CHAPTER FIVE

THE PEER AND THE GANGSTER

‘Not for the first time, the East End wide boy and the public school ponce rubbed elbows or other body parts in the cellars of Soho.’

Ex-Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham remembers the early 1960s

‘Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp were the pop equivalent of the Kray Twins.’

Roger Daltrey, 1994

What was once the Railway Hotel in Harrow burned down on a Sunday evening in February 2002. By midnight, the roof had caved in, the mock-Tudor frontage was charred black and the boarded-up windows ran with water where firefighters had tried to douse the flames. In 1964, this three-storey Victorian pub was the scene of some of The Who’s most dramatic performances. Seven years later, the pub would be pictured on the back cover of the group’s hits collection, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. However, by the time the Railway caught fire, it had been empty for years, an abandoned wreck towering over the bridge where the traffic idled, bumper to bumper, en route to Harrow and Wealdstone train station.

Outside, the Railway’s walls were daubed with graffiti. Inside, some of the stairs leading from the public bar down to the basement where The Who used to play had perished. But in the late 1960s, the basement had been filled with long-haired students in army greatcoats nodding along to blues guitarist Rory Gallagher or folk-rockers Jethro Tull. Later, the Railway’s 60p Sunday-night reggae club brought in the skinheads from nearby Headstone Lane estate. By the early 1980s, the Railway was hosting Irish folk singers howling republican anthems, and frantic rockabilly groups praying for some of The Who’s lingering magic to rub off on them.

Soon after, the Railway’s reputation for beery violence outweighed its musical legacy. The singers and bands moved on, and while the seasoned drinkers stayed put, there was an air of decay, as if someone had already called time. Finally, even the landlord quit, and by the middle of the decade the Railway stood empty. The fire made headlines in the local press, but it was an ignoble end to what had once been an historic venue. In the days following the blaze, rumours circulated around the area about arsonists and alleged insurance scams. But if anyone was able to provide damning evidence they were reluctant to come forward. While local musicians swapped stories about the pub’s illustrious past, the Railway’s most famous alumnus, Roger Daltrey, gave a pithy statement to the press: ‘It’s like when the house you were born in is no longer there.’

For a few months, even after the bulldozers had done their worst, there was a chunk of the Railway’s wall that stayed upright. It stood there as if in some futile gesture of defiance; a final reminder of what one regular visitor from The Who’s era remembers as ‘the horrible, black vomit-proof bricks’ that had once walled the basement. By September 2004, two blocks of utilitarian-looking flats had risen up in the Railway’s place. In was a gesture that would have amused and shocked The Who’s 1960s followers, the flats were named Daltrey House and Moon House. In December 2009, the council unveiled a blue plaque on the wall of Daltrey House, honouring the site ‘where The Who made rock history by smashing a guitar in 1964’.

The Who’s journey to the Railway Hotel began in December 1963, when the Wembley branch of the Young Communist League held its Christmas party in the pub’s function room. Local R&B group the Bo Street Runners provided the music, and the party was such a success that by the following spring, the YCL was hosting a weekly blues club at the Railway.

Richard Barnes had seen Cyril Davies at the pub in 1962. ‘It was an epiphany,’ he says, even though Davies passed out drunk onstage prompting his singer Long John Baldry to start kicking him in disgust. By June 1964, Barney was co-promoting a Tuesday R&B night at the Railway, called the Bluesday Club, with the High Numbers headlining. His co-promoter, a fellow blues fan named Lionel Gibbins, dealt with the pub’s management, while Barney took care of advertising. Flyposting all over Harrow and as far north as Watford paid off, and, before long, the gig was attracting large groups of suburban mods that lived too far out to travel to the Goldhawk or into the West End. The High Numbers’ debut single had been a disaster, but that hadn’t affected their ability to pull a crowd whenever they played live.

Barnes and Gibbins worked hard to create an atmosphere. The basement’s radiators were turned on even though it was summer, the lights stayed off except for two coloured bulbs and the windows were blacked out as if anticipating a German air raid. ‘We wanted to make it like a nightclub-cum-bordello,’ says Barnes. When the show was over, Barney and Gibbins would jump into Lionel’s Jaguar and grab a late meal in Harrow, paying for the food out of the night’s takings. ‘I lived on half crowns that year,’ he says.

The High Numbers’ Tuesday 14 July gig at the Railway was just like any other. There were the usual scooters lined up outside and the usual youths jostling for space on the dance floor. Barney was at the front desk when he first saw Kit Lambert, the man who would go on to become The Who’s co-manager. ‘I was taking money and sorting out membership cards when I spotted this rather aristocratic looking gentleman in a dark suit loitering outside,’ he says. Presuming he was a representative from the local council, sent to investigate the noise, Barnes panicked, and asked the bouncers not to let him in: ‘I was terrified he’d come to close us down.’

It was then that Lambert explained that he was looking for a pop group to star in a film he wanted to make. His Savile Row suit, cut-glass accent and the fact that he was almost ten years older than anyone else in the room suggested a cultured background and, more importantly, money. Barnes let him in. Lambert negotiated the steps down into the dank cellar. ‘The Who were playing there in this room with just one red bulb glowing and an extraordinary audience that they had collected,’ he later told the Observer’s Tony Palmer. ‘They were the loudest group I’d ever heard.’ How this former Oxford graduate and jungle explorer found his way to The Who in the first place is a story as strange as anything Pete Townshend could have dreamed up.

Born on 11 May 1935, Christopher Sebastian Lambert was the third generation of a musical and artistic dynasty. His grandfather, George, was a painter, his uncle Maurice a sculptor, and his father Constant a composer and conductor. Constant Lambert had been a star pupil of the Royal Academy of Music. At the age of twenty, he’d been commissioned to write a score for the Russian ballet impresario, Sergei Diaghilev. In 1928, Constant’s work The Rio Grande set the writer Sacheverell Sitwell’s poem of the same name to a score unusually influenced by jazz and classical music. A year later, he was appointed musical director of what would later become the Royal Ballet, and went on to write Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, in which he pioneered the idea of bridging European classical and black American music, leading to an irresolvable rift with many traditionally minded critics.

Constant had married Kit’s mother Florence Kaye when she was still a teenager. Their only child was named after the English painter, and Constant’s former lover, Christopher ‘Kit’ Wood and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Kit’s godfather was Constant’s friend, the esteemed composer William Walton; his godmother the Royal Ballet’s star dancer, Margot Fonteyn, who’d begun a long-running affair with Constant at the age of seventeen.

The Lamberts’ marriage ended soon after Kit’s birth, and Constant left the family home in Knightsbridge. Kit spent his early years being raised largely by his maternal grandmother, Amy, while Florence established a property business and tried in vain to become a model. Aged two, Kit was admitted to hospital for the removal of a tubercular gland in his neck. The subsequent operation left him with a prominent scar, of which he was always self-conscious and which others later mistook to be the result of a skirmish when serving in the army.

Constant Lambert spent the war years touring with the Royal Ballet. After which he flitted in and out of his son’s life, while also trying to balance his career and his second marriage to the painter Isabel Rawsthorne. Kit was an introverted child brought up in a female-dominated environment. It seems he was starved of affection or attention; factors he later blamed for the homosexuality to which he was never quite able to reconcile himself. Like Pete Townshend, an only child until he was fifteen, Lambert seemed to have spent his early childhood surrounded by, but sometimes ignored by, brilliant creative adults.

In the spring of 1949, Kit became a boarder at Lancing College near Shoreham, Sussex. He muddled through in most subjects, but his keen wit and insouciance are still remembered over sixty years later. ‘Kit had a certain air of intellectual superiority,’ says former Lancing pupil Richard Newton Price, who, like Lambert, was a member of the school’s Field House. ‘He was always very jokey, amusing and bright, but I don’t think he was extraordinary. His schoolwork wasn’t terribly good because of his laziness.’

Kit’s chaotic approach to school life changed dramatically after the summer of 1951. On 21 August, his father died from bronchopneumonia and previously undiagnosed diabetes. He was just forty-five years old. Prior to his death, Constant’s heavy drinking had accelerated into full-blown alcoholism and had started to impinge on his work; he was said to have passed out halfway through conducting a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. In his final months, Constant had focused all his remaining energy on composing a new ballet, Tiresias. It was an ambitious work based on the Greek legend of the blind prophet, who is transformed from a male into a female and back again, and then asked to decide which gender gains the most enjoyment from sexual intercourse. Lambert’s score, the choreography, the design and the ballet’s sexual themes were widely condemned: ‘Did you ever see such a thing?’ wrote the Observer. ‘Idiotic and boring.’

Constant was deeply hurt by the response to the ballet and reportedly began drinking more than ever. In his wilder moments Kit blamed the speed of his father’s death on the critical drubbing Tiresias had received. While this was an overstatement, Constant’s desire to experiment and to introduce jazz and black American influences into his music had been viciously condemned by the critical elite. ‘They couldn’t understand,’ said Kit, ‘how someone of [Constant’s] talents could hang around with Louis Armstrong rather than classical musicians.’ In his later role as Pete Townshend’s mentor and a champion of The Who’s provocative rock opera Tommy, Kit would relish the opportunity to provoke the musical establishment just as his father had done.

Constant’s death seemed to spur his son into focusing on his studies and widening his social circle. His school work improved, he started acting in several dramatic productions, and became a key member of two societies: the literary discussion group the Elizabethans, and, later, a dining club called the Library, where he struck up a friendship with the future Amazon explorer Richard Mason.

‘It was an extraordinary thing, as one couldn’t imagine anyone less Amazonian than Kit,’ says Newton Price. ‘Whereas Richard Mason was a games-playing prefect. Athletics and cross-country running were his forté. No way would Kit be seen on any games field.’ Mason was athletic, rugged and a stickler for the rules. Newton Price remembers him beating a boy severely for talking in chapel, after which several pupils staged a singing strike as a protest. Nonetheless, Lambert and Mason’s odd friendship endured.

Homosexuality was rife at Lancing, but it was strictly covert. ‘There was a picture of [the conductor] Benjamin Britten and [his partner, the tenor] Peter Pears in the school magazine once,’ says Newton Price, ‘and I remember someone saying if we did what they did we’d get expelled. Everybody recognised it was a normal way of behaving if you put several hundred teenage boys in a monastery. But if the authorities became aware of it, they would have rejected it.’ Newton Price recalls being politely propositioned by Lambert, ‘but he was fine when rejected.’

In 1953, Kit’s renewed commitment to his studies paid off. He was awarded with an open scholarship to read French at Trinity College, Oxford, which was deferred until he had completed his national service. Later, Lambert would brag that he had been the ‘worst officer in the British army’. Nevertheless, he still showed enough commitment during basic training to be considered officer material, albeit of the lower-ranking variety.

Just before Christmas 1954, Junior Field Officer Christopher ‘Kit’ Lambert of the 14th Field regiment of the Royal Artillery was posted to Hong Kong. Here, he met fellow officer and lifelong friend Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall. ‘I could see he was unusual then, compared to the young national service officers we had around us,’ Fearnley-Whittingstall told Kit Lambert screenplay author Pat Gilbert. ‘He was cultured and intelligent and we struck up an immediate accord, particularly after we found we were both going up to Trinity.’

The nature of officer life meant that the pair enjoyed what Fearnley-Whittingstall calls ‘long periods of boredom broken up by long periods of leisure time’. At every available opportunity, Lambert travelled from his remote barracks to the coastal town of Kowloon, where his friend was stationed, and where there was a thriving nightlife. Both men loved the cinema and theatre, and began acting in amateur productions and reporting on the latest films for a Radio Hong Kong programme called Going to the Pictures.

