Pete Townshend: Who I Am

On my first Isle of Man fishing trip, I had a fiasco with a huge trout and was consoling myself by playing harmonica in the rain. I got lost in the sound of the mouth organ, and then had the most extraordinary, life-changing experience. Suddenly I was hearing music within the music – rich, complex harmonic beauty that had been locked in the sounds I’d been making. The next day I went fly fishing, and this time the murmuring sound of the river opened up a wellspring of music so enormous that I fell in and out of a trance. It was the beginning of my lifelong connection to rivers and the sea – and to what might be described as the music of the spheres.

I was always drawn to the water. A friend at school was a Sea Scout, and at the age of eleven I was impressed by his smart uniform and badges. He took me to meet the troop leader, and I was immediately signed up for a ‘bunkhouse weekend’ in order to acquaint myself with the camp. Dad interviewed one of the leader’s assistants and was very suspicious. He told me the fellow didn’t know which way to fly the Union Flag, and doubted he could ever have been any part of the Navy. When I pressed Dad he said he thought the man was ‘bent’, an expression I didn’t understand.

Dad eventually agreed to let me go for the weekend. The troop’s headquarters were on the River Thames, where a large shed was laid out as a dormitory, and a large rowing boat was moored – an old ship’s lifeboat in which the boys were taken for trips. We arrived on Saturday and spent the afternoon trying to tie nautical knots from a chart, which the two adults present couldn’t manage. After a fry-up lunch the light began to fade and we were hurried to the boat for a short trip on the river.

The tide was high and it wasn’t safe to row, so the men fitted an ancient outboard motor to the stern and fired it up. As we swept past the Old Boathouse at Isleworth once again I began to hear the most extraordinary music, sparked by the whine of the outboard motor and the burbling sound of water against the hull. I heard violins, cellos, horns, harps and voices, which increased in number until I could hear countless threads of an angelic choir; it was a sublime experience. I have never heard such music since, and my personal musical ambition has always been to rediscover that sound and relive its effect on me.

At the very height of my euphoric trance the boat ran up against the muddy shore at the troop’s hut. As it stopped, so did the music. Bereft, I quietly began to weep. One of the men put his coat around me and led me up to the camp, where I was settled by the stove to warm up. I kept asking the other boys if they had heard the angels singing, but none of them even responded.

A few moments later I was standing naked in a cold shower set up behind the bunkhouse. It was almost dark; there was a stark light bulb behind the two men who stood watching me shiver as the freezing water sprayed over me. ‘Now you’re a real Sea Scout,’ they said. ‘This is our initiation ceremony.’ The only thing ceremonial about it was the wanking these two chaps were doing through their trouser pockets. I was freezing, but they wouldn’t let me leave the shower until they had each achieved their surreptitious climax. I felt disgusted, but also annoyed because I knew I could never go back: I would never get my sailor’s uniform.

I remember only one truly terrible row between my parents, and sat terrified in the dining room as cups were smashed in the kitchen; I believe Mum flourished a knife. I intervened, weeping like a child actor, only to be told off by Dad who hated the melodrama to which I was contributing. There were also parties, and Dad invited musicians sometimes; their playing kept me awake and I annoyed and embarrassed Dad by bursting in on them and crying, telling him off in front of his friends for the disturbance; Dad told me off in return, but it was terribly exciting. The smell of cigarettes, beer and scotch floated down the hall.

Maybe to compensate for being kept awake at night by wild parties, I was given a small black bike which I hired every day to my friend David for his paper round. He paid me sixpence a week, but I caught him one day bumping it against a curb violently and ended the arrangement.

Once I had a bike I gave full vent to my local wanderlust; there was hardly a street or alley I didn’t explore in an area over two or three square miles. But I was one of the few boys in the gang with a bike, and my solo excursions deepened my solitary feelings. I often went into a trance-like state when cycling. I was nearly killed by a dustmen’s lorry at the top of my street as I swerved in its path, my head full of angelic voices.

I laboriously learned the tricky harmonica theme of Dixon of Dock Green, played by Tommy Reilly, on my own first chromatic instrument. No one was even slightly impressed by my achievement and I realised I was playing the wrong instrument if I wanted superstardom.

