National Post (National Edition)
Meet the English soccer lout who has a flare for attention, between his cheeks.
English football fanatic Charlie Perry got a little cheeky at the Euro soccer final. He has no regrets
Over the last year or so, there has been a lot of talk about who or what is deserving of being commemorated with a public statue. I haven't followed it very closely, truth be told, but I believe the general consensus is that people are complex, citizens of note come in all shapes and sizes, and there is always space for new, thoughtful pieces of art dedicated to modern figures of seismic cultural import — however controversial they may be.
Well, step — or shuffle, depending on how the cheek burns have healed — forward Charlie Perry, a 25-year-old roofer from Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey, who has done more to unite, confuse and revile England over the last week than almost anybody.
If you don't recognize Perry at first glance, it may be because he isn't bent over with a 6-inch smoke flare inserted part-way up his rectum, just next to a tattoo bearing the words “Benidorm Bunters” — plumes of red vapour pouring, volcanically, up and out of him as if he's been hired by a desperate Vatican to jazz up the announcement of a new Pope.
That image of Perry, taken in London's Leicester Square on Sunday before he broke into Wembley without a ticket to watch England lose the Euro 2020 final, swiftly went around the world wide web. In it, we saw an unedifying picture of England in the summer of 2021: utterly off its head, attention-seeking to the max, unbothered by the fact it is quite literally on fire.
He'd been drinking “since half eight in the morning and had had at least 20 cans of Strongbow,” Perry told The Sun, the British tabloid, this week, in an interview that will cause your facial expression to flit between bewilderment and disgust with every passing paragraph. “It was the biggest day of my life. There were no rules that day. All I know is that I loved it all. I was off my face and I loved every minute.”
Yet, more than just a picture of England, the details of Perry day provided us with a portrait of a very modern yob.
Perry started early. Not just 8:30 a.m., when he had the first of his 20-odd Strongbows, but probably many months before. A “jibbing” (football slang for getting into a stadium without a ticket) Facebook group organized the mass Wembley break-in, and he admits he is an old hand.
“Obviously I didn't have a ticket,” he said — and to be fair, that was obvious: nobody who knows they will be sitting on hard plastic for an hour and-a-half in the evening would pop a flaming stick of dynamite up themselves beforehand. “I had gone in as a jibber before so I knew how to get into the stadium already.”
Despite wearing an easily identifiable £545 blue designer Louis Vuitton bucket hat (roofing in Sunbury evidently pays well), when he was thrown out of Wembley after his first attempt, Perry simply took off his sweater and hat — the flare, for clarity, had also been removed — found a steward in a COVID testing area, gave him “a little backhander,” bribed another official at a turnstile (total spend: £250), and Bob's your uncle, he was in.
The big question hanging over Perry, and indeed all of us this week, is surely: “What fuels a perfectly healthy-seeming 25-year-old man to impale himself on a lit smoke flare in a 17th century public square, and on the Sabbath of all days?”
The answer wasn't peer pressure. “No one dared me to do it,” Perry said. “Everyone was fooling around, there was a bit of competition to do stuff.” Then the clincher, or clencher: “So I thought I'd put the flare up my bum.”
The answer wasn't precedent, either. Because I'm a thorough journalist I just Googled the words, “flare up bum history,” in case it was some kind of ritual that had eluded my sheltered life. Most of the results were complaints about wide-legged jeans inducing hemorrhoids.
No, the answer was simpler than that: cocaine. Oodles and oodles of the stuff – well, three grams, specifically. Once the preserve of `It' girls, middle-class dinner parties and Elton John, it is now the marching powder of the football yob.
“Banging loads of powder,” as Perry was filmed doing at one point around midday, meant he could drink all that cider without falling asleep aflame, and imbued him with the chutzpah to rival Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos by attempting to blast off into space.
“The flare burnt for about 10 seconds or so around the cheeks. I didn't feel a thing because I was highly intoxicated,” he noted. He really is like Elton, a rocket maaaaaaaaaaan.
There is no reason to condone any of Perry's actions on the 11th of July, none at all. But, but, butt… it did bring people together in righteous condemnation on what eventually became another damp squib of a day for England. And this, he claims, was always his intention.
Football yobs of yore would cause mayhem and destruction with no thought for the wider public, but in the same way that English coach Gareth Southgate inspired a different kind of footballer, so too has 2021 produced a different kind of lout: one who thinks of others. As JFK sort of said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask whether you ought to whack a firework up your fundament for the lads.”
“After 18 months of misery, I thought it would bring the England fans together,” Perry said, in his best butter-wouldn't-melt voice. Except on Sunday the butter would have melted, because he temporarily became a steam-driven locomotive.
Masked with a scarf, locked in a pack for extra security, dodging CCTV… there was a time when the clandestine nature of law-breaking football fans suggested they knew they were doing wrong and didn't want to be identified.
Not today, not Perry, who even posed for a new portrait in the same outfit as he wore on Sunday. “Nah, no way. I'm not saying sorry,” he insisted. Looking back on his actions that day, he “regrets nothing.”
“See you in Qatar,” Perry signed off. I am fairly sure the penal code in the State of Qatar doesn't explicitly mention what punishment a man receives for turning himself into a disco chimney, but I reckon it's a little stronger than a celebratory article in The Sun.
It's a risk he'll have to take. We now have a little over a year to predict Perry's next trick. Rip his own leg off and play it like a vuvuzela? Cover himself in pollen and jump into an apiary singing Sweet Caroline? Eat a giant Viennetta in the shape of England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford while crowds chant his name in Doha's Ad Dawhah public square?
Anything's possible. Game on.