The album, released many years after Mod culture had been dead and buried, with its motifs borrowed/quoted from Debussy's La Mer and the theme of nostalgia for the band's younger selves confirmed that the Who had indeed given up the idea of dying before they got old.
The film, however, came out at the peak of Mod revivalism in 1979 - which was handy when it came to recruiting extras as well as audiences - and in the wake of more recent outbreaks of youth-culture tribal violence during ther punk era. It remains one of the all-time great movies for playing "spot the anachronism", with The Jam and Motorhead logos in evidence during the riot scenes, Brighton Marina (built mid-1970s) in the background and the director's desperate attempts to keep the Mark IV Cortinas in the background out of focus during the opening shots of Jimmy riding down the Seven Sisters Road. Phil Daniels plays Jimmy as an incoherent, gibbering mess who is not so much misunderstood as incomprehensible; the same character twenty years on and crossed with an Alexei Sayle monologue gets recycled on the voiceover for Blur's Parklife. The film is also a reminder that Sting was once considered cool, and punk princess/Teletubbies voice Toyah Wilcox gets a cameo role as well, as the girl that Jimmy should have been with all along instead of Leslie Ashe (later of Men Behaving Badly).