© Gavin Watson
By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s.
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Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon.
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“What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”
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Watson’s images have stood the test of time, and reflect the truth of skinheads – one which contradicts the mainstream media’s conflation of the subculture with the National Front. Here, the photographer talks us through his new book, transporting us back to a time when a group of marginalised youth became a threat to Thatcherite Britain because they refused to kowtow to the status quo.
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© Gavin Watson
© Gavin Watson