![The Who - The Who, The Mods And The Quadrophenia Connection [2009] by The Who(2009-10-05)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51-PY2DzEaL._SY445_.jpg)
This is an insightful documentary about this era in Britain during the 60's which was the setting for The Who's album Quadrophenia. It will give you a deeper understanding of the times & the changes that were taking place in the culture at that time, especially among the youth. It is a thoughtful, well done rock doc. If you are a fan of The Who & the Quadrophenia album, I don't think you will be disappointed. It is a must see & highly recommended.
Pete Townshend on Mod movement
One of the things which has impressed me most in life was the Mod movement in England, which was an incredible youthful thing.
Announcing The Who x Modfather Clothing 60th Anniversary Collection.@Modfatherlondon Clothing was born from a passion for classic Italian scooters & British subcultural style. Music has and will always be at the heart of everything they do.
Available now on the official Who… pic.twitter.com/eir3LUMZsV— The Who (@TheWho) January 16, 2025
It was a movement of young people, much bigger than the hippie thing, the underground and all these things. It was an army, a powerful, aggressive army of teenagers with transport. Man, with these scooters and with their own way of dressing.
It was acceptable, this was important; their way of dressing was hip, it was fashionable, it was clean and it was groovy. You could be a bank clerk, man, it was acceptable. You got them on your own ground. They thought, “Well, there’s a smart young lad.”
And also you were hip, you didn’t get people uptight. That was the good thing about it. To be a mod, you had to have short hair, money enough to buy a real smart suit, good shoes, good shirts; you had to be able to dance like a madman.
You had to be in possession of plenty of pills all the time and always be pilled up. You had to have a scooter covered in lamps. You had to have like an army anarack to wear on the scooter. And that was being a mod and that was the end of the story.
The groups that you liked when you were a mod were The Who. That’s the story of why I dig the mods, man, because we were mods and that’s how we happened. That’s my generation, that’s how the song “My Generation” happened, because of the mods. The mods could appreciate the Beatles‘ taste. They could appreciate their hair-cuts, their peculiar kinky things that they had going at the time.
When you look at the people who were mods, the people I am talking about, they are now ordinary people and I mean I’m also going through the same changes.
I’m becoming more and more ordinary as I go along. This is the natural progression, this is the natural progression of boring maturity and boring spirituality and boring ascendance of the evolutionary path.
The thing is that you become simpler and simpler and more and more down to the simple ways of life, to be able to blunder through life without getting anybody uptight at all.
Music was as much a fashion as the fashion it created. It was an incredibly flippant fashion. It was as flippant as the girls in the group drinking liebfraumilch in the 1920’s.
It was as flippant as that. Music was just a feather. You went from record to record and you went from group to group, but you always dug The Who, because they were always down at the local dance. They were mods and we’re mods and we dig them. We used to make sure that if there was a riot, a mod-rocker riot, we would be paying in the area. That was a place called Brighton.
It was the first move that I have ever seen in the history of youth towards unity, towards unity of thought, unity of drive and unity of motive. Youth has always got some leader or other, some head man.
