Whatever happened to the football casual?

My first encounter with him was in January 1980 when I got a broken nose courtesy of a gang of strangely dressed fellows in Liverpool. It was a revenge beating. We were there to see Grimsby lose 5-0 to Liverpool in the FA Cup; the Evertonians who punched me were there to avenge a 2-1 defeat in the League Cup two months previously. While the rest of the country was awash with Mod revivalists and punks, these guys were wearing bell bottomed jeans, deck shoes or Adidas trainers and had magnificently gay-looking wedge haircuts; a sort of Bowie-gone-thug look.

Inadvertently or otherwise, men have a great deal to thank the casual for. Casual has had a far greater effect on men’s fashion than any dim Parisian fashion house. If it weren’t for those stylish popinjays we’d all still be dressing like Richard O’Sullivan in the Man About The House. But where did they go to and did acid house really kill them off? And, more importantly, is it true that everyone was too busy doing ecstasy and stroking Millwall tattoos to fight at the football?

Casual – birthed in cities like Liverpool, Manchester and London – was at its most active and visible in the early to mid-eighties. The culture revolved around an ever-changing array of exclusive and/or hard-to-find clothing, going to the football and a penchant for the occasional bout of fisticuffs. It was among these terrace tykes that the humble trainer was elevated to fashion icon status, long before rappers – erroneously assumed to have been the style leaders in such matters – discovered the Adidas Shell-Toe. (I went to see Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five about 25 years ago, and far from dressing sportily, they were dressed head-to-toe in leather and looked like Rick James Super Pimps.)

While hip hop continued to use Theophilus P. Wildebeest as its sartorial model, the casual looked like Jack Nicklaus as worn by Jack Nicholson. “People were picking clothes that weren’t meant for them,” says Chelsea fan and DJ, Terry Farley, “such as Fila BJ tracksuits; they weren’t meant for people walking round carrying Stanley knives, they were meant for people to play tennis in. Pringle jumpers were meant for 50-year-old men to play golf in and even trainers were not meant for people to walk about in, they were still meant for running.”

The vaguely threatening street smart kid is nothing new, of course. It’s been going on for centuries in this country. Before the term ‘hooligan’ entered into the popular lexicon in the late 1800s, there were gangs very much like the casuals in most urban conurbations who delighted in such names as Scuttlers, Peaky Blinders and Area Sneakers.

Then there were Spivs, Teddy boys, Mods and Skinheads and Suedeheads. Neither is violence at football new. Invasions, match abandonment, drunken footballers, attacking referees; these were all as commonplace in the Victorian era as now. Casual, then, was merely polite society’s latest menace rather than any new or unanticipated threat. In any case, most casuals were more often interested in exclusive clothes rather than Stanley knives. “A football crew’s reputation could be severely damaged by giving it toes (getting chased) at Fulham Broadway, Finsbury Park or Euston Road, but more serious damage could be done if a fatty was seen wearing a bad pair of trainers by the opposing team’s fashion spotters,” wrote Peter Hooton in The Face, and he wasn’t joking.

Up until the arrival of acid house, casual as a culture had a limiting and limited worldview. It didn’t exist outside of football matches, there were no magazines (though casuals did read fanzines like The End and Boys Own), no music, unless you discount the long forgotten Accent; it was a culture without a culture. But far from being influenced by acid house it was instrumental in its birth. Prior to its arrival, what decent clubs there were tended to be exclusive and cliquey. Art school rather than old school; cool rather than hot. Acid house was inclusive and all of those who’d been knocked back on the doors of the West End and beyond were suddenly in the middle. “Acid house was a by-product of casual culture,” claims Terry Farley. “The whole acid house thing grew out of that suburban soul scene. Whether it was Danny Rampling or Paul Oakenfold, they were just suburban soul boys. And it was the same with people who started doing parties in places like Leeds and Edinburgh, they were all football casuals.”

