★★★★★ A documentary by Tahnaiya Russell that confronts violence, duality, and the contradictions inside a man who embodied both brutality and vulnerability.
This documentary on Nicky Crane is, in my view, both fair and engaging. Nicky Crane was a violent British neo‑Nazi skinhead who became well-known after appearing on the cover of Strength Thru Oi, the 1981 compilation album put together by Garry Bushell and released on Decca. It neither sensationalises nor sanitises. It presents the violence plainly, but it also acknowledges the complexity of a man who lived two contradictory lives with an intensity that few people ever experience.
I knew Nicky Crane a little in the 80s through the late Ian Stuart of Skrewdriver, the most successful Skinhead band of all time. I knew Ian mainly through my involvement in one of his record labels, White Noise Records. The film’s portrayal of Crane as capable of extreme violence is accurate. His record speaks for itself. The transcript recounts how he “led a mob of around 200 skins who went on a rampage through Brick Lane… kicking and punching South Asians whilst chanting racist slogans,” and how he later “organized around 100 skins to ambush black people lining up for the movies at the Woolwich Odeon.” These were not abstract political acts; they were brutal, unprovoked physical confrontations. At the time, Nicky Crane, was a member of the openly Nazi British Movement.
But the documentary also captures something that many people outside those circles never saw: the duality. One interviewee describes meeting him and being shocked that “he was really camp… he had a really quiet effeminate voice.” That aligns with my own experience. I had conversations with him where he displayed an artistic, sensitive side. His thinking was odd — distorted, certainly — but not simplistic. The film’s reference to his attraction to “power and symbols of power” is telling. That was very much how he framed things: not ideological in any coherent sense, but symbolic, almost mythic.
The documentary is right to highlight that Crane’s sexuality was not the open secret some now imagine. It notes that “rumors of Nikki Crane’s sexuality began spreading around the early 1980s,” and that Searchlight eventually “outed” him by pointing out that “on Thursday nights, he can be found at the Heaven disco.” Heaven is, and was, a well known gay venue. At the time social media didn’t exist so rumours spread more slowly. I was aware of his homosexuality — or possible bisexuality — because he attended NF meetings in the company of what appeared to be boyfriends or girlfriends. As Joseph Pearce says in the film, “there were lots of homosexuals in the National Front… it was a whole subculture within the NF.” That is true. Martin Webster was openly gay. It was not considered a problem by the vast majority of NF members aware of it.
Ian Stuart commented after Crane’s death that homosexuality and nationalisim are incompatible. I don’t understand Ian Stuart’s view. People’s sexuality is their own business, and they are free to express it, and history is full of examples of gay men and women who loved their country and, indeed, fought for it. I don’t even understand on what basis Stuart concluded his view, he never discussed it with me and, in fact, never made negative comments about gays to me. He did complain after I arranged for him to record at a major studio that the gay technicians were eyeing him up and it made him uncomfortable! I told him he should take it as a form of flattery and that he was lucky he was allowed at such a prestigious venue and that they had no problem doing the job.
That being said there were people within the National Front, and even more so on the Nazi fringes, that had a real problem with homosexuality. I was criticised heavily for giving an interview to a mens magazine where I said the age of consent should be equalised and also appearing on the ‘Out’ documentary which discussed why some gay people were attracted to the Skinhead image. I am glad that though there are many aspects of my youth I’ve questioned since, expressing support for gay rights isn’t one of them.
Crane was attacked at a nationalist skinhead night at a club in Soho showing how real the hostility to gays was. I recall that incident. I was drinking with Stuart when it happened. During the attack I asked Ian whether I should send my bodyguards (which I had because of my public profile at the time) to intervene. He told me not to get involved because it was over allegations of Nicky being gay. As it happened, the fight ended in a kind of draw before I could decide what to do. Nicky was tough and gave as good as he got. Stuart said vehemently that he didn’t want to discuss it when I asked him about it.
Years later, after his AIDS diagnosis, I bumped into Nicky at Piccadilly Circus. He was a shadow of his former self — physically diminished, emotionally withdrawn. I asked him if there was any way I could help him, but he told me he just wanted to be left alone. I think that even seeing someone from his past, albeit someone he didn’t know well, disturbed him. Among some of his former associates there had been speculation that Nicky had come out and distanced himself from his former politics because he was weakened and vulnerable from the disease, and knew he might be reliant on people who would otherwise be unsympathetic. Whether that is true or not, I cannot say. But the encounter upset me and stayed with me.
One thing the documentary touches on indirectly, but could have made more explicit, is the anti‑gay mass culture of the time. Some of the headlines shown reminded me of how hostile the media was. Private Eye, under Richard Ingrams, routinely referred to gay people as “sads”. The documentary showed the negative reaction to the first gay kiss in the UK Soap ‘Eastenders’. This was a period when gay men were demonised, mocked, and blamed for AIDS. Racism was rife. That wider cultural hostility fed into the mindset of those who attacked gays and ethnic minorities. The documentary shows the violence, but it doesn’t fully connect it to the broader social climate that normalised and encouraged it. Joe Pearce mentioned and apologised for the Young National Fron publication ‘Bulldog’ (which he edited when younger). It was not far removed from the tabloid press, like the Sun newspaper in many ways, even having a kind of Sun style Page 3 featuring National Front girls (although not topless like the Sun!).
Another small criticism I would make is that the film only briefly addresses how the ‘Left’, like the mass media at the time, also used sexuality as a weapon. Searchlight “outed” Crane not out of concern for gay rights but as a tactic. Outing someone in that era was dangerous. It could get them beaten, ostracised, or killed. Crane’s sexuality was used as ammunition in a political conflict. The documentary hints at this but doesn’t interrogate it. Of course Searchlight would likely have justified this on tactical grounds using a means to an end argument that Crane was a violent leader who needed to be neutralised. A murky moral worldview which mirrors some of the arguments of the ‘far right’.
Still, the film succeeds in showing the contradictions: the man who proclaimed “Adolf Hitler is my god,” yet spent nights “walking friends to bus stops so they could get home safely” from Heaven; the violent street fighter who became “a regular himself, deeply embedding himself in the gay scene”; the poster boy for racist violence who appeared in a Psychic TV video at Piccadilly Circus, framed almost as a rent boy.
A final point: a lot of hard research has gone into this documentary. I learned things I never knew — details of incidents, personal accounts, and contextual history that were not widely circulated at the time. It made me think more about my own attitudes to violence when I was younger. It is a fascinating documentary, not because it excuses Crane, but because it refuses to flatten him. It shows the brutality, the delusion, the insecurity, the sexuality, the need to feel powerful, the need for belonging, and the strange, contradictory humanity inside someone who caused real harm.
By Pat Harrington
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Scorcha! Skins, Suedes and Style from the Streets 1967-1973
