Skinhead Girls (1972, James Moffatt)

 

Skinhead Girls has a reputation for being one of James Moffatt’s more shambolic books, and it is a reputation that is well earned.  I wouldn’t say this is Moffatt’s worst book –Satan’s Slaves and Dragon Skins are much more of a chore to get through- but you can never make a case for Skinhead Girls being a textbook example of how to write a book.  A sort of side-sequel to Moffatt’s ‘Skinhead’ series –on account of their anti-hero Joe Hawkins receiving a few name checks here- the title Skinhead Girls is a bit of a misnomer.  Moffatt’s focus is on just one girl, Joan Kerr, and she’s only really affiliated with a skinhead gang for a few of the early chapters.  For the majority of the book, Joan is a newly re-married woman, works in a supermarket and spends her free time as a Suedehead.  Then again Skinhead Girls is the type of title that sold books, rather than the more accurate ‘Homemaker, Shop Assistant and Part Time Suedehead’. 

Moffatt kicks off Skinhead Girls in a characteristically vicious mood, as Joan and her skinhead friends travel to Brighton with the express purpose of beating up hippies.  Armed and dangerous, Joan makes the trip with a knife hidden in her bra and a tyre iron stuck up her skirt.  Both of which come into play when there is a savage ruckus on Brighton Beach that sees the hippie men being kicked in the balls and beaten over the head with the tyre iron, while the female hippies predictably fall victim to the rape-ready skinhead men.  “She didn’t give a damn what the blokes did to the hippie birds but she did object to the way they had acted like Stallions with a king-size urge”.  The straw that breaks the Skinhead Girl’s back comes when Joan’s skinhead husband Ian insists that the missus participate in the rape of one of the hippie girls.  “The memory of ineffectual matings blasted holes in the fabric of their relationship and she suddenly wanted to run...anywhere...get away...escape this degenerate scene”. 

Skinhead Girls then makes the misstep of jumping forward several years, and finds Joan re-married, struggling to make ends meet, and holding down a succession of dead end jobs.  Reading about Joe Hawkins, who is back in the news due to having escaped from prison, sends Joan on a trip down memory lane to a time when she was wild and out of control.  This anecdotal format ensures that Skinhead Girls is never dull, there’s aggro, a gang bang and numerous eye watering descriptions of below-the-belt violence “her fingers were shafts of burning fire, twisting, squeezing, clutching at his testicles”.  If only Moffatt’s plot could grab your attention with the same effectiveness that Joan grabs a guy by the bollocks.  Unfortunately no amount of sleaze or ball busting incidents can hide just how mundane and uninvolving Joan’s present day circumstances are, and Moffatt was never great at feigning sympathy with the unfulfilled working class youths that his writing became synonymous with.  Finding people Moffatt actually liked can be a needle-in-a-haystack like task in his books, but Skinhead Girls manages to put forward at least two candidates for this extremely exclusive club, namely Vincent Price and Edward Woodward.  Price receiving a positive name check when Joan and husband number two, Brian, go to a double-bill at the local fleapit “Vincent Price’s in the big picture...I dig him, don’t you” asks Joan.  The big Vincent Price film at the time Moffatt was writing this would have been The Abominable Dr. Phibes, although that bears no resemblance to the film within a book described in Skinhead Girls.  When it comes to the small screen, there can only be one man for Joan, Edward Woodward in Callan, a show Moffatt does write about here with genuine enthusiasm. 

Moffatt’s books weren’t known for being nice to people though, and Skinhead Girls is yet another of his books that gives the author a chance to bash Pakistanis, Gays, Jews, Hippies and Trade Unionists in print.  As well as add a new group to the Moffatt hate list, his main gripe here being with the Greek community.  Ferdie, the Greek owner of Joan’s local greasy spoon cafe, exists in these pages merely to be insulted.  “I wasn’t in the mood for catering to bloody foreigners who came over here and took over our Caffs” seethes Joan.  In that sense at least, Moffatt definitely wasn’t into Greek. 

As per usual for Moffatt, sexuality leads us into dark, morally murky waters in Skinhead Girls.  Moffatt continues his troubling obsession with underage sex.  Joan being yet another Moffatt heroine who begins young- aged just 14- with Moffatt displaying no qualms about delving into that for the purpose of intended titillation.  “Frequent handling had filled out her breasts better than any bust-developing cream.  Delightful nights spent behind Centrepoint flats had worked wonders for thighs, hips, buttocks”. 

