This Vice piece on “British Chaos” content cropped up in Jay Springett’s weeknotes, and with it came a sense of recognition. The phenomenon of their global visibility may be somewhat new—though there was a similar flurry back in the late Noughties and early Teens, as online video started to get established—but without my having seen any of the stuff mentioned, I found myself able to put faces and mannerisms to almost every character described.

They’re archetypes of a Britain that never usually made it into the media, except in the denatured form of sit-com stereotypes, and that special style of British-made cinema and TV that peaked in the late Nineties and early Noughties: Human Traffic, Guy Ritchie’s gangster flicks, Spaced, Teachers. That was also the period in which I met these people, quite often in the context of the workplace—or, more specifically, in the context of the designated smoking spot outside whatever factory I was temping at.

In Portsmouth, at that time, the appropriate designation—fully owned, worn as a badge of honour—was geezer, or sometimes mush; wide-boy types, larger than life, who (with hindsight) always gave the impression of performing for a camera eye that didn’t yet exist. Characters who not only knew they were characters, but who took considerable pleasure and pride in it.

You might meet them almost anywhere, it seemed, though that probably had a lot to do with my spending a lot of time in liminal spaces where the barriers of class had become more porous. You might be harangued by them on your way to the bogs at the back of the late-night snooker club in Commercial Road, or relieved of your last tin of Stella by them on the last train back from Southampton after seeing a show at the Joiners and failing to find a floor to crash on.

You might sit briefly with them in a hot-boxed XR3 with obviously fake Cosworth trim, parked in a lay-by not far from the small rave taking place in an empty pig-farm somewhere in Dorset, negotiating the purchase of five pills whose speckled colour you had to hope didn’t predict a stint in the K-hole; they might chop you out a line of still-damp billy base on the kitchen counter in the last edgy hours of a house-party showing signs of going south.

They might spit cheerfully on your skate shoes as they passed you and your weird-looking mates on their way back into Southsea from the seafront clubs. They might, with literally zero preamble or justification, kick the shit out of you in a side-street at 3am in November, while you were too drunk or otherwise addled to understand what was happening to you, or why. In the Job Centre on Tuesday morning, they might deliver an impromptu soliloquy that sat somewhere between Shakespeare and Dickens, as delivered by Ebeneezer Goode; they might run gamely out of the northern entrance to the Cascades, clean between the totally upstaged cops who’d been called on them for harassing the pretty student girls who worked in the Body Shop at weekends, before bee-lining it back to Somerstown and a celebratory pint of wife-beater in one of its many shabby little pubs, almost all of which were steadily redeveloped into flats as the new century got its feet under itself.

Thinking back, the overall impression is of motion: they were possessed of an energy that was nothing to do with the drugs, or which was at most only amplified by the drugs. I’m reminded of the verse that was removed from Pulp’s “Common People” for the radio edit:

You will never understand / how it feels to live your life

with no meaning or control / and with nowhere left to go

you’re amazed that they exist / and they burn so bright, while you can only wonder why…

That they still exist is no surprise, at least not to me. Like the faerie folk, once you’ve learned to see them, you always will—and also like the faerie folk, they can see that you can see them, and that marks you out for whatever blessings or curses they may choose to bestow upon you for trespassing in the margins that they have been confined to.

That they’re having their moment in the ring-lamp sun of late-stage social media is little surprise, either. Chaos is the right word, because it’s chaos that makes the membrane thinner. Back in the Nineties, that chaotic energy felt right to me, if not exactly good; it was simply the way things were, the buzz of the times. The chaotic energy of Britain right now feels rather less right, but I suspect that’s partly because I (like most of the others commentating on it) am older, and—crucially—not from that side of the membrane. I can imagine, however, that to at least some middle-class kids hitting early adulthood, there is a similar sense of right-if-not-goodness. The wheel has turned, the membrane has thinned, and the wild ones are running loose in straight world too scared of its own shadow to rein them in.

It’s their time again. Your outrage won’t stop them. It’s what they’ve been feeding on; you’ve left them little else.