Pete Townshend came into my sights this week by way of his appearance on Radio 4 (Baroque and Roll: Townshend on Purcell, 27/10/09) in which he discussed the influence of Purcell on his music. Such talk was notably absent from the 2007 film, Amazing Journey, a biopic of the band which I viewed on Sunday, though Townshend's penchant for an erudition teetering dangerously on the edge of pretension ('John [Entwhistle] and Keith [Moon] were geniuses and I was verging on it') was consistent. Amazing Journey plots the colourful history of The Who from their foundation as The Detroits and The High Numbers through to an elder statesman-style reconciliation, (between Roger Daltrey and Townshend, the only two extant members of the original band), which included a species of demythifying, faux candid profanity, that we might expect. According to the film, Daltrey supported Townshend throughout his trial by the media following his arrest for allegedly viewing child pornography. Clearly Townshend's appearance on Radio 4 heralds a prodigal return to respectability; his time spent as a media untouchable has been duly served.
The documented history of The Who would be a good choice for a time capsule information pack and a future needing to comprehend the course of popular music from the early 1960s to the late 1970s.
As The High Numbers playing Detroit soul to an Ivy League-
emulating audience of young Mods, the group looked, sounded and felt as exciting as the phenomenon of small club/pop group/dancing audience ever gets. The astonishingly clear and well-edited footage of a performance at The Railway Hotel, Wealdstone in 1964, captured by Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, who subsequently managed the band as The Who, is here:
The Who's first single, 'I Can't Explain', [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uFcPjILC7k ] was one of the best pop singles ever created, in my opinion, and a fine example of Townshend's perfectly tuned, introverted lyrics: 'Can't explain/ I think it's love/
Try to say it to you/ When I feel blue'. The fumbling, introspective, lovers' melancholy of the fledgling, adult male was never better expressed. Couple that with the staccato chop of dampened guitar chord and the enfant terrible expressiveness of Moon's drumming and you have the best of early '60s guitar band vitality bubble-wrapped. Further, there's the beautifully concise guitar solo with the unmistakeable Rickenbacker's (12-string?) harmonic overtones in the middle.The Who were, arguably, always more exciting, energetic and expressive of a generation's disengagement from establishment values than The Beatles, or even The Rolling Stones - and certainly The Kinks, though 'You Really Got Me' has a similar energy, musically. 'My Generation' became an anthem of youth culture's imagined disjuncture with all that had gone before. Daltrey's stuttered, rhetorical question, a thinly disguised expletive, 'Why don't you all f-f-fade away?', spat out amphetamine-fuelled contempt. Townshend's windmill, power-chord guitar playing, Entwhistle's high-held, top-end tone, lead-style bass and Moon's overhand, explosive engagement are perfectly married in an expression of magnificent malcontent. A pent-up anger about the 'values' espoused by parents and rammed down the throats of their young is finally and succinctly exporated. This song gave a name for the first time to a shared desire to break free from a miasma of greyness, austerity and deference to the travails of Second World War survivors; it also provided the momentum for anti-heroic reinvention.
Townshend explains in the film that an atmosphere of silence about 'the war' prevailed during his youth in the late '40s and early '50s in which all discussion on the topic was taboo. Yet the consequences of the war and the ideological imperatives of post-war rebuilding were all too apparent. It was down to this 'generation' and their technological inheritance to create a bright, new future on the back of the effort of the wireless generation, those conscripts to armies and factories. A potent emotional ambivalence, a mixture of instinctive love (I can't explain) and implicit resentment (I can't explain) for the privileges of a youth who would inherit an earth unbound by austerity and servile duty thus informed the necessarily inexplicable, regenerative atmosphere of the 1950s. Like Beckett's 'accursed progenitors' , a shell-shocked legion of parents had given birth to a gaggle of emergent aliens like Midwich Cuckoos in the nest. A generation 'gap' had arisen by way of a baby-boom birthing cauldron, an amniotic soup of complex expectation and ineluctable struggle.
