7 July 2016

MY LIFE AS A MOD


My sociology professor, Stan Cohen, wrote a book Folk Devils and Moral Panics about the Mod on Rocker battles at Margate, Brighton and Bournemouth in the early 1960s and introduced the term "moral panic" into the language. Stan hung out with the Mods and Rockers for his PhD research.

Ringo Starr, asked if he was a Mod or a Rocker, said, "I'm a Mocker". I never had a parka or a Lambretta, but I was a Mod, a proper Mod, a Mod before Mod. I was into Hard Bop, Italian fashion and the International Style. Hard Bop was the style of modern jazz that succeeded Bebop, exemplied by Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk. I despised the Trad Jazz Revival, with those repulsive phonies from the home counties, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk - the first rivalry, before Mods and Rockers, was Modernists vs. Trads.



Around 1960, as my parents' finances improved, we left behind the holiday resorts of Margate and Bournemouth and went to Riccione and Viareggio. Riccione, "The Green Pearl of the Adriatic", had been made popular by Mussolini in the 1930s and was expanding rapidly post-war, with cool modernist hotels and a spacious promenade. Italy led the world in fashion and interior design. Sharp, neat Italian clothing was pushing aside the baggy demob suits and short-back-and-sides of British men. We north London boys wore narrow trousers, narrow ties, short jackets and hair cut the same length all over.

1960 was the high tide of modernism. Town planners and architects swept away everything old, cramped and impractical. Building was functional, streamlined and airy. Ornament was crime and Victorian a four-letter word.

My taste in music was influenced by my friend Russell, whose father was the jazz drummer Tony Crombie. We followed Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk, who came over to play at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn. I was wearing trousers and ties I'd bought in Italy and carrying books about Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe. We liked the way black jazz musicians dressed, but the most stylish dresser of all was Nat King Cole.  The Mods of Brighton and Margate, with razor blades sewn into their parkas, had some style, but they were johnny-come-latelies.

Dizzy Gillespie

Modern Jazz Quartet

Thelonious Monk

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

Nat King Cole, the sharpest dresser of all
Me in Viareggio, 1959