CHAPTER SIX

GOOD YOBS

‘In an atmosphere of brooding sexual menace, the total effect is like crossing pop with science fiction.’

The Observer describes The Who, June 1965

‘If we liked each other we probably wouldn’t exist.’

Pete Townshend on the key to The Who’s success, 1965

‘All great art is crap.’

Kit Lambert

On 24 January 1965, Britain’s wartime prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, died at his home in London’s Hyde Park Gate. He was ninety years old, and had recently suffered a stroke. Churchill had served a second term as prime minister in the mid-1950s. But it was his time leading the country during the Second World War for which he would always be remembered. Following the news of his death, radio and TV programmes were cancelled to make way for memorial broadcasts. Six days later, Churchill’s coffin, draped in the Union flag, was carried on a gun carriage through streets lined with people, from Westminster Hall to St Paul’s Cathedral, for a state funeral service. In 2012, Pete Townshend summed up his attitude towards the British establishment in the mid-1960s like so: ‘They’re all cunts and Winston Churchill is a bastard.’ But the country’s loss was The Who’s gain.

Five days after Churchill’s death, The Who made their first appearance on ITV’s Ready Steady Go!, a pop TV show that had picked up where Six-Five Special and Oh Boy! had left off. Ready Steady Go! began broadcasting on Friday evenings in August 1963. A year on, the show’s slogan ‘The Weekend Starts Here!’ had become a national catchphrase, and The Beatles, The Kinks, the Rolling Stones and The Animals had all passed through its central London studio.

In 2013, the programme’s former editor and producer Vicki Wickham described Ready Steady Go! as being run by ‘young people who knew nothing about TV’. The exception to the rule was its thirty-five-year-old host, radio DJ Keith Fordyce. But it was Fordyce’s co-presenter, Cathy McGowan, who became the show’s figurehead. McGowan was nineteen years old, and had been offered the job after answering a press advert for ‘a typical teenager’. TV executives and older viewers winced as she fluffed her lines and missed her cues. But McGowan’s charm and fashion sense appealed to a teenage audience, who soon nicknamed her ‘Queen of the Mods’. Rather like The Who, Cathy McGowan was her audience.

With the release of ‘I Can’t Explain’, Kit Lambert became aware of Decca Records’ failings and decided to promote the record himself. Among those he called was Ready Steady Go!’s programme editor. Pete Meaden had previously pestered Vicki Wickham into considering the High Numbers for a slot on the show. But she’d been put off by their contrived image. Lambert invited Wickham and the show’s director Michael Lindsay-Hogg to watch The Who at the Marquee. Impressed by the noise and the energy coming from both the band and its fans, they decided to book the group.

Lambert was aware that Ready Steady Go! employed a scout to visit clubs and ballrooms, and handpicked the programme’s young audience. ‘They wanted people who could dance and looked good,’ says one of the show’s regular dancers. ‘They didn’t want it be like Top of the Pops, with kids standing around chewing gum and looking vacant.’ When Kit discovered that the scout was off sick, he promised Lindsay-Hogg that he could fill the studio with teenagers from the Marquee. Lambert then scavenged over a hundred tickets for the show, which were hastily distributed among the Goldhawk and Marquee ‘faces’.

Shortly before The Who were due to make their TV debut, Lindsey-Hogg’s team were informed that their usual studio at Television House, Kingsway, WC2, was needed for a Winston Churchill memorial broadcast. The team were moved to the larger Rediffusion studio in Wembley, much closer to The Who’s stamping ground. By the time the group arrived for rehearsals, their fans were already marshalling, like a sharply dressed army, outside. ‘We basically took over their show,’ said Roger Daltrey. ‘We nicked their tickets and filled it with our audience.’

The acts that evening also included the Mancunian beat group The Hollies and the self-styled ‘British Dylan’, singer-songwriter Donovan. A forward-thinking Lambert had supplied The Who’s followers with scarves, to ensure that they stood out from the rest of the crowd on TV. When Donovan and The Hollies performed, they did so to an audience dominated by The Who’s scarf-waving fanatics. Like the oversized speaker cabinets with which they’d once intimidated rival bands, it was another example of the group’s psychological warfare.

The High Numbers had made their low-key TV debut the previous autumn on BBC2’s The Beat Room. That day, John Entwistle had threatened to walk out after discovering he was hardly in shot during the performance. It was Ready Steady Go!’s policy to include the whole group. On the night, The Who nervously lip-synced through ‘I Can’t Explain’ – ‘all hand clapping and gum chewing,’ said Chris Stamp. But when Townshend mimed the song’s final chord, the fans threw their scarves towards the stage where they ended up draped around the band like garlands. As Daltrey explained, ‘After Ready Steady Go! everything took off.’

Next, Lambert and Stamp gambled £350 they barely had to make a promotional film of The Who, which they then sold to the TV pop show That’s For Me. The further exposure helped ‘I Can’t Explain’ begin its slow climb into the top thirty. By now Stamp was following Kit Lambert’s lead, and repeatedly phoning the new pirate station, Radio Caroline, to request the song. The Irish entrepreneur, Ronan O’Rahilly, who also managed Georgie Fame and the Scene Club, had set up Radio Caroline in spring 1964, motivated by the BBC’s refusal to play Fame’s first single (it was an independent release and the Beeb favoured major labels).

Stamp’s persistence had the desired effect. Daltrey and Townshend had first heard Bill Haley and Elvis Presley on Radio Luxembourg. Ten years later, there was an illicit thrill to be had from hearing their own music illegally broadcast, albeit from a decommissioned passenger ferry moored off the Essex coast. The station’s support worked: ‘I Can’t Explain’ finally cracked the top thirty, and The Who were asked to play on the BBC’s Top of the Pops.

‘It’s incredible how fast everything happened,’ says Richard Barnes. ‘From playing some shitty boozer in Shepherd’s Bush to Top of the Pops in what felt like six months.’ The Who’s appearance on the show came about only because another group had cancelled, and the producers needed some bright young things to fill the ‘Tip for the Top’ slot. But it worked. ‘I Can’t Explain’ had made achingly slow progress but finally peaked at Number 8, sandwiched between The Supremes’ ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ ’.

‘I never doubted we were going to make it,’ Daltrey told the author. ‘I don’t know whether it was over-confidence or me thinking, “I don’t know why but this is what I’ve got to do.” I felt like I was the man in Close Encounters [of the Third Kind] building a mountain. There were never any doubts.’

Not everyone was pleased. The Kinks returned from a US tour to hear ‘I Can’t Explain’ on the radio. For a few confused seconds, they thought they were listening to themselves. The High Numbers had supported The Kinks on a number of occasions, and to singer Ray Davies the borrowing was apparent. ‘I felt a bit appalled,’ he said. ‘The only reason I let it go was because I’d seen Keith Moon play, and he was such a funny, nice, original guy.’

The single’s success had an immediate effect on The Who’s finances. They could now charge as much as £300 a night, but with New Action running up sizable debts, the increase was laughable. The company had opened accounts with several different London banks, and squeezed at least £500 out of each thanks to their SW1 address, Lambert’s public-school accent, and telling the managers what Chris Stamp called ‘a load of old bollocks’.

Cheques were always in danger of bouncing, but the money enabled the managers to pay for The Who’s promotional film, photo sessions, posters, flyers and new clothes. Lambert was determined to present a moneyed image to the outside world, whatever the cost. Just as he’d pawned his grandmother’s jewellery to front the money for The Who’s first Marquee gig, now he pawned a set of Constant’s cufflinks to pay a dentist to fix Roger Daltrey’s crooked front teeth. In the meantime, he cruised between business meetings in a hired Rolls-Royce, the bill for which was always overdue. ‘Kit gave up taking buses early in life,’ points out Robert Fearnley-Whittingstall.

In the meantime, Pete Townshend was photographed trying on clothes in Just Men, a hip boutique near the King’s Road, and looking every inch the elegant would-be pop-star-about-town. New Action fed the music press with bogus facts and figures suggesting The Who were more affluent than they were. ‘The group have a £50-a-month repair bill,’ reported Melody Maker. ‘The usual clothes-buying form is for two or three of the boys to go to London’s Carnaby Street, and spend £200 in one visit.’ ‘That’s how we built up the debt that we were in,’ said John Entwistle. ‘Buying clothes by day and smashing up equipment at night.’

The Who had managed a top-ten hit, but soon realised just how poor their deal with Shel Talmy and Decca Records was. After everyone else had taken their cut, the band made just £1,000, from which New Action then deducted their managerial forty per cent. Lambert and Stamp browbeat the record label into upping the group’s royalties from two and half to four per cent for the next single. But the managers’ already prickly relationship with Talmy would only get pricklier.

It hadn’t made him rich, but Pete Townshend had written a hit single. If he needed proof that quitting art school had been the right thing to do, it was there in black and white in the New Musical Express charts. ‘I Can’t Explain’ had been composed specifically for The Who’s audience. Townshend realised he’d achieved his aim when a deputation of mods, led by ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons, appeared in the Goldhawk club’s dressing room. ‘I remember saying to Townshend, “You’re writing about us”,’ said Jack. ‘And he said, “That’s what I’m trying to do.”’ Neither was Townshend’s achievement lost on Kit Lambert. With the band about to start recording their debut album, Kit knew he had to nurture the songwriter.

