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Teen 2000: There are 5,250,000 teenegars in Britain. On Saturday
15 January 2000, the Face travelled the country and spoke to 1,000
of them
Oliver's Cafe, Cheap Street, Sherborne, Saturday January 15, 2.30pm
At Sherborne Boys School for in Dorset, the rules are simple enough
to grasp.
"Basically," tuts 16-year-old A-level student Will Mclachlan, "Girl
Power is bollocks. Now, if you go for a women who's affected by
this Girl Power thing, they're like, 'No, I'm not going to let
you pinch my arse.' Women: know your place!"
His mate Charlie Benham look up from his mobile phone and agrees. "These
days, it's the women choosing the men," he grumbles. "The
problem is, as soon as you start going out with someone, the girls
are all like, [super keen] 'How's It Going!?!' the whole time.
It becomes really commercial, yeah?"
Will and Charlie are boarding pupils at the 350-year-old, £16,000
per year school, a traditionally-minded institution that has rule
against most things 16-year-olds might want to do: no fags, beer
or drugs, and sex with girls is punishable by expulsion (or, it's
rumoured, suspension if the girl happens to be a boy). These new
politics of copping off? Troublesome, mate. More rules are categorically
not what's needed.
These are the worst of times to be a teenage boy: you can't drink,
vote or bet yet, your female counterparts are consistently outperforming
you at GCSE level, you're scapegoated for the rise in urban crime,
the delinquent thrills of wheel, boards and balls you once thought
your own now co-opted by people who won't admit they're no longer
young. The future is an infinity of boredom stretching before you.
Admit it: you're in even more trouble than normal.
According to a different set of rules, however, these are the
best of times to be a teenage boy: economic wealth at your fingertips;
empowering new media and technologies self-generating faster than
your own sperm; a bouyant market for the computer skills you're
insticntively honing; an infinity of opportunities stretching before
you. No wonder everyone wants to be a teenage boy. You've never
had it so good!
Adolescence: it's a confusing time for all of us. It's fifty years
since the teenager stopped being mere sociology and became living,
breathing, swearing, shrugging reality, an entire demographically-specific
mode of being with its own disposable income to fritter, impenetrable
code of language and a blatant disregard for what its worried parents
thought.
Fifty years later, the kids aren't necessarily "alright".
They aren't necessarily in deep trouble either. The problem is
that Britain's ranks of teenage boys all are becoming all the more
difficult to locate on the cultural radar. Predictably, the first
people to notice were those with the most to lose, namely the advertising
industry. Where once you could rely on the marketeers to tell you
everything you'd rather not know about teenage boys, it seems they
recently awoke to discover that one of their demographics had left
home. Their patterns of consumption had changed. The boys were
acting wierd. Soho, we have a problem...
But more troublingly, amid the new orthodoxies of adolescence
- the dismissal of mainstream political systems for single-issue
activism, the replacement of traditional religions with a belief
in a vague but complex "something", emotional sophistication
at a younger age and an increasingly conservative disposition -
a gloomier shift has been detected, in which teenage boys are reacting
badly to this age of personalized insecurity. Faced the rise of
inner-city violence and the empowerment of women, and no longer
certain of a job for life, boys are increasingly showing signs
of nervousness and self-consciousness once more closely associated
with teenage females. One media agency has even published a report
entitled "Are Men the New Women?". These days, boy will
be boys, though increasingly they'll actually be girls.
Adolescent males in crisis? It has to be admitted that Britain's
teenagers are being mysterious and contradictory beyond the call
of duty. Would the real teenage boys please stand up?
***
Safeway car park, Malvern Links, Worcestershire, Wednesday
19 January, 7.00pm
WHAT do the lads do for fun in "Great" Malvern?
"Well, last time we went out skating, I landed on my head," laughs
16-year-old rollerblader Michael Gogerty. "I couldn't move
my neck for a week."
