QUADROPHENIA was one of those excesses of the seventies which, by rights, should have died with the decade.

The Who found their second rock opera too unwieldy for complete live performance, and only a couple of the magnum opus’s 17 songs qualified for a place in their greatest hits.

Yet Franc Roddam’s superb 1979 film of the work kept the story alive in people’s minds. And now, 23 years after its conception, with Tommy also well and truly revived and all things Brit-poppy back on the agenda, Quadrophenia’s time is here. And, against all the odds, it has proved a triumph.

With cameo performances by Billy Idol and P J Proby, the tale was told partly in song and partly in the filmed narrative of its central character, Jimmy the mod. It is a rites of passage story of one speed-fuelled glorious summer of rocker-bashing as Jimmy fights the inevitability of adulthood.

Essentially, this was a solo album by Pete Townshend, and it was to him we looked first for the flashes of manic genius which, along with Roger Daltrey’s rippling musculature and the late Keith Moon’s mad eyes, marked The Who out as a slightly dangerous crew.

Townshend certainly had his moments. He gave us some impassioned singing and

furious acoustic guitar bashing on Drowned. And when he donned an electric guitar at the finale and set that windmill right arm in motion, it was possible to imagine just how daunting a figure he must have cut as a young man doing this, and demolishing his guitars into the bargain, in the sixties.

With Daltrey, you don’t need to imagine him as a young man. The 52-year old could pass for someone 20 years younger, and he poses, hollers, and whirls his microphone as he has always done. Quadrophenia may not be packed with hits, but it did hang together as a story worth telling and well-told.

A brass section, the thunderous drumming of Zak Starkey (son of Ringo) and the virtuoso bass playing of John Entwistle — one of rock’s great over-achievers — gave the tale all the dynamic oomph it needed.

The work complete, The Who treated us to some oldies including Won’t Get Fooled Again and Who Are You? There was a sense that, like the Rolling Stones, these men who have spent half a lifetime bickering are still yoked together in a job from which they may never resign.

The question is, which will get them first — the final split or the Zimmer frame?