But to do so, he would have to remove Townshend from his natural habitat. The scene that greeted every visitor to Pete and Barney’s flat was one of casual squalor. There were LPs, guitars, amps, mattresses, bedding, over-filled ashtrays and Stramit boards scattered everywhere. The curtains were drawn and a haze of dope smoke hung over everything like a dull mist. The flat’s occupants were so used to the mess, they barely noticed it. Lambert made a suggestion: ‘That he take Pete out of our squalor,’ says Richard Barnes, ‘and into his.’

In reality, despite his plush SW1 address, Lambert was still living beyond his means. Bailiff’s letters arrived, which he ignored, until the bailiffs themselves turned up. ‘It’s very depressing when you’re managing a group and you’re supposed to be making money and you arrive and there’s a big furniture van on the steps of your office and a big bloke’s carrying out your desk,’ he later admitted. Invariably, Lambert would scrounge together enough cash to retrieve his possessions, and then the whole cycle would commence again.

In the 1987 biography The Lamberts, Kit’s secretary Anya Butler told author Andrew Motion how Lambert always ordered her to hide a valuable bust of his father whenever the bailiffs arrived. Anya would stash the sculpture in the lavatory, then sit above it with her knickers around her ankles until they’d gone. This farcical ritual would be repeated several times.

Unaware of the extent of Lambert’s financial chaos, Townshend accepted his offer ‘to rescue me from my art school friends’ and moved into Eaton Place. As soon as he arrived, Townshend noted the connecting door between his and Lambert’s bedrooms. But he was unfazed. At Ealing, Townshend had been convinced that his effeminate appearance and inexperience with women had led many students to presume he was gay. ‘And I didn’t care,’ he told the author.

Despite Shel Talmy’s impression that ‘Lambert was hot after Townshend’, it seems Kit wanted to groom his nineteen-year-old protégé, not seduce him. ‘I was disappointed Kit didn’t fancy me,’ Townshend admitted. ‘But only because I wanted his absolute approval. Kit didn’t like pretty boys, if I was a pretty boy in any sense of the word. He preferred street urchins and rent boys.’

At Eaton Place, Townshend would sleep late, and then disappear in the early evening to play the Marquee or a late-night mod dive on the south coast, only returning in the early hours. More than once he wandered out of his bedroom the next day to find some sullen youth he’d never seen before gulping tea and scoffing scrambled eggs at the table. There would be an awkward silence, before Lambert offered some implausible explanation: ‘This unfortunate boy had a terrible accident and hurt his foot, so I had to put him up for the night …’

The Who knew about their co-manager’s sexuality, even if he wasn’t completely open about it. Townshend believed it gave Lambert a better insight into how The Who’s audience worked. ‘The audience were ninety per cent boys,’ he told Andrew Motion. ‘He picked up that the link between our audience and the band was a sexual one. He used that piece of secret knowledge to make the band – in dress and manner – more androgynous.’ This manifested itself over time in Lambert encouraging The Who to adopt a more flamboyant look and to wear a little make-up onstage. In Townshend’s mind, they were tapping into something that was already there in their mod fanbase waiting to be explored.

‘A lot of my mod friends from the Goldhawk tried being gay,’ he said. ‘They tried it out because it was a fashionable thing to do, but also because in that little mod circle, we thought Rod Stewart was gay because he performed with Long John Baldry who was openly gay. We thought David Bowie was gay and we thought Marc Bolan was gay because Marc had said “I was a rent boy”, which was a radical thing to say.’

At first, Townshend also believed Chris Stamp was homosexual: ‘Because he was even better looking than his brother Terence.’ Later, when Townshend joined Lambert and Stamp for dinner dates in Chelsea, he relished the attention they attracted: ‘We would walk into a restaurant and all the men would look round and think that I was Kit’s boy or, better still, Chris’s. The frisson that created, especially with women, was quite extraordinary. What women would do was break into what they saw as a gay triangle.’

The first woman to break into that triangle was Anya Butler. ‘It was the first really profound sexual affair I had,’ Townshend told the BBC in 2011. ‘Profound because it was so exciting and disturbing. Anya was ten years older than me, and just wanted to crash into this frisson.’ The pair would have sex at the flat, until a disapproving Kit found out, and insisted that Anya set up Townshend in a place of his own. There was one condition: it had to be close to Eaton Place.

Lambert’s reaction to the affair was hardly surprising. His insight into The Who and their male audience was partly born out of his own obsession. ‘Gay managers like Kit regarded their groups as their family,’ says Keith Altham. ‘The “straights” that went home to their wives and children did not have the same time to offer their bands. Gay managers did.’

What Townshend called his ‘toy boy relationship’ with Kit’s secretary fizzled out after Anya found him a flat at 8 Chesham Place, close to Sloane Square. Townshend moved his mattress, his records, his guitars, his clothes, a Marshall amp and his two tape recorders into the bare flat. There was nobody living next door for him to disturb, but also nobody to disturb him. He worked alone and often late into the night: ‘The only thing in my life at the time was Who gigs and my tape machines.’

Townshend was now further away than ever from The Who, in every sense of the word. Entwistle was still with his mother and stepfather in Acton (Kit now referred to the forthright Queenie as The Who’s ‘shop steward’); Moon was renting a flat above a laundrette in Alperton but would soon move back to his parents’ house in Chaplin Road, and Daltrey was technically homeless. Now separated from Jackie (whom he’d eventually divorce), the singer was living in the band’s converted furniture van. ‘It was no different to being a lorry driver kipping in your cab,’ he said. ‘I loved it. Park it up anywhere, get washed up at a mate’s place …’

Daltrey claimed he spent six months living in the van, an impressive achievement considering Townshend and Barney only managed three weeks in their ambulance. But Reg Bowen insists that he no longer had the option of living at his parents’ house: ‘Rog lived in the van because his sister had pinched his old bedroom.’

With Chesham Place barely a minute in the chauffeur-driven Rolls from Eaton Place, Lambert could still keep tabs on Townshend: ‘Kit would recommend books to read, music to listen to – great think-tank sessions.’ Kit had the use of a private box at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, which Townshend was soon using to watch operas by Benjamin Britten, Verdi and Mussorgsky, whose challenging work Boris Gudunov proved a little too much: ‘I drank champagne, lay on the floor and fell asleep.’

Townshend’s collection of John Lee Hooker, Bob Dylan and Charlie Parker LPs now shared floor space with records handpicked by his manager. These included music by Kit’s godfather, William Walton, the Italian violinist Arcangelo Corelli and Henry Purcell, the seventeenth-century English composer, whose work would soon have an impact on Townshend’s writing.

These records also gave Townshend a glimpse into Lambert’s childhood, and his relationship with his late father: ‘This was the music Constant had introduced Kit to. This was the music of his childhood.’ Constant had been a distant presence in his son’s life, and most of the stories Kit told about his father had come via those who had known him better. Nevertheless, Kit had studied Constant’s life and work and while he already shared his father’s hedonistic tendencies, he also displayed his forward-thinking attitude.

Constant had infuriated the classical establishment by favourably comparing Duke Ellington with Ravel and Stravinsky. Similarly, Kit believed that pop was as valid an art form as classical music. But he also understood the importance of image in selling that art form. ‘Constant deserted Kit as a child, and I always thought Kit was trying to appeal to the ghost of his father,’ said Townshend. ‘To try and acknowledge the musical genius, the entrepreneurial genius. Kit wanted to do all of that.’

Townshend was soon demoing as many as three or four songs a week on his Vortexion stereo tape recorders, and Kit was soon pacing around the flat, chain-smoking and critiquing the work: ‘The wilder I got in my songwriting the more he supported me.’ During these visits, Lambert would notice the pictures decorating the wall. They were pages torn from a pop-art book Townshend had stolen from the college library. The next stage in The Who’s music and image would emerge from those pictures.

At the High Numbers’ first Greenwich Town Hall gig in the summer of 1964, Jeff Dexter remembered Townshend playing with the Union flag draped over his amp. At Woodgrange Avenue, Townshend had filled notebooks with doodles of flags, targets, medals, chevrons and roundels, partly inspired by the British artist Peter Blake.

Blake was a thirty-three-year-old painter, who had grown up in the shadow of the Second World War. He liked Hollywood movies, comic books, Elvis and Chuck Berry, and expressed his love of pop culture in his work. In 1961, he produced Got a Girl, using images of Presley and other 1950s pop stars alongside military medals and chevrons. In the same year, Blake painted a self-portrait in which he wore a denim jacket adorned with badges. ‘I had Peter’s pictures cut out of books and magazines on my wall,’ recalled Townshend. ‘That was the image that I felt informed the way that I wanted to write.’ Blake inspired more of The Who’s imagery with The First Real Target, in which he reproduced a traditional archery target in vivid colours with additional typography, and his series of Roxy Roxy artworks, featuring portraits of female wrestlers framed with images that include the Union flag.

Blake wasn’t the only pop artist working with this kind of iconography. The American Jasper Johns had created artworks from a target and the US Stars and Stripes nine years earlier. The English optical artist Bridget Riley was also using bold stripes and chevrons in her work. Blake and Riley both had their work displayed at Robert Fraser’s Duke Street gallery throughout 1963 and 1964. Fraser was an Eton-educated former King’s Rifles officer turned art dealer, and a confidante of the Rolling Stones. His exhibitions attracted pop stars, models and actors, and drew together worlds that had once seemed utterly disparate.