According to the ten-man MASS - Malvern Aggressive Skate Scene,
average age 15 - extreme sports are the only way to deal with the
extreme normality of their home, a town of 38,000 inhabitants whose
prosperity was built on a Victorian spa and the twentieth century
defence industry. These days, though, the town proliferates with
charity shops and the only sport store has closed. Malvern, reckon
Mass, is a dull place with stupid people. Example: presented with
a choice of manufacturers' quotes, local sports councillor Jack
Lemon opted to buy for the "dearest, but shittest" half-pipe
- der! - after six months months of MASS's agonised lobbying to
get one built.
As a consequence, at weekends MASS redeploy to skateparks in Worcester,
Bristol, Derby and Birmingham, and noisily carve out the complicated
moves - grinds, rail jumps, allez-oop fishbrains, royales, soyales
and roof jumps up to the current record of 8ft - of a kind that
keep the demand for orthopaedic surgeons in the NHS strong.
Tonight being a chilly school night and Malvern lacking a skatepark,
Safeway's carpark doesn't afford escape from the permanent affront
to the bladers' sensibility that are "the Bos": Malvern's
patroling Boy racer fraternity, who figure marginally lower than
skateboarders on the MASS evolutionary index. At the corner of
the carpark that's this evening's competition ground, Michael Gogerty
kicks off his Duffs trainers, pulls his tent-sized Roces jeans
down over his blades and pauses to list the Bos' principal crimes:
1. "surgically-implanted" caps. 2. tight jeans with mobile
hitched on the belt and tops tucked in. 3. cheesy "dreamscape" in-car
soundtracks. 4. thinking tinted windows, alloy wheels, modified
Cosworths and Novas are cool.
"The Bos are mamof round here,' he stutters, 'mamof' meaning
everywhere. "It's well dodgy: they've all got cars and they're,
like, 19, but they all go out with girls from year 9 who are only
about 13!"
Neverthless, Malvern's girls are apparently choosy over which
of the carpark-dwelling tribes they associate with, appearing to
be more impressed by donuts and burnouts than grinds and royales.
"Girls can go and jump in a bin," Ralphie returns, wobbling
knock-kneed along the kerb. "You don't need to go out with
girls. You can meet them at party, get off with them and leave
it at that. Girls are good: when you want them there."
"I had a job and a girlfriend, and I had no time to skate," points
out Carl. "Then I lost my job and my girlfriend finshed with
me." He beams. "Now I can skate."
In the face of such crassly mainstream company of the Bos and
their embrace of high street culture, it falls to MASS to bear
the standard of 'alternative' in Malvern, even if it's an alternative
that's widely available as Korn, Machine Head, Limp Bizkit or Eminem
downloads for their Diamond Rio MP3 players, or through a subscription
to 'Blade' or 'DNA' skating magazines, or for the price of Salomon,
Puberty and Shifty bladewear the constitutionally untucked gang
all wear. But, it seems, some kind solidarity counts for a lot
these days.
"I've have got female friends and they get A stars, they're
good at sport, good-looking," explains Michael. "It's
really annoying. Girl Power is commercial bollocks, but the fact
is they are going to get the jobs. Employers think they can trust
girls and they don't think they can trust boys."
Currently, a more pressing issue the wrath of the Safeway security
guard who's marching across the car park. Hassle beckons. Ross
has towed a pair of bare-knuckle bladers past the store entrance
on the back of his Yamaha moped one time too many and a stern shooing-off
is in order. Frantically grabbing trainers and Eastpak rucksacks,
MASS instantly retreat and V-sign Mr Safeway from afar.
'Thing is, no-one wants to skate here, but no-one consulted us
about the half-pipe,' Ralphie later announces amid a bomsbite of
burger wrappers in the adjacent McDonalds. "Jack Lemon's a
wanker".
The issues that matter in Malvern are U-shaped, and prompting
on others yields little more than the collective MASS shrug. Drugs
are "stupid: they make you skint and knackered". GM food
is "alright as long as it tastes nice". And politics?
Britain's leaders may be interested to learn that nine out of ten
bladers expressed no political preference whatsoever. Meanwhile,
the dissenting voice, 16-year-old Arran, would like to take this
opportunity to address Tony Blair: "What the fuck are you
playing at? Get it sorted."
