TheNamelessThing.com

Below is an interview I did by email with a Swedish fanzine about my book Perry Boys. Thought I'd post it here for the two people who actually read this fucking blog (me and my mum, sorry, "mam" - dead hard, me...)

My name is Arvid Gunnarsmo and I'm writing to you from Sweden. I and a couple of friends are running a non profit fanzine (have a website as well Sektion-e) on football and football culture and in the next issue we are going to make a review of the Perry Boys (which we like a lot by the way - thanks. Not just another shitty hooligan story).

We would also like to make an interview with you in the same spot and therefor I wonder if you would care to take some time to answer a few questions? Would really appreciate it...

1) You are now a grown up man and far from the days of the nameless thing (I presume). In what senses do you think that the nameless thing have shaped the person you are today?

1) To answer that question, I have to start at the beginning, because the conditions from where the Thing sprang were chaotic and completely uncertain, even as the mindset anticipated it. The slang words, the attitudes, and sense of verve were already formed, waiting in northwest England for the outer layer to dawn. Even our dads were cool, but they were too old, so things simmered in the unconscious. Consequently, there was a dead zone between 1977 and 1979, when the fashions slipped off the radar and went totally underground. Nobody knew what to wear, apart from the odd silly craze, like lumber jackets (brightly coloured tartan jackets with furry trim, like miniature Santa Claus uniforms) and fake leathers based on the movie Grease. Straight-leg jeans came in, as flares died off, and people started to wear clothes that were very plain. Collars shrank and hairstyles became shorter. It was like an unconscious urge towards something that was timeless, ageless, and without obvious agenda. That was the priming of the pump, and when the pipeline was opened, we were all instinctively ready to judge what was OK and was not.
I remember being on a bus on my way to Old Trafford for the derby match, in March 1980, and we witnessed a full-on battle when United’s lads steamed a load of Manchester City lads outside a pub called The Manchester Regiment. My first thought, as I saw them all bearing down on the pub was, “where are all their scarves?” These lads all had smart shirts on and very conservative looking hairstyles – short back and sides, as we called it, on its way to being a proper wedge. We’d stopped wearing scarves by then, and were in Fred Perries, smart small-collared shirts, and Hush Puppies. I thought the hooligans were all older beer-monsters who were stuck in the 70s fashions, and I never realised that I was already part of this association between football hooligans and these elegant new styles. I’d been as transfixed by the hooligans and the stadium as I had by United’s team all my life, as it was all part of the experience of being a Manchester United boy. I knew a few slightly older lads who were cool as fuck, well into this new look, who were United fans, but that day I suddenly grasped that they were actually United’s main boys! It was a shock, and it contained an irresistible, almost sexual momentum, knowing you could be dressed like this and be considered a tough kid. The compulsion to steam in at the match exploded in me. Funnily enough, we knew one of them, and we saw him throw a bottle right over the United lads and it landed on a City fan’s forehead, right between his eyes. The same guy is mentioned in Perry Boys a few times. There was something about them that seemed very heavy-duty, and as the numbers grew over the next few months, it became obvious it was their way or no way at all.

By mid-1980 I was already familiar with the slang words (it happened so fast), the clothes, and the attitudes. We didn’t just act like we were cooler than everyone else, we knew we were. That attitude seems to have taken deep root in me, and even now I find myself judging people by their clothes, walk, and, most of all, that nameless aura that we all give off. Some people seem “with it”, but there are people I meet even today who I can’t take seriously because it’s obvious they don’t see life from this vantage point. Timothy Leary once said that anyone born after 1949 was a new type of person, and I would extend that to say that there are remnants of the pre-1949 mindset all around us, because that genetic lineage didn’t get stamped out, it just stopped being cool. A different breed took the helm sometime in the mid-60s, kind of a prettier thing, you know? The Mod styles and even some of the Hippie styles looked fantastic, but it took until the late 70s and early 80s to really mature into something we could make work in day-to-day life. That Thing was Nameless, but it hit you with a jolt when you beheld it.
The Scouse and Manc attitude is definitely more genuine that the rest of England, when it comes to looking down on those who aren’t giving out the right vibe. Being there first has everything to do with it, but the real reason is not just being there first, it is being among the first to practice a way of life that has never been replaced by anything better. Even when I wear what are considered mainstream straight-laced clothes today (I am almost 42) they still wouldn’t be out of place on the Old Trafford forecourt in 1980, that’s the beauty of it. The modern fads, like Carhart, Rockport, and Timberland are just like some of the label-less stuff we wore back then. Being into the Nameless Thing enabled me to track the downturn in societal quality as I aged, and it provided me with a solid grounding in what the other half wore, so to speak. I think it’s a sin that Adidas and others have gone downhill so badly, and they provide a very clear barometer for what capitalism does to itself and its environment. As the corporations make evermore cash, the product and those who wear it come to look cheap and nasty. Preserving that original memory of what those archetypes should look like helps me through the dark night of this modern world. Sometimes, I’m convinced we’re utterly fucking doomed, and this is one of the major symptoms, this materials deterioration in clothing.

