Talkin' bout my generation

To me, it meant the best of music, clothes, art, attitude and lifestyle. It has shaped the very person I am.”

Although only a baby when the scene was at its 1960s peak, as a teenager he became part of the secondwave revival and has spent the past 30 years mixing with Mods new and old as a DJ and enthusiast.

The result is Mods: The New Religion, a glossy coffee table book that collates interviews with original Mods from all over the UK and music stars including Martha Reeves, Eddie Floyd and Chris Farlow, as well as unseen photos and other mod ephemera.

The book represents a seven-year labour of love but the 49-year-old from Reading is pleased to have produced something that presents a multifaceted picture of the scene.

Mods are so much more than the scooters-and-parkas image with which they came to be associated through films such as Quadrophenia, he explains.

But it’s hard to pin down exactly what Mod is because there are many interpretations of the term. Anderson defines it as “always being smart and sussed... dressing to fit the occasion rather than just dressing up for the sake of it”, while Peter Meaden, manager of the most famous Mod band, The Who, described it as “clean living under difficult circumstances”.

Born of a Britain eager to forget the privations of the Second World War, the subculture is thought to have begun in the late 50s when groups of working-class young men discovered a passion for sharply tailored suits and imported music from America.

“London was still full of bomb sites and rubble.

People wanted to distance themselves and embrace something new. Mods injected glamour and freshness.”

Although they dressed smartly – as Anderson puts it “often better than their bosses who were on five times their salary” – it was a rebellion nonetheless.

“It was 15 years after the war ended and many of the older generation were anti- Italian, anti-American... race relations weren’t great. But these kids embraced black American R’n’B, Italian scooters, French clothes.

It shocked their parents.”

Even something as innocent as the Mods’ favoured Chelsea boots were capable of causing uproar. “One of the guys I spoke to for the book told me that he saved up for four weeks to buy his first pair and then came home to find his mum had put them on a bonfire. She thought they were effeminate and said there was no way a son of hers was going out in them.”

The mod lifestyle involved dressing up, congregating in clubs including Brighton Aquarium, which put on some of the biggest bands of the day in the 1960s, and dancing all night, often with the aid of amphetamines.

“All my money went on clothes and drugs,” one Mod told Anderson. “I didn’t have a scooter because that cost money – money I could have spent on a new suit.”

Another interviewee kept notebooks detailing the clothes he was going to have made. It was an unusually aspirational youth cult, notes Anderson, and many mods looked down on the Teddy boys that preceded them as “thicks”. “They didn’t aspire to anything whereas Mods wanted the best.”

The scene took a turn for the worse in 1964 however, when Mods clashed with Rockers – the other big youth subculture of the time – in brawls at Margate, Clacton, Bournemouth and, most famously, Brighton. Anderson is among a proportion of people who feel the media coverage of the fights gave them unwarranted significance and contributed to subsequent tensions between the two groups. While he doesn’t deny there were aggressive Mods on the scene at the time, the fashions were easily appropriated by outside troublemakers and for many Mods the violence marked the beginning of the end.

“One of the guys I spoke to said the riots were dreadful.

‘I just saw all these lost kids,’ he told me. He was just into music, clothes and dancing and had gone to the seaside for a day out when it all kicked off. He didn’t want to be a part of it.”

By 1966, the Mod scene was in sharp decline but was later resurrected by a new generation. By the early 1980s it was not so much a fashion statement as an anti-fashion statement.

“We were living a parallel life to many of our peers. They were into Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Spandau Ballet and wearing baggy, one-button suits like in Miami Vice. Meanwhile we were listening to these obscure 1960s records and wearing desert boots. People hated us. If you got on the Tube in a three-button suit it was asking for trouble.”

Anderson can’t pin down what it is about Mod that has continued to hold his attention over the years. “I just love it,”

he shrugs.

“I started out as a DJ on the Mod scene in the 1980s and I loved going to record fairs with lists trying to get hold of these old 1960s records. There might only have been 60 or 70 left in circulation and finding one was like scoring a goal for England.

“I love the clothes. We used to go to clubs with little gold chains hanging across the V-cut at the bottom of our trousers or covered buttons on our suits – little things but the sort of attention to detail that Mods always notice.”

There was – and continues to be – a tremendous camaraderie on the Mod scene, he adds, “Particularly in the 1980s when everyone hated us. It was quite a dangerous thing to be a Mod and when you got to the clubs you really appreciated what everyone had been through to get there.

“It really felt like a magical secret and it still does. If I wasn’t excited by it, I’d walk away from it but I can’t.

It’s in my blood.”

*Paul Anderson will be at Waterstones, North Street, Brighton, at 7.30pm on May 1 talking about his book Mods: The New Religion. Entry is free but places must be reserved by calling 01273 206017 *Mods: The New Religion (Omibus Press, £24.99)