As the bladers of MASS will tell you, you've got to fight for
your right to a new half-pipe. Even if you fight for little else.
"There's not a lot else to do here. It's a bit pathetic really," notes
Micheal's brother Will, who is 13.
***
Scott's house, Arley, Warwickshire, Saturday 2.30pm
Liberation comes GTi-shaped for the max powerless of Arley, an
ex-mining village consisting of three shops, three pubs and several
streets and surrounded by fields and crumbling mine workings. Among
the sheds and bins behind the redbrick terrace where Scott lives,
three lads with earrings, battered Adidas trainers and hair gel
and are clocking the village's greatest civic treasures: a tangerine
VW Polo, lowered, bodykitted, with alloys, Team Dynamics exhaust
and a skull gear stick. It is declared "mint," by Paul,
16, Charlie, 15 and Scott Glover, 16. A street away is a "proper
sports car" we also peer into: a cherry red Toyota GT, 6-inch
exhaust, £16,000. On work experience, Scott drove one of
these around the garage until his boss started acting the twat
and Scott told him to fuck off. The episode was concluded when
Scott's dad, who's been a bouncer, went round and banged him.
For the time being, the disembowelled Kawasaki KX 125 scrambler
Scott's rebuilding in his uncle's shed, outside which several other
permamently crippled motorbikes are rusting, will have satisfy
his taste for torque.
"The meaning of life is to have fun, isn't it?" Scott
theorises as Paul and Charlie poke through motorbike magazines
the shed also houses. "It's about booting it, putting you
foot on the floor and watching the rev counter fly around, knowing
you've got loads of power. Doing donuts: you whack the steering
round, rev the bollocks of it and dump the clutch out. "
Aside from the all-too-infrequent squeal of fat tyres on post-industrial
wasteground, Arley is a deafeneingly quiet place, the silence hanging
most densely over three of its sons. A village fractured by the
miner's strike of the Eighties, the cruel socio-economics of life
have pressed the pause button of their lives: adrift between the
regimented ignominy of school - Paul has already left, Charlie
was expelled for punching a teacher, Scott is battling for his
engineering GNVQ - and being granted driving licences, there's
little to do in Arley except wait. Here, choice is expressed between
a shared Lambert & Butler and a rip on Ricky Carmichael's Motocross
on PlayStation. They might occasionally smoke a bit of weed,
but harbour a deep scepiticism about most other drugs, on account
of what happened to Charlie's sister. "She had the thing they
put cows to sleep with? Ketamine, is it? All one side of her face
was went down there, like that," he mimes. "Haff her
maff waf like vat!" She sounded funny: I just laughed. She
were alright after a week."
Still, the dream is to be able to drive to Milton Keynes to hear
DJ Si, M-Zone and Producer lay down thumping hardcore at the Helter
Skelter mega-raves soon. Most poeple "drug it" there,
Paul explains.
Paul: "I'd go everywhere if I had a car. I'd got to the cruises.
It's just freedom, innit."
"But you'd just go in Nuneaton and pull donuts all day wouldn't
yer?" Charlie interrupts
"Yeah! In the multi-storey carparks there's loads of mint
cars, booting it round, ripping the handbrakes up..." Scott
contemplates.
The zippy thrills of the future might not have to wait. Just as
they could tell you where to get hold of chipped Nokia phones with
unlimited talktime for £160, fake tax discs, MOTs and insurance
aren't too difficult to come by. What the law defines as Taking
cars Without Owner's Consent is something of a pastime with mates
of theirs down in Nuneaton. TWOCing's not for them, they insist,
but apparently it's dead easy. Max Power even decribed how you
can break into an Escort using a carrot.
"Criminals-to-be, this lot," assures Scott's 21-year-old
sister Kelly, glowering at her brother and his mates. "And
if it's Scott who's nicked first, he'll have no teeth left."
Paul, for one reckons he'll get into trouble - car crime probably,
- in the next year. "We're all thick up here," he laughs,
nervously checking Charlie and Scott for confirmation.
