Pretend You're In A War: The Who and the Sixties by Mark Blake

Author:Mark Blake [Blake, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aurum Press Ltd
Published: 2014-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE FIRST CONCERT ON MARS

‘Everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life.’

Time magazine, 15 April 1966

‘The Who won’t last that long. What I would like to do then is to go into writing musicals and operettas.’

Pete Townshend, October 1966

‘Fuckin’ hell! Who’s he?’

Roger Daltrey meets Jimi Hendrix, November 1966

Pete Townshend, with his modish white shirt and gangly folded limbs, sits hunched on a stool in the middle of a television studio. It is January 1966, and he is facing his first TV inquisition on a new programme called A Whole Scene Going, the BBC’s attempt to entice Ready Steady Go!’s viewers with a higher-brow take on pop culture. Over the next few minutes, Townshend will parry questions from the show’s hosts, Barry Fantoni and Wendy Varnals, and a panel of teenagers, delivering his answers in what the Observer has recently described as ‘classless cockney’.

The Who, says Pete Townshend, are sexless and unglamorous; yes, he meant it when he wrote the words ‘I hope I die before I get old’, and yes, he takes drugs, but admits they’re not conducive to a good live performance. Townshend also reveals that he and John Entwistle had just listened to the latest Beatles LP in stereo, and thought the backing tracks were ‘flippin’ lousy’. Throughout the interview, he is articulate, outspoken and uppity.

The Who are also shown miming to ‘Out in the Street’ and ‘It’s Not True’ from the My Generation LP. The unfortunate set design means that Moon, Townshend and Entwistle are playing on rostrums that are higher than Daltrey’s, rendering the singer dwarf-like in comparison. In the light of the band’s recent problems, it is hard not to wonder whether this is deliberate.

Like most television programmes from the mid-1960s, A Whole Scene Going is now showing its age and some. But in 1966 it marked the moment when the broadcasting establishment started to regard pop music as more than a silly fad. This was a sea change to which Townshend was well suited. With The Who still at war with each other, their songwriter daydreamed about writing a book, about the band, their fans and their relationship with pop. ‘It was an audacious, and possibly even a pretentious position to take,’ he said. ‘But I really felt that after The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, the world was our oyster, artistically speaking, and that was what I wanted to shout from the rooftops.’

It wasn’t such an implausible idea. A Whole Scene Going’s co-host Barry Fantoni quickly spotted that the twenty-year-old Pete Townshend was a perfect guest for the show. ‘Because he was the sort of twenty-year-old we were aiming at,’ says Fantoni now. ‘The BBC wanted what Ready Steady Go!’ had, but wanted a magazine programme that didn’t just present pop music but the pop spectrum as a whole. Pete Townshend was the audience.’

Townshend found plenty of common ground with Barry Fantoni. The then twenty-six-year-old host was a former jazz musician who’d been thrown out of art school for ‘getting drunk and chasing birds’.

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