CHAPTER TWO

UNKEMPT HUMANITY

‘It is the business of everybody to obey orders.’

Sir Cyril Norwood, The English Tradition of Education, 1929

‘Should We Surrender to the Teenagers?’

Melody Maker headline, June 1956

‘I was a horrible little sod.’

Roger Daltrey remembers his schooldays, 2008

What was once Acton County Grammar School is now Acton High School, ‘a centre for media arts and applied learning’. Most of the plain brick buildings on Gunnersbury Lane in which Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Pete Townshend were schooled over fifty years ago are long gone. The main school building now splays out from either side of a circular tower that has been constructed from clear polished glass and turquoise steel. In 1955 it might have resembled a pupil’s drawing of what a school would look like in impossibly far-off 1999.

Acton County was a typical British post-war grammar school. Founded in 1906, it extolled the same principles as a public school, and placed equal emphasis on sporting and academic achievement. The masters shunned traditional mortarboards of the kind still worn at fee-paying Harrow, the famous public school six miles away, but nonethelesss wore gowns to morning assembly. Here, the navy-blue-uniformed boys lined up for prayers and hymns, honouring the Latin motto on the school’s insignia: ‘Pactum serva’ – ‘Keep the faith’.

Roger Daltrey’s arrival at the school coincided with the appointment of a new headmaster, forty-year-old Desmond James Kibblewhite. Four years later, Kibblewhite would make a decision that would seriously impact on Daltrey’s prospects and unwittingly lead him towards a career in music. But in 1955, Daltrey came with a glowing report from Victoria Junior Boys, where he’d been described him as ‘eager, helpful and co-operative’. He had the intelligence and the acumen for a grammar school education, but he also felt self-conscious about coming from Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Everybody looked at me like I was a working-class twit,’ he said. ‘Nobody at this new school spoke the way I did. I was very cockney, and Acton felt like it was more upper class. Looking back now, maybe it was more in my head than it actually was. It was there that I had my first run-in with a different class of people.’

In fact, Acton County drew its pupils from a broader cross-section of society than Daltrey remembers. ‘There was nothing unusual about Daltrey,’ recalls one former Acton County pupil from the class of 1955. ‘There were other boys there from Shepherd’s Bush; there were boys from Wembley and Sudbury as well. There was a whole bunch of tough kids at Acton County, it’s just that Daltrey ended up at the tough end of toughness.’

According to this ex-pupil, Daltrey’s insecurities were unintentionally inflamed during one of the school’s early end-of-year comedy revues. The same pupil recalls Daltrey being cast in a sketch set during wartime. Lights flashed on and off in the darkened school hall to signify explosions, as Daltrey appeared onstage dressed as a soldier. A ‘gunshot’ rang out and he fell to the ground. Another pupil dressed as an officer, knelt down to cradle the wounded soldier’s head. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘the officer’ asked. ‘No, sir,’ replied Daltrey, ‘I’ve been shot.’ ‘Don’t speak,’ he snapped back. ‘Why, sir?’ ‘Because you’re so common.’

‘Roger and I weren’t in bother for the first couple of years,’ said another ex-pupil Reg Bowen, who joined the school in 1955 and would go on to play in Daltrey’s first group. ‘To start with, we really weren’t bad kids at all.’ Bowen’s memory seems to match the image of Daltrey in the 1956 school photograph. Sat cross-legged among his peers, this boy, with his blonde hair neatly combed into a side parting, looks younger than his twelve years.

Feeling uncomfortable about his accent, Daltrey has since said that he retreated into himself. His insecurity was exacerbated by the fact that he was small and, as a younger child, had broken his jaw after falling on to a manhole cover: ‘So my face was lopsided. My chin stuck out. So I was treated different and got ribbed about it. I shut off, and I started to get bullied.’ According to Daltrey, everything changed when he decided to stand up to his tormentors, and threatened one of them with a chair.

Alan Pittaway was in Daltrey’s class and later joined his first musical group. ‘The first contact Roger and I had was because we both had train sets,’ he says now. ‘He and his father built all these tiny cottages and bridges to go with the trains. They were both very good with their hands.’

Pittaway soon witnessed just how good Daltrey could be with his hands: ‘Roger was great, but he could be quite an aggressive character,’ he laughs. ‘We used to have these play fights, but they’d get to the stage where he had his hands around my neck, and I’d be thinking, Roger that’s enough now, but you could see the red mist in his eyes.’

Any hope that the school’s music lessons would provide a distraction for Daltrey were quashed early on. Roger could play the trumpet and had previously sung in church (‘I was told I had perfect pitch. I didn’t know what perfect pitch was but I had it.’) But taking violin lessons proved disastrous. ‘The music teacher Mrs Holman actually told him, “Roger, you will never make a living in music,”’ recalls Reg Bowen. ‘She probably said that to anyone that couldn’t hold two notes. But it always stuck in my mind that she said it to him.’

In 1955 the music that Daltrey would later make his living from had yet to make its mark in Britain. For the most part, popular music was still defined by the BBC’s strict programming policy. It was the preserve of the Ted Heath Orchestra’s former crooner Dickie Valentine or the American singer Frankie Laine, whose speciality was light jazz, show tunes and the themes to many of the cowboy movies shown at the Acton Gaumont.

That year’s big hits included Dickie Valentine’s ‘The Finger of Suspicion’, Frankie Laine’s ‘Strange Lady in Town’, Ruby Murray’s tender ballad ‘Softly Softly’ and Kentucky-born Rosemary Clooney’s sugar-sweet ‘Where Will the Dimple Be?’, in which a mother-to-be pondered the cuteness of her unborn child. In many ways, these were still the songs about hope and the restoration of romance with which The Squadronaires had soothed their wartime audience.

But at some point that year Daltrey stumbled across an alternative. ‘I was listening to some crackly American services radio station, or maybe Radio Luxembourg,’ he said. ‘Whichever station it was, that’s where I first heard Bill Haley – and that changed everything.’

Singing guitarist Bill Haley and his band had been playing their home state of Pennsylvania since the late 1940s. Around 1951, they’d ditched the yodelling cowboy ballads and jaunty western swing tunes for a sped-up fusion of country and black rhythm and blues that critics would soon start calling ‘rock ’n’ roll’.

To reflect the change, Haley scrapped the group’s original name The Saddlemen and rebranded them The Comets. Their next US hit, ‘Crazy Man Crazy’, married a revved-up tempo with American hipster-speak (‘Oh man, that music’s gone gone …’). In truth, The Comets had removed much of the sex, saltiness and swing of black rhythm and blues, but, in the context of the times, even their sanitised version sounded new and, more importantly, young.

The Comets’ ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’, had become a US rhythm and blues chart hit in April 1954. Within six months it was being played on Radio Luxembourg, the pioneering station that inspired the first wave of pirate radio broadcasters. Crucially, Radio Luxembourg had none of the BBC’s musical constraints. A year later, the station launched Jamboree, a two-hour Saturday night show, where British teenagers could hear these exotic American rock ’n’ roll artists.

‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’s frantic syncopated rhythms couldn’t have been further away from ‘Where Will the Dimple Be?’ ‘It was ground-breaking,’ said Daltrey. ‘I’d honestly never heard anything like it.’ In November 1955, The Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had topped both the American and British charts. The song’s seesawing rhythm had also been heard in the opening credits to the movie Blackboard Jungle, a graphic tale of teacher-versus-pupil conflict in a US high school. The film was immediately given an X certificate in the UK, making it even more enticing for a young audience.

As tame as the film might seem today, Blackboard Jungle exposed British teenagers to the hairstyles, clothes, language and music of their American peers. War babies that had grown up with US culture, via the cartoons and Westerns they’d watched in regional cinemas, were now exposed to another grittier side of American life. It was a colourful, even dangerous antidote to the drab uniformity of 1950s Britain, where boys still dressed like their fathers and the BBC shunned presenters with any hint of a regional accent.

Rock ’n’ roll polarised opinion among established home-grown performers such as Cliff Townshend. Musically, Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ wasn’t so distant from the rowdier swing numbers The Squadronaires played. But it was considered by many musicians and critics to be nothing more than the latest fad; albeit one popular enough to cause many dance hall orchestras to reassess their repertoire.

In 1955, The Squadronaires’ big-band contemporaries Jack Parnell and His Orchestra released a buttoned-up and terribly English version of ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. The Squadronaires, though, would go even further. For a time between March and July, bandleader Ronnie Aldrich changed the orchestra’s name to Ronnie Aldrich and The Squads. In March they released ‘Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So)’ with the B-side ‘Rock Love’. Over the coming months, they followed it up with other songs, including ‘Rock Candy’, that used the phrasing of American rock ’n’ roll, but were still rooted in big-band jazz. Nobody was fooled.

The Squads failed to take off, and by August they were back as The Squadronaires, once again charming holidaymakers with their version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ at the Douglas Palace Ballroom. But a seed of doubt had been planted. In November, Melody Maker published an article under the prescient headline, ‘ARE WE HEADING FOR A DANCE BAND SLUMP?’

The arrival of rock ’n’ roll also marked a transitional time for Cliff Townshend. In 1955, while still a member of The Squadronaires, he signed a solo deal with Columbia Records. A year later he released his version of ‘Unchained Melody’. ‘Norrie Paramor [Parlophone Records’ recording director], the guy who later discovered Cliff Richard, decided that my dad was sexy enough to flog dance records to teenage girls,’ Townshend later told Melody Maker.

