war machine – sleek, simple, undefeatable. I bought two, and used one to drive each of my speaker stacks of eight 12-inch speakers.
Now not only was my sound unique, it was so loud it shook most of the small halls in which we performed. Jim had no idea his amplifier design would make him rich, and I had no idea it would make me strong.
Despite my interest in songwriting, Peter Meaden decided he was going to write the two songs we would record for our first experience in a studio, the Fontana session. He had already persuaded us that The Who was a tacky, gimmicky name; it sounded uncool, so we were to record as The High Numbers. ‘Numbers’ was the term used for a Mod subgroup of lieutenants that rated below the fashion-leading ‘Faces’ (among whom Peter Meaden no doubt saw himself as a major player), but above the ‘Tickets’, the ordinary kids on the dance floor.
What was happening in the Mod movement was based on trendsetting fashion statements and dance moves by local Faces that were immediately copied by the rest of the kids in any particular locale. Meaden wanted to help that transmission along with coded messages in our songs. His idea fit so neatly into what I’d been taught at art college that I readily agreed to allow him to go ahead. We went to the home of Guy Stevens, a Face and the leading DJ at the exclusive Soho Scene Club, the most fashionable Mod stronghold in London. Guy lent Peter a couple of then rare R&B records that we all liked, and Peter borrowed liberally from them, replacing the lyrics with his own.
At the time we were getting most of our inspiration from growling R&B songs by Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf. Peter’s two songs were cool enough, but had very little of that driving R&B beat with its hard-edged guitar sound. Guitar feedback, a staple of our live shows, was entirely absent from the two sides Peter had written. On ‘Zoot Suit’, which was based on ‘Misery’ by The Dynamics, I play weedy jazz guitar, demonstrating that my solo work was undeveloped. The record didn’t break out, despite Peter Meaden’s assault on the pop magazines of the day. I think it sold about 400 copies. The problem was the sound, which was unoriginal. With Peter’s help we had developed an image, but the musical puzzle was still incomplete.
Looking back it seems astonishing to think that Peter Meaden, the principal articulator of the lifestyle that lay behind the emergent British Mod movement, missed out on the fact that we were breaking new ground with our sound. But he did. He hated all that feedback from my guitar, Keith battering away like a lunatic, Roger growling like an old black prisoner and John clanging at his bass sounding like Duane Eddy. It must have felt uncool to him. But when we played our first few shows in real Mod strongholds, like the Aquarium at Brighton, or The Scene Club, where pep pills and beautifully dressed young rent-boys were openly for sale, our Mod garb combined with that aggressive noise allied us to a very powerful new idea in pop culture: the elegant, disciplined, well-to-do, sharply dressed, dangerously androgynous yobbo.
What was I looking for in this drive to create a successful band? I was only eighteen and was motivated by artistic visions as well as the usual pop-star dreams: money, fame, a big car and a gorgeous girlfriend. We had just made our first record for a major label, and I had had sex for the first time not long before. To me the sexual conquests of Roger, John and Keith were as fantastical and unapproachable as my theories of auto-destruction were to them. Barney and Jan sometimes emerged from Barney’s bedroom to join me for our ritual brainstorm chats after they’d conducted a long and sweaty sex session I could only imagine. How could it all last over an hour?
Of course I was dealing with psychological issues that my closest friends and bandmates didn’t share. I suffered from a deep sexual shame over my dealings with Denny, although I’d managed to push the details out of memory’s reach. Why should a victim of childhood abuse feel sexual shame at all? I still have no answer to this question, but its roots may lie in our tendency as children to take the blame. Perhaps it’s a way of pretending we have some degree of control over our lives, when to acknowledge the alternative might drive us insane.
At the time I didn’t realise how many other people were working through similar feelings. So many children had lived through terrible trauma in the immediate postwar years in Britain that it was quite common to come across deeply confused young people. Shame led to secrecy; secrecy led to alienation. For me these feelings coalesced in a conviction that the collateral damage done to all of us who had grown up amid the aftermath of war had to be confronted and expressed in all popular art – not just literature, poetry or Picasso’s Guernica. Music too. All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to the truth.
With The Who I felt I had a chance to make music that would become a part of people’s lives. Even more than the way we dressed, our music would give voice to what we all needed to express – as a group, as a gang, as a fellowship, as a secret society, as subversives. I saw pop artists as mirrors of their audience, developing ways to reflect and speak truth without fear.
Still, I was more certain then of the medium than the message. Surely, God help us all, we weren’t just going to write songs about falling in love, or hopeless longing? What was it, then, that needed to be said?
I had found a new sound. Now I needed the words.
In a remarkable act of synchronicity, two young men, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, had been searching London in order to make a film about some wonderful new, as yet undiscovered band that came from the street. Kit saw us perform that first time at the Railway Hotel in July when I smashed my guitar and described us as satanic. He persuaded Chris to come and see us, and they quickly decided to make us the subject of their film.
The two friends (later dubbed by the media ‘the fifth and sixth members of The Who’) came from very different backgrounds. Chris, from the East End of London, was the son of a Thames waterman; Kit was the son of Constant Lambert, the musical director of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Chris was drop-dead handsome, even better looking than his famous film-star brother, Terence. Kit had a look of Brian Epstein about him; we all thought he was gay. Most importantly, the two of them knew how to get things done.
Kit and Chris made their film. (That film still exists; Roger now owns the only remaining copy.) Then they decided to go one better, and offered to manage us. But Peter Meaden and Helmut Gorden didn’t want to give us up. At some point in the negotiations Meaden brought the manager of the Stones, Andrew Oldham, to see us play at a rehearsal hall in Shepherd’s Bush. He liked us, but when Kit’s name was mentioned it quickly became clear that Oldham already knew Kit (they were neighbours), and Oldham wasn’t going to get embroiled in Peter Meaden’s failing power struggle.
Kit and Chris later confronted Meaden at a band rehearsal – an occasion on which Phil the Greek, Meaden’s henchman, flashed a knife and menaced Kit. But Peter Meaden eventually stood aside for the then princely sum of £200, and Kit and Chris took over the management of the band. They quickly gave us back our proper name – The Who.
We had begun to play on regular summer Sunday concert bills with established major artists, all of whom had chart hits at the time. We supported The Beatles, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, the extraordinary Dave Berry and Lulu. The Beatles’ audience was almost entirely young girls who seemed lost in their own fantasy world while the music played. (The theatre really did smell of urine after the show.) Unlike the Stones, The Beatles seemed almost like royalty, distant and caught up in their own extraordinary potency. After they had been whisked away after their show, we hung around, and Kit was mobbed by girls who thought he was The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.
Lulu was just fifteen when we played with her in Glasgow, after which we attended her sixteenth birthday party. She had an enormous, soulful voice, and while the accordion played I nearly got off with her best friend. Dave Berry’s hit was ‘The Crying Game’, and his act was the antithesis of the others. He moved slowly, with measured, controlled movements, almost like a mime artist, but he too drove the girls wild.
Away from the big-city Mod strongholds, these shows were like mini-festivals of bands with recent or current hits. We were all young, but there was solidarity between us reminiscent of the show business of Dad’s generation. We learned from everyone we performed with, secure in the knowledge that none of them would borrow too much from us: our whining guitars and auto-destruction were our own inviolate territory.
At