Quadrophenia
[Sight & Sound, February 1997]
Back in early 1966, when he was still close to the moment, Pete Townshend wrote his kiss-off to the subculture that he was just leaving: “Substitute” ruthlessly ex posed the violence, perversity and psychosis that lay be hind Mod’s shiny surface – and, by implication, the post war consumerism that the Mods had bought into so thoroughly. Top Ten in the week that “Time” magazine published its famous April 1966 cover story on “Swinging Lon don”, “Substitute” presents a world where nothing is as it seems, where everything is fake, where everything – gender, race, age, reality itself – is questionable: modernism stripped bare at its zenith. ‘I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth’; yup, that’s how it felt in Lon don’s western suburbia during the mid-sixties.
Centrally placed within a string of hit singles that established Townshend as pop’s most acute chronicler of male adolescence, “Substitute” provided a direct inspiration for Punk (re-released in late October 1976, the original Who version made the Top Ten just as the Sex Pistols, who’d play it in their early sets, be came a national scan dal); it not only announced the Who’s creative independence (from a restrictive production contact), but their independence from the movement which had thrust them into prominence. The Who weren’t Mods – at least two of the group had greaser tendencies – but they’d articulated Mod concerns better than anyone. This guilt-flecked empathy saturates “Quadrophenia”, which reenacts the central couplet of “Substitute”, not as a manifesto, but a curse: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated/ I look pretty young but I’m just backdated’.
Set in 1964/5, written and recorded in 1972/3, filmed in 1978/9, rereleased in 1997, “Quadrophenia” is in part a classic teen movie, in part a serious examination of male bonding and group identity, in part a self-conscious recreation of a recent, but already long distant past – the al ready self-conscious sixties recreated in the guise of the late seventies, revived again in the late nineties. 1966 – 1996; Swinging London Mark II; Mod pop as Britpop; talk about backdated, oo-ee: on one level, “Quadrophenia”‘s reappearance is perfectly timed, not the least because the style which the film helped to popularise – the late 70′s Mod revival – is now being itself revived. And, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, the image gets more and more degraded each time.
For the first twenty five minutes, “Quadrophenia” is a straight nighttime rush, at its best as a pure teen movie. It’s all there: the perpetual, spinning triangles (between boy/ girl / boy, boy/ girl/ girl, boy/ girl/ the gang, boy/ boy/ the gang: if you think this is complicated, just look at “St Elmo’s Fire”); the subcultural locations and rituals – as this is ostensibly about sixties Mod, we’re talking about clothes, scooters and speed in pill form (purple hearts, drinamyl, dexedrine); the self-referential positing of ‘real’ youth against adult marketing speak (as in “A Hard Days Night” and “Catch Us If You Can”); even hints of other classic movies, like “The Wild One”. So far so good: the lighting is excellent, the crowd scenes well choreographed, the characters believable, the star – Phil Daniels as Jimmy – charismatic.
However, after an early climax – the horribly accurate suburban party sequence – things start to get unstuck. De spite the high level of period detail and set dressing, there are niggling anachronisms: 70′s tube stock rolling in the distance, a taxi with a 70′s number-plate, an early 70′s Who compilation racked a little too obviously. Other things start to grate: the way the Mods say ‘bollocks’ all the time – a very post Sex Pistols word; the constant swearing; the complete emotional inarticulacy of the central characters. As the true retardation of Jimmy’s friends is slowly revealed, with their casual sexism, homophobia and racism, you’re so in the 70′s that you think, well, why doesn’t somebody challenge them, and then you realise that oh, you’re supposed to be in the mid 60′s, you know, before all those pesky -isms happened.
But “Quadrophenia” has very little to do with the high 60′s, and everything to do with the period in which it was filmed. Not only are the locations grim grim grim, like the late 70′s were (and in this, the nearest film in mood is the truly depressing “Breaking Glass”), but the class make-up of Mod is shifted downwards: from suburban to, in effect, inner urban, from white collar to blue collar. Jimmy, to be sure, works in a classic Mod setting – an advertising agency, full of toffee-nosed gits whom he despises, which is as it should be – but his friends Dave (played by Mark Wingett, now star of “The Bill”) and Pete work in a rubbish dump, a scrapyard. Do you think fanatical stylists like these Mods are supposed to be, let alone original Mods like Marc Feld and Johnny Moke, would have sullied their beautiful bodies so ? I think not.