By his own admission, Fearnley-Whittingstall was a reluctant soldier, but Lambert was even more disaffected and struggled to fit in: ‘I don’t think he cared for the army much. Superficially he appeared to have tremendous confidence. But underneath I think he was insecure. He was also very quick and very witty, and I don’t think that appealed to some of his fellow officers.’ Lambert’s homosexuality while still discreet manifested itself in his fascination with a rather camp captain whom he’d spotted wearing a pink suit when off-duty: ‘Nothing was ever said but he was obsessed with this chap,’ says Fearnley-Whittingstall.

With their undistinguished spell of national service complete, both men took up their places at Trinity in October. Despite Kit’s gift for languages, he switched to English history almost as soon as he arrived. At Trinity, Fearnley-Whittingstall had rooms two floors above Kit’s, and watched, amused, as his friend challenged his strait-laced peers. Lambert’s habit of wearing an exotically patterned dressing gown from Hong Kong drew disapproving comments, which, in turn, prompted him to wear the offending gown more often. Like Keith Moon, Lambert also showed great powers of mimicry, and impersonated one of his lecturers with pinpoint accuracy: ‘He had a tutor called John Cooper, who was a famous history don. Cooper was incredibly learned, and much imitated. Kit used to invent these legends about Cooper – “At the end of a tutorial the topic will be the influence of metal ink on military thinking, 1831 to 1832. There is quite a good paper in the library …”’

But Lambert also showed a more decadent side, as if mimicking his late father. He started drinking heavily and, unusually for Oxford in the 1950s, experimented with marijuana and the hallucinogenic mescaline. The manager, producer and writer Simon Napier-Bell became a close friend of Kit’s in the 1960s, and suggests that Constant’s cycle of success and failure became a blueprint for his son. ‘Constant was a prototype for Kit – emotionally volatile, easily bored, sexually ambivalent and irresistibly drawn to self-destruction.’

Nevertheless, in his lucid moments, Kit contributed articles to the university magazine Isis and was active in the film and theatre societies. The latter asked him to help promote their upcoming production of the Jacobean tragedy The Changeling. Lambert failed to do anything until two days before opening night. However, within twenty-four hours, he’d arranged to have hundreds of flyers printed, which were then dropped over Oxford from a hired aeroplane. ‘Kit had a force of personality which was enough to let him overcome most adverse circumstances,’ adds Fearnley-Whittingstall.

That force of personality helped see him through most tricky situations. Yet those that knew him suggested Kit relied on alcohol as a prop to boost his confidence and to blot out his insecurity. Moreover, he was still terrified that his mother would discover his homosexuality, although he was ‘out’ among his friends at Oxford.

After moving out of the college halls and into a succession of shared houses and flats, Lambert had several short-lived affairs and a more serious relationship with a brilliant fellow student named Jeremy Wolfenden. Later, Wolfenden would be recruited to the British intelligence services, where his lifestyle led to him being blackmailed by the KGB. Wolfenden featured in The Fatal Englishman, author Sebastian Faulks’ study of three English lives, in which Lambert and his group of friends are described as ‘dissolute … and given to displays of solid camp of a rare vintage.’

In 1959, as his time at Trinity drew to a close, Lambert had what Fearnley-Whittingstall called ‘a disaster with his degree’. After taking the amphetamine Benzedrine and staying up for several nights revising, Kit stormed out of the examination room before completing his English history paper. Lambert later told the examining staff that he’d been hallucinating. Incredibly, he was still awarded a fourth; a decision that might have had more to do with preserving the college’s reputation than accurately reflecting Kit’s efforts.

After Trinity, Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall started training to become a stockbroker, and Lambert signed up to study film at the University of Paris. Although one of his cinematic idols, the director and screenwriter Jean-Luc Godard was lecturing at the university, Lambert couldn’t settle. He thought the course was old-fashioned and found his fellow students less worldly than he’d expected. Before long, he was making frequent trips back to London. By early 1960, he’d quit Paris, moved into a flat in Earls Court, and taken a junior position at a documentary film-making company, supplementing his earnings with the modest royalties from his father’s estate. Then, early in 1961, Lambert bumped into Richard Mason at a party in London.

After leaving Oxford, Mason had travelled extensively through South America and the Middle East, and had just secured funding for an expedition to Brazil to chart the source of the Iriri River, one of the longest unmapped rivers in the Amazon basin. It was a journey that would take the expedition through miles of uncharted jungle. When Mason learned that Lambert had been studying at film school, he suggested he join them to make a documentary about the trip. Lambert accepted.

Before embarking on the expedition, Mason and fellow explorer and Oxford graduate John Hemming spoke with the Villas-Bôas brothers, recognised as the foremost authority on South America’s indigenous people, who told them they believed the area close to the Iriri to be uninhabited. Fearnley-Whittingstall remembers Lambert reassuring him that the trip wouldn’t be dangerous before producing a book with pictures of a tribe of South American Indians ‘who’d only been seen twice, spoke no known language and were terribly fierce’. It was an unwitting preview of the terrible events that lay ahead.

In April 1961, while a supposedly ostracised Pete Townshend was preparing for his O levels at Acton County, Kit Lambert joined Mason and Hemming for the voyage to Brazil. After arriving in Rio de Janeiro, the party was flown to Cachimbo, a sparse airstrip surrounded by over 900 miles of dense jungle, but as close as it was possible to get to the source of the Iriri.

Now one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Amazon and a former director and secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Dr John Hemming is the only surviving member of the expedition. ‘In 1961 this was unmapped territory,’ he says now. ‘There was nothing, no aerial or satellite photography. All we had was a compass to try and stay on a northerly bearing.’ The national mapping agency sent three surveyors to join the expedition, and Hemming and his team were granted permission to name any new features they discovered in the jungle.

The party was completed by five Brazilian woodsmen who helped carry supplies and built dugout canoes from the surrounding trees. ‘These men were illiterate,’ says Hemming, ‘but they hollowed out trees with their axes and built these beautiful canoes using biblical hand measurements – the length of a thumb, a handspan or a forearm.’ However, the arduous task of cutting a path through the jungle fell to the three Englishmen, working in shifts. For five months, they hacked a trail north-eastwards from the airstrip towards what they thought was the source of the river. Every three weeks the party would move their base camp further north along the cleared path. It was a painstaking process. Between fulfilling his role as a cameraman and shooting footage of the trip, Lambert also worked shifts cutting the path – a task in which he showed the same tenacity as his more experienced companions.

‘Kit was different from us in a lot of ways,’ says Hemming. ‘But he was also a tough little chap. Richard Mason was about to become a doctor so he made sure we had enough vitamins. But we were always hungry, so one could get rather bad tempered.’ On one occasion, Hemming and Lambert made the eighteen-mile trip from Cachimbo to camp together. The path they’d cut was so narrow that both men, heavily weighed down with backpacks, had to walk in single file: ‘Kit had started just ahead of me. We were each carrying a revolver for signalling purposes, and Kit later told me that he’d got so angry having me walking right on his heels for several hours that he nearly took out his gun and shot my foot off.’

The team experienced a major setback when they discovered they’d wasted weeks making canoes for a river that turned out not to be the Iriri, but another tributary some five miles away. ‘Richard and I spent three days doing some reconnaissance to explore the lie of the land,’ says Hemming. ‘Kit cut a trail on his own and then realised the river was curving in the wrong direction. So there was a moment of depression when we discovered that this river was not the one we wanted.’

After realising their error and how much time they’d wasted, Hemming returned to Rio in August to arrange for fresh supplies to be parachuted into the jungle. He then flew from Rio to a smaller Brazilian airbase, and persuaded the national radio station to broadcast a message to camp, telling them the time of the scheduled drop and instructing the team to light a fire as a guide for the pilot. However, technical problems with the plane delayed take-off for twenty-four hours. A day later, the Brazilian president, Jânio Quadros, resigned unexpectedly, and the air force were ordered back to base. Quadros’ sudden resignation and the fear that his hardline left-wing deputy João Goulart would assume control put the Brazilian military on high alert. All military aircraft were grounded and the banks were closed. Hemming was stranded, with his supplies, but without money or a plane.

Hemming finally persuaded a farmer with a light aircraft to fly him to Rio after bribing him with a bottle of whisky given to him as a gift by the British ambassador: ‘There were still a few commercial planes flying, and I discovered the cost of the air ticket to Rio was 1,740 cruzeiros. So I found a drunk air force sergeant in a bar, showed him a second bottle of the malt whisky, told him, “This is the finest thing you’ve ever tasted, and you’re going to buy it off me for 1,740 cruzeiros,” which he did, and that’s how I paid for my ticket.’

In Rio, Hemming secured an urgent meeting with the air minister’s deputy, who explained that all military planes were grounded but one plane used for air-sea rescue was still permitted to fly, and could take him to Cachimbo. Within twenty-four hours Hemming was travelling in darkness in the hold of what he calls a ‘flying boat’ through the middle of a storm: ‘There was thunder and lightning and the plane was being buffeted from side to side, when suddenly the door opened and one of the pilots came back to me.’ The pilot informed Hemming that news had just come over the radio: his camp had been attacked and all of his companions had been killed. ‘There was,’ he says, ‘something Wagnerian about it all.’

When he finally arrived, Hemming discovered that only Richard Mason was dead. Mason had been carrying supplies from Cachimbo to a new riverside camp, when he’d been ambushed by a hunting party from the Pánara tribe, also known as the Kren Akarore. In the Pánara’s language there was only one word for both ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy’.

‘We believed the area to be uninhabited,’ says Hemming. ‘But it clearly wasn’t. This hunting party had stumbled over our trail, which to an Indian must have looked like a bloody motorway.’ Hemming later discovered that the Pánara had also been made aware of Mason’s presence by the sound of his trousers rubbing together as he walked. These naked tribesman had never seen a white man before, or a man wearing clothes. They shot Mason with arrows, before smashing his skull with clubs and beating him to death.

When Mason didn’t return to camp, Kit Lambert went looking for him. A day’s walk from camp, he discovered his school friend’s battered and bloodied corpse, around which his attackers had arranged their arrows and clubs as a warning to other strangers. Lambert and the rest of the party made their way back to Cachimbo, terrified that they could be ambushed at any moment. ‘Kit was in a bad state when I got there,’ says Hemming. ‘He’d lost an awful lot of weight and was covered in insect bites.’

Back in England, the BBC had broadcast the news of Mason’s death. Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall met with Lambert’s mother Florence: ‘She told me, “We must rescue Kit. I’m going to talk to Harold Macmillan and get him to send a gunboat …”’ Within days, a reporter from the Daily Mail arrived in Cachimbo. ‘And Kit started pouring out his emotions and thoughts to this dreadful hack,’ says Hemming. An hour later, another plane arrived carrying a Daily Express writer. He had barely spoken to Lambert and Hemming before discovering that the Mail’s reporter had beaten him to the story, whereupon he flagged down the plane he’d arrived on as it taxied down the runway, and returned to Rio. The Daily Express’ report on 7 September 1961 stated that Mason had been killed with a poison dart from a blowpipe, and quoted a school friend who described him as ‘a man’s man’.

Eventually a team of medics and soldiers arrived in Cachimbo to help retrieve the body. Hemming and Lambert accompanied them to where the corpse had lain for nearly a week. ‘In the rainforest everything decomposes very quickly,’ says Hemming, ‘and the animals move in.’ The expedition party had been carrying machetes as gifts for any Indians they encountered. As a peace offering and a gesture of extraordinary goodwill to the Pánara, Hemming left the weapons at the site of the ambush. Mason’s decomposing corpse was embalmed, wrapped in canvas, and carried for two days out of the jungle. He was buried in a plot in the British cemetery in Rio.

