a website devoted to the film. Guests
on SammiCurr.com left messages such as: ‘me and my life’; ‘Can totally
relate to Ragman [Eddie’s nickname in the film]. I was [i]n high school
when this came out. I was a metalhead. And still a metalhead.’ (SammiCurr.
com 2016a); ‘this movie grabbed a part of myself that will forever be’
(SammiCurr.com 2016a). While these online testimonies should not be
read as a straightforward ‘reflection’ of the reception of Trick or Treat in
the 1980s, what they do indicate is the potential for such texts to be
empowering for some youth audiences at a time when other media,
political and institutional discourses were constructing metal and other
forms of youth culture as illegitimate and deviant.
Conclusion
In his seminal book on the cultural contexts of horror fiction, Grixti argues
that magical beliefs become dominant in societies where humans have
gaps in their knowledge and in their powers of control (Grixti 1989, 153).
The power of horror is therefore connected with the way that it often
plays with uncertainties that stem from anxieties about a lack of control
over different aspects of life. Thus, it is not surprising that in Trick or
Treat, as well as in other heavy metal horror films, the occult is often
explored by adolescents. This is because as Twitchell points out, the con-
cerns of adolescents are ‘fraught with inarticulated [often sexual] anxiety’
(1985, 68). It is significant that the specific use of the occult in Trick or
Treat enables Eddie to control aspects of his life that he otherwise finds
difficult (including getting a girlfriend). He accesses dead rock star Sammi

Curr’s occult powers (through playing a record backwards) in order to get
back at the bullies who are making him feel powerless. The increased
(magical) power that he obtains through engaging with Curr also gives
him the confidence to present a more assertive self-identity in front of
Leslie, the main love interest in the film.
Conversely the theme of helplessness and a lack of control dominated
the discourses of those who claimed that metal music was a pernicious
influence on youth in this period. The PMRC, as well as organisations like
California-based Back in Control that delivered workshops to parents
advising them of the dangers of their children’s involvement with heavy
metal and advocated ‘de-metaling’, articulated anxieties about the vulner-
ability of adolescents under the influence of metal and about the subse-
quent loss of parental control (Rosenbaum and Prinsky 1991). In the face
of a national crisis over the condition of US youth evidenced by higher
levels of child poverty and teenage suicide, it is striking that pressure
groups like the PMRC partly attributed the causes of these problems to
cultural artefacts like heavy metal albums (Giroux 2002, 172). For here
too, as in heavy metal horror films, we have an example of magical beliefs
about popular music’s influence being invoked when groups of people
lacked knowledge and had anxieties about control over others. Anxieties
about control, particularly control over adolescents’ life experiences are,
therefore, a central thread for understanding the cultural impact of heavy
metal horror films like Trick or Treat in mid-1980s USA. Yet, as this chap-
ter has shown, these films were not only able to lay bare these anxieties.
They offered youth audiences potential opportunities to reflect upon their
own sense of control over their cultural practices when faced with wider
discourses that denied them any agency.
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Youth, Hysteria and Control in Peter
Watkins’s Privilege
Rehan Hyder
Introduction: The Pitfalls of the British Pop Movie

The twin releases on DVD and Blu-ray of Peter Watkins’s Privilege in
2010 by New Yorker Video and the BFI was a significant moment of redis-
covery for those interested both in post-war British film and also for stu-
dents of the pop music movie. Not only did this release reintroduce a key
film in the oeuvre of one of Britain’s most gifted and controversial direc-
tors, it also filled an important gap in the development of a particular
strand of film-making exploring the avenues and byways of the popular
music industry. Watkins’s film is key to the development of the subgenre
of British films that focus on the exploitative aspects of the popular music
industry. Whilst many films have explored the manipulative and dehuman-
ising forces brought to bear on the figure of the pop star, it is only Watkins’s
film that attempts to explore such a narrative within a broader political
context. The framing of the narrative within Privilege around post-Marxist
ideas of media manipulation as practised by the forces of the culture indus-
try marks out his film as a unique provocation, one that reflects not only
R. Hyder (*)
University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

180 R. HYDER
the tumultuous period in which it was made but also is prescient in its
representation of pop music as a means of pacifying the vulnerable masses.
The framing of the pop music industry as devious and unscrupulous
was a theme first established in British film in the 1950s. The focus on the
machinations of commercial pop has retained a grim fascination for gen-
erations of film-makers and their audiences. Following early attempts to
chart the rise of the nascent rock ‘n’ roll star, films such as The Tommy
Steele Story (1959), which reflected a celebratory and optimistic quality,
British film-makers soon began to explore the pitfalls of the music industry
and adopt a much more cynical tone.
Films like Expresso Bongo (1959) and A Hard Day’s Night (1964),
whilst capturing the energy and excitement of the burgeoning post-war
pop industry, began to reflect a more sceptical and cynical approach. This
tendency focused on the machinations of the commercial aspects of the
industry and emphasised the exploitation of the individual artist at the
heart of the narrative. These often-disparaging and always-knowing
accounts of the commercial pop world began playfully, satirising the self-
serving operations of unscrupulous managers and promoters, but later
gave way to darker and more disturbing tales of burnout and decline. Such
was the dominance of this particular narrative that the decades following
the 1960s gave rise to such films as Stardust (1974), Flame (1975),
Breaking Glass (1980) and Brothers of the Head (2005) which developed
more sinister takes on the ‘rise and fall’ story. The sleazy and cruel nature
of the music industry depicted in these films gives little credence to the
hope and optimism of the early British pop film, instead charting the pro-
tagonist’s exposure to the dehumanising forces of organised capital.
In these films all of the potential and artistic creativity of the central
figure of the singer/musician is all but smothered by an industry that
treats them as little more than slaves,1 ultimately reducing them to obscu-
rity, madness and even death. These dramatic narratives are informed by a
critique that contrasts the youthful energy and artistic potential of the titu-
lar star against an unfeeling and manipulative capitalist system that chews
up and spits out these tragic protagonists. These films share an approach
which views the industrial side of pop music in a negative light; any overtly
political analysis tends to be dissipated and distributed by focusing on the
individual roles played by managers, promoters and businessmen—the evil
baddies that seek to thwart the naïve ambitions of the creative artist.
It is really only Peter Watkins’s film that attempts a wider examination
of the political and ideological implications of producing pop. Drawing on
YOUTH, HYSTERIA AND CONTROL IN PETER WATKINS’S PRIVILEGE 181
a post-Marxist critique of mass cultural production and reflecting the rise

of the global pop star in the 1950s and 1960s, Watkins was able, in
Privilege, to create one of the most overtly politically charged films to be
produced by a major motion picture company. The largely negative critical
response to Privilege and its subsequent obscurity was to have a profound
effect on Watkins’s approach to film-making, so much that he not only
turned his back on the studio system but never made another film in his
own country. Despite the many years that the film languished in obscurity,
rarely viewed or discussed by audiences and critics alike, the re-emergence
of Privilege nearly fifty years after its initial release reveals a work of uncom-
mon passion and polemic, with the themes of mass-media and ideological
manipulation both prescient and provocative for our times.
The Social Cement: Pop Music and the Culture

Industry
The imaginary setting of ‘Britain in the near future’ that provides the back-
drop for Privilege presents a world where the production and consumption
of popular culture has become fully integrated with the dominant political
and ideological framework. Whilst clearly influenced by the recent devel-
opments in pop music culture represented by the rise of the international
pop star—as epitomised by Beatlemania in the mid-late 1960s—the over-
riding concerns of Watkins’s film owe much to the theories and ideas
developed by post-Marxist writers and thinkers of the twentieth century.
In particular, Watkins evokes the work of the Frankfurt School, especially
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno whose ideas about what they
coined ‘the culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997) helps to
frame the dramatic narrative of Privilege. Focusing on the internal logic of
advanced capitalism and the rise of factory production, Adorno and
Horkheimer emphasised that standardisation was becoming central to
understanding this system. Their contention that cultural products such as
movies and music could be produced in the same way as other consumer
durables like cars and refrigerators was supported by examples such as the
Hollywood studio system and Tin Pan Alley. The passivity of the audi-
ence/consumer implicated in this analysis reflects the wider ideological
ramifications produced by this system of cultural production. Adorno and
Horkheimer suggest not only that the culture industry ensures a predica-
ble cycle of production and profit, but also that they propagate the politi-
cal values that underpin the continuation of a system of inequality:
182 R. HYDER
there is an agreement—or at least the determination—of all executive

authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from
their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all, themselves
[…] (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 33)
A central facet within this argument is the notion that the mass ranks of
ordinary people are both vulnerable and passive in their reception of the
endless reproduction of standardised cultural forms. Taken together with
the full panoply of mass-produced cultural forms, standardised popular
music has the ability not only to generate repeatable profits but also to
ensure that the masses are given the safe means of escapist relief:
Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening helps to
make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible. The sickness has a
preservative function. (Adorno 2001, 47)
Music, then, acts as a kind of ‘social cement’ (Adorno 1990) that is able
to offer some temporary relief to the individual within the masses so that
they are effectively distracted from the unequal and oppressive systems of
economic and political control.
The vision of Britain presented in Privilege, then, effectively develops
the themes outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer by focusing on the
fictional career of the pop star Steven Shorter, ‘the most desperately loved
entertainer in the world’. We are introduced to Steven Shorter (portrayed
by real-life pop star Paul Jones) as he is heralded in a US-style ticker-tape
parade in his home town of Birmingham in celebration of his triumphant
global tour. This is followed by footage of his homecoming live perfor-
mance in front of a packed house of adoring and often hysterical fans. The
bizarre stage show that focuses around Shorter’s incarceration and
attempted escape from brutal prison guards is inflected with violence and
provocation, providing the backdrop for the film’s first musical number
Free Me.2 This intense pantomime ends in a wilfully orchestrated near riot
over which the film’s deadpan narrator (voiced by Watkins himself) makes
clear the ideological function of the performance;
The reason given for the extreme violence of the stage act that you are about
to see is that it provides the public with a necessary release from all the ner-
vous tension caused the state of the world…
Polemical statements such as this set Watkins apart from other

British pop films which, although sharing elements of critique with
Privilege, focus exclusively on the personal narrative of the manipulated

pop star with little consideration of the wider political context. It is
clear from the outset that Watkins’s narrative has clear allegiances with
the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno. Whilst the character of Steven
Shorter is afforded a demi-god status amongst his followers that is rep-
licated in other British pop movies, the placing of the music star at the
centre of wider political control and manipulation is unique. As we
learn more about the central protagonist of Privilege, we realise that
not only is he a purveyor of successive pop hits3 and concerts but also
the figurehead of Steven Shorter television stations, consumer ‘dream-
palaces’ and discotheques. Watkins, then, establishes from the outset
the key role that Shorter plays in binding together the various aspects
of the culture industry in order to help maintain the political status
quo:
Britain in the near future. There is now a coalition government in Britain

which has recently asked all entertainment agencies to usefully divert the
violence of youth. Keep them happy, off the streets and out of politics.
During an interview in 1978, Watkins reflected on this articulation of

the ideological function of popular music as represented in Privilege,
claiming that ‘The media uses so-called counter-revolutionary move-
ments, methods and songs, and then simply repackages them and regurgi-
tates them to the young’ (Friedman 1983, 238).
Watkins emphasis in Privilege goes beyond the idea of pop simply as
commercial manipulation extending this idea to encompass the broad
range of media present in consumerist culture. In the aftermath of the
histrionic opening performance the story moves first into one of Steven
Shorter’s branded discotheques, ‘specially built (to) spread happiness
throughout Britain’, and then to a gaudy showroom where images of the
compliant pop star are used to promote the sale of a range of household
goods and easy credit:
You are now in what is called a Steve Dream Palace. There are 300 of these
in Britain each designed to keep people happy and buying British […] A full
range of consumer products bear the pop star’s name including various
items badged ‘Steve’s Electrics’ (washing machines, refrigerators and TV
sets) and even ‘Steve Chunk Dog Food’. Once within the dream palaces, all
goods and services are promised and as a piped in advert declares, ‘If we
haven’t got it, Steve will get it for you’.
184 R. HYDER
Placing the charismatic pop icon at the centre of the capitalist mode of
production allows Watkins to develop the earlier notion of the culture
industry by focusing on the increasing centrality of the star performer in
stimulating and shaping patterns of popular consumption. The opening
scenes of hysterical fan worship bordering on riotous display clearly evoke
the recent phenomena of Beatlemania that had spread from Britain into
Europe and America during the 1960s. The intensity of such fan behav-
iour, particularly when articulated by seemingly ‘vulnerable’ young peo-
ple, lends itself then to the portentous narrative of centralised control and
media manipulation at the heart of Privilege.
Onward, Steven Shorter: The MONOFORM

Pop Star
Privilege, then, played an important part in the development of Watkins’s
overall critique of contemporary mass media and helped shape many of his
subsequent projects, particularly The Gladiators (1969) and Punishment
Park (1971). Both of these films develop the themes of mass manipulation
and control first introduced in Privilege and helped to advance Watkins’s
critical approach to mainstream film-making and media which he himself
sought to challenge as a film-maker. Privilege was the only time that Watkins
worked with a major studio (Universal funded the film to the sum of
£700,000, allowing the film-maker a remarkably free reign on the narrative
and final cut). The effect of the largely negative critical and commercial
response to Privilege (particularly in the UK) combined with his previous
falling out with the BBC over the refusal to broadcast his controversial
documentary The War Game in 1965, convinced Watkins that his future
works should only be produced outside of mainstream media institutions.
Watkins’s wider philosophy about film-making and his critique of main-
stream media production focus on many of the issues foregrounded in
Privilege. Watkins suggests that contemporary ‘mass audio visual media’
(MAVM) (Watkins 2016) seek to ‘shape, distort, manipulate, control,
fragment, isolate, blur and change our perception’. The term he uses to
describe increasingly standardised media productions is ‘MONOFORM’
and this is characterised as
an instantly recognisable highly fragmented, rapidly cutting, endlessly track-

ing, zooming and fidgeting method of using images, accompanied by densely
packed, noisy, restless and constantly interrupting soundtracks. (ibid.)
These techniques, argues Watkins, have saturated much of our contem-

porary media landscape, and, again reflecting notions akin to that emerg-
ing from the idea of the culture industry, he suggests that this has a
damaging and stultifying effect on audiences:
a consistent use of the Monoform—with its total absence of time for reflec-
tion, its apparently seamless (and thus unquestionable) narrative thrust, its
constant monolinear direction forward (denying flexibility of memory, and
complexity of human experience)—has had both obvious and incalculable
long-term effects on our feelings. It has desensitized us to many of the
things that occur both on the screen, and everywhere around us (particu-
larly to violence, and the fate of others). (ibid.)
In Privilege, it is the figure of Steven Shorter that is at the apex of this

MONOFORM culture so that not only is he an adored pop singer and
arch advertiser of consumer goods, but also that his presence dominates all
mainstream broadcast media. The drama in Privilege centres on the
rebranding of Steven Shorter from rebel to conformist in order to maxi-
mise the pacifying potential of the pop icon. This change in image is intro-
duced into the narrative at a board meeting of Steven Shorter Enterprises
Limited, chaired by the merchant banker Andrew Goddard Butler (William
Job). The proposed change of image is presented not merely in order to
promote further sales but also to use the popularity of the star to help
subdue and manage the unruly and youthful masses. As government
expert, Professor Tatham (James Cossins) explains to the gathered mem-
bers of the board:
we must of necessity subdue the critical elements in the country’s youth.

Gentlemen, in accordance with our planned campaign and because we’ve
reached commercial saturation point. In 10 days’ time we’re going to make
Steven Shorter repent. We’re going to make him say, I’m sorry for what
I’ve done.
We’re going to make him say, Now I want to go back into society.
Now I will accept law and order.
No longer will I criticize or rock the boat.
We’re going to make Steven Shorter say these things because we want, as
we’ve always wanted, the youth of Britain to say them also.
186 R. HYDER
In order to ensure the widespread success of this campaign, Shorter’s

management team are closely aligned with a veritable array of establish-
ment institutions. Also present at this crucial board meeting are represen-
tatives from the Central Office of Information, the Board of Trade, the
Ministry of Defence, the British Tourist Board, the Foreign Office, the Air
Ministry, the Inland Waterways Board and the Commonwealth Office.
The full range of governmental and industry bodies included ensuring the
success of this campaign demonstrates Watkins dystopian vision of the
near future where the interests of government and the cultural industries
are inextricably melded together. In Watkins’s film, any notion of political
difference—let alone dissent—has all but been erased with the UK being
governed by the coalition government of Britain—‘formed because of the
complete lack of difference between the policies of the Conservative and
Labour parties’—whose aims of control and consumption are shared by
those producing both consumer durables and consumer culture. The final
piece in this ideological jigsaw is provided by the Church of England, who
in an opportunistic and timely move (partly to stem the sharp decline of
church attendance) add their support to the remodelling of Shorter’s
image. With all of the various components and adherents to establishment
ideology in place, a concerted and coordinated campaign is put into place
so that every element of the pop star’s image and influence can be carefully
brought on message. The climax of this campaign is represented in the
film’s dramatic finale: a live performance (supported by blanket media
coverage on television and radio) at the National Stadium by Steven
Shorter himself, the ‘establishment event’ that will ensure the youthful
masses follow their idol and in doing so will ultimately fall in line.
Forgive Us All!: The Pop Star as Idol

One aspect that Privilege shares with other British pop movies is the cen-
tral focus on the star icon to illustrate the negative workings of the indus-
try. In Steven Shorter, Watkins focuses on a pop star who is vulnerable and
almost childlike in his acceptance of the role placed upon him by the vari-
ous instruments of establishment self-interest. Watkins’s emphasis here is
on the pop star as unwitting puppet4 of the dominant forces of self-interest
that permeate the landscape of near-future Britain. Once again there are
echoes of Adorno’s writings on popular music which also stresses the
important role of the star figure in ensuring the continued existence of the
status quo:
Its ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individu-
alistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its meth-
ods of operation and content, the more diligent and successfully the culture
industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-
throbs. (Adorno 2001, 101)
The gradual increase in the anxiety and resentment exhibited by

Steven Shorter throughout Privilege is reflected in several small acts of
churlish and ineffectual protest, such as his request that his retinue
drink hot chocolate instead of wine during a lavish meal. On the brink
of the biggest (and what turns out to be his ultimate) performance
where he is to publicly repent, Shorter tentatively attempts to express
his unease to Andrew Butler, the head of Steven Shorter Enterprises and
asks what would happen if he were to ‘stop all this’. In response, Butler
ushers Shorter to the concrete balcony of his penthouse suite and deliv-
ers a chilling monologue, emphasising the ideological importance of
the star’s role:
There are millions of people down there. Millions of little people. First we
must be quite clear in our minds about one thing: that the liberal idea that,
given enough education these millions will grow into self-aware creative
human beings is nothing but an exploded myth. It can never happen.
They’re stunted little creatures with primitive emotions that are, in them-
selves, dangerous. They’ve got to be harnessed, guided … we’ve got a
chance to make it work for their own good. You… You’re our chance,
Steven. They identify with you. They love you. Steven, you can lead them
into a better way of life … a fruitful conformity.
During the subsequent performance at the National Stadium where

