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| I remember once I got all dressed up to go out and I had one clean shirt. I was cleaning my shoes and I noticed some spots of boot polish on the shirt. I didn't go out. That’s how seriously we all took it. |
| The last week of March 1964 was an eventful one in teenage history. |
| On Saturday, the first pirate radio station began transmitting non-stop pop from a ship called the Caroline moored outside territorial waters, off the coast of Essex. |
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| On Sunday, on that very coast, there occurred in Clacton what the Chief Constable at the time described as 'several acts of wanton and purposeless damage'. The Daily Express put it more vividly: |
| A thousand rioting teenage 'wild ones' brawled, rampaged and fought their way through the streets of a seaside resort yesterday. |
| Sixty people were arrested over the Easter weekend, several people got thumped, damage to property was estimated at £500 and this unremarkable affray passed into legend as the first mod-rocker riot. |
| On Tuesday, the Government published a bill which would prohibit the unauthorised possession of amphetamine pills. A pocketful of previously-legal 'purple hearts' would soon cost you anything up to six months in jail. |
| In a single week, teenagers had acquired their own broadcasting service and witnessed the first twitches of establishment hysteria over drugs, while those of them who had never heard of mods or rockers (the majority) had been offered by the media a choice of two do-it-yourself teenage rebellion kits. |
| By May, the teenagers of Britain had made their decisions and sorted themselves out. A schoolteacher reported to New Society that over half the boys in his technical school had aligned themselves with one group or the other, while the committed proportions at nearby secondary moderns were even greater. |
| By August, the words 'mod' and 'rocker' were widely known outside the UK, if not understood, and the Pope was able to tell an audience of Italian Rover Scouts that 'the unhappy faces ... of the 'mods' and 'rockers' ... reveal profound, piteous dramas filled with sorrow, lack of trust, vice, badness and delinquency.' |
| His Holiness may have been unaware as he spoke that the seeds of the modernist style had blown to Britain from Italy some five years earlier. It all began with the import of cheap Italian suits cut in a bizarre fashion: short, box jackets ('bum-freezers'), narrow lapels and drain-pipe trousers. Worn with winklepicker shoes, white socks, 'slim Jim' knitted ties, silk shirts and blow-waved hair-cuts, these became the last word in sartorial elegance in the post-Ted era. The look was chosen at the time as a mark of distinction not only from the outmoded Edwardian style, but also as a reaction against the scruffiness of the trad jazz brigade. It bespoke a fondness for modern as opposed to traditional jazz, and its adherents therefore called themselves 'modernists'. |
| From the beginning it was a dandified image. There was a touch of 'What if I am?' about it. An anonymous teenage girl, interviewed for the radio in 1961, observed that although 'the modernist boys are smarter, they're getting as conceited as what the girls are ... always looking in mirrors and patting their hair down and putting it into place.' The secret of the mod hair-style in those pre-hair-spray days was sugar and water. |
| You'd leave it on all night, then wash it out in the morning before you went to work. That way you got a perfect little parting down the front. |
| Perfection was the aim all right. The most dedicated of the dandies in the East End of London soon moved on from ready-to-wear and started designing their own tailored suits. |
| If you were poor you had to start with Burtons, but then you went up to guys whose fathers were tailors and you had to bribe them to get your suits made. You'd copy little ideas out of Italian magazines, or something you' d spot in a film. French films were very much in vogue then. |
| A friend of mine look it so seriously. He turned up one day and he had a stripey jumper, a bike, a beret, and he even had some onions. He was just the epitome. He was an A1 mod, that one. |
| As Pete Townshend remembers: |
| This kid used to work in the bank at the top of the road. He had very short hair, always wore a nice suit, a very clean-cut kid. He was also an outrageous mod. He was very alert, because he was pilled out of his head all day. His hair wasn't just short, it was also a very subtle French crew, so it was very sharp and in fashion. His suit was made out of Tonik, which was very important. It had to be Tonik. It would be in that month's colour, which would be either dark brown or dark blue. The lapels would be the exact correct width. It might be a two-button jacket or a single-button jacket. It might be a three-button jacket with the top and bottom buttons left undone - whatever happened to be the vogue at the time. It might have single pockets on either side. They might be straight or slanted. There was a craze, also, for several secret inside pockets to a suit, so one tended to fold one's jacket over and put one's hand in one's pocket, holding the jacket open so that people could see that you had the right number of inside pockets ... And yet he would still get a job in a bank. He had to have a job to spend all this money on dope and clothes. And nobody knew except me and him and a few other people. It was a way that people could be legitimate, fit into society, and yet at the same time be outrageously fashionable and in-crowd. |
| Modernists may have taken their collective name from modern jazz, but it expressed far more than their musical preferences. At the start of the sixties, 'modern' was a word that stood for a whole complex of ideas and attitudes, all of them optimistic. |
| In 1959, Queen Magazine asked: |
| Have you woken up yet? Do you know that you are living in a new world? Here we are, twenty years after the war started, in an age better even than any of our grandfathers can remember... We don't want you to miss it. Don't wait until years after to realise you have lived in a remarkable age - the age of BOOM. |
| The first and most obvious sign of the boom was the comparative affluence of youth. A bright fifteen-year-old could walk into any of a dozen reasonably well-paid white-collar jobs. Mods enhanced the effect of this spending-power in two ways. One was by purchasing cheap clothes - a shirt from Littlewoods or a check jacket from Burtons - and altering them in subtle ways to make them special. The other was by shop-lifting. But by whatever legal or illegal means, the aim was to look cool, sophisticated and stylish, to walk into the Bastille coffee bar and be admired by other mods. At the beginning there wasn't much more to it than that. If that had remained the essence of mod, it would surely have passed unremarked. But during those early years the nucleus was being bombarded by other sources of energy; in particular by a certain kind of music - rhythm'n'blues - and by a certain chemical compound - amphetamine. |
| I remember once going to see Jimmy Reed at the Flamingo and I couldn't believe it - and he couldn't believe it! He came in the Flamingo and he was still in his overcoat, he didn't take his overcoat off, and his manager was next to him, and they were bewildered. They were playing, standing up in the middle of the crowd, and there were all these kids around, the mods, that they couldn't relate to at all. These young, white, European kids looking at Jimmy Reed, idolising him, standing there with their mouths open saying 'It's Jimmy Reed!' And he's standing there, this black guy from wherever he's from, and you could see he was a bit edgy about it. The manager was thinking right, we'll do this, grab the money and run, Jimmy, before they lynch us... It was amazing though. He was absolutely idolised, surrounded by these doting fans, this quite old, black, blues singer. That was great. |
| Mods liked R'n'B because the best records were obscure and hard to get. They liked it because the rhythms were rather more subtle than those of ordinary pop, and therefore more difficult and rewarding to dance to. It was important that being a mod should never be easy. They liked it because the tone of most of the songs was cool, hip, knowing, grown-up, as opposed to the gee-whizz gaucherie of most pop lyrics. They also liked rhythm'n'blues because its most authentic practitioners, both black and white, tended to be middle-aged and physically unattractive. There was nobody up on stage who might cause their narcissism to tremble, which is another reason why proper mods weren't too keen on the younger groups like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. God forbid a mod bird should be moved to squeal at a singer! |
| The obscurity was the main thing. Veterans of London's Scene Club still speak in awed tones about the record collection of the resident disc-jockey, Guy Stephens. They were very snobbish about the matter of authenticity. When the Rolling Stones walked into the Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester, shortly after the release of their first LP, disc-jockey Roger Eagle took pleasure in playing, one after another, all the second-hand songs from the record in their original versions. The Stones scowled but the mods understood. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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