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Cinema and Culture: The Angry Mods of 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.”

The Format of the Film

At the heart, Quadrophenia is really a coming-of-age film. The camera follows Jimmy, the lead character through his daily routine as a restless teenager. He works in a corporate firm as a runner by day and by night he joins his fellow-mods at various clubs and they do the things that mods do. Jimmy is a typical teenager influenced by peer pressure and the rising lifestyle choices of his zeitgeist. When asked by his old-friend and present rocker Kev (played by Ray Winstone) as to why he is a mod, he ironically utters the famous line:

“No, Kev, that’s it. Look, I don’t wanna be the same as everybody else. That’s why I’m a Mod, see? I mean, you gotta be somebody, ain’t ya, or you might as well jump in the sea and drown.”

Later on in the film in a revenge spree after one of the mods is attacked, Jimmy and his friends unknowingly beat up Kev because he is a rocker albeit he was not the one who hurt their friend. This only adds to Jimmy’s growing drug-induced guilt about having to betray a childhood friend because of the dedication to his culture. As the film goes on, we see Jimmy’s life falling apart piece by piece- he’s dumped by the girl he loves, fired from his day-job, arrested in the birghton riot, kicked out of his parents’ home and has his much-loved scooted thrashed in an accident.

Despite all of these unfortunate events, Jimmy still holds onto his lifestyle as it becomes his last remaining proof of identity. He literally worships his Mod-idol “Ace Face” (played by Sting) and decides to leave everything behind and join him only to find that he works as a mere bell boy at a hotel by day. Jimmy’s identity crisis escalates to its highest and propels him to steal Ace Face’s scooter and drive it over a cliff. The ending of the film is left ambiguous as the scooter is shown falling down a great height onto a rock and being broken into pieces. In a way, this either symbolizes Jimmy’s death (though he is not shown falling) or the death of his belief in the Mod culture and his final decision to live himself out of it.

The Influence of the Film

Though not a major box-office hit, Quadrophenia quickly went onto receive a cult-following. Here is an excerpt from the Culture wiki:

“The 1979 film Quadrophenia, based on the 1973 album of the same name by The Who, celebrated the mod movement and partly inspired a mod revival in the UK in the late 1970s. Many of the mod revival bands were influenced by the energy of British punk rock and New Wave music. The revival was led by The Jam (whose frontman Paul Weller is nicknamed The Modfather), and included bands such as Secret Affair, Purple Hearts and The Chords. This was followed by a mod revival in North America in the early 1980s, particularly in Southern California, led by bands such as The Untouchables. The mod scene in Los Angeles and Orange County was partly influenced by the 2 Tone ska revival scene in England, and was unique in its racial diversity. Mod revivalist scenes also developed in other areas across the United States and Canada.

The 1990s Britpop genre displayed obvious mod influences, with bands such as Ride, Oasis, Blur and Ocean Colour Scene (who have collaborated with Paul Weller). The mod subculture has spread around the world, but now mainly exists as an underground culture.”

The film also played a major role in the fashion industry, being one of the influences on the rise to the New Romantics of the 1980s. The style of the film, featuring tailor-made slim-fit suits and ties topped over with an oversized parka (probably itself influenced by French New Wave cinema) was also extremely popular and highly imitated in fashion, music and cinema in the following decades.

What I loved most about the film was its consistent energy, largely provided by the restless performance of Phil Daniels. The film succeeds in presenting an experience, more than just the story and a highly accurate sample of the zeitgeist of those times when amphetamine was cool, ska music ruled and lambretta was the vehicle of choice.