Quadrophenia

Stephen Glynn

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231850551
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

1964: Mods clash with Rockers in Brighton, creating a moral panic. 1973: ex-Mod band The Who release Quadrophenia, a concept album following young Mod Jimmy Cooper to the Brighton riots and beyond. 1979: Franc Roddam directs Quadrophenia, a film based on Pete Townshend's album narrative; its cult status is immediate. 2013: almost fifty years on from Brighton, this first academic study explores the lasting appeal of 'England's Rebel Without a Cause '. Investigating academic, music, press, and fan-based responses, Glynn argues that the 'Modyssey' enacted in Quadrophenia intrigues because it opens a hermetic subculture to its social-realist context; it enriches because it is a cult film that dares to explore the dangers in being part of a cult; it endures because of its 'emotional honesty', showing Jimmy as failing, with family, job, girl, and group; it excites because we all know that, at some point in our lives, 'I was there!'

1

PREQUEL: CULT INTO MUSIC

THE PUNK AND THE MODFATHER

I was a Mod once: or tried to be. The decisive moment came in 1979 when I was at university and dabbling in rock journalism. I recall seeing advertisements seeking actors for a forthcoming feature film based on the Who’s 1973 ‘Quadrophenia’ album. I had no acting talent, but I had anticipation – and a growing sense of rock film history. I had endured pub-room reminiscences from ageing rockers about Bill Haley and the mayhem enjoyed with Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956). I both envied and doubted them – I knew already of John Lennon’s disappointment at the expectations raised by press hype when he went and, for lack of dancing in the aisles and wanton destruction of cinema property, had been forced to sit through Haley’s tepid feature: ‘I was all set to tear up the seats too but nobody joined in’ (Braun 1964: 35). Now it was to be my turn. Through the late seventies I had endured the growing violence of the football terraces and, more unexpectedly, at several music gigs – but in truth I never believed it would come to a cinema foyer near me.

On the late August evening in 1979 when I first went to see Quadrophenia the atmosphere inside the Odeon at New Street, Birmingham was itself rather like a football stadium: the Mods were the ‘home’ fans standing up and cheering every time a Rocker was hit over the head; when a Mod got bashed, a muffled shout carried over from the few foolhardy heavy metal fans who had dared to turn up, their puny cheers drowned out by raucous catcalls. After the film, the violence broke out for real – not in truth a Midlands microcosm of the Mod versus Rocker rumpus just seen on screen, but a brief territorial fight-out between rival Mod groups. I edged round the side and set off home, shaking my head at the punch-up but thinking that this had been the most exhilarating cinema experience of my life. Mod had come to the movies!¹

It was a perfect summation. For my generation, the Who’s ‘Quadrophenia’ album – and its accompanying booklet – first occasioned an examination of matters Mod. ‘Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances’ was the epitome of the Mod aesthetic in the mid- to late seventies, with many classic Mod records long-deleted and, worse still, the High Streets awash with flared trousers and wide collars. Rummaging for straight-legged white jeans in remainder outlets was perhaps the only quasi-communal activity for myself and occasional fellow aficionados, but when punk started to wane in 1978 Mod’s fourth, revivalist movement began to coalesce. Its prime mover was Paul Weller and the group he fronted, The Jam. Even at the height of punk’s safety-pin savagery Weller, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler wore tight, black mohair suits, and regaled their punk following with fast and punchy renditions of R&B classics and Who covers. Here was the clearest fusion of seemingly opposing subcultures, the fury of punk with the cool of Mod. Weller had been Mod-inspired, not so neatly via Townshend’s ‘Quadrophenia’ but, indirectly, through that paean to cool, David Essex, the Damascene moment coming in 1974 when Weller heard the Who’s ‘My Generation’ on his sister’s copy of the soundtrack album to Stardust (Michael Apted, 1974). From there he explored and expounded a life-style, devouring the musical heritage and moulding his group in the image of his forebears. In 1975, a time of afghan coats and Zapata moustaches, Weller was one of the happy few to wear a parka and drive around on a Lambretta. The Jam’s commercial and critical success seemed imminent with the release in May 1977 of ‘In The City’, but the group then stalled and Weller returned home to Woking and re-immersed himself in the music of the Who and the Kinks for inspiration: the resultant ‘All Mod Cons’, issued in November 1978, met with instant praise as it rose to number six in the UK album charts. Perhaps even more than the music I recall poring over the album cover and its revivalist packaging – the target design on the label, the Lambretta diagram, the Immediate-style lettering – which demonstrated Weller’s reaffirmation of a specific Mod consciousness. This, perhaps, was the true catalyst for the revival of the Mod movement, and The Who’s influence – and relevance – to the late seventies was made explicit when the Jam’s single release from the album, ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’, was backed with the Who’s ‘So Sad About Us’, a tribute to the recently departed Keith Moon whose image featured on the rear picture cover. The 45 featuring tracks by Weller and Townshend, the punk and the godfather, was released on 6 October and was a constant play on my turntable as it rose to number 16 in the UK charts.

