Sharpies and Mods - Melbourne 1966
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ส.ค. 2024
- An excerpt from the Australian 1966 ABC TV 'Four Corners' programme episode "Go-Go Where?", looking at the youth culture of Melbourne. In this excerpt the Sharpies and the Mods are featured.
Discotheques need to employ bouncers because of brawls that happen between the Sharpies and the Mods. A teenage mod is interviewed about the fights between the Sharpies and the Mods. Sharpies are kept out of teenage discotheques and dances. Sharpies usually wait outside the dances in the dark to pick fights with the mods. A Sharpie is interviewed about how they feel towards the mods and their fights with the Mods.
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The Sharpies were around from the mid 60's into the early 70's.
Remember in the mid 60's a gang of Sharps started to pick on a few of us outside a dance. My brother was a Rocker, and I saw a mate of his car across the road at the hamburger shop and I went in and got them. The Rockers grabbed a few tyre levers from the back of the Ford Customline, and you should have seen the Sharpies run!
I was a mod in Box Hill in 1966 went to disco's at the Whitehorse Town Hall. They were similar to British mods I had my shoes hand made with an italian shoe maker and my trousers made at Alexanders Tailors in Box Hill. We also went to the ten pin bowling alley and drive in movies.The best knitwear was made by crestknit and was fantastic quality and great to wear.Happy days for me anyway.
I really like the designs on those cardigans the sharpies wore really smart I was a mod in the uk in the early 80s watched a few documentaries about the sharpies they seem like a tough bunch good clothes though
Got my shoes from Cosmano and Acropolis in Collingwood. I was an apprentice plumber and it was 2 weeks wages for a pair of those shoes and were hand made in the shops there. Crestknits were great and Maroon cardigans as well, flag 12 inch pants.The girls were called brushes and wore pleated skirts etc lol.But these videos show Sharps as kids and dirty tattooed toothless clowns when in fact they were opposite and looked immaculate when they went out. Clean, perfect clothes, short hair no mustaches or beards clean shaven . Exact opposite than being shown.
@@gregfowler957 Hi Greg I believe I was wrong to label myself as a Sharpie I was like you a mod from UK being 15 at the time.
@@abwm2365 Do you know the Van Morrison song, "Cleaning windows"? Not that you were cleaning windows, but what you wrote reminds me of that, a working-man in his prime.
This footage is gold. The sharpies and the mods (in this footage) both dressed very smart. You can't imagine many of the youth today dressing as well. Thanks for posting.
Agree.
But the fighting still happens, either stabbed, bruised up the works.
Fukin eshays kids.
And bloody boomers also on that stupid one sided affairs that plays like a fucking record.
Youths this youths that.
Turned just as square as the oldies of the 60s. Embarrassing
Couldn’t get any more sharpie than Sunshine in the 70’s
Have to love Y/T You learn some thing all the time, I never knew Mods were in OZ during the sixties
By the time the name 'mod' arrived to Australia it was associated with the 'Swinging London' look and therefore did not appeal to the harder kids. So they differentiated themselves from the 'mods' by calling themselves 'Sharps' and developing their own look, dances and lifestyle. The original British Skinheads were mods that rebelled against the 'Sgt Pepper's' look and developed their own style.
Full doconentary on Yourube . ABC TV show , Four corners "Go Go Where"
remember, In the UK in 1966 the skinhead movement was in its infancy and was an offshoot of the Mod Movement developing a harder edge, anyway this is unfortunatly the nature of the unwritten history of Australia and that we always considered ourselves inferior in cultural terms, my observation is that later sharps were a mirror of the skinhead movement in the Uk. However if you study the Sharps in the video there are some similarities, im going to study this.
Chopper Read rated them Sharpies. Dennis Allen the maniac was one too.
Chris Flannery, the Kayne brothers, Chopper, you name any top crim in the day they were all sharpies out of Collingwood, Fitzroy Brunswick etc. The heavy working class, poor areas. The commission areas like Creveilli Street in Preston, Allen and that crew were spawned out of the housing commission of West Heilderg another fearsome area. For those that say they would get eaten alive to day they dont realise you couldnt go into or drive through those areas at night and day without getting a beating of them if you didn't belong there. Brutal.. All were sharpie.
These aren’t what the real sharpies looked like. Real sharpies wore polo shirts and tight fine knit sweaters and baggy , tailored, pants called ‘ flags’.
Especially the Sharpies in Sydney.
Wasn't that the 70's sharpies?
