Sorry Dimple, completely missed your post!
Townshend's also gone on record stating how unhappy he was that Jimmy was changed from being a Bin man and also that he wasn't overjoyed that the film moved away from emphasising the four aspects of Jimmy's character that gave it's name to the album and instead attempted to represent the Youth culture in which Jimmy existed. When you read various things Townshend has stated through the years you realise how often he contradicts himself, in fact I would say he suffers more than a modicum of Montgomery syndrome in that he often rewrites history post events to alter his part in it
, Don't get me wrong I still love him to death and his catalogue of work always has a place in my life (In fact for me personally he's one of two people, Justin Sullivan of New Model Army being the other, who has written a song in some form to cover pretty much everything I'm ever feeling at any one time
)
The biggest obvious inaccuracy of the Film is the Brighton riot, the film is set in '65 and it took place in '64 but that can be explained away as artistic licence. By 1965 because of the events of 1964 many more thousands of People who identified themselves as Mod were doing so because of the saturated press coverage, the market led tagetted product that had about as much to do with
Mod as The Jam had to do with Punk (
). It was more akin to the celebrity chav culture we have today in terms of the popular press saturation and you know something is wrong when even Blue Peter is doing articles on how to dance right!
Many commentators sepparate this period from the earlier sixties
true Mod scene by calling it Gang-Mod culture which in all reality has more in common with the working class movements of Skinheads of the late sixties and the Suedeheads of the early seventies than it did with the Middle Class driven Modernist scene of the late fities and early sixties, it also represents a tipping point culturally as well as many of the middle class
Originals started to look across the Atlantic at the burgeoning beatnik and drop out scene for influence where as the Working class steadfastly stuck to what they knew, increasingly bringing in the Afro-Carribbean influences that existed on the same same streets as themselves due to the large number of immigrants bringing music and style with them.
Sorry about the long preamble but it leads to where I think the film falls over a little. It represents the Myth of 60's Mod scene rather than the fact, It's all the stories that the "Old Boys" tell but when you dig deeper very few truly experienced, it's an idealised pastiche of how they wanted
Mod to look and feel. It's rigidly set in a working class setting slap bang in the middle of Gang-Mod culture but also tries to represent the ideals and sense of the Original Mod scene and leaves it all feeling a bit confused and messy.
The thing I've always felt about the film is that it was made during the 1978-79 Mod revival and more accurately represents the values and need for the Mod Myth of that period than any real representation of the 1960s and it's scene. It's often mistakenly identified as causing the Mod revival but that occurred long before release and can probaly be more attributed to Hoxton Tom McCourt reintroducing Suedehead stylings into post Punk London.
Sorry for the rambling wall of guff
, as you may tell it's a scene and culture I've taken a keen interest in over the years (although long ago stopped limiting myself to
). None of it means I think Quadrophenia is a bad film either, in fact it's just about my favourite film of all time if I'm honest. I own 3 different BLue-ray copies, 5 DVD copies, 3 VHS versions and a Laserdisc copy
(obviously all different releases not the same ones) and if anything happened to any of them I'd cry