The Mods were in self-styled opposition to a blanket of conformity and the projects of fathers and mothers who had inexplicably suffered in ways that were necessarily acknowledged at the same time as they were guiltily resented. A step on from Osborne's angry, young men,
a working class youth of the '60s exploited both individualism and solidarity by way of technological advance which included Lambrettas and Vespas, Dansettes and 45s, ITV and Ready, Steady, Go. For the budding musician there was Boosey and Hawkes, the Selmer mail-order catalogue and the possibility of a 'Hire Purchase Agreement' or 'HP' as everyone called it. 'Escape' was a keyword and one that became increasingly deployed as explanation in a similarly emergent jargon of pop psychology. The lack of respect for prevailing values and 'standards' existed both within a traditional cycle of supercession and within a new found land of snook-cocking postures of indifference. If the burden was on the kids, the kids weren't having it; 'The kids are alright'. Though the latter song, like 'Substitute', bears witness to a complex renegotiation of identity and gender roles which exceeds the slogan-like mantra of an 'anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose' sentiment.The matter of war as backdrop, (reinforced by war comics and TV history programmes), as 'Cold' and deferred, and as it composed the increasingly implacable distance between parents and offspring became a repressed needing return. Battles were displaced and enacted on Brighton beach and other such loci of leisured conformity and promenade. Whilst the Mods adopted fashion and make-up, their counterpart, the Rockers, or Greasers as they were later known, represented a uniform resistance to such gender slippage and coquettry. As depicted in the Franc Roddam-directed film, Quadrophenia (1979), (part-written by Townshend), the Rockers appeared to represent some stuff that was good about an existing culture and worth hanging on to. The scene in which Jimmy Cooper (Phil Daniels) is helped by his erstwhile mate, Kevin (Ray Winstone), to fix his scooter conveys the idea that Rockers and their
hands-on approach to machines and a seemingly less agitated sensitivity to the matter of disinheritance constituted a more moderate relationship with existing values. Kevin's willingness to open a toolbox and help a mate resonates, not unsympathetically, with the ethos of 'Practical Handyman'. The Rocker is symbolically aligned with what is worthy and good about fixing things: repair and sustain. After all, their fathers had ridden and loved motorbikes. Scooters were somehow effeminate and accessorising; they weren't about speed and engineering. Many of the 'ton-up boys', however, became Hell's Angels as the decade wore on, and the Mods evolved into Hippie emulators or 'Freaks'; both sides of the debate came increasingly under the influence of psychedelic drugs.'Drugs' found a new life in the 60s. At the beginning of the decade there were 'pills' or 'blues', i.e. amphetamines, predominantly the 'slimming pill', dexedrine. Their use and their facility to induce paranoia and increase anxiety are well depicted in Quadrophenia. The desire for escape and its mediation by the press, the pop-psychologising 'escapism', constituted the only available explanations for an increasingly febrile reaction to a perceived politics of constraint. An atmosphere of non-conformism developed into an irrevocable rift with the apparently hypocritical values of an outmoded system by way of the psychedelic drugs, Marijuana and LSD, which were increasingly available as the decade went on. The doors of perception, the gates of heaven and hell, were flung open and, from the perspective of the new explorers of an altered mind, the 'straights' were viewed as the wicked gatekeepers or guardians. 'Far out' was considered desirable and 'out of sight' of 'normal' people or everyone who hadn't yet 'turned on'. The ambiguous territory of sharing a platform of power with an arrière garde politics positioned pop bands in an entirely novel position. The words of politicians were no longer to be trusted following national scandals like the Profumo and Poulson affairs. Meanwhile, the words of pop songs became the messages and anthems of a new aestheticism. The politicians of this new aestheticism were the rock stars; their platforms were the stages at rock concerts.
Late '60s and early '70s footage of The Who performing rock 'opera', Tommy, for example, demonstrates a spectacular transcendence from the solidarity of a shared spikiness to a kind of magical realist spectacle: a big production number. The clothes are bad, particularly Daltrey's Buffalo Bill jacket over a bare chest, and the music had reached a level of frenzied excess in which the guitar-smashing seemed less art-house anarchy, more wanton, token and pointless; even more so than it once did to the uncomprehending bystanders at the small clubs who could only dream of owning a decent Telecaster, let alone smashing it up. 'We won't get fooled again', though an epic aspiration, is undercut by the glitzy cheese of stadium rock. The arrival of punk, as has often been observed, was a necessary palliative: a rootsiness, albeit already partially commodified, of which The Who had been a model. In an interview with Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols in Amazing Journey, Jones describes how he and Paul Cook happened on Pete Townshend in a Camden pub in the late '70s. Apparently Townshend was pissed and asking 'who are you?' incessantly. Unwittingly, he had already handed on the baton.
The Who produced some great music throughout the '60s and '70s and the above seems less than generous in that regard. However, for an index of the evolution of pop music from American influence to home-grown hybrid to psychedelic impro romp to pretentious 'rock', The Who's career is paradigmatic. Then again, there are currents which are unique to the Mod sensibility or to its carnivalesque other as explored in songs like 'Happy Jack' or 'Bell Boy'. Comparable material caricaturing the harmless, because unwitting, emerged by way of The Small Faces and The Kinks. The cue to reconstitute Englishness by way of quasi-nostalgic portraiture perhaps came by way of The Beatles and the urge for a pop act of remembrance. The unlikely amalgam of comic grotesque and psychedelic fuelled the Magical Mystery Tour bus and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club with its parade of benign eccentrics, like so many aunts and uncles in the hinterland of the front-line conflict of parent/child relations.
Townshend was clearly a great writer and the mastermind within The Who, but such a band could not have existed without the phenomenal coincidence of musicians who were drawn to its original, energetic constitution.
So, what of Pete Townshend on the influence of Purcell? Everyone is prone to historic revisionism, but Townshend impressed with his account of hearing Purcell as a young man. It emerged that he commanded a much grander vision of his music and career than I had formerly understood; that he knows how music works and knows how to talk about it. The most telling remark, however, was on the topic of how he had been moved to tears by Purcell's sensibility and rendering of Englishness: its melancholy and its tendency to tragic resolution. The young man who wrote 'the things they do look awful c-c-cold/ I hope I die before I get old' has survived and is possibly still evaluating his own emotional ambivalence to growing up within the context of a post-War Britain which prompted him to wear a Union Jack jacket or sport an RAF insignia on the back of a parka.
