Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: A Life In Mod – From the Revival to Acid Jazz

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I think everyone's in a reflective mood because, unless you live in a monastery, unless you work in an ‘essential’ job, however that's defined, you’ve been under house arrest for the last year. The book contains fifteen years’ worth of material, from 2005 to 2020 and it occurred to me when I was doing it – and this wasn’t deliberate – that 2005 was the last time the Labour Party won an election. I recall my total disinterest in this. I probably voted for some sort of left-wing joke candidate, Communist or Socialist Labour Party or something like that. I was absolutely disengaged from the whole thing. As were – you can tell from the pitiful turnout – most of the population. a b c Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. By Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson. Published by Routledge, 1993. ISBN 0-415-09916-1, ISBN 978-0-415-09916-5 A valuable exploration of the many modernist projects that have defined our society and politics. Esmond Sage, Morning Star What a wonderful book. Mod isn’t about what decade you lived in, it’s about your attitude, and this book has tons of it’ Kenney Jones , The Small Faces

Akin to being in the company of someone with plenty of entertaining tales to tell…. the comradery and spirit of like-minded souls is inspiring.’– Paul Ritchie, Shindig! Magazine If more joined him in that celebration, our cities would be immeasurably better places to live, work and play. Mondo Mod. Dir. E. Beatty and P. Perry, orig. 1967. DVD: something Weird Video, rel. 2002 w/ The Hippy Revolt There’s something almost biblical about a man who takes his cultural obsession and makes a first-class career out of it. For Eddie Piller a musical compulsion coupled with a healthy Presbyterian work ethic has for over forty years propelled him forward as a devoted curator of his scene. First, as a young man growing up in Woodford, where a family association with the Small Faces ( his mother ran their fan club ) first ignited the universe in him. Those small steps however would eventually see him forge his own path in the music industry, starting as a DJ before taking the brave decision to form his own record label, all before he had even turned 18 years old.The blogs were pioneers in some ways, of understanding the recent past. We realised that if we didn’t try to understand that past, we were going to have the same stories repeated again and again about Red Robbo and British Leyland in the 1970s and the rubbish piling up in the streets. It’s the same bullshit narrative that the 2005 Forever people fervently believe in: everything was dreadful and then it was saved by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. No one else writes so clearly yet with such elegiac intensity about the symbiosis that exists between history and the built environment, or the lives that are caught, mangled and realised in its midst. Lynsey Hanley, [for The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space]

This essay was curated by The Subcultures Network, which was formed in 2011 to facilitate research on youth cultures and social change, and commissioned as part of the National Lottery Heritage Funded project to build the online Museum of Youth Culture. Being developed by YOUTH CLUB, the Museum of Youth Culture is a new destination dedicated to celebrating 100 years of youth culture history through photographs, ephemera and stories. No one else writes so clearly yet with such elegiac intensity about the symbiosis that exists between history and the built environment, or the lives that are caught, mangled and realised in its midst.” What a wonderful book. Mod isn’t about what decade you lived in, it’s about your attitude, and this book has tons of it’– Kenny Jones, The Small Faces Rawlings, Terry and R. Barnes, Mod: Clean Living Under Very Difficult Circumstances: a Very British Phenomenon (Omnibus Press, 2000), p. 89.A charismatic storyteller, witty and unpretentious, he is at once an engaging protagonist and an indisputable authority, giving a live-wire, visceral perspective on mod life in that short flash of time. He manages to create a welcoming space in this rather exclusive world while never losing his formidable edge as a narrator' - The Big Issue Street the look Skinheads". British Style Genius. BBC. Archived from the original on 11 December 2013 . Retrieved 30 June 2014. Revolution in Men's Clothes: Mod Fashions from Britain are Making a Smash in the U.S., Life Magazine, 13 May 1966; pg. 82-86. Cover story.