Characters struggling with their sexuality is another reoccurring theme in Skinhead Girls.  One of the skinheads, Colin, has an unspecified problem when it comes to ‘relaxing’ around women, but although Moffatt is adamant that Colin ‘wasn’t bloody bent’, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion, especially with follow on lines like “being without a bird was akin to having a priest tell a bloke he was doomed to limbo with a bunch of queers”.  Joan too initially struggles with fears that she might be gay, fleeing from the rape of the hippie girl after she finds herself being unexpectedly turned on by it “her mind burned as she ran...was she?...wasn’t she? The heat of the hippie girl’s body against hers had been delectable.... ‘I’m not queer’ kept running through her mind”.  Later on in the book, we get a bona fide lesbian character called...what else... Butch, who dresses like a dandy and speaks like a luvvie “you get better looking every day, dawling”.  While Butch is paraded around like a sideshow attraction for Moffatt’s audience, she is surprisingly a force for good in the book, and there is none of the violent hostility Moffatt has for gay male characters “Her ‘disease’ wasn’t one of those to make me squirm and shy away. Providing I kept her outside grope length I felt comfortable in her company”.  For a book that was written by a homophobic author, and was aimed at a straight male audience, Skinhead Girls sure bangs on about the erotic appeal of Edward Woodward allot as well “He was fabulous. A sex-pot.  A real He-man” swoons Joan “God, how I’d have done whatever he wanted me to do”. 

Skinhead Girls marked the end of Moffatt’s association with Laurence James, who’d been Moffatt’s editor at New English Library, as well as a published NEL author in his own right.  James later cited Moffatt’s drinking, extreme right wing views and unreliability as the reasons for the split, and why he pasted the job of editing future Moffatt books onto others.  After reading Skinhead Girls you can understand why James jumped ship.  There is no doubt about it, Skinhead Girls is a messy piece of work, which looks like James was just able to salvage.  The book alternates between being told in the first and third person.  Then there’s that confusing, unannounced time jump early on in the book that sees Joan suddenly go from being married to a skinhead called Ian to a suedehead called Brian.  The fact that Brian is virtually the same character as Ian makes Moffatt’s decision to fast forward the story by a few years seem even more unnecessary.   For reasons known only to himself, Moffatt also sets himself the task of writing a brand new character into just about every other chapter, giving highly detailed back stories to people who have little bearing on the main plot.  Do we really need to know what appears to be the entire life story of George, the local butcher, who after all the build up doesn’t even turn out to be the butcher Joan chooses to shop at!  Likewise, we get nearly a whole chapter documenting suedehead Karl’s journey from Cheltenham to London,  only to discover that his only purpose in the book is to show up at Joan’s local, finger her (in the rude sense) then get kicked in the balls for his troubles.  Which was hardly worth him making the journey for, nor us having to read all about it in detail.  Perhaps most damaging of all is Skinhead Girls’ ending...or rather that is doesn’t have one, and simply stops dead in its tracks.  Did Moffatt intend to write more? It certainly feels that way, with the last chapter hinting at a confrontation between Joan and her new neighbours, teasing the return of Joe Hawkins, and setting up the mystery of why red smears keep appearing on Brian’s belly.  However, whatever was on Moffatt’s mind, he failed to get it down on paper.  Leaving you to wonder if Moffatt’s inability to finish Skinhead Girls was the final nail in the coffin between him and Laurence James.  I am told Moffatt did write another Joan Kerr novel called ‘Smoothies’ in 1973, which given that it has the potential to tie up all these loose ends is likely to be my next destination on the Moffatt trail.  

Skinhead Girls has the feel of a book that Moffatt was making up as he went along, and sadly wasn’t getting struck by too many flashes of inspiration.  What with the majority of the skinhead nastiness relegated to flashbacks, the rest of the book is all rather soap opera-ish, mainly centred on Joan’s attempts at keeping potential love rivals away from her husband, and day to day dealings with her dullard boss and tarty female co-workers.  The latter at least giving Moffatt the opportunity to lust after the type of woman he was into, I believe the word I am searching for is....trollops.  “She had big, brown eyes, jutting breasts and buttocks like over-filled udders constantly shifting weight inside her tight skirt”.  On that level, Moffatt has his moments here, even finding a kindred spirit in Toby, one of the skinheads “he loved them big and titty.  He couldn’t content himself with short-assed birds.  The old adage ‘the bigger the better’ was the epitaph he wanted engraved on his lonely grave”.

