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 residency at the Scene, the centre of the Mods’ musical activity, and renamed them the High Numbers – ‘Numbers’ being a synonym for ‘tickets’ while the ‘High’ implied both rank and the Mod use of speed tablets or ‘leapers’. With the name had to come the right style, the right clothes, the right image and so Meaden, à la Brian Epstein, rekitted his group in Carnaby Street gear, long white zoot suits with side vents, or cycling jackets, t-shirts, boxing boots or black and white brogues. Rather than the Beatle mop top he had them coiffured in the trendy French crew. This was not to all the band’s liking: Daltrey, an ex-Ted, had always favoured a rock sound and vision while Moon was a wannabe Beach Boy. They embody an important caveat: as Paul Gorman noted, ‘the grand irony of the Who’s iconic status as the Mod group is that they arrived unfashionably late on the scene with a manufactured image as calculated as that of any 21st Century boy band’ (2004: 18).
Meaden was less successful in capturing the sound of the group’s on-stage excitement. For the High Numbers’ first and only single ‘I’m The Face’ Meaden took Slim Harpo’s R&B standard ‘Got Love If You Want It’ and wrote new lyrics about the Mod movement. The B- side ‘Zoot Suit’ – featured in Quadrophenia as Jimmy prepares for a night out – was equally fashionistic, and equally stolen, this time from ‘Country Fool’, an R&B standard most closely associated with the Showmen. Released in July amidst the maelstrom of seaside publicity, Meaden marketed it as ‘the first authentic Mod record’ and even bought 500 copies in an unsuccessful attempt to hype them into the charts.
Cinema came to the group’s rescue through the intervention of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, their managers throughout the sixties. Theirs was an attraction of opposites, Stamp the womanising son of an East End tugboat man who drifted into film on the coattails of his brother Terence, and Lambert the Oxford-educated gay libertine, son of classical composer Constant. At Shepperton Studios, they had worked together on projects as varied as Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Judy Garland’s I Could Go On Singing (Ronald Neame, 1963). By the Summer of 1964, inspired by Richard Lester’s Beatles’ vehicle A Hard Day’s Night (1964), they decided to direct their own grass roots pop film, one that would capture the visual element of the West London scene – the sound and vision of Mod. On seeing the High Numbers, they acted quickly and within a week contracts were signed, not to make a film, but to replace Meaden as managers of the band.
Lambert in particular began grooming his new protégés. He ensured a regular Tuesday night slot at the Marquee where they further cultivated their Mod following and changed their name back to The Who. Perhaps most significantly, Lambert encouraged Townshend to start writing songs: ‘I Can’t Explain’ earned the group a record contract and hit number eight in the UK charts after an explosive Top of the Pops display of the stage act. Townshend’s next compositions conveyed the aimless aggression of Mods: ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’ – playing in the record-store listening booth when Jimmy looks at the model agency photos – was another top ten success in July, while the real breakthrough arrived with ‘My Generation’, a defining ode on the Mod world view, musically through its hypnotic two-chord riff and endlessly rising key changes, and vocally with the singer stuttering from amphetamine overdose for us to ‘f-f-fade away’, crying out that ‘I hope I die before I get old’. The single reached number two on 27 November, 1965 and, though again chronologically too young, gatecrashes the party in Quadrophenia. That Top of the Pops ‘leg-up’ had demonstrated the importance of the visual media and Lambert and Stamp ensured the Who became mainstays of Ready, Steady, Go!. As briefly witnessed by an enraptured Jimmy in Quadrophenia, these television performances broke the persistent modus operandi of focusing on the lead singer. Instead the nation saw Moon gurning and shoving over his drum kit, Townshend leaping in the air windmilling chords on his guitar, while even Entwistle’s still centre commanded attention. Daltrey was obliged to twirl his microphone and strut around the stage with evident menace in order to get any attention from the cameramen.
Despite this success the Who’s new management had the acumen to realise that remaining a Mod band in a mainstream market meant fading away when the hang-on majority defected to the next inevitable craze. For the engrained filmmakers this need to change was still centred on image: when the group started to drape flags on their speakers, Lambert proposed making them into jackets; suddenly Zoot suits were out, target t-shirts and militaria were in. Restyled in accordance with the Pop Art of the time, Townshend could now accompany his guitar smashing with pronouncements on the auto-destruction art philosophy of Gustav Metzger.2
‘That’ll make you deaf, you know.’ Parental scorn for Ready, Steady, Go!