2) I read an article written by a swedish sociologist (left wing intellectual) who were intrigued by the "casual movement", but in the same time troubled by the fact that it was so unaware of politics. Do you think that was the case or did you see the nameless thing as some what of a revolutionary reaction against the Thatcher era back then? Or did you just not give a fuck? =)

2) I left school in July 1982, and knew plenty of others who’d left a year or two earlier, in ’80 and ‘81. We were all around 16 or 17 years old, and the Nameless Thing was at the crest of the wave. In a way, the recession was an excuse not to get a job, even when there were jobs on offer in Manchester. Coming right out of school and going on the dole was like being given free money when you were 16, and it was an in-joke among the lads. The real problem was the class system and the way it kept us down, even those of us who were intelligent and gifted; most of us never realized what we could achieve until we were well in our thirties. But unconsciously we surely recognised British society for what it was. We certainly paid enough lip service to the fact we were the poor folk, but we wanted to be poor, ‘cos it was cool. The working class in Britain have always ruled the roost in some twisted way, when it comes to personal violence, without realising that there was more to life than being a hard-nut in a Fila tracksuit. In the 70s it was Doc Martens, but it amounted to the same thing. The Scousers epitomised this attitude of dole money and smart clothes, but I don’t recall ever seeing any incongruity in it, or thinking the one was a reaction to the other.
The scenes around town and especially at the football were of thousands of young kids in baggy, expensive, supple clothes, with fine, glossy hair that they flicked and flopped about, as they cockily walked in their crumpled jeans. We literally worshipped Adidas trainers, especially the tennis range that came in in ’81, Nastase being the original cheapest type, followed by ATP, Wimbledon, Grand Slam and Grand Prix. Everything was so lush and high quality, and it was that that drove it all; the superior designs and the comfort level of those excellent cushioned soles. I think the recession in the north was just happening to us simultaneously, and we were completely immersed in it. It became part of the psychological soundtrack, to hear people say “Thatcher is a cunt”, or whatever, while flicking their wedge back across their ear, and bouncing about singing footy songs, reveling in the Nameless Thing. The fact that this high-energy phase exploded right in the middle of her reign was never diagnosed as a symptom of a system in dysfunction in real time; it’s only today, that thinkers and writers associated with the casual era look back and see a connection and say that Thatcher caused it, because they know the group mind is deep, and its doings are powerful. I have no doubt that we were reaching back into the unconscious and hitting society with everything we had, like teenagers do. It’s like a mirror, or an act of symmetry; we were getting fucked to a certain depth, so we gave society that same depth back by fucking it in turn. The crater that the Nameless Thing left behind not only killed off the 70s dinosaurs but will outlive Thatcher and her entire cabinet. But the capitalist values she enjoyed have been the ones that dragged the designers to the Far East and plunged our thing into decadence– so I suppose we took casualties on both sides.
When the riots erupted in Manchester, a lot of young lads went to Moss Side, and some reckoned they looted televisions and videos out of shops. Back then, Moss Side was well-known as a black area, where people went to score weed, but nobody knew what kind of resentments were simmering there if they weren’t properly part of it, and most likely black. We saw the riots as a bit of a laugh, really. The first time I ever got in trouble with the police, I was with my mate Kenny, and I smashed a window in a phone box. A bloke taking his dog for a walk saw me and reported it. Half an hour later, a police van, on its way back from the riots packed with tired, pissed off coppers swooped in and picked us up. We’d swapped coats by then but our coats had really distinctive patterns and stripes, and the coppers even told us they knew we’d swapped, as the bloke had described what coat I was wearing, and I had much darker hair than Kenny. They stuffed us in between two long rows of riot police, and gave us a few kicks whenever we accidentally touched them, and we were shit-scared, being only 15 years old. Luckily they didn’t find the lock-knife I had down my jeans, and they let me go with a caution. Why I had the knife I do not know; my cousin had given it to me earlier and I was walking around with it, acting the cunt. I mention an incident in Perry Boys, where all the Mancs were gathered in Piccadilly and they rained missiles down on the fleet of police vehicles heading for the Moss. I remember one kid, who must have been a cricket player. He launched a half-brick with amazing force and accuracy, and it shattered the window of a van, right at the back of a copper’s head. The window was wired, so it broke the momentum of the brick, and I can still see the fragments exploding around this cop’s head, as he didn’t have his helmet on at the time. That was the closest to the Moss Side riots I ever got!
The Falklands War was on at that time too. Ironically, most average people in England were behind the troops, even as they knew Maggie was wagging the dog a little with the war, and after we’d cheered the lads on to victory, everyone agreed that she looked and sounded a total twat when she started spouting and beating her chest when we won. All too obvious, even back then, I’m afraid. By the time the miners went on strike in 1984, and there were “white” riots between miners, scabs, and police, we were too stoned to care about training shoes and even the conservatives were old hat by then. Of course, these days, United fans are happy to chant Argentina. The war can’t have affected me much, ‘cos I wanted Argentina to win the ’82 World Cup, and that was just weeks after the war finished.
Now I’ve lived in America for 14 years, though, I feel that capitalism isn’t all bad; it helps us sanitise and build and save for a rainy day. But I can see how America is ahead of Europe in all the useless, shitty aspects of capitalism, and Europe is desperately clinging to its age-old way of life and trying to avoid it happening over there. The American system is not a system which has been corrupted, it is a corrupt system in itself, and only Americans think it represents freedom. The rest of the world sees it as fascism, exploitation, and greed.

