May 18, 1964, 60 years ago: Great Britain's 2 leading youth cultures square off, and it is a mess.
National Service for men aged 18 to 20 ended gradually from 1957. Britain has had an all-volunteer military ever since, just as America has had with the post-Vietnam ending of the draft in 1973. Both countries have found that having an armed forces staffed entirely by men and women who want to be there works far more effectively than having one with men who were forced to give up their lives to fight for a cause they didn't always understand.
But having so many more men ages 17 to 21 out on the streets, without an equivalent of America's G.I. Bill to send them to college, led to unintended consequences, including the creation of some subcultures that became nationally infamous, and then world-famous.
This was around the time that England's first rock and roll bands were being formed. It is no coincidence that 1957 was also the year that 17-year-old John Lennon met 15-year-old Paul McCartney in Liverpool; and that, early in 1958, they met 15-year-old George Harrison. By that point, 17-year-old Richard Starkey was already drumming in a band, and would begin calling himself "Ringo Starr" a year later.
After The War, young men in delinquent gangs who had adopted Edwardian-era fashion -- in the style of the years from 1901 to 1910, when the King was Edward VII, or "Good Old Teddy" -- were sometimes known as "Cosh Boys" or "Edwardians." On September 23, 1953, the national newspaper the Daily Express shortened "Edwardian Boy" to "Teddy Boy," and the name stuck.
By the early 1960s, that fad had ended the way most fads do: The originators grew out of it, and moved on. But 2 new subcultures took the Teddy Boys' place: The Mods and the Rockers. The Rockers were based on motorcycle culture, inspired by Marlon Brando in the 1953 film The Wild One. (Brando played a character named Johnny, which caught John Lennon's attention. And the film included a motorcycle gang named the Beetles. But The Beatles were named as a play on Buddy Holly's band, The Crickets.)
The Rockers wore leather jackets, leather pants or blue jeans, and leather boots, and generally made nuisances of themselves everywhere they went. Their choice of music was that of the early rockers who had toured Britain: Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. (Cochran and Vincent had completed a tour of Britain in 1960, and were heading home to London's Heathrow Airport when their driver crashed, killing Cochran and badly injuring Vincent.)
The Rockers were leather-clad slobs. The Mods were different. They dressed up. The play The Odd Couple wasn't staged until 1965, and the movie and the TV show based on it came a few years after that; but if the Rockers were "Oscars," the Mods were "Felixes."
And instead of big motorcycles, like the kind produced in Britain and America, they preferred scooters, small and efficient enough for getting around streets in the countries that were producing them, Italy and France. If the scooters could work well in the streets of Rome and Paris, it was reasoned, they could work well in the streets of London. They would have multiple lights, or "lamps" in British parlance, on them. But, what was more, you could show up to work dressed like a Mod, and keep your job. It was "respectable."
Their musical tastes were different as well. They were originally called "mod" because they preferred "modern jazz," instead of "traditional jazz," whose fans became known as "trad." But they also embraced rock and roll, not the harder stuff of Elvis and Chuck Berry, but vocal groups with the black and Italian "doo-wop" sound.
Pete Townshend, the lead songwriter and the lead guitarist for The Who, defined the Mods for Americans in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine for their September 28, 1968 issue:
It was a movement of young people, much bigger than the hippie thing, the underground and all these things. It was an army, a powerful, aggressive army of teenagers with transport. Man, with these scooters and with their own way of dressing.
It was acceptable, this was important; their way of dressing was hip, it was fashionable, it was clean and it was groovy. You could be a bank clerk, man, it was acceptable. You got them on your own ground. They thought, "Well, there's a smart young lad." And also you were hip, you didn't get people uptight. That was the good thing about it.
To be a mod, you had to have short hair, money enough to buy a real smart suit, good shoes, good shirts; you had to be able to dance like a madman. You had to be in possession of plenty of pills all the time and always be pilled up. You had to have a scooter covered in lamps. You had to have like an army anorak to wear on the scooter. And that was being a mod and that was the end of the story.
There was another difference in there, mentioned by Townshend: The pills, amphetamines, as opposed to the Rockers' drugs of choice, tobacco and alcohol. That's why Who lead singer Roger Daltrey purposely stuttered on their signature song, "My Generation": As Townshend explained, he's under the influence of the pills.
The Mods seemed like the perfect counterweight to the Rockers and their predecessors, the Teddy Boys. They launched the 1960s culture that became known as "Swinging London." But, soon enough, it would be fists that would be swinging, between the Mods and the Rockers.
On May 18, 1964, the 1st warm weekend of the calendar year, it came to a head in several seaside communities in England. The worst of the Mod vs. Rocker violence was in Brighton in Sussex, where, as all surviving sources agree, the Mods started it, not the Rockers with what was then the more aggressive reputation. The fighting moved along the coast, to Hastings, which led to the media calling it "the Second Battle of Hastings."
There were also beach and beach-town battles in Margate, Kent; and Clacton, Essex. Newspapers called the groups "vermin" and "louts." The Birmingham Post warned that Mods and Rockers were "internal enemies" who would "bring about disintegration of a nation's character." The members of The Who -- Daltrey, Townshend, bass guitarist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon -- were not directly involved in the fighting. But Townsend would write the rock opera Quadrophenia about the events, releasing it in 1973. It became a film in 1979.
The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night was filmed in March and April 1964, a few weeks before the Brighton violence, but not released until after: July 6 in Britain, and August 11 in America. If Americans had heard about the violence in Brighton at all, they had quickly forgotten about it. In the film, a female reporter asked Ringo, "Are you a Mod or a Rocker?" And with the "cheeky humour" for which the group was then known, he answered, "I'm a Mocker!"
Every so often, as with other fads, the British youth subcultures come back. The Teddy Boys had a revival in the Glam Rock period of the 1970s. The subsequent rise of punk rock in 1976 brought the Rocker subculture back. The "Northern Soul" movement of the 1980s, centered around Manchester, revived interest in the Mods. And The Stray Cats, an American retro-rock band of the early 1980s, proved more popular in Britain, and, wittingly or not, was another revival of the Rockers.