Steven Shorter’s redemption is revealed to mass audience of adoring fans,
the themes of ideological control and manipulation via the medium of pop
music and stardom become fully realised. The staging of this combination
of pop performance, religious assembly and nationalistic rally evoke the
images of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-era documentaries and anticipate the
mass gatherings of the Christian Nationwide Festival of Light movement
that emerged briefly in the Britain towards the end of the 1960s. Ranks of
military personnel, police and Boy Scout groups are framed by huge
murals of Steven Shorter’s contrite visage and more forthright Christian
iconography, most pointedly the huge crucifix put to flame alongside the
lofty stage. The event is broadcast live to the entire nation and as Watkins’s
188 R. HYDER
sardonic voiceover declares, ‘What you are now watching is the largest
staging of nationalism in the history of Great Britain.’
Even before Steven Shorter has taken the stage, the ideological func-
tion of the event, framed by echoes from the totalitarian past, is made
abundantly clear. After a disarming blessing by a young choirboy, Shorter’s
warm-up act appears in the shape of the charismatic Reverend Jeremy Tate
(Malcolm Rogers) who makes clear the underlying purpose of the eve-
ning. Exhorting against the forces of moral decline and immortality the
Reverend focuses on the three words inscribed on the ‘pledge cards’ that
have been handed out to all of the gathered throng. ‘We will conform’ is
written on the card, demanded by Tate and reciprocated in the roar of the
crowd. This conformist call to arms is followed by a rousing Mersey-beat
inflected version of Jerusalem by Shorter’s backing band The Runner
Beans. Garbed all in black and wearing red and white armbands, the band
end their routine with a coordinated Nazi salute to the huge crowd. Once
Shorter reaches the stage, resplendent in his stylishly tailored red redeemer
suit, the atmosphere has reached fever pitch, with the front rows of dis-
abled fans falling into chaos as fans, nurses and even policemen lose them-
selves in a fervour of religious, nationalistic star mania. The reprise of Free
Me that follows has undergone some significant changes. The dirty-
sounding rock instrumentation of the original has now evolved into an
orchestration of lush strings and heavenly choirs and the lyrics now speak
of peace and religious redemption rather than violence and rebellion.5
Shorter, rechannelling his rebel angst into an earnest display of contrition
and religious euphoria, gives his most convincing performance yet, ensur-
ing that both his change of image and the ‘establishment event’ is an over-
riding success. As the voiceover declares, ‘In one evening in the National
Stadium 49,000 people gave themselves to God and Flag through Steven
Shorter’.
I’m a Person! I’m a Person!: Sympathy

for the Pop Star
In the aftermath of what appears to be his greatest triumph, Steven Shorter

quickly moves towards his ultimate demise as he finally kicks back against
the very system that has given him almost godlike status. The mounting
anxiety and alienation reflected throughout the film comes to a head at a
music awards ceremony where Steven Shorter, inspired by his burgeoning
romance with his official portrait painter, Vanessa Richie (Jean Shrimpton),
finally cracks in front of a packed audience of industry bigwigs. Upon
receiving his curious spinning, silver award—given to our ‘platinum boy’
on behalf of ‘the staff and executives of Federated Records and its overseas
subsidiaries in Germany, France, Japan, United States’—Shorter does the
unthinkable and speaks his mind. After a somewhat stilted attempt to reas-
sert his own sense of selfhood—crying out, ‘I’m a person, I’m a person,
I’m a person’—the disaffected star underlines his protest by telling those
who have so long pulled his strings what he really thinks of them scream-
ing, ‘I hate you!’, and thereby sealing his fate. According to the omnipres-
ent voiceover, Shorter has doomed himself by momentarily breaking away
from the totalising force of the status quo:
All that Steven Shorter has just done has been to express the wish to become
an individual. But that, in an age of conformity, can become a social
problem.6
The consequences of Shorter’s short but impassioned speech are swiftly

felt, with the star quickly falling from grace. This motif of an almost inevi-
table decline is characteristic of several British films focusing on the music
industry, and in Privilege this fate is severely administered. In Flame, the
musical protagonists walk away from fame to presumably fade into
obscurity, in Breaking Glass madness overcomes post-punk singer Kate,
and the stars depicted in both Stardust and Brothers of the Head end up
tragically dead. Although none of the latter outcomes are served upon
Steven Shorter, his fate is arguably the most bleak and complete as he is all
but erased from history in a united front presented by the culture industry
that had previously supported and benefitted from his efforts. The follow-
ing day after his sensational outburst,
with public endorsement… Steven Shorter is barred from this and any fur-
ther appearance on television just to ensure that he does not again misuse his
position of privilege to disturb the public peace of mind.
Watkins presents a downfall that is as swift as it is complete; not only do

the ideological forces of the state and industry turn against Steven Shorter,
but so do the legions of fans that had so slavishly followed and adored the
charismatic pop star for so long. According to Watkins’s voiceover, ‘The
public knows what it feels. Its love for Steven has turned to hate’.
190 R. HYDER
Presumably the public will move on to follow another well-packaged and

more acquiescent star figure, with the eventual fate of the former icon
Steven Shorter left uncertain and ambiguous. We are never told what hap-
pens to the disgraced star, reflecting the cold efficiency of the culture
industry that seeks to completely remove all trace of his former status:
Within about a year all that remained of Steven Shorter were a few old
records and a piece of archive film … with the sound, of course, removed.
It’s going to be a happy year in Britain this year in the near future.
A Fruitful Conformity? Rethinking the Audience

Whilst it can be argued that the cynical and polemical narrative of Privilege
sets the film apart from other British films about the music industry, it
does however share one of the key failings of this genre as a whole. In
emphasising the corrupt nature of the industry by focusing the drama on
the narrative of the manipulated pop star, Watkins fails to consider the
potential agency of the audience. Throughout the film, it is made clear
that Steven Shorter’s fans are merely passive dupes; mindlessly following
their icon’s changes of image and ravenously consuming all that the cul-
ture industry provides. This tendency to portray the masses as vulnerable,
passive and easily manipulated by the producers of disposable popular
cultural artefacts reflects a wider trend within left-leaning narratives about
the spread of advanced capitalism throughout the twentieth century. Such
a notion was key to the arguments made by many of the writers of the
Frankfurt School, including Adorno who considered fans of popular jazz
music to be ‘childish’ and ‘childlike’, even referring to them on occasion
as ‘insects’ (2001). In this light, fans of popular music function act simply
as cogs in the capitalist machine, unquestioningly amplifying and support-
ing the very system that exploits them;
There are […] the enthusiasts who write fan letters to radio stations and
orchestras, at well-managed jazz festivals, produce their own enthusiasm as
an advertisement for the wares they consume. (Adorno 2001, 52)
This representation of young fans as mindless and easily manipulated

dupes of the music industry is consistent across most British films set in
this area, where audiences are portrayed either as a hysterical mass or as
expendable groupies and hangers-on. In Watkins’s film, the unquestioning
and passive nature of the pop audience is stretched to its fullest extent.
Not only do the fans of Steven Shorter eagerly consume all of his music
and various associated branded products, they unproblematically accept
and embrace his ideological transformation from sinner into saint. The
hysterical images of fans witnessed during Shorter’s ‘rebel’ performance at
the outset of the film are mirrored and intensified as the star presents his
new redemptive image at the National Stadium. Even more striking than
this is the abrupt and absolute way in which Shorter’s entire fan base is
persuaded to denounce and abandon their adoration of the pop star fol-
lowing his ill-advised outburst at the Federated Records award ceremony.
The very fans who have slavishly followed every word and change of image
of the object of their adoration reject Shorter en masse, helping to ensure
that all memory of the star is expunged from the popular imagination.
This provides a stark and sudden conclusion to the film’s narrative and
emphasises the lack of agency afforded to fans throughout the narrative.
Looking back on Privilege, over a decade later, Watkins recognised the
failings of his portrayal of the fans of Steven Shorter which he felt reflected
‘a certain dismissal of the public which I very much regret now’ (Gomez
1979, 84). Watkins was not alone in portraying fans as passive consumers;
most other film-makers adopted this approach which arguably reflected
widespread attitudes to fandom encompassing both popular culture and
academic debate (Lewis 1992). It is only in the wake of groundbreaking
studies focusing on subcultural youth and fan cultures (Hall and Jefferson
1976; Jenkins 1992 etc.) that there has been a recognition of the cultural
agency—and potential ‘resistance’—exhibited by those participating in
music cultures. Watkins himself later echoed such ideas, suggesting an
alternative to the portrayal of fans as entirely compliant in Privilege:
many young people are aware of this manipulation process. They may not be
quite sure how to stop it but are conscious of it and in one way or another
may be trying to break that pattern. (Friedman 1983, 238)
This recognition of the potential agency of young audiences to recog-

nise and resist the forces of ideological control led Watkins to reflect on
how he might alter the film’s ending with the benefit of hindsight:
I would probably add something which deals with the way the public, in a
rather complex way, feels about this young gentleman and what he has done,
showing that there is already an ambivalence in attitude towards him because
192 R. HYDER
there obviously is a tension. While the public may watch television or appear
to be manipulated, at the same time most of us don’t, of course. Privilege is
guilty of not dealing with that tension. (Friedman 1983, 239)
Whether such an approach would be successful is debatable, and a film

attempting to reflect on the tension that Watkins identifies might under-
mine the powerful polemic of Privilege. There have been very few films
that have successfully combined a critique of the music industry with
notions of fan agency and resistance. Although there are many films that
have focused primarily on the experience of fans rather than artists, often
these replace cynical critique of the industry with an emphasis on nostalgia
and sentimentality. Whilst recent British examples like Spike Island (2012)
and Northern Soul (2014) celebrate the everyday vitality and creativity of
music fans from various eras, they tend to adopt nostalgic, coming-of-age
narratives that all too often lapse into clichéd storyline populated with
familiar stereotypes of youthful self-discovery.
Conclusion: Britain in the Near Future…

Given the subject matter of the film and also the social and historical
context in which it was made, it is perhaps inevitable that certain ele-
ments of Privilege appear somewhat dated. Such is the veracity of the
scenes of hysterical fan mania—clearly inspired by the rise of Beatlemania—
that the film at first glance appears firmly rooted to its particular historic
moment. Whilst Johnny Speight’s original story can be seen as just the
latest of a line of British ‘rise-and-fall’ pop films produced since the
1950s, the radical reworking of the narrative by Peter Watkins and his
co-writer Norman Bognor created a film whose pertinence and relevance
continues to resonate some forty years after its inception. Although pre-
vious films had attempted to throw a cautionary spotlight on the sharp
practices of the music industry, none had explicitly linked these to wider
processes of political and cultural control. Watkins followed the well-
trodden path of focusing on the figure of the pop star, but he also placed
his protagonist at the centre of an institutionalised web of economic,
cultural and political control. This focus on the ideological function of
mass-produced popular culture marks out Privilege as unique in the pan-
theon of mainstream film. No other film produced by a major studio has
attempted such an explicit political polemic attacking the very machinery
of the culture industry from which it emerged. It may well be that the
circumstances surrounding the genesis of Watkins’s project represent a

perfect convergence of factors that are unique to the time and context in
which Privilege was able to emerge. The phenomenal rise of pop music
and youth culture in Western Europe and the US in the post war years
undoubtedly opened up new ground for those seeking to produce and
profit from this new youth ‘market’ and for others seemed to represent
the latest development in the pacification and exploitation of the masses.
The emergence of the pop music film—a new sub-genre cynically aimed
at tapping into the economic potential of the youth market—nevertheless
allowed both writers and directors of these projects to question the moti-
vations and machinations of the marketplace. Building on some of the
themes established by writers and directors in the previous decade,
Watkins was able to bring his unique sensibility to a subsection of British
cinema that had already been grappling with the rapid rise of this new,
exciting and, for some, alarming brave new world. By the end of 1965, at
the same time that Beatlemania was sweeping the globe, Peter Watkins’s
career had reached something of a crossroads. Disillusioned with his for-
mer patrons at the BBC, Watkins was looking for new opportunities to
develop his distinctive themes and methods. At the same time, Universal
Pictures—attracted by the favourable tax breaks offered by the British
government to film-makers working in the UK—were searching to mimic
the critical and commercial success of films like The Beatles A Hard Day’s
Night. The combination of these economic and cultural factors ultimately
persuaded the major Hollywood studio to invest a sizeable budget in
Privilege and to take a calculated risk on a controversial but undoubtedly
gifted British director on the rise.
Privilege then in many ways can be seen to represent something of an
experiment which, on the basis of both the initial critical response and
box office, ended in failure. The innovative structuring of the narrative
and clever blend of generic conventions, allied with the satirical polemic
overlaying the entire film, undoubtedly made Privilege hard to categorise
and also to place within the marketplace. When presented with the fin-
ished film, Universal were clearly perplexed by the work, stating in an
article in the Daily Express (April 1967) that ‘This is an unusual film,
interesting and problematic. We are not sure how to sell it’ (Glynn 2013,
122). As a result Privilege suffered from a lack of backing as it attempted
to reach its audience, with national UK distributor Rank refusing to dis-
tribute a film that they felt ‘mocked the church, defied authority, and
encouraged youth in lewd practices’ (Glynn 2013, 122). The film also
194 R. HYDER
received some particularly savage reviews with critics deriding the perfor-
mances of the film’s two lead actors and dismissive of Privilege’s unique
blend of generic styles and conventions.7
For Watkins these responses to his completed film were both bruising
and affecting. After the experience of working with Universal Pictures,
Watkins never worked with a major studio again, instead pursuing many of
the ideas explored in Privilege with independent producers of both film
and television. By the time of the release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray
in 2010, Privilege has become recognised as an important and innovative
film that not only captures a key historical moment of change, but whose
themes continue to provoke and resonate in relation to the contemporary
political, economic and cultural landscape.
Whatever the shortcomings of Watkins’s film, in particular the inability
to recognise the potential agency in the pop audience, Privilege nevertheless
stands out from the crowd. The inventive and sometimes playful innova-
tions of style and structure mark out the film as one of the most original
of its period, and the angry and incisive political critique that Privilege so
passionately conveys ensures a legacy that is unique in the annals of main-
stream cinema.
Notes
1. The musician as slave to the industry is usually metaphorical, whilst Brothers
of the Head takes this one stage further as the conjoined Howe twins have
their lives signed away to an ambitious pop impresario by their unfeeling
father.
2. The film’s music, written and arranged by Mike Leander, is a particular
strength of Privilege, helping to add to the film’s documentary feel and
sense of veracity. Leander most famously arranged The Beatles She’s Leaving
Home on their influential Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and
went on to write and produce most of Gary Glitter’s chart-topping hits of
the 1970s.
3. In one sequence Shorter is asked to change the channel on his wrist bound
radio which is playing his latest hit ‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy’ (also a top five
hit in the actual UK charts) but he finds that whatever station he tunes into,
it is playing the same ubiquitous tune.
4. Some posters for the film and the original soundtrack album depict an image
of Steven Shorter represented as a puppet hanging on controlling strings.
This design later reappeared as the cover art for the New Yorker DVD
release.
5. The initial version of Free Me include the lines;

My spirit’s broken
No will to live
My body’s all aching
My hands are tied
I need my freedom
Not your sympathy
These are later changed to;
I kneel before Him
My time has come
O Father, Father
Your children call
Defend our mothers
Forgive us all
6. Again this seems to echo the work of Adorno who stated:
In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of
the standardisation of the means of production. He is tolerated only so
long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned.
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 38)
7. The British Film Institute Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that
‘What hangs around Watkins’ neck is sheer lack of professionalism: his
film is a mass of poor scripting, inept acting, and directionless, irrelevant
camerawork and editing […] the television-vérité style that Watkins has
clung to so obsessively throughout his short career has now reached its
ultimate condemnation […] Everything in ‘Privilege’ goes wrong, and
one can do little but catalogue the failures [… ] For ‘The War Game’ the
technique was just about as hollow, but the film’s subject gave it the
compulsive fascination of a nightmare; with ‘Privilege, the result is mere
farce’. (Watkins 2016)
References
Adorno, T. W. 1990. “On popular music.” In On record: rock, pop and the written
word. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.) London: Routledge.
Adorno, T. W. 2001. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture,
London: Routledge.
Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment, London:
Verso.
196 R. HYDER
Friedman, L. 1983. “The Necessity of Confrontation Cinema: Peter Watkins

interviewed” Literature/Film Quarterly, 11.2: 237–48.
Glynn, S. 2013. The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Gomez, J. A. 1979. Peter Watkins, New York: Twayne Publishers.
Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds.) 1976. Resistance through rituals, London:
Hutchinson.
Jenkins, H. 1992. Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture,
London: Routledge.
Lewis, L. 1992. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, London:
Taylor and Francis.
Watkins, P. 2016. Peter Watkins: Filmmaker/Media Critic. Available from; http://
pwatkins.mnsi.net/. Accessed 15/01/17.
Filmography
The Tommy Steele Story (Hudis UK 1959).
Expresso Bongo (Guest UK 1959).
A Hard Day’s Night (Lester UK 1964).
Privilege (Watkins 1967).
The Gladiators (Watkins SE 1969).
Punishment Park (Watkins US 1971).
Stardust (Apted UK 1974).
Flame (Loncraine UK 1975).
Breaking Glass (Gibson UK 1980).
Brothers of the Head (Fulton & Pepe UK 2005).
Spike Island (Whitecross UK 2012).
Northern Soul (Constantine UK 2014).
Representing Subcultural Identity:
A Photoessay of Spanish Graffiti and Street
Art
Andrzej Zieleniec
Introduction
Graffiti has a long history. Writing on walls was practised by our distant
ancestors as they represented themselves and the animals they shared their
environment and lives with through cave paintings. On ancient Greek and
Roman buildings, on Meso-American temples, signs, symbols and mes-
sages from the past are found scratched and drawn on walls. Explorers as
diverse as Viking marauders and colonists and Victorian grand tourists
have left their marks on walls to signify ‘I was here’ (see Lovata and Olton
2015). Abel and Buckley (1973) demonstrated that the fascination that
exists for writing messages and leaving names on the private space of pub-
lic toilets, ‘Latrinalia’, is a common imperative for many. In this way we
can perhaps view graffiti as exhibiting a universal human tendency to ‘leave
signs of our passing’, to make marks of existence and symbols of our being
and presence in the places that we inhabit and occupy, even if only for a
limited time.
A. Zieleniec (*)

