The want to fight club

Gentlemen, take note: a guy who’s medium-old and out of shape looks great in a fitted polo tucked into tight jeans. Neither article of clothing ought to be uncomfortably snug, but they must indicate a certain insouciant pride in the wearer’s gut, which will burst from the waistband of his jeans with chutzpah. The key to the look is to treat the belly like a guest of honor rather than an unwelcome one. After all, it’s a working man’s gut, is it not? Don’t you have the right to fill it with beer and sandwiches after a day of hard manual labor, to emphasize its presence with a pair of braces rather than trying to hide it under a shame hoodie?

In related news, early British punk legends Cock Sparrer appeared at the Brooklyn Paramount recently, and they put together one hell of a send-off for what they say will likely be their last New York shows. Prankish Québécois punks Béton Armé opened, along with demonic hardcore behemoths Sheer Terror and the New York-based quintet Disket. The venue overflowed with aging punks, all soigné in their skinhead finest: Levi’s jeans that appeared not so much skinny as tattooed on, and Doc Martens polished to a high gloss. The venue had a coat check, but most of the men opted to keep their leather jackets, the better to show off patches for crews I assumed to be long defunct. Skull tattoos were so sun-faded as to be all but inscrutable. Jewel-toned polos and checkered button-downs in jaunty colors abounded, in a palette reminiscent of a party scene from Gone with the Wind—except in this case the men were the bright and colorful ones, preening exclusively and heterosexually for each other.

The venue’s deep blue-and-red lights gave all those skinheads’ skulls the merry, bauble-like appearance of Christmas ornaments. I’ve never seen so many men in their fifties embracing with that kind of gusto—they all gave each other unselfconscious heroes’ welcomes, with nary a “no homo” in sight. The mood was jolly and collegial, somewhere between an unusually fun union meeting and an unusually masculine pageant. (Not that kind of skinhead, to address the elephant in the room. These guys mostly looked like they’d spent the nineties beating up Nazi punks, not celebrating them.)

My husband Sean and I had a good vantage point on all the peacocking from our post at the front of the room, where I park for all standing-room-only shows because it’s the only way I can see. We arrived within minutes of the doors’ opening and negotiated our way to the barricades that separated stage from audience. One guy in our vicinity stood out the moment I became aware of him. For one thing, he was wearing a red-and-white-checked Ben Sherman button-down that Sean also owns, though my husband has never cared to replace the missing buttons on his and this guy’s was sealed tight up to the throat. He also kept appearing with different mixed drinks, first a clear one, then a brown one, and finally a PBR tallboy which he would eventually huck at the stage in a moment of dumb skinhead exuberance. He had a habit of grabbing his much younger girlfriend in a sort of romantic headlock and slopping kisses onto her mouth. 

As the crew set up for Sheer Terror after a high-octane set from Béton Armé, the guy turned his attention to Sean. “You a Sheer Terror fan?” he asked, his voice full of weird, jovial menace.

“We’re Cock Sparrer fans,” said my husband, putting an arm around me.

“I should’ve guessed from your hair,” the guy said, looking askance at Sean’s long ponytail. He didn’t say any homophobic slurs, but they might as well have been hanging in a visible thought bubble over his head.

Taken aback, Sean burst out laughing. “Dude,” he said pleasantly. “What year is it?”

Nineteen ninety-something, in the guy’s head—whenever the last year was when a skinhead might have beat up a longhair for failing to worship Sheer Terror to a sufficient degree. We’re now deep into ancient punk beefs that are as illegible to me as the beef between, I don’t know, the Scythians and the Medes. In any event, it’s not really in my husband’s nature to laugh in people’s faces, and so he tried to save a sour moment with good cheer. “My head was shaved twenty-five years ago, man! I promise!”

The guy chuckled and clapped Sean on the shoulder, all benevolent condescension. “Hey, I’m sure you’re still tough. We’re still tough.”

The two of them shared some uncomfortable small talk about the Swiftie-level commitment of the skinhead’s Sheer Terror fandom; apparently he’d come down to this show from Ontario. He kept asking my husband which crew he was a part of and whether he approved of the kids at the show who were wearing Ramones shirts when they weren’t even fans of the band, while Sean offered friendly but distant responses that all meant “sir, we are both forty-five years old.” I smiled at the girlfriend and tried for the younger consort’s conspiratorial eye roll: Can you believe these goofy old men of ours? Her face remained impassive. 

The house lights dimmed and Sheer Terror took the stage. “Get out of my way,” the guy said grandly, trying to elbow me aside to claim my spot at the barricade. The space was packed tight, though—he could only wedge in one hip. I glanced around for my husband, but he’d gone to get another beer. (Later, he told me he ran into an old friend at the bar. They chatted for a moment before Sean said, “Well, I have to go find my wife.” The friend whistled. “At a Sheer Terror show? Better go protect her, man.”)

I held my ground. I’m used to wiping all expression from my face while defending my hard-won patch of stage proximity from some encroaching asshole. I am smaller than the average punk miscreant, as well as being the sort of woman that same punk miscreant may believe shouldn’t be at his show. (Meaning: any woman other than his girlfriend or wife, a “coathanger,” as such women were once known in particularly lunkheaded circles.) So I braced myself against my elbows and clenched my arms enough to keep the guy from knocking me out of place, which by then he was trying with great determination to do. Our relative heights were such that every time he thrashed against me, he snagged his armpit hard on my shoulder. 

