Brighton 64: when rockers and mods clashed – History Archives

Our mind tends to think that all past times were better, creating a distorted image of the healthy and friendly youth of the generations before us. But this is not the case, youth has always been a battlefield for a society that advances too slowly compared to the passing of youth. In this article we discover the confrontation between two very different groups, the mods and the rockerswho clashed in the small resort town of Brighton in 1964.

But… what the hell is a mod?

How can you imagine, it is a youth subculture and at first it brought together many different types of people, as if it were a mixed bag, to refer to all those followers of «swinging London”. That is to say, the revitalization of the cultural scene that London experienced during the good and happy years 60, since the postwar period had confined the 50s in an austerity that left little to the imagination. In short, and saving the distance, it could be similar to our Movida, a kind of cultural, musical and youth resurgence against previous decades that were grayer and with a certain oppression.

However, the fathers of the movement were a series of Italian dandies commonly known as mods who were dedicated to selling clothes in London. Later the whole world would begin to take on their style until this subculture took over important areas such as Soho and the entire center of the English capital. The Italian influence was a real constant in the movement, many young people longed to travel to the peninsula and enjoy its fashion and style.

At first, their appearance and behavior meant that in most cases they were quite accepted by adults, who assimilated them much better than, for example, rockers or the later skinheads. But deep down, this way of dressing was subverting a social reality that was far removed from the concepts of the past and the generation of their parents and grandparents. They would soon take on other hallmarks of identity, such as moving around the city in scooter Italian like the Vespa or the Lambretta.

According to the magazine sundaytimes, the life of mod It consisted of going out to clubs seven days a week. However, this could be afforded by very few, who, generally helped by pills, stuck to it week after week of partying until the body could bear it. But the truth is that most mods they were too poor to afford this pace of life, their rusty lambrettas and their parkas eaten away by the rain and the sun took away the dream of reality for many young people. According to Barker and Little, they were not professionally qualified and held low-ranking positions with which they only earned 11 pounds a week, insufficient for that much-desired life.

It is at this point that its “magic” lies. They were poor people, with little education or any type of higher education, to the point that they had assumed their servile role in the day jobs they had obtained. But when the night came, they became the masters of their acts, with tailored clothes and feeling like the real bosses of the places they frequented. Because as Denzil rightly points out, a mod interviewed by him Sunday Timesthe dream of every member of this subculture, was precisely to run one of the nightclubs in Soho like the club Scene.

Thus, the servility of the day was combined with the absolute vanity of someone who only thinks of himself at night. We thus find ourselves with a figure that borders on the most extreme individualism, an excessive ego and, above all, a superficial and merely aesthetic interest. Although it is true that they had a great interest in music, the truth is that their desire was to find the rarest record, to be the most mod of his neighborhood and being able to boast about it, is still a materialistic conception and one of personal growth through something tangible and not really for artistic interest.

To this we must add that to cope with all this and with the little money they had left, they decided to get up to their eyebrows in speed. Amphetamine was first synthesized in rugged Wallachia at the end of the 19th century, but saw a big push during the world wars, where soldiers were fully dressed in these to endure entire days of combat. In addition, during the 20’s and 30’s it was legally marketed under the registration of different brands. Years later and with the terror of the war far away, young British people used them in a totally recreational way, just as it is used now, although it is no longer very fashionable. The benefits of this drug were an increase in physical and mental activity in exchange for an aggressive deterioration of both. The cliché of live fast, die young, and leave a nice corpse. In fact, they are the musical heroes of these people, who comment on it with great success. Let’s listen for a moment to The Who:

People try to put us down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful cc-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

Here you can enter a quite personal reflection. It has become very fashionable to criticize millennials, that is to say, the generations that surely -with some exceptions- are reading this same text. You, me, and all of us who had the misfortune to be born from 1982 to 1996 have fallen under the banner of being considered the most disappointing, selfish and individualistic generation of the 20th century. Following the cliché that all past times were better, they have endorsed us with the glorious title of authentic uselessness, when in reality, since the middle of this century, the prize for seeing who is more individualistic and self-destructive is really close. After all, generations devoured by the horse and the most absolute nihilism tell us.