198 A. Zieleniec
The origins of modern graffiti reside in the creative expression associ-

ated with and located within the disadvantaged and deprived communities
of US inner-cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The innovative and
imaginative explosion associated with hip-hop also included graffiti as a
fundamental backdrop and signifier of a new cultural field of expression.
This was, at least in part, a demand for the recognition and acknowledge-
ment of the lives and experiences of an urban population who were dis-
criminated against, disenfranchised, alienated and ignored except in
negative representations in popular and political discourse. The opportu-
nity to give voice and to paint, draw and write provided marginalised
urban youth a means to express their identity, creativity and worth through
signs and symbols of a cultural politics that expressed the inhabitation and
colonisation of the city that demonstrated and celebrated existence and
being. The development of modern graffiti, particularly within New York,
has been documented and illustrated by a number of authors (see Cooper
and Chalfant 1984; Chalfant and Prigoff 1987; Cooper 2009a, b, 2013;
Felisbret 2009; Stewart 2009), reflecting its increasing popularity and
appreciation as a form of urban cultural practice. From the walls of the
ghetto, subway and transit systems of the city (Austin 2002; Gastman and
Neelon 2011), graffiti has spread to become an almost universal urban
phenomenon. Graffiti is now a feature of towns and cities across the globe
(see Chmielewska 2007; Valjakka 2011; Benavides-Venegas 2005; Best
2003; Ferrell 1993; Manco et al. 2005; Brighenti 2010; Schacter and
Fekner 2013). It has grown and developed in style, sophistication, com-
plexity and form as it has been adapted by new writers in new urban geog-
raphies using new methods and media, with new influences and
aesthetics.
Modern graffiti was and is associated with the use of permanent marker
pens and aerosol spray paint to adorn the city with a mainly calligraphic or
text-based writing based on ‘the tag’ and its expansion into throw-ups,
blockbuster and wildstyle as well as large scale murals, sophisticated and
skilful (master)pieces. However, graffiti remains embedded as a street-
based embodied practice, writing without permission or approval. It is
made on and in the streets as unsanctioned and illegal embellishment,
adornment and decoration of the city by predominantly young people
who write for a variety of reasons and audiences, not least each other, and
the recognition and status to be achieved amongst fellow writers. However,
since the late 1990s new means and methods of adorning the streets and
walls of cities have developed. Street art employs a variety of techniques
Representing Subcultural Identity: A Photoessay of Spanish… 199
and methods that includes stencils, stickers (‘slaps’), the pasting up or glu-
ing of pre-prepared posters (‘wheatpastes’) and the placing of objects in
the public sphere. Whilst for some this reflects an extension of graffiti, for
others there are clear distinctions (see Catterall 2010; Bengsten and
Arvidsson 2014; Young 2012, 2014; McAuliffe 2012; Iveson 2010a).
Street art may not only be more varied in terms of methods and means, it
may also be considered as more ‘legitimate’—attracting paid commissions
for work, and appreciated more as ‘art’ by the public, policing authorities
and the art market. It has also become the focus of growing public atten-
tion as ‘urban art’ and has become popular and of interest as a form of
creative practice (Jaka 2012; Schacter and Fekner 2013) that is collectible
and saleable. Banksy may be the best-known example of a graffiti artist
whose work is regularly bought and sold in auctions houses as well as
appearing in galleries. However, there are many more writers and artists
who are now recognised and promoted as having ‘value’. This acknowl-
edgement of graffiti and street art and its commodification has led to criti-
cism that the original meanings and values associated with graffiti have
been diminished (Dickens 2010; Bengsten 2013, 2014).
Nonetheless, both graffiti and street art remain as embodied practices
oriented towards a clear association with the writing and painting, adorn-
ment and decoration of the physical urban environment (see Schacter
2008, 2014) and which makes claims on the right to occupy, colonise and
‘create’ urban space (Nandrea 1999; Zieleniec 2016). It is supported, pro-
moted and promulgated as a subculture through the increasing use of
social media. There are any number of digital repositories (see for example
Art Crimes: The Writing on the Wall https://www.graffiti.org/), open
and closed Facebook groups, Instagram posts, forums and blogs for mak-
ing and developing contacts, swapping tips, techniques, warnings and
advice as well as publicising work and creating a sense of subcultural group
identity and collective endeavour associated with the painting of the urban.
Graffiti and street art have been subject to a range of academic research
that has explored their diversity and practice, the people and places associ-
ated with these practices as well as the conflicts and governance strategies
that have been employed as a means to control or combat them. There
have been studies that reflect the use of graffiti as associated with territo-
riality and gangs (Ley and Cybriwsky 1974; Phillips 1999), and those who
consider graffiti as a pedagogical tool to promote identity, learn about
culture, and explore and understand the city (see Calvin 2005; Civil 2010;
Iveson 2010a; Nandrea 1999; Burnham 2010; Schacter 2014). There are
200 A. Zieleniec
also a range of ethnographic studies that have sought to document the

lived experiences of graffiti writers and the meanings, values, aesthetics,
risk and excitement they encounter in their mainly nocturnal adornment
of the urban landscape (see Ferrell 1993, 1996; Halsey and Young 2006;
Snyder 2009; Young 2014; McDonald 2001; Schacter 2008, 2014). This
has been extended by graffiti writers and street artists speaking for them-
selves about their motivations for writing (see Banksy 2002, 2006, 2012;
City 2010; Desa 2006; Jaka 2012; Schacter, and Fekner 2013; Gastman
and Neelon 2011; Martin 2009; Monsa 2013; Puig 2008; Scholz 2003;
Madrid Revolutionary Team 2013; Uys and Uys 2013; Ruiz 2008).
Graffiti and street art employ means and methods by practitioners to
make claims on or colonise urban space through their creative interven-
tions, the production and circulation of a symbolic and aesthetic realm of
signs, symbols, meanings and messages. It is a practice which often raises
conflicted reactions. On the one hand it reflects an active engagement
with the world and provides opportunity for expressing meanings and val-
ues as a practice that sees, reads and writes the world in ways meaningful
to not only the individual but to a community of other practitioners
engaged in similar activities. It can be considered as a creative, artistic and
aesthetic urban practice that colonises, subverts or adorns often-subjugated
and commodified space. It represents a number of embodied practices
(your body has to be there to do it) that challenge the delineation, regula-
tion and policing of the urban as a social and public cultural sphere. These
may be considered as everyday acts and experiences for those who practise
graffiti writing but also can be associated with resistance during particular
events such as riots, protests, occupations, strikes and sit-ins. As such, it
can be understood as a form of colonisation, appropriation and reflection
on and representation of alternate readings and uses of community and
space.
Whilst academic research and graffiti writers own words reflect a range
of motivations and reasons for writing, it is possible to identify a number
of themes. These include territoriality, the marking and claiming of space,
whether or not it is associated with gang affiliation. Engaging in graffiti
may also be a reaction to the boredom and frustration experienced by
urban youth. Whether this is explicitly deviant or criminal there is a sense
of excitement, adventure and danger in leaving your mark, sign or art in
public that has an obvious thrill and appeal to many. Writing graffiti can
also reflect the need for individual and/or group recognition and status.
Having your art/writing seen by peers and fellow practitioners is a means
to achieve ‘fame’ or notoriety for both the quantity and/or quality of

work produced. Similarly, graffiti provides a means for personal expres-
sion, social and subcultural kudos and reputation building, the expansion
and development of techniques, skills and abilities portrayed and adver-
tised as a form of everyday art and practice in a very public gallery.
Graffiti and street art represent ‘signs of passing’, fleeting presence or
symbols of existence as well as (self)identification and (self)publicity within
a group of practitioners who assess, critique and comment on each other’s
works. Various ethnographic studies and the self-expressed meanings and
motivations of practitioners provide evidence of graffiti and street art as
subcultural forms of practice which, as Hebdige (1979) argues, use form,
style and symbolism as an intentional and signifying communication and
meaning system, that is, a homology. Thus there are ideological or politi-
cal values, beliefs and meanings, codes of conduct and practice amongst
graffiti writers and street artists. For example, where it is or is not appro-
priate to paint or write. Such codes of conduct and evidence of being in
the know function as means to bind or include members, however loosely,
within a group. Similarly, one can also reflect on the subcultural career of
writers/artists as they progress from being novices (‘toys’) to experts
(‘kings’) and as discussed above, how subcultural activity, style and mate-
rial objects can be subsumed and commodified by the market. What is
evident is that there are a range of identifiable styles or types of graffiti as
well as abilities and skills, from the simple, quickly done to the very elabo-
rate and often breathtaking full-wall creations. There is a language and
vocabulary as well as a complicated hierarchy involved in graffiti that
reflects an internal communication between practitioners as well as its dis-
play and promotion to a general urban public. Thus graffiti and street art
can be associated with the definition of a subculture. What is created is an
urban (sub)cultural aesthetic that uses the streets of the city as a gallery,
notice board and medium for display, conversation and communication.
On the other hand, graffiti is often portrayed as antisocial and criminal
behaviour, a symbol of community breakdown and decline, symptom of
urban blight, a lack of direction, discipline and deviance in youth. Wilson
and Kelling’s (1982) ‘broken windows’ thesis argued that examples of
low-level criminality such as graffiti are precursors or indicators of com-
munity decline and causally linked to serious violent crime. Whilst Harcourt
(2005), Harcourt and Ludwig (2006), and Bowling (1999) have under-
mined such claims as flawed, the broken windows thesis and zero-toler-
ance policing used in the US was supported by politicians and policymakers
202 A. Zieleniec
around the world (see Waquant 2006). Iveson (2010b) refers to the polic-
ing strategies and criminalisation of writers as a ‘War against Graffiti’ that
has led to the use of new technologies, innovations in urban design and
the securitisation of urban public space as a state-sponsored response (see
also Ferrell 1993, 1995, 1997, 2001; Young 2010; Dickinson 2008). This
reaction to graffiti and street art reflects how such practices and perfor-
mance conflicts with the values and priorities of property holders, develop-
ers, the state, the police and courts (see Bengsten and Arvidsson 2014)
that view it as a threat to law, order and security, and have sought to purge
it from the public urban realm. Graffiti thus also represents conflicting
ideas about who and what the city is for and punishes with fines, confisca-
tion of property and, in some cases, jail sentences those who are caught.
Graffiti has become an omnipresent feature of the urban in recent years,
eliciting as discussed above a number of responses, reactions and analyses.
It has spread and developed to become a global phenomenon, one that
has not bypassed Spain. There is an established and prevalent culture and
practice of graffiti in towns and cities across the country. As is common
elsewhere, there is a network of actors and communication within and
between practitioners as well as competition over locations or ‘spots’ and
demonstrations of skill and ability. The history of Spain’s flourishing and
developed graffiti and street art scene is evident both on the streets of its
cities as well as in publications (see Madrid Revolutionary Team 2013;
Martin 2009; Monsa 2013; Puig 2008; Scholz 2003). This is supported
and promulgated by a variety of websites (for example, Valencia Street
Art; Spanish Graffiare, Ultimate Guide to Barcelona Street Art and
Graffiti). What follows will develop aspects of the varied approaches and
analyses discussed above to explore how, using a variety of styles and
methods, graffiti writers and street artists in Spain represent themselves,
exhibit their work, illustrate the means and methods of their practice as
well as promote the scene and the activity as a subculture. The explicit
focus will be on the material object of their work. It will use examples col-
lected from the street during a research project in Spain, as opposed to its
existence in virtual or digital reality, to illustrate aspects of the performed
practice of graffiti as a subcultural activity and to demonstrate the self-
reflective way graffiti writers represent themselves, their work and their
practices in what they produce. It will explore, illustrate and analyse the
way in which graffiti writers represent their identity, practices and them-
selves through their work in the public arena of the streets, walls, public
places and spaces of the urban they inhabit.
The following commentary and analysis uses the author’s own photo-
graphs, collected as part of a research project, supported by a small grant
from the Santander Research Fellowship Scheme. The photographs were
taken by the author engaged in a visual ethnographic research project
(Ward 2014; Pink 2013; Harper 2012) conducted in Spain’s three largest
cities of Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid during multiple visits between
August 2012 and May 2013. The methodology employed was a form of
directed psychogeography (see Coverley 2010; McDonough 2009; Ford
2005; Knabb 2006) in which specific areas of each city were identified
through online research and contact with graffiti practitioners who advised
on locations/areas to investigate. Fieldwork consisted of multiple trips to
each city where ‘walking’ the area in a non-directional manner permitted
investigation of the locale; the collection and collation of the types, forms
and prevalence; and the photographing of graffiti and street art found in
the streets and public spaces of each area. This was coupled with other
qualitative research methods such as a small number of semi-structured
interviews with practitioners and scholars in each city to extend and deepen
not only the meanings, values and intentions behind their practice, but to
elicit a situational understanding of the practice of writing/painting within
their experience of the city as well as within the graffiti/street art com-
munity. The following illustrated commentary and analysis will demon-
strate how graffiti and street art practitioners reflect on and represent
themselves and their activities as part of processes of associative identity
making which forms part of, or is constitutive of, their subcultural
community.
Getting Your Name Up and Known: Tags

The most prevalent type of graffiti to be found in most cities in Spain and
elsewhere is the tag. This is a writer’s signature made with permanent
marker pen or spray paint. It can be simple or more complex and is the
unique identifying mark of an individual writer that indicates participation
in the practice of graffiti writing. In Spain there are a plethora of tags to be
found in towns and cities. They can appear on almost any surface from
walls, doors, windows, street signs and furniture as well as on public and
private transport. Tags are relatively easy to do and quick to accomplish. It
is an individual writer’s identifying graffiti signature that acknowledges
being in place as well as being and belonging to an active, if amorphous
and non-constituted community of graffiti writers. It is akin to making a
204 A. Zieleniec
statement that ‘X was here’. As the photographs below demonstrate the

colonisation or occupation of particular sites by multiple tags is common.
The concentration of tags in a single site (see Figs. 1, 2, and 3) may
reflect an ease of access and/or a means to mark a particular spot that has
significance or importance for writers. It may also mark out a common
ground and meeting point for writers to clearly demonstrate their pres-
Fig. 1 Tags on unoccupied

shops—Madrid
Fig. 2 Tagged doorway—Barcelona
Fig. 3 Tagged abandoned shop—Madrid

ence and active participation in the scene and on the street. Whilst for
some the tag is evidence of vandalism and anti-social behaviour making
public space ugly and inscribed with visual dirt, the use of multi-coloured
markers and paints can lend a kaleidoscopic and phantasmagoric aesthetic
to what, in some cases appears abandoned or closed premises. Such tag-
ging is evidence of an active population engaging in a form of practice that
represents an urban street culture that gives a sense of life to the street in
contrast to a lack of activity in the premises or buildings tagged.
Tags can also be used to mark an individual’s territory or, as in Fig. 4,
to signal a group identity. This is an example from a ‘gang’ was found
across a wide geographically dispersed area of Madrid. The ‘crew’ respon-
sible were clearly mobile, active and keen to be ‘seen’ in the city, publicly
announcing their existence and presence. Similar examples of multiple
tagging by individuals or gangs/crews are common features across many
areas and cities in Spain. They represent attempts to ensure visibility that
advertises or publicises the existence of a group as active practitioners.
Tagging, whether by an individual or group, is a simple way of ‘getting
up’, being seen and known and ensuring visibility amongst peers. It can be
linked to ‘bombing’, which is tagging a lot of areas/places over a short
period of time. Similarly, tagging can develop into other practices such as
the throw-up (a name painted quickly with one layer of paint and outline),
and those who develop their skills to include more detailed writing styles
such as block-type lettering known as ‘blockbuster’.
The idea of claiming space and colonising areas reflects an aspect of
graffiti subcultural identity making. Where sites or ‘spots’ provide
opportunities they are often ones which become collectively owned and
made by multiple use. Whilst there may be competition between individuals
and groups and over-writing does take place, there is also the possibility for a
Fig. 4 Crew/gang
tag—Madrid
206 A. Zieleniec
mutual experience of being in a communally shared writing-place that

offers a concentration of activity and reflects a vibrant and active graffiti
scene. This allows writers to share tips and methods and to copy and
develop the skills and methods of more experienced or skilled writers. This
embodied practice where individuals act in what at times are often danger-
ous conditions and in the dark, these sites of multiple writing provide the
possibility for a collective practice and sense of belonging to a group that
exists in physical space as well as through shared digital media communica-
tion. This can be related to other practices such as squatting where the
‘claim’ to a building is often publicised in its external adornment by a
variety of graffiti writers and street artists using a range of style, techniques
and sophistication. Figure 5, shows abandoned offices whose ownership
was disputed in Plaza Espana, a major public square in the capital of Spain.
It demonstrates how unused buildings can be appropriated or colonised
and become an important, if albeit temporary, location for writers to make
their mark. What is also clear in this image is how graffiti writers and street
artists go to extraordinary lengths and dangers to get their name, tag or
work in places where it is not only highly visible, but also difficult to
remove. Such spots are referred to as ‘heaven’ and are usually high above
the street in elevated locations. This involves writers and artists negotiat-
ing not only access to buildings that may have material barriers in place,
security personal and systems, but also the inherent hazards that accom-
pany operating in the dark, and being vulnerable to a range of hazards and
risks in the form of physical dangers from dilapidated or unmaintained
buildings as well as from other people, whether fellow writers competing
for prime ‘spots’ or from those who occupy empty buildings as temporary
homes or shelters or for drug and drink use. What is clear is that the
extremes to which some artists and writers will go, whether hanging out
Fig. 5 Squatted abandoned

office buildings ‘claimed’ by
graffiti—Madrid
of windows or from roofs, as exemplified in Fig. 5, are inherently danger-

ous but apparently worth the risk to have one’s work on high and in front
of peers and the public.
Self-Representation
Graffiti writers also represent themselves and the practices and activities
they engage in through what they leave on the walls of the city. This is
done by ‘self’ portraits, figurative and idealised self-representations, show-
ing not only themselves ‘at work’ but also the tools and methods they use
to write and paint. Whilst this can appear as a hyper-inflated or romantici-
sation of the practice of writing and painting, it is also informative of how
writers and artists see and represent themselves, giving insight into graffiti
and street art as a subculture as well as reflective of processes of associative
identification within a community of active and like-minded practitioners.
Barcelona SM172 (Fig. 6) shows a representation of a ‘writer in action’
using the ubiquitous spray can to adorn the walls of the city with their
work. In Fig. 7 the same artist, this time in Madrid, shows not only another
figure engaged in the ‘act’ of making street art but also how the ladder is
another ‘tool of the trade’ to reach places and take opportunities where
they are found. The inclusion of a figure in both cases can be viewed as a
form of self-depiction as well as a self-conscious attempt to reflect their
practices, techniques and means by which their art is achieved. Similarly in
Fig. 8, YCN2 in Madrid depicts a figure, face covered and holding a paint
roller—a necessary tool and part of the process of preparing a wall for art
work. In all of these images the depiction of figures and their equipment
are integrated into the art itself, showing the act as a form of praxis as well
as the means and methods used to achieve it.
Fig. 6 SM172—Barcelona
208 A. Zieleniec
Fig. 7 SM172—Madrid
Fig. 8 YCN2—Madrid
Fig. 9 Wheat paste—

Noche Crew, Valencia
At other times, street artists depict themselves as a ‘heroic’ group of

mostly unseen, invisible night-time contributors to the creative culture
and aesthetic of the street. For example, in Fig. 9 the faint image of the
‘Noche Crew’ in Valencia reveals how one shadowy group leave not only
their marks but traces and representations of themselves on the walls of
the city that they stalk by night. As in Fig. 8 the faces of those depicted are
Fig. 10 ‘Stick-Up Kids’—Valencia
Fig. 11 Zone—Barcelona
mostly covered. This may signify that graffiti writers and street artist have
to operate not only anonymously undercover with pseudonyms as signa-
tures/tags, but also that their identification may lead to prosecution and
sanction by policing and legal authorities.
Other examples of street art demonstrate this sense of reflective self-
portraiture, perhaps reflecting a somewhat humorous and tongue-in-
cheek sense of self and what they do. In Fig. 10 the cartoon images of the
self-styled ‘Stick-Up Kids’ in Valencia is an ironic allusion to the nefarious
activities of bandits, highwaymen and women, street hustlers, muggers
and robbers replayed in numerous fictional accounts in film and literature.
Whilst these ‘stick-up’ merchants don’t take your money they do paste up
and paint on your walls and your imagination, arresting your attention and
making you stop and think. Other portraits such as by Zone in Barcelona
(Fig. 11) paint a somewhat heroic Che Guevara-esque figure complete
with bomb to represent both the practice of ‘bombing’ (hitting an area
with multiple tags or graffiti in a short space of time) and perhaps, given
the somewhat stereotypic explosive held in the hands of the figure, a nod
210 A. Zieleniec
Fig. 12 ‘Hello sorrow’—Fromthetree,

