FABIAN

From "Une vie pour rien ?" n°5-November 2001

Well known by some, unknown by others, Fabian was part of the very first generation of Parisian skinheads (Les Halles). He was one of the first supporters of La Souris Deglinguee and right from the beginning of the 80s, he got involved in quite a few different activities: he sang in Bootboys and wrote most of the band's lyrics, he did quite a lot of security work at rock gigs, before opening up his own shop, Chelsea, with Hooligan, he was one of the first salesmen at London Styl (famous skinhead clothes shop in Paris). He has always been very involved in football and got in charge, in the mid-90s, of the supporter department of his club, PSG. Now he trains kids of a club in the Parisian suburbs. He is now pretty much detached from the scene and looks back on things that happened at the time in a quite objective way (poilitics, aggro...). Fabian is very talkative, "he's got more souvenirs than his jead can contain": we spent two entire evenings at his place doing this interview and if we had to stop, it was only because it was getting very late.

Before starting to tape this, we were talking about La Souris Deglinguee. How did you meet them?

knew them even before they were a band. Since they were from the area they played in Meudon Bas and at the time they especially played old rockabilly tunes. That was before the gig at the Gibus with the skins from Les Halles. That was at the time of their first 7".

Do you have their first 7"?

No, I don't have any collector items because I didn't buy any records during the first ten years. I realised that records were important thanks to Chelsea and I realised that records could cost a lot of money thanks to Eric Saunier. With our money, we preferred to go to gigs and have fun than buy records and, anyway, we saw all the bands quite regularly. I bought the first Clash LP and the first one of the Jam but besides that I didn't have many records. Actually it's quite funny because the "skinhead music" label came at the time of the division with rac music. Before, we listened to rocksteady, punk and then to Sham 69 and the Cockney Rejects which attracted more skinheads than other kinds of people.

There were also the oi! compilations of Sounds, no?

Yes but even in these compilations there were some bands you'd call skinhead bands but there were also kind of hippie bands. Some people also talk about Trojan skins. According to me, that came after 1981. From 1982 on, you'd hear "you're a skin but what kind of skin are you?". To me a skinhead is a skinhead even if he listens to Trojan stuff, to oi! or other stuff. Then you can sometimes say he's not a skinhead but a political militant (for any cause whatsoever) who wears the skinhead gear. When we were skinheads, we only fought against mods and against society. There lied our militancy.

Why against mods?

Because there's always been some kind of rivalry between skinheads and mods. And in most cases, the ordinary skinhead was middle-class or working class whereas the mod came from a higher social class. Then there were the problems with women. With the first mods in Paris, things happened like this : "you're a mod, you're a skin, give me your parka...". Then some modettes started chatting up some young skinheads and some skingirls started going out with some mods. It was getting harder to make trouble for each other. There's also the fact that when you get older, you're not going to get into trouble with kids. One day I was walking in the street and I met two punks who were with their mother. You feel stupid when she says : "Oh, but sir, it's only a fad for them you know". When the London Styl opened, being a skinhead wasn't marginal anymore. We used to go and get the clothes in London and when you met someone wearing a harrington or a Fred Perry, you automatically knew he was part of the same movement as you were. It's pretty much the same nowadays with rap.

How did you meet the first lads from Les Halles (the first skinhead gang in Paris)? How many were you?

Not more than 15 skins and we weren't very often together. We'd often meet at the Gibus or the Rose Bonbon. Then we'd see each other at Les Halles. That was the place where you were sure to meet people you knew at any time of day or night. We can also thank the mods for the parties at the week-end. Since we used to take loads of amphetamines, we used to hang around a lot and we never wanted to stay in the same place all the time. Afterwards, a lot of people started taking harder drugs. They weren't skinheads anymore- they were just junkies who looked like skinheads. After 1981-82, Les Halles didn't exist anymore. I understood that when you went to see a guy with whom you'd done crazy things and he'd say "Wait a second, I've got something to do..." and the thing he had to do was to try to get his next shot...It is not another crew that killed the Halles crew but it is drugs that did it. When the squats liked Les Cascades closed down and Fan died, Les Halles stopped existing.

Do you know how they all became skinheads?

To be honest, I don't know. All of us and me the first were all punks before. In 1977, I had a red mohawk. Afterwards came Reading, Sham 69, the first skins in London and I said to myself that's what I was and that's what represented me the best. There was the way we looked, the image was more aggressive and virulent, there was also the football, the beer, the music and the parties.

