The world's out there
Three great songs from the Mod Revival that move beyond the limits of genre
Overheard:
“All youth culture is trying to say the same thing. It’s young people trying to make their voices heard. Searching for an identity. Trying to discover themselves as an individual. Every young person tries to do that. And this is a new way of doing it. It’s a fashion.”
“Of course, youth cults are at their healthiest when they are developing naturally. When the practitioners are looking back and trying to recapture a lost moment then they are inevitably more constrained and less creative.”
The first quote above is from Secret Affair’s frontman Ian Page, holding forth in 1979 for an interviewer in a televised BBC report titled The Mod Revival. The second, arriving decades later, is Garry Bushell in the forward to his book ‘79 The Mod Revival, Time for Action: Essays from the Frontline, a collection of on-the-ground pieces that Bushell wrote for Sounds magazine in the late-70s. Two sides of a coin.
It’s generally regarded that the Mod Revival peaked in the U.K. in 1978 and ‘79 when record labels, sniffing the Next Big Thing, began signing and swiftly releasing singles and albums from bands like Secret Affair, the Chords, Purple Hearts, the Jolt, the Lambrettas, the Merton Parkas, each bobbing in the considerable commercial wake of the Jam. Paul Weller, who has spent a lifetime skirting hypocrisy by citing, and sounding, his influences while treating his allergies to conformity, disavowed the movement as a shallow media invention. From one angle, he was right. The common fate of many Mod bands in the late-1970s was swift, and deadly: high-wattage attention from labels and music journalists, each quick to recoil at the smell of diminishing returns when the bands either failed to sell many records, enjoyed fewer and fewer kids at shows, or anyway began blurring together as surface-level sound and image that soon paled. Few talk about Mod Revival bands now as little more than curios from a long-gone era.
Which is a shame, given the number of terrific records that came out that era, the best of which transcend the limits of genre and group identification. I’ve written before about great Chords records (here and here), and Purple Hearts’ exciting run of 45s (here); inspired songs written and played by kids hungry to chase the songs where they took them, even if that meant past the genre’s borderlines. What’s great about, say, the Chords’ “So Far Away,” Purple Hearts’ “Millions Like Us,” and the Lambrettas’ delightful “D-a-a-ance” is the urgency—in writing, playing, and production—that catapults each song out from and beyond the “Mod” trappings that threaten to box them in.
The giveaways in lesser Mod Revival tunes are eye-rollingly obvious: a tutored Rickenbacker guitar slash here, lyrics about south coast fights, scooters, or bank holidays there. Such signaling marred Secret Affair’s otherwise genuinely spirited 1979 debut album Glory Boys, and yet was generally absent on the band’s underrated second and third albums, Behind Closed Doors (1980) and the terrific Business as Usual (1982), the title of each—the first earnest, the second ironic—suggesting hard-won insights into the limitations of scene-obsessed groupthink. But by then it was too late. Secret Affair, like the rest of the parka-clad, scooter-racing groups, was through.
Defocus the lens, and mods morph into silhouettes of human beings, absent of identifying accouterment. If you’re at a bar or a pub and the bartender plays some Mod Revival compilation—Millions Like Us, say, or 100% Mod, This Is Mod (20 Mod Classics In True “Modophonic”Sound), the live Mods Mayday ‘79—you’d be forgiven, while drinking, chatting with friends, scrolling on your phone, for thinking that you were listing to a Rhino Records power pop or Creation Records compilation, or an obscure gathering of mid-70s and -80s “roots of pop punk” tunes, or a tribute album of Buzzcocks or Undertones deep cuts and b-sides that you’ve never heard. The best songs—the ones that get into you and surprise you, the hooks, melody, or energy new, bright presences in the joint—shed their press-on labels as they spin.
Here’s another observation: “Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better…. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow,” Bobbie Ann Mason
The Jolt formed in the mid-1970s in a couple towns in the Glasgow, Scotland suburbs. Their self-titled debut was released in 1978 and was an early entry in the Revival, a scene that the band lukewarmly embraced. The album was produced by Vic Smith and Chris Parry, who were also adding power and drive to the sublime run of the Jam’s albums In The City, The Modern World, and All Mod Cons and their non-album singles (“All Around the World,” “David Watts”/“‘A’” Bomb in Wardour Street”). Thick and punchy, the Jolt’s album blurs past, its best tracks a combustible blend of pop, aggression, and nerve, another in a line of criminally overlooked records from the era.
“Decoyed” closes down the first side; the band—Robbie Collins on guitar and vocals, Jim Doak on bass and vocals, and Iain Shedden on drums—also routinely opened their shows with it, at barely two-minutes a blast of exasperation and fury. The story’s as old as air, the hollered chorus—the song wastes no time in beginning with it—making clear what was inevitable:
You’ve been decoyed since you entered your teens
Decoyed, nothing is what it seems
Always decoyed with not a choice to be seen
Unruly against three chords, the singer talks back against three truisms that his elders—his parents, his bosses—offer as learned wisdoms: work hard if you wanna get out and work hard and you got it made, because these are the best years of your life. In real life?
Five years pass by in a rush, and meanwhile “the world’s out there but you can’t get a look.” Choices are slim, fears are legion, and you get lost in the mix. The sneering discovery at the end of the song, which is, of course, a sonic fast-forward to the end of your life: “You ain’t justified by a gold watch.”