They're out drinking tonight - a bottle of vodka each at
someone's house is the preferred routine- and enjoying their status
as the Arley pin-ups, some consolation that their immediate horizons
seem to be truncated just beyond the turning off for Nuneaton up
the road where thge village peters out and fields and slagheaps
begin.
"We do have a laugh, but it seems to involve trouble," says
Scott, fastening his skeletal Kawasaki into the shed. On pain of
a more than thumping from his big sister, you suspect he wishes
it didn't.
***
The music room, Sherborne, Saturday January 15, 4pm
Though rock & roll isn't listed among the many activities
in the school prospectus, at Sherborne it's possible to beef up
your CV and kick out the jams at the same time. Thus, Desert Storm,
the band Charlie and Will recently formed with their Barbadian
friend Rhys is is an excuse for extreme yoof terror on poorly-tuned
guitars as well as being a valuable "career opportunity".
Will and Charlie, too, are "heavily into" Slipknot,
Machine Head, Marylin Manson, Korn, Metallica and Eminem, the homogenised
voice for mildly pissed off white kids, and while they cautiously
hope to pursue careers as artist and graphic designer respectively,
Saturday afternoon involves cranking through covers of US metal
that MTV has decreed it's okay to rebel along to. Currently, vague
plans for the band at the moment extend as far as writing some
of their own stuff. Get signed? Maybe. Desert Storm's relevance
to the present, is twofold:
"There will be a few girls who'll like it," Charlie,
who's the singer, decides. "But not many."
"And we're gonna cause a storm,' winks guitarist Will, adjusting
his Metal Zone footpedal. "We're taking a different approach.
No-one's at Sherborne has ever played heavy metal before: they
all play [with savage disdain] popular rock like Green day and
Nirvana."
Are you going to change the world with it?
"We're trying to do stuff that most people would reject?
It's sort of like a type of anarchy, really. Like, I'm anarchistic
through my A-level artwork. Hur hur: fuck the school! And we're
getting people who normally wouldn't like Machine Head, to really
just rock out. And they're gonna be affected by it..."
"I reckon people will really go insane," Charlie grins
to Will. They're working hard on Jimi Hendrix's "Fire" and
Metallica's "Wasting My Hay". Their first gig is three
weeks away.
As practically any activity at Sherborne that's not designed to
build young chaps into overachieving professionals looked upon
as deeply suspect, if not positively ruinous, the plushly appointed
music room is the only place in Sherborne where it's acceptable
to wallow in feedback, read the NME and describe yourself as "un-rugby".
As if to prove the point, the upper sixth form band Red Shift soon
arrive and perform a depressingly competent version of Guns N'
Roses' 'Sweet Child Of Mine'. Nexy to Will and Charlie's painstakingly
dishevelled DMs and trenchcoats, the scrubbed and hockey-shirted
fellows of Red Shift look strikingly unhip. Rock & roll one,
Sherborne nil.
"There aren't really any people who are different in this
school," Charlie whispers, heavily conspiratorial as he packs
up his guitar leads up.
Later, the band shamble off into the town centre with the prospect
of spending Saturday night's joint disco with the affilliated Sherborne
Girls school, a tediously segregated affair with a blatant prejudice
against Coal Chamber and in favour Shania Twain and Britney Spears.
It's either that or trying to find a pub free of the patrolling
teachers and avoiding the attentions of Sherborne's state school
headbangers.
We stop outside The George, Sherborne's "hardest pub".
"The fucking stress of this town..." Charlie sighs,
gesturing beyond its front door. "If we were to go in there,
we'd get our heads kicked in. There's a jealousy/hate thing - the
Gryphon school hates us. Last term they were joyriding round town,
trying to run us over. Seriously. The teachers warned us to stay
off the streets.'
Persinal injury is one thing, but with blood on the collar and
alcohol on the breath, a grounding or an expulsion would be quite
another. Like so much at Sherborne, fighting the power remains
an academic science and one that's simply costly to pursue.
