Things are moving fast. Just as we've digested punk into our mainstream and started to adapt to post-punk, something new comes up.

Well, not new exactly. A revival in fact. Odd things, revivals. Some months back I went to a gig for an obnoxious band called the Angelic Upstarts who weren't. We turned up far too early, as usual. The thing about small gigs here is that nobody ever seems to know what time things are going to happen. It's a pretty hit and miss affair (the times I've been asleep on my feet only to be rudely woken up by the headline band I can't tell you ...) Staggering into the Railway Hotel, a place which gives lie to its name since where the bands play is small, dark and with the slowest barmen in the world, the audience appeared as usual. In other words a peculiar cross section— still a sociologist's dream. Punks looking fed up; punkettes looking now strangely sophisticated (no roots showing, pink eyeshadow carefully applied, very discreet eyebrows); skinheads apparently testing the floor for signs of strain (bullet necks, cropped heads) but . . . there up by the bar in a group, about six or seven young Mods. Deceptively casual looking, not arrogant but somehow knowing they looked more "contemporary" then everyone else, they kept themselves aloof in their parkas (anoraks with -fur linings and "Tails": pieces that do up between your legs so you can keep the elements out when riding the "mod" vehicle, a Lambretta scooter). „

Now there had been a bit of a murmur about the Mods coming back. But this was the first time I'd seen any of them turn up at a gig in a collective sense. And the media, since they're never themselves part of a cultural phenomenon, have to see to even partially believe.

About 9:30 a band came on stage. Even to my eyes, which witnessed early punk, nay even early rock 'n' roll, they look incredibly young—about 15 at the most. They have a strange air of being fresh faced Which doesn't quite fit with the music they play. By and large this is

the fast and furious punk of the crash,

bang, wallop variety. The really odd thing is the lead guitarist . We can't hear him but we can certainly see since rthe floor is now practically empty. People are not dancing. He looks like a carbon copy of Pete Townshend as a kid. Tall, thin, dark haired he wears—lord!—a jacket with a Union Jack on the back. He waves his arm like a helicopter blade. At the end, after a series of remarkably missabje numbers wherein the lead singer just jumps up and down and yfells incoherently, he smashes his guitar against a speaker until it fajls to pieces.

This is very weird. I begin to wonder if I have actually led the last 12 years of my life or have spent them in a time warp. Ah well, it's not exactly like the Who in those early days when I remember them. For a start the lead guitarist can't resist showing everyone how excited he is to be onstage (Townshend might have been excited but he never showed it. Cool, was what it was all about). And the band weren't into projecting any kind of aura. I mean to say, when they'd finished they packed up their equipment in front of us and the guitarist showed all his mates how the guitar was especially made to fall apart and be put back together agaip. Nobody seemed to know who they were.

Gary works for a record company as a messenger bqy and thinks this band are pretty funny. It doesn't matter. Gary is into being a Mod. He became a Mod, he says, because he used to read about the original Mods when he was at school. He thought it sounded great. When Punk got taken over by the trendies and became part of the establishment he got bored. He thought it was time to be a Mod.

Now everyone's talking about the Mod revival, 15 years after it first hit the streets. There's the groups: The Purple Hearts (after the pills of the same name and not the pin-on medals Audie Murphy amassed winning World War II); The Chords, The Fixations and—natch—The Scooters. Right now The Purple Hearts seem favourites for the first band to get a record contract (yawn) since avaricious A&R men, this time knowing this is something they can cope with, are arriving thick and feist to Mod gigs. But truth to tell it's all so embryonic nobody has come out leader of the pack. The media, these days so fast at exploiting anything new they're almost writing about it before it's happened, have already propelled it along by a couple of years.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Meanwhile, as whole editions of the NME are turned over to writers declaring they were Mods in the early days, the new Mods have been quietly organising. Putting on their own gigs— and like the early punks keeping the price for a view of four or five bands down to 50 pence; putting out the first

Mod fanzine Maximum Speed. There's already been one large Mod gig (a few hundred turned up because, despite the headlines declaring "thousands", there are only a few hundred at the moment) in Enfield. Enfield is one of the Mod strongholds. Deptford and Romford are the others. Like punks, the new Mods have emerged from the outer ring of central London; sort of working class suburbs, pretty desolate.

There's a Mod agency for booking out Mod bands and it's rumoured that one forward-thinking entrepreneur has a secret garage crammed full of lambrettas ready for the real Mod explosion. Meanwhile Carnaby Street, > once the centre for all Mod activity in the 60's (and which for the past 10 years has declined into a tatty tourist trap), is about to enjoy a restoration. Union Jack jackets blow in the wind. "Jam" jackets they've been called for some time now, ever since that band took on the hem of the Who's cloak.

