Quadrophenia

By Stephen Glynn

1964: Mods clash with Rockers in Brighton, creating a moral panic. 1973: ex-Mod band The Who release Quadrophenia, a concept album following young Mod Jimmy Cooper to the Brighton riots and beyond. 1979: Franc Roddam directs Quadrophenia, a film based on Pete Townshend's album narrative; its cult status is immediate. 2013: almost fifty years on from Brighton, this first academic study explores the lasting appeal of 'England's Rebel Without a Cause'. Investigating academic, music, press, and fan-based responses, Glynn argues that the 'Modyssey' enacted in Quadrophenia intrigues because it opens a hermetic subculture to its social-realist context; it enriches because it is a cult film that dares to explore the dangers in being part of a cult; it endures because of its 'emotional honesty', showing Jimmy as failing, with family, job, girl, and group; it excites because we all know that, at some point in our lives, 'I was there!'

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231850551

Book preview

CULTOGRAPHIES

CULTOGRAPHIES is a new list of individual studies devoted to the analysis of cult film. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to those films which have attained the coveted status of a cult classic, focusing on their particular appeal, the ways in which they have been conceived, constructed and received, and their place in the broader popular cultural landscape. For more information, please visit www.cultographies.com

Series editors: Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia) and Jamie Sexton (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)

OTHER PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE CULTOGRAPHIES SERIES

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

Jeffrey Weinstock

DONNIE DARKO

Geoff King

THIS IS SPINAL TAP

Ethan de Seife

BAD TASTE

Jim Barratt

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY

Glyn Davis

THE EVIL DEAD

Kate Egan

BLADE RUNNER

Matt Hills

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

Ian Cooper

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!

Dean DeFino

FRANKENSTEIN

Robert Horton

QUADROPHENIA

Stephen Glynn

WALLFLOWER PRESS

LONDON & NEW YORK

A Wallflower Press Book

Published by

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York • Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © Stephen Glynn 2014

All rights reserved.

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85055-1

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Columbia University Press

A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-231-16741-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-85055-1 (e-book)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

1   Prequel: Cult into Music

2   Production: Cult into Film

3   Analysis: Film of Cult

4   Reception and Afterlife: Film into Cult

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the series editors of ‘Cultographies’, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton (they can argue over which of them is ‘The Punk and the Godfather’); I am grateful for their continued support and wise counsel during what proved to be a drawn-out process for this latest contribution to their fine series. Many thanks also to Yoram Allon (‘The Rock’), Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, who showed equal patience and encouragement.

The biggest thanks of all, though, must go to the two women in my life – Sarah and Roz. They are ‘The Real Me’; they may not share my Mod obsessions but we too have our wealth of Brighton memories and this book is for them. ‘I mean, that’s somethin’, innit?’

Stephen Glynn

Oakham

February 2014

FOREWORD

One looks in vain for Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, 1979) in the pantheons of academic criticism. In the Sight and Sound survey of 2012 it received not a single vote from a film maker, critic or academic, (though director Cameron Crowe had the film in his 2002 top ten). Nor has it a place in the BFI top 100 of British films, voted by industry members in 1999. Look to the UK’s more popular media, however, and the situation is reversed. In February 2001 Hotdog magazine placed Quadrophenia at number seven in its list of ‘50 Best British Movies Ever’. In a poll conducted by Carling Lager to discover the most ‘cool’ movies, Quadrophenia came in third, behind Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) and the alcohol-high Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987) (Daily Express, 17 July 2002). In April 2005 it was named the eighth greatest rock’n’roll movie of all time by readers of the music magazine Mojo. A search for ‘Quadrophenia’ on the internet auction site eBay will inevitably call up between 400 and 500 items on offer. These range from the film DVD and original soundtrack album through to Quadrophenia t-shirts, coasters, key rings and badges. The filming locations are part of a Brighton tour CD, with the back-alley to Choy’s Chinese Restaurant a shrine to aficionados keen to scrawl on the brickwork that ‘Jimmy Did It Here’.

‘Quadrophenia’ now exists in four versions – album, tour, play and film. The latter, its most enduring manifestation, has earned a loyal and repeated viewing public. It has occasioned regular revivals and has generated strong fan-based literature, most notably Gary Wharton’s encyclopaedic Chasing the Wind, but not as yet a detailed academic treatment. The genesis of Quadrophenia was long and convoluted, beginning with a four-piece pop group whose fourth film venture centred on a four-phased youth movement known as Mod. This study will explore the passage of that film to cult status – in four sections.

1

PREQUEL: CULT INTO MUSIC

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