From 2005 to 2010 I played saxophone and keys in a mod themed tribute band called Carnaby Street. Unlike the two people who formed the band, I wasn’t in Carnaby Street because of any affinity to mod culture or because I’m a great fan of mod music. I started playing with them purely because it gave me the opportunity to play sax in live bands again after a long break. That’s not to say that I don’t have some credentials. I did play in a band called the Jazzboard towards the end of the sixties mod period. And the Jazzboard were the opening act for some of the top mod bands of the day – the Who, the Small Faces and the Action.
Carnaby Street performed mainly at pubs, scooter rallies and mod events to predominantly forty-somethings – people who were part of the mod revival period of the late seventies and eighties. Most of the punters enjoyed our covers of Jam, Specials, Madness songs from that period. However, the songs from the original mod era that Carnaby Street played are way out of line with the music I remember liking in the mod period of the sixties. No self respecting mod back then would have listened to some of the material on Carnaby Street’s set lists. Only a few sixties songs in the band’s repertoire by the Small Faces and the Who come anywhere near the mark. It’s a good job that there weren’t too many original mods in the audiences.
It all started for me in the summer of 1963 when I was still at school in Sunderland and I went to visit my cousin Linda in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire – about 30 miles from central London. Linda and her two friends, Maureen and Mauveen were “mods”. They were surprised that I’d never heard the word before and that I didn’t know of any mods in the north east. They spent the next few weeks educating me. This mainly consisted of dragging me around coffee bars, clothes and shoe shops. There weren’t any shops dedicated to mod fashion. Linda and her friends just mixed and matched clothes and accessories to get the effect they wanted.
As far as I remember they weren’t into any particular type of music. They had just started watching a new TV programme called Ready Steady Go featuring mod music but to them, mod culture was purely about fashion. I went to a few dances with them and they taught me the latest mod dance – the Shake. They talked non-stop about mod things and I felt sure that when I returned to Sunderland, after the school holidays, mods would have taken hold in the north east. I was wrong. There was something missing in the north east which gave young people in the south a head start – Ready Steady Go. It was another year or so before Ready Steady Go was broadcast nationwide and by that time the mod movement had become front page news in the national press. It was nothing to do with fashion or music; just the bank holiday battles between mods and rockers at south coast seaside resorts. The newspaper coverage painted both the mods and rockers as vicious hoodlums whose only interests were violence and their means of transport – scooters and motor bikes, respectively. This was the first I had heard of the association between mods and scooters. Linda and her friends had not mentioned it and, anyway, I’d been riding pillion on my dad’s Lambretta since I was ten so I doubt that part of mod culture would have impressed me.
By the end of 1964 and beginning of 1965 the mod “brand” had become very commercialised. High street clothing shops like Burtons were selling jackets, slacks, suits and shirts that were advertised as and could pass as mod gear. Even my little sister’s Sindy doll had a mod boyfriend called Paul, complete with blue mohair suit, a high collared shirt, knitted tie and Chelsea boots. Any new fashion fad was invariably described and advertised as being mod. By the time I joined the Sunderland based band, Jazzboard towards the end of 1965 the label “mod” was not being used any more. It had been done to death and was dropped from the vocabulary of young trendy people. Even when the Who and Small Faces started to chart in 1966, the word mod was not universally applied to these bands or their music – at least, not back then.
Very interesting.
Personally, I remember a very vibrant mod scene with clubs like the gogo being predominantly full of mods but i guess it’s always a question of definition.
One thing that really interests me is how, at the end of the sixties, the mod crowd morphed into the smooth crowd that used to haunT the Biz, Annabels & The kirk.
The music in Annabels was unbelievable and very eclectic. What a great DJ John Harker was.
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Love your website – brings back memories of the music and club scene around Sunderland, South Shields, Newcastle etc.
I guess i was on ‘the other side’ then – a ‘rocker’, leathers ‘n all with a 305cc Honda cb77 bike. that was in 1963 and us ‘rockers’ were supposed to hate mods! maybe some did, i recall reading about all kinds of battles between the two groups somewhere down south on the coast maybe?
In 1963/64 we used to congregate at a cafe on the seafront between Whitburn and Seaburn along with maybe 50 or more other bikers. No booze though we were mostly too young to get hold of that!
Never will I forget the frequent meetings on the winding road between my home in Cleadon and Whitburn, with my mystery nemesis on a Norton Commando bike (very fast) who lay in wait and raced me all the way! But he never came to the cafe – odd that!
By 1965 I was driving a car and visited London with my buddies frequently – that is where I saw the streets packed with mods on scooters and even knocked one guy off his scooter accidentally, luckily no damage done.
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I think the only thing I want to comment on is this:
“towards the end of 1965 the label “mod” was not being used any more. It had been done to death and was dropped from the vocabulary of young trendy people.”
Now, I’m well used, by now, to hearing people saying things like “There were no mods left by 1964,” or “No one used the term ‘mod’ after 1965,” or “Mod died in 1966,” and so on. What they usually mean is that THEY stopped calling themselves by that label, or they left a particular scene, or they simply stopped being one themselves. Sometimes it was that the term ‘Mod’ had been applied in a slightly different way, as a succession of new kids came along. When people use one of those “Mod died…” phrases to me, I reply that Skinhead and Northern Soul didn’t drop out of the sky. In fact each of those very different youth movements could not have happened if there had not been an extant mod scene to start them off.
As a teenager, I lived in Blackpool. I had wanted to be a mod since my friend next door’s mates used to come round to his. My friend was a year older than me, and his mates were one year and two years older. This was the early 1960s, and they were in the first generation of mods in the NW of England, and I was a wannabe hanger-on! I didn’t have the pocket money, couldn’t persuade my mum and dad to buy fashionable clothes for me, and was too young to go out clubbing. As the 60s wore on, the clothes the Blackpool mods wore got a cleaner, more conservative ‘cut’ to them, hair got more ‘college boy’; so by 1967 I could con my parents into buying me a new suit and a pair of brogues, I could save up my pocket money and buy jeans and a surfer jacket, I could cadge a striped tie off a girlfriend (her school tie!), and I could get out to youth clubs etc. In 1968 the Blackpool Mecca and the Twisted Wheel were going strong. The kids I hung out with still called themselves ‘Mods’, and so did the crowds of youngsters from all over Northern England and Scotland who came their for summer holidays.
In the summer of 1968, my family left Blackpool and we moved to SE London. I found kids down there who dressed pretty much like those I had hung around with up North. THEY didn’t refer to themselves as ‘Mods’ – that much is true – in fact they didn’t refer to themselves as anything (though sometimes the term ‘Totter’ or ‘Peanut’ was thrown around). During 1968 and 1969 I made the occasional trip back to Blackpool, and to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, where I found kids still calling themselves ‘Mods’. Meanwhile in London, no one suddenly STARTED calling themselves ‘Skinheads’, nor did anyone wake up one morning and decide that a certain ‘new’ look was going to happen. Things happened gradually – button-down shirts replaced plain collars, the Harrington replaced the surfer jacket, wing-tip brogues from the Squire Shop became the footwear of choice – but the kids still went to the same clubs, listened to the same music, bought the same records.
Of course there were eventually major shifts, but all of these were due to the next lot of younger brothers and sisters joining in. But all along the way it was a case of a survival of influences, not a death. if you see what I mean.
Thanks for an interesting post.
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