The Mod & Rocker Page


(Or just what is a mod or a rocker?)

First, an introduction as to why this page is even here: About late February 1997, I was struck with an insane and uncontrolable desire to find out what exactly were the mods and the rockers. The cause for this? A Beatles imposter b nd (Beatles 1964 - I'd put their web page up, but I've forgotten the address. If you know it, mail it to me. ) was appearing at my college, and I was reminded of the line in A Hard Day's Night:
"Are you a mod or a rocker?"
"I'm a mocker."
I mentioned the line to my friends (many of whom are big Beatles fans), and not only had they not heard the reference, they hadn't even heard of Mods or Rockers before. So I decided to learn for myself just what a Mod and a Rocker are.

I first turned to the World Wide Web, naturally. But much to my chagrin, the most information I could find out was a listing of books to read on the subject, and this link , which, while interestin , was not exactly what I was looking for.

So I journeyed next to my college library, and after hopelessly trying search terms like 'mod','rocker','sixties culture', etc., I finally used 'popular culture' and was led to a bunch of youth culture books that (amazingly!) mentioned Mod and Rocker culture, and even described it in some instances. I read them - and now I know (basically) what Mod and Rocker's are about.

And I decided to share my newfound knowledge with you, the readers of this web page. Because I had been searching for some original content to put on my page, and I haven't found any substantial info on this subject on the Web already, here it is:

Strike that last remark: The Boiler IS mod on the web. Go there immediately and you will learn much more than I could ever tell you.

The Mod and the Rocker


The Mod


The Mod was a product of working-class British youth of the mid-sixties. The popular perception of the mod was this: "'Mod' meant effeminate, stuck up, emulating the middle classes, aspiring to be competitive, snobbish, phony."(Nuttall , p. 333) The od image was one of neatness, of 'coolness'. Brake (p. 75) separates Mod culture into at least four distinct subgroups (three of which I will mearly touch upon):

  1. "The art school high camp version," (Brake, p.75) who'sm boys were very effeminate, using make-up and dressing elaborately.
  2. The "scooter boy," (Brake, p.75) who was characterized primarily by riding in scooters and covering them in chrome and glitzy accessories.
  3. "Hard mods. This harder, bottom strata sported jeans and industrial work boots...They were to develop into skinheads in the late sixties." (Brake, p.76)
  4. Mainstream mods, about whom the rest of this section will focus.

While still retaining some of the effeminate qualities of the first category, these Mod boys dressed in "suits, neat, narrow trousers, [and] pointed shoes." (Brake, p.75) The girls were just as obsessed with clothes, and displayed a "boyish femininit [with]...huge, darkened eyes and...thinness."(McRobbie, p.9). The girls had short hair, of course, leading to a 'unisex' type of culture, a mid-point in the male-female polarity, with the effeminate boys (much contrasted with the look of the Rocker.).

The music of the Mod was "strictly black in inspiration:rhythm and blues, early soul and Tamla, Jamaican ska."(Chambers, p.77). The closest thing to a Mod group was probably the Who - the music "neatly caught up the 'pilled up' London night life of th mod mythology in a series of effective anthems:'My Generation, 'Can't Explain', 'Anyhow, Anywhere'."(Chambers, p.77)

The drug use of Mods was of "amphetamines ('purple hearts', French blues', dexedrine)" (Chambers, p.78) and "pills, uppers and downers, leapers and sleepers." (Brake, p.75). Brake explains why the mods existed by writing "for this group there was an attempt to fill a dreary life with the memories of hedonistic consumption during the leisure hours...the insignificance of the work day was made up for in the glamour and fantasy of night life." (Brake, p.75). These were working class teenagers, a ter all, whose white-collar office work was a drudgery that, for many, would exist for the rest of their lives.

As an American, I had initial difficulties understanding the Mod culture simply because it occured in England, and is not as commonly understood over the Atlantic. Brake makes an analogy that did make some sense to me (and hopefully to you):" n the United States the new dandyism was to be found mainly among young ghetto blacks. Finestone's 'cats' combined a cool demeanour, elegant clothing as indicators of conspicuous consumption with esoteric jazz knowledge and heroin use, all paid for by m steriously living on one's wits. The 'cat' set himself off from the square world, but the British mod's small, neat elegance set him off from his opposite, the clumsy, unfashionable, butch, class-bound rocker." (Brake, 74). This leads perfectly into the next section,

The Rocker

The British Rocker has a simple and direct American comparison: the motor-biker. These "Hell's Angels" existed almost the same in England. They wore "black leather and studs" (Brake, p.77), and "project an 'easy rider' nomadic romanticism, violent, l yal only to each other, anti-authority and anti-domesticity, the male free wanderer dream, living only for the present." (Brake, p.77). The non-riding rockers were 'greasers', bad boys who shared the motor-bikers "studied scruffiness and aggressively wor ing class masculinity" (Brake, p.77).

The music of the Rockers was "the music of the golden age of Elvis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran...physical and unchanging, making no demands on intellect of knowledge of melodic craft." (Brake, p.77). The rocker culture was definetely male-dominated: asculinity and aggressiveness were treasured.