And skinheads were more subversive than armchair punks ?

In the early days, bands like Metal Urbain or Stinky Toys were not like that. They only said there was no future and that was it. This is the way I viewed life at the time: for people like us, after school will come unemployment and a hassled-filled life. You're fixing up a shitty world for us to live in so I'm going to look like your shitty world. In the texts or thoughts I wrote at time, you could find that: "I am in the image of the world you're offering me". Filthy, shaggy, safety pins to frighten society and the middle-classes. That way, you could exist, you were not an anonymous person in the crowd. That lasted the time I discovered skinheads existed. To me, the approach was similar to punk but was more masculine and radical. There was also the violent side to it because when you lack of opportunities in life, which tool do you most often use? Violence.

You were talking about rap earlier on. There a quite a few similarities with what you're saying like when you talk about violence as the only means of expression, no?

If I was 17 now, I think I would have been a rapper. You can find the most radicalism and violence when you listen to hardcore rappers. In their lyrics, they put forward the same feeling of being tired with life. Every music style in which people identify themselves by a certain look has to be interesting.

Did you think about that when you used to train the kids from the Clamart football club?

They knew it perfectly. I don't hide nor repudiate anything even though I'm not proud of everything I did. Now I find it easy to say that violence does not resolve everything but the hard thing is to try not to be violent for any reason or the other. These kids who were into rap made me think of myself 15 years ago. If they'd been ordinary French kids, they might have chosen something else. In this case, rap is their way of expressing themselves. In Les Halles, there was one black guy, one Arab, one Jew...We were all skins and the rest was not important.

Actually, the kids didn't understand. One day a kid told me: "You can't be a skinhead, you're not stupid". Or another one told me: "You should take that off your arm, just imagine if someone who doesn't know you sees that!" (skinhead tattoo on his arm). Well if you read that and you judge me, you don't need to know me.

But still, in 1977, you met Sham 69 and the Sham army that a had a pretty right-wing reputation.

Not at the time. The Sham army hardened itself later on at the same time as the general politicisation. OK, there weren't any black skins in the Sham army but most of them listened to reggae. There weren't any splits or political recruitment. For me that started in 1981 when the left wing got into power. You could be white, Arab or half-cast but we were all skins. It's mad to see the difference between what it was like at the beginning and what it all became like.

Even when I got involved in politics, I wasn't a skinhead who was a political militant, I was just an ordinary citizen who spent X number of years in the army, who was asking for a place for his family to live and who didn't get it because he didn't have priority over the others. My son's mother got pregnant when she was 17 and a half, I'd served my country for 5 years and I reckoned I had the right to have a place to live. Since I wasn't in the top-list to have a home, I tried to find some help. At the time, I found someone who said "French people first". I found it natural to get involved, not against foreigners, but against the people in power. At that time, I had the chance to do back-up vocals for La Souris Deglinguee and they didn't find any better idea than to make me sing "We're all foreigners". It was a good way of cocking a snook at some people and to show that there is a right to be different and to respect others. If you make generalities, you miss a lot of things and, being in Les Halles, I got the chance to think differently than many skins who thought this way: "I don't like blacks so I'm skinhead". That's what bothered me the most with what happened later on.

To me, being a skinhead never was a political or racial involvement on the contrary to what happened afterwards. The media said it was like that and some skinheads showed it that way too. It's a bit like if some people who wear a suit and tie share the same ideas, you'd say that everyone who's got a same particular look shares the same values and ideas. The most shocking and provocative attitudes were shown and the people who thought they were handling the media perfectly did more wrong than right. They took the excuse of having a certain look. All fascists are not skinheads, all skinheads are not fascists. My opinion is that in England, all the English people are proud to be English even if they're black. When there were racial problems in England, the blacks and Pakistanis put forward their desire to be fully considered as Englishmen. That's a huge difference with the French mentality.

Do you believe like Tai-Luc ( La Souris Deglinguee singer) that being a skinhead is an English thing?

Yes. I used to go to London every time I could. We were skinheads in France because we didn't have the time and the money to go to London. All the first French skinheads once lived in squats in London.

How come all the French people ended up in the same squat?

When you go to London with a few mates of yours and you open up a squat, you open it up with French people. Actually the French who were there weren't all Parisians, there were some people from Aix en Provence, from Marseilles, there were some punks. There was no skin-punk rivalry like there was later on. The enemies were the mods, not foreigners or anyone else.

