You are what you wear They may have been poseurs living by bizarre rules, but the mods were pop's greatest role models. And now they're back, says Dom Phillips Guardian Thursday April 19, 2001 Thirty-five years after its heyday, mod is making another comeback. Next Monday sees the release of a four-CD box set of 1960s classics, glossily packaged with a history of mod and claiming to represent "the first ever style movement". Close on its heels is another box set, this time of singles from mod icons the Jam. Terry Rawlings's lavishly illustrated book The Story of Mod has just gone into a second edition. Paolo Hewitt's The Soul Stylists, which features mods heavily, has been reprinted and the TV options sold. Sales of scooters are up more than 60% for the second year running, according to Piaggio, makers of the classic mod vehicle, the Vespa. Even Robbie Williams has been spotted in a parka. Mod happened not once, but at least twice: it peaked in the mid-1960s, then was revived in the late 1970s. And again in the mid-1990s, if you count Britpop heavyweights Blur and Oasis battling it out with Union flag imagery and Small Faces guitar riffs. But this time mod is being offered up for nostalgia, not revival: a wallow in the birth of British cool. Some say it never went away. Talvin Singh's east London "Asian mods" made an appearance in Hoxton in the late 1990s. Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels delved not just into the mod penchant for ska, old soul, long leather coats and crisp suits, but into its social framework of sharp-looking working-class lads on the make and on the move. "This is the age of giving the old influences a new coat of paint," says cutting-edge DJ Gilles Peterson. "There's something classic about mods that's far more relevant to now than other tribes. They were eclectic from the start." Mod is in many ways the blueprint for later British youth movements. Its look-good, stay-cool code has more lasting resonance than the situationist pranks of punk. And with the style cognoscenti in a state of confusion about the whereabouts of youth rebellion - the magazine Dazed & Confused has even staged a debate on the issue - it's not surprising that people are looking back at it. Mod can be traced back to the late 1950s, when smart bohemians hung out in Soho jazz clubs and called themselves "mod ernists". "Kind of intellectual types into smooth jazz," remembers Phil Smee, a veteran of the 1960s mod scene who designed The In Crowd's packaging. "You needed a bit of money to belong to that set." But by the early 1960s there was money around. "The only way you were out of work was if you couldn't be bothered to work. It was a real social stigma," remembers Richard Shirman, lead singer of mod group the Attack. "There has never been a time like it for being a teenager. We were flexing our muscles in all sorts of ways." The development of discotheques meant it became cool to go out and listen to records. Early forms of ska seeped from London's Jamaican clubs to join fast American soul from labels such as Tamla Motown and homegrown, up-tempo "pop art" groups such as the Who and the Attack as the soundtrack to a fast-living, resolutely urban lifestyle. With the help of the mods' own TV show, Ready, Steady, Go! - slogan, "The weekend starts here" - everyone knew what was in. Smee remembers presenter Cathy McGowan changing the direction of the flicks in her hairstyle. "Of course every girl in the country had to change her hair." Hair was pretty important, says Phil Smee: "Members of the Action had hair that grew the right way. Woe betide anyone with curly hair." And while a hand-tailored suit was the ultimate mod outfit, Smee remembers a pivotal moment when one style guru turned up wearing a complete Chelsea pensioner uniform, to the awestruck envy of his friends. Richard Shirman was one of Ready, Steady, Go!'s dancers. As a Mick Jagger-lookalike and dude-around-town, he became a regular feature of the Melody Maker's The Raver column and was dubbed Jivin' K Boots. He compares mod's obsession with detail - such as shoes, or the huge functionless tank aerials that they fixed to their scooters - to the way teenagers obsess over trainers today. "They were showing that they were worthwhile and to be reckoned with," he says. "They were the ones who had the style." Those who followed mod's unwritten rules most closely were known as "faces" - a phrase that gave itself to style magazine the Face - and set standards of cool for bands ever since. Daddy G from Massive Attack, one of the UK's most influential bands of the past decade, describes growing up on Bristol's ultra-cool club scene in the 1980s: "We were so obsessive, there was this thing about quality control with us. From the early days, you couldn't wear the wrong trainers or the wrong jeans. It was quite subtle, but it was of the utmost importance." It has even been argued that the entire history of popular culture since the 1960s can be divided between two schools of thought: mods versus the sloppier, scruffier, more easy-going hippies. According to this theory, punk was mod; acid house hippie. But come the mid-1990s, clubbers smartened up and became mod, while punk - a retro lifestyle choice for drop-outs - hippie. Sharply dressed Craig David is a mod; baggy old Starsailor hippies, and so on. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the mod revival threw up 2-Tone bands such as the Specials and Madness, as well as the Jam. Once again there were "faces", many of whom became movers in the 1980s acid-jazz movement, such as Mark Nelson of the Young Disciples and Eddie Pillar, who started the Acid Jazz label. And there were off-the-peg "Millet mods" with their reflex reliance on the mod imagery of scooters, targets and parkas. Photographer Dean Belcher was a "face" in Swindon at the time, where he sang in a mod group when not spending weekends clubbing in London and buying cloth to take back to Swindon to be tailored into suits. He worked in a plastics factory. "It was about the clubs and being part of a gang," he says now. Years later, while photographing the drum'n'bass star Goldie in Los Angeles, Belcher found himself having dinner at the actor Larry Fishburne's house. Fishburne had been an LA mod in his youth and dinner was spent discussing scooters. Belcher can spot old mods a mile off. It's all in the details. The In Crowd's glossy booklet contains many photos of 1960s mods. Their kitchen-sink cool was monochrome in more ways than one. "It was a black-and-white world," says Phil Smee. "You either got it or you didn't." . The In Crowd is out on Universal/Island records on Monday. Part 2 of Jam 45rpm is out on Polydor on April 30.The Story of Mod by Terry Rawlings is published by Omnibus Press, price �19.95. Opinions??? Sean ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?aVxiMu.aVzSEg Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01 ==^================================================================
