This ‘White Power’ band has been the soundtrack of racist punk for 40 years
Skrewdriver both shaped and exploited the movement
“I stand and watch my country going down the drain,” snarled the British rock band Skrewdriver on their 1983 single “White Power.” “We are all at fault, we are all to blame, We’re letting them take over, we just let ’em come, Once we had an empire, and now we’ve got a slum.”
Rock music may seem like an unlikely place for xenophobia, but Skrewdriver emerged at a moment when nativist paranoia was gaining ground in the UK, and the band exploited the growing willingness of alienated white, working- and middle-class youth to don a uniform for a poorly articulated political cause, the nebulous aims of which were spelled out in the group’s brash, loud, uncomplicated songs: “They came upon our people in the dead of the night,” they sing on “Their Kingdom Will Fall.” (It is unclear who “they” are.) “Death and destruction in the morning light, Jail for our fighters, bondage for the strong, They’ve had their own way for far too long, Their Kingdom Will Fall.” Or, on the subtle anti-hippie track “Shove the Dove,” “You can talk about a thing called love, while the bombs rain down from above, you can talk about a thing called love, And you can shove your fucking dove! Up your ass!”
Skrewdriver was founded in 1976 in Poulton-le-Fylde, a small town in Lancashire, England, by frontman Ian Stuart, who’d previously fronted a Rolling Stones cover band called Tumbling Dice. Skrewdriver began as a punk outfit, but quickly adopted the skinhead uniform: Bic-ed heads, white T-shirts, Levi’s, and “boots and braces” (steel-toe Doc Martens and suspenders). They weren’t overtly political at the outset, but they soon drew a strain of rabid fans sympathetic to radical politics, and drifted ever rightward. In the late 1970s, the group was dropped by their label, Chiswick Records, once their message became overtly violent; clubs throughout Britain refused to let them play.
But, though marginal, there was support for Skrewdriver and their ilk. The National Front, a far-right political party which was experiencing sharp growth throughout the 1970s, saw in Skrewdriver an opportunity for propaganda, and started its own record label, the cleverly named White Noise, on which the band released five early singles. Skrewdriver maintained an allegiance to a range of far-right groups and causes in the UK, including the National Front and the British Movement (BM), a neo-Nazi group founded in the late 60s and known for violence. BM wasn’t just lip service, either. The group had a trained elite, the Leader Guard, who spent weekends doing armed, paramilitary-style drills in the countryside. They regularly attacked members of racial minorities with broken bottles, clubs, or simply their fists.
Nicola Vincenzo “Nicky” Crane, a legendary neo-Nazi streetfighter and all-around menace, began roadie-ing for Skrewdriver in 1983, and his association with the group boosted their reputation for brutality. Crane and Ian Stuart started Blood & Honour, a still-active, neo-Nazi political and social club, together in 1987. Crane, known for his temper and for leading ambushes against unsuspecting minorities (one judge called him “worse than an animal”) was living a double life, however. He was outed as gay after it was reported that he frequented Heaven, a London nightclub, and he acknowledged that he was gay in 1992, before dying of AIDS-related complications in 1993.
Skrewdriver’s lyrics are rife with references to fallen imperial glory. As Nancy S. Love writes in her 2016 book, Trendy Fascism: White Power Music and the Future of Democracy, “White racial identity became a psychological substitute for class struggle and economic justice. The psychological ‘wages of whiteness’ gave poor(er) whites a claim to the rights and privileges of the elites. These psychological wages also provided a bridge between nationalism and imperialism by marking foreign immigrants as racial ‘Others’ competing for scarce jobs.”
This was a significant departure from the first iteration of skinhead culture, which emerged in the late 1960s as a rejection of bourgeois middle-class values and hippie peace-loving. The working class skinhead scene overlapped significantly with mod fashion and — borrowing from West Indian neighbors — reggae and rude boy culture, and most of its music was a chill blend of numerous influences, including ethnic and racial ones. Occasionally, the marriage of punk rock and reggae — as exemplified by the Clash — found expression as an explicitly anti-racist force. In 1976, for example, Rock Against Racism (RAR) was organized to counter a surge of racist violence. Intended to be a single concert, RAR became a movement. In 1978, tens of thousands marched from Trafalgar Square to London’s East End for a festival organized by RAR and the Anti-Nazi League.
One of RAR’s main functions was to pressure bands to denounce their racist fans. Some, like Sham 69, heeded RAR’s call, and went on to find success. But Skrewdriver refused and dug in, which meant alienating the mainstream music establishment.
For all their commitment to the cause of white supremacy, however, there are many suggestions that bandleader Ian Stuart wasn’t as die-hard as he sometimes claimed. After breaking up and reassembling with new members, Skrewdriver released the album “Back With A Bang” in 1982. In response to a review in Sounds magazine, Ian wrote in, saying “I read your review of ‘Back With a Bang’…and it seemed a fair, unbiased review. However, I cannot understand the necessity to mention fascism every time our name is brought up. Skrewdriver are not a political band, and none of us are involved in politics. I cannot understand where you get the ridiculous idea that anyone who wears a Union Jack is some kind of Nazi.” (People likely got that idea when British Movement neo-Nazis committed acts of brutality clad in black uniforms emblazoned with Union Jacks.) Elsewhere, Stuart articulated a much meeker stance than was apparent in his lyrics and stage persona, saying in an interview, “I wasn’t really political at all, to be honest. I didn’t really like blacks because I’d never seen one till I went down London, and there I met lots, and they all seemed to have a chip on their shoulder, I didn’t like lefties funny enough, because they all reminded me of students being all anti-British and that put me off them.”
Regardless, Stuart began as a racist, and was further radicalized by participation in a violent white nationalist community. As Skrewdriver’s career attests, he was an active, vocal participant in a scene that condoned — indeed, actively stirred up — racial violence. He was jailed for close to a year in 1986 for a street attack on a Nigerian in King’s Cross, and he started two other spin-off groups while in Skrewdriver: White Diamond and The Klansmen, whose first release in 1989 was titled “Fetch the Rope.”
Ian Stuart died in a car accident in 1993, effectively ending Skrewdriver’s reign as the powerhouse of racist rock music. By that time, however, the band was pretty much synonymous with 1980s neo-Nazism, having toured through Europe and made their way to the States on vinyl. The mascots of white power have gone on to enjoy a long afterlife, too, mostly as a (not so) funny footnote in the annals of punk and as an “ironic” T-shirt. (British crooner Plan B was caught in one in 2012.) Of course, shock value alone can often drive such phenomena, particularly among young people, for whom cultivating awe and disgust is a kind of currency. Still, many find it surprising and disturbing to see Skrewdriver fans — or “fans” — at punk and hardcore shows nearly 40 years later. Just this week, Zachary Lipez mused on the trend in Vice under the headline, “Your ‘ironic’ white power Skrewdriver T-shirt might make you an asshole.”
Might?
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
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