Ever since our parents were kids, generations of young people have dealt with adolescent misdemeanours. That feeling of being misunderstood and a yearning to redefine yourself like no other young person before. Whilst caught in the structure of society the young have exercised creative freedom to make their very own lifestyle choice. Seen in many guises, the youth movement has inspired not only the people who lived them but also the legacies they’ve left in music, fashion and political apathy or opinion.

Perhaps the most misunderstood youth movement of the last fifty years is the Skinhead. Conceived as the harder brother of the Mod, Skinheads adopted an aggressive look that by 1970’s standards placed them on the media hit list for singling out.

In the mid seventies Gavin Watson was fourteen years old and living in High Wycombe, North London. Armed with a camera he began to document his brothers and friends against a backdrop of second-generation kids jostling to understand their own backgrounds and history.

"You had this small village surrounded by council estates where in the late sixties and seventies they’d moved in Polak’s and West Indians. So coming up to the eighties you had this second generation who were very political and very very violent, it was just gangs, gangs gangs. As a son of an Irish immigrant, where do my loyalties lie? It’s not like now! Third and fourth generation kids know they’re Londoners. Back then, so many racial backgrounds constituted why there where so many gangs and fractions" Gavin remembers.

With all the clichés about skinheads ringing in my ears, I’d not known what to expect meeting someone who was and had been a skinhead when it mattered.

Gavin’s images of his brothers and friends are now some of the most provocative pictorial documentation of this youth fraction and yet looking at them I wasn’t sure what to make?

Sure a seventeen year old wielding a pellet gun is a provocative image no doubt. And lads causing mischief knocking down brick walls could have been any bunch of bored teens on any council estate from Glasgow to Hackney.

But was the skinhead really the bastard child brother to the mod?

One image of a young boy, no older than ten sticks in my mind. Sitting in presumably his bedroom, looking as cheeky as I probably was at that age, I’m struck by the shocking extremity of the décor. The wall is covered with writing and skinhead symbolism, SS logo, union jacks and a swastika. Yet the boy doesn’t look racist nor anymore extreme than a teenager with a
bellybutton piercing in 2001.

"That’s my brother aged ten. He’s the intellect in the family. He’s really extreme; he was a really extreme child. What happened was, me old man said he was going to decorate it (the room). He took the wallpaper off and nothing was happening. We didn’t get a slap round the head for it, so all me mates helped graffiti the wall and me brother decorated years later.

I went to a really rough school and was a really shy child, I just thought, how am I going to survive this? Luckily the skinhead thing came along and people just left you alone'. says Gavin

But that’s just it, any extreme image is going to provoke, that’s the point!

"It was the Hell's Angels and Sid Vicious; the Punks who wore a swastika. We grew in a multi-cultural society. Young men go off into there groups, batter each other around regardless of colour, hopefully they’ll get a bird, grow up, have kids and be sitting down the pub saying – d’you remember when we had that scrap at school? That’s the reality of it" laughs Gavin

So I’m not interviewing the neo-nazi skinhead the media at the time would have us believe. Instead I’m looking at specific images depicting a specific fraction of youth culture – the skinhead! Anyone can see that. And the people and places in them are the life and times, family and friends of the photographer. Much the same as anyone else’s group or gang might be, that’s why we identify with them and recognise the people they depict.

"What I find quite amazing is how our microcosm represented the microcosm of all the other skinheads around. So any skinhead from Scotland to Cornwall who sees these will see themselves, because gang dynamics are made up of the same elements, the big guy, the tough guy, the comedian, whatever."

With boredom and apathy as the bedfellows of the young, what motivated a fourteen-year-old Gavin to document his childhood so extensively? and was he aware he was doing it at the time?

Gavin goes on, "My older brother was very gregarious, very outgoing, very popular, but I was shy, lonely, diagnosed as being mildly autistic and very dyslexic and not very social. Because of the dyslexia I felt bullied and put upon, although not physically, more emotionally. It was grim at home. I’m not going to paint a picture, you know it wasn’t Fred West grim, but it was grim to me who was quite sensitive. Me mum wasn’t happy, me dad through himself into his work and in their late thirties they were thinking, what the fuck’s all this about? We live in this shitty council estate and there was pressure there. I was lonely and not that popular either but with an extremely artistic sense of soul in this fuckin orrible environment.

I got heavily into art and I was going to do my art A level. If you ask me who’s my biggest influence in photography, it was my art teacher and our lesson on perspective. I never went to college to study photography or art in the end but when one Christmas I was offered a choice of binoculars or a 1.10 Handymix camera, I thought I’ll save up for the binoculars and get the camera first. I got my first set of pictures back an just thought, that’s it. Luckily the Handymix had a glass lens. I didn’t know what that meant at
the time, but my brother was using a Kodak Instamatc and his pictures were shitty. My first ones where fucking pin sharp and something just hit me. After that I just couldn’t do anything else. My art teacher was gutted but the perspective thing just went straight into my photography.

Everything just piled into this, my loneliness, my dyslexia. In a way it was a way to buy friends, taking pictures of everything that moved, recording my life, making myself feel like I exist. Obviously this is only retrospect."

Retrospect indeed! See that’s the problm with youth movements, people only understand there importance after the event. Lukily Gavin, for whatever reason has recorded something that we can all identify with, kids or not... and thank fuck he did too!

To see more of Gavins work check www.pymca.com/