Like many of my peers I spent long, boring hours outside various pubs, a packet of crisps and fizzy drink in my hand, wondering why I was permitted such luxuries only when my parents were getting drunk. I was caught shoplifting once. I had gone into a bookshop for some Observer books I was then collecting. I paid for two, and tried to walk out with six. What’s strange is that I knew I’d be caught. The police were called, and I was questioned before being released.

Dad said nothing about the incident. It was the not unkind warning of the police officer I remember: ‘This is the first time, son. Make it the last – it’s a terrible road you’ve set out on.’ A terrible road? He was a good copper, but I thought it was obvious that I was simply filling the time, bored, up to no good. I began to collect things to settle myself down: model trains, Dinky cars, comics, postage stamps.

I was determinedly non-academic, although I wrote stories constantly and drew hundreds of pictures, mainly of military battles. I became obsessed with drawing plans for a fantasy fleet of huge, double-decked touring buses. My fleet of buses contained schoolrooms, playrooms with electric train sets, swimming pools, cinemas, music rooms, and – as I approached puberty – I added a large vehicle that contained a nudist colony with a cuddling room.

For a few years I attended Sunday school, regularly singing in a church choir. As I fell asleep at night I sang my prayers into the mouth of my hot-water bottle, which I held like a microphone. My parents still resisted the idea that I had any musical talent. No matter, I was already a visionary. A mobile nudist colony with a cuddling room? I’ll bet even Arthur C. Clarke hadn’t come up with that at my age!

Whenever we made a family visit to Horry and Dot’s, I got to see not only my beloved grandparents, but also Aunt Trilby, Dot’s sister. Trilby was single when I met her, and kept a piano in her flat. It was the only one I had a chance to play. Tril read music, and played light classics and popular songs, but never tried to teach me much. Instead she entertained me with palm-readings and interpretations of the tarot, all of which indicated I would be a great success in every way – or at least enjoy a ‘large’ life.

Aunt Trilby provided me with drawing paper and complimented my rapid sketches. After a while I would drift to the piano and, after checking to see that she was engrossed in her knitting or a book, begin to play. The instrument was never quite in tune, but I explored the keyboard until I found whatever combination I was after.

One day I found some chords that made me lightheaded. As I played them my body buzzed all over, and my head filled with the most complex, disturbing orchestral music. The music soared higher and higher until I finally stopped playing, and came back to the everyday world.

‘That was beautiful,’ said Tril, looking up from whatever she was doing. ‘You are a real musician.’

Because of Tril’s faith in me, I became a bit of a mystic like her. I prayed to God, and at Sunday school I came to genuinely love and admire Jesus. In heaven, where he lived, the strange music I sometimes heard was completely normal.

Miss Caitling continued to encourage me to link my fantasies with the real world through creative writing and art. She began inviting me to tell serial stories to the class, which I made up as I went along. Looking back, I understand that my classmates were as gripped by the thrill of seeing how I would escape my tangled plots as they were by the stories themselves. Sometimes, if I got in too deep, I simply dropped a nuclear bomb on my characters and started all over.

I felt natural standing in front of an audience. I also discovered that I could think quickly on my feet. If I didn’t know something, I could often bluff my way around it. In my last year at Berrymede I told anyone who asked about my ambitions to be a journalist.

In summer 1957 on the Isle of Man, Jimpy came for another visit. We had a great time together, and Dad took us to the cinema to see a musical film. I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK.

For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same.

4 A TEENAGE KIND OF VENGEANCE

I was still playing the harmonica, and getting good at it, but it was clear that the guitar was the instrument that mattered. Jimpy and I had been mesmerised by Rock Around the Clock, and Haley’s band only had a single sax player. They marked their Country & Western heritage with a pedal-steel guitar, and the swing was jaunty and extremely cheerful, bordering on manic. The words were often nonsensical. Today almost every early rock lyric has been interpreted as having some secret meaning to do with sex, but if they did I never noticed.