“Decoyed” offers no answers, only clear-eyed truths delivered in a song that’s over before it starts.
If “Decoyed” outlines in brutal, uncompromising terms the trajectory of a life created, and fated, by lies, the Chords’ “In My Street,” written by guitarist Chris Pope, zooms in on that life with cinematic clarity. Released as a single in October of 1980, “In My Street,” joins XTC’s like-titled “Respectable Street” in a long line of the era’s withering critiques of English suburbia. The single followed the equally pointed “The British Way of Life”; sadly, the Chords had only a couple singles left in them before calling it quits in the early 1980s. (The band has since reformed, and have issued a live album, some comps, and an EP.) Their lone full-length, 1980’s storming So Far Away, is one of the great rock and roll albums of the Mod Revival, and, frankly, of the era.
Blending slashing guitars, an urgent, tuneful melody, and punk-era propulsion, “In My Street” sounds desperate, because it is, but the desperation’s dressed in propriety. “Everything in my street,” guitarist Billy Hassett sings in the opening line, “is probably just like yours.”
People talk, act right, never seem to know what for
Everyone stays so still and cold, rooted in their ways
All they want is what they’ve got and that’s the way they’ll stay
The observations are familiar (“Everyone’s so nice to me, they say ‘Hello’ and ‘How are we?’” and yet “I don’t think they like me much at all”) but in Hassett’s yearning, the chorus—
In my street I’ll live and die
Say “hello” and wave goodbye
—still cuts and bleeds. The wound, bright with sunshine pouring through the lace curtain windows, surprises only because in this town, in all like towns, the notion of suffering is studiously avoided. The Joneses eye the Joneses, ignoring the rising resentments knocking politely against their low ceilings. They’d been decoyed. “We’re all potential suicides,” Hassett warns.
Pope waits until near the end of the song to raise the stakes. With Hassett’s vocals made enormous by reverb and Buddy Ascott’s drums rolling in on waves of righteousness, a couplet arrives that, through its revealing lens, strips away the politeness: “The kids playing in the gutters, love to hate, fear, and lie / None of that really matters, this world will just pass them by.” As always, there’s a thin line between cynicism and realism; here, the observer’s made jaded by what he witnesses, yet rooted, by choice and fate, he’s powerless to change things.
Interestingly, the liner notes of “In My Street” state that the photograph on the front sleeve—of a proper suburban matron buttoned up against sadness—was taken “on location in Amies Street” in London, which is, as it turns out, a ten-or-so minute scooter ride away from the Battersea Power Station, the urban icon in front of which “Jimmy” (a local kid, Terry Kennett, whom Pete Townshend discovered in a pub) was photographed by Ethan Russel for the Who’s 1973 Quadrophenia album. Is it me?
Here’s Amies’ Street a couple of years ago, looking virtually unchanged since the Thatcher Era. You can pick which house was photographed for “In My Street.” You’ll probably be close enough.
If the singer’s angry in “In My Street,” he grimly recognizes the social stasis that’s inevitably going to keep his neighbors stuck there. The singer in Solid State’s “Train to London Town” says Fuck all that.
Little is known about Solid State, so modest was their output. I came across them a few years ago on The Cutting… …Edge, a Phase III Mod Revival compilation released in 1985 in the U.K. on Razor Records. (Solid State later morphed into Penny Arcade and then changed their name again to Imperial; stray demos and live cuts are scattered online.) With Nick Jarvis singing and on guitar, Andy Kettle on bass, and Mark Lester drumming, Solid State kicks up a lot of noise on “Train to London Town,” the ticket out of small town provinciality. See those open windows on the second floor in that photo of Amies Street? You don’t have to squint too hard to see a silhouette of a restless kid who’s gazing out those windows and beyond, and who won’t accept his fate.
The song begins with a timeless three-chord clarion call, with nods to early Who and early Jam, only to fall in the verses to anxiety and disorientation. The singer’s on a train to the big city “to escape the cage of depression” at home, rushing on his way to restart his life. Where he’s been is nowhere: endless queues for no jobs, and even fewer chances. He left a note for his mum, and ringing in his ears are the jeers of his mates who say, “You’ll find nothing, wait and see.” But he’s got to take his chance. He’ll wave goodbye to live. The song resolves nothing—as it begins and ends in media res, between stations on a hurtling train, the singer with little to do but think and reflect—but then, rock and roll rarely solves much but the desire to translate a quickening heart, a thwarted impulse, or a darkening thought, however temporarily.
“Train to London Town,” jittery in its verses, comes alive with bravado in its stirring chorus. Gang-sung, the words barrel ahead like the train itself, clinging to the tracks lest it derail: “Gotta get out now of this town / gotta get my head off the ground / Gotta get out now of this place, gotta go far away.” Couldn’t be simpler, couldn’t be more eternal; whatever he’s wearing, however he’s posed, is mere window dressing. Hurtling forward, between homes, resolved and scared to death—this kid’s beyond time, let alone fashion.
“Just another teenage anthem,” as New Hearts sang.
The Jolt reminds me of the CB/Max's era band Day Old Bread.