Undoubtedly the most psychologically revealing aspect to Skinhead Girls is how Moffatt turns himself into a secondary character in the book.  ‘Victor Carlyle’ is a chain-smoking, heavy drinking newspaper hack, who has been fired by the majors, rejected by paperback companies, and hopes to salvage his career by writing a series of trashy articles about football hooligans.  Remind you of anyone?  Moffatt even used one of the proposed titles for Carlyle’s piece ‘Terrace Terrors’ for one of his own books, a couple of years later.  While these meta elements to Skinhead Girls would have been lost on audiences of the time, ‘Carlyle’ offers much insight into Moffatt’s own character.  Moffatt captures all of his own lechery, racism and cynical contempt for his subject matter, as Carlyle views writing about youth cults as his means of escaping them “only bigger and better success stood between him and a country home far from this sickening mob”.  Moffatt had in fact already decamped to Sidmouth, Devon by the time of Skinhead Girls, and holding on to that exclusive address was a strong motivating factor in him writing like a madman during this period.  Be prepared to be rendered temporarily deaf, when Moffatt loudly blows his own trumpet at one point, by having Joan cite her two favourite books as “Richard Allen’s Skinhead and Justice for a Dead Spy by James Moffatt.  That Silas Manners was fifty times better than James Bond”.  Saying that, Moffatt clearly poured his own bitterness, pain and career frustrations into the Victor Carlyle character.  At one point Moffatt even seems to be apologising for the poor quality of Skinhead Girls, by having Carlyle admit to writer’s block “the harder he thought, the worse his efforts became”.  If you are reading Skinhead Girls and it ever crosses your mind what motivated a person to write books like this, the answer can be found hidden away in its own pages.  “Of late, he had taken knocks to his inflated ego.  Like those novels that had been rejected.  Like being fired.  At the moment he rode a wave’s crest with these articles.  And he was bloody well determined to keep surfing on high”.  If I was a betting man, I’d wager that Moffatt secretly wished he could have used Carlyle’s way of signing off articles, as his own author’s dedication for this book “To all the rotten little bastards- my love”.    

The valuable life lesions that rotten little bastards can take away from Skinhead Girls include... life is too short to settle for short-assed birds, beware of Greeks bearing Full-English breakfasts, and most vital of all for men...your balls are not safe around a woman from Plaistow.

Under the Counter (2022, Oliver Carter)

 

I highly recommend this book ‘Under the Counter – Britain’s Trade in Hardcore Pornographic 8mm films’, which has proven to be an absolute goldmine of information about British blue movies.  Beginning with the primitive b&w efforts of the 1960s and taking the story up to the censorship axe coming down in 1984 in the form of the video recordings act.  In the process Oliver Carter’s book pieces together a gripping tale of police corruption, porn entrepreneurs, live sex shows, taboo breaking 8mm films, obscenity trials, and leaves no stone unturned when it comes to Soho in its sex driven heyday. 

Those early hardcore loops (referred to at the time, and in this book, as ‘rollers’ ) have often left inquisitive souls, whose interest in them goes beyond the masturbatory, to ask ‘who made these movies, and just what was their story’.  Questions that get an answer in Under the Counter, which puts names to those anonymous filmmakers, explains how they came to be involved in the porn trade, the difficulties faced by these often untrained filmmakers, how the films were distributed around Soho and the inevitable cash payments slipped to bent policeman in smoky pubs, which guaranteed they stayed in business.  The collusion between corrupt members of the Obscene Publications Squad and the London underworld, which allowed hardcore to flourish in Soho under their watchful eyes, is the main theme of Under the Counter.  Meaning that this book is equally at home in the true crime section as it is in the halls of academia.  When it comes to tales of criminality, there is no shortage of explosive moments in Under the Counter.  Quite literally in the case of ‘Fat’ Bill Hicks, a bookshop owner who upon being shaken down by gangsters, responded by reaching below the counter, not for the expected wad of cash, but for a hand grenade.  Then there is the case of the unfortunate shoplifter, whose attempt to steal from a shop belonging to ‘Godfather of Soho’ Bernie Silver, resulted in the thief being hustled upstairs by Silver’s henchmen, hung from the ceiling then ‘stripped and cut down his back with a bayonet’.  Even in such an environment, pornographer Mike Freeman stands out as this book’s wild card, as well as its most compelling and terrifying character.  Freeman’s lifelong hatred of the law, and devil-may-care attitude to pornography (his casting call extending to three underage schoolgirls) gradually made him a liability in an environment where pornographers were expected to be on cosy terms with crooked cops, and not draw outside attention to their activities.  Freeman’s inability to work within such a system resulted in him being essentially blackballed from the dirty bookshop circuit, and if his self mythologizing is to be believed, marked for death.  Freeman comes across like British porn’s version of Bobby Beausoleil, a man who feared nothing, and like Beausoleil ended up with blood on his hands.  Infamously killing an associate in 1969 by stabbing him to death ‘in self defence’ 89 times.

