Perry Boys

'A kaleidoscope of football and fashion; drugs and violence; music and sex.' - United We Stand magazine.


In the late 1970s, a small body of violent young trendsetters exploded out of England's north-west to bewilder, terrify, and eventually enlighten the rest of the country. Their novel hooligan style came to be known as the 'casual' movement, with its wedge haircut and obsession with designer clothing and training shoes. Ian Hough came of age at the epicentre of the explosion, in 1979 in north Manchester, where outsiders branded these unlikely-looking pretenders Perry Boys due to the Fred Perry polo shirts they wore with their narrow cords and Adidas Stan Smith trainers.


Hough witnessed the sudden ramping up of an age-old rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool's Scallies, as the two cities' football hooligans realised each was a carbon copy of the other, and how they all in turn were embracing a form of organised violence, thievery, and thinking that was yet to see the light of day elsewhere in the UK. As the enlightened tribes of the north-west dug in for the long war, slashing each other with craft knives and engaging in battles involving thousands, the rest of Britain began to pick up the styles for themselves.


He describes, in vivid and often humorous prose how the Perry Boys kick-started a national fashion eruption whose tremors are still being felt. The book moves through the 80s underground, as the psychedelic fragments of what came to be termed the Rave scene gravitated from the council estates and football stadia of Manchester into the nightclubs. Manchester's subsequent descent into mayhem, in the form of gangsters, drug dealers, and music, now bathed in the strange glow of hallucinogenic drugs like Ecstasy, spawned the 'Madchester' scene of modern urban legend. The sense of unreality and optimism which accompanied Manchester United's domestic and European successes later became inextricably dovetailed to the scene in the city.


Rounding off with the story of how this unlikely new style had proved contagious across the UK, and how its perpetrators proceeded to travel the globe in search of greener pastures, Hough describes the mass exodus of young people, many of whom exported the philosophy of the Perry mindset, grafting and simply travelling for its own sake, around the globe. This book is for anyone who is interested in how things began, whether it was football hooligan culture or the Rave mentality.