The single sold modestly, but Cliff’s fleeting brush with pop stardom made a lasting impression on his son. ‘I remember watching him play in some ballroom, and these two women came and sat next to me. They smelled of a perfume I later came to recognise as sex. One of them said, “Oh, I like the drummer”, and the other said, “Oh, I want to fuck that one, he’s gorgeous”, and I realised to my horror that she was pointing to my father. I said, “That’s my dad!” and she went bright red. I remember thinking, “That’s it. I’m gonna be in a band.”’

But in 1955, Pete Townshend was still ten years old, and was, he claimed, preoccupied by other, more spiritual matters. Cliff and Betty had recently started sending him to Sunday school, a decision that coincided with an improvement in the couple’s relationship. ‘It was probably so they could go to the pub or have sex,’ he speculated. ‘I became religious, but my parents weren’t. Later I graduated from Sunday school to singing in a church choir.’

It was around this time that Townshend experienced what he would later call ‘hearing angels’. ‘It doesn’t happen so much now,’ he told the author in 2012. ‘But I am able to go to a place where I can hear sound – not so much music, just sound.’ (He then suggested that this ‘might be an admission of some kind of aspect of bipolar [affective disorder]’.) In other interviews, Townshend has compared the sound with ‘violins, cellos, horns, harps and voices … countless threads of an angelic choir.’

‘I had this sense that maybe because I’d heard this stuff, that I would hear it again when I sang in church,’ he said, ‘because in church the echo of our voices would go on for four or five seconds.’ It wasn’t to be. Instead, Townshend experienced the mystical sound outside of church. At a school friend’s suggestion, he joined the Sea Scouts, the nautical wing of the scouting movement, another Christian organisation that aimed to promote similar ‘habits of obedience, reverence, discipline and self-respect’ to those espoused by the Boys’ Brigade.

Townshend accompanied the troop on their weekend camp beside the River Thames. Late one Saturday afternoon, they took to the water near Isleworth, in west London, where Townshend claimed to hear ‘the angelic choir’ merging with the sound of the boat’s outboard motor. ‘By the time we had gone up the river and back again, I had to be carried off. I was in a trance of ecstasy,’ he said. ‘When they turned the outboard motor off, I actually physically broke down.’

In his memoir Townshend enlarged on the story: how the scout leaders had been concerned for him; how the other boys in the troop had refused to answer when he asked if they, too, had heard the ‘angels singing’. But in this version of events, the evening ended with Townshend stripped naked and sprayed with cold water by two senior scouts. It was, they told him, his ‘initiation ceremony’ into the troop. Townshend noticed that they were both masturbating at the time. ‘I felt disgusted,’ he wrote. ‘But also annoyed because I knew I could never go back.’

Townshend later said that throughout his fractured childhood and beyond, he was ‘looking for a gang to join’. The insular world of The Squadronaires and their tour bus had offered an early version of that gang. Then came Jimpy and his friends, Sunday school and the choir. Any hope that the Sea Scouts might bring him the fraternity he so desperately sought were dashed. But he would keep on looking.

That summer, Townsend and Jimpy again spent the summer holidays on the Isle of Man. This year, though, there was another distraction, far more exciting than last year’s one-man-band and his wheezing harmonica. A new movie, Rock Around the Clock, was being shown at Douglas’ Palace Cinema. Rock Around the Clock was a clunky, fictionalised account of the birth of rock ’n’ roll, starring Bill Haley and His Comets. It didn’t matter that Haley was pudgy and looked closer to fifty than thirty (a state that may have owed something to his alcoholism), the film-makers were eager to exploit rock ’n’ roll – presumably before it faded and became last year’s craze. Despite its shortcomings, Rock Around the Clock, the movie, was a hit.

Townshend was smitten. Later, Betty would recount how her son and Jimpy saw the film almost every day of the holiday. While The Squadronaires charmed their now ageing fanbase at the Palace Ballroom with their familiar set-list of wartime and post-war hits, Haley and His Comets were enthralling their offspring at the nearby Palace Cinema. One encapsulated the past, the other the future.

Back in Ealing, Jimpy persuaded his father to make him a guitar, mainly so that he could pose with it in front of the bedroom mirror. The finished instrument was pieced together from a wooden box and discarded piano wire. But it did the job.

‘The first guitar I ever played was Jimpy’s,’ said Townshend. ‘It was barely functional, but I got a tune out of it.’ Perhaps more significantly, it was symbolic of a transition. ‘I remember thinking, “My dad is handsome, well-dressed, he wakes up in the morning and plays Prokofiev, he’s sophisticated, he drinks and all the women love him. But his time is up.” I could point that guitar at my dad and say, “Bang! You’re dead!” The guitar had replaced the saxophone as the sexy instrument of the late twentieth century.’

Before long, the religious fervour Townshend felt when he sang in the choir began to wane. ‘As much as I loved, “Oh Jesus Christ our Lord, he came to save our souls” and much as I loved being part of the flock, it soon felt to me like it was all over. There was something about all this ritual that made me think I was looking at the end of the show. Instead, my time had come.’

If 1956 was the year Pete Townshend discovered rock ’n’ roll, it was also the year that, despite his later insistence that he was ‘profoundly unacademic’, he passed his Eleven Plus exam. That summer Townshend took up his place at Acton County, the school he’d first explored as an inquisitive four-year-old. Among the other new pupils that year was John Entwistle. But with the two boys placed in different classes it would be months before they made contact.

In February 1957, Bill Haley and His Comets disembarked from the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton Dock amid much fanfare to begin their first UK tour. Townshend and his father caught one of the Comets’ shows in London: ‘We had seats in the gallery at the very back, and the walls rumbled and the floor moved.’ Reportedly, Cliff’s verdict on the music that was now usurping his own was gracious, if nothing else: ‘Not bad.’

What Pete Townshend, and every would-be 1960s pop star who saw one of those shows, didn’t yet know was that Haley’s career was already fading. In America the hits had dried up, and even his latest UK releases, ‘Don’t Knock the Rock’ and ‘Rock the Joint’, were failing to match the sales of ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Just like the dance bands they’d started overshadowing a year earlier, Haley and His Comets were about to be eclipsed themselves. The threat had been there all along.

Elvis Aaron Presley was a Tupelo, Mississippi-born singer, whose first single ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ had been a UK Number 2 hit in May 1956. ‘There was this slot on the BBC on Sunday between midday and one o’clock, where they handed over to the Armed Forces Network,’ said Roger Daltrey. ‘Down the pipe came the sound of Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel”.’ As he had been with Bill Haley, Daltrey was smitten once again. Before long, Presley was back in the charts with ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’; songs that sounded like a sexualised hybrid of black rhythm and blues, hillbilly country and gospel, and which easily outdid ‘Rock Around the Clock’ for swagger and energy.

Better still, unlike the prematurely aged Haley, with his kiss curl and outmoded bow tie, Elvis was a handsome twenty-one year old with a magnificent haircut. The Rolling Stones’ future guitarist Keith Richards, at the time a schoolboy in Dartford, Kent, and listening to the same ‘crackly American service radio stations’ as Daltrey, would characterise Elvis’ impact more succinctly than anyone. ‘It was,’ said Richards, ‘as if the world had gone from black and white to Technicolor.’

Pete Townshend has expressed conflicted opinions about Presley, claiming at different times that Elvis made him ‘want to vomit’, but also that he went cold the first time he heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’: ‘I remember thinking, “What the fuck is that?”’ What Townshend already knew, though, was that Elvis was a role model in a way that Haley had never been, not least to a boy brandishing a home-made guitar in front of a bedroom mirror. In July 1957, Elvis landed his first British Number 1 with the stuttering, sexually charged ‘All Shook Up’. Suddenly, Bill Haley already seemed like a distant memory.

Presley’s effect on Roger Daltrey was immediate and overwhelming. After catching his first glimpse of Elvis on a TV show, he returned to school enthusing about what he’d just seen: ‘I said to my teacher, “Did you see Elvis Presley on the TV at the weekend?” – and he went through the roof saying it was bloody disgusting! It was anathema to the teachers. Their attitude was, “What is this stuff? It’s rubbish.” In fact, they thought it was worse than rubbish. It was as if they put a blindfold on and didn’t want to know anything about it at all.’

As the months passed, Daltrey and his peers would discover more American rock ’n’ roll, via Radio Luxembourg’s crackly transmissions. There was rhythm-and-blues veteran-turned-rock ’n’ roll poet Chuck Berry, whose ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and ‘Never Can Tell’ captured the frustration and exuberance of adolescence in just three minutes; Buddy Holly, the bespectacled Texan with the exotic Fender Stratocaster guitar, whose ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Rave On’ would inspire the first wave of British rock ’n’ roll guitar heroes; and Little Richard, the preening, pompadoured showman who described his hits ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ as ‘music to make your liver quiver, your bladder splatter and your knees freeze’. This was music that sounded as if it came from another galaxy. It was essential listening.

The class-conscious Daltrey also sensed a division emerging. Some, it seemed, regarded rock ’n’ roll as the music of the secondary moderns and technical schools: ‘It did feel in those days that it was the few working-class kids at my school that were really on the button with what was going on, especially with music.’

