At the final ceremony of the British summer Olympics in London, in 2012, fifty Mods revved into the O2 stadium on their Lambrettas and Vespas , delivering Kaiser Chief, Ricky Wilson to centre stage to perform the Who’s “Pinball Wizard.” The ceremony closed with the Who themselves performing “My Generation ,” “Baba O’Riley, ” and “See Me, Feel Me ” from Tommy . The display at the Olympics, as Simon Wells has pointed out, showcases Mod as one of the cultural signifiers of British identity . 1 Sleeker, less threatening, and harder to make fun of than punk , more definitively British (while simultaneously stolen from Europe, America, and the West Indies) than Goth, Mod is a style that seems timelessly cool, even as it is also embedded in the very specific economic and cultural history of post-war Britain. As Richard Weight writes in his celebratory, Mod: A Very British Style, “Formed against a backdrop of American global supremacy and European decline, Mod was a uniquely British amalgam of American and European culture.” 2
It is arguable that Mod is the only twentieth-century style to spawn its own academic discipline. One of the founding texts of British subcultural studies , Dick Hebdige ’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style is directly indebted to the stealthy manoeuvres of 1960s’ Mods, whose complex relation to the dominant discourses of their day made them ripe for analysis, while also revealing them to be savvy and creative manipulators of their own image: “The mods invented a style which enabled them to negotiate smoothly between school, work and leisure, and which concealed as much as it revealed.” 3 Hebdige ’s work on subculture took off from the energized, political, emerging field of Cultural Studies that developed in the late 1960s, which, as Sam Cooper, argues in his chapter in this book, “believed that politics happened on the dancefloor, in the café and in front of the television.” 4 Thinking through and with Mod allowed Hebdige , Stanley Cohen, and the critics who followed them to reflect on a huge number of pressing social issues: changes to working-class culture and family relations; European influence in post-war British society; gender and sexuality (as refracted through Mod style that made men fashion arbiters and gave women chic short haircuts); the politics of resistance and compliance; race (in Mod’s debts to black style and music); drugs; motor bikes; and crucially, juvenile criminality and rebellion. The beachfront battles during the bank holiday weekends of 1964, carried out by the Mods and Rockers at Brighton, Hastings, Bournemouth, Margate, and Clacton, made them into household names: “Sawdust Caesars ” in the words of the judge in Margate who sentenced them. 5 It’s more than a little ironic that at the 2012 Olympics Mods charged in on scooters celebrating their style as a proud signifier of British identity , when in the early sixties Mod was seen as a threat to the established order, a harbinger of the corruption of youth, and the potential downfall of civilisation: teenagers transformed into well-dressed “folk devils” sparked off a moral panic in the early 1960s at a moment when traditional British culture was in the midst of rapid change. 6 By the 2012 Olympics, Mod had definitively lost its menace, and, although the not very Mod amalgam of songs played at the ceremony doesn’t indicate it, a large part of that journey to the centre of British culture was due to the ongoing effects felt from the album and film Quadrophenia.
Mod, as an identity is a treasure trove of cultural paradoxes, a chocolate box for academics who like sharp suits and soul songs mixed in with their Pierre Bourdieu . What has been less acknowledged is the many ways in which the continuing circulation of the idea of Mod in contemporary culture has relied on its most potent and brilliant representation: the soundtrack, story, and film that charts it all out. The Who’s 1973 album Quadrophenia and Franc Roddam ’s 1979 cult classic film based on the album are now inseparable from Mod identity, and in part responsible for the style’s staying power. If Mod as a style has been central to the development of cultural and subcultural studies in Britain, then Quadrophenia—the album and the film—is Mod’s canon. Quadrophenia brought Mod to the consciousness of the greater public and the world, and the cult status of the film means that it continues to introduce Mod style to subsequent generations. From Paul Weller and the Jam’ s influence on the late 1970s’ Mod revival in Britain that was already in train when the film was released, to Mod’s more recent and continuing influence on subcultures in Germany, Sweden, and Japan, Mod revives and persists. 7 If you tap “Mod images” into a Google search you find a plethora of photos of contemporary scooters and rallies and advertisements for Mod all-nighters, as well as the old photos, target signs, stills from the film, early photos of the Who, and shots from the album’s evocative photographs. Mod identity and Quadrophenia continue to work together. Quadrophenia has escaped its moorings in the album and film, and has become, as the film’s tag line suggests, a way of life.
