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There’s only a narrow pathway between numbers 10 and 11 East Street, Brighton, but it’s a small thoroughfare with huge significance. This is the scene of a key moment in the 1979 film Quadrophenia, when existentially troubled teenage mod Jimmy, played by Phil Daniels, briefly escapes a street riot and has sex with Steph, the girl he has fixed his thwarted ambitions on, played by Leslie Ash.
“Alleyways are romantic,” says Franc Roddam, director of the movie, now 79. “When I was a kid, you didn’t have places to go with your girlfriend, you went to parks and graveyards. So I’m not surprised it became a favourite scene. There’s a blue plaque saying Quadrophenia Alley there now, which makes me laugh.”
The film was a screen adaptation of the Who’s 1973 concept album Quadrophenia, which looked back to the early 1960s mod scene from which the band emerged, and features in Archive on 4: We Were the Mods. Roddam, a young tyro who had just made the acclaimed TV drama Dummy, was recommended to the band as a director. All he had to do was convince main writer Pete Townshend and band mates Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon.
“Pete is a great intellectual, an extraordinary man,” says Roddam who, from working-class origins in County Durham, went on to create Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and MasterChef and direct in Hollywood. “I said, ‘I don’t want it to be like your rock opera Tommy. I want to do a street movie and to use other music as well as the Who’s’. Pete said, ‘It’s your film. Make it.’ Roger and John were wonderful. I saw Keith last; he arrived in a Rolls-Royce with a big bodyguard who was reputed to have thrown somebody down a lift shaft and killed them. It was quite a moment! Keith put on a pirate voice like Long John Silver and said, ‘Why don’t we direct the film together?’ Having to think very quickly, I said, ‘OK, as long as I can drum with you on the next two albums.’ That seemed to do the trick. I passed the test.”
Quadrophenia the film had a visceral authenticity, not least because of Roddam’s handling of the crowd scenes, be it clubs and raucous parties in London or the bank holiday riots in Brighton. The violence looked real, says Roddam, because it sometimes was. “We had a whole stack of actual mods, tough guys from the North and the Midlands, on the beach. I said to them, ‘Those effing extras are screwing everything up. Go for them for real!’ That’s what gave it such great energy. It’s the sort of thing you do when you’re a young director. I gave the mods the instruction, ‘Please attack the police.’”
This authenticity, along with a young cast that featured Ray Winstone, Timothy Spall, Phil Davis, Toyah Willcox and Sting, and the adept use of matchless soul and rhythm and blues tracks like the Kingsmen’s Louie Louie – to which Sting performs one of the coolest dances in screen history – gives the film its potent punch. But were compromises made?
In 2019 Trevor Laird, who played drugs dealer Ferdy, said he was told at the time that, being black, he couldn’t be seen kissing a white girl in a party scene. Roddam doesn’t remember it that way. “There’s a big party, and all these kids are messing around, smooching, and whatever they’re doing. Trevor is a mate still, and I love him. But I never consciously cut anything out.”
It’s a sign of Quadrophenia’s continuing cultural importance that these things matter, nearly half a century later; a point that reverberates in We Were the Mods, which follows the story from the album and film to Townshend’s new project, a collaboration with Sadler’s Wells on Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet.
Curious visitors still wander along Quadrophenia Alley hoping for an echo of that far-off day; including Roddam. “Once, in Brighton, I thought, ‘I’ll take a peek, see how much graffiti there is.’ It’s become a holy spot, Lourdes for mods.” Does he like that? “You want your work to make an impression; Quadrophenia did. But we mustn’t forget the music – we mustn’t forget Pete’s original vision.”
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