Some of us are fortunate enough to have reminiscences from the transition when Lancashire became Greater Manchester. When the Perry Boys weren’t quite old enough to go abroad yet. My bushman’s holiday adventures in Prestwich made the 6-week summer break a time of mystery and danger, via the tribes on the move through local parks and woods in clannish costumes; star-jumpers and Slade, Sta-Prest and soul. Sunshine and leafy roads. Original orange Choppers with proper cowhorns. Homemade trackers, Frankenstein contraptions whose frames, knobbly wheels and handlegrips were salvaged from disparate decomposing relics and electrified into life. Off the beaten track of Bury New Road, between time-warps and alehouses that tottered unsteadily on the edge of a water-eroded valley. In among the storied hollows and sleepy slopes of Prestwich Clough stand wise old trees, supernatural sentinels from the glimmering ‘seventies. A Glam-Soul collective unconscious that contains T-Rex and Detroit Emeralds. Primeval monkey business. In monkey boots. Initials chiselled into ancient bark with Bowie knives; bone-handled, pearl-handled, wooden-handled, all bearing that same vicious hallmark – the curved tip, often sharpened on both edges. Friction burns and carvings, inflicted by denizens of a near-dead generation. Sycamore and horse-chestnut trunks protruded from stream-worn valley sides. Giant scaly limbs overhead, grooved by rope-swings; a nylon noose slung over and a stick-seat tied onto the bottom. Many broken arms and wrists suffered by diamond dogs naive enough to fly without fear. Playing knifey; swinging deeply with a Bowie knife between the teeth. Jumping madly onto the stick-seat with practiced venom. Propelling oneself way out into the gorge, over the stream; radius/ulna shattering territory. Then back up to just a hair above the ground (disqualification if you touched earth). Hanging by one’s knees from the seat, gripping the rope where it met the stick. Stretching agonisingly back with one arm to slip the blade-tip just far enough into the moist slope so it didn’t fall out and counted as a point. He who sticks it highest up the hill takes all, sometimes even the blade in question. Kids in skinner trousers, brown silky Birmingham bags with patch pockets. Semi-flared blue jeans with tiny turn-ups, no trace whatsoever of a crease as if ironed on a round pole, hung half-mast above cherry-red Docs.
And then there were the Perries.
Perries would slink up in a group, dressed in whichever aspect of the Bowie chronology obsessed them that day. It was 1975, 1976, Philadelphia soul-saturated, Young Americans. Some of them played knifey, some didn’t. Just as the Glam crowd wore the dagger in the sheath, so did the Perries, but they claimed silent sovereignty – the Bowie knife was their thing and no one else’s. They were baggies thirty five years before Madchester; thick, small-collared shirts, peg trousers, docksider shoes and heavily piled wedgeheads, dyed auburn or maroon. Living embodiments of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs; wild future-kids inhabiting a ruined city, with dyed hair and skinny faces. A Disco-pansexuality that dripped hot articulate breath onto the homophobic terror of working-class ignorance. They looked soft but were generally hard as nails. It wasn’t all Perries and Bowie and Glam, though. There were water-pistols and fishing nets. Fluorescent nylon; orange, green and yellow. Spud guns; little Derringer look-alikes with orange inlaid plastic handles and real chambers to load up with potato bullets. Technicolour t-shirts bearing transfers of Steve Austin and Why Don’t You. Go and switch off yer fucking television instead? I wrote a letter to “Why Don’t You” once. Inspired by one of those wank little films they made of peoples’ hobbies; some pitiable twat in a garden shed in Yorkshire, working a potter’s wheel like his life depended on it. I told them I was an avid brass rubber; spent all my spare time touring the churches and cathedrals of Manchester, committed to transferring the visages and heraldic crests of antiquity onto paper for posterity. All completely made up; my spare time was spent kicking a ball about, washing cars for pocket-money, and shoplifting toffees and books from Percival’s bookshop in Prestwich Village. And playing Knifey with the Glam-Soul elders, occasionally joined by that weird Bowie space-face crew.
Perries dyed their hair crimson to match the likeness on the Diamond Dogs album cover, but they styled it more like Bryan Ferry; short back and sides with a lopsided long fringe obscuring one eye. Sci-Fi Scuttlers in iridescent shirts and high cheekbones.
The Perries playing and posing in Prestwich Clough were juvenile facsimiles of what lurked uptown in Pips’ Roxy Room; Catholic sixth-formers, cricketers and football freaks. Intellectual romantics, tough-guys with Irish DNA massively transformed by a deep injection of English speed. And the English mongrels in the secondary moderns were there, too. Rumour had it they shot up raw gin in the school bogs. But that was the Heys Road soul boys, a Carr Clough Diamond Dog-pack that rode scooters and fought pitched battles with the Kersal mob on a regular basis. Together these groups formed an unholy alliance that drew Perries in from Manc-riddled Hillock and points east of Heaton Park. Hair dyed with veggie food colouring from their mothers’ kitchen cupboards, Bowie albums temporarily borrowed from begrudging older siblings. Scousers will deny their existence till they’re blue in the face, and we all know why: Perries invented Casual culture.
