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What were the Perry Boys? This is a good question, for several reasons. The Perry Boys represent a prototypical form of something which was to emerge in Northwest England as casual hooliganism, or football casuals, several years after the Perry Boys began, but a lot of people fail to grasp how the look and the group itself came to be misrepresented and depicted in modern media.

In Manchester, in the mid-70s, Perry Boys were what the rest of England called Soul Boys, but typically Manchester had their own term for it. By "the rest of England" here, it is difficult to say exactly which cities had their own Perry Boys (or Soul Boys), but it's safe to say that London, Liverpool, and possibly Cardiff had individuals recognisable for their fashion sense and love of Motown or Northern Soul music. The Manchester Perry Boys tended to wear Modish clothing, namely long-sleeved polo shirts with hoops around them, narrow-bottomed corduroy pants, boat pumps, and wedge hairstyles. Liverpool's version of the Perry Boy was a scruffier, punky type, designed to feel youthful, alienated, and generally more modern than other Soul Boys in the UK at the time. In London, Soul Boys wore the narrow jeans and sandals, with the wedge haircut and a sense of maturity similar to that in Manchester, though the Mancs definitely had more than a sprinkling of the Scouse cynicism and arrogance, not to mention a heavy leaning towards violence, which is why the Perry Boys in Manchester were so feared.
While there is no doubt that Liverpool's spiky trendsetters blazed a most original trail, with their Adidas trainers obsession, the Perry Boys of Manchester set standards of their own, by simply choosing to wear quality clothing and to commit to a life of violence and thievery. When the Peter Werth long-sleeved polo shirt came in fashion in 1979, it was lifted straight from the Perry Boys' wardrobe, little did the Scousers know, but the young Mancs knew all too well that they were emulating the dress code of a style tribe as notorious for knifing their victims as for shagging the fittest females or listening to the coolest music. The Perries of Manchester had favoured the polo look, especially the hooped polo, since the mid-70s, and to actually sport a polo shirt and walk around with a wedge in 1979 was truly an honour, as before then the real Perry Boys would never have allowed it to happen.
That the younger football hooligan element came to be tagged Perry Boys is no surprise, as they indeed copied the look of this Manchester gang. This same tribe of imitators were themselves vastly imitated across the country once the styles were recognised, and only the Scousers exist on the other side of the timeline, with their own claim to fame in the form of that bizarre post-punk look they honed into the later "casual" form. As the 80s became the 90s, and further mischief made, under the auspices of the Men in Black, things moved towards sleeker forms, but always the template hung behind the door like a superhero costume awaiting the return of the original attitude. But spare a thought for the Perry Boys, for they are a misunderstood bunch, and not a lot of people know that...