Article from Intro magazine: 28th October 1967
At the centre of successful group, there’s always a writer.
Pete Townshend innovative writer: He’s the one who’s responsible for the hits, the one who comes up with fresh ideas and who pushes the whole group in new directions. He’s the one who matters more than all the others put together.
In this series, three important writers talk to NIK COHN about their work, their ideas, their influences, their future plans and anything else that interests them.
Pete Townshend is a talker. He’s sharp, imaginative and comes out with some very funny lines. He tends to shoot his mouth off but mostly talks sense and he’s never boring.
Most important of all, he’s got his own private progression and, at a time when most of the people in pop keep changing fads as often as they once changed their socks, he jumps on no bandwagons.
At the moment he is working away feverishly on the Who’s third album, which has been scheduled for months, but which never seems to get any closer to completion.
He already has about fifteen tracks in the can but he says that only half a dozen of them are any good and that it’ll need something extra if the whole record isn’t going to bomb.
His latest idea is to devote one whole side to songs built around advertising, inter-cutting music and real ads, and spoken slogans to make up one long mad montage of the whole ad world.
Pete Townshend innovative writer: AD-OPERA
“For instance, we might start with the four of us in barber-shop harmony, really sweaty and masculine, singing the one word Jaguar,” he says.
“Then it’d go into some maniacal drumming by Keith, and it’d open out from there into someone like Fenella Fielding talking about Odo-ro-no and then straight on to a song I’ve written about a girl with smelly armpits.
It would all be one continuous ad-opera and we’d make it as fast and insane as we could.
“I think that it’s a logical thing to progress into writing songs about subjects like these; Jaguars and Odo-ro-no -and all the rest.
Instead of putting ‘Oh, my heart is breaking,’ I put ‘Oh, my arms are stinking.’
At least it makes a change from the usual draggy old love songs, at least it’s a bit more relevant to real lives and problems.
“I want to take something really improbable, like Odo-ro-no, and write a story that would go beyond being flip and funny, that would have some poignancy about it.
It’s not easy because everyone’s immediate reaction will be to laugh, but it’s possible and it would be something worth doing.”’
STUNNED AMERICANS
Pete has only recently got back from a mammoth Who tour of America during the course of which they took off very big indeed.
“We really went down,” he says. “If everything else failed, we’d make it with the monster smash-up at the end of our act.
The Americans are brought up in an incredibly materialistic society and they just couldn’t believe that anyone would deliberately destroy anything worth money. It completely stunned them.”
According to Pete, the hippies have spread far beyond San Francisco and are busy establishing their own colonies in towns all over America.
“The new hippies are a bit pathetic,” he says. ‘‘They don’t really know what they’re doing so they get terribly conned.
Pete Townshend innovative writer
“They wear their beads and they smoke pot and they carry unopened
underground papers around with them, but they can’t do anything new for themselves and so they are completely lost.
“The only hippy thing that really impressed me was the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which has absolutely the best audience in the world.
It’s a corny thing to say, but there were some tremendous vibrations and it was impossible not to get turned on by them.
“Whatever we played, the audience responded to it, understood it and gave us something back. We suddenly saw what the hippies must have been like originally, before big business moved in, and we played the best there that we’ve ever done in our whole careers.”
The same things that make Pete good to talk to—his dryness, his perception, his deadpan humour—are also the things that power his writing.
His songs are full of calm violence, sober insanity, but they are always unexpected and full of funny lines.
He wrote the present Who single, I Can See For Miles, about two years ago and I think that it’s still as good as anything he’s ever done.
“I did it as a demo in my own studio and it was so good, so much better than the final record that I didn’t ever want it to be released as a single. It was my special thing, my private property.
“I’m only putting it out now because I had no time to write anything new while I was in America and we had to release something. I don’t mind really, but I’d rather have kept it just for myself.’’
NEW IDEAS
Beyond the immediate problems of making their singles and albums, the Who are currently working on a completely new stage act.
“It’s going to be the Who marathon,” Pete says. ‘‘It will involve us in playing for upwards of three hours a night.
“We hate the whole ballroom set-up as it is. We hate the way groups arrive about an hour late in their Mark Ten Jags with the darkened windows.
“They dash out on stage, rush through a fast twenty minute spot, sleepwalk through their hits and then bundle straight back into the Jag and off home to London before the audience even knows what’s hit them.
The groups give nothing, the audience gives nothing and the whole thing is a waste of time.
“The point is that if you’re going to reach any kind of communication with your audience, with all the thousands of people that you can’t see in the dark, you’ve got to be prepared to put out a lot of physical energy and sheer hard slogging.
You’ve got to force them out of their apathy, you’ve got to shake them up and invade their privacy. You’ve got to get tough with them.
“When we were just starting out at the Marquee, three years ago, I used to hold my guitar like a machine gun and I’d mow the entire audience down.
“I’d start at one end of the room and swing round very slowly until every single person in the audience had been shot.
The people at the far end of the line could see me coming and they would try to hide, they’d double up in pain and they’d really be frightened.
Pete Townshend innovative writer
At the very least, they couldn’t ignore me, they had to react. They didn’t want to be killed.
“That’s the kind of communication we had originally and that we’ve tended to lose. We had to get it back again.
So, in this new stage act, we’re going to start playing at the very beginning of the evening, right through to the end.
“We’ll do one long set, made up of the more intricate numbers that we don’t normally get a chance to play, and we’ll try to get the audience involved in our music rather than in just the auto-destructive bit.
Then we’ll hand over to some really good support group, say the Alan Bown Set, who’ll get things worked up even more.
Then there’ll be some incredibly wild D.J. like Emperor Rosko. Finally, we’ll come back on for our usual act and we’ll throw in everything, winding up with explosions all round.
‘‘The audience is king and pop musicians his court jesters. The king has probably seen James Brown the night before, Otis Redding last week, the Stones the week before that and he’s bored stiff.
Basically, he wants to dismiss you and you’ve got to hit him hard to keep him amused.”
REVOLUTIONARY
Beyond its obvious importance to the Who, this new stage act could have quite a revolutionary effect on the rest of the business.
Once audiences have got used to three hours of the Who, they’re hardly going to accept twenty minutes from other groups, and everyone will have to make changes.
This development is already long overdue—the pop public are being conned rigid in any number of ways (substandard performances, throwaway albums, blatant follow-up singles) and they deserve something better.
It’s probably a very naive hope but the Who might be just about to inaugurate a new deal.
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