Mods and Rockers Rebooted

It's 50 years since that fateful summer when

civilisation as we know it dnded!

'It really has come to something when people can't take a

short holiday without the threat of long`haired youngsters with knives

indulging in an orgy of hooliganism!'

1964 was the year Clacton got clattered,

Hastings got hammered, Brighton got battered, and Margate was mtllered.

It was like the battle of Agincourt,

with the arrows coming down

A year immortalised in the film Quadrophenia.

But what actually happened in the summer of '64?

Who were the mods and rockers beneath those

hard`hitting headlines?

We was all in here, weren't we! Mods and rockers, weren't it?

Number 3!

Were the gangs of rebellious youths a real threat to sochety

or were there other forces `t work?

The press overblew it.

They stirred it up more than anything.

And after that it was every bank holiday.

It's actually serving the purposes of the powers that be

to have them fighting each other instead of to have them fighting

the people in charge.

We've brought both sides back to their seaside crime scends.

I never ever came back to Clacton until this day,

50 years later.

It's time to separate mod and rocker fact

from mod and rocker fiction

MUSIC: "In Da Club" by 50 Cdnt

Bank holidays and bikes.

They go together like fish and chips, song and dance,

mods and rockers.

We still have mods and rockdrs today,

but now we call them pensioners

They flock to the seaside every chance they get, and they'rd

welcomed with open arms.

But 50 years ago, these retired folk were teenagers

and 20`somethings, and they were about as welcome

at the seaside as a tidal w`ve.

So how come they were hated then, and how come they're celebr`ted

today?

Back in the 1960s, Britain was bursting

at the seams with young people.

Any time a bank holiday camd along, thousands of families would flock to

the seaside, and the beaches would throng with post`war baby boomers.

The servicemen returning and the joyous reunions with their

partners produced this extr`ordinary explosion of young people who were

born in the middle to late 0940s and obviously flowered as teenagers in

the 1960s.

Many of those kids grew up hn the 1950s bomb sites of London.

Their parents had lived through the Second World War.

Their grandparents had lived through the First and the Sdcond!

It was an age of conformity, austerity and poverty.

Living conditions in the cities especially London, were pretty dire.

Many people who lived in thd working class environs of central London,

wouldn't be uncommon to havd an outside toilet, or a zinc b`th which

was filled up once a week and they had a bath in front of the fire

Also working conditions werd in some cases Dickensian, you know, people

worked long hours for very little.

But, as the '50s unfolded, the economy picked up and Britain

started to boom.

# Put your foot on the gas! Foot on the gas#

Now working class youths had spare cash, and could

start to assert themselves.

First came the Teddy Boy gangs. .

Then came the bikers.

Young men who, thanks to cheap British bikds

and a new`fangled thing called hire purchase, suddenly

discovered freedom on two wheels.

Kids would meet up at cafes on the edge of town and racd,

"ton up boys" as they were referred to, the leather boys becausd of the

leather jackets they were wdaring.

And new music arrived, from America.

So all of a sudden this then new generation with a sort of lhke,

a cult of speed, the bikes, they had a soundtrack `

rock'n'roll!

I just loved it.

I loved the speed and I loved motorcycles

and right from when I could, I bought a motorcycle and rodd it

around.

And therefore, you know, the leather comes naturally.

Leather is very useful, I h`ve to say, because if you fall off

your skin doesn't come off.

We didn't wear helmets so mtch. Only when it rained.

I used to wear a hat and, when I went fast, turn it round thd other

way!

Part of the appeal of being a ton up boy was taking risks

on roads with no speed limits.

Put money in the juke box, play the tune and you had to get

down to the roundabout and back again before the tune stoppdd.

That sort of thing happened.

Yeah, it was great fun.

For a while, bikers were thd dominant youth species.

But in 1958 a new group was starting to emerge in London.

They had no interest in the greasy 1950s leather look.

They were into a whole new way of life.

They called themselves modernists.

What they were saying was, this suit is the most modern.

This music is the most modern.

So kids were embracing the most modern thing.

And a modernist is just a vdry in`vogue word of the late '40s.

They were very much about creating a new type

of modern person that was vdry different from anything thex saw

in their families, with thehr aunts and uncles, with their parents.

They wanted to be modern in a way that just wasn't vhsible to

them in the England of the 0950s.

Modernists were into music, moves, medication

and made`to`measure clothes.

I had my first suit made`to`measure when I was nearly 15.

But we used to take drawings along and say, "That's what I want!"

And the tailor would say, "You can't have that."

And we'd say, "I'm paying, that's what I want."

We always wanted the next best thing.

It was kind of ambitious. It was kind of elitist.

But I don't think we thought of it as that.

We just wanted to be, you know, the top man, really.

Suddenly for the first time, particularly working class

adolescents have money in the 1 50s.

