Before every academic study of Mod, there was this — and nothing has bettered it on its own ground. Richard Barnes published Mods! in 1979, and his advantage was simple: he was there. Pete Townshend's flatmate in the early days of The Who (he suggested the name), Barnes documented the subculture from the inside, with over a hundred and fifty black-and-white photographs that remain the definitive visual record of the movement: the clothes, the scooters, the dancing, the obsessive hunt for American soul and R&B 45s.
It isn't an essay; it's an album, an artefact, an act of love. The text is short and sharp, but the images do the talking — faces, streets, details of style that no later reconstruction has matched for authenticity. It is the photographic proof that Mod, before it became nostalgia and quotation, was a living thing — precise, and English to the bone.
For anyone who loves this culture — and for readers of our Mod Story series or the Grooville Books volume Mods: A British Story — Barnes's book is the primary source, the object from which the rest descends. A classic that deserves reprinting more often than it gets.
