“It was a queer look...  whose protagonists spoke a new slang and swayed when they walked like vicious sexless soldiers in a Nameless army”—Ian Hough, author of Perry Boys: The Casual Gangs of Manchester and Salford

At the end of the Sixties, mod fragmented.  Some went psychedelic (the transition from Spencer David Group to Traffic, from The Action to Mighty Baby, or indeed mod-about-town Marc Feld to Marc Bolan in John’s Children to Marc Bolan in Tyrannosaurs Rex). In the North some stayed mod in an arrested, time-defying way (Northern Soul), while down south, the harder mods, the ones who didn’t go psychedelic,  evolved into skinheads.  That hard mod spirit resurfaced in the Eighties with the youth tribes known variously as casuals, Perry Boys, and scallies: working class youths whose lives revolved around clothes and football.  So named because of their love of the Fred Perry shirt, the Perry Boys were first: they emerged from Manchester in the late Seventies.  Scallies were Liverpool’s answer to Perry Boys. Casuals (sometimes known as “chaps”) was the South of England version of this same archetype, although the term “casual” has subsequently come to encompass all the regional variants.

 
Differing from province to province, changing on a yearly or even seasonal basis, the ever-fluctuating shifts in favored jeans, shoes and shirts, the fetish for tiny details of stitch-pattern, pocket placement, and brand motifs, do not mask the fundamental “unchanging sameness” of the casual subculture and its extension of the spirit of mod, the religious seriousness about clothing. What it is really striking is how inappropriate the word “casual” is.  These young men were fanatics, uptight about their obsessions and their pursuit of kicks. The continuity from mod to casual can been seen in the obsession with expensive European clothing brands, the extreme homosociality (there had been female mods, albeit marginal figures, but was there even such a thing as a female casual?), and there’s always that penchant for violence as a route to a naturally-induced high based on the body’s own internal drugs (adrenalin, endorphins, dopamine, etc). Which many casuals intensified further by the use of unnatural chemicals  (speed, cocaine, etc).

These young men had virtually everything in common, but they warred with each on the football terraces and in the streets surrounding the stadiums. This wasn’t chaos, this was highly organized violence: the rival firms of hooligans virtually making dates to meet and clash.  Ian Hough, scholar of the Northern branches of this Eighties-and-after movement, notes that the Perry Boys, descendants of the mods, would sometimes also go to war with Hells Angels bikers, descendants of the greasy rockers. Hough uses the term “hipster hooligan” to describe these smart-dressed football fans.

Unlike the mods and Northern Soulers and skins, casual culture didn’t have a very specific relationship with music, beyond a general orientation towards Black American sounds and a soft spot for London soul-boy bands like Spandau Ballet. The latter were originally called The Cut and on their first single articulated a mod mini-manifesto in the single line “I am beautiful and clean and so very very young.  But for the most part, music slipped into a distant third place for the casuals, far behind clothes and football. 

During  the Madchester-rave era, though, the Perry/Scally attached itself to music with such indie-dance outfits as Northside, Paris Angels, Inspiral Carpets, The Farm, Flowered Up (who sampled The Who-inspired mod movie Quadrophenia on their “Weekender” single) and Happy Mondays.   “Acid casuals” is how some wag (“acid casualties”, get it?) identified the look of these groups, referring to the way that the hardness had been softened by Ecstasy and LSD (the classic mod/casual preference for tight pegged trousers, for instance, was replaced by loose-fit flares, a style hitherto redolent of the hated hippies). 

But the acid casuals hadn’t been softened that much. I recall reading an interview with Manchester band Paris Angels in Melody Maker. When the journalist went to the toilet, one of the band intoned into the tape recorder: “City are cunts City are cunts City are cunts City are cunts...”. He was a Manchester United fan, clearly. Nothing could be revealing of the arbitrary nature of working class England’s tribal warfare than the enmity between Man U and Man City fans: youth divided even though they wore the same clothes, liked the same bands, danced and drugged at the same clubs, and lived in the same town.  Football fandom as a system for the incitement of fervour and hatred: for their own sake, for the buzz and the crack of it.

America is, by and large, a looser and louder culture than Britain, and one that is perfectly capable of both rowdiness and extreme violence (from serial killers to political assassins to mass shooters). But it’s England that invented both football hooliganism and style-tribe warfare.  There is no other country in the world where young people have beaten the crap out of each other for no reason beyond differences in clothing, music taste, and sports allegiance.  These are forms of insubordinate creativity that are inextricably entwined with violence - a violence perhaps best understood as displaced and diverted politics.  As the style culture analyst Peter York once put it, in a tightly class-stratified country like Britain, talent is “blocked off from conventional embourgeoisment.... If you have a whole lot of people who are blocked, then the steam is much more intense. And where it finds a crack it rises more violently.”