Personally this was an ideal Mod marriage as the Who had been central to my musical identity since I started listening to and buying rock music in the early seventies. The T. Rex single ‘Children of the Revolution’ was an auspicious start, though grammar school pretentions were more assuaged with (seemingly) meaningful Prog Rock albums by the likes of Yes and Genesis. To the rescue came the Who and ‘Quadrophenia’, an album of genuine substance that I could explore much as Weller would a year or two later. I bored my long-haired schoolmates with an exegesis of the nihilism in ‘5.15’ and spooked my Catholic parents by returning from the local library with works on eastern mysticism. Most of all though, ‘Quadrophenia’ led to the careful tending of a Mod crew cut and the proud sporting of a hardy parka to football matches while others strived to keep Bovril off their impractical sheepskins.

This was all a prelude, though, a slow and somewhat solitary build-up to the explosion of exhilaration communally experienced in that Birmingham cinema in 1979. As this study will hopefully testify, Quadrophenia itself does not condone violence but recognises, even celebrates the energy central to such teenage rites of passage; Quadrophenia is an achieved, forensic examination of adolescent angst, exclusion and failure; Quadrophenia is a cult film that explores the attractions – and the dangers – of a distinctive British cult movement; Quadrophenia is Mod at its peak of popularity.

I’M DRESSED UP BETTER THAN ANYONE

Defining Mod is not easy, largely because it is ‘prone to continuous reinvention’ (Jobling and Crowley 1996: 213). Its Britishness, however, is self-evident, if only from the debate still raging over the extent of its ‘cross-class membership’ (Muggleton 2000: 160). Its development up to 1964 and the seaside riots recreated in Quadrophenia can, though, be sketched in with some certainty (see Melly 1972, Barnes 1979, Hewitt 2000, Rawlings 2000 and Weight 2013). Mod’s origins can be traced back to the musical wilderness at the end of 1959, when groups of young men in and around London reacted to the uncouth Teddy Boys, the pretentious beatniks and the fogeyish trad jazz aficionados by fashioning themselves as ‘Modernists’. These emergent, ‘core Mods’ – initially no more than a hundred or so – were ‘true dandies, interested in creating works of art – themselves’ (Melly 1972:150). While Liverpool remained leather, this new London scene, led by Peter Sugar, demanded tight-fitting three-button Italian mohair suits, Anello & Davide dancers boots while casual jean-wear had to be American. Their cigarettes were Gauloises, less for flavour than the visual flair. ‘They went to the cinema to watch foreign films and the actor’s wardrobe’ (Hewitt 2005: 11). From there they also picked up on the nippy scooters popularised by Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1959). In opposition to the trad boom, they expressed their preference for modern jazz, but fashion was paramount.

