My Mod Story

MY MOD AND ROCKER STORY.

If one of my kids asked me if I was a mod or a rocker when I was young I'd say both.
I was definitely a rocker when I was a kid in the fifties when my idols were Eddie Cochran and Duane Eddy. Its was cool liking Rock and Roll and the more obscure the artist the more credibility you got. When I saw Eddie Cochran at The Finsbury Park Empire it was one of the best moments in my life. From the moment of the opening bars of Come on Everybody,Cochran with his back to the audience,girls screaming,drums,bass and guitar rocking the old foundations I was a rocker. As his vocals began he swung round to face the audience and the girls screamed louder and the foundations rocked on.

Gene Vincent was Top of the bill but by the the end of Eddies set everyone went home knowing they had seen one of the greats of Rock and Roll. What he might have become we will never know as his life was cut short at the age of 21 in a car crash,while on his way to the airport after his successful UK tour on which I had seen him a few weeks earlier. Like Kennedy and Lennon I can remember where I was when I heard the news,watching Aston Villa v Arsenal on an Easter Monday at Villa Park.
I think I stopped cheering!

Rock and Roll was the music of the teenagers and unlike today parents never understood modern music. What set the rocker apart from other teenagers was that their music was raw and usually American. Perhaps the only British rocker that was accepted by rockers (well male anyway) was Marty Wilde. It was the music that you were judged by and the more obscure the better. Duane Eddy did it for me as I loved a sax sound and also The Everly Brothers with their perfect Harmonies. Got to meet Duane while I was an office boy at The New Musical Express in the early sixties, when the editor, Andy Gray took me to a theatre in Harrow to see the Twangy Guitar man". Went back stage and Andy introduced me to my Hero. We shook hands and behind him I see The Shirelles AND Little Richard walking by. Heaven!


DUANE EDDY	THE SHIRELLES	LITTLE RICHARD

Years later I got to meet the Everly Brothers When Tony Peters of Acuff Rose invited me to an after gig party at The Hammersmith Odeon. I never meet Cochran but I did help him to get in the charts with My Way when I worked for the NME!

THE BEST HARMONY GROUP EVER

Because of American Rock and Roll English bands started up all over the place and especially in Liverpool where Sailors and people working on ships brought back with them the latest sounds from the states weeks before they were released in England.
The four main men from Liverpool cut their their teeth on some of these records and their first album was the first British band I had ever bought. By 1962 the whole Rock explosion had begun and it fell directly when I was in my mid teens. Working for one of the top music papers in the world cemented my love of music and having access to archives let me gain knowledge of so many kinds of music.
Go deeper into Rock and Roll and you'll find R&B and The Blues.
About the time The Beatles and The Stones started make ripples I was finding all about Slim Harpo and Howlin' Wolf. I then moved on from The NME to work for Transatlantic Records who distributed the New York based "Folkways Records which had a big blues catalogue dating back to the 1930,s.
As Rock and Roll started to loose its edge R&B came to be played more by the bands. This was the music that made the Mods. The REAL REAL rocker never left their heroes behind. Jerry Lee Lewis was now the king after Presley and the Everly Brothers got their hair cut and they would remain loyal while kids and the bands decided it was cool to wash the Brylcream out of your hair.The motor bike was the symbol of the rocker as was the leather jacket and the DA. Both sets of youth were on a collision course but was it because of the difference in cloths or music or was it because the English have always like a punch up!

The difference in style of clothes goes back to the fifties and a generation emerging after years of rationing and crappy songs being played on the radio. The BBC had about three stations and each was as bad as the other. While American youth could cruise along in their cars to Chuck Berry we had to try and tune into Radio Luxembourg which was the only station this side of the Atlantic that was playing Rock and Roll. When Bill Haley toured this country in 1956 the kids rioted and the "teenage delinquent" was born.

The first teenage cult I ever saw was the Teddy Boys who modelled their clothes on Edwardian suits. Big quiff,drainpipe trousers and Brothel Creepers" set it all off and they soon got a reputation of liking a fight. But it was also music that they liked and they influenced people like John Lennon and John Entwistle, who never lost heir Rock and roll roots. Teds and Rockers are miles apart in style and dress but put them in a room with "Summertime Blues" belting out and they are as one.
Mods was a different thing entirely and their style of clothes came from a different source.

A lot of young men were doing national service during the fifties and perhaps because they had to wear a rough uniform every day they would smarten up when they were home on leave. Now this was a London thing in the beginning as most of the good tailors came out of The East End. The Teddy boy look was out of fashion and this time the young men modelled themselves on the cut of the Italian suites. Some went to place like Sam Arkus in Soho for a personal cut and to look immaculate.
Other than Rock and Roll the two main music sounds that the teenager were into were Traditional Jazz and Modern Jazz. The Trad fans were into New Orleans jazz and had their own favourite like Chris Barber. Their style of dressing was casual in a very English way but the Modern jazz fan was either a beatnik or a sharp dressers. My two elder brothers were part of that scene and it was modern Jazz that was the cool music of the day. Charlie Parker,Dizzy Gillespie and "Flying Home" was what they played in their bedrooms while getting dressed to go out. With the Italian suits came the Lambreta
and it was years before any pill had been popped that 20 odd suited and slicked back hair scooter riders turned up at our door to meet up with my brothers.

As far as I can remember they were not called anything although Modernist was a description of someone who liked Modern Jazz and perhaps they were just some of the few who probably influenced their younger brothers .
The sixties were approaching.

