Quadrophenia has had many lives since its release in 1973: first as a groundbreaking concept album, then a 1979 cult film starring Phil Daniels and Sting, before several live revivals, including one for the Teenage Cancer Trust in 2010 that featured Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and the former Kasabian frontman Tom Meighan.
When the Who’s Pete Townshend wrote it in the early 1970s, he wanted to release a record that would reconnect the band with its mod fanbase, who had drifted away from the group and were obsessed with soul music, sharp fashion and scooters.
More than 50 years later, he’s reviving it again – not as a rock opera, but as a ballet in collaboration with Sadler’s Wells and Universal Music.
“I wanted to remind the band where we came from; we came from west London and the mods were our people,” says Townshend, who thinks in 2024 there are echoes of the mid-60s, when mod culture emerged as a rejection of conservative British norms.
“British pop music had this function, which was to tell the audience that there was a possibility of a new world. A new time,” says Townshend. “Because the old time from about ’64 onwards was just worn out. What we have now is the same boring old shit that was going on in 1964; politicians that don’t seem to understand their own people.”
Quadrophenia was ambitious, even for the Who: a double album about a mod called Jimmy who becomes disillusioned and goes on a journey that includes getting “a job as a dustman”, “attempts to propagate communism”, moving to Brighton and “taking a lot of drugs”.
The original mods started a moral panic after running battles with rockers, motorbike-riding fans of rock’n’roll. There were several high-profile, violent clashes in the early 1960s. After one such incident, a Margate magistrate dismissed them as “sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats, in hunting in packs”.
Townshend says he sees the similarities between mods and gangs who are associated with knife crime, but he thinks teenagers have to deal with a bigger problem now: social media. “It’s easier to help someone who is in trouble in a gang rather than someone who is locked in their bedroom that you never see until they finally push the button,” said the guitarist.
The Who emerged in the 1960s and, with an original lineup of the drummer Keith Moon, John Entwistle on bass, Townshend on guitar and Roger Daltrey as vocalist, became one of the iconic British guitar bands, going on to global success.
Moon died aged 32, while Entwhistle died on the eve of an American tour with the Who in 2002.
“We started as a band of four boys, a drummer, a bass player, a guitarist and a singer, and two of us have died. So we’re left with the guitar player and the singer trying, in a sense, to revive and honour the music that we wrote when there were four of us. It’s tricky,” he said explaining why he calls the Who “a brand”.
“We can honour it and celebrate it, but whether we can actually do it is another story.”
Quadrophenia: the Mod Ballet opens at Plymouth Theatre Royal on 28 May 2025 before touring the UK
