Brett Callwood
The Who
Quadrophenia (Track/MCS)
New Model Army Recall Mod Army: New Model Army man Justin Sullivan told us about his love for the Who‘s mod classic.
Justin Sullivan: I was nine years old when I first heard the Who’s “My Generation.” My response was to run around the house screaming and doing much air guitar playing and even more air drumming and it planted a kind of “fuck you” punk rock attitude in me forever. From that moment, the Who were always a group that I liked (especially watching Keith Moon on Ready Steady Go) but I didn’t really connect with them in the same way again until Quadrophenia.
(Track/MCA)
By this time, I was a typically confused seventeen-year-old and the album had everything that I wanted and needed – beauty, violence, mystery, melody, sex, pathos, romance, fury and the sound of the sea. It mixed orchestral splendour with rock chaos. Very few bands that could do the chaos thing quite as well as The Who but to be able to combine that with a carefully constructed thematic orchestration (without ever using an actual orchestra) was an astonishing feat.
The album made sense of the world that I was growing up into when nothing else did. I remember listening to it repeatedly on the newly acquired family headphones at an unbelievable volume, which almost certainly began the deterioration of my hearing at an early age, but never mind because it saved my soul.
It doesn’t matter that the album is a study of a teenage gang thing that I was too young to have been a part of, because the themes of excitement and alienation are timeless. Neither does it matter that the music is now inevitably accompanied in most people’s heads by images from the film – although I think the film is very good too. There are so few people these days that would attempt such a thing and probably none that could pull it off. Modern recording technology (while in theory making anything possible) would probably bleach the life out of such an enterprise, so the fact that music will never be made like this again only increases its wonder.
The album remains my favourite rock album ever, although I don’t listen it too often. I try not to overuse magic in my life lest it lose its power, but I know it’s always there to go back to – like blood family or a reliable god.
New Model Army Recall Mod Army: New Model Army’s Unbroken album is out January 26.
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