Lively male wearing coarse cloth (8)
I believe the answer is:
smacking
'lively' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'male wearing coarse cloth' is the wordplay.
'male' becomes 'm' (common abbreviation).
'wearing' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'coarse cloth' becomes 'sacking' (sacking is a kind of cloth. I am not sure about the 'coarse' bit.).
'm' put inside 'sacking' is 'SMACKING'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for smacking that I've seen before include "Belting" , "Slapping" .)