http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=3423
COVER
MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A HEAD
DAVID BERRY / [email protected]
Apparent arson puts spotlight back on skinheads-nice and not-so-nice
Some 90 minutes after midnight on Feb 6, local musician Pat Bourne opened his door to find two large, angry skinheads standing on his front step. Bourne says they barged in, one turning his attention towards trashing the living room, the other forcing Bourne upstairs to his bedroom. Once there, the latter invader found what he was apparently so upset about: in the window, Bourne had hung an old Soviet Union flag, using it as a curtain.
The thug tore the flag down and accused Bourne of being a Stalinist. The two intruders stomped on Bourne’s guitar. The musician had some blues CDs sitting on a table in his room: the skinheads yelled at him for listening to “nigger music” and smashed the discs to pieces, using the shards to carve swastikas into a stereo amplifier.
They forced Bourne back downstairs, where he found most of his living room kicked in and his bike thrown through a window. The intruders, Bourne recalls, said they were going to take him to the basement.
Bourne managed to bolt out the door. He called the police, who had him fill out a report and recommended he bar the doors with furniture, lest the skinheads return. The officers, Bourne says, also helpfully suggested he find a baseball bat for protection.
About an hour later, sitting in his basement, trying to calm down with his friend Ted Wright, Bourne heard a window break. A “huge fireball” came sailing through. Bourne grabbed what he could—a guitar and an amp—and managed to escape. He didn’t even look at the house again.
“I didn’t want to see all my stuff going up,” he explains.
“It was probably one of the scariest things that’s ever happened to me in my entire life. I’ve heard stories before about these kinds of guys; they were big guys. I had no idea if they were going to do something to me physically or not.”
However, there’s also something else Bourne wants to make clear.
“I have a lot of friends who are SHARPs,” he says. “I always wanted to make it very clear that it was nothing to do with those guys.”
A SHARP, for those who don’t know, is a SkinHead Against Racial Prejudice. Together with other non-racist skinheads of no specific affiliations, they make up more or less the entirety of Edmonton’s skinhead community. Whenever something like this goes on, though, times get tough for the lot of them—the good skinheads lumped in with the bad.
The skinhead movement was birthed out of the British Mod movement of the ’60s. Generally speaking, the skinhead aesthetic was a reaction by Britain’s working-class youth to the “peacocks”—upper-middle-class mods obsessed with the latest fashion (they are the image of a mod that persists today)—and the trademark short hair was adopted chiefly as a rejection of the preening mods.
Then, and now, most skinheads were interested chiefly in reggae music, borrowing an interest in ska and dub from Britain’s large Jamaican immigrant population.
The image most people associate with skinheads, however, developed in the following decade. After the movement’s heyday in 1969—hence the frequent allusions to “The Spirit of 69”—the skinheads split and diversified, though still remaining close to their working-class roots.
Then, in the mid-’70s, the neo-Nazi National Front perpetrated one of the most successful re-brandings of an image to date. Drawing largely from the disaffected working classes, a decent number of whom just happened to be skinheads, it slowly adopted the skinhead look as its own. Increased media attention on the National Front movement fixed the image in the public’s mind: a skinhead was a neo-Nazi, wiping out any and all other connections.
Brendan (name changed) is a local traditional skin who has “claimed”—the traditional skinheads’ term for self-identified—for six years.
“I was in the punk-rock scene when I was young. There were a few [skins] who would come to the shows, and through them I started getting into the music,” he explains. “It kind of just fit me better. Short hair was always more me; it’s actually just kind of a style thing and a music thing, for me. I can name off more reggae singers than most people can, I think.”
For Brendan, generally speaking, Edmonton has been a welcoming town. The city has always had a strong punk community, and while not dominant, the SHARP and traditional skinhead scene are a significant part of that.
“We’ve had a good town for a lot of years, as far as these things go. I mean, I can go almost anywhere without a lot of problems,” he says. “But when these guys [the racist skinheads] start to come and cause trouble, we get problems.
“Basically, these white-power guys, they’re all about making noise and being seen,” he continues. “That’s probably why people start to notice them more, and especially notice them more than us.”
And as soon as the white-power skinheads are in the public eye again, so are Brendan and his friends.
According to Brendan, a group calling themselves “Blood and Honour” came into the city from central Canada over the summer and started to make their presence felt. While Brendan is fairly certain the group hasn’t been involved in some of the higher-profile incidents in the past—he wouldn’t comment on the firebombing of Bourne’s house, though he has it on good authority the group had nothing to do with the spray-painting of a synagogue around Christmas—he thinks their presence has encouraged some of the people in Edmonton entirely unrelated to either movement to show their colours a bit more.
And though he’s since heard that the group has pulled up and left after receiving a less-than-inviting welcome, the incidents have still drawn more attention to the subject, which, due to the public’s misconception, draws more attention to non-racist skinheads like himself.
“People who have that kind of [racist] view, when they see a group like this come to town, who are more militant, they start to feel a bit safer, so they figure, ‘OK, these guys are there, I can go spray-paint stuff,’” he says with some disdain.
“But, since this bad stuff started happening, and there were the articles in the paper, [non-racists skinheads] have been getting more attention. When people recognize us as skins, they’ll sort of shy away, or whisper to each other, or come over and say stuff about it. It does definitely affect the way people look at us.”
For Pat Bourne, things have now calmed down a bit. He’s found a new apartment, and he’s heard through some of his friends in the community that the people who allegedly invaded his house left Edmonton after being confronted about some unrelated incidents. His friends in the music community have organized two benefit shows to help him replace all his gear—one at Avenue Skatepark this Sat, Mar 18, another at New City on Mar 31—and his new band, The Get Down (Ted Wright’s in it, too) will be playing at both.
“I just want to say thanks to everybody. I appreciate everything everyone has been doing,” he says. “We’ve got a great community, and it’s nice to know I’ve got support when I need it the most.”
For Brendan, though, a benefit show won’t be able to repair some of the damage that’s been done. There’ll still be stares, and questions, for a long time after the smoke has cleared.
“It’s a really shitty thing to happen in a town I love, to people that I like,” he says. “This is a really cool place to be. It’s a great town, there’s a lot of good people here, and I’ve made a lot of friends, and none of them have done or said anything different from the way it’s always been.” V
Sat, Mar 18 (6:30 pm)
Pat & Ted Benefit
With The Get Down, The James T Kirks, The Vertical Struts, Fat Dave Crime Wave, Southside Riots
Avenue Skatepark, $10