Lambert attended the funeral and recuperated in the city. ‘He told me that the one thing he absolutely craved after being in the jungle was sugar,’ recalls Fearnley-Whittingstall. As a guest of the British ambassador, Kit’s dietary needs were well catered for. But he had other cravings and by the time he left for London, Lambert was also suffering from an anal infection contracted in a Rio brothel.

Back in England, John Hemming spoke about the expedition at the Royal Geographical Society and wrote articles for the Sunday Times. Unfortunately, the whereabouts of the footage Lambert shot on the trip remains unknown. Hemming believes that Kit may have still had it up until his death in 1981. Fearnley-Whittingstall suggests, only half-jokingly, that ‘Kit may have left it in the back of a taxi.’

However, both Hemming and Fearnley-Whittingstall dispute the suggestion that Lambert was in love with Richard Mason; a theory mooted by several people who came to know Kit later on, including Terence Stamp. ‘We didn’t even know Kit was gay,’ points out Hemming. ‘It was a friendship forged when they were boys,’ says Fearnley-Whittingstall. ‘It certainly never occurred to me that they were gay, or that Kit had any feelings towards Richard.’

‘I don’t think Kit wanted to dwell on his time in Brazil,’ he adds. ‘I think coming back to London and civilisation was also about coming back to normality.’ The two men moved into a flat in Curzon Place, near Piccadilly Circus. What Kit now wanted, he said, ‘was to be rich’. After a short stint selling advertising, he decided that the surest route to achieving his aim could be found in the film industry. Those who knew him well suggest that Kit was more interested in the idea of making a movie than the work involved. Nevertheless, just three months after his life-threatening experience in Brazil, Lambert had landed a job in cinema.

Over the next two years, he worked as a director’s assistant and production manager on several films, including Judy Garland’s final movie I Could Go on Singing (1963); Sean Connery’s second James Bond thriller, From Russia with Love (1963) and director Bryan Forbes’ version of W. Somerset Maugham’s drama Of Human Bondage (1964). Lambert’s tasks ranged from preparing actors’ call sheets to assisting with the sets to running menial errands for the talent, including, he once said, emptying Judy Garland’s chamber pot. None of the work was going to make him rich, but it allowed him to travel overseas and brought him into contact with the kind of creative individuals that he believed might help him to realise his dream.

Kit Lambert encountered his future business partner and The Who’s co-manager Chris Stamp in 1962, after they were hired as director’s assistants on producer Richard Attenborough’s romantic drama The L-Shaped Room (1962). The pair met at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. One of Lambert’s jobs was to ensure that the star, French former ballerina Leslie Caron, was on set on time; which was easier said than done considering Lambert’s wayward approach to timekeeping. Stamp, meanwhile, ensured that he was on set, mainly because he was utterly smitten with Caron.

As with Richard Mason, Chris Stamp was the apparent antithesis of Lambert. Yet he was intrigued by what he called ‘Kit’s worldly sophistication’ and his background in a ‘West End bohemian artistic family’. Lambert, meanwhile, at least initially, was attracted by Stamp’s good looks and his working-class upbringing.

Christopher Thomas Stamp and his five siblings were the children of merchant seamen Tom Stamp and his wife Ethel Perrott. Their eldest son, Terence, would go on to become a film actor and writer. Their second son, Chris, was born in Stepney, east London, on 7 July 1942. Tom spent the war years as a stoker in the merchant navy. It was a harrowing experience that Chris would refer to in interviews many years later, and which helped him identify with Pete Townshend’s notion of a generation damaged by war.

On several occasions, Tom Stamp’s merchant vessel was caught up in a skirmish and its crew forced to abandon ship. More than once, Ethel went to the shipping company’s office to collect her husband’s wages, only to be told there weren’t any as Tom’s ship had gone down. During the Blitz, his crew received a wire informing them that London was under attack. When Tom received a second wire, he was so sure it would tell him that his wife and son had been killed in an air raid, that without opening the telegram, he tried to throw himself overboard. His shipmates restrained him while one of them read the message, telling Tom that Ethel and Terence were safe and had been evacuated to Yorkshire.

On a voyage from Ireland to Iceland, Stamp’s father’s vessel sailed into a force 10 gale. Tom and his fellow stoker spent twelve hours shovelling coal into the ship’s boiler, while up to their waists in freezing water. The Iceland voyage would be the tipping point. By the end of the trip, Tom Stamp’s jet-black hair had apparently turned white. He was psychologically scarred and, for a time, struggled to settle down to life in peacetime before taking a job as a tugboat man on the River Thames.

Ethel Stamp had raised Terence while his father was away at sea, and Tom focused much of his attention on his second son. ‘Dad decided to bring Chris up himself, or at least to influence him as much as he could,’ wrote Terence in Stamp Album, the first volume of his autobiography. Tom soon taught Chris how to fight and, as a teenager, encouraged him to enter a school boxing championship. He made it through to the quarter-finals before being beaten. After the bout at Plaistow Town Hall, Stamp waited outside for his opponent and promptly knocked him unconscious. ‘Chris was a natural fighter,’ wrote his brother, ‘but a street fighter.’

Chris Stamp left Plaistow Grammar School in 1958. Together with a group of friends, he bought a Daimler Hearse in which they rode around East End dance halls offering to quell any trouble in exchange for free entry. Among his friends was fellow ex-Plaistow Grammar schoolboy Bill Curbishley. In 1971, Curbishley was given a job with The Who and later succeeded Lambert and Stamp as the group’s manager. According to Terence Stamp, talking to Andrew Loog Oldham in Oldham’s book Stone Free (2013), the gang’s activities had attracted the attention of east London’s notorious criminal twins, Ronnie and Reggie Kray ‘who were always on the lookout for young likely lads’.

In 1960, Ethel Stamp told Terence she was worried about Chris’ involvement with the gang and urged him to intervene. Terence had moved out of the East End to a flat in Harley Street and was trying to break into acting. He summoned his brother to the flat where Chris begrudgingly told him that the only thing he was interested in was girls. Terence loaned Chris his theatre employee’s union card enabling his brother to get a backstage job at Sadler’s Wells Theatre: ‘Two months later he rings up from Glasgow, and says, “I’ve just shagged all of the corps de ballet. The last one’s here – she wants to say hello.”’ Despite the perks of the Sadler’s Wells job, it was only when Chris was hired as a prop man on the West End production of Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story that he realised he’d found his ideal career. ‘It changed his life,’ said Terence. ‘From that moment on he knew he wanted to be in show business.’

Like Kit Lambert, Stamp had a steely charm and fearlessness that enabled him to talk his way into jobs without having the necessary experience. A year later, Lionel Bart, the songwriter behind the West End hits Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (1960) and Oliver! (1960), met Chris backstage and was instantly besotted. Terence assured Bart that his brother was heterosexual, but agreed to arrange a meeting. Chris told Terence, ‘I know about queers,’ and met with the songwriter who promptly hired him to run his publishing company.

Stamp had gained another foothold in show business, but the hand-to-mouth nature of the industry was evident in his living conditions. The writer Christine Day (née Bowler) met Chris in 1962 when he shared a flat with her brother, Clive Colin Bowler, an actor who’d appeared with Terence Stamp in the TV drama Term of Trial. Stamp, with his jeans, leather jacket and gruff East End accent made quite an impression at the Bowler family home in Wembley.

‘Chris and my brother’s fortunes seemed to fluctuate,’ says Christine now. ‘For a time they rented a room in Ladbroke Grove, when Ladbroke Grove was an absolute no-go area. My mother sent me down there with a bag of groceries because they had no money at all. I think there was this thing in the 1960s of wanting to dabble in an authentic lifestyle rather than thinking you were actually down and out.’

Not that this penury impacted on their social life. One evening, Christine, joined the pair on a trip to gatecrash a party in west London. The partygoers set off in Clive’s newly acquired second-hand Jaguar, the bonnet of which was secured with a length of rope but floated off as they crossed Hammersmith Bridge. Once at the party, Stamp emptied the contents of the host’s well-stocked fridge into the boot of the car.

Nevertheless, their fortunes changed soon enough, when the pair moved into a chic penthouse flat at 23 Cadogan Gardens, near Sloane Square. This new residence soon became a magnet for Chelsea’s beautiful people, with models, actors, photographers, gamblers and debutantes regularly passing through. Mim Scala, a young film agent, shared the flat with Stamp and Bowler, and wrote about it in his 2012 memoir, Diary of a Teddy Boy: ‘The most desirable girls in the world traipsed through these portals on a daily basis.’

Scala, whose parents ran an ice cream parlour in Fulham, also observed a crumbling of social barriers: ‘For the first time since the days of the Regency Bucks, the riff-raff and the aristocracy mingled freely. Etonians acquired strange cockney accents, and cockneys started speaking posh. It had become completely credible for well-bred young girls to have naughty King’s Road boyfriends.’

Among the regular visitors to Cadogan Gardens was John Fenton, who would go on to work with Lambert and Stamp, and would soon become involved in a lucrative deal to sell Beatles merchandise. ‘We were hanging around the King’s Road Chelsea set, doing three or four parties a night,’ says Fenton now. ‘Forget La Dolce Vita. Our lifestyle was twenty-four-seven. I liked Chris Stamp because, like me, he came from a serious working-class background.’

At Cadogan Gardens, Christine Day witnessed her brother and Stamp’s mod-like attention to detail, when Clive came padding down the stairs in wet jeans he’d been wearing in the bath to shrink to fit: ‘They were both absolutely obsessed with getting the perfect shape on their jeans.’ This obsession led to Terence Stamp, now a star after his lead role in the naval drama Billy Budd (1962), treating his brother and Clive to a stay at Hampshire’s Forest Mere Health Farm. ‘Terry paid for it, so that the pair of them could eat fruit and get really fit and healthy, and look great in their clothes,’ says Christine.

According to his older brother, by the time Chris Stamp worked on The L-Shaped Room, he was subsisting on a diet of apples in an attempt to shift some extra weight and impress Leslie Caron. In the end, though, it was Kit Lambert’s eye that he caught. ‘It never surprised me that those two got together,’ says Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall. ‘It may have seemed like an implausible partnership, but only superficially. It was a meeting of minds. They both wanted to make money, and nothing binds people together closer than that.’

What Lambert and Stamp also had in common was a willingness to take risks. Christine Day had noticed this attitude in Stamp early on: ‘My brother and Chris were extreme, in that they thought everything was funny, everything was a laugh. Society at that time was very cold in a way. Most people were very conventional, so anyone in the arts was considered to be different. And anyone who was that way inclined would feel quite out of place. I think Chris reflected that.’ Stamp, meanwhile, admired Lambert’s blasé disregard for convention or doing his job properly on The L-Shaped Room.

In the summer of 1963, Lambert was hired as production manager on the Walt Disney thriller The Moon-Spinners (1964), a film that attracted a degree of prurient interest as it featured former child star Hayley Mills performing her first screen kiss. Lambert flew to Crete to organise the construction of a road for one of the film’s sets. ‘He was out there for about three months,’ recalls Fearnley-Whittingstall. ‘He brought me back a dreadful bottle of wine, but became fluent in Greek.’ In a later interview, Lambert said that Walt Disney was so impressed by his organisational skills that he doubled his salary. However, others claim Lambert was unable to account for a significant shortfall in his production budget; a forewarning of future business practices.

When Lambert returned to England, he saw that The Beatles had just played the Royal Command Performance, and that ‘rock ’n’ roll had taken London by siege.’ In summer 1964, with the help of director Richard Lester, the Fab Four would extend their success to cinema, indulging their skewed humour in the group’s debut film, A Hard Day’s Night. Until then, pop music movies were still defined by Cliff Richard and the Shadows’ recent box office success Summer Holiday, by which point the hint of sexuality evident in Cliff’s breakthrough hit ‘Move It’ had long since been excised. His films, like his music, were strictly wholesome, family entertainment.