Fraser wasn’t the only gallery owner to spot the new trend. Graphic designer Pearce Marchbank was a Marquee regular in the early 1960s. ‘There were two fantastic art exhibitions in 1964,’ he told author Jonathon Green in the social history, Days in the Life. ‘There was this great big show called the Gulbenkian and there was 54–64 at the Tate [Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 1954–1964], which had a whole room full of American pop art: Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, targets and flags.’ Marchbank would leave the exhibition to go and watch The Who play: ‘And you’d put two and two together. There seemed to be direct line between what was on at the Tate and what was on at the Marquee.’

‘The art scene was almost closer to pop,’ said Townshend. ‘People like Jasper Johns and [Roy] Lichtenstein, people that were actually painting pictures, seemed to understand popular culture more than the people in the music industry.’ American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s comic strip-style works Whaam! and As I Opened Fire were loud and explosive and partly inspired by the Second World War. There were parallels to be drawn with the explosive song that became The Who’s second single, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’.

After ‘I Can’t Explain’, The Who wanted to release something more representative of their uncompromising live show. Unlike that first single, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ wasn’t the result of one of Townshend’s meticulous demo sessions. Instead, he arrived at the Marquee one afternoon with a scrap of an idea, which the band worked on during rehearsal. It was fast and spontaneous. Townshend later said that the song title had come to him while lying on his bed listening to the freewheeling jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. ‘He was a soul without a body,’ he said of Parker, ‘riding, flying, free on music … I wanted us to be like that.’ But Townshend would have to run all this freedom past The Who’s lead singer first.

Roger Daltrey had felt uneasy singing the vulnerable lyrics of ‘I Can’t Explain’ so Lambert suggested that Townshend involve Daltrey in writing the words to the new single. ‘Roger didn’t want pop music, and Pete was also getting all the kudos,’ says Richard Barnes. ‘The politics of ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ was to placate Roger and get the live act on a record.’

The group were booked to record the track at IBC Studios in Central London’s Portland Place on 13 April. Townshend and Daltrey stayed up most of the night before finishing the song. By the morning, its protagonist was no longer the blissful free spirit of Pete Townshend’s imagination, and more reminiscent of the teenage Roger Daltrey, squaring up to ‘Basher’ Hurse in the classroom at Acton County. The final lyrics talked of breaking through locked doors and not caring what was right or wrong. Townshend’s dreamy abstract vision had been dragged back to Shepherd’s Bush. ‘I toughened the song up,’ insisted Daltrey.

‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ became even tougher in the studio. To achieve a live sound, Shel Talmy miked up Townshend’s amp from three different positions, and stuck twelve microphones around Keith Moon’s drums. This time, there was no sign of the Ivy League or Jimmy Page, only session man Nicky Hopkins, whose bluesy piano fills would snake through the whole song. ‘I suppose if I’d tried to sell another guitarist, I would have gotten a lot of hassle,’ admitted Talmy. ‘Nicky brought something unique to the recording without angering anybody else.’

After a conventional first minute or so, the track seemed to collapse in on itself, leaving Townshend to fill almost forty seconds with distortion and feedback, the sound of his plectrum scraping along his guitar strings, and the bleep of the emergency Morse code signal, which he created by flipping the selector switch on his guitar back and forth.

The Beatles’ Number 1 hit ‘I Feel Fine’ in winter 1964 had begun with a five-second squall of feedback, but The Who were the first to make feedback a feature of a track. It was an extremely daring noise to use on a pop song that lasted two minutes and forty-four seconds; even more daring considering it was only The Who’s second single.

As far as the group were concerned, the single had served its purpose. ‘The intention was to encapsulate The Who’s stage act,’ said John Entwistle. ‘To illustrate the arrogance of the mod movement and, through feedback, the smashing of the instruments.’ Decca Records weren’t convinced. When they first heard the track, they presumed they’d been sent a defective copy. ‘I got a cable from them, saying, “We think we got a bad tape,”’ recalled Shel Talmy. ‘But I assured them that was the way it was.’

Brainstorming ways to promote the single, Kit Lambert stared at the pictures on the wall of Chesham Place, and informed the press that that The Who had just made ‘the first pop art record’. ‘I used to talk to Kit about pop art a lot,’ said Townshend in 1966. ‘And suddenly, he came out with this idea. He told us, “Keith is going to have a bull’s-eye on his T-shirt, Pete is going to wear badges.”’

According to a 1966 Observer article, radio DJs were sent early copies of the single in a garish yellow and orange sleeve with a message inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip imagery: ‘Pow! Don’t walk, run to your nearest record player.’ ‘Townshend was intellectual,’ wrote Nik Cohn in 1968, ‘and Lambert wasn’t exactly intellectual, but he had the jargon off. Between them, they looked at the things The Who did and analysed them and thought up sassy names for them.’

The press bought into it. Christine Day recalls The Who traipsing into the Boyfriend office in London’s North Audley Street for an interview. Townshend assumed control, the others, she recalls, stood around combing their hair in the mirror. ‘Pete was clearly the leader,’ Christine says now, ‘and he used to be moving all the time, so animated, up and down and walking in and out of the doorway while he spoke to you. He never stopped.’ As Richard Barnes points out: ‘I took an awful lot of pills around that time, and so did Pete.’ ‘The Who are everything that is 1965,’ wrote Christine in Boyfriend, before comparing ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ to ‘jets flying, cars roaring along the new motorway, the noises of the streets.’

Kit Lambert had schooled the band, particularly Townshend, to feed the press with good quotable lines and what Chris Stamp might have called ‘old bollocks’. In Townshend’s case, this was no great leap. ‘We live pop art,’ he proclaimed, before dropping Peter Blake’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s names in interviews. The message spread beyond the music press to Fleet Street. A column in the 27 June issue of the Observer described The Who as ‘the first group to employ distortion and out-of-tuneness as an intrinsic part of their music’. Townshend played along, telling the Observer: ‘From valueless objects – a guitar, a microphone, a hackneyed pop tune – we abstract a new value. We take objects from one function and give them another. And the auto-destructive element adds immediacy to it all.’

But The Who knew that namechecking a few modern artists wasn’t enough. ‘We’re anti-middle age, anti-boss class and anti-young marrieds,’ Townshend bragged to Melody Maker. Even Daltrey sounded uptight and desperate. ‘I never want to grow old,’ he said in New Musical Express. ‘I want to stay young forever. If I wasn’t in a group I don’t know what I’d do with myself. I think I’d do myself in.’

Townshend had just turned twenty; Daltrey was twenty-one. Such angst might seem faintly ridiculous in 2014, but in 1965 it set The Who apart. Even the Rolling Stones didn’t sound this disenfranchised. Kit Lambert’s pop-art marketing strategy was rewarded. Ready Steady Go! started using ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ as their theme tune, and after twelve weeks in the charts the single reached Number 10. After ‘I Can’t Explain’s success, this came as a disappointment, but The Who had made their point: this was a song that didn’t sound anything like The Kinks.

Although he had succeeded in bottling what Entwistle called ‘mod arrogance’, Townshend was already distancing himself from the youth cult that had so fascinated him six months earlier. In a way, Ready Steady Go!’s championing of mod music and imagery had taken away the very thing on which the movement thrived: elitism. ‘We think the mod thing is dying,’ Townshend told Melody Maker. ‘We don’t plan to go down with it, which is why we’ve become individualists.’ The paper’s readers wondered what an individualist was, and how they might become one.

The Who’s individual new look had been developing onstage for some time. ‘Mod was fantastic and fashionable, but it was all very controlled, not flamboyant,’ points out Richard Barnes. ‘After a while, The Who wanted to become more colourful onstage.’ The Who’s new look was revealed on television in July during their third appearance on Ready Steady Go!. Townshend wore a jacket with medals from his mother’s shop pinned to the front, and Keith Moon’s shirt sported a vivid target image.

Over the next few months, Ready Steady Go! would reflect similar influences as the show’s designer Nicholas Ferguson began copying his favourite pop artists and painting bold stripes on to the set. In the meantime, more stripes, targets, medals and chevrons found their way on to The Who’s clothing. It was mod with a subversive twist, slyly echoing the icons of the British Empire and the Second World War.

Townshend and Richard Barnes’s art-school friend Michael English (who died in 2009) had designed a pair of sunglasses with a Union flag underlay on the lenses for the Carnaby Street boutique Gear. ‘Michael also did Stars and Stripes sunglasses and some with bull’s-eye targets on them,’ recalls his ex-wife and former Ealing student Angela Brown. ‘They had fine see-through dots all over them so that you could see through them. He just bought cheap sunglasses and silkscreen-printed them.’

The Who followed suit. A Union flag draped over a Marshall amp become a Union flag cover on a Marshall amp, and a Union flag jacket. Sir Winston Churchill would have been appalled. ‘Kit came up with the idea for the jacket,’ said Roger Daltrey. ‘Prior to that the Union Jack had only been flown on buildings as a flag. When we walked into a Savile Row tailor and said, “Will you make a jacket out of this?” they said, “No.” They thought they’d go to jail.’ Townshend said he had five jackets made, which he and, occasionally, Entwistle wore on and offstage.

A typical picture of The Who in 1965 might show Townshend baiting the establishment in his Union flag jacket, Entwistle modelling a shirt decorated with military insignia, and Moon in a target T-shirt and a jacket to which he’d pinned an oversized ‘Elvis is Everyone’ badge, in homage to Peter Blake. Which just left Daltrey, the man Pete Meaden might have called ‘the red sheep in the flock’.

