All mod kinds: From the Beats to Brighton

Turner's take on subcultural shifts

AN ACCLAIMED and prolific popular music writer for 50 years, British journalist Steve Turner’s most recent published book concerns Peter Meaden, a key instigator of the subcultural style known as mod and, as young band manager, an important figure in the early manoeuvrings of the Who as they rose from raw bar band to transatlantic stars.

Dubbed ‘the original modfather’, Meaden was a fascinating and energetic player on the London scene but he was also a figure of tragedy who would, after a frenetically active 1960s, die young the following decade, a combination of drugs and nervous breakdown conspiring to trigger his early death in 1978 aged only 36.

Little more than a couple of years before his demise, Turner conducted an extended interview with the man for the pop weekly New Musical Express. He has now taken that revealing exchange and placed it as the centrepiece of his new title, King Mod: The Story of Peter Meaden, the Who and the Birth of a British Subculture.

Turner has always been interested in the social and cultural dimensions that lie behind popular music recording and performance. In the new book, he explores the nature of mod, a vigorous eruption of youth expression even before the Beatles and Stones had truly established a national reputation.

The author is also intrigued by the American Beat movement, which would itself feed into the British incarnation of mod alongside musical developments in jazz and soul and notions of cool, cerebral and sartorial, adopted and absorbed from sophisticated European centres like Paris and Rome.

In the interview below for Rock and the Beat Generation, Turner touches upon some of the reasons why these subcultural peacocks connected with the existentialist impulse of Kerouac’s On the Road.

In a wide-ranging career, Turner wrote for many of the great, late inkie papers which dominated the reporting of UK popular culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. His work also appeared in Rolling Stone.

By the 1990s, he had turned to books, penning bestselling portraits of the Beatles and Van Morrison and further focused his keen historical eye on Kerouac himself. His biography of the novelist, Angelheaded Hipster, is one of the most engaging and readable of the many life portraits of the writer that exist.

At present, Turner is turning his energies again to Beat topics with a strong musical twist. His forthcoming volume Hydrogen Jukebox: The Influence of the Beat Generation on Rock Music is progressing and hungrily anticipated in the R&BG offices. In the meantime, we return to our conversation about mod and Meaden, youth attitudes and Kerouac’s literary influence, on that style-obsessed community…

SW: The 1950s and 1960s were marked in the UK by a fertile subcultural scene – Teddy boys, beatniks, rockers, mods, hippies, skinheads and all. Most of these tribes were British in derivation and all linked to musical movements. Do you have any thoughts on this wider phenomenon?

ST: Although we associate Teds with rock ‘n’ roll they predate it by four or five years. The original South London Teds would have listened to big bands like that of Ted Heath. The British beatniks were initially associated with traditional jazz and it was the mods who veered towards modern jazz (and suits and ties). A British beatnik in 1958 probably wore a sloppy jumper and corduroy trousers while listening to Kenny Ball or Acker Bilk!

But it’s true that the UK bred a variety of strong, influential subcultures. I used to have interesting talks with my dad (born in 1917) who, as a teenager, basically dressed like his father except for very minor differences – narrower lapels, lower-waisted trousers, shoes rather than big boots, patterned rather than plain socks.

By the time I was a teen I wanted to look like anything but my dad (or Prince Charles!) and this started the search for identity in clothes. I found all the subcultures appealing and it was sometimes hard for me to make my mind up.

I wore long knitted pullovers and duffel coat (beatnik), as well as jeans and a leather jacket (rocker), madras striped jacket and Levi’s (mod) as well as a Granny Takes a Trip satin shirt and an Afghan coat from Kensington Market (hippie).

The only American comparison I can think of for the Who and mods, is the Beach Boys and the surfers. The Beach Boys were not big surfers but they knew how to write songs that appealed to surfers. In the 1940s there might be a comparison with Cab Calloway and the zoot suit gangs.

SW: The mods – originally short for modernists, as we know – are an intriguing example in that they appeared to span the classes and cultures of the time: linked to jazz, Italian style, French movies and Beat literature. In their slightly later version, they were also branded as one half of the warring factions who fought seaside battles with the rockers. How do you see these contradictions: style-obsessed, Gauloise-smoking, aspirational intellectuals or street bruisers and speed-driven hooligans?

ST: The later mods liked R&B, soul and Motown rather than jazz, liked Kerouac because of his Benzedrine habit and French films for the clothes and haircuts rather than the existential angst.

