CHAPTER 1
1 A broadly similar experience has been shared by Stuart Maconie on his Radio 2 music show, 16 January 2008.
2 It was a sensible strategy. By the time the Soul System changed their name to the modish The Attack in late 1966 Mod was virtually done for. LSD was a catalyst: ‘tickets’, like the former High Numbers, replaced Mod neatness with colourful kaftans, lured by the burgeoning hippy counter culture and its antithetical pot-filled passivity. London clubs took on Pink Floyd-style happenings and dropped R&B which headed north, via the Twisted Wheel to find a new home at the Wigan Casino. As Gorman notes, ‘hindsight has bestowed a rosy afterglow on the Mod period, but if truth be told any unity lay in fashion; the music scene was, at best, splintered’ (Gorman 2004: 24).
3 One can see reasons for the artistic dissent in the finished film, the Who’s exuberant, life-affirming music transposed into an introspective, destructive medium. A more immediate cause cited is the high fee foreign film fan Lambert expected for his clients. Whatever the reason, Antonioni beat a tactful retreat: ‘What the Who do is meaningful,’ he explained. ‘I wanted something utterly meaningless so I couldn’t use them’ (Cited in Neill and Kent 2002: 67).
4 The sleeve of the US single for ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ bore the logo ‘From the motion picture Lifehouse’.
5 The album concept was only (and then half) realised with the deluxe release of ‘Quadrophenia: the Director’s Cut’ (note the cinematic title for a musical repackaging) in November 2011. Alongside a 100-page hardback book and two CDs of Townshend solo demos there featured a DVD with a 5.1 surround-sound mix (though only for eight of the seventeen tracks).
6 I saw its second outing at Wolverhampton Civic Hall on 29 October 1973 and even to an enthralled ingénu it was evident that all was not well. As well as Townshend’s guitar lead coming out every time he leapt across the stage, when Daltrey announced that the band had played ‘Quadrophenia’ for the first time the night before, a self-deprecating Townshend shouted out ‘Yes, and it was bloody horrible!’ before adding that ‘If we played it all, you’d fucking fall asleep!’
7 ‘Quadrophenia’ was kept off the US top spot by Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and in the UK by David Bowie’s ‘Pin Ups’, an album of cover versions including two Who singles from 1965, ‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ – evidence that a revisiting of rock roots was in the air.
CHAPTER 2
1 While pointing out that her ‘slightly rounded, slightly chubby’ stature looked more authentically Mod and was therefore preferred by Roger Daltrey for the lead, Willcox admits the received wisdom that, in 1979, ‘you couldn’t sell the sexuality of Leslie’s role if she had the bouffant and everything’ (DVD documentary 2006).
2 In spite of such early cockiness, Daniels later averred that ‘there’s a lot to be said for doing the end of the film first for an actor because you know where you’ve got to go. I know where I’m going to end my part so then I can build up to that’ (DVD documentary 2006).
CHAPTER 3
1 Guilty as charged: the subheadings in this volume are all taken from the lyrics to ‘Quadrophenia’.
2 Admittedly written for an American readership, Peary’s essay was selected to head the pressbook for the 1997 British re-release of Quadrophenia. I must admit to finding Jimmy much more adolescently ‘annoying’ than Jim – and all the better for it.
3 Smokescreen has a pop music proximity in that it was the support feature to the Elvis Presley biker musical Roustabout (John Rich, 1964) as it toured Britain’s provincial circuit.
4 The film actually depicted, some say accelerated, the transition from Skinhead to Suedehead or ‘Suedie’. While Bronco wears standard Skinhead boots and jeans, Del sports longer hair, a penny-round collar and a floral shirt, the start of a return to formal, Mod ‘roots’ clothing that would culminate in the seventies Mod revival.
5 To Suedeheads what Quadrophenia is to (some) Mods, Bronco Bullfrog is greatly admired by Paul Weller (www.Modculture.com/bronco). Here we do agree.