Lambert and Stamp realised that they were working on movies that could cost as much as £1 million to make, but which were being overshadowed, in terms of ticket sales at least, by the likes of Summer Holiday. The pair decided to find a group of their own and then film themselves and their band struggling to make it in the music industry. Unlike Cliff’s recent big-screen adventures, this would be an uncompromising, down-to-earth documentary; an anti-Summer Holiday. ‘I wanted to make a film that was about the reality,’ said Stamp, ‘the pills and the mods and the sweat and the tears.’

With his perfect-fitting Levi’s and chic haircut, the twenty-one-year-old Stamp looked like a man who belonged in the pop business. At first glance, the twenty-eight-year-old Lambert, with his crumpled aristocratic demeanour and what Richard Barnes calls ‘a Savile Row suit covered in fag burns’ did not. But then the same was true of Brian Epstein. By Christmas 1963, Lambert and Stamp were sharing a cramped ninth-floor flat at 113 Ivor Court in Gloucester Place, near Baker Street. Lambert commandeered the bed, Stamp took the sofa, and later, a bed, in the hall. Andrew Loog Oldham occupied the flat downstairs and observed his budding rivals with interest. ‘Kit Lambert reminded me of a naughty sulking schoolboy,’ wrote Oldham, ‘who had either been deprived of his food or his first crush.’

Lambert’s determination to find a band in London was driven by his belief that fans wanted the next challenge to The Beatles to come from the capital, blithely ignoring the existence of the London-based Rolling Stones and The Kinks. As a throwback to his days in the Royal Artillery, Kit acquired a Shell map of London on to which he pinned markers to divide up different areas of the capital. The pair began scouring the music papers and the local press, and made a habit of scribbling down any band names, pubs and dates they spotted on flyposters. By day they worked at Shepperton, but most evenings they would both head off to a different part of the city to investigate whatever group was playing.

Soon after, Stamp enlisted old school friend Mike Shaw to assist. Shaw was a twenty-one-year-old mod and lighting technician. He moved into Ivor Court, where his ‘bed’ was an armchair, and began riding his scooter around the capital’s pubs looking for a new Fab Four. Unfortunately, he fared no better than Lambert or Stamp.

By June 1964, funds were running low and Chris Stamp took a job in Ireland on the movie Young Cassidy (1965), a drama starring his brother’s future girlfriend Julie Christie. While he was away, Lambert drove his Volkswagen Beetle around north-west London, stopping at any pubs with scooters parked outside. When he spotted the Vespas and Lambrettas crowding the car park of the Railway Hotel – ‘a scruffy looking pub in Harrow’ – he decided to investigate.

Once inside the Railway, Richard Barnes directed Lambert towards Pete Meaden. In Meaden’s version of events, Lambert didn’t mention making a film. ‘He lied to me, he said he was a promoter looking for a band, to put in his club,’ claimed Meaden. ‘So I gave him the hard sell – “This is absolutely where it’s at. You cannot fail on this, squire … If you’ll just listen to me, you can make a lot of money out of this … because they are the people, they are the hippest numbers in town, there’s no one quite like them.”’ As Meaden later realised: ‘I hard sold myself right out of a band.’

In conversation with the Observer’s Tony Palmer three years later, Lambert talked up his first sighting of The Who. He spoke of how Keith Moon ‘battered away for all his life was worth’, and acclaimed the overall performance as ‘revolutionary’ and even ‘Satanic’. But even allowing for hyperbole, his argument that the High Numbers ‘had to be the face of the late 1960s’ was perceptive considering how the band would develop.

Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall says that Kit appeared to own only two records at Oxford: a recording of Façade, with his father and Edith Sitwell reciting Sitwell’s poems to William Walton’s score, and Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!. Lambert also admitted that at first he could only tell a bass guitar from any other guitar by counting the four heads at the top. Yet in other ways, his ignorance was an advantage. Lambert approached pop without preconceptions. When Townshend and Daltrey were schoolboys worshipping Lonnie Donegan and The Shadows, he’d been pondering his father’s critically doomed ballet Tiresias or fearing for his life in the Brazilian jungle. He had little prior pop knowledge and therefore very few prejudices.

Back at Ivor Court, Lambert called Chris Stamp in Ireland and told him he’d found the band they’d been searching for. Stamp caught a plane to London and joined Lambert for the last twenty minutes of the High Numbers’ set at the Watford Trade Hall on 18 July. Stamp was as impressed as Lambert, but noticed something else: the audience. ‘I was knocked out,’ he recalled. ‘But the excitement I felt wasn’t coming from the group. I couldn’t get near enough. It was coming from the people blocking my way.’

Lambert and Stamp moved quickly, and arranged a private audition at a school in Holland Park. As well as giving them the chance to watch the High Numbers without an audience, it was their first opportunity to meet the band. ‘The great thing about The Who is that they had this incredible, distorted, dysfunctional energy,’ said Stamp. ‘Pete was cerebral, John was very isolated and shut down, and Roger was Roger – his anger came through in his voice. It moved because of Keith – his energy energised them.’ For Stamp there was also something very appealing about the band’s collective attitude. ‘Totally up yer arse, up yer cunt, down with the motherfuckers,’ as he later put it.

‘On Kit’s side, what was evident was that he was gay,’ said Pete Townshend, recalling his first meeting with the pair. ‘If not obviously gay, certainly gay enough that he was like Brian Epstein, who had masterminded The Beatles. Chris Stamp was a beautiful man, very sharp, also a mod. He’d grown up around people like the Krays, and knew how to handle himself. I completely and totally and utterly fell in love with both of them.’

It seems it took barely a week for Lambert and Stamp to adjust their plan. They still wanted to make a documentary about an unknown group, but now they wanted to manage that group as well. Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall recalls Kit taking him and his wife, Jane, to watch The Who at the Railway: ‘He told us he was thinking of managing this band. It wasn’t my kind of music but what I was impressed by was that the kids were listening to the music and not just dancing.’

In the meantime, Pete Meaden decided that the group’s set-list needed sprucing up, and took them to visit the Scene club’s DJ, Guy Stevens, who had one of the best record collections in the country. It teamed with obscure imports, offering rich pickings for up-and-coming bands in search of new songs. Lambert tagged along to the meeting. An excited Stevens played them Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’, James Brown’s ‘Please, Please, Please’, and every Motown and Stax single he could find. ‘Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon sat there for three hours drinking tea looking like little schoolboys,’ said Stevens in a 1979 interview, ‘and I’m playing the records going, “Jesus Christ! Wake up!”’ What nobody seemed to realise was that what the High Numbers needed was original material, and that Pete Townshend, despite his faltering early attempts at songwriting, was capable of providing it. Instead, Lambert offered Stevens £5 to make a two-and-a-half-hour tape of songs for the High Numbers to cover.

While Lambert and Stamp were circling the High Numbers, Helmut Gorden was out of the country on holiday. Pete Meaden wanted to retain his hold on the group but knew that Gorden was a poor manager. Despite his earlier jealousy of Andrew Loog Oldham, Meaden steered his former business partner towards the group, believing that Oldham’s involvement would strengthen his own position. ‘Madame Loogy’ watched the High Numbers playing Tamla Motown covers at a club. He liked what he saw, but spotted his fellow Ivor Court tenants Lambert and Stamp in the audience, and declined to embroil himself in Meaden’s confused power struggle.

By the beginning of August, Lambert had acquired copies of the High Numbers’ agreement with Helmut Gorden and surreptitiously passed it on to The Beatles’ lawyer David Jacobs, who pointed out that Cliff and Betty Townshend hadn’t counter-signed the contract, and that it was therefore invalid. Lambert later told a journalist that he landed the management of the High Numbers after a game of brinkmanship in a Chinese restaurant. When the band laughed at his promise to get them a top-twenty record, he offered them a wager: ‘I said, “Listen you cunts, I’ll bet your wages and more I can.” I actually threw down the gauntlet on the Chinese tablecloth.’

In Lambert’s account of the story, he bet £120 of his money against the cash they’d make from ten gigs, at £12 a night. Townshend refused to take the bet, Entwistle said he’d bet £10 only, but Daltrey and Moon took the full wager. Lambert then said he’d take over paying their wages, worth £1,000 a year each. That he didn’t actually have the money seemed not to deter him. In the end, he sold Christopher Wood’s 1926 portrait of his father to raise the funds.

Asked about it now, Richard Barnes still remembers the band hesitating over whether to dump Gorden and Meaden and sign with the film-makers. ‘Townshend and I really liked Pete Meaden,’ he says. ‘But by then, we knew he had no money and we knew his weakness.’ That weakness became even more apparent once on a stroll around Soho, when Meaden suddenly stopped outlining his plans for world domination and started retching in the middle of Berners Street. They later found out, he’d popped a handful of pills on an empty stomach.

The High Numbers had wanted Meaden to help them emulate the Rolling Stones’ management model. ‘The Stones had Eric Easton, who put up the money but left the management to Andrew Loog Oldham, and got a return on his investment,’ explains Barnes. ‘That’s what we wanted. Have Helmut Gorden put up the money and let Meaden manage the band. But Gorden wanted to be Brian Epstein, and when ‘I’m the Face’ flopped, it was obvious that he was going to interfere even more.’ What finally convinced the High Numbers to sign with Kit Lambert was their mistaken belief that he was rich. Also Roger Daltrey’s latest girlfriend, Cleo, was Constant Lambert’s god-daughter. ‘The story of The Who is full of all these incredible coincidences,’ says Barnes.

Cleopatra Sylvestre was the teenage daughter of one of Constant’s mistresses, Soho cabaret artist Laureen Sylvestre. When Laureen became pregnant, Constant and his friend, the Labour MP Tom Driberg, agreed to become her child’s godfathers. By 1964, the teenage Cleo was an aspiring actress and singer, and had just recorded a version of Phil Spector’s ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’ with the Rolling Stones as her backing group. ‘My memory is that it was Cleo who convinced them to go with Kit,’ says Barnes. ‘She was the one that told them it was the right thing to do.’

Cleo Sylvestre first met Daltrey and the rest of the High Numbers at the Scene, but she had no idea at first that the ‘Kit’ in question was her godfather’s son. ‘Constant died when I was about six,’ she says now, ‘and although I’d met Kit, my mother always referred to him by his real name, Christopher.’ It was only when Daltrey mentioned that Kit’s father had been a conductor at Sadler’s Wells that she made the connection. Daltrey gave her Lambert’s phone number and she called him up, jokingly telling him, “I think we’re related. I’m your fairy godmother.”’

Helmut Gorden returned from his holiday to find a letter at his mother’s house informing him that he was no longer managing the High Numbers. In desperation, he telephoned Doug Sandom: ‘He asked if I could help get him back in,’ says Sandom, ‘the bastard!’ When Gorden realised the band had wriggled out of the contract because of Townshend’s parents’ missing signatures he sued his lawyers. A year later, Gorden began managing Episode Six, a group whose lead singer was former Acton County pupil Ian Gillan. In 1969, Gillian and Episode Six’s bass guitarist, Roger Glover, were poached by Deep Purple, and Helmut Gorden’s hopes of becoming the next Brian Epstein were dashed once and for all.

