8 - A Message to You, Maggie: 1980s Skinhead Subculture and Music in This is England

Summary

In the early eighties there was little to keep the disenchanted youth anesthetised indoors, so as unemployment figures rose and YTS Schemes fell, the kids refused to toe the factory line and spilled out onto the streets. The stage was set for a revolution.

Oi! This is England pressbook (2005: 3)

As the above quotation suggests, Shane Meadows' This is England (2006) mediates the 1980s through a nostalgic rendering of subcultural resistance via key iconographic and musical cues. In so doing, the film engenders an idealised image of skinhead subculture – or more accurately subcultures – that recalls the romanticised sociological accounts of Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the 1970s and early 1980s. Reproducing these early subcultural scholars' focus on the ‘magical realms’ of ritual and style (Cohen 1972), Meadows juxtaposes the lush colours, dreamlike slow motion and joyful non-diegetic soundtrack of the skinhead gang – at least before its ideological infiltration by far-right extremism – with the ‘colourless walls of routine’ (Chambers 1985: 15) of Thatcher's Britain. However, this chapter will provide neither a purely textual nor an auteurist approach to the film. Instead it will situate the textual strategies and authorial signature of This is England within their wider historical contexts of production, mediation and consumption, through analysis of its key intertexts – chiefly the music and sociological literature it draws on – and a range of pre- and post-production reception materials such as interviews with the director, publicity material, and reviews from mainstream and niche presses.