Phil Daniels stunning performance as Jimmy is so on the nose it’s hard to think of him in any other role. His career since has never reached such heights unless you think of a part in the soap opera Eastenders is any where near comparable.
I remember loving the movie when it first came out in 1979 and thought that it might have dated badly. Certainly, the riot police look as though they are equipped to sort out a scuffle in Camberwick Green rather than a set to between pumped up gangs of Mods and Rockers in the centre of Brighton. It’s noticeable too that scooter and motorbike riders are helmet-less but aside from these differences, the film still stands up pretty well. This is because it gives such a truthful representation of the confusions at the heart of youth culture. There’s also the hammy laugh out loud performance by Sting as the Ace Face.
Pete Townsend wrote three rock operas for The Who – a genre , like the dreaded concept album, that seems very much a 70s/80s Prog-Rock phenomenon. Tommy is over praised and I liked it even less after Ken Russell’s ridiculously OTT movie treatment. Lifehouse died a natural death although the best songs were salvaged for the excellent Who’s Next album. Quadrophenia is the one that, for me, really works. Great songs, unfussy production – the band captured at the peak of their powers.
Townsend has said that it is essentially the three minute single ‘My Generation’ expanded into a double album. What the record and the film do so well is map out the psychological minefield that Jimmy treads as he seeks desperately to belong to a gang/ group yet also wants to be an individual on his own terms. These twin needs become unresolvable and he becomes rejected by his parents for not being ‘normal’ and isolated from his peers because he taking everything so seriously. For them being a Mod is a bit of a laugh, for Jimmy it is his life.
It’s a tragic tale which Daniels humanizes and makes believable.
