The Scooter Boys

MY MOD STORY

EARLY ROOTS

SCOOTER BOYS

R U A
MOD ?

HERE COMES
THE MODS

THE MYTH OF
SWINGING LONDON

YOUR
STORIES

ATLANTIC RECORDS

BLUEBEAT RECORDS

LONDON RECORDS

ISLAND RECORDS

MOTOWN RECORDS

PYE INT/
CHESS
RECORDS

STATESIDE
RECORDS

SUE RECORDS

HOME

THE SCOOTER BOYS

The image of the mod would be nothing without The Scooter Boys and their love of The Lambretta or Vespa and of course music. As this site is more interested in the music of the mods I will not dwell too much on the scooter boys (and girls) as they deserve a site of their own. The crew I knocked about with spent most of their money on "clobber" (clothes) and quite a few of them preferred the mini car as you had more privacy down a lovers lane! The scooter boys outfit was the parker and desert boots so no one really bothered if you had the latest fashion underneath your coat. They were usually smart, cocky and had a taste for adventure, as proved by their yearly sorties to the coast.
But the scooter boys and the suits all got on as they showed the rest of the country that teenagers made their own rules. Many of my mates were scooter boys and while we took the train down to Brighton or Margate they went as a pack, roaring through sleepy villages in the south of England and later all over the UK. There was a fine line of perhaps a few months between the suited mods and the scooter boys joining forces to fight their common enemy The Rockers. From the latter part of '63 to May '64 scooter boys were not so well know until this appeared one morning in the papers.
From then on Mods became a national thing and the small clique who enjoyed being a face, and more or less had the west end all to themselves , were joined by thousands of teenagers who adopted the style, dress and discovered the great sounds that had only been played within a mile section of Soho. To understand being a mod you have to go deeper than being a scooter boys. From worrying what size vent in your suit was in that week you thought about whether to buy a Lambretta or Vespa. Instead of thinking about what jacket or tie you would buy you spent your money on chrome bars to make your scooter look more flash. When the suited and booted joined forces with the scooter boys the fashion became more casual and soon after the above headlines appeared the shops in the high street caught on and a little bit of uniqueness disappeared. If it wasn't for the image of the scooter and the parka perhaps the mod would have been a short lived trend and Townshend would not have written Quadrophenia. To many,particularly the Americans, the mod is the scooter boy and all those that drove through their towns with a foxes tail hanging from an aerial should be proud that they did so much to spread the word and the music. But as Townshend said "Being a mod was (pause) you know what I mean??????

TO BE CONTINUED