Numbers grew slowly until a feature by Peter Barnsley in Town Magazine in October 1962 brought the movement to public attention, and marked the transition from Modernist to Mod. Headlined ‘Faces without Shadows’ and featuring photographs by Don McCullin, Barnsley examined the lives of three Stoke Newington youths, including Sugar and a 15-year-old Mark Feld, later reinvented as Marc Bolan. The article unwittingly testified to a coalescence of past, present and future: National Service had been abolished, the economy was taking off, and hire purchase arrangements – buying on the ‘never-never’ – gave young people vastly increased spending power. It also supported George Melly’s view of early Mod as ‘a small, totally committed little mutual admiration society totally devoted to clothes’ (1972: 150) for it includes a wealth of discussion on fashion, but only one reference to UK music – Feld’s dismissal of Adam Faith and Cliff Richard as has-beens. Yet for this second phase, the intermediate or ‘group Mods’, such an emphasis was no longer accurate. Feld / Bolan’s counterparts had discovered the rhythm and blues, blue beat and ska brought over by Caribbean immigrants. Allied to the release, simultaneously with Barnsley’s exposé, of the Beatles’ first single ‘Love Me Do’, a more vibrant club scene was emerging, encouraging chemical enhancement – French blues, black bombers, dexys (midnight runners). Pot slowed down the senses, but amphetamines kept the mind and body alert for hours on end, maximising the weekend’s fun potential. With this need for ‘speed’, the group Mods now lacked the time and focus to search out and customise their own style: they knew what they wanted but needed it ready-made, and here Carnaby Street came to the fore, quickly spreading out from John Stephen’s limited editions. This phase saw the dedicated followers of fashion, set to music by Ray Davies, ‘dressed like kaleidoscopes’ (Melly 1972: 151). A dual Mod-model developed for this ideal style: the close-at-hand Jamaican hustler – or rudie – increasingly seen operating from street corners with trademark pork-pie hat, dark glasses and cool; but also the cinematic, ‘the Italian Mafiosi-type so frequently depicted in crime films shot in New York’ (Hebdige 1979: 89).

By 1963 the secret was out. The Beatles were largely to blame, their enormous success alerting the media and fashion world to a youth market ripe for exploitation. Television was soon in step and on 9 August 1963 teenage Britain sat down to hear the Mod clarion call – ‘the weekend starts here!’ – and to see Cathy McGowan and London Mods display the latest fashions and dance steps to the latest bands on Ready, Steady, Go! (1963–66). Though a commercial production by AR-TV, this was shown around the country (though not always on Friday evening) and brought in an audience of over three million. Almost overnight it nationalised Mod, sending the purists scurrying for cover and bringing in the third and best-known phase, the mediated or ‘gang Mod’. Melly writes of this ‘new and more violent sector, the urban working class at the gang-forming age’ rejecting the excesses of Carnaby Street for ‘extreme sartorial neatness’. Melly found everything about them ‘neat, pretty and creepy: dark glasses, Nero hair-cuts, Chelsea boots, polo-necked sweaters worn under skinny V-necked pullovers, gleaming scooters and transistors’(1972: 152).

The core Modernists had long since decamped to join up with jazz lovers – and gangsters – at the Flamingo club, leaving this ‘lumpen-Mod escalation’ (Melly 1972: 153) to develop its own codes, conventions and hierarchical structures. At the top were the ‘Aces’ (or ‘Faces’), setting the pace, anticipating the latest sounds, still wearing the classiest combinations. Following where the Aces led were the much-maligned ‘Tickets’ (or ‘Numbers’), their look and outlook more working-class in flavour, their descent on local dance halls inevitably leading to trouble. This was the Mod phenomenon as most commonly remembered, and as treated in Quadrophenia: they would arrive on the regulation scooter – now personalised with peacock fans of wing mirrors, numerous headlights, crash bars, whip aerials, white wall tyres and high backed seats. The US army surplus parka kept out the cold while weaving through the traffic, and protected the expensive weekend suit. For weekday casual wear Desert boots and Fred Perry tennis shirts were essential, as were turned-up Levi’s, usually shrunk to size by being worn in the bath. Women dressed fairly androgynously, with short cropped or bobbed hair, trousers and shirts to match (and often borrowed from) the boys, flat shoes, bobby socks and minimal make up – pale foundation and lipstick, perhaps some brown eyeliner but de rigueur false eyelashes. Indeed, relative to other subcultures, Mod gave young women a high profile and relative autonomy while their presentable McGowan-style neatness also made it easier for them to integrate with home, school and work (Hall and Jefferson 1976: 217). There were events every night of the week, all fuelled by amphetamines, with an emphasis more on dancing than dating, being ‘in’, not putting out. There was energy, there was camaraderie, but ‘by 1964 the whole Mod spirit had turned sour. They were squeaking for blood’ (Melly 1972: 152). A lot of this was already territorial in-fighting amongst Mods but, as more commonly propagated in the media – and in Quadrophenia – this was where the Rockers came in.

We are the Mods! We are the Mods! We are, we are, we are the Mods!

