The Questors Theatre in Ealing is a modest brick and glass affair tucked away behind the main shopping thoroughfare. It’s a gentle stroll from what was once Ealing art school and the house in Sunnyside Road where Pete Townshend conducted his earliest drug experiments. The art school is now the University of West London, and the former student drug den an elegant town house with an immaculate front garden.
It is a crisp Sunday afternoon on 16 February 2014, and four hundred people have arrived to hear Pete Townshend discuss his life and career as part of the Ealing Music and Film Festival. The man tasked with interviewing Townshend is a familiar face, Tony Palmer, now an esteemed film director, but in the mid-1960s the Observer’s pop critic and a staunch advocate of The Who’s music.
Townshend lopes onstage, wearing a smart suit and a hangdog expression. ‘Ah, back on duty,’ he says, with a Tony Hancock-style comedy sigh. Yet with very little direction from Palmer, Townshend spends the next sixty minutes talking about The Who and the men he describes as ‘real stars in their own right’, the now deceased Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.
As the conversation wears on, Townshend makes self-deprecating asides and describes himself as ‘a big-nosed bastard’. But he also silences the room with his admission that ‘there are times when I wake up feeling incredibly depressed and want to commit suicide’. At one point he bellows the words ‘fuck all of you!’ so loudly that a theatre usher beside me gasps. Yet as Townshend explains afterwards: ‘That explosion of swearing was to show you that I’m still as interesting as I was when I was younger.’
The past casts its spell over Townshend and The Who in 2014, just as it always did. In the 1960s they came of age, absorbing and expressing the restlessness of the time in a way that ultimately propelled them to the triumph of Tommy. The 1970s would present the band and their contemporaries with a new challenge: how to survive. On 10 April 1970, Paul McCartney announced that he was leaving The Beatles. By the end of the year the group had officially broken up. They had stopped touring four years earlier but had continued to set the agenda in the studio. For Townshend, their split was about more than just the music.
‘The Beatles never said that they would promise anything,’ Townshend explained. ‘But we had expected them to come up with some answer that would have a political and social consequence for us all – and it didn’t happen.’ There was now a void to be filled: ‘Suddenly, they broke up, and you were left with The Who, The Kinks, the Rolling Stones …’
In 1964, The Kinks had been the inspiration for The Who’s emotionally charged debut single, ‘I Can’t Explain’. Later on, Townshend had praised 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, their songwriter Ray Davies’ portrait of a lost England, telling journalists that Davies should be appointed the nation’s poet laureate. The Kinks initially wowed America, but by the mid-1970s their fractious relationship with each other and Davies’ growing discontents had slowed their progress.
In contrast, no amount of in-fighting, drug abuse and even death could derail the Rolling Stones. With Brian Jones’ replacement, gifted guitarist Mick Taylor, in the fold, the Stones, like The Who, were soon reconfiguring themselves for the decade ahead. Unlike The Who, the Stones would never fully abandon the rhythm and blues that had served them so well in the 1960s. The music remained the same. It was just that the amps, the lights, the stage and Mick Jagger’s persona became bigger.
Indeed, size was to be one of the dominant themes of the new decade: bigger concepts, bigger shows, bigger venues and, inevitably, bigger money. In the studio, the dramatic approach The Who first used on Tommy would become the model for 1970s anthems such as ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O’Riley’. These were big songs for the big audiences The Who routinely played to from 1971 onwards. Yet their inspiration came from the 1960s and even earlier.
‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ was the sound of Townshend, the 1970s rock star, railing at his peer group’s failure to right the social and political wrongs committed by the previous generation. ‘Baba O’Riley’ addressed the unease he’d felt about the drugs and self-destruction of the 1960s; the ‘teenage wasteland’ he’d witnessed at Woodstock.
There were echoes of Roy Ascott’s revolutionary groundcourse, Bertrand Russell’s impassioned speech at the Aldermaston march, and Meher Baba’s philosophy in these songs. Townshend worked strenuously to convey his message. But onstage, simply raising his right arm and bringing it down on to his guitar, like a windmill’s sail, was invariably enough to win over a stadium. Inevitably, in all that excitement, the message was forgotten. ‘One windmill and I’ve got a thousand people in my pocket,’ he admitted.
Three years after Tommy, the Who released Quadrophenia, an even more ambitious work that told the semi-autobiographical tale of a mod’s coming of age in the early 1960s. It addressed Townshend’s obsession with post-war English youth culture more explicitly than anything The Who had done before. But in 1972 Quadrophenia was already a work of history. For The Who what was once an audience of a hundred mods at the Railway Hotel in 1964 had become thousands at Charlton Athletic football stadium by 1974, all waiting for Townshend to smash his guitar. However hard The Who worked to bridge the gap between them and their followers, the intimate connection Townshend had with his audience in the 1960s, became much harder to sustain.
