Liverpool ‘78-’80
In 1978 all of Britain was dressing down and waking up. The process that led to the phenomenon called casuals just happened quicker in some areas than others. The city of Scousers was quick to fuse their sartorial uniqueness with football; Liverpool FC were as much a religion as Manchester United were in their city, so the resultant overlap was inevitable. While Manchester’s primeval components were being assembled in clubs, church discos, and places like The Factory and Pips, the Scousers had a head start via football travel and a tendency to reject anything that wasn’t Scouse. The look was Scouse and so was the elitist attitude; they weren’t copying the Soul boys of old, or the Perry Boys if you prefer. They were assembling their own take on style.
1978 became ‘79 and this strange new ensemble - much of which was identical to the clothes worn by Manchester’s Perries - grew in visibility on the football terraces. It was obvious from the start who these kids were; they were the thieves and hooligans who travelled more than most other fans. While Manchester’s Factory hipsters slowly melded with United’s vandals, Eric’s night-club in Liverpool facilitated a rapid crossover whose synergy exceeded anything taking place in the larger city to the east. The “electric Soul Boy”, for want of a better term, began to fluoresce; the burgundy Peter Werth polo shirts (whose pattern appears as a background to this website) and foreign Adidas trainers added much needed colour to recession-hit Liverpool. Their Scally contingent swelled to the hundreds, as they besieged football grounds the length of the land. By early 1980, Manchester’s Boys had fully emerged from the Perries of old. We were frequenting the discos and youth clubs, and had been wearing the styles for about a year, especially the older lads. Fred Perries, narrow jeans, Adidas trainers and the wedge hairstyle were the order of the day. Burgundy was the colour, for some reason, from the chunky fishermen’s jumpers to the auburn rinses in the wedge (or “flick”) hairstyles. It was a queer look; a futuristic Bowie affair whose protagonists spoke a new slang and swayed when they walked like vicious sexless soldiers in a Nameless army. It was cool as fuck.
In the ‘78-’79 season, Liverpool had come to Old Trafford and we’d noticed quite a few Scousers sporting an awkward facsimile of the Perries’ wedge hairstyle. It was a clumsy affair, cut tight across the top of the ear, no sideboards whatsoever. They wore drainpipe jeans and sweatshirts, and walked with their hands behind their backs in a strange affected fashion. For the rest of that year, I joked that the lads I saw walking round Manchester with that same daft haircut were Scousers, and the number of “Scousers” seemed to grow by the week. The following year, in April 1980, Liverpool brought a more finished crew to Old Trafford that was as much a statement about who they were off the pitch as on it. They singularly wore, almost without exception, burgundy Peter Worth polo shirts, Lois jeans and Adidas Stan Smith trainers; the entire Liverpool firm was uniformly dressed, and as they emerged from their tunnel at the Scoreboard End, they looked like this:
As a young lad standing on the Stretford End, I was shocked; I’d seen this bizarre new look evolve from the Perry Boys in Manchester over the past several years, but had never seen a full crew of Boys like this lot! The utter uniformity of the mob made it even more eerie than it might have been, with only the odd lad sporting a black Peter Werth or a pair of Dunlop Green Flash to break up the effect. There must have been a thousand of them, all walking and oozing that same confidence. I knew then that something had happened in British culture that nobody but us knew about. And so began the Nameless Thing…