Hill Rise was lucky to grow up in Richmond.

Getting off at the station after changing at Willesden Junction you knew straight away you were in a quality area.

Presumably he could mooch along to the Ivy Shop at lunch times from school. He was just down the road from Eel Pie Island and Ealing.

Completely irrelevant to this forum but hugely important in London history, Richmond had the largest ice rink in the world until the 1990s. I remember going to a dance at a girls school in Stanmore and getting the invite to ice skating at Richmond. The falling over element put me off, so I never went. In retrospect, I wish I had. Girls loved ice skating.

^ Eel Pie Island was a little bohemian place on the river Thames where popular beat combos from the early 1960s used to play a type of music known as 'rhythm and blues'.

Tonight I was in a pub in Kingston where the Yardbirds used to practice in the room upstairs.

Chelsea were on TV. They lost to Barcelona. On the bus home a man in a Chelsea shirt with a haircut that could be defined by a number was abusive to a female passenger. I thought about intervening but did not.(He was not very big). Drink and being a bad loser were contributory factors. He was not a skinhead though some might describe him that way because of the haircut.

My only memory of Richmond is nicking a Metropolitan Police Neighbourhood Watch sign there back in '86.

There seems to be a lot of talk here about simplyfying the story and not simplyfying it. The fact is I agree that both of these elements exist, that there was, (is?) a hardcore and also the "rest" that exist too. When it comes to the "rest" the view seems to be that a lot jump on the band wagon to look good and pull birds. One point that doesn't seem to have been mentioned in all this, is that people want to have a sense of belonging. If your mates get into something (especially from around 14 to 19) chances are you get into it too. We want to belong. We also, when belonging to our little clique, have a tendency to look down on others (snobbery again).

It may not even be your mates thing you get into, you find something from somewhere outside your norm, but then you get a sense of belonging to that. Why are we all posting on here? I'd hazard a guess that we want to have a sense of some belonging, of sharing something we have in common (whichever end of the spectrum you fall on)

I suspect none of us here (except for a few) are young and have the same sort of social life as we did when teenagers or in our 20's. So where are all my mates who wear the same sort of gear as me? Well here and there, but I can get a bit more of that on the net.........so here we all are.

Like Alex I have a great love of debunking the myths.......I think that far to much is made of "scenes" in retrospect......its fun reading about and trying to piece it all together.....but then that becomes just that, an academic exercise. I read a lot of stuff on here that seems to me to be a rehash of certain books that I've read. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it starts to be taken as the only reality and I'm wary of that. I actually think the reality is that fashion/scenes are a lot more organic. I also happen to think that at the time for a lot it isn't that life changing, that part often comes with hindsight.

But I also find myself agreeing with Jim, there is often a hardcore (you can usually spot them as they have OCD tendencies!!!) I think the personnel of the hardcore often changes as time moves on. But they do make up a part of the story. The thing is who says they are the hardcore, them or others (distinct tones of "faces" here)? And different areas will have their own hardcore. The hardcore are an interesting bunch, they are either usually very sussed and move on when the time is right. Or they stay with it, often risking ridicule when out of fashion, but then get respect for sticking the course. Often hardcore is also describing people with no horizons beyond what they already know.

"It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated within it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies." (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1977)

Last edited by 1966 (2009-05-07 13:53:57)

That's the second time you made me laugh out loud today. Well done.