There is plenty of footage featuring clips from mod (or mod-related) bands and artists, although sometimes it's not easy to find this material in the average video store (at least in the USA). For original 1960s artists, the Ready Steady Go series and parts of The History of Rock'n'Roll contain fairly good coverage of soul/R&B acts.

For the more popular artists there are several interesting tapes and discs. The Who's Who's Better, Who's Best is possibly the most intriguing due to actual High Numbers period footage, though you'll also have to put up with the stadium-rock material when the color clips begin. For Paul Weller/Style Council/The Jam the essential items are Video Snap!, The Video Adventures Of The Style Council, and Highlights And Hangups. A Small Faces compilation (Small Faces: Big Hits) with limited clips and TV appearances also exists.

On a more contemporary note, the cover (though not much of the contents, unfortunately) of Blur's 1993 Starshaped video compilation is a rather stunning use of mod imagery. There are also a large number of second-generation ska bands available on video, The Specials' On Film and the Dance Craze compilation being the most interesting in terms of the clothes and music on display.

Absolute Beginners (1986) is a musical adaptation of Colin Macinnes's novel of the same name. A commercial flop, it's nevertheless worth watching (especially if you can't get the book) since the characters and settings have been directly extracted from the 1950s early-mod period.

Hairspray (1988) is a John Waters nostalgia satire about the integration of a TV teen dance program in 1962 Baltimore. The rich sound track mixes chestnuts and deservedly unearthed old soul tracks as it follows a bubble-headed series of teenage crises and crushes, alternating with historically accurate choreography of such forgotten dances as The Madison and The Roach. Plenty of modern-day celebs are on view (Pia Zadora and Ric Ocasek as beatniks, TV host Ricki Lake as an impossibly overweight dancing sensation, and so on).

By far the easiest and quickest introduction for neophytes to mod culture, the film Quadrophenia (1979, 115 minutes) was produced by Who Films and set against the music from a 1974 Who double-concept album. Single-handedly it gave the late 70s British mod revival a rallying point as well as a certain degree of credibility.

Directed by Franc Roddam, the film is a reasonably faithful recreation of the early to mid-sixties mod period, portraying the acutely image-conscious lifestyle and underlying mood of frustration and working class anger of British youth at that time-an anger which concludes in a typically vicious Brighton mod vs. rocker battle in the tradition of the 1964/65 seaside clashes.