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the who - quadrophenia - introduction- the story lyrics

i had to go to this psychiatrist every week. every monday. he never really knew what was wrong with me. he said i wasn’t mad or anything he said there’s no such thing as madness. i told him he should try standing in a queue at brentford football ground on a sat+rday morning. i thought it might change his mind. my dad put it another way. he said i changed like the weather. one minute i’d be a tearaway, next minute all soppy and swoony over some bird. schizophrenia, he called it. nutty, my mum called it

it used to be alright at home. my dad would get p+ssеd out of his brain every single night, and whеn the telly finished he’d storm out of the house like a lunatic to get to the eel and pie shop before it closed. he’d come home with ehough for an army. i never liked the eels, just the pie and mash, and the liquor. my friend dave said that eels live on sewage. my dad must be ful of it, he used to eat five bleeding cartons of eels a day. i don’t think he ever twigged i was doing five cartons of leapers every day. each to his own sewage. the rows at home started when i got back from the trouble at brighton. i’d slept on the beach and me suit was ruined. i really cared about my suit, all my clothes, even though my mother said i didn’t care about anything. my mother’s terrible when she’s had a few guinesses. not that she’ll ever settle for a few. as soon as i said i was leaving she started rejoicing like the war had just ended. i was a mountain of paranoia. coming down off leapers isn’t much fun. you can put it off by having more just as you start feeling bad, but it only makes it worse in the end. pills used to make me see things. they used to make me feel great, like tarzan. but i think i saw life the way it was. people couldn’t hide from me when i was leaping. my shrink used to have a sign on his wall to make you laugh. it said that a paranoiac is a person who has some idea what is really going on. that was me on leapers

i p+ssed off after i’d slept off the come+down. i got me suit cleaned at the automat and spent two hours pressing the p+ssing thing. it never did look quite right. i took my parka as well, in case i had to sleep rough. i got a sh+tty couple of nights sleep under hammersmith flyover. there only seems to be about five minutes in the night when there ain’t some flash b+st+rd in a sportscar going round and round with his tyres screaming and a police car bell coming up behind. on the second night i saw the posters going up outside the odeon for a who concert. i’d seen them down at brighton. they were a mad group. well mods liked them. they weren’t exactly mods but mods did like them. they had a drummer who used to play with his arms waving about in the air like a lunatic. the singer was a tough looking bloke with really good clothes. if i hadn’t have seen him near home i would have said his hair was gold. real gold i mean, like gold paint. the guitar player was a skinny geezer with a big nose who twirled his arm like a windmill. he wrote some good songs about mods, but he didn’t quite look like one. the bass player was a laugh. he never did anything. nothing. he used to smile sometimes, but the smile would only last half a second then it would switch off again. my friend dave said he smiled a lot more at his sister, they were engaged i think. his bass sounded like a bleeding vc10

they played tamla stuff and r&b. they could have been perfect if they’d played blue beat as well. i used to know one of them before they got their record in the charts so i went to see them. they were alright. they smashed up so much gear that n0body believed it was real. when they played down the marquee they used real gear. i used to have a bit of bass drum to prove it. after the show i hung around outside waiting for them to come out. when they did they never bl++dy well recogneized me. i shouted and one of them turned around and said “how are you doing?”, like he remembered me. “working?” he said. i hate it when people say that. course i wasn’t working. i was still at f+cking scholl

next day i got a job, as a dustman. now i know why people say “working?” to one another. nine quid for a full weeks filthy work. they stuffed it, i left after two days with two quid in me pocket. two of the blokes there were talking about striking for more money, but most of the geezers there had been working for the council for years. they looked upon it as some sort of church. the mayor as the pope. one bloke has medals for being a war hero and he didn’t have the guts to strike for more pay. they were all clean though, after hours

there’s a part of me that hates people. not the actual people but how useless they are, how stupid. they sit and stew while the whole world gets worse and worse. wars and battles. people dying of starvation. old people dying because their kids have got their own kids and they ain’t got time. that’s what makes me smash things up. my shrink says i ain’t mad. he should see me when i’m p+ssed

i don’t know what kl!cked inside me, but i got fed up with sleeping under the flyover. the weather was terrible for a start. two rainy nights and that was it. i really started fancy going back to brighton. i still had about two hundred leapers left, kept me company. what was really weird was seeing this bird that i really liked, i even had her on the beach at brighton. two in a sleeping back is really cosy until you’re finished. anyway, she was with my mate dave

