Perry Boys Make Some Noise

The teenage wasteland resonates like a demented tin-hatted sentinel at guard by a blazing ancient sofa, where eagle-eyed tramps contemplate vile deeds and the good people troop home from work while the morning's tinfoil starshine coming up over the horizon like a flaming lamp in the hand of Leviathon glitters with massive might fresh from the bowels of the periodic table. Aye, me hearties, when the Perry Boys start to emerge from the fire-escapes, humming their ska tunes and dancing to Bowie, the sun curdles rusty in the sad socket of the dusky sky, and the tiddlywinks are flipping across the clouds like stone discuses in unison with the flocking geese that point in formation to the south, and warmth, nourishment, blue seas, and security.
When did the illegitimate clown paint his face to resemble his father's keeper and stomp on the dogshit in the thoroughfare like he just didn't care anymore? Why do the women insist on gender-based biochemical symmetry when no such thing exists? People are obsessed with elegance where none lies, and when our gorgeous damsels finally accept that their lot is not to match us at our preposterous game but to complement it, they will discover happiness. There are many cracks between worlds, and few are so deep and mysterious as that between gender. One must trace the lineage all the way back to the volvox and beyond in order to discern when the fissure first exhibited its qualities. The drums, stars and guitars are thumping, twanging, lurching like dalek-dogs on heat at my garden gate, as I pull the blinds tight and scratch my head in solid gold wonderment. Clever are the modern day football hooligans, the casual gangs of Mancheser and Salford, the Scallies of Scotland Road, and the thick-hided denizens of the Millwall mythos. When did the pathologic slide begin? Was it when Adidas took their proboscis and stuck it deep into southeast Asia, or was it earlier in the chronology, was it when the Perry Boys scowled and stared at the scallywagglers of Liverpool? Did the Cardiff Soul Crew not make sense of the Butlins Barry Island massacres, and did the Leeds Service Crew ever run from the Perry Boys, or am I sorely, surely mistaken?
Why did they even call us Perry Boys? Why didn't they call us something more original, like the Gaggleflockers, or the Jibtastic Wretches?

Hard to say, my sons, but I am listening to some excellent music by a band called Dile right now, and they are doing the business, with their songs like "Perry Boys", "Garstang", and "take the Skinheads Bowling"....fucking awesome.

Mad Dogfish; the ones that got away

The travelling gene will not move from the helix, won't be expunged from the code. We will always want to live in Deadwood and be drunk on the frontier of civilisation, in places where thugs, football casual hooligans, and deadbeats roam free, while the measly few chatterbox whippets of future planning knock together their banks, post-offices, and hardware stores. The ruts are sloppy and deep, the whisky is third rate, but it doesn't matter, because we're free. Free from the nine-to-five slough toward Gomorrah executed by the filth-laded mules of straightheadedness and sloth. The babies are gurgling in the treetops, like little beans, and the turrets hold princesses waiting to be freed like butterflies and beetles entrapped in the buckets and glass globes of teenage boys.
Buses trundle the boulevards and the trees are unidentifiable, the denizens of the sidewalks skid on innumerable oil-slicks and rotten fruits, and the traffic sounds like a roaring behemoth. When we hit the stadia we halt and sniff the air, as it curdles our brains with its gorgeous cold hydrocarbon merging with crisps, beer, and freshly cut grass, right there in the bowl of theatrical magnificence called Camp Nou or even Foxboro.
Be of stout mind my sons, and don't drop the soap, as it might slip away and you'll be filthy thereafter. When you lie to yourselves about where you've been and why, the answer will rain down in indecipherable slang from a great height in your unconscious; you are running away from being a human being, you are chafing at the doorway to mortality, and they'll never take you alive...

Adidas Nastase and Manchester United, 1981

Now we're a lot of us getting to be old, old me, we start to turn inward and search for meaning in the burnt out shells of what were our lives. Gone are the Adidas Nastase, the Fred Perry, the Old Trafford free-for-alls, and the long nights around Piccadilly and Victoria, roaring for more, screaming in pain at the ecstasy of being a Manchester scally. Many are divorced, or going through a divorce, and even more are mentally ill and have hit the rails big time. We are the generation that invented binge drinking, casual culture, and Rave, but was any of it that productive, or are we just a load of tossers living in an irresponsible, ADD-riddled dreamworld, pumped up by failing egos and retro training shoes?
How green was thy valley back then, my Kool Kats? How mental did it feel to chug cheap wine on the French hillsides and riot in the ritzy boutiques? I remember the hot nights of '81, and the way it felt to ponce about with a litre of French red in one's brain, and a bouncy pair of tennis belters on't' feet. When the Scoreboard End was tightly stocked with myriad specimens of the prototype species that went on to infect the world like a Nameless Thing without a cause.
Anyway, the time is short, and the memory long, and when we reach that bridge we'll have to cross it soon enough. Go to my football Casual Perry Boys website and make your presence felt, me hearties. It's all still there, inside. You just have to set it free....or my name's not Ian Hough.