6 This volume thus constitutes the film’s fourth entry to a written ‘pantheon of cult’.
7 Roddam’s full list (as printed): 1. Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957); 2. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968); 3. Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947); 4. Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973); 5. The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956); 6. Performance (Nicolas Roeg, 1970); 7. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950); 8. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942); 9. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946); 10. If …. (Lindsay Anderson, 1968).
8 While Eco’s arguments endure, his readings of Casablanca have been subsequently questioned: see Telotte 1991: 43–54.
9 A similarly potent tourist attraction: since 2008 the Littledean Jail Museum, set in the Royal Forest of Dean, has held ‘The Quadrophenia Collection’. This includes the only fully restored customised Vespa GS/Rally scooter used by Ace Face, a replica of Jimmy’s Lambretta scooter, authentic clothing and props from the film, the original film script and an array of signed film stills, posters and memorabilia. (www.littledeanjail.com). [Both websites accessed 26.06.13].
10 Kermode does not err when he writes of ‘the on-screen appearance of modern-day buses and cinemas showing Grease’. Diegetically showing on Screen 1 above Heaven Can Wait, its split-second appearance at the top of the frame has been removed by recent matted releases.
11 Mods versus Rockers: the Kinks versus Gene Vincent is more than just a bath house spat but a battleground for competing analytical concepts for the study of subcultures. While Hebdige explored Mods via bricolage, Paul Willis’ Profane Culture, (London and New York: Routledge, 1978) analysed the culture of bikers through the concept of homology – literally ‘shared ancestry’. The Rockers’ pointed preference for fifties rock’n’roll, a historically unified corpus of music expressing masculine values, separated them from consumers of contemporary pop, such as the reviled Mods.
12 Mods, largely because of their more muted style, were only identified as a group and featured as a cause for moral panic during the Bank Holiday clashes central to Quadrophenia, by which time the subculture was not only fully formed but already mutating, some would say diluting. The media decrying of the more stylistically deviant punk subculture was virtually coincidental with its invention: the same week as the Sex Pistols swore to Bill Grundy on Thames Television’s Today programme the Daily Mirror started running alarmist centre spreads (29 Nov–3 Dec 1997).
13 Radio On, a road movie anti-thriller, follows a man’s picaresque journey from London to Bristol on hearing of his brother’s death. Comparisons are germane, though, with Quadrophenia: with the film’s evocative soundtrack, running from Bowie to Kraftwerk to Wreckless Eric; with the casting – Sting again present; and with the journey, again away from the capital and back into the past, revealing the hero’s failure to communicate with those he meets on the road, and ending with him stalled in his battered old Rover at a quarry edge, his questions still unanswered, forced to turn around or end it all.
14 Here was a chance not so much for new, young directors to make their state-of the-nation films but for a revival of the horizontal integration of the media industry not seen since the sixties heyday with the Beatles, Cliff and co. but due to accelerate following the advent of MTV in 1981.
15 Roddam tells of refusing Townshend’s initial offer of an orchestration of the album’s music: ‘It’s got to be rock’n’roll. It’s got to be street’ (DVD documentary 2006).
16 By September 1977 Cosmopolitan ran a review of Zandra Rhodes’ latest collection that appropriated elements of punk dress; the review ended with the soundbite that it was ‘chic to shock’ (Hebdige, 1979: 96).
17 This ‘latent’ reading recurs in Roddam’s later films: in War Party (1988) a picnic scene between Sonny and Skitty ‘only makes sense as naive expressions of the men’s gayness’ (Julian Stringer, Monthly Film Bulletin, 58, 687, 1991: 112) while K2 (1991) ‘barely raises a Freudian flicker with its incipient homosexuality’ between Taylor and Harold (Michael O’Pray, Sight and Sound, 1, 10, 1992: 51).
18 One could ask if this critique is not in itself time-bound, a nineties, Britpop response redolent of the Loaded magazine generation: see part 4 – reception and afterlife.
19 A knowledge that the two actors are reprising roles – and costumes – from Roddam’s earlier Dummy adds an ‘extra’ resonance to their relationship.