In fact, Daltrey became The Who’s biggest individualist, and made a fashion statement worthy of Vivienne Westwood’s early punk designs, by accessorising his clothes with electrician’s tape of the kind commonly found in factories. Before the gig, Anya Butler would cut the tape into different shapes, which Daltrey would then stick to his clothes: ‘I’d go onstage in a knitted jumper with tape stuck on it so it looked like something else,’ he said. The strips would curl up and flake off in the heat, and it wasn’t a flattering look. But that didn’t matter: ‘The idea was, “This is my statement, nobody else’s.”’

However, offstage The Who were now moving too fast for Daltrey’s liking and not in the direction he wanted. Townshend had written enough songs to fill The Who’s debut album, but Daltrey wanted to include the numbers they played live. At the IBC sessions for ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ The Who had recorded James Brown’s ‘Please Please Please’, Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m a Man’ and Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heat Wave’, among others.

The album was due for release in the US in the summer. Shel Talmy played Beat Instrumental journalist John Emery an early acetate. ‘One thing hit me slap in the face,’ wrote Emery. ‘The lack of originality in the choice of material.’ He went on to describe The Who’s version of ‘I’m a Man’ as ‘monotonous’. Lambert panicked, and released a statement to the press explaining that the album was being delayed, that The Who were ditching R&B covers and focusing on what he called ‘hard pop’.

With the gift of hindsight, it might be difficult to understand why Daltrey didn’t want more original material on the album. But ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ hadn’t been a major hit, and, although he’d change his opinion later, Daltrey regarded ‘I Can’t Explain’ as soft pop. He was adamant that The Who on record should accurately reflect the band live. Furthermore, the Rolling Stones’ recently released debut album had included the Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed numbers they played live, and The Kinks’ first LP was predominantly covers with just a handful of Ray Davies’ originals.

But under the terms of the ‘proclamation’ Townshend had drawn up over a year before, The Who had to be different. ‘We could have sung the blues and been a much bigger band much quicker,’ said Chris Stamp. ‘But everybody was doing that.’ The management’s decision to delay the album and replace the covers with more Townshend originals did little to endear it to The Who’s lead singer.

Daltrey was now becoming isolated in what had once been his band. As well as Townshend’s songwriting and his closeness to Lambert, he also had to contend with Kit’s growing influence on Keith Moon. The drummer was intrigued by Lambert’s worldliness and sophistication, and shared his love of booze and spending money. Lambert, meanwhile, was attracted to Moon’s wild energy and, some suggest, his good looks. According to Chris Stamp, Keith turned Kit on to pills, and Kit turned Keith on to expensive champagne.

‘Keith was a terrible social climber,’ said Townshend. ‘He once said to Kit, “Suppose I’m in a nightclub with The Beatles and want to impress them by ordering the best champagne, what should I get?” And Kit said, “Dom Pérignon 1926” or something … And the next thing we’re in this nightclub and you hear Keith shouting “Dom Pérignon 1926!” And next there’s an £8,000 bill!’

Simon Napier-Bell maintains that, ‘Kit gave Keith licence to be himself. Keith’s madness was an outward and visible expression of what was in Kit too.’ To others, though, it seemed as if Moon was taking aspects of Lambert’s character and making them his own. ‘I remember Keith in the very early days and he was this young good looking sub-Beatle who had this very ordinary cockney accent,’ says ‘Irish’ Jack. ‘Then, little by little, Keith’s accent began to take on Oxford tones. You’d ignore him and take no notice and tell yourself, “Well, he’s probably drunk.” But after a while you might speak to him and he’d be stone-cold sober and he’s going, “Yes, quite, absolutely dear boy.” And you’d be looking at him and thinking, “What the fuck?”’

Daltrey’s isolation was compounded by the fact that Moon, like the rest of The Who and their managers, took drugs. Daltrey smoked and drank, and had tried amphetamines, but pills dried out his throat and affected his voice. He also hated the effect they had on his bandmates.

With the album on hold, The Who returned to what they did best: playing live and often. It wasn’t unusual for them to follow a gig in the provinces with another performance the same evening at an all-night mod club in the capital. One favourite venue was Tottenham’s Club Noreik, where ‘French blues’ and ‘bombers’ were readily available, and the doors stayed locked, keeping the outside world and the crippling comedown at bay, until the morning. To cope with the frantic schedule, and for their own entertainment, Entwistle and Moon had formed an especially close drug-taking partnership. Pills would be counter-balanced with alcohol, followed by more pills to sober up. And so it went on.

‘Moon would pass out before a gig,’ said Entwistle, ‘sober up just before we went on, play like a maniac, and go back on the bottle as soon as we finished.’ After a performance in Reading that summer, the drummer sidled up to Richard Barnes and asked ‘whether I had anything in the upward direction, dear boy?’ Barney had a stash of twenty-four purple hearts that were meant to last him for the next three weeks. Moon swallowed the lot: ‘I was pissed off, but incredibly impressed at the same time.’

The Who’s first trip to France, to promote a French EP of ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ and ‘I Can’t Explain’, included a gig at the Parisian equivalent of the Marquee, Le Golf-Drouot. At the same time French TV show, Seize Millions de Jeunes, screened a documentary about English mods that included footage of The Who, an interview with Townshend and a fluently French-speaking Lambert. Entwistle and Moon managed to stay awake for the duration of the three-day trip by consuming six phials of liquid methedrine. The Who wowed the French audience, but Lambert was forced to borrow cash from Chris Parmenter to pay for his train fare home.

Wherever they were played, be it a festival, mod club or a suburban town hall, one thing remained constant: the audience now wanted The Who to smash their equipment. Christine Day and Keith Altham had watched Townshend destroy a guitar at the Marquee, aware that he was doing it partly for their benefit. What had begun as a spontaneous act of destruction had now become a theatrical stunt that could be performed to order.

The Who’s air of aggression, real or otherwise, didn’t work everywhere, though. At the Public Hall in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, the audience objected to Daltrey’s swearing and cockney accent, and pelted the band with bottles and coins. Penguin-suited bouncers ended up positioned onstage to deter a further onslaught. ‘The people there didn’t know what we were trying to do,’ complained Chris Stamp. ‘Most nights ended up with a violent punch-up.’

Yet not every northern gig ended that way. Film-maker Richard Stanley would later work with The Who, but first encountered them when he was an art student and the High Numbers played Leicester’s Granby Halls in summer 1964. ‘Humphrey Lyttelton was headlining,’ says Stanley now. ‘Another group were meant to play but didn’t, so The Who came instead. I was sat in the bar with Humphrey, being a typical jazz fan and thinking The Who were just some pop band, not really my thing, when my friend came running in, very excited and said, “The guitarist is bleeding all down his white trousers!”’ Townshend had smashed his hand against his guitar and had drawn blood.

Stanley didn’t take that much notice until The Who played his college, Leicester School of Art, the following spring. That night, he projected a film he’d made on to the stage as the band performed. Sleeping and Digging, a ‘weird film with stop-motion’, showed bicycles being ridden over slumbering bodies. ‘Pete kept turning round while he was playing to look at what was going on,’ says Stanley. ‘Afterwards, he came up and asked who had been projecting the films. He wanted to know everything about it.’ When Stanley told him he was about to move to London to study at the Royal College of Art, Townshend gave him his address and insisted he call.

But it was the release of ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ that made Richard Stanley a convert: ‘It felt like the beginning of a new genre,’ he says. ‘There was pop art happening and exhibitions at the Tate Gallery. But that song was the start of it. It seemed more powerful than The Beatles or the Stones.’

What also struck Stanley was Pete Townshend’s ‘absolute curiosity’ about the film he’d made, and the guitarist’s interest in his ideas and his course at the Royal College of Art. When Stanley invited Townshend to a party he was throwing for his college friends, he realised that a pop star’s life wasn’t as glamorous as he might have imagined: ‘Pete said, “That would be fantastic because no one invites me to anything anymore.”’

In the press statement released with ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, The Who vowed, ‘If this disc is a flop, we’re going to make another just like it, only harder hitting.’ Although the song hadn’t been a flop, it hadn’t been the hit The Who needed either. If ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ aimed to capture The Who’s live sound, then Kit Lambert believed that The Who’s next single needed to make a grand statement, and the grander the better.

Townshend recalls jotting down the lyrics to what became ‘My Generation’ in the back of a car. The socialist playwright David Mercer had just published a trilogy of his work, The Generations, which gave Townshend the title for the song. Its inspiration also came from an incident that highlighted the social gulf that separated Townshend from his Belgravia neighbours.

In summer 1965, Townshend had bought a 1935 Packard V12 Hearse. One day he returned home to find the car missing from outside his flat. The police informed him that it had been towed away on the orders of the Queen Mother, who’d complained after seeing it on her regular journey from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace. She’d taken umbrage, as it reminded her of her late husband, George VI’s funeral car. The incident fuelled Townshend’s ire at the Royal Family and the British class system in general. ‘I was outraged,’ he said. ‘This was the world we were living in.’

‘I’m not pretending we were the Arnold Weskers or John Osbornes of our age,’ he insisted. ‘But certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.’ ‘My Generation’s’ grand statement was, he said: ‘All right you motherfuckers, I am going to have you. I am going to be bigger and richer, and I’m going to move into your neighbourhood.’

The song came together over the summer. Unlike the spontaneous ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, it developed out of demos on which Townshend sung and played every instrument. Copies were then given to Lambert, Stamp and the rest of the band. Townshend later compared the first demo with Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Talkin’ New York’ and ‘Jimmy Reed at ten years old suffering from nervous indigestion’. ‘It was much slower,’ recalled Roger Daltrey. ‘Very Bo Diddley – jink-a-jink-ajink, jink-a-jink-ajink.’