With Gorden gone, Pete Meaden’s hold on the High Numbers was more tenuous than ever. In desperation, Meaden tried to get Phil the Greek to intimidate the new managers by flashing a knife at them during a band rehearsal. But Lambert and Stamp weren’t easily intimidated. In July 1964, the Daily Mirror had written about the ‘homosexual relationship between a prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld’ under the headline, ‘PEER AND A GANGSTER – YARD ENQUIRY’. Unknown to the public, the newspaper had acquired a photograph of the well-known Conservative MP Lord Boothby with Ronnie Kray and Leslie Holt, a cat burglar and male prostitute with whom Boothby had been having a sexual relationship.

It later transpired that Boothby and Tom Driberg were regular guests at Ronnie Kray’s Walthamstow flat, where, as Driberg’s biographer Francis Wheen wrote, ‘rough and compliant East End lads were served like so many canapés.’ Compared with some of the people Lambert and, especially, Stamp knew, the likes of Phil the Greek and Reg the Butcher, were small fry. ‘I knew gangsters,’ said Chris Stamp in 2002. ‘These were half-baked tea leaves.’

In the end, it was Daltrey who broke the news to Pete Meaden that Lambert and Stamp were now managing the High Numbers. Meaden met Lambert at a restaurant in Soho’s Frith Street, where he’d once had a job peeling vegetables, and was offered £500 in an envelope as a pay-off: ‘I learnt later that I was supposed to accept £5,000, but I just said, “Yeah, that’s alright, that’ll do – thanks a lot.”’ Later on, Lambert boasted that he’d deliberately stuffed the envelope with crisp new banknotes to help lure his prey.

With the High Numbers now officially theirs, Lambert and Stamp formed a company, New Action Ltd, and had new contracts drawn up. For the third time in as many years, the band’s parents were given a document to sign. Lambert turned up at Fielding Road one Sunday carrying a bunch of flowers on a charm offensive. The Daltreys agreed to sign, but the contract marked the beginning of the end of Roger’s already precarious marriage. Lambert knew that pop fans wanted their idols to be single. The Rolling Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts and Beatle John Lennon were encouraged to keep their marital status quiet. Lambert wanted Daltrey to do the same. Roger’s son Simon was born that summer, but Daltrey was soon spending more and more time away from the Wandsworth council flat he shared with his wife and their new baby. As the photographer Colin Jones, who took some of the most famous photos of The Who, recalled, ‘Roger fancied women something rotten, and he had them all over the place. He really tucked into it.’

Kit Lambert’s charm offensive continued at Woodgrange Avenue, where he assured the Townshends that he was going to help make their son rich and famous. This time, Cliff and Betty signed the contract, but only after Cliff had struck out a clause guaranteeing the managers a percentage of Pete’s future songwriting royalties. It was a decision that would, in time, help make his son a wealthy man.

With their parents’ signatures in place, the High Numbers signed to New Action Ltd with a deal guaranteeing Lambert and Stamp forty per cent of the band’s earnings, with the remaining sixty split four ways. It was a deal that reinforced the view that the managers were, as Daltrey put it ‘the fifth and sixth members of the band’.

Their management takeover now complete, Lambert and Stamp returned to the idea of making a film, and arranged to shoot one of the Tuesday night gigs at the Railway Hotel. The 16mm footage shot by Lambert and Mike Shaw offers a crude but brilliant snapshot of the primitive Who performing Jessie Hill’s ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo’, Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and the Guy Stevens-approved Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ ‘Got to Dance to Keep From Crying’.

Daltrey, wearing sunglasses and with his chest puffed out, growls into the microphone, while his straw-coloured hair starts to curl in the heat. Behind him, a sweat-soaked Moon’s arms flail as he performs frantic laps of his kit. To his right stands Entwistle, hunched over his instrument, his gaze settled on a point somewhere in the middle distance. Lurching over the cymbals to the left of the drum kit is Townshend whose body twists and turns, a mess of right angles, bent elbows and twitching knees. His head sways from side to side and his eyelids close for a few seconds, as if in the grip of some fleeting reverie, before snapping open again. He looks, at times, like a man trying to escape his own body.

Just as striking as the High Numbers are the audience. On the dance floor, mod girls with elfin hairdos and desert-booted boys in voguish striped T-shirts dance in their own private spaces, their staring eyes and clamped jaws suggesting a mid-week amphetamine jag. One youth, Lee Gaish, a friend of ‘Irish’ Jack’s from Shepherd’s Bush, accompanies the band on a harmonica, while his brother, Martin, another Goldhawk Club regular, throws shapes beside him.

The Railway audience as a whole, though, is a microcosm of mid-1960s youth. Behind the mods, huddled around the bar, are lads clasping half-pint glasses of beer and wearing the traditional uniform of sports jacket and closely knotted tie. The next morning they will go back to work in either the local offices or the nearby Kodak factory. Alongside them are boys probably moonlighting from Harrow County School, a five-minute bus ride away in Gayton Road, who, in turn dance inches away from the black-clad, aspiring existentialists from nearby Harrow art college.

Several future pop stars and music entrepreneurs would pay their three shillings and sixpence to see the High Numbers that year. Among them were former Bo Street Runner and soon-to-be Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood; budding Face and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, who was then playing with Ealing mods The Birds; and the ex-Pinner County grammar school boy turned blues pianist Reg Dwight, who would go on to reinvent himself as Elton John. Another Railway attendee, Malcolm Edwards, who would shortly change his surname to McLaren, was studying at Harrow Art School in 1964. McLaren first met his future wife, Vivienne Westwood, at the Railway. At that time, her then husband, Derek Westwood, worked part-time for Bob Druce. McLaren would refer back to the aggression and anger of the High Numbers at the Railway when he launched the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s.

Word of Lambert and Stamp’s coup soon reached Bob Druce, whose services had also been dispensed with. There was just one problem: the High Numbers hadn’t finished paying him for their van. On the night of filming, Pete Townshend took roadie Reg Bowen aside: ‘Pete said, “Look we’ve got some people coming down here, but I’ve heard there might be trouble.” He said, “One of them is Chris Stamp, he’s Terence Stamp’s brother.” I thought, “God, he must be somebody.” As soon as they arrived and the place started filling up, Bob Druce’s bullyboys arrived.’

Former Detour Pete Vernon-Kell’s new group, The Macabre, supported the High Numbers that night. ‘Their big green Commer van got repossessed,’ recalls The Macabre’s ex-guitarist Chris Downing. ‘Bob Druce’s lot turned up and took it away. So all the High Numbers’ equipment had to go in our old Dewhurst butcher’s van.’

The Macabre supported the High Numbers on several dates that summer. Chris Downing worked at the tax office with Queenie Entwistle, but he swiftly discovered her son John’s band were not like his. ‘At the Railway, Keith Moon’s playing was so intense he took off his T-shirt after the gig and wrung it out into a pint glass,’ he recalls. An astonished Downing also watched as a bored Pete Townshend casually pushed his amp down a flight of stairs into a venue rather than carry it himself.

There were other more serious differences. The Macabre spoke to each other; the High Numbers didn’t: ‘The High Numbers were like four individuals who came together to play. It always felt as if Roger and Pete came from dysfunctional backgrounds. John and Keith didn’t and were easier to talk to, and I didn’t recognise the wild man Keith became. Roger was angry, though, and I got the impression there was some sort of criminal element there. He wouldn’t talk to me. But Roger didn’t even talk to his own band.’

One night, Daltrey’s father-in-law strode into the Railway just as the High Numbers were due to go onstage. ‘He was looking for Roger who hadn’t been home for a long time,’ says Downing, ‘and when he found him, he took him outside the pub and punched him.’ The Macabre had to go back onstage and fill in until the fight was over. When Daltrey reappeared, he joined the rest of the High Numbers and sang the set as normal. His band may have been deeply dysfunctional, but, as Daltrey explained, ‘They came before everything.’

Writing in 1969, the pop critic Nik Cohn reflecting on The Who’s early years, described them as ‘the last great fling of super-pop’. The first sign of how they were already gearing up to become what Lambert had called ‘the face of the late 1960s’ came on 16 August when the High Numbers shared the bill with The Beatles at the Blackpool Opera House.

Lambert was determined to maximise the High Numbers’ impact. Mike Shaw was now working as the band’s production manager, and produced lighting cues for the theatre’s reluctant in-house technicians to follow. At Blackpool, the High Numbers performed their two-song set to lights that flashed on and off and changed colour. Compared with the extravagant light shows of the late 1960s, it was a charmingly primitive display. But in 1964 it was ground-breaking. When The Beatles played later, they did so beneath a simple followspot and in front of a row of footlights.

Yet the din of screaming girls drowned out the first few bars of The Beatles’ opening number, and didn’t stop until they were offstage. It was a sobering reminder of what the High Numbers had to live up to. ‘Beatlemania was extraordinary,’ says Richard Barnes, who watched from the side of the Opera House stage. ‘But it’s hard to express just how loud and how powerful that screaming was when you experienced it up close.’ From their vantage point, Barney and the band watched a grinning John Lennon blithely telling the crowd to shut up and fuck off, knowing that they were far too hysterical to hear him.

By the end of The Beatles’ set, the whole venue smelled of urine. ‘Every single girl in the audience must have pissed themselves,’ said Townshend, who later watched the theatre ushers spraying the sodden seats with eau de cologne. Townshend recalled the incident later in the lyrics to The Who’s 1973 hit ‘5:15’ (‘Ushers are sniffing/Eau-decologning’). When the High Numbers were loading up their van after the gig, a gang of teenage girls mistook them for The Beatles, or decided that in the absence of the real thing, they’d do. In the ensuing hysteria, the sleeve of Daltrey’s mod-approved Madras cotton jacket was torn off. Kit Lambert, convinced he’d just been mistaken for Brian Epstein, was overjoyed.

Two weeks later, the band were headlining Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall Arena above balladeer Dave Berry of ‘The Crying Game’ fame and fifteen-year-old singing schoolgirl Lulu. After the gig, the band accompanied Lulu to her parents’ flat for a party. An accordionist played downstairs while Townshend disappeared upstairs with one of Lulu’s girlfriends. ‘She was a beautiful girl, but she had this strange coat on,’ he recalled. ‘I remember getting one button undone and then another, and looking down and there were like forty buttons on this military coat. I thought, “Give me a week and I may have got somewhere.”’ These strange incongruous gigs came as a culture shock after the Goldhawk and the Scene. ‘We felt,’ said Townshend, ‘as if we were on another planet.’

When they came back to earth, the band discovered that New Action Ltd had printed hundreds of promotional flyers. In a shrewd ploy for attention, the flyers abandoned standard advertising hyperbole and proclaimed the High Numbers as ‘the Worst in Family Entertainment’. With Commercial Entertainments dispensed with, the group needed to find new venues in which to play. New Action’s plan was to break the band in areas outside their usual west London strongholds. But it would prove more difficult than they imagined.

On 23 September ‘the Worst in Family Entertainment’ played Greenwich Town Hall in south London. DJ Jeff Dexter and his business partner, the songwriter Ian ‘Sammy’ Samwell, had been holding a weekly record hop in the hall since the end of 1962. Dexter was unimpressed by most of what he calls ‘the dodgy beat bands’ that ended up on the bill in between the records. The High Numbers did little to change his mind. ‘I thought they were fucking rubbish,’ he says. ‘They didn’t seem to be tuneful or solid enough. Pete Meaden had told me about this great mod group from Shepherd’s Bush. But this wasn’t it.’

The summer of 1964 had seen several crucial developments in The Who/High Numbers’ story. Yet the two most significant were yet to come. One would be partly driven by embarrassment, the other by simple envy. On 4 August, The Kinks released their new single, ‘You Really Got Me’. Pete Townshend recognised the song’s truculent riff from when both groups shared the bill with The Beatles in Blackpool. The Kinks’ stage outfits of blood-red hunting jackets and white ruffled shirts had amused him. But their new song was no laughing matter. ‘That sort of music usually came from over the water,’ said Townshend. ‘The Kinks had filled a hole we wanted to fill.’