At the Questors Theatre in 2014, Townshend discussed The Who’s plans for a tour to mark their fiftieth anniversary. It would be their last he insisted. The Who had said that before, in 1982, when the remaining band members were in their thirties; Townshend will turn seventy in 2015 and Daltrey seventy-one.
Their bandmates and mentors hadn’t survived the journey with them. Keith Moon died on 7 September 1978, his body having buckled under the drugs and alcohol he’d been pouring into it since the early sixties. In the end, it was an overdose of clomethiazole, a sedative prescribed to alleviate the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, that killed him. Even in death, Moon maintained a complex relationship with the truth. A clerical error on his death certificate gave his birth year as 1945. Moon was born in 1946, but had spent his adult life telling his bandmates and interviewers he was a year younger. By the end, nobody was quite sure what to believe.
Moon’s early demise meant that he would remain forever frozen in time: the permanently grinning, gurning man-child flailing away at the drums on Ready Steady Go!. His name remains a byword for rock ’n’ roll excess, but for Roger Daltrey the public image of ‘Moon the Loon’ is misleading: ‘Keith was a Shakespearean character, a troubled man,’ he said. ‘He was a genius on the drums, but the other side of his character was incredibly destructive.’
Moon’s closest friend in the band, John Entwistle, would remain with The Who until his own death. He was there when they hastily reconvened with Moon’s replacement, former Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones, just seven months after Moon’s death, and he was there again each time they reunited in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite his indomitable public persona, at the time of his death Entwistle was battling alcohol and cocaine addictions, and living beyond his means.
Home for The Who’s bass player was a seventeen-bedroom mansion in the Cotswolds, which he shared with an extensive collection of medieval suits of armour and stuffed fish. ‘I have to keep working with The Who if I want to maintain my ridiculous lifestyle,’ he admitted. In his final years, he was forced to sell off his guitars to make money whenever The Who weren’t working.
After an evening spent drinking and taking cocaine, Entwistle passed away on 27 June 2002, in a Las Vegas hotel suite. The groupie he had gone to bed with woke up to find him dead. Entwistle was about to start another Who tour, which had been organised to help him pay off his considerable debts. ‘John had a wonderful wit and a very dark sense of humour, and I miss him,’ said Daltrey in 2014. ‘But he had his insecurities, partly because he was always overshadowed by Pete and I. He died a very rock ’n’ roll death.’
Shortly before The Who’s victorious raid on the world’s opera houses in 1970, Kit Lambert began adding heroin to his daily drug cocktail. With the onset of addiction, his control of The Who and Track Records started slipping away. By the early 1970s, Chris Stamp had also lost himself in what he later called ‘the neurotic drug culture’ of the era.
Before long, even Townshend could no longer ignore the financial chaos that surrounded The Who, and was forced to turn his back on the men who’d helped make him one of the world’s most famous songwriters. In 1971, Stamp’s childhood friend Bill Curbishley took a job at Track Records. Curbishley entered the organisation with the clearest of heads while everyone else appeared to be losing theirs. ‘Kit and Chris were totally out to lunch, and Bill was very much at lunch,’ points out John Fenton. ‘I could see that Bill was a man with a mission.’ Five years after Curbishley’s arrival at Track, he was officially appointed The Who’s manager; a position he continues to hold today.
In the end, Kit Lambert lived up to his assertion that the ultimate triumph in life was to create what he called ‘a magnificent disaster’. Track Records had become that disaster, and the once-magnificent label closed down, leaving behind a murky trail of debts and missing royalties that some of their former artists would still be chasing in the twenty-first century.
Chris Stamp’s story would have a happier ending. Stamp entered a drug rehabilitation programme in the 1980s, and he later became an addiction counsellor and therapist, specialising in psychodrama therapy, where clients work through their problems through role-play and by recreating real-life situations. Stamp described his experience of working with The Who as ‘an apprenticeship’ for his later career. By the mid-1990s, he’d made his peace with the band and was, said, Townshend, ‘handsome and white-haired, looking like a god and behaving like one.’ Stamp died of cancer on 24 November 2012.
Lambert was less fortunate. Like Stamp, he never discovered another group to match The Who, and his wilful spending and drug addiction took its toll on his career and personal life. In 1976, he was made a ward of court to head off bankruptcy proceedings. That said, his closest friends maintain that however desperate Lambert became, he never completely lost the wit and spark that had once made him such an irresistible force. ‘He was the most extraordinary, clever, amusing and knowledgeable person I’d ever met,’ says Simon Napier-Bell.
Shortly before he died, Lambert hatched a plan to stage a new production of his father’s most famous ballet, The Rio Grande. Meetings were held with the ballet’s original choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, but the project never came to fruition. It was another reminder of how much Kit’s career had been driven by his desire to prove something to the man he’d never really known. ‘He had this terrible wound he was carrying,’ said Townshend, ‘which I think was to do with the fact that he never managed to have a proper relationship with his father.’