There was also another attraction. As rock ’n’ roll began challenging the status quo of Dickie Valentine and Frankie Laine, the newspapers began running stories about delinquent male rock ’n’ roll fans. In reality, the so-called ‘Teddy Boys’ made up a tiny fraction of the rock ’n’ roll audience, but they made for great headlines. They wore their hair long and sculpted into voluminous quiffs, and dressed in garish Edwardian drape jackets. Their look was in complete defiance of austere plain-suited post-war fashions. ‘The general effect was aggressively masculine,’ observed the jazz singer and music critic George Melly, ‘a return to the dangerous male dash of the Regency Buck or the Western desperado.’ The press gleefully reported how Teddy Boys were so transported by the music in the film Rock Around the Clock that they slashed cinema seats with their flick knives and danced, claimed one eyewitness, ‘like monkeys’ in the aisles.

In September 1956, the Daily Express had run a two-page investigation into what it called ‘THIS CRAZY SUMMER’S WEIRDEST CRAZE’, illustrated with a photograph of four Teddy Boys smoking outside a south London courthouse. These Teds had each been fined £1 for ‘insulting behaviour’, namely dancing during a screening of Rock Around the Clock at the Peckham Gaumont. ‘I’ve never felt so excited in my life. The rhythm makes me feel like nothing else mattered,’ said eighteen-year-old Kenneth Gear, who preferred the nickname ‘Rat Killer’. Elsewhere in the article, the newspaper’s ‘psychiatrist’ declared rock ’n’ roll to be ‘excessively stimulating only to the maladjusted or people of a primitive type’.

The newspapers echoed the sentiments of Acton County’s teaching staff; all of which made Daltrey love the music even more. Now, though, he had an image to aspire to as well: ‘I got myself pink socks, green trousers and a Teddy Boy jacket with about five pockets going up the side.’ Daltrey, in his own words, ‘just wanted to be Elvis Presley’. No small ambition for an ordinary boy from Shepherd’s Bush.

In February 1957, the BBC broadcast the first edition of Six-Five Special, a magazine show unlike any before in that it was aimed squarely at rock ’n’ roll-loving teenagers. The show went out live early on Saturday evenings. At producer Jack Good’s insistence, the studio was filled with dancing, grinning teens, while its co-presenter, thirty-two-year-old BBC disc jockey Pete Murray, gamely tried to pass himself off as one of them. But the main problem Jack Good’s team faced was finding any genuine rock ’n’ roll acts to board the Six-Five Special. Bill Haley had gone home to Pennsylvania, and Elvis Presley had yet to perform in the UK, and never would.

In the absence of rock ’n’ roll stars, Six-Five Special signed up the leading lights of the British jazz scene, Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber. Despite the fanfare surrounding rock ’n’ roll, jazz had been enjoying a quiet renaissance in Britain, and Barber’s band would later help spearhead a revival of pre-war New Orleans jazz. In February 1959, their hit single ‘Petite Fleur’ would become one of the defining records of the ‘trad jazz’ boom; a trend that would inspire Pete Townshend and John Entwistle.

In contrast to the TV-friendly Barber and Lyttelton was Barber’s former bandmate, trumpeter and cornettist Ken Colyer. Colyer was a New Orleans jazz buff, born in the less exotic locale of Great Yarmouth, who had moved to London and played with the Crane River Jazz Band. Colyer joined the merchant navy in 1952, and jumped ship in Mobile, Alabama, with the intention of seeking out his New Orleans jazz heroes, the George Lewis Band. Once he had made contact, Colyer defied the ‘colour ban’ in place throughout the American South, and played with his black idols.

His behaviour attracted the attention of the local police who denounced him as ‘a nigger lover’. As soon as Colyer’s visa expired, he was arrested. His letters from a New Orleans jail to Melody Maker, cast him as a jazz hero; a martyr suffering for his art. When Colyer returned to England in early 1953, Chris Barber was waiting. Together, they formed Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen.

There would be no appearance on Six-Five Special for Ken Colyer, though. Colyer was a jazz purist who would never compromise his beloved New Orleans sound, and was once overheard telling a disrespectful club owner, ‘While we’ve been playing music torn from the souls of oppressed people, all you’ve done is fucking cook fish and chips.’ Perversely, it was from his band that a musical fad emerged that would galvanise the next generation of British pop stars, including Roger Daltrey.

One of Colyer’s Jazzmen was twenty-two-year-old banjo player Anthony Donegan, better known as Lonnie, a moniker he’d borrowed from the black American guitarist Lonnie Johnson. Donegan was highly ambitious, and leapt at the chance to play in the break during the Jazzmen’s set. As a contrast to the steady flow of New Orleans jazz, Donegan would join Colyer and Barber for an interlude of black American folk music, which soon acquired the name ‘skiffle’, and was described by one early critic as ‘folk song with a jazz beat’. Before long, Donegan was performing these interludes on his own.

Most jazz clubs at the time didn’t have a licence to sell alcohol, and Donegan’s ‘skiffle break’ was a shrewd way of dissuading the audience from dashing off between sets to the nearest pub. Before long, though, the skiffle breaks were attracting as much attention as the Jazzmen’s main sets and Donegan’s recording of the 1930s folk-blues standard ‘Rock Island Line’ was heading for the charts.

The song had first been made popular by Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, a black American bluesman who’d grown up dirt-poor in Texas and had served time in prison for attempted murder. Lead Belly’s background couldn’t have been more different from Donegan’s, the Glasgow-born son of a professional violinist. But it didn’t matter. Lead Belly’s song immediately found an audience among the teenagers avidly watching Six-Five Special, and Donegan became a regular on the show.

In skiffle, guitars and banjos were simply strummed, and the rhythm supplied by equally simple drumming, the scrape of fingernails on a washboard and the single-note twang provided by a piece of string tied between the top of a broom handle and a tea chest. The music had its roots in the American jug bands of the 1920s and 1930s, where plantation workers used makeshift instruments out of financial necessity. Now suburban teenagers across Britain would do the same.

As Bill Haley and His Comets were finishing up their UK tour in March 1957, Donegan’s version of an Appalachian folk song called ‘Cumberland Gap’ was heading for the top of the British charts. Donegan wasn’t alone. Within weeks, he’d been joined by The Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, whose cover of another arcane folk song, ‘Freight Train’, reached Number 5, and The Vipers, with their top-ten hit ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O’. Out of the same pool of players as The Vipers came south London teenager Tommy Steele. A goofily grinning, blond-haired ex-merchant seaman, Steele was pitched as Bermondsey’s answer to Elvis. His first single, ‘Rock With the Caveman’, raced to Number 1 and became a favourite for Daltrey and his friends. ‘Skiffle had that DIY quality that punk later had,’ said Pete Townshend. ‘Even if it didn’t have the drive and the message.’

‘Everybody wanted to be Elvis,’ said Daltrey. ‘But nobody could be Elvis. But even if you couldn’t be Lonnie Donegan, everybody could do a pretty good imitation. That was the great thing about skiffle. It had a vibrancy and energy, but it was touchable. It was possible. Every street in Shepherd’s Bush had a skiffle group.’

Daltrey’s next step was to acquire a guitar: ‘We couldn’t afford to buy one so I bought some wood and some guitar strings and made one. It wasn’t very good. But it made the noise of a guitar and I could play, relatively in tune, the first three chords that anyone needed for most skiffle songs.’

On a summer holiday trip to Brighton, Daltrey busked for loose change on the seafront and talked his way into playing in one of the local pubs. His parents were outraged. ‘I did my first pub gig in Brighton at fourteen,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t even old enough to drink in there.’ He was already determined to play music. ‘I didn’t care. It was what I wanted to do.’

The London skiffle scene had germinated in a network of Soho dives: the 44 Skiffle Club in a basement in Gerrard Street, Wardour Street’s Blues and Barrelhouse Club and, most famously, the 2i’s Coffee Bar on Old Compton Street. Daltrey and his friends rode the Central Line into the West End to make their pilgrimage to the 2i’s, only to be disappointed. ‘We kept reading about this place,’ he said. ‘But when we got there it was just full of prossies [prostitutes].’

It was at the 2i’s, though, that one of Daltrey’s later musical collaborators had recently been discovered, and was now being groomed as a rock ’n’ roll star. Daltrey’s first solo album, released in 1973, would be co-produced by Adam Faith, and the pair would star together in the prison drama McVicar (1980). In 1958, though, Faith was one of a new breed of British singers, like Tommy Steele, being pitched as the nation’s answer to Elvis Presley.

Faith had grown up in a council flat in Acton Vale, where he was known by his birth name Terry Nelhams. In 1957, he was spotted at the 2i’s playing with a skiffle group called the Worried Men. After dumping the band he was signed as a solo artist. Later, when the Worried Men’s guitar player quit, Roger Daltrey tried out with the group.

Vic Gibbons, now Chris Barber’s manager, but, in the late 1950s the Worried Men’s drummer, dimly remembered Daltrey from Victoria Junior Boys. ‘Roger was two years behind me at school,’ he says now. ‘But I later became aware of him because I had a summer job at Shanks where his father was the general manager. What we didn’t know was that Roger played the guitar, until he came down to the house.’

Daltrey turned up with his makeshift guitar, but the Worried Men were unimpressed. ‘Basically, he couldn’t play,’ insists Gibbons. ‘That was the trouble with skiffle groups. A lot of them couldn’t even strum one chord.’ Gibbons was also discouraged by Daltrey’s manner. ‘He was very surly. I remember that from the way in which he used to address his father when he came to see him at work. He was a typical teenager. There didn’t seem to be any shape or substance to his conversation. But he seemed utterly obsessed by one thing – playing.’