I’VE GOT TO MOVE WITH THE FASHIONS
The Who were also progressing musically, their compositions becoming increasingly cinematic in scope and structure. While playing a home demo to Lambert, Townshend commented, half-facetiously, that he was writing a ‘rock opera’. Perhaps because of his family background, this appealed fully to Lambert who encouraged Townshend to pursue the idea. His first attempt was called ‘Quads’, a futuristic parable concerning parents who request four girls and, when one turns out to be a boy, insist on raising him as a daughter: pressure for a new single caused the opera to be compressed into the three-minute song ‘I’m A Boy’. Their second album was fleshed out with Townshend’s mini-opera ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ which conveyed in its nine-minute, six-part structure the story of a woman’s extramarital affair and reconciliation with her ‘man’. This trend to extended composition continued with the pseudo-concept album format of 1967’s ‘The Who Sell Out’: with its cover art an ad industry satire for deodorant, baked beans and zit cream, this pastiche broadcast from a pirate radio station served as both an elegy and epitaph for the medium that had brought Who music to much of its early audience.
Such visual acumen seemed ready-made for full film treatment, and Lambert / Stamp’s earliest effort brought the group back to Italian and radical chic. Already the myth of a New Age London was becoming a magnet for foreign film directors – Roman Polanski had just made Repulsion (1965) – and Michelangelo Antonioni, scouting for what many consider the quintessential ‘Swinging Sixties’ film, Blow Up (1966), attended the Who’s farewell appearance at the Goldhawk Road Social Club in December 1965. After witnessing Townshend’s ritual finale with a ruined Rickenbacker, a screen test was tentatively agreed, but negotiations failed, the tempestuous Italian and a rock-sure Townshend disagreeing over how the scene should be shot.3 Blow Up remains, by proxy, the Who’s first film outing, since the following October at Elstree Studios Antonioni shot Jeff Beck leading fellow Mod band the Yardbirds through a blatant Who impersonation, complete with climactic smashed-up guitar.
The group did make their debut film appearance in D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968), ‘the film that got the whole rock documentary ball rolling’ (Ehrenstein and Reed 1982: 76). Their performance of ‘My Generation’ is interesting not just for displaying the transition from blues to acid, but particularly for a growing dichotomy of sound and image – a Mod anthem, but the Pop Art trimmings now abandoned for Daltrey in a thickly embroidered psychedelic shawl, and Townshend in a ruffled shirt and three-quarter-length paisley jacket, all the better to win the Wild West. From Mods and Rockers to hippies and rock-stars: it marked an upturn in the group’s US career, but a temporary nose-dive in the UK.
During this homeland downturn, Townshend turned to the teachings of Indian mystic Meher Baba, which henceforth would inform his writings. One of Baba’s teachings stressed that those who perceive earthly things cannot then perceive God. From this Townshend worked up the story of a boy who, deaf, dumb and blind and removed from earthly perceptions, sees God and becomes a spiritual leader (Townshend 2012: 110, 146–7). When released in May 1969 the double album ‘Tommy’ would secure international stardom and set up the Who for life. It was also, from the outset, a project with evident cinematic potential. Universal showed an interest but Lambert’s management strategies were proving increasingly erratic and he became embroiled in a two-year bureaucratic wrangle with the studio who finally pulled the plug. Townshend fell out with Lambert and, for the first time shorn of his manager’s still-secure editorial judgments, seriously overreached with his new composition ‘Lifehouse’, a complex project involving virtual reality and the discovery through rock music of the Lost Chord that occasions cosmic union. Envisaged as a filmed audience-participation ‘happening’, it didn’t, though several songs were salvaged and released, to considerable critical acclaim, as ‘Who’s Next’.4
During the ‘Lifehouse’ developments came the summer 1970 release of Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock rockumentary. This featured ‘See Me, Feel Me’, the finale from ‘Tommy’, played just as the sun rose over the festival – a light show that no-one could have invented or afforded. It showed rock at its most powerful, and that the ‘Tommy’ concept still had legs. Townshend now took charge and met with further film producers, only to find them all lacking the required drive or direction. Concurrently, with increased fame and resultant project offers the rest of the group began to baulk at being patient instruments for what they saw as Townshend’s increasingly outlandish visions. In short, during this remunerative but drawn-out lifeline for ‘Tommy’, the Who began to fall apart. All parties agreed to a break and scurried off to work on their individual projects. Entwistle and Daltrey released solo albums, while Moon became the first band member to strike out on a film-acting career, debuting as a demented nun in Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer’s 200 Motels (1971), then as drummer D.J. Clover in the David Essex vehicle That’ll Be the Day (Claude Whatham, 1973). The latter film would have drawn an ambivalent response from Townshend: he would have been pleased to hear Billy Fury sing a fifties-style version of his composition ‘Long Live Rock’; he might have been disconcerted, though, to see that this exploration of a Rocker’s subcultural beginnings even included a scene with its hero introspective and alone on the beach. It all bore a strong resemblance to the plot lines he was formulating for his next concept album, ‘Quadrophenia’.