3) Don't know if you have some kind a theory on why young lads in Brittain (and elsewhere) seem to have a need to get together arround clothes and violence, Teddys-Mods/ Skinheads, the namless thing and so on. Why's that? Bet you have given it a thought...

3) What set the Nameless Thing apart from most other movements (Mod excepted) is that the proponents were all about introducing foreign and unfamiliar items of clothing to the scene. Other fads were simply a case of follow-the-leader, but the Nameless Thing sought to push cultural and geographical boundaries by dictating its own look, and bringing much of that look in from another place, namely the continent. In Perry Boys I harp on a bit about the end of the Ice Age and cavemen, but they are the best example in history of what it was all about.
If you trace evolution back to the furry four-legged beasts and even scaly reptiles and birds, everything can be seen to make a show of itself to frighten its enemies. Whether it’s a frilly collar, a pair of tusks, a striking pelt or a weird call, conscious living things seek to gain an advantage over their competitors. Ultimately it’s about food, reproduction, and survival of the species. That tendency never went away as we slowly became human. Imagine living in temporary shelters, hunting and gathering across an uncertain, bleak landscape, as our northern European ancestors must have done. It must have been murder being anatomically identical to you and me, but living in a fucking cave freezing your bollocks off. They must have been tough times for the old Homo sapien, and don’t forget they were as intelligent as we are. It took them 80,000 years to reach a decent standard of living through farming, and then over 10,000 more years to reach industrialisation. Then science kicked in and we were able to develop drugs, vaccines, machines, and instruments to fend off the horrors of the hostile world. Life improved, but people remained the same, and people are gregarious animals. They will always build a town square, a village green, or a zocalo to meet up in, for drinks and conversation. We’re just like a colony of seabirds or a herd of bison. We are animals. And just like animals we use our appearance and our accents to warn others and send messages to the foe about what we feel.
I apologise for going on at this depth, but we are always at this depth, if we just give ourselves a moment to think. I saw a picture of some skinheads today, wearing shortened turned-up jeans and high Doc Marten boots. They were staring sullenly at the camera, and it made me remember; all through my childhood I’d come to fear skinheads, as they were said to be so tough. But once we’d cracked the genetic code and discovered the Nameless Thing, they saw it in our eyes and the disdainful scowls on our faces. The skins never made a stand against us, because even as we steamed in, we were laughing at them, slapping them for fun. They couldn’t even look at us anymore, in their preposterous green jackets and too-short jeans. We showed it up for the Sham 69 it truly was. It was an evolutionary moment, and it wasn’t just a scuffle between kids; the world had selected us over them for dominance. They couldn’t survive, but we were thirty years ahead of the game, a hundred years ahead. It’s the same wherever large groups come together, as they always must in a gregarious species. Subsets emerge, and each thinks itself to be stronger than the rest. Even militaries design their uniforms to be better than their enemies, and camouflage is only one part of it. They are trying to tell each other, “We don’t need camouflage, because we are the kings of this jungle”. When our various uniforms clash in the public theatre there is always going to be trouble. You can’t remove something as fundamental as that, apparently.
The Ice Age hunters brought new ideas and goods from afar, and introduced them into northern European society, such as it was back then. We did the same thing, 15,000 years later. When the ice thawed and agriculture came about, it was like European football allowing young, working class kids to gather their prizes and it took root in England due to sheer demand, and even necessity. Our uniform has turned out to be the endpoint in style. At least for the moment.

