Hi and welcome back to our ongoing exploration of the Squire songs that specifically celebrate mod culture! Last time, we looked at "It's a Mod Mod World" and its take on style and identity. This week, we're diving into another mod focused song - “Noonday Underground!” This song might seem like a simple set filler at first listen, but it carries deeper connections to both the original '60s mod scene and our own revival movement.
While the music was written specifically as an easy danceable song, with a triplet intro that nods to the Beatles cover of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles “You Really Got A Hold On Me”, the lyric is a much deeper dive into the mod imagary. When I wrote "Noonday Underground", the title came directly from Tom Wolfe's chapter in The Pump House Gang, published in 1968. His brilliant piece of writing captured London's hidden youth culture of the 1960s, particularly its daytime club scene. Reading about these young people who would disappear into basement clubs at noon, I was immediately drawn to how perfectly he captured this secret world that existed in plain sight.
The song itself is built on a simple 12-bar structure, but like the culture it describes, there's more beneath the surface. Wolfe's chapter is an incisive look at London's 1960s youth culture, particularly its daytime club scene and self-styled rebellion rooted in appearances, exclusivity, and irony. His description of kids who "don't even know what time it is... Time is not part of it. They're down there, listening to records, slouching in vinyl banquettes, dancing in some desultory way..." perfectly captured not only how I felt at the time, drawn to a culture that was aspirational yet secretive, but also embodied the spirit I were trying to evoke in the songs from the time, describing a ‘pop art’ world by mixing up 1960s references with the current cultural moment of feeling cut off and rejected by the mainstream world around us. I wasn't angry about it though - I wanted to create something that continued the mod narrative, but more sophisticated, in our own image.
Every line is loaded with codes and references that connect the mod revival to the original 1960s movement. When we sing about "White socks, Loafers, Sta-Prest, and Button downs," we're not just listing clothes – we're describing a uniform that marks belonging. While Squire were best known in the early days for our boating blazers, beneath the jackets our look was almost regimental: white socks, loafers, Sta-Prest trousers, and button-down shirts - starched stiff! Just as Wolfe wrote about how London's underground youth used fashion as both armour and identity, these details mattered.
What struck me most was how that chapter captured that sense of living in two worlds at once. He opens with this perfect observation: "At noon on a sunny day in London in the summer of 1966, all these young people are underground... literally." Our lyrics "Rockin' and reeling at the Noonday Underground" echo that same spirit – the thrill of being somewhere you're not supposed to be, at a time when you're supposed to be somewhere else.
The contradiction in both the title and concept fascinated me – an underground scene happening in broad daylight. It reminded me of reading about places like The Scene Club, The Flamingo and countless other clubs from the 1960s that had looked like nothing from the photos of the outside, but held entire worlds within. Just as Wolfe wrote about these spaces existing parallel to ordinary life, we would later experience our own version with our early concerts. There's something special about walking out of a sweaty, pulsing venue into the afternoon sun, still carrying that underground energy with you- just as we experienced with the Bridge House Mods Mayday all dayer in May 1979.
"Everybody's going to the best Mod club in town" captures that feeling of being part of something exclusive yet welcoming, hidden yet magnetic. Mods weren't just passive consumers of music; they were tastemakers, actively shaping trends by seeking out obscure imports, introducing new dance styles, and setting the agenda for what was in and out. From venues like The Scene and The Flamingo in London to basement bars tucked away from prying eyes, Mods curated their own world where American R&B, soul, and jazz reigned supreme.
While the song was written in 1979, it wasn't until 1982 that we finally had our own literal Noonday Underground to share. The Beat Route club in Greek Street, Soho, W1, just five minutes from Carnaby Street, wasn't the direct inspiration for the song, but it became a real-world reflection of its themes – a space where Mods could immerse themselves in the continuation of that Soho secret club culture that had survived since the 1960s, and earlier. We played matinee shows there on Saturday afternoons to the new 1980s mod cohort - a real noonday underground!
The line "We don't get old we just get updated" came from thinking about how movements evolve and survive. This is one of the key paradoxes of the Mod movement - Mods positioned themselves as outsiders, yet their aesthetic and tastes heavily influenced mainstream fashion and music. Their world was exclusive, yet its impact became visible everywhere. The Mod ideal wasn't about stagnation but evolution—constantly refining, improving, and staying ahead of the curve. When people accused us of being "just a mod revival," they missed the point – we weren't trying to replicate the past, but to update it, to make it our own. The Noonday Underground chapter underscored my own feeling about the mod revival, that scenes aren't static; they're living things that grow and change while keeping their core identity.
"My friends and I we get pretty violent / When people say we're just a mod revival" wasn't about actual violence – it was about that fierce pride in belonging to something that outsiders might dismiss. Writing "Well I know a girl she's not complicated" and the scene of the girl "doing the mashed potato" was a way of populating this world with real characters, just as Wolfe wrote about specific characters he'd observed. These weren't abstract ideas about youth culture – I wanted to capture actual moments I'd witnessed - not some abstract idea about youth culture, but real faces in real places, people I knew who were carving out their own space in the scene.
Looking back, what connects the song to Wolfe's writing most strongly is that sense of documenting something special and fleeting – those moments when ordinary spaces become extraordinary through the sheer force of youth, style, and rebellion. Every time we played those matinee shows, we were adding our own chapter to that story, creating our own noonday underground for a new generation.
The magic of these underground scenes, whether in the '60s London or our own mod revival era, is that they're always there if you know where to look. Behind anonymous doors, down narrow stairs, in places that transform from mundane to magical when the right people gather – that's where you'll find the noonday underground, still rocking and reeling after all these years.
All the best from Squire