Quadrophenia: the day the Mods rocked Brighton – report by the Telegraph

It’s 35 years since the film 'Quadrophenia’ immortalised the battle between Mods and Rockers of 1964, but for some the memory of those fights will never fade, says Sophie Campbell.

There is a shiny red Lambretta coming out of the bedroom wall at the Hotel Pelirocco on Regency Square in Brighton. The scooter’s front half is the left-hand bedside table, its back half the right. The bedspread is parka-coloured with an RAF roundel in the middle and the melamine breakfast table is flanked by moulded bucket seats in orange plastic.

This is the hotel’s Modrophenia room. It’s a cheery allusion to the fact that Brighton, somewhat to its amusement, is still pulling in visitors fascinated by the skirmishes between Mods and Rockers that took place on its seafront over the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend in May 1964, and which erupted in several other seaside resorts throughout that summer.

It’s a double whammy: not only will “Battle of Brighton” events take place this year, but tomorrow night Brighton’s Concorde 2 music venue will have a 35th-anniversary screening of Quadrophenia, the film about that weekend, with a turn by Sting and a soundtrack by the Who.

“I’ve seen Quadrophenia a million times and actually it’s not a bad film,” said Adam Le Roy, whose North Laine shop Jump the Gun sells parkas, knitted ties, Sta-Prest trousers and three-button Tonik suits (Tonik is mohair suiting with a sheen prized by Mods). “Though half of it was shot in Eastbourne.”

“True Mod was kind of ’59, ’60, ’61,” he said. “People were looking towards things that weren’t fuddy-duddy Britain: the Continent, a bit of Ivy League from the States, the whole Italian thing, American soul coming over, the r &  b scene. It was post-war; people were fed up.”

Rockers, on the other hand, took their inspiration from classic British motorcycles and American rock ’n’ roll. In the fashion section of the Brighton Museum there’s a slim-cut blue Mod suit, complete with sheen, nattily accessorised with a salmon-pink tie and hankie. Next to it is a biker jacket of zipped and belted black leather bought, disarmingly, from the John Lewis catalogue.

“I don’t think the Battle of Brighton was as much of a battle as it’s made out to be,” Adam said. “The actual area wasn’t that big. But for the time it was a disaster. Imagine in 1964 having hundreds and hundreds of people descend on the town, chanting and rioting…”

My own nostalgia day began in Brighton’s town hall, one corner of which contains the former police cells. Until 1964 these were famous chiefly for housing the Trunk Murderer (don’t ask) and a prisoner who escaped and slaughtered the police chief in his office. They’re now part of a museum founded by Pat Drake, who was Brighton’s mayor 10 years ago. Her team of volunteers includes policemen with first-hand memories of Mods, Rockers and flying deckchairs.

“It was standing room only in here,” she said, as I shuffled into one of the eight male cells with a family from Hong Kong. “It was so full they put some of the overflow into the tunnel from West Street to the beach, some in mail trolleys at the station, you know, the ones with netting sides, and the others on Duke’s Mound near today’s marina, where they woke them up every 10 minutes until they calmed down.”

Graffiti carved into the yellow distempered walls are still visible if you crane your neck. “Beatnik George” and “Jimmy Bolton (Irish)” are next to a lovingly wrought girl in a bikini. “Dave the Rocker 8th June 1964” must have been at one of the earlier fights that summer that rippled down from Margate and along the south coast to Hastings , but Brighton was the big one. “Dave the Rocker came on one of my tours,” Pat said. “He brought his grandchildren.” She pointed to the scrawl above the door that said in large, clear letters: “The cops in this prison are [a word no Lady Mayoress should hear]s.”

I wondered how many other bus-pass holders remember dressing in their sharpest suits, covering up with trench coats and climbing on their scooters – or zipping up their leather jackets, checking their denim turn-ups and climbing on their roaring Triumphs or AJSs – for the drive down the A23.

“It all kicked off here,” said Lyn Neville, who leads Quadrophenia walks and was waiting for me by Palace (now Brighton) Pier. “If you look behind you you’ll see that nothing’s changed from when they were filming.” She has a still from the film and, sure enough, there is the run of tall terraced houses, the seafront, the end of the pier. The Brighton rock shop hasn’t changed. The arches on the beach still house a Formica café and the Brighton Swimming Club, whose members have been leaping into the sea every day since 1860.

She pointed out the arcade where, in the film, the scooters park up. This is where Jimmy, played by Phil Daniels, turns to see Ace Face (Sting) at the head of a shoal of Mods, cruising down the seafront on his silver and grey Vespa GS in a silver-grey suit, belted trench, truly awful grey shoes and anachronistic, late-Seventies bleached spiky hair.

A film walk is a tricky thing to pull off, because you have buffs who know everything and people like me who don’t, though I’ve seen the film a couple of times and vividly recall that first glimpse of Sting. “Oh, I’m used to it,” said Lyn. “I get loads of Quaddies who know every frame, often thirtysomething Germans oddly enough, and their families or girlfriends, who have no idea what they’re going on about.”

She is good at bringing to life the film and the fighting it was based on, and her main subject, Brighton, is a charmer. The air is full of ozone and a faint whiff of sleaze, the buildings are gloriously dog-eared and it’s fun trying to work out where the filming was done from.

We descended to what is now the Sealife Centre, which doubled as a nightclub exterior, and took the tunnel to the beach. Its walls were covered with murals of Brighton’s rock ’n’ roll past: the Beatles (they appeared here), the Who, Gary Moore of Thin Lizzy (who lived in Sussex) and Abba (who won the Eurovision Song Contest in the Brighton Dome five years before Quadrophenia came out).

Where the pier backed darkly into the beach you could see a line of doors that appeared in the film. It’s behind one of these that two of the Mods wake up to realise they are sharing with a nest of Rockers. Beyond was the stretch of reddish shingle where young Mods and Rockers rampaged through sunbathers and windbreaks.

One image I did remember from the film was the hapless bobbies wearing white helmets, a feature of Brighton summers in the Sixties. You can see one of the helmets in the Police Museum – and its raffia equivalent from next-door Hove.

Two minutes from the sea was the alleyway – now known as “Quadrophenia Alley” – where Jimmy and Steph escape the action to create some of their own. “The lamp post’s gone!” said Lyn, “It was here last week. These never go, though,” she said, pointing at the messages scrawled on the wall. “As fast as they paint them out, they come back.”

The walk ended by the Grand Hotel, known to many as the site of the 1984 Conservative Party conference bombing but to Quaddies as the place where Jimmy, back in Brighton and longing for excitement, sees Ace’s scooter, then realises that his hero is in fact a bellboy. Even Sting can’t carry off a toy soldier’s uniform and a striped pillbox hat. So Jimmy nicks the scooter and drives it off Beachy Head.

“Seven Sisters, actually,” said Lyn. “And does he really go over with the bike? That’s the question I always ask. I end with a Pete Townshend quote: 'Mod is a shorter word for young, beautiful and stupid… we’ve all been there.’ ”

If you haven’t, it’s time to get down to Brighton.