Quadrophenia

For three decades, Quadrophenia has stood as the essential document of mod culture - the incendiary movement of the early Sixties that revolved around music, fashion, drugs and scooters. Thirty years after its release, Clash dons its parka and delves into the making of a very British phenomenon.

Teenagers in the early 1960s were unrestricted in their access to emerging fashions. Due in part to the country’s post-war financial recovery, most were employed with ready access to cash to cover the constant update of their bespoke wardrobe, their record collection, their scooter accessories and the lifestyle that went with it. Mod was an extension of the 1950s beatnik culture, altogether more stylish, more affluent, and with a love for soul, R&B and blues.

By 1973, mod culture had effectively died out. The commercialisation of this vital youth movement had led to its rapid decline, while the burgeoning Sixties began to offer its disciples new musical and social opportunities, where they evolved into hippies, skinheads and beyond. Pete Townshend of The Who, however, was using his own mod experience as the basis for his latest rock opera - the story of Jimmy, a teenage mod whose personal troubles and internal conflicts lead him to develop four personalities.

The Who’s subsequent album, ‘Quadrophenia’, found favour not only with their original fans, who’d followed them since their mod beginnings in West London, but their fan base in general, thus introducing the movement to an international audience. Jimmy’s four personalities were apparently each to be based on a member of The Who, though Townshend now refutes this. “In a sense it was a sop to the band and their US fans to base Jimmy on the four members of The Who,” he tells Clash. “It helped us all get inside it. In reality I believe we in the band worked the other way round: each of us in The Who based ourselves on characters (sometimes groups of characters) we had observed in the early days in our audience.”

Listen to ‘Quadrophenia’ now and you hear a riotous soundtrack that journeys through Jimmy’s life - the emergence of psychological problems, his realisation of the transparency of rock ‘n’ roll worship, his disenchantment with the mod life, escaping to Brighton to recapture the highs of a recent mod/rocker clash, his self-destruction through drugs and alcohol, and his ultimate fate: stranded on a rock in the sea, discovering spiritual enlightenment in the storm raging around him.

The film adaptation of The Who’s 1969 album, ‘Tommy’, and its huge success, had pointed the band in a new direction. “I think about the time the Quadrophenia film was made The Who were pretty much finished as a performing band because of Keith Moon’s physical decline,” Pete admits - his drummer died two weeks before filming commenced, “so we had turned to film as a new business and bought a chunk of Shepperton Studios.” The Who’s manager, Bill Curbishley, and producer Roy Baird proceeded to field ‘Quadrophenia’ as a screenplay. They approached director Franc Roddam.

“We talked it through and they had a script that’d been written by a fan, but it wasn’t really a script,” remembers Franc. “It was a rambling, two hundred and twenty pages of something, but it wasn’t a script. You just couldn’t make it into a film. They said the money was there, the record company was willing to pay for the film. This was in June and they wanted to start in September! In film, sometimes you wait seven years for finances and we had a film fully financed, ready to go but with no script. It was quite exciting in a sense.”

With an ambiguous ending, rumours of a sequel to Quadrophenia have always abounded. “If it happens it will have very little to do with me,” claims Townshend. “Jimmy - in my mind - never went over the cliff with the scooter he had stolen from Ace Face, but I didn’t fancy his chances of survival if he hung around in Britain. In the album version I don’t even know if he got off the rock. One sequel I have heard about begins with Jimmy in Tangier. Probably wearing a caftan.” Mark Wingett is at first positive: “If it was working with that lot again, absolutely. But only if Franc directs it!” Then reservedly admits: “It’s a bit old to do a sequel thirty years later. Toyah [Wilcox, who played Monkey] said that if we did do a sequel we would have call it Septicemia instead of Quadrophenia. We’d ride around on zimmers instead of scooters,” he laughs.

But the unassailable power of Quadrophenia survives, with Townshend and Roger Daltrey recently presenting their stage adaptation, and the former confessing his desire to play the entire rock opera again. Clearly time has not withered Quadrophenia’s influence, or the endearment of Jimmy to millions of teenagers the world over. They may proudly mimic the film’s rallying cry of the troops, ‘We are the mods!’, but, for Franc Roddam, its ongoing charm has always been more humble: “I feel that 99.9% of people are losing 99.9% of the time, and yet all American films are about winning,” he explains. “So I wanted to turn it around and make this about not getting it, not being confident, not being capable, not having sexual experience, not being a good fighter, not being good looking, not being the best dancer, not getting the girl. And I thought those were normal experiences and I think that’s why the film has endured. Because it let people off the hook, they don’t feel so bad about themselves.”

Words by Simon Harper

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Read our Classic Album feature on The Who album that inspired the film HERE.