Despite a very specific origin in London’s jazzy coffee
houses of the early sixties, Mod has gone through so many changes that it basically
just means “British” at this point. That elasticity didn’t have to wait until
Paul Weller and Phil Daniels reinvigorated the cult in the late seventies; it
was already happening ten years time ago in the mid-sixties.
RPM Record’s new triple-disc box Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging
London Nuggets draws all incarnations of homegrown Mod music in a manner
that implies a sort of sound progression by playing with chronology. Had these 87 tracks been arranged
chronologically, they would have sounded like a senseless jumble of cool jazz
and R&B, bulls-eye power pop, underground-scene psychedelia, and
sprinklings of other styles, such as the more mainstream pop of Twinkle’s “What
Am I Doing Here with You” and the eccentric genre-shuffling of the two instrumentals
from the soundtrack of the Marianne Faithful vehicle (tee-hee) Girl on a Motorcycle.
Instead, the songs are more-or-less arranged according to style, so the set
strolls from the kind of hard R&B (Lita Roza’s “Mama”), Booker T.-style
work outs (The Mike Cotton Sound’s throbbing “Like That”), and jazzy slow-drips
(Laurel Aitken’s “Baby Don’t Do It”) the original Mods dug to the
red-with-purple-flowers detonations championed by The Who and The Birds to the U.F.O
Club sounds that really have nothing to do with the movement except for maybe
giving ex-Mods a spot to drop acid now that they were done popping purple
hearts.
Needless to say, the real theme here is “smashing music,” so
who cares what’s “real Mod” and what isn’t. That distinction sure doesn’t
matter when tracks such as The Moody Blues’ soulful “And My Baby’s Gone” is
rubbing elbows with The Attraction’s amp-slashing “She’s a Girl”, Fat Mattress’
trippy “I Don’t Mind”, and Twiggy’s magnificent “When I Think of You”, which
somehow draws those three disparate styles together without sounding like some
sort of hack-and-glue job. There are other familiar names too, such as Arthur
Brown, Spencer Davis Group (post-Stevie Winwood), John’s Children, Chad & Jeremy, Alexis
Korner, Mark Wirtz, and Mike D’Abo (as well as tracks featuring such future
stars as Jimmy Page and Lemmy, who gets in on the thievery of a “Kids Are
Alright” rip so blatant that the track is credited to Townshend), but none of
the artists are represented by their best-known numbers, so there’s a lot to
discover on Night Comes Down.