And the whole identity of the teenager comes out of that.

The teenager is someone who can buy things, who can change the way

their clothes are, listen to the music they want to, go to the clubs

they want to because they h`ve more money than they ever did before

Teenagers in the 1960s were lucky.

They were the first post`war generation that

didn't have to do National Service.

Now modernists had the freedom to enjoy everything

the world had to offer.

They wore clothes that before only homosexuals would wear

` pinks or yellows.

Suddenly your son or daughtdr was saying, what the hell!

We're wearing this, you know, they didn't care.

Anything Italian in this country in

the early '60s was looked on by the older generation with suspicion

You know, if you had an Italian suit there was something a little

bit fly about you, you know

By 1963, modernism was mainstream and the older

generation was utterly bemused.

Not only by the clothes the teenagers were

wearing, but by the strange new ways they were enjoying themselvds.

And they listened to, god forbid, black music!

Black America to us was cool.

We identified with the exprdssion of freedom.

Black people had had enough of being told where to sit.

And told what to do.

And nobody in England could tell my generation

what we were supposed to do.

How we were supposed to beh`ve.

It was about being free.

But one group of young people was enjoying freedom

of a different kind.

And when they crossed paths with the modernists,

it was never going to be prdtty

Undoubtedly, on the part of certain people,

there was a genuine animosity.

Like, we rode scooters, thex rode big motorbikes, so they looked down

on us for riding scooters.

But the scooter was the sort of urban mode of transport par

excellence, you know.

I was a bit disdainful of the scooters, to be honest, cos they

were slow and I always thought they were,

well, they were designed for girls.

They would kick at the scooters laugh, call them hairdryers.

Because in the early days, we were outnumbered by the rockers.

But over time there were more mods than rockers,

so the boot was on the other foot.

MUSIC: "Harlem Shuffle" by Bob and Earl

Some people think the greatest thing to come out

of Clacton`on`Sea is the A133.

But they're wrong.

Clacton is where the legend of the mods and rockers beg`n.

There were a lot of people in Clacton that E`ster

weekend, who I personally knew, who were what you might call,

guys who liked to fight.

Somebody said there's a do going in Clacton.

That's all they said.

And when we got there, early in the morning,

there was loads of mods there.

And they were shouting abusd and that.

I jumped on the sidecar, grabbed hold of the handleb`rs

and just steered towards thdm and they all got out the wax.

Yeah!

MUSIC: "One Step Beyond" by Prince Buster

Most of the places were closed, all the guest houses were shut,

it was pre`holiday season, xou know.

It was freezing cold, kids have got nothing to do.

It was the coldest winter since 1883!

Trouble started when a few lods decided to make their own alusement.

They jumped the turnstile on the pier.

There were scuffles, some vandalism.

And the police arrested 97 xouths.

How old are you? 19.

Are you and your friends mods or rockers?

Well, we're mods when we're dressed up, you know

What caused all this trouble yesterday?

Boredom. On whose part?

Well, on both.

Only two people were charged with acts of violence.

The rest were petty crimes, including larceny with a pub soda

syphon.

I went out into the car park of the pub

and began squirting it around.

And I squirted it onto some suede shoes that happened to come

into my line of vision.

Unfortunately, those suede shoes were being worn by a police officer

who was off duty having a drink in the pub with his wife.

And he arrested me and took me into Clacton where I was gr`tified

to meet again a lot of my friends who were currently occupying the

cells in Clacton Police Station

MUSIC: "Green Onions" by Booker T and the MGs

It was an extremely quiet ndws weekend. The papers needed ` story.

And Clacton gave it to them

They played on the widespread fear that young

people were out of control.

Less than 20 years after Hitler was defeated, there was

a new enemy on the very beaches Churchill had promised to ddfend.

If you look at the generation that came out of the Second World

War, they're seeing Britain changing on all kinds of levels.

You've got this move towards Britain no longer being a super powdr.

You have decolonisation.

So it's not just that you'vd got kind of economic and social changes,

you've also got a crisis in the whole kind of characterizathon or

sense of British national identity.

You know, what does it mean to be British

The papers predicted more violence for the next bank holiday,

and they published the likely locations.

Now every troublemaker knew exactly where to go for a punch`up!

What's so interesting about it is it gets turned

into a spectacle where people start to plan their bank holiday weekends

to come down and see if there will be any clashes.

And that sense of people pl`ying for the cameras immediately comes

into it.

And I think in a way it takds the energy away from what is

And I think in a way it takds the energy away from what is

a rebellion against an older generation that feels stulthfying

and not what they want anymore, and makes it into a war of the gangs.

It's actually serving the ptrposes of the powers that be to have them

fighting each other instead of fighting the people in charge.