The first time I heard the term Modernist was in the early sixties when it was used to describe what a collage student was wearing when we meet him in the street. He added a French look about him and the grease had gone from his hair. He was into R&B and would tell us who was on where. Clubs started to spring up all over the place but if you wanted to hear the best sounds you went Up West This was a part of London that you had to go to in order to become a true teenager.
London ruled and no matter how Liverpool,Manchester and Birmingham all put forward to the claim of THE music city it was London that had that something special which is why the bands moved down there once they had become famous.
For the best description of how the mod thing started I recommend you read "Mods!" by Richard Barnes which goes into more depth. I can only give you my interpretation of how I saw it, which brings me back to the opening lines when I said I would describe myself as a mod.
I had the razor haircut every 3 weeks,wore a suit with my shoes from Ravel and took ages getting ready. This was late 63,early 64 and the scooter boys had not rode into town yet. Growing up in Whetstone,North London was not the best places to hear good music and although the bands were good at the local "Con Club" they did not play the
type of music that my friends and I preferred. It was George who took me into the mod world. A year younger he had started going up town for the past few weeks and asked me along with some of his mates. From then on we would travel into town at least five nights a week.
On the tube at Totteridge, pick up Phil at Finchley Central, Steff and Mad John at East Finchley and the two Tonys, Ginge and Ken at Tufnel park. All the way to Tottenham Court Road we would stand as we did not want to get creases in our trousers. Out at TCR and round to the Coronet pub off Soho Square to sink a few before we went off to The Last Chance. Here was a club that played great American tracks by artists I was dying to learn about. My love of that kind of music made me a mod and once you had the uniform you could mingle with the rest of the mod crowd. Remember Cliff and Elvis were
at the top and the Beatles were starting to shake up the music world as the word "Beatlemania" was used for the first time.
But down south we had the Stones and they were playing R&B as good as any. Although both bands influenced the course of music in this country the mod thing was heavily into the American sound and particularly The Atlantic sound. But there was another influence nearer to home that would have an affect on your identity of being a TRUE mod. In clubs like the Flamingo the white Mods mixed with the Jamaicans as like the rockers and the Teds, they became one with their love of the beat of Ska. Music again the common denominator. Ska became Bluebeat and the young brothers of the Mods were watching.
The Scene became the place to go to as the kids found the pills that would keep them dancing all night. From here and a pub in Harrow emerged the group that would epitomise the mod movement. It was when they were known as the High Numbers that The Who were to become a cult band. They had seen the audiences change and adopted the style of the
kids who came to see them. Like me they became Mods. But it was still a London thing as the BBC continued to turn out music from the charts. It was probably The Who that is best remembered for the Mod cult in London but in the early part of 1964 they were still finding their way and it wasn't until May 1964, that The Who were taken over by Pete Meaden. Meaden was big in a new British youth movement called the Mods, young men who dressed in stylish clothes and wore their hair short. Meaden renamed The Who The High Numbers. Numbers were what Mods called each other and the High implied both rank and use of leapers, the speed tablets that Mods took to allow them to party all weekend. Meaden wrote The High Numbers' only single "I'm the Face" backed with Zoot Suit. Both tracks were old R&B songs with new lyrics about Mods. Despite his best efforts, the single failed, but the band became the Mods' favourite group.
The Mod movement was little known and their music was American until bands like The Animals and George Fame started playing the sounds that they liked. For a while you judged each by the cut of your clothes or by what shoes you wore but it was music that brought us all together

Then in May 64 The fights between Mods and Rocker hit off at and suddenly the name Mod was splashed across the front pages of the daily papers and The scooter boys arrived. Until then most teenagers got the train to the coast but now the Lambretta and the Vespa carried the boys from London down to places like Brighton, Clacton and Margate.

Like the Beatles The Mods were big news. Like the Beatles they were not known by grown ups and it was when the fans caused a riot after a Beatles Concert at the London Palladium that the tag "Beatlemania" was used. The riots at the coast now brought the words Mods and Rockers to the attention of those not in their teenage years and the generation gap widened.

Now people would ask you if you were a mod and the inner circle of being one died as young kids from all over the country adopted the style,although London still had a snob appeal due to the fact that the fashion scene was run from there. The original mods did not ride scoters as it would have messed up the creases in their strides,but as the summer of 64 drew closer a more casual style of dress was cool and the jeans and desert boots made you into a mod. For me it was still the music that was the deciding factor and those with money could buy the latest fashion and ride a chrome scooter. That and the pills that kept them awake while they bopped away the night and grew in strength.
To me it was all over by the beginning of 65.
The Who started to make their name in London after taking over the Tuesday night spot at the Marquee Club in November 1964. They were advertised all over London with black handbills designed by Richard Barnes featuring a windmilling Pete and the legend Maximum R&B."

Me and George use to go and the crowd was so sparse that we could stand up the front, sure that Pete Townshend could see that we had big noses too. We use to talk to the band across the road at The Intrepid Fox during the break and it was our own little scene. We were telling everyone to come down and see the geezer smash his guitar. Then their first single came out and we went along for our regular Tuesday night only to see a queue! That was it, we started going on a Friday to see the Action.
To me the mod scene wore a bit thin during 65. We started hanging out in pubs instead of clubs and within 18 months London died to us as Carnaby Street became an avenue for the pseudo. The Union Jack became a buy me sign for the American and European tourist and when it became "Swinging London" we were out of there.

We found the pipe of peace and travelled along with John Lennon as he pulled the Beatles into expanding their minds. We never wanted to go to the coast to fight, manly it was with the hope of pulling a bird. The hippies were coming and as our hair slipped below our collars we found other things to occupy our minds.
The music progressed and the pirate ships blasted out The Beachboys,The Birds and other sunshine bands. The mod lived on as the long hairs were upstaged by their short haired brothers who changed the name to skinheads but still loved the music of soul and reggae. As I have said, there are many books on mods that can go deeper in depth than this page but I really wanted to make this site about the music so hit a button below and take a trip into the past.

Brian Carroll


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