How did things go with the English?

For the English, French skinheads didn't exist. They didn't understand you being a French skin especially if you supported an English club. They thought you were mad. Then the problem was that some people went to gigs like they'd go to the movies, the movement got harder and the anti-French feeling increased. Sometimes we were a bit ashamed when we saw these bunches of French tourists arrive in London. That happened to me in the London Underground, I was with another French skinhead who, by the way, is a famous reggae singer now. We used to wear clothes skins used to wear at the time, Sta-Press, Fred Perry, Ben Sherman, sheep-skin, donkey jacket (bomber jackets didn't exist). Tourists couldn't see we were French. We were used to hearing stupid comments and not very clever jokes and then we'd tell them in French: "You prick...", "Oh, you're French, just like us", "No, we've got nothing in common with you". That's exactly what they shouldn't have said. Then we'd laugh about it and wait for the summer when the tourists arrived. We were in the same state of mind and had the same way of life as English skins but when there were ten of us Frenchmen in London, we stayed together and didn't really go towards the natives. I only met the Business later on thanks to Eric Saunier who lived over there.

You have to be interested in the English culture. It's a bit strange to be a skinhead and not like football...It's like only being interested by the rac scene- that's not being a skinhead, that's being a national-socialist militant, a bonehead. It's also like being a redskin because you're into politics above all- that's not being a skinhead. Even when I got involved into politics, I especially didn't do it as a skin. I believe the political involvement of quite a few skins was detrimental to the cause they were defending.

That's what happened with the Front National which very soon wanted to separate itself from skinheads.

Yes, for the good and simple reason that skinheads are hard to handle, that you can spot them from far away and that it's a movement that's not conformist enough compared to the political ambitions the FN had at the time. But a lot of skinheads or young people who looked like that were their first "soldiers". When the rac scene arose and the movement got more extreme, I asked myself if I should change my look but I said to myself that I was there first and that if some people should quit, it wouldn't be me. I wasn't going to change the way I looked because some people put forward ideas that weren't mine. I've always thought that being a skinhead is not about being fascist or anti-fascist. That's a stupid way of thinking! The London Styl was a good thing because you didn't have to go to London anymore but the bad thing was that the movement opened itself to a wide range of people. It almost became fashionable. I believe you've got to live it for yourself and that there's something wrong when you start living it for others.

To me, there's two ways of looking at things. Being different from ordinary people or trying to look like others.

Yes, you're not going to be a skin to look like someone else. In the early days, it was so simple, there were so few of us that we obviously had quite a few common points. You were a skin because you wanted to live differently than the way society wanted you to live, because you were anti-establishment and because you rejected the values they wanted to force down your throat. Now the skinhead movement is so various that I'm not sure I'd have much in common with someone who looks like a skin. And when you see the way the media portray the movement, it's not very flattering to call yourself a skinhead nowadays.

But the aim never really was to give a good image of skinheads. Just look at what you were saying about the yobs from Les Halles.

To belong to Les Halles, you didn't necessarily have to be the best or the strongest, you had to be proud of what you were. You had to be ready to defend your colours on your own. People were integrated to the crew because they took pride in what they were as individuals. Afterwards people grouped themselves like in crews nowadays, there's two or three leaders and the rest follow but when they're on their own, they're not capable of standing up to what they're trying to be. I've always hated guys who shut up when they're alone and come and pick on you when they're with five or six mates. If someone from Les Halles acted like that, he'd be the one who would get beaten up. Then the image of skinheads changed: "They're tough when they're in a group". Farid from Les Halles who was not really big or anything always used to say that "the guy who deserves respect is not the strongest but is the one who's not scared of giving nor taking". I've seen some guys say: "you're going to take my harrington because you're twice as big as me but I'm not going to give it to you, I'm going to defend myself". I've got more respect for someone who says that than for someone who lifts weights four hours a day. You'll never be able to make that person change.

Is a skinhead necessarily a troublemaker?

Being a skin isn't necessarily being a troublemaker, that's being a hooligan but you can be a skinhead and a hooligan. Skinheads have got an image of troublemakers, lager louts and of having as much brains as they've got hair. Some are like that but some also use their brains in a good way and some even use their brains to think for others. Now you can choose who fits which category.

