Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me? Page #6

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turned on its head by

the mod movement where a face

would turn to you and say,

"Get your hair cut."

And you'd think, "Hold on a minute,

you're only three or four

"years older than me, don't f***ing

tell me to get my haircut!"

If you were raised in a modern

neighbourhood, you had to fit in

with those people.

So, we sat down and had our hair cut.

Which I hated.

It had taken me nearly a year

to grow my Beatle fringe

down to here.

I was taken to this guy called

Jack the barber,

more like Sweeney Todd!

I remember going back to my house

with Keith Moon

and smashing the mirror in my room

because I hated it. Horrible.

I kind of rebelled against it

went out and bought myself a jacket

and trousers and I felt OK about it.

Except for my hair.

My initial reaction to it was,

"It's about me."

The essence of Townshend's

writing is that he

writes about the adolescent problems

and they never change

and that's why if you take away

the mod tunic, the mod uniform,

what you're left with is

the universal adolescent problem.

What's happening at the very end

is he's thinking, "This is sh*t."

He can't deal with it.

And at the end you get this abject

self-pity which Jimmy is...

Falls into regularly.

This sense of, "I can't do this."

So, it sets up this thing

that starting at the beginning

of Quadrophenia that he's

becoming disenchanted with

the burden of being a mod,

of trying to fit in,

of having the right shoes,

the right shirt.

He's not getting what he wants.

A gang of nearly 1,000

youths entered the Grand Hotel

in pursuit of two leather-clad

rockers.

South Coast police have warned

that if the fight between rival

gangs of mods and rockers continue

strict security measures will be

in force at railway station both

in London and on the south coast.

Brighton was just one of those

places that was popping.

Say me and my friends went

to a dance hall once,

there was a load of rockers there,

they were taking the mick out of us.

You can't let a load of kids take

the Mickey out of you, can you?

So, what do you do?

Well, you have a punch-up about it.

What do you fight with? With fists!

The first trouble was in Clacton.

And afterwards I think Margate

and then it was Brighton.

You had about 30 little mods

versus three big rockers.

They were all running up,

"Come on, then!" And all this stuff.

We were posing and stuff like that.

It's the rockers that started. They

screw you. What does screw mean?

You know, look you up

and down and think, "That's a funny

"way of dressing." Think you're

a poof or something like that.

The really cool mods hated

the fact that there was this

violence on the beach.

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