Valencia
to the anarchic practices of past ‘revolutionaries’. However, these ‘bomb-

ers’ detonate their ideas, messages and values through images and text that
‘explode’ on the streets and walls of the city and impact on the imagina-
tion and senses rather than causing physical damage to those caught by
them. These examples provide insight into the self-referential representa-
tion of actors in the subculture and the means they employ as well as their
experience of themselves as fleeting figures, anonymous but ever-present,
in the creative culture of adorning, embellishing and decorating the city.
Whilst all of the images discussed so far are relatively small in size and
completed or ‘put up’ quickly, other work is of a far larger scale that
requires much more planning, equipment and time to implement. The
work by ‘Fromthetree’ in Valencia (Fig. 12) not only demonstrates the
size and scale of some street art it also depicts some of the means and
equipment used to access sites and produce such large ‘masterpieces’. In
Fig. 12 the scale of the work is contextualised by the presence of cars
below the wall that is being used as a large canvas. Whilst the potential
dangers and extreme lengths that writers can go to get their work in
‘heaven’ or to access dangerous locations, sites or ‘spots’ has been dis-
cussed above, this image shows that some work requires planning and the
use of more sophisticated equipment. The depiction of barriers to keep
the public at a safe distance from the work in progress as well as the use of
a scissor lift demonstrates not only that some street artists work is on a
grand scale but also that the means and methods, the care and consider-
ation for health and safety (of the artist and the public), requires planning
and implementation that is both complex and potentially expensive. Whilst
some large-scale pieces are commissions in which permission and payment
may provide a sense of security from prosecution and safety in using
appropriate equipment. However, not all large pieces are commissioned or
approved. There is a clear sense that many writers and artists put their
health and safety in jeopardy, working high up on buildings that may be in
disrepair and fundamentally unsafe. Such commitment to getting their art
and craft to the public and their peers reflects how participation in the
world of graffiti and street art has inherent dangers, but which is nonethe-
less considered as worth the risk.
Representing and Promoting the ‘Scene’

Some graffiti and street art is explicit in making connections to a recog-
nised community or subculture. Thus practices, events, messages and
meanings can be explicitly conveyed in some works reflecting a self-aware
belonging to and promotion of a scene with a collective sense of identity.
This represents and reflects various aspects of graffiti and street art activity,
practice and culture. Whilst there may be at times competition, sometimes
violent, between writers and street artists over spots and/or status and
authenticity, there is also the sense of connecting with and contributing to
a graffiti/street art scene. This is clear in the ways in which individuals
represent what they do in their art, but also how they are part of a wider
scene. Thus it is not only individual self-promotion that is on offer, but
also a clear identification with others who are not only or necessary com-
petitors but who participate in the creation of a an alternate urban aes-
thetic through their practices. For example, the Madrid collective of Yippi
Yippi Yeah (Fig. 13) use humour as they ‘flash’ passers-by with images to
‘advertise’ the Madrid Street Art scene as well as themselves as practitio-
ners operating within the city.
More explicit perhaps is the work of Julietta xlf, which illustrates the
sense of collective identity and a culture of practice that is shared and pro-
Fig. 13 Yippi Yippi Yeah, Madrid

212 A. Zieleniec
Fig. 14 Julietta xlf—

street art advertising
graffiti festival, Valencia
moted within the street art and graffiti subcultures, that is, the ways in
which graffiti writers and street artists use the walls of towns and cities not
only to promote themselves, but as advertising spaces for collective or
community events. Figure 14 is an example of wall art that explicitly is
used to inform the public as well as other artists and writers of a specific
event. Mislatas Representan is a biennial graffiti and street art festival held
in a neighbouring Valencian municipality with the support of the local
authority. This promotional piece has a resemblance to advertising indus-
try techniques and aims but uses street art, and the particular skills and
influences of this artist, to paint space, to signal a meeting point, time and
event for fellow writers and artists as well as the general public who may
be interested in such creative practices. It is a clear sign of a collective
practice celebrated as a ‘Festival of Graffiti’.
Graffiti and street art practitioners are aware and appreciate that in part
what defines their work, creations and contribution to an urban aesthetic
is not only the media and methods that they use, but also the spaces and
places that they practise. That is the street. It is a performed aesthetic and
creative practice that is inextricably connected to the urban and the city. As
Escif in Fig. 15 shows in the depiction of two animated brick walls using a
paint roller under the banner ‘Otra Pared es Possible/Another Wall is
Possible’ there is a self-conscious awareness and promotion of the possi-
bilities and potentialities of graffiti and street art to change the way we see
and understand the city as a creative space. Those who do it share through
their experience and their works collective meanings and values, a form of
associative community that reflects a do-it-yourself culture of practice,
learning, belonging and identity formation that has some correlation to
better-known and studied youth subcultures.
Fig. 15 Escif: another wall is

possible’—Valencia
Conclusion
Graffiti and street art can be understood as a demonstration of a process
of associative identity making. By inscribing, painting and decorating the
physical environment of the city with signs, symbols and markers of sub-
cultural activity, graffiti writers and street artists are directly engaged in the
creation and promotion of an urban aesthetic that reflects individual iden-
tity, a collective sense of belonging to a group of similar practitioners, as
well as a wider public. This public appeal and value is recognised by the
sale of prints, gallery exhibitions and a market in original works by well-
known writers and artists for most practitioners. However, it is primarily
the community of graffiti writers and street artists who promote and per-
petuate activities and practices that reinforce a sense of belonging, often
supported by digital and social media, as well as funded, for some, by
commissions and the sale of prints and original artworks. This is represen-
tative of subcultural identity making, affiliation and projection through
praxis. Graffiti and much street art remains an embodied activity that
necessitates the writer/artist to have intimate knowledge of the world on
which they write/paint as well as putting their bodies, safety, security and
liberty at risk.
The images presented in this chapter were collected from three Spanish
cities in 2012–2013. Whilst they are a very small sample of the hundreds
taken during the research project, they give some indication and illustra-
tion not only of the skills and abilities but also the practices, means and
methods of a variety of graffiti writers and street artists. They demonstrate
a sense of collective identity associated with the practices of writing/
painting and the scene of which they are a part as well as their active colo-
nisation and use of urban space. Like most graffiti and street art, it is on
214 A. Zieleniec
the whole ephemeral and temporary. It is expected by those who do it that

it will be covered over by other writer/painters or that it will be ‘buffed’
by private or municipal cleaning crews who remove much if not most of
what appears on the walls and streets of our cities. As such, these images
may no longer exist in the places and spaces that they were seen and
photographed.
Nonetheless the photographs used here illustrate a number of interre-
lated themes to demonstrate that graffiti and street art practices and mate-
rial objects are indicative of subcultural identity making and promotion.
These include the use of individual writers’ tags or group or ‘crew’ tags as
signifiers of collective belonging and identity, the self-representation of
writers, and the ‘tools’ and methods of ‘writing’ they use, as well as the
promotion of the graffiti and street art scenes themselves. Graffiti can be
and remains for many the relatively simple act of getting out there and
getting your name, tag or reputation recognised by your peers. However,
the world of graffiti and street art is increasingly complex and sophisti-
cated, using styles, methods and locations to promote activities and prac-
tices in the very public forum of the public spaces, streets and walls, and
they remind us that subcultures not only exist and flourish but have the
potential to change the way we see and read the city. They are practices
and objects, art and aesthetics that reflect and represent ways of being and
doing that support and promote subcultural identity and belonging.
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From Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer:
Between the Bedroom and the Street
Jo Croft
The dreamer is set adrift. (Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams 1943)
Introduction: ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?’

The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ (1978) echoes down the decades as an
anthem of exuberant yet frustrated youth, inextricably associated with a
punk iconography of urban decay—of brick walls, graffiti, shuttered shop
fronts, alleyways and, of course, the street itself. And yet when we listen a
little more closely to the lyrics, and try to decipher the song’s pent-up,
frenetic energy, it is clear that the narrator is addressing us from what is, to
all intents and purposes, an inside space. He seems to contemplate rather
than participate in life outside, gazing out at a girl as ‘she walks down the
street’—whilst he is ‘all alone’ and not yet able to act on his desire (‘I’m
gonna call her on the telephone’). In other words, The Undertones’ song
encapsulates the tension between inside and outside space, and these teen-
age dreams seem to be as much about individuated masturbatory fantasies
as they are about collective thrill-seeking: this dreamer who ‘wishes’ and
J. Croft (*)

220 J. CROFT
‘wants’ may well be filled with desire for encounters in the outside world,
but he is also still lingering on the threshold between bedroom and street,
enchanted and transfixed, not yet part of the action.
My starting premise, then, is that the delinquent loitering in the street
can also be the dreamer in the bedroom, and that subcultural narratives
are often shot through with ambivalent spatial identifications or, as Sian
Lincoln puts it, young people can ‘often find themselves caught in the blur
between the public and the private’ (Lincoln 2012, 187). In this chapter,
I trace lines of connection between the ‘wayward youth’ and ‘teenage
dreamer’. I consider how each of these categories occupies a contradictory
subject position, conjuring up a peculiarly unanchored state, hovering
somewhere between imagination and action, and shaped not only by
‘kicks’, but also by ‘fantasy’ (MacInnes 1959, 12).
My analysis is underpinned by the assumption that the words ‘adoles-
cent’, ‘youth’ and ‘teenager’ may well mean almost (but not quite) the
same thing, but that they also seem to cast quite different shadows (See for
example Croft 1992; Savage 2007; Lesko 2001). It perhaps helps to pic-
ture the relationship between these subject positions as a Venn diagram
which throws into relief their overlapping discourses, whilst also fore-
grounding the tensions between them. The ‘wayward youth’ and ‘teenage
dreamer’ are categories that accentuate these discursive intersections, and
which therefore seem to accrue an overdetermined borderline status. Key
to my approach here is to consider how these iterations of in-between-ness
come to be associated with intensely liminal spatialities, and how the
fraught yet dynamic movements, exchanges and tensions between inside
and outside space can be related to psychic processes of identification.
In my readings of three very different texts—August Aichhorn’s
Wayward Youth (1925), Frederic Thrasher’s The Gang (1927) and
Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001)—I set out to show how the prob-
lem of ‘being in-between’ is often most intensely articulated through
complex, ambivalent registers of feeling associated with fugue-like move-
ment, a distracted drifting that has no clear destination (Hacking 1998).
All of the borderline subjects that I write about, whether they are ‘way-
ward youths’, ‘suggestible gang-boys’ or ‘teenage dreamers’, seem torn
between hesitation and recklessness—half wanting to be somewhere else,
but unable to pursue a linear version of worldly progression. In other
words, these teenagers waver on the brink, fending off the narrative clo-
sure that we expect from the Bildungsroman’s purposeful trajectories
FROM WAYWARD YOUTH TO TEENAGE DREAMER… 221
towards fully individuated development (Moretti 1987), and mirroring

the indecision expressed in another teenage anthem, The Clash’s ‘Should
I Stay or Should I Go? (1981).
‘Wayward Reality’
August Aichhorn was an early pioneer of youth work, and his seminal text
Wayward Youth bears witness to an unusual encounter between psycho-
analytic and pedagogic approaches to ‘delinquent youth’ (Aichhorn 1925
[1936], 11). In his therapeutic practice with ‘dissocial’ young people in
Vienna between 1918 and 1930 (Houssier and Marty 2009), Aichhorn
deploys psychoanalytic techniques in contexts that might otherwise be
regarded as the domain of criminology or pedagogy, and he sets out to
synthesise Freudian analysis with what he calls ‘re-education’. There is
something both optimistic and potentially radical about Aichhorn’s mis-
sion to wrest psychoanalysis away from the genteel confines of the consult-
ing room, extending its reach into the corridors of the courthouse, or even
into the street (Danto 2005; Eissler 1949). For example, in Wayward
Youth he describes how he counsels his patients while walking along, or
even while riding on trolley-cars—‘As we talked, we walked slowly along
the street’ (Aichhorn 1925 [1936], 106), ‘he walked all the way home
with me’ and ‘He went on the streetcar with me’ (1925 [1936], 110). It
is also striking that in his ambulatory version of the clinic, Aichhorn some-
times pictures his patients in a state of reverie—‘We walked along in
silence; he was lost in thoughts and I was busy watching him.’(1925
[1936], 108). And as Aichhorn lays claim to the roles of educator and
analyst, he also maps out a different kind of clinical space, one which is
transformed by movements which blur the boundaries between public and
private: a space in which the daydreamer has a key stake.
The original title of Aichhorn’s Wayward Youth is Verwahrloste Jugend:
Die Psychoanalyse in d. Fürsorgeerziehung; 10 Vorträge zur ersten
Einführung, and the editors of the 1936 English edition comment on the
particular problems presented by the German term ‘Verwahr’, which is
translated in the title as ‘wayward’ but ‘is also rendered interchangeably as
“dissocial” and “delinquent”’ (1925 [1936]: xi). While the German term
‘Verwahrloste’ itself suggests pathological resonances, with synonyms
including abject terms such as ‘seedy’, ‘depraved’, ‘mangy’ and ‘dilapi-
dated’ (http://en.bab.la/dictionary/german-english/verwahrlost), the
222 J. CROFT
English word ‘wayward’ usually seems to have more positive, perhaps even
romantic, connotations. More often than not, ‘waywardness’ makes us
think of dislocated movement—i.e., movement away from where you’re
supposed to be. Indeed, in the 1935 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, ‘way-
ward’ is listed alongside adjectives such as ‘unsteady’, ‘vagrant’, ‘waver-
ing’, ‘afloat’, ‘alterable’, ‘plastic’, ‘mobile’, ‘fleeting’ and ‘transient’.
Another entry in the same edition of the thesaurus links waywardness to
obduracy, and nowadays, a more likely equivalent German term to ‘way-
ward’ would be ‘eigensinnig’—a word which suggests both obstinacy and
free will. Thus, as we thread our way through this list of supposed syn-
onyms, the ‘wayward youth’ seems to become more and more entangled
with ideas of both distracted movement and rebellion. This is in turn sug-
gests a close link with another borderline adolescent category—the
fugueur. In French this word refers, literally, to a runaway or absconder
and, more often than not, is linked with adolescence. Crucially, though,
‘fugueur’ also tends to be associated with the related terms, ‘fugue state’
and ‘dissociative fugue’, which describe supposedly psychopathological
states of amnesiac travel or ‘bewildered wandering’ (American Psychiatric
Association 2013, 298).
In Mad Travellers (1998), Ian Hacking describes the case of Albert
Dada, the so-called ‘first fugueur’ (Hacking 1998, 7). According to
Hacking, Albert made ‘obsessive and uncontrollable journeys’ which
‘were systematically pointless, less a voyage of self-discovery than an
attempt to eliminate self’ (1998, 30). Perhaps most significantly, though,
Hacking suggests that the diagnostic category of ‘fugueur’ is premised on
the shape of the subject’s movement, which he characterises as both ‘aim-
less’ and ‘compulsive’ (1998, 198). Like Albert Dada, several of Aichhorn’s
runaways and truants seem to occupy a borderline position, somewhere
between aimlessness and compulsion. For example, Aichhorn describes a
case of ‘vagrancy’ in a 16-year-old boy, who runs away from home and
from his apprenticeship because he cannot stop thinking about the death
of his mother,
I was apprenticed to a mechanic in July and was there for two months. I
couldn’t enjoy anything. I couldn’t help thinking all the time about my
mother and how awful she must have looked after her accident, and then I
ran away from my work. (Aichhorn 1925 [1936], 44)
In this example, supposedly delinquent movements are set in motion

by a train of distracted yet intrusive thoughts. The boy runs away in order
to pursue his feelings, and also to avoid them. Or, to put it another way,
he moves in order to ‘eliminate self’ (Hacking 1998, 198).
Aichhorn also tells us about young people who have failed to leave home,
and who consequently end up being targets of their family’s resentment.
Whether they ‘escape’ or are ‘stuck’, these delinquents often seem to act in
ways which are distracted or fugue-like, hesitating on the threshold between
inside and outside. This, then, may be how best to understand Aichhorn’s
use of the term ‘wayward’: the frequent representation of spatial ambiva-
lence in his study suggests that Aichhorn’s ‘wayward youth’ has the poten-
tial to be both day-dreamer and fugueur. For example, he describes a case
of ‘waywardness’ in a boy who, seeing cherry stones on the sill as he looks
out of the window, steals his mother’s money, and then runs away to pick
cherries for her. But then he eats the cherries himself and returns home,
washes and puts on clean clothes. The boy’s mother cannot ‘explain his
running away’, and she is keen to stress that ‘his only friend was a boy of a
nice family, and he was hardly ever on the streets.’ Yet despite vouching for
her son’s respectability, she also insists that ‘He belongs to a reform school’
(Aichhorn 1925 [1936], 13). Aichhorn’s narrative of the cherry-stealing
youth thus seems fraught with confused movements and muddled identifi-
cations, experienced both by the boy himself and his mother. There is a
complex interplay here between personal pleasure-seeking and familial duty,
and an overwhelming sense of ambivalence, played out in bizarre to-ing
and fro-ing movements, and contradictory gestures. In other words, the
subliminal plea from both mother and son seems to be: ‘I love you. I can’t
bear to be without you. I resent you. I can’t bear to be with you.’
According to Aichhorn, the wayward youth also communicates ambiv-
alence through the specific prism of class. Most of the case studies that
Aichhorn cites are not conventionally bourgeois, and the typical protago-
nists of his wayward narratives are serving apprenticeships, perhaps leaving
school early in order to support families, but also expressing dissatisfaction
with their class position. For example, Aichhorn tells us about a boy who
‘declared that he did not want to be a burden to his mother since he was
strong and healthy, but he refused to be a common labourer as his mother
wished.’ (Aichhorn 1925, 66). This boy apparently refuses to leave home
and, like the ‘cherry-picking’ delinquent, he is resented by his mother who
declares, ‘If I don’t get him out of the house, something terrible is bound
to happen.’ (1925 [1936], 69). Initially, she refers her son to Aichhorn
because of his ‘laziness and aggressive behaviour’ (1925 [1936], 64), yet
she also implies that he is effeminate, and stresses how ‘his closet is much
224 J. CROFT
neater than any of his sisters […] housework and reading are no work for
a grown boy.’ (1925 [1936], 66). So, rather confusingly, his waywardness
is characterised both by excessive domesticity and by slovenliness,
‘clear(ing) up everything around the house nicely’ even though he is ‘care-
less about his person’ (1925 [1936], 69). Such contradictory accusations
again seem to articulate ambivalent narratives of delinquency, imbricating
class, gender and generational conflict.
We are therefore left with the impression that Aichhorn’s wayward
youth is out of kilter with the class and gender values of his family, that he
is illegitimately laying claim to a realm of adolescent affect. Foreshadowing
Keith Waterhouse’s eponymous fantasist in Billy Liar (1959), Aichhorn’s
wayward youth is distracted by aspirational dreams, yet cannot quite leave
home. Both Waterhouse’s and Aichhorn’s wayward youths overly identify
with internal space, and so become cuckoo-like presences in the family
house. Both boys take on typically bourgeois adolescent traits such as nar-
cissistic daydreaming and immersive, indiscriminate literary consump-
tion—‘he will stand before the mirror for an hour arranging his tie and
combing his hair’ (Aichhorn 1925 [1936], 69), and ‘He read a lot in his
spare time—anything that came to hand, without discrimination’ (1925
[1936], 66). Both boys daydream of other places: ‘Are you really going to
London, or just pretending?’ (Waterhouse 1959, 183). And both boys
waver on the brink of escape, drawing back from the outside world.
‘Without Really Knowing What We Were Doing…’