Now, there's quite a few skinheads that are into techno and that seems pretty logical to me. When you've been in a movement in which rivalry and balance of power are so important, you feel like having fun. When you're a skinhead you either create trouble or get into trouble so one day or the other you get fed up with all that. There's too much rivalry for some people. Being feared is easy but being respected is far more difficult. Some say that you've got to prove yourself but it's easy to prove yourself in certain occasions, the only true people are the ones that last a long time. I'm still good mates with people I've known for 20 years even though we might have changed and be different now but the thing is we respect each others changes. Some people decided that since I wasn't like them anymore, I didn't belong to their scene anymore. That isn't really a bad thing because I wouldn't like to be the same as I was 20 years ago. The Business gig the other day was, for me, like a pilgrimage. I enjoyed myself very much but 20 years ago I would have joined in the fight (Business gig at La Peniche in Paris). What would have I gained from that? It would have made people talk about me because you exist through what people say about you. There's some people I enjoy seeing and hanging out with but I couldn't care less about some others.

Let's get back to the English. There was a Jam gig in Paris where there were a lot of English supporters. The same happened for Madness.

I wasn't there when the Jam played in Paris but some mates of mine got a good hiding and that day, a 2 CV that belonged to a skinhead from our crew got burnt. Not only were there all the French mods who were trying to have a go at us but the English also were and they're not always easy targets. There was a whole contingent of hard mods who could fight back easily. Bad day- I was happy not to be there or else I guess I would have improved on my foot racing.

It's quite the same with their football clubs: when the English love something, they've got no limits, it's their way of life…Madness or the Jam had their crew that would follow them wherever they went. It's like an English football fan who follows his team everywhere- only the English are like that. When there are 200 Frenchmen, there'll be 2000 Englishmen. The English bands always had a following.

And every time there was trouble?

The thing is that the English in France, always feel superior and when there's a lot of them, you have to be able to fight back. It's like for France-England, we can't say that things went too well for us: my brother got hit by an axe, one very good mate of La Souris Deglinguee got hurt by a razor blade. Some English ones also got hurt and actually, I had some English mates on the other side. It's a bit like if West Ham played over in France- if things went bad I'd have trouble taking sides.

For the France-England game, were you waiting for the English at Gare du Nord?

No, I talked to some English friends on the phone and I knew that there was going to be a lot of them coming over to prove, amongst other things, that they were the best- at that time, Parisian hooliganism was gaining more and more importance. It is one of the only times there was a truce between the different crews. We all agreed, be it the lads from Les Halles, Tolbiac or Bonsergent that the common enemy was the English and we had to kick him out of our territory. Because of our lack of experience, we only committed one mistake and this mistake was to meet at the Porte de St Cloud when the English were already there. We had decided to meet two hours before the game but the English had been waiting since the morning. They had plenty of time to group themselves while we arrived in small groups. At that time, I worked at Voek Structure which was the only place where you could get metal bars so I put quite a few of these tools in the boot of my car for everyone to take advantage of them. When we arrived, we parked our cars further away and we charged- actually, that was shown on TV later on. The only problem was that all the different crews were supposed to meet each other but we never did and since the English were all over the place, everyone had problems on their own side. I ended up in front of the Terminus (a bar that still exists) charging at the English, they formed a semi-circle so we tried to go backwards but realised there were only 6 of us. They all attacked us at the same time, the first one got badly hurt, the second a bit less and the third caught me, I threw my bar away and cleared off! I tried to find a place to hide and that place was underneath the pinball machine of the bar but the owner very gently told me to leave his bar since they were going to smash everything because of me. He came back with one of his dogs and I had to make the choice between the dogs and the English...I chose the dogs!

Then we got into the stadium and at the time, you wouldn't get searched like you would now so I managed to get in with stuff that would help me not get hurt. The English were already in the stadium (upper Boulogne) so we had to kick them out and that created more clashes. Then most of the English ended up on the lower level. The police officers viewed the whole thing in a funny kind of way : "If they come up, we'll be with you having a go at them but it's your problem if you go down". On the lower level, there were 500 of them and some French lads, a few hooligans and skinheads, still decided to go down and got caught at the bottom of the stairs. My brother, who was part of that lot, got hit by a fire alarm hatchet (it's after this game that the first security measures were taken at the Parc des Princes because there had never been any problems as big as that before). Anyway, I didn't see the game, I only had the time to hear the Marseillaise and right after that I went to the hospital where some Englishmen were waiting for us. They were in the same situation as us- some of them were wounded but they were escorted by some of their mates that weren't hurt- so we continued fighting in the casualty service. It was quite mad up to the intervention of the police.