The rockers… it’s easier to guess, right?

With Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry as the flag and imitating Marlon Brando in «The Wild One»the rockers they began their adventures around the 50s. They liked to wear showy toupees, wide sideburns and the indistinguishable until today leather jacket.

In the London of the 60s the atmosphere rocker had been relegated to the outskirts of the city, where the bypass highways allowed their motorcycles to roar as they wanted since, generally, their desire was to have a motorcycle with a large displacement, as opposed to the more urban environment in which what they wanted. was in style were the vespa and lambretta of the mods.

They were from really humble backgrounds and their social and economic status was very similar to that of their future enemies. For the rockers, be mod it meant extreme hedonism, mounted on their mopeds that they considered literally toasters with wheels and with a mechanic that gave a lot of problems. They were seen as preppy daddy’s boys who wore expensive clothes to show off, and they really felt very different but they weren’t at all. Because this is so, the hallmark of any young adolescent is to believe they are different, and that is precisely what makes them so normal.

In this the mods they were true experts, since they combined their desire for individualism and self-indulgence with the feeling of belonging to a group that felt like them. Instead, for their rivals, the feeling of brotherhood and camaraderie was much more significant.

Brighton in ’64

The truth is that initially both sides went to their ball. There was no violence between the two subcultures beyond the violence of youth nightlife. In other words, there were no reasons for hatred between both sectors for the mere fact of being part of their ranks. However, as they got together, the altercations flourished, and the press took it upon themselves to make both rockers What mods end up identifying themselves as authentic enemies. It might seem like an exaggeration, a minor confrontation of four or five young people with too much time on their hands, but no, it was an advance even for sociology, since Cohen coined the term of «moral panic» which describes as follows:

  1. A group is seen as a threat to the interests of the community.
  2. The threat is recognizably described by the media, through symbols, such as scooters or leather jackets.
  3. Wearing these symbols arouses public concern.
  4. There is a response from the authorities and politicians.
  5. The “moral panic” leads to social changes of some relevance.

The importance of the media in all this is vital, as they serve as a means of disseminating the discontent of the youth and at the same time help the adult sectors to observe with terror how their society evolves, something that, from its generally conservative perspective, makes they think that society is misguided and that the world is losing its way. Does it ring a bell? According to Cohen, these groups end up being considered as dangerous as “folk demons”, that is, as the demons of the stories of popular folklore.

The newspapers of the time defined them as a Trojan horse. Both groups were allowed to be called “vermin and louts” who constituted true “internal enemies” with the aim of “disintegrating” the British nation. And then, terror arose among the middle and lower classes of the population, whose children, moreover, were part of these groups.

Be that as it may, both because of the desire of the media to cover covers blaming the new generations, as well as because of these for wanting to party and have problems, the breeding ground for a confrontation was served. The first place of confrontation would be Clacton, in Essex, where during Easter 1964 they clashed, ending the pitched battle with 94 detainees and extensive damage to hotels in the area. There were also riots in Hastings, in what the media called “the Second Battle of Hastings” and later the most notorious in Brighton and Margate, due to the importance given to it by the press and its immortalization in Frank Roddam’s film «Quadrophenia»

Brighton was a quiet little holiday town in the south of England. Although, over time it has become the Benidorm of Albion, the coastal and fishing environment of the area still had an important printing press in the small town. Its benign climate for the British Isles and its bucolic atmosphere began to attract more and more tourists to rest during the festivities, and this meant that both mods What rockers were going to have a good time in the premises of their environments.

And so it happened, at first there was a tense calm that soon culminated in two crazy days of riots throughout the city. Despite the mobilization of the police forces, which had shielded the city due to previous precedents, they were unable to contain the adolescent fury that was coming their way.

While a small group of rockers enjoying the spring day on the beach, a whole tangle of mods