The UK Kung Fu Boom Part 1.

A look at the worldwide martial arts explosion that happened in the 1970’s, told from a distinct UK perspective.

The 1970’s in the UK experienced an unprecedented cultural spike; something weird happened and it was no flash in the pan, it went on much longer than expected. While other fads came and went this one lodged itself in the national psyche and wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It went ‘viral’ before we understood what ‘viral’ even meant, and with no help from the Internet (for obvious reasons). This was the Kung Fu boom.

I am going to look at this from a UK perspective, mainly because I lived through it and its influence on me was clearly going to be a significant one.

Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter the Dragon’ was released in the UK in January 1974. This was the same year that I started karate training as a sixteen-year-old, but that was just a coincidence. I didn’t actually see the movie till maybe a year later. I think the first inkling of it on my consciousness was the jokers who thought it was funny to make chicken squawk sounds, imitating Bruce Lee’s strangled high-pitch ‘kiai’, if we dare call it that. It is strange how long it took for the trope to become extinct? (Maybe somebody should write a paper on it?) I do remember coming out of the picture house and seeing teenage boys, false-kicking each other and squawking frantically like demented bantam cocks. For all that joking it must have touched a nerve with the youth zeitgeist.

The early 1970’s was a depressing time, it’s funny how it keeps cropping up as a reference point for current political commentators, even though the real ‘Winter of Discontent’ was four years off, in ’74 we were all feeling an ominous cold blast, the same one we are feeling now (whether you want to refer to our current situation as ‘Winter’s coming’ or, ‘we are about to enter the Upside-down World’ there’s certainly something in the air). At that time nothing in the newspapers was good, it was doom and gloom from page to page.

Something was needed… anything, and as usual, youth culture bore the brunt of it, nobody had any money. But strange cultural phenomena started to erupt from the ground up.

It’s not too much of a stretch to draw a connection between the embryonic Kung Fu boom and another underground culture, this time in music.

Northern Soul.

Here was a predominantly working-class youth culture that thrived on its underground music movement status. It was never meant to be popular; the sweat dripping, vest wearing dancers did not want their ‘scene’ ruined by middle class ‘divs’, this was a celebration of semi-obsolete fast-beat American soul music, spun on rare discs that were imported by entrepreneurial DJ’s, part mad-enthusiasts, part spiv, who became celebrities in their own universe. But the dancers!.. male and female; athletic, bold, inventive and competitive, who were just grooving on the music. The guys, when asked who was the influence for their macho balletic physical displays, didn’t hesitate in saying, ‘Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali’, all the moves from Bruce and dancing like a butterfly and stinging like a bee from Ali. Here was a celebration of physicality, all of this happening in tandem with the Kung Fu boom, I don’t think I am stretching a point here. The point being how this filled a niche. To understand Northern Soul, think what came before – Disco dancing was in its infancy, it was still a US thing, all there was before was jive, and before that ballroom. The Soul dancers were backdropping and spinning years before break dancing was even thought about!

In 1970’s youth culture there was a hunger for ‘moves’ and Kung Fu, and karate, gave them more ‘moves’ than they could ever cope with. For the sake of argument, I’ll put Kung Fu and Karate together in this because at that time nobody cared about the difference, and besides, Bruce Lee (Kung Fu) and Jim Kelly (karate) were brothers in arms in ‘Enter the Dragon’, even though Jim had to be sacrificed along the way, leaving Bruce Lee and the slightly effete John Saxon as soul survivors. Jim had to take a bullet for the team despite his cool ‘John Shaft’ vibe.

The demise of Boxing.

Other things contributed to the time being right. My pet theory is that the decline of the boxing clubs created a vacuum that needed to be filled. Young men in working class culture believed there was a nobility in being handy with your fists – all in an honourable way of course; Marquis of Queensberry rules, like an extension of duelling, issues were resolved, from schoolboys to factory apprentices; jackets were removed and sleeves rolled up, a crowd was formed and bets were placed. And this was not confined to the men. The last time I saw this was outside the Bridge Tavern in Mansfield around 1984, where I witnessed two women squaring up and a crowd of men laying bets. I didn’t stick around.

The boxing clubs were a magnet for young working-class males. Some were sponsored by charities (I am thinking of the Repton Boys Clubs in East London, frequented by those embryonic gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray), nobody thought there was anything seedy or unwholesome about the boxing clubs. Although, by a certain time they’d had their day. Some say that the dip occurred in the 1960’s and coincided with the civil rights movement in America, socio-economic reasons meant that the desperate struggle out of poverty was not dependent on stepping into the ring. That might have been true in the States but it the UK the dynamics were different. Very few people thought of making their money out of boxing.

At that time and amongst a particular group of people there was clearly an urge to fight man-on-man. Whatever you choose to call it, be it a surplus of testosterone, a male identity crisis, the primitive urge to find a hierarchy ladder to climb, any of those things or none, it was a problem in search of a solution. Twenty years later, Chuck Palahniuk summed up the root of it really well in his 1996 book (and the movie 1999) ‘Fight Club’, there are a number of quotes that can be applied, “I don’t want to die without any scars”, or “We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war…”. Not popular opinions now, but they certainly applied in the 1970’s.

Selling points.

So, what was the draw? What was it that pulled people in?

Besides for the physicality, was there something else that motivated young people to take up the martial arts in their droves?

Exoticism

This particular pot had been bubbling on the counter-culture scene for a long time. Going right back into history there has been a major dissatisfaction with what the West had to offer in terms of spirituality, the obvious answer lay in the Eastern traditions – and here we have it on a plate, served up, packaged, consumer-ready. Whether we knew it or not, the martial arts gave us the whole vibe AND we got to punch each other and be heroes at the same time!

Prior to the 1970’s nobody was really interested in anything Oriental in the UK. In fact, I’d go as far as saying the last time British people thought anything from the far East was cool was during the Regency period when the aristocrats started to appreciate what was called ‘Chinoiserie’. (George IV thought it was amazing).

Words we’d never heard of, like ‘Zen’ started to be used, we had a vague notion about meditation but only connected to the Beatles brush with exoticism (and drugs) and their dalliance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, (until they ‘saw the light’ and left, that was 1968).

For me, the exoticism added much needed spice and it certainly was a contrast to the grimness of Mansfield and the East Midland Coal Field. Culturally it gave a glimpse of a world beyond, but anyone wanting to find out more struggled to access any kind of information. Pre-Internet we had nothing beyond what the local library could supply (I can’t think of one single bookshop in Mansfield – a quick Google search tells me that there still isn’t one – maybe they all use Amazon?).

All the conditions were right; the eco-system was perfect for something like this to come out of nowhere, and it stuck around for far longer than a mere fad; fads don’t become iconic, they just become objects of curiosity. The Kung-Fu boom and what it morphed into, once some of the silliness had been burnt off, still has a place in our cultural consciousness.

Part 2 will go on to look at; the cinema, media, racism, how music contributed to the boom, the inner-city vibe and the possibility of a resurgence.

Image Credit: IMDB ‘Five Fingers of Death’ 1972.