After that I got back into the Parc des Princes where things had calmed down and then with a few friends we went to Gare du Nord. We met a group of five Englishmen with whom we had a little punch-up before seeing 2 pubs full of Englishmen try to get us...

It is quite a memorable day since that was shown on TV channels all over the world (sometimes even with the music of "A Clockwork Orange" in the background) in which we can see "Mister Media" at work. We've got to admit that, at least, he went into the lion's den. We've also got to admit things like going down to fight against the English, knowing there was a lot of them, was both unconscious and courageous.

How did you end up working for PSG?

The reason I accepted this job for PSG was that I didn't accept cowards being violent for no reason at all. It's logical to fight with hooligans and people who are like you or who are against you but to attack a father and his kid who are in the Boulogne stand by mistake is another story. I've seen stuff like that happen and I cannot stand that. My son goes to the Parc des Princes to watch a football game, nothing more nothing less, so I wouldn't like him to get hassled by any hooligan. When I started that job, I was like a child saying to himself "It's the club I support, I'm going to meet the players...". Then I realised that the players are just human beings, that some deserve to be smacked on the face or have got no brains whatsoever and that the only thing the managers are interested in is making money. They don't care about the ordinary supporter. They're selling a show so it's a problem for them when a kid who's really into it doesn't act like they'd want him to. There was a clash between me and them when I refused to help the RG (French Political Security Police) and do the cops' job. When I see what it all became like, I don't regret having quit. To me, it was just a waste of time.

The managers didn't learn anything from that experience.

They'll never change. I once wrote a text called " Everybody should stay in their own place". The supporter's role is not to make money for the club, he should just be proud of wearing his colours on the terraces. The player on the field and the manager in the stands should not be ready to sell their soul for more money. Micky told me that "when you follow West Ham away, whatever the result is, the players will always come and thank you".

Is that the first team you went to see in London?

No, even if it means destroying the myth, when we used to go to London at the beginning, we went to see Tottenham. We then went to see West Ham because of the Cockney Rejects and the Business.

Talking about how football has changed, we're more and more going towards managers only being interested in money and players who don't care about the crowd. A player like Le Guen doesn't understand why people are going mad in the stands but you can't understand when you've never been a fan. The English respect the fans and so do the French ones who are playing in England.

Not Anelka...

Anelka doesn't respect anyone and I don't even know if he's got any respect for himself.

How did you end up doing security work with Sergio and the others?

I met Gerald from Rock a l'usine in the autonomous squats where we used to go to at the time of Les Halles even if some of us were very different.

At the time, a lot of people of people used to say: "Fabian is a skinhead, he's right-wing and he does security work for left-wing bands".

That happened when I got a security job for Berurier Noir. There was a festival in Lisieux where people were talking about the fact I was a bouncer over there. Anyway, everyone agreed that there was no problem if I worked there, they all knew I was working there but they seemed surprise in front of their mates. Anyway, the singer used to come to Chelsea. I work as a security guard not as a political militant, I worked for rap bands and that's far more difficult. There were plenty of different kinds of people working as security guards- that would avoid people taking sides. Every time I had the most problems it was with skinheads at techno nights. I had to tell them that they couldn't do what they wanted to because I was working there, that they were not on home-ground.

At a Berurier Noir gig in Cherbourg, some guy came to me and said: "there's someone with a French flag on his jacket, you've got to make him take it off". I've got one tattooed so what can I do about it? Of course, I don't show it or try to be provocative. But if someone hits you, that's not going to make you change. I was telling an Arab friend of mine that it's him who makes me see things differently or people like Sergio, not guys who'll beat me up. I've got three cult movies. The first one is American History X because it sums up perfectly what the movement's all about: some people are hard and uncompromising, some try to be like that but are not capable of standing up to that and some don't fit with the image they're trying to have, you can see that there is a huge difference between what they say and what they do. Besides going to jail, my story's about the same. The second film is Braveheart which is about following your ideas through. Some friends betrayed me for money and gave me away to the PSG management telling them I was on the supporters' side. That was true. It's not because I was well paid that I was going to repudiate my own opinions. I could not accept what they wanted to do to Boulogne and its fans. I didn't mind working for PSG even if I didn't agree on everything with them, but it was impossible for me to continue working with them when they started asking me to denounce guys in the interest of the club. The last film is The Wall because I played in it as an extra and because of the context of gigs and drugs. When you're into that and you endanger the lives of people you love, you just quit.