Whatever misgivings the Worried Men had about Daltrey’s musical ability, his ambition was never in question. When he heard about a forthcoming Spirit of Skiffle talent competition, Daltrey put together a group of his own. His bandmates were fellow Acton County boys, Reg Bowen, Alan Pittaway, Mike McAvoy and Derek ‘Del’ Shannon (not to be confused with the rock ’n’ roll singer Del Shannon of later ‘Runaway’ fame).

‘Roger was the first one to get into skiffle,’ says Alan Pittaway. ‘I started strumming my dad’s old guitar. But Roger was always ahead of me. He knew more chords.’ With Bowen and Shannon also playing guitars, McAvoy ended up on bass. ‘They said, “You can play bass Mike”,’ he recalls. ‘I said, “What’s that?” They said, “Just a piece of string and a tea chest …”’

In the summer of 1958, the group, calling themselves the Sulgrave Rebels after the Sulgrave Boys’ Club, of which Daltrey and Bowen were members, entered the competition, which was held at Wormholt Park School in Shepherd’s Bush. In the playground beforehand, Daltrey took Alan Pittaway aside and told him he wasn’t able to sing and play the little guitar licks in their chosen Lonnie Donegan songs, ‘Ham and Eggs’ and ‘Grand Coulee Dam’.

‘So he showed me these licks, and I had to learn them before I went on, so he could just concentrate on singing,’ says Pittaway. ‘We still had the classic skiffle set-up and I thought we’d get blown offstage, because the best band there had two electric guitars and these cornflake-box-sized amps. But the contest was all about the spirit of skiffle. So we were perfect for it. We won.’

The Sulgrave Rebels were awarded record vouchers and a photograph appeared in the Acton Gazette & Post which showed five grinning schoolboys, four of them cradling guitars almost as big as they are. They never played together again.

Around the same time that Six-Five Special first appeared on television screens across the country, Betty Townshend gave birth to her second son, Paul. His older brother welcomed the new addition to the family, and even more so the extra pocket money his parents now gave him for babysitting. A third son, Simon, would join the family in October 1960.

Paul’s arrival in the spring of 1957 coincided with the Townshends leaving their flat in Whitehall Gardens and moving to a terraced house at 20 Woodgrange Avenue. The new home was also closer to Ealing Common, where Betty had taken over the running of an antique-cum-junk shop called Miscellanea.

The Squadronaires were still touring, but Cliff was now forty and no longer harboured any ambitions for a pop career. At weekends, his musician friends would fill the living room at his new house, and the drinking that had begun at lunchtime in the pubs around the Common would carry on into the evening, often accompanied by the blare of saxophones and trumpets.

But Pete Townshend was still hesitant about whether he wanted to make music of his own. ‘Although he was in the choir, I never thought he was talented musically,’ said Betty. Townshend saw the absence of a piano in the family home as further evidence of his parents’ lack of encouragement: ‘My father didn’t see any point in having a piano in the house because I showed no musical aptitude.’ Later, Cliff tried to teach his son how to play music, but gave up when he saw how much he struggled with it. When Pete started to excel in his English classes, Cliff suggested a career in journalism.

In the summer of 1957, Cliff helped his son with what would become Pete Townshend’s first published work: a poem called ‘The Museum’, which appeared in the summer issue of the school magazine, The Actonian. The twelve-line verse was squeezed in between a report on current developments in the world of rocket building (‘This leads one to think that the day when an unmanned instrumental satellite encircles the Earth is not so far distant …’) and a rundown on the athletic team’s fair performance at an intra-school championship (‘The outstanding performance was Carter’s 10.7 seconds in the under 15s …’).

In ‘The Museum’, the twelve-year-old Townshend wrote of ‘dug-up fossils and ships of old, that makes one’s dreams of deeds so bold …’, ‘plays by Shakespeare … verse by Brooks’, before arriving at the conclusion, ‘I realise I have much to learn.’

It was during that same summer that Townshend took up the guitar. Encouraged by his ability to coax a tune out of Jimpy’s homemade instrument, Pete had asked his parents for a guitar of his own. Cliff had offered to buy him one for Christmas in 1956, but didn’t fulfil his promise. ‘But what happened is she bought it,’ said Townshend.

The ‘she’ in question was Grandma Denny. Unfortunately, Denny acquired what Townshend described as ‘a cheap guitar of the kind you’d see hanging on the wall of a Spanish restaurant’. Cliff showed him the basic chords, but Townshend found it a struggle. He claimed to have spent a year battling with the instrument before putting it aside in frustration. Instead, he acquired a banjo from a friend of his father’s, and bought himself a chord book.

Before long, Townshend was attending Sunday evening sessions at the Chiswick Jazz Club, held in a nearby pub, where Ken Colyer was among the regular performers. The attraction lay in what he described as ‘the vital, bright sound’ of the British banjo players, who had a more attacking style than their American counterparts. Townshend didn’t know it yet but this same attacking style would manifest itself later in his idiosyncratic guitar playing with The Who.

Trad jazz might have seemed picturesque after the dynamism of American rock ’n’ roll. But, like skiffle for Daltrey, Townshend found it ‘touchable and possible’. It was the music of the left-wing, duffel-coated, art-school ‘ravers’ that Humphrey Lyttelton had nicknamed ‘the ’Ooblies’. It was the music played on the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament Easter 1958 protest march from London to the atomic weapons research establishment at Aldermaston. Better still, it was another pot shot at what Townshend called ‘the kind of serene, dance hall music my father played’.

By 1958, Townshend and John Entwistle had become aware of each other. What Townshend’s hastily learned chords on the banjo gave him was potential entry into his next gang, of which Entwistle was already a member. ‘John was this big guy, very funny, very sharply dressed,’ recalled Townshend. Both boys were just coming up to their teens, but Entwistle was already nearly six feet tall and towered over his future bandmate. At first, though, it wasn’t music that drew them together. ‘I just remember Pete having a good sense of humour,’ said Entwistle. ‘So he joined the comedy clique that we had.’ That clique comprised of boys who would meet in the playground at Acton County to, as Entwistle put it, ‘stand around making up jokes’.

Among their topics of conversation were the BBC’s surreal comedy radio programme The Goon Show, which Townshend considered ‘youthful and rebellious’, and Mad, the American satirical magazine. Mad had launched six years earlier and poked fun at the establishment with its witty cartoons and razor-sharp parodies of popular culture.

‘They were all very keen on Mad,’ remembers fellow pupil Michael Wheeler. ‘Some lunchtimes I used to join them as they sat there flicking through the latest issue. Mad was American, and anything American in the 1950s was jumped on at school.’ But what Wheeler also remembers now is the contrast between the two pupils: ‘Pete always had a bit of mystique, because his father was in show business, so we were impressed by that. John was very arty and creative and musical.’

John Entwistle now played the French horn in the school orchestra, and would also spend two years playing in the Middlesex Youth Orchestra. At the same time, he was still performing with 1st South Middlesex Boys’ Brigade, where he would remain until 1962. As Roger Daltrey later stressed: ‘John was the only one of The Who that had any kind of serious musical background.’

In the late 1950s, Dave Lambert, who would go on to become guitarist/vocalist with the folk-rock group The Strawbs, encountered the teenage Entwistle at the Boys’ Brigades’ annual camp in Woolacombe, North Devon. ‘I’ll never forget my first sighting of John,’ says Lambert now. ‘He was wearing winkle-picker boots, drainpipe trousers and an American ice-hockey jacket that we used to call a ‘Richmond jacket’, because people wore them at Richmond ice rink. He struck me as a very hip young teenager.’

Lambert was similarly impressed by Entwistle’s casual approach to leadership. ‘We were all split up into tents. Each tent had different duties, called ‘fatigues’. On the first morning, John’s tent were doing their fatigues, which involved washing up after breakfast. John was in charge, but he was stood there, watching, arms folded, whistling, and tapping his foot in that L-shaped stance he always had, while everyone else did the work. I remember thinking, “How the hell does he get away with that?”’

On Sunday, the Brigade marched from their camp down into Woolacombe for a church service and then back again. Sounding the drumbeat as they marched, Lambert quickly realised that the nonchalant teenager was also a gifted musician. It was Entwistle’s job to play the Brigade’s bugle calls. At the end of each day, he would perform the final call, known as ‘Sunset’. ‘It’s a beautiful tune anyway,’ says Lambert. ‘But when John played it … I had never heard anybody play a brass instrument as well as that before.’

‘John once gave our fourth-form teacher, Mr Marks, a trumpet fanfare when he entered the class,’ recalls fellow Acton County pupil Brian Adams. He also remembers Entwistle’s artistic ability from the art classes they attended together: ‘He had a particular style. He was a great cartoonist but nearly all his works were knights in armour.’ This fascination would manifest itself later when the pop star Entwistle bought suits of armour for his first house in Ealing and, later, his rock star’s mansion in the Cotswolds.

As a brass player, trad jazz was unlikely to pass Entwistle by. ‘I never really liked trad, but it is the only thing you can play with a trumpet,’ he said. So, in the spring of 1958, he joined a group of pupils for a weekly trad session. His bandmates included drummer Chris Sherwin, and a fellow school orchestra musician, clarinettist Phil Rhodes. They called themselves The Confederates. It didn’t take long for Entwistle to suggest that Townshend join as their banjo player.