Nobody was overly impressed. But Stamp heard something he liked and urged Townshend to persevere. Lambert, meanwhile, told him to make the song bigger and more grandiose. The second demo included handclaps, backing vocals, a lead vocal in which Townshend deliberately stuttered some of the words and a bass solo that John Entwistle would later turn into an integral part of the song. At Lambert’s suggestion, the third demo threw in several key changes that Townshend told Rolling Stone magazine were ‘pinched, again, from The Kinks’.

The one dissenting voice belonged to Roger Daltrey, who was still fixated on playing soul and R&B songs. Just as Townshend’s grand statement started coming together, The Who started falling apart. The friction between Daltrey and the rest of the group reached a violent peak on a run of European and Scandinavian dates.

September 1965 started badly, and would only go downhill. In an effort to make The Who’s van more secure, roadie ‘Cy’ Langston had visited south London’s Battersea Dogs’ Home to enquire about an Alsatian guard dog. When he came out, the van containing several thousand pounds’ worth of gear had been stolen. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on The Who or their crew. When the vehicle was recovered, there were only two smashed speakers still left inside.

The Who had gigs lined up in Holland and Denmark. Chris Stamp assured them they could borrow equipment, forgetting that the fans would expect to see some damage inflicted on a guitar or amp as part of the act, and that none of The Who could speak Dutch or Danish. The borrowed gear broke down during the second Dutch gig. Two days later, in Elsinore, Denmark, when another set of borrowed equipment malfunctioned, tempers flared and, according to one eyewitness, Daltrey and Moon came to blows backstage.

A day later The Who were booked for two evening shows: one in the port town of Aarhus, the other in neighbouring Aalborg. Of course, Townshend, Entwistle and Moon had scored pills for the trip. Already frustrated at using equipment that didn’t work properly, Daltrey now had to contend with everyone taking drugs, sharing in-jokes and chattering incessantly. Worst of all, the drugs were affecting the band’s performance. ‘The music was going down the tubes,’ he said. ‘It was fucking dire.’

The atmosphere at the Aarhus-Hallen that night was reminiscent of the Wild West or the Peckham Paradise in 1962. The hall was filled with around 4,000 young farmers, most of who had been drinking steadily and were itching to let off steam. Townshend had recently declared, ‘The Who is a band chopping away at its own legs, and we will succeed.’ This, then, was the moment when what he called his ‘pseudo-intellectual ambitions’ might be realised. The Who would ‘destroy the bourgeois tools of production’ (their instruments and equipment) before throwing themselves at their audience’s mercy.

But when the drunken farmers greeted The Who with a volley of chairs and bottles, Townshend quickly forgot his pseudo-intellectual ambitions and made a run for it. The band played half a song before fleeing to the dressing room for safety. The audience invaded the stage and smashed the bourgeois tools of production themselves. The mob then ran riot through the town. ‘We heard afterwards that they’d done £10,000-worth of damage,’ said Townshend, ‘and made the front page of all the Danish papers.’

Inside the dressing room, Daltrey’s frustration at the abandoned gig, the faulty equipment and his drugged-up bandmates spilled over. ‘You’re all fucking junkies!’ he shouted, before grabbing Keith Moon’s bag of French blues and pouring the contents down the toilet. Distraught at losing his precious stash, the drummer picked up a tambourine and started hitting Daltrey with it. According to Townshend, ‘Roger lashed out, bloodying Keith’s nose, turning what would have been a minor spat into a melodrama.’ Others claim the singer beat Moon unconscious. ‘I almost killed Keith,’ said Daltrey. ‘It wasn’t because I hated him. It was because I loved the band so much and thought it was being destroyed.’

Whatever the severity of the assault, the fallout was Daltrey’s dismissal: ‘They told me to fuck off and not come back.’ Nevertheless, in a curious repeat of the circumstances surrounding Doug Sandom’s dismissal, it was agreed that he would remain with the group long enough for them to finish the album and record another single. A fortnight after the bloodshed in Denmark, The Who went into IBC Studios and, in a whirlwind session, recorded what would become their debut LP and their next single, ‘My Generation’. Perversely, considering he’d been so opposed to the song, Daltrey helped make ‘My Generation’ the grand musical statement Kit Lambert had hoped for.

Townshend had stuttered some of his vocals on the song’s earlier demo version, a trick he’d copied from bluesmen John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. But when Daltrey stuttered his lines, dragging out the words ‘fade away’ and ‘generation’, he sounded less like a black American bluesman and more like one of the Goldhawk’s ‘dislocated boys’, a pilled-up English mod struggling to articulate his feelings. Unlike ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, ‘My Generation’s’ message hadn’t been twisted to fit Daltrey’s macho voice and personality. Daltrey’s voice and the existing lyrics were already a perfect fit.

Behind the singer, Townshend’s guitar howled and Moon and Entwistle played as if they were trying to drown their bandmates out. Even more audacious was the decision to include a bass solo. Entwistle tried three different instruments and sets of strings before finding the sound he wanted, which was then finessed by engineer Glyn Johns positioning the bass amp on a paving slab. The key changes that Townshend had ripped off from The Kinks made the song more grandiose, but also more frantic. ‘My Generation’ sounded every bit as fraught and combustible as The Who themselves.

By the early morning of 13 October, the group had recorded their next single and a further seven Townshend compositions. But it hadn’t been easy. ‘I was aware of the tension,’ says Shel Talmy, who couldn’t have cared less. ‘I’d heard a rumour third or fourth hand that Roger had been asked to leave, but I wasn’t interested enough to suss out the truth.’ The tension increased when Talmy again banned Kit Lambert and The Who from the control room. Townshend persuaded Glyn Johns to let him in so he could hear a playback, presuming Talmy’s eyesight was so poor he wouldn’t even notice he was there.

The Who emerged from IBC blinking into the daylight. Twenty-four hours later their petty squabbles would be thrown into perspective by the news that production manager Mike Shaw was in hospital. Shaw, who had been ferrying equipment to Liverpool, had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a lorry. He was left paralysed from the shoulders down and would be confined to a wheelchair until his death in 2012.

‘The effect of his disablement on The Who and Kit and Chris was terrible,’ wrote Townshend in Who I Am. Shaw was Stamp’s childhood friend, and the first member of The Who’s extended family after their managers. His work ethic, his patience and, crucially, the respect he earned from all four members of the band had been an invaluable asset. The severity of Shaw’s accident, at a time when The Who’s relationship with Daltrey had already deteriorated to breaking point, served to ratchet up the tension within the group still further.

‘My Generation’ was released at the beginning of November with an excitable blurb from Decca Records: ‘This is a cry from the heart, penned by The Who’s lead guitarist Pete Townshend and shouted by lead singer Roger Daltrey.’ Lambert and Stamp, already afraid they might not have a band for much longer, were further frustrated when the BBC refused to play the A-side. When Daltrey stammered ‘f-f-f-f-fade away’ it sounded as if he might be about to shout an expletive instead, but it wasn’t this hint of profanity that made the BBC nervous, rather it was the fear that the vocal might upset stutterers. However, the corporation soon backtracked when pirate stations started playing the record.

Naturally, it was ‘My Generation’s’ confrontational lyrics that attracted the most scrutiny. The Rolling Stones had sounded disgruntled and frustrated on their recent hit ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. But The Who sounded even more disaffected, as if they might explode at any second. Even if Townshend hadn’t meant the line ‘I hope I die before I get old’ to be taken literally, he stood by the sentiment. Talking to the Observer’s George Melly he explained that the shocking lyric was necessary as The Who ‘had to be drastic and violent to reach the audience’. At times, Townshend’s message might have seemed contradictory, but it reflected the contradictory mindset of the people he was trying to reach.

Pete Townshend would spend the next fifty years being asked about lyrics he’d written as an angry young man. His response would vary: sometimes he’d defend them, sometimes he wouldn’t, sometimes he’d make light of them and sometimes he’d evade the question altogether. But without that lyric pleading for an early demise, The Who’s fortunes may have turned out very differently. By the end of November 1965, The Who’s ‘cry from the heart’ was a Number 2 hit. Its success convinced them to carry on.

Townshend was now a successful songwriter, pop star and, in the eyes of his former tutor, an artist. Having left Ealing under a cloud, Roy Ascott was now promoting his controversial groundcourse at Ipswich School of Art. The future Roxy Music musician and producer Brian Eno was among his students. Eno vividly recalls Ascott arriving in class one day waving a copy of The Who’s new single: ‘He was saying, “You’ve all got to listen to this!”’ Ascott applauded ‘My Generation’, insisting it was a direct product of what Townshend had learned at Ealing, and as valid an artistic statement as anything hanging in the Tate.

The issue Townshend and The Who now faced was whether to stay together and create more art. Just as ‘My Generation’ reached the charts, news of their internal strife reached the music press. Melody Maker ran a front-page story with the headline ‘THE WHO SPLIT MYSTERY’ and stated that Raymond ‘Boz’ Burrell, the twenty-year-old singer with the Boz People, was replacing Daltrey. Burrell denied the claim and witheringly described The Who as ‘children playing with electronic toys’. ‘Does anybody in their right mind think The Who would split up at a time like this?’ blustered Chris Stamp at the time.

