casuals - 1996 - The Football Factory

The Football Factories
John King
1996
Vintage
262 pgs

I've watched a number of documentaries about English football casuals where a talking head representing the subculture expresses his resentment about punk getting all the attention back in the 70s and 80s when the casuals were just so much more interesting. Its such a dumb and funny thing to express since the punk subculture gave rise to new fashions, music, attitudes, literatures, ethos, semiotics, philosophies, dance. The Casuals pretty much bashed eachother at and around football matches. When punks were exploring the limits of every cultural form within the framework of their DIY ethos and post-situationist anti-establishment attitudes, the Casuals were becoming even more conformist by dressing in designer sportswear. Sociologically the Casuals are interesting, but they're interesting for the absence of creativity in their culture.

The Football Factories is a dramatic film about casual firms, starring Danny Dyer who went on to host a documentary TV series about the subject, The Real Football Factories. It was first a 1996 novel by John King that's written in the first person consciousness stream from the perspective of a Casual Chelsea supporter named Tommy. The novel reminds me of two other works of transgressive fiction, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. A Clockwork Orange because King writes in the heavy cockney slang of Tommy - not the lyrical rhyming slang we sometimes hear about in Canada either - reminiscent of the slang Burgess invented for his novel. I'm well aware that there really are people out there calling the police 'old bill' and whatever, but its foreign enough to me to make me think of the nadsat language.  American Psycho because the sex, intoxication, and violence of Tommy's life becomes a dull pattern that moves around Chelsea's home/away schedule, otherwise the narrator expresses his views about life and such and every single idea he has is a cliche trapped in a painfully constricted worldview.