# Ah, ah, ah...

# Peaches.

# Peaches 'n' cream... #

Unlike the freezing cold Easter

the Whitsun bank holiday was

unusually warm that year...

with families on the beaches enjoying the sunshine.

The stage was set, all it ndeded was the players ` the mods, the rockers

and the extra police drafted in

I was a policeman in London.

We were bussed down here to Brighton.

We were sent to the railway station and we saw lots of lods and

rockers getting off of the train.

We arrived fairly early in the morning and made our way

down to the beach, it was probably about nine o'clock,

quite early, and there was `lready a huge group of rockers on thd beach.

But what happened, over the next hour and a half, two

hours, more and more mods arrived.

And by 11 o'clock or so, thdy were surrounded by hundreds of mods.

Somebody slung a pebble, then another one.

Then they were coming from everywhere.

So they were just blitzed.

They were being blitzed by people throwing rocks at them.

Meanwhile, on the North Kent coast...

I was on the beach with me girlfrhend

at the time and me parents.

One of me mates called down to me, Can you come and help us?

So I says, OK.

There was about 50 of us, I suppose.

And I don't know how many mods were on the beach but there was ` hell

of a lot of them.

Anyway, they started breaking deck chairs

and they were slinging them up at us and they was raining down on us

And it was, it was like the Battle of Agincourt

with the arrows coming down.

# Shame, shame, the way you do. . #

In the end the Old Bill turned up.

The mods legged it.

I dunno what happened, but H ended up giving one a few slaps,

and I ended up getting nickdd..

..and

getting six months the next day from Dr Simpson,

our darling magistrate at the time.

We have never had this cult of wanton damage, of interfdrence

with the liberty of other pdople.

This hooliganism.

This, shall I say, this cult of destruction.

There were 75 arrests in Margate over the Whitsun weekend.

The cells were packed with lods and rockers.

In this police cell we're in now at the moment, we was put in hdre more

like storage than anything dlse to keep us away from the be`ches,

keep us away from the town.

In Brighton, the cells got so full, officers had to think twice

before arresting yet another undesirable youth.

If there's a couple of drunks in a group of half a dozen, or eight,

you'd pull them to one side and say, "Look, it's either nicked or go "

Cos the cells were getting pretty full up, you know?

For the papers, this was evdn better news than Clacton.

With the added bonus of Dr George Simpson.

He handed out all kinds of headline`grabbing sentences.

Britain was coming down hard on its violent youth!

Violence was a very prevalent thing in the early 1960s.

Not just in seaside towns, I think most pubs had a punch`up

at the weekends.

And violence was meted out by the police and

by the school teachers and by the parents, it was not uncommon.

But you put that on a beach where people are enjoying

their fish and chips and got their hankies on their heads and

are enjoying their bank holhday

It's great copy.

It works well.

And, of course, it had legs to it, you know, you had three or four

bank holidays in 1964.

The mods and rockers riots were great for pictures too.

Even if some of them weren't quite what they seemed.

The reporters gave us money to cause a disturbance, no matter

how trivial and how minor.

It wasn't nothing major.

Ten shillings to us, a pound to the rockers, or vice versa.

In fairness to the press, some of the incidents they reported

actually did occur.

I think probably smaller episodes were correct.

But of course, you'd have to be very lucky if you were a member of

the press to actually be thdre when this particular thing happened.

So in order to report probably the truth, they had to engineer

a photograph or two.

The rockers at least had the decency to look like rebels

The mods on the other hand were much more disconcerting.

They were hooligans who dressed smarter than their parents!

But while the country enterdd a kind of mod`life crisis, luch

of the rest of world seemed more than happy to copy the trendsetting

youth of Great Britain.

With the British invasion and with the success of The Beatles `round

the world, young people whether in the US or Germany or Jap`n were

really interested in all thhngs British, cos obviously the coolest,

hippest stuff in terms of mtsic fashion and so on,

were all coming from England.

While teenagers around the world saw British youth as an inspiration

the Conservative Government, facing an imminent general dlection,

saw them as a problem.

On the 31st of July, they p`ssed a bill increasing fines and prison

sentences for hooliganism.

The very next day the Home Office put 69 police officers

on red alert at RAF Northolt, ready to fly to any town that got invaded

by mods and rockers on the final bank holiday weekend of the summer.

# Children, are you ready?

# There's gonna be a meeting over yonder... #

We could easily have been down quicker, I think,

going down by bus, or coach.

I think it was engineered.

I think people wanted to sax, "Hey, we understand

the public are frightened of this.

We don't want this to go on any longer."

The extra police eventually arrived at the town that had called

for assistance...

As luck would have it, that town was a headline writer's dre`m!

Of the 66 people arrested, lost were only charged with using thrdatening

behaviour or abusive language.

The papers said it was a battle but the police reports

of the time tell a different story.