Lambert died on 7 April 1981. He’d been beaten up two days earlier, supposedly over a drug debt, in the toilets of a gay nightclub in Earls Court. He made his way to his mother’s house in nearby Fulham, where he drank too much brandy and later fell down the stairs. Kit was taken to hospital, diagnosed with a cerebral haemorrhage and never regained consciousness. He was forty-five years old, the same age at which his father had died.
A memorial service was held at St Paul’s in Covent Garden, the church in which Constant’s memorial had taken place. An orchestral group played music by Kit’s father and Henry Purcell alongside extracts from The Who’s Tommy. After the service, a few of the guests repaired to a studio in the West End to snort cocaine and toast Kit’s memory. The sharp contrast between the ceremony and the wake seemed to encapsulate Lambert’s conflicted life and character.
Lambert and Stamp had been brilliant managers in the 1960s, but their imagination and bravado wasn’t enough to sustain them in the 1970s. Their great success story was The Who. But The Who outgrew them, just as the Stones outgrew Andrew Loog Oldham and The Beatles would almost have certainly outgrown Brian Epstein, had it not been for his premature death.
As the music industry grew to accommodate the new generation of 1970s supergroups so too did the role of accountants and lawyers. Someone now needed to collect the money and balance the books. The pioneers were left behind. Lambert and Stamp made bad deals and terrible mistakes, but without them The Who might never have made it out of the pubs and clubs of Shepherd’s Bush. Their frontier spirit paved the way for the bureaucrats of the years that followed.
In the middle of the decade, during the dying days of Track Records, Malcolm McLaren, the former Harrow art student who’d watched The Who at the Railway Hotel, walked into Track’s Old Compton Street HQ and asked to see Chris Stamp. McLaren told him that he wanted to form a band that would be bigger than The Beatles. What the Sex Pistols’ Svengali needed to know was how Stamp had first discovered The Who and made them what they were. Years later, Stamp shared the story with Townshend.
‘Chris told Malcolm McLaren, “We went to a club and found the four ugliest guys we could find. They were idiots and they couldn’t play. But we added our panache, gave them a decent name and dressed them up,”’ recalled Townshend. ‘And as soon as McLaren heard that he went, “Gotcha!”’
Soon after, McLaren had assembled his own ‘four ugly guys’ and had them playing ‘Substitute’. The Who’s 1960s legacy inspired the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups, helping initiate a sweeping musical trend that threatened to render the 1960s vanguard obsolete, just as The Who had done to the first generation of British rock ’n’ rollers twenty years earlier.
However, The Who’s influence and legacy has withstood punk and any number of musical trends since. In 2014 the world is still partly populated by young men with guitars and an attitude, just as it was in 1964. Moreover, the musical and cultural distance between the two eras is far less than the distance between The Who and the post-war world of their youth.
In August 2012 The Who performed at the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. ‘At one point neither of us wanted to do it,’ admitted Townshend. ‘But the Olympics turned out to be a wonderful, poetic event.’ On the night, Daltrey wore a jacket festooned with military insignia; similar to the one Townshend had sported in 1966. The Who’s short set culminated with their once insurrectionary anthem ‘My Generation’, accompanied by a Union flag fluttering on a video screen behind them, and exploding fireworks where once there would have been exploding Marshall amps.
Like film director Danny Boyle’s spectacular opening ceremony a fortnight earlier, it said much about Britain’s cultural identity in the modern age. In the opening ceremony, the journey from the smouldering chimneys of the nineteenth century’s industrial revolution to The Beatles on the cover of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. The Second World War that had so shaped The Beatles, The Who and their contemporaries, had once been the starting point of modern history. Now it was as if the 1960s and The Who, a band whose very purpose had been to challenge the old order, had taken its place.
As the Olympics reiterated, two out of four of The Who never completely fulfilled their early promise to die before they got old. Moreover, these survivors grew old in public, where their mistakes, egotism and petty squabbles have been magnified and endlessly picked over.
Talking at the Questors Theatre, Townshend confessed to being ‘in total shock’ that he was still in a group with the boy who on their first meeting had ‘wanted to knock my teeth out’. For Daltrey there is something indefinable about their relationship. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it works,’ he once told the author. ‘It doesn’t matter what Pete says about me or I say about him. The truth is, we create together.’
Yet as Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, The Who’s last men standing, prepare for what might well be their victory lap, their extraordinary achievements are thrown into even sharper relief. The trail The Who blazed in the 1960s has lost none of its lustre. The music they made and the anxieties they addressed are still as pertinent today as they were then. The battles they fought and the music that came out of those battles suggest that, deep down, there will always be a part of The Who that needs to pretend they’re in a war.