[PREV - OUTSIDE_MOD]    [TOP]

THE_REAL_FACE

                                            December 28, 2025

In the Quadrophenia Documentary from 2012
"Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaETQJDElf4

Pete Townsend and Irish Jack talk about the
old days when The Who song "I Can't Explain"
was adopted by the mods....

Irish Jack is describe as a "Mod Face", which
makes him one of the few voices here with some
claim to being at the center of the Mod scene.

The Who played a mod nightclub (The Gold Hawk Club,
with a capacity the hundreds) where the crowd got
them to play "I Can't Explain" three times in a row.

Afterwards, Irish Jack says he was appointed as a kind of
spokesman to go backstage and talk to Pete Townsend about
how they felt about this song.  It evidently really spoke
to them, this seems like it was the closest thing around to
a mod anthem (though it wasn't intended that way when it
was written).  The mods wanted Irish Jack to ask Townsend
to do *more* work like this.

Townsend:

  So I said to him -- quite patronizing -- "So Jack, you want me to
  write more songs for you about the fact that you can't explain what
  it is that you want me to explain, and that I can't explain what it
  is that you want to explain."

  Jack immediately goes: 'That's it!'"


Irish Jack:

  Because this is what Mods were about-- they *couldn't* explain.

I think the fact that Townsend didn't quite get this is a clear
sign he was on the outside of the scene-- while he *knew* Mods,
he wasn't one of them.


I think it's a common feature of the various such
sub-cultures that is that there's often some sort
of drive toward an ineffable quality that isn't
that easy to pin down, and isn't easy to talk about.

And that very fact makes it really easy to dismiss:

    It's just faddish teenage nonsense
    It's just kids doing drugs, trying to get laid
    It's just an excuse for being lazy and cutting school, dodging work...

Maybe nothing about it really makes all that
much sense: it might be doomed from the outset,
but I think there's always something deeper they're
after beyond the obvious surface appeal, however
crazy and impossible it might turn out to be.

The common fate may be to end up settling for some sex and drugs
and some confused memories and retroactive excuses with nothing
much to persuade the outsider skeptics that there was much point
to it.

       The Mods may not have exactly been "rebels without a
       cause", but they were rebels without a manifesto.


       My contention is that if Townsend had *really* got
       it, he probably wouldn't have found Jack's request
       that weird.


                        And Quadrophenia, almost without exception,
                        keeps up that outisde view of the mods--
                        there's very little presented about them that
                        you wouldn't hear from a conservative critic
                        defending the path of Being Normal.

                            But there's a few places where you get
                            some glimpse of the sheer joy of being
                            dressed right and racing along ...

                                  NOTHING_IS





--------
[NEXT - OUTSIDE_MOD_BARNES]