thumb|Three rockers on [[Chelsea Bridge]]

thumb|Two mods on a scooter

Mods and rockers were two conflicting British youth subcultures of the late 1950s to mid 1960s. News coverage of the two groups fighting in 1964 sparked a moral panic about British youth, and they became widely perceived as violent, unruly trouble-makers.

The rocker subculture was centred on motorcycling. Rockers generally wore protective clothing such as black leather jackets and motorcycle boots or winklepickers. The style was influenced by Marlon Brando in the 1953 film The Wild One. The common rocker hairstyle was a quiff or pompadour, while their music genre of choice was 1950s to early 60s rock and roll and R&B, played by artists including Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Bo Diddley, as well as British rock and roll musicians such as Billy Fury and Johnny Kidd.

The mod subculture was centred on fashion and music, and many mods wore parkas and rode scooters. Mods wore suits and other clean-cut outfits, and listened to music genres such as modern jazz, soul, Motown, ska and British rhythm and blues-rooted bands like the Who and the Small Faces, and later the Yardbirds and the Jam. The Who wrote a portrait of the cultures with their 1973 album and movie score Quadrophenia.

Physical conflicts

BBC News stories from May 1964 stated that mods and rockers were jailed after riots in seaside resort towns in Southern England, such as Margate in Kent, Brighton in Sussex, and Clacton in Essex.

Conflicts took place at Clacton and Hastings during the Easter weekend of 1964. A second round took place on the south coast of England over the Whitsun weekend (18 and 19 May 1964), especially at Brighton, where fights occurred over two days and moved along the coast to Hastings and back; hence the "Second Battle of Hastings" tag. A small number of rockers were isolated on Brighton beach where they – despite being protected by police – were overwhelmed and assaulted by mods. Eventually calm was restored and a judge levied heavy fines, describing those arrested as "sawdust Caesars".

Newspapers described the mod and rocker clashes as being of "disastrous proportions", and labelled mods and rockers as "vermin" and "louts".

Academic debunking

The sociologist Stanley Cohen was led by his retrospective study of the mods and rockers conflict to develop the term "moral panic". In his 1972 study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, he examined news coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s. He conceded that mods and rockers had some fights in the mid-1960s, but argues that they were no different from the evening brawls that occurred between youths throughout the 1950s and early 1960s at seaside resorts and after football games. He argued that the U.K. press turned the mod subculture into a symbol of delinquent and deviant status.

Cohen argued that as hysteria about knife-wielding mods increased, the image of a fur-collared anorak and scooter would "stimulate hostile and punitive reactions". He said the news media used possibly faked interviews with supposed rockers such as "Mick the Wild One". The press also tried to exploit accidents that were unrelated to mod–rocker violence, such as an accidental drowning of a youth, which resulted in the headline "Mod Dead in Sea".

Eventually, when the press ran out of real fights to report, they would publish deceptive headlines, such as using a subheading "Violence", even when the article reported that there was no violence at all. Paul McCartney originally gave this response in an April 1964 interview.

See also

  • Mods & Rockers Film Festival

Footnotes

<!-- commented out in case dead site is temporary * The Who Location Guide -->

  • Rocker Reunion website
  • The Mods and Rockers
  • Mods – 1960s Fun Lovin' Criminals
  • Rockers

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