‘We used to rehearse in my parents’ front room in Ealing,’ says Chris Sherwin now. ‘There was John, Pete, Phil Rhodes and I. There was also another guy from school called Rod Griffiths who played half a trombone like a bugle. Pete was pretty accomplished, even back then. But I do remember that one time he was having trouble tuning the banjo as the rest of us were making such a noise, so he went to the outside loo in my garden for a little peace and quiet.’

The outside lavatory was still common in British houses through the 1950s and beyond, and provided a similar retreat/rehearsal room for John Entwistle. ‘He used to practise in the loo as it was best for the echo,’ remembered Queenie. ‘But the neighbours would complain.’

The Confederates played Dixieland jazz such as ‘Maryland’, ‘Marching Through Georgia’, ‘Willie the Weeper’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. Townshend had finally found his gang – but he knew his place in it. ‘What you have to do is find a good bloke,’ he explained. ‘A strong bloke. Find the top man and become his lieutenant. It worked tremendously well for me as a young kid. My memory of that time was, “Hey, I’m a little boy, but I’m happy with that because the gang like me.”’

The only published photograph of The Confederates shows Entwistle and Rhodes dressed in Edwardian-style waistcoats and bowler hats. Their outfits were in honour of trad jazz figurehead, Acker Bilk, who was enjoying his first chart hits. Entwistle and Rhodes look every one of their thirteen years. Townshend, sat next to Chris Sherwin’s drums and playing a banjo that looks almost as big as he is, still resembles a primary school boy.

In 2013, Sherwin’s memories of the now famous rock star he knew as a kid are far less nuanced than Pete’s memories of him. Over the years, Townshend has portrayed Sherwin in interviews as the gang’s ‘top man’, who took him under his wing and apparently took him to see his first X-certificate film, the voyeuristic thriller Peeping Tom. Although they were both in the same school year, this was a reprisal of the surrogate older-brother relationship Townshend had enjoyed with Jimpy. ‘I always looked for older boys to hang around,’ he said, ‘or certainly boys more emotionally equipped than I was.’

But if there was such a hierarchy in their friendship, Chris Sherwin seems unaware of it. ‘Pete and I were great mates as well as being in this band together,’ he stresses now. ‘I spent a lot of time with him doing all sorts of other things as well. I remember us building a bike together. We went to the dump and stole the bits – wheels, a frame and handlebars – and messed about building it in my backyard. It was just the usual boys’ stuff. So we also had that kind of friendship on top of playing music.’

Chris Sherwin became a regular visitor to Woodgrange Avenue. On one occasion he was asked to help out with one of Betty Townshend’s business ventures: ‘Pete’s mum used to go to this company who made carpets for cars, and I went with her and Pete once to this little factory in North Acton. She picked up all these off-cuts of carpet, took them home, and had me cut them into squares.’ The squares were then taken to Miscellanea, ‘where she used to sell them as carpet tiles. Betty was a bit of a wheeler-dealer.’

The weekly rehearsals in Sherwin’s front room paid off the following year when The Confederates were asked to play at the Congo Club, a youth club held in the hall of the Congregational Church on Churchfield Road, Acton. It was one of the band’s regular rehearsal spaces, but now they were playing to an audience, although Townshend has since stated that as few as five or ten people turned up.

Performing in the same church’s choir as an eleven year old, Townshend wished he could hear ‘the angels singing’, on the night of The Confederates’ debut gig, though, the only sound he heard was the band clattering noisily through ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. The blood rushed to his head. ‘I really blushed,’ he said. ‘It was the only time in my whole life that I’ve been really nervous.’

When Townshend returned to Ealing after another summer holiday on the Isle of Man, he discovered that the rest of the group had been lured away. ‘There was another guy from school called Barry Smith who played trombone,’ explain Sherwin. ‘Barry lived opposite Alan Maynard, who called himself ‘Alf’.’

The banjo-playing Alf Maynard was a former Acton County pupil, who quickly co-opted Barry Smith, Griffiths, Sherwin, Rhodes and Entwistle into a trad band he modestly christened Alf Maynard’s New Orleans Jazzmen. Townshend sat in with them for a time. ‘But Alf played banjo,’ says Sherwin, ‘so there was really nowhere for Pete.’ Alf Maynard’s Jazzmen played one of their few gigs at the Corgi Books Factory’s Christmas dinner and dance in Acton. ‘Everybody came with instruments in cases,’ recalls Sherwin, ‘and everybody left with instruments out of cases, but the cases filled up with books, which we’d nicked.’

By the end of the year though, Townshend was also becoming drawn to the same skiffle sound that had so enthralled Roger Daltrey. Rather than Lonnie Donegan’s prevalent hits, though, it had been the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group’s ‘Freight Train’ that had seized his attention. The band featured four guitars backing the song’s guest vocalist, Scottish folk singer Nancy Whiskey. ‘I just loved the sound of those guitars rattling along together,’ he said. ‘That’s when I decided to focus on playing guitar.’

Townshend took the cash he’d made from a newspaper round and purchased an acoustic guitar he’d seen in his parents’ shop. He had his banjo and his guitar and he was a part of the gang, but Townshend was still desperately insecure. Sex and violence seemed to have been part of the problem. The onset of adolescence had made Townshend acutely aware of what he thought was his greatest physical shortcoming: the size of his nose. ‘The geezers that were snappy dressers and got chicks years before I even thought they existed would always like to talk about my nose,’ he told Rolling Stone in 1968.

Townshend’s self-consciousness was worsened by the fact that he felt he’d let his good-looking parents down: ‘My mother seemed to think that anyone who wasn’t beautiful wasn’t any good.’ Cliff was more sympathetic to his son’s plight, but awkwardly reminded Pete of how well his friend, the bandleader Ronnie Aldrich, had done in life, despite having a large nose, or how the unprepossessing American playwright Arthur Miller had ended up marrying blonde pin-up Marilyn Monroe: ‘Whenever my dad got drunk, he’d come up to me and say, “Look, son, you know looks aren’t everything” – and shit like that.’

It didn’t help that some of Townshend’s surrogate older brothers seemed to be more sexually active than he was. In Townshend’s mind, at least, ‘fifteen-year-old girls were getting their brains fucked out on the pool table’ in the darkened back room of the Congo Club, while other teenagers innocently listened to pop records outside. He also believed that some of his peers had lost their virginity while trying to Ban the Bomb: ‘Everybody and their brother seemed to have had his first fuck on the Aldermaston march.’ Even allowing for exaggeration, some of Townshend’s friends were clearly more daring around the opposite sex than he was.

‘Me and a mate would go to Hyde Park on a Saturday afternoon,’ Townshend told the author. ‘It’s nice and sunny, and he pulls a couple of girls, rolls over and starts snogging the really good-looking one. The other one’s left, and he’s looking over at me, waving his hand and saying, “Move in, move in.” But there’s all these people about walking their dogs, and this girl’s looking at me with a look on her face as if to say, “You move in and I will fucking kill you.”’

On the train home, Townshend challenged his school friend about what had happened: ‘I said, “We were in the middle of Hyde Park and you’re trying to fuck this girl, while we’re surrounded by all these people … and spaniels! Explain it to me.” And he goes, “Oh, you’ll understand one day.” And he was the same age as me, and he was always very kind to me, but he got it – and I just didn’t. I didn’t even kiss a girl until I was eighteen.’

In 1957, the all-male establishment at Acton County had begun admitting female pupils. ‘That certainly improved things,’ remembers Alan Pittaway. (Among the new arrivals were the Wise twins, one of whom, Alison, would later become John Entwistle’s girlfriend and first wife. Their first date was a Boys’ Brigade concert at the Royal Albert Hall.)

Over the fifty-odd years since he left school, Townshend has frequently portrayed Acton County as a harsh environment where violence and humiliation were rife. The arrival of female pupils only made it worse. ‘It wasn’t so bad until they brought in the girls,’ he said. ‘But the old guard were still doing all the stuff they did before – caning boys on the spot if they were caught running in the corridor, and giving you a thick ear that made you cry out of shock, with tears all over your face. Except now there was a group of girls looking at you while it happened.’ Like teachers at every other post-war school in Britain, many of Acton County’s staff were also trying to rationalise their own grim wartime experiences. ‘That post-war period was ghastly for all of them,’ said Townshend. ‘They were traumatised.’

‘It was strict,’ concurs Michael Wheeler. ‘I was in fear of the teachers and remember being scared a lot of the time.’ Among the strictest teachers, and still remembered by some ex-pupils even now, was the house master Leonard Hurse, known by some of his victims as ‘Basher’ Hurse and ‘Hitler’.

‘Oh, he was a nasty man,’ says Chris Sherwin. ‘We used to call him Hitler because he had the same little moustache and side parting.’ The nickname seemed even more apt as Hurse taught German. On one occasion a foolhardy pupil shouted the Führer’s name as he walked past: ‘So he asked whoever did it to own up. When they didn’t, he lined us all up outside the science lab – there were about twenty of us – and with his knuckles went down the line and nutted every one of us.’

According to Sherwin, his teachers were mostly ‘nasty bastards’ with the exception of his English, art and metalwork tutors. Townshend also recalled a teacher hurling a blackboard rubber – ‘this bloody great big piece of wood’ – at one impudent pupil, who was then carried, in a semi-conscious state, out of the classroom. Like the murky abuse he’d suffered in Westgate-on-Sea, Townshend’s memories of this violence and humiliation would later find an outlet in the us-versus-them sentiment of ‘My Generation’ and the brutal treatment meted out on the main character of Tommy.