And just as the fashion had veered from Buffalo Girls to the utterly silly Hard Times it, too, suddenly found it democratised. “I went to the Up North weekender at Fleetwood,” recalls Phil Thornton, author of the seminal book about the scene, Casuals, “and I always remember the Modern Room there being full of lads in shirts, ties and pants, smartly dressed; whereas we were all in acid clubwear, bandanas, baggy clothes, looking ridiculous. I think acid house said: you don’t have to wear that stuff any more. You can wear a cagoule; you can wear a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt ten sizes too big; and it didn’t matter. I think it undermined that dictatorship of labels for a while.”

Next – so the myth goes – everyone was just so loved up they laid down their Stanley knives, kissed each other’s tattoos and climbed aboard the Love Bus. “That’s bollocks,” says journalist Adam Porter. “About five percent of it was acid house. There was still trouble in 1988. The real reason football hooliganism died away around that time was mainly because of Heysel, which just made the whole thing seem very untrendy. The ritualised chest-beating that’s so much part of hooliganism was lost in all the deaths of innocent people.” Terry Farley concurs with this: “They must have shown two hours of violence before they showed the Heysel match and everyone I know was ringing up going, ‘this is brilliant, look at this!’ and then no-one rung each other up for at least a week after it. Before that everyone had thought that this was something between them and other consenting young men and no one really got hurt. I think a lot of people felt very very guilty and responsible after that. Although it didn’t stop it, it stopped the people who actually mattered.”

There are other points to consider, too. Football suddenly became trendy. Posh people feigned interest and because of this it found itself with cultural allies in the press, something it had never previously enjoyed. (This was most comically expressed by a gushing ten thousand word piece in the London Review of Books in which Paul Gascoigne was described as “fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable, orphan-like...tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun”, rather than a Geordie nitwit.) For some reason, it simply became unfashionable to write about football hooliganism.

In any case, though the fighting had diminished it hadn’t disappeared totally. The biggest riot I’ve ever seen was in 1990 when Stoke City visited Blundell Park, a match that ended with thousands on the pitch, plastic seats sailing through the air (but then Stoke has the highest nutter-to-normal person ratio of any place I’ve ever been to).

These days, casual is both invisible and ubiquitous. Its influence is in every pub, and on every high street; it gave birth to the label-crazy youth of the present day. It single-handedly revived men’s fashion, while haute couture happily turned out clothes that looked like they’d been designed for a Vic & Bob sketch. The true inheritors of the casual mantle are arguably the likes of Dizzee rascal 9fix up, look sharp indeed).  Phil Thornton claims it’s bigger than ever. “You get 50 year old fellers in Liverpool walking round in Lacoste and Adidas tracksuits. Go into the centre of Liverpool any time over the past 7 or 8 years and it’s just a sea of Lacoste with whatever Adidas reissues are out at that time. Maybe we romanticise it a bit and forget that we were all quite prone to uniforms ourselves. I think we all saw ourselves as individuals, but really we just followed what everyone else was wearing.”

Nick Noble opened his store, Originals Footwear in Barnsley, in 2000. It’s a trainer-lover’s wet dream. “You could go out and buy your Nike Cortezs and your Adidas Countrys all day long but as far as your Forest Hills and Borg Elites, you just couldn’t get them,” says Nick. “We’re selling all over the world now, Korea, Japan, Holland, Austria, Germany and loads to the USA.

“People like Fila, Pringle and Tacchini really had no idea that these hordes of children were buying or stealing their clothes,” says Farley. “Once they realised this, they started targeting them and the style was no longer driven by the casuals themselves but by marketing. You only have to open the back of FHM and you’ll see loads of adverts for provincial boutiques selling the same ten labels: Stone Island, CP Company etc… But I’m far too old to know or care about today’s casual. There are people there who think they’re casuals, but it’s like looking at men 20 years ago in a drape and brothel creepers. I had a Burberry jacket in 1982. The Burberry jacket is the same as a Teddy boy jacket now.”  Those Prada Sport wearing youth at Ninian Park and the Riverside Stadium might just disagree.

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