TheNamelessThing.com

The book Perry Boys is my first book to be published, hopefully the first of many, and it tells the story of British youth in transition. The book begins during the uncertain times of the late 1970s, when the previous fashion styles had receded, giving way to a vacuous cultural landscape, one populated by disjointed and incoherent forms. Around 1978-79 in northwest England (specifically Liverpool and Manchester) a brand-new style emerged from nowhere, a way of life which had no name; The Nameless Thing.

Young people in the two cities were football crazy, as ever. This Nameless novel fashion, which encompassed designer sportswear (as well as various forms of leather jackets, jeans, expensive cashmere sweaters, and even deerstalker hats) in its many multicoloured manifestations quickly made its presence felt on the football terraces of Liverpool and Manchester. The distinctive "wedge" hairstyle these people adopted had a bizarre effeminate appearance which added to general sense of novelty now associated with attending football games; hundreds of lads would be crammed onto the terraces, a mass of heads with one eye concealed by the long fringe of the wedge, constantly flicking the hair back from the eye in an involuntary twitching movement not unlike the shared behaviours of a single species of animal. The fact that its proponents tended to be robust, adventurous types meant that the more aggressive, or at least mischievous, elements of the football support embraced it wholesale. The result was an explosion of well-dressed young lads engaging each other in an elaborate dance of provocation and violence, exclusive to northwest England at the time.



This initially small population went on to bigger things.



As they matured they began to experiment with psychedelic compounds, and the excitement previously supplied by the adrenalin rush of mass violence was replaced by that of consciousness expansion. The night-clubs of Manchester became notorious for many things in the mid to late 1980s, but chief among them was the availability of illicit chemicals, specifically LSD, amphetamine sulphate, and Ecstasy. The original group of youths responsible for the style revolution at the end of the 70s were the initiators of another new lifestyle, one which spread across the country as the previous one had done before it. My book is an attempt to place the reader among the developing magic of those changing times, and to explain the causes of it in a way that concentrates on humanity as an evolving animal rather than a product of a “society” which is only a couple of hundreds of years old, namely industrialisation.



Many of the young people instrumental in these innovations began to travel abroad for longer periods of time than had those of previous generations, and in much greater numbers, and now this became a third invention on their behalf; the mass migration from an otherwise affluent country of young people simply as an adventure and an opportunity-seeking experience in and of itself. The book is published by Milo Books, an excellent independent publisher based in northwest England responsible for unleashing many great tales on the British public and beyond in recent years. Check it out, you'll like what you find.

The book is written as a memoir, not a hooligan memoir, but more an anthropological one, from the point of view of someone who was in the thick of it at times, but who managed to maintain a sense of objectivity amid the mayhem.