Way to early for sharpies I was 8 for this ..14 for the real ones in Melbourne.. skinheads were earlier
Where..not here..not a polo shirt unless it was sixties
@RobMackenzie Yes ABC archives still hold a lot of the old pop music programmes in their archives. If you are prepared to pay for them you can get copies. Contact ABC Library sales
This isnt the way the widgies and bogies dance we did the rock and roll with partners
wow never knew this stuff sharpies eh I guess the same as the casuals in London in the early 80's and us mods used to pummel em
This is the first time I've heard of sharpies (I'm from the UK). To be honest they looked a bit similar to mods from what I could see. We know that mods were into black American soul music, Jamaican ska and British bands like the Who, the Kinks and the (early) Rolling Stones. I'd be interested to know what music sharpies were into.
I noticed that the narrator said "mods have long hair", but mods were known for having short and neat hair. Maybe Australian mods were a bit different from the British version.
i wasn't around for all this, born in 1968, but from what i can gather they were into local rock bands they could see at local venues around Melbourne.
those early rock bands were the forerunners of what became known as 'Aussie pub rock'(one of the worlds great music genres), bands that cut their teeth playing gritty city and suburban pubs in the late 70's, early 80's.
some of those bands made it big worldwide(INXS, AC/DC), but most just famous in Australia(Cold Chisel, Rose Tattoo, the Radiators, the Angels, Hoodoo Gurus, Australian Crawl, Dragon, The Divinyls, Richard Clapton, the Sunnyboys, Midnight Oil and dozens of others).
it wasn't till the early 80's that British subcultures like mods, punks, skins, rude boys etc became really visible because of few bands and alternative import record shops before that.
my favourite genre, ska music, had bands in Sydney and Melbourne come and go within a few short years and none of them were anywhere near as good as the British 2-Tone era bands.
Sharpies were into pub rock. Think bands like Coloured Balls.
so much for the good old days
The sharpies were so uncouth and the mods extremely refined.
Sharpie - Fried egs and unsmoked bacon! 😂
Mod - Poached eggs and smoked bacon!
Ya see the difference?
Sharpies were savages…
@RobMackenzie The entire 1/2 hour doco is available on my youtube channel, search for " ABC TV 'Four Corners' (1966) "Go-Go Where?" "
I had nothing to do with its production. It came from the ABC archives.
What were the gangs back than? Mods, Sharpies, than what are the others? I’m from America so I don’t know.
Actually i think we had our left ear pierced, i got mixed up in my comment. it was a while back, somewhere back in the fog. So to your question we had our left ear pierced around the early/mid 70s. Gotta admit though i loved growing up back then, we were fairly free and wild, motorcycles at 16 yrs old, gun license at 15 yrs old, i had shotguns, military auto weapons all to shoot some cans behind the golf course next to the airport. Imagine trying that today in our nanny states
Then a few years later the mods and sharpies joined forces and became “the shods.”
Oh I think you’re getting confused with Morpies!
😂🤣💀
There was another group - those that followed the jazz bands who were called 'jazzers' - often bumped heads with the rockers and others .. a very diverse time .. but a lot more innocent than today ..
Wow. This is sounding pretty cool. So you were in this band singin on the bridge thingo???!!! The MOds and The Sharpies.....how bloody mad and super simple...
G’day guys watching this for school, GAZMO here.
I was a sharpie In the 70's around Clayton in melbourne. Platform shoe's tite black pants miller shirt cardigan and a ring in the left ear. It was a rebellion against normality. I don't remember fighting much. Butt i do remember it being non racist and accepting of people with disabilities. I got set strait for breaking those rule's.
I read somwere that australia In the 1970s was a violent dangerous place I was surprised I always imagined it to be laid back and friendly 😚
Greg Fowler, most of Australia is and was laid back, but there are always subcultures who enjoy a good stoush.
Yeah, there were fistfights in the 50s, 60s and 70s, because there were a lot of macho blokes around. But people generally weren't killed, and that sort of thing....
If you look for trouble you can always find it, no matter what time or place.
I don't know whether you had to be in Melbourne in the late 60's to know about sharpies but I can tell you they were real enough - and a bunch of thugs.
The mods (in Melbourne anyway) were just part of the wider teenage culture - Beatles Stones etc and you could be labelled a mod without intentionally being one. They were different from the UK mods and didn't ride Vespas covered in rear-vision mirrors etc. If you can google a 60's photo of Ronnie Burns in a suit, that's pretty much the epitome of what a mod looked like - boy-mod anyway but, as I say, you didn't have to be a mod to dress like that.
The sharpies on the other hand were intentionally identifiable. They were desperate to be different so, to be different, all of them wore black or dark blue pin-striped baggy trousers (when stove-pipe trousers were in fashion), sandals and socks and always some maroon - usually vests. They either had crew cuts or grew a bit at the back like a mullet. The girls dressed the same as the boys but their hair was usually longer, but not always. From my experience most if not all of them lacked self esteem and hated the world. They were into head-banging music like Status Quo and for some reason were fond of Lobby Lloyd which is mildly surprising as he was a great guitarist.