There were a range of mods from the downright criminal to the proto hippies. They were generally office clerks or factory workers but there were some grammar school boys, art students and ad agency wizards (Peter Meaden was all three). The mod v. rocker fights were stoked by the media. They happened in holiday resorts like Brighton on Bank Holiday weekends, not at the Scene Club on a Friday night.

SW: How do you see the relationship between the Beats and their literature – On the Road obviously – and the mods at the turn of the decade. Miles Davis, Paris and Rome seem to be the guiding lights initially. How did London, not to mention the likes of Kerouac, shape the mod philosophy?

ST: When I first read On the Road, in the summer of 1967, I was immediately reminded of the mods – especially the opening chapter with Kerouac’s description of Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) and his own aspiration to be a firework and to never say a commonplace thing.

The love of music, the romanticising of black culture, the use of drugs, the tolerance of criminality and the resentment at being tied down to any single place or occupation all seemed very mod to me.

Peter Meaden mentioned On the Road to me in the interview that is at the core of this book. London club life (especially the Scene club and the Flamingo), Jewish tailors, black American GIs, amphetamines, the gay subculture, pirate radio and the British affection for polite eccentricity, the colour supplements, and the magazine revolution, all helped to shape mod.

SW: I do believe counterculture historian Barry Miles included the mods in his list of representatives of the capital's underground who turned up at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in June 1965. Was he right?

ST: He could well have done because Beatism segued neatly into modism which then became hippyism. All of the mods I knew in Northampton and Rugby – my old stomping ground – eventually became hippies of one variety or another.

Modism was always about pushing through to the next discovery, the next style, and the next sounds, and the hippy movement provided all that. David Bowie would be a good example of someone who was a confirmed mod but who then turned hippie, but who in his future incarnations still contained vital elements of both the mod and the hippy.

Another example would be Steve Marriott of the Small Faces who epitomised mod during the time of their early singles but then grew his hair, made psychedelic records like ‘Itchycoo Park’ and even did a concept album (Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake). Incidentally, Peter Meaden did PR for the Moments, Steve Marriott’s first group.

As an interesting aside, I have a great photo of Bob Dylan in the book trying on Carnaby Street gear in 1966. His defining image in that period was Beat/hippy hair plus mod shirts, shoes and jackets from London.

SW: By the mid-1960s, groups like the Who, the Small Faces and the Kinks, maybe the Stones and the Beatles to an extent, seemed to hijack the mod mentality with an eye-catching mixture of kitchen sink songs and Carnaby Street fashion, Pop Art symbolism and the youthful dance moves of Ready Steady Go! Yet black music – R&B, US soul, later Northern soul – came across as the true driving force of the mod aesthetic. How do you feel the new British rock dovetailed with the sounds of Motown and Stax?

ST: Guy Stevens played an important role in developing musical tastes and spread his influence by being a resident DJ at the Scene club in the West End, the hub of all things mod, and the venue to which RSG came to recruit dancers for their TV show as well as to entertain visiting American stars.

Stevens ordered singles and albums from then-obscure small record labels in the American South as well as playing Motown. A girl called Sandra Blackstone also played American singles in the week which she obtained from black GIs stationed around London who frequented the Flamingo on Wardour Street.

Bands like the Small Faces and the Who did cover versions of some of these American records and then started writing their own songs in a similar style. I suppose the songs of the Kinks were more like journalistic commentary on the mod phenomenon rather than the driving force of modism.

Pete Townshend of the Who spoke a lot with mods and put their often poorly articulated thoughts into songs like ‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘My Generation’, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and Jimmy James and the Vagabonds played a lot of the American music that mods liked because it was soulful, danceable, rare and had great bass rhythms that affected the body.

Peter Meaden, the subject of my book, wanted the Who to reflect modism and to articulate the feelings of mods. As his one-time business partner Andrew Loog Oldham, who provides a foreword to the new volume, said of the Rolling Stones, ‘They’re more than just a group. They’re a way of life.’ Peter felt the same way about The Who.

Editor’s note: King Mod: The Story of Peter Meaden, the Who and the Birth of a British Subculture is published by Red Planet Books and is now available

See also: ‘The trials of teenhood #2: Peter Everett’, June 6th, 2023; ‘The trials of teenhood #1: Peter Everett’, April 30th, 2023