Return of the Cockney

Although the smart consensus now is that 'the Sixties' in Britain was really 'Swinging London', outside of the art/fashion/music scene it was really a northern decade. Starting with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning then the Beatles, The Making of the English Working Class, Coronation Street, Z Cars, Manchester United, the New Universities (none of them in London), Harold Wilson (Huddersfield) vs George Brown (Lambeth) it was the north that made the running. The stereotype of 'the northern scientist' - ex-grammar school, then onto British Steel - was much more representative than, say, Michael Caine.

In many ways, as The London that Nobody Knows suggests, much of London's popular culture, architecture etc was looking rather archaic by the '60s. Blow Up is a strangely silent and empty film, as a small group of hipsters run round a Victorian playground. And for good reason: London was already in its then alarming decline, in which it would lose a million of its population. Get Carter is a great cinematic revenge on Londoners, in which Caine has to head to where the real money and power is. And never returns.

The real London decade was the 1980s. There's no need on here it rehearse the economics and politics of why that was so. But it’s worth noting that it was the decade when working class Londoners (including the Essex/Kent/Surrey diasporas) finally decided to take themselves seriously and catch up with modernity. No more Steptoe and Son.

Most striking was the big invasion of cockney voices, writing and faces into the media. Obviously Only Fools and Horses, Eastenders, Minder, The Bill, Grange Hill. Cockney was down-on-the-street 'real'. Maybe more importantly cockney accents were finally allowed on factual television, the medium's great test of authority:

Always going to be too pronounced for some those accents, but they properly reflect the desire to force yourself onto the medium without apology and without fluffing your lines. Also note there's no censoriousness or 'anthropology of the workers' in those films, but no cheap exploitation either. Instead it’s relaxed, democratic, in-the-moment. It has a 'this is what my friends do at the weekend: why shouldn't it have 15 mins of airtime?' feel.

The Robert Elms/Spandau Ballet/Paul Weller wing of this minor movement began to take themselves rather too seriously, of course ('From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet'.) The northern suspicion of 'cockney wankers' grew in this period: either they were too brash or too slick. Definitely too materialistic.

Billy Bragg, Paul Weller or Ken Livingstone might feel rather aggrieved at being labelled this way. They were after all rather more explicitly anti-Thatcher than New Order or Tony Wilson ever were. The Style Council were incredibly earnest, and their clumsiness in crafting a modernist-socialist-soul sound stands in contrast to the cool post-modernism of Factory.

The brief hegemony of cockney was its undoing. The tabloids and commercial TV embraced it and distorted it for their own ends. The path to London Fields and Parklife began here. 'Cockney' was also very male, always with a hint of aggression to it, and apolitical. Red Ken is very rarely called 'a cockney' although he is one. Admitting that 'the most successful working class socialist politician' really was a man of the people would have been too much for The Sun.

The likes of Class War did attempt to give the 'Loadsamoney' style a leftish twist:

It doesn't quite convince, mainly because Ian Bone is actually from Bristol. But the clip nicely brings out some of the contradictions of the 80s cockney. Ross, whilst hinting he agrees with some of the politics, isn't going to drop the American-style slickness he's hard won, even as his brother is denounced as a class traitor.

It was the actors, where voice matters most, who really suffered in the 90s fall out. Kathy Burke has now effectively given up acting, Ray Winstone reduced to betting ads. Nil By Mouth showed what they really could give to British culture. But we've ended up with Nick Love and Notting Hill instead.

"After Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, complained that for all her advantages and beauty directors would not hire her because she was not "trendily working class", an exasperated Kathy Burke found the effort of keeping a civil tongue in her head too much to bear. "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes," she told Time Out, "I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt."

Thatcher’s footsoldiers

On his toes from the late 70s, the Casual was well named not just on account of his attire. Here were men forcibly unshackled from the certainties of work, factory, union and class who shifted loyalties to things you could count on, like clothing labels. In the new age of precarity, the casual could well be a casual worker but such mobility was important. They were brothers in arms with their firm but the casual’s biggest love was for himself. In the Thatcherite decade the aspirational individual was king and the casual was of his time, far more representative of the shifts to an atomised post-political subculture than even the smartest among them could have divined.

