CityLife

Modfather who kept his cool

MOD TILL HE DROPS: Eddie Yates

WHEN you hear an original mod describing his creed of sartorial elegance, it makes the uniform rules of the Household Cavalry seem just a bit vague and casual.

“I went to Burton’s in Moss Side and had a tailor-made suit,” says Eddie Yates, harking back to the 1960s.

“That had to have 16-inch parallel trousers, dark blue pinstripe, with a fitted, waisted jacket with two vents at the back, high lapels, four buttons, three-inch flaps on the pockets - which you had to have - and a ticket pocket with a three-inch flap. I would wear a Ben Sherman shirt, striped tie, blue silk handkerchief, cufflinks, rings and a tiepin or stud – anything that looked expensive, looked neat.”

The weekday mod uniform was desert boots, Levi or Wrangler jeans, Ben Sherman or Fred Perry shirt, possibly a Wrangler denim jacket and the parka on top.

Enamel badges would be collected on scooter runs but, according to the strict rule of mod fashion, would be pinned only to the left hand side of the parka.

And, to stay cool in more ways than one, Yates had a summer outfit too – a Levi’s Sta-Prest lightweight sandy suit with high centre-vent, and saddle-stitching around the edges.

“It was just sharp. You had creases in your trousers and your shoes were polished,” says Yates, who lives in Urmston.

“I was an apprentice mechanic, and I was on, perhaps, £3.50 a week. Ben Sherman shirts were something like £2.50. You spent more money on clothes than on the bikes.”

Now 59, a grandfather and recently retired as a telephone engineer, Eddie Yates still lives by the mod ethic. He wears his parka with pride, has two pristine 1960s’ Lambretta scooters and is chairman and historian of Manchester Scooter Club The Lyons.

Yates will be donning his parka and Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and joining members of The Lyons, Salford Knights and Lazy Aces scooter clubs to ride in procession through Manchester to the Opera House on Tuesday, June 16 evening to mark the opening of Quadrophenia.

What began as a 1973 album by The Who became a film in 1979, starring Phil Daniels, Ray Winstone, Sting, Leslie Ash and Toyah Wilcox, and has now been produced for the stage.

It is just the latest of many rekindlings of mod culture, which began in 1962 with fashionable young Londoners, modernists, discovering early R&B and ska and inventing a sharp-suited new style.

Transport of choice was the sophisticated Italian scooter, made by Lambretta or Vespa, sometimes festooned with mirrors and sporting a long whip aerial.

They had their own social hierarchy of style-setting “faces”, whose followers were “tickets” or “numbers”.

The mods were the very opposite of the motorbike-riding, leather-clad rockers, and the two clans clashed, notoriously, in May Day Bank Holiday riots in Brighton in 1964.

Pill-popping mod

It seemed to some like the end of British civilisation. It was also the inspiration for Quadrophenia, the tale of a pill-popping mod, Jimmy.

The mod ethic kept cropping up in pop, not just through The Who and Quadrophenia, but also through the likes of Paul Weller and Oasis, the brothers Gallagher known as keen scooter enthusiasts from the early days of the band, and no strangers to a parka.

Among the membership of The Lyons is Mani, once bassist with the Stone Roses, now Primal Scream.

The Lyons have been going since 1954, the oldest scooter club in the UK. Yates joined in 1966, aged just 16.

“All of a sudden there were 50 of us in the club,” he says. “Club night was Monday at the Kingsway Hotel, Burnage. You met all your mates and went out for rides. The rest of the week, it was a case of come home from work. have your tea, get on your bike and go down to the coffee bar, Ma Graham’s, in Levenshulme.

“There was a motorbike club, called Ten Ten, and you stayed away from that, because they were greasers and we were mods.”

The kind of pitched battles seen on Brighton beach were never played out in the north of England, though Yates recalls the odd “run in” before time and maturity brought a grudging respect between bikers and scooterists. If mod fashion remained timelessly cool, its soundtrack also proved durable.

“Even now, if you put Motown on, everybody gets up and dances,” says Yates. “When I listen to Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye, it brings back the memories.”

The Lyons remained a Lambretta-only club right through to 1999, then admitted riders of Vespas and modern scooters. There are now 70 members, meeting every Monday at the Dog and Partridge pub in Didsbury Road, Heaton Mersey.

“I was going to the club on Monday night, and I stopped at traffic lights, and this guy was walking towards me, staring at my bike,” says Yates. “He came up, gave me a thumbs up and just said ‘Brilliant!’ and walked off. Wherever we go on the scooters, we get people taking photographs of us.

“It’s a way of life. people say ‘Why do you ride a scooter?’ and I say that if I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand. When I get on it, I’m 18 again.”

Quadrophenia is at the Opera House from Tuesday, June 16 until Saturday, June 20. Call 0844 847 2295.