In fact, both the band and their managers had been considering other options. At first, Lambert and Stamp floated the idea that Daltrey should start a soul group, leaving The Who to carry on with Townshend singing lead vocals. ‘When they kicked me out, I just thought, “Oh well, that was one band. Now I’ll start another,”’ Daltrey told the author. ‘I was convinced that as the chemistry had found me once before, so it would find me again.’

Keith Moon, meanwhile, had another, stranger idea. Moon had first met drummer Ray Stock when The Beachcombers played with Stock’s group The Shevelles at the American Air Force base at Lakenheath; a venue in which Keith’s infamous pantomime horse had made an appearance. The Shevelles had since become the Flamingo’s resident house band. ‘Keith wanted The Who to have two drummers and two bass players,’ says Ray Stock now. ‘He wanted me to be the other drummer and Boz Burrell to be the other bass player. That was the plan. He said, “If this comes to be would you be interested?” And, of course, I said yes.’

The Shevelles and The Who had crossed paths before, but Stock had no idea how badly the group got on: ‘Keith told me John Entwistle had got so angry with Roger at a gig a few days before, he’d smashed him in the ear with his bass. I was shocked. They all wanted Roger out of the band.’ Ray Stock never made it as far as a rehearsal studio with The Who, and after Burrell’s terse comments in Melody Maker, the idea was abandoned. ‘I was disappointed,’ he admits. ‘But it was obvious that the management weren’t going to let The Who split up. The pounds, shillings and pence soon took over.’

As managers of what was now a successful hit group, Lambert and Stamp persuaded Daltrey and the rest of The Who to try to resolve their differences. According to Townshend, the subsequent meeting was a humiliating experience for Daltrey, who was told he could remain in the band as long as he never resorted to violence again. Daltrey, who later described himself at this time as ‘a bastard’ and ‘a real cunt’, agreed to do as he was told. ‘The problem was mostly me,’ agreed Daltrey. ‘I was the one who didn’t know how to articulate my feelings. The only way I could solve anything was to have it out there and then. I had to learn to bite my lip and be a good boy from now on.’

Daltrey’s acquiescence was an unusually conciliatory gesture from a man who rarely backed down from anyone or anything. It was borne out of simple pragmatism, though. Despite his initial thought that ‘the chemistry would find me again’ Daltrey had worked too hard to walk away from The Who. The thought of starting again or, returning to a ‘proper job’ in the steel factory, was at best daunting and at worst unthinkable.

Nevertheless, Daltrey’s vow not to beat up his bandmates didn’t resolve The Who’s other problems, or quell his dissatisfaction with their live performances. ‘Even in a stupor with all the speed he was taking, Pete knew that The Who’s playing had gone downhill,’ said Daltrey. ‘The others needed reining in. It wasn’t just me.’ The rest of The Who acknowledged that their drug-taking was affecting the music, but carried on indulging as before. Meanwhile, Moon and Entwistle continued to upset Daltrey – and often Townshend – by playing too loudly. Keith knew he was now free to undermine the singer without risking getting punched in the face.

Daltrey wasn’t the only band member feeling isolated. Townshend, who always wanted to be part of any gang, now felt excluded by Moon and Entwistle. ‘Keith and John might have been like chalk and cheese but they got on,’ says June Clark, who was soon helping to run The Who’s fan club. ‘The sense of humour bonded them. John was very humorous and dry, but he was tolerant and patient of Keith’s idiosyncrasies, whereas Roger and Pete would get very annoyed with Keith and tell him off.’

Townshend’s growing role as The Who’s songwriter and mouthpiece would only heighten his sense of isolation. The Who were now a band without a leader, but with Townshend delivering the songs and shaping the band’s image. The consequence was an uneasy democracy, every bit as dysfunctional as it had been under Daltrey’s dictatorship. Meanwhile, their discontents were played out in public, with individual members bickering about each other via the music press. ‘Roger is not a very good singer at all,’ Townshend told Music Echo. ‘We’re not mates at all,’ Daltrey informed New Musical Express. Before long, Townshend had come up with another perfect soundbite. ‘Ours,’ he said, ‘is a group with built-in hate.’

The Who’s reworked debut album, My Generation, finally appeared in the UK in December. The cover photograph was taken on a cold winter’s morning at east London’s unglamorous Surrey Docks. The group posed next to four large canisters of industrial propane, and looked as if they’d stopped rowing just long enough for photographer David Wedgbury to shoot a few frames. Wedgbury’s photograph for the album’s US edition, released the following spring, caught The Who looking even more sour-faced in front of Big Ben.

The music inside was similarly at odds with itself. James Brown’s ‘Please, Please, Please’ and ‘I Don’t Mind’ and Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m a Man’ were still there, but they didn’t quite fit with Townshend’s compositions; part of the reason being that the guitarist’s songs were so incredibly English. The white noise and splashes of feedback on ‘Out in the Street’ and the morbid sounding ‘The Good’s Gone’ fulfilled Kit Lambert’s promise of ‘hard pop’. And although ‘La-La-La-Lies’, ‘The Kids Are Alright’ and ‘A Legal Matter’ were musically lighter, they were still a showcase for Keith Moon’s frantic drumming and Townshend’s deeply cynical lyrics.

‘All the disturbing experiences of my childhood went into my composing,’ he said later, when discussing Tommy. But there’s already evidence of those traumas on My Generation. Every relationship Daltrey and Townshend sang about on the album seemed to be irreparably damaged, and everyone involved, particularly the women, was invariably a liar. My Generation’s overall message embodied the band and its audience’s paranoia: trust nobody – girlfriends, boyfriends, mothers, fathers; the world, in fact.

The final track on the album’s UK edition was ‘The Ox’, an instrumental credited to Townshend, Entwistle, Moon and Nicky Hopkins, and reminiscent of one of Keith Moon’s favourites, The Surfaris’ surf-pop hit ‘Wipe Out’. But whereas ‘Wipe Out’ evoked blue Pacific waves and tanned beach bodies, ‘The Ox’ suggested Margate in the wake of mod-versus-rocker violence, with broken glass and deckchairs strewn across the sand. It was the perfect ending to a profoundly unromantic album. ‘We weren’t very good at doing love songs,’ understated Daltrey. ‘There was always more important things to sing about.’

In 2002, Townshend explained how The Who differed from The Beatles and the Stones in Andrew Loog Oldham’s book 2Stoned. ‘The rules were laid down,’ he said, as if alluding to ‘the proclamation’ drawn up in Michael English’s flat. ‘You do not sing about fucking love … These are songs about “I can’t reach you” … “I’m gonna fuck you”, but “we are in love” is a no …’

Nevertheless, unbeknown to the readers of Boyfriend or Melody Maker, Townshend did now have a reason to write a love song. He was in a relationship with Karen Astley, the daughter of Edwin ‘Ted’ Astley, a composer whose theme music for the popular TV drama The Saint could then be heard in living rooms throughout the country. Karen had first met Townshend when she was studying couture at Ealing Art College. ‘She sat in the booth beside me at Sid’s,’ he recalled. ‘She was very tall and beautiful.’

Karen Astley had now left Ealing and in January 1965 had modelled for the Daily Mirror under the headline ‘A NEW KIND OF GIRL FOR THE NEW YEAR’. The photographer John French went into raptures about her ‘small nose, good-quality hair and absolutely fabulous “sclerotics”’, which the Mirror claimed were the ‘blue whites-of-her-eyes’. A few months later, Karen met up again with Townshend at a Who gig in north-west London.

Despite Anya Butler’s best efforts, New Action would soon be evicted from SW1, forcing Lambert to move his HQ back to Ivor Court. Before long, the inevitable eviction notice came for Townshend’s Chesham Place flat (‘We never paid the rent,’ said Townshend. ‘One didn’t’). Townshend narrowly avoided having his tape recorders repossessed, squeezed some money out of Lambert and moved to a penthouse in Old Church Street, Chelsea. The tape recorders went with him, and the late-night demo sessions continued as before. But there was one important difference. ‘Karen enriched my output as a writer,’ he said. ‘We made lots of friends and as a couple were more social than I had ever been on my own. My demos had a bigger audience.’

But not everyone in the Who camp was pleased for him. ‘I found this beautiful girlfriend,’ said Townshend. ‘And Kit was particularly jealous. I think he found it an irritation that he didn’t have the access to me that he once had.’ The relationship was also difficult to sustain amid The Who’s hectic touring schedule. Townshend would later admit to paranoia, worrying that ‘my fabulous new girlfriend was deceiving me’ whenever he was away with The Who.

It was an insecurity he shared with Keith Moon, if not on the same scale. Earlier that year Moon had met a sixteen-year-old part-time fashion model named Maryse ‘Kim’ Kerrigan, at a Who gig in Bournemouth, and was now in a relationship with her. Moon was smitten but also consumed with jealousy, terrified that the beautiful, blonde Kim would leave him for Rod Stewart, who was also pursuing her.

Moon once stormed on to the set of a boating magazine photoshoot at which Kim was the model, and threatened to punch her male colleague. Despite being a pop star, whose photograph was now splashed across the pages of numerous teen magazines, Moon remained as insecure as any of the dislocated boys described in Townshend’s lyrics. Moon and Townshend were both young and in love, and struggling to make sense of their feelings. Neither did it help that Lambert was still determined to keep their respective relationships, especially pretty-boy Moon’s, secret from the fans.