Wayward Youth is probably most famous for the fact that Sigmund Freud
wrote its foreword, and at first glance, Freud’s introductory remarks seem
to offer a cautious optimism about the future possibilities for combining
psychoanalysis with pedagogy. Danto (2005) explores how, between 1922
and 1936, Freud supported a ‘social activist’ movement to establish The
Vienna Ambulatorium as a free clinic and child-guidance centre. Yet in
Wayward Youth Freud’s tone is also guarded, perhaps even a little anxious,
about maintaining the institutional authority of psychoanalysis, and he
insists that ‘educational work is sui generis, not to be confused with nor
exchanged for psychoanalytic means of influence’ (1925 [1936]: vi). With
hindsight, Aichhorn’s work effectively marks both a threshold and an
impasse in the history of the Freudian institution, paving the way for a
hybrid version of psychoanalysis that never really quite takes off. It is per-
haps not surprising, then, that Wayward Youth resonates as a liminal text,
replete with liminal subjects. And perhaps this is why Aichhorn’s narrative
voice often seems rather disoriented, not quite in the right place, or in the
right institution, at the right time. Aichhorn self-consciously draws atten-
tion to his potential failures as a storyteller and expresses concern that his
readers ‘will be incredulous, that the interpolations of theory will interrupt
the story, and that you may criticize me for being unscientific.’ (1925
[1936], 12). As if to counter this uncertainty about his authority as a nar-
rator, Aichhorn sometimes slips into a normative, conservative rhetoric
about ‘leading the dissocial back to conformity’ (1925 [1936], 3), and
attempting ‘to fit a child for his place in society’ (1925, 7). In some ways,
therefore, he seems a little too keen to produce narratives of ‘cure’.
Then again, Aichhorn repeatedly emphasises how he refuses to take up
a position of authority with young people, and insists that ‘I am not a
detective nor a policeman and I don’t need to know everything’ (Aichhorn
1925 [1936], 96). Indeed, Aichhorn’s colleagues seem to attribute his
famous ‘charisma’ to such protestations of ignorance, ‘his attitude of being
“ignorant” about the subject-matter to which he has devoted his life’s
work, his belief in always beginning anew, in being eternally a student and
pupil, not a teacher’ (See Paul Federn’s preface to Eissler 1949: XI). By
using these strategies to efface his clinical authority, and by emphasising
the ‘no-man’s land’ qualities of his consulting room—‘there is nothing to
be afraid of, that this is neither a police station nor a court’ (1925 [1936],
127) Aichhorn maps out a kind of heterotopic space for his delinquent
subjects to inhabit, a space ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place
several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault
1967, 6). In other words, he tries to cleave out an alternative, decentred
institutional position that has the potential to meet the wayward youth’s
demands for ‘his own special brand of reality’ (1925 [1936], 40).
‘Continuous Flux and Flow’

In his 1927 study of 1313 gangs in Chicago (published just two years after
Aichhorn’s Wayward Youth), Frederic Thrasher, a pioneer of The Chicago
School, focuses on collective forms of delinquency. His young gangs are
inhabitants of outside spaces. They are also ‘lawless, godless, wild’ (Thrasher
1927, 6), and we find them in the cracks and crevices of the city, beyond
the reach of both private and public jurisdiction, ‘almost beyond the pale
of civil society’ (1927, 6). Whereas Aichhorn seems to be concerned with
individual crisis-bound subjects, whose relationship to the outside is
226 J. CROFT
ambivalent, or even phobic, and who often ‘did not enjoy going out in the
street’ (Aichhorn 1925, 15), Thrasher’s youths are almost always repre-
sented in terms of their positive spatial identification with the street, and
he tends to use a rather giddy, libidinous vocabulary to describe the spatial
dynamics of ‘gangland’. According to Thrasher, for ‘the gang boy who has
not travelled, the great outside world is a place of mystery and magical
wonders’ (Thrasher 1927, 166), and ‘Once a boy has tasted the thrilling
street life of the gang, he finds the programs of constructive agencies
unsatisfying’ (1927, 79). (See also Dimitriadis 2006).
By contrast, the gang boy’s home only seems to register as a point of
departure—a place to be ‘away’ from. And yet the gang’s apparent flight
from domesticity is far from unequivocal, and Thrasher highlights their
tendency to move ‘without direction’, stressing that gangs are character-
ised by ‘locomotion for its own sake’ and by ‘interest in mere change and
movement’ (1927, 171). In other words, Thrasher seems to associate the
gang with undecided forms of mobility, and with non-developmental,
unresolved, narratives—‘movement and change without much purpose or
direction’ (1927, 85). One of his case studies features a gang called ‘The
Bimbooms’, and he describes how ‘They were constantly chasing each
other about the room, in and out of doors, and around the block’(1927,
85). According to Thrasher, ‘This ceaseless activity without purpose or
direction, this chaotic expenditure of energy, may be regarded as a form of
“milling” typical of the gang.’(1927, 85). Perhaps most significantly,
Thrasher defines ‘ganging’ itself as a ‘process’ of ‘continuous flux and flow’
(1927, 35), and he vividly articulates its non-linearity through the open-
endedness of present participles—through actions such as ‘prowling’, ‘rov-
ing’, ‘roaming’, ‘wandering’, ‘loafing’, and of course ‘milling’ itself.
In Thrasher’s text, both gangs and ganging are represented through a
vocabulary of borderline spatiality and he specifically places the term
‘interstitial’—‘spaces that intervene between one thing and another’
(1927, 22)—at the axis of his text, emphasising that it is ‘probably the
most significant concept of the study’ (1927, 22). Thrasher famously por-
trays the gang as ‘an interstitial growth […] flowering where other institu-
tions are failing to function efficiently…’ It is a ‘symptom of the disorderly
life of the frontier’ (1927, 495). And so, as he weaves together these
botanical and medical metaphors, what emerges is a paradoxical sense that
gangs both animate and clog the city’s interstices. Like tidal flotsam and
jetsam, Thrasher’s gangs ‘flux and flow’, yet they also ‘collect and cake in
every crack and cranny’ (1927, 22).
Perhaps most significantly, Thrasher seems to suggest that gangland is

constituted through the imaginary transformations of play, and that ‘most
of the boys, like the “So-so’s”, the “Onions”, and the “Torpedoes”, lead
an irregular life in the street, which is their playground.’(1927, 15) (my
emphasis). As I have explored elsewhere (Smyth and Croft 2006), the
playground conjures a space which merges the psychic with the social,
action with imagination. As such, it is a heavily freighted term in Thrasher’s
text, not least because it draws attention to the overlap between psycho-
analytic and topographical discourses. Just as Thrasher describes how ‘the
‘gang boy transform(s) his sordid environment through his imagination’
(Thrasher 1927, 117), so Freud himself describes transference as a play-
ground (Freud 1914, 154), while Winnicott nominates play as a space of
borderline potentiality, ‘neither inside nor outside’ (Winnicott 1971, 113).
Thrasher’s gangland, therefore, is defined not only as a geographical
and social territory, but also as an imaginative space: as the gang-boy expe-
riences the street as a playground, so the subjectivities of ‘wayward youth’
and ‘teenage dreamer’ collide. Indeed, at times, Thrasher’s gang-boy con-
spicuously takes on the mantle of teenage dreamer, one who:
sees in a broken sewer a sea on which sails the Spanish Armada [...] To him
the piles of rubbish in the city dumps or the mud along the drainage canal
are mountain fastnesses, while stretches of wasteland become prairies of the
Golden West. (Thrasher 1927, 116)
Here Thrasher uses heightened literary language to represent transfor-

mative relationships between environment and imagination. Moreover,
his syntax suggests a distinct shift in focus away from the collective social
identity of gangs, towards a singular daydreaming subject, which in turn
implies that youthful imagination is inextricably bound up with both indi-
viduation and literariness. At one level, therefore, Thrasher’s narrative
seems to open itself to the positive effects of immersive adolescent literary
identification. Yet he also seems to suggest that reading can have negative,
antisocial effects, and he makes clear connections between the gang-boy’s
literary consumption and his waywardness:
Thrilling stories of far-away places read in books and magazines are likely to
have the same effect upon the boy. The Bureau of Missing Persons asks, as
one of its first steps in locating runaway boys, what they have been reading.
(Thrasher 1927, 165)
228 J. CROFT
In a move which goes against the grain of current educational rhetoric

about the benefits of ‘reading for pleasure’ (See for example Clark and
Rumbold 2006), and which also anticipates his later work on the poten-
tially detrimental effects of comics (1949, 1954), Thrasher argues that
certain forms of reading actually stimulate delinquency. Though some of
this material is excised from later editions, The Gang originally features
chapters with headings such as ‘The Quest For New Experience’, ‘The
Role of the Romantic’, ‘The Movies and Dime Novels’, and ‘Wanderlust’.
Most strikingly, Thrasher shows how the gang boy’s reading apparently
inspires truancy rather than excessive interiority:
Wanderlust behaviour represents a response to a two-fold stimulus situation:

it is, on the one hand, an attempt to escape or to compensate for what is dull
or uninteresting; while on the other, it is a quest for novelty and adventure
impelled by previous experience and further stimulated by the movies, read-
ing and personal narratives. (Thrasher 1927, 170)
Like Aichhorn’s truants and runaways, Thrasher’s boys are ‘impelled’

in ways, which are distracted or fugue-like, and they apparently follow
these wayward trajectories because they are ‘stimulated’ by books and
films. In Wayward Youth Aichhorn poses the rhetorical question, ‘Why
should the delinquent not have his own special brand of reality too?’
(Aichhorn 1936, 40), while in The Gang Thrasher he argues that ‘the
gang boy’s life is fanciful […] and many times he does not distinguish
between what is real and what is not’ (Thrasher 1927, 131). So, both
susceptible gang boy and wayward youth read as they dream as they move.
They summon up their own porous realities. They enter the terrain of the
teenage dreamer.
‘He Had No Words as His Dreams Slid and Shook’

Oscillating between consciousness and hallucination, the eponymous pro-
tagonist of Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko seems to epitomise the ‘teenage
dreamer’, and much of the film’s action plays upon this wavering dynamic
between internal and external space. Of course, this film has strong sub-
cultural resonances, generating peculiarly intense (especially adolescent)
‘cult’ identifications since its release in 2001. There are well over 2000
IMDB reviews of Kelly’s film (Internet Movie Database 2016), many of
which focus on its representation of the ‘whole teenage angst thing’. Jake
Gyllenhaal (the actor who plays Donnie) introduces The Donnie Darko
Book (2003) by speculating about the film’s enigmatic, ‘subversive’
appeal—‘Call it cult. Call it genius. Call it what you will’ (Kelly 2003: viii),
and he also implies that Kelly’s film has the capacity to provoke meanings
which are not ‘conscious’ (2003: vii). Subcultural responses to Donnie
Darko seem particularly invested in how the film opens up other registers
of consciousness, and comparisons between the original ‘theatrical’ cut
and the director’s cut often make much of the play between internal and
external (even extra-terrestrial) spaces: with each version turning upon a
slightly different topography of consciousness, the film conjures multiple
configurations of inside and outside.
A number of Kelly’s iconic montage sequences highlight movements
between inside and outside, with tracking shots often lingering upon
threshold sites such as hallways, doors, front gardens and the school
entrance. Axiomatic to the film’s narrative is the image of a fractured, vio-
lently penetrated domestic realm, shaken to the core and almost destroyed
by an inexplicable object (a stray plane engine, without a plane) which
crashes through the Darkos’ roof, ending up in Donnie’s bedroom. As the
private space of the teenage bedroom is torn apart, and opened up to the
street’s public gaze, so this breach of architectural boundaries brings with
it other tropes of conceptual interpenetration or oscillation which are key
to my understanding of subcultural borderline subjectivity in this
chapter.
But the film does not open with this moment of collision. Instead,
Donnie is first pictured as a dreamer who is adrift in the outside world—
‘shivering, curled up in the foetal position’, lying in the road in his pyjamas,
‘asleep at the edge of a cliff’. He wakes up and is ‘disoriented by the morn-
ing light’ (Kelly 2003, 3). A few scenes later, we see Donnie stirring from
sleep for a second time, as he is beckoned by a disembodied voice ‘to wake
up’. Apparently this is the voice of ‘a grotesque 6 ft bunny figure’ (2003,
10). Next, Donnie wakes again in the morning sunlight, ‘dazed and con-
fused’, but this time on the seventh hole of the golf course. These opening
scenes therefore establish Donnie in an excessively liminal realm—as a
teenager caught on a threshold between sanity and psychic breakdown,
and as a dreamer, poised between night and day, waking and sleeping, on
the outskirts of the suburbs. In the film Donnie is also emphatically por-
trayed as a subject who reads: early on, we see him reading a collection of
Graham Greene’s short stories in his bedroom, and then performing a
different kind of intense reading in the bathroom—staring at his own
230 J. CROFT
reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, and scanning the words on a

bottle of his anti-psychotic pills. In the opening sequence of the film,
Donnie reads a note written on the fridge door which asks ‘Where is
Donnie?’ This phrase, a question about the enigma of liminal subjective
location, is a refrain that repeats throughout the film.
Of course, Donnie is not just a daydreamer, he is also a sleep walker,
and Kelly makes it clear in the film that these borderline forms of con-
sciousness are associated with Donnie’s potential for psychosis. Indeed,
even the golfer who wakes him on ‘the seventh hole’ hints at this, as he
happens to be the Darkos’ family doctor (an institutional figure involved
in Donnie’s diagnosis). The scene on the golf course also anticipates a later
scene when Donnie is woken up from a hypnotic trance by his therapist:
‘Donnie is now undoing his belt. He is no longer paying attention. Dr
Thurman quickly claps her hands. Donnie jolts awake.’(Kelly 2003, 32).
Here, the therapist interrupts Donnie in his dream state, just as he pre-
pares to masturbate, and this gesture of censorship reflects how Donnie
tends to be on the threshold of consciousness when he experiences such sup-
posedly therapeutic interventions. Melissa Gregg points out that ‘Donnie’s
character is unavoidably implicated in an omnipresent therapeutic culture’
(Gregg 2005, n.p.), and certainly these episodes indicate that Donnie
comes to us with a crisis-bound history, as an adolescent whose parents
‘pay someone two hundred dollars an hour to listen to all (his) thoughts…’
(Kelly 2003, 5). Above all, though, Donnie is identified as a permeable
subject who is besieged by forces from elsewhere, whether in the guise of
institutional surveillance, or in the form of extraterrestrial, hallucinatory
messengers.
Throughout the film, Kelly represents Donnie Darko as a protagonist
with an excessive and volatile interiority. Donnie articulates an acutely
adolescent position, and, crucially, reading is one of the key actions
through which Donnie’s psychic porosity and emotional depth is signalled
in the film. Immersive literary consumption is, of course, a familiar sign of
adolescent intensity (see for example Smyth and Croft 2006; Moretti
1987; Neubauer 1992), and the capacity to read ‘with insight’ typically
allows the protagonist to accrue subjective complexity. It is no coincidence
then that the scene with his English teacher, Karen Pomeroy, (played by
Drew Barrymore) follows the filmic conventions of a traditional rites of
passage narrative: literariness, or more specifically, literary insight, operates
as a marker of separation from the group, underlined by the following
implicit mantras—’I understand, but they don’t’, ‘I have depth, but they
don’t’. According to the familiar patterns of such narratives, the teacher in

turn apparently recognises this depth, often through a look, rather than
through dialogue. By insistently portraying Donnie’s ‘depth’ through the
iconography of literary adolescence, Richard Kelly reinforces the audi-
ence’s intense identification with Donnie, following the narrative logic
that we can ‘read’ Donnie, and so are not like his classmates. The film
therefore offers up peculiarly adolescent viewing pleasures, affirming the
audience’s cultish ‘uniqueness’ through a series of readerly projections: we
recognise Donnie’s depth as being like our own depth, our ‘I’ is like
Donnie’s ‘I’.
So what is this story that Donnie understands better than his fellow
pupils? What triggers such a concatenation of identifications? Donnie’s
class has been set the homework task of reading Greene’s 1954 short
story, and ironically this a text which shatters conventional literary tropes
of adolescent interiority. In other words, Donnie Darko’s status as a sensi-
tive literary reader is shored up by his capacity to offer his teacher a know-
ing response to a shockingly nihilistic narrative. ‘The Destructors’ describes
how a gang of children and teenagers painstakingly demolish an old man’s
house from the inside—‘“We’d do it from the inside. I’ve found a way in
[…] We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple.” He said with a sort
of intensity.’ (Greene 1954, 12). The story’s brutality is exacerbated by
the gang’s leader, T’s, insistence that their actions should only be moti-
vated by the desire to destroy, that ‘destruction is a form of creation’
(1954, 15). T also asserts that ‘All this hate and love […] “it’s soft, it’s
hooey. There’s only things”’(1954, 16). So, on T’s instruction, the gang
sets about meticulously destroying Old Misery’s house. By taking as its
target a ‘beautiful’ and precious building, which was supposedly designed
by Christopher Wren, and which has miraculously survived the onslaughts
of the Blitz, the gang is destructively mobilised not only against ‘things’
but also against both ‘home’ and ‘history’.
At the heart of Graham Greene’s short story there seems, almost literally,
to be a black hole—a gap in representation which can only be filled by
destroying the concept of home. And if ‘Where is Donnie?’ is Kelly’s filmic
refrain, for Greene the equivalent literary refrain is ‘Where’s my house?’
(Greene 1954, 21). The figure of T (or Trevor) is probably the closest thing
to a narrative focaliser in ‘The Destructors’, and yet where we might expect
to find interior monologue, we find only a disquieting absence of adoles-
cent introspection or uncertainty—‘it was as though this plan had been with
him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year
232 J. CROFT
crystallized with the pain of puberty.’(1954, 13). Indeed, there are striking
similarities between Greene’s portrayal of youth in ‘The Destructors’ and
the ‘youth without youth’ of Wolfgang Borchert’s unnerving manifesto,
written in 1945:
We are the generation without ties and without depth. Our depth is the
abyss. We are the generation without happiness, without home, and without
farewell. Our sun is narrow, our love cruel and our youth without youth.
And we are the generation without limit, without restraint and without pro-
tection—thrown out of the playpen of childhood into a world made for us
by those who now despise us because of it. (Borchert 1949, 39)
With this incantatory repetition of ‘without’, Borchert pictures his gen-

eration through a language of absolute negation, not quite eviscerated of
all affect, yet almost triumphantly empty. Like Thrasher’s gangs, they
occupy some kind of interstitial realm, yet their space is emphatically
detached from both play and home. Greene’s gang, it seems, are of this
same unbounded, un-housed generation. They are ‘youth without youth’
emerging from a ‘hill of rubble’ (Greene 1954, 21). And even when
domestic life occasionally still impinges upon their world—when for
example, we read that ‘Mike had gone home to bed’—these moments
only accentuate the pervasive sense that ‘home’ is antithetical to the gang’s
potency. So, as T’s authority in the gang is temporarily challenged by
another member who tells him to ‘Run along home, Trevor’ (1954, 18),
we are left with the feeling that a reversal has somehow taken place,
whereby the house that previously ‘shelter(ed) daydreaming’ (Bachelard
1958, 6) now robs the daydreamer of language, negates his capacity to
dream:
T stood with his back to the rubble like a boxer knocked groggy against the
ropes. He had no words as his dreams shook and slid. (Greene 1954, 18)
So what happens when the narratives of Donnie Darko and ‘The