When the skinhead thing arrived, they were mostly ex-sharpies that morphed into that new and even edgier subculture. Much later, punks became more of the leaders in anti pop culture, they differed markedly from groups such as sharpies and skinheads in that they didn't go looking for fights and didn't share one brain.
At the same time as the mods and sharpies there were also dying remnants of the rockers, many of whom rode Triumph motorcycles and had unfashionably greasy hair (and were generally older) and a lesser known group called jazzers who had all the brains that had been removed from the sharpies (or thought they had) along with a mortgage on good taste. They hung out at the very few coffee shops and, as far as electric music went, could barely cope with a microphone, if that. The Loved Ones were initially part of that culture but started to wonder why nobody listened to their music so they switched to Rock/Pop and nailed many lesser bands (or "groups" as they were then) to the wall. Does this mean they were smart because they were jazzers or smart because they left?
Cheers for the insight there, fascinating stuff.
strikalite I thought Australian and British mods would be identical, even down to the Vespa or Lambretta. I thought Sharpies would be more into soul and reggae, especially if they became skinheads.
strikalite A great insight.Thank you
sharpies werent tough one on one, not at all. only when there a bunch together they suddenly got brave..sharpie girls were tougher than the blokes probably
@@mylillambs Those were the first rock and roll kind of culture I believe in the 50s , they dressed loudly and different too but in suits and stuff.
could be just me but ur sharpies looked like mods..and mods looked like bikers..its all upsidedown ma dingos...lol
The Sharpies...the predecessor to the bogan...
And then the bogan became the predecessor to the eshay
@@larismitani1009 🤣 very true
@RobMackenzie I guess you missed Four Corners in 1966!
I remember going to school with the kids of these sharpies who had the same mentality. Couldn't fight unless they were in packs and were just low lifes. Real winners they turned out to be too lol
to me the point of dancing is not to look cool or impress anybody the point is to have fun and enjoy yourself. you may not be particularly "good at it" so what yer havin' fun and these people look like they're really enjoying themselves very cool.
plus it's in oz so most are probably drunk.
Oh yeah!!
can someone tell me who the presenter was for this episode?
Hi Zippy, yes I am guilty of that
Hi, are you the Rob Mackenzie of (among other things) Mackenzie Theory?
What about the floggers ?
All those things you mentioned is exactly how i grew up. Crackers slug guns etc. When i turned 15 my dad took me to the Gelenelg cop shop and i got my gun license. He then took me to Fisher Firearms and bought me a 44 magnum lever action rifle for pig shooting. When i turned 16 he bought me a 30.06 for goat shooting in the Flinders. I also had mini bikes, YZ80s and then 125s. We had such a great up bringing compared to the geeky wimpy kids of today
fun with fire crackers , slug guns , mini bikes , building underground cubby houses , cubby houses in trees , seeing where storm water drains ended up , all good fun . soft kids of today , take there I-pod thing and mobile of em , wouldnt know what to do . even these guys on this video , settled their beefs with there fists , no gettin stabbed , king-hit from behind when youre not looking ....
Is the band the Loved Ones ?
No...Purple Hearts...
shake it baby !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#Mod v #suededhead downunder in '66? weird OZ subculture. worth a peek
Daddy cool
Do they get everything down under backwards ???
on erew ytterp lamron.
@@michaelearthling ok lol
They may dress smart but look at that "dancing"! Lol
Thugs vs thugs
Must've been before sharpies were infused with the skinhead look from the ten pound poms, and before the harder mullet rocker thing began to brew in their subculture before blooming into the 80's bogan rocker ACDC rose tattoo thing.
Wow..you need to learn timelines. And the 80s was the death of rock and roll..bogan were 90s
And 10 pound poms were after ww2..google it
Lol ha ha
They all look the same. All wearing cardigans- so heavy! I wouldn’t survive obviously.
So picking fights for nothing
I'm from Adelaide and remember around 1972 all these sharpies came over from Melbourne and came to Hindley st where all the Hindley street rockers were full time. The sharpies cruised down the street and the rockers saw them and attacked, They were dragged out of their cars and flogged severely. their cars were stolen and thrashed and crashed and a couple of their chicks were gang banged. Ahh the good old days in Oz, when aussie men were men
“A couple of their chicks were gang banged” Well that’s something to brag about.
@@cycologist7069 Whose bragging, it happened. Are you one of these sensitive types who get upset at hearing about shit from the past?
What confuses me is that the Sharpies I remember were virtually skinheads. These guys in this video look like Mods with shorter hair.
Not skin heads just short hair cuts.
the original skinheads in england came out of so called "hard mods" which were more working class, agressive, had shorter hair and didn´t like swinging london, psychedelia, folk and "intellectual" things
This is mid 60s. Different.
Rockers and Mods....The selfish Baby Boomers of today
Sharpies, definition American Democrats,just sayin'