The Sad Decline of the Great British Badboy

It's often said that we don't really "do" rebels in this country. Hugh Grant, Guy Fawkes and Swampy aside, the thinking goes that we're far too reserved to get involved with any kind of heartfelt disobedience and too cynical to be pissed off with much conviction. The cliche dictates that when shit goes wrong for us, we just moan about it in pubs and make snide gags on comedy panel shows, rather than getting wound up and firebombing police stations like our continental cousins. A poll on the Greatest British rebel of all time even placed Henry VIII at number one. Sure, he took on almost the entire civilised world at the time and founded his own religion, but let's face it, he was a fucking king. A megalomaniac, yes, but a rebel? I'm not so sure.

The thing that got me thinking about this was the Billy the Kid of pop-grime himself: Costadinos "Dappy" Contostavlos. The second most famous member of N-Dubz has been having a rough year; in February, he was found guilty of affray and assault after a fight at a Shell garage, in March, he launched his microphone into a fan's mouth, and a couple of weeks back, he was filmed stumbling around a hotel corridor with a strange white smudge on the end of his nose.

Traditionally, this is behaviour that would have been described as "rebellious". In fact, he even used those terms to describe himself in an interview in January: "Sometimes they [the public] think I'm a bit rude, but I'd rather be the rebellious Liam Gallagher-type and sell a million records than be clean cut," he told the press. But is Dappy really a rebel, or is he just an arsehole?

Through the decades, the British pop culture rebel has tended to be different to others from around the world – generally, they aren't fighting political oppression or big business, like Ice Cube, Nadezdha Tolokonnikova, Vitali Klitschko or Jacques Mesrine. Instead of righteous political seditionaries, we've got a history of filling the world with swaggering wankers with authority and substance issues – rogues, cads, anti-heroes, badboys. Which, on the evidence above, is a category that most would probably slot Dappy into.

Crucially, Dappy isn't a particularly likeable human being, and this sets him apart from Gallagher and tons of other British badboys of the past. From Brian Clough to Mick Jagger, Ronnie O'Sullivan to Wiley, we've always done a great line in bravura dickheads you probably wouldn't invite to your wedding, but who'd be first on the list for the stag do. They've tended to possess a certain amount of wit, charm and sartorial panache, a poise in the face of authority which suggests that, even though they might seem nuts at times, they're enjoying being in control of their own destinies. At its most potent and extreme, the British badboy's probably best embodied by the pair of characters Malcolm McDowell played in the late 60s and early 70s: Mick Travis in If… and Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange. Both were effeminate yet dangerously virile, snarling yet eloquent, carefree yet calculated. Sure, they were both violent narcissists, one of whom machine-gunned a congregation of churchgoers, the other bludgeoning a woman to death with a massive marble phallus. But when the films end, you're glad these young men exist. You're on their side.

Clearly, Dappy doesn't commit to this blueprint of the British badboy at all; he's most famous to date for a slew of petty, small-man criminal offences and being used as a human punchline by Phill Jupitus. Dappy is yet to provide any evidence that he's one of history's great raconteurs and he doesn't seem like he's having much fun, he just seems dumb, bitter and beleaguered. Instead of charming a succession of Miss Worlds like George Best, he's spitting at people and starting mass brawls after being spurned by girls in petrol stations.

Behold, the modern face of British anti-heroism, Costadinos "Dappy" Contostavlos (via).

Then take the hotel thing. Had this taken place in the Vegas Bellagio, or the Paris Ritz, or even the Shepherd's Bush K West, he might have been able to come out of it with a bit of added badboy kudos. But it took place in the Cadbury House Hotel, just outside Bristol. I mean, I'm sure it's a lovely place, but it's an establishment your mum might take your nan to for a mini-break. It's also, well, a bit Partridge, isn't it? This is the tragedy of Dappy. His life is pretty Partridge, he's still getting thrown out of Alton Towers for smoking weed, he seems like the most boring nihilist in the world, the badboy equivalent of a chicken and sweetcorn sandwich.

And he's not alone. Today, the tabloid internet offers a whole depressing array of shitty British pop culture rebels. It's a motley crew of preening mummy's boys like Harry Styles, benchwarming football Gs like Jay Bothroyd and Nile Ranger, hackneyed shock comics like Frankie Boyle, bleary-eyed Mahiki alphas like Spencer "Spenny" Matthews and rugby players who get hit by buses while wearing make-up, like Danny Cipriani.

If they formed a gang, it would be weird and shit. You look at Giggs, perhaps the only really bad British badboy who's got anywhere near the mainstream in the last few years, and you see a grizzled Clint Eastwood character who could outfight, outsmoke and outfuck the lot of them. Musically, things are pretty dire in this respect, there's not a single new band in the country who could claim a legitimate badboy among their ranks and it's unlikely the EDM scene is gonna give us one any time soon, unless James Blake loses his shit and curb stomps a paparazzo.

You survey the wimps and the morons that surround us today and you wonder, where are the stylish nihilists? Where are the bona fide British badboys, with their alien slang, ratty posturing, casual violence and wanton promiscuity? Sure, Dappy possesses some of those traits, but he appears at the tail end of this lineage as a kind of bastard child of the bastard children. I suppose the big thing that's missing here is charm, and if we're honest, Dappy and his Mail Online badboy crew possess all the charm of a third-hand bukkake VHS.

Finding reasons for this gradual decline is more difficult than pointing at it and saying that it exists. Perhaps it's just that the generation gap that all those old British badboys exploited to make the parents of teenagers fear them isn't there any more, and hasn't really been there since grime (if you're an optimist), rave (if you're a realist) or punk (if you're a pessimist). If the generation gap exists at all now, it's likely to reside in technological advances; your mum probably finds iPads more terrifying and confusing than she does the Harry Styles or Spencer Matthews she sees on telly and in the Mail every week. Or by Dappy, who she might be vaguely aware of because his mate is a judge on The X Factor.

It doesn’t quite make sense that no pop culture figure's really menaced Britain in the six years since Doherty broke up with Kate Moss and caught the Eurostar to obscurity. There’s a gap in the market here – in the age of broadsheet journalists earnestly tweeting about The Voice, we need a new folk devil for the petite bourgeoisie, a lightning conductor for anti-austerity outrage. Not just an idiot like Dappy. A brilliant, provocative, deranged wanker who will be the person kids' parents point at on TV and warn them about. Britain is holding out for an anti-hero. Where have all the badmen gone?

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

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