"I'd say that Mod was mentally a very homosexual thing, though not in any physical sense. I was too hung up on myself to be interested in anyone else" - Mark Feld aka Marc Bolan
"I was completely knocked out by my own image, by the idea of Mark Feld" - Feld / Bolan
"... they danced by themselves, lost in narcissistic dreams and, wherever there was a mirror, they formed queues. Often, they would wear make-up - eye-liner and mascara - but that didn't mean they were queer, or not necessarily; it was just a symbol of strangeness..." - Nik Cohn.
From Today There Are No Gentlemen (1971)
Oddly, Marc and crew look very much like gentlemen in this photo for the Town spread.
Oh yea we're the London boys
Do you remember
Going to Petticoat Lane
With all the conceptions
Moving in your brain
Oh yea we're the London boys
Don't you remember that we're just the London boys
Oh yea we're the London boys
Mighty mean mod king
Dressed like fame
London to Brighton
And then back again
Changing life's patterns
To get to the top
And when you get up there
You don't know if you're there or what
Bright lights, Soho, Wardour street
You hope you make friends with the guys that you meet
Somebody shows you round
Now you've met the London boys
Things seem good again, someone cares about you
Oh, the first time that you tried a pill
You feel a little queasy, decidedly ill
You're gonna be sick, but you mustn't lose faith
To let yourself down would be a big disgrace
With the London boys, with the London boys
You're only seventeen, but you think you've grown
In the month you've been away from your parents' home
You take the pills too much
You don't give a damn about that jobs you've got
So long as you're with the London boys
A London boy, oh a London boy
Your flashy clothes are your pride and joy
A London boy, a London boy
You're crying out loud that you're a London boy
You think you've had a lot of fun
But you ain't got nothing, you're on the run
It's too late now, cause you're out there boy
You've got it made with the rest of the toys
Now you wish you'd never left your home
You've got what you wanted but you're on your own
With the London boys
Now you've met the London boys
66 in 73 - Bowie revisiting his mod 'n Marquee days on Pin Ups.
Ghastly turgid rendition
"Shipes... things before my eyes"
Those are beautiful Bolan quotes. He often seems to be implicitly regarded as a shallow idiot-savant who hopped from one scene to another and somehow produced great songs in the process, but these show how perceptive he was capable of being about his own interests and personal history. (Visconti said in a recent interview that he considered him genuinely poetic in a way that Bowie was not, and I agree)
ReplyDeleteOn the 'upward mobility' of the Mod - the combination of the welfare state, investments in popular education (the GI Bill, cheap-to-free public college in the US, arts schools in the UK) and union-protected, near full employment in the postwar period enabled basically the entirety of culture from the late 40s to the mid 70s, and the gutting of all three areas were functionally driven by fear of what that culture unleashed, and the desire to permanently tamp it down.
Is mod the biggest British movement to have absolutely no traction outside the UK? And before anyone mentions the Who, were they actually that mod?
ReplyDeleteMind, is mod actually that distinctive? Weren't mods just poncey rockers?
I'm not sure "absolutely no" is correct - there was a trend in Brooklyn for neo-mods riding around on Vespas some point in the last 15 years or so I believe. Then you have a group like The Make Up - Ian Svenonius taking influence from mod. that dude in New Radicals was clearly a fan of The Style Council. I suspect there are adherents in places in Europe and probably Japan.
DeleteBut yeah it is peculiarly British, or even English - the take-up elsewhere in the globe is fairly surface level I should reckon, whereas true mod speaks to something in the English character. That liminal class and its resentments and aspirations.
True mod is nothing to do with rock. They liked soul and ska and thought the Rolling Stones were slumming unkempt bohemians with dirty hair.
The closest thing to American Mod, ironically, might be Cohn's transfiguration of them into the fictional disco rats in the source article to Saturday Night Fever. (The title itself, which was originally just Saturday Night before the Fever was tacked on to tie in with the Bee Gees, kind of gives away its early-60s Angry Young Man roots.)
DeletePete Townshend alleged that Bolan worked as a rent boy outside the London clubs in order to earn money to buy clothes. In refutation of the mod>glam continuum, there's a fascinating clip here in which louche, decadent Marc introduces the uptight, fastidious Jam:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I22blCFaXtY
Two very strikingly different worlds.
Well, Bolan and Bowie went on an evolution, starting out with mod, through psych, and then into glam. It's not surprising that Bolan in 1977 is some distance from the Jam, who are at that point a photocopy of something from 1965.
DeleteI forgot to post clips from Bowie's own "photocopy" of 65-66-67 - Pin-Ups. Done bizarrely earlier, in 1973, way ahead of the Sixties revival that would barrel into view towards the end of the decade.
With Bolan in particular I don't think it was an evolution rather than a series of reactions. In the original Tyrannosaurus Rex with Steve Peregrine Took he seems to be reacting against his Mod past - he's a natural raggle-taggle scruff playing wholesome acoustic instruments. Then the move into Glam seems to be a reaction to his hippie phase - electric instruments, make-up, raunchy riffs, saucy come-ons, etc.
DeleteWhen his Glam incarnation started to get stale circa 1973 that was when he should have reacted again. But on that occasion he didn't, possibly because his Glam phase had been such a success that he thought he could find a means of restarting it.
The rent boy angle makes sense, but knowing Townshend's neutral to positive stance on them (as well as his own bisexuality) I'm not sure 'alleged' is the right verb
ReplyDeleteA wonderfully evocative set of quotes and pictures. It could be a mood board for Roeg and Cammell's Performance: a dramatisation of the conflicts exposed as Mod degenerates into Psych.
ReplyDelete