In September, the High Numbers auditioned for EMI at Abbey Road studios. Kit Lambert had persuaded his friend, the pianist and light entertainment TV star Russ Conway, to ask EMI’s A&R rep John Burgess to audition the group as a favour. One of New Action Ltd’s more ridiculous ideas was to have the High Numbers play as Conway’s backing group, a notion that may have owed something to Lambert having persuaded the pianist to invest in the company. It didn’t happen, but the High Numbers did get an audition.

The group were thrilled to be performing at Abbey Road where The Beatles had recorded their hits. The difference was that the High Numbers were still playing other people’s songs. The Beatles had just reached Number 1 with their own composition ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and Andrew Loog Oldham would soon lock Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in their kitchen until they wrote a song of their own. John Burgess wrote to Kit Lambert later, saying that he was unsure about the High Numbers, and wondered whether they had some of their own material to offer instead.

In the meantime, the band’s Tuesday night residency at the Railway remained an important weekly date on any discerning Ealing art student’s social calendar. Several of the college’s ‘lovely, fizzy girls’ often made the trip to Harrow and Wealdstone. Their presence was partly responsible for what happened next.

Just like Keith Moon’s entrance into The Who, the story of how and why Pete Townshend first smashed his guitar onstage has acquired a life of its own. In Who I Am, he added another twist by writing that he destroyed the instrument the first night Kit Lambert saw the High Numbers at the Railway. But most people believe it happened at least six weeks later. ‘I saw it happen,’ says Richard Barnes, before hesitating. ‘Or did I? I’m not sure. I know we had to pay for the ceiling.’

What isn’t in dispute is why it happened. The High Numbers usually extended the Railway’s stage with upturned beer crates, but had just paid for a collapsible wooden stage which they planned to take with them to all their gigs. What the band didn’t realise was that this new stage was higher than what they were used to at the Railway.

As the night wore on, Townshend ran through his repertoire of moves: jamming his guitar against the amp to create howling feedback, playing it upright like a banjo and, finally, thrusting it above his head. This last move was accompanied by a scream of feedback followed by a splintering sound as the top of the guitar collided with the Railway’s nicotine-stained ceiling. Townshend had held his guitar overhead many times before, but had forgotten that the distance between the ceiling and the new stage was significantly reduced.

Laughter rippled through the crowd. Townshend squinted into the darkness and saw girls from the art school pointing and sniggering. In one account, he claimed another of his college friends was doubled up with laughter in front of the stage. Flushed with embarrassment and with all thoughts of the outstanding hire-purchase payments forgotten, Townshend seized the guitar, wrenched it out of the ceiling and wondered what to do next. The audience, meanwhile, seemed indifferent. ‘I was expecting everybody to go, “Wow, he’s broken his guitar!” but nobody did anything,’ Townshend later told Rolling Stone magazine, ‘which made me angry, and determined to get this precious event noticed. So I proceeded to make a big thing of breaking the guitar.’

In the few seconds it took to reduce the instrument to a mess of tangled wire and splintered wood, Townshend felt a rush of excitement and validation. Over the years, he would compare this destructive act to Gustav Metzger flinging acid on to canvas, the Japanese youth attacking a painting with a samurai sword, and Malcolm Cecil sawing through his bass – but taken to a more extreme conclusion. And after he began to talk publicly about his childhood abuse, he would tell journalists that destroying a guitar was a way of exorcising his demons.

On the night, Townshend followed his violent act by calmly picking up his spare, twelve-string Rickenbacker and playing the rest of the set as if nothing had happened. He was brought back to reality as soon as the gig was over. An unimpressed Daltrey told him that he could have mended the broken guitar: ‘And I was standing there thinking, “That’s not the point!”’ Not for the last time, Townshend’s big artistic ideas had run up against Daltrey’s hard pragmatism. What neither man yet knew was the dramatic effect this spur-of-the-moment act would have on the High Numbers’ fortunes.

When the band returned to the Railway the following Tuesday, Townshend could see the anticipation on the audience’s faces as soon as he walked onstage. But he refused to oblige. Instead, Keith Moon kicked over his drums at the end of the set. The drums didn’t break, but the act itself was theatrical enough to shock. ‘After Keith Moon smashed up a drum kit, we had it – we had that thing,’ said Townshend. ‘Even on days when we weren’t going to smash anything we just had to look as if we were, and the crowd would be like, “Oh my God”. There was this tension. It was all very, very punk and very, very dangerous.’

Two weeks on from the original incident, the crowd’s patience was amply rewarded when both Townshend and Moon destroyed their instruments. There was no turning back. In the space of a fortnight, Townshend had smashed two guitars, with hire-purchase payments outstanding on both. As The Macabre’s Chris Downing notes: ‘It was an incredibly daring thing to do. My Rickenbacker cost me £169 and I was earning seven pounds a week at the tax office.’ Kit Lambert’s reaction to the wanton violence was one of admiration tempered with fear. Lambert was shameless in his pursuit of publicity but was also aware of how little money New Action Ltd had. Kit’s grandmother Amy had died earlier that year and left him a substantial share of her estate. But Lambert and Stamp were spending far more on the High Numbers than they were making. Now, as well as a new van and new stage clothes, the group needed new instruments.

Word of Townshend’s auto-destructive art also found its way to Marshall’s. ‘We went to Jim Marshall’s not long after the Railway and Pete said, “I need a new guitar,”’ says Richard Barnes. ‘And they said, “No way, we know what you’ve done.” So Pete grabbed one off the wall and ran out of the shop.’ The guitarist soon became adept at ducking into the store, helping himself to a new instrument, and dashing out with a shouted promise to ‘Pay ya later’. On other occasions, he sent Reg Bowen to do the deed for him. ‘Marshall was owed a fortune,’ says Bowen. ‘So I’d grab the guitar, and jump on my scooter and drive off before anyone could say anything.’

Not wanting to lose the business or the publicity, Marshall’s would soon start mailing hire-purchase agreements to Townshend. ‘I think at one point he was paying for seven guitars on HP,’ says Barnes. Before long, Townshend was trashing guitars just enough to impress an audience but not enough to be unsalvagable. On those occasions, the damaged guitars would be returned to Marshall’s to be repaired.

‘I fixed some for him,’ recalls Terry Marshall. ‘But I remember these three wonderful Gretsch Country Gentlemans that came into the shop. Pete said he wanted one to use onstage. I said, “OK, but for God’s sake, don’t bugger it up” – and he did. He broke the neck. I could repair that. Then he took it out again and broke the head, and there was no chance of fixing that. I couldn’t believe it.’

Entwistle had found his niche as the unflappable bassist who played like a lead guitarist. But with Moon and Townshend smashing their instruments, there was now added pressure on Daltrey. In time, the singer took to accompanying Townshend’s feedback and adding to the noise by striking Moon’s ride cymbal with his microphone (something Keith apparently hated). Later on, Daltrey would discover what would become his trademark stage move: whirling the microphone lead overhead, like a cowboy lassoing cattle. ‘The trouble is at first he kept smashing the heads off the mics,’ says Terry Marshall. ‘He’d come into the shop to get them repaired, and they’d look like a bunch of bananas.’

The group had stumbled on a visual gimmick that set them apart from every other band in the country. New Action’s dogged attempt to bring ‘the Worst in Family Entertainment’ to the farthest reaches of London continued, with Stamp showing promoters an edit of the 16mm footage they’d shot of the group playing the Railway. More High Numbers dates followed in dance halls in Essex and Kent, and there was another visit to Greenwich, but it was still a struggle to find an audience.

Among the few regulars at Greenwich Town Hall was Plumstead teenager June Clark, who, along with her friend Deirdre Meehan, would later help run The Who’s fanclub. ‘The stage was about six inches off the floor and there was no one there,’ she says now. ‘But the music was different. Just the sound of it was so heavy compared to the poppy stuff that was around at the time.’ June and her friends stood on chairs around the edge of the hall watching the band play as if the venue was full: ‘Keith was breaking drumsticks and throwing them into the audience, even though there was hardly anybody there to catch them. At the end of the gig they all sat on the stage, and I went up and spoke to then. No one was too important.’

The violence of their stage act came as a surprise, though: ‘I was shocked when Keith accidentally broke his drumsticks. When I later saw Pete break a guitar, I thought, “That is crazy. Nobody does that.” I didn’t find it exciting. It made me think, “My God, that man is angry.”’ June Clark also noticed how seriously Kit Lambert took the High Numbers’ audience: ‘Kit made a fuss of the fans and took them seriously. He thought they had something worthwhile to say.’ Lambert would exploit this connection with the fans soon enough.

By the end of 1964, Chris Stamp had taken a job in Norway on an upcoming Kirk Douglas war movie The Heroes of Telemark (1965) in order to raise some much-needed funds. Over the coming months, New Action’s extended family would expand beyond Mike Shaw to include Stamp’s personal assistant Patricia Locke and long-serving roadies, Alan Oates and Dave ‘Cy’ Langston. Lambert also hired a secretary, a striking looking thirty-year-old brunette named Anya Butler, who would soon begin a clandestine affair with Pete Townshend. But Anya struggled to maintain order at the Ivor Court HQ, which now resembled a cross between a printworks and a military bunker with maps, flyers, music papers and posters strewn around the room.

Having turned down the offer to become the High Numbers’ road manager (‘I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded like hard work’), Barney was now producing silk-screen posters advertising the band’s gigs. His latest artworks were often hung up to dry in the flat. Lambert conducted his business on the phone while chain-smoking cigarettes and trying to ignore the chaos. ‘He had this little Irish cleaning lady, who’d walk in, see what was going on and shake her head,’ says Barnes. ‘Kit would be ranting down the phone, spot her, and shout, “Boiled egg, dear.”’

By late autumn, the chaos, and bailiff’s letters, had become too much, and Lambert relocated to 84 Eaton Place, just around the corner from Lord Boothby in upmarket Belgravia. Lambert shared Pete Meaden’s love of a fine postcode. But the chaos of Ivor Court soon followed him to his new SW1 address. Since Bob Druce’s departure, New Action were acting as the High Numbers’ managers and promoters. When it came to hustling new gigs, Lambert had to weigh up the pros and cons of telling the promoter that his band’s drummer and guitarist had a penchant for destroying their equipment. There was also another problem: the band’s name. The ‘Worst in Family Entertainment’ flyers had failed to have the desired effect, with some promoters mistaking the High Numbers for a bingo game. The name also evoked their non-hit single ‘I’m the Face’ and already sounded out of date; the worst crime in the mod world.

By November, The Who were again calling themselves The Who. ‘It was,’ insisted Townshend, ‘the name we were supposed to have all along.’ It was also a name that lent itself perfectly to the new logo Townshend had designed. The Detours’ name, as painted on the side of their old van, had included an arrow. Townshend co-opted this and added it to the letter ‘O’ in The Who’s logo, turning it into the universal gender sign for the male sex. It was an arresting image that demonstrated Pete Meaden’s ethos of ‘neat, sharp and cool’ more powerfully than the High Numbers ever had.

In November 1964, the group began what would become a residency at two London clubs. The first was at the Ealing Club. ‘I knew Pete Townshend as the boy from the college,’ says the club’s former owner Fery Asgari. ‘I’d seen The Who before, because they’d come to the club on their nights off to watch the Stones and Manfred Mann. Kit Lambert came to see me, drank lots of Scotch and told me he wanted to me to try out The Who.