The film is inauthentic, yet trades on a kind of spurious authentic ity, where the only ‘real’ experience is from ‘the street’: you feel that it is made by people who took the punk rhetoric of ‘street credibility’ seriously (like “Rude Boy”, which at least has the Clash ram paging away throughout). This can now be seen as a necessary counter point to what was to follow – all that neo-con “Brideshead Revisited” bullshit – but then one of the factors that fractured Punk was the disparity between its aggressive rhetoric and the reality of its cross-class make-up (which is as it should be in pop, one of the few places where the different classes can meet on any thing like equal terms). Indeed, the whole point of Punk was the non-privileged could be beautiful; artistic; intelli gent; could refuse their class stereotype; could make a difference.
In its core characters, “Quadrophenia” exhibits such a neurotic, aggressive normality that any overt attempts at meaning are undercut: when Jimmy and his mum start splitting hairs about ‘what is normal’, you’re not sure where you stand. The central idea of the original album is that Jimmy is psychologically unstable – ‘schizophrenic ? I’m bloody quadrophenic’ – and as such embodies the disturbances of his time. As the liner notes begin: ‘I had to go to this psychiatrist every week’. Well, that’s a start, but try to find any hint of this in the film and you’ll be lucky. Nobody has any interior life here. Jimmy’s prime motivation is tossed off in the briefest of explanations by his dad, played by an over-avuncular Michael Elphick: ‘Half your mother’s family is the same’. Only poofs go to psychiatrists, after all.
There is not one strong, autonomous woman in the film, but “Quadrophenia” does have some things to say about male bonding: indeed, the relationship of Mod Jimmy to his old school mate, Rocker Kevin, is one of the sweetest things here. ‘I don’t give a monkey’s arseholes about Mods and Rockers,’ Kev spits; ‘We’re all the same, aren’t we ?’ ‘No Kev, that’s it, I don’t wanna be the same as everybody else,’ replies Jimmy (in an echo of the Kinks’ great bohemian anthem, “I’m Not Like Every body Else”); ‘That’s why I’m a Mod, cos’ you’ve got to be somebody, don’t you ?’ The relationship between the two is curiously intimate: this is one of the only places where we see Jimmy in civvies, standing easy from the Mod army, where anything like spontaneous kindness is shown. It provides Jimmy with his first moral dilemma: who does he choose, Kevin or the gang ?
Jimmy ducks the issue but we see no more of Kevin after his ritual sacrifice – kicked to shit by the railway arches in Shepherd’s Bush market: an authentic location for such an event – in the first half of the film. And so any hint of softness, nay even homosexuality, in Jimmy’s make up is ruthlessly suppressed. His mates routinely harass and insult the barbers and tailors that make them look good, as if to deny their own predilections for such unmanly pursuits as personal hygiene and peacock posing. Yet some of the most effective scenes in the film, near the end, show Jimmy at his most androgynous: like when, leapered to the gills, he is caught doing his make up in the train toilet and flips his eyelashes, or when he hunches out between the two bowler-hatted businessmen on the 5:15 – a bug-eyed, hollow cheeked mutant.
That’s more like it, but it’s hard to avoid the sensation that this is presented as a weakness. The early gang scenes are so strong that they provide the film’s dominant mood: by the time that Jimmy – understandably because they’re such a bunch of stiffos – leaves the group in disgust, you feel that he’s the freak, that he’s the outsider and, as such, must pay the price. Despite the considerable beauty of the final sequences on Beachy Head, and the deliberate ambiguity of the final shot, the conclusion is that Jimmy is a victim: something to do with all that whining around Steph (a wooden Leslie Ash), something to do with the way that all the trappings of his life in the Mod Army are stripped away from him. Things happen to Jimmy, he doesn’t initiate them: his full slide into Mod beauty is thus not subcultural aspiration but terminal psychosis.