As the story moves on into the 1970s, it sees the rise of the celebrity pornographer, with ‘membership only’ cinema owner David Waterfield and Scottish blue filmmaker John Lindsay appearing on TV and in the media.  A far cry from their shadowy, publicity shy, porn forefathers.  Both men portrayed themselves as sexual freedom fighters and anti-censorship campaigners, the ideological opponents of the likes of Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford.  An image that in Waterfield’s case appears to have been genuine, he did lend his support to several counter culture groups of the period.  Whereas Lindsay’s claims to be motivated by a social conscience feels a bit more contrived and questionable.

The amount of research in this book is exemplary, there are stories told here about the blue movie trade that I’d feared had been lost to time, and characters brought to life who I’d only heard of passing.  Like the mysterious Ivor Cook and German porn smuggler turned producer Walter ‘Charlie Brown’ Bartkowski.  Under the Counter even manages to bring new material to the table when it comes to comparatively well documented figures like Freeman and Lindsay.  Among the many, many revelations in this book is that both are now deceased, their deaths receiving little, if any, public acknowledgement until Under the Counter’s publication.  Freeman passed away in June 2021, while John Lindsay died way back in 2006.  Which now explains why all attempts to track down and interview Lindsay during the last decade have never met with any success!  Under the Counter also takes the opportunity to correct misinformation that has been allowed to slip out about British hardcore, providing evidence that the Mary Millington loop ‘Miss Bohrloch’ couldn’t have been made prior to the Watergate scandal (you’ll have to read the book to find out why).  Meaning that Bohrloch likely dates from around 1972-1973, rather than the often cited 1969 or 1970 production date.  It also retells the story of the BBC’s ill-fated attempt to film John Lindsay at work- as part of the Open University strand of programming- with more much clarity and accuracy than the account given in Stanley Long’s autobiography.  Although Long’s portrayal of Lindsay as an untrustworthy character (Lindsay invited the BBC to Long’s penthouse and filmed pornography there without Long’s permission) is certainly validated by this lengthier account of the incident.  Which suggests that Lindsay mentioning about it in the newspapers is what first got the BBC in trouble with the law, the broadcasters’ woes added to when Lindsay then sold his side of the story to the News of the World tabloid.  

John Lindsay (1935-2006)

The appendix of this book alone –which documents around 1000 blue movies shot in Britain from 1960 to 1980- singles out Under the Counter as a ground breaking work in terms of film research.  Offering a tantalising glimpse into an underbelly of the British sex film that exists beyond the pleasantries of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and 8mm glamour films, with perverse, yet oh-so-British titles like: The Carpet Fuckers, Prick Layers, Up Your Kilt and Vicar’s Fantasy.  In another apparent first, Under the Counter shines a light on the comparatively small, but historically important, gay side of British hardcore, represented by Hard Dollar Hustler (Alan Purnell, 1977) thought to be Britain’s first feature length gay hardcore movie.  As well as ‘Dial a Guy’ and ‘What a Gay Day’ by the seemingly up for anything Mike Freeman, who for all his unsavourily reputation did commendably refuse to take his gay movies off the market, ignoring legal advice to the contrary.  

Under the Counter also wins personal approval from me for helping propagate the bizarre legend of ‘A Schoolgirl Dreams of King Kong’. A hardcore short made by British filmmakers for a German distributor, in which a young lady fantasizes about being tied to King Kong’s penis, eventually causing the giant ape to ejaculate over the New York skyline.  Trust me, that one really does belong in the ‘has to be seen to be believed’ category. 

22 year old Jennifer Eccles rides Kong's penis in 'A Schoolgirl Dreams of King Kong'   

Under the Counter ends on a downbeat note (or upbeat note, depending on your point of view) with the idealistic hopes of 1970s pornographers being thoroughly crushed by the arrival of the Thatcher government and the censorship stranglehold on the video industry.  Comments from a 1986 interview with John Lindsay reveals a defeated and deflated man compared to the one who, only a few years before, had victoriously walked away from court claiming he had all but legalised hardcore pornography in Britain.  A second volume of Under the Counter, restarting the story in the mid-1980s and taking it up to the modern day, is planned, but volume one alone is a considerable achievement in the field of British sex film archaeology.  Others, from newspaper hacks to writers of speculative fiction, have attempted to penetrate the subject of home-grown hardcore, but Under the Counter has finally succeeded in gaining access to ‘the back room’ of this hitherto clandestine part of British history.