What is 'Hooligan: a history of respectable fears' and can we eat it?

Never read the book, but Pearson's idea of 'respectable fears' is simply a way of articulating the way the middle aged and solid (and bourgeois, presumably) citizen sanitizes his/her own youth and by association the way society was then: secure, safe, stable moral centre. Against this backdrop the shenanigans of the youth look particularly threatening and one's fear of them is normalized, plus wider fears for the state of the society get dumped on them. You probably already knew that, but this is pretty much a sympathy post anyway (god, that looks so cruel written down).

Thank you. This is of course a standard pinko leftie argument against the 'youth of today are out of control, bring back National Service' brigade. Do you know if Pearson provides much historical evidence to back it up?

It is, by the sound of it, the book that will catch the Brutish by the bollocks and put their essence in aspic. It will contain both Clockwork Alex and Whitehouse Mary. It will ram the prim down the gullet of the scary.

See also: 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics' by Stanley Cohen.

I saw Damien Hirst interviewed yesterday on the Charlie Rose show, and bless me if he didn't look a dead ringer, with his bullyboy shave, for that other 90s celebrity hooligan, Irvine Welsh. They both had the same nervous energy, the same squashball face with thin lips and beady, mentalist eyes. In fact they both looked like Oor Wullie, the frizzhead prole from the Scottish Sunday tabloid. I could fill a volume with the history of the respectabilisation of hooligan style in the 1990s, but will leave it to others, since I have more important work to do: trying to bring back the values of the 1890s.

Oor Wullie v. Oscar Wilde -- FITE!

oor wullie would smash Wilde upside the head with his bucket.

In fact they both looked like Oor Wullie, the frizzhead prole from the Scottish Sunday tabloid.

!!!!!

I know from years of receiving Oor Wullie annuals that both Irvine and Damien are far to pudgy to look like Oor Wullie. Maybe more like the fat sister from the Broons.

In my darker moments i worry that i resemble Daphne Broon, which is the fat sister you're referring to.

I don't know if Mr Pearson has a chapter on this, but he should consider the constant collusion in British culture between the aesthete and the hooligan. Mr Wilde of course dallied with stable boys in his private dining room upstairs at Kettners. The Wilde of the 1980s, Morrissey, scandalised his admirers in the music press when he started posing as a bully boy in his videos, singing about Reggie Kray and spoiling other people's billiards games. He was symbolically crucified and 'banished' when he draped himself in the Union Jack at Madstock, either taunting or placating some skinheads in the audience. (Wilde of course was also banished for some sort of silly buggery.)

Yet the values Morrissey flaunted in the early 90s to so much dismay (flags, suedehead style) got taken up by the very people who protested them. The NME people who'd called him a racist went off to use the union jack to promote their nationalist BritPop (if they were called James Brown they went off and started Loaded, *the* magazine of le hooligan nouvelle) and everyone got a suedehead and started going to football and boxing matches, just as Morrissey had. The respectable and the fearsome shook hands and made up. Hooligan Hirst became a chic restauranteur, Irvine Welsh won the Booker and Nobel prizes (well, almost) and the broadsheets started borrowing tricks from the tabloids.

The aesthete and the hooligan turned out to be two backs on the same Rough Trade beast.

(Substitute 'le hooligan nouveau' please, ed.)

N.: dunno how Pearson works the argument through. Cohen's moral panics thesis emerged out of his own close observation of the mod/rocker scuffles at (was it initially) Clacton (?) and press aftermath. It's been muchly applied since, probably most notably to rave culture/E, by a Canadian woman whose name I forget. Momus is OTM re the fear/fascination dynamic.