Retromania by Reynolds Simon

Author:Reynolds, Simon [Reynolds, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571271801
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2011-05-09T05:00:00+00:00

ALL MOD CONS

Just as the original wave of Northern Soul flagged in the final years of the seventies, the UK saw a full-blown Mod Revival. This effectively meant that you had a tradition that developed out of mod (Northern Soul) co-existing with a retro reconstruction of it. The Mod Revival was almost entirely a south of England phenomenon, however, and its focus was radically different from Northern Soul. It didn’t recreate sixties mod’s orientation towards black American music. The Mod Revival was about bands wielding electric guitars and bashing drums: mod according to The Who, in other words. Indeed, some Mod Revival bands specifically drew inspiration from The Who’s 1973 concept album Quadrophenia, which depicted the modyssey of an alienated young man in the early sixties.

Just as important as The Who, though, were The Jam. Their stylised sharpness stood out against the anti-fashion ugliness of punk. The Jam appealed to British kids who liked punk’s high-energy sound but didn’t care for either the yobbish element or the art-school theory-and-politics contingent. The inner sleeve of The Jam’s 1978 album All Mod Cons featured a montage of mod fetishes: singles like ‘Biff Bang Pow’ by The Creation and ‘Road Runner’ by Motown’s Jr. Walker & the All-Stars, a Sounds Like Ska compilation, plus Union Jacks and a cappuccino (a nod to Soho cafe culture). All this provided vital clues for those fans who were in the process of forming their own Jam-style combos.

The Jam had actually started as a school band way back in 1972, doing American rock’n’roll covers, songs by the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But when singer, guitarist and leader Paul Weller discovered The Who, he decided that mod could be ‘a base and an angle’ from which to write songs but also something that would set the group apart from everybody else. Punk was coalescing and its initial orientation was very American: The Stooges, New York Dolls, sixties garage punk. Mod was totally English. It was also, Weller decided, the antithesis of rock’n’roll, even though groups like The Who used guitars, bass and drums. This notion actually had roots in the dichotomy that the original mods had felt existed between ‘their bands’ (The Who, Small Faces et al.) and The Rolling Stones, whom they considered ‘dirty, undesirable, long-haired art school beatniks’, to quote NME writer and genuine sixties mod Penny Reel. Weller himself would later rail against ‘elegantly wasted wankers like Keith Richards’, and assert that ‘I’ve never really seen us as part of the rock thing. I see us outside of that … I believe in … clean culture, real culture.’

The Jam, revealingly, would never break America, never winning over more than a niche anglophile following. Weller talked of being indifferent to America and its music (apart from soul, of course). And there was something inherently English and neurotic about mod, from its neat-freak ethos to its fractured, combustible guitar pop. Built around Pete Townshend’s slashed power chords and Keith Moon’s flailed cymbal crashes and tom rolls, The Who weren’t a groove band.

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