One pupil guaranteed to upset ‘Basher’ Hurse and every other ‘nasty bastard’ at Acton County was Roger Daltrey, whose Teddy Boy image coincided with an increasingly confrontational attitude and a sharp decline in his schoolwork. During one of Hurse’s classes, Daltrey’s disinterested attitude drove Basher to a violent outburst. ‘The classroom we were in had this highly glossed wooden floor, so the desks and chairs slid very easily,’ remembers one ex-pupil, who witnessed the altercation. ‘Daltrey was messing around. I think he was making fun of Hitler. Suddenly, the teacher shoved this empty desk. It slid so hard across the floor, it hit Daltrey’s desk, driving it back hard into his stomach. It must have hurt. And I’ll never forget, he [Hurse] uttered the wonderful words – “Daltrey, you’ll never amount to anything in this world!”’

Acton County’s school photograph from April 1958 depicts Daltrey as a junior Elvis-in-the-making. He stares sulkily into the camera with his once neatly combed hair coaxed up into a quiff. It was a rare sighting of him wearing the school uniform. ‘We all had to wear blazers,’ says Alan Pittaway. ‘But Roger was the first guy at school to get away with wearing a drape jacket. He opened the drape one day to show me and there were these little loops sewn inside, and inside one was this miniature axe.’

‘Roger got us all into it,’ adds Mike McAvoy. ‘I remember my mum actually saying to me, “You cannot go out like that!” I had my hair slicked back like Elvis, the tightest black jeans you could find, black brothel creepers and bright yellow fluorescent socks.’ McAvoy and Daltrey had also begun excusing themselves from lessons: ‘We’d be there for registration, then slip out through the orchard behind the school, and go to the cinema to try and see one of the X-certificate films. The teachers eventually realised what we were doing, and I think we both got caned.’

Headmaster Desmond Kibblewhite summoned Daltrey’s parents to complain about their son’s appearance, behaviour and frequent absences. But Daltrey had made up his mind. ‘I just wasn’t interested in learning,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t interested in wearing their silly uniform.’

Pupils in the years below were also wary of the scowling apprentice Teddy Boy. Pete Townshend maintains that his first exchange of words with The Who’s future lead singer came after seeing him setting about another pupil in the playground. ‘I shouted that he was a dirty fighter, because he kicked the guy when he was on the ground. Roger came over to me and said, “Who called me a dirty fighter?”’ before forcing Townshend to apologise.

‘I probably shouldn’t talk about this,’ Townshend told Playboy in 1994. ‘But I’m on a good enough ground now with Roger to address it. He used to be the worst bully, terrorising other kids.’ Unsurprisingly, Daltrey doesn’t agree: ‘I got a reputation as a tearaway but I don’t think I knowingly picked on anyone. I just loved to fight, that’s what boys did.’

‘Roger didn’t mind using his fists when he wasn’t winning an argument but he never bore a grudge,’ confirms Reg Bowen. ‘He could have a fight with you one day and the next day be your best mate. The trouble is, we were in a grammar school, and you weren’t supposed to behave like that in a grammar school.’

In spring 1959 Kibblewhite’s patience finally ran out and Daltrey was expelled. In a 1967 interview, Daltrey claimed that ‘I got slung out of school’ and cited the reason: ‘Someone got shot … It was an accident. Someone aimed an air gun at the door … it bounced off the door and hit someone in the eye.’ In later interviews, however, Daltrey has said that his expulsion was as a result of being caught smoking.

‘Roger and I both got caught smoking,’ says Bowen, who maintains that Daltrey’s reputation as a hard man at school has been overstated. ‘I got suspended for a week, and was allowed back to do my exams. Roger was out on his earhole. I think they wanted an excuse to get rid of him. But he was fifteen and, at that time, many kids left school at fifteen to start work.’

The way Daltrey tells it, he was expelled the day before his fifteenth birthday, which he then spent roaming the building sites of Acton looking for work: ‘My parents were devastated. But in a lot of ways it was the best day of my bloody life.’ For a time, Daltrey took a job earning a shilling an hour as an electrician’s mate. But he quit after being offered an apprenticeship at Chase Products, a sheet-metal factory in Packington Road, South Acton, that specialised in making storage racks and specialist equipment boxes.

‘I had no choice. I had to get a proper job. Mum still needed to be paid,’ he said. To begin with, the work involved making tea for his workmates rather than learning a trade. But despite clashing with Desmond Kibblewhite, ‘Hitler’ and every other teacher at Acton County, Daltrey settled down and even came to enjoy the routine and camaraderie of life inside ‘this big tin shed’.

‘I hated getting up in the mornings, but I actually enjoyed going to work,’ he said. ‘You turned up, you knew what you had to do, and then you went home.’ In years to come he would talk almost fondly of the ordered life he’d had at the factory and how it compared to the chaos of life with The Who: ‘I had some very good times there. Never mind your cotton fields, we were in Acton, banging out bits of metal and getting a rhythm going. There was no radio, but we’d all start singing. We sang from ten in the morning until five at night. We drove the guv’nor mad. But that’s where I learned to sing.’

Better still, after his mother had taken her share from his weekly pay packet, Daltrey still had money left over to spend on the most important thing in his life. But that wasn’t music. Despite the Sulgrave Rebels’ victory at Wormholt Park School, Daltrey had given up singing and playing guitar. ‘We tried to persuade him to carry on,’ says Alan Pittaway. ‘But he’d completely lost interest. He’d fallen head over heels for this girl. He was mad about her, and he told us he was packing in music.’ It couldn’t last.

In 1958, the British rock ’n’ roll star Marty Wilde announced, ‘Kids these days would rather listen to a jukebox than the prime minister.’ He wasn’t wrong. Nevertheless, the recently elected Conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had passed a bill that would change the lives of Wilde and every other pop star of the 1960s.

The 1948 National Service Act had been introduced to determine how and when young men should serve in the armed forces now that the war was over. It decreed that all eighteen-year-old males were required to serve for eighteen months, unless excused on medical grounds. In 1957, though, Macmillan’s government announced the gradual abolition of national service.

Being ‘called up’ had proven disastrous for several of Britain’s earliest rock ’n’ rollers; eighteen months was the equivalent of several lifetimes in pop music. Terry Dene, once billed as ‘Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll rebel’, had deferred his national service, but conscription into the army could only be delayed for so long, and as soon as he set foot on the parade ground his musical career was over. He broke down in tears in his barracks’ mess hall and was later threatened with violence by some of his fellow conscripts. Two months later, Dene was discharged on medical grounds. He never had another hit record, rejected pop music and found religion instead.

Others were more fortunate. Tommy Steele failed his medical on account of his fallen arches and corns. (Although his manager insisted it was better for his image to tell the press that he had been diagnosed with a heart condition.) Adam Faith, meanwhile, was so desperate to avoid the call-up that he offered a Harley Street doctor money to amputate one of his toes. They refused. Faith turned eighteen just after the bill was passed: ‘It was as if I’d been on death row, and somebody suddenly came along and said, “It’s OK, you can go home now.”’ National Service continued until the end of 1960, with the last conscripts serving until 1963. But Acton County’s junior Lonnie Donegans and Elvis Presleys were all spared.

For Pete Townshend the reprieve was bittersweet. ‘Those of us born after the war were never called up,’ he told the author. ‘But we were the ones who were also told, “You’re never going to have to kill anyone, you’re no use to this country or to anyone, just go out there and enjoy the sugar, you’re lucky to have it.”’

Those who opposed the end of national service and considered it far better to have thousands of hormonal teenage boys off the street, had their prejudices reinforced in the summer of 1960. On 31 July, a strange incident of youth-cult violence took place at the Beaulieu Jazz festival, a three-day event held in the grounds of jazz buff Lord Montagu’s bucolic stately home in Hampshire. Members of the 9,000-strong audience, condemned in the Observer at the time as ‘unkempt humanity’, clambered on to a lighting scaffold, causing it to topple over while Acker Bilk and his band were playing below.

A piano was damaged, Humphrey Lyttelton’s trumpet went missing, in what were described as ‘mysterious circumstances’, and, most shockingly, the BBC’s coverage was interrupted by the fracas. A drunken beatnik grabbed a BBC microphone and demanded ‘More beer for the workers!’ on air. The police and the ambulance services were called, several arrests were made and the press were outraged.

After the uproar that had attended Teddy Boy violence in 1956, this latest incident was seen as another example of how pop music was expediting the decline of civilisation. ‘A tribal dance to the sound of a tom-tom has a more civilised air than this modern wreck and roll to the beat of a jazz drum,’ wrote the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, the day after the so-called ‘Battle of Beaulieu’.

Where once the soundtrack had been Bill Haley, it was now Acker Bilk. Where once the protagonists had worn drape coats and brothel-creeper shoes, there was what the Observer called ‘a standard uniform of rumpled jeans, T-shirts, sandals and haircuts that must have wrung the hearts of the two former Irish guard sergeants running the campsite behind the car park’.