I only liked Bill Haley for a few months, but Jimpy was totally hooked and bought several Haley and Elvis records. While Jimpy was still with me on the Isle of Man, he and a pretty girl named Elaine – with whom we had both fallen in love – started singing Elvis songs together. They lost me there. To my ear Elvis sounded corny, a drawling dope singing about dogs. I just didn’t get it. Unfortunately I had missed his first masterful releases like ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and had come in directly on ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Love Me Tender’, a song that made me want to vomit, especially when Jimpy and Elaine crooned it at one another. In his movies (apart from Jailhouse Rock) Elvis confirmed my view of him as a chump.

After the holidays I started my second year at Acton County Grammar School. To my parents’ enormous joy, my mother finally got pregnant, and my brother Paul was born. Mum and Dad made plans to move to a bigger flat, and found one on the same street where Dad’s parents still lived on Uxbridge Road. It seemed good karma all round. In the new flat, on Woodgrange Avenue, I sat on a ladder in the empty dining room, playing my harmonica. I knew this was going to be a lucky place. I had my own room with a door, and Paul was the sibling I’d always wanted.

That autumn Dad got tickets for Jimpy and me to see Bill Haley live at the old Regal cinema at Marble Arch. I went along mostly for Jimpy’s sake. We had seats in the highest gallery, the very back row, where we were surrounded by rowdy older teenagers. The cinema had been structurally weakened by bombs, so when the audience bounced enthusiastically to the beat the gallery literally shook. (The building was demolished a few months later.)

Several boys at school had got the rock ’n’ roll bug, but their interest seemed confined to whistling whatever record was number one at the time. Jimpy got his father to make him a guitar. He stood in front of the mirror, wiggling like Elvis, strumming at the tuneless piano wire with which Fred had strung the homemade instrument. One day I grabbed the wooden box and, not quite knowing what I was doing, picked out a tune. Jimpy was gobsmacked. He ran into the other room where both our dads sat drinking, and brought them in to hear me. Dad didn’t say much, but Fred Beard said, ‘If he can play that thing, he could do really well with a proper guitar.’

Dad wasn’t convinced. I badgered him, but because I’d never followed his advice and learned to read music he wouldn’t take my aspiration seriously. (Without a piano in the house I’m not sure how he thought I would be able to learn.)

Ironically, it was Denny who stepped in. She bought me a guitar that she saw hanging from the wall of a restaurant, whose owner was a friend of hers. It was an awful instrument, almost harder to play than the one Fred had made for Jimpy, but I was delighted. After I got it correctly strung, I started learning a few chords. Within minutes three strings had broken and the neck of the guitar started to bend, but I just reduced the tension and made do with the three remaining strings.

One day I was strumming when Dad’s trumpet player friend Bernie Sharpe heard me in my room and looked in. ‘You’re doing well, Pete,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he, Cliff?’ No response from Dad, but alone in my room picking out notes on my guitar I had visions of leaving him and his glorious musical traditions behind. Deep down, I suspected that my father had had his day.

In 1957 Chas McDevitt had a UK hit with a song called ‘Freight Train’. I first heard the song on BBC TV sung by Nancy Whiskey. Listening to the homespun campfire sound of skiffle I realised that with a guitar and a few chords you could make hit records.

Because of the very real and immediate threat that skiffle music posed to Dad’s recording career – and thus to my family’s security (for now I never seemed to see a saxophone or clarinet player on the TV) – I had a unique window on how society was subtly changing. After decades of dealing with military threats, our parents now faced a danger from within. ‘Youth’ was what it came to be called. I had joined an army of my peers by picking up the guitar, that instrument that threatened my father’s career. Perhaps that’s why I delayed by picking up the banjo for a while, playing Dixieland jazz.

The group of school friends with whom I played music was full of potential Jimpy substitutes. Chris Sherwin was a student drummer, and with Phil Rhodes on clarinet and John Entwistle playing trumpet we met each week to rehearse a quartet in which I played banjo. We called the group The Confederates. In spring 1958, when we began, I was still only twelve years old, but they were already teenagers. I knew John Entwistle a little, and enjoyed his sense of humour. Chris Sherwin acted like the band’s leader, partly because our rehearsals were held at his father’s house on Ealing Green.

