A play by Trevor Griffiths about a group of four white skinheads, unemployment and violence.  Yes, Neil played a skinhead, called Napper.  They played and sang protest music.  Environment and failure to get work since leaving school made them angry, hard and disillusioned.  Mob violence provided them with looting opportunities.  Produced by Central Television and shown on ITV in 1982.  Originally a stage play at the Royal Court in London - Neil is rumored to have appeared in this, also - does anyone know if that's true??

The below extract is taken from Screen Online - click here for the full page with more details!

Written in response to the riots of the early 1980s, and to a worrying rise in neo-Nazism in the same period, Trevor Griffiths' Oi For England (ITV, tx. 17/4/1982) is arguably as relevant today as it was in 1982.

The 1980s riots, in Bristol, Liverpool, Brixton and elsewhere, had disparate triggers, but all were fuelled by seething anger at mass youth unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, oppressive policing and racism, all of which were blamed on Thatcherite economics.

Set in Moss Side, Manchester - scene of its own riots in July 1981 - Griffiths' play gives voice to this tinderbox of disenfranchised youth in the form of four skinhead would-be musicians, who gather in a dusty basement to vent their frustration in violent, angry songs played on ripped-off instruments: wired, hot-headed Napper (Neil Pearson), gormless Swells (Ian Mercer), Landry (Richard Platt), the eldest and group peacemaker, and quiet, thoughtful Finn (Adam Kotz), the group's singer and songwriter. Calling themselves Ammunition, the band play Oi! music, a raucous skinhead variant of punk frequently associated with neo-Nazism.

The lads' undirected fury makes them easy prey for arch-manipulator The Man (Gavin Richards), who brings news of the race war raging above and offers them the chance to play at a 'skinfest'. But the offer is vetoed by Finn, who alone sees the ugly fascist behind The Man's smooth mask of respectability. Finn, proud of his Irish roots and mindful of his grandfather's stories of the Nazis, is no fascist. The others, however, are far less politically aware.

Napper, justifying his beating and robbing of an Asian worker, complains, "I'm eighteen and I've never 'ad a job in me f***in' life!", and it is his kind The Man is thinking of when he identifies a constituency "sick of being kicked around, ignored, shat on, pushed to the bottom of the midden, up to their necks in brown scum, the diarrhoea their leaders have seen fit to flood this England with." It is a frighteningly potent speech, which Finn's expression of opposition, based on his grandfather's memories of liberating concentration camps, cannot match. In the end, Finn's reaction is articulated without words, as he smashes the band's instruments and, in a cautious alliance with black landlord's daughter Gloria (Lisa Lewis), prepares to take to the streets.

A reworked Oi For England had an afterlife touring youth clubs and community theatres in an attempt to unite working-class audiences against fascism.