I was a little amused and a lot annoyed. It had been a very long time since I’d encountered this specific variety of antisocial behavior at a venue; time hadn’t disposed me any more kindly towards it. There is a type of guy who believes his favorite bands put on shows for him specifically, and that it’s his duty to secure the room against interlopers like women and ponytailed men. If he sees a Ramones shirt, he’ll challenge the wearer to list their favorite Ramones songs with the intensity of an officer demanding license and registration. Ordinarily, men age out of this sort of thing with no little embarrassment. But if such a guy doesn’t grow up, thirty-year-old crew rivalries will remain as vivid to him as they were when he was a teen, suggesting he is living a life that is otherwise small and drab. He’s an enforcer, a bean counter, a rules lawyer, and a total fucking drag.

What’s funny about this archetypal guy’s presence at this particular show is that Cock Sparrer, at least, have been outspoken about what a pain in the ass he is. In a recent interview with Spin, guitarist Daryl Smith described the original U.K. punk scene as very tribal and, with all those little crews jockeying for dominance, very violent. That the scene has opened up so much and lost so much of its belligerent edge is a good thing, not a bad one. “The gigs don’t have that air of menace about them anymore,” Smith said in the same interview. “The idiots have gone and it’s left to people that want to have a good time.”

Many of the idiots have gone, it’s true, though some scenes and bands have stubbornly held onto theirs—Hatebreed shows in particular are pilgrimage sites for an especially tiresome variety of he-man, woman-hating neanderthal. But Cock Sparrer, for their part, are a sweet-seeming bunch. Half their early songs are about beating the shit out of people who cross them, it’s true, but onstage in 2026 they’re a passel of good-natured love bugs. Vocalist Colin McFaull introduced one song as a friendship anthem, another as a paean to fatherhood, and both songs got the same gleeful singalong treatment from the audience as their more riot-forward classics.

Part of what made their set so special was the palpably close friendship among the bandmates. It’s just a wonderful thing to be entertained by five men who genuinely love each other, as they have for a half century. In one moment that charmed me, McFaull pretended to offer Smith the mic and then, when Smith opened his mouth to sing, yanked the mic away in a jokey pantomime of prima donna narcissism, making his friend double over with laughter. Any edge they may have lost, they were clearly happy to see go. This band should tour their live show specifically for audiences of men suffering under the loneliness epidemic. In their rowdy, cheeky, unapologetically lovey antics, those insecure men may find an answer.

But back to my nemesis. It was hard to hold a grudge while Sheer Terror sprayed an exhilarating din all over the audience, and I ignored the guy’s elbow in my face as best I could, even when it hit my mouth and pulled my lip open. All I was doing was standing my ground while he repeatedly threw himself against my arm. The band wrapped up a song, and he glared at me. “You don’t have to hurt me, you know,” he said.

“I…what?” I was, at this point, a little frightened of the guy, who seemed drunker than a shit brickhouse. 

“You’re hurting me,” he said, and I was astonished to hear tears in his voice, to see his face squinch into the early stages of a good cry. I couldn’t help it — I burst out laughing. He had fifty pounds on me and at least a head of height, and he’d opened a hole in my face to boot, all of which I’d absorbed stoically. But I was hurting him.

I immediately wished I hadn’t laughed. His face bore the unmistakable wounded, panicked expression of a man who will do anything to keep a woman from making fun of him, and his girlfriend hurried to calm him down. “Hey, babe,” she said. “Don’t beat up the girls! That’s my job! But maybe watch out for her head?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said snottily. “Because I’m sure she’s a real big Sheer Terror fan.”

That was the last he and I spoke—his girlfriend managed to coax him away from me, and from then on I only saw him as a crowd-surfing blur, hurling himself over the barricade again and again with a little boy’s undiminishing delight. Between the stage and the crowd stood a number of crew members whose primary directive, at least that night, was to fireman-carry crowd surfers across the barricade to safety. My enemy kept surfing in the same spot so that the same guy kept scooping up his body and setting him on the floor, the gesture surprisingly tender. I felt jealous that he and his crew member seemed to be forming a bond, grinning at each other, clapping each other on the back. It was the first time in years that I wished I could experience the scene as a man. 

I’m a D.C. punk at heart. Our mascot, if you will, is bossy and irascible Ian MacKaye, who famously banned moshing from his shows. The old heads I know say that punks in Washington slam-danced happily enough until kids from the hoity-toity counties surrounding the city started turning up at shows, bringing with them the same stunted suburban rage one might associate with date rapists. Violence at and around the shows became prevalent, and moshing felt like a catalyst for it. By the time I was coming up, moshing was back, and I certainly caught my share of elbows to the face in those days. But they were accidental elbows, not acts of drunken aggression that stank of misogyny.

I don’t remember the first time I felt any kind of second-class citizen status as a woman at punk shows. I can report, though, that it felt as lousy at thirty-four as it did when I was a teenager, this sense that the big boys in the room think I shouldn’t be there. 

At one ludicrous moment Paul Bearer of Sheer Terror gave a shout-out to “working men and women!” and then made a point of saying, “Where are the working women in the house?” A feminine cheer went up in the room. Triumphant, I tried to make eye contact with my foe, wanting to see what he made of the moment. But he was laughing with another skinhead and didn’t notice. 

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