POTTED HISTORY OF MOD

Mod started at the end of the Fifties in London when a few kids started dressing French and Italian, so the story goes. But there's no big deal about it. All it was, was the beginning of the emancipation of youth; you know, money to spend, not much to spend it on, everyone dressed in monotone, boring gear, so the kids got adventurous. If only to wind up the adults. Drugs, mindless violence, sex, and the need to shock was the order of the day. So you had gangs of drugged-up kids dressed in hand-made clothes looking for trouble from one end of the country to the other until the fashion blew itself out. The End. And ever since, we've had a whole stream of experts, most of them not around at the time, trying to tell the rest of us about it. Actually, from the point of view of social revolution - and as an ex-so-called Mod I'll commit sacrilege here - the Teddy boys and Rockers were the vanguard of the change and far more radical. Mod was part of that evolution.

Anyway, Mod died around 1964, and everyone became wannabe gangsters, dressed in well-tailored expensive suits. Cars, not scooters were the preferred means of transportation and booze took over from amphetamines.

This lasted until about 1966/7 when hippy and flower power took over. Some younger wannabe Mods took to being skinheads and got into reggae. But they became confused and racist, and tended to join extremist political parties if they could think beyond how many laceholes they had in their DMs.

Dropping out was fashionable too. But more of that at a later date, eh?