The prices are rising overnight.

The Jam seem definitely to have something to do with the new. Mods.

After all many of the Mods were once punks but they were the ones who went for the Jam maybe more than for Rotten. Less dangerous, more melodic, the short haircuts? Who knows?

Right now though there's a couple of opld things. One is there's no Mod "sound". Because it hasn't grown organically like the original Mod's did, out of frustration and borrowing music / from America; the new Mods are simply reiterating the old Mods, with a bit of punk thrown in. Some write and play their own music (punkbased) , mostly they rely on about 25 percent old Motown and Stax and a homage of old Who and Small Faces and very.early Stones (who, in turn, took early R&B and soul). Well, that's OK with me. To be honest I wouldn't mind a soul revival right now.

It's odd seeing something revive itself that I remember in its original form. I mean, I used to go to The Scene to watch the Who when they were called—hinting at the drug terminology of the day—The High Numbers, and see the Mods.' Tight and obsessive, popping pills all weekend and now, on Sunday night, coming down to go back to work on Monday. Tom Wolfe, no slouch at registering cultural events, wrote about those first Mod days in The Pumphouse Gang: "It's the style of life that makes them unique, not money, power, position, talent, intelligence . . . their clothes have come to symbolize independence from the old ideas of a life based on a succession of jobs. The hell with that. Hell, one thing working class teenagers know is that for five shillings you can buy enough pills— purple hearts, depth bombs . , . to stay high for hours . . . There is hardly a kid in all of England who harbors any sincere hope of advancing himself in any very striking way by success at work".

' Well, we have a new government. The right-wing Conservatives, whose plans for a free enterprise system, pundits have forecast, will have our unemployment figures in the two million range by the 80's. I guess things haven't changed much since the Who got pn stage and went through "My Generation," except in those days kids could get jobs but they were always dead boring. Keith Moon worked as an office boy. He got so fed up he lay on top of filing cabinets and victimised half the staff all day. It's hard to tell. whether the new Mods have the same desperation. The same frantic feeling of "hope I die before I get old" (and "old" to them meant 19). Punk had it because it emerged without obvious debts to the past. Because the Mods are a revived form, following images set out in old pictures and written about years ago, they seem more into the spirit of the image then the ethos of the ideals. Will these new Mods stay out all weekend and construct a new way of life for themselves in three nights? Will they go back to the Brighton beaches and re-live the old fights with their deadly enemies The Rockers? Hard to work out right now ifhistory will repeat itself (whether as farce or not).

It seems to me less dramatic now. It's still about clothes, the way you look, but not—as it was originally—as a form of protest, a gang thing that made you stand apart and ready to answer for what you believed. The original Mods were, really, the first identifiable British teenagers "cult", way of life. Transitions are easy now. Skinhead and punk to Mod. It's not hard. Jimmy Pursey could be the new Mod hero without doing much than slightly change his music (and I've noticed how expensive his clothes are getting lately!)! A nice piece of irony too. Kenny Jones, for years drummer with the original Mod band the Small Faces, has replaced Keith in the Who. As I write this the group should have just finished their first U.S. tour. And the Who are about \ to start recycling themselves in everlasting 'Mod' form. Quadrophenia, the film of Townshend's Mod album, is due out in the autumn—tracing the life of Mod Jimmy and his typical weekend (and including in its unknown cast The Police's "Sting"-as the Face, Mod slang for the sharpest among them). Given the way things are moving it's a real master-stroke. Giving the new Mods, the old Mod lifestyle on screen, reviving the Mod language, bits of which are already beginning to come back into use. Meanwhile a real problem: most of the groups and kids in the audiences were children when the first Mods were

around. They've heard about "The Block" but they don't know how to do it. So there's no Mod dance right now.

"Blue beat (early reggae) music. Stiff at knees, throw arms everywhere, make like a gospel singer, hips to the side four beats" ... 1 found that description in an old article. But reading it's one thing, doing it? When the Who started to shoot Quadrophenia, they panicked. Nobody could find, on any old. film reels, shots of Mods dancing. And they were about to film a dance sequence. I got a frantic phone call. Could I dance like a Mod? Couldn't I even remember how Mods danced? No. In the film the Mods seem to be doing a thwarted pogo. I don't remember it looking like that. See, there's pictures of back-combed, middle-parted hair and button down shirts to copy; William Bell and Judy Clay's "Private Number" keeps coming up on re-release. No trouble. But there doesn't seem to be anyone left to show them how to dance. Maybe they all really did die before they got old.