Ian Hough is an English writer living in the United States. Hough is a native of the city of Manchester, and believes that northwest England as a whole is a source of much of England's greatest accomplishments, particularly Manchester. Long interested in how seemingly unrelated evolutionary fragments combine to create new states of being for humans through history, Hough has used as his themes science, violence, groupthink (and the collective unconscious), modes of existence, and psychedelics in his written material.
His first book, Perry Boys , has just been published in the UK by Milo books. Perry Boys tells the story of how the so-called "casual" culture emerged in the northwest of England in the late 70s in the hands of a small and select group of individuals, and progressed to a nationwide obsession with designer clothing and clubbing. That the movement had no official title for several years is a source of wonder to Hough, who calls it "The Nameless Thing".
Ian has a degree in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and this scientific leaning is evident throughout his first book. Perry Boys draws parallels between those early working-class stylists and the hunter-gatherer period of human development. Hough draws this quasi-mystic thread through the entire story, culminating at the point where all Britain became enlightened as to new fashions, a phenomenon Hough compares to the shift to agriculture 10,000 years ago in western Asia, which quickly spread across Europe. The fact that he uses humour, and even graphs, to illustrate some of his points, must be realised as somewhat tongue-in-cheek while actually being quite convincing. It appears that this quality in Hough's writing is lost on some critics of Perry Boys, who have apparently been under the impression Hough was taking himself seriously at all times during the book. This is difficult to understand, as there are entire chapters which deal exclusively with fantasy and make-believe, in a blatant form of psychedelic mockery and simultaneous enhancement of the experience of reading the very trippy book.
Hough weaves together a complex plot-line, combining football hooliganism, clothing, language, drug culture, and crime in the city of Manchester. His interests in environmental chemistry and anthropology are used to define the hows and whys of an underground cult's journey from a media-ignored explosion on the football terraces to mainstream sensibilities thirty years later.