Perry Boys Abroad
April 4, 2009
The hot summers of the 70s were top notch. From the ‘76 heatwave to the Argentinean World Cup in 1978, a ferocious and obscene desire rocketed through the youth of Britain; to hit the road, go abroad, watch foreign football teams knock it about. Domestic fashion was lurching through the Punk era, with innumerable cults and sidebars bristling off on
tangents: Northern Soul Perries, Disco wallahs, hipsters and post-Glam dinosaurs, all co-
existing in an uneasy peace that was as fragile as it was wrong. Fragile because it was wrong. Live European Cup games were a rare spectacle, but when they were on telly we all watched with intensity and longing; the black pentagons panelling the white football somehow slowed the thing down, allowing for more time and a cushioned response from the footy boot. The commentary came over like a lunar landing. Pitches were either lush or appeared desert-like. Liverpool were one of the few teams to sample that world in the flesh, but a mass movement was already dripping south independent of football. In Manchester groups of demi-Mods and Soul stylists patrolled the parched inner-city like starving hermit-lizards, having adopted jewel-encrusted tortoise shells and arrayed themselves, crablike, across clubland. Each and every “disco” had at least a tiny group of
Perry Boys occupying its further corners. Wearing bizarrely plain but expensive garments
that glistened against the eye like internal stalagtites…hanging from the brain and projecting a knowing light out at those who simply lagged in the fashion stakes. Perries with a one-eyed wink to Bowie, a stultifying, rock-hard owning of Roxy Music’s entire catalogue providing nourishment in the face of the garbage trends around them. They ruled the clubs and their music was an eclectic hybrid borne of Soul but fanned out into multiple personalities of rhythm and modernist brilliance; Bowie’s eye-liner and Ferry’s suits were largely ignored, but virtually all else about those cool cats was consumed and digested avidly. By ‘77, small firms had flocked from the flats of Greengate, the avenues of Crumpsall and the housing estates that lined Harpurhey onto ferries across the filthy Channel to a foreign world. Architecture, language and above all clothing, were all noted and diagnosed as yet another reason Britain was a dump. Add the climate to this sad equation and the incentive to hit the road for a few months was born. And so they went. The Perry Boys abroad…
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