Our first gig with The Confederates was at the Congo Club at the Congregational Church in Acton on 6 December 1958. We played for about ten people. I was frozen with nerves as we played a tune we’d made up together, based around a banjo ‘C’ chord I picked out. We went on with ‘Maryland’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, featuring Chris Sherwin’s explosive drum solo. After we finished I watched in complete amazement as John Entwistle and the other boys jived with girls. One girl tried to teach me the steps, but I just couldn’t hit her marks. I still can’t jive today.

And when the lights went down and the snogging started, I slid away home.

One day, while looking through the junk shop, Miscellanea, that my parents were now running, I found a mandolin, which whetted my interest in the so-called antique trade. Dad enjoyed the simple rhythm and informality of running the shop – it was often ‘closed for lunch’ while he went to the pub. In the summer I stayed with Dad for the few weeks he was playing on the Isle of Man, and when I got home I realised that while I’d been developing my banjo skills other boys also had been getting on with their music.

John Entwistle, Chris Sherwin, Phil Rhodes and Rod Griffiths were rehearsing regularly with Alf Maynard’s jazz band. Alf was a great fellow, but he played banjo, which made me redundant, although I remember playing duelling banjos with Alf at Christmas, when the band of six took in £18. I was briefly part of their brave, grown-up world and could even afford my first decent guitar. Purchased from my parents’ junk shop for £3, it had been built in Czechoslovakia and had a thin but pleasing tone.

I saw less of John Entwistle while he was playing in Alf’s band, and I left music itself behind for a while as Chris tried to help me catch up with the march of adolescence all around me. He took me to my first X film, Peeping Tom (which turned out to be elegant film noir rather than the smut I’d hoped for). He also arranged a doubled paper round for me, earning 30 shillings a week, which seemed a colossal sum of money. It was a difficult round, though, taking in most of the big houses around Ealing Common, and it was awful in winter. One cold wet morning I slept through my alarm and was sacked.

My parents gave me extra pocket money for looking after my brother Paul, but he was a wonderful little boy and I enjoyed it. Denny lurked in the wings like a vampire, but I gave her dark looks, warnings that she wouldn’t get her evil hands on my little brother as long as I was around. Paul’s arrival had made us feel like a real family, and no one was going to take that away from me.

My parents were obviously lovers again. They spent a lot of time at the local pub, which I didn’t understand at the time but I now know that they both had drink problems. Dad needed booze to feel comfortable with his peers, and Mum was trying to deaden the lifelong pain of being abandoned by her mother. She became pregnant again, and my brother Simon was born at home in October 1960, when I was fifteen.

In the last term of grammar school in spring and summer 1961, I continued to count Chris Sherwin as one of my closest friends. He was sweet to my baby brother Simon, and I knew he had a soft heart, but Chris began to harp on my failures with girls. One day, as we headed home from the pool, I lost my temper and said I would fight him. A big fellow, he just laughed and turned away.

I swung my school bag and hit him over the head; to my amazement he dropped to the ground. Assuming he was being silly, I walked off, still angry. Seconds later I felt his fist smash into the side of my head from behind. ‘You knew I had a concussion,’ he shouted. He spread word of my ‘cowardly act’ all over school, which sullied my reputation to the point where John Entwistle seemed the only one who would have anything to do with me.

Then, if possible, my social standing fell even lower. I was cycling home one day, past some boys from my school throwing stones at an old man’s windows, when a policeman showed up. The boys escaped but the copper grabbed me. Incriminated by wearing the same school uniform as the vandals, I was arrested and persuaded with the usual threats of prison to give up the boys’ names.

Next morning the headmaster called out the names I had supplied, and after a pause added my own. We all received the cane, naturally. But this was a new low point for me, as rumours circulated that I had ‘grassed’ on the stone-throwers. Mum remembers seeing me sitting hangdog in a small public park next to the school; it was raining, but still I wouldn’t go in. Dad was so worried he came to speak to me, but I was too ashamed to tell him my problems. My schoolwork slumped, and I locked myself away with my guitar, swearing to go it alone somehow.

