Following my own critical review of this book on The Modernist Society Blog, John Harris of The Guardian is also unimpressed by the unoriginality and scatter-gun approach of this work. His review is reproduced in full below:
"The
scooters, the Fred Perry shirts, the parkas … John Harris gets to the heart of
the mod scene for The Guardian
Let us
leave aside the 1960s for a moment, and acknowledge that for most people who
came of age in the UK between the late 1970s and mid 1980s, mention of the word
"Mod" should spark at least a few Proustian flashes. There may be
memories of a local teenage gang clad in ex-army parkas, or perhaps a
recollection of provincial discos always setting aside 15 minutes for a run of
songs by the Jam. The more hard-bitten might be transported to the origin of
habits that have never left them: the insistence that collars should always be
buttoned-down, or a belief that lapels on a jacket must never exceed a certain
width. In retrospect, one other thought might occur: that when a London-centred
60s cult was revived circa 1979 and its influence once again rippled through
the culture, we saw the decisive stirrings of something now taken for granted –
a pop culture that endlessly resurrects and recontextualises the past.
As an
adolescent growing up in the far-flung suburbs of Manchester, I was consumed by
my first taste of what Mod had left behind, and it changed me for ever: the
initial rites included a poleaxed listen to the Who's My Generation (which,
even in 1984, sounded like musical gunpowder), my first and only pair of two‑tone tonic trousers, and a
dreamed-about trip to Carnaby Street, or what remained of it. But what my
friends and I were doing had almost nothing to do with Mod's rarefied
beginnings, crisply explained in Jonathon Green's oral history Days in the Life
(1988) by the journalist David May. "Mods were always intellectual,"
he said. And at the start there "was always a large gay element in it. On
Saturday afternoon we'd go to get our hair done in the women's hairdressers.
Then we'd go out in the evening, dancing … We didn't fight rockers, we were far
more interested in some guy's incredible shoes, or his leather coat. But
underneath this, one did read Camus. The Outsider: there it was, it explained
an awful lot. A sort of Jean Genet criminal lowlife was also important."
As a more succinct statement of what it was all about, I have always loved the
late Mod pioneer Peter Meaden's famous quote – reproduced on the sleeve of the
Who's 1973 Mod-opera Quadrophenia – about "clean living under difficult
circumstances".
Uncertainty
clouds both Mod's origins, and its legacy. The word was definitely short for
"modernist", and initially at least, the face-off between
"trad" and "modern" jazz was central to the cult's self-understanding.
Up until around 1962, its disciples probably numbered no more than 150,
resident in east and north London, and fond of enjoying themselves in Soho,
refreshed by such go-faster drugs as Dexedrine and Drinamyl. West End clubs The
Scene and The Flamingo were important – as, at various points, were sartorial
items including Brooks Brothers shirts and Clark's Desert Boots. But much of
the rest is unclear, particularly the almost unfathomable series of
coincidences and superficial similarities that may or may not tie together
Mod's clandestine beginnings, and scores of later happenings.
In other
words, what could possibly link 1980s suburban oiks in Fred Perry shirts to
sharply dressed 1960s existentialists? This book, written by an academic, attempts
an answer, contending that Mod was not only "the first distinctively
British youth culture" but "a popular form of modernism – that stream
of creativity in Europe and America that began in the early 20th century as an
avant garde reaction to mainstream aesthetics, morality and politics". Its
400-page text goes from the 1950s to the present day, and mentions a sprawling
array of people and cultural touchstones: Terence Conran, Mary Quant, the
Beatles, Michael Caine, the artist Bridget Riley, David Bowie, 1970s Northern
Soul, 1980s football-following "casuals" and more. The book does not
convincingly tell the story of the original Mods – to all intents and purposes,
the only people worthy of the term – perhaps because its ambitions are much
loftier, something embodied in its subtitle's citing of a "very British
style".
But such
a wide focus – "Perhaps … we are all modernists now," Weight ends up
suggesting – creates dire problems when it comes to coherence. There is almost
no sense of a story unfolding – instead, Weight opts for a scattershot
narrative, brimming with second-hand quotations, a bit like an undergraduate
dissertation ("As George Melly recalled … As Dick Hebdige has argued … As
the American critic Ted Polhemus explained"). The writing manages to
convey roughly what he is getting at: a sensibility whose inspirations fell
between mainland Europe and the US, and a drive to transcend class via an
attachment to style and what the modern vernacular would call aspiration. But
he gets so lost in the big picture that crucial details are almost forgotten.
The sole discussion of the Mods v Rockers seaside disturbances that marked the
cult's high-water mark of visibility and also the moment at which it lost all
connection to its origins totals a few paragraphs, and comes in a chapter on
the 1970s. There is a chronic shortage of anecdotes – which, in the case of a
phenomenon so driven by remarkable individuals, is a real shame. There are also
errors of fact, and interpretation: "AirWair" is not an eight-hole
variety of the Doctor Marten boot but the generic brand-name of its
air-cushioned sole; if you think the Jam's "Town Called Malice"
"celebrated family life", you have probably never heard it.
Plenty
of other things are either omitted, or underplayed. Aside from the specifics of
jazz, rhythm'n'blues, Italian suits and the rest, what arguably defined pure
Mod was a fevered consumerism, whereby what was in or out could change
drastically in a matter of weeks. The cult was also almost ludicrously hierarchical,
so that an inner circle of "Faces" held themselves to be very
different from mere "Tickets" or "Moddy Boys". Small wonder
that the most devoted Mods seemed to have no countercultural aspect whatsoever:
"A lot of these boys went off and did jobs like bank clerks," one
ex-Mod later recalled, "and their managers thought they were fantastic … I
used to go to work and I was better dressed than my boss by a long way."
In fact,
what gets lost in Weight's rather forced attempt to identify a
"modernist" sensibility running through whole swaths of post-60s
culture is something much more simple: the idea that the Mods were on the
cutting-edge of modern capitalism, trailblazers for the latter-day high street
notion of "fast fashion", and that very profitable practice by which
companies market themselves via carefully chosen figureheads – and the herd
runs off in hot pursuit.
The
14-year-old me would wince at the cynicism of that observation – and he would
probably have a point, because it does a disservice to Mod's seductive and
magical life‑codes.
They probably defy rational explanation, better understood via a clipped
electric guitar chord or the fold of a shirt-collar than any text. But to be
reductive about it, the Mod ideal boils down not just to a kind of neurotic
self‑respect,
but an emphasis on sharpness, an attention to detail, and everything being just
so. And in that sense, this rambling book is so unlike its subject that it ends
up missing its target, by miles."
