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”.
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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.
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