Yet Pete Townshend shared some of the Observer’s disdain for those unkempt jazz fans. Trad had inspired him to learn the banjo, and skiffle had been the spur to him picking up the guitar. But he was growing weary of both. ‘I remember going to see Ken Colyer and being disgusted by the state of the audience,’ he said. ‘It was all chaps in duffel coats, and instead of a handkerchief they’d have a toilet roll in their pocket.’ Townshend insisted he’d seen a group of Colyer fans casually urinate down themselves as they stood at the bar of the Hammersmith Odeon, too drunk or lazy to use the lavatory.

Despite these misgivings, trad and skiffle’s legacy would endure in what Townshend called ‘the weird shit you can hear in The Who’s music’ (try the banjo-style guitar playing and marching-band brass on 1966’s ‘Cobwebs and Strange’). Yet the principal reason Townshend had moved away from the music was that rock ’n’ roll had become something he could completely identify with. ‘It was now the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson,’ he explained, ‘and then there was Cliff Richard aping Elvis Presley on TV.’

Cliff Richard and his backing band, The Shadows, dressed in decent suits and were unlikely to walk around with toilet rolls stuffed in their pockets or piss themselves while stood at the bar. Despite his Elvis-style sneer and greasy quiff, the nineteen-year-old Richard (birth name: Harry Webb) came from a middle-class family and lived in suburban Hertfordshire. He’d had his Eureka moment watching Bill Haley and His Comets at the Edmonton Regal. Like Adam Faith, Cliff had been ‘discovered’ at the 2i’s. His first single, ‘Move It’, became a hit in August 1958. It was a riposte to the Melody Maker critic Steve Race, who’d recently condemned rock ’n’ roll as ‘a monstrous threat to popular music’ and it was a defining record. After so many awkward attempts at the genre, ‘Move It’ proved that the Brits could play rock ’n’ roll without sounding hopelessly tame.

Cliff Richard had also appeared on the first edition of ITV’s new teen-orientated music show, Oh Boy!. Within months, Oh Boy! had become a shop window for other home-grown rock ’n’ rollers, including Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, and Americans such as Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, who, unlike Elvis (recently conscripted into the US army), were willing to come to Britain.

Eddie Cochran played chunky chords on a low-slung guitar, in a style that Townshend would later co-opt for The Who. His signature song, ‘Summertime Blues’, would become a mainstay of The Who’s set. But Cochran was doomed to the same lost hero status as Buddy Holly, dying after a car accident in the English countryside in April 1960.

In truth, Cochran was too hip and too American for an English schoolboy to impersonate. But Cliff Richard’s guitarists weren’t. Cliff had hired several former skiffle players for his backing group The Shadows, including Bruce Welch and Hank Marvin, both former grammar schoolboys, only a few years older than Pete Townshend. They were believable role models. Townshend’s cheap guitar had a pick-up on it. It could be made ‘electric’. The next step, then, was for him to buy an amplifier.

Townshend wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm for adding electricity. John Entwistle had now discovered the American guitarist Duane Eddy, whose resonant, twanging instrument sounded impossibly futuristic. Moreover, the weekend dance band in which he played trumpet had just added an electric guitarist. But Entwistle was self-conscious about his big hands and the fact that his best friend was already a capable guitarist. Instead he chose the electric bass; an instrument that had only been in circulation for a few years, but had quickly overtaken the upright bass as the preferred choice of the aspiring rock ’n’ roller. What nobody knew yet was that Entwistle had no intention of playing it like a conventional bass. Inside him was a lead guitarist, who would spend the whole of his career with The Who trying to get out.

The Shadows’ Jet Harris owned the first Fender electric bass in Britain. But that was beyond Entwistle’s budget. Instead, he started to make one of his own. ‘He bought the wood, carved it out, made the neck and got someone to put the frets on,’ remembered Queenie Entwistle. ‘Then he painted it mauve. I never thought it would play. But it did.’

The only downside, other than ruining the finish on his grandparents’ dining table, which he’d used as a workbench, was that Entwistle had built an unusually long neck to resemble the coveted Fender. Fenton-Weill, the Chiswick guitar-makers tasked with fretting the instrument, used the standard Höfner bass as a guide, which meant several spare inches at the top of the neck without any frets. ‘It was diabolical,’ said Entwistle, but it was a start.

Townshend and Entwistle began practising together at Woodgrange Avenue. But the noise became too much for Denny. On one occasion, after being told by his grandmother to ‘turn it down’, all his repressed anger spilled over. Townshend screamed ‘Fuck off!’, picked up his new amplifier, bought with money saved from his paper round, and hurled it across the room. Entwistle, stoic as ever, lightened the mood by asking, ‘What now? Another paper round?’

Townshend managed to get the amp repaired. But his outburst was a forewarning of the destructive behaviour for which The Who’s live performances would become notorious. As he later admitted: ‘Every time I smashed a guitar I saw my grandmother’s face.’

Back at Acton County, not everyone was impressed by Entwistle’s and Townshend’s musical volte-face. ‘When those guys started messing around with rock ’n’ roll we thought they’d sold out,’ says Chris Sherwin. ‘The rest of us were traddies, wearing donkey jackets and sandals, thinking we were beatniks. To us, rock ’n’ roll was disgusting.’

Townshend’s musical defection would coincide with a dramatic end to his friendship with Sherwin. According to Townshend, the two boys had an argument on the way home from school after Sherwin had been ‘harping on about my failings with girls’. In Townshend’s version, he swung his schoolbag at Sherwin’s head and almost knocked him out. Townshend thought the other boy was feigning injury, but Sherwin was still recovering from a concussion he’d sustained playing rugby. In 2011, Townshend told the BBC that Sherwin retaliated by hitting him with a brick: ‘He smashed me on the back of the head with it.’ By the time Who I Am was published, the brick had disappeared and Townshend wrote that Sherwin had punched him on the side of the head.

In every retelling of the story, though, Townshend has insisted that the brawl led to him being ostracised by his school friends, with the exception of Entwistle: ‘Everybody said, “It’s terrible what you did to poor old Chris.” Apparently he had just been to hospital with concussion, and I had retriggered it. I am sure he could have killed me if he had wanted to. But what he did was arrange to send me to Coventry.’

Sherwin, of course, remembers the incident differently: ‘It was the end of term and we all had to take our books home. Pete and I had an argument, and he smacked me round the head with his heavy bag of books. I went down, he did a runner and I got up and chased him down the road and punched him in the ear. I heard an interview he did on Radio 2 where he talked about how the whole school sent him to Coventry. I knew nothing about this.’ Whatever the exact circumstances, the fight signalled the end of their relationship. ‘We were absolute best mates until this massive falling out,’ sighs Sherwin. ‘We were talking about me and him going to the Isle of Man where his dad did his summer season …’

By now, Sherwin was playing weekend gigs and taking lessons from the local jazz drummer Jim Marshall. In 1960 Marshall opened his first musical instrument shop in Ealing, and would go on to supply instruments and amplifiers for the biggest rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Who. After leaving school, Sherwin would take a full-time job at Marshall’s. ‘The Who were big customers, so that made things difficult,’ he admits. ‘Because Pete and I never spoke to one another again.’

Believing that his school friends had turned against him, Townshend brooded about his predicament, while obsessively practising the electric guitar. ‘Maybe I did him a favour then,’ offers Sherwin. ‘Because I heard on the radio that he became introspective and practised the guitar like mad.’

When Townshend re-emerged, it was the reliably faithful Entwistle who invited him to join his next band. Entwistle was now playing his home-made bass in a group that included two boys from the Mad magazine-reading ‘comedy clique’, guitarist Pete Wilson and drummer Mick Brown. ‘Mick’s great ambition at that time was to see a hundred X-certificate films before he was actually eligible,’ remembers Michael Wheeler.

The group rehearsed at Brown’s house. As well as being a proficient drummer, he owned a tape recorder. ‘So we did a lot of taped gags – like The Goon Show – sped-up sound effects, silly voices, stupid nonsense, but incredibly funny,’ said Townshend. While creating their own take on the Goons, Brown also taped his school friend playing The Shadows’ hit ‘Man of Mystery’ on the guitar. Later, Mick took Pete aside and told him that his playing was ‘magical’.

‘I said, “Oh good”. And he said, “No Pete, it’s magical,”’ recalled Townshend. ‘So I went up to see him and his mother, who was a very glamorous, extremely sexy redhead – all the boys were crazy about her – and she sat and listened and said, “Yes, it’s magical.”’ After the uncertainty of the past few months, it was the endorsement Townshend needed: ‘Mick Brown and his glamorous mother liked me.’ After the paranoia that had dogged him since the fight with Sherwin, Townshend was again part of the gang.

Mick Brown believes that their new group still used the name The Confederates, and that they rehearsed far more than they ever played live. Others, though, including Entwistle, have said they called themselves The Aristocrats and, later, The Scorpions, and that they once played their Shadows covers at that hotbed of sexual activity, the Congo Club. ‘We were terrible,’ Entwistle said.

Regardless, Townshend felt empowered. Playing guitar to an audience, however small, helped compensate for his lingering anxieties: his large nose, his parents’ disinterest, his grandmother’s complicity in his abuse, his lack of sexual experience. ‘It gave me confidence,’ he said.

Unlike Roger Daltrey, though, Townshend still found it hard to imagine making a career out of music. His earlier hopes of becoming a journalist had been usurped by his growing interest in art. Townshend was now taking Saturday morning classes at the local Ealing Technical College & School of Art. His plan was to leave school and take up a place there. The prospect of a factory job, like Daltrey’s, with its steady income and camaraderie, held little allure. A life of drawing nude models, listening to pop music and dressing, as he put it, ‘in a Bohemian manner’ seemed much more appealing.