‘The Who’s style was different from the other groups,’ he adds. ‘They really worked the audience hard. On the first Saturday, the crowd weren’t sure. But by the fourth Saturday, there was a queue going around the corner, the club was full to capacity and we’d doubled our usual takings. Kit would be in there every Saturday, drinking all my whisky and practically dead on his feet, drunk, by ten o’clock.’

Three days after their Ealing Club debut, The Who played the Marquee. To advertise the gig, their new logo was put to use on the next round of promotional flyers and posters. The club had moved from its old Oxford Street premises to a new site at 90 Wardour Street, just down the road from the Flamingo. The High Numbers’ Tuesday night run at the Railway had ended, not long after Townshend first stuck his guitar through the pub ceiling (‘I think we broke some rule or other,’ says Richard Barnes). Chris Stamp convinced the Marquee’s owner, Harold Pendleton, to let The Who play on Tuesdays, traditionally the slowest night of the week, in exchange for sixty per cent of the door takings.

Although random gigs at Greenwich Town Hall and the Rochester Corn Exchange were forcing The Who out of west London, they weren’t attracting a bigger following. A central London venue such as the Marquee was more prestigious and could potentially attract an audience from all over the capital.

Kit Lambert commissioned a friend in advertising to produce an eye-catching monochrome poster for the show. The Who’s new macho logo was set above the words ‘Maximum R&B’ alongside an arresting image of Townshend with his arm up, poised to strike his guitar. ‘That was daring,’ says Barnes, ‘putting the guitarist on instead of the singer’ – even more so when the singer was Roger Daltrey. The image was printed on to over two thousand handbills and fly-posters, and still remains one of the most recognisable Who motifs.

In the space of a year, the band had replaced amateurish hand-drawn flyers with a poster that predicted the style and typography soon to be seen in the fashion title Nova, which launched the following year. The legend has grown over five decades, but the ‘Maximum R&B’ image also made its mark at the time. ‘It looked amazing even then,’ says Roger Spear, who wasn’t completely sold on what he calls The Who’s ‘flashing noise’. ‘The card with Maximum R&B and The Who logo on it was on the mantelpiece of my flat for about four years.’

The Goldhawk and the Scene were soon littered with handbills, and west London plastered with posters. To help spread the word further, Stamp devised the idea of an exclusive club made up of The Who’s most dedicated fans, who would be given reduced admission to the gigs in exchange for distributing flyers. Among this so-called elite was ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons, who had first encountered Lambert at one of the Hammersmith Palais’ mod nights.

The Savile Row-suited Lambert immediately stood out among the youths peacocking on the dance floor. ‘He had a scarf furled over his shoulder,’ he recalls, ‘and wore a fancy double-breasted jacket. When he spoke he sounded like he was from the BBC.’ Jack had watched his favourite band dispense of Helmut Gorden and now Pete Meaden, and was suspicious of this latest interloper. But he was impressed when Lambert solicited his opinion on which band name was best –the High Numbers or The Who – and seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say.

Before long, Jack and his friend and fellow Goldhawk regular Martin Gaish had been summoned to Eaton Place for a meeting with the new managers. The grandeur of the spacious, top-floor flat didn’t go unnoticed by the two Shepherd’s Bush youths. Inside, the pair were introduced to Chris Stamp, who, said Jack, ‘looked aristocratic but spoke with a cockney accent’.

Stamp picked up where Lambert had left off at the Palais by asking if the boys would help spread the word and get their friends from the Goldhawk to go to the Marquee. When Gaish asked if they’d get paid, Lambert, through a fog of cigarette smoke, cunningly offered free admission to some of The Who’s later gigs as a reward. Minutes later, Stamp had proposed the idea of an exclusive club for fans. Lyons and Gaish watched as the two men batted the idea around ‘like two college professors discussing philosophy, and chain smoking at the same time’. ‘How about calling them “The Hundred Faces”?’ said Stamp in the end.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictitious Edwardian detective Sherlock Holmes conscripted a gang of street youths called the Baker Street Irregulars to run errands for him. By sending their own version of the Great Detective’s scouts out on to the streets, Lambert and Stamp could publicise last-minute gigs, but also establish a very human connection between The Who’s existing audience and potential new fans. It was a perfect example of the management’s promotional nous and innate understanding of The Who’s fanbase.

However, as ‘Irish’ Jack points out, the problem with the Hundred Faces is that they didn’t exist: ‘It was an idea that Chris mooted to Kit but in reality it was never formed. Yet loads of mods told you they were a member of the exclusive Hundred Faces.’ The idea had tapped into the mods’ love of elitism; their constant need to stay one step ahead of the pack. ‘There were never a hundred faces,’ confirms Richard Barnes, ‘more like thirty. But it sounded good.’

The Who’s first Marquee date was on 24 November. Prior to the show Lambert enlisted Jack and the Gaish brothers to hand out concession cards, granting half-price entry for two shillings and sixpence. Lambert resumed the role of junior field officer and ordered Jack on to Oxford Street with instructions to give a card to anyone young and fashionably dressed. It was pouring with rain and the usually teeming thoroughfare was almost deserted. In the end, he only managed to coax a couple of teenage girls into the club with the promise of free admission.

When he returned to the Marquee there were between thirty and fifty people in a club that could hold over 500. Few of the Goldhawk’s regulars had been tempted to make the trip into the West End on a wet Tuesday night. The Marquee also lacked a drinks licence. To avoid an exodus to the Ship public house down the road, Lambert was soon scurrying around handing out tots of whisky. Knowing that the club was almost empty, the mood in the tiny dressing room was subdued. ‘The Marquee meant nothing to me when we started,’ said Townshend. ‘I thought it was a jazz club. It was a dump.’

The Who’s support bands included a Kentish Town mod group called The Boys (who’d soon change their name to The Action) and the latest incarnation of The Mustangs, now a three-piece playing soul covers and renamed The Footprints. ‘Roger Daltrey phoned up and offered us six weeks at the Marquee,’ says their ex-guitarist Alan Pittaway. ‘The money was virtually nothing, but we weren’t going to say no.’ As their former drummer Peter Amott says, ‘We had the unenviable task of following The Who.’ Prior to the show, Amott spotted a jittery, chain-smoking Kit Lambert in the Marquee foyer and persuaded him to give up one of the Maximum R&B posters as a memento: ‘We later discovered that Kit had pawned some of his late grandmother’s jewellery to get The Who into the Marquee.’

Despite the poor attendance, Harold Pendleton agreed to have The Who back the following week. Lambert’s ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ went into action and the crowds increased each Tuesday in the run-up to Christmas. ‘Lambert and Stamp were unbelievable,’ said Pendleton. ‘They were the originators of promotions and stunts and spin and they built that night up.’

‘We called what they were doing WOMP – word of mouth publicity,’ says Richard Barnes. It was a revolutionary idea in the age before groups could directly text message and email their fans. ‘It was incredibly forward thinking, but the message was mobile. The mods had scooters so they could spread this information around London, and get fans to the gigs. Eventually it worked.’

The Who’s Marquee residency ran for twenty-two weeks. Playing though a backline of Marshall cabs beneath the club’s chintzy striped stage decor, The Who produced a sound that, according to one eyewitness, ‘hit you in the head as well as the guts’. They played ‘Smokestack Lightning’, ‘I’m a Man’ and a combative version of Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heat Wave’. Just as they’d previously done with the blues they were now taking unknown soul songs from Guy Stevens’ record collection, and twisting them into bold new shapes, strafed with feedback, clanging power chords and Daltrey’s Goldhawk Road-meets-Mississippi Delta howl.

‘My eyes popped out of my head,’ says Max Ker-Seymer, who had his second Who sighting at the Marquee. ‘I had never seen or heard anything like it. It was light, it was dark, the colours were revolving. It was extraordinarily loud and I started feeling nauseous. It was that overwhelming.’ Lambert’s expedition companion John Hemming accepted Kit’s invitation to the Marquee and was similarly taken aback. The intrepid explorer, who’d braved months in the Brazilian jungle, was shocked by the noise. ‘I was amazed by the loudness,’ he says. ‘It hit you in the face.’

Keith Altham, who would oversee The Who’s PR in the 1970s, but was then a writer for the pop magazine Fabulous, had his first sighting of the group at the Marquee. ‘I wandered into the club and caught the end of The Who’s set,’ he says now. ‘I thought I was seeing things. They were like a four-man demolition squad. Pete was trying to ram his guitar into the amp speaker cabinet. Roger was trashing his microphone and Keith was kicking his drums over. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. I can’t honestly say I thought it was amazing, I didn’t. I thought it was dangerous and they were doing something but I wasn’t sure what it was.’

According to Altham, the destruction was being carried out for the benefit of a Daily Express journalist that Kit Lambert had lured to the gig: ‘I think Pete had already smashed a guitar, but Kit had told him to do it again.’ What had been a spontaneous act two months earlier had unavoidably become a gimmick The Who could deploy whenever they needed to shake up a complacent audience or shock a journalist into writing about them. After the gig, Altham tried to make a hasty exit but was spotted: ‘Kit grabbed my arm and said, “Ah, Keith from Fabulous, you must come and have a brandy and talk to the boys.” So I waited for them outside the dressing room.’

Fabulous, like all the pop papers, was used to presenting a flattering picture of its subjects. But The Who made little attempt to present a façade to Altham: ‘The first one out was Keith Moon with his bag packed trying to head out the door at great speed. He said, “I can’t stop, the singer’s trying to kill me.” I asked why? And he said, “Because I told him he can’t sing for shit.”’

Earlier, Altham had seen Daltrey throw his microphone at Moon, who’d retaliated by flinging his drumsticks back. It was Altham’s first glimpse of Moon and Daltrey’s fractious relationship; a simmering tension that would rip the band apart months later.

Onstage, The Who’s set now included a short, brutish instrumental version of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’. It was as if Townshend was tormenting himself by playing the song’s circular guitar riff over and over again. As well as sounding like the kind of song The Who should be writing, ‘You Really Got Me’ had also reached Number 1. The failure of ‘I’m the Face’, EMI’s rejection letter and his envy of The Kinks gradually convinced Townshend that The Who needed songs of their own.

Just as The Who were preparing for their Marquee debut, the Essex pop group The Naturals released a version of the Townshend composition The Detours had recorded a year earlier, ‘It Was You’, as the B-side to their single ‘Look at Me Now’. The single came and went. But it was a good omen. Townshend had started writing songs again, and had turned one of the spare bedrooms at Woodgrange Avenue into a makeshift recording studio. However, the conversion had been poorly thought out.

Townshend had initially approached Roger Spear’s flatmate, a BBC cameraman and electronics wizard named Chris Glass, for advice about soundproofing the studio. ‘I think Pete wanted somewhere Keith Moon could smash up his drums in peace,’ says Glass now. ‘The bedroom was about six by eight – just big enough to put a drum kit in. To soundproof it, I suggested they made a false floor with old tyres and then put a hardboard floor on top, and that they brick up the window.’

The advice went unheeded. Instead, Townshend bought sheets of heavy, straw-filled soundproofing material called Stramit boards. ‘But we never got around to putting them up,’ says Barnes, ‘so these boards were left lying around, all over the flat.’ After asking another friend for advice, they ended up with the studio floor covered with a thick layer of cement. To Cliff and Betty Townshend’s alarm, the ceiling in their flat below started to buckle under the added weight. ‘I always thought Pete’s family liked having us in that flat,’ says Barnes now. ‘But years later Pete’s brother Paul told me that his dad fucking hated having us there.’ Nevertheless, Townshend now had his studio. Using a mono tape recorder and a microphone, he began experimenting.

