A scooterboy (or scooter boy) is a member of one of several scooter-related subcultures of the 1960s and later decades, alongside

rude boy Rude boy, rudeboy, rudie, rudi, and rudy are slang terms that originated in 1960s Jamaican street culture, and that are still used today. In the late 1970s, there was a revival in England of the terms ''rude boy'' and ''rude girl'', among other ...

s, mods and

skinhead A skinhead is a member of a subculture which originated among working class youths in London, England, in the 1960s and soon spread to other parts of the United Kingdom, with a second working class skinhead movement emerging worldwide in th ...

s. The term is sometimes used as a catch-all designation for any scootering enthusiast who does not fall into the latter three categories.

Definitions

Michael Brake identifies the subculture differently, classifying it as a subgroup of the mods, alongside "art school mods", "mainstream mods", and "hard mods". Scooter boys, according to Brake, had "Italian motor scooters (a working-class sports car) covered in accessories and anoraks and wide jeans". According to Colin Shattuck and Eric Peterson, a scooter boy is more specifically, "one who attends scooter rallies and accumulates event patches on a garment of some kind". The garment is conventionally a MA-1 bomber jacket(Scooter Jacket), but can be any of several other types of jacket, a mechanic's, a motorcyclist's, or even a

parka A parka or anorak is a type of coat with a hood, often lined with fur or faux fur. This kind of garment is a staple of Inuit clothing, traditionally made from caribou or seal skin, for hunting and kayaking in the frigid Arctic. Some Inuit ...

. According to Kayleen Hazlehurst, the scooterboy with anorak, accessory-covered scooter and industrial work boots was a late-1960s/early-1970s halfway house between the mods and the skinheads. Scooterboy Gaz Kishere suggests a less reductive view of this is that scooter boys emerged as a break away from a strongly 'new mod' conformity of the late 70's mod revival which saw a massive re-ignition of scooter riders and interest in traveling to scooter rallies. It enabled people to identify with more diverse groups such as punks, psychobillies or for those new to the scooter scene to keep their own original subculture identity. However the scooterboy 'birth' was also a reaction to the 'new mod' scene from those who adopted this as a passing interest or sought to no longer conform to the mainstreaming of the then scooter scene. It would be difficult to reduce scooterboys to patch wearing enthusiasts or as a subgroup of mods. As scooter boys continued to find the freedom to emerge, he or she was as likely to own a leather motorcycle jacket, a grinder, welder, black paint and have long hair. In reality, the antithesis of the ''Quadrophenia'' mod. Music biographer Mick Middles observes that the flight-jacketed scooter boy with Dr. Martens shoes was a slightly different image, favoured by scooter boys in the late 1970s scooter revival. He describes the

Lambretta Lambretta () is the brand name of mainly motor scooters, initially manufactured in Milan, Italy, by Innocenti. The name is derived from the word Lambrate, the suburb of Milan named after the river Lambro which flows through the area, and whe ...

boom period from 1968 to 1973 as featuring:

ant packs of scooter boys surg ngout every Sunday from the big Lancashire towns ... avoiding the faster, dirtier motorbiking 'greasers' and clashing with each other in Blackpool and Southport. Those were the days of Crombie coats and two-tone 'tonic' trousers, of brogues ... and Barathea blazers, of smartness, neatness, in clothes as in music.

He characterises the late 1970s revival, in contrast, as "something of an oddity", in which scooter owners were "more concerned with the machine — the mechanics, the practicalities — than the look.

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