Compared to their opposites, the Mods, the Rockers were usually in "more routinized unskilled work;" (Brake, p.76) and were "bad-boys against the the Mod's clean boy image. For them mods were contemptibly unmasculine."(Brake, p.77)

Sources



This isn't done yet - it may never be.
Comments? Suggestions?
Some, like Nutall, see these kids - and not the Rockers, as was popularly believed - as the real descendants of the Ted. They inherited his vanity, confidence and fussiness; they were too fastidious for the motorway caffs which at that time were attracting another stream. And it was their "sharp dressing" which led to the modern, the modernist, the Mod. By now, the beginning of the sixties, changes were diffusing rapidly, the youth culture was being opened up to new influences and it was difficult to sort out the types. Already the art school students and college or university drop-outs were appearing on the scene, and the musical focus switched from loud rock, from the brief skiffle craze and from the older conformist ballad tradition, to indigenous groups such as the Beatles, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, the Rolling Stones. A brief hysterical ambience began concentrating in the London clubs such as the Flamingo and the Marquee. This was where the Mod era began and it had reached at least one of its peaks by 1963. " pg. 184 In the meantime, the Rockers were evolving. They could justifiably be seen as similar to the Teds in at least two senses: they were in many respects the lumpen, those who hadn't caught on to the new teenage image personified by the Mods; also, they were more outgoing and direct, closer to the butch image of earlier years. But...they were not just transformed Teds: they leaned towards the romantic stream in their longing for the earlier crudities of pure rock. Their transitional models - like the Italianate styles had been for the Mods - were the ton-up boys of the motorways. These boys saw the Teds becoming too respectable - a few years before the end of the decade, Teddy Boy suits were already being sold at jumble sales - and they went directly to the old American "Wild Ones" theme: the black leather, the motor-bikes, the metal studs. Away from the city and the coffee bars, they belonged on the motorway and the transport cafes. The more legendary of the cafes, such as the Busy Bee and the Ace on the southern end of the M1 are still, more than ten years later, shrines for the faithful. 'Rockers' - the term of course, deriving from the loyalty to early rock - was simply the name given and taken by this group. " pg. 185 This division between the two was in place by 1962-3. But not all adolescents were involved, and most of society didn't even know the difference. To insiders of either group, the markings were of course obvious. The Mods saw Rockers as proudly displaying their class-bound nature, and as brutish loud and obnoxious. The Rockers saw the Mods as effeminite and stuck up. But this time was definetly for the Mods. "By the middle of 1964 there were at least six different magazines appealing mainly to Mods, the weeklies with a circulation of about 500,000, the monthlies about 250,000. There was also "Ready, Steady, Go" a TV programme aimed very much at the Mods, with its own magazine related to the programme and which organized the famous Mod ball in Wembley. This was the time when whole streams within schools, sometimes whole schools and even whole areas were talked of as having 'gone Mod'." pg. 186 The Mod splintered up quickly (as these things do); "by 1964-5, the so-called Mod was hardly recognizable...youth workers at Brighton could distinguish at least between the scooter-boys (dressed in plain but smart trousers and pullovers, plus anoraks, often trimmed with fur; usually uninterested in violence, but involved with the Law in a range of driving offences); the hard Mods (wearing heavy boots, jeans with braces, short hair, the precursors of the Skinheads, usually prowling in large groups with the appearance of being jumpy, unsure of themselves, on the paranoic edge, heavily involved in any disturbance); and the smooth Mods (usually older and better off, sharply dressed, moving in small groups and usually looking for a bird)." pg. 187 "Music was much more important for the Mods than the Rockers - and also than for the Teds who had not grown up as a generation through the whole Rock explosion. If the Beatles tuned into the ethos in its most general way - and changed as this changed - it was the Rolling Stones who were the first major liberators...the title of one song, 'Get Off My Cloud' could have been the theme of the early years of the separist youth culture, but more specifically than the separation theme, they managed to convey so many other dominant moods. Theirs was the voice of arrogance and narcissism celebrated by the early Mods; of aggression and frustration (i.e. 'Satisfaction') of cynicism, and the occasional hysterical scream at being able to thwart the adult world's attempts at manipulating them." pg. 189 "The Who were pure and complete Mod. They came straight out of Shepards Bush, 'one of the most major Mod citadels' and they were unambiguously and uncomplicatedly representative of the new consumers. Although they were eventually managed and staged by entrepreneurs of the swinging London scene, who were invariably middle class, they explicity stood for, sang about and understood their origins. Their dominant mood was uncertainty, the jumpiness and edginess of the hard Mods, and an almost ugly inarticulateness and tension. This reached its convulsive climax with 'My Generation' Pete Townsend's battle hymn of unresolved and unresolveable tensions, which, more than any other song, was the sound of Brighton, Margate and Clacton...Pete Townsend testifies to the enduring influence of the Mod experience: 'It really affected me in an incredible way because it teases me all the time, because whenever I think 'Oh you know youth today is never going to make it' I just think of the fucking gesture that happened in England. It was the closest to patriotism that I've ever felt." pg. 189-90 "By 1964 the Rockers, as Nutall puts it, 'seemed almost endearingly butch'; they were dying out, but fought with the stubborn bitterness of a group left out of the mainstream of social change. Without the publicity that was given to the initial clashes with the Mods, their weakness would have become more apparent and they would have metamorphosed into another variant of the tougher tradition...in a different way, the reaction also kept the Mods going. Even by 1963 the symbols had not crystallized: newspapers were still using the term 'Teddy Boy' to describe BOTH groups or terms such as the 'ton-up kids' to describe Rockers...it needed a public drama to give each group its identity as folk devils." pg. 190 The English bank holiday by the sea. First Event: Clacton, Easter 1964. "Easter 1964 was worse than usual. It was cold and wet, and in fact Easter Sunday was the coldest for eighty years...a few groups started scuffling on the pavements and throwing stones at each other. The Mods and Rockers factions - a division initially based on clothing and lifestyles, later rigidified, but at that time not fully established - started separating out. Those on bikes and scooters roared up and down, windows were broken, some beach huts were wrecked and one boy fired a starting pistol in the air." pg. 29 Other Events: Whitsun, 1964 - Bournemouth, Brighton, Margate
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