As a frequent visitor to the flat, John Challis became a guinea pig for some of these experiments. ‘Pete had this analytical approach to music, which I still think had something to do with Roy Ascott’s ground-course,’ he says. ‘He would make you lie on the couch, put a speaker on your chest, play you something and ask you how it felt. Or he’d put a big pair of headphones over your ears and play something at deafening volume until you couldn’t stand it any longer. It was all a bit sadistic. But there was a point to it – he was playing with your mind.’

Challis heard what would become The Who’s first single ‘I Can’t Explain’ being composed in the flat: ‘I could hear Pete playing that tune down the passageway, while a gang of us lay around stoned in the front room. I thought, “What’s that?” He was playing it on an acoustic guitar and it was close to how it sounded when the record came out.’ The riff to Townshend’s composition though was certainly familiar. ‘Pete was trying to play the riff to The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”,’ said John Entwistle. ‘But what he came up with was “I Can’t Explain”.’

By the time The Macabre’s Chris Downing heard the song, Townshend had recorded a demo in the spare bedroom-cum-studio. ‘John Entwistle played us the demo,’ says Downing. ‘It was the same tune but the lyrics were different and it was called ‘It Must Be Spring’. We were sat there, me, John and Peter Vernon-Kell listening, but all thinking there was something wrong with the words. It sounded too happy.’

According to Richard Barnes, ‘I Can’t Explain’ started out sounding like a Bob Dylan blues number: ‘Pete had gotten into Dylan, especially the Another Side of Bob Dylan LP. There was a song on it called ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. The subject matter was what you might call Townshend-ish.’

The lyrics of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ had a similarly indignant air to the final lyrics for ‘I Can’t Explain’. ‘I thought [‘I Can’t Explain’] was about a boy who can’t explain to a girl that he’s fallen in love with her,’ Townshend said. ‘But two weeks later I looked at the lyrics and they meant something completely different again.’ The confusion made sense. Besides Dylan, the inspiration for lines such as ‘I feel hot and cold down in my soul’ came from The Who’s frustrated, inarticulate and invariably male audience; ‘The dislocated boys’ as Townshend later called them.

One of Roy Ascott’s preoccupations had been society’s changing semiotics. Townshend was now convinced that pop music had a new function, which was to tap into the emerging language of its audience: ‘Boys that were often in love with the girl on the other side of the room, but didn’t want to go up and say, “Hey babe do you wanna dance?”’

The other challenge Townshend faced as a composer was writing words Roger Daltrey would be willing to sing. Surprisingly, for a song that The Who were still opening their shows with in the twenty-first century, Daltrey was unsure about ‘I Can’t Explain’: ‘I felt uncomfortable when I had to sing it, because it wasn’t like anything we’d done before.’ The ‘dislocated boy’ voicing his insecurities about girls, sex and life in general wasn’t an easy character for Daltrey to assume. Knowing this, Townshend presented The Who with other songs. One of these, ‘Call Me Lightning’, had a lyric that exuded machismo and confidence. But it wasn’t as good as ‘I Can’t Explain’.

It was Townshend’s vulnerable song that first piqued the interest of The Kinks’ producer. Sheldon ‘Shel’ Talmy was a Chicago-born studio engineer who’d moved to London in 1962. Showing a similar flair for a good hustle as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, Talmy arrived in Britain with several acetates, including the Beach Boys’ ‘Surfin’ Safari’, which he successfully passed off as his own productions. Decca Records hired him as an independent producer and A&R man. A year later, he’d produced the hit single ‘Charmaine’ for Irish harmony group The Bachelors.

Despite their success, Talmy wasn’t interested in The Bachelors’ cloying pop. Still only twenty-six, he wanted to find a British rock ’n’ roll group. The Kinks fulfilled that ambition, but Decca in the UK, showing the same short-sightedness that had led them to turn down The Beatles, said no to The Kinks. Talmy took them to Pye Records instead. He scored a hit with ‘You Really Got Me’ and followed it with another top-five single, ‘All Day and All of the Night’, in October 1964. Both singles were the sort of records The Who should have been making.

Talmy’s approach to record production differed from that of his British counterparts. He wanted more noise, more energy and more confrontation. In the studio, he insisted microphones were set up next to the drums and amplifiers, instead of relying on the in-house mics suspended from the ceiling. Like Townshend and Jeff Beck, The Kinks’ lead guitarist Dave Davies was a fan of distortion and feedback and, encouraged by Talmy, he slashed the cone of his amp to create a dirtier sound. However, Talmy supplemented such rawness with session players, supposedly hiring twenty-year-old session ace and future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page to play rhythm on The Kinks’ debut album. Although as recently as 2014, Dave Davies was still insisting that Page never played on ‘You Really Got Me’.

Talmy heard about The Who through Anya Butler, who was friends with his wife. He watched the group play a church hall in Shepherd’s Bush, and was impressed. ‘After hearing the first eight bars, I was convinced that at last I’d found a kick-ass English rock band,’ he says. ‘It was a no-brainer.’ After a second audition in the former home of skiffle, The 2i’s Coffee Bar, Talmy offered to pay for a recording session, which he would then shop around the record companies. The band, with Lambert and Stamp producing, had already cut a demo of ‘I Can’t Explain’ at the Marquee’s studios. But Talmy insisted the song needed reworking.

In November, Talmy joined The Who and engineer Glyn Johns at Pye Records’ studio in London’s Marble Arch. Talmy might have believed that The Who were a ‘kick-ass English rock band’, but he wasn’t taking any chances and had hired the Ivy League, a male vocal trio, to sing harmonies on the track. ‘The Who didn’t do backing vocals,’ Talmy explains. ‘Or, to be more precise, they did them badly.’

The Ivy League weren’t the only hired hands at the session. Interviewed in 2002, Chris Stamp said that ‘Talmy didn’t really want to use The Who, he wanted to use Jimmy Page and some drummer, but we said, “No fucking way.”’ In 2013, Page confirmed that he was present at the session, but that his contribution only amounted to ‘playing the riff underneath’ Townshend’s lead guitar, and that he was barely audible. However, as with The Kinks, rumours circulated that it was Page, not Townshend, who had played on ‘I Can’t Explain’. The session musicians’ code of silence meant that for years, nobody, including Jimmy Page, was inclined to put the record straight.

Talmy, however, strongly denies wanting to replace Keith Moon. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he says now. ‘I never thought of bringing in a session drummer. Moonie was the best rock drummer of all time.’ Nevertheless, Townshend, Daltrey and Entwistle all backed up Stamp’s allegation. ‘Keith told the session drummer, “Get out of the fucking studio, or I’ll kill ya!”’ said Townshend. Entwistle claimed the producer wanted to replace him as well.

Shel Talmy believed it was his job to make the best record he could, and had little interest in becoming friends with the band. ‘Pete, for whatever reason, had two chips on his shoulders. To get on with him, you had to be twice as sarcastic,’ he said. ‘Moon I was very good friends with, John never spoke and Daltrey I never connected with at all.’ But he found their management a bigger problem. ‘Kit Lambert was out of his fucking mind,’ Talmy told journalist Richie Unterberger in 2010. ‘I think he was certifiably insane. If he hadn’t been in the music business he would have been locked up.’

Asked about The Who’s ex-managers now, Talmy offers a more measured response: ‘I never found out what the hell Chris Stamp was doing,’ he says, before describing Lambert as ‘mad, bonkers, demented, deranged, potty, daft, incompetent, unhinged and pixelated.’ The friction was probably inevitable: Lambert thought he should be producing The Who’s records, because that was what Andrew Loog Oldham was doing with the Rolling Stones. But Talmy didn’t want Lambert in the studio and, according to Townshend, he was reluctant to enter into dialogue with the band. An hereditary condition meant that Talmy had extremely weak eyesight. ‘Recording with him, we were also blind,’ said Townshend. ‘We never knew what we were doing.’

However painful the process, with ‘I Can’t Explain’ Talmy helped create a commercial pop record that still retained some of the bile and fury of The Who’s live show. It was a compromise, but it worked in a way that ‘I’m the Face’ hadn’t. Like The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, The Who’s debut single showed off both Talmy’s noisy, revolutionary production but also a new style of songwriting. Townshend’s stabbing guitar riff controlled the song and everything else, including Daltrey’s vocals, followed that riff. This wasn’t the sort of record The Beatles were making. Instead, like ‘You Really Got Me’, it was a template for the kind of heavy rock Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin would build a career from in the 1970s.

Such confrontational originality meant the record companies would be hard to win over. Just as they’d done with The Kinks and The Beatles, Decca in the UK turned down The Who. But Talmy had a standing arrangement with the company’s US wing, and called in the favour. ‘They were a very nice bunch of guys, older men who had no idea what rock ’n’ roll was,’ he recalled. ‘But they said, “If that’s what’s supposedly selling, then we’ll go out and try and sell it.”’

Talmy secured a one-off deal for The Who with Decca in America, which traded as Brunswick in the UK. However, neither The Who nor their managers were aware that Decca UK and Decca US were separate companies. New Action had also naively signed a deal with Talmy’s production company, which tied The Who to him for five years, gave him control over all their recording and production, and would earn the group a paltry two-and-a-half per cent royalty rate (the industry standard was between four and six per cent).

Talmy had also written the B-side for ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Bald Headed Woman’, a song The Kinks had already covered, thereby guaranteeing himself further royalties. Talmy’s argument was that neither Lambert nor Stamp knew how the record business worked, he did, and was therefore entitled to a payback for financing the recording, and landing The Who a deal, albeit one with an American label that had little long-term interest in them. It would be a while yet before the band and their managers realised the full ramifications of the deal.

In the meantime, with Christmas 1964 approaching, Kit Lambert began courting the music press. Christine Day was now working as a writer for the teenage magazine Boyfriend, when Lambert contacted her. ‘I met him in a Soho coffee bar,’ she says. ‘He was trying to get The Who written about in the “upcoming British bands” slot. When he realised I already knew Chris, I think he thought that gave us a kind of bond.’

Stamp and Lambert’s chalk-and-cheese partnership came as no surprise to Christine, who’d witnessed Chris’s hustling abilities when he’d shared a flat with her brother: ‘Kit and Chris were both part of that very sixties thing – of not staying within your own class, and that idea that anything goes.’

Over coffee, Lambert outlined his plans for The Who. ‘He told me they had this campaign to put arrows that just said “The Who” – nothing else, no explanation – all over London. I remember being terribly impressed. No other managers were doing anything like that.’ It was the sort of viral marketing strategy record companies would embrace forty years later. Yet despite the fact that The Who had a record coming out, Lambert was still fixated on the idea of making a film about the band. ‘That was still the master plan,’ says Christine. ‘They wanted to launch the group and make enough money that they could then make this movie. Their main interest didn’t seem to be pop music, it was movies.’

Christine went back to the Boyfriend office and wrote a story talking up The Who and their new single. ‘I Can’t Explain’ snuck out largely unnoticed in the US in November 1964 and was released in the UK on 15 January 1965. Lambert threw a launch party at Eaton Square, inviting everyone he knew. ‘Kit had hired waiters in suits who walked around with champagne and canapés on silver trays,’ says Christine. ‘They just kept playing ‘I Can’t Explain’ over and over again. It all seemed terribly funny because The Who were just hanging around, drinking the champagne, and basically looking like yobs.’

Halfway through the party, Kit grabbed Christine’s hand and led her into his bedroom. Pinned to the wall above his bed was her Boyfriend article about The Who: ‘He was so pleased, so proud.’ Later, when the champagne was gone, Christine discovered that the lavish party had been something of a charade. Letters from bailiffs had been arriving at 84 Eaton Place. Once again, Lambert and Stamp were being threatened with eviction.