By 1960, Roger Daltrey’s smoking partner and ex-schoolmate Reg Bowen had started playing guitar with a new group. Reflecting the popularity of The Shadows at the time, this new ensemble contained no fewer than four guitarists. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to be Hank Marvin or Bruce Welch.

It was at the Fuller, Smith & Turner brewery’s social club in Chiswick that the group acquired one of those guitarists, Vic Arnold. ‘I joined them after meeting a guitar player called Bill,’ says Arnold now. ‘I can’t remember Bill’s surname, and every time I asked him what it was, he seemed to change it. I did wonder if he was on the run …’ But ‘Bill’, who also sang with the band, was well connected. ‘His mate’s sister was married to Gene Vincent,’ remembers Bowen. ‘So he had contacts, which helped us get gigs.’

When another of their guitarists left to join an Irish show band, Bowen recommended Roger Daltrey. The girlfriend that had so preoccupied him during his final months at school hadn’t been enough to turn him off music for good. Vic Arnold remembers Daltrey auditioning with a gutsy performance of Elvis’ ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. The band wanted him to join, but Daltrey didn’t even own a guitar. To start with, he borrowed Bill’s. Then, resourceful as ever, he spent weeks building a new one, based on a photo of a Fender Stratocaster, the hallowed instrument of Hank Marvin and Buddy Holly. ‘He came back with this bright-red thing,’ marvels Arnold, ‘but it worked.’

It didn’t take long for Daltrey to make his presence felt and graduate to playing lead guitar. So far, the band had played under several names (none of which anybody can recall now). At Daltrey’s suggestion, they started using the name The Detours, lifted from the song ‘Detour’ by Duane Eddy. ‘What stood out for me about Roger Daltrey was that he knew what he wanted,’ says Vic Arnold. ‘Blinkers on, straight ahead, very confident.’ Before long, they all agreed that having four guitarists was a little excessive: ‘So it was suggested that someone should learn bass instead, and all eyes seemed to be looking at me.’

Arnold bought a bass on hire purchase, hoping The Detours would make enough money for him to pay off the instalments. Over the coming months, various players, including the enigmatic ‘Bill’, came and went, lured away by rival groups, parental disapproval or the need to concentrate on a day job. The lead singer’s role was soon filled by another ex-Acton County pupil, eighteen-year-old Colin Dawson, whose ability to mimic Cliff Richard made him the ideal candidate for the job.

‘My mother always used to say, “Colin is a good singer, but he’s very much a Cliff Richard clone,”’ says Reg Bowen. ‘Whereas she always pointed out that Roger was a proper singer, but he wasn’t one for putting himself forward at that time.’ When The Detours performed live, Vic Arnold remembers playing songs by Elvis, Cliff Richard, Duane Eddy, Little Richard and poor Buddy Holly, who had now acquired a tragic-hero status, after the plane he was travelling in crashed, killing Holly and all on board in February 1959.

Thanks to Daltrey, The Detours secured an out-of-town booking at Chislehurst Caves in Kent, where Arnold lost his plectrum and ‘splattered everyone with blood from the broken blisters on my thumb’. He also fixed them up with the Chase Products’ annual work dinner and dance: ‘It was at this hotel out of town, and we travelled down there on a coach with all the revellers, and everyone passing bottles of brown ale down the aisle.’

However, after several months, Arnold still wasn’t earning enough. When he was asked to join a group booked to open for Chubby Checker, the Philadelphian rock ’n’ roller of ‘Let’s Twist Again’ fame, on his UK tour, Arnold didn’t hesitate. ‘We were at Reg Bowen’s house when I told The Detours I was leaving,’ he says. ‘I went to catch the bus, and Roger ran down the road after me to try and persuade me to change my mind. He kept saying, “Things are looking up, there’ll be more gigs …” But I kept saying, “No, no … I’ve got this tour supporting Chubby Checker …”’

Vic Arnold caught the bus from Acton, after walking out on the group that was about to become The Who: ‘Looking back, it was the probably the silliest mistake anybody’s ever made.’ Arnold made it into the charts in 1964 with the folk-pop three-piece the Lorne Gibson Trio. He now writes and performs country music. ‘The Who wasn’t for me,’ he insists. ‘I have no regrets.’

Daltrey wouldn’t have to look far to find a new bass guitarist. It was one of those strange, serendipitous moments: one evening Acton County’s most feared hooligan and the 1st South Middlesex Boys’ Brigade’s star bugler crossed paths in Acton. ‘I’d just finished work and I was in hobnail boots and jeans covered in grease,’ Daltrey recalled, ‘when I see this guy walking towards me with what looked like the biggest guitar I had ever seen in my life.’

It was John Entwistle. Daltrey recognised him from school and also on account of his odd gait. ‘John walked a bit like John Wayne,’ he recalled. ‘He had a swagger.’ But he’d never seen the peculiar looking instrument Entwistle was carrying over his shoulder before: ‘I said to John, “What is that?” He said, “It’s a bass, innit.” This thing looked like a football boot, but with a neck on it that was about five feet long.’ Being an experienced guitar-maker, Daltrey wasted no time in pointing out its shortcomings: ‘I told him, “That neck’s going to fold up on you soon …”’

An undeterred Daltrey gave Entwistle a similar speech to the one he’d given Vic Arnold: that The Detours had bookings, that they were earning money, that things were looking up … Entwistle listened. Although he was wary of Daltrey’s reputation, The Detours played regularly, whereas his school group rehearsed more than they gigged. Entwistle agreed to an audition at The Detours’ drummer’s house the following week. ‘Our drummer at the time was called Harry Wilson,’ remembers Reg Bowen. ‘A lovely bloke, Harry, but not the greatest of drummers.’ Entwistle brought along his ‘football boot’-shaped bass, played a couple of songs in the front room and was invited to join the group.

This casual jam session would alter the course of Daltrey and Entwistle’s lives. Not that either of them could have imagined it at the time. Fame, it seemed, was something that happened to other people, and even then there was always someone to remind you of where you’d come from.

Adam Faith was, by then, the local Acton boy made good. He had already enjoyed ten top-twenty hits, including the recent ‘Someone Else’s Baby’, a maddeningly catchy song that paired his hiccupping London accent with pizzicato strings, à la Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining In My Heart’. Faith had left skiffle and rock ’n’ roll behind and was about to appear at the Royal Variety Performance.

Bowen and Daltrey had a school friend who lived in the same block of flats in Acton Vale as Faith’s mother. ‘We’d go over to this guy’s place to listen to records,’ says Bowen. ‘And you’d see Terry Nelhams, as we all still knew him, driving around in a Ford Consul. Later, after he’d made a bit of money, he started turning up this big, flash Yankee job, and all the kids in the flats threw rubbish and old fruit at it.’

Daltrey was ambitious, but nobody truly believed that he was going to become the next Adam Faith or that The Detours would ever rival The Shadows. When they first rehearsed at Bowen’s house, Entwistle remembered plugging into Reg’s parents’ radiogram, as he didn’t yet have an amp of his own. When the group did get a booking, they’d arrive at the youth club or church hall in a van driven by Harry Wilson’s father. ‘None of us took it that seriously,’ insists Bowen. ‘The whole music scene at that time was a bit “bash it and run”.’

Over more than fifty years, the memories have become hazy and half-remembered anecdotes accepted as facts. In some accounts, The Detours’ ever-changing line-up included a guitarist named Roy Ellis who accidentally drowned in the Thames, but left behind an expensive Vox amplifier, which was used to lure Pete Townshend into the band. In fact, the Vox amp was Reg Bowen’s, and Ellis died in the summer of 1962, by which time Townshend was already a member.

Whatever the reason, Daltrey made his initial approach to Townshend during his final term at Acton County in the spring of 1961. Entwistle had mentioned Townshend’s name to his bandmates on several occasions, but Daltrey was well aware of the Acton County pupil whom he thought resembled ‘a nose on a stick’ and who’d also dared to challenge his fighting etiquette. He decided to pay Townshend a visit.

After having Daltrey expelled, Desmond Kibblewhite had insisted that he never set foot in the school again. But since his departure, Townshend had occasionally spotted Daltrey in the playground, visiting what he called ‘his various cronies’. In his eye-wateringly tight drainpipe trousers and with a quiff so large it now resembled the prow of a ship, Daltrey was difficult to miss. But his school visits went unchallenged by the staff. As Townshend remarked, not without exaggeration though: ‘Roger was quite capable of beating to death any teacher that threw a blackboard rubber at him.’

Townshend was in his final term at Acton County and remembers being outside his classroom talking to his form teacher, when he saw Daltrey marching down the corridor towards him. Like Entwistle, Townshend was cautious: he hadn’t forgotten their first exchange of words. Communicating via the sort of barked questions and monosyllabic grunts that had so irked the Worried Men’s Vic Gibbons, Daltrey told Townshend that he’d heard he was a good guitarist and asked if he wanted to try out for The Detours. ‘As calmly as I could,’ said Townshend. ‘I told Roger I was interested.’

It would be several months before Townshend heard from Daltrey again, but the connection had been made. Townshend had been invited to join his next gang. ‘We always try to fill in the missing pieces, don’t we?’ he said. ‘Maybe Roger Daltrey was the thug of an older brother I never had.’ Either way, for Townshend, ‘It was the greatest bloody triumph of my life.’