By the end of the spring term I had electrified my Czech guitar and bought a small amplifier. John had made his own bass, and we rehearsed together at my house. We would visit a fish-and-chip shop in Acton and walk back to Ealing with our tongues scalded by the hot oil, sharing dreams.

One day Denny burst into my room while John and I were playing music. ‘Turn that bloody row down,’ she shouted.

I looked at her coolly, not replying, but picked up my small blue amplifier and threw it violently against the wall. ‘Fuck off,’ I said, feeling very calm as the amp smashed to the floor.

Denny went pale and left the room.

‘Great,’ John said dryly.

John was playing bass guitar with a group started by our school friend Pete Wilson, a fan of Cliff Richard and The Shadows. Pete’s guitar playing was enthusiastic but clumsy, so when I was invited to join the band I was flattered but ambivalent. Having grown up with the notion that I was going to be an artist of some sort, the idea of playing Shadows songs didn’t set me on fire, but Pete became a friend and he was an encouraging, natural leader.

Mick Brown, our drummer, was a competent musician and one of the most amusing people I’ve ever met. He also had a tape recorder, the first I’d ever come across, and I realised immediately that this was an extraordinary creative tool. He made the first recording of me as I played The Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ solo on my Czech guitar. It sounded good, and I soon got hold of a basic tape machine of my own.

I loved cartooning and drawing – my childhood tour buses had earned praise from Alex Graham, the creator of the famous British cartoon Fred Basset – and I did very well in my art classes at grammar school. The art master encouraged me to take some extramural classes, so in my last term at Acton County in 1961 I became a part-time art student at Ealing Art College. There I began attending Saturday morning introductory lessons with my friend Martin and his next-door neighbour Stuart, hoping to draw nude models and make pots. Martin gave up after a while, but Stuart and I carried our portfolios over the Common together, and tried to dress in what we thought was a bohemian manner.

To make money I worked in Miscellanea. Mum and I often moved furniture together, sometimes entire houses full, and I became strong and wiry. I also began to learn about human nature as it applied to business. Most customers haggled, and some, if they got a bargain, visited regularly to crow about it. The dealers were always quietly looking for a steal.

In the last few weeks of school, exams behind us, the atmosphere changed for the better. It seemed everyone except Chris had forgiven me, and even he had stopped glaring. The Dixieland band I had been excluded from practised as they walked back and forth outside school, and because Alf wasn’t allowed into the school (he was older and had a job) I was invited to step in on banjo. After the months I’d been away from the band one thing became clear: I had progressed faster than the others. At school, for the first time, I felt a part of the human race.

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I’d first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I’d witnessed the fight, and I’d thought Roger’s tactics were dirty. When I’d shouted as much, he had come over and forced me to retract. Since then I’d seen Roger around at the foot of Acton Hill, carrying an exotic white electric guitar he’d made himself. He was usually with Reg, a friend I knew from infancy, who carried a 15-watt VOX amplifier. Serious stuff.

I was outside our classroom talking to the form teacher for the final year, the redoubtable Mr Hamlyn, when Roger swaggered up in his Teddy Boy outfit, his hair combed into a grand quiff, trousers so tight they had zips in the seams. Mr Hamlyn welcomed Roger with the weary patience of one who knew there was little point enquiring why Roger had returned to an institution that wanted nothing to do with him. Until he was expelled Roger had been a good pupil, and I think Hamlyn begrudgingly respected him.

A few boys looked over at us with interest, curious to see whether Roger still bore me any ill will. He simply informed me that John had told him I played guitar pretty well, and if an opportunity came up to join his band, was I interested? I was stunned. Roger’s band, The Detours, was a party band. They played Country & Western songs, ‘Hava Nagila’, the hokey-cokey, the conga, Cliff Richard songs and whatever was high in the charts at the time. Roger ruled The Detours with a characteristically iron hand. Judging by the faces of those around me, just the fact of Roger speaking to me meant that my life could very well change.