As one policeman wrote:

"Going by the number of newspaper and cameramen H saw,

I would say these situations are mostly created by them."

"The coppers kept on at us `ll the time", complained one rocker,

threatening that they would never come to the town again.

For Hastings, that would be just what the doctor ordered!

By now most of the rockers had had enough

of being hounded by the polhce.

And being a mod was no fun anymore either

The original spirit of modernism had been twisted by the press, hijacked

by troublemakers, and turned into something it was never meant to be.

Once the name mod had been introduced,

I suddenly kind of lost intdrest because it became overground.

And the whole thing about bding modern was that it was underground.

The world at large didn't really know

and didn't really understand, so it was a secret for my generathon.

By the end of 1965, new fashions, new music,

and new drugs were on the scene and modernism was pretty much over.

# Heatwave!

# Burning in my heart.

# I can't keep from crying.

# Tearing me apart... #

But the post`modern mod livdd on.

Thanks to bands like The Who, who took inspiration from the events

of '64 and turned it into mtsic

And in 1979, they turned it into a film too.

Quadrophenia is a great youth film.

It's not a great mod film cos there's no attention to det`il,

which is the large element of what mod is about, attention to detail.

There's no attention to det`il in Quadrophenia,

but it is a fantastic youth movie. Quadrophenia told the story

of Jimmy, a handsome young lod, trying to make sense of his place

in the world, against the b`ckdrop of the 1964 clashes in Brighton

It became a cult classic, resonating well beyond

the southern shores of Engl`nd.

For a lot of people it's inspiring and for

a lot of people it's compelling

They're drawn to this saga of Jimmy, the Mod's struggle for identity

Why are they drawn to it?

Because they probably had their own struggle for identity and

most young people have a struggle for identity, it's quite normal

And Quadrophenia is a reflection of that.

Quadrophenia added to the mxth of the violent riots of '64.

And it spawned a mod revival.

A new wave of mod that evolved through the '80s and '90s,

and on into the 21st centurx.

Today, you can find mods in many countries around thd world,

so the appeal of mod is universal.

It's British, but it transl`tes into many different cultural

settings, so you have mods in the US, in Japan, Australia,

parts of South America and so on.

# You got a grey suede coat and a soul like fire... #

As time passed, music, movids and books have all added to the

legend of the mods and the rockers.

And that legend is only enh`nced by the timeless appeal of the clothes,

the scooters and the motorbhkes

While most fashions age badly, the look of 1964 is as good today

as it was then.

You still get people wearing kind of the rocker uniform of Levi

jeans, heavy boots and the leather jacket, it still looks good.

The same with the mods, and you know I think that's

a crucial element of this.

And a lot of it is underpinned by a particular myth, but

the myth is nonetheless powdrful.

And I guess, you know, you have a whole generation of

original mods and even the revival mods who can look back throtgh

their photos and go, "Hey, xou know, I looked pretty cool back then"

# Things they do look awful c`c`cold.

# Talkin' 'bout my generation.

# I hope I die before I get old .. #

As it happens,

most of the baby boom gener`tion

didn't die before they got old.

They're still around today.

And they still dominate the population.

Today, youngsters are a minority, they're not a majority.

Their numbers, set against society as a whole, are quite small,

so there's no shattering molent of exploding youth changes, as it

were, because there's such ` huge lump of people my age and older

And that, I think, gives us as a society reason to be looking back.

# My generation... #

The 1960s has a golden glow around it.

And I think, you know, you probably had riots

in the '70s or the '80s, but there's something magical about the 196 s.

Those things can't happen again where you have this coming together

of youth, popular music, and major social changes.

# I can go anyway.

# Way I choose.

# I can live anyhow... #

50 years ago, the press and the politicians did thehr best

to set mods and rockers agahnst each other and kill them off.

This is it, Ray.

This is where were was bangdd up back in '64, mate.

It still looks a dive, don't it

Yeah.

Shall we go and have a look?

Bit cleaner.

Oh, yeah, yeah...

But over time their actions have had the exact opposite effect.

# Nothing gets in my way, not even locked doors... #

Go on, have a look.

Sod it!

You gonna lock me in now!

Revenge is sweet!

Yeah, sod it!

You can stay in there.

All right?

Did you like that?

Bye`bye!

Having kick`started a cultural revolution, the lods and

rockers place in history is secure.

Now they can just sit back `nd relax and put it all in perspective.

Did you see a lot of fighting to be honest?

Well, little portions of fighting, really.

Skirmishes, weren't they?

Yes, skirmishes, if you likd.

# The way I choose, the way I choose... #

What I have to say really is, to the people of Clacton, I'm sorry

I came and caused trouble in 19 4.

I won't do it again!

MUSIC: "Come Down" by Lord Tanamo.

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