THE WHO MODS MODS

THE WHO MODS MODS

Mods exuded cool: never has youth rebellion dressed or danced so well. Mods were something else entirely working-class teenagers, with a strong sense of upper-class style, they invented a modern youth subculture. The Rockers’ look was familiar from American motorcycle films like The Wild One (1953).

The sharper image of the Mods, compared to the rough and ready leather-clad Rockers, might also help account for the way they’ve lived on in cultural memory. That’s why I’m a mod, see?”Īnd of course there’s the look. As Jimmy says in the film: “I don’t want to be the same as everyone else. I was desperate for that kind of enabling gang, both to hide in, and to assert my shaky teenage individuality. That chant appealed to me as a middle-class American suburban teen, whose image of the Mods came entirely through an obsession with both the album and the film.

In the crowd scenes of Quadrophenia the triumphant communal cry of “ We are, we are, we are the mods!” is both menacing and exhilarating, eliciting a certain jealousy for such a strong sense of group identity. But in the aftermath of the clashes, Mods and Rockers’ identities became primarily defined by their contrast to each other.īut for me, and for many, it is the Mods that have an enduring and nostalgic pull. Before then, they were frustrated young people in local gangs, looking for some thrills. The nature of these arrests interests me: did the Mods and Rockers take to the beaches primarily to fight each other, or to get up the noses of the powers that be? Our image of Mods and Rockers travelling on bikes and scooters from London, explicitly to do battle with each other, is potentially misleading it was during weekends like this one that the differences between the two groups hardened. After the initial reporting people began planning their weekends so as to watch the clashes.

In the early 1970s the sociologist Stanley Cohen showed the ways in which, even as they were vilified by the press, Mods and Rockers were adopted as spectacle, a kind of seaside attraction. The “Battle of Brighton” is very much a cultural crisis that we love to relive.īut it’s a bit odd to look back fondly toward a grey, violent, Whitsun weekend in the early ‘60s, odd that there’s enduring nostalgia for the moment. There are Quadrophenia walking tours of Brighton you can even visit the alleyway where Jimmy and Steph have it off, and the sites near the pier where the trouble began. Walk through the streets of the city and you’ll find you are never far from the Mods’ trademark target symbol. It’s 50 years since Mods and Rockers rumbled by the sea in Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton since their images were captured for posterity in iconic black and white photos of deck chairs being thrown on to rocky beaches.Īnd coincidentally, it’s also been 35 years since director Franc Roddam’s cult film, based on the Who’s 1973 album Quadrophenia, mythologised that weekend further.

The who mods