Destructors’ cross paths? Perhaps we might argue that as Donnie identifies
with the postlapsarian ‘kind of imagination’ (Greene 1954, 15) revealed in
Greene’s story, he also frees himself from the conventional discourses of
adolescence. After all, it is Donnie’s sensitive literary identification with
Graham Greene’s story which paradoxically inspires his somnambulistic
vandalism (‘They made me do it’). Donnie moves as a disoriented dreamer
and seer between two different spatial identities—from the ‘I’ who reads
privately but does not act, to the ‘we’ who acts out delinquently. Thus,
when Donnie—in a dream state—attacks his school with a sledgehammer
we witness a hyperbolic collision between wayward youth and teenage
dreamer.
Conclusion: ‘A Border Resembling the Meeting

of Two Clouds’?
Often we have no guiding principle for our absence and do not persevere
once we have set out. Reverie merely takes us elsewhere, without our really
being able to live the images we encounter along the way. The dreamer is set
adrift. (Bachelard 1943, 3)
I began this chapter with a song about a teenage dreamer caught

between bedroom and street, and have ended up with Donnie Darko: a
figure on a rather different kind of threshold, who dreams his way back
and forth between private and public realms, and who also somehow slips
a gear in time and space. By focusing upon states of borderline conscious-
ness rather than upon more familiar aspects of subcultural identity, I have
shown how the teenage dreamer often articulates an overdetermined state
of liminality, or as the psychoanalyst Andre Green puts it: ‘a border resem-
bling the meeting of two clouds’ (Green 1972, 63). According to Green,
‘to be a borderline […] implies a loss of distinction between space and
time’ (Green 1972, 63), and in the texts that I have focused upon in this
chapter, ‘wayward youths’, ‘suggestible gang-boys’ and, of course,
‘teenage dreamers’ all seem to experience an equivalent loss of distinction.
My readings therefore illuminate those interstices which mark the divide
between the exterior public domain (where youth presents a potential
threat) and an interior, psychic realm (where the adolescent elaborates a
highly individuated language of introspection and emotional intensity).
Ranging across discipIines and historical moments, I have traced the (nec-
essarily) rather hazy trajectories of these young subjects in states of reverie.
And by seeking out those spaces in texts where imagination seems most
acutely bound up with hesitant actions, I have highlighted the association
between teenage dreaming and ambivalence. This is perhaps not surpris-
ing in the context of Aichhorn’s psychoanalytic case studies, yet what is
striking about Aichhorn’s wayward youths is that they often seem to
express their uncertainty through dream-like movements. Less predictably,
234 J. CROFT
Thrasher’s sociological ethnography also emphasises that gang life is

shaped by imagination and play, often articulated through ‘wandering’
mobilities. And so it seems that both the problem, and allure, of teenage
dreaming lies with its proliferating possibilities for in-between-ness:
emerging from a tangle of borderlines, the teenage dreamer is ‘set adrift’
(Bachelard 1943, 3).
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From Exaltation to Abjection: Depictions
of Subculture in Quadrophenia and Ill
Manors
Keely Hughes
Introduction
This chapter represents a contribution to the debate concerning the verac-
ity and accuracy of defining and describing subculture in contemporary
society. Following Blackman (1997, 2005) and others (Blackman and
France 2001; McCulloch et al. 2006; Nayak 2006; Shildrick and
MacDonald 2006), it will be argued that the term ‘subculture’ should not
be so readily abandoned. Using an analysis of two films, Quadrophenia
(1979) by Franc Roddam and Ill Manors (2012) by Ben Drew, as illustra-
tion, the aim of this chapter will be to provide a critical discussion of the
construction of subcultural affiliations. In order to achieve this, an explo-
ration of the role and representation of class relations and ‘symbolic styles’
(aesthetic appearance, performative, territory and moral boundaries)
(Hebdige 1979) will be undertaken for each film. Through an analysis of
both film representations of subculture, it will be argued that there has
K. Hughes (*)

238 K. Hughes
been a shift in the constructions of subcultural movements and affiliations

from a form of self-othering in Quadrophenia to external-othering in Ill
Manors. This shift, it will be suggested, occurs through changes within the
capitalist system. In particular, the erosion of the paternalistic welfare state
model of the post-World War Two era in Britain and the increasing des-
peration of the working classes to survive as an entity under contemporary
neoliberal policies.
Quadrophenia: Post-war Communities and Classic

Subculture
During the years 1945 to 1970, Britain experienced a major social and
economic reconstruction, establishing a forward-looking Britain in which
an ‘economy of society’ and ‘social mobility’ would dominate public and
political rhetoric. The social market economy born from this era, aimed to
establish fair competition between the classes by maintaining a balance
between a high rate of economic growth, low inflation and low levels of
unemployment. This reconstruction of economic and social conditions
provided youth groups with opportunities of skilled work, regular employ-
ment, stability and security. Weight (2013) acknowledges that ‘the youth
of post-war Britain represented a society in transition, a society where
opportunity and affluence would potentially raise expectations, heighten
class-consciousness and distort class boundaries’ (p. 20). Succeeding these
developments was the hope of a ‘classless’ society, achievable by providing
full employment and opportunity to the working classes. Despite these
developments, ‘class refused to disappear’ (Hebdige 1979, 74). However,
as Hebdige (1979) notes, ‘the ways in which class was lived—the forms in
which class found expression in culture—did dramatically change’ (ibid.).
Quadrophiena portrays these new ‘lived’ experiences of culture for
working-class youth in post-war Britain. The film tells the story of the
1964 Brighton riots between gangs of Mods and Rockers from the per-
spective of Jimmy, a young Mod. Working in a monotonous job as a post-
room boy, becoming increasingly disillusioned with his parents and his
incessant need to ‘be somebody’, Jimmy finds an outlet for his angst by
popping pills, visiting all-night dance halls, hanging out with his Mod
friends and battling with a rival gang of Rockers. Quadrophenia portrays a
dichotomy of work and leisure as the new ‘lived’ experiences for post-war
youth groups. This work/leisure dichotomy becomes essential to the sub-
cultural identity for the group of Mods in the film.
From Exaltation to Abjection: Depictions of Subculture… 239
Emerging from the portrayal of work and the characters’ jobs is the
maintenance of historic class structures in post-war Britain. Regardless of
social, cultural and economic developments, traditional class structures
continue in terms of low-status employment for the working classes.
Nevertheless, employment provided working-class youth with disposable
income, which they invested in their subcultural image through the pro-
cess of ‘stylisation’:
I’ve got a good job

And I’m newly born.
You should see me dressed up in my uniform.
I work in a hotel all gilt and flash.
Remember the place where the doors we smashed?
(The Who, Bellboy 1973)
These lyrics pick up on the idea of youth being reborn or ‘newly born’
during the post-war era and emphasises the importance of work in creat-
ing the Mod identity. The juxtaposition between a subservient role in
menial employment and a high-status value within the subculture is evi-
dent in Quadrophenia, in particular with the character ‘Ace Face’. The
‘Ace Face’ to Jimmy is the ultimate Mod; he is the sharpest dresser, the
coolest dancer and rides the best scooter. Yet, as Jimmy discovers, Ace
Face has a low-status job as a bellboy, carrying the luggage for middle-class
guests at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Although he has high status within
his subcultural group, his job reinforces his working-class status.
All the characters seemingly engage in relatively low-status work. Jimmy
is the lowest-ranking employee at an advertising firm as a post-room boy,
Dave works as a bin man, Peter at his uncle’s scrap yard and Steph as a
checkout girl. However, despite this engagement in low-status work, there
is a positivity surrounding it. This is explicit in an exchange between
Jimmy and Peter: Peter says to Jimmy, ‘you don’t work, you don’t get
money, and I like money’ (Quadrophenia 1979). Work for Peter provides
him with a disposable income which is pivotal in facilitating the commu-
nication of his subculture, as money enables him to acquire and create the
commodities and signifiers of Mod identity.
The ‘symbolic styles’ of the Mods portrayed in Quadrophenia reflect
the ideas promoted by the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies) (Corrigan 1979; Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979;
McRobbie 1980; Willis 1979) regarding the self-stylised construction of
240 K. Hughes
this subgroup’s identity. The film portrays vividly the attitudes, rituals,
leisure and style of the group, including the subversion of objects to reflect
the symbolic use, meaning and importance of ‘Mod’ identity. The group
forms a ‘style’ and creates a ‘lifestyle’ that separates itself from bourgeois
hegemonic norms and the historically rooted traditions of the working-
class parent culture. This separation manifests itself in the form of ‘sym-
bolic styles’, including: aesthetic appearance, performativity, territory and
moral boundaries (Hebdige 1979).
Aesthetic Appearance
My jacket’s gonna be cut slim and checked,
Maybe a touch of seersucker with an open neck.
I ride a GS scooter with my hair cut neat,
Wear my war-time coat in the wind and sleet
(Love Reign O’er Me, The Who 1973)
In Quadrophenia, there is a clean aestheticism attached to the Mods.

The Mod style includes expensive fashions, such as tailored suits, French
crew tops, polo-shirts, brands like Levi’s, Fred Perry and Ben Sherman,
clean cut feathered or bouffant hair, parkas and Lambrettas/Vespas. The
clean aestheticism of the Mod works to distance them from the dirty
industrial image of their working-class parent culture and to challenge the
materiality of their middle-class counterparts by owning a superior appear-
ance; this is particularly the case with Jimmy and his parents/boss.
Hebdige states in The Meaning of Mod that ‘the importance of style to
the mods can never be overstressed—Mod was pure, unadulterated
STYLE, the essence of style. In order to project style, it became necessary
first to appropriate the commodity, then to redefine its use and value, and
finally to relocate its meaning within a totally different context’ (1979,
76). The Mods use of scooters and parkas provides a perfect exemplifier of
the subversion of commodities. The customisation of the scooter (adding
lights and mirrors), turned it from a practical means of clean, cheap trans-
portation, an ‘ultra-respectable means of transport’, to a ‘weapon and a
symbol of solidarity’ (ibid.) Subverting commodities such as the scooter,
with lights and mirrors, provided the Mods with a commodity that func-
tioned and represented the Mod style. Similarly, the parka is initially used
to keep the Mods clothes clean when riding their scooters but are custom-
ised with patches and badges to convey the Mod style. The importance of
these subverted commodities to the Mod identity is illuminated in a scene
where a postman driving his van inadvertently crashes into Jimmy’s

scooter. Jimmy shouts at the postman, ‘you’ve killed me scooter!’ This
scene symbolically marks the ending of Jimmy’s ‘Mod way of life’.
Performative
MRS COOPER. Where you been?
JIMMY. Fell asleep on the train and wound up in bloody Neasdon.
MRS COOPER. It’s running around on them motorbikes most of the night
… I’m not surprised.
JIMMY. (sighs)
MRS COOPER. It’s not normal.
JIMMY. Oh yeah … what’s normal then.
(Quadrophenia 1979)
The performative style of the Mods relied as much on their aesthetic

appearance as on consumerism. Hebdige (1976) describes this performa-
tive element of style as ‘consumer rituals’. The performative style of the
Mods was to ‘worship leisure and money’ (Benstock and Ferris 1994, 52).
Throughout Quadrophenia, the leisure activities constructing the perfor-
mative style through consumer practices include dancing in all-night clubs,
socialising (in cafés and at house parties), spending time listening to music,
collecting records and maintaining the Mod aesthetic look by visiting fash-
ion boutiques, tailors and barbers. For Mods, scooters aid in these con-
sumption practices. The scooters allow the Mods to break with locality, to
consume and engage in a wider variety of leisure activities in a range of
locations and to define and enact their performative identity. The events of
the bank-holiday weekend show the Mods travelling to Brighton to see and
be seen in streets and public places (Brighton seafront and nightclubs).
The Mods use of ‘blues’ (amphentamines) are also an intrinsic part of
their leisure lifestyle. The Mods in Quadrophenia consume ‘blues’ almost
every time they are engaging in leisure activities. The Mods generally use
amphetamines for extending their leisure time into the early hours of the
morning and as a way of bridging the gap between the hostile and daunt-
ing everyday work life and the Mod lifestyle. Wilson indicates that amphet-
amines ‘symbolised the smart on-the-ball, cool image’ inviting ‘stimulation,
not intoxication … greater awareness, not escape and confidence articu-
lacy’ (Wilson 2008, 5). This image counters the ‘drunken rowdiness’ of
the working-class parent culture and previous generations. ‘Blues’ are an
integral part of resisting prior working-class lifestyles and in creating and
engaging in ‘consumer rituals’.
242 K. Hughes
Territory
Out of my brain on the 5:15
(5:15, The Who 1973)
MR COOPER. Who do you think you are anyway?

JIMMY. Oh I don’t know … you tell me.
MR COOPER. You’re barmy, that’s what you are. Staying out all hour’s
getting up to god knows what dressing up like a bloody freak … and stand
still when I’m talking to ya. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you’re on
drugs … yeah, I know what you get up to down that club, you and your
mates, your gang. You’ve gotta be part of a gang haven’t ya ay … you gotta
be a Mod or this or that. I mean haven’t ya got a mind of your own.
(Quadrophenia 1979)
The territorial style of the Mods portrayed in Quadrophenia is both

cultural and spatial. Spatially the Mods are very much integrated into soci-
ety and community; they are often seen gathering in public spaces such as
cafés, bars, clubs and shops. They also construct their own public spaces
through the development of a ‘youth’ consumer market. For example, the
all-night dance halls are a space for the Mods. They colonise spaces to
demonstrate and perform their identity as a collective group of shared
values and meanings (Hebdige 1979). The change in socioeconomic con-
ditions in the 1960/1970s provided opportunities for the Mods to define
and create meanings and values as well as a style and practice that identi-
fied their distinctiveness not only in terms of a generational break but also
from other youth subcultures such as the Rockers.
Working-class culture had until this point been quite stable in terms of
its normative values (hard manual work, honest living, traditional mar-
riage, family values and remembering one’s roots). However, the Mod
subculture unsettles this through the socioeconomic developments of
affluence, opportunity and the chance of mobility through the changing
attitudes of this group to money, power and status (Goldthorpe et al.
1968). This enables the Mods to create a space between two cultures: the
bourgeois dominant culture and the working class parent culture. This is
demonstrated throughout the film in various scenes between Jimmy and
his parents, and Jimmy and his middle-class co-workers. Cohen stresses
that the Mods ‘attempted to realise, but in an imaginary relation, the con-
dition of existence of the socially mobile white-collar worker […while…]
their argot and ritual forms [continued to stress…] many of the traditional
values of the parent culture’ (1980, 98). The Mod subculture, therefore,
forms in Quadrophenia from three sites—(1) generational difference,

resulting from post-war economic and social modernisation in an emerg-
ing consumer society; (2) middle-class social forms and values, and (3)
attitudes from the traditional working-class parent culture. Jimmy strug-
gles with this three-way identity and struggles to find a space to be the
‘Mod’ both at home with his parents and at the advertising firm where he
works. It is only within the Mod group/gang that his culture and identity
appear to be whole.
Moral Boundaries
JUDGE. It seems strange to me to see this precession of miserable speci-
mens so different from the strutting hooligans of yesterday who came here
to pollute the air of this town. Yes. These longhaired, mentally unstable,
petty little hoodlums […] these sordid Caesars who can only find courage
like rats by hunting in packs, came to Brighton with the profound intent of
interfering with the life of its inhabitants.
(Quadrophenia, 1979)
The moral boundaries and behaviour of the group of Mods portrayed

in Quadrophenia take the form of defiance, contempt, parody and sar-
casm, to demonstrations of verbal and physical outbursts of rage. These
are expressed and acted out as a form of resistance (particularly in the case
of Jimmy) towards middle-class counterparts/co-workers, parents, the
wider working-class community and towards the gangs of Rockers. This
resistance is presented in both passive and aggressive forms and acts as a
site for the negotiation of the Mod identity, allowing it to develop and
present itself as an alternative identity.
In Quadrophenia, Jimmy highlights these two phases of subversive
styles through behaviour. Early in the film, Jimmy’s behaviour is passive as
he challenges authority, mainly his parents and his boss. This can be inter-
preted as Jimmy resisting normative culture’s attempts to socialise him.
He resists this to develop the Mod identity. Later in the film Jimmy’s
behaviour becomes more aggressive; however, this aggressive behaviour is
acted out among his fellow Mods. These two forms of behaviour enable
the group of Mods to create their own acceptable models of behaviour,
which challenge behaviour models existing in other cultural groups. The
behaviour model of the Mods acts as meaningful attempts of negotiating
the space between the emerging consumptive affluent worker and working-
class status.
244 K. Hughes
Irrespective of the rebellion found at its core, the Keynesian social wel-
fare economy of post-war Britain enabled a mode of self-identification of
subcultural identity. Quadrophenia presents a vision of society which pro-
vides stable economic opportunities, disposable income and an element of
social mobility which appears inclusive, even if there is clear inequality
between social groups. This is not the case with Ben Drew’s Ill Manors,
which reflects the subcultural horror of neoliberal capitalism in contempo-
rary Britain.
Ill Manors: A Neoliberal Subculture