The Rockers were, ‘roughly’, the last of the fifties Teds who, with their leather and heavy motorcycles, mocked the Mod movement as effeminate and snobbish. In return the Mods saw Rockers as behind the times, oafish and unwashed. Rockers tended to be rural, manual workers; Mods were city dwellers mostly in reasonably paid office jobs. Musically Rockers stayed with Elvis and, as sung by Kenny in Quadrophenia, Gene Vincent. Rockers signalled their rebellion and looked like trouble; Mods looked well-kept if rather aloof. In the capital – as replicated in the topography of Quadrophenia – the Mods’ frequenting of all-night R&B clubs anchored them to Soho and Central London while the Rockers sped round the ring roads and then back to the suburbs. Fights would occur wherever territories overlapped, or rival gangs met up.

The situation came to public attention on the May Day Bank Holiday of 1964. It was a tradition for Londoners to head for the coast on such occasions, and that year thousands of Mods descended upon Clacton and Great Yarmouth. However, a large number of Rockers had exactly the same plans and so, meeting up, the rival gangs proceeded to overturn deckchairs and trample down sandcastles along the East Coast. Direct Mod versus Rocker hostilities played little part in that first altercation, the main targets for aggression being the limited amenities and unwelcoming shopkeepers. But the media highlighted and rigidified the opposition between the two groups, setting the stage for conflicts that duly occurred at Margate and Brighton during the Whitsun Weekend of 17 and 18 May. Dr George Simpson, the magistrate presiding over the Margate aggressors, labelled them ‘Sawdust Caesars’ in a speech that made the front cover of the Daily Express on the Monday morning, 19 May. He also levied heavy fines, infamously inciting a 17-year-old bricklayer James Brunton to ask for a pen so he could pay by cheque. With such banner headlines and bravado, the number of would-be Mods shot up, and at Hastings during the August Bank Holiday further trouble was expected, and willingly executed.

Opinions vary on the summer’s severity. For Dick Hebdige, the pose wins out over the punch: ‘the fact that the Mod clashed before the camera with the Rocker is, I suspect, more indicative of the Mod’s vanity than any deeply felt antagonism between the two groups’ (1976: 88). This author would agree instead with John Pidgeon, for whom ‘the Mods’ boyish haircuts and clothes-consciousness hid the truth that they were some of the hardest bastards about’. He saw the summer’s conflicts as largely one-sided: ‘the leather-jacketed greasers were usually the ones sprinting across the sand away from a beating’ (1982: 1265). Whether seen as an incitement to vanity or an outlet for violence these summaries place the Mods as the driving force. Yet by the autumn the whole Mod / Rocker phenomenon had all but ceased – only very minor skirmishes dribbled on in Brighton and other coastal towns until 1966. This was not so much because of the press and the law’s process of ideological recuperation emerging from the labelling of magistrate Simpson and ‘others of his kidney’, but rather due to Cathy McGowan, John Stephen and a ‘commodified recuperation’, the conversion of Mod from an impenetrable elite to just another form of ephemeral teenage consumerism (Hebdige 1979: 94). Where their Soho predecessors had invented their own fashions and found their own music in American record catalogues, the gang Mods, now visible in towns all over the country, had everything marketed for them. The local co-op now served just as well as Carnaby Street to find that compulsory parka. And musically, thanks to Ace Face Peter Meaden, ex-employee at the John Michael fashion house and publicist for the likes of group Mod favourite Georgie Fame, they could dance and pose to the new kids on the block, the Who.

I AM THE FACE

The Who, architects of Quadrophenia, arguably constitute rock’s most cinematic group – by origin, image and ambition. From the moment in March 1964 when Keith Moon, garbed in ginger with hair dyed to match, marched on stage at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford and insisted on performing, singer Roger Daltrey, bass guitarist John Entwistle and their Acton County Grammar school friend Pete Townshend had their definitive line-up and an introduction to the benefits of shock tactics. Building up a following on the emergent London club circuit, the former Detours found another way to build their fan-base when Townshend accidentally cracked the neck of his guitar on a low ceiling during a show at the Marquee, Wardour Street. Moon soon followed suit by smashing up his drum kit and the word spread – including to Peter Meaden whom they accepted in May as their first manager. Meaden immediately set out to shape them into a group with whom all mainstream, ‘gang’ Mods could identify. He hustled their Wednesday residen...