This collection of essays, then, returns to the album and the film to uncover a contested canon of Mod history. The legendary persnicketiness (or perhaps we should say, attention to detail) of Mod devotees has assured that both Pete Townshend ’s representation of the trials and tribulations of the every-Mod Jimmy, and Franc Roddam ’s filmic version, have been subject to unstinting criticisms about their authenticity and faithfulness to their source material. 8 The contributors to this volume are, on the whole, less concerned with some ideal of authenticity than they are with the ways Mod history interacts with its fictional representations, and with the ways in which Quadrophenia has created new ways of telling and retelling Mod myths and truths. Quadrophenia is, of course, about topics beyond Mod as well. Contributors to this volume analyse the film and album through numerous contexts: the history of the Who’s reception and influences, the 1970s’ cultural and social landscape into which the album and film emerged, the adolescent novel of development (the bildungsroman ), adolescent angst, 1970s’ socialist politics, trains, glam rock, Brighton, and Bruce Springsteen are but a few topics that arise alongside Mod stories here.
There is also another story running in a subterranean way through many of the scholarly essays in this book—the story of what it means to be a fan and critic together. My own history with Quadrophenia began in 1978, when I lay on a couch for three years getting through the worst of my adolescence by never having it off the turntable. Quadrophenia, the Who’s dark, elusive, 1973 conceptual double album, was the follow-up to Who’s Next , the record that introduced me to the possibility that my own teenage waste land could be made bearable by turning the music up loud. I loved the fact that Quadrophenia told a story. Jimmy, the pilled-up , emotional, occasionally violent, Mod teenager, seemed both representative of every adolescent in his ur-teenage activities (like fighting with his parents) and—a very specific case—a kid with bipolar disorder enmeshed in the exacting style and requirements of his demanding Mod subculture at his specific historical moment. Jimmy’s dilemmas spoke to me through all the paradoxes of adolescence: desperately wanting a crowd of friends to ratify you, to shelter you, but also desperately needing to be an individual, a unique identity. As Jimmy says in the line in the film that makes everybody laugh: “I don’t want to be the same as everyone else. That’s why I’m a mod, see?” 9 The album played out as a wailing plea for love and understanding, from the younger to the older generation, from the young to anyone who will listen, from the young to the crashing sea. Set against the remote (for me) historical and geographical backdrop of the Mods and Rockers ’ encounter in the locale of Brighton, England, 1964, it was impossibly exotic and absolutely familiar. I fell in love with it.
This collection is in part dedicated to the ways in which an artwork gets under your skin and lodges there. As a teenager I examined the album in detail. The cover of Quadrophenia shows the brooding back of a boy on a massive scooter with multiple side mirrors each reflecting the face of one member of the Who. Open the album and you find the story Townshend wrote for the inside cover along with Ethan Russell ’s compelling book of black-and-white photographs depicting, in what seemed like brutal realism, the hero’s (or anti-hero’s) life. Quadrophenia was a treasure trove of information from a world I didn’t recognise; it was smoke signals sent up from somebody else’s much more interesting adolescence. I remember wondering what a parka was. I couldn’t believe there was such a thing as an Eel and Pie shop. Quadrophenia might have been the first time I genuinely became interested in history; listening to “The Punk and the Godfather ” was the moment I remember first trying to interpret a text. When Franc Roddam ’s glorious, sad, and funny film of Quadrophenia came to America it fleshed out the story for me; it felt at the time like a documentary of a way of life I needed to know more about. Phil Daniels seemed lifted from his life as Jimmy and parachuted into the film. 10 With its gritty realist feel, and punk-related stars, such as Toyah and Sting , it brought the earlier story of the album into the now of late 1970s punk . Quadrophenia was then, and has remained, a rich text, much like Middlemarch or The Golden Bowl. It bears repeat listenings and watchings; it is worth thinking with and through. The chapters in this book have helped me see Quadrophenia as a window into late twentieth-century British social history including subcultural styles and sexualities, the history of Brighton, and class politics, amongst many other topics. I hope they will help you as well.
In Part 1, “Quadrophenia in its Histories,” Bill Osgerby’s “Brighton Rocked: Mods, Rockers, and Social Change During the Early 1960s” sets the stage by unpacking the 1960s’ mythologies of youth...