We’re barely aware of the tension between two rival gangs of hoodlums in Great Britain in 1964, but it made for some awesome footage, and inspired a whole lot of cool music over the years. This clip is a short history of that period, featuring some cool motorcycle and scooter footage, plus a rundown of the events that led up to the riots. These events were sort of the British version of the Hell’s Angels rolling into your town.

The Mods

The Mods were initially a small group of working class British kids men insisting on clothes and shoes tailored to their style. By 1963, the mod subculture were riding Vespa and Lambretta scooters, taking amphetamines and listening to American soul music. If you listen to the Who’s Quadrophenia —  which loosely documents the battle between the Mods and the Rockers — the second side of the second disc is packed with American soul from James Brown and Booker T. & the MGs. The pub band Cross Section also gets its only recorded bit of material with a cover of Tommy Tucker’s “High Heel Sneakers,” another Mod favorite.

This seven-minute video of the High Numbers — who would eventually become the Who — was captured at the Railway Hotel right around the same period in 1964 and gives you a good idea of the Mod scene at the time.

The Rockers

Rockers were the polar opposite. Where Mods were wearing tailored suits and riding Vespas, the Rockers were wearing black leather jackets, jeans, boots, and riding Triumphs and BSAs with clip-on handlebars and rear-set footpegs. They hung out at places like London’s Ace Cafe and listened to Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps. The hot ticket was a Record Run, where you’d have have some good looking chick drop a quid or a bob — or whatever the hell they use for money over there — into the jukebox and race 3.5 miles down the North Circular Road via the infamous Iron Bridge with its tight bend, around a roundabout and back. Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran usually gave you three minutes to do it. If you got back first, you and that bird would hook up for the weekend.

The Riots

Over the Whitsun weekend (May 18 and 19, 1964), thousands of mods descended upon Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton to find that an inordinately large number of rockers had made the same holiday plans. Within a short time, marauding gangs of mods and rockers were openly fighting, often using pieces of deckchairs. The worst violence was at Brighton, where fights lasted two days and moved along the coast to Hastings and back. A small number of rockers were isolated on Brighton beach where they – despite being protected by police – were overwhelmed and assaulted by mods.

Newspaper editorials fanned the flames of hysteria, such as a Birmingham Post editorial in May 1964, which warned that mods and rockers were “internal enemies” in the UK who would “bring about disintegration of a nation’s character”. The magazine Police Review argued that the mods and rockers’ purported lack of respect for law and order could cause violence to “surge and flame like a forest fire.”

Given our current culture of Knockout Games, sexting and heroin use, it’s kind of fun to see a bunch of dudes in suits and ties beating the crap out of each other, while riding around on vintage bikes and scooters.