20 Arnold Van Gennep used the concept of ‘limen’ (from the Latin for ‘threshold’) in his seminal anthropological study of 1909, The Rites of Passage. Gennep described rites of passage such as coming-of-age rituals as having a three-part structure: separation, liminality and reassimilation. Beginning in 1967 Victor Turner borrowed and expanded upon Van Gennep’s concept of liminality, ensuring widespread usage of the concept in the fields of geography, sociology, tourism and cultural studies.
21 The freeze-frame ending to Bronco Bullfrog, leaving its young couple on the quayside with an uncertain future, has also been compared to Truffaut’s film (Leggott 2008: 100).
22 When Andrew Smith and photographer Andy Sewell made a pilgrimage to eight of Britain’s ‘semi-secret network of rock shrines’, primum inter pares was ‘the Quadrophenia alley, Brighton’. They noted how ‘the unmarked alleyway looks just as it did then: slimy and streaked with damp redolent of the seedy area of which it was once a part. All the same, hundreds visit every year, scrawling messages such as “Incrowd S.C. North London”, “555 Liverpool Thrash” and “Sascha Schafke Blizzard Mod Hamburg”. The most prominent reads: “Why do you keep painting the wall!! We will always be back” followed by the circle-and-arrow mod symbol.’ They conclude that ‘in itself, the place is nothing, and would be disappointing but for the intensity of attention it attracts’ (The Guardian Weekend, 4 August 2007: 22–24 – my italics).
CHAPTER 4
1 Sides one and two comprised the original 1973 album, remixed by John Entwistle and shorn of ‘Cut My Hair’, ‘Quadrophenia’, ‘The Dirty Job’, ‘Is It In My Head?’, ‘Sea And Sand’, ‘Drowned’ and ‘The Rock’, while side three was augmented by the three new cuts, all included to help the narrative: the ‘Quadrophenia’ out-take ‘Get Out And Stay Out’, Townsend’s 1968 song ‘Joker James’ featuring the first session recordings by Kenney Jones and ‘Four Faces’ (an explicit explanation of the main theme) recorded over a previously recorded Keith Moon drum track. Also included were ‘Hi Heel Sneakers’ by NME competition winners Cross Section and, dragged from the archives, the High Numbers’ ‘Zoot Suit’. Entwistle’s attempts to record a ‘disco’ version of ‘The Real Me’ were eventually abandoned: instead he used the 1973 version with a new ending, again featuring Jones. Side four was made up of seven sixties soul and pop classics utilised in the film: ‘Night Train’ by James Brown, ‘Louie Louie’ by the Kingsmen, ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and The MGs, ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ by the Cascades, ‘He’s So Fine’ by the Chiffons, ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronettes and ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ by the Crystals. ‘Green Onions’, a million seller in America in 1962, was re-released as a single after its inclusion in Quadrophenia and finally charted in the UK, reaching number seven in December.
2 Mod fanzines, notably North London’s Maximum Speed, were already in circulation prior to the film’s release.
3 As if aping the message of the ‘Quadrophenia’ album never to meet your heroes, Weller and Townsend finally met up in October 1980. It was a rather acrimonious, mistrustful interview, particularly from the young pretender: though he hated Quadrophenia, Weller stated that he was like the audience the film created, a fan of the Who’s early records rather than the music they were making now (Melody Maker, 11 October 1980).
4 Brett ‘Buddy’ Ascott, former drummer with the band, bemoaned how ‘NME put scooters on their cover in May 1979 and did five pages saying this is the greatest thing since punk. Then nine months later they said this is wimpy, retrospective rubbish. I don’t believe that we were deserving of that much praise at the start or that much wrath thereafter’ (Ted Kessler, Q/Mojo The Who Special Edition 2004: 120).
5 Ironically, as chart success slipped away in the early eighties, the London Mod scene grew ever larger, with soul, R&B and jazz filling the dance floors every night of the week. But post-punk power pop was not placed on the turntables: the new generation had discovered the old, the original, the black music and had no time for its pale, white imitation. Tamla Motown took the place of the Teenbeats, Stax stood in for Long Tall Shorty.