I’M REMEMBERING DISTANT MEMORIES
Townshend’s response to the Who’s crisis of identity was to withdraw, take stock and write a cathartic history of the group. Initially entitled ‘Rock Is Dead – Long Live Rock’ it was closely married to a cinematic realisation, Townshend announcing that ‘I think the cinema reaches people in a far more intense way, and achieving that end is now top priority’ (Marsh 1983: 399). This was contentious: could a celluloid copy ever reproduce the intensity of their Woodstock performance, for example? Perhaps Townshend wanted a film entry for the prestige offered, since only the biggest pop acts ever got to the screen – not just the Beatles and the Stones, but also the band they supported on their first US tour, Herman’s Hermits. Perhaps it offered a cultural respectability – rock was many years from attaining academic respectability, while cinema was now edging its way into the university curriculum. Perhaps Townshend just saw it as a way to reassert his dominant position in the band.
Digging deep into his memories of the Who’s formative years, Townshend also looked to cinema for inspiration: an early description of his new project labelled it ‘a sort of musical Clockwork Orange’ (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) (Neill and Kent 2002: 225), itself a work that comments on the Mod versus Rocker incarnation of adolescent extremes (Rabinowitz 2003: 114). This was also a period recently revisited in Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), a detailed sociological study of how the seaside riots of 1964 had launched and sustained a moral panic. The book – or at least the discussion around it – would have interested Townshend, for while Mod had only signified as stepping-stone for management and some fellow band members, it had always meant more to him. If never quite belonging (just like Jimmy), he had been musically influenced by the scene’s evangelical disc jockey Guy Stevens’ collection of American records and had genuinely admired the bearing of Meaden and other ‘Faces’. The narrative origins of Townshend’s new project may have come from the Brighton death of Mod Barry Prior, found at the foot of the Saltdean Cliffs on 18 May 1964, and discussed by Cohen as an accident unrelated to the riots but still appropriated for media hysteria (Cohen 1972: 29).
Townshend’s central character, Jimmy, a fan of the Who/High Numbers, emerged from six people Pete knew from their early Mod audiences, including group chronicler ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons. This mix was boiled down as Townshend sought a way to transform his four-man band history into the single character focus that had served him well with ‘Tommy’. His answer was to make Jimmy’s pill-popping cause his already troubled personality to split four ways, each with its own leitmotif: ‘Schizophrenic? I’m Bleeding Quadraphenic!’ This narrative and musical strategy also fitted with a new technical challenge: to feed the four themes through the four speakers of the newly hyped ‘quadrophonic’ sound system (Townshend 2012: 241, 245–6).
Primary recording began on 1 June 1973, with ‘Bell Boy’ the first song laid to tape. The basic tracks came together quickly, Townshend making rough demos so other members of the band could later contribute. Townshend had stated his desire for a genuinely collaborative effort – a project to unite the band artistically and emotionally – but initial hopes that each member would write his own theme swiftly diminished, and so Townshend took on more and more of the task, with the result that many of his original demo keyboards and sound effects survived the July overdubbing to come through on the finished album. While an engrossed Townshend set down tracks, an increasingly embittered Roger Daltrey sought out Who cash and, his suspicions confirmed, moved for the dismissal of Lambert and Stamp for misusing band funds. When it was corroborated that much of Townshend’s own US publishing money had disappeared, they were out and Bill Curbishley, an ally of Daltrey’s who had worked his way up since being employed by Stamp in 1971, was installed as the group’s fourth manager.