him! she walked right past me after a dance at the goldhawk. the girl of my best friend and all that. it did me in. it was like the last straw. the real last straw was yet to come. i was so brought down, i smashed me g.s. up in the p+ssing rain. i can’t bear to think about it. i walked to the station down the railway tracks, across the river. i felt like throwing myself in front of a train, but i didn’t. i took about twenty leapers at once, got a first class ticket to brighton and set off to my land of dreams

i did some thinking on the train. at one point i could swear i was floating about in the carriage, looking down at these two city gents. what was weirdest about it was that i could see myself as well. must have been the pills again

brighton is a fantastic place. the sea is so gorgeous you want to jump into it and sink. when i was there last time there were about two thousand mods driving up and down the promenade on scooters. my scooter’s seen the last of brighton bl++dy promenade now, i know that. i felt really anonymous then, sort of like i was in an army. but everyone was a mod. wherever you looked there were mods. some of them were so well dressed it was sickening. levi’s had only come into fashion about a month before and some people had jeans on that looked like they’d been born wearing them. there was this bloke there that seemed to be the ace face. he was dancing one night in the aquarium ballroom and everyone was copying him. he kept doing different dances, but everyone would copy it and the whole place would be dancing a dance that he’d only just made up. that’s power for you. he was really heavy too, though. when the mods collected in brighton, the rockers would turn up too. there were never as many of them, but this geezer once took on two of them at once and beat them. that didn’t usually happen i can tell you

i was in a crowd of kids once chasing three rockers down brighton pier. as it seemed they were going to get caught anyway they stopped and turned to meet their fate. all hundred of these kids i was with stopped dead. i was the first to stop, but the rest ran, so i had to follow. there’s nothing uglier than a rocker. this ace face geezer wouldn’t have run. he smashed the glass doors of his hotel too. he was terrific. he had a sawn+off shotgun under his jacket and he’d be kicking at plate glass and he still looked like he was fred astaire reborn
quite funny, i met him earlier today. he ended up working at the same hotel. but he wasn’t the manager
i never ever felt like i blasphemed. you know, in an old fashioned sense. but i was in a pretty blasphemous mood when i left for brighton. brighton cheered me up. but then it let me down. me had me let down, rock had let me down, women had let me down, work wasn’t worth the effort, school isn’t worth mentioning. but i never ever thought i’d feel let down by beeing a mod. i pinched this boat, first time i’d ever been on a boat at sea.i had another few leapers to keep from coming down and i felt a bit bravado. so i headed for this rock out off the coast. it was sticking up very jagged, but very peaceful. i didn’t know then what i was up to, but i know now

schizophrenic! what a laugh. it must be alright to be plain ordinary mad. about halfway over i took a swallow of this gilbeys gin i’d bought. booze never did help me much though. on the boat it did me right in, specially on top of the pills and the come+down. anyway, the sound of the engine turned into this drone, then the drone turned into a sound like pianos or something.like heavenly choirs or orchestras tuning up. it was really an incredible sound. like the sort of noise you’d expect to hear in heaven, if there is such a place. i pinched myself and i wasn’t really drunk anymore. i was floating. i felt really happy. i must have looked bl++dy stupid as it happens. i was waving my gilbeys around in the air and singing in tune with the engine. the sound got better and better, i was nearly delirious when i got to the rock. i switched off the engine and jumped onto it. when the engine stopped, so did the music. and when that beautiful music stopped, i remembered the come+down i had, i felt sick from the booze, the sea was splashing all over the place and there was thunder in the distance. i remembered why i’d come to this b+st+rd rock

so that’s why i’m here, the bleeding boat drifted off and i’m stuck here in the p+ssing rain with my life flashing before me. only it isn’t flashing, it’s crawling. slowly. now it’s just the bare bones of what i am
a tough guy, a helpless dancer
a romantic, is it me for a moment?
a bl++dy lunatic, i’ll even carry your bags
a beggar, a hypocrite, love reign over me
schizophrenic? i’m bleeding quadrophenic

(no one in this story is meant to represent anyone either living or dead, particularly not the mum and dad. our mums and dads are all very nice and live in bungalows which we bought for them in the outer hebrides.)

- the who lyrics

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