Ill Manors begins with the tagline ‘We are all products of our environ-
ment… Some environments are just harder to survive in’. Set in Forest
Gate, London 2012, home of the 2012 London Olympic Games, the film
presents a neighbourhood immersed in chains of violence, vengeance and
lethal reprisals that ripple through the community of drug dealers, prosti-
tutes, immigrants, local gangs and the poor. The film attempts to address
the issues and experiences of young people who are economically and
socially excluded under the post-2008 austerity period and the neoliberal
social order. These economic, political and social regressions constitute
what Henry Giroux describes as a ‘war on youth’ (Giroux 2010). This
‘war’ occurs through the lack of quality education, unemployment, the
repression of dissent, a culture of violence and the discipline of the market
(Giroux 2010). The lack of these fundamental economic, political and
social goods shapes the dismal experiences of many young people. Ill
Manors attempts to capture this ‘war on youth’ through the portrayal of
an underclass council estate community to which the term ‘Chav’ has
become the derogatory name for its members. ‘Chav’ has been defined as
a culture that has evolved from previous working-class cultures and is
often used in a classist manner as an attack on the poor (Jones 2011).
The neoliberal mantra replaces issues such as equality and justice with
the incessant need to ‘consume’ and ‘economise’ oneself. The popular
discourse under this economic and social system is that every individual is
accountable for their own economic and social failings as every individual
has choice and autonomy within the free market. The idea of ‘choice’
denotes having access to the means to engage socially and economically.
However, the neoliberal order creates injustice, inequality and demonisa-
tion on the basis of ‘choice’ as not all individuals have equal access to social
and economic goods. As Bauman highlights, failure under the neoliberal
order is envisaged as ‘the aggregate product of wrong individual choices;

proof of the “choice incompetence” of its members’ (1998, 78). Tyler
(2013) refers to these choice-incompetent individuals, or ‘the poor’, as
the ‘social abject’.
In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes the abject as something that
‘disturbs identity, system order, what does not respect borders, positions,
rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1980, 7).
The abject is ‘being for the other’ and it is the normalcy of the ‘other’
which gives the abject its identity. The ‘social abject’ therefore, works as a
mode of governmentality of waste populations, through ‘including forms
of exclusion’ (Tyler 2013). Ben Drew presents the ‘social abject’ in Ill
Manors; he does this by showing the characters attempting to survive in
their hostile and impoverished community. The characters turn the every-
day rules of neoliberal capitalism aside, corrupting, misleading and taking
advantage of them through the ‘consumption’ mechanism which lies at its
core. The characters achieve this by engaging in underground economic
activities, such as drug dealing, prostitution and theft. The perception and
assumption by dominant cultural groups towards the underclass and ‘Chav’
in terms of economic activity is as Plan B sarcastically suggests: ‘Kids on the
street, no they never miss a beat, never miss a cheap thrill when it comes
their way’ (Ill Manors, Plan B 2012). It is this perception, that these youth
groups who are part of the underclass are quick to sell their morals to make
easy money rather than gain qualifications to become a hard-working and
meaningful economic agent in society which evokes the reaction of ‘dis-
gust’ towards them. It is the general consensus that ‘Those at the bottom
are there because they are stupid, lazy or otherwise morally questionable’
(Jones 2011, xiii) rather than having unequal access to ‘culturally valued
resources’ (Griffin 2011, 255) that enable them to conform to normalcy
both economically and socially under the neoliberal order.
The abject is, however, useful under neoliberal forms of capitalism, as it
reminds the non-abject (or the object) that they are not the abject (them).
In these austere times, anybody can at once become ‘economically dis-
placed’, so in a sense the abject keeps the neoliberal order active by remind-
ing adequate consumers to remain precisely that, ‘adequate’. The fear of
becoming abject plays a disciplinary role: it keeps individuals (the non-
abject) complicit in the regime of consumption practices and market rule.
It is as Kristeva notes the ‘abject has only one quality of the object and that
is being opposed to “I”’ (Kristeva 1980, 8.) Therefore, the ‘socially
abject’, in some ways, reinforces the popular neoliberal discourse as the
246 K. Hughes
‘object’ tries to further itself from the ‘abject’. In terms of subcultural

affiliations, in Quadrophenia, the Mod subculture positively self-construct
their identity by resisting the traditional working-class and dominant
middle-class culture. The Mods have a good self-image, despite of and
perhaps even because of the mischief and bad press that they receive.
Whereas in Ill Manors, the Chav as the ‘social abject’ accept an identity
constructed by the dominant middle-class culture, a negative image which
is internalised by the Chav subcultural group. The Chav as a ‘social abject’
is constructed from ‘without’ rather than from ‘within,’ giving this sub-
cultural group a negative external identity in wider society.
Like Quadrophenia, ‘symbolic styles’ appear in Ill Manors in the con-
struction of the Chav subcultural group. The ‘symbolic styles’ in Ill
Manors which form the compound of the group identity of the Chav con-
form to classic subcultural affiliations, including subversion to normalcy
through signifying practices of ‘style’ which differentiate this group from
the dominant cultural group. Post-subcultural analysis prioritises auton-
omy in the consumption of goods and the construction of lifestyles and
identity. What Ill Manors depicts is a lack of autonomy in these spheres as
consumption practices and their subcultural affiliations are limited by eco-
nomic necessity. Therefore, the Chav group cannot be categorised as the
post-subcultural line of thought would argue, as a ‘neo-tribe’ (Bennett
1999) or ‘Scene’ (Maffesoli 1995) due to this lack of autonomy in the
construction of their identity. However, emerging in the film in terms of
the subcultural affiliations of the Chav in comparison to the Mod in
Quadrophenia is an inversion connected to the ‘symbolic styles’ and ‘forms
of subversion’ constructing their identity. Although the Mod subcultural
group is constituted from without by its opposition to a purported ‘main-
stream’, the Mods have more leverage through good social and economic
conditions to create their own image, whilst the Chav subculture is more
determined from without than within through social abjection and non-
inclusion of this group in society (socially, culturally, politically and
economically).
Aesthetic Appearance
SOCIAL WORKER. Anyway, stay outta trouble yeah … oh and erm take
that hat off and maybe the old bill will leave you alone.
AARON. Yeah … doubt it.
(Ill Manors 2012)
In terms of aesthetic appearance, the visible ‘style’ of the characters in

Ill Manors follows the branding culture of post-modern consumerism.
The characters are seen in casual-wear and sportswear, which are mostly
brands and designer labels, including Burberry, Ralph Lauren and Adidas.
Other styles portrayed comprise of trainers, hoodies, baseball caps,
chucky gold jewellery (bling) and accessories such as smartphones and
flash cars, BMW’s and Audi’s for instance. The image is to demonstrate
wealth and the ability to be an active consumer. The aesthetic appearance
of the Chav reflects the dominance of consumerism and the power of the
market in contemporary society whereby the owning of branded items
becomes a status symbol. In this sense, the characters are effective in
consumer practices as they are able to buy into high-end goods. However,
there develops a disassociation by the dominant hegemonic cultural
group to buy these products, as they do not want to be seen buying simi-
lar consumer goods as ‘the poor’. As Haywood and Yar identify, the poor
are ‘often in the same moment both socially and economically excluded
yet culturally and commercially included’ (2006, 21). The Chav group
try to include t hemselves but find themselves at the same time excluded.
Unlike the Mod subcultural group in Quadrophenia who construct their
own ‘youth market’ through self-constructions of ‘style’ and subverting
commodities, in Ill Manors, this becomes inverted; it is other consumers
choosing not to buy into the same brands as the Chav group through fear
of being labelled a ‘Chav’ themselves that creates to some extent the
Chav aesthetic.
Style for the Chav subcultural group also adapts itself to a function,
which is concealment mainly from society and authority figures.
Throughout Ill Manors the characters are shown wearing dark-coloured
clothes, which emphasises this idea of concealment emerging through
economic disassociation connected to this group. They use this style to
engage in other economic endeavours, mainly underground, criminal
activities. Featherstone (2013) argues that the hoodie has become a sig-
nifier of ‘the capitalist other’. It embodies and is associated with crimi-
nal activity linked to the underground or black economy. The need for
concealment to engage in such illegal economic activities is illustrated
when Marcell stresses to Jake: ‘You see why I’m always in black … cuz
people can’t pick me out’ (Ill Manors 2012). Rather than being a posi-
tively self-constructed style in the case of the Mods associated with
materiality, the style is negative and becomes externally constructed, asso

ciated with social and economic exclusion. The need to hide, not to be
248 K. Hughes
identifiable, not to stand out to authority is a key factor in belonging to

the group but also to be able to successfully engage in their activities.
Performative
Who closed down the community centre?
I killed time there, used to be a member
What will I do now until September?
School’s out, rules out, get your bloody tools out.
London’s burning, I predict a riot.
(Ill Manors, Plan B, 2012)
What occurs within the performative aspects of ‘style’ in Ill Manors and
the Chav subculture is a move from a distinctive work/leisure dichotomy
seen in Quadrophenia towards a blending of the two. The lack of educa-
tion and work opportunities creates conditions in which for many there is
no clear division between work and leisure time—they become the same.
In Ill Manors, leisure becomes entwined with work through a lack of sta-
ble employment. The need to survive in a neoliberal capitalist society
without formal economic opportunities requires a creative engagement
and commitment to informal moneymaking practices to survive. Therefore,
the performative element of the Chav subculture involves the characters
attempting to make money wherever and whenever they can, but this is
mainly tied to the underground or ‘black’ economy. The film shows Aaron
and Ed prostituting Michelle in pubs and kebab shops and Chris, Ed and
Aaron dealing drugs in the local pub. The boundaries between work and
leisure are never separate. This results in ‘leisure’, such as hanging around
on the streets, becoming associated with criminality, or as Haywood
(2004) puts it ‘street delinquency’, which in effect is also waiting for mon-
eymaking opportunities to arise.
Territory
Keep on believing what you read in the papers,
Council estate kids, scum of the earth…
(Ill Manors, Plan B 2012)
The territorial style of the Chav subculture is both cultural and spatial,
like the Mod subculture. Spatially, unlike the Mods in Quadrophenia, who
break boundaries of locality and colonise public space, the Chavs spatial
territory is restricted. In Ill Manors the characters are only seen in the
small geographic area of the community where they live (Forest Gate,
London). This is further narrowed to abject and abandoned spaces. The
group is shown occupying streets, alleyways, empty car parks, housing
estates, prisons, abandoned properties and decaying industrial buildings.
The characters coalesce in unused spaces and more often than not, this
enables concealment of their engagement in illegal economic activities.
Marcell’s gang use a decaying abandoned industrial building to hold hos-
tage their ‘customers’ who fail to make payment of drugs, and Michelle
and Katya take refuge in abandoned properties.
Like the Mod subculture in Quadrophenia, cultural territory in Ill
Manors is linked to socioeconomic conditions. The difference being, how-
ever, that the Mods construct their cultural territory by deconstructing,
reconstructing and destructing spaces, whereas in Ill Manors cultural ter-
ritory is constructed by others. Chav subcultural members are assembled
through media and political discourse as ‘scum’, ‘benefit cheats’,
‘scroungers’, ‘feral’ and ‘council housed and violent’. The Chav has
become identified and constructed from the space it occupies: ‘the council
estate’; ‘Made from stone, steele and iron beams, the council blocks they define
the mean’ (Ben Drew, Lost my Way, 2012). The Chav has become identi-
fied and constructed through the negative associations attached to these
sites by wider societal discourses. Therefore, the space they occupy defines
their culture and the survival tactics employed by the Chav group consti-
tutes a self-contraction of their identity through their practices and behav-
iours. This fuels the ‘othering’ done to them by proving that they are who
and what society depicts them as.
Moral Boundaries
Like crimes the only way we’re gonna feed off this economy.
Revert to type, live out these self-fulfilling prophecies.
Common goal, common enemy, economise.
(Live Once, Plan B 2012)
The representation of moral boundaries in Ill Manors shows drug deal-

ing and taking, prostitution, antisocial behaviour, murders, theft and even
the selling of a baby. There is a lack of moral boundaries, in fact there
appears to be no boundaries at all. In contrast to Quadrophenia, there is a
large difference between the behaviours of the Mods and ‘Chavs’ that
stems in large part from the economic conditions prevalent in each period.
In Quadrophenia, economic conditions provide opportunities not only for
250 K. Hughes
relatively good wages but also for social mobility. The behaviour of the
Mods is formed through resisting the parent culture to create new behav-
iours to construct their identity that is facilitated by the monetary means
to do so. In current economic conditions, the working classes (such as
those depicted in Ill Manors) have become stripped of the opportunity to
make a respectable living known by the old working class (such as the
Mods in Quadrophenia), let alone the chance of social mobility that was
possible for some (MacDonald et al. 2005).
What emerges in Ill Manors through highlighting the past histories and
present socioeconomic conditions these characters face is that the lack of
moral boundaries is necessary, pragmatic and functional to survival. Katya
steals a pram and a purse to save her baby and escape the sex-slave night-
mare she has had to endure. Michelle prostitutes herself to feed her drug
habit, which provides her with the only means of escaping her past. Aaron
works for Ed selling drugs to afford the bare minimum life essentials.
These examples illustrate the fluidity of moral and legal boundaries in the
context of surviving at the margins of society. To survive in a neoliberal
economy and with no capital to exchange, to some extent the only means
by which these characters can acquire money to live is by eschewing their
morality and becoming dehumanised in the process. It becomes apparent
that the economic and social limitations this group endure force them to
behave in this manner. Phil Cohen identifies that under neoliberal socio-
economic conditions
There are increasing numbers of young people unable, through no fault of

their own, to make the transition to the kinds of mobile individualism
demanded by the new career culture, and whose sense of frustration leads to
anti-social or self-destructive behaviour. (1999, 425)
Ultimately, these ‘symbolic styles’ are a response to the task of living

and surviving in a hostile environment. They are not self-constructed and
have become necessary as it is what is available to the Chav subcultural
group; their style is not chosen. The ‘symbolic styles’ act, therefore, as a
response to the challenges of living. Ill Manors shows that the subcultural
group Chav is less a ‘lifestyle’ but rather a ‘style of life’. That is, a ‘lifestyle’
is a means of forging a sense of self and creating cultural symbols that reso-
nate with personal identity, which is what is seen in Quadrophenia. One
can choose to be a Mod or Rocker and conform to the subcultural group
‘lifestyle’ or choose to be neither (Jimmy’s sister is to some extent an
example of the non-subcultural). However, in Ill Manors, the representa-

tion of the lived experience of Chav shows that not all aspects of lifestyle
are voluntary. One does not choose to be a Chav, and Ill Manors high-
lights the struggle to escape from the Chav subculture in the character of
Aaron. Ben Drew’s overall view of the community in Ill Manors is as
follows:
Look around this manor and all you’ll see

Is ill mannered people iller mannered
Than the illest mannered person
You’ve ever met in your manor
Or are ever likely to meet
In any manor, cause this manors’ deep
You judge them on the life that they lead
But then it’s not all as black and white as it seems
They’re all some way enslaved and their circumstances
Shape the way they behave in their battle on the street.
(Lost My Way, Plan B 2012)
Conclusion
The analysis of the representations of subcultural identity and practice in
the two films emphasises how subcultures are constructed and expressed
within wider social and economic processes and experiences. Quadrophenia
presents an exalted sense of importance for youth within the post-war
social market economy. This economy provided youth with a positive
community to reinforce their identity and oppose mainstream society. The
film is about the ‘Mod’ subculture engaging in conscious self-constructions
of identity, starting with the individual (or the self) and stamping this
identity onto the wider social, economic and political spheres through
group affiliations and activities. This is an ‘inward-out’ identification. In
contrast, Ill Manors presents the opposite, a subcultural abject created
under the neoliberal free-market economy. The film reflects how social,
economic and political structures and processes shape physical and social
environments, emphasising how this can promulgate inequality. In Ill
Manors the environment is negative and hostile. The environment has a
causal effect by stamping ‘Chav’ subcultural identities onto the people liv-
ing within this community. The Chav subcultural group is shown as con-
structed from all that is ‘other’ and external to them. The engagement in
252 K. Hughes
subculture is unconscious, resulting in an ‘outward-in’ identification. It is

not possible to become a ‘Chav’ or to buy into the ‘Chav’ subculture as post-
subcultural theories (Bennett 2005; Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003) might
advocate; it is embedded in class. This chapter has argued that subculture is
not redundant, but has rather become inverted through changing market
economies from a positive mode of self-identification in community, to a
negative external identification through elite and popular discourses that
perpetuate an authoritarian and negative categorisation and identification.
As a result, the idea of post-subculture should perhaps be reconsidered.
References
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Bennett, A. 1999 “Sub-cultures or Neo-tribes? Rethinking the Relationship
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Index1
NUMBERS & SYMBOLS American International Pictures (AIP),

100 Club (club), 42 9, 12
976-EVIL, 166, 169 American News Company (ANC), 6
Amis, Martin, 46
Argosy, 7
A Authenticity, 23–37, 43, 44, 48, 50,
Ace Books, 8 98, 100, 110, 118, 119, 122,
Ace Magazines, 8 123, 132, 137–139, 152, 154,
Adorno, Theodor, xxv, 181–183, 186, 211
187, 190, 195n6 Avon Books, 6, 10, 11
Aichhorn, August, xxvi, 220–226,
228, 233
AIDS, xxii, 36 B
Albatross Books, 5, 6 Bachelard, Gaston, 232–234
Aliens, 172 Back to the Future, 111, 115, 116,
Allen, Richard (James Moffat) 124n5
Punk Rock, xxii, 42, 47, 50, 51 Bad girl fiction, xxi, 3–19
Skinhead, 50 Bad girl films, 12
Suedehead, 50 Bad Girls, 4, 8
Almat Magazines, 8 Ballantine Books, 6
Amazing Stories, 7 Ballantine, Ian, 6, 10
Banksy, 199, 200
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73189-6
256 INDEX
Bantam Books, 6 Brothers of the Head, 180, 189, 194n1

BBC 4, 35 Brown, Andy, 112, 118, 154, 163,
BBC Radio 4, 26, 33 164, 167
Beatles, The, 76, 78, 84, 129, 153, Brown, Ian, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135,
193, 194n2 143n4
Beeler, Stan, 94, 99, 101 Brown, Wenzell
Bentley, Nick, xxii, 27, 28, 31, 41–56 Big Rumble, The, 10
Berkoff, Steven, 25 Cry Kill, 10
Bhabha, Homi, xxii, 61–64, 71 Girls on the Rampage, 3–19
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Monkey on My Back, 10, 11
xxiii, 111, 116 Run Chico Run, 10
Billy Liar, 224 Teen-age Mafia, 10
Birmingham pub bombings, 53 Teenage Terror, 10
Blackboard Jungle, 9 Bullman, Janine, 42
Black British writing, 60 Burchill, Julie, 46
Black metal (music), 149, 155 Burroughs, William
Black Roses, 164–170 Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed
Black Sabbath, xxiv, 118, 119, Drug Addict, 11
148–150, 161
Blues (music), 63, 65, 116, 152, 241
Bolton 7, 35, 36 C
Bolt Thrower, xxiv, 150, 156–161 Campaign for Homosexual Equality,
Bowie, David, 25, 49 34
Bradford, Richard, 54 Capitalism, 49, 53, 109, 117, 119,
Bragg, Billy, 25, 26 181, 190, 244, 245
Braithwaite, E. R. Caponegro, Ramona, 15
To Sir, With Love, 28 Carmel, 25
Breaking Glass, 180, 189 Carrie, 166
Brexit, 134 Carter, Angela, 46
Brighton Rock, xxiii, 85–88 CBGB (club), 42
Britain, Sloane Centre for Contemporary Cultural
The Needle, 11 Studies (CCCS), xx, 93, 94, 96,
British, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 5, 19n5, 27, 36, 112, 114, 118, 153, 239
42, 46–48, 55, 56, 60–62, 66, Channel 4, 35, 85
67, 75–89, 91–96, 100, 105, Chav, 244–252
127, 130–134, 137, 139, 140, Children of the Corn, 168
152, 154, 179–183, 186, 189, Clans, 139
190, 192, 193, 195n7 Clarke, Dylan, 50, 53
British Council, 61 Clarke, Noel, 62
Britpop, 131, 133, 134, 137 Clash, The, 48, 51, 221
Brixton riots, 66, 68 Clifton, Bud
Broken windows thesis, 201 D for Delinquent, 10
INDEX
257
Club, xxiii, 13, 25, 31, 32, 60, 78, 80, Denby, Joolz, 43, 44
87, 92–95, 97–101, 104, 128, De Roo, Edward
241, 242 Go, Man, Go, 10
Coe, Jonathan, 48, 54, 55 Little Caesars, The, 10
Rotters’ Club, The, xxii, 42, 46, 47, 53 Rumble at the Housing Project,
What a Carve Up!, 46 10
Cohen, Phil, 27, 53, 54, 93, 250 Young Wolves, The, 10
Cohen, Stanley, 19n5 Devlin, Rachel, 12, 15
Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 32 Dhondy, Farrukh, 66
Consumption, 30, 92, 97, 99, 100, Digital, xx, 103, 134, 199, 202, 206,
119, 120, 181, 184, 186, 224, 213
227, 230, 241, 245, 246 Dime Detective, 7
Cook, Matt, 27 Discourse, xx, xxi, xxii, xxv, 12, 16,
Cool and the Crazy, The, 9 42, 83, 91, 94, 96, 134, 137,
Coon, Caroline, 41, 48 155, 164, 167, 171, 174, 175,
Cooper, Morton, 10, 198 198, 220, 227, 232, 244, 245,
Delinquent!, 10 249, 252
Cosby Show, The, 62 DJ, 62, 92, 98–102, 130, 168
Cosmopolitanism, xxii, 61, 63, 71 Documentary, xxiii, 25, 29, 34–36,
Council estate, 139, 244, 248, 249 43–45, 78, 81, 97, 119, 124n1,
Cox, William 127, 129, 130, 135–139, 141,
Hell to Pay, 10 184, 187
Creation Records, 129, 136 Donnie Darko, xxv, xxvi, 220,
Cyberpunk, 46 228–233
Dragstrip Riot, 9
Druggie pulp, 10–11
D Drugs, 11, 14, 26, 67, 68, 70, 81, 92,
Daily Mirror, 32 94, 96–102, 113, 135, 155, 206,
Dalton, Stephen, 25 242, 244, 245, 248–250
Damned, The, 51 Drum’n’bass (music), 98
Dance (music), 91, 94, 102, 103, 105
Dancefloor, 91–105
Dateline Diamonds, 76, 83 E
Dead Girls, 165 Ecstasy, xxiv, 97, 98, 150, 160
Dean, James, 9, 64, 65 Eden, xxiii, 91, 102–105
Death metal (music), 149, 157, 160, Ellis, Bret Easton
161 Less Than Zero, 42
De Bekker, Jay Ellis, Julie
Gutter Gang, 10 Gang Girl, 13
De Graff, Robert, 5, 6 Ellison, Harlan
DeMexico, N.R. Deadly Streets, The, 10
Marijuana Girl, 17 Juvies, The, 10
Demon Boyz, 62 Rumble, 10
258 INDEX
Ellson, Hal, 14, 19n8 Genre, xx, xxi, xxiii–xxv, 3, 5, 7, 10,