Townshend then found his own attention distracted by the final fruition of a film deal for ‘Tommy’. Ken Russell became a frequent visitor to the sessions for script consultations and a screenplay was finalised, dated 18 July. This did not damage cinematic aspirations for ‘Quadrophenia’ since, after the loss of Blow Up, the protracted negotiations over Tommy and the failure to finish ‘Lifehouse’, a troubled Townshend had determined not to create a further project dependant on external agencies for its celluloid realisation: instead he flipped the concept and envisaged his new rock-opera as the soundtrack to a never-made film, complete with music, sound effects, full scenario and photo album to supply the images. The gatefold packaging, produced at a cost of £10,000, featured a 44-page tableau of monochrome photographs taken over two weeks by Ethan Russell (no relation) in London, Brighton, Goring and Cornwall. On 24 August at 5.00 am the Who plus extras assembled for a photo shoot at the Hammersmith Odeon, where ‘The Who in Concert – All Tickets Sold’ was billed in lights. All then adjourned to Graham Hughes’ photographic studios for the cover photo, lugging a scooter up to the first floor. Russell’s original idea for the cover had been to combine headshots for the four members of the Who into one face – Jimmy as a gestalt entity. On the day he thought up the Mod-specific device of having the Who appear in the scooter’s four wing mirrors, thus exemplifying the ‘quadrophenia’ of the fan who, astride his scooter with the Who logo painted on the back of his parka, is correctly central to the cover – so central that the mirror motif would be self-consciously reproduced in Quadrophenia. This first incarnation of Jimmy was modelled by Terry Kennett, a 21-year-old paint-sprayer from Battersea, who had been discovered by Townshend in the pub down the road from their new Ramport studios.
‘Quadrabollocks’ – Roddam’s verdict on his album cover homage.
SOMETHING IN US IS GOING WRONG
If the artwork succeeded, the technological realisation of the concept – the eponymous quadraphonic sound – led to insurmountable problems. Firstly Townshend had amassed a wealth of material, 50 songs at an estimated 15 hours of recorded music. Secondly, mixing this for the new four-channel quadraphonic system immediately doubled the problems of achieving a properly balanced end-product. Thirdly, the precise integration of the sound effects with the music proved frustratingly difficult: in pre-digital days the mix of the opening ‘I Am The Sea’ necessitated nine separate machines running bits of information into the master – days of work for a few minutes of sound. Finally, to cap it all, the technology itself proved schizophrenic: CBS and RCA adopted competing systems, and while the former proved by far the least effectual it was the one in which most studios, including MCA, had invested. As sound engineer Ron Nevison wryly concluded, ‘quadrophonic wasn’t ready for ‘Quadrophenia’’ (Marsh 1983: 415).5
Throughout August and September Townshend and Nevison locked themselves away at Eel Pie Sound Studios with 16-track tapes piled up to the ceiling. But they got the job done, Townshend stating his contentment with the result of the initial recordings. Others disagreed: when mixed down to stereo Entwistle considered his bass inadequate, while Daltrey felt the vocals had been buried, a further cause of tension between singer and songwriter. Indeed, during August rehearsals for the group’s first tour in two years, the two came to blows and (in a rare victory for a Rocker over a Mod) Townshend ended up in hospital with temporary amnesia.
If the sound was muddy, post-Lambert / Stamp the group’s visual acumen now failed to materialise. The Who considered a film background for their album tour, but the idea floundered as it proved impossible to construct a mobile screen sufficiently large and thus a first attempt at filming ‘Quadrophenia’ was shelved. Nor did the album work well on stage. Due to a vinyl shortage caused by the OPEC oil embargo, only limited numbers of the album had reached shops before the tour started and so Daltrey and Townshend felt obliged to supply lengthy expositions between songs. Daltrey’s complaints at the staccato nature of the shows – in addition to the verbal interruptions Townshend had to change guitar twenty times for all the different capo settings the work required – led over the course of the tour to several songs being dropped. Also the group tried to recreate the album’s sound by playing along to backing tapes, but these often failed to function in sync. This occasioned further depression for Townshend and the following February the ‘Quadrophenia’ set was dropped entirely.
