The clothes were ditched even before they fell apart which would rarely be more than

The clothes were ditched even before they fell apart, which would rarely be more than a few weeks unless you were one of those who, like the 15-year-old Mark Feld, featured in the pages of Town magazine in 1962 (and later to re-emerge as Marc Bolan), ordered suits from Mr Bilgorri of Bishopsgate - in which case you probably wore them for a couple of weeks longer. Everybody has a reason for joining their adolescent tribe, and, looking back, I guess that Camus must have provided mine.Meursault, of course, killed an Arab in Camus's story in an act of dispassionate racism that might, at a stretch, provide a link with the meaningless violence of the scooter-borne mods and the more clearly motivated version enacted by their direct successors, the skinheads and suedeheads who provided the foot soldiers for various putrid little neo-Nazi mobs.But no one spent much time wondering what it all meant There were clothes and music to worry about. Maybe it was no coincidence that in 1961 Penguin published the first paperback edition of l'Etranger; it was a set book for those sitting O-level French the following year, and few compulsory texts can have exerted such a powerful effect on the imaginations of a generation of students. Yet for others, it was also impeccably cut mohair suits in sober hues, andthe perfect button-down shirt, and French New-Wave movies, and Miles Davis, and dope bought from the Jamaican boys who fringed the crowd.Whether the Mods were aware of it or not, they adopted the pose of refined alienation proposed in 1942 by Meursault, the protagonist of Camus's l'Etranger, and refined 17 years later by Alain Delon's portrayal of the amoral Tom Ripley in Rene Clement's Plein Soleil. It was clothes and music, of course, but it was also about a shift of attitude It was both exclusive and inclusive. It was kids in fur-hooded parkas on Vespas with racoon tails on the dummy aerials, buzzing down to the coast for a Bank Holiday rumble with a bunch of blues and bombers in one pocket and a hammer in the other. There are no prizes, as you stroll around the cappuccino-culture streets of today's Soho, looking at kids with neat razor-cuts and clean-line clothes, for guessing who won.Mod culture was rather more various than subsequent revivals and analyses might suggest.

Rockers were the Ace Cafe on the North Circular, with Eddie Cochran on the jukebox; Mods were the Scene Club in Ham Yard, where a young, would- be pop manager called Peter Meaden took his band, The High Numbers, later renamed The Who, to hear the DJ, Guy Stevens, play Derek Martin's "Daddy Rolling Stone" and Inez and Charlie Foxx's "Mockingbird". Mods, "modernists", were the future: neat, clean, cool, and aspiring to an air of affluence and Continental sophistication. Among the suggestions were Bills to outlaw the unauthorised possession of purple hearts, to suspend the driving licences of offenders, and, mysteriously, to crack down on obscene publications.Rockers, with their greased-up hair and motorcycle leathers, represented a thorough commitment to the past - albeit a past that dated back barely a decade to Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones and the prototype rock'n'roll of Elvis's Sun records. Police reinforcements from other Essex towns raced to the shattered resort, where fearful residents had locked themselves indoors. By last night, after a day of riots and battles with police, 97 of them had been arrested."By Whitsun, the riots had spread to Southend, Bournemouth, Brighton and Margate, where two people were stabbed and a magistrate described the perpetrators of the affray as "little sawdust Caesars". The prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, asked his home secretary, Henry Brooke, whether there was anything that could be done. A desperate SOS went out from police at Clacton, Essex, as leather-jacketed youths and girls attacked people in the streets, turned over parked cars, broke into beach huts, smashed windows, and fought with rival gangs.

But the hundreds of kids who confronted each other at an Essex seaside resort over the Easter weekend of 1964 were inaugurating an inter-tribal ritual that was to take its place among the defining phenomena of mid-Sixties Britain."The Wild Ones invaded a seaside town yesterday," The Daily Mirror gasped on its front page the next day, "1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring, rampaging teenagers on scooters and motorcycles. There had been sporadic outbreaks of street violence in Britain since the war - between gangs of razor-toting south-London Teddy boys in the early-Fifties, between white racists and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the Notting Hill and Nottingham race riots of 1958, and between black-shirted Mosleyites and anti-Fascists in 1962. Its existence was more important than its output.Two days later, the Easter Monday tranquillity of the Clacton seafront was disturbed by running battles between gangs of Mods and Rockers. Caroline not only played better music; its illegitimacy made it feel as though it really belonged to its listeners. On Easter Saturday, 28 March 1964, Radio Caroline began transmitting pop music from a ship in the North Sea, feeding an appetite starved on the one hand by the BBC's Light Programme, which treated pop with a Reithian loftiness, and on the other by the affectless, pay-for-play pabulum of Radio Luxembourg, the despised "Fabulous 208", which made you twiddle your thumbs through a dozen Helen Shapiros or Frank Ifields for every Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs. And it happened with astonishing, exhilarating speed.The fun was in the details, in the things that could be controlled, such as the depth of a pocket flap. But two of the bigger and more generally consequential things took place over the Easter weekend 35 years ago.

The effect was a cliche of respectability, and gentlemanliness of a kind that died with the acting of Richard Todd.He produced a card and then opened a portfolio and displayed some sheets of cartridge paper. A few pretty watercolours of houses, nicely sketched; he was a house-painter, I now saw, in the sense that he painted pictures of houses.But why our house? He said because it was interesting and attractive, of an age and style that he enjoyed painting.Now I like our house It is perfectly fine One in a long street of similar houses. Red brick at the front, cheaper yellow London stock at the back Bay windows to the ground and first floors Built 1890. The towns and cities of England have terraces and terraces of them, marching off the main roads of middle-ranking Victorian suburbs and once occupied by the families of foremen and senior clerks, handily placed for the tram. I imagine that plans for them could once be bought off-the-shelf by speculative builders. But "interesting" would not be a word I would use."You can't really think this house is interesting," I said."Oh yes", he said "very interesting and very attractive I'd love to paint it."His pitch was this. He would take some snaps and return in a few weeks with a finished picture If I did not like it, no money need change hands.

If I did like it, the price would be pounds 100 plus VAT.That seemed a fair proposition and we shook hands, mainly because he seemed the kind of man with whom one shook hands, but after he had gone I began to worry that I had become, or was about to become, the victim of a scam He had my name, address and telephone number. I imagined an empty house in the Easter holidays, a telephone ringing and ringing to ascertain our absence, a jemmy at midnight working a rear window loose.All paranoia. He turned up at the door again last week, again in his check suit and silk waistcoat, with a watercolour of our house, lighter and pinker than in reality but true enough to its form, and pretty Of course, I paid. Picture apart, it was worth it just to hear a little of his remarkable story.His name is Peter Michael and he earns his living by walking the streets of London and knocking on doors and subsequently knocking out paintings of houses. He is, so far as he knows, the only practitioner of this craft in Britain; but he has definitely hit on something The British love property ("an Englishman's home is.. " and so on). Compared with Europeans, they live in an eclectic mixture of architectural styles, each with its devotees. Why would they not want a picture of what they lavish so much money on, and of what, however humdrum, they can be so intensely proud?By divining this truth about the owner-occupier, Michael has made a career and re- invented a tradition that belongs to the era of Gainsborough and Lord and Lady X sitting proudly before their country seat The money is good.