As soon as the My Generation LP was released Pete Townshend was telling journalists he didn’t like it, calling the James Brown covers ‘some old crap’ but also distancing himself from some of his own songs. The press and the public took a different view. Beat Instrumental journalist John Emery praised the new version of My Generation, and applauded Townshend’s unique songwriting. ‘The Who haven’t copied anyone,’ he wrote. ‘They are in a class of their own.’

The album made it to Number 5 in the UK. It was a modest victory. They still trailed behind the Stones, whose three LPs so far had all reached the Number 1 or 2 spots. And, shortly before Christmas 1965, The Beatles’ sixth album Rubber Soul would set yet another benchmark to humble the Fab Four’s many rivals. Earlier that summer Paul McCartney had told the press that: ‘The Who are the most exciting thing around.’ But Rubber Soul was The Beatles’ first step towards Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and with it the idea of an LP as an artistic statement – something more than just a collection of random singles and filler – began to take hold.

Townshend’s dissatisfaction stemmed from his conviction that both he and The Who could do better. My Generation would end up overshadowed by Rubber Soul but also by the big statement albums The Who released later in the decade, particularly Tommy. Its influence, however, would become more obvious over time: in the gnarly American garage bands that cropped up in its wake, and in the British punk groups of the late 1970s, some of whom cut their teeth playing early Who singles.

By the end of the year, the band members and their managers all seemed to be looking beyond The Who, as if conscious that the group might disintegrate at any moment. Townshend had followed his father’s advice and in April he had formed his own publishing company, Fabulous Music. He knew that not everything he wrote would be accepted by The Who, and was also drawn to the idea of becoming a writer for hire, like some of the classical composers Lambert had turned him on to.

‘Kit and I read that Mozart was doing commissions on motifs, numbered motifs, and selling his copyrights,’ he said. ‘“Oh, the bloody prince of Denmark wants another piece of music, and I’m so busy. Give him fifteen of number twenty-two, six of number four, nine of number fifty-eight …”’

Townshend pitched one of his new compositions, ‘Magic Bus’, a song with which The Who would later have a hit, to an R&B group called The Fairies. Their drummer John ‘Twink’ Alder recalls drinking with Townshend in Blaises nightclub in Kensington before going back to his flat to hear the song. ‘We were looking for a second single at the time,’ he says. ‘Pete said ‘I think this will be good for you guys,’ and it was ‘Magic Bus’, with exactly the same arrangement and the Bo Diddley beat as when The Who recorded it years later. It didn’t click with us then because of that beat, because it sounded so very unlike The Who. Believe it or not, we said no.’

Among those who later recorded one of Townshend’s songs were the Liverpudlian pop group The Merseybeats. Lambert and Stamp had started managing the band that summer. Having become The Who’s managers almost by accident, they were reluctant to have them as their sole clients. But with Shel Talmy controlling The Who’s studio output, Lambert also wanted a group of his own to produce. The Merseybeats had shared the Cavern Club stage with The Beatles and had enjoyed several hits, including ‘I Think of You’. But by the time Kit and Chris approached them after gig in a London pub in early 1965 the hits had dried up.

‘Lambert and Stamp said, “We would love to take you over and record you,”’ recalls Merseybeats guitarist and vocalist Tony Crane. ‘Chris said, “I work in films,” and Kit said, “I’ve been an explorer.” So I said, “That’s all very well, but what’s it got to do with music?”’ Stamp then told Crane that his brother was Terence Stamp, and that they were about to break a new group called The Who. The Merseybeats agreed to consider their offer if the pair managed a Number 1 hit with The Who. ‘A few months later, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” went to Number 1 in the Disc charts,’ says Crane. ‘Disc wasn’t as good as Melody Maker or New Musical Express. But I opened up the paper in the morning, saw that it was Number 1 and Kit rang me that afternoon. I was impressed.’

Lambert caught the train to Liverpool the next day and signed the band. As part of the deal, he insisted he had to produce their records from now on. The band and their label, Fontana, agreed. The Merseybeats’ next single, the Lambert-produced ‘I Love You Yes I Do’, put the group back into the top thirty. ‘I don’t know how he did it,’ says Crane. ‘Because Kit didn’t know anything about producing records. He let himself be guided by the engineers. But it worked.’ Lambert was doing with The Merseybeats what he really wanted to do with The Who.

The Liverpudlians were swiftly introduced to New Action’s glamorous but disorderly management style. The Merseybeats’ bassist Billy Kinsley watched astonished as Lambert, after claiming he’d lost his wallet and chequebook, paid for an expensive meal in a restaurant by writing on a table napkin: ‘He told the waiter it was legal tender and his bank would honour it – and they did.’ ‘Kit didn’t have a clue financially. He’d wine and dine whoever to get a hit record, but beyond that he never thought about the money,’ says Tony Crane, who first experienced London’s nightlife in the company of the Stamp brothers and Terence’s girlfriend, the actress and model Jean Shrimpton: ‘Those nights on the town really opened my eyes to what went on.’

In October, just as The Who were finishing My Generation, The Merseybeats arrived at IBC Studios to record their new single, ‘I Stand Accused’. Unfortunately, so did Keith Moon. ‘Keith was there and tried to wreck the session,’ says Crane. ‘We’d booked the studio for three hours, the clock was ticking, and Keith was messing around in the control room, lying on the floor trying to make love to his girlfriend.’ In a final attempt to keep the drummer occupied, Lambert and The Merseybeats agreed to let him play: ‘Keith found a gong in the corner of the studio, and asked if he could hit it. I said “Yes, when I give you the nod,” which I did, but he started hitting it and never stopped.’

The Merseybeats’ ‘I Stand Accused’ with Moon’s banging gong on the outro, was a minor hit. Lambert launched the single, just as he’d done for ‘I Can’t Explain’, with a champagne-and-canapés reception at Eaton Place. ‘It was the party to go to,’ says Crane. ‘It was filled with TV stars, DJs, actors and musicians. It must have cost a fortune.’

In the meantime, The Who’s uneasy détente continued, observed by their new road crew and visiting journalists. After the incident at Battersea Dogs’ Home, ‘Cy’ Langston had taken a job as a guitarist with Gary Farr and the T-Bones, although he’d work with The Who again later. His replacement was The Merseybeats’ ex-roadie Neville Chesters. Despite being a slightly built man, Chesters was unusually strong. ‘Neville’s party piece was to come into the shop, put his hands on the counter and push himself up into a full handstand,’ recalls Terry Marshall. ‘He was the only person I knew who could pick up an eight-by-twelve cabinet on his own. We used to put casters on them, but the first thing Neville would do was take them off and then drag the cab down the road, so that by the time it was in the van, the bottom was down to bare wood.’

Chesters’ ability to fix broken equipment under extreme pressure made him an invaluable asset to The Who. But he had other skills, which included entertaining Roger Daltrey. ‘It didn’t occur to me at the time, but Roger had nobody to talk to,’ says Chesters now. ‘There was this continual tension between Roger and Keith, which I walked into. But there were other things as well. The cost of the damages to equipment was being split four ways. So Roger was paying a quarter, and he hated it, absolutely hated it.’

‘John Entwistle was always cool, and he was the one I was closest to,’ he adds. ‘Pete was difficult because he was a genius. But it depended on what mood he was in. He could be great. He could be awful. But I’ve tended to forget the awful times. Keith …’ He hesitates, ‘Keith was a fucking horror.’ Quite how much of a horror would dawn on Neville a few months later.

Also joining the crew that summer was Richard Cole, who’d recently roadied for Unit 4 + 2, best known for the 1965 hit single ‘Concrete and Clay’. ‘With The Who it was £15 a week plus extra for food,’ says Cole now. ‘But I told them to make it a round £20 all in, because I knew I’d never get the extra cash out of them. Kit and Chris were great. But Kit was usually off somewhere being posh, while Chris was busy cultivating his cockney accent and shagging debutantes.’

Cole’s first job was to drive Entwistle and Moon to Scotland, where The Who had three gigs booked: ‘And that was my first introduction to those two lunatics. Unit 4 + 2 had been no trouble, but The Who were something else.’ When they arrived in Edinburgh, Moon asked the new chauffeur to pull over outside a hardware shop: ‘I didn’t ask why. But I found out when we got to the hotel. I was downstairs ordering a plate of sandwiches, when suddenly all the fire alarms went off. Moon had made smoke bombs from mixing sugar with the weedkiller he’d bought at the hardware store, and now he’d let them off. We were thrown out of the hotel and Roger and Pete were not best pleased.’

The situation didn’t improve. Cole soon realised that with Townshend and Daltrey travelling separately, he would always end up chauffeuring the rhythm section. ‘I accidentally became their driver. But John and Keith had this resentment against Roger and also Pete, to a certain extent, and I ended up getting drawn into it. I didn’t have a great relationship with Roger, and I could tell Pete didn’t like me always being in the van with them two.’

Soon, Cole was joining Entwistle and Moon at the Scotch of St James, a late-night watering hole near Buckingham Palace, where Keith loved to hold court among the other pop dignitaries of the day: ‘I was only a year or so younger than the band, so of course I loved it. It wouldn’t be wrong to say The Who were yobs, but they were good yobs. It was great fun.’

Negotiating Pete Townshend’s mood swings was less fun, however. During one Saturday night gig in the Home Counties, Cole dashed onstage to retrieve Moon’s drumsticks, only to get kicked offstage by the guitarist: ‘I don’t know if Pete did it on purpose. Maybe he went into one of his trances. But I fell off and got caught between the stage and a radiator and ended up ripping all the hairs out of my leg. I was going to fucking kill him.’ The gig climaxed with Townshend and Moon trashing their instruments, leaving Keith without a set of drums for the following night’s show. Cole was also a drummer and agreed to loan Moon his own kit: ‘And he smashed those fuckers up as well.’