4) The nameless thing was quite a paradox. It was a very rough, masculin culture in many ways (with all the violence), but in another way it was a bit androgyn, listening to Bowie (and others) and the obsession in sharp clothing. What was the deal with that? Was the irony appealing to you in some way or did it just happen to turn out that way? (No offense... I'm into the gear myself)

4) I think the working class in England have always displayed a curious androgyny when they’ve tried to be ultra-hip. The flares and platform shoes thing of the 70s had a distinctive feminine shape to it. Lads with centre-parting haircuts would blow-wave their hair till it was perfect, and it was often indistinguishable from the girls’ style, feathered on top and tucked in around the sides. The flared jeans had high waistbands that tended to pinch the waist in and emphasise the hips, even in men. In fact, most of that glam-rock era was pointedly bisexual. There’s a Scottish scientist called Ian Harg who says that experiments with groups of rats reveals how the most hard-done by of the group (i.e. bullied away from the food, drink, and warmest nests) tend towards more feminine and even homosexual behaviour as their willfulness is taken away from them and pathology sets in. It could be argued that the poorer classes in England have been the recipients of similar privations, and that this pathology has led to a form of creative exhibitionism peculiar to that social stratum. The irony is that these characters were never without a pint of strong dark ale in hand, and a cigarette on the go, and their favourite use of their stack-heels was to smash someone’s face in with them.
The Nameless Thing was no different in that respect, but there was a streamlined futuristic look to it. Gone were the fancy trimmings; everything was pared down and leaner. But the hairstyle was really feminine, especially around the back. I think the Bowie thing was more a product of how ultimately cool Bowie himself was rather than it being something the Perries discovered. The 70s boys were well into Bowie, and so were we. How could you not be? An American friend of mine recently said he thought Bowie was probably the greatest musician of all time, and I had to agree. I think the fact he came from Glam-Rock contributed to his bisexual aura, and this was partially transferred onto his casual admirers. Women are so much more beautiful than men, and Englishmen do like to act feminine or gay for a laugh, but there’s something deeper there. The English are a very sophisticated animal, when you get beneath the Union Jacks and the beer-bellies, and it is possible they have incorporated this factor into their styles in an attempt to beautify themselves further. Who can deny that a Glam-Rocker looked better with his glitter, glossy lipstick, and beauty spot on?! Where the 70s lads had their big heels to stomp you with, the casuals had blades. It’s an evil thing to do, but even the use of the Stanley knife captured something of that pointed, shark-like image. Packs of lads with wedge hairstyles and imported tennis shoes, carrying weapons that they sliced you up with, is an image that almost borders on fiction, but it’s fact.
I think Sweden contributed a couple of great icons to those eras, too. The 70s and 80s saw Abba and Borg influence English culture massively. I don’t like to admit this (especially in response to a fucking question like this!) but I know loads of lyrics to Abba songs due to their being played on the radio continuously when I was growing up. They’re part of that whole era. And as for Borg, well, I will let the cool silence speak for itself. You could say he was the Bowie of tennis.

