The Ready, Steady, Go! Mod Ball reviewed – archive, 15 April 1964
It was foreseeable that the Mod Ball at Wembley Pool last Wednesday should end in tears (28 arrests). The commentator, Keith Fordyce, wound up the show on television just before 11, talking straight into the cameras, and issuing what seemed to me an invitation to all and sundry to come and join in the fun outside the Pool after the show was over.
He spoke admiringly of the way autograph hunters could cover every exit of a big building, and wondered if the performers would be able to get out at all. Earlier in the evening, little interviews (especially one with Kathy Kirby) had said what good things mods were, and what good things mums and dads were, and everyone had pointedly refrained from mentioning rockers at all.
From the archive, 4 April 1964: 9pm at the Ace Cafe
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The difference between mods and rockers is a class one. Mods pursue high fashion, and have clean hair, moderate means of transport, and educational aspirations. Rockers pursue low (or outmoded) fashion, wear Brylcreem, have spots and ton-up machines, live in slums, etc. So if you get 8,000 kids together and tell them they are mods and mods is good, no doubt most of those who are not there will agree and resolve to be mods for all they are worth. But the few who do not agree because they like being rockers, wearing Brylcreem, skid-lids, etc, are all the more likely to come along and beat up the officially patronised prigs as they come out of their evening of virtue and self-congratulation.
Nor can one be quite sure the police helped to avoid trouble on this occasion. They brought dogs along. Surely they must know – the rest of us do – that alsatian dogs do not calm a crowd; they guarantee a sudden release of adrenaline into human bloodstreams, and make fighting more likely.
But the press has the greatest responsibility in the mods and rockers business. If the moulders of teenage opinion go on boosting modism, they can easily make everybody a mod except the committed criminals. If that happens the words will become useless and once again the criminals will be ostracised in their little corner. (see Colin Fletcher’s remarkable article about the Merseyside groups in New Society, of 20 February 1964.)
One of the Beatles recently declared himself a rocker, and this is the right outlook. It is nasty to encourage kids to be something good, and look down on the other lot who are something bad: you’re just a beastly, low, ill-bred rocker, but I’m a mod. If there has to be all this exhortation and stuff, it should be towards doing something good or interesting, and should cut out the looking down on.
The performances at the Mod Ball itself were achieved by groups on a sort of trolley mouthing and miming in time with their records; nobody could actually have sung in that crush. It is a pity the high priests themselves were absent (the Beatles seem to me the only group of musical interest), but nice to see all the suffragans and rural deans.
From the Observer archive, 24 May 1964: Mods v Rockers: Britain's summer of discontent
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Cilla Black is a competent singer; in Anyone Who Had a Heart she has a fine song, though her version is little more than a carbon copy of an earlier American recording. Apart from that, Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa, and a handful of Beatle numbers, I think Little Children is the only good pop song around at the moment. The Rolling Stones and the Merseybeats are not for listening to at all, but for looking at. I hope the long hair fashion spreads so that we can return at last to the normal European look and forget the military crop which came in with late Victorian imperialism.
The Mod Ball actually lasted from 7.30 to 11.30, but Messrs Rediffusion chose to transmit from 10 to 11. This realistic choice of time for what was obviously going to be the high spot of the television week for everyone between seven and 15 nicely shows up the hypocrisy of the tobacco companies’ putting all the cigarette advertisements after 9 o’clock. It is very curious to see these great money bags, the television contractors and the tobacco firms, go on and on trying to hypnotise children and adults into taking a poison. The only thing parents can do is to remind children from time to time: “These people are liars; they want your money and they don’t mind if you die.”
The Ready, Steady, Go! Mod Ball at Wembley Empire Pool, 8 April 1964: the Rolling Stones, Cilla Black, Freddie and the Dreamers, Sounds Incorporated, Kenny Lynch, Kathy Kirby, Manfred Mann, Fourmost, Billy J Kramer & the Dakotas, Merseybeats, and the Searchers with comperes Keith Fordyce and Cathy McGowan. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Alamy