I Am Skinhead: Reflections on an 80s Youth

By: Paul London

Narrated by: Paul London

When it comes to Skinheads, I see a lot of people these days re-writing history, whitewashing the youth cult or bending the truth to suit their political narrative.

I spent over ten years of my young life as a London Bootboy and became one of the most famous Skinheads in the world. Being a Skinhead had a profound effect on me.

Even though I walked away from that life, and left it in the last century, I still feel the shockwaves of my experience and still find people with nefarious agendas trying to tell their version of my story.

I hadn’t planned to write any poems about my old Skinhead life and inspiration came from a most unusual source. I was listening to the audiobook of ‘How to say Babylon’, the engrossing story of Safiya Sinclair who grew up in a Rastafarian household in Jamaica. After listening to the audiobook, I spent some time thinking about my own childhood and within a month I found that I had composed over 40 poems.Skinhead was the ultimate non-conformist youth cult and London was the epicentre of everything Skinhead. We didn’t want to be liked and we certainly didn’t care what people thought of us. It was a five fingered gesture to society, a nihilistic strut and a tight-knit sense of family. We were outsiders and we cut our cloth accordingly. Our number one rule – apologize to no-one.

So, if you really want to try and understand what it was like being a Skinhead in the nineteen eighties, I promise you, this is as close as you are going to get. The mask is well and truly off. Some of the poems are written as I would have felt at the time and some are more reflective, but all are 100% authentic and give a taste of what it meant to be a London Skinhead, warts ‘n all.If you judge them through the prism of todays political and social sensibilities, then you will completely miss the point. This is a work of a historical nature. It’s neither a call to arms or an apology, it’s simply Skinhead, the way it was.

©2024 Paul London (P)2024 Paul London