"It's a very sheltered life here, I know," Charlie conludes. "I
want to take a gap year to see how difficult life is. Here, we
worry about what the next rule will be, not the next law."
***
It was once the touchstone of teenage culture that rules existed
to be broken. But for the 16-year-old boys of today - and hence
the 18-year-olds of election year 2002 - the notion of radical
youth is evaporating as quickly their material wealth is growing.
According to a recent survey of 18-year-olds, 87 per cent of the
sample said they approved of their parents' lifestyle and 43 per
cent supported the arming of police while home-ownership and marriage
were also overwhelmingly favoured. Add to that a 750 per cent increase
in the male style press and as many as 240 TV channels now available
in the UK, and it doesn't take a sociologist to figure out that
the surfeit of choice may bring more options, but allows scarce
opportunity to opt out and find their own path.
"Being an individual", meanwhile, was also the principal
remit of youth. But in marketing terms at least, "youth" is
now a mindset instead of an age range, and most shades of teenage
behaviour have been appropraited and remarketed as shrink-wrapped
lifestyles available at all major stores. These days, every member
of Britain's ageing population can be a teenage boy. It's therefore
hardly surprising that teens themselves are invisible amid the
ranks of grown men pursuing a fantasy of youth with Dreamcasts,
snowboards and illicit substances. Where does it leave the young
when their youth is no longer their own?
__________
• The year 2000 according to Michael Gogerty, 16
I'll try and get the best grades I can and try to get into technical
college, and do a GNVQ; I don't know what in though. After college,
I'd like to take a year out and travel; I was born in South Africa
so I'd like to see what that's like, then Europe and America, definitely
New York. I'd like to snowblade where it's snowy and skate where
it's warmer. I've thought about so many things I fancy doing and
decided weren't for me. Everyone in my family is clever and there's
a pressure to do as well as them; I'll be the only boy that's isn't
head boy form the last few generations. You feel as if you're letting
it down, but I've had learning prpblems. I've been told by my family
that going into a trade would be good - a lot of the people with
nice cars and houses have been in the trades, and seem to do really
well. You think it's normal to do A-levels and then go to university,
but it doesn't always happen like that. I feel really restricted
that I'm not as clever as I'd like to be, but it's just the way
it goes.
• The year 2000 according to Scott Glover, 16.
At the moment, fixing cars and getting some money would improve
the quality of my life the most. What I wannna do is keep to the
end of school, get sorted out for a work-based training, try and
hang on there for a bit, see how it goes fixing cars, then if that
goes alright, get a job fixing cars and get some money. I think
I've got a good chance of getting a job. I think I'm likely to
break the law as well, driving without a licence or getting caught
on a motorbike. If the police stop you, you get accused of things
you haven't done. I'd like to get a flat with some mates as well,
probably in Arley because there's here's about 15 members of my
family in Arley, so I'd like to stay. It's where I've always lived.
Or down Nuneaton. It does worry me that I'll end up like the criminals
round here, in prison. I mean, I don't want to. It's stupid, thieving
cares, dodgy licences, drugs and all that. You can decide something
for now, but you can't really decide something for the rest of
your life.
• The gap year plans of Charlie Benham, 16
I'll work in a pub or get a job somewhere and in the summer I'm
going to Indo for some surfing - Indonesia, that is - then I'll
go to Barbados to see my friend from the band and stop off in Jamaica
because we often go there as a family, then go to Venezuela to
see a friend, then across to India and Goa and then across to Thailand
and then to Australia where I'll probably do some surfing down
the east coast. Then I'll got to uni somewhere. I'd like to go
to Bristol because a lot of my mates are going to Bristol. And,
I dunno, study graphic design or journalism? But if our band works
out really well and we start composing stuff, maybe sign a record
deal. If it doesn't work out I'd quite like to make some stuff
like LTJ Bukem or Goldie, drum & bass or something like that.
I'm studying art for A-level but I don't want to resign myself
to fine art. I'd definitely want to be an artist, if I had the
guarantee of being really well paid, am worried about finance.
I want to have a secure future.
© Kevin Braddock 2000
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