6 Looking again to American points of reference, John Coleman’s review had worried that ‘the nastiness at the seaside when the “poufs” and “grease-monkeys” clash was perhaps too convincing for comfort. (Will Life Copy Art? Cf. The Warriors in the States and watch your local tabloid in the weeks to come)’ (New Statesman, 17 August 1979). The review in Variety was also concerned: ‘What must be pondered in and out of the trade is whether, as Quadrophenia release fans out, the pic may prove as provocative around Britain as Paramount’s Warriors seemingly was in the US’ (Variety, 22 August 1979). The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) was linked to outbreaks of violence, including three murders, with commensurate moral condemnation and industry exploitation. See P. A. Roth (1990) ‘The Virtue of Violence: The Dimensions of Development in Walter Hill’s The Warriors,’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 24, 3.
7 An earlier scooter run, in June to Keswick in the Lake District, also met with a strong police deterrent. Amongst those laying into the law was an 18-year-old Ian Brown, later to be lead singer with the Manchester rock band the Stone Roses.
8 Scenes intercut featured several shots from the riots, Jimmy’s balcony dive, the long shot of the pier the morning after, Waterloo Station, and the ‘killing’ of both his own and Ace Face’s scooters.
9 One could argue that the true subcultural legacy of Mod is the club culture of the nineties: a cosmopolitan eclecticism, a willingness to embrace the shock of the new in style and sound, a revelling in display and taking the fetishisation of the weekend even further, the stylised leisure-time pilgrimages to the seaside having just moved on, with cheap air flights, from Brighton to the Balearics. (See Andrew Calcutt, Brit Cult: an A-Z of British Pop Culture, London: Prion, 2000: 298).
10 Quadrophenia itself now contributes to international cinematic intertextuality. In El Angel de la Guarda / The Guardian Angel (Santiage Matallano, 1996) the film is shown three times being played in a cinema. The Swedish film Blodigt Javla Helvete (Kim Ekberg and Victor Kerschner, 2008) re-enacts the scene at the public bathhouse, this time in showers, with characters singing the same songs. The film’s centrepiece, the Mods versus Rockers battle, has proven less exportable, though Exhumed (Brian Clement, 2003) transposes it to a post-apocalyptic world where the Vampires ride their Vespas and the werewolves are leathered-up bikers, and DreamWorks’ Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath and Conrad Vernon, 2012) sees animal control Captain duBois and gang drive ‘pimped up’ Mod-style scooters in a chase around the streets of Monaco.
11 Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel The Originals (2004) is an alternative history again inspired by Mods and Rockers, this time allowing the rivals to ride on hovering scooters and motorbikes. ‘Think Quadrophenia with futuristic transport and more violence…a lot cooler than Sting’ advised the magazine Loaded, November 2004.
12 Other programmes in the series had featured films of the classic / cult status of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962), If; … , The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1979).
14 Not all see it this way. For Mark Blake ‘What could have been a clunky attempt to shoehorn some social and historic context into a bunch of ‘70s rock songs ends up refocusing ‘Quadrophenia’s hazy plotline and packing a weighty emotional punch’ (Mojo, June 2013).
15 I saw this version’s tenth European outing at the Birmingham LG Arena on 28 June 2013. Despite my reservations over some of the visual components, I was thrilled that musically the group had finally ‘nailed it’. After erratic backing tapes in 1973 and momentum-slowing narrations in 1996, new digital technology coupled with the tried-and-trusted practice of placing the music centre stage finally gave ‘Quadrophenia’ the live treatment it merited.
16 To cite at random: the 2004 tour featured Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) at Edinburgh Royal College of Surgeons, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975) at Newcastle Keep and Saturday Night Fever at Derry Dance Studio.
17 In a future for Jimmy far different to that expounded by Roddam, Meadows or myself, director Ivay has admitted that the initial appeal of ‘luring over an actor so indelibly associated with the cinematic lore of scooters’ to his biker comedy evolved as he ‘began to see Grouch more and more as an evolution of Phil’s character in the classic Mod flick. “What Grouch believes, which could be an extension of Jimmy’s mindset, is it’s not about dreams but it’s about a way of life – which ironically is the tagline for Quadrophenia”’. Firebird DVD booklet.