“I maintain that there are few finer moments in life than when you step into an alien city en masse, all dressed up ruthless, and watch those people stare”
The Ins and Outs of High Street Fashion, Kevin Sampson and Dave Rimmer, The Face, 1983

These cruisers arriviste wasn’t casual in outlook. From Aberdeen to Portsmouth via Wales, the northern cities, midlands and London, these guys were known for an obsessive approach to fashion and a lust for football related violence. Little things like Heysel were not going to get in the way of male hordes ripping up towns and, er, some of them looking pretty sharp with it. Other shit like music, respect for other ethnic groups and the football on the pitch itself (wearing your team’s replica shirt was a no-no) seemed down the list below clothes and street brawls. Why the fuck not live in the buzz of the me-time present when the communal future was being destroyed? For the casual, everything was subordinate to the buzz. The end of Revolt into Style (can’t think of a look less daring and more conformist), the neutering of agitated working classes, the ascent of consumerism, just as ‘The Lady’ (euurggh) would have wanted.


More influenced than they would admit by the Perry Boy, skinhead and mod, these ‘match dudes’ ushered in the era of sports and leisure wear, though none of that Bukta and Dunlop shit from the 70s; only the finest European stuff. For some, casual was nothing more than staying fashionable; for others, like the QPR fans who laughed at the Luton bumpkins attempting to have a go with their unfashionable threads, it was a Way of Life. This was not simply about buying the right labels, but how they were worn – collars up on a coat that needn’t be on, jeans placed just so over the trainer. Most of the hoolie ‘hit and tell’ books invariably offer a chapter on their firm’s look, Harrington, Stone Island, Burberry et al.

Though rave made acid casuals out of some its communal bliss did not suit all the extraordinary boys, who nevertheless came back stronger than ever with Lad Rock and managed to adapt in a skinny-jeaned post-Strokes world. Liam Gallagher, having gone from austerity casual in Oasis’ early days to overtrendy, monied casual with his Pretty Green label, is King Caj for many even if it’s a label he may resist itself. Mid to late 1990s was where roughly I intersected with this post-tribe. Hours were spent in pubs and bars up and down England checking the clothes out of other men, offering mutual compliments if we passed each other in the lav. My piece de resistance that lasted for about 5 years was a light beige plastic-finish Duffer of St George coat, cheap in a sale. Loved that coat, but it died when dyed in the wash and that was that. I was only playing at this shit anyway, not being on-trend or uptight enough, too into music and like many others questioning the grip of football in the Sky age. And certainly not a fighter.

Not immune to influencing and being influenced by other 90s styles, its love of sportswear and general loose fit principles fed into the wider urban and hip-hop cultures, and, united by Fred Perry, etc, Oasisman stood side to side with the middle class dressage of Blur and co before, huh-huh, it all went off. Drink and drugs wise, He could neck all kinds of shit but nothing much would knock the peacock off the perch. Like the scrotes on their phone sorting out the rumble retaining cool poise was all important, however ludicrous it looked.

The casual comes in from some [rather nervy] pisstaking from hipper types who accuse him of being little better than the smart-casual joke of Alan Partridge, but they miss the point. The casual, the type who’ll happily play golf with the boss (the sport provided early sartorial inspiration, as did tennis) was never much more than an avatar for the modern life we were being expected to assume, weekenderism, political apathy, live sports on the TV, other bullshit stimuli. And when the casual gets old, it’s just a short trip to suburbia where talk about the English Defence League is often accepted. You can even wear the same clothes, which couldn’t be said for any other pop-cultural tribe worthy of the name.

We’ve mentioned him throughout as the movement was emblematic of a social retrenchment after egalitarian advances. There is no female equivalent of the casual, ‘the birds’ were still expected to dress up, especially later on in that oversexualised, increasingly pornographic style that was infecting the 90s. Of course, many a casual geez would have been aware of the writings of Loaded and FHM, and it was their subjects who provided the archetype for their other halfs and helped validate the lifestyle: men who should know better but allow themselves to act like [and call themselves] boys.


There are other icons, Danny Dyer through the hoolie/80s films, but the whole point of casual was its accessibility, perpetuated by the retro cottage industry around it, so there’s not too much poncy hero worship, just clues for clothes purchases. Nearly 30 years on casual is still a default look for awakening male youth, but nothing quite says socio-political opt-out and, very often, racist outlook than the blank assemblage of anorak, [polo]shirt, jeans and trainers of the true caj. Thus its full decline could only be welcomed as it would imply a reengagement and a decrease in reliance of the spectacle/moment of a swathe of working and lower-middle male youth. My hopes aren’t high.