Alex takes Quadrophenia on as a great passion for all and is making the dream come true with his ideas of bringing back the WAY OF LIFE and the Mod:)
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Quadrophenia
If you’re from the United Kingdom and you’ve watched Quadrophenia (1979), for you it would be a film about your country in the 1960s but for everyone else unfamiliar with the Mod culture, it would probably not make so much sense. The film written and directed by Franc Roddam has been classified as an A-grade cult-classic, an influential factor of the Mod-revival of the 1980s and above-all just a damn good film. The film stars Phil Daniels in perhaps the most important performance of his underrated career and Sting (yes, the musician) in his first ever appearance on film. Surprisingly, even though Phil Daniels carries the entire film on his 21-year old shoulders, most of the publicity material and other marketing mostly featured the then rising music star Sting, who appears for less than 10 minutes in the entire film. Ray Winstone is featured in one of his earliest roles giving a short but memorable performance as a kind-hearted rocker.
Quadrophenia was made in 1979, a time when Mod culture had completely disappeared and the bohemian lifestyle of the rock music scene caught mass appeal. The film is set in 1964, the peak point of the Mod revolution and the crucial year of the infamous Brighton riot, often cited as the biggest fight between the Mods and the Rockers. The film’s name is taken from the famous album by The Who with the same name. Ironically, many of the famous Mod bands including The Who turned towards Rock music once the Mod culture started to decline in the mid-1970s.
For further understanding of the film and this article, here’s a crash-course in Mod culture.
Mod Culture 101
Here’s an excerpt from the Culture wiki:
“The mod subculture began with a few cliques of teenage boys with family connections to the garment trade in London in 1958. These early mods were generally middle class, and were obsessed with new fashions and music styles, such as slim-cut Italian suits, modern jazz and rhythm and blues. Their all-night urban social life was fuelled, in part, by amphetamines. It is a popular belief that the mods and their rivals, the rockers, both branched off from the Teddy boys, a 1950s subculture in England. The Teddy boys were influenced by American rock n’ roll, wore Edwardian-style clothing, and got pompadour or quiff hairstyles.
Originally the term mod was used to describe fans of modern jazz music (as opposed to trad, for fans of traditional jazz). Eventually the definition of mod expanded beyond jazz to include other fashion and lifestyle elements, such as continental clothes, scooters and to a lesser degree a taste for pop art, French New Wave films and existentialist philosophy. The 1959 novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes has often been cited as an inside look at the late 1950s teenage London culture that spawned the 1960s mod scene.
Mods gathered at all-night clubs such as The Scene and The Flamingo in London, and Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester, to show off their clothes and dance moves. They typically used scooters for transportation, usually either Vespa or Lambretta. One reason for this is that public transit stopped relatively early, and scooters were cheaper than cars. After a law was passed requiring at least one mirror be attached to every motorbike, many mods added 4, 10, or even 32 mirrors to their scooters as a mockery of the new law.
Members of the rockers subculture (associated with motorcycles and leather biker jackets) sometimes clashed with the mods, leading to battles in seaside resorts such as Brighton, Margate, and Hastings in 1964. The mods and rockers conflict led to a moral panic about modern youth in the United Kingdom.”
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