In 1975 Bowie released Young Americans, calling it “plastic soul” – a couldn’t-care-less counterpoint-cum-tribute to the Beatles rubber equivalent over a decade previous. Lennon’s contribution to “Fame” and a scandalous cover of “Across the Universe” punctuated the soul-struck glitter from the city where Jim Bowie’s blade was first mass-produced. Bowie – the original Bowie – had made the knife and applied it thoroughly to the necks of his enemies. It was sent to Philadelphia for improvement. Bowie’s homemade blade had no handle, like the knife my dad used to cut the rind off the bacon on mad Sunday mornings. The grating sound of him sharpening “the knife with no handle” on the back step functioned as a Pavlovian alarm clock that cut through my hungover REM sleep. Rescued me from the vicious reptiles of my subconscious with a Salford-size stack of luscious brown sauce-hammered butties. The sharpest knife in our house, apart from the pearl-handled one I kept in a leather sheath from childhood. By the time I was old enough to be drunkenly roused by the bacon cutter it was a relic. Replaced by a more efficient tool on nights when teenage wedgeheads walked proud. Wary of the more developed 20-somethings, 30-somethings, 40-sad-somethings who challenged them to fights, confused at how a weird sub-sect from the mid-70s had suddenly exploded. The dinosaurs were vanquished, from our lives and from our Sunday morning dreams. Knights won their spurs; I saw one bloke battering a young Perry, astride him, punching for England. Up came another, grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. Under the muted sodium of a lamp-post the stripe was inflicted across the forehead. Blokes in their 30s do one, rapid, voices high like castrated tigers. Same again less than a month later. Big hardman wanting it outside a pub. Young Perry sliced him across the belly and off they ran again. This was no Bowie knife; these were for cutting carpets, as far as I knew. The name had changed to Stanley and the soul boys had finally escaped the Roxy Room to multiply across Salford and north Manchester. Time to leave the cosy prehistoric vault of the Stretford End and enjoy the pre-match alien clapping that ricocheted from the cantilever high above the Scoreboard/United Road segment. Spaghetti Western sound-effects from Britain’s best footy ground. It’s the northeast quadrant now, traditionally the most solid and seamless section of Old Trafford. Designed to face the Salford hordes as they pour around that corner, eager for an eyeful of their temple, experienced in life enough to demand that it passes muster. But the pride has bled away now, with the FC fans and the decent upper-working-class folk who owned season tickets for United Road seats. Replaced by cocks of every stripe from counties and countries astride every latitude. They know nothing of Knifey, of the daredevil rope-swings of fabled Prestwich. The little crews walking the streets and woods, singing soul songs in platform shoes and blow-dried feather-cuts. They know less than nothing of the auburn Perries, sharp and deadly, living life to the bone. But I was there, I saw this infinitesimal population grow and become mainstream, or as mainstream as something like that could ever become.
But back to the Now, as they say. The UEFA Champions League final made me think, and think again. I’m convinced that United’s prep for the big game was dismally poor, that they spent that week eating Cheshire/Worsley food a notch above the “catastrophic” (to use Patrice Evra’s description of English cuisine), swanning about in overrated shopping malls like the Trafford Center, glowing with pride. All the while Barca’s men were hitting the bricks early for some serious sweating, then rounding off a long morning with some group video studies of United’s weak spots. Kinda like Manny Pacquiao did in the weeks leading up to his absolute decimation of Mr. Hatton. Maybe I’m wrong.
Reading Andy Mitten’s imaginary interview with John O’ Shea on the Four-Four-Two website summed up the way most of us hoped things would go that night. We should all rightly feel like fools, like grinning under-qualifieds who’ve just been politely told, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you..”. Then there’s the optimistic United fans, they of the “You cannot say anything negative about the team, especially in a season when we won the league” variety. These are people who insist on being realistic, while chanting “Champions of England, Champions of Europe” and constantly reminding us all that it doesn’t stop there; United are champions of the world. It’s balderdash and there’s nothing wrong with throwing a tantrum and slagging off a team that loses its bottle and allows a slightly better team to completely humiliate them on the big stage.
May I also apologise for the poor quality of my last contribution to this fine publication, truncated and bollocksed as it was. I ran out the door that day and drove my wife to Hartford Hospital, where a creature was hatched. The chimp-child is now fastened to the teat and vigorously draining my missus of her precious macromolecules. Or else strapped in the car seat grinding on a dummy – a Mini-Me-Hannibal Lecter who only has eyes for my wife’s tortured nips. We’ll have to move back to Manchester before she’s old enough to learn the Yankee lingo, and before I’m too old to forget Mancunian. The sun is shining and the snow shovels are packed away. A small flower has bloomed but we fucking bottled it in the Champs League final. Nuff said.
