2 Tone and Skinhead - The Multiracial Roots Nobody Talks About

Say the word skinhead to most people today and you will get one image back: shaved head, boots, and a far right politics attached to it. That image is real, but it is only half the story, and it is the later half. The earlier half is a multiracial youth culture built on Jamaican music, and it never fully went away. It just got harder to see once the far right latched onto the same haircut.

This piece is about that earlier half, and about the 2 Tone scene that grew out of it a decade later and put the multiracial roots back on the record sleeve, literally.

What skinhead actually was, before the politics

The first skinheads showed up in working class London in the late 1960s. They came out of the mod scene, but stripped mod down to something rougher and cheaper: cropped hair, work boots, braces, tight jeans, a look built for factory floors and football terraces rather than scooters and tailoring.

Crucially, this scene did not form in isolation from Black British culture. It formed inside it. Postwar Caribbean migration had put Jamaican families in the same streets, schools, and youth clubs as white working class kids across London and other UK cities. Sound systems played ska, rocksteady, and reggae at local dances, and white and Black teenagers shared those dance floors. The Jamaican rude boy look, sharp, understated, and confident, fed directly into how skinheads dressed and carried themselves.

Musically, this period is often called the trojan skinhead era, named for the reggae label whose singles soundtracked it. The point is not that skinhead was a “tolerant” curiosity on the side. Jamaican music and style were load bearing parts of the culture from day one. Calling early skinhead a white subculture that later added a Black soundtrack gets the sequence backwards.

How the far right moved in

By the mid to late 1970s, Britain was in economic trouble, and youth unemployment was high in exactly the working class communities skinhead came from. The National Front and other far right groups went looking for recruits on football terraces and in exactly these neighborhoods, offering an explanation for hardship that blamed immigration.

A second wave of skinheads emerged in this climate, and it was rougher and more openly aggressive than the first. Far right organizers did not invent this wave, but they worked hard to attach themselves to it, and press coverage of racist violence involving people with shaved heads did the rest. By the early 1980s, “skinhead” and “racist” had become synonymous in a lot of public reporting, even though plenty of people in the scene wanted nothing to do with that politics.

2 Tone: the multiracial answer, on record

Coventry in the late 1970s was hit hard by deindustrialization, and it is where The Specials formed, led by keyboardist Jerry Dammers. Dammers founded 2 Tone Records specifically to put ska back at the center of British pop, and he built it around bands with mixed Black and white lineups: The Specials themselves, The Selecter, and later acts on the label carried the same makeup.

The label’s black and white checkerboard imagery was not just a design choice. It was a direct visual argument: this music and this scene belong to Black and white people together, not to one side co-opting the other. Between roughly 1979 and 1981, 2 Tone acts had a real run of chart hits, and the movement was explicit about its politics. Bands played Rock Against Racism shows, and songs like The Specials’ “Ghost Town” spoke directly to the unemployment and unrest of the era, including riots that broke out in several UK cities in 1981.

2 Tone’s audience included skinheads, and that matters for the record. It shows that the shaved head, boots, and braces look was never owned by one politics. The same aesthetic that far right groups were trying to claim was, at the same moment, filling dance floors for a label built on Black and white musicians playing together against racism.

Key elements of the look and the scene

A few things carried through both the late 60s original scene and the 2 Tone revival: cropped or shaved hair, Fred Perry and Ben Sherman shirts, braces, tapered jeans or suit trousers, and boots, often Doc Martens. Musically, ska’s offbeat rhythm and horn sections are the throughline connecting Jamaican sound systems in the 60s to Coventry stages a decade later.

What did not carry through consistently was politics. The clothes and the music were shared property. What you did with them, and who you stood with, was a separate choice, and different people in the scene made different choices.

Where this stands today

Since the late 1980s, there has been an organized effort inside skinhead culture to reclaim its original identity: groups describing themselves as SHARP, short for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, formed specifically to draw a line between the subculture’s Jamaican derived roots and the far right groups that had attached themselves to it. The name started in New York in 1987 among American skinheads pushing back on the growing white power scene there, and it crossed to the UK a couple of years later, adopted by British skinheads for the same reason. That split, traditional and anti racist skinheads on one side, explicitly racist “boneheads” on the other, is still how a lot of the scene understands itself today.

2 Tone also never fully disappeared. Ska revivals have come and gone in multiple countries since the 1980s, and the checkerboard imagery still circulates as shorthand for the genre’s anti racist origins.

Common misconceptions

Skinhead was always about race. It was, but not in the direction most people assume. The founding influence was Jamaican music and style, absorbed by white and Black working class kids together. The racist association came later, layered on top by a specific political movement in a specific economic moment.

All skinheads are, or were, far right. No reputable account of the subculture supports this. The scene has always contained multiple, often conflicting political currents, including an explicitly anti racist strand that predates and outlasts the far right association.

2 Tone was a one-off pop trend. It functioned as pop music, with real chart success, but the bands and the label were explicit about using that platform to make an anti racist argument, not incidentally, but as the point.

FAQ

Did skinhead start as a racist movement? No. It began in the late 1960s as a working class youth culture shaped heavily by Jamaican immigrant music and style, with white and Black kids sharing the same scene. Far right groups attached themselves to a later, rougher wave in the mid to late 1970s.

What was 2 Tone? A late 1970s and early 1980s British music movement centered on Coventry label 2 Tone Records, built around multiracial ska bands like The Specials and The Selecter, with an explicitly anti racist message reflected in its black and white checkerboard branding.

Are skinheads still around today, and are they all racist? Yes, the subculture continues in various forms internationally, and no, it is not uniformly racist. Anti racist and traditional strands, including groups identifying as SHARP, have existed since the late 1980s specifically to contest the far right association.

What is the difference between mod, rude boy, and skinhead style? Mod was more tailored and scooter centered. Rude boy style came from Jamaican youth culture and favored a sharp, understated look. Early skinhead blended elements of both into something rougher and cheaper to reproduce, which is part of why it spread so fast among working class kids.