In spite of all its troubles, the album had gone gold on the day of its release, 27 October, and platinum after two days, representing one million sales: it reached number two in both the US and UK markets. The press reviews were largely positive. Hubert Saal declared the album one of rock’s four great milestones – though it must be admitted that he also placed ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ in this pantheon (Newsweek, 12 November 1973), while for Chris Welch ‘this is a masterpiece – the Who at their greatest yet, sap flowing from the roots of their creation’ (Melody Maker, 27 October 1973). Nigel Rogers would soon vote it the ‘greatest exposition of the rock’n’roll ethic ever produced’ (NME, 22 June 1974). Amongst the more moderate and considered reviews, Lenny Kaye thought ‘Quadrophenia’ represented ‘the Who at their most symmetrical, their most cinematic, ultimately their most maddening’. For Kaye the album possessed a number of ‘effective moments rather than a coherent whole’ – he labelled it a ‘concept in crisis’ (Kaye 1973). Still, for all its discontinuities a clear narrative can be deduced from the four elements of music, lyrics, liner notes and pictures. Jimmy’s journey through a series of disappointments before becoming one with the collective unconscious, washed clean of earthly cares by the tide on Brighton beach, is the ur-text for the film’s narrative development. (See Appendix 1.)
BUT I’M ONE
Townshend explained that Jimmy has four distinct sides to his personality, each directly linked to the players in the band and each expressed by a theme on the album: violent and determined, aggressive and unshakable (Daltrey – ‘Helpless Dancer’); quiet and romantic, tender and doubting (Entwistle – ‘Doctor Jimmy’); insane and devil-may-care, unreasoning and bravado (Moon – ‘Bell Boy’); insecure and spiritually empty, searching and desperate (Townshend himself- ‘Love Reign O’er Me’). This may be the theory, and in practice the musical leitmotifs combine elegantly in the opening song, but thereafter they unite only once and briefly in ‘The Rock’ while the themes are never lyrically developed. The four separate allocations do not come through strongly in the plotting where, as noted by Lenny Kaye, ‘Jimmy is seen only through Townshend’s eyes, geared through Townshend’s perceptions’ (ibid.). Though the album most about the Who, it was their least democratic product: instead of a reconciliatory four-way group expression, ‘Quadrophenia’ acted out in its writing and production Townshend’s struggle to locate himself within the band. Dave Marsh sees the album as Townshend’s ‘way of coping with the unique and increasingly difficult problem posed by the fact that the singer and the songwriter were not one’ (1983: 418): one could amend this since Townshend was here purposefully trying to express himself also through the bass guitarist and drummer: not schizophrenic but quadraphonic. Though no longer part of their touring plans, it was mooted that summer that there would be a television adaptation of ‘Quadrophenia’. It even reached the drawing board stage, but then faltered. The Who had former heroes to revisit.
The film version of Tommy, premiered in March 1975, has been written on at length (Barnes and Townshend 1979, Cawthorne 2005, Smith 2010, Glynn 2013). It proved a huge box-office success, earning $16 million in the US alone, where it was placed number ten for the 1975 ratings. Alongside the royalties, Townshend’s scoring of the incidental music earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Score Adaptation. However, in the group’s ever-precarious internal dynamic, Tommy made Daltrey the Ace Face: not only a teenage heartthrob at the age of thirty but Russell was sufficiently impressed to offer him the leading role in his next musical extravaganza, Lisztomania (1975). As well as giving the singer rather than the songwriter a passport to cinematic independence, Tommy showed up ‘Quadrophenia’s lack of progression away from the already-dating rock opera idea. Townshend sank into depression and drink. The next album, ‘The Who By Numbers’ (1975), was perfunctory, yet also confessional, revealing in unambiguous lyrics the paralysis, division and self-doubt Townshend felt were destroying the group. Then, during 1976 and its ‘summer of hate’ when punk rock stole the airways and the column inches, the Who stopped touring and focused on individual projects or drifted away on stimulants.
Cinema again would revivify the group. They had invested their Tommy earnings in the purchase of part of Shepperton Studios and had established Who Films with a view to producing a variety of movies, experimental and mainstream. They began, though, with what they knew best, an authorised bio-pic of their own career. This was debut-directed by Jeff Stein, a young fan from California who had published a pictorial history of Who tours before approaching the group with the idea of collecting early film clips to create a cinematic collage. To make the project viable, however, quality footage of several ‘key’ tracks was still needed and so the group decided to patch up their differences and perform. Though the shooting schedule went over time and over budget, causing further acrimony within its members, The Kids Are Alright reunited the group and it was released in 1979 alongside a second Who Films project and a fourth Who film, a delayed entry for Quadrophenia.
