1960's mod movement: Mod Movement and Mod Revival

Mod Movement and Mod Revival

by Hongbeom (Jacob) Shin

When one hears a name “The Who”, “The Yardbirds” and “The Kinks”, it is very easy to associate the name to “Mod movement”. Rising new style of music, artists during this era, starting from late 1950s to 1960s, attracted lots of young British teenagers as well as American listeners. For example, most of the people, not just ones who are from that generation, when they listen to “Who are you,” will immediately recognize what that song is either they know The Who or they have listening to the theme song of CSI. Therefore, it is clear to say that the mod movement affected many generations and have been a great part of our culture.

“The [Mod’s] era began with Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’ at the top of British chart” but around mid 1960s, mod music culture declined its peak after the generation from 1950s and 1960s became adults and had to change their lifestyles. Not only the audiences but the bands also slowly changed their musical style to more psychedelic rock kind of music. Its music was outgrown by other styles of music, rock, that they both have been fighting against each other in order to maintain to be a mainstream. So after rock music took over the public, it seemed as if mod style wouldn’t come back again.

A scene from Quadrophenia. Phil Daniels as Jimmy with
his mod mates. This picture shows typical mod style-
mod fashion and most importantly, the scooters.

In 1979, Franc Roddam produced a movie named Quadrophenia which was a movie based on The Who in the 1960s, the Golden days of the mod movement and created millions teenage mods. Triggered by this movie, the “Mod Revival” started. The revival started from late 70’s and lasted until early 80’s. It was not very long period of time, but it affected many other musical genres which followed mod revival music. As the revival started, young teens brought their scooters out and started exhausting their engines like old original mod days. And they perused for the similar idea that the original mods had in earlier generations. Many famous bands were created such as Secret Affair, “one of the most creative neo-mod groups of the late 70s… debuted supporting” The Jams, The Prisoners, etc. Some of them are still surviving and are performing. With better sounding systems, for example, when fans of a band group went to their concert to see them but not to listen to them (since the audio system/microphone system weren’t as developed so that they couldn’t afford to make the music loud enough for all the audience to listen), it allowed neo-mod performers to perform in live more often.