The group had a trained elite, the Leader Guard, who spent weekends doing armed, paramilitary-style drills in the countryside. 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.

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. 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.īut, though marginal, there was support for Skrewdriver and their ilk. 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. 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). 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. 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!”

“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.” A gang of skinheads giving the salute outside a pub in Brighton, UK, 1980s.

Sham 69 back patch