5) What person do you think you had been today if you hadn't been into the nameless thing? For better and worse?

5) That’s a hard one, because I was so young (13 or 14) in the years when it first began to creep from inside us. Because I went through puberty literally as I was caught up in the tide of it all, I only remember myself as a kid with the Thing removed from the equation. I would have to say that it transformed the landscape so completely that it is impossible to say how I would have been without it. Those of us who were into it were always naughty boys, even as little kids, and we had a fascination with football, violence, gangs, and fashions. I think people who never totally got it still kind of look to leaders to dictate to them how they should think and act and dress, but those who were into it developed an acute sense of independence, and right and wrong. This taught me that I could be on the wrong side of the tracks while remaining critically more aware than my “superiors”, most of whom were easy to belittle and dismiss. They were sheep and I was a wolf, back when we were teenagers, and this seems to count for something. The problem with that perspective is that it can delude one into believing one is better off than one truly is; simply believing that one’s own life has been more exciting and original than others’ isn’t in itself worth real points in the real world. The sad truth is that most of the straightheads, as we used to call them, end up better off than those who have lived life more intensely. They had boring adolescences and were tangled up in mortgages and kids earlier, but as they hit middle-age they’re going to faraway exotic places for their holidays, buying ever-nicer cars and houses, and generally getting on my fucking tits. It’s nice to know that I am superconscious compared to them (laughs sarcastically), but I’ve pissed away my adult life, travelling and running riot. Now, at 42, I am just planning to buy my first house, and actually become static for the first time. I have been hunting and gathering since I was 13, and I’ve only just stopped. I think I deserve a rest.

6) Was the nameless thing a bad thing or do you think it helped young lads in some ways? If so, in what ways?

6) I really believe that the Nameless Thing awakened a sense of quality and style in people. Those patterns and indicators of what constituted a well-made piece of clothing can easily be carried forward and translated into other aspects of life which a lot of kids might never have learned, or else took much longer to grasp. When you hear about lads going into supermarkets and ripping the special railway offers off the packets of laundry detergent, or doing Transalpino “rub-outs”, or simply jibbing trains across Europe, you know they learned a lot about fending for themselves, not to mention waking up to the fact that everything is negotiable. Poor, working class kids in 1979-1981 in England needed to learn these things, to realise that a lot of what others have is due to their sticking their neck out and asking for second helpings, not keeping their heads down and shovelling shit forevermore, as a lot of our parents had been taught to do and did themselves. Being so driven to go to football in our finest, to hang around in the streets and pose and strut, and to go places by hook or crook, put a lot of real-world values and strengths into us as a generation. The best part of it is that a lot of what we did wasn’t out of necessity; it was luxury and leisure. Our parents had carved out the necessity barrier, and managed to improve us from rock-bottom to somewhere just above it. But we just went for it. We said “fuck it” and decided to go for the good times. It was all about the things we did in our spare time, and, being on the dole, we had plenty of it. We dropped out of society really, and we even got to blame Maggie for it all, even those of us who didn’t want a tinpot job ‘cos we knew we were too good for the shite they offered us. So Maggie got the pleasure of thinking she’d fucked us all over, and we got the bonus of having her go down in history as a heartless, war-mongering old bitch. The truth was, we had a blast at the expense of her memory.
I’m currently writing my second book, and it gets a little more political than the last one. It’s about the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s once again, and a few of the quotes talk about how they reacted to what Margaret Thatcher did to their communities. The book is mainly about travel, and about how vast numbers of British people have left their mother country to seek lives elsewhere. I think it had as much to do with more vigorous economies and better climates than it did about Maggie Thatcher, but it seems that a lot of people think, fuck it, let her take the blame!

Take care and thanks for a really good book. Enjoyed reading it.

Arvid Gunnarsmo