The Who’s financial problems were now becoming an issue for the crew. ‘There was three quid spent to every one made,’ says Neville Chesters. ‘The money wasn’t coming in quick enough, and it was either owed or hidden.’ Or, in some cases, disappearing into roadies’ or Keith Moon’s pockets before it could be accounted for.

The Who acquired the services of a Liverpudlian roadie via The Merseybeats. ‘He wormed his way in with The Who and got himself a job on the crew,’ says Chesters. ‘He turned up one day at my flat, where I kept the guitars overnight, before a gig. We loaded up the van, and then he asked me for the cashbox, which I also used to look after, and the van’s keys. I asked him why and he told me the band had told him he was in charge from now on.’ Chesters was furious at the newcomer being promoted after four weeks in the job, and punched him on the jaw – ‘I broke my finger and he fell into the gutter’ – before throwing the cashbox and keys on top of him: ‘I went back to my flat and decided, that was it.’

Three days later Chris Stamp phoned Chesters: ‘“Where the fuck are you, Neville?” I told him what had happened.’ Stamp replied that the roadie had been fired and said, ‘“Get yourself to Newcastle. Roger is looking after the cashbox and the keys now.”’ In Who I Am, Townshend wrote: ‘The Who had several roadies from Liverpool who seemed to operate on the assumption that there was a moral gulf between London and their home city,’ before claiming that several guitars and even items of hotel furniture went missing during this period.

The Who were now in the peculiar though not unique position of being pop stars, but still, to all intents and purposes, they were penniless – except for Pete. When Townshend received his first PRS (Performing Rights Society) cheque, he quickly realised how much better off he was than his bandmates: ‘The other guys were still grubbing around trying to make money on the side from gigs and getting petty cash out of people that had no petty cash.’

Richard Cole witnessed this grubbing around first hand. After Mike Shaw’s car accident, The Who hired a new production manager. ‘We’d just done a gig in Hassocks, and this new guy collected the night’s take. He was a bit green and said, “What do I do with the money?”’ says Cole. ‘And, of course, Keith said, “Oh you give it to me.” So he did. John didn’t mind, as Moonie probably split it with him. But those sort of strokes really didn’t please the other two.’

Future Melody Maker journalist Brian Southall was a local newspaper reporter when he interviewed The Who at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange that winter. His first impression was formed after walking into their dressing room and spotting drink, drugs and groupies. ‘There was booze and what I presumed were pills being passed around,’ he says, ‘and there were several young ladies in very short skirts, none of whom I’d never seen around town before.’ In one corner of the room was Keith Moon, leaning over a chair, in the grip of a violent coughing fit, punctuated by equally violent bursts of swearing, while Kim tried to calm him down: ‘Then, at some point, either Kit Lambert or Chris Stamp walked in, and opened a briefcase stuffed with money and doled out its contents. The four band members lined up as he handed them bundles of ones and fivers.’

Daltrey and Townshend told Southall that despite their earlier denials, the rumours of The Who splitting up were true: ‘They said, “We were contemplating a break-up. We were bored, we hadn’t had a hit record, and we weren’t getting any money.”’ They’d changed their minds, because of My Generation, and the fact that they were now earning ‘good hard cash again’.

On Friday 3 December The Who played the Goldhawk Club for the first time since April. It was a homecoming gig, a ‘thank you’ to those that had stuck with them through every incarnation of the band since the summer of 1963. The Who arrived straight from an appearance on Ready Steady Go! to find a queue trailing down the steps outside the building and along Goldhawk Road. The two warring elements in The Who’s music would be captured right there in the audience that evening. In one corner of the club was the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni; in the other Roger Daltrey’s criminal acquaintances.

Antonioni’s recent film Red Desert (1964) had been a brooding commentary on post-war industrial culture, starring his girlfriend, Monica Vitti. The director was now seeking a fashionable pop group for his first English-language film, Blow-Up. He’d been introduced to The Who through Terence Stamp, who was due to take the film’s lead role. The experimental director now found himself shoulder to shoulder with The Who’s jittery, pilled-up fanbase, and various local villains, in a working men’s club where a brawl was never more than a few minutes away from breaking out.

‘The Goldhawk was very cliquey and very territorial,’ says Max Ker-Seymer, who was in the audience that night, and later became an extra in Blow-Up. Towards the end of The Who’s set a fight began on the dance floor: ‘There was a bouncer there who had a wooden billy club about two feet long on a bit of string, and he would fling it to clear a circle and then drag out whoever it was that had been attacked.’

While The Who played, ‘Irish’ Jack remembers seeing as many as twenty mods moving in formation through the throng. ‘It reminded me of a rugby pack powering its way over a goal line,’ he said. ‘Only this was an army of mods trying to kick some guy across the Goldhawk dance floor. The guy was using one of his arms to protect his head, leaving the rest of his body open to more flying boots. In the melee of bodies it was difficult to tell whether he was actually trying to roll his way out of trouble or being shunted along like a rag doll by the force of the kicking.’

Whenever a fight broke out at the Goldhawk, the bands usually stopped playing. Instead, The Who played on, as if, said Jack, ‘they were part of the disturbance’. They supplied the soundtrack as the club’s bouncers, which included local heavyweight boxer Basil Kew, tried to separate the victim from his attackers. ‘The Who were almost nonchalant,’ says Ker-Seymer. ‘You could see that Roger Daltrey could handle himself. But the whole group’s attitude was, “We are here, this is what we do, we are in charge.” That’s how they were different from every other band. They had the attitude and they had the authority.’

The Who’s set ended with Townshend jamming the head of his Rickenbacker through the front of his Marshall cab. ‘The guitar broke too quickly,’ says Ker-Seymer. ‘I remember Antonioni looked surprised.’ It was still a suitably violent climax to the show. The broken amp was still feeding back as The Who trooped offstage towards the dressing room, and a battered body was carried off the dance floor. The club’s manager opened the fire-exit doors to let some much-needed cold air into the room. When The Who re-emerged, ‘Irish’ Jack watched as a local villain and two of his sidekicks surrounded Daltrey as the singer made his way out of the club. As they passed, Jack glimpsed an object inside the villain’s jacket: ‘A fucking shooter. It was the first time I’d ever seen a real handgun, and the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck.’

In a 2011 interview Townshend claimed that Daltrey had jumped in to break up the fight at the Goldhawk, and returned to the stage with ‘a sawn-off shotgun under his shirt’. Whatever the exact circumstances, this was a turning point for The Who, and also for the mod culture they’d once found so appealing. ‘Something had shifted,’ admitted Townshend. ‘Things got darker and nastier. Some of the faces had got really old, and when they showed up at clubs they had become proper criminals.’

It would be the last time The Who played the Goldhawk. After the gig, Antonioni fled Shepherd’s Bush for the sanctuary of his suite at London’s Savoy Hotel. Shortly after, David Hemmings replaced Terence Stamp as the lead in Blow-Up, and The Who were passed over for The Yardbirds. ‘Antonioni wanted us for the part,’ said Pete Townshend. ‘But we were too genuine.’ Simon Napier-Bell insists, however, that Kit Lambert had offended the director with some unspecified act of rudeness, allowing him to take advantage of the situation to pitch his own act: ‘I went to Antonioni’s suite and persuaded him The Yardbirds would be the better group for his film.’

‘A year later I was an extra on the set of Blow-Up,’ says Max Ker-Seymer, ‘and I got to watch Jeff Beck trying to break a guitar à la Townshend, and Antonioni had me standing in exactly the same position I had been in at the Goldhawk. It was very weird. Almost poetic.’

In The Who’s usual contradictory fashion the violent curtain call at the Goldhawk was followed a fortnight later by a family-friendly appearance in Ready Steady Go!’s Christmas pantomime. Cathy McGowan played Cinderella, with Keith Moon her lovesick friend, Buttons. When filming was over, The Who dashed off to play Windsor’s Ricky-Tick Club, only for Moon to pass out during ‘My Generation’. This time, it wasn’t just the booze and drugs that felled him; the drummer was diagnosed with whooping cough.

The Who already had a replacement on standby: Viv Prince, who’d just been fired from the hard-nosed R&B group the Pretty Things, for excessive behaviour. ‘Viv was even crazier than Keith,’ said Jimmy Page, who’d briefly played with him in the group Carter-Lewis and the Southerners. ‘Viv was also the one who first coined the phrase “Moon the Loon”.’

Moon, in fact, had been watching and studying Prince for several years. John ‘Twink’ Alder who’d later join the Pretty Things saw The Who with Prince deputising. ‘Viv was Keith’s hero,’ he says now. ‘Keith took a lot from Viv, who had entertainment value. He was over the top, always leaving his drums and playing the mic stand, the guitars, the floor, people’s heads, while drooling from his mouth at the same time. That’s probably why they got rid of him from the Pretty Things.’

Prince curbed his outlandish antics enough not to upstage the rest of The Who. Moon, perhaps fearful of losing his place to one of his drumming idols, soon recuperated and rejoined the band. It had been an eventful year. The Who had become pop stars and Pete Townshend a hit songwriter. They’d beaten each other up, ripped each other off, and fired and reinstated their lead singer. But 1965 would end as strangely as it had begun. Kim Kerrigan was pregnant and The Who’s wayward man-child drummer was going to become a father.