Product Description

Paolo Hewitt, celebrated rock journalist and biographer of Oasis, The Jam and The Small Faces, has collected some of the best writings ever on mod: the music, the fashions, and the entire way of life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1646230 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Library Journal
As portrayed in the Who rock opera Quadrophenia, the mods were a working-class British youth cult in the mid-1960s preoccupied with mohair suits, dance clubs, scooters, and amphetamines. Rock journalist Hewitt borrows short snippets from Richard Barnes's standard Mods! (Plexus Pub., 1994), fiction by Tom Wolfe and Samuel Selvon, scholarly accounts by Stanley Cohen and Dick Hebdige, and oral histories. More obscure mod-related pieces, including an interview with top mod Pete Meaden, a 1960s article by fashion queen Mary Quant, and an unpublished eyewitness account by mod pioneer Irish Jack are also included. Though he somewhat neglects the mod drive for upward mobility after the lingering postwar economic squalor, Hewitt provides marvelous descriptions of mod trappingsDthe fashion, the music, the drugs, the clubsDthat clearly demonstrate the roots of Britpop and Austin Powers. Recommended for anyone interested in social history, youth movements, Carnaby Street, and rock'n'roll.DDave Szatmary. Univ. of Washington
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
As well as new essays from Hewitt, The Sharp Word rediscovers impossible to find writing by Tom Wolfe, Mary Quant, Tony Parsons and Nik Cohn. Going beyond the surface cliches, Hewitt's hugely readable collection fully documents one of the most misunderstood cultural movements of the post-war era.

About the Author
Hewitt was a key writer at the NME and is the highly respected author of many books, as well as penning the sleevenotes for Oasis' What's The Story Morning Glory.

Customer Reviews

A sharp insight, superbly done
One of the finest books I have read in a long time, a very sharp look at the mod culture of which I was one, this book took me back to a time I had enjoyed and lived, I would recomend this book to any one who has followed the mod culture through all its rebirths over the last 40 years. If I had any critisism it would be a lack of photographs but this doesnt detract from the content of the book I have read it three times now, the first reading was accomplished in one sitting I could not put the book down.

Interesting, but Badly Designed
This collection of 31 excerpts from various works of music and cultural journalism, biography, and fiction seeks to shed light on the little-understood "mod" subculture. Hewitt has done well to seek out the relevant passages from a wide range of sources, although Richard Barnes' "Mods!", Nik Cohn's "Ball the Wall" and Johnathan Green's "Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971" are each excerpted three times. The first-hand accounts of living the mod life are fairly uniform in their descriptions and as a whole tend to expose the mod subculture as a fairly empty narcissistic enterprise--albeit a sharp one. Only in "Ace Face" (and former Who crony) Pete Meaden's rambling 1978 NME interview is there any sense of a larger purpose, but then he comes across as a bit of a whacked-out dreamer compared to all the other sartorial hipsters. Still, worth reading if you're interested in the history of the mod subculture. It's a shame the publishers didn't devote any time or effort to the look of the book. From weak cover to atrocious typography, it exhibits none of the attention to detail that characterized the essence of mod style.

Cool collection
Its a cool collection of interviews, newstories, book excerpts, etc. Really concentrates more on peakcockish mods than hard mods. Definatley makes those early mods extremely fanatical.