Perry Boys Abroad
Perry Boys Abroad is a thirty-year social history of British working-class underground and overground culture. It tracks the multi-generational development of a lifestyle that began in soul and ended up in Madchester. From riotious beginnings in Saint Etienne in ‘77, to “firms” of grafters knocking out tickets and merchandise and robbing continental sports and jewellers’ stores in the early-80s, to drunken mayhem in the Israeli kibbutz system in the mid-80s, English lads spread their wings, usually with the same results: Trouble. Perry Boys Abroad will take you into the heart of Manchester, to the original haunts and tastes of those who invented independent style back in the 70s. With quotes from those who were there, Perry Boys Abroad examines the attitudes and cultural collisions that perfused places like The Factory club, Pips disco, and Manchester’s football terraces. It charts the transition from bovver boots and flares to the confused fork in the road between Russell Club and Roxy Room. It sits you on a jet airliner and shoots you into hostile lands where American customs and Israeli security services turned the screw. There are tales from tropical Mexico and Sydney, as well as stories set against the Rio Carnaval and Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Most of all, it remembers how music, football and fashion melded, repelled and emulsified in a kaleidoscope of not-at-all superficial language and grafitti on the walls of the working-class mind.
1970s Manchester looked very different than it does today, but beneath the grime, the slang and the expectations of its citizenry remain relatively unchanged; Manchester was ahead of its time, but held itself back via a stubborn tendency to reject media broadcasting of its culture. It was in that sense a northern, working-class British city. But in another sense it was a hive of industry, a place where hybrid fashion and music busily self-organised into a subterranean hierarchy that wouldn’t see the light of day for a long time. The sub-sub-cults around this fascinating city lurked like vicious eels or flamboyant clownfish behind nightclub exteriors and in terraced streets where outsiders feared to tread. Entrepeneurs and gangsters - as well as hairdressers and musicians - were vital in teasing out those elements far enough so that they could be sculpted and manipulated. And it is in this sculpting and manipulating that a keystone species emerged from the urban ecosystem, known as Perries. But who - or what - were the Perry Boys?
Soul music, for whatever reason, was the genre that transfixed and soothed Manchester’s “slum” neighbourhoods; the Stylistics, Four Tops, Detroit Emeralds and Spinners, you name it, working-class Mancs and Salfordians were lapping it up, and with it came a dress code that was as complex as any animal behaviour. In 1975, David Bowie went to Philadelphia, then world capital of soul, and experimented not just with the American sounds but with the English look, too. When Bowie came out as a soul boy, he appealed to old soulies and younger kids alike, and a race to emulate the Young Americans mood was on. Manchester’s Perries were right on time, and within a few years they’d expanded their range, both into football grounds and beyond, to rob designer gear from Europe and bang out moody merchandise and events tickets.
From these second-generation Perries came the scouse-influenced football casuals, but that’s only half the story. A tendency to travel with little in the way of funds - the appetite for which had come from football away matches in Europe - while exploiting the trusting nature of continental shopkeepers, was now the in-thing to do. Perry boys abroad and their scally scouse counterparts tell their stories of how they both worked together in graft and sometimes clashed violently. It was all in a day’s work.
We’ve all heard the Liverpool story; how mickey mousers went to Germany for football and copped for the latest trainers and Lacoste cardies, etc, but the Perries’ accounts are not so well known - perhaps even doubted by those casual culture “experts”out there, many of whom are too young and distanced to really know what happened. Liverpool invented the mass-terrace thing, but that was the tip of the iceberg, even in Liverpool itself. Read Perry Boys Abroad and find out why. The book fills in more of the blanks, taking up where its predecessor, Perry Boys, left off. It also tracks the full-circle of football “casual”, from its inception in ‘78-9, to its demise in late ‘82, early ‘83. From there on, the long haul up the hill to Madchester began, with many scaling the heights and finding Nirvana, and others being reduced to empty shells by drugs.
Now, the dust is settling on 30 years of evolution; Manchester and its underground denizens have remained ahead of the curve, and many others have been taken with them. Read Perry Boys Abroad and feel the undertow, the seductive pull of style, violence and consciousness-expansion. If you like social histories with an edge, this is for you.