The term "greebo" existed in the UK much earlier than the development of the Grebo scene. In the early 1970s greebo entered the British vocabulary as a perversion of "greaser" and was used to describe long-haired leather boys/bikers who favored, generally, Harleys as well as Japanese, British and Italian motorcycles and who were generally fans of progressive and hard rock music. How this transformed into the Grebo scene is murky and obscured by the mists of time but several most likely apocryphal explanations have been offered. Whatever the connection, the greasy, grubby look seems to be central. Now, as then, it is rarely a self-identifying term, but rather one applied derogatorily by chavs, scallies, trendies and other class and/or macho-conscious subcultures to socially awkward, skateboarding types that populate the social margins and town centers of England's suburbs who have little connection to the music scene of the previous generation.





Historically, a few bands had already melded some of these Grebo-favored ingredients in a prescient manner. These proto-Grebo bands include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, The Beastie Boys, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Big Audio Dynamite. The true Grebo bands were both championed by the likes of NME and Melody Maker and simultaneously derided, alongside Shoegazer, as "The scene that celebrates itself"- a comment on the genre's existence outside of the approval of the critics and popular audiences.





Grebo was pretty much brushed aside and wiped out by the importation of the much more popular Grunge and the advent of the shortlived Britpop scene. After those two scenes declined (within a few years), a new crop of American bands carried on in a similar but more simplistic hybrid of styles not completely dissimilar to Grebo which was branded Rap-Rock. Rap-Rock, however, evinced the disparate influences in a less fully integrated, more cut & paste fashion than the more fully integrated Grebo.