Duke, 3, 10, 13 13, 17, 18, 18n2, 27, 30, 45, 46,
Golden Spike, The, 10, 11 96, 103, 105, 110, 113, 115,
Rock, 10 117, 118, 120, 131–135, 150,
Summer Street, 10 151, 163–166, 170, 190, 193
Tell Them Nothing, 10 Gilbert, James, 8, 9, 19n5
Tomboy, 3, 4, 6, 10, 13, 15, 17 Gladiators, The, 184
English identity, 137 Gold Medal Books, 6
Enoch, Kurt, 6 Gorer, Geoffrey, 147, 150
Everywhere and Nowhere, xxiii, 91, 92, Gosling, Ray, xxi, 23–37
98, 99 Lady Albermarle’s Boys, 32
Expresso Bongo, 180 Personal Copy: A Memoir of the
Sixties, 35
Sum Total, 35
F Graffiti, xxiv, xxv, 197–214, 219
Fandom, xxv, 113, 120, 122, 131, Greene, Graham, xxiii, xxvi, 85, 86,
137, 138, 141, 167, 191 229, 231, 232
Fawcett Publications, 6, 8
‘Female-centred’ stories, xxiii, 135
Fiction, xix, xx, xxi–xxii, 3–19, 25, H
27–31, 35, 36, 41–56, 67, 76, Hallberg, Garth Risk
94, 99, 101, 111, 119, 156, 168, City on Fire, 42
170, 172, 174, 182, 209 Hall, Stuart, 28, 29, 153, 154, 191,
Film, xx, 9, 25, 44, 62, 76, 91, 109, 239
129, 151, 163–175, 179, 209, 237 Hanson, Kitty
Filth and the Fury, The, 44, 50 Rebels in the Streets, 11
Flame, 180, 189 Hard Day’s Night, A, 83, 180, 193
Fortune (magazine), 6 Hatfield and the North, 54
Frankfurt School, xxv, 181, 190 Head-banging, 112, 120, 169
Franzen, Jonathan Heavy metal (music), 112, 113,
Freedom, 42 116, 118, 122, 123,
Friday the 13th series, 166 163–165, 174
Hebdige, Dick, xxvi, 42, 52, 81, 93,
112, 154, 201, 237–242
G Hedonism, 94, 98, 133, 137
Gallagher, Liam, 130, 132, 133, 135 Heidegger, Martin, 152, 157
Gallagher, Noel, 130, 135, 143n6 Hendrickson, Clymer, 8
Gang, The, 220, 228 Heritage, 34, 61, 62, 64, 69, 128,
Gate, The, 164–169 132, 133, 136, 137
Gathings, Ezekiel C., 16, 17 ‘High,’ 5, 8, 9, 29, 47, 79, 94, 116,
Gay Left, 28 117, 131, 138, 166, 167, 169,
Gay Monitor (website), 34 173, 174, 206, 207, 211, 238,
Gay News, 28 239
INDEX
259
High School Hellcats, 12 Jordan, Valerie

Hip hop (music), 61–63, 111, 118, I am a Teen-Age Dope Addict, 11
154, 198 J.S. Ogilvie Publications, 6
Hitt, Orrie Juvenile delinquency (J.D.), 4, 8–11,
Torrid Teens, The, 13 13, 15, 17, 18, 19n6
Hoggart, Richard, 27, 155
Uses of Literacy, The, 31, 154
Home, Stewart, 46 K
Tainted Love, 51 Keller, Yvonne, 16
Horkheimer, Max, 181–183, 195n6 Kensit, Patsy, 25
Hornsey, Richard, 27 Kidulthood, 62
Horsfall, Alan, 34 King, John, 46, 116
Hot Rod Girl, 12 Knapp, Dexter
House Select Committee on Current Girl Gangs, 18
Pornographic Materials, The, 16 Kureishi, Hanif, 50
Human Traffic, xxiii, 91, 95, 96 Buddha of Suburbia, The, xxii, 42,
Huq, Rupa, 128, 131, 132, 134 47, 49, 52, 53
Hysteria, xxv, 112, 179–195
L
I Labour Party, 45, 50
Identity, xx–xxvi, 14, 16, 24–26, 28, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 26
29, 31, 32, 35, 47, 49, 53, Leader, Darian, 149–150, 156
59–71, 81–83, 92–95, 98, 100, Led Zeppelin, 48
114, 118, 119, 123, 128, Life (magazine), 7
131–139, 141, 142, 148, 152, Lost Boys, The, 166
157, 164, 168, 197–214, 227, Loving Them Both, 28
233, 238–246, 249–251 Lydon, John, 50
Identity crisis, 128
Ill Manors, xxvi, 237–252
‘Indie’ (music), 127, 131, 132, M
134–136 MacInnes, Colin, 23, 26, 32–35,
Iommi, Tony, 149, 151 37n2–13, 220
Irish identity, 137 Absolute Beginners, xxi, 24, 25, 27,
28, 30, 31
England, Half English, 25
J ‘Sharp Schmutter,’ 27, 29
Jarman, Derek, 45 Madchester, 128, 131, 133–134
Jazz (music), 25, 63, 75, 190 Mad Travellers, 222
Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 67 Mainstream, 8, 13, 16, 19n8, 41, 53,
Voices of the Living and the Dead, 66 81, 92–94, 109–124, 131, 184,
Johnson, Richard, 4, 5 185, 192, 194, 246, 251
260 INDEX
Malkani, Gautam 165, 168, 179–181, 183–185,

Londonstani, 62 190–193, 220, 223–232
Manchester, xxiii, 127–142 National Front, 54
Manson, Charles, 18 Nationalist, 61, 133, 134, 140, 142,
Margulies, Leo, 4, 8 187, 188
Masculinity, xxii, xxiii, 25, 29, 32, National Organization for Decent
113–114, 121, 123, 132, 135, Literature, 16
136, 155 Neoliberalism, xxvi, 112, 238,
McCarthy, Elizabeth, 13 244–251
McRobbie, Angela, 87, 239 New American Library, 6, 7
Meadows, Shane, xxiii, 127, 138–142, Newland, Courttia, vii, 60, 62–63, 65,
143n7 69–71
Media, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv–xxvi, Book of Blues, xxii, 61
4–5, 9, 11, 12, 15–18, 19n5, 75, New Musical Express (NME), 48, 129
80, 81, 100, 110, 111, 123, Nightclub, xxiii, 91–105, 128, 241
163–165, 167, 170, 172–174, Nightmare on Elm Street, 166
179, 181, 183–186, 198, 199, Norman, Tony
206, 212, 213, 249 Gutter Girl, 13
Melly, George, 27, 75 Northern Soul, xxiii, 91, 100–101,
Melody Maker, 48, 79 104, 192
Metalheads, xxiii, 109, 111, 119, 121, Nostalgia, 18, 34, 127–128, 142, 192
123, 148, 154, 156, 171–174 Notting Hill riots, 68
Michael X, 26
Mieville, China, 46
Mods, ii, 19n5, 54, 77–81, 85, 86, 88, O
118, 154, 238–243, 246–250 Oasis, 129–133, 135–137, 139,
Moffat, James, see Allen, Richard 141–142
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 53 Oasis: Supersonic, xxiii, 127, 130
Moral panic, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 19n5, 51, Osbourne, Ozzy, 111, 117, 148, 149,
88, 109–112, 123, 163–166, 151, 172
171–172 Oscar Wilde, 28
Motorcycle Gang, 9 Owen, Wilfred, 147, 149, 156, 161
Multicultural, 25, 61, 69, 71, 137
P
N Parents’ Music Resource Center
Nadel, Alan, 12 (PMRC), 110–111, 113, 163,
Narrative, xx, xxiii, xxv, 3, 7–9, 12, 18, 165, 167, 171–173, 175
24, 27, 28, 33, 35, 41–43, 46, Parsons, Tony, 46
51, 56, 60, 62, 80, 86, 88, Penguin Books, 5
91–105, 109, 113, 114, 118, Performance, 49, 52, 62, 69, 78, 82,
123, 130–131, 137, 139, 141, 85, 87, 88, 94, 97, 115, 118,
INDEX
261
135–137, 182, 183, 186–188, Reform School Girl, 12

191, 194, 202 Reggae (music), 51, 63, 65, 67, 96
Perry, Mark, 56n1 Reinventing Britain Conference, 61
‘Punk Life, A,’ 45 Retro, 25, 127, 128, 132
Phillips, Mike, 60 Revival, xxiii, 81, 84, 88n1, 127, 128,
Blood Rights, 59 130, 134, 140, 142
Pines, Ned, 8 Reynolds, Simon, 25, 128
Pocket Books, 5–8 Richard III, 45
Poltergeist II, 172 Riots
Pop (music), xxiv, xxv, 24, 25, 27, 46, Brixton, 66, 68
53, 76–78, 133, 136, 155, Notting Hill, 68
179–194 Rock Against Racism, 48, 51
Popular culture, 12, 13, 16, 47, 94, Rock (music) 7, 19n5, 47–49, 54–55,
115, 117, 152–154, 181, 191, 83, 103, 110–111, 113, 115,
192 116, 120–122, 130, 132,
Popular Library, 6, 8, 10 134–137, 141–142, 154,
Pre-Internet age, 142 163–175
Privilege, 25, 179–194, 194n2, 195n7 Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, 165, 168,
Pryce, Everton, 67, 68 169
Pulp fiction, 19n10, 47, 156 Rocktober Blood, 165
Punishment Park, 184 Roe, Tony, 37
Punk (music), xii, xxii, 41–56, 79, 80, Romeo and Juliet, 51
118, 136, 140 Ronn, Edward
Pyramid Books, 8 Gang Rumble, 10
Roxy (club), The, 42, 51
Ruts, The, 43
Q
Quadrophenia, xxii, xxvi, 79–88,
88n1, 237–244, 246–251 S
Quandt, Albert, 18n1 Sabin, Roger, 52
Zip-Gun Angels, 34 Sade, 25
Queer, xxi, xxii, 23–37 Sams, Gideon
Punk, The, xxii, 42, 47, 48, 51,
52
R Scarman Report, 67
Race, 26, 32, 49–51, 53, 61, 92, 94, Schuster, Max, 5
97, 139, 140 Segal, Hanna, 150
Rastafarianism, 67, 71 ‘Sell-out,’ 118, 130
Ray Gosling OAP, 35 Sex, 4, 7, 8, 13, 17, 18, 35, 81, 92,
Rebel Without a Cause, 9, 83 99, 101
Reformation, 28, 34, 127–130, 138, Sex, Lies and Video Tapes, 35
223 Sex Pistols, 45, 48, 50, 51
262 INDEX
Sexuality, xxi, 12–14, 16, 23–37, 53, 169, 182, 194, 195n7, 198, 201,
87, 92, 96, 99, 101, 110, 113, 202, 206, 214, 237, 239–243,
121, 122, 133, 169, 174 246–248, 250
Sexual Offences Act, 28, 35 Style Council, 25
Shock ‘Em Dead, 165 Subcultural capital, 52, 132
‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?,’ Subculture, xix–xxiv, xxvi
219–221 See also specific entries
Simon, Richard, 5 Sullivan, Katherine
Sinfield, Alan, 27 Girls on Parole, 11
Ska (music), 139
Skeptix, The, 44
Skinhead, 51, 54, 79, 139 T
‘Slacker,’ 115, 116, 119 Tags, 13, 133, 198, 203–207, 209,
Sniffin’ Glue, 42, 45, 56n1 214, 244
Social class Teddy Boy, ii, 31, 75
under, 136, 244, 245 Teen-Age Book Show, 7
middle, 24, 31, 49, 115, 119, 135, ‘Teenage Kicks,’ 71, 219
239, 240, 242, 243, 246 Teenager, xxi, xxii, 6, 7, 17, 23–25,
upper, 48 27–34, 77, 110, 220, 229, 231
working, xxiv, xxvi, 24, 30–31, Temple, Julian, 25, 44–45, 50
33–35, 45, 61, 75, 83, 87, 93, Terror on Tour, 165
114, 118, 119, 132, 139, 140, Thatcher, Margaret, 42, 53, 68
147–161, 238–244, 246, 250 Thatcherism, 50, 55, 112
Sorted, xxiii, 91, 92, 97–99 Thornton, Sarah, 52, 93
Soul Boy, xxiii, 91, 100, 101 Time (magazine), 7
Stardom, 9, 55, 102, 103, 130, 187 Tommy Steele Story, The, 180
Stardust, 180, 189 Torres, Treska
Steampunk, 46 Women’s Barracks, 17
Stone Roses: Made of Stone, The, xxiii, Townshend, Pete, 79–80, 83
127, 129 Trial of Oscar Wilde, The, 28
Stone Roses, The, 127–133, 135, 136, Trick or Treat, xxv, 164, 165, 167–175
138–142 Tudor, Andrew, 164, 166
Street art, xxiv, xxv, 197–214 Tyler May, Elaine, 12
Street, Leroy
I Was a Drug Addict, 11
Strummer, Joe, 48 U
Style, xxii, xxvi, 8, 25, 27, 29, 31, Underground, 26, 42, 47, 97, 99,
43–46, 50, 56, 59–71, 78, 81, 118, 132, 245, 247, 248
93, 94, 96, 97, 99–101, 104, Undertones, The, 71, 219
110, 112–114, 116, 118–119, Universities and Left Review, 28
122, 131–133, 136, 148, 159, Ush, 44–45
INDEX
263
W Halfway to Hell, 4
War Game, The, 184, 195n7 Who, The, 48, 77–79, 82, 116, 239,
Washington Post, 9, 110 242
Waterhouse, Keith, 224 Williams, Raymond, 153–155
Watkins, Peter, xxv, 179–195 Willis, Paul, 42, 239
Wayne’s World, xxiii, 109–122 Wilson, Elizabeth, 52
Wayward Youth, xxvi, 9, 219–234 Wilson, Harold, 54
Weller, Paul, 25, 26, 79 Wolfenden Report, 28
Welsh, Irvine Working Week, 25
Trainspotting, 46 Wyn, A.A., 8
Wertham, Frederic, 15
Wheatle, Alex, 46, 66, 69, 70
Brenton Brown, xxii, 64, 65, 68 Y
Brixton Rock, xxii, 64, 65, 68 Youth culture, xx, xxiii, 5, 17, 25, 29,
Dirty South, The, xxii, 60, 67–68, 71 47, 50, 51, 54, 60, 92–95, 100,
East of Acre Lane, xxii, 67, 68 110, 112–114, 117, 122–123,
Whitecross, Mat, xxiii, 127, 139–142 128, 171, 174, 193
Whittington, Harry Youth-sploitation, 8–12, 18

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More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music

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Our thanks go to a number of people who have assisted and helped us in

Part I ‘Subcultural Fictions’ 1

 irls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America 3

 ueering the Grammar School Boy: Class, Sexuality

 unk Fiction; Punk in Fiction 41

‘Styles, ‘Codes and Violence’: Subcultural Identities

Part II Subcultural Representations on Screen 73

 od at the Movies: ‘Face’ and ‘Ticket’ Representations

 ou’re All Partied Out, Dude!: The Mainstreaming of Heavy

 on’t Look Back in Anger: Manchester, Supersonic and Made

Part III Critical Theory and Subcultural Representations in

 igures in Black: Heavy Metal and the Mourning

 hock Rock Horror! The Representation and Reception

 outh, Hysteria and Control in Peter Watkins’s Privilege 179

 epresenting Subcultural Identity: A Photoessay of Spanish

 rom Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer: Between

 rom Exaltation to Abjection: Depictions of Subculture

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. He is author

Andy R. Brown DPhil (London) is Senior Lecturer in Media Communications

Matthew Cheeseman is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of

Jo Croft is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores

Dave Ellis is Associate Dean for Student Experience at Oxford Brookes University.

David Forrest is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Stephen Glynn is an Associate Research Fellow at De Montfort University and

Nedim Hassan is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool

Keely Hughes is a Teaching Fellow in Education Studies at Keele University,

Rehan Hyder is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University

Beth Johnson is Associate Professor of Media and Film at the University of

Ben Jones is a lecturer in modern British history at University of East Anglia with

Bill Osgerby is Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at London

Lucy Robinson is Professor of Collaborative History at the University of Sussex.

Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Communication at Kingston University,

Andzrej Zieleniec is an interdisciplinary lecturer at Keele University. His back-

Section 1: Subcultural Fictions

Section 2: Subcultural Representations on Screen

Noting how subcultural leaders are inevitably challenged, a comparative

Section 3: Critical Theory and Subcultural

c­ onsciousness rather than upon more familiar aspects of subcultural iden-

‘Bad Girl’ Fiction and the ‘Circuit of Culture’

© The Author(s) 2018 3

of production and the readings generated by audiences—also demanded

The Paperback Boom and a Market for the ‘Three Ss’

sales traditionally relied on bookshops, de Graff (a seasoned pressman) saw

in parental allowances, ensured a sustained growth in young people’s

boom in paperbacks. But, like mainstream magazine publishers, many

The ‘Fifth Horseman of Doom’: The ‘Juvenile Crime

pulp’ of the 1950s was beat icon William Burroughs’ semi-­autobiographical

Part I ‘Subcultural Fictions’ 1

irls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America 3

ueering the Grammar School Boy: Class, Sexuality

unk Fiction; Punk in Fiction 41

‘Styles, ‘Codes and Violence’: Subcultural Identities

Part II Subcultural Representations on Screen 73

od at the Movies: ‘Face’ and ‘Ticket’ Representations

ou’re All Partied Out, Dude!: The Mainstreaming of Heavy

on’t Look Back in Anger: Manchester, Supersonic and Made

Part III Critical Theory and Subcultural Representations in

igures in Black: Heavy Metal and the Mourning

hock Rock Horror! The Representation and Reception

outh, Hysteria and Control in Peter Watkins’s Privilege 179

epresenting Subcultural Identity: A Photoessay of Spanish

rom Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer: Between

rom Exaltation to Abjection: Depictions of Subculture

c onsciousness rather than upon more familiar aspects of subcultural iden-

pulp’ of the 1950s was beat icon William Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical

In this example of writing from within the subculture, the self-conscious

working-class London draws upon an intensified sense of affiliation to a

As the track progresses and its seminality becomes evident, Hansen-Løve