How we made Quadrophenia, by Phil Daniels and Leslie Ash
I wasn’t well when I went for the auditions at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. I’d been in South Africa filming Zulu Dawn and got some sort of disease. I looked washed out. When the director Franc Roddam saw how sick I was, he told me to go home, but I was asked back for a screen test. When I heard that Johnny Rotten was no longer being considered for the lead role, I thought: “Well, this is it.”
Roddam had us hang out for a month before filming started. He encouraged the depraved side of our nature – he was not one for tucking us into bed at night. We wore authentic clothes and were given lessons in how to dance and ride a scooter – and we got to hang out with some original mods. We were living it, doing all sorts of stuff to get us into the mood. That’s why it looks like we aren’t acting.
We shot the end of the film first, at Beachy Head. Riding along the clifftop, I got a lot closer to the edge than I was meant to and fell off the scooter a couple of times. I remember the first assistant director, Ray Corbett, telling me: “Listen, it’s the third day. If you fell off that cliff, d’you know what would have happened? They would have recast you tomorrow.”
Jimmy’s not a hero, he’s just a normal boy next door, and that’s what makes him work. He ultimately rejects the whole ethos of being a mod – making your whole life revolve around sitting on a silly scooter. In the end, he had to jack it in to move on. He couldn’t take it any further.
Quadrophenia’s a difficult one to live down. Over the years, it’s filled me with horror – and joy. At the time, a friend warned me: “If it’s a hit, they may only ever remember you as Jimmy.”
Leslie Ash, played Steph
When I was asked to audition, I didn’t know much about mods or their music, but we were all given a copy of the Who’s Quadropheniaalbum, which I really loved. I was 17 and a bit of an airhead, so I didn’t appreciate what a remarkable crew we had working on the film. It was a fairly small unit and there was not much of a budget, but we couldn’t have asked for a better director in Franc.
They’d asked scooter clubs and mods from all over the country to come down for the Brighton part of filming. The moment we walked out of the hotel to start shooting, we saw all these
scooters and hordes of mods lined up against the seafront. It was amazing. Filming the riot sequences was really scary. It was supposed to be staged but it was chaos, with police and members of the public getting involved. It was like a real riot – health and safety didn’t come into it at the time. When Franc