As a man who, throughout my teens and student years in Manchester, argued passionately that The Who were simply the best live band in the world and that their 70s’ albums were pretty close to perfect articulations of rock music, it’s become worrying easy to mock Pete Townshend’s high-falutin’ notions about his own music.
It doesn’t help that The Who’s live iteration these days is a shameless and apparently joyless carry-on based around two quarrelsome codgers and a bunch of slightly more youthful ringers who, last time I saw them perform, neither Townshend nor Daltrey could even be bothered to introduce. So, it’s probably fair to say that I approached something riskily dubbed a ‘mod ballet’ (which, incidentally, just seems to mean a dance piece performed in sharp Paul Smith garments) with a fair degree of scepticism.
Credit: Johan Persson
Although the piece isn’t flawless, I’m happy to say it’s certainly not a folly nor even a faintly laughable indulgence. It’s actually pretty darned good. It’s unlikely to disappoint fans of either dance or the music of The Who, which is given positively thrilling new life by the wordless classical arrangements of Rachel Fuller (who happens to be Mrs Townshend). To help make sure that 60s purists don’t lose heart, there are ingeniously re-imagined versions of My Generation and Can’t Explain in the mix. But the real musical joy comes from her brilliantly dramatic arrangements of post-1973 Who stalwarts such as The Real Me, 5:15 and especially Love Reign O’er Me, which becomes a significant, increasingly moving, motif throughout the show.
That said, the narrative strand with protagonist Jimmy, a confused young man growing up in 60s London haunted over a life-defining week by four different facets of his own personality in the shape of four different dancers (quadrophenia, geddit?) must be fairly befuddling to anyone who’s not up to speed with the notion. Much more rewarding in narrative terms are Jimmy’s interactions with the mods who offer him a lifestyle choice different to that of his parents, stuck in a stalled marriage, including the ‘ace face’ whom every mod hopes to impress and the mod girl whom every mod, including Jimmy, wants to be with. A couple of the dance set-pieces, such as the club scene and the Brighton Beach fight with a gang of rockers, are especially vivid. This show is an unexpected triumph over accusations of pretentiousness.
Main image: credit Johan Persson
Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia – A Mod Ballet is at Lowry, Salford until July 19, 2025. For more information, click here.
