The Mod look. Trevor Laird, Gary Shail, Mark Wingett in Quadrephenia, 1979.
Stan Cohen wrote a book Folk Devils and Moral Panics about the Mod on Rocker battles at Margate, Brighton and Bournemouth in the early 1960s and introduced the term “moral panic” into the language. Stan hung out with the Mods and Rockers for his PhD research. Ringo Starr, asked if he was a Mod or a Rocker, said, “I’m a Mocker”.
I never had a parka or a Lambretta, but I was a Mod, a proper Mod, a Mod before Mod, into Italian fashion and the International Style and Hard Bop, the style of jazz played by Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk. I despised the Trad Jazz Revival and those phonies from the home counties, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk. The first rivalry, before Mods and Rockers, was between Modernists and Trads.
The Mod look: The Small Faces
From the late 1950s my family left behind the holiday resorts of Margate and Bournemouth and went to Riccione and Viareggio. Riccione – “The Green Pearl of the Adriatic” – had been popularised by Mussolini in the 1930s and was expanding rapidly in the post-war years, with its cool modernist hotels and its spacious promenade. Italy led the world in fashion and interior design. Sharp, neat Italian clothing was replacing the baggy demob suits and short-back-and-sides of the older British male. We wore narrow trousers and narrow ties and had narrow hair cut the same length all over.
Town planners and architects were sweeping aside all that was old, cramped and impractical. Building was streamlined and airy, ornament was crime and Victorian a four-letter word. The Design Centre was telling people what everything in their homes had to look like.
Style icons. Clockwise from top left: Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Milt Jackson of the MJQ, Thelonious Monk.
My taste in music was influenced by my friend Russell, whose father was the jazz drummer Tony Crombie. When Russell was little, Duke Ellington came to stay and sat Russell on his knee. We followed Art Blakey, The Modern Jazz Quartet and Thelonious Monk on their English tours. We liked the way black jazz musicians dressed. The most stylish of all was Nat King Cole. The Mods of Brighton and Margate, the after-Mods, with razor blades sewn into their parkas, had no style.
MARSHALL COLMAN 