We are the mods: rewatching Quadrophenia out of my head on blues

"We are the mod, we are the mods, we are we are the mods / We are the mods, we are the mods, we are we are the mods ...". Er, yes, I've just dipped my toe in the sea in Brighton and watched the mods and the rockers doing battle on the seafront in Franc Roddam's teen-friendly film Quadrophenia (1979). Gulp. A 50p copy of a DVD seen the other day in a charity shop tempted me to take the plunge and in I went. Hmm. It must be 40-odd years ago that I first saw this messy Who-inspired ode to the 60s mods (presumably on a VHS video), and so, I thought, it might be interesting to watch this "cult" film all these years later, diving back into the heady mod-revival times of 1979 as a cynical old guy with millions of miles of road behind him, 100,000 hours of music listened to and 40,000 hours of films viewed. Was it interesting? Sort of. In short, I think the film's pretty terrible (the DVD will be going straight on to another charity shop as soon as the last word in this post is safely typed up), but I guess you can still rev up the er, critical Lambretta and get a little mileage out of it. 

Bank Holiday fun by the sea: Quadrophenia assembles the mod masses

Jimmy (Phil Daniels) freaking out the gents in first class

Here, for what it's worth, is what I thought of this ropey little film:

*It very much has the feel of a film for 15-year-olds (my age when it came out) and you can't help but sense its aching condescension to its intended young teen audience. Its central character Jimmy (Phil Daniels) is a supposedly loveable rogue type, part puckish gurning Norman Wisdom (wthout the pratfalls) and part Tom Courtenay's smart-alec Billy Liar. Skinny, lairy and very Cockney-fied. Despite the film being packed with future TV/film stars (Timothy Spall, Ray Winstone, Philip Davis, Leslie Ash, Michael Elphick, Kate Williams), Daniels has to basically carry the entire film. He does, more or less, but it's often hard work watching him. At his best Daniels has a touch of the wide-boy swagger of Gary Oldman's Bex from Alan Clarke's The Firm, as well as a bit of the antisocial menace of Tim Roth's Trevor from Clarke's Made In Britain. But then again, these Clarkean best bits are relatively few and far between in Quadrophenia. 

*At the time, critics apparently praised Quadrophenia as "gritty", but looking back now it seems more like an extended episode of Eastenders, just with a lot more swearing (the peppering of the script with "fuck off" and "cunt" is quite entertaining). The film is in many ways pure soap - restless mod kid gets girl, loses girl, throws up his job and spirals into depression. Admittedly, it's unlikely that a soap opera would end with a major character driving his scooter off a cliff, but most of the "action" of Quadrophenia is still emotionally basic and undemanding. 

*The music in Quadrophenia is obviously important (and is after all the main reason I rewatched it) and I think to some extent it works. One scene where Jim is shown wildly shaking his head while watching The Who doing Anyway Anyhow Anywhere on Ready Steady Go is genuinely good, almost entering "freak-out" territory. Other good musical moments are when a gang of teens at a house party starting going wild to The Who's My Generation on the record player, and a scene where another crowd dances in a pub to the Crystals' superlative Da Doo Ron Ron, watched on by a head-nodding Jimmy wearing wrap-around sunglasses. Set against this, though, are numerous truly terrible interludes where a kind of "rock opera" score fills out scenes featuring Jimmy moodily staring into the sea at Brighton or the scooter pack driving along empty roads en route to their Bank Holiday weekend ruck on the south coast. The film is 120 minutes long and feels horribly padded out by these queasy rock opera scenes. Come back Tommy, all is forgiven.    

*Like the music, clothes are a big thing in the film. Jimmy's fishtail parka, made-to-measure Italianate suit and his button-down short-collared shirts look pretty good (or at least interesting), and it's generally quite entertaining to check out the styling. Toward the end of the film Jimmy is wearing some quite expensive-looking brown tasselled loafers, while he's also often seen wearing a white Fred Perry shirt. I must admit, I didn't realise Fred Perrys were actually worn by mods in the mid-60s, thinking it was just a mod-rival thing from the late-70s. There you go: watch Quadrophenia and be educated. Meanwhile, Levi jeans get a high-profile plug in the film, with a whole scene involving Jimmy's father (Michael Elphick) quite amusingly haranguing Jimmy for wearing Levi's which Jimmy has soaked with water so they "fit right". "Jeans by Levi" even appears in the credits, product-placement for the 1979 pop heritage-loving consumer.

And I guess that's it. My critical Vespa ("that bleedin' hairdryer, call that a motorbike?") is starting to misfire and I'm about to break down (please get me some more pills, some blues, I need some blues). Quadrophenia is midly diverting here and there, sometimes for its snatches of music and sometimes for its attention to period mod style, but - in my view - it's a painfully weak film with horrible rock opera pretensions (Pete Townsend had a hand in producing the dodgy screenplay so I reckon it's case closed). "You gotta be somebody, ain't ya? Otherwise you might as well jump in the sea and drown", says the livewire Jimmy, a delivery boy/postroom worker at an advertising firm full of stuffed-shirts with plummy accents. The class conflict elements in Quadrophenia are vaguely interesting, but like almost everything else in this film they're poorly and over-obviously done, with the film-makers apparently fearful that your average late-70s 15-year-old couldn't possibly bear any more complexity than this. Meanwhile, two of the cast of Quadrophenia are themselves reminders that there were infinitely better music-related films being made at this time. Toyah Willcox plays a pretty one-dimensional character called Monkey in Quadrophenia, but a somewhat more interesting one in Derek Jarman's punk film Jubilee (1978), while Sting's rather ridiculous cameo in Quadrophenia as the "Ace Face" mod from Brighton is far inferior to his charming off-beat appearance in Chris Petit's excellent Radio On (1979). Compared to these two films, Quadrophenia is laughably bad but it still has its moments. The single best one may be where "pillhead" Jimmy is losing his mind and puts on eyeliner to signal his droog-like otherness as he travels on a train from miserable west London back to sunny Brighton to end it all. For a minute or two we see Jimmy freaking out the commuters in a first-class train carriage with his druggy weirdness. There needed to be a lot more of this sort of thing to make Quadrophenia even halfway interesting though. Anyway, still not convinced by my negative take on Quadrophenia? No? Oh dear, I've done the best I can. I guess I just can't explain ...