Talk about neo-conservative: if you didn’t know this film came out the year of Mrs. Thatcher’s victory, then you’d guess it. Part of this has to do with the translation between record and film, between 1966 and 1973, between 1965 and 1979: all that backdating. If the gender/ identity obsessed “Substitute” and its transvestite follow-up, “I’m A Boy”, help to mark 1966 as the high point of pop modernism (along with “Tomorrow Never Knows”, John Cale’s “Loop”, the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On”, the Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” et al), then one by-product of the era that followed – let’s just agree to call it postmodernism, and it begins in 1967 – was a change in pop time from linear to circular, from a straight line to a loop. To put it simply, pop could now freely source the past, including its own.
The “Quadrophenia” album was part of this process: written and recorded at the same time as Stanley Cohen’s groundbreaking piece of youth sociology, “Folk Devils and Moral Panics”, which zeroed in on Mod and, in particular, the 1964 Hastings/ Brighton disturbances, as prime examples of the media as an active, distorting agent in the dissemination of youth culture. The Who’s third concept album – after the great “Tommy” and the failed “Lifehouse” – “Quadrophenia” was a re-examination of Mod nearly a decade after its heyday, stretching the identity crises of a single like “Substitute” over a whole double album – from under 3 to over 80 minutes. This presupposes a certain windiness: while there are songs of considerable power, like “The Punk and the Godfather”, “I’m One”, the tempos are down, the atmosphere regretful and wistful – a lament indeed for lost youth.
Place these songs in an aggressively marketed teenage rampage movie and you can see that there is a problem developing: the two are rarely in sync. The film solves this by jamming much of the soundtrack into the last third – most effectively in the use of “I’ve Had Enough” over the final sequence – and filling the rest up with classics like “Night Train” and “Green Onions”, but the mood of the original album casts a pall over the whole proceedings. As does its gender orientation: if in 1966 the Who were a plastic pop group – girly make-up and moussed up French Mod hairdos – then by the recording of “Quadrophenia”, they were a lads rock group par excellence: nothing wrong with that, especially with a writer as acute and questioning as Pete Townshend, but the film, in swallowing this discourse whole, leaves no space for anything else. Not so much ‘we are the Mods’, but ‘we are the lads’.
In the same way, the Mod Revival that began in 1978 – clustering around the Jam and Paul Weller – simplified and made palatable the extremities of Punk. Early punk groups like the Clash and Sex Pistols spring boarded from 60′s Mod into an entirely contemporary time zone: accelerating that heavily chorded Kinks/ Who style, cutting up mid-sixties clothing along with other youth styles – skin head, zooter, and, of course, rocker. One of the sources of the famous Ted antipathy to punks was, indeed, this trashing of their sacred costume: in their eyes, a blashphemy to be punished with summary dispatch. Never mind that, twenty years after its initial flourishing, Ted costume was ripe for plunder, it’s in the nature of re searched youth cult revivals that they are fundamentalist, with all that that implies.
Some fine records apart – power-pop explosions like the Purple Hearts’ “Millions Like Us”, the Chords’ “Maybe Tomorrow” – the groups that followed the Jam and the film’s autumn 1979 success into the charts were rarely anything to write home about. Out they all trooped in their Burtons suits: the Lambrettas, the Merton Parkas, and Secret Affair – who attempted to tap the bullying nature of Jimmy’s peer group with their would-be youth cult, the Glory Boys. This was a brief but baleful pop-cult moment that too many people have never got over: as Mark Sinker has written, ‘the whole Weller army was a mass of opinion-clones, each as terrified as the next of looking foolish, and all hilariously prone to getting antsy when the Woking Man’s chummy Mod nostalgia wasn’t treated with proper deference’.
Within the context of 1979, “Quadrophenia” was reactionary and divisive. When I think of that year in moving images, it’s not in terms of those fake mods, but the interior space of Don Letts’ video for Public Im age’s “Death Disco”, the class betrayal in Jonathan Powell’s adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, the sight of Joy Division on BBC2′s “Something Else”, blasting out “She’s Lost Control” with blowtorch intensity – quadrophenia incarnate – to a gaggle of politely bored….Mods. Here is the struggle then: do you want peer acceptance, comfortable sentimentality, or do you want to live life intensively, with all the risks? Jimmy makes that leap, but, contrary to the Who’s original spirit, “Quadrophenia” makes it clear that this is not a begin ning, but the end: in this obliteration of difference, it is one spiritual forefather of today’s con formist, thirty-something pop and media culture.